Before there can be a grand strategy there must be a need for one: a conflict that goes beyond the normal disputes of international relations, for which diplomacy is the remedy. Because we know that the Cold War followed World War II, it is easy to assume that the leaders of the victorious coalition knew this too and were preparing for the struggle that lay before them. This was not the case. Indeed, it is doubtful that any of those leaders, prior to 1945, anticipated a "cold war" as we have come to understand that term - with the sole exception of Iosif Stalin.
We do not often think of Stalin as a grand strategist, but perhaps we should. He rose to the top in the Kremlin hierarchy by systematically eliminating rivals who underestimated him. He transformed the Soviet Union from an agrarian state into an industrial great power. He then led that state from a devastating military defeat to an overwhelming triumph in less than four years. When World War II ended, Stalin had been in power for almost two decades: he alone among postwar leaders had had the time, the experience, and the uncontested authority to shape a long-term plan for the future.
Stalin’s strategy had several objectives, the first of which was to continue the acceleration of history his predecessor Vladimir Ilich Lenin had begun. Karl Marx had identified class conflict as the mechanism that would cause capitalism to give way to socialism and then to Communism, at which point states would wither away. But Marx had been as vague about when this would happen as he had been precise about where it would occur: in the great industrial societies of Europe. Lenin sought to hasten the process by starting a revolution from the top down in Russia, with the expectation that it would spark revolutions from the bottom up in Germany, Britain, and other countries in which workers were supposedly waiting to overthrow their capitalist masters. They had not done so, however, by the time Lenin died in 1924.
That disappointment led Stalin toward another method of advancing the Communist cause: he would industrialize Russia, and then use it as a base from which to spread revolution elsewhere. He undertook this process during the 1930s with little regard for the human or material costs. He also knew, though, that his accomplishments would mean little unless the USSR was safe from external attack. One could hardly expect capitalists to welcome the emergence of a strong socialist state whose goal it was to end their own existence.
This led to the second of Stalin’s objectives: a fusion of traditional Russian imperialism with Marxist-Leninist ideology. Lenin regarded imperialism as the highest form of capitalism, but since capitalism was doomed he thought imperialism was also. He never saw the reconstruction of empire as a way to speed the destruction of capitalism. Stalin’s strategy, however, required extending the Soviet Union’s boundaries as far as possible, for with Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan on the rise, the international environment was hardly benign. The most plausible justification was to claim all the lands the Russian tsars had once possessed, together with spheres of influence beyond them that would allow only "friendly" neighbors.
From this perspective, Stalin’s apparent inconsistencies between 1935 and 1945 - his call for the League of Nations to resist the aggressors, his support for the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War, his 1939 "non-aggression" pact with Adolf Hitler, his alliance with the United States and Great Britain after Germany attacked in 1941, his determination to retain his wartime gains after the war - reflected a single underlying priority, which was to ensure the safety of the Soviet state, the base from which the international proletarian revolution would in time spread. Imperialism now had a revolutionary purpose.
The third and final objective in Stalin’s grand strategy was to await the selfdestruction of capitalism. Stalin firmly believed, as had Lenin, that "internal contradictions" arising from an inability to resolve economic crises would produce rivalries among capitalist states which would eventually lead them to attack one another. The two world wars had arisen, after all, from just such causes: why should there not be a third that would bring about capitalism’s demise once and for all?
Until that happened, the Soviet Union would rebuild its strength, absorbing the new possessions victory had brought it while letting the United States, Great Britain, and the other capitalist countries stumble into the next war. It was a curiously passive program for a revolutionary, but it reflected Stalin’s conviction that the forces of history were on his side: the "science" of Marxism-Leninism guaranteed it. At no point did he share the capitalists’ interest in a stable postwar order. Such a system could only come, he believed, with a victory for Communism everywhere. It was in this sense, then, that Stalin anticipated a "cold war," and developed a grand strategy for conducting it.
World History
