The Russians Are Coming, Again. John Marciano
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absorb the full brunt of Germany’s fury. This is when the United States was urging the Soviet Union to take the risk of having to fight on a second front—in the Far East. The United States invaded Italy in September, 1943 and then on June 6, 1944, landed at Normandy, France, where nine thousand American soldiers died. By that point, the Soviets had reversed the Nazi blitzkrieg at a cost of over seven million military and five to six million civilians killed, with shattered towns and villages destroyed by fire. And they were occupying much of Central Europe.12
Secretary of War Henry Stimson wrote to Dean Acheson on May 17, 1943, that “the British are trying to arrange this matter so that the British and Americans hold the leg for Stalin to kill the deer and I think that will be dangerous business for us at the end of the war. Stalin won’t have much of an opinion of people who have done that and we will not be able to share much of the postwar world with him.”13 These comments capture the essence of a military policy that forced the Soviets to shoulder a huge portion of the military burden, which added to the legacy of the Wilson administration’s “Midnight War” in sowing Soviet mistrust for the West. This mistrust was also deepened with proposals by military leaders like George Patton for preventive war, and the exclusion of Soviet influence and repression of the political left during the Allied occupation of Italy, which intensified Stalin’s urge to consolidate his own sphere of power in Eastern Europe.14
THE PROMISE OF YALTA AND ITS BREAKDOWN
“Russia hands” in the U.S. State Department and British Foreign office considered the Soviets to display Asian features, which made them inclined toward tyranny, adopting a mix of Russophobia and anti-Communism tinged at times with anti-Semitism. Nevertheless, during wartime conferences, President Roosevelt established a good rapport with Stalin and recognized the Soviets’ need for a security buffer in Eastern Europe to protect the country from renewed German aggression. Stalin in a November 1944 speech had called for creation of an organization akin to the United Nations to “defend peace and ensure security” and would establish a military force that could be activated to “liquidate aggression and punish those guilty of aggression.”15 Even Dwight Eisenhower was hopeful about postwar cooperation, telling a group of congressmen, “Russia has not the slightest thing to gain by a war with the United States. There is in Russia a desperate and continuing concern for the lot of the common man and they want to be friends with the United States.”16
At the Yalta Conference in February 1945, held at a resort town in the Crimea, a deal was brokered whereby the Big Three (Britain, United States, and the USSR) agreed to accept Soviet influence in Romania and a pro-Soviet government in Poland, a provisional body consisting of leaders known as the Lublin Poles. By way of concession, Stalin agreed to enter the war against Japan and support the United Nations. He also accepted the addition to the Warsaw regime of some members of the anti-Soviet Polish government in exile, the London Poles whom writer and journalist Isaac Deutscher described as a “motley coalition who could not by any criterion, ‘Eastern’ or ‘Western,’ be labelled democrats.” Elections would follow in due course. The Anglo-Americans, Diane Shaver-Clemens writes, had reason to trust Stalin because despite acts of perfidy such as the cover-up of the Katyn Forest massacre by Soviet troops in Poland, he had already allowed free elections in Austria and Finland, and he had recognized Charles de Gaulle as leader of France. Clemens regarded the Yalta Conference as an agreement among realists to maintain spheres of influence, though right-wingers in the United States considered it a form of appeasement by pro-Communist New Dealers (in 2005, George W. Bush compared it to Munich and the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact). As part of the agreement, Stalin agreed to non-interference in the Greek civil war where Britain and the United States backed right-wing monarchists, many of them Nazi collaborators, against left-wing guerrillas advocating for socialism, land and wealth redistribution, and nationalization of industry.
After succeeding Roosevelt in April 1945, Harry S. Truman rejected the Lublin government in Poland that Stalin had helped impose, and created a separate West German government that denied the Soviets access to the Ruhr industrial heartland and provided only minimal reparations payments. Truman felt betrayed because the 1947 election in Poland was considered to be unfair and Stalin endorsed acts of political terror against the pro-Western opposition. Stalin felt the West was hypocritical in trying to interfere in Poland by supporting Stanislaw Mikolajczyk (pro-West candidate who got 10 percent of the vote) when the Soviets did not attempt to interfere in Belgium, Italy, or Greece. The Soviets in turn consolidated control over Eastern Europe with their support for Communist dictatorships, and thus the Cold War commenced. “We are living with the problems of a world that did not benefit from the experience at Yalta,” Clemens concluded from the perspective of the 1970s. “It is perhaps relevant to ask what the world would have been like if the spirit of Yalta had triumphed.”17 Perhaps it is still relevant.
THE PATH OF PEACE NOT PURSUED: THE REMOVAL OF HENRY WALLACE
A key turning point that may have influenced the entire history of the Cold War occurred at the 1944 Democratic Party national convention in Chicago when Harry S. Truman was nominated over Henry A. Wallace as vice president on the Roosevelt ticket.
Wallace was a progressive New Dealer who supported free trade, national health insurance, abolishing Jim Crow, and free public schooling and day care. Unique among American leaders, Wallace was sensitive to the conditions of grinding poverty and oppression that Lenin had seized upon, and to the accomplishments and appeal of Soviet Communism. He also questioned many aspects of U.S. foreign policy, such as the State Department’s friendliness toward right-wing dictators.18
As an alternative to Henry Luce’s vision of the “American Century,” which demanded that the United States “accept wholeheartedly our duty and our opportunity as the most powerful and vital nation in the world and … exert upon the world the full impact of our influence, for such purposes as we see fit and by such means as we see fit,” Wallace had proposed a “Century of the Common Man,” in which “no nation will have the god-given right to exploit other nations. Older nations will have the privilege to help younger nations get started on the path to industrialization, but there must be neither military nor economic imperialism. The methods of the nineteenth century will not work in the people’s century which is now about to begin.”19
At the Democratic Party convention, California oilman, party treasurer, and chief fundraiser Edwin Pauley and chairman Robert Hannegan coordinated with Southern segregationists, big-city machine politicians, and business interests to remove Wallace from his nomination as vice president through a backroom arrangement supported by Congress of Industrial Organization (CIO) leader Sidney Hillman and an ailing FDR. When Wallace appeared poised to receive the nomination, the convention was adjourned and spotlights turned off just before Claude Pepper (D-FL), a Wallace supporter, could take the podium. Overnight, the bosses then worked to secure Truman’s nomination by offering ambassadorships, postmaster positions, and cold cash to delegates, blocking Wallace supporters from entering the arena the next day.20
Wallace was subsequently fired as commerce secretary after proposing in a speech at Madison Square Garden, on September 12, 1946, that the United Nations assume control of the strategically located air bases with which “the United States and Britain [had] encircled the world.” According to Wallace, “nations not only should be prohibited from manufacturing atom bombs, guided missiles and military aircraft for bombing purposes, but also prohibited from spending on its military more than 15 percent of its budget.” The United States, he said, could easily ensure cooperation with the Soviets if they made clear “we are not planning for war against her,” and had “no more business in the political affairs of Eastern Europe than Russia has in Latin America.” Wallace ended the speech by calling on Americans “who look on this war-with-Russia talk as criminal foolishness … [to] carry our message direct to the people—even though we may be called communists because we dare to speak out.”21