4

Reconstructions

During the 1940s and early 1950s, Europe and the rest of the world were being reconstructed in ways that would have been hard to recognize from the early part of the century. Some of this reconstruction was physical, made necessary by the ravages of war. But there was also a political and intellectual reconstruction going on, which put the Cold War between Communism and capitalism, and between the Soviet Union and the United States, at the center of world affairs. For people in most parts of the world it was increasingly as if the great power conflict had something to do with them, often at the personal level. Over and over again, events that were in origin local and specific metamorphosed into manifestations of a global struggle. The main reason for this was that both the Soviets and the Americans—as Kennan had pointed out in his Long Telegram—stood for models of human endeavor that had universalist pretensions. The Nazis had tried to rule through extermination. The colonial empires had ruled through exploitation and racial oppression. But the undoubted cruelty that both emerging Superpowers were capable of—nuclear extermination of cities or millions sent to labor camps—was offset in people’s minds by the promise each held of a better life, especially for those in the many parts of the world who had gone through hell in the first decades of the twentieth century. The reconstruction that took place in the first years after the war ended was psychological as well as physical, and it privileged a Cold War competition for people’s minds.

At first, agendas changed rather subtly, and then—as wartime attempts at cooperation faded from memory—the changes happened more and more quickly. One good example is the United Nations, the brainchild of President Roosevelt, the world organization through which he wanted to make up for the US failure to help build peace and prosperity after World War I. To begin with, the UN concentrated on rescue and relief operations in Europe and Asia; through the UN Relief and Recovery Administration much was achieved, mainly with US funding. The UN agencies dealing with food and health, the Food and Agriculture Organization and the World Health Organization, began work to study and ameliorate famine and epidemics with support by both Superpowers, and without much overt Cold War interference. Even the new world economic institutions, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, launched relatively smoothly, although the United States—as the biggest provider of funds—kept control of who could receive funding. Stalin at first regarded the UN simply as a concession to his wartime American partners and took little interest in its proceedings, except through the UN Security Council, where the Soviet Union used its veto to block resolutions it did not like.

It was the Americans who first discovered how the UN could serve their Cold War purposes. The text of the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights was passed in 1948 by a coalition of American New Dealers, western European liberals, and postcolonial elites, with the Soviets unable to block it. They in the end abstained from the vote, along with seven other states. Forty-eight voted in favor. The Chilean representative summed up the conflict in distinct terms: “The views expressed by the Polish representative and shared by the USSR delegation resulted from a different conception of life and man. The draft declaration rested on the assumption that the interests of the individual came before those of the State and that the State should not be allowed to deprive the individual of his dignity and his basic rights. The opposing conception was that the rights of the individual must give precedence to the interests of society.”¹ The declaration may not have had much practical significance in the first decades of the Cold War, but its adaptation was a victory for the United States over Soviet concepts of rights.

While words could be made into weapons at the UN, science could be made into weapons at the world’s top universities and laboratories. In 1945, some observers thought that the invention of nuclear weapons would prevent armed conflict in the future. The consequences of war would simply be too great. But the Truman Administration did not heed calls for shared control of the frightful new weapons through the UN. Instead, the US military gradually began integral planning for the use of atomic bombs in warfare. “Plan Broiler” from November 1947—one of the first complete war plans against the Soviet Union drawn up by the US Joint Chiefs of Staff—envisaged thirty-four atomic bombs dropped on twenty-four Soviet cities. The White House and top military commanders were aware of the terrifying gulf that separated nuclear weapons from conventional weapons, in spite of calls from some officers and members of Congress to make atomic bombs more readily available at the potential frontlines of a war with the Soviets. Truman had read the medical reports coming in from tests made on survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The atomic bomb was not just another weapon, and the Administration was uncertain both about production and control. Still, having a nuclear monopoly gave the Americans confidence, and boosted their willingness to develop a global strategy. By the end of 1949 more than two hundred bombs had been produced, and twenty B-29 bombers had been modified to carry them.

For the Soviet Union the US nuclear monopoly was an immediate threat, even though neither Stalin nor his American counterparts believed that atomic weapons by themselves would win a war. Outwardly the Soviets used the US refusal to share nuclear technology as part of its “peace campaign,” portraying the Truman Administration as warmongers, hell-bent on nuclear destruction. Internally, Stalin had started a crash program to develop a Soviet nuke. Using a combination of Soviet physics’ prowess and intelligence gathered from spies within the US program, the plans made rapid progress. The first test in August 1949 was an example of what Soviet science could achieve. Even though the Soviets were only able to develop five or six atomic bombs over the first couple of years, it started an arms race in which Moscow seemed to be catching up with Washington. In November 1952 the Americans tested the first thermonuclear weapon, the so-called hydrogen or H-bomb, a nuclear weapon 450 times more powerful than the bomb that had destroyed Hiroshima in 1945. The Soviets tested a similar weapon only nine months later.

The US invention of nuclear weapons made most Americans feel that their country had unique power and responsibility in the world. After the Soviets got their nukes, it also created a sense of American vulnerability. The change from isolationist American attitudes in the 1920s and ’30s was palpable. Government propaganda explains just a part of this change. The experience of having been attacked at Pearl Harbor, of having fought in Europe and the Pacific during World War II, as well as the legacies of an activist state at home during the New Deal, contributed to making Americans more interventionist in their approach. Even though those in charge in the White House were Democratic liberals, they were joined in their Cold War policies by many Republicans. The Marshall Plan, a massive US investment in the future of Europe, passed a Republican-controlled House with only 74 members voting against. The assistance to Greece and Turkey was opposed by 107 congressmen. Even Republicans like Robert Taft, who had been a standard-bearer for noninterventionism in the 1930s (and who later was to oppose both NATO and the Korean War) voted for Truman’s economic and military aid plans. From a US perspective, the Cold War was a bipartisan initiative.

Instead, the main challenge to Truman’s decision to confront the Soviet Union came from the Left. And it was not much of a challenge. Roosevelt’s former secretary of agriculture, Henry Wallace—a Democratic Party grandee who regarded himself as a leader of the Left—decided to form a separate party for the presidential elections in 1948. “The bigger the peace vote in 1948,” Wallace said in declaring his candidacy, “the more definitely the world will know that the United States is not behind the bi-partisan reactionary war policy which is dividing the world into two armed camps and making inevitable the day when American soldiers will be lying in their Arctic suits in the Russian snow.”² Even though it was supported by some Democrats who felt that Truman was moving away from the legacies of the New Deal by breaking the wartime alliance with the USSR, Wallace’s campaign was undermined by his own haplessness as a candidate and the rather shrill US Communist Party support for his cause. To everyone’s surprise, Truman narrowly won the election against the Republican Thomas Dewey. Wallace’s Progressives scored 2.5 percent of the vote, less than Strom Thurmond’s Southern segregationists ticket.

Truman’s second-term foreign policy was marked by increasing tension with the Soviets, the collapse of a US-supported government in China, and the outbreak of the Korean War. This was the time when the Cold War was militarized, both from a Soviet and American perspective. Truman’s administration struggled to put together a comprehensive and global strategy for fighting what everyone hoped would remain a shadow war with the Soviets. There was never much doubt in the president’s mind that the struggle was both against the Soviet Union and Communism globally. And he had little time for those among his own advisers—such as George Kennan—who warned against a global militarization of the conflict. Kennan was replaced as director of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff in 1949, and his successor, the more hawkish Paul Nitze, put together a document that attempted to set out a US Cold War strategy.³ Later known as NSC-68, the paper was radical in its recommendations and would probably not have come to reflect the Administration’s policies if it had not been for the outbreak of the Korean War three months after it was first presented.

The direction of NSC-68 focused on the need for dramatic increases in US defense spending and on American willingness to intervene globally. It encouraged economic and psychological warfare as well as covert operations to target the Soviet enemy and its allies. It wanted a dramatic increase in US intelligence-gathering capabilities and in money spent on internal security and civil defense. It was even foolhardy enough to suggest that tax increases and cuts in domestic programs would be necessary to pay for these expenses. The purpose was to put the United States on war footing in a conflict that could last for a very long time.

Still, the most striking aspect of NSC-68 was not its practical suggestions but the view of the enemy that it represented. “The defeat of Germany and Japan and the decline of the British and French Empires have interacted with the development of the United States and the Soviet Union in such a way that power increasingly gravitated to these two centers,” Nitze and his colleagues explained.

The Soviet Union, unlike previous aspirants to hegemony, is animated by a new fanatic faith, anti-thetical to our own, and seeks to impose its absolute authority over the rest of the world. Conflict has, therefore, become endemic and is waged, on the part of the Soviet Union, by violent or non-violent methods in accordance with the dictates of expediency.… The [Soviet] design… calls for the complete subversion or forcible destruction of the machinery of government and structure of society in the countries of the non-Soviet world and their replacement by an apparatus and structure subservient to and controlled from the Kremlin. To that end Soviet efforts are now directed toward the domination of the Eurasian land mass. The United States, as the principal center of power in the non-Soviet world and the bulwark of opposition to Soviet expansion, is the principal enemy whose integrity and vitality must be subverted or destroyed by one means or another if the Kremlin is to achieve its fundamental design.… Our free society finds itself mortally challenged by the Soviet system. No other value system is so wholly irreconcilable with ours, so implacable in its purpose to destroy ours, so capable of turning to its own uses the most dangerous and divisive trends in our own society, no other so skillfully and powerfully evokes the elements of irrationality in human nature everywhere, and no other has the support of a great and growing center of military power.⁴

The long-term US aim, NSC-68 maintained, is to create “a fundamental change in the nature of the Soviet system, a change toward which the frustration of the design is the first and perhaps the most important step. Clearly it will not only be less costly but more effective if this change occurs to a maximum extent as a result of internal forces in Soviet society.” But to begin with the United States should concentrate on internal and external defense:

It is quite clear from Soviet theory and practice that the Kremlin seeks to bring the free world under its dominion by the methods of the cold war. The preferred technique is to subvert by infiltration and intimidation. Every institution of our society is an instrument which it is sought to stultify and turn against our purposes. Those that touch most closely our material and moral strength are obviously the prime targets, labor unions, civic enterprises, schools, churches, and all media for influencing opinion. The effort is not so much to make them serve obvious Soviet ends as to prevent them from serving our ends, and thus to make them sources of confusion in our economy, our culture, and our body politic.⁵

As a document, NSC-68 was itself a product of a new US foreign policy coordination process centered on the White House. The National Security Council (NSC) was set up by President Truman in 1947 in order to link the various foreign policy, military, and intelligence bodies within the executive branch. At first the NSC was intended primarily as a step toward providing better and more consistent advice to the president. But, bowing to bureaucratic necessities, it increasingly took on key functions of consultation, deliberation, and—at least to some extent—policy-making. As the Cold War intensified, the NSC became the main coordinating body for how to conduct it within the US government. On intelligence, likewise, Truman aimed for centralization and effectivization. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), established by the same act that set up the NSC, aimed at bringing together the various intelligence-gathering bureaus and agencies that existed within the US government. In this it failed, since different branches of military intelligence as well as the signals intelligence bureau (later renamed the National Security Agency, or NSA) remained outside CIA purview. But the new agency still became a key instrument of US Cold War capabilities, both through spying and through covert operations.

AS US CAPACITY increased and expanded, so Britain’s decreased and contracted. The agenda for the British government in the late 1940s and early 1950s was much narrower than its victory in World War II should have allowed for. Britain was still a great power with global interests. But it did not have the economic capacity to sustain its status for much longer. As the war ended, Britain was broke. It had lost one quarter of its national wealth, meaning that its expenditure for World War II was roughly twice that of World War I. When Churchill had spoken of all-out mobilization against the Nazis, his government had really meant it: Britain had borrowed (from the Americans), sold off foreign assets, and sacrificed civilian production at home to keep the war going. It had won, but at a cost that was too great to bear for Britain’s prewar position. In order to pay back its debts and rebuild at home—not to mention prepare for the welfare state that the Labour government had promised—the UK had to introduce rationing for most goods and cut back dramatically on its overseas military engagements. Still, it was not enough. People had to line up for hours in order to get basic supplies. Bombed-out Londoners had to wait on average seven years to get a new home.⁶

Politically, Clement Attlee’s government was caught in a quandary. For a while it kept on pretending that Britain could be the balancing force on the European continent, helping to contain Communism, while gradually allowing for more freedoms in the Empire and building a welfare state at home. In reality it had to choose, and—understandably enough—opted for the latter. By 1950 the British withdrawal from east of Suez was in full swing; India and Pakistan had become independent in 1947, southeast Asia was soon to follow, and Britain’s position in the Middle East and the Mediterranean was much reduced. One should be careful, though, with making Britain’s international weakness in the 1950s total: it still had one of the largest armies and navies in the world, it had the prestige of having stood up to Hitler when nobody else would or could, and it had—successfully it seemed—hitched its wagon to that of the world’s main power, the United States. The British may have felt that they were treated dismally by their big ally and resented the slide in their country’s international prestige. But, whether they voted Labour or Conservative, they were also aware that they were getting something back: free medical care for all, universal pensions, and family allowances mattered in what was still one of the most class-ridden societies on earth.

If life in Britain was topsy-turvy after the war, its former enemy had had its existence almost obliterated. Germany was a wreck in 1945, and it took a long time for its people to begin moving out of the physical and psychological ruins Hitler had left behind. Even though German industrial production in 1945 was less than 20 percent of what it had been before the war, the psychological scars were worse than the material destruction. The Germans had, in 1933, joined up with a disastrous political project. Right to the end of the war they had embraced the lie, and the Nazi breakdown was therefore utterly demoralizing. What was the purpose of work, if death and devastation were its wages? Getting any form of economic activity going again in post-war Germany was difficult, and in the first years Germans were dependent on handouts from the victorious powers. The only way of obtaining goods beyond the bare necessities was through the black market.

The allies had a hard time deciding what to do with Germany. The French and some Americans suggested its total dismemberment as a state; one American plan proposed the abolition of its industrial potential and its reinvention as an agricultural economy. Agreeing to zones of occupation was the easy part at first. The Soviets got 40 percent in the east (reduced to 28 percent when Stalin transferred German territory to Poland). The remainder was shared between Britain (in the northwest), the United States (in the south), and a smaller zone in the southwest for France. Very soon the discussion about Germany’s long-term future was overwhelmed by its immediate needs. None of the occupying powers wanted to contribute more to the German economy than what they were getting out of it—“paying reparations to the Germans,” as the cash-strapped British put it. To make things worse for the western Allies, the Potsdam agreements allowed the Soviets to receive some of their reparations from the western zones. So while the Americans in reality were paying for the upkeep of the former enemy, the Soviets—who contributed much less in their zone—were busy dismantling surviving German industries in the Ruhr and shipping them east.

In May 1946 the US military governor, General Lucius D. Clay, unilaterally suspended reparation deliveries from the American zone. The British did the same three months later. The Soviets were furious, but could do little about it. Neither could they hinder the Americans and the British from joining their two zones, for economic purposes, at the end of 1946. The so-called Bizonia was supposed to be a temporary measure. But in reality it laid the foundation for a separate West German state. At the Moscow foreign ministers’ meeting in March 1947, it became clear that both the two main western allies were edging closer to Kennan’s view from 1945, when he had argued that “we have no choice but to lead our section of Germany… to a form of independence so prosperous, so secure, so superior, that the East cannot threaten it.”⁷ By mid-1947, after the authorities in Bizonia had in effect given up on the de-Nazification of German industry, some economic activity had restarted in western Germany, but it did still not show any signs of an economic recovery.

As on so many other matters, Stalin found it difficult to decide what Soviet postwar policy toward Germany should be. He had learned from his mentor Lenin that Germany was the big prize for socialism in Europe; only with a Communist Germany, Lenin had believed, could the Soviet Union continue to exist in the long run. But instead of going socialist, Germany had been taken over by the Nazis in the 1930s and, after Stalin’s attempts at accommodation had failed, had started a war in which the USSR itself almost succumbed. Even in defeat, Germany was therefore a big opportunity as well as a big danger. If a neutral Germany could gradually be linked to the Soviet Union, then the Cold War in Europe would be won. But if the Americans succeeded in turning the part of Germany it occupied—the richest and best developed part—into an arsenal for a US-led attack on the USSR, then Communism would be stamped out. Stalin therefore had to be cautious not to misstep, again, on Germany.

As so often happens, indecision led to passivity. For a crucial year Stalin let events in Germany float. He allowed his soldiers to introduce a regime of terror in the east, not exactly conducive to the future establishment of socialism. He seemed more preoccupied with looting what could be of use to the Soviets than with establishing order in his occupation zone. If the Soviet zone, after the initial chaos, for a while seemed to work better than the west, this was due not so much to Stalin as to Red Army administrators and the German Communists who had come back with them. They were more than ready to take over the centralized planning systems that had existed in Nazi Germany and to rely on them in order to get basic infrastructure and production going wherever possible. After a while former Nazi officials at the lower levels—those the Soviets decided not to put on trial—also found it remarkably easy to collaborate; the Communist ideas of planning were not, after all, that different from those of their former masters.

Publicly, however, the new east German authorities held high the banner of anti-Fascism. They were the “good Germans”; the bad Germans, plenty of them, were all collaborating in the western occupation zones, or so German Communist propaganda claimed. Many Left-wing Germans fell for the disinformation, especially intellectuals and artists, some of whom moved east, including top names in German literature like Stefan Heym and Bertolt Brecht, who both moved there from wartime exile in the United States. In the spring of 1946 the Soviets and the German Communists forced the Social Democrats in the east into a Socialist Unity Party (SED), in which the Communists under Wilhelm Pieck and Walter Ulbricht had full control. Again, some non-Communist Left-wingers joined enthusiastically, believing that they thereby made up for the failure of the German Left to cooperate against Hitler in the 1930s. Most Social Democrats were made of sterner stuff, however, and fought to keep their party separate, even if it meant relocating to the western occupation zones. Still, the SED scored enough successes for Stalin to be convinced that there would be a future for Soviet political influence in a united Germany.

The reasons why Stalin wanted a united Germany were exactly the same reasons why the United States, by 1947, did not. A functional German state would have to be integrated with western Europe in order to succeed, Washington found. And that could not be achieved if Soviet influence grew throughout the country. This was not only a point about security. It was also about economic progress. The Marshall Plan was intended to stimulate western European growth through market integration, and the western occupation zones in Germany were crucial for this project to succeed. Better, then, to keep the eastern zone (and thereby Soviet pressure) out of the equation. After two meetings of the allied foreign ministers in 1947 had failed to agree on the principles for a peace treaty with Germany (and thereby German reunification), the Americans called a conference in London in February 1948 to which the Soviets were not invited. Before the meeting started, it was clear that the Americans and British had agreed between themselves on German currency reform and on elections in Bizonia. The French reluctantly joined in the plans. As Bevin explained to Parliament,

Germany cannot be allowed to remain a slum in the centre of Europe. On the contrary, our policy is that she must contribute to her own recovery and keep herself, and give her share to European recovery. That is the best way to get Germany to make reparations for the devastation that she caused in the war. In accordance, therefore, with the London recommendations, Germany has been incorporated into the European Recovery Programme [the Marshall Plan].… She will receive her share of aid under this programme, but in turn she must produce and be enabled to pay her share into the common pool. She cannot do it unless we proceed apace with economic rehabilitation. We must give her the tools to work with if she is to make a contribution.⁸

The division of Germany was therefore in some respects a result of the Marshall Plan. The United States regarded it as crucial to its own security to get the European economies going again. The Soviet Union and the Communist governments had, understandably, no wish to join in European recovery plans headed by the United States and implemented by US officials. The necessity of including the western part of Germany, under control of the western Allies, into the Marshall Plan therefore meant its separation from the east. The new deutschmark was a symbol of this division, and it was a dramatic step. First the western Allies agreed on a new German central bank. Then, in June 1948, they wiped out public and private debt by setting ceilings on how much old currency could be fully converted into Deutschmark. And then they pegged the new currency to the US dollar at a low exchange rate, while abolishing price controls in the western zones. The effects were spectacular. Overnight the black market virtually disappeared. Goods reappeared in the shops and production began to increase. Workers were unhappy because their wages did not increase. And savers were furious because—for the second time in the lifetimes of some—their savings were decimated. Angriest of all were the Soviets, who were now forced to introduce a separate currency in the east in order to prevent their zone being flooded with the former currency, now worthless in the west.

West German currency reform was an integral part of the Marshall Plan, which in itself was a part of the integration of western Europe into a US-led capitalist economy. It was the completion of a process that had begun in the early part of the twentieth century, with the gradual transfer of technology, production, and management methods, and instruments for trade and investment. But it was also a response to the crisis that had been created by depression and world war. Like the New Deal in the United States, the Marshall Plan was an attempt at getting production going again, using whatever instruments were available. US advisers, many of whom were old New Dealers themselves, were willing to accept European government controls, planning, and even nationalizations if it helped put people back to work and bring goods to market. At the core of the project, though, was the realization that the capitalist market had not existed in Europe during the war and had mostly been a disaster before it. If markets, banking, and belief in private property were to be resurrected, the United States had to offer economic assistance to Europe.

It is hard to say exactly how much Marshall Plan aid assisted with European postwar recovery, in spite of its $12 billion size (roughly $150 billion in today’s money)—about 1.5 percent of the US GDP per year. It is likely that some growth would have begun anyway, though more in some countries and regions than others. But its psychological effect was massive everywhere. Western Europeans started believing in public and private institutions again, making spending possible and increasing employment and productivity. In economic terms, it made up for the trade deficits with the United States, which otherwise would have had a debilitating effect on European economies. It made claims for reparations from Germany less important. And it abated balance of payment difficulties between European countries, helping to get inter-European trade going again. Between 1947 and 1951 production grew on average 55 percent in Marshall Plan countries.⁹

The recipients at first approached US offers of aid gingerly. Some did not like the inclusion of Germany. Others believed that it amounted to a wholesale US takeover of the European economies. Resistance was found mostly at the far side of the Right and the Left. The Communists protested—violently, in some cases, as when dockworkers in Marseilles and Naples prevented the off-loading of American ships. “The European worker listens listlessly while we tell him we are saving Europe, unconvinced that it is his Europe we are saving,” according to one US Marshall Plan official.¹⁰But traditional European elites were not too happy, either. They felt that the Americans were out to upset established social order and wipe out their positions within their own societies. They saw American table manners, raunchy music, and black soldiers as a threat to their European culture.

The meeting of minds was most often between American officials and the emerging European Christian Democrat or Social Democrat leaders. The Americans insisted that the Europeans themselves should decide on the details of how Marshall Plan funds should be spent, within the frameworks established by Washington. In Britain, some of the funds were used for food imports, alleviating the shortages created by the war. In Germany and France much money was spent on the import of heavy machinery to restart industries. Everywhere governments used the new funds available for reconstructing what the war had destroyed; photos of smiling families in front of their new apartment block rising from the rubble were much used to counter Communist slogans that the Marshall Plan was simply preparation for a new war. The budget guarantees US aid offered enabled western European governments to begin constructing their modern welfare states; without it, there certainly would not have been the surpluses necessary for new social expenditure or, for that matter, for government investments in infrastructure, which helped tie the western part of the continent together.

For Americans and western European governments alike, a major part of the Marshall Plan was combatting local Communist parties. Some of it was done directly, through propaganda. Other effects on the political balance were secondary or even coincidental. A main reason why Soviet-style Communism lost out in France or Italy was simply that their working classes began to have a better life, at first more through government social schemes than through salary increases. The political miscalculations of the Communist parties and the pressure they were under from Moscow to disregard the local political situation in order to support the Soviet Union also contributed. When even the self-inflicted damage was not enough, such as in Italy, the United States experimented with covert operations to break Communist influence. The Italian election in April 1948 pitted a US-funded Christian Democracy, heavily supported by the Catholic Church and the Vatican, against a Soviet-funded and Communist-led Popular Democratic Front. Both camps were led by Italians from outside Italy: the Christian Democrat leader Alcide De Gasperi, born in Austria and not an Italian citizen until he was almost forty, against Palmiro Togliatti, the Communist leader who had spent almost twenty years in exile in the USSR. The CIA got Italian-Americans to write letters to their relatives at home, agitating against the Communist threat, while engaging in dirty tricks’ campaigns against Communist candidates. In the end the Christian Democrats won almost 50 percent of the vote. They would probably have won anyway, since the Communist coup in Czechoslovakia two months before drove a lot of voters away from the Left. But the 1948 elections symbolized the first occasion when the CIA had engaged in a big covert operation against its enemies, and the Agency was very pleased with the result.

In France the Communist Party had been thrown out of government in May 1947 after they refused to support the French reconquest of its Indochinese colonies. The French Communists, led by Maurice Thorez, had long been caught between being a responsible party leading the country and getting a more radical course of change. Their position in France was very strong; the sense that the old elites had failed during the war drove young people to the Communist party. Its support among intellectuals and students was particularly powerful, but it also had a solid working class base in the trade unions. In addition, it was helped by the positive image of the Soviet Union held by many French people—the Soviets had, after all, defeated Nazi Germany (which France itself had spectacularly failed to do). Even anti-Communist intellectuals such as Raymond Aron admitted that “every action, in the middle of the twentieth century, presupposes and involves the adoption of an attitude with regard to the Soviet enterprise.”¹¹ But the French Communists went so far in supporting the Soviet Union’s ever-changing policies that they isolated themselves, in spite of being the biggest political party and the only one with mass popular support. They got no succor from Stalin. The Boss “considers the policy of the Fr[ench] party entirely wrong,” the former Comintern chief Georgi Dimitrov wrote in his diary after another evening of drinking at Stalin’s dacha. “Its leaders have fallen prey to the fear that France would collapse without American credits. The Communists should have left the government with the explanation that they are against the betrayal of France’s independence, instead of waiting to be thrown out.”¹²

Stalin’s advice to the French showed him at his most disingenuous. In 1945 he had advised the French Communist Party (PCF) to work within a parliamentary system. With Great Power relations in tatters, he now turned on them because they had followed Soviet instructions. But he was right about the rest of French politics (except the Communists, who remained his most loyal followers whatever opprobrium he threw at their party). The new French leaders—General Charles de Gaulle, who had resigned in a huff in 1946, and those of the Fourth Republic who followed him—were entirely dependent on US aid. Since almost all Frenchmen still believed that their country was a Great Power, this was a difficult position to be in. Germany had humiliated France in 1940. The United States was, in the eyes of many Frenchmen, humiliating France now simply by being in a so much more powerful position than France itself was. “The United States… is infatuated with its own weight,” wrote the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. “The richer it is, the heavier it is. Weighed down with fat and pride, it lets itself be rolled towards war with its eyes closed.”¹³

But while French anti-Americanism was shared by many Frenchmen outside of the Communist Party, its government became increasingly closely linked with the United States. Marshall Plan aid was crucial for France, which mostly spent it making long overdue investments in French industry, thereby laying the groundwork for an industrial revival in the 1950s. But the links with Washington were also essential in security terms. The leaders of the Fourth Republic knew that in case of war the Red Army would be heading straight for Paris. American influence may be a danger to France’s soul, but Soviet power was a danger to its heart. And France needed assistance against what its leaders saw as a distinct security threat. In March 1948 its government signed the Brussels Pact with Britain, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg, providing for mutual assistance in case of an attack by others. But it was clear to many non-Communist French leaders—with Soviet forces standing only one hundred miles from the Rhine—that this was not enough. After the Czechoslovak coup and the crises over Germany, French leaders who at first had wanted to work with the Communists—such as the wartime head of the French resistance, Georges Bidault, who had insisted on Communist participation in his postwar government—sought a US commitment to French security. Bidault became a key figure among European Christian Democrats in the discussion about a western European defense treaty with the United States.

The Soviet reaction to western economic policies in Germany helped convince French leaders that the Soviets and not the Germans would be the biggest threat to their country’s security in the future. Stalin was furious about the introduction of the deutschmark and what he saw as US attempts at keeping Germany divided for its own purposes. He wanted to strike back, but in a manner that did not risk outright war with the western countries. The German strategy arrived at in Moscow in 1948 was split into many different parts. Stalin wanted to solidify his grip on the east by taking full control of Berlin. He also began reaching out to “real Germans,” as he put it, those who had followed Hitler and the NSDAP, through Soviet-sanctioned nationalist propaganda in Germany against the United States. If German nationalism could prevent US control of western Germany, then it would objectively serve Soviet interests. The National Democratic Party of Germany, set up under Communist control in the east in order to attract former Nazis to the Soviet cause, declared in its program: “America violated the Treaty of Potsdam and plunged us Germans… in the biggest national distress of our history.… But the American war may and shall not take place! Germany must live! That’s why we National Democrats demand: the Americans to America. Germany for the Germans.… Peace, independence and prosperity for our entire German fatherland.”¹⁴

Alongside their propaganda for a plebiscite on the unification and neutrality of Germany, Soviet and German Communists developed a somewhat rudimentary plan for forcing the western powers out of Berlin. Stalin had stressed the centrality of Communist control of Berlin in order to show the Germans that unification could only happen under the auspices of the Soviet Union. In the spring of 1948 Red Army commanders had started harassing western Allied transports heading in and out of the German capital. In June, after the introduction of the new currency, the Soviets prohibited its use in Berlin and threatened sanctions against the western zones. With Berlin as an island within Soviet-held territory, such threats held some credibility. When the deutschmark started appearing in Berlin, the Soviets cut off all surface traffic between western Germany and the capital. In the days that followed they also terminated all deliveries of food or electricity to western Berlin. Stalin had decided on the first real showdown of the Cold War.

The Berlin blockade, which lasted for almost a year, was a Soviet political failure from start to finish. It failed to make west Berlin destitute; a US and British air-bridge provided enough supplies to keep the western sectors going. On some days aircraft landed at Tempelhof Airport at three minute intervals. Moscow did not take the risk of ordering them to be shot down. But worse for Stalin: the long-drawn-out standoff confirmed even to those Germans who had previously been in doubt that the Soviet Union could not be a vehicle for their betterment. The perception was that Stalin was trying to starve the Berliners, while the Americans were trying to save them. On the streets of Berlin more than half a million protested Soviet policies. When the SED chased councilors from other parties out of City Hall, located in east Berlin, they reconvened in the west and elected a Social Democrat mayor, the formidable trade unionist Ernst Reuter. Communist and Social Democrat workers fought each other in the streets, with the latter giving as good as they got. The young Willy Brandt, a German Social Democrat who had taken up arms against Hitler’s regime and who returned to Berlin in 1946 as a Norwegian officer, helped organize the resistance. But even he was in doubt about the final outcome: “Would the western democracies risk a world war in the interest of a few million Berliners?” Brandt wrote.¹⁵

The need to reassure not just Berliners but other Europeans about US staying power was a key reason why the Truman Administration in the fall of 1948 began discussing a formal alliance treaty with the countries in western Europe. The President was fully aware of how difficult such a process would be. Americans were not naturally given to forming foreign alliances in peacetime—its founding fathers had warned against any “entangling alliances,” especially with European powers. Many voters were resentful of the United States taking on Europe’s problems and paying for them through their tax bill. And a majority of Americans were still against any permanent foreign stationing of US troops. Opinion in western Europe was also divided. Some believed that their countries should try to act as a bridge between Soviets and Americans, and not join one side against the other. For people on the Left, especially, it was tough to consider joining the United States—a country they saw as the home of freewheeling capitalism—in an alliance against eastern Europeans who themselves professed to be socialists.

But by 1949 fear seemed to rule out all other considerations. Truman managed to get a coalition together in Congress for a North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), an integrated alliance that included a mutual defense obligation. Though much time was spent in Washington on discussing who in Europe could join, what was most remarkable was how European governments lined up to get inside quick. In Italy and France, their Christian Democrat and liberal governments delivered their countries for NATO. In Britain and the Low Countries both labor parties and conservatives were in favor. Even in Scandinavia, with its long tradition of neutrality, Danish and Norwegian Social Democrats steamrolled applications for membership through their parliaments. The Norwegian ambassador to the United States explained that “Norway learned her lesson in 1940.… Today [it] does not believe that neutrality has any relation to the facts of life.”¹⁶ The most curious addition was Portugal, which was neither a democracy nor a World War II ally. But both Britain and the United States viewed the Portuguese Atlantic islands as essential bases in case of a war against the Soviets. In April 1949 the treaty was signed in Washington.

The initial effects of NATO in Europe were neither military nor political. They were substantially psychological. Non-Communist western Europeans started to believe that the United States would not withdraw from the continent anytime soon. This meant that Europe would remain divided. But it also meant security against a Soviet attack. The setting up of NATO was not about a civilizational definition of a European core (“from Plato to NATO,” as some put it—even though Greece would not join until 1952). It was about stability on a continent that had been going through hell for more than a generation. If the purpose of NATO—as its first general secretary, Lord Ismay, is said to have quipped—was to “keep the Americans in, the Soviets out, and the Germans down,” then this was a purpose with which the majority of western Europeans agreed around 1950. The exception, of course, were the Communists, who protested everywhere. Togliatti condemned his government in the Italian parliament: “We say ‘no’ to the Atlantic Pact, ‘no’ because it is a pact of preparation for war. We say ‘no’ to your policy, a policy of hostility and aggression against the Soviet Union. We say ‘no’ to the imperialist intrigues which you are plotting to the harm of the Italian people, their independence and their liberty, and we shall do everything in our power to unmask this policy of yours and make it a failure.”¹⁷

The speed with which NATO was brought about was in part a reflection of the military weakness of the United States and its new allies on the ground in Europe. The advice President Truman had got from the Joint Chiefs of Staff was clear: US troops could not defend continental western Europe against the Red Army, even if the atomic bomb were to be used. At best, the Americans would be able to hold on to bridgeheads in Italy and the French west coast, and help protect Britain as an air base for bombing raids against the Soviets, while waiting for reinforcements to arrive from North America. The Soviets were in a position to establish full control of all of Europe within less than two months, the Joint Chiefs reported. The Berlin Blockade had changed the perspectives of the US military dramatically. General Clay, for instance, told his superiors in Washington of his feeling that war “may come with dramatic suddenness.”¹⁸ Although historians have found no evidence of Soviet planning for an offensive war until the 1950s, and though the alarmism expressed by some US generals, Clay included, was also fed by their wish for Congress to approve higher levels of military spending, there is no doubt that there was a real fear of war among US military planners from mid-1948 on. They assumed it would be a global war, with Soviet offensives not just in Europe, but in the Middle East and east Asia, too. US war planning was itself increasingly global, implying an almost universal perception of threat as well as an expansion of US capabilities, especially in terms of aerial warfare. But underlying it all was also a rising assumption of US global interest, in which events in Europe and North America were linked to those in other parts of the world in a systemic sense.

With preparations for war came fears of domestic subversion. The link had been made many times before in US history: the Red Scare after World War I or the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II were just recent examples. The public witch hunt against Communists and other Left-wingers in the 1940s and 1950s had equally damaging effects. Charges of disloyalty, most of which were entirely unfounded, drove many knowledgeable and gifted experts away from government service. Joseph McCarthy, the demagogic and hyperbolic Wisconsin senator who through his speeches on the Senate floor came to symbolize anti-Communist paranoia, did more damage to US interests than any of Stalin’s covert operations. In February 1950 McCarthy claimed that he had evidence of 205—later corrected to 57—Communists working in the State Department, and denounced the president as a traitor who “sold out the Christian world to the atheistic world.”¹⁹ The series of hearings and investigations, which accusations such as McCarthy’s gave rise to, destroyed people’s lives and careers. Even for those who were cleared, such as the famous central Asia scholar Owen Lattimore, some of the accusations stuck and made it difficult to find employment. It was, as Lattimore said in his book title from 1950, Ordeal by Slander. For many of the lesser known who were targeted—workers, actors, teachers, lawyers—it was a Kafkaesque world, where their words were twisted and used against them during public hearings by people who had no knowledge of the victims or their activities. Behind all of it was the political purpose of harming the Administration, though even some Democrats were caught up in the frenzy and the president himself straddled the issue instead of publicly confronting McCarthy. McCarthyism, as it was soon called, reduced the US standing in the world and greatly helped Soviet propaganda, especially in western Europe.

One effect of McCarthyism was that public hysteria made investigations into genuine spy networks more difficult. Since the 1930s there had been a substantial Soviet intelligence presence in the United States, just as in the main European countries. These agents—some ideological, some blackmailed or bribed—had provided important information to Moscow during World War II, and their activities were stepped up as the Cold War took hold. Stalin demanded that the Soviet intelligence services—known for most of the Cold War as the Committee for State Security (KGB) and its military counterpart, the Main Intelligence Directorate of the Red Army (GRU)—deliver information about US war plans against the USSR. Because of the rising frenzy in the United States, Communists or ex-Communists were easy targets to recruit. A British spy of German origin, the physicist Klaus Fuchs, provided intelligence on the US nuclear project on which he worked. Fuchs continued to spy after returning to Britain in 1946 until he was arrested in 1950. There were several hundred such spies in the United States, though few as important as Fuchs. As US counterintelligence in the late 1940s gradually cracked Soviet codes—a top-secret enterprise known as Operation Venona—many of these spies were arrested. But since Venona was to be kept secret (even, it turned out, from President Truman), its results did little to allay public fears of Communist subversion.

The alarm that the Cold War created in the United States paled in comparison to the spasms that the Soviet Union and eastern Europe went through. Up to Stalin’s death in 1953, denunciations, purges, and show trials were the order of the day. This was of course nothing new in Soviet history; in many ways it was a repeat of what had happened on several occasions since the Bolshevik revolution and that had peaked in Stalin’s great terror of the 1930s. World War II had intensified Stalin’s suspicions and the Cold War brought them to another peak. The first problem was the hundreds of thousands of soldiers who returned from German prison camps; could they be trusted? More than a third of them were marched straight from German to Soviet prison camps. Then there were those who had lived under German occupation; most were investigated and many, including all Communist officials there, were sent to the camps. Even victorious Red Army soldiers returning from the battlefront were seen as suspect. They may have glimpsed ways of life abroad that were inconsistent with Soviet visions of the future. One careless statement about German living standards or Czech culture could be enough to land them in prison upon their return.²⁰

The worst crime of the Soviet 1940s was the mass deportations of whole peoples or population groups from the western USSR to the east. During the war more than a million Soviet Germans were deported to the east, plus another million Muslims from the Caucasus and the Crimea (Chechens, Ingush, Kalmyks, Tatars, Turks, and others). They were regarded as security threats. One-fifth of them died in the first three years after deportation. Then, as the Red Army advanced westward in 1944, mass deportations from the Baltic states, Ukraine, and Belorussia began. In eastern Poland, now incorporated into the Soviet Union, the Communists completed the Soviet deportations of the old elite that Hitler had interrupted in 1941. In the early 1950s the Soviet population controlled by the Chief Directorate of Camps (GULag) reached its peak of over two and a half million prisoners.

Some groups continued to resist, especially in Ukraine and the Baltic states. Ukraine, which had been part of the Russian Empire and was taken over by Communist forces after the 1917 revolution, had come under German control in 1941, and Ukrainian nationalists used the opportunity to declare independence from the Soviet Union. While Ukrainian autonomy remained a sham under German occupation, many Ukrainian nationalists continued to fight against the Red Army after the Nazi withdrawal. The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) existed in the Soviet Union until 1950, when its leader, Roman Shukhevych, was killed. While the OUN was feared for its collaboration with the Nazis and its atrocities against Poles and Jews, some Ukrainians still regarded it as the champion of independence and sovereignty. Soviet countermeasures were brutal. Between 1944 and 1952 as many as six hundred thousand people were arrested in western Ukraine; about a third of these were executed and the rest imprisoned or exiled. The fierce Soviet response probably did as much to keep resistance alive as the waning military power of the OUN.

In the Baltic states—Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania—the return of the Red Army also provoked lasting resistance. Having become independent from Russia in 1918, the three countries were occupied by the Soviets in 1940, after Stalin’s pact with Hitler. The occupation was vicious, and the German invasion in 1941 had been greeted with relief by many Balts, who now turned their wrath on Russians and other local minorities, including Jews. The German defeat meant the return of the Red Army and the start of another round of bloodletting. In all three Baltic countries resistance coalesced around former officers, most of whom had collaborated with the Nazis; they were known collectively as the “Forest Brothers.” The fighting lasted for almost a decade and cost up to fifty thousand lives, mostly in Lithuania. Around 10 percent of the entire adult population of Balts was deported or sent to Soviet labor camps between 1940 and 1953.

As had been the case in the 1930s, external pressures led Communism to turn in on itself in the late 1940s. These inner purges started with the conflict with Yugoslavia, a completely unnecessary clash that was created by Stalin’s indecision and paranoia. The Yugoslav Communists were the only eastern European party that had taken power by its own devices after World War II. Not only had the party’s partisans held their own against the Germans, they had also defeated the Croatian militias and, after the war ended, the Chetniks under Draža Mihailović, a conservative, royalist movement mostly of Serbian extraction. The Yugoslav Communists were led by the flamboyant and energetic Josip Broz, who called himself Tito, a veteran organizer of mixed Croatian and Slovene parentage who had spent several years in the Soviet Union. In 1946 Tito had declared a socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia ideologically aligned with the Soviet Union.

Tito was profuse in his praise of Stalin and wanted to be known as the keenest and most powerful disciple the vozhd had in eastern Europe. In the postwar years the Yugoslav Communists were always the first to criticize what Stalin thought ought to be criticized, whether it was US policies in Europe or the foibles of western Communist parties. But Tito’s approach awakened Stalin’s suspicions, as did the very fact that the Yugoslav Communists were not dependent on the Soviets for their power at home. In 1945 Stalin criticized Tito for his occupation of the Trieste region, which had created a crisis with the British and the Americans. He also felt that the Yugoslavs were too radical in supporting the Communist rebellion in Greece. Most fundamentally, perhaps, the flamboyant, intense personality of Tito himself irritated Stalin, as did the fierce loyalty the Yugoslav leader had among his followers. Communism could only have one head, Stalin thought, and set out to put Tito in his place.

The ostensible cause for the chastising was a plan for a Balkan federation. Such plans had existed for a very long time, but the fact that so many countries in the region had turned Communist after 1945 breathed new life into the idea. Both Tito and the Bulgarian Communist leader Dimitrov had discussed these plans with the Soviets. In September 1946 Stalin had told Dimitrov “that Bulgaria and Yugoslavia will unite in a common state and play a unified role in the Balkans.”²¹ As the plans matured, the Yugoslavs and the Bulgarians kept the Soviets informed and sought their advice. Then, out of the blue, Stalin turned on them. At a hastily convened meeting in Moscow in February 1948, the Soviet leader accused them of systematic errors and “leftist infatuations,” having taken an “improper and intolerable course” in planning their union.²² The Bulgarians immediately fell to foot. The Yugoslavs hesitated. Before they could respond formally, the Soviets unilaterally withdrew all their advisers from Yugoslavia. A week later Stalin and Molotov sent a letter in which they claimed that Tito had turned anti-Marxist, that he was ignoring the class-struggle, and that he was slandering the Soviet Union. The Balkan federation plans were now used to prove that Tito had planned to take over neighboring countries. Tito fought back. Having lived in Moscow during Stalin’s purges in the 1930s, he believed that if he did not, then not just his political career but his life would be forfeited. In June 1948 the Cominform expelled the Yugoslavs, accusing them of revisionism and of having instigated a terrorist regime. They had, the resolution stated, been “betraying the cause of international solidarity of the working people.” It called for “healthy elements” inside the Yugoslav Communist party to overthrow Tito. The first break among Communist parties was out in the open.

Stalin had expected Tito’s regime to fall at his command, if not immediately, then during the first few months after his break with the Yugoslavs. When this did not happen, the Soviets started a set of purges among Communists elsewhere in eastern Europe who could be suspected of disobedience, now or in the future. The victims were chosen more or less randomly, but always among Communists who had shown initiative of their own and who were popular within their own parties. Sometimes they were picked because they were easier to portray as outsiders: Jews, national minorities, or people who had spent time abroad. In Hungary László Rajk, a Jewish Communist who had fought in Spain, fitted the pattern perfectly. Rajk, who himself as minister of the interior had been responsible for sending thousands to their deaths, was accused of being a Titoist spy and an agent of imperialism. He was shot in October 1949. In Bulgaria Dimitrov’s second in command, Traicho Kostov, was executed two months later. The two main intended victims in Poland and Romania, Gomułka and Ana Pauker, survived because it took time to collect “evidence” against them and Stalin died before their show trials could begin. Rudolf Slansky, the general secretary of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, was not so lucky. In his confession, well rehearsed before the trial, a harrowed Slansky agreed with everything the prosecution claimed: “As the enemy of the Communist Party and the people’s democratic regime, I formed the Anti-State Conspiratorial Center at the head of which I stood for several years. In this center of ours I concentrated a number of various capitalist and bourgeois-nationalist elements. My collaborators became agents of imperialist espionage services, that is of the French, English, and particularly of the American services… aimed at liquidating people’s democratic order [and] restoring capitalism.” Slansky was executed in December 1952.

Utterly unbelievable and therefore ridiculous, these confessions contributed to the loss of faith in Communism in western Europe. But in eastern Europe, and in the Soviet Union itself, it is difficult to say if they made a difference. Unless one’s family or friends were directly hurt by the purges and show trials, most people chose to concentrate on the reconstruction of their country, which might give a better life for their children and grandchildren, if not for themselves. The Communist order seemed there to stay, and in spite of small signs of everyday resistance to the dictatorships, conformity ruled. One reason for people’s acquiescence was that the Communist authorities were able to deliver on some of their social and economic promises, especially during the era of reconstruction. The Communists were good at coordinating resources because they had no market or civil society to interfere with their dispositions. Housing, for instance, was rebuilt more easily in eastern Europe, even though much of the building was of poor quality. Social services, such as health care and care for the aged, were developed more quickly. Overall, the economies of eastern Europe grew more rapidly than those in the west during the first postwar years. But they started from a much lower position, and growth was greatest in the least developed economies (such as Bulgaria) and lowest in the more developed (such as Czechoslovakia). The fact that the economies grew at all is as much a testimony to the willingness of ordinary people to work as to Communist abilities to organize, especially given Soviet looting and the loss of western markets and technology imports.

In the Soviet Union itself it took a long time to improve people’s livelihoods. No other country had suffered the wartime loss of so much of its productive capacity as the USSR. The first postwar years were dire; in 1946 there was a famine in parts of the country (unreported, of course, in Soviet media). Even though the Soviet authorities did not expect a new war, at least not soon, they liked the wartime command systems for the economy and kept them in place. The result was an economic system even more regimented than in the 1930s, with production quotas set out in miniscule detail. The priority was heavy industry; steel plants and machinery production were always top of the list. Still, on its own terms, Soviet output returned to its prewar capacity remarkably quickly. A significant reason for this was simply peace: in one way or another Russia had been at war, internally or externally, through wars, civil war, collectivization, or purges ever since 1914. Even though Stalin had in no way given up on political campaigns, he understood that another round of this right after World War II would have been too much to dish out. With at least the semblance of peace, Soviet production was able to catch up on the backlog of unrealized potential and seemingly make great strides from the late 1940s on.²³

FOR MANY PEOPLE, reconstruction after World War II also meant getting used to a new way of seeing the world. The Cold War had its roots, of course, in the early parts of the twentieth century, and as an ideological divide, its shadow had long fallen on much of European and global history. But it was in the intense first years after the war that the conflict between Communism and capitalism was imposed almost everywhere as the predominant worldwide clash. As people were busy rebuilding their lives—getting a roof over their heads, feeding their children, finding work—they found that they were increasingly doing so within a framework defined by the Cold War. They may not have felt that they were part of the conflict, but they could not avoid being touched by it. It created strictures and opportunities they had not seen before, whether in war or in peace. And gradually, the Cold War connected different parts of the world in ways and purposes that had not been obvious in the past.