The creation of NATO and a formal division of Germany solidified the split in Europe, leaving little room for further diplomatic bargaining. Yet there were two events in the fall of 1949 potent enough to change Soviet strategic calculations and the general Cold War stalemate. The first one was the end of the US atomic monopoly, publicly acknowledged by President Truman on September 23. The Kremlin was greatly relieved by this breakthrough, which provided much-needed reassurance against the American atomic ace, but the bomb was neither integrated into Soviet military doctrine nor assigned to troops until after Stalin’s death.
The second critical development of 1949 that redounded to the strategic advantage of the Kremlin was that it secured a giant new ally in the East. In 1945-47, Stalin carefully kept his options open, maintaining close contacts with both sides in the Chinese Civil War. This caution was in line with his general skepticism about revolutionary prospects in Asia. For Stalin, local Communists were too nationalistic, too immature, and too independent to be trusted. He paid little attention to their liberation struggles. Stalin’s constant message to Communist leaders of Indochina and Indonesia was to go slow, avoid revolutionary goals, and concentrate instead on an agenda for national liberation. But, as the tide in China’s Civil War turned against the Nationalists and as Soviet-American relations deteriorated in Europe, Stalin moved to a closer partnership with Mao Zedong. The establishment of Communist control over mainland China laid the basis for institutionalizing a new relationship between the two most populous Communist regimes on earth. Stalin ultimately agreed to annul the 1945 Sino-Soviet Treaty with Chiang Kai-shek, admitting to Mao that “for us it entails certain inconveniences and we will have to struggle against Americans. But this we have already learned to live with."124
The new Sino-Soviet treaty of friendship, alliance, and mutual assistance, signed on February 14, 1950, after tense bargaining, provided for military assistance in case of aggression from Japan and its associates, along with a mutual pledge not to take part in coalitions hostile to either party. According to other agreements, the Soviet Union was to yield control over the Chinese Eastern railroad with its entire huge infrastructure, to transfer to China all its property in Dalian, and to evacuate its Port Arthur (Lushun) naval base with no compensation for construction costs incurred prior to 1945. These big concessions were reciprocated by secret agreements providing for Soviet special rights in Xinjiang and Manchuria, which in effect preserved this area as a Soviet buffer zone. Overall, in Stalin’s eyes, the benefits of a Sino-Soviet alliance clearly outweighed any substantial concessions. China’s incorporation into the socialist camp promised not only to serve Soviet security interests in East Asia and the Far East, but also to change the overall correlation of forces in the Cold War.
The momentous events of late 1949 and early 1950 prompted Stalin to endorse North Korea’s attack on South Korea. The main Soviet interest in the area was to prevent Japan and the United States from using the Korean peninsula to attack Manchuria and the Soviet Far East as Japan had done in the 1930s. Until the end of 1949, Moscow restrained Kim Il Sung from attempting to unite the country by military force. Such an attempt, warned Soviet diplomats, was likely to result in US military intervention under UN auspices and a renewed American occupation of the South.
But on January 30 - a week after his decisive meeting with Mao - Stalin changed his mind. Most likely the dictator was tempted to make up for the Soviet retreat in Europe and enlarge a territorial springboard from which to threaten Japan. Second, the emergence of the new ally in Asia with its huge manpower resources made it possible, ifnecessary, to assist Kim Il Sung and in the process to lock China firmly into the Soviet orbit by setting it against the United States. Finally, a continued denial of Kim Il Sung’s request in the presence of comrades from the new Communist China might have endangered the Kremlin’s leadership in the Communist world and encouraged Mao’s pretensions to that role.
During his talks with Kim II Sung, Stalin gave a new estimate of the situation: the victorious Chinese Communists were now fTee to assist the North; furthermore, the Americans would have no stomach to fight China after it became a Soviet ally and would be reluctant to interfere in Korea now that the USSR had acquired the atomic bomb. Stalin’s miscalculations became obvious early on: the Americans intervened under the UN flag, the Chinese equivocated, and the North Koreans were soon on the run. By early October, Stalin contemplated a total defeat ofKim Il Sung rather than a direct clash with the United States, but after intensive arm-twisting managed to encourage Mao to send his armies into battle. Pledging Soviet help in case of an American attack on China, Stalin hoped that the United States would not risk an all-out war against his main ally and did everything he could to avoid a direct superpower confrontation.
This hope proved to be justified once the war became stabilized. Stalin, then, was in no hurry to stop the bleeding of his "main enemy." "This war poisons Americans’ blood," was his blunt remark to Zhou Enlai in August 1952. "Americans realize that the war is detrimental for them and will have to stop it."125 Until he died in March 1953, Stalin encouraged Mao and Kim Il Sung to stall ceasefire talks. But while the outcome of the Korean War looked like a draw, its long-term consequences were very negative for the Soviet Union. The conflict led to a massive rearmament of the United States and NATO’s transformation into a full-fledged military alliance; it also boosted the United States’ long-term military presence in the region.
Faced with a militarization of NATO, Moscow began to flesh out its own military alliance in Europe. During a January 1951 meeting with party leaders and defense ministers from Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, and Hungary, Stalin laid out a crash program for building up their national armies and defense industries. To increase defense cooperation within the Soviet bloc, a Military Coordination Committee was set up. Participants’ accounts of that meeting point to a defensive rationale: Stalin wanted to repel any "aggression from the West," which now looked increasingly likely to Moscow.126 By 1953, the Soviet military budget had doubled from its 1948 level.
Preparing for the worst, Stalin still tried to block the final moves toward West Germany’s integration into a West European army. The famous Soviet notes of March-April 1952 were a desperate last-minute attempt to torpedo
Western agreements that envisioned the creation of a European Defense Community to include West Germany. Whether Stalin was truly ready to sacrifice his puppet state in East Germany for a neutral, united, and demilitarized Germany, or whether he pushed this scheme mostly for propaganda purposes, remains unclear. But the West did not test his intentions; their rejection of his demarche cleared the way for the final Soviet steps to set East Germany on a course of socialist construction, rearmament, and rapid integration into the Soviet bloc.
World History
