Cold War

We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.

The starting point for our study of the Cold War is the year 1917, when the Bolshevik leadership established a communist regime in Russia and defied the international order by preaching world revolution and challenging conventional diplomatic practices. The Western powers (Britain, France, and the United States) responded with military intervention and ostracism. During the next twenty-four years the estrangement between Russia and the West was overshadowed by the challenges of Italy, Japan, and Germany, but the capitalist world continued to regard the Soviet Union with fear, mistrust, and repugnance—sentiments that Moscow duly reciprocated.

The March 1917 * Revolution created Russia’s first constitutional government, kindling hopes of freedom among its subject peoples, salving its allies’ consciences, and facilitating the US entry into the war on the side of the Entente. But one month later, the charismatic Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin returned from his ten-year exile in a sealed train provided by the German government and was determined to seize power. When Prime Minister Alexander Kerensky chose to continue Russia’s disastrous combat against the Central Powers, the Bolsheviks—appealing to the population’s widespread war weariness and land hunger—led an insurrection of workers, soldiers, and sailors and toppled the provisional government on November 7.

Like the French revolutionaries of 1789, the Bolsheviks were imbued with messianic fervor. In his 1916 expansion of classic Marxism, Lenin had characterized Russia as “the weakest link in the imperialist chain” but also as the potential spearhead of a global uprising against the imperialist powers that had ravaged the earth with their greed and militarism. Accordingly, the Bolsheviks’ first acts were to call for an immediate end to the fighting (the Decree on Peace), to publish all the secret wartime treaties over the disposition of enemy territories, to denounce annexations and indemnities, and to proclaim the right of all nationalities to secede from foreign rulers.

Western leaders denounced the revolution as a German-Bolshevik conspiracy and feared the spread of strikes, mutinies, and rebellions across their borders. Russia’s erstwhile partners were also irate over Lenin’s repudiation of tsarist war debts, which wiped out some 25 percent of France’s foreign investments, as well as the Bolsheviks’ seizure of private property. For European socialists, many of whom had sacrificed the principle of class solidarity for the defense of their homelands, the Bolsheviks’ ascendancy, the dictatorship of the proletariat, and the call for armed revolution had violated their patriotic and democratic creed. Consequently, after November 1917 the hostility between democratic and revolutionary Marxists became almost as strong as the enmity between capitalists and communists.

Peacemaking between January and June 1919 was dominated by the leaders of the three democracies—which were also the world’s largest empires. Their deliberations took place in the shadows of their clients’ expansive territorial claims, German recalcitrance, and communist uprisings in Berlin, Munich, and Budapest. Moreover, the Big Three had fundamental differences over the postwar order, with France demanding maximum security against Germany and Russia, Great Britain seeking to revive the old balance of power, and the United States promoting democracy and open markets, the end of colonialism, and a League of Nations to preserve the peace. As they plunged into a series of complex economic and territorial issues, the victors excluded their ex-enemies, Germany and Russia, from their often fraught deliberations.

Predictably, there were awkward political compromises. Poland, a state resurrected after a century of partitions by its neighbors, was a prime test case. Out of Franco-British wrangling over its western border came the improvisations of the “Corridor” (giving Poland access to the sea, but also separating the main part of Germany from East Prussia), the Free City of Danzig (a German city placed under international control to serve as Poland’s port), and the plebiscite in Upper Silesia that would eventually divide the coal-rich province between Germany and Poland. Over Polish protests, the Allies forced the Warsaw government to sign the world’s first minority treaty to protect the rights of non-Poles, numbering some 33 percent of the population, and proceeded to impose similar arrangements on several other unwilling Eastern European governments.

The League of Nations was created at the peace conference but had several major impediments as a global body. Against the will of their populations, the former Arab territories of the Ottoman Empire, designated as League mandates, were divided between Britain and France, and Germany’s colonies in Africa, Asia, and the Pacific were handed over to Britain, France, South Africa, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand. There were other anomalies: US and British opposition blocked Japan’s efforts to insert a clause guaranteeing racial equality in the League Covenant. The League’s membership excluded Germany and Soviet Russia, two former great powers whose cooperation would be essential to creating peace. And the world’s first international organization left out most of the colonial world, whose populations would view the peace settlement as an old-fashioned distribution of the spoils of victory.

Map 2. The territorial changes between 1919 and 1923 created volatile political conditions in central and Eastern Europe.

The official end of World War I took place on June 28, 1919, with the formal treaty signing in the Palace of Versailles. Germany was now a republic whose population was stunned by its unexpected defeat and whose leaders, determined to resist the Allies’ harsh territorial, military, and economic terms by any means possible, created a propaganda machine to denounce them. The Treaty of Versailles, which indeed fell far short of the victors’ promises, was almost universally criticized. Lenin termed it “a treaty of robbers and plunderers . . . which has made slaves of tens of millions of people.” British economist John Maynard Keynes decried the reparations clauses, which would thwart Europe’s recovery. French marshal Ferdinand Foch termed it a “twenty-year truce.” And the US Senate refused to ratify it, removing the major architect from either the enforcement or the modification of the peace settlement.*

THE SOVIET ENTRY INTO WORLD POLITICS

At the end of almost every major war, coalitions have dissolved and old rivalries erupted. What was unique in 1919 was the emergence of an ideological struggle between Lenin’s Russia and the West that sowed the seeds for the future Cold War. The immense popularity of the American communist John Reed’s chronicle, Ten Days That Shook the World, spread the story of the Bolshevik Revolution. In March 1919 the new Soviet regime founded the Communist International (Comintern) to wage a global struggle against capitalism and imperialism and deploy propaganda, espionage, and recruitment to subvert its enemies, the foremost of which was the British Empire.^† At home, the Bolsheviks unleashed a wave of terror against the church and also drove hundreds of thousands of anti-Bolsheviks into exile, forcing the League of Nations to cope with its first major refugee crisis. Western governments, terrified by the postwar Red Scare within their countries,* were intent on isolating, weakening, and even undermining the nascent Bolshevik regime.

Soviet Russia’s first years of existence were indeed tumultuous. Instead of inciting war against its enemies, as had France in 1791, it found itself under an Allied blockade, fighting foreign troops, and defending itself against a band of opponents, from tsarist reactionaries on the right to Menshevik and socialist revolutionaries on the left. Thanks to Leon Trotsky’s military leadership and their enemies’ disorganization, the Bolsheviks were victorious in the civil war and reconquered Ukraine (as well as the Caucasus and Siberia) but they were forced to acknowledge the other new states created by the Treaty of Brest Litovsk—Estonia, Finland, Latvia, and Lithuania—and also a greatly expanded Poland that had defeated the Red Army. By 1920 the revolution had survived in Russia, but with greatly reduced frontiers in Europe and appalling material and human conditions at home.

Lenin, ever the realist, dramatically changed course in 1921. In that year of pervasive drought, crop failures, epidemics, and anti-Bolshevik rebellions, he launched the New Economic Policy (NEP) and announced a temporary retreat from orthodox communism. Convinced that the West needed Russia to survive the postwar economic crisis, Lenin for the next three years pursued the dual path of advertising his country as the vanguard of world revolution while appealing for normal relations with the advanced capitalist world. From Moscow came the call for “peaceful coexistence” and an appeal for Western capital, loans, trade, and recognition along with hints of concessions to prospective Western partners.

The Soviet initiative was received by a wary Western audience. Lenin’s regime, which the United States had excluded from the Washington Naval Conference of 1921–1922, had become a political blank space on the map of Eurasia. But the capitalist world was also sorely divided. The United States and France were resolutely anti-Soviet, but Britain sought to revive contacts with Moscow in order to restore its own and Europe’s economy. The small states wedged between Germany and Russia were a feeble, disunited force against their still-powerful neighbors: at odds over their territorial disputes and weakened by discontented minorities, lack of investment capital, high tariff barriers, and the cost of their excessively large armies.

Photo 1.1. Vladimir Il’ich Lenin, the leader of Soviet Russia, leaning over a balcony, May 1920. Courtesy of Library of Congress.

Western society was also in ferment. Artists and intellectuals bemoaned the crushed illusions, bodies, and landscapes, destroyed by four years of mechanized warfare, and one historian predicted the decline of the West.* When the postwar period brought inflation and high unemployment, the public protested against a peaceless world and frightened their leaders with the threat of revolution.

One tantalizing diplomatic byway was the Genoa Conference, an unprecedented gathering of thirty-four states in April–May 1922 that included Germany and Russia. Its purpose was to quell public discontent by reintegrating the two outcast states, revitalizing the European economy, and forging a new world order based on neither victor nor vanquished. However, this brainchild of the mercurial Lloyd George faced too many obstacles, among them America’s refusal to participate, France’s obstruction, and the panic of the divided small powers. The denouement occurred within a week of the meeting. On Easter Sunday the German and Soviet foreign ministers signed the Treaty of Rapallo, establishing full diplomatic relations and paving the way for close military and economic cooperation.

Rapallo was a triumph for Lenin’s pragmatic foreign policy. It not only cemented relations between his revolutionary regime and a major capitalist government^† but also ruptured the possibility of a unified Western stance against Russia and stiffened Moscow’s resistance to making any concessions on debts or nationalized property. Seven months later, the ailing Soviet leader achieved his last major triumph with the formation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), which survived until Christmas Day 1991.

The failure of the Genoa Conference brought an end to Lloyd George’s conciliation project and was followed by a cascade of ominous events. In Europe the fascist seizure of power in Italy (October 1922) and Adolf Hitler’s first putsch (November 1923) warned of the frailty of liberal democracy in Central and Southern Europe; the stirring of anticolonialism from Egypt to India threatened the future of European imperialism; and the League of Nations, the scene of Anglo-French bickering, drew back from both developing a robust collective security system and guiding Europe and the world toward economic cooperation and disarmament.

Lenin’s death at age fifty-four in January 1924 marked the close of the world-revolutionary phase of Soviet politics. Proclaiming the doctrine of “socialism in one country,” his successor, Joseph Stalin, set out to build up the USSR’s economic and military strength as the best means of promoting the ultimate victory of global communism. While maintaining Moscow’s stance as a major critic of the peace settlement, Stalin also exerted greater control over the Comintern’s activities throughout the world.

By the mid-1920s, thanks to US financial assistance, a tenuous European peace was established that essentially excluded the Soviet Union. The Locarno Treaties (1925), signed by Britain, France, Italy, and Germany, paved the way for Germany’s entry into the League of Nations with a permanent council seat. During the next years Berlin, Moscow’s principal partner, maintained a delicate balancing act between the West and the Soviet Union, with which it had clandestine military ties and a shared aversion toward Poland.

France and Britain, on the other hand, remained hostile toward the Soviet Union, insisting on full debt repayment, restoration of private property, and cessation of the Comintern’s intrigues. Tensions heated up in 1927, when the British government severed relations with the USSR over Moscow’s machinations during Britain’s general strike and its intervention in China. Franco-Soviet relations also reached a nadir at that time.

Stalin, ever cautious, drew back from a confrontation with the West. The Anglo-Soviet dispute was defused but not forgotten. As part of his “great turn” in 1928–1929, Stalin launched the first Five-Year Plan to create a powerful and self-sufficient military-industrial complex. He also moved to destroy his domestic rivals (foremost among them the followers of Leon Trotsky) and to coerce the peasantry and expand the police and terror apparatus. Abroad, Stalin’s roving ambassador, Maxim Litvinov, exhibited the friendly face of the USSR. Despite the USSR’s hostility toward the League of Nations, it engaged in multilateral peace efforts, such as the Kellogg-Briand Pact and the Preparatory Commission on Disarmament in Geneva. It also concluded security arrangements with neighboring countries and improved trade relations with the United States. Nonetheless Stalin remained inherently suspicious of the capitalist governments, which had excluded and threatened the world’s only communist regime and knew no other way of settling their rivalries except by recourse to war.

Soviet and American abstention from a leading role in world affairs had left a dangerous power vacuum. Britain and France continued to squabble over enforcing a contested peace, and Germany prepared for its overturn. The illusory calm of the late 1920s ended abruptly in 1929 with the outbreak of the global Depression, followed by the Japanese occupation of Manchuria in 1931 and Hitler’s ascent to power two years later.

THE DARK DECADE, 1931–1939

In 1931 Japan, which had been a permanent League Council member and had enjoyed amicable relations with the West, suddenly altered its domestic and foreign policies. Spurred by the collapse of Japan’s export markets and the revival of an expansionist form of nationalism, the military seized control and on September 18 launched an invasion of Manchuria.

The ensuing crisis set the pattern for the Western powers’ feeble response to aggression. The League of Nations was unprepared either to halt the Japanese conquest or to respond to pleas for assistance from China, one of its members. The two most interested governments, Britain and the United States, reeling from the Depression, shrank from risking war with Japan, and the USSR, despite its considerable interest in Manchuria, also wished to avoid offending Japan. The League’s mild sanction—nonrecognition of the puppet state of Manchukuo—prompted Japan’s withdrawal from the Geneva organization and kindled widespread alarm among the League’s smaller members over their vulnerability to attack.

The advent of the Third Reich in January 1933 posed an even greater danger to the international order. In his book Mein Kampf (published in 1925–1926) the Nazi leader and new German chancellor Adolf Hitler had made clear that his goals were not merely to overturn the Versailles treaty but also to vanquish communism and achieve German racial and political domination in Europe and the larger world. When the Nazis’ persecution of German Jews created a flood of refugees and the Third Reich peremptorily exited Geneva, the League issued only a mild censure. The West was unready to meet the threat of the Nazi dictatorship.

The Soviet Union, no longer Berlin’s partner, had become potential prey. Stalin’s government made another crucial turn, ceasing to vilify the post–World War I peace settlement, preaching collective security, and joining the previously reviled League of Nations in 1934. In 1935 the Comintern reversed its long-standing refusal to cooperate with reformist socialists and bourgeois parties and ordered its members to pursue a Popular Front strategy to resist the spread of fascism.

Stalin’s about-face created ripples abroad. The United States, under its new president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, was mired in the Depression and swept by strong waves of isolationist and anticommunist sentiments, but to stimulate trade, Roosevelt established relations with the USSR in 1933 and sent a corps of wary diplomats to Moscow. The French government made even stronger overtures to the Soviet Union, proposing to create a barrier against Nazi expansion in Eastern Europe and concluding a Treaty of Mutual Assistance in May 1935. However, almost two decades of anti-Sovietism prevented the resurrection of the 1894 French-Russian alliance, which had saved Paris in World War I. Not only were France’s small allies, Poland and Romania, terrified of the price of Soviet “protection,” but France’s own political and military leadership was unwilling to forge an alliance with Stalin’s Russia. In addition, France’s aloof partner Britain was suspicious of Stalin’s goals and preferred to deal directly with Nazi Germany. Thus when Hitler in March 1935 scrapped Versailles and announced full German rearmament, Britain responded three months later with a bombshell—the Anglo-German naval agreement—that torpedoed the treaty’s last disarmament clauses and wiped out Paris’s last independent initiative.

With the failure of organized resistance, the aggressors moved quickly. Italy invaded Abyssinia (Ethiopia) in 1935, and in 1936 dispatched “volunteers” in support of the Nationalist leader Francisco Franco’s insurrection against the Spanish Republic, where he was joined by a special German air force unit.* In February 1936 Hitler, claiming that the largely innocuous French-Soviet pact had created a “red menace,” renounced the Locarno Treaties and reoccupied the demilitarized zone of the Rhineland. And in July 1937 Japanese military forces, moving south from Manchuria, captured the principal cities and ports of northern and central China. The three formed offensive alliances: the Rome-Berlin Axis (1936) and the Anti-Comintern Pact (1937) linking Italy, Germany, and Japan.

World reaction was muted. The League failed to enforce sanctions against Italy, to condemn Germany’s violation of the Versailles and Locarno agreements, or to offer assistance to China, and the French-British–sponsored Non-Intervention Agreement, signed by twenty-seven governments in August 1936, did not halt the flow of arms and manpower to Franco’s forces in Spain. Despite efforts by liberals and socialists to mobilize an antifascist resistance, pacifism was widespread in Western Europe, epitomized by the powerful 1937 antiwar French film The Grand Illusion.

The United States was conspicuously silent. The Roosevelt administration, facing another severe economic downturn in 1937, resisted British pleas for a joint diplomatic initiative against the fascists’ aggression. Congress in 1935 and 1937 passed Neutrality Acts banning sales or loans to belligerents in wars and in civil wars, harming the victims more than the aggressors. And although distressed over the Nazis’ racism and sympathetic to China’s plight, the American public—in a strongly isolationist mood—was determined to avoid being dragged by the British Empire into another world war.

Stalin, who in 1936 had launched a major wave of purges against his political, military, and intellectual enemies, now faced major threats in Europe and in Asia. In line with his Popular Front strategy against fascism, the Soviet Union became the major outside supporter of the Spanish Republic, furnishing military supplies and advisers, directing the Comintern to mobilize an international army of volunteers, and producing a global propaganda campaign on behalf of the Madrid government. Not surprisingly, post–Cold War documents have revealed that Stalin’s principal goals in Spain were to purge the local communists of Trotskyites, to create a Soviet satellite in Western Europe, and also, like Hitler, to prolong the conflict and divert attention from his domestic policies.

Britain, faced with powerful rivals and restive colonial populations in Palestine and India, pursued an active policy of appeasement toward Germany and Japan. This approach, promoted in 1937 by Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, had historic and practical roots as well as a strongly ideological flavor. Deeply suspicious of US designs on the empire, Chamberlain was also appalled at the prospect of collaborating with Soviet Russia, a sworn enemy of Britain that had been stigmatized by the purges and by its self-seeking policies in Spain. Lacking reliable partners—France was divided internally and Italy now firmly in the Nazi camp—Britain sought to thwart Hitler’s aggressiveness by encouraging him to fulfill his territorial designs in the East.

British appeasement reached its apogee in September 1938 at the Munich Conference, convened to devise a peaceful solution to Hitler’s saber-rattling against Czechoslovakia, which threatened to plunge Europe into war. Britain, France, Italy, and Germany, ignoring the League and excluding both Czechoslovakia and its Soviet ally, agreed to a substantial cession of Czechoslovak territory to the Third Reich. The Munich agreement averted war and bought time for British and French rearmament, but it also represented a moral and political defeat for the West—the betrayal of a small democratic ally—that simply whetted Hitler’s appetite for armed conquest. It also had a jarring effect on Stalin.

Scholars have long debated whether Stalin had ever seriously intended to honor his treaty obligation to defend Czechoslovakia (with which he had no contiguous border and would have involved the transit of Soviet troops and air power through Poland and Romania). One group, although acknowledging the dictator’s ruthless realism, views Soviet diplomacy between 1933 and 1938 as both a genuine quest for collective security and an attempt to stave off war against Nazi Germany and Japan. According to this perspective, Stalin, convinced by Munich that the appeasement-obsessed Western powers hoped to direct German aggression eastward, moved defensively into the Nazi camp.

The opposite argument, which has grown since the end of the Cold War, insists that Stalin had always been bluffing and that Moscow’s collective security strategy was simply a ruse to bait Hitler into a joint revisionist project against the new order in Eastern Europe. Thus Stalin’s infamous warning to the “instigators of war” (Britain and France) during the Eighteenth Party Congress on March 10, 1939, that he had no intention of “pulling their chestnuts out of the fire.”

There is evidence for both interpretations, which bring together Stalin’s growing conviction that another world war was imminent and his overall strategy for protecting the Soviet state. In the wake of the German seizures of Prague and Memel in March 1939, the Soviet dictator suddenly launched two seemingly contradictory initiatives. On March 18 he proposed to resurrect the Triple Entente of 1914 in the form of a military alliance with France and Great Britain for the purpose of protecting the nations of Eastern Europe against further Nazi aggression, but that same day he also informed Berlin of his interest in suspending their ideological conflict and negotiating a Soviet-German rapprochement. Unlike the Russian leadership in 1914, Stalin was appealing to the highest bidder over his response to Hitler’s anticipated attack on Poland.

Britain and France’s reluctance to negotiate an equal partnership with Moscow became quickly apparent. The Allies recognized that Soviet support would require politically undesirable concessions to a dangerous and longtime ideological opponent and necessitate territorial sacrifices by their clients, Poland and Romania. They also had considerable doubts over Moscow’s military value, because of Stalin’s liquidation of almost the entire high command of his armed forces in the 1937–1938 purges and the Soviet Union’s inadequate transportation network. Thus, instead of immediately sending a high-level delegation (as had France twenty-five years earlier during the July 1914 crisis), London and Paris waited four full months to appoint a mission of low-ranking military officers, then postponed their departure for eleven days, and finally sent them to Moscow via a very slow form of sea transport, instead of by air. Upon their arrival on August 10, 1939, these hapless Allied envoys at once revealed their governments’ unwillingness to coordinate military operations with Moscow or to put pressure on the Poles or Romanians to permit the passage of Soviet troops. During these five crucial months the alliance that might have prevented the outbreak of World War II failed to materialize because of Anglo-French unwillingness but also because of the Soviets’ loss of interest.

By May 1939, the German option had become increasingly attractive to the Kremlin. Through a Soviet agent in Tokyo, Stalin had learned that Hitler was determined to turn westward after crushing Poland, thereby diminishing the threat to Russia and the value of joining a new entente with Britain and France. An accommodation with the Third Reich would enable the Soviet Union to expand its military and economic forces while the capitalist powers exhausted themselves in a slugfest. In an important signal, Stalin replaced Litvinov (the apostle of collective security) as foreign minister with his crony, Vyacheslav Molotov, who not only guided the German discussions but also taunted Berlin over the prospect of a Soviet deal with the West. By August Hitler, impatient to launch his Polish campaign and ready to placate Stalin, sent his foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, to the Kremlin.

The Nazi-Soviet pact, signed on August 23, 1939, was a blatant license for aggression. The public document pledged both sides to observe strict neutrality should either become involved in a military conflict, and the secret protocol (known in full detail only after the Cold War) gave Stalin an impressive payment in kind: the annexation of eastern Poland; the assignment of Finland, Estonia, and Latvia * to the Soviet sphere of influence; and the recovery of Bessarabia from Romania, thus restoring all of Russia’s losses after World War I. In an equally stunning coup, one month later Stalin ended hostilities with Japan, which Soviet troops had battled, on and off, over the previous two years, thus freeing his country from the immediate threat of a two-front war (and enabling Japan to focus on China, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific).

The news from Moscow shocked the world’s Marxists and crushed their resistance to fascism. Britain and France, disconcerted by Stalin’s defection, continued to seek a peaceful solution to the Polish crisis, but Hitler, refusing to return to the conference table, used a fictitious border incident as the pretext for his attack on Poland on September 1, 1939. When he ignored their ultimatum to withdraw, Britain and France reluctantly declared war two days later.

THE AGGRESSORS TRIUMPHANT, 1939–1941

The outbreak of World War II in Europe—it had already erupted in Asia—pitted only four official combatants: the British Empire, France, Poland, and Nazi Germany. Mussolini, pleading unpreparedness, stayed out. On September 17, 1939, two days after concluding an accord with Japan, the USSR, without a declaration of war, sent troops across the Polish border, sealing the fate of its western neighbor, which collapsed at the end of the month and once more disappeared from the map of Europe.

The United States was jolted into action. Labeling Nazi aggression a threat to the Western Hemisphere, President Roosevelt urged the modification of the Neutrality Acts. On November 4 Congress, while still banning American ships and civilians from entering the war zone, voted to allow “cash and carry” purchases of arms and goods by France and Great Britain, which had as yet made no significant military moves against the Third Reich.

Indeed, the period between the autumn of 1939 and the spring of 1940 has been dubbed the “phony war,” with French troops languishing on the Maginot Line along its border with Germany and a few Anglo-German naval skirmishes around the British Isles. Yet in northeastern Europe a very real war exploded on November 30. After Finland had refused to follow the Baltic states and allow the Red Army to build bases on its soil, Stalin, ostensibly to protect Leningrad (only twenty miles from the border), now committed one of his greatest blunders. Again, without a declaration of war he ordered an invasion of his small neighbor, whom he suspected of German sympathies. Although three times larger and far better equipped, the Soviet forces were poorly prepared to face an unexpectedly strong Finnish resistance and initially suffered high casualties. On March 12, 1940, Stalin, after a string of Soviet counterattacks (and perhaps fearing Allied intervention), ended the brutal 105-day war with the Moscow Treaty, which allowed Finland to preserve its independence but forced it to cede 11 percent of its territory, including a large swath of land on Lake Ladoga that would later shield Leningrad, and to allow a Soviet military base on the Hanko peninsula.

The war with Finland had important consequences. Soviet-US relations plummeted after Stalin rebuffed Roosevelt’s mediation offer. The moribund League of Nations, which had been helpless against Japanese, Italian, and German treaty violations, was suddenly aroused by the attack on a neutral member. For the very first time in its history the League Council (with some notable abstentions and absences) voted to support the victim and expel the Soviet Union—too late, however, to save Finland. The principal victor of the Winter War was Nazi Germany. Watching from the sidelines, Hitler had noted the Red Army’s weakness and the West’s ill-coordinated and feeble responses, including the stillborn threat to punish Soviet Russia by bombing the Baku oil fields. Berlin also reaped the bonus of closer relations with Finland, which would be an important partner a year later.

The phony war finally ended on April 8, 1940. Britain and France, now facing two powerful opponents as well as an irate citizenry, opted to take the war to neutral Scandinavia and block the delivery of Sweden’s iron ore crucial to Nazi Germany. In a highly risky operation British naval units laid mines in Norwegian waters, and Allied troops were sent to the Norwegian coast. But the next day the well-prepared Germans seized Norway’s capital and major ports and also occupied Denmark, thus securing not only their northern flank but also a string of indispensable naval and air bases for future combat. Then on May 10 the Reich’s long-awaited Western offensive brought the collapse of the neutral Netherlands and Belgium, the audacious sweep through the Ardennes, and, on June 22, the capitulation of France.

Stalin, now the observer, had anticipated a lengthy struggle in the West and was startled by France’s sudden collapse. He was still building up his military force and also consolidating his newly expanded realm, extending the Soviet political system from the Baltic to the Black Sea. To ensure Poland’s permanent subjugation, in March and April 1940 Stalin ordered the mass killing of some twenty-two thousand captured Polish officers, which took place in Soviet prisons and in the Katyn Forest. In July, he ordered the incorporation of the three Baltic Republics into the USSR along with the murder and deportation of thousands of their leading figures. That month, to secure his southwestern border, Stalin formally annexed the two former Romanian provinces of Bessarabia and northern Bukovina. After the Nazi victory over France, the Soviet Union also expanded its diplomatic contacts with Persia, Turkey, Bulgaria, and Yugoslavia, much to the annoyance of Berlin.

By the summer of 1940 the Third Reich dominated the entire European continent with its string of annexed territories, satellites, allies, and compliant neutrals, including the Soviet Union, which supplied the grain and oil to fuel the Nazi Empire.* Only Britain, now led by the tenaciously anti-Nazi prime minister Winston Churchill, held out. Thanks to the quality of its air power, radar, and code breaking as well as Churchill’s indomitable grit and optimism, Britain in the fall of 1940 withstood the Nazis’ massive air offensive. It was also saved by Hitler’s indecisiveness and blunders, and by Germany’s naval weakness.

In November 1940 Europe’s flagging anti-Nazi resistance was stirred by Roosevelt’s reelection to an unprecedented third term. The next month, the US president urged Congress to adopt his Lend-Lease program, which held out the prospect of substantially increased aid and supplies to a beleaguered and nearly bankrupt Great Britain. In the meantime Mussolini, who had entered the war against France and Britain, had forced Hitler to salvage Italy’s failed adventures in the Balkans and North Africa, temporarily diverting the Reich from turning eastward.

Stalin during this critical period gravitated between overconfidence and fear. Discounting the numerous warnings of a German attack from credible US, British, and even Soviet intelligence sources, he insisted that Hitler would not risk a two-front war until Britain was vanquished. Thus Stalin failed to construct defenses along the new border with the Reich or to relocate military and industrial plants into the interior, boasting that the Red Army would repel any invader and then “crush” him on his own territory. Nonetheless, having witnessed the wages of the German blitzkrieg (lightning war) and the bombing of civilians and well aware of Hitler’s racist and anti-Bolshevik views, the Soviet leader knew that the calendar and Russia’s snows could not indefinitely protect his vast and vulnerable realm.

At 3:15 A.M. on June 22, 1941 (the 129th anniversary of Napoleon’s ill-fated attack on Russia), the Wehrmacht crossed the Bug River, and Operation Barbarossa began. Hitler had assembled the largest invasion force in human history—approximately 3.5 million troops (including a half million non-German soldiers), 2,700 aircraft, 3,000 tanks, and 7,000 artillery pieces—which were hurled against the Soviet Union over a two-thousand-mile front from Finland to Romania. By the autumn of 1941, the Nazi offensive threatened to destroy the Red Army and overthrow Stalin’s regime: Kiev had fallen, Leningrad was under siege, and Moscow was within reach. Accompanying the attack were the SS Einsatzgruppen, the mobile killing units that not only targeted Soviet partisans but also massacred 1.5 million Soviet Jews.

At this calamitous moment the antifascist alliance, unachievable in peacetime, suddenly materialized. On June 22 Churchill, characterizing Hitler as a “monster of wickedness” spreading desolation in Russia, swallowed his longtime anti-Bolshevism and pledged to aid the Soviet Union.* One day later, US secretary of state Cordell Hull, speaking on behalf of the US president, announced that his country would give Russia “all aid to the hilt.” Stalin’s reply on a grim July 18 was a masterpiece of arrogance and desperation. While defending the terms of the Nazi-Soviet pact, he urged his new partners to launch offensives in France, Norway, and Finland to relieve the struggling Red Army.

Almost a quarter of a century after the Bolshevik Revolution, the Soviet Union and its two principal capitalist enemies had been drawn together by Axis aggression, but the habits of exclusion, rivalry, and suspicion remained.

SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER STUDY

Primary Sources

“Agreement Between the United Kingdom and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, July 12, 1941.” Yale Law School Avalon Project: Documents in Law, History and Diplomacy. http://avalon.law.yale.edu/wwii/brsov41.asp.

Auswärtiges Amt (German Foreign Ministry). Documents and Materials Relating to the Eve of the Second World War. 2 vols. New York: International Publishers, 1948.

“Comintern Electronic Archives.” Russian State Archives for Social and Political History. Accessed February 24, 2013. http://www.comintern-online.com.

Foreign Office of Great Britain. Documents Illustrating the Hostile Activities of the Soviet Government and the Third International Against Great Britain. London: H. M. Stationery Office, 1927.

“Foreign Relations 1918—The Conclusion of the Peace of Brest Litovsk.” Yale Law School Avalon Project: Documents in Law, History and Diplomacy. http://avalon.law.yale.edu/subject_menus/blmenu.asp.

Gromkyo, A. A., ed. Soviet Peace Efforts on the Eve of World War II. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1973.

Hitler, Adolf. Mein Kampf. Originally published in German as two volumes, 1925–1926. New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1939.

Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich. The Foundations of the Communist International. New York: International Publishers, 1934.

Nazi-Soviet Relations, 1939–1941: Documents from the Archives of the German Foreign Office. Edited by Raymond Sontag and James Beddie. Washington, DC: US Department of State, 1948.

Roosevelt, Franklin Delano. “Quarantine Speech, October 5, 1937.” Miller Center, University of Virginia. http://millercenter.org/president/speeches/detail/3310.

Wilson, Woodrow. “President Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points, 8 January, 1918.” Yale Law School Avalon Project: Documents in Law, History and Diplomacy. http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/wilson14.asp.

Contemporary Writing

Borkenau, Franz. The Communist International. London: Faber and Faber, 1938.

Eastman, Max. The End of Socialism in Russia. Boston: Little, Brown, 1937.

Trotsky, Leon. The First Five Years of the Communist International. New York: Pioneer Publishers, 1945.

Films

Alexander Nevsky. Directed by Sergei M. Eisenstein and Dmitri Vasilyev. Moscow: Mosfilm, 1938.

The Czar Wants to Sleep (Poruchik Kizhe). Directed by Aleksandr Faintsimmer. Moscow: Belgoskino, 1934.

Five Cartridges (Fünf Patronenhülsen). Directed by Frank Beyer. East Berlin: Deutsche Film (DEFA), 1960.

The Flowers of War. Directed by Yimou Zhang. Beijing: Beijing New Picture Film, 2011.

The Grand Illusion (La Grande Illusion). Directed by Jean Renoir. Paris: RAC, 1937.

Land and Freedom. Directed by Ken Loach. London: British Broadcasting Corporation, 1995.

The Last Train from Madrid. Directed by James P. Hogan. Los Angeles: Paramount Pictures, 1937.

Ninotschka. Directed by Ernst Lubitsch. Los Angeles: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1939.

October (Ten Days That Shook the World). Directed by Grigori Aleksandrov and Sergei M. Eisenstein. Moscow: Sovkino, 1928.

Reds. Directed by Warren Beatty. Los Angeles: JRS Productions, 1981.

Triumph of the Will. Directed by Leni Riefenstahl. Berlin: Leni Riefenstahl Produktion, 1935.

The Winter War. Directed by Pekka Parikka. Helsinki: National Filmi Oy See, 1989.

Fiction

Bulgakov, Mikhail. The Master and Margarita. Translated by Diana Burgin and Katherine Tiernan O’Connor. New York: Vintage, 1995.

Koestler, Arthur. Darkness at Noon. New York: Macmillan, 1941.

Malraux, André. Man’s Fate. Translated by Haakon M. Chevalier. New York: Random House, 1934.

Orwell, George. Animal Farm: A Fairy Story. London: Secker and Warburg, 1945.

Platonov, Andrei. Soul. Translated by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler et al. London: Harvill, 2003.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. Troubled Sleep. Translated by Gerard Hopkins. New York: Vintage, 1950.

Poetry

Auden, W. H. “September 1, 1939.” In The Collected Poems. Edited by Edward Mendelson. 2007 Modern Library Edition. New York: Modern Library, 2007.

Diaries, Memoirs, and Journals

Dimitrov, Georgi. The Diary of Georgi Dimitrov. Edited by Ivo Banac. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003.

Djilas, Milovan. Memoir of a Revolutionary. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973.

Fischer, Louis. Men and Politics: An Autobiography. London: Cape, 1941.

Kennan, George F. Memoirs. Vol. 1: 1925–1950. Boston: Little, Brown, 1967.

Litvinov, M. M. Notes for a Journal. New York: Morrow, 1955.

Orwell, George. Homage to Catalonia. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1952.

Secondary Sources

Caballero, Manuel. Latin America and the Comintern, 1919–1943. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.

Carley, Michael Jabara. 1939: The Alliance That Never Was and the Coming of World War II. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1999.

———. The Silent Conflict: A Hidden History of Early Soviet-Western Relations. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2014.

D’Agostino, Anthony. The Rise of Global Powers: International Politics in the Era of the World Wars. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.

Davis, Donald E., and Eugene P. Trani. The First Cold War: The Legacy of Woodrow Wilson in U.S.-Soviet Relations. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002.

Ericson, Edward E. Feeding the German Eagle: Soviet Economic Aid to Nazi Germany, 1933–1941. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1999.

Fink, Carole. The Genoa Conference: European Diplomacy, 1921–1922. Rev. ed. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1993.

Gorodetsky, Gabriel. Grand Delusion: Stalin and the German Invasion of Russia. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999.

———. The Precarious Truce: Anglo-Soviet Relations, 1924–1927. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976.

Haslam, Jonathan. The Soviet Union and the Struggle for Collective Security in Europe, 1933–39. New York: St. Martin’s, 1984.

———. The Soviet Union and the Threat from the East, 1933–1941: Moscow, Tokyo, and the Prelude to the Pacific War. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992.

Imlay, Talbot. Facing the Second World War: Strategy, Politics, and Economics in Britain and France, 1938–1940. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.

Iriye, Akira. The Origins of the Second World War in Asia and the Pacific. London: Longman, 1987.

Jacobson, Jon. When the Soviet Union Entered World Politics. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.

Knox, MacGregor. Mussolini Unleashed, 1939–1941: Politics and Strategy in Fascist Italy’s Last War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982.

Leonhard, Wolfgang. Betrayal: The Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939. New York: St. Martin’s, 1989.

Louis, William Roger. British Strategy in the Far East, 1919–1939. Oxford: Clarendon, 1971.

Manela, Erez. The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.

Marks, Sally. The Ebbing of European Ascendancy: An International History of the World, 1914–1945. London: Arnold, 2002.

Mayer, Arno J. Political Origins of the New Diplomacy, 1917–1918. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1959.

———. Politics and Diplomacy of Peacemaking: Containment and Counterrevolution at Versailles, 1918–1919. New York: Knopf, 1967.

McDonough, Frank. Hitler, Chamberlain and Appeasement. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

McKenzie, Kermit. Comintern and World Revolution, 1928–1943: The Shaping of Doctrine. New York: Columbia University Press, 1964.

Medvedev, Roy. Let History Judge: The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism. Translated by George Shriver. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989.

Miner, Steven Merritt. Between Churchill and Stalin: The Soviet Union, Great Britain, and the Origins of the Grand Alliance. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988.

Ogata, Sadako N. Defiance in Manchuria: The Making of Japanese Foreign Policy, 1931–1932. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964.

Parker, Robert. Chamberlain and Appeasement. New York: St. Martin’s, 1993.

Pons, Silvio. Stalin and the Inevitable War, 1936–1941. London: Frank Cass, 2002.

Ragsdale, Hugh. The Soviets, the Munich Crisis, and the Coming of World War II. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

Roberts, Geoffrey. The Soviet Union and the Origins of the Second World War: Russo-German Relations and the Road to War, 1933–1941. Houndmills, UK: Macmillan, 1995.

Saul, Norman E. War and Revolution: The United States and Russia, 1914–1921. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2001.

Steiner, Zara. The Lights That Failed: European International History, 1919–1933. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.

———. The Triumph of the Dark: European International History, 1933–1939. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.

Thornton, Richard C. The Comintern and the Chinese Communists, 1928–1931. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1969.

Volkogonov, Dmitri. Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1991.

Watt, Donald C. How War Came: The Immediate Origins of the Second World War, 1938–1939. New York: Pantheon, 1989.

Weinberg, Gerhard L. A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

* The March 1917 Revolution occurred in February according to the old Julian calendar, which remained in use in Russia until 1918.

* In a joint resolution in July 1921 the US Congress declared the war at an end, and one month later the new president, Warren G. Harding, concluded separate treaties with Germany, Austria, and Hungary that omitted the League of Nations.

^† At the 1920 Congress of the Peoples of the East held in Baku, Comintern leaders—breaking the long silence of their Western socialist rivals toward European imperialism—pledged their solidarity with the global anticolonial struggle.

* In the United States in particular, where there had been a wave of strikes during World War I, the Bolshevik Revolution heightened the government’s fears of foreign agents stirring political unrest. The Red Scare intensified in 1919, when more than 3,600 separate strikes erupted, and there were explosions, fires, and race riots in several cities. In 1920 the Federal Bureau of Investigation, newly created within the Justice Department, placed thousands of individuals under surveillance and launched raids across the nation but never discovered evidence of a foreign plot against the United States. After the September 16, 1920, Wall Street bombing, in which 38 people were killed and 141 wounded, the Red Scare gradually diminished.

* Among them, Vincente Blasco-Ibanez, Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1918); Paul Nash, We Are Making a New World (1918); Fernand Léger, The City (1918); Igor Stravinsky, The Soldier’s Tale (1918); George Bernard Shaw, Heartbreak House (1921); T. S. Eliot, The Wasteland (1922); and Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West (1918).

^† Much to the chagrin of German Marxists and Bolshevik hard-liners.

* Pablo Picasso’s graphic depiction of the bombing of Guernica, displayed at the Paris World Exhibition in 1937, brought world attention to the atrocities against Spanish civilians.

* Lithuania was added one month later in another agreement, in which Stalin relinquished territory in Eastern Poland and the German-Soviet border was established on the River Bug.

* In September 1939 Stalin had announced: “The USSR is interested in a strong Germany and will not let it be beaten.”

* Because defeating the Third Reich had become his foremost objective, the prime minister famously announced: “If Hitler invaded Hell, I should at least make a favorable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons.”