He need to defeat Nazi Germany brought the United States and the Soviet Union together in a common struggle, in spite of their contrasting political systems. Both nations emerged from the Second World War with a renewed sense of purpose, and both tried to use the victory against fascism to promote their claims for legitimacy and leadership in Europe. These circumstances placed a special burden on European nations and their postwar governments, as they were forced to take sides in this global confrontation at a moment of weakness and uncertainty.
The images here, all from May 1945 in Czechoslovakia, display several different possibilities for representing the German defeat in this Eastern European country. Image A shows a Czech civilian rending the Nazi flag, with the Prague skyline in the background and the flags of the major Allied powers and Czechoslovakia overhead. Image B depicts a triumphant Czech laborer wielding a rifle
And socialist red flag standing over the body of a dead German soldier. Image C depicts portraits of Stalin and the Czech
A. Czech propaganda poster celebrating German defeat, May 1945.
B. Another Czech propaganda poster, May 1945.
Leaders accepted as the price of defeating Hitler and others ignored so as to avoid a dangerous confrontation. When visiting Moscow in 1944, Churchill and Stalin quietly bargained over their respective spheres of influence, offering each other “percentages” of the countries that were being liberated. The Declaration of Principles of Liberated Europe issued at Yalta in 1945 guaranteed free elections, but Stalin believed that the framework of Allied cooperation gave him a free hand in Eastern Europe. Stalin’s siege mentality pervaded his authoritarian regime and cast nearly everyone at home or abroad as a potential threat or enemy of the state. Yet Soviet policy did not rest on personal paranoia alone. The country’s catastrophic wartime losses made the Soviets determined to maintain political, economic, and military control of the lands they had liberated from Nazi rule. For the Soviets, Eastern Europe served as both “a sphere and a shield.” When their former allies resisted their demands, the Soviets became suspicious, defensive, and aggressive.
In Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union used a combination of diplomatic pressure, political infiltration, and military power to create “people’s republics” sympathetic to Moscow. In country after country, the same process unfolded: first, states set up coalition governments that excluded former Nazi sympathizers; next came coalitions dominated by communists; finally, one party took hold of all the key positions of power. This was the process that prompted Winston Churchill, speaking at a college graduation in Fulton, Missouri, in 1946, to say that “an Iron Curtain” had “descended across Europe.” In 1948, the Soviets crushed a Czechoslovakian coalition government—a break
C. Czech propaganda card, May 1945.
President Edvard Benes above two columns of Soviet and Czech soldiers marching together under their respec
Tive flags. Benes, who had been president of Czechoslovakia before the war, was returned to office in October 1945,
Only to be forced to resign in 1948 after a successful coup by the Soviet-backed Communist party.
Questions for Analysis
1. How do these three images portray the victory over the Germans?
2. How do these images deal with the question of Czechoslovakian nationalism?
3. Which of the three images most coincides with the Soviet view of the Czech situation?
With Yalta’s guarantee of democratic elections that shocked many. By that year, governments dependent on Moscow had also been established in Poland, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria. Together, these states were referred to as the Eastern bloc.
The Soviet campaign to control Eastern Europe did not go unchallenged. The Yugoslavian communist and resistance leader Marshal Tito (Josip Broz, 1892-1980) fought to keep his government independent of Moscow. Unlike most Eastern European communist leaders, Tito came to power on his own during the war. He drew on support from Serbs, Croats, and Muslims in Yugoslavia—thanks to his wartime record, which gave him political authority rooted in his own country. Moscow charged that Yugoslavia had “taken the road to nationalism,” or become a “colony of the imperialist nations,” and expelled the country from the communist countries’ economic and military pacts. Determined to reassert control elsewhere, the Soviets demanded purges in the parties and administrations of various satellite governments. These began in the Balkans and extended through Czechoslovakia, East Germany, and Poland. The fact that democratic institutions had been shattered before the war made it easier to establish dictatorships in its aftermath. The purges succeeded by playing on fears and festering hatreds; in several areas, those purging the governments attacked their opponents as Jewish. Anti-Semitism, far from being crushed, remained a potent political force—it became common to blame Jews for bringing the horrors of war.
The end of war did not mean peace. In Greece, as in Yugoslavia and through much of the Balkans, war’s end brought a
Local communist-led resistance to the verge of seizing power. The British and the Americans, however, were determined to keep Greece in their sphere of influence, as per informal agreements with the Soviets. Only large infusions of aid to the anticommunist monarchy allowed them to do so. The bloody civil war that lasted until 1949 took a higher toll than the wartime occupation. Greece’s bloodletting became one of the first crises of the Cold War and a touchstone for the United States’ escalating fear of communist expansion. “Like apples in a barrel infected by the corruption of one rotten one, the corruption of Greece would infect Iran and all to the East. . . Africa. . . Italy and France,” warned Dean Acheson in 1947, then deputy head of America’s State Department. “[N]ot since Rome and Carthage had there been such a polarization of power on this earth.”
Defeated Germany lay at the heart of these two polarizing power blocs and soon became the front line of their conflict. The Allies had divided Germany into four zones of occupation. Although the city of Berlin was deep in Soviet territory, it too was divided. The occupation zones were intended to be temporary, pending an official peace settlement. But the Soviets and the French, British, and Americans quarreled over reparations and policies for the economic development of Germany. Administrative
GERMAN COMMUNISTS PROTEST IN BERLIN AGAINST THE MARSHALL PLAN, 1952. Cold War tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union divided Europeans against one another. The signs in this protest read "Strength and Labor through Trade with the East!" and "Against the Marshall Plan [which] brings unemployment and poverty." ¦ What made the question of U. S. economic assistance so controversial for Germans?
Conflicts among the Western powers were almost as intense as their disagreements with the Soviets; Britain and the United States nearly had a serious falling out over food supply and trade in their zones. Yet the quickening Cold War put those arguments on hold, and in 1948 the three Western allies began to create a single government for their territories. They passed reforms to ease the economic crisis and introduced a new currency—a powerful symbol of economic unity. The Soviets retaliated by cutting all road, train, and river access from the western zone to West Berlin, but the Western allies refused to cede control over the capital. For eleven months, they airlifted supplies over Soviet territory to the besieged western zone of Berlin, a total of 12,000 tons of supplies carried by hundreds of flights every day. The Berlin blockade lasted nearly a year, from June 1948 to May 1949. It ended with the creation of two Germanies: the Federal Republic in the west and the German Democratic Republic in the former Soviet zone. Within a few short years both countries looked strikingly like armed camps.
The United States countered the expansion of Soviet power and locally based communist movements with massive programs of economic and military aid to Western Europe. In a 1947 speech to Congress arguing for military assistance to anticommunists in Greece, President Harry Truman set out what would come to be called the Truman Doctrine, a pledge to support the resistance of “free peoples” to communism. The Truman Doctrine, however, also tied the contest for political power to economics. The American president declared the Soviet-American conflict to be a choice between “two ways of life.” A few months later, Secretary of State George Marshall outlined an ambitious plan of economic aid to Europe, including, initially, the Eastern European states: the European Recovery Program. The Marshall Plan provided $13 billion of aid over four years (beginning in 1948), targeted to industrial redevelopment. The plan supplied American tractors, locomotive engines, food, technical equipment, and capital to participating states. Unlike a relief plan, however, the Marshall Plan encouraged the participating states to diagnose their own economic problems and to develop their own solutions. The Marshall Plan also encouraged coordination between European countries, partly out of idealism (some spoke of a “United States of Europe”) and partly to dissuade France from asking for reparations and trying to dismantle the German economy. With a series of other economic agreements, the Marshall Plan became one of the building blocks of European economic unity. The American program, however, required
GERMANY DIVIDED AND THE BERLIN AIRLIFT. In the
Summer of 1948, the Soviet Union blocked routes through the German Democratic Republic to the Western Allies zone of Berlin. The blockade exacerbated tensions between the Soviet Union and the United States and forced the Allies to airlift supplies to West Berlin. At one point, planes landed in Berlin every three minutes. ¦ Looking at the map, why were the Western Allies able to airlift so much food with so much frequency? ¦ How did this event lead to the eventual division of Germany into two nations? ¦ What were the consequences of this division for the German people?
Measures such as decontrol of prices, restraints on wages, and balanced budgets. The Americans encouraged opposition to left-leaning politicians and movements that might be sympathetic to communism.
The United States also hastened to shore up military defenses. In April 1949, Canada, the United States, and representatives of Western European states signed an agreement establishing the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Greece, Turkey, and West Germany were later added as members. An armed attack against any one of the NATO members would now be regarded as an attack against all and bring a united military response. NATO established a joint military command in 1950, with Dwight Eisenhower, the wartime commander of Allied forces in the West, as its senior military officer. NATO’s ground forces began with thirty divisions in 1950, and by 1953 had nearly sixty—including, perhaps most surprising, a dozen divisions from the young state of West Germany. West German rearmament had been the subject of agonizing debate, particularly in Britain and France, but American pressure and a sense of strategic necessity led to its acceptance within Western Europe. Among the most striking aspects of the Second World War’s aftermath was how rapidly Germany was reintegrated into Europe. In the new Cold War world, the West quickly came to mean anticommunism. Potentially reliable allies, whatever their past, were not to be punished or excluded.
NATO’s preparations for another European war depended heavily on air power, a new generation of jet bombers that would field the ultimate weapon of the age, the atomic bomb. Thus any conflict that broke out along the new German frontier threatened to dwarf the slaughter that had so recently passed.
Two Worlds and the Race for the Bomb
The Soviets viewed NATO, the Marshall Plan, and especially the United States’ surprising involvement in Europe’s affairs with mounting alarm. Rejecting an original offer of Marshall Plan aid, they established an Eastern European version of the plan, the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, or Comecon. In 1947, the Soviets organized an international political arm, the Cominform (Communist Information Bureau), responsible for coordinating worldwide communist policy and programs. They responded to NATO with the establishment of their own military alliances, confirmed by the Warsaw Pact of 1955. This agreement set up a joint command among the states of Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and East Germany and guaranteed the continued presence of Soviet troops in all those countries.
All these conflicts were darkened by the shadow of the nuclear arms race. In 1949, the Soviet Union surprised American intelligence by testing its first atom bomb (modeled on the plutonium bomb that Americans had tested in 1945). In 1953, both superpowers demonstrated a new weapon, the hydrogen or “super” bomb, which was a thousand times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Within a few years, both countries developed smaller bombs and systems of delivery that made them usable. Intercontinental missiles were built that could field first one and then several nuclear warheads, fired from land or from a new generation of atomic-powered submarines that roamed the seas at all times ready to act. J. Robert Oppenheimer warned that the H-bomb so dramatically raised the ability to make war against civilians that it could become a “weapon of genocide.” Beyond the grim warnings that nuclear war would wipe out human civilization, the bomb had more specific strategic consequences. The nuclearization of warfare fed into the polarizing effect of the Cold War, for countries without nuclear arms found it difficult to avoid joining either the Soviet or American pact.
Over the long term, it encouraged a disparity between two groups of nations: on the one hand, the superpowers, with their enormous military budgets and, on the other, nations that came to rely on agreements and international law. It changed the nature of face-to-face warfare as well, encouraging “proxy wars” between clients of the superpowers and raising fears that local conflicts might trigger general war.
The hydrogen bomb quickly took on enormous cultural significance as the single most compelling symbol of the age. It seemed to confirm both humanity’s power and its vulnerability. The leaps in knowledge that it represented boosted contemporaries’ confidence in science and progress. At the same time, weapons of mass destruction and
U. S. AND SOVIET VIEWS OF THE ARMS RACE. From 1946 to 1958, the United States exploded multiple nuclear weapons in tests at the Bikini Atoll in the Pacific Ocean. The Soviet Union's first successful nuclear test came in 1949. These posters, both apparently depicting the Pacific site of U. S. nuclear testing, demonstrate the attempts by both governments to use images of nuclear warfare in communicating with their populations. The U. S. civil defense poster (right) seeks to convince the American population that "it can happen here" while the Soviet poster (left) states simply "het!" ("no!") ¦ Coming so soon after the destruction of World War II, how might such images have been received by the populations of the United States and the Soviet Union?
Humanity’s emerging power to obliterate itself raised gnawing questions about whether that confidence was misplaced.
Was the Cold War inevitable? Could the Americans and the Soviets have negotiated their disagreements? On the Soviet side, Stalin’s personal suspiciousness, ruthlessness, and autocratic ambitions combined with genuine security concerns to fuel the Cold War mentality. U. S. leaders, for their part, believed that the devastation of the Continent gave the Soviets an opportunity to establish communist regimes in Western as well as Eastern Europe. Western Europeans alone could not respond effectively to multiplying postwar crises in Germany, Greece, and elsewhere. The United States, too, was unwilling to give up the military, economic, and political power it had acquired during the war. As it turned away from its traditional isolationism, the U. S. thus articulated new strategic interests with global consequences, including access to European industry and far-flung military bases. These interests played into Soviet fears. In this context, trust became all but impossible.
A new international balance of power quickly produced new international policies. In 1946, George Kennan argued that the United States needed to make containing the Soviet threat a priority. The Soviets had not embarked on world revolution, Kennan said. Thus the United States needed to respond not with “histrionics: with threats or blustering or superfluous gestures of outward toughness” but rather “by the adroit and vigilant application of counterforce at a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points.” Containment became the point of reference for U. S. foreign policy for the next forty years.
At its height, the Cold War had a chilling effect on domestic politics in both countries. In the Soviet Union, writers and artists were attacked for deviation from the party line. The party disciplined economists for suggesting that Western European industry might recover from the damage it had sustained. The radio blared news that Czech or Hungarian leaders had been exposed as traitors. In the United States, congressional committees launched campaigns to root out “communists” everywhere. On both sides of the Iron Curtain, the Cold War intensified everyday anxiety, bringing air-raid drills, spy trials, warnings that a way of life was at stake, and appeals to defend family and home against the menacing “other.”
Stalin died in 1953. Nikita Khrushchev’s slow accession to power, not secure until 1956, signaled a change of direction. Khrushchev possessed a kind of earthy directness that, despite his hostility to the West, helped for a time to
Ease tensions. Stalin had secluded himself in the Kremlin; Khrushchev traveled throughout the world. On a visit to the United States in 1959, he traded quips with Iowa farmers and was entertained at Disneyland. Khrushchev was a shrewd politician, switching quickly between angry antiAmerican rhetoric and diplomatic reconciliation. Showing his desire to reduce international conflict, Khrushchev soon agreed to a summit meeting with the leaders of Britain, France, and the United States. This summit led to a series of understandings that eased the frictions in heavily armed Europe and produced a ban on testing nuclear weapons above ground in the early 1960s.
Khrushchev’s other change of direction came with his famous “secret speech” of 1956, in which he acknowledged (behind the closed doors of the Twentieth Party Congress) the excesses of Stalin’s era. Though the speech was secret, Krushchev’s accusations were widely discussed. The harshness of Stalin’s regime had generated popular discontent and demands for a shift from the production of heavy machinery and armaments to the manufacture of consumer goods, for a measure of freedom in the arts, for an end to police repression. How, under these circumstances, could the regime keep de-Stalinization within safe limits? The thaw did unleash forces that proved difficult to
World History
