Russia

In the Far East, the Soviet Union’s belated participation in the war with Japan enabled it to add southern Sakhalin and the Kurile Islands to its possessions. China turned Communist, and for a moment even France and Italy seemed likely to do so. Marxist internationalism proved to be a far more potent lure than pan-Slavism had ever been. Furthermore, since the Soviet regime offered both a model for overcoming backwardness and help for peoples oppressed by other imperial powers, many more countries, including Egypt, Afghanistan and Cuba, were to become Soviet clients. For a time only the Western monopoly of nuclear weapons seemed to prevent a stampede to enter Stalin’s corral, and, thanks to its espionage service, the Soviet Union soon broke that monopoly. Just as the Soviet leaders came to poach Western technology and suborn useful citizens, they learned to exploit discontent in capitalist countries and cut a dash in the Third World.

Soviet prestige and world influence now exceeded those of any former Russian empire, and they continued to grow. In 1961, to general astonishment, the Soviet Union sent the first astronaut to orbit planet Earth, and when the ebullient new Party Secretary, Nikita Khrushchev, boasted that it would be able to match the United States in terms of economic output in a decade or even less, his claim did not seem entirely ridiculous. Within the short span of twenty years Soviet Russia had moved from the position of an embattled pariah to become a great power with a strong claim to world pre-eminence.

Once the German offensive at Kursk in the summer of 1943 had been broken, Soviet military operations read like a triumphant progress. But the successes were not won easily. Attention focused first on a stretch of the front along river Dnieper near Kiev, where Russian longboats had once gathered for the voyage to Constantinople. The first Russian imperial capital was defended by battered, but still formidable, divisions under the command of the able Field Marshal von Manstein, and by the great and treacherous river itself. The man in charge of the Soviet forces in the sector of intended breakthough to Kiev was General Vatutin. The carefully planned operation was heralded by a terrible barrage of more than 2,000 guns, mortars and rocket-launchers concentrated on to a front only 4 miles wide. A few days later guns in Moscow firing blank charges roared out a salute to greet the news that Kiev had been cleared of enemy troops. Czech troops under a Colonel Svoboda had taken part in the operation. They had been told that in fighting for Kiev they would be fighting for Prague. Events were to justify the claim. ¹

From this point on the story of the war can be reduced to a series of pincer movements which snapped shut to trap enemy armies; and a list of battles to cross great European rivers - the Bug, the Vistula and the Danube, the Oder and the Elbe. Prague was one of the very last cities to be taken: the Germans held it even after the fall of Berlin. But the war was fought on many levels. Aside from the military operations, there were diplomatic wars between the Allies over grand strategy and struggles between political leaders and military commanders. Moreover the war helped to shape the peace which followed. The victory over Nazi Germany was comprehensive and, as the Allies recognized, due largely to Soviet sacrifice. The shape of the new Europe was determined partly by the position of forces on the ground when the fighting stopped, and partly by agreements made between the Allies while the war was still in progress.

Peace arrangements, like military operations, were the subject of careful planning. The partition of post-war Germany, for example, had been proposed at an early stage by the Americans, though on the basis of a north-south rather than an east-west division, and the Soviet government was engaged in strategic preparation for the peace many months before the war ended. At Tehran in 1943 it was agreed that Poland’s frontiers should be moved westward, leaving the Soviet Union in possession of Polish territory it had occupied in 1939 (the predominately Orthodox areas) but compensating the Poles in the west at Germany’s expense. In November 1944 Maxim Litvinov, who had been Soviet Foreign Minister before the war and was now engaged in foreign-policy planning, sent his successor, Viacheslav Molotov, a position paper based on the premiss that the United States might revert to isolationism or even fall out with Britain (and they did indeed disagree over important questions such as the future of the British Empire). In such an event, he argued, Anglo-Soviet co-operation would bring advantages. With this end in view, Litvinov suggested that the British be accommodated over Iran (Persia), Afghanistan and Sinkiang in return for control of the Straits and hence free access from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean (which had been offered to Russia during the First World War).