USSR announced it had already reached agreement
with Poland’s communist government on that
country’s new boundaries. The new boundary with
Germany followed the Oder and West Neisse rivers
from the Baltic Sea to Czechoslovakia, involving
the surrender of East Prussia by Germany to Poland
(and expulsion of German inhabitants) in compensation
for Soviet annexation of territories in
eastern Poland. The Soviet fait accompli, while
increasing Soviet security, reduced prospects for
fruitful bargaining, and disagreement was papered
over in a statement indicating that the boundary
question “shall await the peace settlement.”20
THE DIVISION OF GERMANY Expectations
still remained high that the Soviet Union would
be prepared to negotiate honestly over the future
of Germany and Eastern Europe. The hope was
that the Yalta axioms would continue to govern
US–Soviet relations. This reflected a realist perspective
that the USSR was a “normal state” and
thus driven fundamentally by power considerations.
This axiom implied that the USSR would
seek to advance its interests but also recognize
that its power had limits. Rational calculation
would, therefore, restrain Soviet behavior. The US
hoped to use rewards such as economic aid and
international control of atomic energy as inducements
to obtain Soviet compliance with the Yalta
Declaration on Liberated Europe and agreement
on how to treat defeated Germany. Even in defeat,
Germany remained the key to European security.
Its central geographic position, skilled population,
and economic potential made it a focus of
attention.
At ministerial meetings in late 1945 and
early 1946, Anglo-American fears about the USSR
intensified when Moscow refused to cooperate in
administering conquered Germany. Although the
victors had divided Germany into administrative
zones, they had agreed to treat the country as a
single economic unit. This made sense because
Germany’s eastern sector was primarily agricultural
and its western region mainly industrial. The
victors had also agreed that reparations would be
paid, especially to the USSR, which had suffered
so greatly at German hands. The USSR was to
receive all the industrial equipment in the Soviet
zone, plus one-quarter of such equipment from
Western zones on condition that no reparations
be taken from current German production until
the country had accumulated sufficient foreignexchange
reserves to buy needed imports to feed,
clothe, and house its citizens.
The Soviet Union quickly removed capital
equipment from its own zone without informing
its allies of what was being taken and refused to
permit shipment of agricultural goods to the
Western zones. The US commander in Germany,
General Lucius Clay (1897–1978), responded by
suspending reparations from Western zones to
the USSR. Stalin’s objectives in Germany were
to obtain as much in reparations as possible to
finance Soviet reconstruction and eliminate any
prospect of a German revival that might imperil
Soviet interests. However, the immediate result
was a cooling of East–West relations, and the division
of Germany.
The United States and Britain were determined
that their zones should become economically
self-sufficient, so that they would not have to
underwrite the German economy and Germany
could contribute to the overall recovery of Europe.
To hasten the revival of the Western zones, US
Secretary of State James Byrnes (1879–1972) proposed
in July 1946 that they be unified. Although
France initially refused, fearing Germany’s revival,
the British and American zones were unified in
January 1947. By the spring, France had merged
its zone as well. The result was to solidify the
division of Germany and eliminate Western influence
from the Soviet zone. In 1949, the Western
zones became the Federal Republic of Germany
and the Eastern zone became the German
Democratic Republic
Eastern Europe was the second focus of
East–West friction. Free and democratic elections
were not held, as promised at Yalta; the USSR
annexed the independent Baltic republics of
Lithuania, Estonia, and Latvia; and Moscow
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installed or aided new communist governments
in Eastern Europe – Bulgaria, Romania, Poland,
East Germany, Albania, Yugoslavia, and, finally,
in February 1948, Czechoslovakia. These events
profoundly affected American public opinion,
especially in communities like Chicago, New
York, and Buffalo with large Eastern European
populations. The Czech coup and the murder
of the country’s foreign minister, Jan Masaryk
(1886–1948), son of the country’s founder, were
the final steps in communizing Eastern Europe, all
of which now found itself in the shadow of Soviet
power.
Interpreting the beginning of the
Cold War
Realists, liberals, constructivists, and Marxists
would analyze the sources of the Cold War quite
differently. Realists, especially neorealists, would
stress the existence of power vacuums in Central
Europe and East Asia created by the defeat of
Germany and Japan and the weakness of other
European and Asian countries. Bipolarity and the
steps each took to increase its security trapped
both in a security dilemma. Neither wished the
other to enjoy a preponderance of power, and
each tried to prevent this by arming and forging
alliances. Realists also offered a geopolitical
explanation of the Cold War as a consequence of
traditional Russian expansionism in search of
warm water ports and defensible boundaries.
Liberals would focus on Soviet authoritarianism
as a key source of conflict. Soviet leaders
could solidify their authority at home by focusing
public attention on an alleged threat from abroad,
and their abuse of human rights at home, as well
as in occupied Eastern Europe, alienated US public
opinion. The absence of Soviet–American economic
interdependence meant that there were
few impediments to Soviet–American competition.
Constructivists would focus on the contrasting
identities of the superpowers that gave rise to
conflicting interests. They would point out how,
after 1917, a consensus emerged among Soviet
leaders about the USSR’s identity as the vanguard
of world Marxism. They would also focus on the
emergence of an American identity as leader of
“the free world.” The USSR saw itself as a socialist
state, just as the United States identified itself
as a capitalist state, producing competing and
incompatible world views about how societies
should be organized politically and economically.
Americans viewed their country as a democracy
in which individual freedom and individualism
were encouraged. Soviet citizens, as members of a
socialist society, sought to encourage economic
equality, collective responsibility, and centralized
economic planning. Each regarded the other’s
version of democracy as a sham that gave power
to the few at the expense of the many.
Marxists viewed the policies of the United
States and its allies as part of a transnational
capitalist effort to strangle socialism and to spread
capitalism globally, make non-Western countries
economic dependencies of the developed Western
states, and obtain new markets for exports
and new sources of key raw materials. “Capitalist
encirclement” and “Western imperialism” summarized
the Soviet belief that economic and class
imperatives shaped Western policies after World
War Two and corporations and banks, protected
by Western governments that they controlled,
were the engines driving capitalist expansion.
Once begun, the conflict spread and deepened.
The Cold War spreads and
deepens
The Cold War entered a new and more dangerous
stage early in 1947. By enunciating the Truman
Doctrine, the United States threw down the
gauntlet and officially adopted a confrontational
approach toward the Soviet Union. Tensions then
spread and deepened as both the American and
Soviet governments pursued policies intended to
obtain military, economic, and political advantages.
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Containment
Early in 1947, Great Britain informed Washington
that it could no longer provide financial assistance
to Turkey or to Greece, where a communist-led
insurgency threatened the country’s stability.
Fearing that other countries were also endangered,
on March 12 President Truman requested $400
million from Congress for economic and military
assistance for Turkey and Greece. Truman placed
the situation in the context of broader changes he
saw taking place. Truman’s speech, known as the
Truman Doctrine, marked America’s first major
Cold War commitment, as it espoused assisting
“free people” anywhere who were threatened by
totalitarian governments. Although the United
States had “made frequent protests against coercion
and intimidation, in violation of the Yalta
agreement, in Poland, Romania, and Bulgaria,”
those protests had proved insufficient. The US
must thus be willing, Truman declared, “to help
free peoples to maintain their free institutions and
their national integrity against aggressive movements
that seek to impose upon them totalitarian
regimes.” Truman’s sweeping language and the
commitment to assist any state threatened by
totalitarianism gained it the status of a “doctrine”
and a lasting American policy. Yet Truman’s
speech (see Key document, below) was more than
that: it was a virtual declaration of Cold War. The
issue was overshadowing everything else on the
global agenda.