The 20th Century
International Relations Since 1919
Who was to blame for the Cold War?
Cold War Mythology
 What were the 1945 summit
conferences?
 Why did the USA–USSR
alliance begin to break down
in 1945?
 How had the USSR gained
control of Eastern Europe by
1948?
 How did the USA react to
Soviet expansionism?
 How was Germany occupied
and what was the Berlin
Blockade?
 What were the consequences
of the Berlin Blockade?
 What were NATO and the
Warsaw Pact?
 Who was the more to blame
for starting the Cold War: the
USA or the USSR?
Framing the study of the Cold
War with these leading
questions turns the student of
history into a blind man
holding an elephant’s tail.
Cold War Reality
• The first usages of the phrase
sent into the territory of the new
“Cold War” to describe the
Soviet Union and, at least as
conflict between the USA and
important, were supplying the
its allies and the USSR and its
White Army and the Cossacks
allies were by George Orwell
with materiel in their struggles
(1945), Bernard Baruch and
against the Red Army.
Herbert Bayard Swope
(1947), and Walter
Lippmann (1947). The
Cold War, however,
began with the Russian
Revolution of 1917.
Soon after, American
and British troops
“American Troops Landing in Russia on Sept. 5, 1918 from the
(among others) were
British Troop Ship Somali” (Chicago Tribune, 26 Feb. 1939)
• Attempts to undo the revolution that began in 1918 continued
throughout the 1920s and 1930s in forms varying from de facto
economic blockades to muffled support of the USSR’s external
enemies—including Nazi Germany. In the Locarno Pact of 1925,
for example, the USA and Western European nations guaranteed
their mutual borders but significantly
left the borders of Eastern Europe
without guarantees, hoping the USSR
might be reduced in size.
• The WWII alliance the USA and the
UK made with the USSR was necessary
because only the USSR could defeat
Nazi Germany. Even before the war had
ended, however, British Prime Minister
Winston Churchill was scheming to
eliminate the USSR and “to impose
upon Russia the will of the United
States and British Empire.”
Government Poster (USA, 1942)
And the US military produced a
plan to atom-bomb the 20 chief
Soviet cities within 10 weeks of
the end of the war. US President
Harry Truman did more than
scheme: he dropped the atom
bomb twice on Japan to warn
the USSR of the destructive
power at his disposal.
Nagasaki after the Atom Bomb
(Yosuke Yamahata, 10 Aug. 1945)
• After WWII, the publiclystated policy of the USA (and to
a lesser extent of the UK) was
based on a nightmare scenario
of the Soviet superpower poised
for the immediate conquest of
the globe, directing a godless
“communist world conspiracy”
ever ready to overthrow the
realms of freedom, requiring
permanent nuclear
confrontation based on the
assumption that only the fear of
“mutually assured destruction”
(MAD) would prevent the USSR
from giving the ever-ready
signal for the planned suicide of
civilization.
“Is This Tomorrow: America under
Communism!” (Catechetical Guild, 1947)
• Entire generations grew up
under the shadow of a global
nuclear battle, which, it was
widely believed, could break out
at any moment, devastating
humanity. Privately, however,
the policy of the USA was not to
contain communism but to
maintain US supremacy, and
the policy of the USSR was
defensive, not expansionist. The
main concern of both the USA
and the USSR was how to
prevent warlike gestures from
being misinterpreted as actual
moves to war. Thus, behind the
scenes, the Cold War was
actually “a cold peace.”
Moreover, the politics of mutual
intransigence, even of
permanent power-rivalry, did
not necessarily imply the daily
danger of war. The virulent anticommunism crusading of the
Cold War that constantly
threatened nuclear
Armageddon was a product of
the internal dynamics of the
political economy of the USA.
America’s allies were not as
committed to the destruction of
communism. Nevertheless, they
accepted both US anticommunism and US supremacy
as the price to be paid for the
containment of the USSR.
“Two Faces of Communism”
(Christian Anti-Communism Crusade, 1961)
World War II Summit Conferences
• US war aims in World War II
were to destroy the German
domination of Europe and to
prevent the domination of
Europe in the future by any
single power, such as the USSR.
In 1943, the Big Three powers
(the USA, UK, and USSR)
outlined two possible futures for
postwar Europe: dividing
Europe into three spheres of
interest or admitting the right
of all to an interest in all parts
of Europe. The first test case
came with the liberation of Italy.
Stalin demanded that he be
involved in deciding occupation
policy. Roosevelt and Churchill
refused, establishing an AngloAmerican sphere of influence.
Churchill and Roosevelt Discuss the
Italian Campaign (24 May 1943)
Shut out of Italy, Stalin
indicated his intention to
control eastern Europe as his
own sphere of influence.
• In November 1943, Roosevelt
and Churchill met with Chiang
Kai-shek in Cairo. Roosevelt
sought to replace the British as
Chiang Kai-shek, Roosevelt and Churchill
(Cairo, 25 Nov. 1943)
the dominant foreign power in
China after the war and to build
up China so that it could be a
junior partner to the USA.
Despite Churchill’s protests,
Roosevelt invited China to be
one of the “four policemen,” the
nations that would organize the
postwar world. The Cairo
Declaration called for Japan’s
unconditional surrender and for
the return of Formosa (Taiwan)
to China.
• In November-December 1943,
Roosevelt and Churchill met
with Stalin in Tehran, where the
US agreed to launch a second
front in France in 1944.
The Big Three agreed to
dismember Germany and to
create a United Nations
organization after the war.
Churchill and Stalin convinced
Roosevelt not to object to new
borders for Poland, giving the
USSR eastern Poland and
Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill
(Tehran, Nov.-Dec. 1943)
moving the Poles westward into
Germany. Using Roosevelt’s
“four policemen” idea, Stalin
proposed dividing Europe into
spheres of influence, giving the
Soviets domination in eastern
Europe. Unhappily, Roosevelt
admitted that his “four
policemen” idea contradicted
the US war aim of an open,
international system. And
Roosevelt admitted that
isolationists favoring neutrality
in the US Congress probably
would not allow American
troops to be stationed in Europe
after the war.
Roosevelt hoped to use
America’s massive industrial
superiority to transform the
whole world into a single US
sphere of influence, free trade
providing it with open markets
everywhere. Churchill,
committed as ever to
maintaining an empire run
exclusively from London, would
not countenance this, and
neither would Stalin, who had
the sheer size of Russia’s army
to counter US economic power.
Between them, they persuaded
Roosevelt to accept the division
they wanted.
• After Tehran, Churchill (and
Stalin) could not be certain of
Roosevelt’s position. Who would
be America’s main postwar
partner: the weakening British
Empire or the Soviet Union,
which was breaking the back of
Nazi Germany? Moreover, if
American isolationists pushed
through neutrality, would
Roosevelt be in a position to
cooperate in organizing the
postwar world even if he wanted
to? Would the US stay out of the
United Nations after World War
II as it had stayed out of the
League of Nations after WWI?
• Churchill decided to protect
British interests in Greece by
making a private deal with
Stalin in Moscow in October
1944. Churchill said to Stalin,
“So far as Britain and Russia are
concerned, how would it do you
to have 90 percent
predominance in Romania, for
us to have 90 percent
predominance in Greece and go
50-50 about Yugoslavia?”
Churchill wrote down a list of
countries with the appropriate
percentages next to them, and
Stalin wrote a large tick on it.
Churchill and Stalin also
reaffirmed the division of
Poland discussed at the Tehran
Conference.
Churchill’s Copy of Secret Agreement
with Stalin (Moscow, Oct. 1944)
• At the Yalta Conference in
February 1945, the Big Three
resolved issues concerning the
structure of the United Nations
and the borders of Poland,
Stalin agreeing in general to a
“broadly based” government
established by “free elections.”
German dismemberment and
Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin
(Yalta,
Feb. 1945)
reparations
to the
USSR were
agreed to “in principle.” And
Churchill pushed through his
demand that France be made an
occupying power in Germany.
As the Red Army was occupying
much of eastern Europe and
defeating the Nazis, Stalin was
in the strongest negotiating
position, and he refused to sell
out Soviet Security for any
amount of money. The Yalta
agreement was couched in
political language making it
palatable to the American and
British electorate, but Roosevelt
and Churchill understood that
Stalin interpreted its wording
differently.
Roosevelt and Stalin agreed that
the USSR would join the fight
against Japan three months
after German surrender. In
exchange, the Soviets regained
territory lost to Japan and
gained a sphere of influence in
China, provided Stalin reach a
formal understanding with
Chiang Kai-shek.
• On 12 April 1945, Roosevelt
died; an inexperienced Harry
Truman replaced him. And
Clement Attlee defeated
Churchill in a general election,
the results being announced on
26 July 1945. Thus, at the
Potsdam Conference of July-
August 1945, Stalin met with
the new leaders of the USA and
UK. Truman attempted to
renegotiate the Tehran and
Yalta agreements, calling for a
unified Germany and a Poland
independent of Soviet influence.
Attlee, Truman and Stalin
(Potsdam, Jul.-Aug. 1945)
Stalin countered by demanding
the four occupying powers
share the administration of a
united Germany, giving the
USSR influence throughout all
of central Europe. Truman
backed down, accepting the new
Poland and a divided Germany
but stopping German
reparations from the western
zones to the USSR. Stalin
insisted that the new Poland
have German territory.
• The World War II summit
conferences gave Stalin’s armies
a free hand in Eastern Europe,
and Stalin was not going to let
Communists elsewhere upset
this arrangement by attempting
to lead revolutions, however
favorable the mass of people
might be. Stalin’s former
foreign minister Maxim
Litvinov spelt it out bluntly to
US representatives in Italy in
September 1944: “We do not
want revolutions in the West.”
Consequently, Stalin did not
interfere when Communist
resistance movements in France
and in Italy (through CIA covert
operations) and in Greece
(through civil war) were forced
to accept the restoration of prewar ruling classes.
Communists Imprisoned in the Greek Civil War
Protest “The British Must Go” (1947)
Russian imperialism in eastern
Europe was real, and the USSR
was a totalitarian state; its
crimes against its own people
were horrific. But after WWII,
the Soviet Union did not expand
from the territories ceded to it
by the Allies in the wartime
conferences, from the territories
occupied by the Red Army at
the end of the war. The idea of
Soviet expansion in the postwar
period was a product of US
propaganda.
• The agreements between the
Western powers and Russia
were not confined to Europe.
Britain and Russia divided Iran
into two spheres of influence
during the war and maintained
their forces there for a couple of
years. The Russian and US
division of Korea in the summer
of 1945 was more permanent—
along a line drawn by the US’s
General MacArthur.
Each picked a dictator to rule in
its half: on one side a smallscale guerilla leader, Kim Il
Sung, who had spent the war in
the USSR; on the other, right
wing nationalist Syngman Rhee,
who could be relied upon to do
what the US wanted. The
division of Korea was the last
great act of cooperation
between the wartime allies.
Syngman Rhee and MacArthur
Kim Il Sung and Stalin
A Façade of Harmony
• The Big Three powers
established a new international
organization, the United
Nations. Its founding
conference in San Francisco in
April-June 1945 promised the
peoples of the world a new
order of peace and cooperation,
which would vanquish war
forever. It was claimed that this
was going to be different from
its inter-war predecessor, the
League of Nations, which had
not been able to do anything to
stop World War II. The “failure”
United Nations Conference on International
Organization (San Francisco, Apr.-Jun. 1945)
of the League of Nations had
not been accidental—it followed
from an intrinsic fault.
The League was set up by the
victorious powers after 1918 as
part of the Treaty of Versailles
by which they parceled out the
world among themselves. Lenin
had described it as “a thieves’
kitchen.” The UN was no
different, even if it had a “soup
kitchen” annex in Geneva (the
children’s fund UNICEF, the
World Health Organization, and
son on). Decision-making lay
with four permanent Security
Council members—the US, the
UK, Russia, and France—and
between them these dominated,
oppressed, and exploited the
rest of the world.
First Session of UN Security Council
(London, 17 Jan. 1946)
• The rulers of each needed a
sense of international harmony
as a cover for consolidating
structures of control. In France,
Italy, and even Great Britain,
governments still benefited
from Communist Party
opposition to strikes.
In eastern Europe, it suited
Stalin that the states occupied
by Russian troops should be run
by coalition governments
involving figures from the prewar right, center, and social
democratic parties.
• Tension festered below the
surface for more than a year,
while each of the powers
consolidated its position—
reorganizing industry now the
war was over, overseeing the
parts of the world it had
recently occupied, and
dampening domestic
expectations. Britain’s Labour
government sought to placate
the wave of radicalism of 1945
with plans to improve welfare
provision and nationalize the
railways and mines. The US
experienced a level of strikes
even higher than in 1936-37.
The Russian occupying forces
in eastern Europe oversaw the
transformation of what had
been small Communist parties
into mass bureaucratic
organizations.
• In 1946, the façade of
harmony cracked. The US and
the USSR entered into a state of
war. Who was to blame for the
start of another war less than a
year after WWII ended?
American Anti-Communism
• Of all the damage done during
World War II—whether counted
in deaths and casualties and/or
in destruction of economies, it
was the USSR and its people
who paid the highest price: a
UN study reported that of the
60 million European dead, a
minimum of 28 million were of
the Soviet Union, and
proportionate damage was done
to the entire economy—
agriculture, factories,
infrastructure. The USSR
emerged from the war in ruins,
drained and exhausted, its
peacetime economy in shreds,
its government distrustful of a
population much of which,
outside Great Russia, had shown
a distinct and understandable
lack of commitment to the
regime.
Soviet War Dead (1942)
On its western fringe, it
continued to have trouble with
Ukrainian and other nationalist
guerillas for some years. It was
ruled by a dictator who had
demonstrated that he was as
risk-averse outside the territory
he controlled directly as he was
ruthless within it. It needed all
the economic aid it could get,
and, therefore, had no shortterm interest in antagonizing
the only power that could give
it, the USA. The USSR posed no
immediate danger to anyone
outside the reach of the Red
Army’s occupation forces.
Stalingrad (1943)
• Of course, Soviet imperialism
was not an invention of
American ideologists. It was
real enough in eastern Europe.
Of course, the USSR was a
totalitarian state; of course, its
crimes against its own people
were horrific.
But the main threat to US
supremacy, as Herbert Schiller
noted, “was the possibility that
significant chunks of the excolonial world might break
away from the world business
system, adopting some form of
socialist economy.” This threat
I Married a Communist Film
Poster (RKO Pictures, 1949)
existed despite of the USSR, not
because of the USSR, yet
American ideologues in the
ruling class, in the government,
and in the mass media
misrepresented the threat as a
Soviet military threat. Why?
The Red Menace Film Poster (Republic Pictures, 1949)
• The American crusade against Communism was in part an effort
to prevent independent economic development, to prevent
indigenous movements from extricating their societies from the
integrated world system dominated largely by American capital
and from using resources for their own social and economic
development. But it functioned in other ways as well. Economist
Joan Robinson: “It is obvious enough that the United States
campaign against Communism is a campaign against
development. By means of it, the American people have been led
to acquiesce in the maintenance of a huge war machine and its use
by threat or actual force to try to suppress every popular
movement that aims to overthrow ancient or modern tyranny and
begin to find a way to overcome poverty and establish national
self-respect. In those countries whose governments have been
prepared to accept American support, ‘aid’ is given in a form which
may do more to inhibit than to promote development.”
• The American crusade against Communism was in part a
technique of domestic control. Even if they were not, dissenters
could be silenced by being denounced as communists.
• The American crusade against Communism was in part a means
for overcoming isolationism and defensive protectionism. If
America was not safe, then there could be no withdrawal from the
responsibilities—and rewards—of world leadership, as after WWI.
• The American crusade against Communism was in part a means
to create public hysteria, making it easier for the government to
raise the vast sums required for American policy from a citizenry
notorious for its disinclination to pay taxes.
• The American crusade against Communism was in part created
by demagogues, some of them, like the notorious Senator Joseph
McCarthy (R-WI), not even particularly anti-communist, who
discovered the political potential of wholesale denunciation of the
enemy within, launching frenzied and squalid anti-Red witchhunts. The demagogues both facilitated and constrained US policy
by pushing it to extremes.
• The American crusade against Communism was in part a useful
strategy for winning votes in Congress or in presidential and
congressional elections. Therefore, it was promoted by both
politicians who were not sincerely convinced of their own rhetoric
and by those who were clinically mad, such as Secretary of the
Navy James Forrestal, who committed suicide because he saw
Russians coming from his window in the hospital.
• The American crusade against Communism was in part caused
by the military-industrial-congressional-educational complex: the
increasingly vast agglomeration of men and resources, which lived
by the preparation of war. Richard Barnet: “The war economy
provides comfortable riches for tens of thousands of bureaucrats in
and out of military uniform who go to the office every day to build
nuclear weapons or to plan nuclear war; millions of workers whose
jobs depend on the system of nuclear terrorism; scientists and
engineers hired to look for that final ‘technological breakthrough’
that can provide total security; contractors unwilling to give up
easy profits; warrior intellectuals who sell threats and bless war.”
• The American crusade against Communism was in part
misplaced moralism and self-delusion. Most Americans sincerely
believed that the ideologies of US capitalism and US democracy
served as the model for the world, presenting the question of how
to respond to those who would not accept that American model,
those who dissented. If Americans represented the good, dissenters
represented the evil. And the response to the evil is deeply rooted
in American Protestantism: the impulse to isolate, to convert, or to
repress. This religious response was translated into an American
foreign policy that denied self-interest and transformed aggressive
invasions into merciful rescue missions. Charles Bohlen: “…one of
the difficulties of explaining this policy…is that our policy is not
rooted in any national material interest of the United States, as
most foreign policies of other countries in the past have been.” The
New Republic expressed the American idealism: “The moral pull
for the US to go on rescue missions will always be enormous.
There are dozens of such spots today. Our conscience aches for
them.”
• The American crusade against Communism was in part the
result of the minimal tactical flexibility of the USA, committing
the military not only to an essentially nuclear strategy of bombs
rather than men but also to the ominous strategy of massive
retaliation. The USA became committed to an insane arms race to
mutual destruction organized by generals and intellectuals whose
profession required them not to notice this insanity.
• The American crusade against Communism was in part the
result of mutually supporting factors, highly resistant to change,
despite its irrationality and the cost it imposed on the citizenry
(almost 70 percent of taxes were used to pay for past, present, and
future wars), not to mention the threat to continued survival. The
USA was dependent on foreign resources primarily because of its
war production. Acquiring those raw materials required an empire.
Acquiring an empire required military power.
• The American crusade against Communism was in part a highly
effective technique of popular mobilization in support of policies
of intervention and subversion in the postwar period. It was an
ideology adapted to an era when the civilizing mission of the white
race could no longer be invoked. Thus, when the US conquered the
Philippines in 1898, it was bearing the White Man’s Burden,
whereas post-WWII, America’s foreign invasions were defending
the Free World against the savage Communists.
• The American crusade against Communism was in part a means
for providing a psychological climate of psychosis in which a
continuing public subsidy could be provided to technologically
advanced sectors of American industry for maintenance of a huge
war machine. Only a population that feared for its survival could
be induced to consent to this subsidy, which had become a central
factor in the American postwar economy. The primary economic
lesson learned from World War II was that wartime government
spending, not the New Deal, had overcome the Great Depression.
• The crusade against Communism depoliticized American society
and created the psychological climate of psychosis in which the
government was able to intervene, in part through fiscal policies,
public works, and public services, but largely through was
spending, to preserve economic health. The American ruling class
saw no other form of government-induced production that would
not harm but would rather enhance the interests and power of the
private empires that controlled the economy, that would be
endlessly expandable, and that, at the same time, would be
tolerated by the mass of the population, which would have to foot
the bill. Vice-President of LTV Aerospace Samuel F. Downer
explained: “It’s basic. Its selling appeal is defense of the home. This
is one of the greatest appeals the politicians have to adjusting the
system…. We’re going to increase defense budgets as long as those
bastards in Russia are ahead of us. The American people
understand this.” The fact that the Russians were not ahead of the
US did not prevent the US ruling class from playing this cynical
and deadly game.
• The American crusade against Communism was highly
functional for the American elite (and to a lesser extent to the
Soviet elite). It served to provide an ideology for empire, and to
mobilize support for the government-subsidized system of military
state capitalism. Opportunities to end the Cold War were
sidestepped, and challenges to Cold War ideology were bitterly
resisted. The American ruling class sought a permanent Cold War.
Increasingly, under the guise of the crusade against Communism,
the control of the economy and of political life was centralized by
the interpenetration of the executive branch of the government
and the corporate elite. At the same time, the role of democracy,
the role of Congress, was diminishing. The House Armed Services
Committee described the role of Congress as “that of a sometimes
querulous but essentially kindly uncle who complains while
furiously puffing on his pipe but who finally, as everyone expects,
gives in and hands over the allowance.”
• Political scientist Harold Stein concurs: “The basic determination
of foreign-military policy, or military expenditures and
organization, and of weapons has been made by civilians in the
Executive Branch, usually with the President in active control.
Congress has exercised an occasionally restraining but never a
guiding hand.” As Senator Arthur Vandenberg (R-MI) feared, the
US President became “the number one war lord of the earth.”
• Mutual fear escalating from confrontation until the American
and Soviet camps started mobilizing under their two opposing
banners explained the congealing of the fronts in 1947-49; the step
by step partition of Germany, from 1947 to the building of the
Berlin Wall in 1961; the failure of the anti-communists on the
Western side to avoid complete involvement in the US-dominated
military alliance (with the exception of de Gaulle’s France); and the
failure of those on the Eastern side of the divide to escape
complete subordination to Moscow (except for Tito’s Yugoslavia).
The blame for the apocalyptic character of the Cold War, however,
can be placed squarely on the USA.
The Iron Curtain
• On 9 February 1946, Stalin announced that the USSR would turn
inward and rebuild itself with more 5-year plans, demanding
sacrifice from his people. This was Stalin’s final rejection of the USsponsored postwar open capitalist system of the International Bank
of Reconstruction and Development (the World Bank) and the
International Monetary Fund
(the IMF). US Supreme Court
Justice William O. Douglas
called Stalin’s isolationism a
“Declaration of World War III.”
• At Westminster College in
Fulton, Missouri on 5 March
1946, with Truman by his
side, Churchill delivered the
“Iron Curtain” speech.
Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” Speech
Churchill said, “From Stettin in
the Baltic to Tieste in the
Adriatic, an iron curtain has
descended on the continent.”
Churchill thanked God for
entrusting the atomic bomb to
the Anglo-Saxon people and
urged an alliance of the
English-speaking nations for the
coming “trial of strength.” He
did not mention his own role in
bringing about the iron curtain
through his deal with Stalin in
Moscow only 18 months before.
Nor did he notice the irony of
repeating his declamation about
“freedom” and “democracy” two
days later in the segregated Jim
Crow state of Virginia. Truman
acknowledged the Soviet threat,
but did not want to tie US
interests to the British Empire;
Stalin angrily called Churchill a
war-mongering racist trying to
decide the destiny of the entire
world.
Map of the Churchill’s “Iron Curtain”
The Long Telegram
• On 22 February 1946, the
longest telegram in State
Department history was sent to
Washington, DC from Moscow
by George Kennan, analyzing
Stalin’s recent “election speech”
(9 February 1946). Keenan
explained that the dictator
needed to portray the West as
evil in order to justify his own
control over the Russian people.
Because of the leadership’s
internal needs, Stalin viewed the
West as an enemy and would
exert constant pressure to
reduce Western power but was
in no hurry and had no
timetable. Kennan ignored the
18-year history of US aggression
against the USSR, blaming the
USSR entirely for the growing
Cold War.
George Kennan (c. 1948)
Kennan argued that the Soviets
would have to “be contained by
the adroit and vigilant
application of counterforce at a
series of constantly shifting
geographical and political
points.” If Americans could be
patient and work to ensure the
long-run prosperity and stability
of their own system, Kennan
advised, containment would
result in the break-up or
gradual mellowing of Soviet
power. Consequently, the US
should no longer negotiate or
compromise with the USSR.
After the “long telegram,”
Truman discarded views
suggesting America had made
mistakes leading to the Cold
War and views suggesting,
because US power was so much
greater than Soviet power, the
US could safely try to work out
a long-term settlement with
Stalin, including the possible
sharing of atomic secrets. From
this point, Truman commanded
US officials to depend more on
economic and military power,
justified by the containment
theory, than on diplomacy to
deal with the Soviets. To
Kennan’s regret, US diplomacy
became overmilitarized.
The Baruch Plan
• Truman committed “the worst
blunder” of his career in June
1946. Without Truman’s
authority, his Secretary of State
negotiated with the USSR on the
international control of atomic
energy, forcing Truman to
adopt a policy providing for an
international body to control
the raw materials and the
production facilities used for
atomic energy. When multimillionaire Bernard Baruch
presented this plan at the UN,
he inserted a voting procedure
that would give the US control
over every action of the body—
even over the establishment of
atomic power for peaceful
purposes within the USSR,
which the Soviets rejected. A
historic chance to control
atomic power had been ruined.
Bernard Baruch at the UN (Oct. 1946)
• On 1 August 1946, Truman
signed into law the Atomic
Energy Act, outlawing any
exchange of atomic-energy
information. The world
remained embarked on an
uncontrolled atomic-arms race.
• In late 1945, leading scientists
had come out against Truman’s
policies, publishing the Bulletin
of Atomic Scientists each month
“to preserve our civilization” as
one scholar said, “by scaring
men into rationality.”
The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists’ Doomsday Clock (created in 1947)
• Truman’s Secretary of Commerce Henry A. Wallace gave a
speech at New York’s Madison Square Garden on 12 September
1946 in which he condemned the arms race and blamed American
as well as Soviet policy. Truman fired Wallace.
• Wallace now prepared to challenge Truman for the presidency in
1948. His Progressive Party organized grassroots opposition to
Truman’s Cold War policies.
Paul Robeson’s “Battle Hymn of ‘48”
There’s a fresh breeze a-blowing all across
this mighty land,
And it sings of peace and progress and
prosperity at hand,
With security and plenty for the people to
command,
For the People’s March is on!
Glory, glory, hallelujah, glory, glory,
hallelujah,
Glory, glory, hallelujah, for the People’s
March is on!
From the village, from the city, all the
nation’s voice has roared;
Down the rivers, ‘cross the prairies, like a
torrent it has poured;
We will march with Henry Wallace; we will
fight with Gideon’s sword,
For the People’s March is on!
Henry Wallace, Albert Einstein, Frank Kingdon,
and Paul Robeson
Vern Partlow’s “Atomic Talking Blues”
(written in 1945; censored in 1950 for being pro-communist)
Well, I’m gonna preach you a sermon about They put a harness on Old Sol splittin’ atoms,
Old Man Atom.
While the diplomats was splittin’ hairs.
I don’t men the Adam in the bible datum.
Hiroshima, Nagasaki, what’ll we do?
I don’t mean the Adam that mother Eve
Hiroshima, Nagasaki, they both went up the
mated.
flue!
I mean that thing that science liberated.
Then the cartel crowd put on a show
Einstein says he’s scared,
To turn back the clock on the UNO,
And when Einstein’s scared I’m scared.
To get a corner on atoms and maybe
Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Alamogordo, Bikini!
extinguish
Here’s my moral, plain as day:
Every damned atom that can’t speak English.
Old Man Atom is here to stay.
Down with foreign born atoms!
He’s gonna hang around, it’s plain to see.
Hiroshima, Nagasaki!
But ah, my dearly beloved, are we?
But the atom’s international, in spite of
We hold this truth to be self-evident:
hysteria:
All men may be cremated equal.
Flourishes in Utah, also Siberia.
Hiroshima, Nagasaki, here’s my text!
And whether you’re white, black, red or
Hiroshima, Nagasaki, lordy, who’ll be next?
brown,
The science guys from every clime,
The question is this, when you boil it down:
They all pitched in with overtime.
To be or not to be? That is the question.
Before they knew it the job was done.
Atoms to atoms and dust to dust.
They’d hitched up the power of the goshdarn If the world makes A-bombs, something’s
sun.
bound to be bust.
Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Alamogordo, Bikini!
No, the answer to it all isn’t military datum
Like “Who gits thar fustest with the mostest
atoms.”
But the people of the world must decide their
fate.
We gotta stick together or disintegrate.
World peace and the atomic golden age or a
push-button war?
Mass cooperation of mass annihilation?
Civilian international control of the atom—
one world or none?
If you’re gonna split atoms, well, you can’t
split ranks.
Hiroshima, Nagasaki!
It’s up to the people cause the atom don’t care.
You can’t fence him in; he’s just like air.
He doesn’t give a damn about damn politics
Or who got who into what of a fix.
All he wants to do is sit around
And have his nucleus bombarded by neutrons.
Hiroshima, Nagasaki!
So if you’re scared of the A-bomb I’ll tell you
what to do.
You got to get with all the people in the world
with you.
You got to get together and let out a yell
Or the first thing you know we’ll blow this
world to….
Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Moscow, too!
New York, London, Timbuktu!
Shanghai, Paris, up the flue!
Hiroshima, Nagasaki!
We must choose between the brotherhood of
man or smithereens.
The people of the world must pick out a thesis.
Peace in the world of the world in pieces!
Woosh!
• In the 1948 election, Wallace was defeated badly. His loss helped
discredit left-liberal analyses of the growing Cold War and led to
the American consensus on how to fight that war.
The Truman Doctrine
• President Truman’s approval
rating had been 87 percent in
mid-1945. By late-1946, it had
fallen to 32 percent. Truman
needed a miracle to win reelection in 1948, and he
cynically escalated the Cold
War to pull off that miracle—
the Truman Doctrine.
• In February 1947, the British
informed Truman they would
pull out of Greece and Turkey
and could no longer help the
Greek government battling
domestic left-wing forces or the
Turkish government coming
under Soviet pressure, which
presented Truman with several
serious problems.
Daily Worker (UK, 7 May 1946)
• The repressive Greek regime
had been responsible for the
assassination of 1,300 left-wing
opponents in the previous year,
and the Turkish government
was just as brutal and corrupt.
Stalin could not be made a
scapegoat because he had kept
his promise to Churchill and
had stayed out of Greece.
Domestically, the Congress
planned to cut taxes and the
American electorate mistrusted
imperial undertakings, so
Truman would have neither the
funding nor the support for
intervention. Moreover, he had
become unpopular throughout
the country. Secretary of State
Dean Acheson, however, solved
all these problems in a few
minutes: he would scare hell
out of the American people.
Secretary of Defense George Marshall,
President Harry Truman, Secretary of State
Dean Acheson, and Secretary of the Treasury
John Snyder (18 Oct. 1950)
• Acheson postulated the “rotten
apple” theory (a precursor of the
“domino theory”). Like apples in
a barrel infected by one rotten
apple, the corruption of Greece
would infect Iran and all to the
east. The infection would
communize Africa, then Europe,
until the United States stood
alone. Acheson developed this
theory into the containment
policy announced by Truman
on 12 March 1947.
• The Truman Doctrine divided
the world simply into “free
peoples” and governments that
relied upon “terror and
oppression…the suppression of
personal freedoms.” There was
no third choice, and Americans
had to choose a side. Truman
never mentioned the USSR.
Instead, Truman called for an
open-ended commitment to
oppose the ideology of
communism wherever it
appeared in the world.
President Truman Addressing Congress
(12 Mar. 1947)
• Truman demanded and received $250 million for Greece and
$150 million for Turkey. Despite US aid, Greek leftists held out
until 1950 before the US-backed right-wing government prevailed.
Truman’s success in pushing through the containment policy of
the Truman Doctrine made him increasingly popular, putting him
on the road to a surprising re-election in 1948.
• Truman followed up with a Red Scare at home, implementing a
federal loyalty program to uncover Communists in government,
while his attorney general published lists of suspected subversive
organizations. The National Security Act of
1947 created the National Military
Establishment, which in its turn created the
“Establishment.” Truman consolidated the
Departments of the Navy and the Army
(which had included the Air Force) into the
War Department while changing its name
to the Department of Defense—just one
year before George Orwell wrote 1984.
Daily Californian (7 July 1949)
• Then the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was created, along
with the unprecedented and always more powerful National
Security Council (NSC), whose director and members, appointed
by the President without further confirmation, are accountable
only to him. Truman institutionalized the military-industrialcongressional-educational complex, which began promulgating
propaganda to shape public perception of the Cold War,
propaganda rarely questioned by the media or by historians.
Political Cartoon (provenance unknown)
Police Beat Attendees of a Paul Robeson Concert
(Peekskill, New York, 4 Sep. 1949)
The Marshall Plan
• From the perspective of US
leaders, WWII had left Europe
(and the world) a field of ruins
inhabited by hungry, desperate,
and radicalized peoples, ready to
listen to the appeal of social
revolution and economic
policies incompatible with the
international system of free
enterprise, free trade, and free
investment by which the USA
and the world were to be saved.
Moreover, as foes of fascism, the
Communists had emerged from
WWII far stronger than at any
time in the past, and sometimes
as the largest parties and
electoral forces of their
countries. The terrible harvest
of 1946 and the appalling
winter of 1946-47 made US
leaders even more worried.
The Hunger Winter in Kiel, Germany
(British Occupation Zone, 1946-47)
• The danger to Western Europe US hegemony, announced by
was not from the USSR but
Secretary of State George
from economic collapse that
Marshall on 5 June 1947.
could turn the population
toward socialism, paralyze the
US economy, and threaten the
entire capitalist system. Indeed,
the socialist premier of France
warned US officials that without
US aid, French Communists
would democratically take over
France in the next election. The
USA responded to this threat of
communist democratic electoral
victory in Western Europe with
the Marshall Plan, a $13 billion
aid package designed to revive
the economies of Europe under
Marshall Plan Aid to Europe (1948-1952)
• The Marshall Plan was
presented as an offer of aid to
all of Europe, including those
areas under Soviet occupation,
but US leaders knew the USSR
would never accept conditions
placed on the aid. An economist
who worked on implementing
it, W. W. Rostow, said that the
plan was part of an “offensive”
which aimed “to strengthen the
area still outside Stain’s grasp.”
Within weeks, and prompted by
the USA, the parties of the right
and center forced Communists
out of the governments in Italy
and France. And in the spring of
1948, the USA poured funds
into Italy to prevent Communist
and Socialist candidates
winning the general election—
and began to recruit ex-fascists
to an armed underground
organization, Gladio (later to
come under NATO’s wing), in
case they did win.
Communist Rally (Rome, Italy, 1948)
• The popular forces of
Resistance were broken in
Europe, in part by force, and the
Marshall Plan successfully
reconstructed European
capitalism: While there were
humanitarian and economic
justifications for the Marshall
Plan, the strategic importance
of keeping Western Europe out
of the Soviet orbit was its
ultimate if not its sole
justification. In strategic terms,
the Marshall Plan represented a
commitment of American
resources to the protection of
Western Europe against the
expansion of Soviet influence
and control. The Marshall Plan
also laid the basis for the
integration of much of the
world economy, largely, though
not wholly, on American terms.
Construction Worker (West Berlin)
• Japan was reconstructed as an
industrial power with an
essentially colonial hinterland.
The Japanese understood that
Japan was “developed not only
as a military base against China
and the Soviet Union, but also
as an industrial base supporting
the counterrevolutionary cause
in Southeast Asia.”
• The Marshall Plan contributed
to the escalation of the Cold
War. Scott Parrish, a US scholar
who studied the Soviet archives
in the 1990s, concluded:
“Conceived by American
policymakers primarily as a
defensive measure to stave off
economic collapse in Western
Europe, [the Marshall Plan]
proved indistinguishable to the
Soviet leadership from an
offense attempt to subvert the
security interests of the Soviet
Union. The upshot was the Cold
War.”
Demonstration against the Marshall Plan
(Berlin, 1952)
• Before the Marshall Plan,
Moscow expressly prevented its
client regimes and communist
movements in Eastern Europe
from building states on the
model of the USSR. Contrary to
the West’s image of societies
behind the iron curtain, the
states occupied by the Soviets
established mixed economies
with multi-party parliamentary
democracies, specifically
distinguished from the single
party dictatorship of the
proletariat officially in place in
the USSR. The only state in
Eastern Europe that did impose
a single party Communist
regime was Tito’s Yugoslavia,
which had escaped Stalin’s
control. Moreover, after WWII,
the USSR had quickly
demobilized the Red Army from
12 million men in 1945 to 3
million in 1948. After the
Marshall Plan, Stalin reversed
these policies.
Marchers Carrying Posters of Stalin and Tito
(Belgrade, Yugoslavia, 1 May 1946)
• In moves that paralleled those
of Truman, Stalin consolidated
his power behind the iron
curtain, setting up a Molotov
Plan to tie together the
Communist bloc, using the Red
Army to crack down on anticommunism, and taking control
of the police and of the secret
police. In Eastern Europe, nonCommunist ministers were
forced out of office; the social
democratic parties were forced
to merge with Communist
parties regardless of the
feelings of their members;
Communist Party leaders who
might show any degree of
independence from Stalin
(including virtually anyone who
had fought in Spain) were put
on trial, imprisoned and often
executed. Władysław Gomułka
in Poland and János Kádár in
Hungary were merely thrown
into prison.
Wladyslaw Gomulka
János Kádár
Traycho Kostov in Bulgaria, László Rajk in Hungary, and Rudolf
Slánský in Czechoslovakia were all executed. Stalin was not only
keen to remove pro-Western supporters of market capitalism. He
was terrified of independent Communist-led regimes emerging—
especially after the break with Tito’s Yugoslavia in 1948. A wave of
show trials of Eastern European Communist leaders followed,
accused, like Tito, of being “imperialist agents” and “fascists.”
Traycho Kostov
László Rajk
Rudolf Slánský
Jisop Broz Tito
The Berlin Blockade and Airlift
• In Germany, the USA, the UK,
and France merged their
occupation zones, introducing a
new currency on 20 June 1948.
This had the effect of cutting
them off from the Russian zone.
By this move, Truman signaled
his intent to create a unified,
independent West German
state. Stalin reacted on 24 June
1948 by imposing a blockade on
the movement of goods and
food by road and rail to West
Berlin, which was an isolated
enclave in the midst of its zone.
German
Occupation Zones
• Stalin imposed the blockade to
force the USA to drop its plans
for a West German government.
A huge American and British
airlift succeeded in keeping the
supplies flowing to the 2.2
million West Berliners—and
became part of a propaganda
The Berlin Airlift (1948)
campaign about the “defense of
freedom.” Western pilots landed
almost minute by minute in the
tiny West Berlin airfield to
deliver 1.6 million tons of food
and fuel over the next 320 days.
On 12 May 1949, Stalin lifted
the blockade.
Berlin Airlift
Propaganda
Campaign
(1948)
• The situation in Germany provided the background for a
campaign against Communist and left wing activists in the West.
In the USA, the Taft Hartley law required trade unions to purge
Communist officials; government employees (including teachers
and college lecturers) were sacked for refusing to sign “loyalty
oaths.” Actors, directors, and writers who would denounce alleged
“Communist” contacts
were banned from
working in Hollywood.
Musicians were blacklisted. Among the many
alleged Communists
imprisoned was writer
Dashiell Hammett.
Charlie Chaplin was
banned from entering
the USA, and Paul
Robeson from leaving it.
The Hollywood Ten and Their Families Protest Their
Impending Imprisonment (1950)
• In a grisly climax, Ethel and
Julius Rosenberg were sent to
the electric chair for allegedly
passing atomic secrets to Russia.
In France and Italy, antiCommunist splits tore the trade
union movement apart. In
Britain, several major unions
Ethel and Julius Rosenberg (Sep. 1950)
banned Communists from
holding office. While this was
happening in the West, the most
sterile form of Stalinist ideology
was imposed in Eastern Europe,
with prisons and labor camps
for anyone who objected.
Aleksandr
Solzhenitsy
after
Release
from
Ekibastuz
Gulag
Camp
(1953)
NATO and the Warsaw Pact
• The two blocs were quickly
organized into rival military
alliances, the North Atlantic
Treaty Organization (NATO)
and the Warsaw Pact, and were
cut off from one another
economically. The NATO Treaty
was signed 4 April 1949, and
member states agreed “to
develop their individual and
collective capacity to resist
armed attack” and “an armed
attack against one…shall be
considered an armed attack
against them all.” NATO “kept
the Russians out, the Americans
in, and the Germans down.” The
Warsaw Pact, the Moscowdirected military alliance
through which the Red Army
policed Eastern Europe, was
signed on 14 May 1955. The
USA banned a massive range of
“strategic” exports to the
Eastern bloc, while within it
Russia insisted on “the
unreserved subordination of
politics, economics, and
ideological activity to the needs
of the bloc as a whole.”
Cold War
Military Alliances
Founding
members of the
North Atlantic
Alliance (NATO)
1949
Entry: Greece and
Turkey 1952;
West Germany
1955; Spain 1982
Founding
members of the
Warsaw Pact 1955
Entry: East
Germany 1956
Withdrawal:
Albania 1968
• Military expenditure on both sides leapt to heights
unprecedented in peacetime, reaching about 20 percent of US
national output and up to 40 percent of Russia’s smaller output.
The USSR built secret cities to develop an atom bomb to rival the
USA, while the USA developed the H-bomb—100 times more
destructive than the atom bomb—and maintained a fleet of armed
nuclear bombers permanently in flight. It was not long before the
combined arsenals of the two superpowers were enough to destroy
the world many times over.
Yet generals on both sides
played war games, assuming
the use of these weapons.
USSR’s Hydrogen Bomb (22 Nov. 1955)
USA’s B-47 Nuclear Bomber (11 Aug. 1950)