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World War II, which lasted six years, set the framework for half a century of Cold War. For much of the war, the Soviets, the British, and the Americans were allies. But the defeat of their common enemies—Germany, Italy, and Japan—meant that the conflict between Communism, led by the Soviet Union, and its opponents, led by the United States, became the new central focus of world politics. The dramatic loss in status and influence of the two main European colonial empires, first the French and then the British, led to the United States becoming by far the world’s most powerful country. The outcome of World War II assured American global hegemony, with the Soviet Union and the Communist parties it had inspired as the only major challenge remaining.
While it is important to understand the role of World War II in creating the Cold War international system, it is equally important not to reduce that great war only to a prelude for what was to come. From a US perspective, World War II was predominantly about defeating German and Japanese expansionism in Europe and Asia. But even so, the question often asked—why was there later a Cold War when the United States and the USSR could be allies in World War II?—is the wrong question. The two were accidental allies in a global war brought on by their mutual enemies. In June 1941 Germany had attacked the USSR, and that December Japan attacked the United States. The Grand Alliance between the USSR, the United States, and Great Britain did not consist of a long period of working together for common aims, as most successful alliances do. It was a set of shotgun marriages brought on by real need, at a time when each of them had to find help to defeat immediate threats.
Winston Churchill, British prime minister since 1940, gave voice to this dilemma when he addressed the nation via radio after the Nazi attack on the Soviet Union, Operation Barbarossa, on 22 June 1941. Never even mentioning the Soviets or Stalin by name, Churchill still declared a de facto alliance with Moscow:
The Nazi regime is indistinguishable from the worst features of Communism… [and] no-one has been a more consistent opponent of Communism than I have for the last twenty-five years. I will unsay no words that I’ve spoken about it. But all this fades away before the spectacle which is now unfolding. The past, with its crimes, its follies and its tragedies, flashes away. I see the Russian soldiers standing on the threshold of their native land.… It follows, therefore, that we shall give whatever help we can to Russia and to the Russian people.… [Hitler’s] invasion of Russia is no more than a prelude to an attempted invasion of the British Isles.1
Stalin knew that his regime was very lucky to receive foreign aid. Just as he had expected uprisings against his dictatorship across the Soviet Union after the German surprise attack, he had expected Britain and the United States to concentrate on their own defense and leave Russia to its fate. Stalin’s views were not surprising. Not only had his pact with Hitler helped unleash World War II, but—shielded by the pact—his forces had invaded eastern Poland, occupied the Baltic states, and attacked Finland. European memories of the peak of Soviet terror in the 1930s were still fresh, as was intelligence information about Soviet supplies of fuel and oil to the Germans in 1939 and 1940. In 1941 there was ample reason not only for conservatives, but for liberals and Social Democrats as well, to see Hitler and Stalin as two thieves in the same market, two dictators leading cruel regimes, which were the deadly enemies not only of free market capitalism but of independent workers’ organizations and of representative democracy.
But foreign leaders realized that the only chance for Britain to survive the war, barring a US entry, was for the Soviets to resist the German forces as long as possible. And for that to happen, the USSR had to receive British and American support and aid. As Churchill quipped to his private secretary on the day of the invasion, “If Hitler invaded Hell I would make at least a favorable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons.”2 As it turned out, Churchill (and Roosevelt) would say much more positive things about Stalin and the Soviet regime later in the war than anyone could have expected in the summer of 1941. But in that crucial year all that mattered was the ability of the Red Army to continue to fight. British military leaders, however, had little belief in Soviet military capabilities. The chief of the Imperial General Staff told the prime minister that “I suppose they will be rounded up in hordes.”3 And to begin with they were. By the winter of 1941–42 the unified armed forces of Nazi Germany, the Wehrmacht, had taken 3.5 million Soviet prisoners. Behind German lines many civilians collaborated freely, especially in the Baltic states and in Ukraine, where significant portions of the population saw the German occupation as a liberation from Soviet rule. Atrocities against Jews were common. Hitler equated Bolshevism with Jewish rule and called his war against Stalin a “crusade to save Europe” from a Judeo-Bolshevik threat. Romanian, Hungarian, Croatian, Slovak, Finnish, and Spanish forces joined the Germans in the first months of the offensive.
The German attack on the Soviet Union also brought Britain and the United States closer together. Roosevelt regarded (rightly, based on past performance) his new British colleague as a jingoist and buffoon, who would not be an easy partner for any foreign nation. But FDR also realized, very quickly, that Churchill would fight to the bitter end against Nazi Germany. There would be no surrender. Meanwhile, FDR himself, increasingly concerned with attacks on his anti-Nazi policies within the United States, which he interpreted in a deeply partisan way as a continuation of his political opponents’ battles against the New Deal, was willing to nail his colors to the mast of the British ship. By dedicating his Administration’s foreign policy to the survival of Britain by any means other than direct US military intervention, Roosevelt could get back at his domestic political enemies for being unpatriotic or worse. The Lend-Lease agreements with London, signed into law on 11 March 1941, put the almost limitless US industrial production capacity at the disposal of the UK war effort. It was war by any other means than the use of US soldiers in Europe. From 1941 to 1945, the United States delivered $31 billion (close to half a trillion in 2016 dollars) worth of equipment to the United Kingdom: ships, aircraft, oil, and food. After Germany attacked the Soviet Union, FDR extended Lend-Lease there. “We are at the moment,” Churchill and Roosevelt told Stalin in a joint telegram, “cooperating to provide you with the very maximum of supplies that you most urgently need. Already many shiploads have left our shores and more will leave in the immediate future.”4
In September 1941, after three months of war on the Eastern Front, most observers still expected the Soviet Union to collapse, either through a military breakdown or through internal uprisings, just like in 1917. A couple of months later they were no longer so sure. The defense of Moscow and Leningrad, organized by Stalin and his generals, was tenacious. The German supply lines were overextended and their losses increased. German racial policies made it difficult to recruit from among the local populations. Hitler’s murderous obsession with exterminating Jews and Communists in the vast occupied areas deflected from the German military advance. And winter was setting in, with temperatures down to forty degrees below. The German soldiers had not prepared to fight under such conditions. Hitler had told them that the offensive would be over quickly, as had happened against France.
When the Germans failed to defeat the Soviets in the fall of 1941, the international situation changed fundamentally. A sudden invasion of Britain became much less likely. In occupied Europe, people began to hope that Germany could after all be defeated. Germany’s allies and friends in Europe—Italy, Hungary, Romania, and Spain—were discouraged, and some of their leaders began to wonder about how to settle with the British or with the Soviets.
But the biggest impact of the stalemate on the Eastern Front was on Japan. No longer believing that the Soviet Union would collapse or even be an easy target for their forces, Tokyo reoriented its aggressive strategy southward and eastward. Its own war with China had been dragging on for four years. Japanese leaders now decided to land a devastating blow to European interests in Asia and secure access for itself to crucial southeast Asian raw materials.
In December 1941, the Japanese attack on the main US naval base in Hawaii, Pearl Harbor, and on European colonies in Asia meant that American forces joined in the fighting in the east and soon also in Europe. Even though the US Navy’s top strategists had been deeply concerned with the Japanese naval buildup in the Pacific, nobody had expected an all-out attack on US facilities. What followed was even more shocking. Within six months, Japan had taken control of all of southeast Asia and stood at the gates of British India. In the wake of the victories of its Japanese allies, Germany rashly declared war on the United States. The Axis Powers, as Germany and its partners were called, now controlled most of Europe and much of Asia. But through their reckless pursuit of power, they had also brought together against them the most powerful coalition of forces the world had ever seen.
The US stock-taking of its new Soviet allies was important for what was to follow. Britain was a known quantity in the United States. Although many Americans disliked the British for their class system, their colonialism, and their snobbish way of looking down their noses at “upstart” former colonials in North America, a common language and common cultural and political traditions linked them. The Soviet Union was very different. Having entered the war, many Americans hoped that the common cause would help make the Soviets more “democratic” and the Soviet Union more like the United States. US government propaganda presented an image of heroic Russians fighting a devilish enemy. For some Left-wingers, in the United States as elsewhere, the Soviet and then the American entry into the war, involuntary as they may both have been, was an enormous relief, and held out hopes for a future in which the two countries could work together both to defeat Hitler and to build a better world. Woody Guthrie, who had lost his first radio job for refusing to condemn Stalin over the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact, now could sing about taking his union gun into battle and ending a world of slavery: “You’re bound to lose / You Fascists bound to lose!”5
The Fascists may have been bound to lose. But the three newfound allies approached each other warily. In Stalin’s mind, there was no fundamental difference between Britain and the United States, on the one hand, and Hitler and the Japanese on the other. Any alliance with ideological enemies would be temporary and brittle, Stalin thought, and would only survive as long as the others needed the Soviet Union for their own purposes. Even with the United States in the war, Stalin expected his capitalist allies at some point to seek a separate peace with Nazi Germany, leaving his Communist country in the lurch.6 As Stalin’s Red Army slowly began to push back the German divisions, at tremendous cost in lives and materiel, the Soviet leader constantly demanded that his allies set up a second front against Germany in northwest Europe. The fact that he did not get it until June 1944, after nine million Soviet soldiers had been killed, was to Stalin proof of British and American perfidy and hostility.
But if Stalin distrusted and disparaged his allies, the Soviet Union was increasingly dependent on their support for its survival. In all, goods and weapons worth $11.3 billion ($180 billion in 2016 dollars) reached the USSR between June 1941 and September 1945. Five thousand sailors died in shipping the aid to Soviet harbors. Some of this materiel was crucial to the Soviet war effort. Locomotives and railcars helped transport troops. Dodge trucks became the mainstay of Soviet logistics in their great tank battles both against Germany and later against Japan. Canned rations produced in Ohio and Nebraska kept millions of Soviets from starvation. Stalin thought, not unreasonably, that the Soviets paid for these supplies in blood on the battlefield. But he also knew that the American supplies were of such great importance to the Red Army’s fighting capabilities that he could not under any circumstance endanger their continued provision. Stalin therefore had a very concrete motive for continuing to cooperate with his allies as long as the war lasted and, if possible, for the long period of time it would take to rebuild the Soviet Union after the war ended.
The main political negotiations among the allies during the war took place at a number of summit meetings. At Tehran in November 1943, Yalta in February 1945, and Potsdam in July 1945, the leaders of the three major Allied powers participated. But in addition there were a number of bilateral meetings: Churchill traveled to meet Roosevelt three times before the prime minister’s first visit to Moscow in August 1942. Churchill’s visit with Stalin was essential. If the head of world Communism and the dyed-in-the-wool anti-Communist could reach practical agreements, then the alliance between the three incongruous partners would probably hold, at least for the duration of the war against Germany. The positive outcome of the first meeting in Moscow showed the degree to which Britain and the USSR, both struck by German power, depended on some form of cooperation for survival. But during their conversations, Stalin passed up few opportunities to chide his ally for British (and US) lack of a land offensive against Germany. According to British minutes of an August 1942 meeting at the Kremlin, “Stalin suggested that higher sacrifices were called for. Ten thousand men a day were being sacrificed on the Russian front.… The Russians did not complain of the sacrifices they were making, but the extent of them should be recognised.”7
At the Tehran summit in November 1943, a pattern was set that would last until the war was over. The Soviet role had changed from supplicant to demander. In January 1943 the Red Army had broken the German offensive at Stalingrad. From the summer of 1943, Soviet forces were on the attack along several broad fronts toward eastern Europe. The often-promised second front in France had not happened, even though Allied forces had landed in Italy in September. On the Asian side, Japan was still on the offensive in China, while US forces were slowly pushing Japan’s Imperial Army back across the Pacific. Most importantly, by the end of 1943 the United States had mobilized fully for war both in Asia and in Europe. In the year to come, the United States would produce 300,000 military planes and 529 large warships. Germany’s production was 133,000 and 20; Japan’s, 70,000 and 90. In the first three months of 1943 the United States produced as much overall shipping tonnage as Japan did in total during seven years of war. The Soviet Union was on the offensive in Europe, but the country itself was devastated. The United States was untouched, and its GDP had almost doubled since 1939.
In their discussions at Tehran, Stalin attempted to set the agenda because he knew that the Americans now wanted something from him. A Soviet attack on Japan could save hundreds of thousands of American soldiers’ lives in the Pacific, not to mention in the battles that would follow an invasion of the Japanese home islands. Roosevelt also had his mind set on a postwar world organization—what became the United Nations—in which he wanted Soviet participation. Given the increasing weakness of the British economic and political position, many of the key points of the conference were settled by Stalin and Roosevelt without Churchill’s direct participation. On the afternoon of 1 December 1943 Stalin came to see Roosevelt in the US president’s quarters in the Soviet embassy in Tehran, into which FDR had moved for security reasons. In their conversation, the US president agreed to move Poland’s borders two hundred miles west, at the expense of Germany, and keep the eastern borders for Poland that Stalin and Hitler had agreed to in 1939. FDR also agreed to the incorporation of the Baltic states into the Soviet Union. He only asked Stalin to keep the deal secret, so that it would not adversely affect his chances for reelection in 1944. FDR believed that little could be done for these countries anyway; at the end of the war the Red Army would be in control of their territories unless Britain and the United States were willing to fight the Soviets over them (which they were not).8 Roosevelt got Stalin’s agreement to enter the war against Japan after the defeat of Germany.9
When the Yalta summit was held in February 1945, the military situation had changed even more in the Soviets’ favor. Budapest fell to the Red Army during the conference. Soviet advance forces ended up standing less than seventy miles from Berlin as the conference was still going on. Even so, Yalta was not an all-out victory for Soviet interests. Roosevelt, physically weakened by illness, got Stalin to repeat his firm commitment to enter the war in east Asia no later than three months after the defeat of Germany. He also got Soviet membership in the new world organization he had proposed, the United Nations. Churchill, on his side, got the creation of a French occupation zone in postwar Germany, although the Soviets and the Americans had opposed it before the conference. The British wanted it because they sought to restore France’s position as a Great Power, in order to fortify against postwar Soviet control in Europe after a US withdrawal. Stalin got little that he had not achieved by military force already. The Allies agreed to build on a Communist-based Polish government, already in place in Warsaw after the Red Army occupation, not on the Polish government-in-exile based in London. The Soviets would be compensated for their efforts in Asia by getting some of their prerevolutionary rights in northeastern China (Manchuria) returned to them. The Chinese had not been asked their opinion in the matter.
A major Soviet concession, at least in the eyes of Roosevelt and Churchill, was agreeing to a joint Declaration on Liberated Europe. But the declaration was long on principle and short on detail. It promised the peoples of Europe the right to “create democratic institutions of their own choice” and “to choose the form of government under which they will live,” including “the earliest possible establishment through free elections of Governments responsive to the will of the people.” It also talked about “the restoration of sovereign rights and self-government to those peoples who have been forcibly deprived of them.”10 The American and British leaders expected the Soviets to at least go through the motions of “democracy” and “elections” in the parts of Europe occupied by the Red Army. It was more than a fig leaf. Leaders in London and Washington needed these concessions both for their own public opinion and as a sign of trust among allies. But they did not think they could alter the facts on the ground in eastern Europe. “It is the best I can do for Poland at this time,” FDR told his advisers at Yalta.11 Churchill went further. As he told his Cabinet after returning from the Crimea, “Stalin I’m sure means well to the world and Poland” and would deliver the “Polish people [a] free and more broadly-based gov[ernmen]t to bring about [an] election.”12
Even battle-hardened politicians can give in to wishful thinking as a long war is coming to an end. Roosevelt and Churchill wanted peace after the war, and they hoped Stalin would help them deliver that peace. But their oversell of the Yalta agreements in their own countries increased the risk of conflict rather than reduced it. Stalin had no intention of allowing Western-style elections in Poland. After occupying the eastern part of the country in 1940, his secret police had executed twenty-two thousand Polish officers, policemen, officials, landowners, factory owners, lawyers, and priests and buried them in mass graves, such as at Katyn. The Soviets knew that any elections in Poland would produce an overwhelming majority against them and the government they had created. But the problem was not only the Soviet relationship with Poland. The Stalin who signed the declaration on democracy and national rights in Europe was the same man who had launched a new democratic constitution for the USSR in 1936, the year in which his regime executed at least three hundred thousand of its own citizens. He was the same man who was purported to have written a theoretical book on Marxism and the “national question,” full of nice-sounding phrases, while sending whole nations to exile or death. The point was not so much that Stalin could not be trusted. The point was that the Soviet regime could not have introduced democratic elections in eastern Europe even if it had wanted to. It was not of that kind.
Stalin learned quickly how to conduct war on a grand scale, even if he left most of the concrete planning to his generals. Because of the ferocity of the German attack, the Soviet leader believed (for the first and only time) that Russian officers were (by necessity) loyal to him and the Communist regime, and he started a massive campaign of Russian nationalist propaganda in order to keep things that way, at least for the duration of the war. The word “revolution” was replaced by “nation” in Communist self-promotion; it is not for nothing that Russians still know World War II as the Great Patriotic War. It is hard to know whether Stalin’s own views changed much. His megalomania certainly grew. More than ever before, the Soviet Union became an instrument of his personal power. It is also clear that Stalin relished the personal recognition that his alliance brought him. To be dealt with on equal terms by a British aristocrat and the president of the most powerful country on earth was pleasing to a former bank robber from small-town Georgia. But Stalin’s wartime interaction with his allies did not change his outlook on the world, which remained crudely Marxist. Those who benefitted from capitalism, he thought, would always oppose the Soviet experiment and try to extinguish it. Therefore there would be conflict, including wars, between the Soviets and their opponents in the future. For now, however, all that mattered was the survival of Soviet power in the USSR and, if militarily possible, its extension into central Europe. Communist revolutions in Europe could wait, Stalin thought, until the European peoples were ready for them. The view in Moscow in 1945 was that the Red Army could further such revolutions, but it could not guarantee them.
Stalin hoped that his alliance with the United States and Britain would last for several years after the war ended. His country was a disaster in 1945. The physical destruction was immense, as were the human losses. Stalin knew that the Soviet Union needed peace if it was to recover. He feared the consequences for his own party if people were forced to live in misery even after the war was over. But Stalin was never quite sure what peace really meant, or whether his and Communism’s international opponents were willing to let him rest. There was no opposition to his dictatorship in the Soviet Union, and Stalin had a hard time imagining any opposition coming out of the new regions his Red Army had conquered. These countries might not be ripe for Communism yet, he thought, but they could be guided toward it by his authority and the example of the Soviet state. The British and Americans would extend their form of capitalism into the heart of Europe. Stalin would, at least over time, attempt to do the same with his system. It was both an ideological and strategic imperative. “This war,” Stalin told his Yugoslav Communist admirers in April 1945, “is not as in the past; whoever occupies a territory also imposes on it his own social system. Everyone imposes his own system as far as his army can reach. It cannot be otherwise.”13
For ordinary Russians, the Great Patriotic War meant that Stalin and the Communist Party became symbols for the defense of the country. In the 1930s Stalin may have symbolized modernization, social justice, and the welding together of the Soviet Union into a new kind of state, but he and his henchmen were still outsiders. One, whom I later spoke to, told me about their sense of having stolen a country and got away with it. In a 1933 poem, Osip Mandelstam had described the vozhd as “the Kremlin’s mountain yokel.” Perhaps it was the line “the huge laughing cockroaches on his top lip” that cost the poet his life. But many shared his sense of insult at a “foreign” regime led by a Georgian imposing its authority on Russians.14 The ferocity of the German attack, Hitler’s policy of extermination in the occupied areas, and, maybe most importantly, the ability of the Soviet regime to fight foreign invaders, had changed much of that. In 1945 Stalin’s dictatorship could be seen as representing the Russian nation simply through having fought, and in the end defeated, the German invasion. Even the Russian Orthodox Church—an institution for which the original Bolshevik approach in 1917 had been to burn its churches, if possible with worshippers inside—blessed the Soviet regime in 1945. “The Russian people accepted this war as a holy war,” said one of the church leaders, “a war for their faith and for their country.… Patriotism and Orthodoxy are one.”15
The pride of the Russians in the victory over Nazi Germany was also reflected in how others viewed the Soviets. In many parts of Europe the Red Army was seen as the real liberator of the continent from Nazi rule. In northern Norway, where Soviet troops entered in 1945, fishermen and their families emerged from hiding with banners praising Stalin and the Red Army. In Czechoslovakia, which had suffered six long years of German occupation, people embraced the Soviet soldiers as they marched through. In eastern Europe, many saw the Red Army as a Slav army liberating them from German racial oppression. But even outside their zones of occupation, Stalin and the Soviets were hailed as the liberators of the continent. In France, quite a few who had condemned Communism in the 1930s now saw it in a more positive light because of the amount of Soviet sacrifice in the war against Hitler. Support for Communist parties in western Europe had never been greater. Most of the new Communists were young people who had come of age during the war. In their eyes Communism and the Soviet example were first and foremost about much-needed reform in their home countries. They wanted full employment and social services. Women who had joined the workforce during the war did not want to be forced back into patriarchal domesticity. Communists were genuinely admired by many for their role in the resistance to German occupation, including by people who regretted their own failure at taking up weapons. Now Nazism and Fascism were dead, and Europe could renew itself. In spite of the Soviets’ bloody past, Communism had a model ready for Europe’s transformation.
The sense of the need for change was also very visible outside of Europe as World War II was coming to an end. If the First World War had sounded the death knell for Europe’s world domination, the Second World War made its abolition a necessity, not least for Europeans themselves. Young people in Europe who had survived the war were far more preoccupied with welfare in their own countries than in what happened to their colonies. Crucially, large numbers of them no longer believed that their own income and status were dependent on the maintenance of colonial control overseas. At the same time anticolonial resistance was on the increase, especially in Asia. Reeling from the war against Germany and Japanese attacks in the east, in 1942 Britain had offered India self-government as soon as the war was over. But independence leader Mohandas Gandhi, known as the Mahatma, or “Great Soul,” refused to budge on his demand for immediate independence. In 1942 he launched the Quit India Movement, which aimed at making use of British wartime weakness to drive them out of the subcontinent. Gandhi wanted no compromise. Churchill’s offers “have shown up British imperialism in its nakedness as never before,” Gandhi wrote. The British “desire our help only as slaves… it is harmful to India’s interests, and dangerous to the cause of India’s freedom, to introduce foreign soldiers in India,” even to fight Hitler and the Japanese.16
Further east, colonialism also seemed in free fall. In Indonesia—a new territorial concept coined by nationalists for all the southern islands of southeast Asia, as well as Malay-speaking regions of the mainland—the anticolonial leader Sukarno worked with the Japanese occupiers to secure independence from the Netherlands. In Vietnam, also a new term for all Viet-speaking regions that had been colonized by France, the Communist Ho Chi Minh established an independent state, with himself as president. The US government had promised the Philippines its independence before the war and used the promise to mobilize against the Japanese occupation of the islands. In Iran and Egypt nationalists protested against imposed British control. For many people in these countries, Nazism and Japan were not the main problems. The problem was European colonialism in all its forms. Working with Berlin and Tokyo could even help hasten the day of independence and national self-determination. The Atlantic Charter, issued by Roosevelt and Churchill in August 1941, seemed to some non-European nationalists too reminiscent of Woodrow Wilson’s World War I idealism, even if it inspired others. In the charter, the two countries pledged to “respect the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live; and they wish to see sovereign rights and self government restored to those who have been forcibly deprived of them.”17This, Indian, Indonesian, and Algerian nationalists claimed, must be as true for their countries as it would be for such white European countries as Czechoslovakia, Poland, Denmark, and France.
For most Americans, the Atlantic Charter summed up the principles for which they fought. The United States had been attacked by Japan and Germany, they thought, because these countries’ leaders hated the principles to which America had dedicated itself. World War II, in the American view, was a battle for individual liberty, constitutional order, and the American way of life. As in World War I, it was the enemies of these principles who had unleashed global war, and the United States had yet again to sacrifice the lives of its young men to attempt to set the rest of the world right. Toward the end of World War II, there was in America, across the political spectrum, a deeply felt sense that the country had earned the right to lead by example and that the world needed to be reformed along US lines if yet another war was to be avoided.
The growing US impatience with being challenged on any major issue even by its allies was in part a reflection of American power as the war was ending. The United States had outproduced and outfought its enemies. By mid-1945 the US Navy was bigger than all the world’s other navies combined, and US bombers had devastated Berlin, Dresden, Tokyo, and Yokohama. As the war ended, more than 60 percent of all the world’s heavy aircraft were American. No enemy bombers ever hit the US mainland. Both because of its productive power and because it was untouched by warfare, the US economy in 1945 reigned supreme. It now accounted for more than half of the world’s manufacturing capacity. It held two-thirds of the total financial reserves available, providing it with the world’s only stable currency and therefore the one in which all global trade was denominated.
President Franklin Roosevelt had no grand plan for what the world ought to look like after the war had ended. When he died, suddenly, on 12 April 1945, his focus was still squarely on fighting the war. The conflict in Europe had not yet ended, although German military power was fading fast. Japan showed no sign of surrendering. Roosevelt still wanted a Soviet entry into the war against Japan in order to spare American lives if an invasion of the Japanese home islands should be necessary. Supremely self-confident to the last, FDR had no doubts that he would be able to manage his relations with his allies as the war came to an end, and after that, too. In spite of rising tension with the Soviets, especially over the future of Poland, Roosevelt was convinced that the wartime alliance would muddle through, not least because of his own charisma, political suaveness, and ability to avoid overall confrontation (sometimes through being economical with the truth, both to his allies and his own people). Political defeat at home, not to mention death, simply did not figure in his calculations.
Because FDR had managed to transmit this confidence in his own durability, if not immortality, to his Administration, Vice President Harry S. Truman had the worst day of his life as he was sworn in as president upon Roosevelt’s sudden demise. The new US president had been abroad only once, seeing combat as a captain in France during World War I, and FDR had never drawn him into any foreign policy decision-making. Now Truman suddenly had to take charge of the most powerful country on earth just as the war was ending. Like his predecessor, the new president believed that the Grand Alliance would remain in place after the defeat of Germany, but he lacked the tools FDR had counted on to make it happen: personal charm, strategic (and moral) flexibility, and knowledge of world affairs. Down-to-earth, middle-class Truman was, in other words, closer both to the behavior and the outlook of most of his countrymen than his patrician predecessor had been. He was also more convinced that the United States had the power to set things right, and with that conviction came an impatience when being challenged. Both FDR and Truman disliked Communism, but from the very beginning of his presidency, the new president saw Communism as a challenge to the United States, as an undesired alternative to a US-led world order. Truman wanted to strike deals with Stalin, but only if the latter behaved according to a US view of how the world was supposed to operate.
Hitler committed suicide on 30 April and Germany capitulated unconditionally on 7 May 1945. With the Führer dead and the country in ruins, Hitler’s generals had nothing left to fight for. The endgame had come quickly, with Soviet forces rushing in from the east and US and British forces from the west and south. While all sides attempted to end up in control of as much land as possible, as long as the war lasted military considerations generally overrode the competition for territory. US and Soviet soldiers hugged and drank together, teaching each other songs from home, when they first met up by the River Elbe north of Leipzig. It would take more than forty years for Americans and Soviets to be able to mingle so effortlessly again.
The heads of the three main victorious states met outside Berlin, the capital of defeated Germany, from 17 July to 2 August 1945. At the small town of Potsdam, where the Prussian kings had their summer palaces, Stalin yet again played the host, as he had at Yalta and Tehran. But even if it was Soviet forces who had taken the German capital, Stalin wanted to avoid a clash with his allies over the occupation regime in Germany. At Potsdam the Soviet leader mainly wanted US and British acceptance of his country’s predominant position in eastern Europe. Both Roosevelt and Churchill had given him reason to believe that would be the case. But at Potsdam, Stalin was the only constant of the three leaders. When the meeting convened, FDR was dead, and Truman took his place. During the conference, the Conservatives lost the British general elections to the Labour Party, so on July 26 Prime Minister Clement Attlee replaced Churchill in Potsdam. Stalin distrusted Truman and Attlee from the beginning—Truman because Soviet intelligence reports stressed his anti-Communism and Attlee because he represented the Right wing of the British Labour movement, the old enemies of Communists everywhere. The Soviet leader knew, however, that he held two trump cards. His troops occupied half of Europe. And the war in east Asia was still not over. The new US president, like the old one, needed Soviet assistance to defeat Japan.
The Potsdam Conference is testimony to how fast global events can move, especially when a great war is coming to an end. The participants were not much preoccupied with Germany. Hitler was dead and his country defeated. The agreement on temporary zones of occupation, demilitarization and denazification, reversal of all German annexations, and moving Polish borders west at Germany’s expense (so that Stalin could keep his conquests of 1939) were easily arrived at. Tehran and Yalta had set the pattern on these matters, and Stalin was secretly relieved to find that those agreements still stood. The attention of all three main participants had moved to war in east Asia and to the political settlements in liberated Europe. Stalin knew that Truman’s eagerness to get the USSR into the war against Japan would help with other matters, maybe also in Europe. The US development of nuclear weapons, which Truman alluded to during their conversations, came as no surprise to Stalin; his spies had been following the US development of the atomic bomb since 1942. There is no evidence that the Soviet leader felt threatened by the US atomic monopoly in 1945, even though it made him speed up his own nuclear program. The Red Army had ten million soldiers in Europe, though Stalin, prior to Potsdam, had started transferring troops to east Asia in preparation for an attack on Japan. Stalin had just survived the biggest war in human history and emerged as its victor. He may have had forebodings about the future (he always did), but at Potsdam he was brimming with self-confidence and gusto. Truman believed he could take the measure of the man, and that negotiations with the Soviets were possible. “I can deal with Stalin,” the new president confided to his diary. “He is honest—but smart as hell.”18
The Potsdam Conference spent a great deal of time avoiding making decisions for the future. It was a waiting game: the war in Asia was still on, Truman and Attlee were new in power, and Stalin wanted to solidify the gains he had already made on the battlefield in Europe and, as a consequence thereof, at Tehran and Yalta. The British and Americans expected elections in Soviet-occupied eastern Europe and at least a pro forma adhesion to principles of democracy there. But at the moment the material challenges of the peace were enormous. All across the continent, great masses of people who had fled from the war were trying to get back home. Big cities were in ruins. Millions had no food or fuel. It is not surprising that there was a general feeling that political resolutions could wait. But while leaders hesitated on the big issues, decisions were being made on the ground, in part as a result of conflicting visions of how societies should be reorganized after the war had ended.
THESE CONTESTS HAPPENED throughout Europe, but it could still be argued that the Cold War began in Poland. There, Stalin’s policy of imposing strict Soviet control clashed with the wishes of his allies and those of the great majority of Poles. Britain had gone to war with Germany over the fate of Poland in 1939, and it would be hard for any British government to accept Soviet occupation and dictatorship in that country. Churchill was led by the exigencies of war and a great deal of wishful thinking about Stalin’s intentions to accept the Soviet plan for a reorganization of the Polish government over the heads of the Poles themselves. But this was only a first step in the Soviet campaign to bring Poland to heel. When the Poles had rebelled against the Germans in Warsaw in the summer of 1944, the Red Army deliberately stopped its offensive outside the Polish capital, allowing the Nazis to destroy the Polish Home Army. Stalin reckoned that the fewer Polish officers alive, the better for Soviet control of the country. When the Red Army was finally ordered to take Warsaw, a quarter of a million Poles had already been killed by the Wehrmacht and the SS and most of the city had been razed to the ground. Even so, after entering the Polish capital, Stalin’s secret police kidnapped many of the surviving leaders of the resistance and shipped them off to Moscow for a typical Stalinist show trial. Stalin had instructed the Soviet judges to give them “light” sentences, as a favor to his great power allies. All but a few were to die in captivity anyway.
As all of this went on in Warsaw, US views of Soviet behavior started to change. Roosevelt had become increasingly concerned with the Polish issue; his main concern had been the disdain for foreign opinion with which the Soviets handled matters in Warsaw. His successor saw matters in more concrete terms. Harry Truman believed that the Yalta agreements on Poland ensured democratic freedom and an inclusive transition government that would prepare free elections. The Soviets were not living up to their commitments, Truman thought. As a result, the new president’s first meeting with Soviet foreign minister Viacheslav Molotov, twelve days after FDR’s death and three months before Potsdam, had been quite frosty. “The President said that he desired the friendship of the Soviet Government,” reads the official US record, “but that he felt it could only be on the basis of mutual observation of agreements and not on the basis of a one way street.”19 “I gave it to him straight,” Truman told a friend afterward. “I let him have it. It was the straight one-two to the jaw.”20
Poland seemed a dividing line to Allied leaders. Churchill, who had less at stake in the final stages of the war in Asia, moved effortlessly back to some of his earlier views of the Soviets. On 12 May Churchill sent Truman a personal message, in which for the first time a western leader used a term that would define the Cold War, “Iron Curtain”:
An iron curtain is drawn down upon [the Soviet] front. We do not know what is going on behind. There seems little doubt that the whole of the regions east of the line Lubeck–Trieste–Corfu will soon be completely in their hands… as this enormous Muscovite advance into the centre of Europe takes place.… It would be open to the Russians in a very short time to advance if they chose to the waters of the North Sea and the Atlantic.… Surely it is vital now to come to an understanding with Russia, or see where we are with her, before we weaken our armies mortally or retire to the zones of occupation.21
Increasingly concerned about Soviet behavior in the east, Churchill wanted US and British troops to remain in the positions they had had when the war ended. Truman turned him down, ordering a withdrawal to conform with the lines of responsibility previously agreed with the Soviets. As a result, hundreds of thousands of Germans fled west to avoid the Soviet zone of occupation. But Truman was concerned enough to send Harry Hopkins, FDR’s trusted adviser and a champion of cooperation with the Soviets, to Moscow to try to convince Stalin of the error of his ways. Hopkins was already dying of cancer, and the grueling trip to Russia took the best out of him. He still tried his hand with the Soviet dictator, though. “I told Stalin,” Hopkins reported to Truman, “that I personally felt that our relations were threatened and that I frankly had many misgivings about it and with my intimate knowledge of the situation I was, frankly, bewildered with some of the things that were going on.”22 Stalin would not budge. He accused the British of muddying the waters in US-Soviet relations. Even though mainly conceived as part of US postwar cost-cutting, Truman’s abrupt termination of the Lend-Lease arrangements with the Soviet Union right after victory in Europe in May 1945 had also helped convince Stalin that he was facing a new attitude in Washington. He did not know whether it was the end of the war in Europe or the coming of a new president that had caused it. Stalin had been on his best behavior at Potsdam. But his suspicions were up. “Poland! What a big deal!” Soviet foreign minister Molotov noted in February 1945. “We are unaware,” Molotov continued, “of how the governments in Belgium, France, Germany, etc. are organized. No one consulted us, although we don’t say we like one or another of these governments. We didn’t interfere because this is the zone of operations of British and American troops!”23
In the rest of eastern Europe, which lay within the Soviet lines of occupation, Stalin’s irritation with his Great Power partners showed more clearly. In Bulgaria he accepted a more radical line from the local Communists in early 1945; hundreds of key opponents of the Communist-led Fatherland Front, which ruled the country after the Red Army invaded, were executed and more than ten thousand sentenced to prison terms. Most of these had served in Bulgaria’s wartime government, which had been an ally of Hitler’s Germany. Neither the Allies nor most of the Bulgarian public therefore protested much. But these were not trials of collaborators as seen in western Europe. In Bulgaria, the Soviets and local Communists established a pattern in which all opposition to Communist control of the government was by its very nature defined as Fascist and therefore subject to imprisonment or worse. Inside the Soviet Union, more than a million Balts and Caucasians, including the whole Chechen population, were deported to Siberia and to the Russian Far East as the war came to an end. The Soviet regime did not want to take any chances with unreliable population groups in its border areas.
Stalin did not have a master plan for what to do in eastern Europe when the war was over. But the Communists there were loyal only to him and provided the ultimate guarantee for Soviet control if relations with the United States and Britain were to break down. And in the spring of 1945 Stalin increasingly fell back on what his Marxism told him about his erstwhile allies. Already in January he had warned against believing in any continuing community of interest between Moscow and the west. “The crisis of capitalism has manifested itself in the division of the capitalists into two factions—one fascist, the other democratic,” he told a group of visiting Yugoslavs and Bulgarians. “The alliance between ourselves and the democratic faction of capitalists came about because the latter had a stake in preventing Hitler’s domination, for that brutal state would have driven the working class to extremes and to the overthrow of capitalism itself. We are currently allied with the one faction against the other, but in the future we will be against the first faction of capitalists, too.”24
One of the biggest surprises the Soviets got in 1945 was the Labour Party victory in the British general election. Stalin may have distrusted Winston Churchill and seen in him the embodiment of British upper-class rule, but Winston was the devil he knew, just as he knew, through his spies, that the old Conservative had formed a bit of a sentimental relationship with Stalin as a fellow survivor and victor in World War II. Besides, there was already bad blood between British Labour and Soviet Bolshevism. The leaders of the Labour Party—Clement Attlee, who now became prime minister, and Ernest Bevin, who became foreign secretary—detested the Communists within their own trade union movement; Moscow’s supporters were responsible, both thought, for splitting the movement in the 1920s and 1930s. Bevin, an unskilled worker who had come to prominence as the head of the biggest of the British trade unions, the Transport and General Workers’ Union, had fought Communist influence there and elsewhere relentlessly. In his postwar dealings with Stalin and Molotov, Bevin saw many of these battles repeated on an international scale. Molotov, said Bevin later, was like a Communist in a local Labour Party branch: if you treated him badly, he made the most of the grievance, and if you treated him well, he put up the price next day and abused you. A cabinet colleague viewed Bevin as “full of bright ideas, as well as earthy sense, but dangerously obsessed with Communists.”25
The Soviets hated British Labour back with equal fervor. In the Soviet documents of the era, there is nearly no sense of opportunity in the news that a Left-wing party, some of whose key union leaders and intellectuals had long-established contacts with Moscow, had won the British elections. Stalin and his lieutenants sensed that Labour’s dedication to building a Social Democratic welfare state could be the worst challenge to Communist aspirations not only in Britain—none of them were so deluded as to expect a Communist revolution in London anytime soon—but also in the rest of western Europe. Soviet foreign affairs experts presumed that the capitalist countries would be hit by an economic crisis after the war ended and that competition among them therefore would increase, as had happened after the First World War. European Communist parties could benefit from the ensuing impoverishment of the workers, since it would prove that no capitalist system could deliver what the working class wanted. The efforts of Social Democrats to reform capitalism was therefore, in the Soviet view, at best irrelevant and at worst counterproductive. Only countries that consciously patterned themselves on the Soviet experience, which had shown that it could deliver full employment and economic growth, would gain in economic terms from the war’s end.
The US perspective on conditions in Europe after the war ended was almost the diametric opposite of that of the Soviets. Americans feared the effects of an economic collapse and lasting poverty in Europe, one that could perhaps spread worldwide. While the Soviets expected revolution after the war, because the end of World War I had created the Russian Revolution, most Americans feared such revolutionary prospects. In their minds, World War I and the Great Depression had created Communism and Fascism, the enemies of America. Polls taken in the autumn of 1945 showed that the majority of Americans wanted their country to act to relieve the despair and poverty that had produced ideologies abhorrent to the American mind.
But American opinion polls also showed a contrary trend to this engagement with the world. Throughout the first postwar years, the vast majority of Americans felt their country had sacrificed enough in terms of blood and direct effort to stem the rot in Europe and Asia. Like Europeans and Asians, postwar Americans wanted their government to concentrate on improving living conditions at home. Essentially they wanted to get their boys in uniform back as quickly as possible. Fearful of the isolationist thinking that had emerged after World War I and mindful of the fact that the United States had not entered World War II until it was attacked by Japan, the Truman Administration wanted to balance the obvious need for the United States to engage internationally after the war was over with the need to placate its voters back home. It could do so, the president himself believed, by using its enormous economic resources to alleviate want elsewhere and get foreign economies going again.
World War II had led to a wholesale transformation of the global economy. As we have seen, the rise of the United States as the center of world economic affairs had been ongoing since the early twentieth century, and had sped up during the interwar years. But it was World War II that made long-term change into a rapid transformation. The American economy had almost doubled in size during the war. In contrast, almost everywhere else lay devastated. In Japan, across the country a quarter of all buildings were destroyed—in Tokyo more than half. Its industrial output was below one-third of prewar figures. In China industrial production was down by more than 60 percent compared to 1937. In the Philippines, the Asian country most devastated by World War II, total economic output was just above 20 percent of what it had been in 1941.
During the war the Roosevelt Administration had realized that it needed to make use of its unique position to create a postwar world that would work better for the United States. FDR’s key idea was to perpetuate the wartime alliances against Germany and Japan, while also creating a world organization to which all countries could belong. The United Nations, a term that Roosevelt used interchangeably for the Allied Powers and for the wider group of nations he wanted to put together, was founded as an organization in 1945, with its headquarters first in London and then in New York. In form, the UN was a compromise between two strands in the late president’s own thinking. One was idealist: to create a truly global forum, which could assist progressive reform everywhere while keeping the peace. The other was realist: to create a forum through which the allied Great Powers could cooperate and, if necessary, force others to do their bidding. The first aim was realized through the UN General Assembly, which at the beginning had fifty-one members, among them twenty Latin American republics. The second was constructed through the UN Security Council, which had just five members—the United States, Britain, the USSR, France, and China—and in which each had a veto against any proposal made. Only the Security Council could issue resolutions binding for all UN member states, including for sanctions or military action. Neither Stalin nor the British had much faith in the new organization, but each went along to please their mighty American partner. In 1945, nobody could foresee the global role that the UN was to play as the Cold War took hold.
One of the new world organization’s main duties was to deal with global economic issues. As the most powerful economy, the United States wanted free trade and access to markets abroad. But it also wanted increased stability in the world economic system. At Bretton Woods in New Hampshire in July 1944, the main allied industrial countries had signed a set of agreements that led to the establishment of an International Monetary Fund (IMF), to provide loans that could bridge a country’s imbalance in payments, and an International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, which later became part of the World Bank. But the most basic element of the Bretton Woods system, as it came to be called, was tying all other major exchange currencies to the US dollar at fixed parities. The Bretton Woods agreements gave the United States a massive opportunity for international trade and for influencing the economies of other countries. But it should not be forgotten that, just like the political division lines in Europe and Asia, the agreements were the outcome of what the war had already created. In the longer run, the United States got neither the opportunity nor the stability that it wanted from Bretton Woods. But the agreements did provide a system, of sorts, to legitimize the advent of the United States as the world’s economic behemoth.
Given its unique position, could the United States have done more to avoid international conflict in the wake of World War II? A lot of different countries resented the consequences of America’s rise but learned to live with it because they had to, for both political and economic reasons. Lines from a ditty much circulated in the British Foreign Office in 1945 went something like this:
In Washington Lord Halifax
Once whispered to Lord Keynes,
“It’s true they have all the money-bags
But we have all the brains.”26
But by 1945 London had to accept that Washington had eclipsed it, by a wide margin, as the center of global power. Britain needed US financial assistance and, if it could get it, US protection against what it saw as the rise of Soviet power in Europe and Asia. Already in 1945, the Truman Administration—as its own relations with Moscow soured—did not need to impose its view in the matter on western European and British leaders. They were as concerned by Stalin’s policy as were any group in Washington. British foreign secretary Bevin in 1945 told everyone who wanted to listen, including Soviet foreign minister Molotov, that “it was the Soviet government which was making things difficult.”27
Although the United States and the Soviet Union were wartime allies, some form of postwar conflict was next to inevitable. Leaders of the two countries had seen each other as adversaries ever since the Russian Revolution of 1917, and in some cases even before that. Stalin’s policy of prioritizing control of eastern Europe over good relations with his allies contributed significantly to the weakening of the Grand Alliance as the war was coming to an end, as did his wartime atrocities, for instance in Poland, and his megalomania. Soviet ideology stood in the way, too, since it considered a future conflict with the capitalist world as unavoidable and predicted that intense revolutionary upheavals would occur in the postwar era. On the US side, there was little patience with the Soviet Union not recognizing the preponderance of the United States in international affairs. President Truman did not have the political agility and personal charm of President Roosevelt, and his key advisers, who long had been advocating a tougher line on the Soviets, led him to make decisions that pointed toward the containment rather than the integration of the Soviet Union. As we shall see, it was containment that made postwar conflict into a Cold War. Truman did not understand FDR’s policy of attempting to tie Moscow to international arrangements and treaties. As the strongest power, the United States should have done more to keep open channels of communication, of trade, and of cultural and scientific exchange. Stalin would probably have chosen isolation anyway. But the intensity of the conflict, including the paranoia that it later produced on both sides, might have been significantly reduced if more attempts had been made by the stronger power to entice Moscow toward forms of cooperation.
It has to be realized, though, that such judgments can only be made with hindsight. It is not surprising that in spite of the absolute predominance of the United States, many people feared Soviet power, especially in Europe. The Red Army had vast forces on that continent in 1945. In terms of numbers and proven capability they outgunned everyone else. Soviet behavior in eastern Europe spread foreboding. Some say that Stalin was indeed terrible to his own people, but rather limited and traditional in his foreign policy aims. That may be so, at least on some issues. But by 1945 Stalin had taken his behavior into the heart of Europe and into China and Iran, too. Soviet actions in these parts precipitated changes in US policies, and they frightened others who glimpsed them from afar. By themselves, these actions may not have precipitated a Cold War. But they certainly made postwar containment against the Soviet Union much more likely.