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 AGLOBAL
HISTORY of the
COLD WAR,
1945–1991
Philip Jenkins
A Global History of the Cold War, 1945–1991
 Philip Jenkins

A Global History of the

Cold War, 1945–1991
Philip Jenkins
Institute for Studies of Religion
Baylor University
Waco, TX, USA

ISBN 978-3-030-81365-9    ISBN 978-3-030-81366-6 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81366-6

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 Contents

1 Introduction  1

Part I Between Wars? 1945–1967  17

2 Origins: The World in 1946 19

3 The Struggle for Europe 37

4 Nuclear Perils 57

5 Asian Theaters 73

6 Decolonization and Third World Struggles 91

7 Khrushchev and Kennedy107

Part II Living in the Cold War 121

8 National Security and Repression123

9 Spies, Saboteurs, and Defectors137

10 Cold War Cultures151

v
vi Contents

Part III The Struggle Redefined: 1968–1991 171

11 Crisis of Ideologies: The World in 1968173

12 A Cold Peace, or War by Other Means?187

13 Four Minutes to Midnight: The World in 1980203

14 The New Struggle213

15 Endgame229

16 Conclusion: Winners, Losers, and Inheritors245

Index255
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Near Omaha, Nebraska, stands Offutt air base, which from 1948 through
1992 was the home base for the US Strategic Air Command (SAC). Founded
in 1946, the SAC was tasked with organizing vast nuclear-armed bomber fleets
which ideally would deter any foe tempted to attack the country. Within a few
years, these were increasingly augmented by missiles. Offutt was chosen as
headquarters because Nebraska stood at the heart of the continental United
States and was furthest removed from potential enemy bomber attacks. From
1959, Offutt was defended by powerful surface-to-air missiles. The SAC
remained active and on perpetual watch until it stood down in 1992, following
the end of the global confrontation that we call the Cold War.
Offutt became home to a museum displaying key aircraft in US military his-
tory, which later moved to another Nebraska location to become the Strategic
Air Command and Aerospace Museum. This is an extraordinary place, with
many tangible remains of that frightening era. The stars of the large collection
include such astonishing items as a gigantic Convair B-36 bomber, with its
230-foot wingspan. With a combination of jet engines and multiple piston-­
driven propellers, some versions of the B-36 had an intercontinental range of
10,000 miles. From the time it entered into service in 1948 until its replace-
ment by the B-52 in 1955, the B-36 was a mainstay of the US strategic arsenal,
and over 360 such aircraft were built. These aircraft, and other later weapon
systems, were intended to bear the nuclear arms that would annihilate the
Soviet Union, causing many millions of deaths. At the same time, Soviet equiv-
alents would be extinguishing great cities in the US and Europe.
What makes this museum so distinctive is that it commemorates a war that
was never fought or, at least, in anything like the way that was contemplated.
In consequence, no B-36 ever engaged in combat of any kind. The B-36 never
achieved the legendary fame of other aircraft like the Flying Fortress or the
Spitfire, and never featured in popular culture depictions of heroic deeds or

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2021
P. Jenkins, A Global History of the Cold War, 1945–1991,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81366-6_1
2 P. JENKINS

futile missions. We can view that achievement—that non-war—in different

ways. We might be extremely thankful that wise policies and effective deter-
rents prevented such a catastrophe, or else we might be outraged and angry
that anyone ever contemplated such horrific slaughter. But the importance of
the story cannot be exaggerated. Both in the threat that was posed to human
civilization and the fact that the ultimate confrontation was averted, we are
looking at one of the most significant facts in human history.

What Kind of War?

If the importance of the Cold War is beyond doubt, its unusual quality raises
some intriguing issues for a historian. When we describe other wars, such as the
Napoleonic conflicts or the Second World War, we know exactly who the par-
ticipants were, when the conflicts began and ended, and where combat
occurred. We can cite the dates on which wars were declared and when peace
agreements ended them. Not only are none of these basic data available to
anyone studying the Cold War, but historians argue at length about basic terms
and details, about the what, why, when, and where. All these questions con-
tinue to divide historians.
By a conventional definition, the Cold War was a confrontation between the
Soviet Union and the US, and the power blocs that each led, which are con-
ventionally termed the East and the West. This situation lasted from just after
the end of the Second World War to the collapse of the Soviet state, roughly
from 1945 to 1991. In the English-speaking world, the “Cold War” concept
was framed by George Orwell, in 1945, and again by the US presidential
adviser Bernard Baruch in 1947. It was popularized by the 1947 book The
Cold War, by the journalist Walter Lippmann. The conflict was so called in
contrast to the hot and extremely destructive world war that had just con-
cluded and was instead characterized by rivalry that fell short of military action
between US and Soviet forces.
The question then arises whether this could legitimately be termed a war. In
legal terms, the two powers were never even enemies, as war was never declared.
Fighting certainly did occur between states aligned to one or other of the two
blocs, most famously in Korea and Vietnam, while internal revolutions and
repressions claimed many lives. If we combine these various conflicts, then the
“non-war” between East and West resulted in tens of millions of deaths. Even
if the two superpowers avoided total and direct war with each other—if they
avoided the constantly dreaded Third World War, “WWIII”—this was nothing
like true peace.

Who Fought the Cold War? The West

Nor was it obvious who the competing sides were in this singular war, and that
lack of definition would have enormous policy consequences with which we
still live today. In the late 1950s, say, global confrontations were
 1 INTRODUCTION 3

overwhelmingly likely to be depicted in terms of East and West, between

Moscow and Washington, and that was the model commonly assumed among
policymakers on both sides. The B-36s existed to attack Soviet targets and
Soviet forces. Even if a particular situation or problem did not immediately
have such an obvious dimension, then it would be reported and analyzed as
part of the larger Cold War context. If a war had developed in 1962, there was
little doubt about the nations that would be aligned on each side. Yet as we will
see repeatedly, such a simplistic East-West approach would often be misleading.
“The West” is a problematic concept. As commonly presented at the height
of the Cold War, two worlds confronted each other, with the West representing
democracy and freedom, and, by some accounts, the heritage of European
culture and civilization. In the US, college courses on the “Western Heritage”
were semi-seriously described as ranging “From Plato to NATO.” Yet the
US-led alliance of the 1950s included such long-powerful countries as Britain
and France, which had their own distinctive interests and needs, and which
struggled to resist the demands of their overwhelmingly powerful US ally. Nor
was such a transatlantic alignment historically inevitable. Until 1945, different
combinations of allies viewed Germany as their principal enemy. The US saw
no natural or eternal alliance with France or Britain, and throughout the 1920s,
US war plans had imagined a likely conflict against the British Empire (includ-
ing Canada), which would be allied with Japan.
After the Second World War, the US was closely allied with the British
world, and the critically important intelligence-sharing system known as Five
Eyes includes the US, Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. But that
“special relationship” had its definite limits, and the US tried to exclude the
British from nuclear secrets. Britain and Canada meanwhile were much more
open than the US to maintaining diplomatic relations with Communist pow-
ers, including Mao’s China and Fidel Castro’s Cuba, Moreover, that close
Anglophone network did not necessarily extend to other North Atlantic Treaty
Organization (NATO) states. In 1966, France withdrew from NATO’s formal
military structures, and transatlantic tensions became acute during the Vietnam
War years. British and European allies were often disdainful of American cul-
tural expressions. Western populations also varied enormously in their attitudes
toward Communism. Throughout the Cold War years, Communist parties in
France and Italy were very powerful organizations commanding mass support,
which was certainly not the case in Britain or Canada, leave alone the
US. Throughout the Cold War, Soviet propaganda and diplomatic efforts
encouraged the detachment of Europe from the US concept of a com-
mon “West.”
Defining “the West” would often be controversial. If indeed the term
referred to a US-led alliance of democratic states opposed to Communism, it
was difficult to include Spain, which was strictly nondemocratic until after
1975, yet which was de facto integrated into US defense arrangements. At dif-
ferent times, dictatorial regimes in Portugal and Greece clearly defined them-
selves as anti-Communist and therefore Western. The US alliance also included
4 P. JENKINS

such key Asian and clearly non-Western nations—Japan, as well as South Korea
and Taiwan (the Republic of China). In the 1970s, Israel sought to expand the
concept of the West and its struggles beyond that central anti-Communist
theme. Israeli leaders presented the country as a part of the “West” engaged in
common cause against terrorism and against hostile Arab and Islamic states.

Who Fought the Cold War? The East

The concept of “the East”—the Communist world—also demands unpacking.
Although US administrations sometimes presented all Communist powers as
integral parts of a solid Eastern Bloc, that view became ever less tenable as the
decades went on. From the 1950s, although Yugoslavia remained Communist,
it became ever more detached from the Soviet alliance in Europe. Other East
European states followed. The Soviets had to struggle constantly to maintain
the loyalty of members of its alliance, the Warsaw Pact, and to ensure that
domestic reforms in these satellite countries did not lead to defiance of its
hegemony. Even a faithful Soviet ally like Cuba’s Fidel Castro was capable of
independent and provocative actions that angered Moscow. During the 1960s,
China became so hostile to the Soviet Union that the two countries came close
to open war. By that point, definitions of Communism itself were in flux. In the
West, the New Left that emerged in the late 1950s presented itself as equally
disdainful of both American and Soviet regimes, and that perspective became
very popular in many societies.
In the early years of the Cold War, the US and the USSR were so inconceiv-
ably stronger than any possible rivals or competitors that it made some sense to
think of their contest in bipolar terms. As the decades progressed, that assump-
tion became ever less plausible.

Beyond East and West

The issue of diversity within the Communist world—the East—had real politi-
cal consequences. Some states and movements were avowedly and wholeheart-
edly pledged to Communism, but others were not, although their policies
borrowed heavily from the left-wing language and assumptions. So how did
each side assess its potential friends and enemies? What decided whether a hos-
tile or critical government was actually part of the enemy camp?
In the 1950s, many nations defined themselves as part of a Third World,
affiliated neither to the Eastern and Western sides in the Cold War, but pro-
claimed values of nationalism, anti-imperialism, neutralism, and non-­alignment.
From an American or Western point of view, a government that spoke the
language of socialism and anti-imperialism might well be a veiled or unadmit-
ted ally of the Soviets, especially if it acted against US economic interests, and
it thus needed to be treated as an enemy. Such a vision neglected purely local
circumstances, grievances, and loyalties. Some crises, which were at the time
seen as East-West battles, can in retrospect be seen as expressions of
 1 INTRODUCTION 5

nationalism and anti-imperialism, or of legitimate social activism. On occasion,

the strict Cold War interpretation would be correct: Castro’s regime really was
Communist and pro-Soviet. At other times, the view proved incorrect. Despite
an early Communist background, South African leader Nelson Mandela was
anything but a tool of Soviet Communism.
Such a debate over interpretation was pivotal to the Vietnam struggle that
was so critical to the central years of the Cold War. US policymakers differed
fundamentally as to whether Communist North Vietnam acted as it did because
it was an obedient tool of the Soviet-Chinese world front, or if it really was fol-
lowing its announced principles of nationalism. Each interpretation demanded
a very different set of policies and reactions. What we decide about these moti-
vations shapes our understanding of the actual scale and scope of the Cold War.
If North Vietnam was an integral part of the Communist Bloc, then the war
was a principal battlefront of that wider struggle. If we emphasize the national-
ist role in the struggle, then the Cold War context is less central.
The problem of understanding motives was further complicated by the role
of religion in shaping political ideology. To some extent, religious language
and motives ran throughout the whole conflict, and the language of “defend-
ing Christian civilization” was important in the West from the 1940s. But new
dimensions of religion and faith-based activism came to play an ever greater
role in political ideology from the 1970s onward. Both the US and the Soviets
repeatedly failed to comprehend that religion might be an authentic motivator
of political action and resistance, rather than a thin disguise for some secular
cause. When the older bipolar world view failed to pay proper attention to
nationalism and religion, it was ignoring or underplaying very potent drivers of
human affairs. This confusion would become apparent in the understandings
that each side developed of the Arab-Israeli conflict, or successive crises in Iran,
Poland, Lebanon, and Afghanistan.
Complicating the language of “war” is the fact that each of the main partici-
pants sought to undermine its enemy by subversive actions that fell short of
open military combat. If Americans and Russians did not fight an apocalyptic
battle in central Germany, then for almost half a century the two sides actually
did fight through proxies and surrogates, who might or might not wear uni-
forms. But in domestic matters, as in international, reliably identifying such
enemy proxies or agents was not an easy task. Both sides debated whether
protesters and dissidents in their own respective societies were complaining
about authentic injustices, or if they might actually be tools of the other side in
the global confrontation. In the US context, right-wingers often saw a sinister
Soviet hand directing the Civil Rights protests led by Martin Luther King Jr.
Soviet authorities were no less convinced about the Central Intelligence Agency
(CIA) sponsorship of the country’s human rights activists, or the surging dem-
ocratic movement in Poland. In both cases, governments or political factions
found conspiratorial interpretations valuable because they served at once to
stigmatize and delegitimize troubling social movements, and to emphasize the
direct threats posed by the Cold War enemy. For both sides, guilt by
6 P. JENKINS

association was a powerful theme throughout these years. Of its nature, the
Cold War created a hothouse atmosphere for the breeding and cultivation of
conspiracy theories.

When Was the Cold War?

If the “who” component of the Cold War is debatable—the issue of identifying
the respective combatants—then so is the when. In common parlance, the very
phrase “Cold War” most often summons images from the 1950s or early
1960s. For Americans, these might include the McCarthy hearings into domes-
tic Communism, the Cuba missile crisis, civil defense drills, or images of the
SAC’s bomber fleets; and each individual society has its own distinctive roster
of memories and symbols. Crises accumulated between 1947 and 1954, and
then became ever more acute with the arrival of hydrogen bombs in the
mid-­1950s, and intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) delivery systems a
few years afterward. The years between 1958 and 1962 were uniquely perilous.
But such a chronological focus is misleading, as the same fundamental themes,
realities, and dilemmas persisted through the 1980s. So, of course, did the
personalities. The Cold War reached a perilous new height between 1981 and
1984, and the world was arguably as close to annihilation in 1983 as it had
been in the early 1960s.
The chronology issue illustrates very different national approaches. From a
Soviet perspective, the key moment in the story was the Bolshevik Revolution
of 1917, which created a new Communist order. From 1919, the Soviet-­
directed Communist International, the Comintern, encouraged Communist
causes and militancy worldwide. The subsequent decades witnessed numerous
assaults intended to destroy that Communist order. In 1936, the grand alliance
between Hitler’s Germany and militarist Japan was called the anti-Comintern
Pact, the Agreement against the Communist International. Between 1941 and
1945, Germany undertook its near-lethal assault on the USSR, but Soviet his-
tory had usually involved bitter contention with capitalist nations, including
the US. From this perspective, what Westerners call the Cold War was only one
phase of a conflict that had been in progress since 1917, made immeasurably
more dangerous by the new nuclear component.
For West European nations like Britain and France, relations with the Soviet
Union in the years between the two World Wars had often involved conflict,
espionage, and subversion, both in home nations themselves and in their colo-
nial territories. In 1924, false charges of Comintern interference in Britain did
much to overthrow a Labour government in that country. Many of the spy
scandals and exposes that we commonly think of as quintessentially Cold War
events involved espionage activities that occurred in the West during the 1930s,
but which were only revealed in the 1950s. In this framework, the Spanish
Civil War of the 1930s was one of the great set-piece military struggles of the
longer-term Cold War, and the heavy Soviet aid supplied to left-wing forces
closely foreshadowed later events in Korea and Vietnam. Both from the Soviet
 1 INTRODUCTION 7

and the West European points of view, the Second World War marked a brief
and unusual period of alliance and cooperation, which speedily and inevitably
collapsed not long after Nazi Germany was destroyed. Between the wars,
Winston Churchill was legendary as a fire-breathing anti-Communist, a role he
promptly resumed after 1945, when he popularized the term “iron curtain.”
Other countries had their own chronologies. For Poland, the post-1945 con-
flict was a phase in a much longer historical struggle for freedom from Russian
rule, which dated back to the eighteenth century. Poles regarded their defeat
of a Soviet Communist invasion in 1920 as a near-miraculous vindication of
that struggle and of their national identity.
Such rewritings affect our sense of historical period. Scholars sometimes
describe the East-West tensions of the 1980s as a “Second Cold War,” the
assumption being that the first or “real” Cold War occurred in the 1950s and
1960s. That whole post-1945 history was itself a second phase, resuming the
open hostility that had prevailed between 1917 and 1941.
However standard it may seem today, the notion that the fundamental
Soviet-Western rivalry was somehow new after 1945 was chiefly an American
perspective. US armed forces had intervened against the Bolsheviks in 1918,
and the country had a lively domestic Red Scare that ran through the 1920s.
In the US Congress, the House Committee on Un-American Activities began
its fervent quest for Communist infiltrators in 1938. Even so, the nation’s poli-
tics through the interwar years had emphasized isolationism, and avoiding con-
frontation with other powers. (The US still felt entitled to intervene freely in
its poorer neighbors in the Caribbean and Central America.) The administra-
tion of Franklin Roosevelt (1933–1945) sought peaceful relations with the
Soviets, and in 1933, the US finally gave diplomatic recognition to the Soviet
state. Roosevelt also placed the US in opposition to the European powers in
matters involving the colonial empires and decolonization. Only after some
serious internal debate was the US prepared to take the lead against Soviet
advances after 1945. From such an American viewpoint, the Soviet confronta-
tion appears more novel and demanding of explanation than it might appear
elsewhere in the world. American predominance over popular culture and the
academic world ensured that the US chronological perspective became the
norm in other nations that increasingly forgot their own older experiences.
Although the period used here for the Cold War—from 1945 through
1991—does have a clear unity and historical utility, it was to some extent an
American construct.

What Was the Cold War About?

The matter of periodization guides our understanding of the issues at stake in
the Cold War, and the question of what the global struggle was actually about.
The Soviet emphasis on 1917 suggests that this was above all an ideological
contest between Communism and capitalism, or as others might have said,
8 P. JENKINS

between Soviet tyranny and Western freedom. But the conflict was at least as
much geopolitical as ideological.
Historically, states tend to follow certain long-term policies regardless of the
administration in power at any given time, or its ideological coloring. For rea-
sons of economics or geography, they define their spheres of influence in par-
ticular ways. Such long continuities are evident in the Soviet case. In the
nineteenth century, the absolute monarchy of the Tsars regarded certain
regions as essential to its security, and the country’s future growth. The
Russians occupied most of Poland, and a potent pan-Slavist vision presented
Russia as the ultimate guardian of all Slavic and/or Orthodox peoples in
Eastern and Southeastern Europe. Russian governments looked south for the
future expansion of which they dreamed, into the Ottoman Empire and the
Levant, and toward Persia and Afghanistan. A map of Tsarist territorial ambi-
tions around 1900 would also provide a valuable guide to the directions of
Soviet policy through the Cold War. In 1940, Stalin’s government declared
that, beyond redrawing borders in Europe, “its territorial aspirations center
south of the national territory of the Soviet Union, in the direction of the
Indian Ocean.”1 During the Cold War as I am defining it here, both Turkey
and Persia (Iran) would repeatedly be the setting for superpower tensions and
clashes. In pursuing its international goals, the Tsarist regime used intelligence
and secret police systems in ways that strongly foreshadowed later Soviet
behavior. That included the use of surrogates and proxies to carry out terrorist
acts on Western soil, with a view to discrediting the regime’s enemies.
Long continuities are no less apparent in the US instance. From the 1820s,
the US had attempted to exclude European powers from the Americas, north
and south, suggesting that it saw all these territories as within its sphere of
influence: this was the so-called Monroe Doctrine. Throughout the early twen-
tieth century, US forces frequently intervened in Caribbean or Latin nations,
sometimes in countries that would later be pivotal to Cold War rivalries, such
as Cuba and Nicaragua.
Historians dislike counterfactuals, but as a thought experiment, we might
imagine how affairs might have developed if we take Communism out of the
political picture. Suppose that the Russian regime in power in the 1940s was
neither Soviet nor Communist, that it was monarchist or even democratic.
Further assume that this alternative Russia had played such a decisive role in
smashing Nazi Germany, leaving a world balance much like what we actually
know in 1945. The hypothetical non-Communist Russia would still see a vital
interest in expanding its power over Eastern Europe, to supply a buffer against
future invasion, and it would be an obvious tactic to create puppet regimes.
Further West, Russia would confront a vast power vacuum in what had been
the heart of Europe, with the collapse of Germany and Italy, and the extreme
weakness of the Allied victor states, of France, Britain, and the Netherlands.

1
Documents on German Foreign Policy, 1918–1945: series D. US Department of State
(Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1960).
 1 INTRODUCTION 9

Europe was conspicuously in play, and both Russia and the US would face
heavy pressure to fill that resulting vacuum. The twilight of the colonial and
imperial powers created a host of new opportunities and pressures on a global
scale inviting Russian expansion into that country’s historically defined sphere
of expansion, and beyond.
The fact that US and Russian military forces were by far the world’s most
powerful would be central to any future relationships. Even without the ideo-
logical element, something like the Cold War would have been easily imaginable.
But pursuing such a mental exercise also points to its limitations. Of itself,
Marxist ideology did not determine Soviet views of the wider world, but with-
out that ideology, the Soviet Union would never have secured the broad and
devoted international support that so often proved vital to its interests. In
Tsarist times, liberals and radicals around the world had loathed Russia as a
symbol of tyranny and authoritarianism, just as, after 1917, so many would
laud the Soviets as the exemplars of a heroic future. However much outsiders
admired the cultural achievements of Tsarist Russia—all the magnificent litera-
ture, music, and art—these splendors were evidently not associated with the
regime or its policies. Matters were quite different under the Soviets, who com-
manded vast and highly appealing resources in the form of propaganda and soft
power, which exercised immense influence in many parts of the world.
Moreover, these messages were inextricably associated with Communist ideol-
ogy and Soviet politics. This sympathy acquired an institutional foundation
through flourishing Communist parties and affiliated movements in many
nations. In the post-1945 context, this ideological power gave Communism
and Soviet causes real advantages in societies struggling against colonialism in
Africa and Asia, or against imperialism and exploitation in the Americas. The
resulting ideological contest shaped every aspect of Cold War thought, policy-
making, and rhetoric.

How Did Technology Shape the Cold War?

The Cold War was also a technological confrontation, in ways that transcended
ideological struggles. It is tempting, but usually misleading, to describe human
affairs in terms of revolutionary new technologies, to fall into the error of tech-
nological determinism. While such breakthroughs might transform human
interactions, they can never be discussed in isolation. In the case of the Cold
War, it is difficult to avoid such a central emphasis on new forms of weaponry,
above all the nuclear menace, and in popular parlance, the two are inextricably
linked. The Cold War is recalled as the age of intense nuclear fears and vice versa.
At first, nuclear weapons did not greatly escalate the destructive potential of
warfare. Using massed fleets of bombers armed with conventional weapons,
both the Americans and British had caused immense casualties in enemy cities
between 1942 and 1945. But as nuclear weapons grew in effectiveness in the
late 1940s, they raised the prospect of swiftly destroying an enemy nation, at
huge human cost. This trend was vastly amplified in the 1950s, with the
10 P. JENKINS

coming of the hydrogen bomb, which raised the stakes in the struggle to an
almost infinite degree. The first US weapon tested, in 1952, was 450 times
more powerful than the bomb used against Nagasaki, and the Soviets tested
their own device the following year. Actual deployable weapons followed a
couple of years later. Ballistic missiles enormously accelerated the speed with
which such weapons could be delivered anywhere in the world. By 1959, both
the US and the Soviets deployed their intercontinental ballistic missiles,
or ICBMs.
Together, these changes transformed both warfare and international poli-
tics. From the start, they gravely undermined the great Soviet superiority in
conventional military forces in Europe. Although the US and Britain had
deployed very large armies against the Germans, the nature of their societies
made these efforts very difficult to support for any lengthy period. The nuclear
element changed everything. Before 1949, the Soviets had no such resource
themselves, and the West retained a crushing superiority in nuclear arms into
the early 1960s. The existence of thermonuclear weaponry raised the prospect
that a Western attack might swiftly eliminate the Soviet state and much of the
population. Without the potential nuclear threat, it is difficult to imagine how
the Soviets could have resisted military actions against a profoundly weakened
Western Europe during numerous crises from the late 1940s onward. But even
the weaker Soviet nuclear forces could still pose enough of a threat to the
Western powers, and above all to the US, to discourage conventional military
operations that would otherwise have proved very tempting. This would for
instance have included a US invasion of Cuba in 1962. Nuclear weapons played
an essential role in ensuring that the Cold War did not become an outright
world war and also in determining its long time-span.
The nuclear balance of terror ensured that a direct confrontation between
the two key players had to be avoided, literally as a matter of life and death.
This determined the nature of conflict and the means through which rivalries
would be pursued, commonly through clandestine and covert tactics. This
placed a high premium on subverting the rival’s position in his own territories,
to combating his allies and supporters, and building up friendly forces. Guerrilla
and low-intensity operations proliferated, as it was vital to allow each super-
power to deny that it was directly involved in military assaults on its rival. When
the Soviets orchestrated major military interventions in several African nations
in the mid-1970s, they did so largely through Cuban allies and proxies (who
had long dreamed of aggressively expanding their revolution in these direc-
tions). Rather than using massed military forces of their own, the two sides
deployed small numbers of personnel as advisors, trainers, or special forces.
Intelligence and surveillance, both international and domestic, acquired
unprecedented significance. So did effective internal security mechanisms and
policing. All that would have been true regardless of the ideological coloring of
the respective sides, and the key protagonists.
The Cold War is much more than merely “the nuclear age,” or indeed
“nuclear paranoia.” But it is incomprehensible without the nuclear dimension.
 1 INTRODUCTION 11

Where Did the Cold War Take Place?

The Cold War was truly global, even more so than the very wide-ranging activ-
ities associated with the two World Wars. Apart from military encounters or
revolutions, surveillance activities brought East-West competition into every
area of the globe, including the poles, as well as the deep seas, and space itself.
Although the main ground forces confronted each other in Europe, crises and
conflicts could erupt anywhere in the globe, from Laos to Congo, from
Nicaragua to Angola. As it was suggested earlier, the broad range of societies
affected should make it impossible to speak in simple East-West terms, as each
individual situation had its own particular set of circumstances and world views.
Profoundly affecting the shape and outcome of these various global situa-
tions was the break-up of the old colonial empires and subsequent decoloniza-
tion. This constituted a revolutionary change in global affairs as they had
existed over the previous quarter-millennium, when European powers had for-
mally or informally ruled much of the world’s surface. Occupation, defeat, or
near-bankruptcy made it impossible for those once great powers to maintain
that rule, and some faced bloody revolutions and civil wars. Between 1945 and
1965, Britain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Italy lost most or all of
their once-vast imperial possessions in Africa and Asia, and Portugal followed
in the mid-1970s. This is sometimes considered to mark the end of formal
decolonization, although the Soviet Union itself included many conquered
peoples, predominantly Muslims, who had been incorporated into the Russian
Empire in Tsarist tines.
Of itself, that tectonic change did not result from the Cold War, but was
rather an immediate outcome of the Second World War, and just like the revo-
lutionary impact of nuclear weapons, it began quite independently of US-Soviet
rivalries. If the Cold War had not happened, this imperial collapse would still
have proceeded, and it would have resulted in conflicts and chaos across vast
regions of the planet. But as the transformation occurred, it could not fail to
become a factor in this larger East-West strife. Dozens of newly independent
nations came into being, from enormous entities such as India, Indonesia, or
the Democratic Republic of the Congo to tiny statelets. The share of the
world’s population in these regions grew steadily over the coming decades in
consequence of very rapid population growth, which by the 1960s was exciting
Western fears of a population explosion. Many of the new nations were in stra-
tegic locations, or controlled strategic resources, often in huge quantities: the
Congo was a crucial source of uranium. Particularly in the Middle East, the
quest to gain and secure oil resources would always prove a powerful tempta-
tion for both Russia and the US.
For policymakers on both sides, the new opportunities were intoxicating.
And if the overall situation originated outside the Cold War context, matters of
ideology soon became extremely important. With the critique of imperialism
that was fundamental to their value system, the Soviets had an obvious advan-
tage in this emerging battle, and they worked strenuously to build up their
12 P. JENKINS

anti-colonial credentials, arming and training national liberation movements

and revolutionary regimes. The Americans and their allies had to compete
imaginatively, through a combination of economic and political solutions, as
well as direct military efforts. On occasion, the West leaped to assume Soviet
inspiration in particular situations that were in fact entirely local in nature, and
over-reacted accordingly.

Was the Cold War Inevitable?

Time and again, the Cold War involved actions and decisions that seem unpar-
donable and by no means only as they are judged with the benefit of hindsight.
On many occasions, both sides ran risks that could easily have resulted in global
destruction on an apocalyptic scale, with millions dead. Even if such a cata-
clysm was averted, there is plenty of blame to be allocated.
Having said this, it is not easy to imagine circumstances in which the basic
antipathy could have been avoided, especially given the circumstances at the
end of the Second World War. Together, the destruction of the European
power balance, the threat to the imperial systems, and the tremendous might
of the two superpowers—each with its historic needs and demands—made a
confrontation all but certain. Just how this clash would develop was shaped
and constrained by the new environment created by nuclear weapons. At many
points in this book, we will encounter moments when different paths might
have been taken, for better or worse. But the fundamental realities of the Cold
War itself suggest a tragic inevitability.

How Do We Tell the Story of the Cold War?

The Cold War, then, was far more than a simple bipolar clash between a righ-
teous US-led West and an aggressive Communist East. That complexity and
nuance has increasingly been reflected in historical writing on the struggle
through the decades, and the present book seeks to take full account of these
insights.
Through that evolving literature, the historiography, we see the powerful
influence of new kinds of source materials as they became available, but no less
significant were shifting political attitudes, as each society projected its contem-
porary interests and obsessions into the historical past. To that extent, each era
has told its own story of the Cold War, which might be scarcely recognizable
to readers just a decade or so before or afterward. And however much serious
scholars would dislike such language, they have often tried to identify their
particular heroes and villains, who have similarly changed over time. When
consulting any book or scholarly article on this era, we should always begin by
noting the date of publication, as this will tell us much about the amount and
character of the source material available to the particular historian prevailing
at the time of writing, and the attitudes.
 1 INTRODUCTION 13

For Americans at least, the heroic image of the conflict was the normal
interpretation well into the 1960s. Even then, there were dissident voices
who presented a very different view of specific confrontations such as the
Korean War, and one much more sympathetic to Communist motivations
and behavior. Such minority views became much more commonplace as the
US became ever more disenchanted with its experience in Vietnam. In the
1970s, the exposure of vast amounts of materials about the misdeeds of
Western intelligence agencies caused a radical rethinking of many aspects of
the post-1945 Cold War, both within Western nations and, especially, in the
Third World or Global South. Liberal and left-oriented historians became
much more sympathetic to narratives that would once have been confined to
devoted Communist writers. In particular, domestic “Red Scares” and anti-
Communist purges in Western nations were treated as monstrously wrong
and unjustified, as cynical “witch-­hunts.” (We will repeatedly describe these
events in the present book.)
The balance changed again in the 1990s, with the release of masses of hith-
erto secret material from Eastern Bloc nations and also of declassified Western
intelligence materials. This often confirmed the reality of Soviet and
Communist clandestine activities around the world and further allowed a
thorough revision of historic confrontations like the Cuba Missile Crisis. The
release of Eastern Bloc materials has utterly revised our interpretation of ter-
rorist movements in Western nations and often confirmed what were once
speculations about clandestine Communist involvement. Meanwhile, the US
has released information about their surveillance activities in Eastern Bloc
nations, with data that were once regarded as the most secret crown jewel of
the intelligence community.
In the past quarter century, the Cold War has been an immensely fruitful
field for historical research, with a huge outpouring of scholarship that can
barely be touched upon here. Some key themes should however be mentioned.
One is the globalization of research, with the much greater coverage of affairs
in Global South nations. This allows us to understand particular conflicts in
terms of the specific and local forces at work in a society, without imposing the
simplistic East-West framework that might once have been used. This approach
has the added advantage of allowing us to see local groups and individual actors
operating according to their own interests and ideologies, which might or
might not coincide with those of Moscow or Washington.
Throughout the modern wave of globalized studies, scholars must wrestle
with the question of intent. When a situation developed in a particular way, can
we assume that a state or group actively sought that outcome? When, for
instance, we see the expansion of Communist power in Eastern Europe in the
1940s, earlier historians might have seen a simple Soviet plot, directed by Stalin
personally. Closer examination suggests a much more nuanced and contingent
view, closely attuned to diplomatic needs and pressures at any given moment.
In Vietnam, similarly, we have also seen how scholars debate the motivations of
14 P. JENKINS

participants: is it more useful to frame the North Vietnamese as Communist,

or as nationalist? On some such questions, highly experienced and able histori-
ans are still unable to achieve consensus, for instance in the role of Communist
ideology and organization in the early phases of the Cuban Revolution. Was
Fidel Castro a secret Communist from the start? Did he adopt that stance for
strategic reasons? Such debates abound.
Perhaps our greatest problem in telling this story is that we already know the
ending, and that has to condition how we tell the narrative. We know that the
US-Soviet nuclear standoff would eventually be resolved and that Offutt would
ultimately stand down. But during the Cold War itself, such an outcome would
have seemed improbable, to the point of seeming a fairy tale. Modern historical
writing proceeds according to the knowledge that the conflict would end
peacefully, but it is vital not to fall into the trap of assuming that inevitability.
On multiple occasions, the survival of human civilization really was at risk.

Further Reading

As the Cold War affected so much of the world over such a lengthy period, the
volume of possible sources is immense, even if we confine ourselves to mate-
rials in English. The sheer breadth of topics and ongoing debates is sug-
gested by the articles appearing in the prestigious Journal of Cold War
Studies, which has been publishing since 1999. Throughout this book, each
chapter will suggest readings, but from the nature of the topic, these are very
selective indeed, and they lean heavily toward recent work, mainly from the
past decade.
One indispensable collection of essays is Melvyn P. Leffler and Odd Arne
Westad, eds., The Cambridge History of the Cold War (three volumes, 2010),
and see the important contributions in Richard H. Immerman and Petra
Goedde, eds., The Oxford Handbook of the Cold War (2013). Each of these
volumes contains multiple essays on detailed aspects of the Cold War, with
specific chronological, regional, and thematic studies. I have not referred to
these studies individually in the chapters that follow, but they are highly rel-
evant and extremely informative about the particular topics discussed.
There are several fine single volume surveys of the Cold War, including John
Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War: A New History (2005); Michael L. Dockrill
and Michael F. Hopkins, The Cold War, 1945–1991 2nd ed. (2006); Melvyn
P. Leffler, For the Soul of Mankind (2007); Norman Stone, The Atlantic and
its Enemies: A Personal History of the Cold War (2010); and John Lamberton
Harper, The Cold War (2011).
Odd Arne Westad stresses global and Global South dimensions in The Global
Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (2005),
and in his The Cold War: A World History (2017). Compare Lorenz M. Lüthi,
Cold Wars: Asia, the Middle East, Europe (2020). Global conflicts also form
the subject of Paul Thomas Chamberlin’s important study of The Cold War’s
 1 INTRODUCTION 15

Killing Fields: Rethinking the Long Peace (2018). Robert Cowley, ed., The
Cold War: A Military History (2005) addresses the military dimensions of
the conflict. See also Campbell Craig and Fredrik Logevall, America’s Cold
War: The Politics of Insecurity (2012); Ralph B. Levering, The Cold War: A
Post-Cold War History (2016); and Christopher R. W. Dietrich, ed., A
Companion to U.S. Foreign Relations: Colonial Era to the Present (2020).
Dianne Kirby addresses a critical theme in Religion and the Cold War (2003).
For (very) long continuities in political attitudes, see David S. Foglesong, The
American Mission and the “Evil Empire”: The Crusade for a “Free Russia”
Since 1881 (2007).
Throughout this book, I will often refer to works of fiction, whether films,
television productions, or novels, as excellent illustrations of strictly contem-
porary attitudes. Some works in particular are fine historical sources in their
own right, in showing how shrewd individuals responded to the situations
they observed. Some of these fictional productions actually contributed sig-
nificantly to contemporary debates about the issues they were covering. A
list of such possible fictional items could be extended indefinitely.
 PART I

Between Wars? 1945–1967

 CHAPTER 2

Origins: The World in 1946

In 1946, two Western leaders delivered speeches in which they offered radically
different visions of the world. On March 5, at Fulton, Missouri, recently
unseated British Prime Minister Winston Churchill warned of growing Soviet
dominance in Eastern Europe:

The Communist parties, which were very small in all these Eastern States of
Europe, have been raised to pre-eminence and power far beyond their numbers
and are seeking everywhere to obtain totalitarian control. Police governments are
prevailing in nearly every case, and so far, except in Czechoslovakia, there is no
true democracy.1

As he famously declared, “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the

Adriatic, an Iron Curtain has descended across the Continent,” turning the
East into a “Soviet sphere” controlled by Moscow. The Soviet threat was obvi-
ous in Germany, Italy, Turkey, and Iran. The Western nations, acting through
the United Nations, must demonstrate their will to resist Soviet expansion.
Far less remembered than Churchill’s was a speech delivered that September
in New York City, by the former US Vice President Henry Wallace, who was
then serving as Commerce Secretary under President Harry Truman. Wallace
scorned claims of potential Russian ambitions on Western Europe or Latin
America. At the same time, he declared that the US had no business interfering
in the Soviet Union or in Eastern Europe, including the Balkans, which he
consigned to the Soviet sphere of influence. The two sides should coexist
peacefully, each practicing its particular visions of social and economic
arrangements until they would ultimately converge, with growing freedoms in
the Soviet bloc. He favored establishing international control over all nuclear

1
“The Sinews of Peace (‘Iron Curtain Speech’), March 5, 1946,” https://winstonchurchill.
org/resources/speeches/1946-1963-elder-statesman/the-sinews-of-peace/

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 19

Switzerland AG 2021
P. Jenkins, A Global History of the Cold War, 1945-1991,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81366-6_2
20 P. JENKINS

weapons. We should recall that if President Franklin D. Roosevelt had died a

year or two earlier than he actually did in April 1945, then he would have been
succeeded by Wallace. Wallace, in turn, might easily have won the 1944 presi-
dential election in his own right, as FDR’s symbolic heir. As President, Wallace
would then have applied his distinctive principles to post-war relations with
Stalin and the Soviets. That is another of the intriguing might-have-beens of
history.
In retrospect, most would agree that Churchill’s analysis of Soviet ambitions
and tactics was largely correct, while Wallace’s view was optimistic at best. But
without hindsight, it was not clear that the emerging post-war world could not
have found a happier and less threatening accommodation. Only by under-
standing then-recent events, can we understand the deeper forces and pressures
driving toward division and dissension, rather than reconciliation.

From Marx to Lenin

Marxist ideology was thoroughly embedded in the very name of the Soviet
Union, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), which supplanted the
Russian Empire after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. The development of
that ideology is essential to understanding the behavior of the Soviet state dur-
ing and after the Second World War. To say that is certainly not to lay all blame
for the emerging struggles at the feet of the Soviets, but rather to define the
critical issues at stake, and to understand the basic vocabulary.
From the 1840s, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels formulated the theory that
class struggle was the driving force of history. Particular classes dominated in
each society, and over time economic development created and strengthened
new classes, which in turn took power, usually through violent revolution. The
elites of the towns and cities—the bourgeoisie—overthrew the old feudal
classes, until they, in turn, were challenged by the rising forces of the urban and
industrial working class, the proletariat. Assumption of power by this class
would for the first time in history represent a truly democratic society ruled by
the great mass of the people, free from exploitation. Marxists debated whether
such a transition could be achieved through formal democratic means and the
degree of violence that might be needed to accomplish change. Before the First
World War, Marxist thinkers assumed that revolutionary change was certain to
occur in one or more of the most economically developed nations, such as
France or Germany, and few saw relatively backward Russia as a candidate.
Most saw revolutions as spreading rapidly across the advanced world, leaving
few or no nations able or willing to attack the new socialist states.
In early twentieth-century Russia, Vladimir Lenin and the Bolshevik faction
decided that revolutionary violence was needed to overthrow the old state
order, sweep away all its mechanisms, and replace it with a whole new state.
Such a campaign must be led and directed by a highly disciplined vanguard
party. Only in this way could a new regime take full control of the economy,
and effect the changes it believed essential. Those tactics succeeded in the
 2 ORIGINS: THE WORLD IN 1946 21

Russian Revolution of November 1917, in which the Bolsheviks overthrew the

embattled democratic state that had briefly replaced Tsarist power. In theory,
the new country was neither a traditional state nor an empire, but a union of
republics founded on Soviets, on councils of workers, soldiers, and other pro-
gressive groups. But contrary to earlier hopes, the old social order did not eas-
ily fade away after the revolution, which was subject to constant international
assaults, and domestic subversion.
For the new Soviet leaders, those existential threats justified keeping the
country on a permanent footing of internal war. Lenin and his associates spoke
openly of the need to defend the new Soviet entity through acts of violence and
repression against representatives of the old ruling order, through what they
termed revolutionary terror. Already by the time of Lenin’s death in 1924, the
Soviet Union had created a brutal system of secret police and mass imprison-
ment in labor camps. The state was totalitarian, utterly centralized, and allow-
ing no forms of economic or civic organization apart from the state and its
ruling party. A brief period of economic liberalization and market reform, the
New Economic Policy, was abandoned in 1926, as Stalin consolidated his rule
over the nation. The Russian Revolution and the subsequent Soviet experience
sharply divided leftist and progressive movements worldwide between demo-
cratically oriented Socialist parties and Communists, who were thrilled by the
social progress and experiments they saw in the new Soviet state.

Stalin
Repression in the Soviet Union escalated under Joseph Stalin, who led the
country from 1927 through 1953, and who created a god-like cult of personal-
ity and absolute authority. In Stalin’s view, the country’s very success in pro-
gressing toward socialism stimulated further class conflict, demanding ever
greater vigilance and repression. Globally too, as capitalism faced a growing
threat to its very existence during the Crash and Depression of the 1930s, it
responded with ever-more savage and aggressive innovations, such as Fascism
and Nazism, and the Soviet state could never relax its iron discipline if it was to
survive. From 1934 through 1946, the Soviet secret police was known as the
NKVD, the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs. Repressive state power
was directed against many internal enemies, resulting in the mass starvation of
peasants who resisted Soviet rural policies, and ever-widening persecutions and
denunciations of anyone thought to be hostile to the regime. During the most
extreme eras, such as 1937–1938, sweeping purges drew in millions for execu-
tion or imprisonment. Fueling such purges were the confessions drawn from
suspects under torture, which implicated ever-wider networks of acquaintance
in fantastic and groundless charges. Show trials, with their ritualized confes-
sions and denunciations, became a fundamental part of Stalinist rule.
From Lenin’s time, the Soviet Union developed a vast network of labor
camps, which were administered through an agency titled by the acronym
GULAG (Glavnoye Upravleniye Ispravitelno-Trudovykh Lagerey, i.e., “Chief
22 P. JENKINS

Administration of Corrective Labour Camps”). The name became famous in

the West with the publication in 1973 of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s history of
the camps, which he compared to an archipelago of islands scattered through
the nation. His book was thus titled The Gulag Archipelago. The systems
included thousands of institutions large and small, but some, like the Siberian
camps of Vorkuta and Kolyma, were immense. Throughout the whole quarter
century of Stalinist rule, some 25 million Soviet people spent at least some time
in the Gulag network, and millions of others experienced internal exile or
deportation. The scale of atrocities was widely known in the West. When the
Second World War broke out in 1939, the Soviet Union had a far bloodier
reputation internationally than did Nazi Germany, although that situation
would soon change.
Internationally too, the Soviets brought all foreign Communist parties into
rigid conformity to the interests of the Soviet motherland. Through the 1930s,
Communists around the world were widely mocked for the frequent and near-­
overnight policy shifts they were forced to adopt to accommodate changing
Soviet demands. In the early 1930s, Communists were required to avoid any
cooperation with other democratic parties against the rising menace of Fascism
or Nazism, because all those parties were themselves “social fascists.” From
1935 through 1939, Communists urged all those other liberal and centrist
movements to join a common alliance against fascism and Hitler, a Popular
Front. That vision of broad left-wing unity in progressive causes proved very
attractive and drew many to join the booming Communist parties. Those par-
ties made extensive use of “progressive” front groups, wholly owned Party
subsidiaries that appealed to a range of interests and causes, allowing sympa-
thizers to be drawn into the Party orbit. That honeymoon period proved brief.
In August 1939, all Communists were suddenly required to laud a startling
new Soviet policy of friendship with the recently denounced Nazi regime.
From a non-Communist point of view, there were abundant reasons to view
both the Soviet Union and domestic Communists with real suspicion. The
Soviets were associated with grim images of repression, symbolized by Siberian
prison camps and murderous secret police. Accusations that Communist par-
ties in Western countries were, in effect, Soviet puppets or agents of Soviet
diplomacy were well substantiated. By no means only on the far right, fear and
suspicion of Communism were already widespread during the 1930s, and those
sentiments easily resurfaced following the end of the war.

The Second World War

The German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 transformed the atti-
tudes of the Western powers almost overnight. British and imperial leaders
were overjoyed to greet this powerful new ally, and both Stalin and the Soviet
war effort were glorified and idealized. Despite initial conservative hostility, US
attitudes became equally friendly after the US entered the war in December
1941. The Soviets were regarded as the most militant and determined part of
 2 ORIGINS: THE WORLD IN 1946 23

the Allied coalition, and the key contributor to the war effort. The Soviets
made some gestures toward accommodation, formally abolishing the
Comintern in 1943. In occupied countries, the Soviet involvement raised the
vision of imminent armed liberation. Communists won high regard for their
activities in armed anti-Nazi resistance. Where active Communist Parties were
legal, membership rolls swelled, as did the influence of party newspapers. The
US Communist Party reached a high of at least 80,000 by 1944; the British
peaked at 60,000.
Western admiration for the Soviets reached new heights with the stunning
Soviet advances through Poland into Germany in 1944–1945, which were
commanded by Marshals Georgy Zhukov and Ivan Konev. Two actions, in
particular, inspired awe among military observers, namely Operation Bagration
(June–August 1944) and the Vistula-Oder offensive (January–February 1945).
The vast scale of those campaigns was deeply impressive. In Bagration, over
two million Soviet soldiers destroyed a whole German Army Group, deploying
6000 tanks, 40,000 guns, and 8000 aircraft, as they advanced 450 miles in just
five weeks. In the campaign of early 1945, the Soviets advanced 300 miles in
two weeks. But however gratefully the West received these efforts at the time,
they also cast a long shadow in the colder diplomatic climate following 1945.
Through the 1950s, Western war planners would think back nervously to those
triumphant Soviet campaigns as possible blueprints for that country’s future
actions.
Soviet forces soon controlled most of Eastern Europe beyond what Churchill
would describe as the Iron Curtain, and in May 1945, they took Berlin itself.
That of itself need not have concerned the Western Allies, who had already
formulated plans for the division of Germany and Austria into occupation
zones, each controlled by one of the major allies. Even so, the Soviets made no
secret of their growing dominance over other occupied nations in the east.
Throughout the war, anti-Nazi forces and movements throughout Europe
had often been divided into multiple factions, in which the Communists were
one of the several forces. With Soviet backing, Communist factions excluded
and persecuted their rivals. One of the bloodiest such actions occurred in
Yugoslavia, where multiple resistance movements and militias had existed dur-
ing the war, often clashing with each other. In 1945, the new Communist
government headed by Josip Broz Tito undertook mass killings of rivals,
including not just former pro-Axis forces, but also many who had resisted Nazi
occupation. In France and Italy, Communist resistance forces persecuted thou-
sands whom they accused of being Nazi collaborators, and in the process, they
targeted many patriotic anti-Nazi fighters whose crime was their affiliation to
anti-Communist movements.
Western protests against Communist actions were muted in light of the
warm memories of the Soviet alliance during the war and a shared loathing of
collaborators. When US and Soviet forces met each other on the River Elbe in
April 1945, it was in an atmosphere of high celebration. Beyond general good-
will, the Western powers believed that the Soviets would be crucial allies in the
24 P. JENKINS

forthcoming assault on Japan. In 1945, the British had to decide on the fate of
many thousands of Russians who had defected to the German cause and had
fought alongside German forces. Although they were enemy combatants, their
reasons for fleeing Stalinist rule had usually been excellent, and all faced death
or imprisonment if they again fell under Stalin’s power. Nevertheless, these
Russians, including many Cossacks, were repatriated in their tens of thousands.
The British, likewise, handed pro-Axis Croatian forces over to Tito’s
Communists, who slaughtered tens of thousands. At the same time, Western
publics were unmoved by the atrocities committed against either German citi-
zens or German residents of the East European states. In massive ethnic cleans-
ing in these years, some 15 million ethnic Germans were relocated to Germany
or Austria, and at least a million died in the process. In Germany itself, the
Russians enthusiastically plundered the zone they occupied, dismantling facto-
ries for removal to their own country, with little concern for the future of the
local population.
Communist policies in these years are usually presented in terms of a ruth-
less grab for power and influence, and that element is undeniable. But matters
were actually more complex, and Stalin’s actions were often more flexible and
even conciliatory than this stereotype might suggest. He emerges as an oppor-
tunist, but one tempered by realism: he knew when he had to give ground.
When Soviet propaganda in 1945–1946 proclaimed a hope of good relations
with the West, this was not simply deceptive. At the same time, it is necessary
to understand the Stalinist ideological context, in which the Soviet Union
played a pivotal role in the cause of progress and human liberation so that
Great Russian nationalism became indistinguishable from Communism.
Extending Soviet power into Europe helped fulfill the onward march of his-
tory. That vision conditioned Soviet attitudes to the newly occupied countries
of the East, where establishing Communist regimes would benefit the masses
of ordinary people. The creation of new states—of people’s democracies—was
a fraternal act. Indeed, failure to reconstruct societies on radical socialist lines
would be a betrayal. In the aftermath of Nazism, the opponents of Communism
were viewed in the most sinister light, as de facto allies of Nazi savagery, and
those reactionary enemies were dehumanized accordingly. In that context, any
action that furthered the advance of Communism was fully justified. Obviously,
many in these occupied countries themselves understood things very
differently.

Poland
Poland was critical to the new situation, and the East-West antagonism that
now became obvious had deep historical roots. In the eighteenth century, the
once-mighty Polish kingdom was partitioned between the three great powers
of the day, namely Russia, Austria, and Prussia, and Warsaw became a Russian
city. A Polish state re-remerged in 1918, although it had to fight a bitter war
for survival against the Soviet Bolsheviks. That state in its turn was destroyed
 2 ORIGINS: THE WORLD IN 1946 25

by the German invasion of 1939, as the Soviets again intervened to seize the
eastern part of the country. In 1944, Soviet forces again conquered the whole
territory from its German occupiers. The subsequent fate of Poland was a
deeply sensitive question for the West, not least because it was the German
invasion of 1939 that had actually detonated the Second World War, and the
British had intervened specifically to secure Polish independence. Large num-
bers of Poles served under British command during the ensuing war. For the
British, national prestige was at stake.
If all the Allies accepted the existence of a post-war Polish state, it remained
unclear how far this entity would be truly independent, as opposed to a Soviet
puppet. During the war, one body of patriotic resistance forces had maintained
a government in exile in London, while other Communist-oriented leaders
operated under Soviet control in Lublin. The British naturally favored the
London contingent as the representatives of the older Polish state, while the
Soviets wished to install their own people. That division was debated at the
Allied conference held at Yalta in the Soviet Crimea in February 1945, between
Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill. The Western leaders agreed to allow a
Communist-leaning provisional government in Poland, to the horror of non-­
Communists. Following fraudulent elections, a Communist government was
created, and over the next three years, it established a pro-Soviet and totalitar-
ian model of government. In June 1946, a (rigged) victory in a national refer-
endum confirmed what Communists claimed as a mandate.
Among other controversial decisions, the new government agreed to a far-­
reaching restructuring of Poland’s national boundaries. Large sections of pre-­
war eastern Poland were annexed to the Soviet Union and incorporated into
the republics of Ukraine and Belorussia (Belarus). For Poland, that meant the
loss of some important historic cities and population centers. In recompense,
the Poles annexed western territories that had previously been the possession
of Germany, marking a new German border along the rivers Oder and Neisse.
Both shifts involved large-scale relocation of existing populations, and the eth-
nic cleansing of older communities. Poland’s new borders were ratified at the
next conference of Allied leaders held at Potsdam in July 1945.
As often in Eastern Europe in this era, Polish Communists initially worked
with members of socialist and other parties to give the impression of a broad
coalition. Leaders of those parties were divided in their response to such over-
tures. In Poland, some socialists favored allying with other non-Communist
factions to hold back Soviet advances at all costs. Others supported a tactical
alliance with Communists to promote social reforms, and in the hope of mod-
erating Soviet ambitions. But through all these shifting alliances, Communists
maintained control over key ministries and bureaucratic agencies, especially
those controlling police or internal security. Between 1945 and 1947,
Communists expanded their power at the grassroots level, building up the
Communist party from a small fraction to a mass organization a million strong,
with strong paramilitary forces.
26 P. JENKINS

Anti-Communists struggled forcefully against the new order. During the

war, the country had developed a potent resistance that constituted a whole
alternative regime, the Polish Underground State. At its peak, the underground
Home Army, the Armia Krajowa, or AK, mobilized hundreds of thousands.
From 1945, anti-Communist resisters—the “doomed soldiers,” or “indomi-
table soldiers”—reorganized against the Soviets, with guerrilla outbreaks. The
Soviet military and NKVD responded ruthlessly, with mass arrests and deporta-
tions to the USSR. Through 1946, actual or potential anti-Communist indi-
viduals were arrested and imprisoned, and some were subject to spectacular
show trials, involving ludicrous charges of Nazi collaboration. If the direct
military threat faded, the potential for resistance remained strong.
Poland in 1946 was not fully under Communist control, but that process
was well underway, and the same was true across other nations of Eastern Europe.

The Spread of Soviet Power

In late 1944, it became obvious that the Soviets would occupy most of that
region. In a personal meeting that October, Churchill and Stalin debated the
exact share of influence that each country would have in the post-war situation.
In the secret “percentages agreement,” the British accepted near-total Soviet
hegemony in Bulgaria and Romania, and Stalin, in turn, recognized British
dominance in Greece. The balance of power in Yugoslavia would be 50–50.
The British originally favored a 50–50 deal in Hungary, but the Soviet share
increased to 80 percent.
In fact, the outcome fell far short of British hopes. Between 1944 and 1947,
the Soviets came to control all those nations except for Greece, and while
Yugoslavia pursued its distinctive path, Communist domination was absolute.
The countries followed a trajectory similar to that of Poland, with 1946 as a
critical year of struggle and transition. In each case, Communists arranged a
tactical collaboration with non-Communist parties, who were then gradually
excluded from power. Communist parties used violence to secure authority at
the grassroots level and to build Communist parties that ultimately absorbed
all their rivals. Throughout the process, the presence of Soviet armies of occu-
pation severely limited the options available to non- or anti-Communists. As
Communists expanded their power to seek monopoly status, regimes used
secret police forces and show trials modeled on Stalinist precedent.
No strategy offered any real hope of resisting the process. In Hungary, a
genuine election in 1945 resulted in a crushing defeat for Communists at the
hands of the rival Smallholders Party, but to no avail. The government merely
stepped up its assaults on political rivals through the Interior Ministry, headed
by László Rajk, and his fearsome security apparatus. As in other nations, all
forms of policing were consolidated under national and centrally directed orga-
nizations, including People’s Militia units. Through 1946, the Communist
leader Mátyás Rákosi was apparently working within a democratic system,
cooperating with other parties, but gradually weakening them through what he
 2 ORIGINS: THE WORLD IN 1946 27

described as “salami tactics,” cutting away a slice at a time. Other countries

followed the path from coalition to ruthless monopoly. In Bulgaria, a coup
established a Communist-dominated regime in 1944. A ruling Fatherland
Front included the Social Democrat party and the Agrarians, but over the next
two years the Communists carried out mass arrests and executions of rivals,
applying false charges of Nazi collaboration. By September 1946, the country
was a People’s Republic under the Bulgarian Communist Party. The new leader
was Georgi Dimitrov, whose trial by Nazi authorities in the 1930s had made
him one of the world’s best-known Communist celebrities.
Within two years of the end of the Second World War, Eastern Europe had
decisively shifted to Communist rule, and fallen into what Churchill called the
Soviet sphere. (We will describe events in Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia in the
next chapter.) In Western debates on these tumultuous events, relatively little
attention was paid to the three Baltic nations of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia.
All three had long been ruled by Russia, but they secured their independence
after the collapse of the Tsarist Empire. In 1940, all were absorbed into the
Soviet Union, and the Western Allies saw no reason to challenge that situation
after 1945 so that the three nations remained Soviet until the collapse of the
USSR. So successful was this annexation that the three Baltic nations were
barely mentioned in discussions of the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe:
the assumption was that these were naturally and properly part of the
Soviet state.

Facing the Unthinkable

Even if Western nations had wished to halt the spread of Soviet influence across
Europe, it is far from clear what they might have done. In the last months of
the European war, Germany’s Nazi leaders had been startlingly confident that
they would form common cause with the Western Allies against the Soviets.
After all, they reasoned, the West could not possibly want to see a Communist-­
occupied Europe, and it was very much in their interests for them to use the
still potent German armed forces in this cause. Through 1945, the legendary
American military commander George S. Patton caused consternation by
advocating just such aggressive policies against the “Asiatic” Soviets. In retro-
spect, such hopes seem ridiculous. Ultimately, the West would indeed integrate
German forces into its military plans, but only after the Third Reich had been
crushed, and the country was at least officially purged of its Nazi inheritance.
But the Allies explored ideas that were not too far removed from Nazi
wishes. In Spring 1945, the British drew up a contingency plan for driving the
Soviets out of Poland; this plan involved the use of a reorganized and reconsti-
tuted German army. The plan was aptly termed Operation Unthinkable, and it
is beyond credibility that such a scheme might have been approved, especially
after the revelation of the Nazi death camps and the Holocaust. If the opera-
tion had been undertaken, the spread of leftist ideas within the various Western
armies would have sparked mass mutinies. Western planners duly noted that
28 P. JENKINS

even their most optimistic visions still left the Soviets heavily outnumbering
any possible assailants. Unthinkable remained unthinkable.
Adding immeasurably to the awareness of war’s risks was the new nuclear
dimension (which will be discussed at length in Chap. 4). After the US attacked
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it was obvious that the new weapons would trans-
form the world order. At first, “the bomb” was popularly associated with
extreme strength and power, often read in a sexual sense, and was even used in
advertising. Early American tests occurred at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall
Islands, and in 1946, French designers appropriated the word “bikini” for a
swimsuit design that at the time was considered outrageously daring. But the
more the nuclear devices were studied and reported, their truly unthinkable
nature became ever more apparent. One of the literary sensations of the era was
John Hersey’s 1946 magazine account of the Hiroshima attack (with the sub-
sequent book, Hiroshima), which became one of the most influential pieces of
twentieth-century journalism. It marked a powerful revival of apocalyptic
themes in the modern secular world and raised the prospect that the horrors
described could someday afflict New York, London, or Moscow.

The Next Battles

Any Western planning for Europe’s future had to begin with the realization
that the Soviets could not forcefully be removed from those East European
lands that were falling under ever-heavier Communist hegemony. In light of
that, their most important task must be to limit Communist ideological
advances in Western Europe, and where possible, to keep democratic forms
alive as far as possible in the east.
Two Western countries, in particular, seemed vulnerable to Communist
power. In Italy, the Communist cause had many advantages, and the country’s
Communist Party (PCI) had a distinguished history of resistance. That experi-
ence had left a powerful legacy for Party activists, who readily resorted to direct
action and extra-legal operations at the grassroots level. The PCI commanded
19 percent of the vote in 1946 and held seats in a coalition government. (By
way of comparison, in 1945, Hungary’s Communists managed only 17 percent
of the vote.) The other great Communist hope was France, where most rightist
parties were discredited by the war and the German occupation. After the
Germans were removed in 1944, the country was for some years ruled by a
Tripartite Alliance which included the Communist Party of France (PCF)
alongside Socialists (the SFIO) and the Christian Democratic-oriented
MRP. All favored sweeping reformist policies with a strong emphasis on state
power and nationalization. As in Italy, the Communists still commanded the
immense prestige deriving from their wartime role in the Resistance, as “the
party of the 75,000 executed” (parti des 75 000 fusillés).2 In 1945, the PCF

2
Pauline Moullot, “Le Parti communiste français était-il le parti des collabos ou des ‘75000
fusillés’?” Libération, May 24, 2019, https://www.liberation.fr/france/2019/05/24/
le-parti-communiste-francais-etait-il-le-parti-des-collabos-ou-des-75000-fusilles_1729388/.
 2 ORIGINS: THE WORLD IN 1946 29

won 26 percent of the national vote, rising to 28 percent the following year,
giving it the largest share of any party. PCF leader Maurice Thorez served as
Vice-Premier from 1946 to 1947. At its height, the Party attracted
800,000 members
As we will see, Communist hopes in France and Italy did not last long, as
they would soon be expelled from government in both countries. Unlike in
Eastern Europe, neither the PCF nor PCI controlled the armed strength
derived from Soviet occupation. But at least in 1946, an informed observer
listening to Churchill’s Fulton Speech might well have thought him optimistic.
From this perspective, the Iron Curtain was threatening to extend much deeper
into Western Europe, and perhaps to the English Channel.

Superpowers
Quite apart from the spread of Communism, the war transformed the balance
of military and political power in Europe and initiated a radically new and dif-
ferent global order. For centuries, Europe had included a number of large
influential states which were acknowledged as the Powers, or the Great Powers.
The actual balance might shift from time to time, and new Powers arose, but
there were normally five or six representatives. The Second World War resulted
in the swift collapse of this system, and its replacement by two global states,
each so vastly stronger than its nearer rivals as to constitute a wholly new con-
cept, the superpower. That quality was based on military might but also popu-
lation and economic production, and the capacity to operate on a global scale.
Even before the expansion of nuclear arsenals, these were greater than merely
Great Powers. Simple geography reinforced that trend. With their vast land
areas, the US or the Soviet Union could withstand multiple nuclear strikes on
its home territory in a way that was quite unthinkable for the far smaller
European nations. Both the US and USSR could test nuclear weapons on their
home territory: the British had to use sites in Australia.
It is difficult to exaggerate the global dominance of the US as the Second
World War drew to its close. By 1945, the US armed forces counted over
twelve million personnel. US economic hegemony was close to absolute, with
a thriving financial system that had sustained the war efforts of its near-­bankrupt
allies. US military production had been astonishing, allowing it to fight two
virtually separate wars, against Germany and Japan. Although the country had
sustained 400,000 military deaths, that was a tiny proportion of its population
when compared to most combatant nations. In contrast to all potential com-
petitors, its industrial strength had suffered no damage from wartime violence.
After 1945, that economy was ready to turn enthusiastically to civilian con-
sumer production, targeted toward a vast domestic market: in 1950, US popu-
lation surpassed 150 million. It was to characterize the new reality that political
scientist Nicholas Spykman coined the term “superpowers” which he popular-
ized in his book The Geography of the Peace (1944).
30 P. JENKINS

The American contrast with Europe was telling. By 1945, most of the tradi-
tional powers lay in ruins after years of invasion or occupation. Only two
European-centered states had any degree of military power or influence,
namely the Soviet Union and the British Empire, and both traditionally had
regarded Europe only as a part of its natural sphere of interest and operations.
The Soviets suffered terribly from the war, losing perhaps 27 million dead, and
a famine in 1946–1947 inflicted even more ruin. Even so, the Soviets had per-
formed a near miracle in maintaining and expanding their industrial produc-
tion to meet the challenges of war. At its wartime height, the Soviet army had
13 million personnel. By mid-1945, Soviet armed forces in Europe alone were
over seven million, and the country commanded 228 infantry divisions and 36
armored divisions (divisions varied in size, but customarily included around
10,000–12,000 soldiers). These force levels contracted after 1945, but the
very large Soviet population offered a powerful base to draw upon. In 1950,
even after that wartime devastation, the Soviet population was still 180 million,
which was about the same as the combined figures for Britain, France, Italy,
and emerging West Germany.

Fading Britain
In his 1944 analysis, Spykman counted Great Britain among the dominant
realities of the post-war world, based on its imperial span and its naval reach.
Technically, the British Empire remained the world’s most populous political
entity, with over 450 million people, and those overseas territories had contrib-
uted mightily to its survival. Canadian forces played a disproportionate role in
the British war effort: Canada ended the war with the world’s third biggest
navy and fourth largest air force. But Britain itself was profoundly weakened by
the war, especially in economic terms, and the country was mired in deep aus-
terity. The country faced a disastrous balance of payments situation, and the
rationing system actually became harsher following the end of the war. A ster-
ling crisis in 1949 was acute. The number of British service personnel plunged
from almost five million in 1945 to below a million by 1948, and to under
700,000 by 1950. Complicating the British situation was the sharp decline of
its imperial position. Most of those 450 million subjects lived in countries that
would shortly gain their independence, chiefly in the Indian subcontinent.
British naval power contracted steadily, as American sea forces expanded. The
events of the Pacific War taught Australia and New Zealand that they would
have to rely at least as much on the US as on their traditional British guardians.
Britain was simply in no position to compete with the two giants of East
and West.
Early commentators on the Cold War stressed the central British role. In
1946, George Orwell remarked that recently, “Russia began to make a ‘cold
war’ on Britain and the British Empire”—not, we note, on the US, or the West
 2 ORIGINS: THE WORLD IN 1946 31

in general.3 But simmering emergency in Greece forced Britain to confront the

new realities. The British regarded the Eastern Mediterranean as firmly within
their sphere of influence, with Egypt’s Suez Canal as a pivot of the larger global
empire, and the defeat of Italy had removed the only likely challenger to this
hegemony. It was only natural that the British occupied Greece in 1944, fol-
lowing the expulsion of its German occupiers. Optimistically as it turned out,
Churchill’s percentage agreement with Stalin had envisaged near-total British
domination of Greece. However, the British faced repeated conflicts with the
leftist resistance movements that were dominated by the Communist Party of
Greece (KKE, or Kommounistikó Kómma Elládas), while left- and right-wing
factions pursued a low-level civil war. In March 1946, the left mobilized a new
Democratic Army of Greece, which began a guerrilla insurgency, supported by
the Communist states of Yugoslavia, Albania, and Bulgaria. Tito especially was
an enthusiastic advocate of armed resistance. (The Soviets were more
restrained.) At the height of the war, which lasted until 1949, Communist
forces operated in the tens of thousands. Fatalities approached a hundred thou-
sand. The British could not hope to suppress the insurgency themselves, par-
ticularly with pressing military needs in Palestine and elsewhere.
Other regional crises loomed. On several occasions in 1946, British warships
operating in the Corfu Channel had military encounters with Albanian fortifi-
cations and minefields, opening the prospect of a larger Balkan clash. Events in
nearby Turkey were almost as perilous. For over a century, British governments
had resisted Russian attempts to expand power over Turkey and to prevent the
establishment of a Tsarist Russian naval presence in the Mediterranean: that
issue almost caused a European war in the 1870s. At the end of the Second
World War, the Soviets pressed Turkey to grant access to their shipping through
the Turkish Straits that separated the Black Sea from the Mediterranean.
Tensions mounted through 1946 as the Soviets undertook naval exercises off
Turkish coasts. By the summer, the Americans felt, plausibly, that the Soviets
were seeking control over Turkey, and both the US and Britain responded with
a naval show of force. Though the situation de-escalated, it was significant that
the Americans, rather than the British, now became Turkey’s main protector.
In February 1947, the British government was forced to ask the US to
assume its role in supporting Greece and Turkey against Communist pressures,
a humiliating climbdown in light of the traditional British role in the region.
(We will see the consequences in the next chapter.) This affair did not mark the
definitive end to British pretensions to match the superpowers, and much
worse humiliations would occur in the next decade. But the debacle did signify
that the immediate future belonged to two superpowers, not three.
The ruin of the traditional Great Powers had its global impact. As we
have seen, the war had resulted in the destruction or occupation of some or
all of the European overseas empires. The Italian empire in Africa was

3
George Orwell, “Russia Began to Make a ‘Cold War’ on Britain and the British Empire,”
Observer, March 10, 1946.
32 P. JENKINS

destroyed, while the Dutch lost control of their wealthy East Indies to the
Japanese. The Japanese also took French Indo-China. In each case, the loss
of imperial prestige was irreparable, and European powers struggled to
regain their former possessions in the face of widespread nationalist insur-
gencies. The French faced a revolutionary war in Indo-China, and insur-
gency in the Dutch East Indies culminated in the creation of a new state of
Indonesia in 1949. In the short term, the British alone maintained their
global power, but they could not long afford to exercise this role as the Last
Empire Standing. As in Europe, the fall of the older Great Powers opened
abundant opportunities and challenges for the two nations that actually
could intervene worldwide, namely the US and the Soviet Union—what the
French called les deux Grands.

Toward Cold War

For multiple reasons, tensions between those two incipient superpowers were
all but certain. However, several specific events and decisions in 1945–1946
rapidly moved the world to the confrontational situation assumed by Winston
Churchill.
Western attitudes were reshaped by the arrival of a new administration in
Washington, after the death of Franklin Roosevelt in April 1945. His successor,
Harry S. Truman, had a far less optimistic view of Soviet intentions. Reinforcing
that attitude was an incident of a kind that would later become quite common-
place, namely the defection of a Soviet official to the West. In September 1945,
cipher clerk Igor Gouzenko defected in Ottawa, bringing with him substantial
evidence of Soviet espionage activities in the West. That included attempts to
obtain nuclear secrets, as well as the operation of sleeper agents in powerful
positions in the West. The case had a special impact in undermining the general
goodwill many in the West felt toward the Soviets, and to Stalin personally. The
Gouzenko story inspired the 1948 film The Iron Curtain, a pioneer in the
soon-to-be enormous genre of Cold War thrillers.
The following months brought further signs that wartime cooperation was
crumbling. During the war, British and Soviet forces had occupied the nation
of Iran to prevent German advances there, and occupation zones were declared.
By early 1946, there was growing concern that the Soviets were refusing to
abandon their zones, which were presented as autonomous republics, in rebel-
lion against Iran’s central government. Only intense US pressure succeeded in
persuading the Soviets to withdraw in Spring 1946, and the termination of the
breakaway entities. We have already seen the growing crises in Greece and
Turkey around this time. Another threatening region was the Julian March
region contested between Italy and Yugoslavia, where Yugoslav forces
brought down two US aircraft. That August, US and British commanders held
serious discussions about likely Western strategies should a larger war develop
against all the Communist powers.
 2 ORIGINS: THE WORLD IN 1946 33

US domestic politics were also being remolded in a militant anti-­Communist

form. The bold liberal experimentation of the New Deal era (1933–1945) had
left plenty of hard-right conservatives determined to discredit and reverse those
reforms, and to expose members of the Democratic administration as red, or at
least “pink” fellow travelers. Another anti-Communist force was the very influ-
ential Roman Catholic church, which was a powerhouse in urban affairs,
in labor unions, and in Democratic Party politics (see also Chap. 10). Supporting
that Catholic anti-Communism was the many ethnic groups of European ori-
gin who constituted so powerful an element of American urban life, and who
were so familiar with the Communist danger in their home societies, in Italy,
Poland, and elsewhere. The emerging American anti-Communism was a thor-
oughly bipartisan affair. If conservative Republicans used that cause to con-
demn liberalism, Catholic and ethnic Democrats were never far behind in
seeking the elimination of Communism at home and abroad. In the country’s
midterm elections in November 1946, Republicans took control of both
houses of the US Congress, shifting the political balance decisively to the anti-­
Communist right.

George Kennan
In February 1946, American diplomats analyzed Soviet intentions in a lengthy
message sent to the US Secretary of State. This brilliant “Long Telegram”
became a crucial document of the developing Cold War, and it had a profound
effect on policy. Kennan’s analysis was impressive, all the more so for his
restraint, and his willingness to acknowledge flaws in Western systems. Nor did
he engage in the then-popular idea on the right of seeing Stalin as a second
Hitler, with a detailed scheme for world conquest. As Kennan rightly stressed,
“Gauged against Western World as a whole, Soviets are still by far the weaker
force.” 4
Kennan began with the fundamental issue of Soviet ideology, which was that
the “USSR still lives in antagonistic ‘capitalist encirclement’ with which in the
long run there can be no permanent peaceful coexistence.” An “instinctive
Russian sense of insecurity” produced a “neurotic view of world affairs.” In
response to this sense of siege, the Soviets would pursue

internal policy devoted to increasing in every way strength and prestige of Soviet
state: intensive military-industrialization; maximum development of armed
forces; great displays to impress outsiders; continued secretiveness about internal
matters, designed to conceal weaknesses and to keep opponents in dark… build
up their industrial and especially military resources.5

4
“Telegram: The Chargé in the Soviet Union (Kennan) to the Secretary of State,” February 22,
1946, at https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu//coldwar/documents/episode-1/kennan.htm.
5
Ibid.
34 P. JENKINS

The Soviets would advance their global interests through propaganda and
soft power, particularly through sympathetic “democratic progressive” ele-
ments. Diplomatically, the USSR would seek advantage as opportunities arose,
especially along disputed borderlands—in Iran or Turkey, or the Baltic. If Spain
became a Soviet Communist state, that would open whole new fronts. Although
he was in no sense offering a full global analysis, it is interesting that Kennan
does not refer to East Asian countries where Communist prospects were bright,
in China or Korea.
Kennan’s conclusions were surprisingly restrained. Although international
crises would occur, they could be dealt with through firmness:

Soviet power, unlike that of Hitlerite Germany, is neither schematic nor adventur-
istic. It does not work by fixed plans. It does not take unnecessary risks. Impervious
to logic of reason, and it is highly sensitive to logic of force. For this reason it can
easily withdraw—and usually does when strong resistance is encountered at any
point. Thus, if the adversary has sufficient force and makes clear his readiness to
use it, he rarely has to do so. If situations are properly handled there need be no
prestige-engaging showdowns.6

Kennan’s approach of firm response backed by the threat of “strong resis-

tance” promised the avoidance of all-out war and the strict confinement of
Soviet interests. In 1947, Kennan’s views reached a larger public with an anon-
ymous article published in Foreign Affairs under the pseudonym X, in which
he stated that “the main element of any United States policy toward the Soviet
Union must be that of a long-term, patient, but firm and vigilant containment
of Russian expansive tendencies.”7 The word “containment” proved for many
the key takeaway of his message. Less often quoted was Kennan’s next sen-
tence, which would be forgotten by so many US politicians, then and later: “It
is important to note, however, that such a policy has nothing to do with out-
ward histrionics: with threats or blustering or superfluous gestures of outward
‘toughness.’”

Paths Not Taken?

We have already encountered the views of Henry Wallace, who favored accom-
modation with the Soviets, and it is intriguing to speculate how matters would
have developed if the US had followed his course, rather than Kennan’s. If
Kennan and Wallace were not engaging in any kind of formal debate, they were
discussing closely related themes.

6
Ibid.
7
“X” (George Kennan), “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” Foreign Affairs, July 1947, at
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/russian-federation/1947-07-01/sources-soviet-
conduct.
 2 ORIGINS: THE WORLD IN 1946 35

But Wallace’s optimism seems ill-judged, especially in offering what a later

generation would call moral equivalence between the two sides. Recent Soviet
history was indeed marked by bloody repression on a horrific scale, and there
was every prospect that that conduct would be re-enacted in any new countries
that fell under Soviet influence. Nor was it reasonable for any outsider to con-
demn hitherto independent nations like Poland to a subservient role. Many
events over the coming years would show just how wrong Wallace was to
believe that the Soviets would be content with the sphere to which he hoped
to assign them, without making frequent tentative probes against the West to
advance their interests. Often, these moves would occur through clandestine
means. When Wallace himself mounted a third-party presidential candidacy
against Harry Truman in 1948, his grassroots campaign was thoroughly pen-
etrated by American Communists, who exploited his Progressive movement
for their own ends.
At least in the circumstances of 1946, it is difficult to imagine the US-Soviet
relationship developing in a way very different from what actually occurred or
at least not in a manner that would have been very harmful indeed for Western
interests.

Further Reading

For the Communist background, see David Priestland, The Red Flag:
Communism and the Making of the Modern World (2009), and Archie Brown,
The Rise and Fall of Communism (2009).
For Soviet policies at the end of World War Two, see Robert Gellately, Stalin’s
Curse: Battling for Communism in War and Cold War (2013); and Norman
M. Naimark, Stalin and the Fate of Europe: The Postwar Struggle for
Sovereignty (2019).
The transition from the end of the Second World War is discussed in Frank
Costigliola, Roosevelt’s Lost Alliances: How Personal Politics Helped Start the
Cold War (2011); Fraser J. Harbutt, Yalta 1945: Europe and America at the
Crossroads (2010); S. M. Plokhy, Yalta: The Price of Peace (2010); Kevin
E. Grimm, America Enters The Cold War: The Road to Global Commitment,
1945–1950 (2018); and Diana Preston, Eight Days at Yalta: How Churchill,
Roosevelt, nd Stalin Shaped the Post-War World (2019).
For the catastrophic impacts of the war, particularly in Europe, see Keith Lowe,
Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II (2012).
Several books focus on pivotal years, when key events were so abundant. See
Ian Buruma, Year Zero: A History of 1945 (2013); Victor Sebestyen, 1946:
The Making of the Modern World (2014); Jonathan Fenby, Crucible: Thirteen
Months that Forged Our World (2019), on 1947–1948; or Elisabeth Åsbrink,
1947: Where Now Begins (2016).
36 P. JENKINS

Debates and rivalries within the incipient post-1945 “West” are the subjects of
Marc Selverstone, Constructing the Monolith: The United States, Great
Britain and International Communism 1945–1950 (2009); Derek Leebaert,
Grand Improvisation: America Confronts the British Superpower, 1945–1957
(2018); and Ian Buruma, The Churchill Complex: The Rise and Fall of the
Special Relationship (2020).
John Lewis Gaddis describes a crucial policymaker in George Kennan: An
American Life (2011). See also Nicholas Thompson, The Hawk and the
Dove: Paul Nitze, George Kennan, and the History of the Cold War (2009).
 CHAPTER 3

The Struggle for Europe

Palmiro Togliatti was the veteran head of the Italian Communist Party, the
PCI, who had long organized resistance to the country’s Fascist regime and
its German Nazi ally. When the Second World War ended, he led one of the
strongest Communist Parties in the whole of Europe, East or West, and he
came close to national power. In July 1948, a Fascist student shot him in an
assassination attempt. Togliatti barely survived, but the response to the
crime produced a near-revolution, with a general strike. Tens of thousands
of workers, many armed, occupied key strategic points throughout north-
ern Italy, seized factories, and began a sabotage campaign. Police who
attempted to intervene were rapidly disarmed by the insurgents. It was
almost as if the wartime Resistance had revived en masse, and Italy seemed
close to civil war.
The story suggests the tense situation that prevailed over much of
Europe in the late 1940s, a period of repeated East-West confrontations
that at several points threatened to develop into a general war. Beyond the
military threat, these years witnessed a historic transformation within
Europe, namely the fragmentation of older regional and cultural distinc-
tions, and their replacement by a crude division between Eastern and
Western halves of the continent. However stark and inevitable that division
came to appear, at the time it represented a shocking novelty, and the exact
borderlines might easily have been drawn other than they actually were. As
the Togliatti case suggests, it was not obvious that Italy, for instance,
really would form part of the newly defined West. The European political
framework that existed through the 1980s might have developed quite dif-
ferently from what actually occurred.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 37

Switzerland AG 2021
P. Jenkins, A Global History of the Cold War, 1945-1991,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81366-6_3
38 P. JENKINS

Making the Eastern Bloc

Between 1945 and 1949, all of Eastern Europe except Greece fell under the
power of Communist-dominated states. The process was already well advanced
by 1946, but the process then accelerated with a series of coups d’etat that
ended the pretense of collaboration with non-Communist parties. In Poland,
non-Communists were systematically excluded from office, until the
Communist takeover was complete by the time of new rigged elections in
1947. The following year, the main Communist organization absorbed the
Polish Socialist party to form the Polish United Workers’ Party, PZPR, which
remained in power until 1989. From 1948 to 1956, the party’s Secretary-­
General was Bolesław Bierut, a hardline Stalinist and an agent for the Soviet
NKVD. Under his authority, Poland agreed that Soviet Red Army forces would
be stationed on its territory in perpetuity. In 1952, Poland was officially
declared a People’s Republic.
That sequence was reproduced across the region. In Hungary, Communists
could win only 22 percent of the national vote in 1947. Even so, Communist
leader Mátyás Rákosi completed his “salami” approach when he forced rival
parties to exclude any officials or members who resisted Communist wishes. By
1949, Hungary was a People’s Republic. In 1947, Romania transitioned to
become a Socialist Republic, with Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej as the venerated
Communist figurehead. Some of the dictators who now took power proved
amazingly long-lasting. Yugoslavia’s Tito ruled from 1945 to 1980. Albania’s
Enver Hoxha ruled from 1945 to 1985.
Although the new states had some genuinely enthusiastic Communist sup-
porters, the whole system represented a kind of informal Soviet empire. With a
few exceptions, the map of that new East Bloc corresponded closely to the
areas occupied by the Soviets at the end of the recent war. As Stalin reputedly
said, “everyone imposes his own system as far as his army can reach. It cannot
be otherwise.”1 The process of socialist transformation developed according to
interpretations of Marxism then prevailing in the Soviet Union, so they implied
both Sovietization and Stalinization. All the new socialist states practiced some
degree of Russification, teaching Russian extensively in schools. As they recon-
structed after the war, East European states came to bear a growing physical
resemblance to Soviet models, using Soviet official architecture. This was
exemplified by the enormous Palace of Culture and Science that dominated the
Warsaw skyline from 1955: it was originally named for Joseph Stalin, and its
style is “Stalinist Gothic.”
The concept of Eastern Europe, of an East Bloc, was problematic. The
Communist countries were very diverse culturally and linguistically. If some
countries had Slavic roots, Romania looked to Latin traditions, Hungary and
Albania had highly distinctive languages, and the emerging East Germany grew

1
Quoted in Caroline Kennedy-Pipe, “Stalin’s Danish Mystery,” History Today, March 2020, at
https://www.historytoday.com/miscellanies/stalin%E2%80%99s-danish-mystery.
 3 THE STRUGGLE FOR EUROPE 39

out of its own particular history. Bulgaria was the only one of the new socialist
nations that resembled Russia in its Slavic speech and Orthodox Christian
underpinnings, and this long remained one of the most closely aligned states
within the larger bloc. Otherwise, “Eastern” Europe was a label imposed on
regions that until recently had been classified quite differently, for instance as
part of the Balkans. The powerful but ill-defined concept of Mitteleuropa cer-
tainly included Czechoslovakia and Hungary, and probably Poland. Prague
was no more “East European” than Vienna or Munich. Some countries fitted
the stereotypes of peasant societies long dominated by aristocratic elites. Others
like Czechoslovakia or East Germany did not.
Ethnic purges during and after the war contributed to the brutal simplifica-
tion. Before 1939, Eastern European states had been very diverse ethnically
with substantial minorities, including Jews, but also ethnic Germans. The Nazis
massacred Jews, and Germans suffered terribly after that nation’s defeat.
Coupled with territorial revisions, this made eastern states more ethnically
monochrome, and lacking groups that had otherwise oriented them to Western
or Central Europe. Poland, for instance, now became an overwhelmingly Slavic
state for the first time in its history.

The Western Response

The Soviet Union’s wartime honeymoon with the Western Allies had long had
its critics, and right-wing media like the Hearst and McCormick chains had
rarely relented from older Red Scare attitudes. But the consolidation of
Communist regimes and the threat of further expansion into Central and even
Western Europe caused general alarm. This was a perilous moment in the Cold
War when a lack of clear Western determination might have resulted in sweep-
ing Communist advances. One key figure was British Foreign Secretary Ernest
Bevin, a powerful and radical labor union leader and a fervent socialist. That
very socialism contributed to his fervent anti-Communism, as he had long
experience of personal interactions with Communists in the British unions, and
was shocked by the brutal mistreatment of socialist parties in Europe’s new
Communist states. Bevin ensured a strong British line against Soviet expansion.
In 1947, he sponsored a defensive alliance with France in the Treaty of Dunkirk,
which was extended the following year to include the Benelux countries in a
new Western Union, an essential precursor to North Atlantic Treaty
Organization (NATO).
In the circumstances of the time, US President Truman was a still more
crucial figure. In March 1947, he announced his Truman Doctrine, which
promised to defend Greece and Turkey from Soviet advances, including when
those took the form of domestic Communist revolt or subversion. He asserted
that it must be the policy of the US “to support free peoples who are resisting
attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.” Beyond
that immediate region, Truman noted that “The peoples of a number of coun-
tries of the world have recently had totalitarian regimes forced upon them
40 P. JENKINS

against their will,” and similar trends were in progress elsewhere.2 By implica-
tion, the promise of aid extended widely.
Later that year, the National Security Act reorganized the nation’s military
and intelligence operations, among other things creating the National Security
Council, and making the US Air Force an independent service. Another out-
come was a new Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), which marked a departure
from historical precedent in being the country’s first peacetime intelligence
agency not affiliated with the armed services. Drawing heavily on the experi-
ences of wartime agents in the former Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the
CIA built up opposition to Communism across Europe and beyond. The
agency developed networks in political parties and labor unions, and sponsored
favorable media outlets. The nascent CIA cooperated with British intelligence
agencies, which retained a high level of expertise despite that country’s decline.
US and British agencies cooperated to support the armed resistance move-
ments which were then active in many parts of the Eastern Bloc.
In June 1947, US Secretary of State George Marshall announced an ambi-
tious plan to aid European economic recovery, a proposal that initially included
the Soviets. This became the basis of the Economic Recovery Program formally
launched in 1948, with the then-astonishing price tag of twelve billion dollars.
That was apart from the very large sums then being directed to rebuild Japan.
Beyond the general goal of reconstruction, the Marshall Plan aimed to pro-
mote modernization and to remove trade barriers between nations. Britain was
the largest recipient of aid, with a quarter of the outlay, followed by France (18
percent) and the new West Germany (11 percent).
The Marshall Plan proved hugely divisive. Soviet Vyacheslav Molotov pre-
sented it as an explicit attempt to draw European states into a US hegemonic
system, making that country the “center of worldwide reaction and anti-Soviet
activity.”3 He claimed that the US was actively moving on the road to blatant
fascism. Poland and Czechoslovakia considered accepting aid, but Soviet pres-
sure forced them to refuse. One immediate consequence of the Plan was to
confirm Europe’s new political map, with the refusing nations constituting the
new Eastern bloc. That rejection extended to Finland which was desperate to
avoid provoking Moscow, although it otherwise succeeded in maintaining its
distance from the bloc. In September 1947, delegates from Europe’s
Communist parties gathered in Warsaw to create the Cominform, or
Information Bureau of the Communist and Workers’ Parties, a successor to the
Comintern, which would be headquartered in Belgrade. At this meeting,
Soviet delegate Andrei Zhdanov declared that the world was irreconcilably
divided into two camps, imperialist and anti-imperialist: class conflict was pro-
jected onto a global stage. Taken together with the Truman Doctrine, this was
close to an official declaration of a Cold War.

2
“Truman Doctrine,” https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/trudoc.asp.
3
Quoted in Gerhard Wettig, Stalin and the Cold War in Europe (Rowman & Littlefield,
2008), 139.
 3 THE STRUGGLE FOR EUROPE 41

Modern historians debate at length about the divisive effects of the Marshall
Plan, and some argue that the US was deliberately trying to place the Soviets
in an impossible position that would exclude them from an emerging capitalist-­
oriented European system. In this view, it was the US move that drove the
Soviets to more radical and intransigent steps in 1948, which included the
formal takeover of Czechoslovakia and the blockade in Germany. It should
though be said that Soviet takeovers in the east were already well advanced
even before Marshall’s speech and that subsequent conflicts only formalized
the existing processes.

Drawing Lines
Generally, a map of the location of Allied armies in 1945 gave a strong sense of
where countries would fit into the new European order. But at the time, it was
by no means obvious which regions would become Communist, and which
not. In the Warsaw meeting in 1947, the parties represented countries thor-
oughly under Soviet control such as Bulgaria, but also such then-contested
societies as Czechoslovakia, Italy, and France.
The imposition of Soviet models was not surprising in countries like Bulgaria
and Romania, with their traditions of authoritarian rule, and backward econo-
mies. But Czechoslovakia between the two World Wars had been a conspicu-
ous example of economic sophistication and democratic government. Prague
in the 1930s was a progressive European city, a center for cultural experiment
and Modernism. After 1945, Soviet military domination encouraged the
growth of a local Communist party apparatus, and in 1946 the Communist
Party of Czechoslovakia, the Komunistická strana Č eskoslovenska (KSČ ), won
38 percent of the popular vote. The Party held key offices in government,
including the Interior Ministry. It controlled substantial armed force through
its armed workers’ militias, which severely limited effective police action. The
decisive transformation came in February 1948, when the Party organized a
coup d’etat that forced the removal of non-Communist ministers and officials.
Although the government was still notionally a coalition, the other parties were
dominated by crypto-Communists and Communist sympathizers. The only
exception was Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk, who in March 1948 was found
dead, apparently thrown from a window by government agents. The country’s
other statesman, Edvard Beneš, died shortly afterward, of natural causes.
Sovietization followed very shortly, and by the early 1950s, Czechoslovakia
was subject to repression as brutal as any in the Soviet sphere. The country’s
experience was alarming for Europeans living in non-Communist nations, as it
suggested how easily a Communist coup might occur in a country where dem-
ocratic norms seemed deeply rooted. This was an obvious issue for countries
such as France and Italy where popular Communist parties commanded wide
political support and were represented in government. The years of 1947–1948
forced a political realignment.
Another random document with
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 X
Psychologie féminine

«Les cerveaux n’ont pas de sexe,

l’infériorité de la femme n’est qu’un
sophisme.»

Pour assurer leur omnipotence, les hommes ont, par la force brutale,
imposé aux femmes une infériorité artificielle qui les fait dépendre de leur
bon plaisir.
La femme est un être frappé d’indignité qui démérite, en raison de son
sexe. Naître femme, augmente cependant, d’après les savants, la valeur
des individus.
Mais peu à peu, grâce à la science, la vérité se fait jour. Le Dr Schenk
de Vienne révéla que pour obtenir, de la nature, des filles—êtres soi-
disant inférieurs—il faut une alimentation plus nutritive à la mère que pour
obtenir des garçons, êtres que l’on prétend supérieurs et que les résultats
scientifiques remettent à leur place.
Depuis 30 ans, d’éminents zoologistes ont fait des observations
curieuses sur différentes espèces animales. MM. Henneguy et Balbiani,
professeurs au collège de France, ont constaté que chez les têtards de
grenouilles, une bonne nutrition donnait des femelles et qu’une nutrition
défectueuse produisait des mâles.
M. Houssay, professeur à la Sorbonne a constaté que chez les poules
une bonne nutrition produisait des poulettes et une mauvaise nutrition des
coqs.
M. Dantan a observé que le sexe des huîtres est très variable, un
même sujet pouvant alternativement être mâle ou femelle. Seules les
huîtres portugaises échappent à cette particularité et possèdent un sexe
fixe. De plus, ce sont chez les mâles, que les huîtres semblent en état
d’infériorité manifeste. Quand les conditions de nutrition sont
défavorables, on voit des femelles évoluer et se transformer en mâles,
pour redevenir femelles aussitôt que l’alimentation est devenue normale.
On peut dire que chez les mollusques le sexe féminin apparaît comme
un épanouissement de l’espèce.
L’espèce humaine subit la même loi naturelle que les espèces
animales. Les conjoints qui ont une bonne nutrition donnent le jour à des
filles. A mesure que le bien-être se répand, le nombre des filles s’élève, le
nombre des garçons diminue. Dans les pays pauvres il naît de 110 à 112
garçons pour 100 filles. En France il naît maintenant 104 garçons pour
100 filles. Pourtant les femmes sont plus nombreuses que les hommes de
près d’un million en France.
C’est que le sexe masculin est plus frappé par la mort que le sexe
féminin. La mortalité masculine est grande pendant la vie intra-utérine. Et
pendant les premiers jours, les premières semaines, les premières
années les petits garçons sont beaucoup plus fauchés par la mort que les
petites filles. C’est qu’ils sont nés dans de moins bonnes conditions de
nutrition que les petites filles et qu’il y a en eux une faiblesse congénitale.
La femme est plus résistante que l’homme; elle supporte mieux la
fatigue et la privation.
M. Edmond Perrier, directeur du Muséum, se demandait pourquoi,
seules les femelles d’un parasite de l’homme connu sous le nom de filiaire
de Médine ou dragonneux, se développait sous la peau en provoquant de
graves abcès. Il donne, à défaut d’observation, cette solution qu’il croit
possible: Dans les formes peu actives du règne animal, de même que
dans la société humaine en décadence, le rôle du sexe masculin
s’amoindrit de plus en plus, tandis que le sexe féminin prenant une
existence croissante se substitue à lui peu à peu et finit par l’éliminer.
Dans le règne animal c’est l’organisme masculin qui s’amoindrit et
disparaît. Dans les sociétés humaines, c’est la volonté masculine qui
s’amollit, qui «s’efféminise» et laisse une sensibilité maladive prendre la
place des fières abnégations de soi-même que comporte le rôle de père
de famille. Ce n’est pas la femme qui s’élève dans ces sociétés, c’est
l’homme oublieux de sa mission qui se laisse glisser.
La supériorité organique de la femme rend impossible son égalité avec
l’homme, suivant le directeur du Muséum, qui vient comme il peut, au
secours du masculinisme.
 Ce membre de l’Institut, bien qu’imbu de préjugés, déclare que le
«sexe féminin» est le sexe de la nutrition intensive, qu’il naît dans
l’abondance et s’y maintient par le dépôt dans les tissus d’importantes
réserves alimentaires.

«Le sexe masculin est au contraire le sexe de la nutrition

imparfaite. Il se caractérise par une dilapidation extraordinaire des
substances qui dans le sexe féminin sont mises en réserve.»

Mais, pour M. Edmond Perrier, que la femme soit supérieure ou

inférieure à l’homme, c’est une question oiseuse (sic) dès qu’elle ne peut
selon lui combiner les devoirs de la maternité avec une existence
analogue à celle que l’homme peut mener, en raison de son
indépendance vis-à-vis de sa progéniture.
Le directeur du Muséum s’écarte de la réalité, en ne constatant pas
que les deux tiers des femmes sont sans progéniture et sans maris pour
subvenir à leurs besoins.
Ce n’est pas en faisant de la maternité une cause de dégradation
civique, que l’on amènera à s’augmenter, en France, le nombre des
naissances. C’est en substituant, comme le demandent les féministes, la
citoyenne consciente du devoir, au mannequin qui sert d’instrument de
plaisir.
Les grands enfants qui gouvernent ont besoin d’un jouet, et, au
détriment de la race, ils sacrifient à leur amusement, les femmes. Mais il
va falloir cesser de se contredire pour appliquer les principes républicains,
en faisant participer la Française aux affaires publiques.
Puisque le sexe féminin est mieux organisé physiquement et par
conséquent intellectuellement et moralement que le sexe masculin, il ne
doit pas subir la domination de celui-ci.
M. Bergson dit qu’il y a une source de connaissance indépendante de
l’intelligence et aussi essentielle qu’elle. C’est l’intuition.
Si l’on arrive à cultiver, à étendre l’intuition, elle sera capable de
donner la clef de tous les grands problèmes de l’univers.
Les femmes sont douées d’intuition, mais leur annulement rend cette
qualité, innée en elles, inutile, puisque inutilisée.
 XI
Le rôle des Femmes et leur devoir dans la société

«L’homme fait verser tous les droits de son

côté, tous les devoirs du côté de la femme.
Dans notre législation la femme ne possède
pas, elle n’este pas en justice[15], elle ne vote
pas. Il y a des citoyens, il n’y a pas de
citoyennes. C’est là un état violent: il faut qu’il
cesse.»

Victor Hugo.

Les objections qu’on oppose a priori aux droits des femmes émanent
de gens qui, sans discussion dénient absolument l’électorat et l’éligibilité
aux femmes. Ils soutiennent cette théorie à savoir, que les femmes
n’ayant pas à remplir dans la société le même rôle que les hommes, elles
ne doivent pas posséder les mêmes droits qu’eux.
Cela s’accommode à tous les langages et s’exprime selon la franchise
et l’hypocrisie de chacun.
Les uns pour refuser à la femme ses droits civiques prétextent son
intérêt; ils entament des dissertations philosophiques sur sa nature, sur sa
mission. La femme ne peut, disent-ils, quitter le foyer où elle est reine
pour se mêler aux agitations de la place publique.
Voyez-vous cette reine qui ne peut qu’obéir, qui ne peut que se
soumettre aux injures et aux mauvais traitements? L’ironie est cruelle.
Les autres, lui assignent carrément ce lot: repriser les chaussettes de
l’homme.
Bref, la vérité, qu’elle se cache sous des fleurs de rhétorique ou qu’elle
se dégage de cette rude franchise, la vérité est que la femme est vouée à
servir l’homme, à être esclave et non pas libre. Ceci est criant dans cette
France qui a écrit sur ses murailles le mot égalité!
 La différence de rôle que certains hommes invoquent pour nous
refuser nos droits, n’est bien entendu qu’un prétexte, car si dans la société
les femmes n’ont pas à remplir les mêmes rôles que les hommes, les
hommes ne remplissent pas non plus tous le même rôle. N’y a-t-il pas des
hommes qui ont le rôle de construire des maisons, d’autres, le rôle de
tailler des habits, ceux-ci d’écrire, d’imprimer, ceux-là de labourer la terre?
Chaque homme a dans la société un rôle spécial et bien déterminé. Eh
bien! Que feraient les hommes si on les renfermait dans le cercle étroit de
leur profession. Si on leur disait: Vous boulanger, votre rôle est de pétrir
du pain! Vous n’aurez pas vos droits politiques. Vous cordonnier, votre
rôle est de coudre des souliers, vous n’aurez pas de droits politiques.—
Vous avocat, votre rôle est de plaider, vous n’aurez pas de droits
politiques.
Ce serait aussi logique que de dire à la femme que parce qu’il est dans
son rôle de prendre soin du ménage, des vêtements et des enfants, elle
n’aura pas de droits politiques.
Quoiqu’ils aient des rôles essentiellement différents dans la société,
aucun homme n’est, de par son rôle, si infime ou si supérieur qu’il
paraisse, exclu du droit? Pourquoi donc dit-on que le rôle des femmes doit
les priver de l’exercice de leurs droits? Est-ce que la femme remplit un
rôle inférieur à celui de l’homme?
Les soins donnés aux affaires domestiques sont-ils moins précieux
que l’attention apportée à l’exercice d’un métier? Non.
L’aisance relative qui résulte du judicieux emploi de l’argent n’est pas
moins précieuse au point de vue social que l’argent qui peut être acquis
dans les professions manuelles ou libérales. D’ailleurs, en dépit de la
surveillance des affaires de l’intérieur qui lui est attribuée, le plus souvent
la femme n’exerce-t-elle pas une profession?
Eh bien! c’est à elle qui se multiplie, c’est à la femme qui meurt à la
peine pour exercer son double rôle qu’on ose dire: «Ton rôle te fait déchoir
du droit.»
Que les hommes n’envisagent donc pas ce prétexte, la différence de
leurs rôles, pour exclure les femmes du droit.
 Ce n’est pas parce que les femmes et les hommes, parce que les
hommes entre eux et les femmes entre elles ont des devoirs différents,
qu’il peut s’en suivre qu’ils n’ont pas de droits égaux.
Tout le monde ne peut remplir le même rôle. La diversité des fonctions
est au contraire indispensable à la bonne harmonie de la société.
Le devoir imposé à tous est différent pour chacun.
Le droit inhérent à l’individu est égal pour tous.
Ce n’est pas parce que la femme française voterait, qu’elle cesserait
d’être dans la maison l’administratrice intelligente et économe, la
travailleuse ou l’intendante active qui surveille tout, qui est à tout.
Ce n’est pas parce que la femme voterait, qu’elle cesserait d’être pour
la famille ce qu’est le soleil pour la fleur, un astre qui la réchauffe de son
amour. Non! les femmes peuvent à la fois jouir de l’intégralité de leurs
droits et être irréprochables dans l’accomplissement de leurs devoirs.
Voter et légiférer ne constitue pas un rôle, mais bien le droit et le
devoir d’administrer la fortune publique; comme de passer un bail, de
vendre ou d’acheter des titres de rente constitue le droit et le devoir
d’administrer sa fortune privée.
Le femme ne cessera pas plus d’être femme en devenant citoyenne,
que l’homme en devenant citoyen ne cesse d’être homme.
En entrant en possession des droits, des titres, des prérogatives, de la
part de souveraineté qui lui appartient, la femme conservera toute sa
féminité; mais elle acquerra avec la puissance politique, une valeur
morale qui la fera cesser d’être méprisée, quand elle a passé l’âge de
plaire.

Tant que l’on continuera à dire dans l’Etat: «Qui a la direction de la

barque sociale?» et dans le ménage: «Qui a la maîtrise?», on sera bien
loin de posséder les mœurs qui font les gouvernements démocratiques.
Qu’est-ce que la liberté? Qu’est-ce que l’égalité dans ce beau pays de
France, où un sexe tient l’autre sous le joug?
 Une pure fiction.
Dans une vraie République, le gouvernement qui procède de tous, doit
être à tous. Il ne doit pas plus y avoir de maîtres dans la maison que de
maîtres dans l’Etat. Mais, selon que, quelqu’un a plus ou moins d’aptitude
pour remplir telle fonction, il doit dans l’intérêt général être délégué à cette
fonction dans l’Etat, ou à cette autre fonction dans le ménage. C’est de
cette adaptation aux emplois des facultés de chacun, de la mise en place
de tous, de la concordance et de l’acquiescement des volontés et des
capacités, que découlera l’ordre véritable: l’harmonie.
Ceux qui placent la femme plus bas que les repris de justice et les
rôdeurs de barrière, disent que l’homme est un être supérieur qui doit
diriger les affaires extérieures et que la femme qui est un être inférieur doit
se consacrer exclusivement à la direction du ménage.
Est-il plus difficile de diriger les affaire extérieures que les affaires
intérieures?
Nous serions très désireux de voir comment les habiles politiciens qui
ne savent faire face aux exigences sociales avec le gros budget de la
France, se tireraient d’affaire dans le ménage, s’ils avaient un très
modeste budget pour satisfaire aux besoins d’une famille.
Le sexe n’assigne pas à l’être humain des attributions déterminées.
Etre homme ou être femme n’importe pas plus dans la distribution des
fonctions sociales, qu’être grand ou petit, brun ou blond, gras ou maigre. Il
n’y a que pour procréer des enfants que la question de sexe est de
rigueur. Mais pour faire des lois, elle n’est nullement mise en cause. A voir
l’obstination de certaines personnes à nous objecter toujours et partout
notre sexe, ce serait à croire, en vérité, qu’elles confondent les mots:
voter, légiférer et enfanter.
Les qualités morales et intellectuelles sont absolument indépendantes
du sexe de l’individu qui les possède. A qui fera-t-on croire qu’être homme
étend nécessairement les facultés d’un individu, fût-il idiot, et qu’être
femme circonscrit fatalement les facultés d’un individu qui a des capacités
multiples pour tout envisager?
Des fonctions déterminées ne doivent pas plus être les attributs de
l’homme ou de la femme, que des aptitudes déterminées ne sont leurs
attributs.
 Les femmes peuvent avoir aussi bien que les hommes, de grandes
capacités pour diriger les affaires de l’intérieur. Nous ne doutons pas qu’il
y ait des ménagères qui feraient de grands hommes d’Etat et des députés
qui feraient d’excellents cuisiniers. La pratique est là pour confirmer ce
que nous avançons. Combien d’hommes quittent chaque année leurs
attributions pour se tailler une situation dans la sphère exclusivement
dévolue à la femme.
Eh bien! ce que les hommes font, les femmes doivent aussi pouvoir le
faire.
De même que les hommes qui en ont le goût peuvent envahir la
cuisine, les femmes qui y sont instinctivement poussées, doivent pouvoir
s’occuper de politique, voter, légiférer, peser de toute leur influence
favorable sur la destinée humaine.
Quand nous parlons de cette chose rationnelle, le droit, la liberté de
choisir la carrière pour laquelle nous avons de l’attrait, tous les hommes
s’écrient: Eh quoi! femmes! Vous voulez nous remplacer! Vous voulez être
électeurs, députés, ministres, et nous faire, nous tous, balayeurs,
cuisiniers, hommes de ménage!
Rassurez-vous, forts en égoïsme! les femmes ne réclament, pas
encore votre monopole pour se l’approprier. Ce qu’elles veulent, les
femmes, c’est de pouvoir suivre la voie qui leur convient. Ce qu’elles ne
veulent plus, les femmes, c’est d’être—parce qu’elles sont femmes—
parquées dans un rôle déterminé, au grand préjudice de leur intérêt et du
vôtre.
Il n’y aura d’harmonie dans la société, il n’y aura de bonheur pour
l’humanité que dans l’égalité des droits pour tous et l’équitable répartition
des fonctions entre tous hommes et femmes, indifféremment, suivant leurs
aptitudes particulières.
 XII
Les femmes sont moins en France que les roulures
de Bagne

«On interdit que pour un temps les droits

politiques aux malfaiteurs, on interdit pour
toujours les droits politiques aux femmes.»

H. A.

Lors des élections, à l’extrême limite, il y a des candidats et des

électeurs de castes, des candidats et des électeurs de classes. Mais si la
plate-forme électorale diffère, les élections sont uniquement des élections
de sexe, des élections de ces nobles d’aujourd’hui: les hommes. Ce ne
sont que les hommes qui votent, ce ne sont que des hommes qui sont
élus. Il n’y a donc pas dans la commune et dans l’Etat une représentation
réelle de la population, qui est, en majorité, formée de femmes.
N’est-ce pas incompréhensible que des femmes lucides, à l’esprit
pénétrant, ne puissent voter comme les hommes idiots ou rendus
inconscients par l’ivresse?
Pour exclure les Françaises de la souveraineté, on allègue que leur
éducation ne les rend pas aptes à s’occuper de politique. Ce n’est point
l’éducation, c’est le pantalon qui fait l’électeur.
Chaque année, lors de la conscription, des garçons, élevés en filles,
voient rectifier leur état civil et leur éducation ne les empêche pas de jouir
des droits politiques dès qu’ils ont substitué à la jupe, le pantalon.
Une erreur de sexe a récemment été reconnue en une point banale
circonstance. Mlle Renée Gautherot, voulant devenir sage-femme, était, à
vingt ans, entrée à l’Ecole départementale d’accouchement de Dijon. Elle
passa ses examens et, pendant un an, fut interne à la Maternité. Elle
coucha dans le dortoir commun, prodigua ses soins aux accouchées
jusqu’à ce qu’un docteur révélât que cette jeune fille... était un jeune
homme!...
Renée Gautherot a été éduquée ainsi que l’est une fille, et si l’on
n’avait point découvert qu’elle appartient au sexe masculin, elle serait
restée toute sa vie exclue de l’électorat comme indigne.
Mais parce que l’on a acquis la certitude que cette femme est un
homme, la voilà reconnue apte à exercer ses droits de citoyens.
L’insuffisance d’éducation alléguée pour spolier les femmes de leurs droits
politiques, ne privera pas de voter ce garçon élevé en fille.
Dans la République, filles et garçons étant pareillement intéressés,
doivent pouvoir également donner leur avis.
L’opinion des femmes doit être entendue et respectée comme l’opinion
des hommes.
Tout le monde n’est pas partisan du vote des femmes. Mais ne sait-on
pas que, si en France, les changements dans le costume féminin sont
sans protestation acceptés, le remplacement d’une coutume féminine par
une autre, a toujours fait se récrier une légion d’opposants.
Quand les parisiennes qui n’avaient le droit d’occuper l’impériale des
omnibus furent admises à monter s’y asseoir, beaucoup de gens
trouvèrent mauvais qu’on leur octroyât cette liberté. Les uns feignaient de
craindre que les femmes accapareraient toutes les places à 15 centimes;
d’autres clamaient qu’il était immoral d’autoriser des enjuponnées à
grimper sur le dessus des voitures.
Lorsque les femmes devinrent cochères, chauffeuses et conduisirent
les voitures, les protestations furent nombreuses. Mais nul n’aurait coupé
les guides de leur cheval si les cochères avaient été électeur. Pour avoir
la liberté d’agir à leur gré, les femmes doivent tenir, comme les hommes,
les rênes de l’Etat.
Les Français s’affaiblissent en n’utilisant pas toute l’intelligence et
toute l’énergie de la nation, en ne relevant pas les femmes de la
dégradation civique.
La dégradation civique est une déchéance qui fait perdre la qualité de
citoyen, et fait exclure du droit de participer au gouvernement.
 Pour les hommes, la dégradation civique résulte de la condamnation à
une peine infamante pour assassinat, vol, ivrognerie, attentat aux mœurs.
Pour les femmes, la dégradation civique ne provient point de
condamnations, mais simplement de leur sexe. C’est parce qu’elles sont
nées du sexe féminin, que toutes les Françaises sont assimilées aux
assassins, aux voleurs, aux satyres et exclues avec eux des droits
politiques. Seulement, les hommes condamnés ne sont qu’exclus
temporairement des droits politiques. Les femmes en sont des exclues
permanentes de ces droits.
Entre hommes et femmes, dont le même sang coule dans les veines, il
ne doit avoir ni supérieurs ni inférieurs, mais accord, efforts combinés pour
faire, de notre France, un lieu de délices.
Les hommes ont tout à gagner à faire à la femme, cette amie sûre,
cette sage conseillère, place à leur côté. Il y a pour eux dans
l’affranchissement de leurs compagnes une augmentation de bien-être, et
tout ce qui peut résulter d’heureux pour l’humanité de l’utilisation
d’intelligences généreuses et primesautières.
La question des femmes est le nœud gordien qui, une fois tranché,
rendrait facile la question sociale.
 XIII
La Femme en France est moins que l’étranger

«Plus encore que le Français, la Française

représente la plus haute expression du
caractère national.»

Elisée Reclus.

Les Françaises qui caractérisent la France n’existent pas socialement,

annulées, sans action. Elles restent à perpétuité hors la loi dans leur pays,
puisqu’elles sont exclues des droits politiques. Ce ne sera cependant
qu’en utilisant toute sa force cérébrale que la France s’assurera la
prépondérance morale dans le monde.
On n’admet pas au droit commun les Françaises; mais on admet au
droit commun les étrangers naturalisés: près de 14.000 étrangers sont,
par an, faits citoyens Français.
Plus de la moitié de la nation française n’est pas représentée au
Parlement tant que les femmes ne votent pas. Mais les nations Russe,
Allemande, Belge, Anglaise, Italienne, Autrichienne, Espagnole,
Américaine, Suisse, Hollandaise, Turque, Grecque, Suédoise, Danoise,
Norvégienne, Portugaise, Japonaise, Chinoise, Bulgare, Serbe, sont
représentées au Parlement Français. Les natifs de ces pays sont devenus
électeurs et éligibles chez nous, exercent une influence sur nos
assemblées administratives et législatives au profit de leur véritable et
première patrie. Ils peuvent faire prendre des déterminations
préjudiciables à nos intérêts nationaux, insinuer une mentalité anti-
française, tandis que les femmes Françaises, point citoyennes, sont dans
l’impossibilité de défendre la France contre ces étrangers.
L’exclusion des droits politiques des femmes contribuables, justiciables
qui forment la majorité des Français, est un sabotage des principes
patriotiques et républicains qui amoindrit la France et met en péril la
République.
 Pendant que les députés refusent de faire électeurs les femmes de
France, le gouverneur général de l’Afrique Equatoriale française,
demande d’admettre sans discussion—par décret—les nègres du Congo
à être citoyens, et cette proposition de faire voter les nègres du Congo est
immédiatement prise en considération et mise à l’étude par le ministre des
Colonies. C’est que les intérêts des nègres du Congo et les intérêts des
députés sont connexes; tandis que les intérêts des femmes et les intérêts
des députés sont en opposition.
Les noirs du Congo seront faits électeurs, parce qu’en votant, ils
augmenteront le nombre des sièges législatifs.
Les femmes ne sont pas admises à voter parce que les députés ne
sont point intéressés à ce qu’elles votent. Comptées déjà, contribuant par
leur nombre à créer des sièges législatifs, elles ne procureraient pas une
place de plus à la Chambre, et en doublant le nombre des électeurs elles
rendraient plus difficile d’être élu.
Les noirs des Antilles, de la Guadeloupe, du Sénégal qui ne parlent
pas notre langue, qui ne subissent pas nos lois, possèdent depuis
longtemps le bulletin de vote.
Les gouvernants élèvent jusqu’à eux, les plus sauvages indigènes de
nos colonies parce qu’ils leur assurent des fiefs électoraux. Ils font des
étrangers qui contribuent à leur garantir ces fiefs, des égaux politiques.
Mais les femmes serves, ne disposant pas des fiefs dont elles ont été
spoliées par les hommes, sont laissées au-dessous de tout.
Les Françaises devraient être en France, au moins aussi bien traitées
que les étrangers.
C’est anti-français d’accorder aux hommes nés hors de notre territoire
des privilèges que les naturelles, que les filles du pays ne possèdent pas.
En la France hospitalière, l’étranger est partout bien accueilli. Il trône
dans les salons, il est embauché par les employeurs et par l’Etat. Une
grande partie du personnel des établissements dépendant de l’Etat, des
départements et des communes est étranger. Le cosmopolitisme pousse
les habitants de notre pays à renoncer à toute initiative propre, à accepter
les yeux fermés la manière de se vêtir, de se chausser, de se loger, de
vivre et de penser de l’étranger.
 A l’instigation des étrangers nous cessons d’être nous mêmes. Nous
transformons notre langue, nous changeons de manière de voir, nous
sommes conquis moralement par les Anglais, les Allemands, les
Américains.
Je propose de mettre un impôt sur les anti-patriques qui remplacent
les mots de notre langue par des mots étrangers: «L’homme qui aime les
autres pays autant que le sien, dit Roosevelt, est un tout aussi nuisible
membre de la société, que celui qui aime les autres femmes autant que la
sienne.»
La France se montre meilleure pour les hommes nés à l’étranger que
pour les femmes sorties de son sein.
L’étranger naturalisé a tous les droits des nationaux mâles. Il est
électeur, il est éligible, il est trouvé apte à remplir les bons emplois, les
hautes fonctions, cependant que des femmes nées en France de parents
français sont comme les repris de justice, des dégradées civiques.
Les étrangers ont en France de hautes situations auxquelles les
femmes ne peuvent prétendre. Des étrangers sont auditeurs au Conseil
d’Etat, mais pas de femmes.
A l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, il y a beaucoup de
correspondants et de membres associés Allemands, mais pas de
femmes.
L’étranger est en France plus favorisé d’honneurs et de sinécures que
les femmes. Il obtient plus facilement qu’elle du travail, et ce travail
souvent mal exécuté, est mieux rétribué que celui des femmes.
L’homme étranger peut en France faire concurrence aux ouvriers
français, en travaillant au-dessous du tarif des syndicats. Il faut bien qu’il
vive le pauvre!... Ne sommes-nous pas tous frères devant les syndiqués?
La femme française, elle, doit mourir de faim ou se prostituer, plutôt
que d’accepter de travailler au-dessous du tarif syndical. Si elle se le
permet en raison de son infériorité légale, qui fait déprécier son travail,
elle est exclue du syndicat, et ses collègues mâles font grève pour obtenir
son expulsion de l’imprimerie ou de la fabrique qui emploie.
Or, ces socialistes qui exigent que les femmes infériorisées par la loi
soient aussi payées que les hommes qui font la loi, lorsqu’ils deviennent
patrons, comme à la verrerie d’Albi, ils donnent aux femmes 1 fr. 25
pendant qu’ils s’attribuent 12 francs par jour[16].

La concurrence étrangère

Les Allemands sont plus chez eux en France que les femmes qui
perpétuent la nation française.
Ils nous vendent leur pacotille, des pneumatiques d’automobiles, des
échelles de pompiers, des instruments de chirurgie, etc.
Les Allemands auxquels l’abaissement de la France importe tant, ont,
dit Edouard Drumont, monopolisé chez nous les industries intéressant la
défense nationale. Ils nous fournissent à bon marché l’acétate qui entre
dans la composition de la poudre B, cause de tant de catastrophes.
Le congrès du bâtiment tenu à Bordeaux en avril 1912 s’est occupé de
la situation faite aux ouvriers français, par les nombreux ouvriers venant
de l’étranger et auxquels, même l’état, confie des travaux importants.
En donnant des détails sur ces travaux, les congressistes nous ont
appris que le monument de Waldeck-Rousseau du sculpteur Marqueste,
érigé à l’aide d’une souscription nationale, a été exécuté à Sarraveza en
Italie. Celui du Vengeur commandé pour le Panthéon par l’Etat à M.
Ernest Dubois, a été exécuté à Carrare. La fontaine décorative de la place
du Carrousel, dont l’auteur est M. Larche a été exécutée dans les ateliers
de M. Pelligripi. Le buste de Paul Déroulède par Pallez a été sculpté à
Carrare.
Est-ce que l’on ne pourrait pas faire travailler à Paris le marbre de
Carrare?
Les artistes qui font exécuter leurs œuvres en Italie, et les grands
éditeurs qui font imprimer leurs livres à Londres et à Berlin devraient être
frappés d’énormes taxes, car beaucoup de Français pâtissent, pendant
que les Italiens, les Anglais et les Allemands mangent notre pain national.
Plus d’un million d’étrangers font chez nous concurrence aux
travailleurs français.
 En voyant préférer, à elles, les étrangers, les femmes françaises se
révoltent. Une fabrique de conserves alimentaires qui employait pour
écosser les petits pois, des ouvrières Belges, fut dernièrement envahie
par des centaines d’ouvrières françaises qui se plaignaient qu’on donnait
leur place aux étrangères. Elles pénétrèrent dans l’usine en frappant les
gendarmes qui s’opposaient à leur entrée et elles demandèrent que le
travail fût attribué aux françaises, au lieu d’être donné aux étrangères:
Ces femmes avaient raison.
Les étrangers viennent nous prendre notre clientèle, notre travail, nos
gains, nos bénéfices. Ils deviennent médecins avec des diplômes
étrangers. Ils sont propriétaires de milliers d’hectares de terre. Ils fondent
chez nous des maisons de commerce, des usines. Ils exploitent notre sol
et notre sous-sol.
Les espions Allemands se font en France, industriels. Les Anglais aux
griffes puissantes ont les mains mises sur tout ce qui leur paraît bon à
prendre.
Les déchets sociaux de tous les pays font de Paris, un repaire de
bandits. Sur sept malfaiteurs il y a six étrangers.
La France installe les espions à son foyer. Les 103.000 allemands qui
vivent à Paris, sont des envahisseurs dont la pénétration choque l’esprit
national.
L’homme étranger jouit à Paris de tant de considération, qu’il trouve
facilement dans le commerce 100.000 francs de crédit. La femme
française ne trouve pas crédit pour 20 kilos de pain.
Quand, pour exercer les droits politiques on n’assimile pas les
françaises aux français, comment peut-on assimiler les étrangers aux
français pour exercer les droits politiques?
La mise du bulletin de vote en la main de l’étranger est une
capitulation qui lui livre notre destinée et lui donne le droit de nous
imposer sa loi.
En laissant la majorité de ses membres—les femmes—au-dessous
des étrangers, la nation française se rend inapte à résister à la
déformation que lui imprime l’infiltration étrangère.
 Des étrangers naturalisés ne peuvent envisager nos affaires et nos
intérêts comme des français d’origine. Comment se fait-il donc que ces
étrangers naturalisés jouissent des prérogatives que les natives de France
ne possèdent pas?
Blanqui demandait: Que serons-nous demain si nous n’avons plus de
patrie?
La patrie est comme une maison familiale dont tous les habitants sont
censés être de la même famille.
Eh bien, les femmes nées en France de parents français sont des
sans-patrie, non à la manière internationaliste qui fait disparaître les
frontières sous les fraternelles étreintes des peuples, mais selon la légalité
napoléonienne qui traite la femme, en errante sans feu, ni lien, qui n’a
d’autre nationalité que celle de ses maris successifs.
On lit dans le code civil article 19: La femme française qui épouse un
étranger suit la condition de son mari[17].
Ce ne sera qu’en devenant citoyennes que les françaises s’assureront
le droit d’avoir une patrie. Actuellement dans leur pays, chez elles, les
Françaises sont moins que des Anglais, des Italiens, des Belges, des
Allemands naturalisés qui peuvent trancher de tout dans la commune et
dans l’Etat.
Pourquoi cette prééminence chez nous des étrangers sur les femmes?
Aux femmes qui les complètent, les français doivent toutes leurs joies.
Aux étrangers qui menacent leur sécurité, qui enlèvent, avec le travail,
le pain quotidien, les français ne doivent que des angoisses et de la
pauvreté. Cependant, ce n’est pas aux femmes, qui se feraient leurs
auxiliaires pour assurer leur bonheur, c’est aux étrangers qu’ils donnent le
bulletin de vote qui leur facilitera de prendre leur territoire après avoir pris
leur gain.
Est-ce logique: que les étrangers qui trouvent avantageux d’adopter,
provisoirement, la France pour patrie, la gouvernent, alors que les
femmes sorties des entrailles nationales n’ont le droit d’y décider de rien?
Ceux qui crient: «La France aux Français», aiment mieux que la
France soit aux étrangers qu’aux Françaises.