Who Started the Cold War?

During WWII, the leading world powers were, or came to be, dominated by charismatic leaders of unusual talent who each came to be identified with their respective nations, and exercised unprecedented political and military power as a result. But at the end of WWII, Hitler, Mussolini, and Roosevelt were dead, and Churchill and de Gaulle were soon to be rejected by their electorates, so Joseph Stalin was the last man standing. In WWII, he was supremely flexible: the only one who managed to switch sides. As a result, he was courted, first by Hitler, then Roosevelt and Churchill. With the rest of them gone, he was in a unique position of strength, security, and freedom of action – sort of like Napoleon returning victorious from Moscow. As a result, the 1940’s can be characterized as the Decade of Stalin. His competitors, the US and the UK, had to guess how he would jump, and so their policies were sometimes blind and always reactive. Stalin didn’t make it easier by being cagey and farsighted – and basically following the time-honored Russian policy of imperialism - striving for expansion everywhere, backing off when there was pushback, moving in when there wasn’t. For example he gave Truman his first jolt in 1946, massing troops on the Turkish border, and demanding control of the Straits, for no real cause other than Turkish weakness. The surprised Truman scrambled to find a response, in the form of sending the body of the deceased Turkish ambassador home by the USS Missouri, filling the Turks with joy and relief at this sign of American support. However, the “Truman Doctrine” of support for independent nations vs. the Soviets was thus very ad hoc and spontaneous in origin.

In any case, Stalin, whether seen as the benevolent “Uncle Joe” of the wartime Allies, or George Orwell’s “Big Brother” afterwards, dominated the world not only because of his longevity and prestige, but because of his ability. His policies were far-sighted and developed over the long term. He was insulated against the possibility of a coup by his show trials and mass purges of his fellow Bolshevik and military leaders, eliminating every possible competitor. And the terror he engendered gave him a highly motivated soldiery, able to perform the kind of mass frontal attacks used by the US and UK in WWI, but which they shrank from afterwards. His social and military models were carefully adopted afterwards by China, North Vietnam, and Korea, and brought them much military success.

Knowledge of Stalin and his system has grown steadily through many years of study, but above all from the opening of Soviet archives and Stalin’s personal papers since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1992. McCauley has incorporated a huge amount of this material into this revised sixth edition of his 1983 book. For example, he discusses the contents of Stalin’s personal library, his reading, writing, and ideas, and goes far to dispel the image of him as a “monster”, that is, mentally ill. Like him or not, he was clear-minded, rational, articulate, and thoroughly under control. He was a Leninist, and believed that Leninism was beneficial to mankind. Well, there’s the little thing of the ends justifying the means, and thus the legitimacy of killing people who stood in the way of Leninism. And could he possibly be number one in human history in terms of the number of people he personally ordered to be killed? Morality aside, he was very effective.

Perhaps the other dominant force in the world of the late ‘40’s was the American political electorate. This people emerged from the war with an unprecedented prosperity, unique in a ruined world. Britain was bankrupt; Russia had suffered grievously, though poverty and destruction in the Soviet Union did not threaten its government’s control and military power as they did in the democracies. The people of the US considered themselves victors and saviors, and ready and deserving to enjoy peace. They had forgotten Stalin’s pact with Hitler in 1939 and very largely shared Roosevelt’s plan for a liberal (and anti-colonial, thus anti-UK) partnership with Russia, and demobilized their army and moth-balled their fleet. They were both scared and impressed with their creation of the atomic bomb, with its potential for the destruction of the world, versus the apparent short-term promise of US military dominance of the world without the vast expense of armies and navies.

Another dark shadow was the Soviet Union. There was really nothing to stop Russia from moving into Western Europe with Its large supportive French and Italian communist parties, except, of course, our tiny handful of atomic bombs and a WWIII that we didn’t want and weren’t prepared for. And another was the sense that Marxism was apparently on the brink of world domination, as portrayed in “1984”. The Soviet takeover of all of eastern Europe without western resistance, and the grimly totalitarian nature of the system imposed on it was disturbing. Those who supported it had to battle hard against anti-communist alarmism and did not really break free of this until the Vietnam war and the 1960’s. Still, the desire for peace and the deep rooted attachment to Marxism on the part of Western intellectuals (it has survived the end of the Cold War and Soviet Union) provided it with an American constituency which always acted as a critic of and force restraining an aggressive response to the excesses of Soviet totalitarianism . Another shadow growing over the American popular mind was the evidence of broad penetration by Soviet espionage, which became dramatically evident with the use of nuclear secrets to build quickly a Soviet atomic bomb. Our society was totally open to theirs, but their society acted behind a wall of great secrecy, which made it possible for its apologists and sympathizers to ignore or minimize the unpleasant things that actually were known. A crucial part of modern Soviet historiography is the vast increase in the amount of evidence for the atrocities of the totalitarian system. For example, this book makes use of Stalin’s personal papers, only available after the 1992 collapse of the Soviet Union. Marxism still has its defenders and believers, but the deniability for its totalitarian excesses is gone.

This is the subject of this book, and why it remains important. But what about the book itself, its purpose and structure? A historical artifact in its own right, it first appeared in 1983 as part of a “Seminar Series.” Martin McCauley was a professor at the University of London for 30 years, a frequent commentator on British TV, and has extensive personal experience in the communist world, having done research, studied, and taught over many years in both Russia and China. He is the author of many books, and this large-selling one in particular has been revised and expanded over six editions. It is NOT a typical narrative history, dealing with each country and topic chronologically but independently. At about 300 pages of text, it’s not particularly big, but it is highly detailed – truly dense with fact. Plainly, it was written as a textbook for seminar use in Prof. McCauleys classes and, one guesses, those of many other teachers. It partakes of the character of both a broad general survey and a reference work. Is it readable? This reviewer enjoyed it very much – though it’s open to criticism on many points. But just ask yourself – are you up for taking Prof. McCauley’s seminar? If so, I think you’ll find the study of his handbook deeply worthwhile.

Your reviewer should note that the original 1983 edition is, according to Amazon, still in print, and only 136 pages long – one third the size of the present edition. Amazon reviewers call it “dull but informative” and one says it repeats McCaulay’s “paranoid anti-Soviet, Russophobe mantra”. This last could reflect the common attitude of Western liberal intellectuals at the time, or indeed even of plenty of diehard holdouts today. Well, the world has changed, and so has the book. But just how has it evolved to reflect our new knowledge and growing understanding of the 1940’s?

One of the best things about it is its detailed description of the communist takeover of the eastern European nations and the grim repression and mass murder inflicted on them overnight. Just one example is the betrayal of the leaders of Czechoslovakia’s wartime resistance government, Benes and Masaryk, the latter also possibly murdered. One guesses this material made up the largest part of the first edition, and is responsible for the “paranoid Russophobe’ characterization – at the time the events in Eastern Europe provided a major obstacle to those arguing for friendship with Russia and the moral superiority of communism. And while McCauley presents many individual examples of such people, for example Harry Dexter White, Klaus Fuchs, Alger Hiss, and Kim Philby, he does not really show the role these ideas played among the American electorate, as shown in the recent The World that Wasn’t; Henry Wallace and the Fate of the American Century, by Ben Steil. This tells the story of the insurgency by progressive Democrats against Harry Truman in the 1948 presidential campaign. It also shows how the overt public participation in American politics of the Communist Party was accepted as thoroughly normal at the time. Wallace failed of course because of the massive shock to the non-communist left, caused by the Berlin blockade – the first Soviet demand to overturn Allied agreements over Germany, backed by the threat of war. Deserted by his large non-communist progressive following, with only the communists left in his camp, Wallace failed dismally, but refused to change his belief in the goodness of the Russians until, finally, the unprovoked invasion of Korea in 1950.

Well – my impression is that when McCauley knows the story, he tells it excellently and incontrovertibly, as he does for Eastern Europe and Iran. There are definite holes, or reliance on contemporary mythology, when he doesn’t. China is a good example. Like Barbara Tuchman, who makes in Stilwell and the American Experience in China practically no mention of actual military operations in China in WWII, and repeats the myth that Mao fought the Japanese and Chiang didn’t, McCauley makes no mention of the massive Japanese offensive into south China in 1944 to knock China out of the war, stopped at ruinous cost by Chiang’s Nationalist army. Here, McCauley needs to read Rana Mitter’s 2013 China; Forgotten All” and Frank’s 2021 Tower of Skulls; A History of the Asia-Pacific War, both of which draw heavily on Japanese and Chinese Nationalist and Maoist archives only recently available and translated. On the other hand, he gives a very clear, concise summary of the postwar Chinese Civil War, and the surrender of the Nationalists dictated to Chiang by General George Marshall in 1946. “This must qualify as the most fatal misjudgment of his career.” (p. 187) Questions? Read it.

Another crucial point he covers well is Stalin’s decision to sacrifice Russia’s century-long penetration of Manchuria. Having occupied it in 1945, Stalin offered it to Mao as his prime base for the invasion of China, sacrificing Russia’s direct interest to create a new and powerful Ally. (He kept Mao thoroughly under his thumb, however, for which Mao later took revenge on Khrushchev.)

I also wish very much the author had read the 2012 Hanoi’s War by Lien-Hang T. Nguyen, the first Western scholar given access to the North Vietnamese diplomatic archives. She provides a very different picture from the myth of a people motivated to fight by desire for national self-determination. Rather she shows us a North Vietnam split by politics and opposition to the war, dealt with in Stalinist fashion with purges and repression by a police state. Or the 2002 novel Paradise of the Blind by Duong Phu Huong, which chronicles the “collectivization of agriculture” in North Vietnam in the late 1950’s. This process, which took place also in the Soviet Union, China, and North Korea, was used to create mass starvation among the peasantry and break them as a political force. It is the reason why, after its defeat of France in 1956, North Vietnam delayed guerrilla warfare against the South until the 1960’s.

In a work so wide-ranging, some weak spots and errors are inevitable. There are many other topics that Mr. McCauley covers thoroughly and well – the military situation in Western Europe, the Atomic Bomb, the Marshal Plan – too many to mention. His lengthy list with capsule reviews of significant books by many other authors with a broad range of competing explanations of the Cold War is a wonderful resource. This book should be of great utility for a range of important purposes – well, plainly it has already done so to go through so many editions.

Origins of the Cold War is not for the reader who needs to be spoon fed, but will richly reward those who enjoy a shrewd critical eye for the cold, hard, factual truth – and lots of it.

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Our Reviewer: Robert P. Largess is the author of USS Albacore; Forerunner of the Future, and articles on the USS Triton, SS United States, the origin of the towed sonar array, and the history of Lighter-than-Air. He has contributed book reviews to ‘The Naval Historical Foundation’ (http://www.navyhistory.org) and The International Journal of Naval History (http://www.ijnhonline.org). His earlier reviews here include The Rules of the Game: Jutland and British Naval Command, King Arthur’s Wars: The Anglo-Saxon Conquest of England, Clouds above the Hill: A Historical Novel of the Russo-Japanese War, Winning a Future War: War Gaming and Victory in the Pacific War, The Fate of Rome, "Tower of Skulls", A History of the Asia-Pacific War, Volume I: From the Marco Polo Bridge Incident to the Fall of Corregidor, July 1937-May 1942, Nathaniel Lyon’s River Campaign of 1861, Korea: War without End, Exterminating ISIS, Admiral Canaris, Armies Afloat: How the Development of Amphibious Operations in Europe Helped Win World War II, and The Spy in the Archive.

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Note: Origins of the Cold War 1941–1949is also available in hard cover.

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