The Penguin History of the World

Prudently, Truman insisted that the United States must not become involved in a greater war on the Asian mainland. That much settled, further fighting showed that although the Chinese might be able to keep the North Koreans in the field, they could not overturn South Korea against American wishes. Armistice talks were started. The new American administration, which came into office in 1953, was Republican and unequivocally anti-Communist, but knew its predecessor had sufficiently demonstrated its will and capacity to uphold an independent South Korea and felt that the real centre of the Cold War was in Europe rather than in Asia. An armistice was signed in July 1953. Subsequent efforts to turn this into a formal peace have as yet failed; sixty years later, the potential for conflict remained high between the two Koreas. But in East Asia as well as in Europe the Americans had prevented Communist victories in the first battles of the Cold War. In Korea these had been real battles; estimates suggest the war cost 3 million dead, most of them Korean civilians.

The Korean War ended because Stalin had died in early 1953. The Soviet leader had believed that keeping the fighting going in Korea was not a bad deal for the Soviets – it kept the Americans fighting an increasingly unpopular war against the Chinese. The Soviet Union could only benefit from that, Stalin had thought. His successors thought differently. They feared that the war in Korea could lead to an all-out war that the Soviet Union was not prepared to fight, and wanted a reduction of tension with the West. The new American president, Eisenhower, remained distrustful of Soviet intentions, however, and in the middle of the 1950s the Cold War was as intense as ever. Shortly after Stalin’s death his successors had revealed that they too had the improved nuclear weapon known as the hydrogen bomb. This was Stalin’s final memorial, guaranteeing (if it had been in doubt) the USSR’s status in the post-war world.

Stalin had carried to their logical conclusions the repressive policies of Lenin, but he had done much more than his predecessor. He had rebuilt most of the tsarist empire and had given Russia the strength to survive (just, and with the help of powerful allies) its gravest hour of trial. But his miscalculations had also led to the outbreak of the war, and the wasteful and inefficient system he put in place – and the terror he promoted – meant that the Soviets had to pay the highest possible price for their victory. The Soviet Union was a great power but, among the elements that made it up, it can hardly be doubted that one day Russia at least would have become one again without Communism. Yet in 1945 her peoples had been rewarded for their sufferings with precious little but an assurance of international strength. Domestic life after the war was harsher than ever; consumption was for years still held down and both the propaganda to which Soviet citizens were subjected and the brutalities of the police system seem, if anything, to have been intensified after the war.

The division of Europe, another of Stalin’s monuments, was more apparent than ever at his death. The western half was by 1953 substantially rebuilt, thanks to American economic support, and was carrying a larger share of its own defence costs. The Federal Republic and the GDR moved further and further apart. On successive days in March 1954 the Soviets announced that the eastern republic now possessed full sovereignty and the West German president signed the constitutional amendment permitting the rearmament of his country. In 1955 West Germany entered NATO; the Soviet riposte was the Warsaw Pact, an alliance of its satellites. Berlin’s future was still in doubt, but it was clear that the NATO powers would fight to resist changes in its status except by agreement. In the east, the GDR agreed to settle with old enemies: the line of the Oder–Neisse was to be the frontier with Poland. Hitler’s dream of realizing the greater Germany of the nineteenth-century nationalists had ended in the obliteration of Bismarckian Germany. Historic Prussia was now ruled by revolutionary Communists while the new West Germany was federal in structure, non-militarist in sentiment and dominated by Catholic and Social Democratic politicians, whom Bismarck would have seen as ‘enemies of the Reich’. So, without a peace treaty, the problem of containing the German power that had twice devastated Europe by war was settled at last. Also in 1955 came the final definition of land frontiers between the European blocs, when Austria re-emerged as an independent state and the occupying allied forces were withdrawn, as were the last American and British troops from Trieste, with a settlement of the Italian–Yugoslav border dispute there.