Origins of the Cold War (1975)

and get rid of rationing. But the election takes place in the midst of a rather intense phase of the Cold War. Now how did the Cold War come about? There's a large revisionist literature which attributes it to the United States in various ways. To the alleged open door, pressure of the United States to try to keep the markets of Eastern Europe open to our exports and to do that we allegedly had to try to keep anti-Soviet governments there. There's another line of argument which is that the Cold War came about because we used the atomic bomb, a pot stamp and after to threaten the Soviet Union. There's another line of argument which is that we did not offer the Soviet Union sufficient aid and finally that we didn't offer the Soviet Union a place of significance and power in the occupation of Italy and of Japan. Now these and other arguments I leave to question period what I thought it might be most

useful to do is for me to state rather bluntly my own view. In Europe I believe the Cold War came about because of three four circumstances. First the way the war was fought. The war was fought in ways which left the Soviet armies in physical control of Eastern Europe and Berlin. This happened partly because the Allies did not win the war in 1944 which would have left them much further than the East and there are people who argue that were the different and were vigorous and imaginative policy by generalized now the war might have been won and our armies would have been a different position. I'll just say that if we had accepted Churchill's advice and not landed in the south of France and make it mid-August 44 but gone storming through the Lubianna Gap into Austria and Eastern Europe we could have prevented that de facto control and there's also arguments about getting into Czechoslovakia. But in any case the fact was that diplomacy began

with the Russians in physical control of Eastern Europe and Berlin. Secondly American demobilization we had the bomb and we had a few bombs but for whatever reasons we demobilized our armed forces so that in the Soviet Union did not. Therefore we had no usable military strength in 1945-46-47. There was hardly an American military unit of any kind that was wholly operational because of the pace and scale of demobilization. This was done unilaterally. The Soviets did not disarm their armed forces. They sat there in the areas that they occupied and to this must be added what President Roosevelt said at the first day at Yalta. Thinking of his experience, remember he was the vice presidential candidate in 1920 and of the probable mood of the United States

at the end of this war. He told Stalin and the others assembled that the United States would not be able to keep forces in Europe for more than two years and undoubtedly Stalin thought that well he lived around there he'd wait two years and see what happened. And indeed American demobilization looked as though it was wholly consistent with his prediction. Roosevelt's prediction. We still have ample forces in Europe 30 years, I guess, at 30 years after Yalta. But that was not the way it looked at the time to Roosevelt and Stalin. Third, American diplomacy towards Eastern Europe. But Yalta, there were two very important political agreements reached. One on Poland. Poland was took up over 75% of the time at Yalta and it really was the key to a solution to the situation in Eastern Europe other than

just splitting Europe on the L. The agreement was that the interim government, which was the Lublin government, the communist government, then in Warsaw, would take into it some non-communist who were then in London and that interim government would then conduct a secret election, secret ballot, universal suffrage, except for fascists who've been conspiring with the Germans, and only then would a Polish government emerge. This was an extraordinarily serious commitment that was made in the most sensitive place that would determine the shape of Eastern Europe and indeed all of Europe. The second was the more general agreed statement on the liberation of the liberation of the so-called liberated areas of Eastern Europe, which called for free elections there also. But the Polish agreement which took an enormous amount of Roosevelt's and Churchill's energy to negotiate was solid. Well, in a long passage

between Yalta in 1947, the United States failed to insist on the honoring of this. And I believe that with that failure to honor that a split of Europe was the only realistic option. So those are the three things on the American side. The way the war was fought, argumentualization, and our diplomacy towards Eastern Europe. Now what about the Soviet side? There I think you've got to try to look at it from the Soviet point of view, and indeed from Stalin's point of view. He had an option that gradually unfolded to him. He was being offered by the United States and Britain. A disarmed Germany, a voice in the roar and in other Western aspects of European life, but not a total control and not a veto. As against this image of a united non-communist Germany with free elections in Eastern Europe, but a Soviet

troops assuring that Germany would be disarmed. He had the option of going for consolidating his base in Europe in Eastern Europe under his total control, and then seeing if he couldn't extend his power to the West. When Abraham and his U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union at that time met Stalin in Potsdam, Harriman had come home to see Mr. Truman and they gone back together. He had said to Stalin that this must be as he greeted him again because he knew him well. This must be a great occasion for you to be here in the heart of Germany after all your people have suffered at the hands of the Germans. Stalin's reply was, Zar Alexander got to Paris, and this is indeed what happened after the Napoleonic Wars. And there's no doubt that a man with a communist background and a Russian background would think in terms of the post-war

dishevelment of Europe, how far he could push west Russian influence, and a communist must have had a sense of moral duty, historical duty, to use the dishevelment of the post-war Europe to extend his power to a maximum. Stalin was not as we know more about him, one of the most outstanding characters ever to appear in world politics. But in a matter of this kind, I don't believe moralizing is very helpful. At least I can reconstruct from Russian history and history of communism. Why? It would look more attractive to him. If it did not get into a war of the United States, the United States did not appear to care all that much about Eastern Europe, to seize the option of total power up to the elve, and then see how far he could build beyond it. That's a view incidentally which I hold now in retrospect as a historian,

but I was a very low-order bureaucrat in the state department at that time. I came out of uniform and worked on German Austrian economic problems, and believed very ardently that we should try to avoid the split of Europe, and felt at the time that it was not inevitable. If we could persuade the Russians, that in fact the option was not to consolidate Eastern Europe, and then pushing Italy in France and Germany further to the west, but that there'd be a split Europe back by the United States. In any case, I wanted that option formulated, but in fact, we did not hold up that option to Stalin. I was split Europe, effectively mobilized with U.S. strength there, until after he'd made his commitment to consolidate it by, as he did.