From Insight Magazine 6/10/96

COLD WAR - Westerners Took a While to Grasp Soviet Threat

By Stephen Goode

In 1946, not long after the end of World War II, Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin gave a speech before the assembled leaders of his Communist Party. His nation lay prostrate, nearly defeated in war, its cities and economy in shambles and its armed forces worn down by a long struggle. But the Soviet dictator had further wars and victories in mind.

Stalin said that the Soviet Union could not rest in its fight against imperialism, by which he meant the United States and the West. It was the duty of good Marxist-Leninists, Stalin said, to see that capitalism, the great enemy of socialism and therefore of the Soviet Union, was wiped out utterly and completely.

The speech fell largely on deaf ears in the West, but it was "the tip-off that it was the end" of the wartime collaboration between the the Soviet Union and America that had defeated Nazi Germany and Japan, says Hoover Institution political scientist Arnold Beichman. "It was the tip-off" that the Cold War was about to begin, he adds.

What followed was a protracted war that occasionally broke into armed conflict - in Korea, Vietnam and other Third World countries where the Soviets sought to expand their revolution. Several times - during the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, for example - it threatened to plunge the world into nuclear war. The symbol that came to represent the conflict in people's minds was the Berlin Wall, a sign of deep divisions between East and West, and built to keep East Germans from fleeing to freedom.

During the 1960s it was popular among historians to deny the responsibility of Stalin for the Soviet and U.S. rivalry that followed World War II. Historians such as William Appleman Williams of the University of Wisconsin charged that it was the belligerent attitude of the United States under leaders such as Harry Truman that caused the Cold War. Moscow was too weak to pose a serious threat to a much stronger West, the revisionist historians argued. America and the West were eager to destroy the Soviet Union and used any excuse at all to provoke Moscow and take advantage of the West's superior position.

But while that was the politically correct view of liberal academe, it no longer is everyone's opinion. Who caused the Cold War? Its cause was "completely one-sided, 100 percent" the fault of the Soviets, says foreign-policy analyst Joshua Muravchik, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and author of Exporting Democracy: Fulfilling America's Destiny.

There is reason to agree with Muravchik.

In the years following Stalin's speech, the nations of Eastern Europe that with the approval of American leaders had been occupied by the Red Army after the war fell to communism. By the end of the forties, with Mao Tse-tung's victory in China, one of every three inhabitants of the world was under communist rule. By that time, too, the Soviet Union had, with the help of communists operating in the United States, added the atomic bomb to its arsenal of weapons, giving it a powerful new tool to be used in the war against imperialism.

America, on the other hand, demobilized after World War II, as it had after every war it ever fought. The armed forces were considerably reduced, and the nation's interest turned toward peace.

Statesmen such as Winston Churchill warned of Soviet intentions - in a speech delivered at Fulton, Mo., the great British leader spoke of an "iron curtain" descending over Eastern Europe that could imprison the rest of the world if the West did not maintain vigilance. Truman was at first so embarrassed by the speech that he considered inviting Stalin to the United States to rebut Churchill's warnings - and give a more benign description of his goals.

It was not only Soviet aggression, raw and cruel as it was, that early critics such as Churchill feared; it was the fact that Soviet communism represented a political and social system profoundly opposed to everything the West traditionally supported. Stalin ruled his empire with a harshness rarely rivaled in history. By 1945 he was responsible for the deaths of millions - some handpicked, as in the infamous purge trials of the 1930s, others killed at large in the forced starvation of peasant farmers in Ukraine and elsewhere who refused collectivization. Millions more had been sent to concentration camps, dubbed gulags, in the far Soviet north or in Siberia, where they were worked to death or spent decades at slave labor.

Moreover, Soviet doctrine was opposed to democracy, the political system of the West. The Marxism that guided Soviet leaders was an extremely aggressive and intolerant doctrine, given added ruthlessness by V.I. Lenin, the founder of the Soviet Union. In the hands of Stalin - called one of the most paranoid of modern dictators by biographer Robert Conquest - Marxism was more than a philosophy, it was a call to battle. Marxism-Leninism saw the defeat of capitalism and the triumph of communism - through war - as inevitable.

A religion-like faith in historical determinism helped fuel the Soviet passion for conquest because it gave them the certitude of victory, says Beichman. It also made them rigid and incapable of accepting change, he explains, though the rigidity came later, after the passion was spent.

It was against this fanaticism and against the communist victories in Eastern Europe and China that the West at last had to react. Truman, sobered by Soviet aggression, gave American financial and military support in the late 1940s to France, Italy and Greece, all threatened by communist takeover.

What emerged during the next four decades were American policies that ranged from the "hawkish" reliance on military preparedness and willingness to make use of military power to "dovish" policies that sought to ease U.S.-Soviet tensions through negotiation, cultural exchanges and the sale of American wheat to the Soviet Union when there were unusually bad shortages of grain there. Both hawks and doves played their part in bringing an end to the Cold War. But the willingness of America to stay armed and present a serious threat to Soviet power is cited by most historians as by far the more important factor in the long run.

Who won the Cold War? The answer that is emerging from analysts of the age is a simple one: leaders whose names are well known, from Churchill on, but also countless numbers of others - everyone who refused to submit to the notion that communism was inevitable and democracy moribund.

AEI's Muravchik says Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader, played an essential role by having the "courage to recognize the Soviet Union needed reform and to be the man to carry those reforms out." But Muravchik doubts that Gorbachev, a devoted communist, would have undertaken the reforms he did if he had known he was assuring his nation's demise. For Muravchik, what is important is that Gorbachev was the first Soviet leader to recognize that things could not go on as usual in the Soviet Union and to take steps to remedy the faults that he inherited.

Beichman, meanwhile, emphasizes the role of Ronald Reagan. By calling the Soviet Union an "evil empire," the U.S. president focused "on precisely what was at stake in Cold War rivalry," Beichman contends. Muravchik concurs: "Reagan turned the tables - [performed] a complete reversal." He was willing to regard the Soviet Union and its society as a "dying, past relic" rather than an alternative for the future, says Muravchik. For Reagan, the only viable moral choice for the world was America; for him, "the United States was the wave of the future," Muravchik obvserves.

For both scholars, what Reagan cleared away was the habit of many American Cold War leaders to make accommodation and excuses for the Soviet Union and its leaders. Beichman quotes Cyrus Vance, secretary of state under President Jimmy Carter, who said, "Leonid Brezhnev [the Soviet leader at the time] is a man who shares our dreams and aspirations." It was a claim so ludicrous, says Beichman, that surely Vance could not have meant it - and Brezhnev would have found it incomprehensible except as a lie told to mollify Soviet leaders.

Muravchik faults former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger for similar accommodations to the Soviet Union. Kissinger's policy of dtente "was a breaking of faith" with America's responsibilities in the Cold War, he says. Kissinger viewed America as a waning power that had to make allowances for growing Soviet strength. He believed realpolitik dictated that America must recognize Soviet superiority, "which was bad geopolitics," says Muravchik.

It was this defeatism that Reagan refused to tolerate. But for Beichman another figure also is responsible for the successful end of the Cold War, Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. There were other great Soviet dissidents. The highly regarded poet, Anna Akhmatova, for example, and Andrey Sakharov, the physicist, but it was Solzhenitsyn "who was the right man in the right place with the right words at the right time," according to Beichman. The great Russian writer made real his own experiences and those of thousands of others in his Gulag Archipelago, which circulated clandestinely and widely in the Soviet Union and was published in the West. In numbing detail, Solzhenitsyn told about the horrors of life in the Soviet Union under Stalin.

Solzhenitsyn would "not have been listened to in the 1930s," notes Beichman, which was a time when liberals and others in the West labored to make excuses for the realities of Soviet power and denied what was happening there. That was the time, for example, when the British socialists Sidney and Beatrice Webb, after a brief visit to the Soviet Union, published their laudatory (and mendacious) Soviet Russia, A New Civilization? When the second edition of the book appeared, the question mark was gone, pointing to the Webbs' belief that communism was indeed the world's future. Excusing Stalin's excesses, Beatrice Webb famously said, "To make an omelet, you have to break an egg," a statement of startling callousness given the fact she had never spent one day in a Soviet concentration camp or one minute at the mercy of one of Stalin's executioners.

"There was a willingness to disbelieve the truth" that stretches down to our own time and which Solzhenitsyn did much to dispel, according to Beichman. Conquest calls it "the evil of stupidity," the evil men and women can do when they refuse to denounce cruelty and horror even after its reality has been spelled out for them.
Muravchik calls the West's finest effort in the Cold War "keeping faith with the struggle. It didn't do it perfectly." But the West did keep faith with the dissidents; "it treated them as heroes"; it gave them voice on Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty to speak to millions in the Soviet Union.

Who won the Cold War? Reagan, Gorbachev, Solzhenitsyn and other great men and women played their part. But their efforts would have had little impact if millions of men and women - from Cubans and East Germans fleeing communist rule to Afghan and Angolan rebels fighting Soviet penetration of their countries, and countless, nameless others - had not opposed communism with every fiber of their being and in ways that often meant giving their lives.

What cold warriors believe we must remember always, as former CIA chief Robert Gates says about the Cold War at the end of his recent book, From the Shadows, is that, "It was a glorious crusade."