A Brief History of the Cold War

Copyright © 2016 by Lee Edwards and Elizabeth Edwards Spalding

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An earlier edition of this book was published by The Heritage Foundation in 2014 as part of their First Principles Series,

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CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

INTRODUCTION

ONE

THE ORIGINS OF THE COLD WAR (1917–1945)

TWO

CONTAINMENT AND THE SOVIET EXPANSION (1945–1950)

THREE

THE HOT WARS OF THE COLD WAR (1950–1973)

FOUR

DÉTENTE (1969–1980)

FIVE

WINNING THE COLD WAR (1981–1991)

CONCLUSION

LESSONS FROM THE COLD WAR

COLD WAR TIMELINE

FOR FURTHER READING AND VIEWING

NOTES

INDEX

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We wrote this book because we were not satisfied with the texts we have used in our world history, international relations, and U.S. foreign policy courses. We felt there was a place in the literature for a brief and balanced history of the Cold War. We believe we have succeeded in writing such a book with A Brief History of the Cold War , and we invite your comments.

We thank The Heritage Foundation for publishing an early monograph edition of our history. We wish to acknowledge in particular the contribution of Dr. David Azerrad, director of the B. Kenneth Simon Center for Principles and Politics at Heritage, whose skillful editing made this a far better history. We also thank Heritage for its research assistance in the person of the following interns: Josiah Lippencott, Isabel Nelson, and Cooper Nye.

At Regnery History, our editor Tom Spence constantly provided wise suggestions while his colleague Maria Ruhl kept us on schedule. Rarely have we worked with a more professional team.

As always, we count our blessings, especially our spouses, Anne Edwards and Matthew Spalding, without whose love and support we would be lost.

INTRODUCTION

The Cold War was the most protracted and unconventional conflict of the twentieth century. World War I and World War II were great sweeping wars that shaped our history and our world, but they did not match the length or the complexity of the ideological and strategic struggle that occupied superpowers and lesser powers on every continent for more than four decades.

The Cold War was waged on many fronts—from the United States to the Soviet Union, from Europe to Asia, from Africa to Latin America—and by many different kinds of governments: liberal democracies, totalitarian regimes, and everything in between. There were grand strategy and petty politics, shrewd diplomacy and brutal coups. There were elements of economics, religion, and culture. There were shooting wars in Korea and Vietnam, and there were purges, deportations, gulags, and forced famines that killed millions of men, women, and children.

At stake in the Cold War was whether the postwar world would be dominated by the forces of totalitarianism led by the Soviet Union or inspired by the principles of political and economic freedom embodied in the United States. If the expansionist ambitions of the Soviet Union had not been contained, much of Western Europe as well as Eastern Europe might have become communist or at least friendly to communism, isolating the United States strategically and economically for years and perhaps decades to come. Considering that China too was under communist rule, the United States would then have faced powerful, unfriendly regimes to the east and to the west.

When the Second World War ended, the American people sought a return to normalcy, to a concentration on domestic not foreign affairs. Most hoped and expected they could turn over most of the responsibility for international affairs to America’s wartime allies—Great Britain and Soviet Russia—and to the United Nations.

But six debilitating years of war had reduced Britain to a shadow of itself, and a militant Soviet Union, led by Joseph Stalin, was determined to proceed with its grand design of socializing the world. As for the UN, it was a new and untested organization. Quite suddenly, there was no one to protect America and its global interests but America itself.

For the next four decades and under nine administrations, Democratic as well as Republican, the United States pursued first a policy of containing the Soviet Union and communism, then a policy of détente and accommodation, and finally a policy of undermining and bringing down what President Ronald Reagan called an evil empire.

Today’s world would be a far different place if the United States had not waged and won—at the cost of tens of thousands of lives and many billions of dollars—the Cold War. That conflict established America as the leader of the free world and a global superpower, thereby shaping U.S. diplomacy, military strategy, economic policy, and domestic politics from President Harry Truman to the present.

ONE

THE ORIGINS OF THE COLD WAR

(1917–1945)

America and Russia, wrote Alexis de Tocqueville, seem called by some secret design of Providence each to hold in its hands the destinies of half the world. One regime is based on the principles of liberty, equality, the consent of the governed, and the rule of law; the other is grounded in autocracy, tyranny, and servitude. To attain his goal, the American relies on personal interest and allows the force and the reason of individuals to act, without directing them. The Russian, in contrast, concentrates all the power of society in one man. ¹

So it appeared to the great French political philosopher in the 1830s when he wrote Democracy in America, a work that a century and a half later seemed uncannily prescient as the United States and the Soviet Union waged a forty-five-year conflict over the destiny of the whole world.

The origins of the Cold War, which began in early 1945 with the Yalta summit and ended on Christmas Day 1991 with the dissolution of the Soviet Union, can be traced to the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, led by Vladimir Lenin, and the birth of the first communist state, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), which adhered to a revolutionary, expansionist ideology.

THE COMMUNIST IDEOLOGY

The theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.² Thus wrote Karl Marx in The Communist Manifesto, published in 1848, laying out the doctrine that the abolition of property is a prerequisite to genuine freedom because it prevents the capitalist employer from exploiting the proletarian worker. Marx knew that depriving individual persons of this basic freedom would not be easy and could not be effected except by means of despotic inroads, that is, dictatorship.³ To achieve this goal, government must control the means of production, credit and banking systems, and communications and transportation systems. Assuring the proletariat that they had nothing but their chains to lose and a world to win, Marx closed his manifesto with a famous call to arms: Workers of the world, unite!⁴ Relying on his doctrine of scientific socialism (communists use the terms communist and socialist interchangeably, partially to disguise their objective), which holds that a society without private property is not only desirable but inevitable, Marx’s followers would pursue the goal of a global revolution, confident in the eventual liberation of man. But Marx did not foresee the emergence of a prosperous and burgeoning middle class, the foundation of which is private property. As Richard Pipes writes, Marxism was . . . dogma masquerading as science.⁵

EARLY EXPANSION

In early 1917, the Tsarist regime that had ruled Russia for more than five hundred years abruptly collapsed, an unexpected casualty of World War I. Led by Lenin, the Bolsheviks took advantage of a political vacuum and by the end of the year seized power. They initiated a campaign of terror that silenced any opposition but controlled only central Russia. The borderlands, inhabited by other nationalities and religions, proclaimed their independence. The Bolshevik response, Pipes writes, was to conquer by force of arms the lands and peoples that constituted four-fifths of Russia’s population. Thus was born the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics that would eventually comprise fifteen countries: Byelorussia, Ukraine, and Moldavia in Eastern Europe; Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan in the Caucasus; Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Kirghizstan, and Tajikistan in Central Asia; the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania; and Russia itself.

In keeping with Marxist-Leninist theory, the Bolsheviks initiated armed conflict first in Russia, then in Europe and the rest of the world. In 1920, Lenin declared that we knew [in October 1917] that our victory would be a lasting victory only when our undertaking should conquer the whole world.⁶ A primary target was the United States—democratic, capitalist, and powerful. Lenin was the first head of state to treat politics, domestic as well as foreign, as warfare, seeking not only to compel the enemy to submit but to annihilate him.⁷ Even during the Russian civil war, the Bolsheviks set into motion plans to communize the world.

The international communist movement was officially launched in March 1919 at the first congress of the Communist International, also known as the Comintern, with representatives from thirty countries, including the United States, Russia, Germany, France, Great Britain, China, Korea, Hungary, Poland, Finland, the three Baltic countries, Sweden, and Persia. The various communist parties were not independent entities but national sections of the Comintern, which controlled and monitored their activities. The Comintern’s newspaper, the Communist International, provided the party line for every national organization. Grigorii Zinoviev, the head of the Communist International, boasted, The movement advances with such dizzying speed that one can confidently say . . . in a year all Europe shall be Communist. And the struggle for Communism shall be transferred to America, and perhaps also to Asia and other parts of the world.⁸

Trying to take advantage of the chaotic state of Europe and the Middle East following World War I, the Soviets staged a failed revolution in Germany and attempted, unsuccessfully, to establish a communist regime in Persia (present-day Iran). In the summer of 1920, they invaded Poland, seeking to use it as a communist base to conquer Western Europe. They were repelled by the Polish army, forcing the Soviets to conclude that they did not yet have sufficient power to export revolution beyond their borders, but they continued to plant seeds of revolution and foster acts of espionage around the world.

The fifth congress of the Comintern, held in 1924, called for the overthrow of non-communist regimes and their control by Moscow. By then there were thirty-seven communist parties in nations as far removed from the borders of the Soviet Union as the United States and Chile. Estonia’s communist party staged a coup that failed. Severe economic problems inside the Soviet Union hampered but did not halt international subversive activities.

At the seventh congress of the Communist International, held in Moscow in 1935, the new Comintern leader, Georgi Dimitrov, called for a Popular Front against fascism. Communist parties, which had been denouncing liberals and socialists, now urged an alliance with them to stop the spread of fascism in Italy and Germany.⁹

STALIN AND THE GREAT TERROR

Joseph Stalin succeeded Lenin as the leader of the Soviet Union in 1924 and ruled with an iron fist for nearly thirty years. He used executions, purges, imprisonment, famine, forced relocation, and other repressive methods to stay in power. Death solves all problems, Stalin is alleged to have said. No man, no problem. An estimated seven million persons died in the forced famine in Ukraine (the Holodomor). The Great Terror of 1936–1938, a campaign of sham trials and executions, took nearly a million lives. Many incriminated themselves to end their ordeal. Millions more—political dissidents and common criminals—perished in the Gulag, a gigantic system of forced labor camps. By late 1938, all opposition, real and imagined, had been silenced, and Stalin turned his attention to international events.

WORLD WAR II

The Molotov-Ribbentrop Non-Aggression Pact of August 1939 prepared the way for World War II and Stalin’s first serious attempt at imperial expansion. He calculated that a treaty with Germany would provoke a major European war, a war that he wanted to last as long as possible. Soviet archives have revealed that Stalin planned to dominate Europe with the help of Hitler’s war machine and then eliminate Germany as a rival for total hegemony over the continent.¹⁰

Two weeks after Germany invaded Poland from the west, the Red Army invaded from the east. In late September Poland surrendered, and the conquerors divided the country between them, the Soviets acquiring slightly more land but less population than the Germans.

At the same time, Soviet troops began occupying the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. When Finland refused to sign a treaty with the Soviet Union, the Red Army invaded on three fronts but met fierce resistance. It was not until March 1940 that the communist forces could claim victory over the Finns.

These militaristic ventures traumatized the foreign members of the Comintern. For six years, they had denounced Hitler, but now they were directed to oppose the anti-Nazi campaign and condemn Anglo-French imperialism. Some communists, such as the American spy Whittaker Chambers, rejected Moscow’s imperial commands and left the party, but most stayed, still enthralled by the chimera of Marxism-Leninism.

Stalin’s first objective following the pact with Germany was to eliminate any opposition in the new territories of the Soviet empire. Orders went out calling for the liquidation of all Nationalists, Trotskyites, and Christian and Social Democrats in the Baltic states. The most notorious of the ensuing atrocities was the execution in April 1940 of some