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This essay would examine the American assumptions about the future of the world after the end of the Second World War, and explain why the Soviet war aims appeared to have threatened these assumptions before 1945. It would be necessary therefore to shed some light on those assumptions and then on the Soviet war aims. Thereafter, an explanation for the incompatibility of both sides’ plans for the post-war period would be suggested.

It should be remembered first of all that the US was adhering to a policy of isolation and neutrality before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. After the First World War, utmost importance was attached to preserving world peace and avoiding wars, even if this required appeasing a potential aggressor.

Furthermore, sources of conflicts—political, territorial, economic, or others—were to be avoided or eliminated. In other words, what was thought to be the mistakes that led to the Second and First World Wars should not be allowed to happen again. Contrary to what happened after the First World War, victory in the Second was to be fully utilized in making plans for post-war peace.

How, then, could a lasting peace be achieved and maintained after the war from the perspective of the United States of America? In his study of the origins of the Cold War, John Lewis Gaddis identified three requirements that “conditioned” America’s plans for post-war peace:[1]

1. to defeat completely, disarm, and occupy those nations which had started the war;

2. to promote self-determination and prevent future [economic] depressions;

3. to create a new collective security organization, in which the USA should be a member.

These requirements were the guiding principles, according to which the US wanted to shape the world. They were enshrined in the Atlantic Charter, the eight-point joint declaration signed by the American President, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and the British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, in August 1941. It would be easy to recognize that the Atlantic Charter was an elaboration on the three requirements for post-war peace already pointed out. The Charter stipulated that the countries of the signatories

a) seek no aggrandizement, territorial or other;

b) desire to see no territorial changes that do not accord with the freely expressed wishes of the people concerned;

c) respect the rights of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live.[2]

Furthermore, the Atlantic Charter pledged to “endeavor to further the enjoyment of all countries, great or small, to the trade and raw material of the world that are needed for their economic prosperity.” There were also items referring to the final destruction of the Nazi tyranny and the creation of a permanent system of security. All countries of the world were called upon “to come to the abandonment of the use of force, for realistic as well as spiritual reasons.”

One would find a striking similarity between the USSR and USA in choosing the ’past’ as a guide for future planning. Wilfried Loth explained that Stalin and his advisers “went about [their] considerations for the creation of the post-war order on the basis of past experience, in much the same way as US decision makers.”[3]

Now, if as pointed out earlier the past ‘conditioned’ American plans for the future, thus the concern with the issue of self-determination, the past, Russia’s past no doubt, also conditioned its plans for the post-war peace. Russia’s past saw several wars or invasions in the 150 years preceding the Second World War, and had less than friendly neighbors. Consequently, peace to Russia, from Stalin’s point of view, was a synonym for security.

This concern with security was shown long before the war. As Isaac Deutscher pointed out in his biography of Stalin, the Soviet leader was trying to create some form of collective security system, but his attempts failed.[4]

Therefore, “Stalin’s pragmatic mind,” Deutscher said, “stuck to concrete, strategic conceptions, to military bases, rivers, salients, and rounded off frontiers, all the elements of defense, the value of which had been so greatly reduced by modern military technique.”[5]

While I would not tend to disagree with the suggestion that modern military technique reduced the value of those elements that Stalin thought important to the defense and security his country, military technique was not in the 1930s and 1940s as modern as implied in the above statement to render them useless. Therefore, in seeking to acquire those elements Stalin had no scruples about the method, whether through forcible annexation, a pact of friendship with Hitler, or imposing on his neighbors regimes to his liking.

Through his non-aggression pact with Hitler, Stalin was given parts of Poland, Estonia, Latvia, and Finland. The latter resisted Stalin’s bid to take it over. However, he lost all this and almost lost his country when Germany invaded Russia in June 1941.

If experience proved that a friendly pact could not secure acquisitions and gains, Stalin would have thought of other ways to hold on to what he would acquire or accomplish if and when an opportunity recurred. However, this could not have happened at a time when the existence of the Soviet Union was in serious danger, because a country that was on the brink of military defeat could not think in terms of long term future plans. The minds of Stalin and his advisers would be preoccupied with resisting the enemy and subsequently defeating it.

Therefore, I would be inclined to agree with Deutscher that “Stalin’s ambition was rising with the certainty of victory. He was no longer content with safeguarding what he gained in partnership with Hitler. He was out to secure that alluded him because of Hitler’s opposition.”[6]

How best, then, could Stalin secure what he acquired this time not through a friendly pact but at a costly, bloody price?

“When planning for the post-war period,” Loth pointed out, “the Soviet leadership had to start from the assumption that although its country would be victorious, it would nonetheless emerge from the war widely devastated, and indeed shaken to the core.”[7]

Loth, furthermore, indicated that members of the Soviet Academy of Sciences concluded that “at the end of the war the European countries would have to suffer the effects of the destruction of their industries, the shortage of raw materials, and a general reduction in buying power, and that the USA, the sole country whose production had substantially increased during the war, would now reckon with a crisis of overproduction in the change over from a wartime to a peacetime economy.”[8]

Stalin and his advisers conceived three basic elements from which they formulated their foreign policy:[9]

a) to mobilize all forces that would resist the expansion of American capitalism, but at the same time could not pose any threat to security of the Soviet Union. (The forces they had in mind were Socialist forces, radical democratic forces, and sometimes national capitalist forces of Europe.)

b) to utilize the power means at the disposal of the Soviet Union to secure and extend Soviet power. (The power means available were the Red Army and communist parties in other countries.)

c) in pursuing the above, account should be taken of the strength of the opposing forces, whether in Eastern Europe, Western Europe, or Germany, to avoid a waste of Soviet forces and unnecessary provocation of the USA.

In other words, Stalin’s perception of post-war order “linked up with those concepts of spheres of influence which had lured some Soviet diplomats in the 1920s and he had so bluntly denounced.”[10] This attitude could explain why Russia disagreed with its allies over the future of Germany, East Europe, and the establishment of an international organization to deal with collective security.

While I would not underestimate the importance and seriousness of the disagreements over these issues, and consequently their contribution to the deterioration of relations among the allies and to the divergence of their views vis-a-vis the post-war world order, those disagreements were effects not causes. I would suggest that the second front issue was the main source of their subsequent disagreements. It could explain why the Soviet Union behaved the way it did vis-a-vis the contentious issues.

Some historians suggested that the second front was there already. But the second front Stalin had in mind was more than having forces facing one another on the western front. He had a detailed proposal which the Soviet Foreign Minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, presented to Churchill first and then to FDR.

A record of the meeting between FDR and Molotov could be summarized in what FDR had said:[11]

There was no doubt that on the Russian front the Germans had enough superiority in aircraft and mechanized equipment to make the situation precarious. The Soviets wished the Anglo-American combination to land sufficient combat troops on the continent to draw off 40 German divisions from the Soviet front.

When asked to go into the details of their proposal, Molotov said that “although the Russians might hold and fight on all through 1942,” it was the right thing to do “to look at the darker side of the picture.” Molotov indicated that “Hitler might throw in such reinforcements in manpower and material that the Red Army might not be able to hold out against the Nazis.” The consequences of such a scenario, Molotov argued, would be turning the Soviet front into a “secondary” one, and therefore “the Red Army would be weakened, and Hitler’s strength would be correspondingly greater, since he would have at his disposal not only more troops, but also foodstuffs and raw material of the Ukraine and the oil-wells of the Caucasus.”

Presented with the above proposal, FDR did not adjourn the meeting for further consultations with his staff. On the spot, he asked General Marshall “if developments were clear enough so that we could say to Mr. Stalin that we are preparing a second front.” Instead of finding a way of hinting to his president that such a matter required further study his answer was a simple “yes.” Molotov was consequently authorized to inform his boss that a second front would be open in 1942.

This promise was not kept, and the Soviet Union had to wait nearly two years before the second front materialized. Taking into consideration that suspicions during a war could be easily aroused, and with a history of relations as that between the Soviet Union and its allies, one could appreciate the impact of the issue on Russia’s suspicion of its allies and how it might have influenced their plans for the post-war period.

Many accounts of the Second World War would indicate that the countries involved anticipated it would break out from as early as the time of signing the Versailles Treaties. Countries therefore formed alliances: Poland with Britain and France with Poland, for example. This anticipation made every country want to delay the conflagration of a new war, yet if it happened, it was wished that it took place as far away as possible from this or that country’s borders and at someone else’s expense.

Stalin’s Russia was no exception. Stalin, however, had an ideological reason for not wanting to involve his country in the Second World War. Such a war, he thought, would be a war between capitalist countries, a war in which Russia should be “a spectator for as long as possible.”[12] Therefore, he had no scruples about concluding a pact with Hitler through which he acquired territories that belonged to his neighbors.

If one would bear in mind that relations between Russia and Western countries were at odds for a long time, and that only in 1933 the United States recognized the Soviet Union, it would be fair to say that the foundations of confidence among the allies were far from solid. Consequently, the alliance formed to resist Hitler was more of a marriage of convenience than an alliance of compatible partners whose outlooks and objectives were similar.

At this point, one could start to examine the American assumptions about the future of the world after the Second World War and how these appeared to have been threatened by the Soviet war aims.

Although the American assumptions would appear to be unselfish, they nevertheless were not fully developed. Moreover, those concerned—particularly Britain and the USSR—did not take them seriously. For example, the right of peoples to self-determination contained in the Atlantic Charter was interpreted differently by Churchill and Stalin. Churchill thought it was applicable to the countries occupied by Hitler, and later on said “I did not become His Majesty’s First Minister to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire.”[13] Stalin on the other hand argued that the exercise of this right was dependent on “circumstances, needs, and historic peculiarities of particular countries.”[14]

American and Soviet ideas of post-war peace were on collision course just as they were before there was a war. While America was trying to liquidate old empires, one of its allies, Britain, was trying to keep its own, and the other ally, Russia, was trying to restore or create another. It was easier for those in Europe to strike deals and share influence where and when it suited them, as was the case with the percentage agreement between Stalin and Churchill. Even FDR allowed himself to make a deal with Stalin according to which Stalin was given some of the Japanese islands in return for Stalin’s help in the war against Japan.

I found Deutscher very convincing in his analyses of Stalin’s actions before the war and the relations among the allies during the war itself. He summarized the state of mind of the leaders of the alliance in a few words that said it all: “[T]he nearer the war drew to an end, the stronger grew their mental reservations, doubts, and fears. Each side made concessions to the others, but sought guarantees to itself. To every act of agreement, each was anxious to add an escape clause.”[15]

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Notes

[1] Lawrence Aronsen and Martin Kitchen, The Origins of the Cold War in Comparative Perspective: American, British and Canadian Relations with the Soviet Union, 1941-48 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988), 2.

[2] See appendix for full text of the Charter.

[3] Wilfried Loth, The Division of the World 1941-1955 (London: Routledge, 1988), 34..

[4] Isaac Deutscher, Stalin: A Political Biography (London: Oxford University Press, 1950), 417-422.

[5] Deutscher, Stalin, 459.

[6] Deutscher, Stalin, 500.

[7] Wilfried Loth, The Division of the World 1941-1955 (London: Routledge, 1988), 34.

[8] Loth, Division of the World, 36.

[9] Loth, Division of the World, 37-39.

[10] Deutscher, Stalin, 500.

[11] For a full record of the meeting, see Thomas G. Paterson, Major Problems in American Foreign Policy: Volume II: Since 1941, Documents and Essays (Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath, 1984), 236.

[12] Deutscher, Stalin, 412.

[13] Quoted in David Dimbleby and David Reynolds, An Ocean Apart (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1998), 146.

[14] John L. Gaddis, The United States and the Origins of the Cold War: 1941-1947 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972), 3.

[15] Deutscher, Stalin, 24.