The Specter of Communism: The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1917-1953

by Melvyn P. Leffler

Overview

The Hill and Wang Critical Issues Series: concise, affordable works on pivotal topics in American history, society, and politics.

The Specter of Communism is a concise history of the origins of the Cold War and the evolution of U.S.-Soviet relations, from the Bolshevik revolution to the death of Stalin. Using not only American documents but also those from newly opened archives in Russia, China, and Eastern Europe, Leffler shows how the ideological animosity that existed from Lenin's seizure of power onward turned into dangerous confrontation. By focusing on American political culture and American anxieties about the Soviet political and economic threat, Leffler suggests new ways of understanding the global struggle staged by the two great powers of the postwar era.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781429952354
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	04/01/2011
Series:	Hill and Wang Critical Issues
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	160
File size:	926 KB

About the Author

Melvyn P. Leffler, Stettinius Professor of History at the University of Virginia, is the author of A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War, which won the Bancroft Prize, the Farrell Prize, and the Hoover Book Award in 1993.

Read an Excerpt

The Specter of Communism

The United States and the origins of the Cold War, 1917-1953

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By Melvyn P. Leffler, Eric Foner

Hill and Wang

Copyright © 1994 Melvyn P. Leffler
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4299-5235-4

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CHAPTER 1

THE BACKGROUND 1917–1941

FROM the beginning, there was an ideological clash. When the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia in November 1917, in the midst of World War I, they appealed to workers everywhere to overthrow their governments. "We summon you to this struggle, workers of all countries! There is no other way. The crimes of the ruling, exploiting classes in this war have been countless. These crimes cry out for revolutionary revenge."

The Bolsheviks believed that their revolution in Russia would be crushed if they did not sue for peace, spark revolution abroad, and consolidate their victory at home. They appealed to the exhausted peoples of Europe to support their campaign for a peace without annexations and without indemnities, a peace based on the principle of self-determination for peoples everywhere. In December, the Council of People's Commissars appropriated two million rubles for the international revolutionary movement. The message was direct: "The workers' revolution calls upon the working classes of all countries to revolt."

The Bolsheviks envisioned a classless society in a warless world. They talked of a vast expansion of democracy, a democracy for the poor and the powerless. They said they would abolish private property, allocate control of the workplace to the workers themselves, fairly distribute the fruits of production, and give the peasants the land on which they labored. Their rhetoric of peace and self-determination encoded a message to common people of all lands to rise up and empower themselves. The Bolsheviks wanted them to overturn an exploitative political and economic system that subjected them to the impersonal functioning of a marketplace economy and that forced them to wage war in behalf of capitalists seeking colonial markets, raw materials, and investment opportunities.

But profound disillusionment and social ferment in the warring countries did not lead to immediate revolutionary upheaval. Within weeks the Bolsheviks had to decide whether to sign a humiliating peace with Germany or to sustain the deadly struggle. Some Bolsheviks abhorred a separate peace, one that would make them accomplices of German imperialism. Notwithstanding the odds, they wanted to work for revolution abroad.

But V. I. Lenin, the leader of the Bolsheviks, rebuffed this line of reasoning. If the struggle persisted, he argued, the revolution would be crushed. Russian soldiers were deserting their military units in great numbers, and the German onslaught could not be stopped. A peace had to be signed with Germany so that the Bolsheviks could concentrate on defeating their domestic foes. "The hands of the Socialist government," Lenin remonstrated, "must be absolutely free for the job of vanquishing the bourgeoisie in our own country."

Lenin exercised the decisive voice in support of signing the separate treaty with Germany, the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. In March 1918 the Bolsheviks relinquished the Ukraine as well as Poland, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and a slice of land (Kars) along the border with Turkey. These territories contained a substantial percentage of Russia's raw materials and industrial infrastructure, perhaps as much as three-quarters of its iron and steel, a quarter of its railway network, a quarter of its population, and a large share of its most fertile soil.

Lenin hoped he would gain the necessary time to develop an army, organize the economy, and defeat the multiple opponents who threatened from every direction. His position was desperate. Large parts of Russia were occupied by the Germans. National minorities were battling for local autonomy. Counterrevolutionary, or "White," forces were gathering momentum. And, meanwhile, Russia's industrial economy was disintegrating. Hungry and disenchanted workers left the cities in great numbers. Angry and rebellious peasants refused to sell their crops for worthless currency.

1. RUSSIAN TERRITORIAL LOSSES AT BREST-LITOVSK, 1918

The situation was chaotic. The Bolsheviks, like many of their domestic foes, were willing to take aid from any quarter. Despite the separate peace with the Kaiser, Lenin and his comrades did not feel secure. The Germans, in the midst of their gigantic offensive on the western front in France, continued to gobble up chunks of Russian territory along the Black and Crimean seas and supported separatist movements from the Baltic to the Caucasus. The Bolsheviks, therefore, solicited aid and assistance from Russia's former allies — the British, the French, and the Americans — even while they continued to iron out their treaty and trade arrangements with the Germans.

During the spring of 1918 Leon Trotsky, the commander of the Red army, and Georgi Chicherin, the commissar in charge of foreign affairs, met frequently with American and British diplomatic emissaries, military attachés, and philanthropic officials. In addition to seeking formal diplomatic recognition, they wanted food, military supplies, technical assistance, and credits. Bowing to an Allied request, they agreed that 70,000 Czech troops might travel east along the Trans-Siberian railroad to Vladivostok where they would cross the oceans and eventually join the battle on the western front. But Trotsky and Chicherin were not willing to resume the war against the Central Powers. And desperate to win the struggle on the home front, they indoctrinated and liberated German and Austrian prisoners of war, seeking to use them against their domestic foes.

The rhetoric and actions of the Bolsheviks ignited fear, revulsion, and uncertainty in Washington. The American secretary of state, Robert Lansing, abhorred Bolshevism. He saw it as a new form of despotism, a class despotism "subversive of the rights of man, and hostile to justice and liberty." Appalled by the Bolsheviks' efforts to withdraw from the conflict, Lansing urged President Woodrow Wilson not to recognize the fledgling new regime. The United States, Lansing believed, should await the formation of "a strong and stable government founded on the principles of democracy and the equality of man," a government that would guarantee "every citizen of free Russia ... the enjoyment of his inherent rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."

The president agreed that the United States must exercise extreme caution. The Bolsheviks angered him. He was agitated by their repudiation of the debts of former Russian governments and by their removal of Allied war supplies from Archangel, a key port on the White Sea. Still more upsetting to Wilson was the Bolshevik dissolution of the Constituent Assembly, the most democratically elected body Russia had ever experienced. Garnering only 175 out of 715 seats in the Assembly, Lenin could not dominate it, so he decided to disband it. Although Trotsky argued that the principles of democracy had to be "trampled underfoot" for the "sake of the loftier principles of a social revolution," Wilson deemed Trotsky to be "absolutely untrustworthy" and was morally repulsed by Bolshevik contempt for majority rule. Maintaining that the Bolsheviks did not represent the Russian people, Wilson was not inclined to recognize their government.

Bolshevik appeals to the war-wearied masses of Europe and their clamor for a peace without annexations and indemnities deeply troubled American officials. The president's advisors believed Wilson should not permit Lenin to monopolize this rhetoric. In their view, the Bolsheviks were using this language to lead the Russian people astray and to sign a separate peace with Germany. They urged Wilson to employ the same powerful message of peace and reform to revitalize flagging support for the war among the European allies, entice the Russians themselves to stay in the war, and prompt the German people to overthrow their government. These considerations inspired Wilson to offer his own vision of a peaceful world order in his Fourteen Points speech in January 1918, one of the most important messages he ever delivered. Wilson was not afraid of the Bolsheviks' revolutionary domestic program, for he was sure it would fail, but he worried that Bolshevik rhetoric would capture the imagination of European peoples, erode Allied support for the war, and open the possibility of a German victory.

In the spring of 1918 nothing influenced Wilson and his advisors more than the necessity of defeating the Germans and their partners. Lenin's willingness to sign a separate peace, trade with the enemy, and use German and Austrian prisoners of war repelled Wilson. The separate peace meant that Germany could redeploy dozens of divisions to the western front during a decisive moment in the conflict. A separate peace and the trade that ensued showed that Bolshevik Russia was willing to cede land and sell critical raw materials and foodstuffs to the enemy.

During March, April, and May of 1918, virtually every Allied assessment stressed the dangers that would ensue if an eastern front was not reopened. The military representatives on the Allied Supreme War Council believed that Germany was enhancing its war-making capabilities by requisitioning food supplies in the Ukraine and demanding shipments of wheat, butter, and fats from western Siberia. According to Allied intelligence reports, the Germans were struggling "to organize as large a part of the Russian Empire as possible as a friendly State ... not only to draw upon its economic resources, but to transfer to the West a great part of the 47 Divisions which Germany still maintains on the Eastern front."

The danger of a German-Soviet combination would be a recurrent nightmare over the next decades. To thwart this prospect in 1918, the French, the British, and the Japanese wanted to intervene militarily and reestablish an eastern front in Russia. Had the Bolsheviks been willing and able to do this on their own, the Allies might have worked with them, at least temporarily, despite their ideological antipathy. But the Allies did not think that the Bolsheviks would cooperate, because any collaboration would prompt the Germans to crush the Bolshevik regime. Intent on preventing the "military and economic exploitation of Russia by Germany," the British and the French pressed the United States to intervene militarily.

Wilson agonized. He viewed the Bolsheviks with contempt. But he did not fear their power, and he did not expect them to survive unless they wrapped themselves in the cause of nationalism and the defense of Mother Russia. He opposed intervention for a long time because he distrusted the Allies, knowing they were animated, at least in part, by their desires to safeguard their investments, preserve their empires, and, in the case of Japan, annex parts of Russia.

Wilson relented when the Czech troops, moving east on the Trans-Siberian railroad, became locked in battle with local Bolshevik forces. To everyone's surprise, the Czechs quickly took control of the railroad line, linked up with White contingents in the area, and captured much of western Siberia. This happened as German artillery approached the outskirts of Paris and Premier Georges Clemenceau toyed with the idea of abandoning the French capital. The British remonstrated yet again, and Wilson now agreed that intervention was "an urgent necessity both to save the Czecho-Slovaks and to take advantage of an opportunity of gaining control of Siberia for the Allies which may never return."

Wilson sent 7,000 U.S. troops to Siberia and smaller numbers to Archangel as a wartime expedient. He sought to thwart German co-optation of Russian resources, safeguard Allied military supplies, and prevent a total concentration of German forces on the western front. Japanese, British, and French contingents intervened in much larger numbers, and one of Wilson's motives was to monitor their behavior and balance their influence.

The intrusion of the Allies into Russian territory, their collaboration with different factions battling the Red armies, and their blockade of Russian waterways confirmed Bolshevik assumptions that all the belligerents in the conflict were imperialist aggressors determined to overthrow the only socialist state. In turn, the Bolsheviks increased their assistance to the Germans, even as the Kaiser's armies retreated and defeat was imminent.

The armistice on the western front in November 1918 should have ended the Allied military intervention in Russia, but it did not. The Red menace seemed greater in the aftermath of war than ever before. As the guns quieted and soldiers returned home, famine and unemployment spread. All through east-central Europe peasants sought land; workers looked for jobs; and subject peoples struggled for nationhood and territory, often at the expense of one another. While the triumphant Allies worked on peace treaties that the vanquished nations would be forced to sign, the blockade of Germany persisted and so did the hardship and hunger of the German people. And inside Russia, Lenin, Trotsky, and their comrades waged a brutal civil war while simultaneously repelling a Polish attack and organizing the Third International, the Comintern, to institutionalize the gospel of revolution abroad.

2. THE CIVIL WAR, 1918-1921

The peacemakers in Paris were alarmed by the ferment and upheaval that racked postwar Europe. Wilson grew irascible as he and his colleagues disputed the terms of peace and prolonged the treaty-making process. "The world was on fire," he declared on March 25, 1919, and "every minute lost assisted the forces of unrest." His ideological animus toward Bolshevism grew as he received reports of the ferocity of the civil war in Russia and the spread of revolutionary fervor abroad. "That ugly, poisonous thing called Bolshevism," he told the Democratic National Committee during a brief return to Washington in February 1919, fed on people's doubts and despair. Wilson knew that Bolshevism's strength rested in its great appeal to demoralized and starving people. He feared that a tough treaty would radicalize the German people and drive them into the hands of the German Bolsheviks.

This seemed to be happening elsewhere. When Romania seized additional Hungarian land in March 1919, right-wing Hungarian politicians handed power to Bela Kun, a Communist. Kun rallied support by defending Hungarian territory, confirming Wilson's assumptions that Bolshevism thrived on the despair and disillusionment of peoples accustomed to traditional forms of national aggrandizement and autocratic rule.

Wilson, however, was convinced that military force could not cure the Bolshevik virus. "The only real protection against it," he said, "was food and industry" coupled with a just peace and a League of Nations. Wilson wanted to lift the blockade against Germany and provide the new liberal government with food and raw materials, so economic life could begin anew. Allied troops in Russia, he thought, should also be withdrawn. "I believe in letting them [the Russians] work out their own salvation," he told a British friend in November 1918, "even though they wallow in anarchy a while."

Bolshevik ideology and practice remained repugnant to Wilson, but, devoid of a power base, Russian Bolshevism posed no threat worthy of military intervention. If peace was restored and the processes of recovery resumed, Wilson believed, "Bolshevism would collapse." The president was more fearful that an angry, revenge-minded, and imperial Russia might supplant the Bolsheviks and unite with a resurgent Germany. "There was nothing in the treaty with Germany," he noted, "to prevent the Germans from forming a powerful industrial and commercial union with Russia."

Wilson wanted to win the loyalty and affection of European peoples. He wanted them to emulate the American experience and adopt the principles and values of a free political economy, an economy of liberal capitalism. Bolshevism represented the antithesis of everything he believed in. But since the Russian Bolsheviks posed no strategic threat in themselves, the way to deal with Bolshevism, whether it be Russian or Hungarian or German, was to allay the conditions of poverty and inequality on which it thrived. The United States and its allies could do this most effectively through aid and assistance.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from The Specter of Communism by Melvyn P. Leffler, Eric Foner. Copyright © 1994 Melvyn P. Leffler. Excerpted by permission of Hill and Wang.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents

Title Page,
PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS,
( 1 ) - THE BACKGROUND 1917–1941,
( 2 ) - FROM ALLIES TO ADVERSARIES, 1941–1947,
( 3 ) - ASSUMING HEGEMONY, 1947-1950,
( 4 ) - LIMITED WAR AND GLOBAL STRATEGY, 1950-1953,
ALSO BY MELVYN P. LEFFLER,
NOTES,
RECOMMENDED READING,
INDEX,
Copyright Page,