LSE Research Onlineeprints.lse.ac.uk/764/1/Tragedy_of_American_diplomacy.pdf · 97 Cox and...

LSE Research Online Article (refereed)

Michael Cox and Caroline Kennedy-Pipe

The tragedy of American diplomacy Rethinking the Marshall Plan

Originally published in Journal of Cold War studies 7 (1) pp 97-134 copy 2005 MIT Press You may cite this version as Cox Michael and Kennedy-Pipe Caroline (2005) The tragedy of American diplomacy Rethinking the Marshall Plan [online] London LSE Research Online Available at httpeprintslseacukarchive00000764 Available online May 2006 LSE has developed LSE Research Online so that users may access research output of the School Copyright copy and Moral Rights for the papers on this site are retained by the individual authors andor other copyright owners Users may download andor print one copy of any article(s) in LSE Research Online to facilitate their private study or for non-commercial research You may not engage in further distribution of the material or use it for any profit-making activities or any commercial gain You may freely distribute the URL (httpeprintslseacuk) of the LSE Research Online website

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97

Cox and Kennedy-PipeThe Tragedy of American Diplomacy

Special Forum The Marshall Plan and the Origins of the Cold War

Reassessed

The Tragedy of American Diplomacy

Rethinking the Marshall Plan

Rethinking the Cold War

If we take seriously E H Carrrsquos dictum that history is not a single well-deordfned narrative but a terrain of contestation between competing and evolv-ing interpretations whose inordmuence is as much shaped by time and place as byany given set of facts it should come as no great shock to discover that the pastis constantly being reassessed or to use the more familiar term ldquorevisedrdquo bysuccessive generations of historians1 The post-1945 period in general and theCold War conordmict in particular has been no exception to this simple but im-portant historiographic rule After all for the better part of forty years theEast-West confrontation divided nations shaped peoplersquos political choicesjustiordfed repression in the East gave rise to the new national security statein the West distorted the economies of both capitalism and Communism in-serted itself into the culture of the two sides led to the death of nearly twentymillion people and came close to destroying tens of millions more in October1962 Little wonder that the Cold War has been studied in such minuteand acrimonious detail Arguably it was the most important period in worldhistory

There have been at least three waves of Cold War revisionism The ordfrst ofthese given intellectual deordfnition by William Appleman Williams but madepopular as a result of the Vietnam War sought to challenge the orthodox viewthat it was the Soviet Unionrsquos refusal to withdraw from Eastern Europe andthe threat of further Soviet aggression that made hostilities inevitableHolding up a mirror to the United States rather than the USSR Williams es-sentially inverted the old orthodox story and argued that the basic cause of theconordmict was not Communist expansion but the US pursuit of an ldquoOpenDoorrdquo world in which all countries and all peoples would have to sing fromthe same free enterprise hymn sheet printed in Washingtonmdashand those that

Journal of Cold War StudiesVol 7 No 1 Winter 2005 pp 97ndash134copy 2005 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Instituteof Technology

1 E H Carr What Is History (London Macmillan 1961)

97



Reassessed








did not (including the Soviet Union) would be forced to suffer the conse-quences Inspired more by Fredrick Jackson Turner and Charles Beard thanby Karl Marx or Vladimir Lenin Williams and others in the so-called ldquoWis-consin schoolrdquo offered an analysis that was radical in form but quintessentiallyAmerican in character They caused rough seas for the traditionalist ship ofstate by suggesting that the latterrsquos explanation of the Cold War was question-able on at least four empirical grounds it underestimated Soviet weaknessoverstated the Soviet threat ignored the degree to which US policymakerswere guided by economic considerations and failed to discuss the active roleplayed by the United States in bringing about the collapse of the Grand Alli-ance after World War II The revisionists accused the traditionalists of havingbeen trapped by their own blinkered ideology and of producing what was lessa real history of the Cold War than a rationalization for US foreign policy inthe postwar years2

Revisionism in its classical form peaked remarkably quickly to be super-seded in the post-Vietnam era by what many academics came to regard as amore balanced less exciting but ultimately more scholarly picture of theCold War Eschewing the materialism and radicalism of the revisionists butat the same time refusing to endorse the traditionalist view that the SovietUnion constituted a serious military threat to Western Europe the propo-nents of what was somewhat imprecisely termed ldquopost-revisionismrdquo aimed toconstruct what they believed would be a more complete picture of how theCold War began Working on the positivist assumption that the task of thehistorian is not to write morality tales in which heroes and evil demons arelocked in mortal combat they sought to stand back from the fray and to dis-cern the underlying reasons for events Post-revisionism swept all before itleaving conservative defenders and left-wing opponents of American foreignpolicy behind in its wake Inspired in large part by George Kennanrsquos realistcritique of the Cold War the post-revisionists in generalmdashand John Gaddisin particularmdashauthored many studies that reordmected solid scholarship and bal-anced judgment No doubt for these reasons post-revisionist work soon be-came extremely popular among a new generation of students tired of old dog-mas3 However the larger role performed by the post-revisionists was not so

98

Cox and Kennedy-Pipe

2 The primary and secondary literature on revisionism is of course huge The most obvious startingpoint for William Appleman Williams is his justly famous The Tragedy of American Diplomacy Firstpublished by a small New York company in 1959 it went on to be reprinted twice (in 1962 and 1972)and soon became a national best-seller For background see Paul M Buhle and Edward Rice-Maximin William Appleman Williams The Tragedy of Empire (New York Routledge 1995) See alsoBradford Perkins ldquoThe Tragedy of American Diplomacy Twenty-Five Years Afterrdquo Reviews in Ameri-can History Vol 12 No 1 (March 1984) pp 1ndash18

3 John Lewis Gaddis The United States and the Origins of the Cold War 1941ndash1947 (New York Co-



98




much to modify revisionism while absorbing its insights but instead to buryit almost completely Indeed according to some skeptics there was nothing atall ldquorevisionistrdquo about post-revisionism It was merely a new brand of tradi-tionalism made academically respectable by the number of archival referencescited In a memorable phrase the radical historian Carolyn Eisenberg de-scribed it at the time as merely ldquoorthodoxy plus archivesrdquo4

The third and ordfnal wave of Cold War ldquorethinkingrdquo came with the quiteunexpected end of the Cold War an event that not only changed the structureof the international system but also precipitated a deep intellectual crisis in atleast two of the academic disciplines that had purportedly failed to anticipatewhat happened in 1989ndash1991 However whereas the fall of Communismcaused a genuine shock in both international relations and Soviet studies5 thedisintegration of the ldquosocialist projectrdquo created enormous opportunities fornew research in the ordfeld of Cold War history by opening up several archivesin the old enemy camp Now for the ordfrst time it ordfnally seemed possible topiece together the whole story and not just a selective version based almost en-tirely on Western sources6 The prospects were obviously exciting and for awhile historians had a veritable ordfeld daymdashto such an extent that some beganto worry that they might now have too much original material with which towork rather than too little Admittedly researchers never had access to themost important archives in Moscow which have remained sealed7 Nor wouldany historian be so epistemologically naiumlve as to assume that archives are neu-tral spaces or provide all the answers But at least there were new primarysources to explore and what they yielded was most impressive so impressivein fact that many believed it was once again time to revise our views about the

99


lumbia University Press 1972) See also John Lewis Gaddis ldquoThe Emerging Post-Revisionist Synthe-sis on the Origins of the Cold Warrdquo Diplomatic History Vol 7 No 3 (Summer 1983) pp 171ndash190

4 On Eisenbergrsquos own contribution to the early revisionist canon see her ldquoUS Policy in Post-WarGermany the Conservative Restorationrdquo Science and Society Vol 46 No 2 (Spring 1982) pp 24ndash38 Her most developed contribution to the revisionist cause remains Carolyn Eisenberg Drawing theLine The American Decision to Divide Germany 1944ndash1949 (Cambridge UK Cambridge UniversityPress 1996)

5 See Michael Cox ed Rethinking the Soviet Collapse Sovietology the Death of Communism and theNew Russia (London Pinter Publishers 1998)

6 Odd Arne Westad ldquoSecrets of the Second World The Russian Archives and the Reinterpretation ofCold War Historyrdquo Diplomatic History Vol 21 No 2 (Spring 1997) pp 259ndash271 See more gener-ally ldquoSymposium Soviet ArchivesmdashRecent Revelations and Cold War Historiographyrdquo DiplomaticHistory Vol 21 No 2 (Spring 1997) pp 217ndash305

7 See Mark Kramer ldquoArchival Research in Moscow Progress and Pitfallsrdquo Cold War InternationalHistory Project Bulletin No 3 (Fall 1993) pp 1 21ndash44 esp 31ndash34 James G Hershberg ldquoSoviet Ar-chives The Opening Doorrdquo Cold War International History Project Bulletin No 1 (Spring 1992) p 1and Jonathan Haslam ldquoRussian Archives and Our Understanding of the Cold Warrdquo Diplomatic His-tory Vol 21 No 2 (1997) p 217



99







Cold War Or at least that was the position adopted by John Gaddis whohaving earlier led the move toward post-revisionism now suggested that thenew evidence made it necessary for us to look once again at the past and to ac-cept that a good deal of what had passed for Cold War history before was notan all-rounded account but only a rough approximation Gaddis even sug-gested a new Cold War typology Whereas he previously divided the ordfeld intoproponents of different schools of thought who had access to more or less thesame limited sources he now argued that the real line of demarcation was be-tween ldquooldrdquo and ldquonewrdquo versions of the Cold Warmdashthe former based on al-most no information from the ex-Communist archives and the latter based onincreasing amounts of material through which to sift Gaddis argued that inthe past we could not ldquoknowrdquo what really happened but now we could atleast with much greater certainty8

Regardless of whether Gaddis is right that we do ldquonow knowrdquo what hap-pened (a claim that many historians have questioned) we can all accept thatthe new sources have provided Cold War studies with a much-needed shot inthe arm In some ways the end of the Cold War could not have come at abetter time for a subject that seemed to have reached an intellectual dead endCharges of staleness could hardly be leveled against the ordfled now with theproliferation of journal articles the frequent conferences on various aspects ofthe Cold War and the continued inordmux of newly released primary material9

It is also true that far more attention is now being paid at least within thescholarly community in Europe to the experiences of the smaller West Euro-pean countries during the years of the Marshall Plan10 But as we will go onto argue a considerable academic deordfcit remains in our understanding of theexperiences of Central and East European states Moreover not all is well inthe academic garden as recent rumblings have made only too clear Althoughwe now have more of everythingmdashincluding two new journals devoted to thestudy of the Cold War11mdashsome critics have argued that there has not beenenough intellectual innovation over the past decade It may well be true asGeir Lundestad has observed that ldquothe new Cold Warrdquo history ldquorepresentsvery signiordfcant progress compared to the oldrdquo but as he has also argued thishas not been accompanied by much in the way of new thinking12

100


8 John Lewis Gaddis We Now Know Rethinking Cold War History (Oxford Clarendon Press 1997)

9 Kathleen Burk ldquoThe Marshall Plan Filling in Some of the Blanksrdquo Contemporary European HistoryVol 10 No 2 (July 2001) pp 267ndash294

10 Bernadette Whelan Ireland and the Marshall Plan 1947ndash1957 (Dublin Four Courts Press 2000)

11 See Journal of Cold War Studies edited at Harvard University and published by MIT Press sincethe beginning of 1999 and Cold War History edited at the University of London since August 2000

12 See Geir Lundestad ldquoHow (Not) to Study the Origins of the Cold Warrdquo in Odd Arne Westaded Reviewing the Cold War Approaches Interpretations Theory (London Frank Cass 2000) p 75




100







On the contrary when historians (including some of the most eminent)have sought to produce a synthesis they have tended to look back instead oflooking forward The result has been a partial but discernible rehabilitation ofold orthodoxies about who started the Cold War and why13 In some caseslike that of Gaddis the argument has been advanced with a notable degree ofsubtlety In others it has to paraphrase Dean Acheson been made in waysthat are sometimes ldquoclearer than the truthrdquo14 Of course the long march backtoward what one European historian has called the new ldquotraditionalismrdquo hasnot upset everybody15 One observer who could scarcely conceal his delightargued that the new history represented progress on many fronts but its mostimportant result he believed was to put the last nail into the cofordfn of radicalrevisionism and all those who in the 1960s had been critical of the US role inthe Cold War16 The specter of William Appleman Williams it seemed couldordfnally be laid to rest

The central purpose of this article is to question the increasinglyinordmuential thesis that new evidence does indeed bear out old truths aboutthe Cold War Naturally we are not the ordfrst to do so Melvyn Lefordmer amongothers has shown that once you get inside the ldquoenemy archivesrdquo the storiesyou discover there do not necessarily conordfrm the orthodox view that the ColdWar was ldquoa simple case of Soviet expansionism and American reactionrdquo Thenew evidence might prove many things he notes but the one thing itdoes not do is provide us ldquowith a clear and unambiguous view of the ColdWarrdquo17 We wholeheartedly agree As our discussion of one especially impor-tant moment in the Cold War will attempt to demonstrate the evidencemdashboth old and newmdashdoes not point to simple traditional conclusions about

101


13 For some of the more recent examples of the new orthodoxy see Beatrice Heuser ldquoNSC 68 andthe Soviet Threat A New Perspective on Western Threat Perceptions and Policy Makingrdquo Review ofInternational Studies Vol 17 No 1 (January 1991) pp 17ndash40 Douglas J McDonald ldquoCommunistBloc Expansion in the Early Cold War Challenging Realism Refuting Revisionismrdquo International Se-curity Vol 20 No 3 (Winter 1995) pp 152ndash178 Eduard Mark ldquoThe War Scare of 1946 and ItsConsequencesrdquo Diplomatic History Vol 21 No 3 (July 1997) pp 383ndash415 See also Harvey KlehrJohn Earl Haynes and Fridrikh Firsov eds The Secret World of American Communism (New HavenYale University Press 1995) and R C Raack Stalinrsquos Drive to the West 1938ndash1945 The Origins of theCold War (Stanford CA Stanford University Press 1995)

14 See James Chace Acheson The Secretary of State Who Created the American World (New York Si-mon amp Schuster 1998) pp 156ndash169

15 Lundestad ldquoHow (Not) to Study the Origins of the Cold Warrdquo p 75

16 Sam Tanenhaus ldquoThe Red Scarerdquo New York Review of Books Vol 46 No 1 (14 January 1999)pp 44ndash48 See also his heated exchange with several of the better-known American revisionist histori-ans of the Cold War in ldquoThe Red Scare An Exchangerdquo New York Review of Books Vol 46 No 6(8 April 1999) pp 75ndash76

17 Melvyn P Lefordmer ldquoInside Enemy Archives The Cold War Reopenedrdquo Foreign Affairs Vol 75No 2 (July August 1996) p 122 and Melvyn P Lefordmer ldquoThe Cold War What Do We Now KnowrdquoAmerican Historical Review Vol 104 No 2 (April 1999) pp 501ndash524



101







American innocence and Soviet intransigence What emerges instead is an al-together more complex picture that seems to run directly counter to thenew orthodoxy and its working assumption of Soviet guilt and US impar-tiality18 Our analysis of the Marshall Plan will show that it was American pol-icies as much as (and perhaps more than) Soviet actions that ordfnally led to thedivision of Europe and thus to the Cold War itself Many historians will feeluncomfortable with this conclusion and it is certainly not a point of viewthat is popular with American historians especially now Nor should thismuch surprise us After all the Marshall Plan has always tended to receivefavorable reviews within the United Statesmdashpartly because few appear in-clined to think critically about an act of generosity involving something closeto $13 billion19 partly because in the context of 1947 the Marshall Plan stoodin sharp contrast to its shrill predecessor the Truman Doctrine and partly be-cause of the huge reputation of George Marshall whose role in the MarshallPlan was commemorated by the British government with the scholarshipsthat still bear his name20 There may also be concern in some quarters that at-tacking the Marshall Plan would lend credibility to the revisionist causewhich has long been out of fashion The result as Diane Kunz noted in a spe-cial 1997 issue of Foreign Affairs designed mainly to celebrate the MarshallPlan rather than to analyze it has been to leave the reputation of boththe Plan and Marshall himself essentially intact Although the end of the ColdWar might have ldquoforced scholars to rethink their viewsrdquo on nearly everythingelse she notes this has not been true of the Marshall Plan Kunz writesthat far from challenging established truths about the Plan and its place inhistory ldquothe collapse of the Soviet Unionrdquo and ldquothe thaw of the Cold Warrdquo

102


18 For a sample of some of the more recent work on the USSR and the Marshall Plan see VladislavZubok and Constantine Pleshakov Inside the Kremlinrsquos Cold War (Cambridge MA Harvard Univer-sity Press 1996) pp 98ndash139 and Vojtech Mastny The Cold War and Soviet Insecurity The StalinYears (New York Oxford University Press 1996) pp 23ndash29 See also Scott Parrish and Mikhail MNarisnky ldquoNew Evidence on the Soviet Rejection of the Marshall Plan 1947 Two Reportsrdquo WorkingPaper No 9 Cold War International History Project Washington DC March 1994 Scott ParrishldquoThe Marshall Plan Soviet-American Relations and the Division of Europerdquo in Norman Naimarkand Leonid Gibianski eds The Establishment of Communist Regimes in Eastern Europe 1944ndash1949(Boulder Westview Press 1997) pp 267ndash312 and Geoffrey Roberts ldquoMoscow and the MarshallPlan Politics Ideology and the Onset of Cold War 1947rdquo Europe-Asia Studies Vol 46 No 8 (De-cember 1994) pp 1371ndash1386 and Silvio Pons Stalin and the Inevitable War (London Frank Cass2002)

19 Signiordfcantly the one major attempt in the past to think about the Marshall Plan in new ways wasby a British historian See Alan Milward The Reconstruction of Western Europe 1945ndash1951 (LondonMethuen 1984) His efforts however did little to impress Americans See the rebuttal in Michael JHogan The Marshall Plan America Britain and the Reconstruction of Western Europe 1947ndash1952(Cambridge UK Cambridge University Press 1987) pp 431ndash432

20 See for example Forrest Pogue George C Marshall Statesman 1945ndash1949 (New York Viking1987) and Ed Cray George C Marshall Soldier and Statesman (New York WW Norton 1990)


102





have only ldquoenhancedrdquo its importance and the ldquoreputation of its Americancreatorsrdquo21

This deferential attitude toward the Marshall Plan and US policy hasmeant that Cold War historians have merely been pouring ordfne new empiricalwine into some fairly old conceptual bottlesmdasha tendency that not only makesfor somewhat lackluster history but also leaves old certainties unchallengedHere we would like to challenge those certainties by raising a number ofdifordfcult issues that over the last several years have not been addressed with theseriousness they deserve We suspect that these issues have not been addressedbecause they raise awkward questions about the now-fashionable view that aslong as Josif ldquoStalin was running the Soviet Union a Cold War was unavoid-ablerdquo22 and that by 1947 the ldquomethods that Stalin employed in Eastern Eu-roperdquo made the Cold War ldquoinevitablerdquo23 In this article we shall seek to refuteboth of these claims24

The ordfrst part of our article focuses on the issue of what ordfnally happenedin Eastern Europe after the promulgation of the Marshall Plan We do notdoubt that it was Stalin who eventually sealed the fate of Eastern EuropeThat much is self-evident However as we shall attempt to argue the waythat US aid was originally conceived under the Marshall Plan not only lim-ited Soviet options but propelled the Soviet Union into a more antagonisticand hostile stance including the establishment of its own economic and po-litical bloc for which it was then held exclusively responsible We do not as-sume Soviet let alone Stalinrsquos innocence nor do we see anything particularlybenign about Soviet intentions Nevertheless we would still insist as havesome other observers who beneordfted from having been there at the time thatSoviet foreign policy was not just a given thing deriving from an essentialistcore but a series of responses and reactions that were just as likely to beshaped by the way others acted toward the Soviet Union as by Stalinrsquos ownoutlook25 Exactly what the Soviet Union did in Eastern Europe was not pre-

103


21 See Diane B Kunz ldquoThe Marshall Plan Reconsidered A Complex of Motivesrdquo in Peter Groseed The Marshall Plan and Its Legacy (New York Council on Foreign Relations 1997) p 13

22 Gaddis We Now Know pp 292ndash294

23 Mastny The Cold War and Soviet Insecurity p 27 See also pp 23ndash24

24 There is of course a problem with any exercise that seeks to highlight the complexities of Stalinistforeign policymaking Not the least of these is that any attempt to interpret the rather narrow parame-ters of Soviet policy options can lead to the charge of justifying Soviet behavior This is certainly notthe intention here The tragedies and brutality of the Soviet system cannot be glossed over For theproblems of working on Stalinist policy see Stephen F Cohen Rethinking the Soviet Experience Politicsand History Since 1917 (New York Oxford University Press 1985) pp 31ndash38

25 The ldquoothersrdquo we have in mind here are George Kennan and E H Carr the British historian ofearly Soviet Russia For an examination of their oddly similar views about Soviet foreign policy seeMichael Cox ldquoRequiem for a Cold War Critic The Rise and Fall of George F Kennan 1946ndash1950rdquo




103







determined and thus the ordfnal complexion of the countries in the region wasby no means set in stone This raises the question of whether a different ap-proach by US policymakers could have led to a different outcome for thepeoples of East and Central Europe

That question in turn leads to another issue again one largely bypassedin the new historiography the extent to which the division of Europe was theoutcome most desired by the Soviet leadership itself26 The traditional or or-thodox line is that other things being equal division was the option most fa-vored by Moscow after the war We take a rather different view and suggestthat the division of Europe far from being Stalinrsquos preferred option was possi-bly the outcome he least desired27 Once again the new material points to lessorthodox conclusions than those recently propounded by some historiansWhat this material shows basically is that Stalin was still committed to coop-eration with the West and some level of serious intercourse between the twoparts of Europe According to Vladislav Zubok and Constantine Pleshakov itwas only by late 1947 that Stalin ordfnally gave up on this preferred route andaccepted the inevitability though not necessarily the desirability of the two-bloc system28 The puzzling feature about European politics after 1948 there-fore was that the Soviet Union probably ended up with a situation in re-sponse to the European Recovery Program (ERP) that it had showed littlesign of wanting during and after World War II

It is not surprising that Stalin was reluctant to get involved in a confron-tation with the West After all as even the rather conventional-mindedVojtech Mastny has acknowledged the Cold War was something that Stalinnever wanted because he realized that the Soviet Union was manifestly unableto compete with the United States over the long term29 An extended andcostly standoff against a powerful enemy held out great uncertainty The mostimmediate results of the breakdown of relations in 1947 were distinctly nega-

104


Irish Slavonic Studies No 11 (1990ndash1991) pp 1ndash36 and Michael Cox ldquoWill the Real E H CarrPlease Stand Uprdquo International Affairs Vol 75 No 3 (July 1999) pp 643ndash653

26 On the making of Soviet foreign policy see Vladislav Zubok ldquoSoviet Intelligence and the ColdWar The lsquoSmallrsquo Committee of Information 1952ndash53rdquo Diplomatic History Vol 10 No 2 (July1995) pp 453ndash472

27 For a more detailed discussion of Soviet foreign policy in this period see Caroline Kennedy-PipeStalinrsquos Cold War Soviet Strategies in Europe 1943ndash1956 (Manchester UK Manchester UniversityPress 1995)

28 Zubok and Pleshakov Inside the Kremlinrsquos Cold War p 39 See also Vladislav Zubok andConstantine Pleshakov ldquoThe Soviet Unionrdquo in David Reynolds ed The Origins of the Cold War inEurope International Perspective (New Haven Yale University Press 1994) p 60

29 His exact phrase is the ldquoUnwanted Cold Warrdquo Mastny argues that the Cold War was ldquoboth unin-tended and unexpectedrdquo it was though he argues predetermined See Mastny The Cold War and So-viet Insecurity p 23




104







tive from the Soviet Unionrsquos perspectivemdashantagonizing the Western powersand uniting them more closely together precipitating a costly economic em-bargo against the Soviet bloc itself and leaving the Soviet Union in control ofa series of hostile countries that proved politically unstable and after 1968economically costly to prop up How much the Cold War actually cost theSoviet Union can never be assessed but there seems little doubt that the so-cial political and economic burden on Moscow was immense30

Our article goes on to address the larger question of whether Eastern andCentral Europe might have escaped the Soviet grip It is difordfcult to envisagehow this might have occurred not just because of Stalinrsquos determination tomaintain tight control over countries like Poland and Czechoslovakiamdashthestandard orthodox explanationmdashbut also because of his genuine concern(conordfrmed by the Marshall Plan) that the United States and its Western allieswere determined to undermine Soviet inordmuence in Eastern Europe by exploit-ing the USSRrsquos weak economic control over the region and ldquoluringrdquo the EastEuropeans back into the Western camp In this sense there really was a basicldquosecurity dilemmardquo that stemmed initially from the US governmentrsquos refusalto recognize that Moscow had certain security needs in Eastern Europe31 Al-though US policy may have seemed perfectly reasonable to the ofordfcials whoformulated it the net effect was to invite the Soviet Union to act in a more in-transigent way than it might have otherwise It is no coincidence that Stalinrsquosturn toward Cold War policies followed rather than preceded the breakdown innegotiations in July 1947 One of the likely reasons for this change of coursewas a concern that the Plan was intended to pull Eastern Europe graduallyback into the capitalist fold As more recent scholarship has shown theUnited States never accepted the ldquolossrdquo of Eastern Europe and did everythingit could short of war to eliminate Communist inordmuence in the region Fur-thermore as both Peter Grose and Gregory Mitrovich have revealed the con-cept of ldquorollbackrdquo began not with the election of Dwight Eisenhower in 1952but with the Marshall Plan itself32 Unfortunately this particular aspect of the

105


30 For reordmections on the costs of the Cold War to the Soviet Union see Mikhail Gorbachev On MyCountry and the World (New York Columbia University Press 2000)

31 See Robert Jervis ldquoWas the Cold War a Security Dilemmardquo Journal of Cold War Studies Vol 3No 1 (Winter 2001) pp 36ndash60

32 See for example Peter Grose Operation Rollback Americarsquos Secret War behind the Iron Curtain(New York Houghton Mifordmin 2000) and Gregory Mitrovich Undermining the Kremlin AmericanStrategy to Subvert the Soviet Bloc 1947ndash1956 (Ithaca Cornell University Press 2000) See also theclaims that the ERP contained ldquooperativesrdquo from the CIA in Sallie Pisani The CIA and the MarshallPlan (Edinburgh Edinburgh University Press 1991) On the very positive propaganda campaignwaged by the Americans over the beneordfts of Marshall Aid see Hans-Juumlrgen Schroumlder ldquoMarshall PlanPropaganda in Austria and Western Germanyrdquo in Guumlnter Bischof Anton Pelinka and Dieter Stiefeleds The Marshall Plan in Austria (New Brunswick NJ Transaction Publishers 2000)



105





Plan has not received the full attention it deserves mainly because most histo-rians seem to have agreed with William Taubmanrsquos earlier judgment thatldquoMarshallrsquos intentionsrdquo and presumably those of the Plan ldquowere primarily de-fensiverdquo in character33 In light of what we now know such a view can nolonger be sustained It neither corresponds to the evidence nor explainswhy the Soviet Union responded to the Plan by dramatically changingthe status of Eastern Europe from a sphere of inordmuencemdashwhich it had beensince the end of the warmdashto a bloc of tightly-controlled economic and politi-cal satellites

This brings us to a fourth issue namely the curious tendency in some ofthe more recent US analyses of the Marshall Plan to overlook or downplaythe role of Americarsquos key allies This charge is not new After all nearly twentyyears ago the British writer William Cromwell made much the same point34

European historians more generally have always complained about theirAmerican counterpartsrsquo apparent indifference to what the European statessaid or did during the Cold War It would seem that this bias has not disap-peared entirely and in the rush to explain or justify US actions scant noticeseems to have been taken of the large body of recent work on the positionsadopted by the United Kingdom or France in response to the ERP35 As weshall see a serious rethinking of the Marshall Plan demonstrates just howkeen the British and the French were to exclude the Soviet Union from a con-ference on European security and how aware Soviet leaders were of what onehistorian has called ldquothe double gamerdquo then being played by the British andFrench foreign ministers Ernest Bevin and Georges Bidault36 The attitude ofthe British and French governments was apparently one of the most crucialreasons for Moscowrsquos decision not to participate in the plan37

Finally our analysis also raises a series of questions about which of thetwo ldquosuperpowersrdquo had the greater range of choices after the war Here againwe want to take issue with those including Gaddis who insist that Stalin

106


33 William Taubman Stalinrsquos American Policy From Entente to Deacutetente to Cold War (New York W WNorton amp Company 1981) p 173

34 William Cromwell ldquoThe Marshall Plan Britain and the Cold Warrdquo Review of InternationalStudies Vol 8 No 4 (October 1982) pp 233ndash249

35 Henry Pelling Britain and the Marshall Plan (London Macmillan 1988)

36 Scott Parrish and Mikhail M Narinsky ldquoNew Evidence on the Soviet Rejection of the MarshallPlan 1947 Two Reportsrdquo CWIHP Working Paper No 9 (Washington DC Cold War InternationalHistory Project March 1994) p 42

37 Wilfried Loth Stalinrsquos Unwanted Child The Soviet Union the German Question and the Foundingof the GDR (London Macmillan 1998) p 65 Alan Bullock Ernest Bevin Foreign Secretary 1945ndash1951 (London Heinemann 1983) pp 405ndash27 and Feliks Chuev ed Sto sorok s Molotovym Izdnevnika F Chueva (Moscow Terra 1991) p 88 quoted in Mikhail Narinsky ldquoSoviet Foreign Policyand the Origins of the Cold Warrdquo in Gabriel Gorodetsky ed Soviet Foreign Policy 1917ndash1991 A Ret-rospective (London Frank Cass 1994) p 108





106







rather than Harry Truman had more options after the war and in 1947 Thisview ignores the gap in the two sidesrsquo economic capabilitiesmdasha gap that washuge by any measure and unlikely to be closed for a long time if ever The gapin itself did not make the United States aggressive nor did it make the SovietUnion defensive However the existence of the gap does suggest that otherthings being equal the Soviet Union was far less free to choose a course of ac-tion than its main capitalist competitor was38 In pointing out this disparitywe certainly are not trying to justify anything the USSR might have donebut by situating Moscowrsquos policy in the ldquoreal worldrdquo of material capabilitieswe are more likely to arrive at a realistic assessment of what Stalin could havedone Moreover although we accept that ideology played a role in shaping theSoviet Unionrsquos outlookmdashindeed one of the more important developmentsover the past several years has been the systematic attempt by scholars to tracethe impact of ideology on Moscowrsquos response to the Marshall Planmdashwewould be concerned if the stress on ideational factors went too far39 MarkKramer has convincingly shown that we cannot understand how the ColdWar began continued and ended without bringing in ideology40 Yet weshould be careful (as of course Kramer is) in not allowing this renewed inter-est in the ideology to distract us from looking at some of the more basic mate-rial factors that determined and constrained Soviet actions Catastrophicallyweakened by four years of one of the most brutal and devastating wars in his-tory the Soviet Union confronted massive economic problems at home andwas faced by the material and military power of a reinvigorated and highly dy-namic American economy that was at least six times larger than the Sovieteconomy In that sense Stalin had only a limited range of policy choices Inthe end he chose (or was impelled) to go along one path rather than anotherThis outcome was not necessarily the only one possible but given the straitsin which the Soviet Union found itself by the second half of 1947 we shouldnot be surprised by what happened The irony though is that what Stalinultimately didmdashin opposing the Marshall Planrsquos intended reinvigoration ofthe Western world in establishing the Communist Information Bureau(Cominform) and in imposing greater economic and political control overEastern Europe while attempting to force a resolution of the German ques-

107


38 Melvyn Lefordmer A Preponderance of Power National Security the Truman Administration and theCold War (Stanford CA Stanford University Press 1992) See also William Curti Wohlforth TheElusive Balance Power and Perceptions during the Cold War (Ithaca NY Cornell University Press1993)

39 Roberts ldquoMoscow and the Marshall Planrdquo pp 1381ndash1383

40 See Mark Kramerrsquos deordfnitive statement on this in his ldquoIdeology and the Cold Warrdquo Review of In-ternational Studies Vol 25 No 4 (October 1999) pp 539ndash576 See also Nigel Gould-Davies ldquoRe-thinking the Role of Ideology in International Politics during the Cold Warrdquo Journal of Cold WarStudies Vol 1 No 1 (Winter 1999) pp 90ndash109


107





tion through the blockade of 1948ndash1949mdashwas probably not what he wouldhave done if left to his druthers

Marshall Aid American Initiative

Perhaps no other American initiative in the post-1945 period has generated asmuch interest and favorable comment among Western historians as the Mar-shall Plan Much of the commentary initially came from those who were actu-ally ldquopresent at the creationrdquo41 A good deal more analysis followed in the1960s and 1970s as new archival material became available in the West42 Theresult was a mass of new work ranging from the more standard diplomatic ac-counts of what actually happened to more complex assessments that refusedto see the Plan in simple Cold War terms and depicted it either as an attemptto reconcile France and Germany and give a huge boost to the process of Eu-ropean integration or as a means of exporting the more successful corporatistAmerican economic model to a class-divided postwar Europe43 Yet in spite ofthis new intellectual ferment most writers agreed about one thing that thepurposes of the Plan were multiple and that its consequences were of enor-mous import Whether indeed there ever was a ldquoPlanrdquo per se is not at all cer-tain but as the chief historian of the Plan has pointed out the measureldquorested squarely on an American conviction that European economic recoverywas essential to the long-term interests of the United Statesrdquo44

The details of the Planrsquos genesis require only the briefest recitation hereOn 5 June 1947 in a commencement address at Harvard University Secre-tary of State George Marshall announced what became known as the MarshallPlan The secretary of state argued that the economic plight of postwar Eu-rope made the continent vulnerable to economic and political collapse and ul-

108


41 For an early example of an ofordfcial history of the Marshall Plan ldquopublished under the auspices ofthe Governmental Affairs Instituterdquo in Washington DC see Harry Bayard Price The Marshall Planand Its Meaning (Ithaca Cornell University Press 1955) For a later example see Charles PKindleberger Marshall Plan Days (Boston George Allen amp Unwin 1987)

42 See for example Hadley Arkes Bureaucracy The Marshall Plan and the National Interest (Prince-ton NJ Princeton University Press 1972) and John Gimbel The Origins of the Marshall Plan (Stan-ford CA Stanford University Press 1976)

43 See above all Hogan The Marshall Plan For a summary of the literature see Melvyn P LefordmerldquoThe United States and the Strategic Dimensions of the Marshall Planrdquo Diplomatic History Vol 12No 3 (July 1998) pp 277ndash306

44 Hogan The Marshall Plan p 27 This view was shared by some on the Soviet side who perceivedUS economic leadership in Europe as a prerequisite for the survival of many West European coun-tries and of the United States itself See Aleksandr V Kirsanov The USA and Western Europe EconomicRelations after World War II (Moscow Progress 1975)





108






timately war Marshall called on the European countries to consult about thetype of aid they needed and to notify the United States which would respondin a positive fashion to an appeal for help45 The motives behind the offerwere of course highly complex Nonetheless the primary aim was to stabilizeWestern Europe through economic and political reconstruction and in so do-ing to create a pan-national framework in which the West European coun-tries could look forward to sustained growth deeper cooperation and anend to the nationalist conordmicts that had so scarred the continent for the pastcentury46

The Plan however was never quite what it seemed Contrary to popularmythology it was not just a simple program of aid As the inordmuential Britisheconomist Sir Alec Cairncross has pointed out US aid to Europe had beenordmowing across the Atlantic for the better part of two years even before Mar-shallrsquos speech47 What made the June 1947 initiative different Cairncrossnoted was its attempt to link aid to the reform of European institutionsand practices Moreover although the tone of the speech was mild and non-ideological its implications were anything but For as we now know (andhave known for a long time) the Plan was not merely a reactive move de-signed to prevent economic chaos instead it was the most dedicated effortyet to reduce Communist inordmuence in Europe and was intended to affect notonly the most obvious countries like France and Italy48 but also the smallerstates under Soviet control This was certainly how George Kennan conceivedof the Plan Although Kennan continued to believe that the basic cause of thecrisis in Western Europe was not Communism as such but the need to restorethe continentrsquos economic health he was in no doubt that the Plan had adeeply subversive purpose49 Dean Acheson was equally convinced of the

109


45 For essential background on how the speech was formulated see Dean Acheson Present at the Cre-ation My Years in the State Department (New York W W Norton 1969) pp 226ndash235

46 For a discussion of the perceptions of US policymakers regarding Soviet motivations and the vul-nerability of West European countries to political and economic implosion see Notter to Rusk 14July 1947 in US Department of State Foreign Relations of the United States 1947 Vol VI p 217(hereinafter referred to as FRUS with appropriate years and volume numbers) See also ClaytonMemorandum ldquoThe European Crisisrdquo 27 May 1947 in FRUS 1947 Vol III p 217 quoted inJohn Lewis Gaddis The Long Peace Inquiries into the History of the Cold War (New York Oxford Uni-versity Press 1987) p 41

47 See Sir Alec Cairncross ldquoThe Marshall Planrdquo paper presented at ldquoThe Marshall Plan and Its Con-sequences A 50th Anniversary Conferencerdquo University of Leeds Leeds UK 23ndash24 May 1997

48 Stalin appears to have believed that a Communist takeover in Italy was a serious possibility in1947 See Arkhiv Prezidenta Rossiiskoi Federatsii (APRF) Fond (F) 45 Opisrsquo (Op) 1 Delo (D) 319Listy (Ll) 4ndash7 quoted in Dmitri Volkogonov The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Empire Political Leadersfrom Lenin to Gorbachev (London Harper Collins 1998)

49 See Walter L Hixson George Kennan Cold War Iconoclast (New York Columbia University Press1988)



109







Planrsquos thrust noting that what US ldquocitizens and the representatives in con-gress alike always wanted to learn in the last analysis was how Marshall aid op-erated to block the extension of Soviet power and the acceptance of Commu-nist economic and political organisation and alignmentrdquo50 At a meeting on28 May 1947 when US ofordfcials decided that the East European countrieswould be allowed to participate in the program they stipulated that anycountries taking part would have to reorient their economies away from theUSSR toward broader European integration

In light of these objectives it is hardly surprising that US ofordfcials wereamenable to the idea of including the East European governments in discus-sions of aid but were much less happy about the prospect of Soviet participa-tion There is little evidence that ofordfcials in Washington ever seriously consid-ered bringing the Soviet Union into the ERP There was of course a viewexpressed most forcefully by James Forrestal that Moscow might participatebut Forrestal raised this issue not because he wanted Moscow to join but be-cause he feared that it would thereby ldquowrecking the Planrdquo altogether51 De-spite this minor risk the informed view was that the Soviet Union in the endwould refuse to take part Kennan among others believed and hoped thatthis would be the case ldquoThe Marshall Planrdquo he wrote ldquowas offered to the So-viet Union with the intention that it would be turned downrdquo He explainedthat the ldquooffer would be in such a form that the Russian satellite economieswould either exclude themselves by an unwillingness to accept or agree toabandon the exclusive orientation of their economiesrdquo52 According to thelong-time US envoy Averell Harriman Marshall too was ldquoconordfdent thatthe Russians would not acceptrdquo the ERP Marshall realized that if contrary tohis expectations the Soviet Union did seek to take part ldquoCongress wouldhave killed the Planrdquo at the outset One of Marshallrsquos economic advisersCharles Kindleberger was less conordfdent than his boss about Moscowrsquos inten-tions regarding the Plan and he later acknowledged that he had been greatlyrelieved when the Soviet Union ldquodecided not to participaterdquo53 Kindlebergermade much the same point in 1987 during ceremonies marking the fortiethanniversary of the Plan ldquoThe fear in Washingtonrdquo he recalled ldquowas that theSoviet bear might hug the Marshall Plan to deathrdquo54 Nevertheless the invita-

110


50 Acheson Present at the Creation p 233

51 See Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas The Wise Men Six Friends and the World That They Made(New York Simon amp Schuster 1986) p 414 See also Kramer ldquoIdeology and the Cold Warrdquo

52 Kennan to Secretary of State in FRUS 1947 Vol III p 228

53 See Kindlebergerrsquos comments in Stanley Hoffmann and Charles S Maier eds The Marshall PlanA Retrospective (Boulder Westview Press 1984) pp 22ndash23

54 Charles Kindleberger Marshall Plan Days (Boston Allen amp Unwin 1987) p 100



110







tion to Moscow still had to be extended Politically there was no alternativeeven though as the US ambassador to France reassured both Bidault andBevin in June (a reassurance they welcomed) the offer was ldquolittle more thanwindow dressingrdquo55

Thus by the late spring of 1947 US ofordfcials had concluded that if thePlan was to proceed the Soviet Union would have to be kept out Not onlywould Soviet participation hamper the recovery program in Western Europeit would also eliminate any possibility of getting Congress to agree to the ERPMore generally from an economic point of view there was no need for theSoviet Union to be involved In fact in the hectic weeks following Marshallrsquosspeech a view began to emerge in Washington though it was not shared byall that it might not even be essential for the East European countries to beincluded A senior ofordfcial involved in high-level US discussions pointed outthat although the reuniordfcation of Europe might be desirable it was not criti-cal for the recovery program in Western Europe William Clayton one of themain architects of the Plan agreed and in a May 1947 memorandum henoted en passant that although Western Europe was economically ldquoessentialrdquoto the East the reverse was not true The ERP could thus go forward ldquowithoutthe participation of the Eastern European countriesrdquo56

US opposition to Soviet involvement in the Marshall Plan was in linewith a larger shift that had already taken place in US thinking over the pre-vious year The reasons for this shift have been analyzed in great detail byscholars of the early Cold War who have clearly demonstrated that Soviet be-havior itself was one of the main factors responsible Other factors also con-tributed to the changes in Western thinking signaled by Kennanrsquos famousldquoLong Telegramrdquo of February 1946 Winston Churchillrsquos ldquoIron Curtainrdquospeech a month later Clark Cliffordrsquos memorandum of September 1946 andthe Truman Doctrine of March 1947 How and why this reorientation tookplace need not detain us here What is important is the impact it had in shap-ing a near-consensus in Washington about the nature of the Soviet Union andthe best way of dealing with it Increasingly policymakers concluded that theUnited States could not rely solely on diplomacy and must instead achieveand maintain a deordfned ldquoposition of strengthrdquo They realized that this ap-

111


55 Caffrey to Secretary of State Marshall 18 June 1947 in FRUS 1947 Vol III p 260 and Clay-tonrsquos memorandum ldquoThe European Crisisrdquo 27 May 1947 in FRUS 1947 Vol III p 230 See alsoClaytonrsquos view that ldquothere would have to be a radical change in the Russian position regarding Euro-pean recovery and other related matters before the American people would approve the extension ofordfnancial assistance to Russiardquo FRUS 1947 Vol III pp 268 270 284

56 See George F Kennan Memoirs 1925ndash1950 (Boston Little Brown amp Co 1976) p 452 andFRUS 1947 Vol III p 235




111




proach could lead to rigidity and would leave little room for a serious ex-change of views But at least it was safer than the alternative of negotiationswhich carried all sorts of dangers particularly if Stalin tried to shape the West-ern policy agenda The meeting of the Council of Foreign Ministers in Mos-cow in April 1947 was crucial in ordfnally convincing Marshall that negotiatingwith the Soviet Union was an almost impossible task and that there was littlepoint in pursuing the matter much further57

Policymakers in the United States were not the only ones who revisedtheir thinking about the Soviet Union and the prospect of its participation inthe ERP As we have known for some time the West Europeans in generalmdashand the British in particularmdashwere equally hostile to the idea of including theSoviet Union in a future European settlement Although the views of theWest Europeans have been somewhat underplayed in recent assessments theirchanging perceptions of Stalinrsquos intentions were crucial to the debates over theMarshall Plan58 In saying this we are not endorsing the once popular viewthat US leaders were pushed into confrontation with the Soviet Union bytheir wily British counterparts59 The Cold War after all was not just a rusedevised in London to preserve British inordmuence in the wider world as somehave suggested60 Still there is no denying that some inordmuential ordfgures on theBritish side accepted the inevitability of a de facto division of Germany andthe exclusion of the Soviet Union from any real involvement in Europersquos fu-ture The British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin was convinced that Sovietparticipation in the Marshall program would greatly complicate Britainrsquoschances of receiving substantial American aid61 As he later made clear in a re-port given to the British Cabinet a short while after the Soviet Union with-drew from the Franco-British-Soviet discussions on 2 July 1947 ldquofrom a prac-tical point of view it is far better to have them deordfnitely out than half-heartedly inrdquo Any other outcome he noted ldquomight have enabled the Soviets

112


57 For the best short account of this episode and its signiordfcance see Philip Zelikow ldquoGeorge C Mar-shall and the Moscow CFM Meetingrdquo Diplomacy and Statecraft Vol 8 No 2 (July 1997) pp 97ndash124

58 See for example Victor Rothwell Britain and the Cold War 1941ndash1947 (London Macmillan1947) For an assessment of Soviet attitudes in the wake of the Yalta Conference see also Sir FrankRoberts ldquoThe Yalta Conferencerdquo in Gill Bennett ed The End of the War in Europe 1945 (LondonHMSO 1996) pp 55ndash61 Roberts argues that Soviet behavior from 1944 onward gave the Britishand the Americans no choice but to proceed with the Marshall Plan and the Atlantic Alliance

59 For an assessment of the British part in the Cold War see Sean Greenwood Britain and the ColdWar 1945ndash1991 (Basingstoke Macmillan 2000)

60 For an earlier and typically provocative discussion see Donald Cameron Watt ldquoRethinking theCold War A Letter to a British Historianrdquo The Political Quarterly Vol 49 No 4 (October-December1978) pp 446ndash456 and Michael F Hopkins ldquoA British Cold Warrdquo Intelligence and National Secu-rity Vol 7 No 4 (October 1992) pp 479ndash482

61 See Anne Deighton The Impossible Peace Britain the Division of Germany and the Origins of theCold War (Oxford UK Clarendon Press 1990) pp 182ndash189



112







to play the Trojan horse and wreck Europersquos prospects of availing themselvesof American assistancerdquo62

British hostility to Soviet involvement in the Marshall Plan was evidentwhen Bevin held a series of important meetings with US Under Secretary ofState William Clayton in London on 24ndash26 June 1947 Although Clayton in-formed a press conference before leaving for Europe that these meetings werenot connected to the issue of aid he brought along a memorandum fromGeorge Marshall about the proposed program63 The issue of Soviet participa-tion was not directly addressed but the message urged the British to seize theinitiative64 The four subsequent meetings between British and Americanofordfcials discussed the issue of aid and Britainrsquos future role in Europe Bevinpressed the British case explicitly linking the argument for rejuvenation inthe United Kingdom to the containment of the Soviet Union Without apowerful and stable Britain he argued the Soviet Union could assume con-trol of the continent Bevin also linked future British prosperity to the estab-lishment of the Bizone in Germany emphasizing yet again that without eco-nomic aid Britain the Bizone and indeed Europe as a whole would ordfnd ithard to resist Soviet pressure65 Bevin was equally clear on another matter thatat least one of the goals of the Marshall Plan should be to break down the IronCurtain and lure the Soviet satellites away from Moscowrsquos inordmuence66

Inevitably the issue of Soviet participation in the ERP was discussed Theparticipants expressed strong doubts about the advisability of including theSoviet Union in any recovery program drawn up in Washington Clayton in-dicated that there would have to be a radical shift in Moscowrsquos position beforethe American people would approve ordfnancial aid to the USSR Moreover be-cause the Soviet Union in his view ldquodid not need food fuel and ordfber therewould be little basis for participating in the short term phaserdquo He pointedout that the Soviet Union had already offered wheat to France and had actu-ally delivered 180000 tons In addition given the sheer scale of Polish repara-tions to the USSR Stalin would have difordfculty in making a case for early en-try into the aid program67 Soviet participation in the ordfrst phase therefore wasruled out In the longer term a rather different argument was used againstpossible Soviet participation that of the general weakness of the Soviet econ-omy itself Kennan noted at the time that ldquothe state of Russiarsquos own economy

113


62 Quoted in Peter Hennessy Never Again (London Vintage 1993) p 296

63 FRUS 1947 Vol III p 247 cited in Deighton The Impossible Peace p 181

64 FRUS 1947 Vol III p 247

65 Ibid p 272

66 Ibid p 291





113





65 Ibid p 272

66 Ibid p 291


was such that she was in any case ill-placed to make a substantial contributionto a constructive projectrdquo68 Much to Bevinrsquos relief the Truman administra-tion was determined to have the aid program go ahead with or without theSoviet Union As Kennan argued once again ldquoif it proved impossible to secureSoviet or satellite participation on reasonable terms the United States wouldlook for the elaboration of the western European project as a pis-allerrdquo69

With the conclusion of these initial discussions British foreign policy hadeffectively come full circle evolving from what it had been in 1946mdashwhenBritish ofordfcials were still seeking cooperation with Moscow in the hope ofavoiding the division of Germany and Europemdashto a position of ready accep-tance that a divided Europe was likely and that one should not be undulyconcerned about Soviet sensitivities This was a striking turnaround As SeanGreenwood has recently shown only a year earlier Bevin not only had beenkeen to keep his lines of communication open to Moscow but had remainedmore than a little suspicious of US motives and intentions70 Twelve monthslater the United Kingdom was locked into a ldquospecial relationshiprdquo with theUnited States and the Soviet threat was the cement holding it together In-deed as Anne Deighton has argued Bevin was convinced after the meetingswith Clayton that the most important task was to make sure ldquothat the Sovietsdid not participaterdquo in the recovery program71 The Anglo-American talkstherefore established the tone for the subsequent meeting with Soviet ofordfcialsto discuss the Marshall Plan Bevin had the assurances he wanted that theERP would go ahead with or more hopefully without the Soviet Union

Marshall Plan The Soviet Dimension

The question of Soviet participation in the Marshall Plan represented less ofan opportunity for the West to improve relations with Moscow than a prob-lem that required careful ordfnessing lest it disrupt the ERP At no time did theTruman administration take steps to ease the path for Soviet inclusion in thePlan on the contrary nearly everything was done to guarantee that Moscowwould stay out Although the Plan conceivably might have been used as abridge to the USSR it instead merely increased the distance between the two

114


68 Washington to Foreign Ofordfce (FO) 25 June 1947 Report of Secretary of Statersquos Visit to Paris inUnited Kingdom National Archives (UKNA) Cabinet Papers CAB 211759

69 Washington to FO 25 June 1947 CAB 211759

70 Sean Greenwood Britain and the Cold War 1945ndash1951 (London Macmillan 2000) p 45

71 Deighton The Impossible Peace p 185





114






sides William Cromwell whose views on the American role can hardly be de-scribed as hostile has noted that ldquoone ordfnds almost entirely missing any seri-ous conviction by US policy-makers that the Marshall Planrdquo represented aldquomajor opportunity to reduce East-West tensions by organizing economic re-covery in a pan-European frameworkrdquo If anything the opposite was probablythe case The whole Western ldquoapproachrdquo in Cromwellrsquos view was designednot ldquoto ameliorate the cold warrdquo but to pursue a struggle that had alreadybegun72

The approach adopted by both the Americans and the British stood inrather sharp contrast to that of Stalin Newly available documents show thatSoviet leaders were still interested in pursuing some form of deacutetente with theWest despite the Western governmentsrsquo increasing movement toward a ordfnalbreak with Moscow73 A more belligerent option always remained a distinctpossibility but in the months leading up to the critical meeting in July therewas strong evidence that the Soviet government was still seeking a better rela-tionship with the United States This at least was the conclusion reached bythe US Central Intelligence Group which in January 1947 reported eightinstances of apparently accommodating Soviet behavior including conces-sions on Trieste East European force reductions a more conciliatory stanceon the veto in the United Nations and acceptance of former secretary of stateJames Byrnesrsquos proposals for drafting the German and Austrian treaties Eventhe announcement of the Truman Doctrine in March 1947 did not muchchange this orientation Stalinrsquos response to the speech was ldquonotably mildrdquo ac-cording to one source74 On the same day that Truman was delivering his mes-sage to Congress the US embassy in Moscow continued to report (as it hadfor some months) on the Soviet Unionrsquos ldquoless aggressive international posi-tionrdquo Embassy ofordfcials speculated that this might be connected to the deteri-orating economic situation within the USSR itself and the need ldquoto concen-trate on internal problemsrdquo75 A US State Department ofordfcial JohnHickerson wondered the same thing and in a memorandum in late March1947 he even compared the economic situation in the USSR in the spring of

115


72 William C Cromwell ldquoThe Marshall Non-Plan Congress and the Soviet Unionrdquo Western Politi-cal Quarterly Vol 32 No 4 (December 1979) p 434

73 Scott D Parrish ldquoThe Turn toward Confrontation The Soviet Reaction to the Marshall Plan1947rdquo in Parrish and Narinsky ldquoNew Evidence on the Soviet Rejection of the Marshall Planrdquo AnnaDi Biagio ldquoThe Marshall Plan and the Founding of the Cominform JunendashSeptember 1947rdquo inFrancesca Gori and Silvio Pons eds The Soviet Union and Europe in the Cold War 1943ndash53 (LondonMacmillan 1996) pp 208ndash221

74 William O McCagg Jr Stalin Embattled 1943ndash1948 (Detroit Wayne State University Press1978) p 262

75 FRUS 1947 Vol IV p 544 n 2 See also Taubman Stalinrsquos American Policy p 155



115






1947 with the disastrous year of 1933 He acknowledged that things were notquite as bad as they had been fourteen years earlier but he said ldquoit seems clearthat the Politburo desires to avoid major political developments that mightlead to a showdownrdquo The Politburorsquos stance he concluded ldquowas largely due toweakness of the internal situationrdquo76

This view of the Soviet situation was not an aberration There seemed tobe a widespread understanding in both the United States and Western Europethat the economic situation in the USSR was distinctly unfavorable Theinordmuential British magazine The Economist carried regular reports throughMarch 1947 on the critical problems facing the Soviet Union77 The New YorkTimes carried an equally somber analysis on 9 March that came to the atten-tion of the State Department78 Meanwhile in the US embassy in Moscowfew doubted that Stalin was facing challenges on many different fronts AsWalter Bedell Smith pointed out in February 1947 there was a ldquoconscious-nessrdquo in Moscow that the USSRrsquos overall position was precarious Althoughthis had not resulted in a diminution of anti-American propaganda whatBedell Smith called the Soviet Unionrsquos ldquoweakened positionrdquo was likely to havean impact on Soviet conduct abroad79 The adverse circumstances of theUSSR may in part explain the posture adopted by Stalin who was eager to re-assure any Westerner who cared to listen that there was no danger of war andthat good relations with the West were most desirable Even Stalinrsquos evaluationof the Conference of Foreign Ministers (CFM) in April 1947 was reasonablyupbeat Whereas Marshall had returned home convinced that the game wasup with the Soviet Union Stalin was relatively optimistic He agreed that themeeting had all the qualities of ldquocombat reconnaissancerdquo but he claimed thaton all ldquoimportant issues such as democratization political organizations eco-nomic unity and reparations compromise is within reachrdquo80 In conversationswith both Bevin and Marshall during the CFM in Moscow on the proposedtreaties with Austria and Germany the Soviet leader continued to speak withsome conordfdence about the future of the wartime alliance81 Moreover despite

116


76 Memorandum of 27 March 1947 Ref 861003ndash2747 in Conordfdential US State DepartmentCentral Files ndash Soviet Union Internal Affairs 1945ndash1949 Reel 2 (Frederick MD University Publica-tions of America 1985) For US embassy reports on the dire situation in the USSR from late 1946onward see FRUS 1947 Vol IV pp 515ndash517 535 544 n 2

77 See The Economist 31 May 1947 cited in Deighton The Impossible Peace p 174

78 ldquoDays of Decision On Our Russian Policyrdquo The New York Times 9 March 1947 p E1

79 FRUS 1947 Vol IV p 535

80 Quoted in Narinsky ldquoSoviet Foreign Policy and the Origins of the Cold Warrdquo p 106 See alsoGeoffrey Roberts The Soviet Union in World Politics Coexistence Revolution and Cold War 1945ndash1991 (London Routledge 1998) p 23

81 FRUS 1947 Vol II pp 340ndash341



116








the obvious lack of agreement over the future of Germany and the issue of So-viet reparations he sensed that compromise was still possible82 In an inter-view with the Republican senator Harold Stassen in May 1947 he reafordfrmedthat there was every reason to hope for continued cooperation between thetwo sides83

Naturally Stalin was keeping his options and had not abandoned his tra-ditional suspicion of the West As a Soviet diplomatic cable in September1946 made clear the war had changed the international landscape leavingthe United States as the most powerful force in the world and the greatestthreat to Soviet security But even this relatively bleak analysis Stalin believedwas no cause for panic84 Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov did notrule out further cooperation85 and until the middle of 1947 he continued tolook forward to ldquothe possibilityrdquo that the United States and the Soviet Unionwould jointly manage ldquothe system of international relationsrdquo86 This outlookalso received theoretical support from the economist Evgenii VargamdashtheldquoPolonius of the Cominternrdquo as Leon Trotsky had once called himmdashwho wasnever one to stray too far from the ofordfcial line In an earlier study Changes inthe Capitalist Economy in the Wake of the Second World War Varga had arguedthat the crisis of capitalism might be delayed because certain elements of cen-tralized planning had been adopted by the Western powers during the warHe even hinted that capitalism might develop peacefully Although in the pe-riod leading up to the summer of 1947 he came under attack and was roundlycondemned he was not forced to recant his argument By mid-1947 he hadreturned to a robust defense of his main thesis that the adoption of planningin the Western states signaled important structural changes in the nature ofcapitalism and possibly allowed for better relations between the capitalistworld and the Soviet Union87

It was therefore not insigniordfcant that Molotov asked Varga in June 1947to assess US intentions with regard to the Marshall Plan Varga prepared a

117


82 Ibid pp 343ndash344

83 On Stalinrsquos optimism concerning the future of cooperation with the West see Alexander WerthRussia The Post-War Years (New York Taplinger 1971) See also J V Stalin Sochineniya Vol 3 (16)1946ndash1953 (Stanford CA Hoover Institution Press 1967) pp 75ndash77

84 Zubok and Pleshakov Inside the Kremlinrsquos Cold War pp 101ndash103

85 For recent disclosures about Molotov see Alexander O Chubaryan and Vladimir O PechatnovldquoMolotov lsquoThe Liberalrsquo Stalinrsquos 1945 Criticism of His Deputyrdquo Cold War History Vol 1 No 1 (Au-gust 2000) pp 129ndash140


87 Vargarsquos view that some form of economic cooperation with the United States was possible was notdiscredited until 1949 In April 1949 the journal Voprosy ekonomiki printed transcripts of a session ofthe Learned Council of the Economics Institute of the USSR Academy of Sciences that severely criti-cized Varga




117








report and submitted it to Molotov on 24 June88 He argued that the primarypurpose of the Plan was to forestall or at least mitigate the worst effects ofthe coming crisis within the American economy by seeking out new marketsin Europemdasha classic restatement of the standard Soviet theory of capitalistcrises Economic self-interest rather than enlightenment lay at the heart ofthe Plan according to Varga But he also contended that the Plan had multi-ple political purposes along with its economic rationale The three mostsigniordfcant political aims in his view were to demonstrate US hegemonyover Europe to induce the West Europeans to form an anti-Soviet bloc if theUSSR refused to participate and to hold the USSR responsible if the Plan didnot achieve its speciordfed objectives He noted that the Plan also had a fairlyobvious subversive purposemdashto place maximum pressure on the East Europe-ans and thereby draw them away from Moscow back into the larger capitalistfold But he claimed there was no reason to be alarmed at this stage After allthe United States was unlikely to get everything it wanted Furthermore if thePlan was driven largely by economic necessity as Varga and others assumed89

it was possible for the USSR to exploit this need for its own ends Varga thusimplied that the Plan was an opportunity as much as a threat and that theaim of Soviet diplomacy therefore should be to disconnect the issue of aidfrom the political conditions the United States would inevitably seek to attachto it In this way the Soviet Union could derive maximum advantage As oneanalyst has cogently observed although Vargarsquos analysis ldquoreordmected a strong de-gree of caution and suspicionrdquo one could still infer ldquothat with astute bargain-ing the Soviet Unionrdquo would be able to ldquogain from participation in [thePlan]rdquo90

On 21 June the Soviet Politburo endorsed the idea of at least discussingthe aid program with the British and the French The assembled ofordfcialshoped that the Marshall Plan might offer a useful opportunity to establish aframework for receiving substantial credits from Washington AccordinglyMolotov suggested to the British and the French that they should meet inParis to discuss the program The Soviet authorities also transmitted instruc-tions to the other East European states to ensure their participation in thePlan91 At this stage Soviet leaders wanted to ensure that the countries that

118


88 ldquoReport of Academician Varga to Foreign Minister Molotovrdquo 24 June 1947 Arkhiv vneshneipolitiki Rossiiskoi Federatsii (AVP RF) F 6 Op 9 D 213 Ll 215 cited in Narinsky ldquoSoviet For-eign Policy and the Origins of the Cold Warrdquo p 108 See also Parrish ldquoThe Marshall Plan and the Di-vision of Europerdquo pp 277ndash279

89 Novikov to Molotov cited in Parrish ldquoThe Turn toward Confrontationrdquo p 19

90 Narinsky ldquoSoviet Foreign Policy and the Origins of the Cold Warrdquo pp 105ndash110

91 Molotov to Bodrov 22 June 1947 in Galina A Takhnenko ldquoAnatomiya odnogo politicheskogoresheniya K 45-letiyu plana Marshallardquo Mezdunarodnaya zhiznrsquo (Moscow) No 5 (May 1992)pp 113ndash127




118






suffered most from German aggression would be given priority for the receiptof US credits This stance though self-serving was in line with Moscowrsquoslong-standing position that any economic aid should be distributed accordingto efforts made in defeating Nazi Germany For the time being Soviet leadersremained serious in pursuing the aid initiative In a cable on 22 June the Po-litburo instructed the Soviet ambassadors in Warsaw Prague and Belgrade totell the leaders of those countriesmdashBoleslaw Beirut Klement Gottwald andJosip Broz Tito respectivelymdashto ldquotake the initiative in securing their participa-tion in working out the economic measures in question and ensure that theylodge their claimsrdquo92 Soviet leaders did not discount the need for vigilance asreordmected in the 24 June memorandum from Soviet Ambassador NikolaiNovikov93 But at this stage in the proceedings they still hoped that under theauspices of the Marshall Plan there would be ample room for what Anna DiBiagio has called a ldquozone of economic exchangerdquo that would enable the twosides to continue their wartime cooperation while avoiding undue interfer-ence in each otherrsquos ldquosphere of inordmuencerdquo94

Stalin highlighted three key issues in the ofordfcial instructions he gave tothe Soviet ofordfcials who traveled to Paris for the meeting Although the threeguidelines were cautious in tone they did not preclude Soviet agreement ifthe West was prepared to enter into serious negotiations that might lead to acompromise The ordfrst issue was Germany the resolution of which Stalinhoped to keep separate from the issue of economic aid The Soviet delegationfor the Paris conference was thus instructed not to discuss the German ques-tion during the Paris meeting The second issue was economic aid Stalin in-structed the delegates to ensure that this question was discussed in terms ofspeciordfc country needs rather than an all-European basis that would enableUS ofordfcials to design their own program of reform The ordfnal issue was thestatus of Eastern Europe Once again the instructions were clear and the So-viet delegates were left in no doubt that they should ldquoobjectrdquomdashand presum-ably object stronglymdashto any ldquoaid termsrdquo that ldquothreatened interference in theinternal affairsrdquo of the ldquorecipientrdquo countries As Stalin envisaged it the UnitedStates could provide aid but it would have to be aid without any conditionsespecially conditions that ldquomight infringe on the European countriesrsquo sover-eignty or encroach on their economic independencerdquo95

119


92 Ibid

93 Novikov to Molotov 24 June 1947 AVP RF F 18 Op 39 D 250 Ll 314ndash320 reproduced inTakhnenko ldquoAnatomiya odnogo politicheskogo resheniyardquo pp 121ndash122

94 Di Biagio ldquoThe Marshall Planrdquo p 210

95 On fears of what would happen if the USSR opened up to the West see Anna Di Biagio Le originidellrsquoisolazionismo sovietico LrsquoUnione Societica e lrsquoEuropa dal 1918 al 1928 (Milan Feltrinelli 1990)p 131



119


92 Ibid




When Molotov arrived in Paris on 26 June for the meeting he had morethan 100 advisers with him As both contemporaneous and later commenta-tors have pointed out this in itself was at least one indicator of the seriousnesswith which Stalin was prepared to treat the negotiations96 Two days beforethe meeting the leading British newspaper commented that ldquothe whole atmo-sphere of international debate had changed to a healthier and hopefully morehelpful moodrdquo97 Molotovrsquos speech on the ordfrst day was relatively mild in toneand thus seemed to conordfrm this analysis However there was no hiding theunderlying tensions and the fact that the British and French egged on by theAmericans were in no mood to negotiate Bevin conveyed this sentiment inhis subsequent report to the British cabinet noting that he and Bidault hadldquoaimed from the outsetrdquo of the Paris conference ldquoon thrashing out the differ-ences of principle between us making that the breaking pointrdquo with the So-viet Union98 When Molotov asked Bevin what had been discussed during theearlier meetings with Clayton Bevin was less than frank99 According toBidault Molotov asked him immediately after arriving what Bidault andBevin had been doing behind his back In the ordfrst session Molotov also in-quired what additional information the French and British governments hadreceived from the United States Again the Soviet foreign minister was reas-sured that nothing had been discussed that affected his position100

At the subsequent negotiating sessions Molotov was presented with An-glo-French proposals calling for economic modernization programs under theauspices of a central European organization that would oversee the distribu-tion of US aid The French also tabled a proposal requiring an audit of theindividual resources of participating members Soviet opposition to these pro-posals soon became evident Molotov attacked both ideas on the grounds thatthey infringed on the sovereignty and independence of the European statesAs an alternative he proposed that individual countries should make theirown assessments of national needs and that these analyses would determinethe amount of total credit required from the United States Bevin and Bidaultinsisted however that disclosure of resources was a prerequisite for participa-

120


96 Vojtech Mastny has argued that the Soviet participants were determined to use the Paris meetingto see how the US proposal could be ldquodeprived of any strings attached thus making it possible tohave the American cake and eat it toordquo See Mastny The Cold War and Soviet Insecurity p 28

97 ldquoHope of Soviet Cooperationrdquo The Times (London) 24 June 1947 p 4

98 On this issue see Bullock Ernest Bevin p 416 See also Deighton The Impossible Peace pp 185ndash186 See also note of 14 July 1948 in FRUS 1948 Vol II p 964


100 Ambassador in France (Caffrey) to the Secretary of State Telegram 501BDEurope6ndash2747Paris 27 June 1947 in FRUS 1947 Vol III p 296



120







tion in the aid program It is not difordfcult to see why this demand and the pro-posal for a central European organization were unpalatable to Molotov Bothproposals would have led to the very sort of ldquointerference in the internalaffairsrdquo of the East European countries that Stalin had explicitly ruled outSoviet leaders realized that if these proposals were adopted the East Europeangovernments would have to alter their internal policies and priorities in a waythat would leave them dependent on the markets and systems of Western Eu-rope and thus ultimately on the United States From Moscowrsquos perspectivethis was unacceptable There was a risk that a central organization overseeingthe program would acquire undue inordmuence in Eastern and Central Europeand even in the USSR itself101

Soviet suspicions of Western intentions were heightened when Molotovreceived information from other sources about the various discussions thathad already taken place between Bevin Bidault and the Americans The re-ports conordfrmed what he already suspected about the central role that Westernleaders envisaged for the Bizone in a recovered Europe Molotov had tried toprohibit any discussion of the German question during the meetings He sug-gested that German participation in the Marshall Plan should not be consid-ered until key decisions had been made about Germany as a whole102 Thisview was rejected by both Bevin and Bidault who argued that in light of con-tinued food shortages it was essential for Germany to be represented at theplanning stage103

The United States took no ofordfcial part in these meetings but both theBritish and the French kept the US ambassador in Paris Jefferson Caffreyfully informed Caffrey reported to Marshall that although there weredifordfculties in the discussion with Molotov the British and French had let theSoviet foreign minister know that they were ldquoprepared to go ahead with fullsteam even if the Soviets refuse to do sordquo By 1 July Bevin was predicting thatthe conference would soon break down104 On 2 July after consulting withStalin (who had remained in Moscow) Molotov reemphasized the SovietUnionrsquos refusal to accept the terms of the Marshall Plan At a meeting on3 July Molotov predicted that Western actions would ldquoresult not in theuniordfcation or reconstruction of Europe but the division of Europe into twogroupsrdquo That same day Bevin and Bidault issued a joint communiqueacute invit-

121


101 On this point see Nataliia I Egorova ldquoStalinrsquos Foreign Policy and the Cominform 1947ndash53rdquo inGori and Pons eds The Soviet Union and Europe in the Cold War p 198


103 Ibid

104 Ibid p 302




121




103 Ibid

104 Ibid p 302

ing twenty-two other European countries to send representatives to Paris toconsider the recovery plan The ldquoWestern blocrdquo as Bevin observed was aboutto be born105

Soviet leaders considered a ldquowrecking planrdquo to disrupt the forthcomingParis conference The British and the French had agreed that the Europeanstates would work out a common program and send it to Washington forapproval Soviet ofordfcials planned to turn up for the conference but then toleave taking the East European delegations with them In a telegram on5 July the Soviet government instructed the East European leaders to attendthe conference but to stress their opposition to the Plan This initiative how-ever was dropped106 According to Anna Di Biagio Soviet leaders worriedthat such a dramatic strategy might compel the East European leaders tochoose between national economic interests and ideological loyalty to Mos-cow Evidently Stalin hesitated before trying to coerce all the East Europeanstates into such action for fear that some of them might resist107 At this stagewhen the Communist parties did not yet have full control in some of the EastEuropean states Soviet leaders could not be fully conordfdent that their linewould hold

The Paris conference duly collapsed but the readiness of some of the EastEuropean governments most notably the Czechoslovak government to takepart in the Marshall Plan (even without the USSR) spurred a forceful Sovietreaction The Marshall Plan was threatening to undermine cohesion in theEast To be sure opinions among the East European states about the MarshallPlan varied widely Tito was adamantly opposed to the program whereas thePolish authorities displayed a considerable degree of interest108 However itwas Czechoslovakiarsquos position that particularly worried Stalin109 From the be-ginning the Prague government had been in favor of joining the ERP Evenwhen Czechoslovak leaders were informed of Moscowrsquos rejection of the Planthe Czechoslovak government led by Klement Gottwald and Edvard Benešdecided to accept the invitation to attend the Paris meeting110 Polish leaders

122


105 V Molotov Voprosy vneshnei politiki Rechi i zayavleniya (Moscow Politizdat 1948)

106 M M Narinskii ldquoSSSR i plan Marshalla Po materialam Arkhiva Prezidenta NFrdquo Novaya inoveishaya istoriya (Moscow) No 2 (MarchndashApril 1993) pp 12ndash37

107 Di Biagio ldquoThe Marshall Planrdquo pp 208ndash221

108 On Yugoslaviarsquos role during this period see Beatrice Heuser Western Containment Policies in theCold War 1948ndash1953 (London Routledge 1989) On the relationship between Stalin and Tito seeYu S Girenko Stalin-Tito (Moscow Novosti 1991) pp 325ndash326 in R Craig Nation ldquoA BalkanUnionrdquo in Gori and Pons eds The Soviet Union and Europe in the Cold War pp 132ndash138


110 The US ambassador in Prague reported that Beneš had been determined to accept the offer buthad been forced to go along with the Soviet position FRUS 1947 Vol III p 318




122








signaled that they too would attend and the Bulgarians Hungarians andAlbanians also seemed to favor this option

As is now well known Stalin exerted enormous pressure on Czechoslovakleaders to reverse their decision When Jan Masaryk the Czechoslovak foreignminister visited Moscow in early July he was threatened with draconian sanc-tions if his government continued to pursue the Marshall Plan111 TheCzechoslovak leaders duly submitted to Soviet pressure Oddly this momen-tous development caused little concern on the part of the Americans In an as-sessment of the outcome of the Paris conference and the withdrawal of the So-viet Union and Czechoslovakia Dean Acheson remarked that ldquoonce againGeneral George Marshallrsquos judgment and his luck combined to produce thedesired resultrdquo112 By July under pressure from Moscow the Romanians Al-banians and Poles had also declined the offer of American aid and the Finnsdid so as well Any hopes the Soviet Union once had of economic cooperationwith the West were effectively shelved The so-called Molotov Plan was pro-claimed as a response to the ERP and it prompted swift efforts to coordinateeconomic activities among the East European states By August the US am-bassador in Belgrade was reporting that Yugoslavia had intensiordfed its drive tocoordinate economic and ordfnancial policies with other East European statesPoland too began redirecting its foreign trade toward Moscow113 In Novem-ber George Marshall said he had believed all along that Czechoslovakia wouldnot be permitted to join the Plan114

Toward Cold War

Signiordfcantly the collapse of the Paris conference with all its implications forthe future of East-West relations did not provoke doom and gloom on theWestern side On the contrary Western leaders were pleased that Moscowrsquosbluff had been called and that the Soviet delegation had withdrawn from thediscussions The Western powers could now get on with the job at hand with-out having to worry about Soviet obstructionism There was a sense of relief

123


111 Ambassador in Czechoslovakia (Steinhardt) to the Secretary of State Telegram 84050 Recovery7ndash1047 10 July 1947 in FRUS 1947 Vol III pp 318ndash320


113 For an assessment of the changes in Soviet trade see Ambassador in Yugoslavia (Cannon) to theSecretary of State Telegram 84050 Recovery8ndash747 in FRUS 1947 Vol IV pp 834ndash836

114 See PPS-13 ldquoResumeacute of World Situationrdquo 6 November 1947 in Anna Kasten Nelson ed TheState Department Policy Planning Staff Papers 1947ndash1949 3 vols (New York Garland 1983) Vol 1(1947) pp 129ndash136



Toward Cold War


123






that Moscow had declined to participate even though the likelihood of Sovietparticipation had never been particularly great As Kennan later admittedone of the prices of Soviet participation ldquowould have been cooperation inovercoming real barriers in East-West traderdquo Such a move would have ex-posed the war-ravaged Soviet economy to the much more powerful Americaneconomy ldquoso in a sense we put the Russians over a barrelrdquo and ldquowhen the fullhorror of [their] alternatives dawned on them they left suddenly in the mid-dle of the nightrdquo The departure of the Soviet delegates did not much surpriseJan Masaryk With bitterness and resignation he indicated that Czechoslova-kia would be staying out of the Marshall Plan partly because it would inevita-bly have led to the loss of Soviet control over Eastern Europemdashthe Americangoal all alongmdashand partly because of the way the Plan had been put togetherHe believed that the offer of aid to Poland and Czechoslovakia had been gen-uine But the offer to the Soviet Union ldquothe crux of the matterrdquo as he called itwas ldquothe biggest piece of eyewash in the whole scheme Do you see Trumanand Congress forking out billions of dollars to enemy Number One Com-munist Russia from whom we all have to be savedrdquo The answer he con-cluded was obvious115

With the Paris conference over Stalin concludedmdashalbeit reluctantlymdashthat the Soviet Union no longer could count on having serious economic rela-tions with the West or on avoiding the creation of a two-bloc system in Eu-rope The most immediate response was the tightening of Soviet control overthe East European states and foreign Communist parties in general The po-litical counterpart to both the Truman doctrine and the Marshall Plan camewith the announcement of the Molotov Plan and the formal establishment ofthe Communist Information Bureau or Cominform116 In September 1947representatives of the Communist parties of the Soviet Union Bulgaria Ro-mania Czechoslovakia Hungary Poland and Yugoslaviamdashas well as Franceand Italymdashmet in Szklarska Poreba in Poland to create an organization to co-ordinate their activities The Cominform was at one level the successor to theCommunist International (Comintern) which had been abolished in 1943but the ordfrst meeting of the new body as Geoffrey Roberts has noted was ldquoastrictly European affairrdquo intended mainly to establish a political line for East-ern Europe in the wake of the Marshall Plan117 At the conference the dele-gates even those from countries such as Czechoslovakia that had earlier ex-pressed an interest in joining the Marshall Plan roundly condemned the

124


115 Quoted in Charles L Mee The Marshall Plan The Launching of the Pax Americana (New YorkSimon amp Schuster 1984) pp 136ndash150

116 Giuliano Procacci ed The Cominform Minutes of the Three Conferences 194719481949Annali XXX (Milan Feltrinelli 1994)

117 Roberts The Soviet Union p 25



124





American initiative This marked a return to the type of thinking that hadbeen associated with Politburo member Andrei Zhdanovmdashnamely that of themilitant ldquotwo camps linerdquo Apparently the two-camp thesis made its way intoZhdanovrsquos speech at a relatively late stage of the drafting process indicating adegree of improvisation after the failure of the Marshall Plan conference118

The establishment of the Cominform had profound implications for theconduct of Soviet foreign policy vis-agrave-vis the Western governments as well asEastern Europe At the Szklarska Poreba conference the French and ItalianCommunists were criticized for their attempts to follow ldquoreformistrdquo strategiesof national unity119 The West European Communist parties were discouragedfrom taking part in any form of coalition government or cooperating withother parties and they were encouraged simply to be parties of opposition120

What chance did this opposition have and more precisely how did the dele-gates at the Cominform conference rate their own chances of success Thereare two views on this matter

According to Wilfried Loth the new Cominform program was essentiallyan optimistic one Soviet leaders believed that at this stage they could forestallthe success of the Marshall Plan in Western Europe through the encourage-ment of ldquopositiverdquo forces Loth argues that for the duration of the conferenceStalin was convinced that the peoples of Europe would not accept the ldquoexploi-tation of American capitalrdquo121 Stalin also hoped that the restoration of Ger-many would be unpalatable to both the British and the French The Sovietdictator continued to assert that the division of Europe could be avoidedthrough ldquoeducationrdquo which would provide the ground for resistance in Eu-rope against American-style ldquoeconomic enslavementrdquo This meant an intensi-ordfcation of strikes demonstrations and mass mobilizations against capitalismbut certainly not inter-bloc conordmict As Zhdanov noted at the conference ldquoIfonly two million people bellow they [the French] would chase out the Ameri-cans and the English Later we will see if any coalitions are possiblerdquo122

This interpretation has not gone unchallenged Di Biagio agrees that thetone of the conference was initially upbeat and enlivened by the view thatthe Marshall Plan might fail in the same way that the Dawes plan did in the

125


118 Di Biagio ldquoThe Marshall Planrdquo pp 214ndash215 Di Biagiorsquos evidence is at variance with Britishviews of the Cominform in 1947 Sir Frank Roberts argued that the establishment of the Cominformwas not a departure in Soviet foreign policy because the Comintern had never really been dissolvedRoberts to Bevin 7 October 1947 in FO 37166475 See also Martin Kitchen ldquoBritish Policy to-wards the Soviet Union 1945ndash1948rdquo in Gorodetsky ed Soviet Foreign Policy 1917ndash1991 pp 111ndash134



121 Loth Stalinrsquos Unwanted Child p 65

122 Cited in ibid






125






122 Cited in ibid

1920s But she contends that this assessment did not carry over into the pro-gram adopted by the end of the conference The ordfnal program she argueswas aggressive in tone but lacking in inner conordfdence Although it called onthe Communist parties in Western Europe to abandon their previous gradual-ism and adopt a line of militant opposition to the Marshall Plan few if any ofthe participants truly believed that this would thwart the ERP123 As it turnedout the new aggressive line had the opposite impact of what was intended Inthe United States the hardening of the Iron Curtain helped mobilize politicalsupport behind the Marshall Plan In Europe it provided a new sense of ur-gency and it put the Communist parties in the untenable position of oppos-ing the vast quantities of American aid that could improve ordinary peoplersquoslives

At the Cominform meeting the discussions focused on the thorny issueof Germany The Soviet delegation made clear its own position and pressedfor the establishment of a united demilitarized and ldquodemocraticrdquo Ger-many124 However the failure of the CFM meeting in London in NovemberndashDecember 1947 and the subsequent Frankfurt resolutions left no doubt thatthe West would not agree to such a thing and was intent on creating a WestGerman state Any hopes on the Soviet side for a great-power condominiumover Germany had disintegrated by the end of 1947 Molotov linked the ad-vent of the Marshall aid scheme to the permanent division of Germany andthe economic reinvigoration of the Western zones under American domina-tion125 The promise of US assistance to the Western zones of Germany un-der the Marshall Plan had a far-reaching impact in the Soviet zone The lead-ers of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED the Communist party)were becoming increasingly concerned about the deterioration of economicconditions and the surge of popular resentment against reparations paymentsto the Soviet Union In a message sent directly to Stalin SED leaders arguedthat the ldquopromised dollarsrdquo from the Americans were having a powerful effectamong the working masses and had raised hopes of ordfnding a way to end theeveryday suffering in the Soviet zone of Germany126 As has been noted else-where the prospect of the Western zonesrsquo participation in the Marshall planmade the reparations payments from the Soviet zone seem increasingly un-bearable127 The SED therefore wanted a halt to the Soviet Unionrsquos disman-

126



124 Procacci The Cominform Minutes of the Three Conferences pp 216ndash251


126 Loth Stalinrsquos Unwanted Child pp 65ndash67

127 Ibid p 66



126






127 Ibid p 66

tling of industrial facilities and the provision by Moscow of economic aid toalleviate suffering Above all the provision of US aid to the Western zonesundermined any plans the SED may have had to push for an all-German so-lution128 The leaders of the SED were correct in predicting that the creationof two economic and political blocs inherent in the Marshall Plan would re-sult in the division of Germany along the Elbe129 Stalin brieordmy took heartfrom the disputes that erupted when the three Western occupying powers metin London in February 1948 to discuss the form of the new West Germanstate and he implemented a mini-blockade over Berlin for two days in Marchand April Nonetheless Soviet pressure and suggestions for top-level discus-sions with the Americans proved futile Stalinrsquos ordfnal gamble to blockadeBerlin in June 1948 also failed to dent Western resolve130

The repercussions for Eastern and Central Europe were immense Thechange in Soviet strategy was radical and was marked by a series of bilateraltreaties that were imposed on the East-European states The ordfrst of these wasconcluded with Romania on 4 February 1948 Two weeks later the SovietUnion signed a nearly identical treaty with Hungary The following monthSoviet and Bulgarian leaders adopted a Treaty of Friendship and Mutual Co-operation All these documents contained clauses outlining the duties of bothparties in the event of a military conordmict particularly if it resulted from Ger-man aggression The primary Soviet concern was the establishment of a mili-tary-political coalition in the Western zones of Germany Soviet writers ex-plicitly linked the two issues

At the beginning of 1948 the USSR concluded treaties of friendship coopera-tion and mutual assistance with Romania Hungary Bulgaria and Finlandfully corresponding to the goals and principles of the United Nations Organiza-tion and having great signiordfcance for strengthening peace and security in Eu-rope Together with them the Soviet Union continued its efforts to preventthe shameful consequences of the policy of the Western powers in relation toGermany131

The process of consolidation following the Marshall Plan also had an impactin northern Europe sparked by Finnish interest in joining the ERP On22 February 1948 Stalin sent a letter to Finnish President Juho Paasikivi pro-

127


128 Ibid p 67


130 On the Soviet blockade of Berlin in 1948 see Hannes Adomeit Soviet Risk-Taking and Crisis Be-haviour (London Allen and Unwin 1982)

131 V G Trukhanovskii ed Istoriya mezhdunarodnykh otnoshenii i vneshnei politiki SSSR Vol III1945ndash1963 (Moscow Izdatelrsquostvo mezhdunarodnykh otnoshenii 1993) p 219





127


128 Ibid p 67




posing a Soviet-Finnish treaty The Soviet leader directly alluded to the bilat-eral treaty with Hungary as a possible model He suggested that the treatyprovide for mutual assistance ldquoagainst a possible attack by GermanyrdquoMolotov described the treaty as a joint defense pact At the time there waswidespread concern in both Finland and the West that Moscow intended toldquoswallowrdquo Finland Paasikivi feared at least initially that Stalinrsquos intention wasto bring Finland under Soviet military control and into a Communist blocWestern diplomats believed that Stalin was pursuing a policy of East Euro-pean military integration132

It was in Czechoslovakia that Stalin took the most radical measures of allWith the backing of the Soviet Army the Czechoslovak Communist Party en-gineered the removal of Benešrsquos coalition government and installed itself inpower133 The Communist takeover in Czechoslovakia led to a brief war scarein the United States and eliminated any remaining congressional objections tothe Marshall Plan134 The fears though perhaps somewhat overblown werereal enough as intelligence reports at the time seemed to indicate135 In a no-table understatement a US ofordfcial commented that the possibility of reach-ing agreement with the Soviet Union had been much ldquoreducedrdquo136 None ofthis really came as much of a surprise to other American ofordfcials least of allGeorge Kennan He had predicted that once the Soviet Union rejected theterms laid down in July 1947 a period of Sturm und Drang would ensue asSoviet ofordfcials resorted to belligerent rhetoric and moved quickly to consoli-date their control over Eastern Europe The task for American diplomacy ashe saw it was to ride out the storm explain why it was happening and advisethose in power not to allow all this to upset their nerve by responding in sucha way that would reinforce the status quo in Europe This may have beensound advice but as Kennan soon discovered few high-level ofordfcials wereready or willing to listen to such words of reassurance and calm The die hadalready been cast

128


132 See US Department of State 27 February 1948 in US National Archives (NARA) RecordGroup (RG) 59 760D61112ndash2748 and US Department of State 28 February 1948 in NARARG 59 760D 61112ndash2848 both cited in Caroline Kennedy-Pipe Stalinrsquos Cold War (ManchesterUK Manchester University Press 1995) p 123

133 Karel Kaplan The Short March The Communist Takeover in Czechoslovakia 1945ndash1948 (NewYork St Martinrsquos Press 1987)

134 Frank Kofsky Harry S Truman and the War Scare of 1948 A Successful Campaign to Deceive theNation (New York St Martinrsquos Press 1993)

135 Lefordmer ldquoThe United States and the Strategic Dimensions of the Marshall Planrdquo pp 277ndash306

136 Ibid For a discussion of the tragic ramiordfcations of the effects of exclusion from the Marshall Planon Czech areas abutting Austria a recipient of Marshall Plan aid See Burk ldquoThe Marshall Planrdquop 280



128







Conclusion

We began this paper with a brief tour of the historiography of the Cold WarIt is therefore ordftting that we conclude by asking once again what the events of1947ndash1948 actually mean for the way historiansmdashincluding the new tradi-tionalistsmdashhave tried to make sense of the origins of the Cold War To answerthis question it is perhaps worth looking at an assessment made by JohnGaddis in his earlier ldquopost-revisionistrdquo phase In his justly famous The UnitedStates and the Origins of the Cold War 1941ndash1947 Gaddis discussed the un-avoidable issue of Cold War responsibility

If one must assign responsibility for the Cold War the most meaningful way toproceed is to ask which side had the greater opportunity to accommodate itselfat least in part to the otherrsquos position given the range of alternatives as they ap-peared at the time Revisionists have argued that American policy-makers pos-sessed greater freedom of action but their view ignores the constraints imposedby domestic politics Little is known even today about how Stalin deordfned hisoptions but it does seem safe to say that the very nature of the Soviet system af-forded him a larger selection of alternatives than were open to leaders of theUnited States The Russian dictator was immune from pressures of Congresspublic opinion or the press Even ideology did not restrict him Stalin was themaster of communist doctrine not a prisoner of it and could modify or sus-pend Marxism-Leninism whenever it suited him to do so This is not to say thatStalin wanted a Cold Warmdashhe had every reason to avoid one But his absolutepowers did give him more chances to surmount the internal restraints on hispolicy than were available to his democratic counterparts in the West137

This is an interesting and multifaceted assessment of the comparable po-sitions of the Soviet Union and the United States in the early postwar periodand it is an especially useful framework through which to view the MarshallPlan Gaddis in 1972 rightly saw the origins of the Cold War as a complicatedissue (a position he now seems to have abandoned) and raised the criticalquestion of options and opportunities We agree with the way he addressedthe issue Nonetheless even his earlier more nuanced conclusion is mislead-ing In 1972 it may well have seemed that the autocratic Stalin had moreroom for maneuver and no doubt some would still make this argument to-day But despotism should not be equated with freedom of action The totali-tarian nature of the system did not permit Stalin the luxury of overcoming thelimits of the Soviet system any more than he could wish away the huge (and asit turned out insuperable) problem of controlling ldquoalliesrdquo such as Tito Natu-

129


137 Gaddis The Origins of the Cold War pp 353ndash361

Conclusion




129



rally all rulers including those in democratic countries work within a set ofconstraints Truman faced a difordfcult Congress a hostile press a divided Dem-ocratic Party and a budget he knew he had to balance But the sorts ofdifordfculties Stalin faced at the time were much more severe The American sys-tem set limits on what Truman could do but Truman did not face the terribleproblem of having to reconstruct a teetering economy in a country that hadjust lost 27 million people The American economy was not in crisis in 1947despite Vargarsquos jeremiads to the contrary In fact it is somewhat strange that inthe same year Varga was conordfdently predicting an American recession theUSSR itself was in the midst of a real recession and was also plagued by fam-ine Nor did Truman face the problem of violent nationalist insurgencies asStalin did in the Baltic states and western Ukraine138 The existence of theseproblems does not mean that the Soviet system would have been less brutalunder better circumstances Nor does it mean that Soviet leaders would havebeen pro-Western or would have cut off support for Communist Partiesabroad But the constraints did make Soviet leaders cautious in their dealingswith the powerful nuclear-armed United States As Vojtech Mastny has ar-gued the Marshall Plan not only was ldquodeeply subversiverdquo of Stalinrsquos concept ofinternational order but also ldquoshifted onto Stalin the burden of decidingwhether he would allow his East European clients to accept the American aidHe had the unenviable choice of either risking the intrusion of Westerninordmuences or insulating the sphererdquo139 In the end with great reluctanceStalin chose the latter course of action

Soviet insecurity might also help explain something else we have exam-ined here namely Stalinrsquos desire through the ordfrst part of 1947 to maintain atleast some sort of dialogue with the United States He seemed to be more thanwilling to cooperate with the West over a range of issues and indeed appearedto envisage a postwar situation in which great-power collaborationmdashor moreprecisely condominiummdashwould have been the norm not the exception140

This was certainly the case in Germany where Stalin did not seek the creationof what became the Trizone To be sure Stalin viewed contacts and connec-tions with the West with great suspicion He feared that these contacts if me-diated through a central European organization could undermine Commu-nist inordmuence in the East Soviet ofordfcials had argued from the outset that a

130


138 Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii (GARF) F 9401Op 2 D 235 Ll 27ndash35 citedin Volkogonov The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Empire p 150

139 Mastny The Cold War and Soviet Insecurity p 27

140 Here too though it is important to take account of Soviet leadersrsquo perceptions of the way theUSSR was being treated by the United States Molotov himself believed that the United States wouldseek to dominate the Soviet Union See N V Novikov Vospominaniya diplomata (Moscow Politizdat1989) p 379




130





United States of Europe was possible only for the purpose of ldquosuppressing so-cialism in Europerdquo141 The trick for Stalin therefore was to secure economicand political aid but not to compromise Soviet security interests142 The prob-lem was that this ambition ran afoul of US planning for the application ofthe Marshall Plan to Eastern Europe The explicit purpose of the US pro-posal was to mitigate Soviet inordmuence in Central and Eastern Europe within amore general strategic framework of rolling back Communism to its originalprewar frontiers The tragedy in our view was that in working so conspicu-ously to achieve this goal the United States actually made Sovietization of theregion more or less inevitable The US government was supported in thisventure by British leaders who like their American counterparts sought topull the East Europeans away from the USSR without apparently realizingthat such a frontal challenge was likely to make the situation worse by posinga threat to Soviet security143

As we have seen Soviet intentions toward the East European states werefar less clear in 1947 than traditional accounts imply This aspect of Cold Warstudiesmdashthe experiences of the East European states in 1945ndash1948mdashis inneed of much greater analysis Churchill in 1946 spoke about the ldquoIron Cur-tainrdquo dividing Europe but as Soviet reactions to the Marshall Plan indicatethe division of Europe was not what Stalin was seeking As Di Biagio in par-ticular has shown Soviet leaders could still envisage serious economic ties be-tween the two parts of Europe This possibility however had to be balancedagainst fears that Western economic penetration might undermine Commu-nist inordmuence in the East turning the Central and East European economiesaway from Moscow Such fears were especially salient with regard to the So-viet zone of Germany where even the prospect of US aid had provided amuch-needed boost to popular morale The subsequent exclusion of easternGermany from the aid program had dramatic social and economic conse-quences144 Up to the time that US assistance began ordmowing to the Westernzones of Germany Soviet leaders were still hoping for cooperation under thebanner of the quadripartite agreements

This brings us to the knotty issue of economic aid to Eastern EuropeOne of the perennial debates in Cold War historiography has revolved around

131


141 See Kirsanov The USA and Western Europe pp 362

142 Takhnenko ldquoAnatomiya odnogo politicheskogo resheniyardquo pp 113ndash27

143 The British by and large seemed to discount the prospect that the Marshall Plan might in factmake relations with the USSR signiordfcantly more dangerous See FO 37166475 For a broader analy-sis of British views of the Soviet threat after 1947 see Kitchen ldquoBritish Policy towards the SovietUnion 1945ndash1948rdquo pp 111ndash134

144 The implications for Soviet policy in the eastern zone of Germany are evident in GARF F 7184Op 1 D 165 Ll 160ndash161 in Norman M Naimark The Russians in Germany A History of the SovietZone of Occupation 1945ndash1949 (Cambridge MA Belknap Press 1995) pp 310ndash311




131






two questions relating to this issue First where does responsibility lie for con-signing Eastern and Central Europe to Communism Second could EasternEurope have escaped Soviet domination Western policymakers in 1947seemed to believe that they could save at least some of the East and CentralEuropean states One suspects however that many East European citizensfeared that their fate was already sealed This also appears to be the underlyingassumption of some historians currently working on the Cold War Yet ourexamination of Soviet reactions to the Marshall Plan suggests that a moreordmexible operation of the US program might have curbed the momentum to-ward Stalinization in the East The problem was that the chief American con-cern was the reconstruction of democratic West European countries ratherthan the plight of the East Europeans Similarly the British and French wereintent on ensuring US support for economic recovery in Western Europe anobjective that in their view presupposed the exclusion of the Soviet Unionfrom the ERP145

Nonetheless the question remains Would Stalin really have been pre-pared to accept any form of American conditionally attached to aid The an-swer depends of course on the conditions themselves and the extent to whichthey would have impinged on the integrity of the Soviet system or on Sovietrelations with Eastern Europe Here Stalin was caught on the horns of an ob-vious dilemma On the one hand he had every reason to want US aid onthe other the fragility of Soviet control over Eastern Europe and the manyweaknesses of his own command economy meant that he could never beconordfdent about the ability of the Soviet system to withstand external scrutinyor to compete with what the Americans had to offer in Eastern Europe

Indeed the argument could be made that one of the reasons Stalin had torefuse the Marshall Plan was not that he was blinded by his own ideologicalopposition to capitalism or even by a romantic attachment to the idea of revo-lution but that he was deeply fearful of the strength and lure of capitalismWhat increased this fear was the attempt by the United States to exploit itseconomic superiority not only to revive Western Europe but also to lure East-ern Europe back into the Western camp Faced with such an adversary Stalinmay have felt that he had little choice but to retreat into his political lair drawin his security blanket in the shape of a newly created Communist EasternEurope mobilize his external support and order Andrei Zhdanov to promote

132


145 See for example the French position favoring the creation of an anti-Soviet bloc in October1947 in UKNA FO 37167674 cited in Kitchen ldquoBritish Policy towards the Soviet Union 1945ndash1948rdquo p 129 It was also apparent to Soviet ofordfcials at the Paris conference that Britain and Francehad no intention of agreeing to a plan that the Soviet Union would accept See V M Molotov Prob-lems of Foreign Policy Speeches and Statements April 1945ndashNovember 1948 (Moscow Foreign Lan-guages Publishing House 1949)




132



the two-camp thesis as loudly as possible As a result of the Marshall Plan Sta-lin moved ahead with the Cominform and rejected any idea that Communistparties in Eastern and Central Europe could or should act independentlythrough individual paths to socialism146 This volte-face did little to aid thepath of political development in the East but that was because it was a strat-egy born not of self-conordfdence or even desire but of weakness and insecu-rity147 Dmitrii Volkogonov argues that Stalin was acutely aware of the dearthof state funds state gold and state valuables throughout the postwar period aconstraint that limited Moscowrsquos ability to fund the activities of foreign Com-munist parties On occasion the Soviet dictator was not above asking the Chi-nese Communist Party for contributions to the maintenance of the interna-tional Communist movement Whereas the United States could amply affordto fund the new Central Intelligence Agency Stalin had to divert money fromthe poorest in his own land to foment opposition to capitalism elsewhere148

This is not it should be stressed a frivolous point For those within the Sovietbloc the human costs of the pursuit of the Cold War were high indeed

The formation of the Soviet bloc at the very time that a Western bloc wasemerging was no coincidence149 Nor is it an accident that the Western blocsurvived long after the Soviet bloc disappeared To be sure nothing is inevita-ble Few scholars of international relations anticipated the demise of Sovietpower in Eastern Europe in 1989 Nonetheless it would not be too fanciful toargue that the roots of the Soviet blocrsquos dissolution can be traced back to theway the bloc was put together in the ordfrst placemdashin haste without much en-thusiasm or legitimacy and as an option of last resort The contrast with theUS experience could not be more stark The democratically elected govern-ments in Western Europe were eager to establish close ties with the UnitedStates and they did their best to ensure a strong US presence in Europe It istherefore not surprising that the Western bloc outlived its competitor

Whether the Cold War might have been avoided if US leaders had actedmore cautiously and had taken greater account of Soviet security concerns re-mains an open question Historians are not required to think of alternatives orto dwell too long on counterfactuals Vojtech Mastny has argued with greatcertainty that the Marshall Plan was not ldquothe turning point it was later made

133


146 Paolo Spriano Stalin and the European Communists (London Verso 1985)

147 Some historians have pointed to Stalinrsquos extraordinary ineptitude in foreign policy They stressthat his diplomacy usually provoked the opposite reaction of the one he had intended See for exam-ple Mikhail M Narinskii ldquoThe Soviet Union and the Berlin Crisisrdquo in Gori and Pons eds The So-viet Union and Europe in the Cold War pp 73ndash74

148 Volkogonov The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Empire p 145

149 Soviet commentators were well aware that the Marshall Aid program heralded the establishmentof a Western bloc See Takhnenko ldquoAnatomiya odnogo politicheskogo resheniyardquo





133






out to berdquo for the Soviet Union but we are far less certain150 If we accept thathistory is not predetermined and that different outcomes are always feasiblewe are bound to wonder what might have happened in Europe if despite theurging of the British and French the United States had tried to keep the dooropen to Moscow or at least had tried to keep it open longer rather than shut-ting it with such ordfnality in the spring and summer of 1947 Ironically if theUnited States had more consistently pursued an Open Door strategymdashthevery strategy that the radical historian William Appleman Williams had al-ways insisted was the basic cause of the Cold Warmdashit is possible that the East-West conordmict might have been less intense or perhaps might have beenavoided altogether This surely was the real tragedy of American diplomacy inthe year 1947

134




134



97



Reassessed








97



Reassessed










98






98






99









99










100










100









101









101








102






102








103










103










104










104









105







105









106











106








107






107









108










108








109









109









110









110










111







111






112









112










113





65 Ibid p 272

66 Ibid p 291





113





65 Ibid p 272

66 Ibid p 291






114










114








115








115








116










116











117











117











118









118








119


92 Ibid






119


92 Ibid






120









120










121




103 Ibid

104 Ibid p 302




121




103 Ibid

104 Ibid p 302




122











122










Toward Cold War


123








Toward Cold War


123








124







124










125






122 Cited in ibid






125






122 Cited in ibid



126






127 Ibid p 66



126






127 Ibid p 66





127


128 Ibid p 67








127


128 Ibid p 67






128









128







Conclusion




129



Conclusion




129






130








130








131









131









132






132







133










133







134




134





98






98






99









99










100










100









101









101








102






102








103










103










104










104









105







105









106











106








107






107









108










108








109









109









110









110










111







111






112









112










113





65 Ibid p 272

66 Ibid p 291





113





65 Ibid p 272

66 Ibid p 291






114










114








115








115








116










116











117











117











118









118








119


92 Ibid






119


92 Ibid






120









120










121




103 Ibid

104 Ibid p 302




121




103 Ibid

104 Ibid p 302




122











122










Toward Cold War


123








Toward Cold War


123








124







124










125






122 Cited in ibid






125






122 Cited in ibid



126






127 Ibid p 66



126






127 Ibid p 66





127


128 Ibid p 67








127


128 Ibid p 67






128









128







Conclusion




129



Conclusion




129






130








130








131









131









132






132







133










133







134




134





99









99










100










100









101









101








102






102








103










103










104










104









105







105









106











106








107






107









108










108








109









109









110









110










111







111






112









112










113





65 Ibid p 272

66 Ibid p 291





113





65 Ibid p 272

66 Ibid p 291






114










114








115








115








116










116











117











117











118









118








119


92 Ibid






119


92 Ibid






120









120










121




103 Ibid

104 Ibid p 302




121




103 Ibid

104 Ibid p 302




122











122










Toward Cold War


123








Toward Cold War


123








124







124










125






122 Cited in ibid






125






122 Cited in ibid



126






127 Ibid p 66



126






127 Ibid p 66





127


128 Ibid p 67








127


128 Ibid p 67






128









128







Conclusion




129



Conclusion




129






130








130








131









131









132






132







133










133







134




134






100










100









101









101








102






102








103










103










104










104









105







105









106











106








107






107









108










108








109









109









110









110










111







111






112









112










113





65 Ibid p 272

66 Ibid p 291





113





65 Ibid p 272

66 Ibid p 291






114










114








115








115








116










116











117











117











118









118








119


92 Ibid






119


92 Ibid






120









120










121




103 Ibid

104 Ibid p 302




121




103 Ibid

104 Ibid p 302




122











122










Toward Cold War


123








Toward Cold War


123








124







124










125






122 Cited in ibid






125






122 Cited in ibid



126






127 Ibid p 66



126






127 Ibid p 66





127


128 Ibid p 67








127


128 Ibid p 67






128









128







Conclusion




129



Conclusion




129






130








130








131









131









132






132







133










133







134




134





101









101








102






102








103










103










104










104









105







105









106











106








107






107









108










108








109









109









110









110










111







111






112









112










113





65 Ibid p 272

66 Ibid p 291





113





65 Ibid p 272

66 Ibid p 291






114










114








115








115








116










116











117











117











118









118








119


92 Ibid






119


92 Ibid






120









120










121




103 Ibid

104 Ibid p 302




121




103 Ibid

104 Ibid p 302




122











122










Toward Cold War


123








Toward Cold War


123








124







124










125






122 Cited in ibid






125






122 Cited in ibid



126






127 Ibid p 66



126






127 Ibid p 66





127


128 Ibid p 67








127


128 Ibid p 67






128









128







Conclusion




129



Conclusion




129






130








130








131









131









132






132







133










133







134




134




102






102








103










103










104










104









105







105









106











106








107






107









108










108








109









109









110









110










111







111






112









112










113





65 Ibid p 272

66 Ibid p 291





113





65 Ibid p 272

66 Ibid p 291






114










114








115








115








116










116











117











117











118









118








119


92 Ibid






119


92 Ibid






120









120










121




103 Ibid

104 Ibid p 302




121




103 Ibid

104 Ibid p 302




122











122










Toward Cold War


123








Toward Cold War


123








124







124










125






122 Cited in ibid






125






122 Cited in ibid



126






127 Ibid p 66



126






127 Ibid p 66





127


128 Ibid p 67








127


128 Ibid p 67






128









128







Conclusion




129



Conclusion




129






130








130








131









131









132






132







133










133







134




134






103










103










104










104









105







105









106











106








107






107









108










108








109









109









110









110










111







111






112









112










113





65 Ibid p 272

66 Ibid p 291





113





65 Ibid p 272

66 Ibid p 291






114










114








115








115








116










116











117











117











118









118








119


92 Ibid






119


92 Ibid






120









120










121




103 Ibid

104 Ibid p 302




121




103 Ibid

104 Ibid p 302




122











122










Toward Cold War


123








Toward Cold War


123








124







124










125






122 Cited in ibid






125






122 Cited in ibid



126






127 Ibid p 66



126






127 Ibid p 66





127


128 Ibid p 67








127


128 Ibid p 67






128









128







Conclusion




129



Conclusion




129






130








130








131









131









132






132







133










133







134




134






104










104









105







105









106











106








107






107









108










108








109









109









110









110










111







111






112









112










113





65 Ibid p 272

66 Ibid p 291





113





65 Ibid p 272

66 Ibid p 291






114










114








115








115








116










116











117











117











118









118








119


92 Ibid






119


92 Ibid






120









120










121




103 Ibid

104 Ibid p 302




121




103 Ibid

104 Ibid p 302




122











122










Toward Cold War


123








Toward Cold War


123








124







124










125






122 Cited in ibid






125






122 Cited in ibid



126






127 Ibid p 66



126






127 Ibid p 66





127


128 Ibid p 67








127


128 Ibid p 67






128









128







Conclusion




129



Conclusion




129






130








130








131









131









132






132







133










133







134




134





105







105









106











106








107






107









108










108








109









109









110









110










111







111






112









112










113





65 Ibid p 272

66 Ibid p 291





113





65 Ibid p 272

66 Ibid p 291






114










114








115








115








116










116











117











117











118









118








119


92 Ibid






119


92 Ibid






120









120










121




103 Ibid

104 Ibid p 302




121




103 Ibid

104 Ibid p 302




122











122










Toward Cold War


123








Toward Cold War


123








124







124










125






122 Cited in ibid






125






122 Cited in ibid



126






127 Ibid p 66



126






127 Ibid p 66





127


128 Ibid p 67








127


128 Ibid p 67






128









128







Conclusion




129



Conclusion




129






130








130








131









131









132






132







133










133







134




134







106











106








107






107









108










108








109









109









110









110










111







111






112









112










113





65 Ibid p 272

66 Ibid p 291





113





65 Ibid p 272

66 Ibid p 291






114










114








115








115








116










116











117











117











118









118








119


92 Ibid






119


92 Ibid






120









120










121




103 Ibid

104 Ibid p 302




121




103 Ibid

104 Ibid p 302




122











122










Toward Cold War


123








Toward Cold War


123








124







124










125






122 Cited in ibid






125






122 Cited in ibid



126






127 Ibid p 66



126






127 Ibid p 66





127


128 Ibid p 67








127


128 Ibid p 67






128









128







Conclusion




129



Conclusion




129






130








130








131









131









132






132







133










133







134




134




107






107









108










108








109









109









110









110










111







111






112









112










113





65 Ibid p 272

66 Ibid p 291





113





65 Ibid p 272

66 Ibid p 291






114










114








115








115








116










116











117











117











118









118








119


92 Ibid






119


92 Ibid






120









120










121




103 Ibid

104 Ibid p 302




121




103 Ibid

104 Ibid p 302




122











122










Toward Cold War


123








Toward Cold War


123








124







124










125






122 Cited in ibid






125






122 Cited in ibid



126






127 Ibid p 66



126






127 Ibid p 66





127


128 Ibid p 67








127


128 Ibid p 67






128









128







Conclusion




129



Conclusion




129






130








130








131









131









132






132







133










133







134




134







108










108








109









109









110









110










111







111






112









112










113





65 Ibid p 272

66 Ibid p 291





113





65 Ibid p 272

66 Ibid p 291






114










114








115








115








116










116











117











117











118









118








119


92 Ibid






119


92 Ibid






120









120










121




103 Ibid

104 Ibid p 302




121




103 Ibid

104 Ibid p 302




122











122










Toward Cold War


123








Toward Cold War


123








124







124










125






122 Cited in ibid






125






122 Cited in ibid



126






127 Ibid p 66



126






127 Ibid p 66





127


128 Ibid p 67








127


128 Ibid p 67






128









128







Conclusion




129



Conclusion




129






130








130








131









131









132






132







133










133







134




134





109









109









110









110










111







111






112









112










113





65 Ibid p 272

66 Ibid p 291





113





65 Ibid p 272

66 Ibid p 291






114










114








115








115








116










116











117











117











118









118








119


92 Ibid






119


92 Ibid






120









120










121




103 Ibid

104 Ibid p 302




121




103 Ibid

104 Ibid p 302




122











122










Toward Cold War


123








Toward Cold War


123








124







124










125






122 Cited in ibid






125






122 Cited in ibid



126






127 Ibid p 66



126






127 Ibid p 66





127


128 Ibid p 67








127


128 Ibid p 67






128









128







Conclusion




129



Conclusion




129






130








130








131









131









132






132







133










133







134




134





110









110










111







111






112









112










113





65 Ibid p 272

66 Ibid p 291





113





65 Ibid p 272

66 Ibid p 291






114










114








115








115








116










116











117











117











118









118








119


92 Ibid






119


92 Ibid






120









120










121




103 Ibid

104 Ibid p 302




121




103 Ibid

104 Ibid p 302




122











122










Toward Cold War


123








Toward Cold War


123








124







124










125






122 Cited in ibid






125






122 Cited in ibid



126






127 Ibid p 66



126






127 Ibid p 66





127


128 Ibid p 67








127


128 Ibid p 67






128









128







Conclusion




129



Conclusion




129






130








130








131









131









132






132







133










133







134




134






111







111






112









112










113





65 Ibid p 272

66 Ibid p 291





113





65 Ibid p 272

66 Ibid p 291






114










114








115








115








116










116











117











117











118









118








119


92 Ibid






119


92 Ibid






120









120










121




103 Ibid

104 Ibid p 302




121




103 Ibid

104 Ibid p 302




122











122










Toward Cold War


123








Toward Cold War


123








124







124










125






122 Cited in ibid






125






122 Cited in ibid



126






127 Ibid p 66



126






127 Ibid p 66





127


128 Ibid p 67








127


128 Ibid p 67






128









128







Conclusion




129



Conclusion




129






130








130








131









131









132






132







133










133







134




134





112









112










113





65 Ibid p 272

66 Ibid p 291





113





65 Ibid p 272

66 Ibid p 291






114










114








115








115








116










116











117











117











118









118








119


92 Ibid






119


92 Ibid






120









120










121




103 Ibid

104 Ibid p 302




121




103 Ibid

104 Ibid p 302




122











122










Toward Cold War


123








Toward Cold War


123








124







124










125






122 Cited in ibid






125






122 Cited in ibid



126






127 Ibid p 66



126






127 Ibid p 66





127


128 Ibid p 67








127


128 Ibid p 67






128









128







Conclusion




129



Conclusion




129






130








130








131









131









132






132







133










133







134




134






113





65 Ibid p 272

66 Ibid p 291





113





65 Ibid p 272

66 Ibid p 291






114










114








115








115








116










116











117











117











118









118








119


92 Ibid






119


92 Ibid






120









120










121




103 Ibid

104 Ibid p 302




121




103 Ibid

104 Ibid p 302




122











122










Toward Cold War


123








Toward Cold War


123








124







124










125






122 Cited in ibid






125






122 Cited in ibid



126






127 Ibid p 66



126






127 Ibid p 66





127


128 Ibid p 67








127


128 Ibid p 67






128









128







Conclusion




129



Conclusion




129






130








130








131









131









132






132







133










133







134




134







114










114








115








115








116










116











117











117











118









118








119


92 Ibid






119


92 Ibid






120









120










121




103 Ibid

104 Ibid p 302




121




103 Ibid

104 Ibid p 302




122











122










Toward Cold War


123








Toward Cold War


123








124







124










125






122 Cited in ibid






125






122 Cited in ibid



126






127 Ibid p 66



126






127 Ibid p 66





127


128 Ibid p 67








127


128 Ibid p 67






128









128







Conclusion




129



Conclusion




129






130








130








131









131









132






132







133










133







134




134





115








115








116










116











117











117











118









118








119


92 Ibid






119


92 Ibid






120









120










121




103 Ibid

104 Ibid p 302




121




103 Ibid

104 Ibid p 302




122











122










Toward Cold War


123








Toward Cold War


123








124







124










125






122 Cited in ibid






125






122 Cited in ibid



126






127 Ibid p 66



126






127 Ibid p 66





127


128 Ibid p 67








127


128 Ibid p 67






128









128







Conclusion




129



Conclusion




129






130








130








131









131









132






132







133










133







134




134





116










116











117











117











118









118








119


92 Ibid






119


92 Ibid






120









120










121




103 Ibid

104 Ibid p 302




121




103 Ibid

104 Ibid p 302




122











122










Toward Cold War


123








Toward Cold War


123








124







124










125






122 Cited in ibid






125






122 Cited in ibid



126






127 Ibid p 66



126






127 Ibid p 66





127


128 Ibid p 67








127


128 Ibid p 67






128









128







Conclusion




129



Conclusion




129






130








130








131









131









132






132







133










133







134




134






117











117











118









118








119


92 Ibid






119


92 Ibid






120









120










121




103 Ibid

104 Ibid p 302




121




103 Ibid

104 Ibid p 302




122











122










Toward Cold War


123








Toward Cold War


123








124







124










125






122 Cited in ibid






125






122 Cited in ibid



126






127 Ibid p 66



126






127 Ibid p 66





127


128 Ibid p 67








127


128 Ibid p 67






128









128







Conclusion




129



Conclusion




129






130








130








131









131









132






132







133










133







134




134






118









118








119


92 Ibid






119


92 Ibid






120









120










121




103 Ibid

104 Ibid p 302




121




103 Ibid

104 Ibid p 302




122











122










Toward Cold War


123








Toward Cold War


123








124







124










125






122 Cited in ibid






125






122 Cited in ibid



126






127 Ibid p 66



126






127 Ibid p 66





127


128 Ibid p 67








127


128 Ibid p 67






128









128







Conclusion




129



Conclusion




129






130








130








131









131









132






132







133










133







134




134





119


92 Ibid






119


92 Ibid






120









120










121




103 Ibid

104 Ibid p 302




121




103 Ibid

104 Ibid p 302




122











122










Toward Cold War


123








Toward Cold War


123








124







124










125






122 Cited in ibid






125






122 Cited in ibid



126






127 Ibid p 66



126






127 Ibid p 66





127


128 Ibid p 67








127


128 Ibid p 67






128









128







Conclusion




129



Conclusion




129






130








130








131









131









132






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133







134




134





120









120










121




103 Ibid

104 Ibid p 302




121




103 Ibid

104 Ibid p 302




122











122










Toward Cold War


123








Toward Cold War


123








124







124










125






122 Cited in ibid






125






122 Cited in ibid



126






127 Ibid p 66



126






127 Ibid p 66





127


128 Ibid p 67








127


128 Ibid p 67






128









128







Conclusion




129



Conclusion




129






130








130








131









131









132






132







133










133







134




134






121




103 Ibid

104 Ibid p 302




121




103 Ibid

104 Ibid p 302




122











122










Toward Cold War


123








Toward Cold War


123








124







124










125






122 Cited in ibid






125






122 Cited in ibid



126






127 Ibid p 66



126






127 Ibid p 66





127


128 Ibid p 67








127


128 Ibid p 67






128









128







Conclusion




129



Conclusion




129






130








130








131









131









132






132







133










133







134




134






122











122










Toward Cold War


123








Toward Cold War


123








124







124










125






122 Cited in ibid






125






122 Cited in ibid



126






127 Ibid p 66



126






127 Ibid p 66





127


128 Ibid p 67








127


128 Ibid p 67






128









128







Conclusion




129



Conclusion




129






130








130








131









131









132






132







133










133







134




134





Toward Cold War


123








Toward Cold War


123








124







124










125






122 Cited in ibid






125






122 Cited in ibid



126






127 Ibid p 66



126






127 Ibid p 66





127


128 Ibid p 67








127


128 Ibid p 67






128









128







Conclusion




129



Conclusion




129






130








130








131









131









132






132







133










133







134




134





124







124










125






122 Cited in ibid






125






122 Cited in ibid



126






127 Ibid p 66



126






127 Ibid p 66





127


128 Ibid p 67








127


128 Ibid p 67






128









128







Conclusion




129



Conclusion




129






130








130








131









131









132






132







133










133







134




134








125






122 Cited in ibid






125






122 Cited in ibid



126






127 Ibid p 66



126






127 Ibid p 66





127


128 Ibid p 67








127


128 Ibid p 67






128









128







Conclusion




129



Conclusion




129






130








130








131









131









132






132







133










133







134




134





126






127 Ibid p 66



126






127 Ibid p 66





127


128 Ibid p 67








127


128 Ibid p 67






128









128







Conclusion




129



Conclusion




129






130








130








131









131









132






132







133










133







134




134







127


128 Ibid p 67








127


128 Ibid p 67






128









128







Conclusion




129



Conclusion




129






130








130








131









131









132






132







133










133







134




134





128









128







Conclusion




129



Conclusion




129






130








130








131









131









132






132







133










133







134




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Conclusion




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Conclusion




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