Contents PROOF

PROOF Contents Acknowledgements vii Notes on Contributors viii Introduction 1 Steven Casey and Jonathan Wright 1 Joseph Stalin 9 Sergey Radchenko 2 Harry S. Truman 32 Steven Casey 3 Ernest Bevin 52 Anne Deighton 4 Charles de Gaulle 71 Sudhir Hazareesingh 5 Konrad Adenauer 90 Jonathan Wright 6 Władysław Gomułka 109 Anita J. Prazmowska˙ 7 Josip Broz Tito 131 Jeronim Perović 8 Mao Zedong 160 Yafeng Xia 9 Ho Chi Minh 180 Sophie Quinn-Judge 10 Jawaharlal Nehru 200 Judith M. Brown 11 Gamal Abdel Nasser 218 Laura M. James v April 10, 2011 11:7 MAC/EARLY Page-v 9780230_249066_01_prexii PROOF vi Contents 12 Fidel Castro 240 Clive Foss 13 John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson 261 Andrew Preston 14 Nikita Khrushchev 281 Matthias Uhl (translated by Jonathan Wright) Further Reading 307 Index 311 April 10, 2011 11:7 MAC/EARLY Page-vi 9780230_249066_01_prexii PROOF 1 Joseph Stalin Sergey Radchenko ‘In the hall way we stopped before a map of the world on which the Soviet Union was coloured in red. Stalin waved his hand over the Soviet Union and exclaimed, “They will never accept the idea that so great a space should be red, never, never!” ’1 So Milovan Djilas, a Yugoslav com- munist, recalled his meeting with the Soviet leader in early June 1944. The contours of victory in the most devastating war the world had ever seen were already discernible. Much of Europe and the Far East lay in ruins. In less than a year the Third Reich would lie prostrate; it was only briefly outlived by the Japanese Empire. The Allies were planning for the post-war world. Maps had to be redrawn, and realities accepted. The basic fact of 1945 was that the Soviet Union was unrivalled in Eurasia in raw military power. Soviet armies were to subdue Eastern Europe in a series of bloody but overpowering offensives. The strength of Soviet occupation was a trump card to force a post-war settlement on Stalin’s terms; whether the British and the Americans accepted these terms was practically immaterial: they would have to bow to the inevitable Soviet hegemony in Eastern Europe. Three years earlier the Wehrmacht stood at the gates of Moscow. Behind it were routed Soviet armies, burning cities and ravaged coun- tryside. Stalin had hoped for a different war, a war in the West, not in the East, a war the Soviet Union would have enjoyed from the sidelines. The signing of the Soviet–German Non-aggression Pact on 23 August 1939 was a masterpiece of Stalin’s personal diplomacy: now he could observe the war between Germany and the West from the sidelines. While their armies dwindled in mutual slaughter in the West, Stalin would build up Soviet security in the East, augmenting forces and bolstering defensive and offensive capabilities in anticipation of an impending showdown on Soviet terms. Unlike ideals of collective 9 April 10, 2011 11:25 MAC/EARLY Page-9 9780230_249066_03_cha01 PROOF 10 Joseph Stalin security, unsuccessfully championed by the former Soviet commissar for foreign affairs Maxim Litvinov, the Soviet–German Pact directly con- tributed to Soviet security by beefing up the Soviet buffer zone in Eastern Europe. Security for Stalin was a geographical concept: occupied territory afforded strategic depth in case of a military conflict, the much-needed kilometres to fall back upon, hold the advancing enemy, regroup and turn the tides of war. The further Moscow or Leningrad were from the borders, the better for Soviet security. By the same token, the closer Soviet tanks and airplanes were to the industrial heartland of Europe, the worse the chances of a potential enemy, the shorter the war, the sweeter the victory. Division of spheres of influence with Germany allowed the Soviet Union, in a matter of months, to occupy eastern Poland, the Baltic states, a sizeable chunk of Romania, and a stretch of territory at the Soviet–Finnish border, although in the last case only after a diffi- cult, bitter war against Finland. These territories were simply annexed by the Soviet Union with German acquiescence, but Stalin’s appetite was greater than that. Hitler’s hopes to divert Soviet attention away from Europe, towards British India and the Indian Ocean, fell on deaf ears. It was not that Stalin did not care about India; simply, he had more immediate, press- ing interests in Europe. His key aims were to improve the Soviet Union’s geopolitical position in the north, by annexing Finland and so to become the master of the Baltic Sea, and in the south, by assur- ing Soviet control of the Turkish Straits, the entrance to the Black Sea. Germany was not particularly forthcoming on either of these two points, nor was Hitler enthused by Stalin’s proposal to send Soviet forces to Bulgaria, or to be consulted about the ultimate fate of Hungary and Romania.2 Germany’s invasion of the USSR in June 1941 wiped out almost overnight Soviet gains of the previous months but not Stalin’s territorial ambitions. No sooner was Germany defeated than Eastern Europe was back on the menu, and now Stalin’s bargaining position was incomparably stronger. ‘Stalin said on many occasions that Russia wins wars but cannot use the fruits of victory’, recalled former Soviet commissar for foreign affairs Vyacheslav Molotov – ‘The Russians fight wonderfully but cannot conclude peace; they are outsmarted; [they are] not given enough.’3 ‘Enough’ was a flexible concept: where did vital security interests give place to extravagant demands? Stalin’s early post-war strategy was to take as much as he could carry in geopolitical terms. His demands included a security belt in Eastern Europe on a far grander scale April 10, 2011 11:25 MAC/EARLY Page-10 9780230_249066_03_cha01 PROOF Sergey Radchenko 11 than anything possible under the Soviet–German Non-aggression Pact, although this was a difference of extent rather than of essence. Histori- ans disagree as to whether Stalin intended at the outset to ‘Sovietise’ the Soviet sphere of influence in Eastern Europe, or was forced to do so by the contingencies of the Cold War.4 My reading of the evidence would strongly favour the former explanation, although insisting that Stalin had blueprints for communization of Eastern Europe would not do jus- tice to the complexity of internal conditions in each country, or to the variations in Stalin’s approach in each case. The Germans and the Slavs The German question was central to Stalin’s post-war planning in Europe. His understanding of this question was heavily influenced by notions more akin to social Darwinism than Marxism. Germany was dangerous because it was populated by capable, industrious, well- organized and militant people. ‘I hate the Germans’, Stalin said on one occasion. ‘But hate should not prevent us from evaluating the Germans objectively. The Germans are a great people. Very good tech- nical workers and organizers. Good, naturally brave soldiers. One cannot annihilate the Germans; they will remain.’5 Not only would the Germans remain but, in Stalin’s fatalistic view, they would also be pre- pared for another war in 15–20–25 – at most 30 – years, a war that would inevitably involve the USSR and other East European countries. The Soviet leader believed that Germany ‘will continue to be dangerous for the Slavic world, because it sees it as an enemy’.6 Ethnic division was not the only contradiction of Stalin’s world but it was one of the more important ones: ‘the capitalist world’, he believed, ‘is divided into two hostile blocks – democratic and fascist. The Soviet Union takes advan- tage of this in order to fight against the most dangerous [country] for the Slavs – Germany.’7 In the impending Slav–German conflict, several precautions were nec- essary to guarantee the Slavs’ victory. First, Germany had to be kept weak, disarmed and occupied. Stalin looked forward to a post-war settlement on much harsher terms than that signed at Versailles in 1919. Versailles, Stalin believed, ‘not only stimulated the idea of revenge, but also made this revenge possible’, lacking as it did an enforcement mechanism. ‘Any measures to restrain Germany’, argued Stalin in a conversation with Churchill, ‘will inevitably cause a feeling of revenge in Germany. The task is to prevent revenge.’8 Stalin’s solution was to de-industrialize Germany, dismantling its heavy industry, a solution April 10, 2011 11:25 MAC/EARLY Page-11 9780230_249066_03_cha01 PROOF 12 Joseph Stalin that, Stalin believed, was not only in the Soviet interests but, ultimately, also in the interests of the British and the American capitalists who would be only too eager to strangle German competition. Stalin’s views on the dismemberment of Germany were ambigu- ous and evolved over time. This idea was seriously considered in the months before the Third Reich’s downfall and discussed in various forms between Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt. In principle, Stalin was not opposed (in fact, he mentioned the possibility of dismemberment as early as December 1941, during his meetings with the UK foreign sec- retary Anthony Eden).9 However, the prospect of several German states did not allure him nearly as much as physical occupation of German territory. In the East, Stalin was more interested in outright annexation rather than dismemberment, evidenced in his insistence on the Soviet possession of Königsberg and revision of Polish borders (recreating an independent Polish state at Germany’s expense). But this sort of trim- ming of Germany was not the same as dismemberment, and even here Stalin went by the principle ‘quod licet Jovis non licet bovis’, for he was very touchy about Western intentions with regard to the Ruhr, the Saar and the Rhineland, seeing their detachment or annexation by France as potentially detrimental to Soviet interests.

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