The Penguin History of the World

In one sense, after all, the Cold War was a late and spectacular manifestation of the rupture of ideological and diplomatic history in 1917, even though some seek its origins further back in time, to when the United States and Russia were expanding across their continents in the nineteenth century, forming states that both in size and in messianic content were unlike anything seen in Europe before. But even if that was so, it was Communist Russia that from the start approached international affairs in a new and uniquely troublesome way. For it, diplomacy was not just a convenient way of doing business, but a weapon for the advancement of a revolution. Even that, though, would have mattered much less if history had not produced by 1945 a new world power, the long-awaited modernized Russia, far better placed than any tsarist empire to have its own way in eastern Europe, and to advance its ambitions in other parts of the world.

Soviet diplomacy after Stalin’s accession to power often paralleled Russia’s historic ambitions, and Soviet state interest, shaped by geography and history, was to prove inseparable from the ideological struggle. Communists and those who sympathized with them everywhere believed they must safeguard the Soviet Union, the champion of the international working class and, indeed (true believers affirmed), the guardian of the destinies of the whole human race. However they qualified it in practice, when Bolsheviks had said their aim was to overthrow the non-Communist societies, they meant it, so far as the long run was concerned. After 1945, other Communist states had come into existence whose rulers agreed, at least formally, and thereby helped impose an ideological division on Europe and the world.

But if the Soviet Union was a new kind of state, so was the United States. Its concepts of individual and religious freedoms, property rights, free markets, consumer opportunities and sense of the equity of quality among men were – even though not always practised at home – revolutionary in a European or Asian setting. Most Americans believed that these concepts were universal in their application and that other countries ought to implement them in order to succeed. In spite of the wish to get the soldiers who had been fighting overseas back home, there was also a profound sense in America that the United States had now fought and sacrificed twice in the twentieth century in order to set the world right, and that other countries, which had benefited from American altruism, now had a duty to prevent any recurrence by following American prescriptions for development and progress. In contrast to after the First World War, this time there would be no American turning away from the world, in part because the new president, Harry Truman, had begun to equate Stalin’s Communism with Hitler’s Nazism, as a dangerous, expansionist ideology intended to keep the world away from the blessings of American ideas.

Events in eastern Europe troubled the Americans much. By 1948, Hungary, Romania, Poland and Czechoslovakia had all ceased to have any non-Communists in their governments, while Communists dominated that of Bulgaria. Then, the opening of the Marshall Aid programme was almost at once followed by what was to prove to be the first battle of the Cold War, over the fate of Berlin. It was decisive in that it apparently established a point at which, in Europe, the United States was prepared to fight. It does not seem that this outcome had been anticipated by the Soviets, though they had provoked it by seeking to prevent the emergence of an economically powerful western Germany under American and British control. Their action conflicted with the western powers’ interest – to reanimate the German economy, at the very least in their own occupation zones, and to do this before Germany’s future political shape was settled, in the certainty that it was vital for the recovery of western Europe as a whole.

In 1948, without Soviet agreement, the western powers introduced a currency reform in their own sectors. It had a galvanizing effect, kick-starting the process of economic recovery in western Germany. Following on from Marshall Aid, available (thanks to Soviet decisions) only to the western-occupied zones, this reform more than any other step cut Germany in two. Since the recovery of the eastern half could not be integrated with that of western Europe, a revived western Germany might now emerge by itself. That the western powers should get on with the business of putting their zones on their feet was undoubtedly economic sense, but eastern Germany was thenceforth decisively on the other side of the Iron Curtain. Currency reform divided Berlin, too, and thereby prejudiced Communist chances of staging a popular putsch in the city, isolated though it was within the Soviet occupation zone.