Revisiting the Cold War

One of the more unpleasant memories for anyone going through graduate school is doctoral exams, one of which, in my case, dealt with the voluminous literature on the origins of the Cold War; more specifically, the question of who caused it, us or the Soviets.

Back then, anyone studying such questions had to endure the near stranglehold of New Left revisionism, which, in a string of scholarly dubious monographs, sought to prove that the whole thing had been provoked by American imperialism in the service of American capitalism. This was, in essence, the Noam Chomksy view of the world, one which still reigns on the left and in academe more broadly, and which serves as a dismal counterpart to Howard Zinn’s equally simplistic, neo-Marxist treatment of American history. To paraphrase Orwell, only intellectuals, or, more precisely, ignorant people pretending to be intellectuals, could believe such slop.

Somewhat ironically, just as Ronald Reagan and the late Margaret Thatcher (along with Pope John Paul II) decisively turned the tide against Moscow in the Cold War, the eventual opening up of Soviet archives thereafter would decisively refute the “blame America” view of the conflict pushed by the left.

Because of what we have learned in the past couple decades, we now know that the left got just about everything about the Cold War spectacularly wrong; indeed, that the soft spot in its heart for Soviet communism was the great disgrace of 20th Century leftism-along these lines, it is difficult to find anything so stomach-churning as reading all those odes to the Soviet system published back in the 1930s in The New Republic or Nation, the same decade when Joseph Stalin was busy killing off all his old Bolshevik colleagues along with millions of “kulaks” in the countryside.

It is therefore appropriate that, after the death of Lady Thatcher, one of the genuine heroes of what Jack Kennedy called the “long twilight struggle,” we have at least three new accounts of Cold War origins further proving what any sensible person should have instinctively known all along-that it wasn’t America but the paranoid mass murderer in the Kremlin who was the primary culprit.

In Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956, Anne Applebaum, author of Gulag, the most comprehensive treatment of the Soviet slave-labor camps this side of Solzhenitsyn, painstakingly chronicles the manner in which Stalin set about the communization of disputed countries like Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia. Far from simply responding in ad hoc fashion to the moves of a supposedly hard-line Truman administration, Stalin always intended to annex everything that the Red Army occupied at war’s end and consistently adjusted his military strategy and diplomacy accordingly.

A similar conclusion is reached by the prominent historian Robert Gellately in Stalin’s Curse: Battling for Communism in War and Cold War. In Gellately’s telling, Stalin not only was determined to exploit the war on the eastern front to conquer as much territory as possible, but deliberately provoked the Cold War thereafter in order to justify the re-imposition of his harsh dictatorship within the Soviet Union. The Cold War, in Gellately’s narrative, didn’t so much “develop” or “happen,” it was planned by Stalin because it served his bloody interests.

Last, in Six Months in 1945: FDR, Stalin, Churchill, and Truman-From World War to Cold War, Michael Dobbs, author of One Minute to Midnight, perhaps the definitive treatment of the Cuban missile crisis, traces “Big Three” diplomacy during the crucial time period between the Yalta and Potsdam conferences. In the process, Dobbs demolishes another central plank of leftist revisionism-that the Cold War might have been avoided if only FDR had lived, and the less experienced Harry Truman had not replaced him and fallen under the sway of hard-line advisers.

As Dobbs’ detailed overview thoroughly proves, it was Roosevelt who was profoundly naïve and ignorant regarding the nature of the Soviet system, and it was Truman, much better read and informed about communism in every respect, who more readily grasped the truth and more effectively defended Western interests against Stalin’s depredations.

In the end, FDR’s vision of a continuation of the grand alliance into the post-war era was less a victim of Truman’s belligerence than the inherent implausibility of the idea of any enduring cooperation with a monster like Stalin. We wouldn’t think of explaining the causes of World War II without reference to a certain failed Austrian painter named Adolf, but somehow we got into the habit over time of explaining the Cold War without paying much attention to the former Georgian seminary student named Iosif Dzhugashvili.

Putting it all together, the left got the origins of the Cold War all wrong; and later, in its criticisms of Reagan and Thatcher in the Cold War endgame, was still getting it wrong.

The source of that persistent error was, of course, ideology; more specifically, the inability of the left to honestly admit the crimes of the Soviet Union. Why? Because the Soviet system was what it saw when it looked into the mirror; it was a part of the family, however embarrassing and wayward.

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Freelance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives and teaches in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.

Editorial, Pages 11 on 04/22/2013

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