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Part Seven

“The Great Patriotic War and the Onset of the Cold War” (Chapter 5 of the Text)

Strategic Geopolitical and Military Considerations The Soviet Political-Military Setting in the Spring of 1941: By the spring of 1941, notwithstanding is territorial gains from the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and the Russo-Finnish War, and its Neutrality Agreement with Japan, the Soviet Union had great reason to be concerned about her national security. Relations with Nazi Germany soured since the summer of 1940, and with the fall of France, British and French land forces remained isolated across the English Channel in Great Britain. This meant that Hitler’s Nazi Germany now had a completely free-hand in Europe. After its occupation of greater Poland, German military forces directly faced Soviet military forces along a 1,200-mile front from Lithuania to the coast of the Ukraine on the Black Sea. And by late 1940, the Nazi German Axis Alliance also included Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria in Central East Europe. And despite a crash program of military buildup after the Russo-Finnish War, the Soviet military leadership was still suspect in the aftermath of the massive officer purge in 1937.

Proceeding with active preparations for the German occupation of the Soviet Union, Hitler had amassed the greatest offensive military force in history along the 1,200-mile German-Soviet front in eastern Europe. The German invasion force consisted of 154 divisions of 2,500,000 men along the German-Soviet frontier in Lithuania, White Russia, and the Ukraine. Stalin’s now two top military officers General Georgii Zhukov and General Simon Timoshenko were so alarmed by the German military buildup along the border that they advised not just a full military alert but a plan for a Soviet pre-emptive military strike should German action merit such a pre-emptive military strike. But Stalin refused to do either.

On the one hand, Stalin reasoned that German military forces would never strike against the Soviet Union as long as they were still engaged in military hostilities against Great Britain. And, on the other hand, he did not want to give the German military any pretext to undertake immediate military action against the Soviet forces. Stalin was poignantly aware that Germany had declared war on Russia in 1914 when Tsar Nicholas II had called for immediate Russian military mobilization. Furthermore, Stalin, just after signing of the Mutual Neutrality Pact with Japan on April 13, 1941, was still not sure that Japan would honor the pact in the face of a German-Soviet military confrontation, but return to a “strike north” policy and attack the Soviet Union from the east confronting the Soviet Union with a two-front war.

Hence, when Nazi Germany launched its massive military offensive against the Soviet Union at 4:00 a.m. on June 22, 1941, Soviet military forces were inadequately prepared for an effective defensive stance, let alone any type of counteroffensive. Stalin himself was so shocked that he experience a temporary mental breakdown that paralyzed his policy-making capacity for an entire week. It was only when his chief party officials convinced Stalin that he alone, built up over the past two decades as the invincible leader of the Soviet state could rally the country to a heroic defense, that Stalin abruptly snapped out of his emotional paralysis and took charge of the Soviet war effort in a strikingly charismatic and competent manner.

The German Political-Military Setting in the Spring of 1941: While Hitler had already begun military planning with his generals for the invasion of the Soviet Union (“Operation Barbarossa”) on December 18, 1940, with the original invasion date set for May 25, 1941, his own plans were disrupted by the military action of his Axis ally Fascist Italy. Benito Mussolini, who, wishing to establish a Balkan empire and having already politically subdued Albania across the Adriatic Sea, invaded Greece on October 28, 1940. But Mussolini was embarrassingly stalemated by a vastly smaller Greek force. Hitler felt compelled to come to the aid of his embarrassed Axis ally with 20 German military divisions in the early spring of 1941. With German military help Mussolini eventually prevailed in Greece, but the German military campaign conducted through Yugoslavia to reach Greece and the fighting in Greece cost Hitler precious time and some damage to this military hardware. Hence, it was not until June 22, 1941, that the German command was fully ready to launce the German military offensive against the Soviet Union. Whether the month’s

101 delay from Hitler’s original time frame was crucial to the outcome of the initial German offensive remains a matter of debate to historians yet today. German military strategy for crushing the Soviet Union called for similar blitzkrieg tactics as those used for the quick decisive victories in Poland and France. The German military offensive, spearheaded by armored tanks units and fighter aircraft against enemy airfields, were to advance along three fronts. Army Group North, commanded by General Wilhelm von Loeb, was to advance northeast to take the city of Leningrad as the second largest city in the Soviet Union and the chief Soviet naval seaport. Army Group Center, commanded by General Feodor von Bock, was to advance directly east to take the Soviet capital of Moscow to force the capitulation of the Soviet government. And Army Group South, commanded by General Friedrich von Paulus, was to advance southeast through White Russia and the Ukraine to take Minsk, Kiev, and Kharkov, and then proceed into the northern Caucasus to take the oil fields at Maikop.

The German offensive which led to the Soviet “Great Patriotic War” against Germany lasted for the next four years, resulting in the greatest loss of human life and property devastation in human history. The Great Patriotic War can be divided into four phases: (i) the Battle of Moscow; (ii) the Battle of Stalingrad; (iii) the Battle of Kursk; and (iv) the “liberation” of East-Central Europe that included the occupation of East Germany.

The Strategic Military Campaigns

The First Phase – the Battle of Moscow: With parallel offensives also launched against Leningrad in the north and Kiev in the south, the spearhead of the initial Soviet thrust was the capture of Moscow some 600 miles from the German eastern frontier in Poland. The Soviet military force of some 170 divisions along the 1,200-mile front, following Stalin’s initial orders to stand back, was caught by great surprise and at first welted before the German armored forces. The Germans advanced thirty to forty miles a day, capturing Minsk in July, Smolensk in August and Kiev in September. Soviet losses were staggering: the Germans took 300,000 prisoners-of-war in the capture of Minsk, 300,000 prisoners-of-war in the capture of Smolensk, and 600,000 prisoners-of-war in the capture of Kiev. By November, the Germans had captured some 2,300,000 Soviet prisoners-of-war, most of whom eventually died from starvation, disease, or overwork in German prisoner-of-war camps. After the capture of Smolensk, Hitler felt confident enough to re-dispatch two units of Army Group Center originally ordered to directly proceed to take Moscow to assist in the campaigns against Leningrad and Kiev. Hence, two crack panzer divisions under Herman von Hoth and Heinz Guderian, were re-dispatched in August to assist in the campaigns to take Leningrad and Kiev respectively. Leningrad never surrendered (see below), and while Kiev fell in September to German forces reinforced by Guderian’s panzer units, by the time the elite Guderian panzer units could rejoin Army Group Center in October for a final push on Moscow the military situation had critically changed. On the one hand, during their initial period of being pushed back, the Soviet military forces regrouped in new formations from and almost unlimited population of military reserves with an ever greater military resolve. On the other hand, the closer the German forces drove toward Moscow the more their armored forces became bogged down in the marshy terrain immediately surrounding Moscow. Compounded by the fall rains beginning in October of 1941 almost all German armor ground to a halt in a swampy quagmire. The frozen ground of one of the coldest Russian winters – temperatures by late November reached -32 degrees Fahrenheit – then also proved of little avail as German military transport remained stalled as oil components turned into sludge. And for the German infantry itself frostbite accounted for more casualties than enemy resistance. In the face of such an impending weather disaster, Hitler refused to order winter clothing on the premise that German military forces would be ever more highly driven to complete the capture of Moscow.

By December 3, 1941, advanced detachments of German forces had reached within 35 miles of the outskirts of Moscow; but by that point the German forces were not only greatly devastated by the Russian climate, but were also confronted by a Moscow civilian population prepared to defend the city of Moscow to the bitter end. Muscovites, mostly women, dug 10,000 miles of anti-tank trenches. And even more critically some 400,000 fresh troops of the Red Banner Army of the Far East, which had distinguished itself in the campaign against Japanese forces arrived on the scene. The Red Banner Army of the Far East was composed of hardened veterans who were

102 equipped with clothing and weaponry to sustain military action even in the most severe Russian winter conditions, and were supported by an armored force of new Soviet T-34 tanks, subsequently named the “Stalin tank” which proved to be one of the most serviceable tanks of the war. By November of 1941, Stalin no longer felt threatened by a simultaneous Japanese offensive from the Far East.

Immediately upon the arrival of the Red Banner Army of the Far East on December 3, 1941, the Soviet military launched a large-scale counter-offensive against the German front just west of Moscow. The offensive drove German forces back some 125 miles well outside of artillery range of Moscow. The new front stretched from Rzhev on the Volga River to Briansk on the Desna River. The Soviet December offensive effectively ended the 1941 German campaign against Moscow and prompted a change in Hitler’s strategic military planning. In the spring of 1942, Hitler put a hold his the campaign to take Moscow and redirected the German offensive south to the Soviet Caucuses. Recognizing by this time that Germany was in for a protracted war from a stronger Soviet military defense – and an emerging coalition of Allied Powers of Great Britain, the Free French and the United States after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 – Hitler sought to seize control of the petroleum rich resources of the Soviet Caucuses lying between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. The Second Phase – the Battle of Stalingrad: The key to gaining control of the Caucasian oil fields was establishing German control of the southern Volga by taking the city of Stalingrad (Tsaritsyn until 1925 and Volgograd today). Stalingrad, then a city of 500,000, controlled the southern Volga to the Caspian Sea. Control of Stalingrad would seal off any Soviet reinforcements sent to recover the oil-rich Caucuses. Occupation of the Caucuses would likewise hold the prospect of a linkup with the Afrika Korps forces of Erwin Rommel advancing through the Middle East to make for a final push of the combined German forces from Stalingrad north along the Volga to take Moscow through the back door from the east (cf. the failed strategy of the White Guard forces of General Denikin in the Russian Civil War).

At first, the German military advance in the late spring and early summer of 1942 from the Ukraine through the Don River Basin toward Stalingrad went so smoothly that again Hitler redeployed two crack panzer divisions in mid-July under Herman von Hoth and Edward von Kleist to immediately take the oil-fields of the Caucuses even before the capture of Stalingrad. But again, these forces had to eventually be recalled as Soviet military resistance stiffened the closer German military forces approached to Stalingrad. The actual battle for Stalingrad began with a German artillery and aerial bombardment of the city in early August 1942, and was followed by an advance of some 300,000 German ground forces to occupy the city in early October 1942. By early November, German ground forces had managed to occupy four-fifths of the city, despite fierce Soviet military resistance behind the rubble to which the city itself had been reduced by the German artillery and aerial bombardment. But the German military command was unaware that German forces were heading into a Soviet military trap. The Soviet forces that still held one-fifth of the city were commanded by Vasili Chuikov, a crusty old Soviet officer who had survived the Gulag. Although Chuikov’s forces totaled only 60,000 men they were constantly reinforced at night from the east through barges across the Volga River. Ensconced in the rubble of an almost completely devastated Stalingrad, Chuikov’s forces were able to hold on to their section of Stalingrad and continue to tie down a remaining German military force of 240,000. What the Germans and Chuikov himself did not know was that the Soviet high command was secretly assembling 1,000,000 additional Soviet troops in two military contingents some 50 and 30 miles to the north and south of Stalingrad behind German lines. The Soviet forces to the north were commanded by General Konstantin Rokossovskii, and those to the south by General Andrei Yeremenko. The two groups were supported by 1,100 aircraft, 1,000 tanks, and 12,000 pieces of artillery. On November 19, 1942, Soviet forces sprung an encircling entrapment of 120,000 German soldiers at the city of Kalach 70 miles west of Stalingrad. The encircling entrapment smashed a gap 50 miles wide in the German military lines west of Stalingrad. Cut off from the rest of their ground forces and unable to be supplied by air, a withering force of 90,000 German troops still fighting in the city of Stalingrad under General von Paulus was ultimately forced to formally surrender on February 3, 1943. The Soviet victory at Stalingrad proved to the pivotal turning point the European war. It not only stopped any further German military advance into the Soviet Union but also destroyed the myth of the invincibility of the German army, and it was followed by an immediate Soviet

103 counteroffensive that drove the German front lines back some 400 miles in the next five months to Kursk near the Ukrainian border.

Stalingrad has become one of the most renowned battles in Russian historical lore. The Soviet Union lost some 480,000 men in the single battle of Stalingrad, more deaths than the total suffered by American forces in the entire European War. Russians still remember the battle of Stalingrad today as though it were still a personal event in their immediate existence; and there is a strong movement in the Russian Federation today to change the name Volgograd back to Stalingrad.

The Germans in turn lost some 300,000 men in their military campaign to take Stalingrad. The 90,000 German prisons-of-war taken by Soviet forces were marched all the way to Moscow where they were mocked by the Soviet population in a public street parade. Only 6,000 of the German prisoners-of-war of the Stalingrad campaign survived Soviet captivity to return to Germany after the war. Marshall Georgii Zhukov became the most celebrated military strategist of the Stalingrad victory, but there was the additional saga of Viktor Zaitsev as an unparalleled Soviet sniper at Stalingrad. Zaitsev was credited with 351 kills of German soldiers in the Second World War, and his role at Stalingrad was so prominent that the Germans sent their own ace sniper to take Zaitsev out at Stalingrad. The two stalked each other for two weeks and when they finally met face-to-face in a twelve-hour showdown amidst the Stalingrad rubble Zaitsev prevailed.

The Third Phase – The Battle of Kursk: On July 4, 1943, Hitler chose Kursk, located 45 miles from the Ukrainian border 110 miles northwest of Kharkov and 75 miles southwest of Orel, where the Soviet offensive had opened up a 90-mile salient in the German lines between the headwaters of the Oka and Donets Rivers, to launch a last-ditch major German counter-offensive to recapture the industrial Don River Basin. At Kursk, Hitler had assembled 570,000 troops, 2,000 tanks (some of which were the new German tiger tanks), and 10,000 artillery pieces. By the same token, the Soviet forces, warned by an informant in Switzerland code name “Lucy,” had assembled an even larger counter-force of 1,000,000 men, 3,000 tanks, 3,000 aircraft, and 20,000 artillery pieces. The Soviet military force included the Sturmovik (as one of the most effective anti-tank aircraft of the Second World War) and “Katusha rockets,” (multiple sequential firing missiles that the Germans dubbed “whistling death”). Additionally, forewarned of the German offensive, the Soviets had laid some 4,000 land mines along every mile of the front line and constructed extensive anti-tank trenches. The attempted German counter-offensive at Kursk proved to be the largest tank battle in military history, engaging 4,500 tanks on both sides. Although the German forces managed to advance twenty miles in the first several days of the military engagement, the German military effort was doomed from the start. Outnumbering their German counterparts two to one in military strength, knowing the German war plans in advance, and protected by their own defensive fortifications, the Soviet forces soon launched their own counter-offensive near Orel 150 miles southwest of Moscow. Within a week of the initial German thrust, Soviet forces forced the German forces into a defensive stance, whereupon German forces were forced to call off their entire Kursk campaign (code name “Operation Citadel”) when Hitler’s forces were suddenly faced with a second Allied military front when British and American forces invaded Sicily on July 10, 1943. After Kursk, Soviet forces quickly pressed forward to drive German military forces out of the Ukraine, White Russia, and Moldavia in the next eight months, clearing all-prewar Soviet territory of German occupation.

A special note should here be made of the Soviet city of Leningrad. In laying siege to Leningrad in August of 1941, von Loeb’s German forces almost completely surrounded the city, leaving access to the rest of the Soviet Union open only through a narrow corridor to the east. For the next 900 days the city was without sufficient foodstuffs and fuel, even though trucks tried to ease the situation in carrying sparse supplies across frozen Lake Ladoga in the winter. Only 600,000 of an original population of 2,300,000 remained in the city when Leningrad was finally liberated by Soviet military forces in January 1944. It is estimated that some 1,000,000 Leningraders died of starvation and cold during the 900 days of the German siege (a significant number of older people and children were evacuated); but, throughout all, Leningrad refused to surrender. Hence, to this day Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg) is remembered as the “hero city. And here again many Russians would like to see the name of the city changed back to Leningrad as its designation until 1991.

104 The Fourth Phase – The “Liberation” of East-Central Europe and Occupation of East Germany: By the end of 1944, Soviet military forces had proceeded beyond the prewar Soviet frontiers to advance further into East Central and Southeastern Europe to occupy the whole of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and Albania. In each of these countries “liberated” from “Fascist anti-democratic rule,” Soviet forces installed Communist dominated governments.

The case of Poland was particularly instructive. Soviet military forces reached the outskirts of Warsaw on August 1, 1944, at the then held German section of Poland at the same time as an accompanying forceful uprising of anti-Nazi forces welded up within the city. The anti-Nazi forces were identified with a non-Communist provisional Polish government-in-exile in London, which was set to take power in German occupied Poland after its liberation from German rule. The Soviet Union had already made it clear that the territory of prewar Poland occupied by Soviet political rule under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact would remain an integral part of the Soviet Union after the war as territory of historical Tsarist Russia. But as regards the rest of Poland still under German occupation, instead of ordering the Soviet military forces to march into Warsaw to assist the Polish uprising in conjunction with the non-Communist provisional government in exile in London, Stalin ordered the Red Army to stand down until the non-Communist Polish resistance was brutally suppressed by the withdrawing Germany military forces. And only then, Soviet military forces advanced into Warsaw to install a Communist sponsored “Lublin Government” as the postwar anti-Fascist political power in Poland. Then, beginning in February 1945, Soviet military forces crossed the Order River to begin a final military assault on Berlin. This entailed Soviet military-political occupation of not only the city of Berlin itself but the German territories of East Prussia, Mecklenburg, Pomerania, Brandenburg and Silesia that extended 90 miles west of Berlin. This last stage of the Soviet military campaign culminated in the formal surrender of Germany on May 7, 1945. After the official surrender of Germany on May 8, 1945, the final postwar occupation status of Germany among the Allied Powers was decided at the Potsdam Conference (17 July-August 2, 1945 – see below).

Reasons Why the Soviet Forces Prevailed

Soviet Prewar Geopolitical Strategic Planning: The geography and climate of the Soviet Union presented almost impossible logistics to a German victory. Almost no invading military power could expect to carry on a successful campaign along a 1,200-mile front in sub-zero weather. Likewise, Soviet manpower outnumbered that of the German invaders by more than three to one. The accelerated Soviet industrial campaigns of the Five-Year Plans provided both the industrial base and strategic location of military production beyond the Ural Mountains secure from German occupation even when much of European Russia was overrun. To be sure the Soviet military effort was significantly aided by American assistance especially in trucks, but by mid-1943 the Soviet Union itself was already out-producing Germany in military armaments.

Likewise, Soviet military hardware was far more sophisticated and operational in sub-zero weather than foreseen by German intelligence, especially Soviet T-34 tanks, Soviet Katusha rockets, and Soviet fighter aircraft. Additionally by 1941, a top Soviet military command structure which replaced that decimated by the prewar Stalinist purges had matured into a highly qualified Soviet military leadership. Such generals as Grigorii Zhukov, Konstantin Rokossovskii, Andrei Yeremenko, and Ivan Konev proved to be the equals of the finest military command structures of the Second World War.

Critical Foreign Policy Relations: The Soviet-Japanese Neutrality Pact of April 13, 1941, proved to be critical in preventing the Soviet Union from being faced with a two-front war, which if launched by Japan at the same time Hitler’s forces struck on June 22, 1941, would have made effective Soviet military resistance on two fronts highly problematic. Moreover, since the Neutrality Pact with Japan ultimately determined the Japanese decision to “strike south,” it led to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor which also brought the United States into the war on the side of the Allied Powers, when Hitler, wishing to consolidate wartime collaboration with Japan, declared war on the United States on December 11, 1941.

105 The Russian National Character: A distinguishing feature of the Russian character throughout its history has been an enormous national pride and a willingness to endure unbelievable hardship in the defense of the Russian state. Stalin recognized this fact in appealing to Russian national pride in addressing a “Great Patriotic War” (Velikaia otechestvennaia voina) in the defense of the “Mother Nativeland” (Matushka rodina), as opposed to the defense of the world base of socialism. Indeed, Stalin embraced the support of the Russian Orthodox Church and called off his campaign against religion during the Second World War. Except for the reluctance of certain dissident ethnic minorities, the whole Russian nation responded to the call for supreme sacrifice that not only claimed the lives of seven million military personnel, but an additional thirteen million Russian civilians. Still, after seeing 40 percent of its industrial capacity destroyed by German occupation forces in European Russia in the first part of the Second World War, the Russian civilian population reestablished Soviet wartime production beyond the Urals to exceed both Soviet prewar and German existing war production by early 1943, sometimes transporting industrial machinery on their very backs.

Soviet-Allied Wartime Agreements

The Nature of the Grand Alliance: The German attack on the Soviet Union immediately brought Great Britain into an informal military compact with the Soviet Union. The Free French under Charles de Gaulle in London were also committed to this alliance in opposition to the collaborationist Vichy Regime in France from 1940 to 1944 under Henri Petain. After Germany declared war on the United States on December 11, 1941, in support of the Japanese against the United States, the three Western governments formed a natural military coalition with the Soviet Union as the “Allied Powers” in the struggle against Axis Powers in Europe. The four Allied Powers negotiated a coordinated wartime military strategy and a postwar political order in three important conferences: the Teheran Conference (28 November-1 December, 1943); the Yalta Conference (4-11 February, 1945); and the Potsdam Conference (17 July-2 August, 1945).

The Teheran Conference: At Teheran, the Soviet Union was in a formidable negotiating position. The Soviet Union was carrying on the overwhelming brunt of the ground war against Germany. Although American and British troops had cleared North Africa in 1942-43 of German military forces under General Erwin Rommel, some 80 percent of Hitler’s military forces were engaged against the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe throughout most of the war. And by the time of the meeting of the Allied Powers at Teheran, Soviet military forces had more than gained the upper hand against German military forces in Eastern Europe.

To understand this military setting is to understand the western accession to Soviet geopolitical gains at the Teheran Conference. Later certain revisionist historians would argue that that the Western Powers “gave up” unnecessary concessions to the Soviet Union. But the truth is the Western Powers, not yet even engaged in a second front in France, were in no position to “give up” anything, let alone territory in Eastern Europe that they did not occupy. Moreover the Western Powers were also looking toward inducing the Soviet Union to enter the war against Japan, which in 1943 and 1944 still represented a supreme military challenge. At the outset, the Teheran Conference the United State and Great Britain trilaterally reaffirmed with the Soviet Union what the Western powers had already bilaterally affirmed at the Casablanca Conference (14-24 January, 1943), namely that the three Powers would continue their united military struggle to achieve an “unconditional surrender” of Nazi Germany. Such an unconditional surrender meant joint Allied Power occupation of Germany after its defeat to establish a new government purged of Nazi ideology and obedient to the international rule of law.

Stalin, in turn, was assured that the Western Powers would establish a second front in France in 1944 to take pressure off of the Soviet ground forces and strategically confront Germany with a two-front war. For Stalin this also meant he would gain the postwar political advantage of military occupation of Eastern Europe and leveraging the establishment of postwar Communist regimes. Finally, Stalin also gained recognition by the Western Powers of all Soviet prewar territorial gains stemming from the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939, the Russo-Finnish War of 1939-40, the Romanian annexations of 1940, and two new strips of land, Transcarpathia comprising 7,000 square

106 miles in Czechoslovakia, and Kaliningrad comprising in 2,250 square miles in East Prussia. Now Soviet postwar geopolitical gains would include 205,000 square miles of territory and 45 million people. The Yalta Conference: The Yalta Conference reaffirmed the commitment of the Allies to a postwar political occupation of Germany for its political reconstruction as a peaceful sovereignty in the international world order. At Yalta the Free French government of Charles de Gaulle, now headquartered in the French West African colony of Senegal, was added to comprise a four-power occupation force. Again, the occupation force was to denazify Germany, looking toward her political reconstruction as a law abiding member of the international community. The actual zones of occupation were to be determined at a later date. And in compensation for the loss of some 74,000 square miles of territory to the Soviet Union under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, Poland was to receive some 42,000 square miles of new territory in the former German Silesian and East Pomeranian areas of East Prussia. The frontier of Poland with eastern Germany was now moved to the Oder and Neisse Rivers, or as Churchill put it: Poland was to be “moved westward.” This not only secured Soviet expansion to the west in White Russia and the Ukraine, but provided for a more western Polish buffer state against a new Germany. At the time of the Yalta Conference in February 1945, the United States had not yet successfully tested a nuclear device (the first test took place at Alamogordo, New Mexico on July 16, 1945). A final invasion of the Japanese home islands by conventional forces was therefore seen to potentially cost one million American lives. Hence, Roosevelt put a premium on Soviet military collaboration in the final campaign against Japan. During the height of the struggle against Nazi Germany, Stalin continued to honor the Soviet neutrality pact with Japan, and legitimately argued to his Western Power allies that at the time he could do more that carrying on almost the entire brunt of the land war against Nazi Germany. But with the defeat of Nazi Germany imminent by early 1945, Stalin was willing to commit Soviet forces to the war against Japan, but at a proper Soviet price. At Yalta, Stalin agreed to enter the war against Japan 90 days after the surrender of Nazi Germany to allow Soviet military forces to be transferred some 6,000 miles from the western front to the Soviet border with Manchuria in the Far East. The price for a second Soviet front was the restoration of joint Soviet-Chinese ownership and Soviet garrisoning rights of the Chinese Eastern and South Manchurian Railroads and the restoration of the former Tsarist leasehold of the seaport of Port Arthur on the Darien Peninsula. Seeking victory over the Japanese and pressured by the United States and Great Britain, Chiang Kai-shek agreed to the Soviet terms in a formal Sino-Soviet Treaty between the two governments on August 14, 1945. In signing the treaty the Soviet Union itself was formally recognizing the Nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek as the official postwar government of China (see below). The Western Powers also agreed that the Soviet Union would repossess oil-rich southern Sakhalin Island, which had been ceded to Japan by the Treaty of Portsmouth of 1905, and gain possession of the Japanese Kurile Islands, which had never been a part of Tsarist Russia.

On August 8, 1945, exactly ninety days after the official surrender of German, the Soviet Union launched a crushing offensive against Japanese forces across the Manchurian border. The Soviet offensive was most probably just as instrumental in the quick surrender of Japan on August 14, 1945, as the dropping of the two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6, 1945 and August 8, 1945. The Potsdam Conference: The Potsdam Conference was primarily devoted to delineating the Soviet-Allied Powers occupation zones of defeated Nazi Germany. At Potsdam it was decided that Great Britain would occupy the northwest sector of Germany that included the areas of Schleswig-Holstein, Lower Saxony, and North Rhine-Westphalia; France would occupy the southwest sector of Germany that included the areas of the Rhineland Palatinate, Saarland, and Baden-Wuttemberg; and the United States would occupy the areas of southcentral Germany that included Hesse and Bavaria. The ultimate status of the coal-rich Saarland of 750 square miles on the French border was to be determined by a plebiscite, which, when held in 1956, opted to remain in Germany. The Soviet Union would all northeastern Germany that included the areas of Mecklenburg, Brandenburg, Pomerania, and East Prussia. In their ensemble, the occupied areas of Germany of the Western Powers included 97,000 square miles of territory and a population at the time of 45 million people; and the occupied areas of Germany of the Soviet Union included 42,000 square miles of territory and a population at the time of 14 million people. The city of Berlin as the former capital of Nazi Germany, lying 90 miles inside of the Brandenburg sector of

107 the Soviet zone, was to be under the quadripartite occupation of all four powers. The Austrian sector of the former German Reich was treated in a similar fashion. After the denazification of Germany and Austria by the occupying powers, Germany and Austria would be reconstituted as sovereign nation-states but presumably demilitarized and neutralized. As it turned out, the Allied Powers and the Soviet Union did agree to reconstitute Austria as a demilitarized and neutralized sovereign nation-state. Germany was a different matter as it immediately became bound up in the Cold-War struggle. In confirming the Oder-Neisse line as the eastern frontier of Germany with Poland, the Potsdam Agreement also stipulated that a strip of land in northern East Prussia on the Baltic Sea of 2,250 square miles (about the size of the state of Delaware) with the historic seaport of Konigsberg (today Kaliningrad) would be ceded to the Soviet Union. Today the Kaliningrad Oblast’ of the Russian Federation lies along the on the southwestern frontier of Lithuania and separated by Lithuania from the rest of the Russian Federation.

Potsdam had also to deal with the status of Korea. At Teheran, it had already been decided that Korea would emerge from the war as an independent sovereign state (before its annexation by Japan in 1911 it had been under the suzerain authority of Manchus China). And following the agreement at Yalta, Soviet military forces occupied the northern part of Korea in advancing through Manchuria after they entered the campaign against Japan on August 8, 1945. At the same time, American forces, advancing from North China, occupied the southern part of Korea. It was therefore agreed at Potsdam that Soviet and American forces would establish respective zones of occupation in north and south Korea delineated at the 38th parallel, again pending the establishment of a single unified Korean state following previous Japanese political rule.

The Postwar Geopolitical Environment in Eastern Europe

The Early Theory of Peoples’ Democracies in Eastern Europe: By the time of the Yalta Conference, Soviet military forces had already overrun most all of Eastern Europe. Under its military occupation the Soviet government established “People’s Democracies” in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and Albania. A similar type of regime was established in Yugoslavia but under native Communist partisan forces headed by Marshal Joseph Broz Tito. People’s democracies were declared to be under the “leading role” (rukovoditel’naia rol’) of national Communist Parties as the paramount forces in the national struggles against fascism. As such, they were also regimes “friendly to the Soviet Union.” Until 1947, Soviet doctrine treated the political-economic natures of People’s Democracies in a somewhat loose and flexible fashion to make them more acceptable to the West. The chief early Soviet theorist of the theory of People’s Democracy was Eugene Varga. Although proclaimed to be under the leading role of the Communist Party and founded on a large nationalized sector of the economy in heavy industry, the early regimes of People’s Democracy still possessed an extensive private sector in consumer goods manufacture and exchange; likewise, agriculture remained largely under private peasant ownership. Furthermore, the governments instead of being composed of self-identified of socialist rule of working class Soviets, the governments still, once purged of fascist organizations, still were founded on multi-party parliamentary rule – although, once again, under the “leading role” of the Communist Party. The idea was to make Soviet imposed Communist rule in Eastern Europe more palatable to the West. The Ideological Crackdown on People’s Democracies in Eastern Europe As cold war foreign policy rivalry heightened between the Western World and the Soviet Union after 1945, Stalin began a crackdown on Communist Party political rule in the People’s Democracies of Eastern Europe, fearing that the West would attempt to promote the overthrow of Soviet Communist political hegemony in Eastern Europe. In May 1947, the Soviet Union sponsored the establishment of a “Communist Information Bureau” (COMINFORM) under the leadership of Andrei Zhdanov.

Under Zhdanov the Peoples’ Democracies under the leading role of the Soviet controlled national Communist Parties were declared to be equally “dictatorships of the proletariat” under irreversible Communist Party rule. And to that extent that were as much at political-military odds with the West as the Soviet Union in world Communist socialist struggle against capitalist imperialism. Furthermore, the “two-camp” struggle for socialism must be carried on both at home and abroad – meaning the complete nationalization of the means of production at home including

108 the collectivization of agriculture and accelerated industrial growth under the economic austerity of five-year plans. And any non-Communist Parties or members of Communist Parties that challenged the new Cominform line were guilty of counter-revolutionary political opportunism that aided and abetted the camp of the enemy, that is, the capitalist-imperialist governments of the Western World (cf. Lenin’s “two-camp theory”). To complete the Cominform crackdown, a Council of Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON) was established in 1949 to totally integrate all economic trade of East European Communist regimes with the Soviet Union – and to the economic advantage of the Soviet – completely isolating the East European Communist governments from the West.

To insure the complete subordination of East European governments of People’s Democracy to Soviet control, the Moscow demanded that “Soviet advisers” play an integral role in the government decision-making of the People’s Democracies of Eastern Europe. Soviet advisers were also established at every level of the military command of the People’s Democracies (Soviet General Konstantin Rokossovskii was actually placed directly in charge of all military forces in Poland). And in 1955 the Warsaw Treaty Organization (WTO) was established to institutionalize an integrated command structure of all Communist military forces of the People’s Democracies with the Soviet military. The Yugoslav Challenge of “National Communism”: Yugoslavia under Communist leader Marshall Tito stood out among the early regimes of People’s Democracy for several reasons. Yugoslavia was the largest of the Peoples’ Democracies encompassing the current nation-states of Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia, Slovenia, Montenegro, Kosovo and Macedonia; Yugoslavia was located in the southwestern Balkans just across the Adriatic Sea from Italy and therefore shared no territorial frontier with the Soviet Union; and finally under Marshal Tito’s Communist partisans Yugoslavia had liberated itself from German occupation on its own, blocking the military occupation of Soviet armed forces, to oversee its own establishment of Communist political rule. At first, Yugoslavia under Tito appeared to the most ardent of the Peoples’ Democracies to embark on the Soviet model of Communist socialist construction, preceding the Cominform crackdown and being the original headquarters of the Cominform as mandated by the Soviet Union. Very early, on its own, it stressed accelerated heavy industrial growth and the collectivization of agriculture. But Yugoslavia was also informed by a sense of independent national identity. Among other reasons, Yugoslavia’s sense of national independence was owed to its size (it was the largest of the East European Communist regimes), its location (it was located directly across the Adriatic Sea from Italy with no common frontier with the Soviet Union), and its independent political-military infrastructure (it had built its own partisan resistance force to both drive out German military occupation and block incoming Soviet military occupation). As such, by 1948 Yugoslavia under Tito’s Communist leadership began to chafe at Moscow’s efforts to attempt to dominate Yugoslav government political and military policy-making. It especially objected to Moscow demand for the establishment of Soviet-Yugoslav “joint-stock companies” clearly operating to the advantage of the Soviet economy and rejected any presence of Soviet military advisers, let alone Soviet efforts to infiltrate the Yugoslav Communist Party with Soviet agents. In an effort to quell Yugoslav resistance to Soviet Cominform demands Stalin called a delegation of Yugoslav to Moscow to read them the riot act and warn them of serious political-military consequences if Yugoslavia did not get in line with Soviet COMINFORM policy. To Stalin’s amazement, Tito not only rejected the Soviet diktat, but to rally his fellow Yugoslav nationalists behind him eventually called for far-reaching economic and political reforms contradicting the Soviet model of Communist socialist construction. The reforms included: (i) de-collectivizing agriculture; (ii) establishing “workers councils” in which the industrial labor force would have a real voice in determining economic output and wages; (iii) renaming the Yugoslav Communist Party the Yugoslav Communist League in which divergent voices from the Communist leadership would have significant input into national policy planning; (iv) and finally the declaration of a neutral foreign policy in which Yugoslavia would remain outside of all political-military blocs of American-Soviet rivalry. In conjunction with the Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru this position took its own third-world ideological doctrine of “positive neutralism,” which held that all political-military blocs lead to world tension and threaten world peace. As such, the doctrine of positive neutralism ran counter to the traditional Soviet socialist doctrine that only capitalist political-military blocs are a threat to world peace in being founded on the aggressive nature of capitalist imperialism.

109 The Challenge of “National Communism”: In their ensemble, the Titoist reforms then became identified with what the Soviet Union under Stalin condemned as “national communism.” In 1948, Tito’s Yugoslavia was expelled from the COMINFORM and its headquarters was moved to Bucharest, Romania. From that point on until his death in 1953, Stalin sought the overthrow of Titoist political rule in Yugoslavia. Stalin used the encirclement of Yugoslavia by Albania, Bulgaria, Romania, and Hungary to apply economic and military pressure against the Tito’s regime along with conspiratorial activities by his own Soviet agents. But all such Stalinist efforts failed as the Yugoslav population rallied around Tito’s national communism. Paradoxically, Tito’s Yugoslav national Communist movement found a tacit ally in the United States, which recognizing Tito’s threat to Soviet political control in Eastern Europe, supplied Tito’s Yugoslavia with $300 million in military assistance in 1950. Accompanying his failure to unseat Tito from power in Yugoslavia, Stalin became obsessed with rooting out all Communist Party leaders for the least suspicion of wishing to follow the Titoist path of national communism. The victims included, Wladyslaw Gomulka in Poland, Valdo Clementis and Rudolph Slansky in Czechoslovakia, Lazlo Rajk in Hungary, Traiko Kostov in Bulgaria, Ana Pauker in Romania, and Koci Xoxe in Albania. Most were executed, only Wladyslaw Gomulka survived imprisonment to play a critical future political role in Poland.

The Establishment of the Maoist Chinese Peoples’ Republic

The Postwar Political Setting: By the time of the surrender of Japan, the Nationalist forces of Chiang Kai-shek in Chungking numbered some 3,000,000, while the Communist forces of Mao Tse-tung in Yenan numbered some 900,000. From 1941, the two sides had concentrated their strategy more on building up their forces for a postwar showdown than continuing an out-out struggle against Japan. The United States and the Soviet Union still supported for a postwar coalition government. The United States, which had assisted Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist forces with large military aid throughout the war expected the Nationalist forces of Chiang Kai-shek to hold the upper hand against the Maoist forces in a postwar coalition government. By the same token, the Soviet Union was satisfied with the prospect of Nationalist paramountcy insofar as Chiang Kai-shek had recognized former Tsarist concessions in China by the Sino-Soviet Treaty of August 15, 1945. Still, absent the willingness of the Nationalists and the Communists to establish a coalition government, the United States and the Soviet Union acted to prepare their own surrogates for a final political-military showdown. In addition to supplying Chiang Kai=shek with extensive military aid from 1941 to 1945 during the Sino-Japanese War, the United States airlifted Nationalist troops from Szechuan Province to key cities in eastern China to establish Nationalist government control. The Soviet Union, in turn, timed its military evacuation in Manchuria to allow for its strategic occupation and capture of Japanese weaponry by advancing Maoist forces from Shensi Province.

The United States under American Secretary of State George C. Marshall urged China Kai-shek to consolidate his political support in the broad expanse of China south of the Manchurian border by carrying out economic reform in the cities and countryside which he had previously failed to do. But Chiang in 1947 embarked on an adventurous military plunge to wrest control of control of Manchuria from Maoist political rule. Maoist forces in Manchuria, on the other hand, had undertaken the same tactics of land reform to gain the political allegiance of the overwhelming peasant population. At the same time, the Maoist Red Army under the general command of Chu Teh had a particularly skillful regional commander in Lin Piao.

At first, Chiang’s forces achieved a measure of success in capturing the Manchurian capital of Mukden. But in line with traditional Maoist strategy, the Communist forces retreated only to counterattack after Chiang Kai-shek overran his supply lines in a hostile peasant environment. The Communist forces under the military leadership of Lin Piao then subsequently recaptured Mukden and drove Chiang’s forces out of Manchuria in November 1948. Then, in December 1948 the forces of Lin Piao crossed the Yellow River to inflict a crushing defeat on Chiang’s Nationalist forces at Hsuehchow. At this point, Chiang’s Nationalist forces completely fell apart as the general population from peasants and workers to most intellectuals showed little support for Chiang Kai-shek’s continued political rule. The Communist forces under the general command of Chu Teh swept through the countryside in the spring and summer of 1949 to drive Chiang Kai-shek’s remaining Nationalist forces completely off the Mainland by August 1949.

110 The remnants of Chiang’s Kai-shek’s Nationalist forces took refuge on Formosa (Taiwan), an island area of 13,373 square miles some 80 miles off the southeast coast of China across the Taiwan Straits leading from the East China Sea to the South China Sea. Then, in October 1949, Communist rule over Mainland China was officially proclaimed in the establishment of the Chinese Peoples’ Republic.

Soviet Postwar Development in a Bi-Polar World Power Structure Economic Recovery: Beyond the human cost of 20 million lives, the Soviet Union incurred devastating economic losses from Germany military occupation. Property destruction included some 1,700 towns and 70,000 villages that were razed to the ground by either being caught up in the fighting, or suspected of partisan activity, or German scorched earth policy in retreat. Industrial economic destruction included some 35,000 plants, which accounted for 20% of total Soviet national economic production and some 40% of Soviet national economic production in European Russia. Stalin was determined to recover World War II economic losses in short order. A Fourth Five-Year Plan from 1946 through 1950 called for the restoration of the Soviet national economy to its prewar level. This meant that following the crushing wartime economic strain on the Soviet population, the same economic hardship of the first five-year plans would be required in the severe economic austerity of low wages matched by a scarcity of consumer goods to fund the highest level of state investment of marginal turnover capital for the growth of heavy industry. Under such conditions, and aided by $10 billion in war reparations from the German economy and the economic output of an estimated 12 million members of the Gulag slave labor force, Soviet economic production did reach its prewar level by the end of the Fourth Five-Year Plan in 1950. A Fifth Five-Year Plan then adopted in 1950 to run to 1955 called for the same elevated industrial targets and draconian consumer austerity. High Level Military and Space Science: As a new superpower, the Soviet state also adopted an ever higher level of military spending. In this, many of the highest ranking members of the Soviet scientific community were sequestered from the rest of the population and brought together in arguably the greatest “scientific think-tank” in the world. The sequestered scientific community called Akademiia Zagorsk (the “Suburb Academic Community”) outside of the city of Novosibirsk achieved marvels in the advancement of aerodynamics, rocketry, space science, and nuclear physics. Not only did the Soviet Union explode first nuclear device in October 1949, and thermonuclear device in 1953, years before American intelligence predictions, but the Soviet MIG-13 proved to be arguably the best jet fighter in the Korean War. And, then, on October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union stunned the United States in launching the world’s first artificial space satellite in Sputnik I. Domestic Political Repression: Postwar Soviet ideological doctrine took on a new hardline crackdown against all political and intellectual values of capitalist Western culture. The political foundation of the postwar Soviet ideological crackdown began with a pronouncement by Stalin in early 1946 that the defeat of the Fascist Axis Powers did not mean the end of world military conflicts. This had been the hope of American President Franklin Roosevelt in sponsoring the development of the United Nations in August 1945. Instead, Stalin argued that as long as capitalism existed there would necessarily be a an imperialist struggle for colonial possessions to block a falling rate of profit of domestic capital. In this, Stalin turned his back on Soviet wartime propaganda which extolled the universal moral struggle of all world “democracies” against fascist aggression. Stalin’s political pronouncement, which distinguished the “peace-loving Soviet Union” from the entire capitalist world, formed the basis for an all-embracing worldwide ideological “two-camp theory,” again most notably espoused by Andrei Zhdanov as a global of his two-camp theoretical crackdown on national communism in Eastern Europe. Building on the Leninist premise of a single correct expression revolutionary ideological thought, Zhdanov condemned all forms of western intellectual thought from the arts to the natural sciences as being infused with incorrect bourgeois capitalist consciousness. For example, biologists were force to proclaim the correctness of the preposterous Soviet theory of Trofim Lysenko that genetic mutations occur and can be passed down on a generational basis, as this nicely corresponded to the accelerated development of the new Soviet man. Even the

111 writings of such Russian authors such as Feodor Dostoevsky and Lev Tolstoy were banned to the extent that they expressed a western moral worldview.

Likewise, Stalin unleashed his Secret Police against any suspected elements identified with wartime German collaboration, either within the ranks of returning Soviet prisoners-of-war or dissident minorities under German occupation. Returning Soviet prisoners-of-war were sent to “re-education centers” which generally functioned like concentration camps. Non-Great Russian populations in the Ukraine and those living in the southern Volga and the northern Caucasus were singled out for especially repressive treatment. The Chechens, Crimean Tartars, and Volga Germans were actually driven from their homelands for resettlement in Siberia, costing millions of lives. It was only after the death of Stalin that these populations were allowed to return to their homelands in 1956.

The Cold War and Communist Containment in Europe

The Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan: By 1946, talks between the United States and the Soviet Union for the postwar political reconstruction of unified German, Austrian, and Korean sovereignties had reached an impasse. This stalemate ensued from an immediate postwar power struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union. The first areas of direct engagement were Turkey, Iran, and Greece. In Turkey, the Soviet Union sought to gain the historical Russian foreign policy objective of political control of the Bosporus and Dardanelle Straits providing military access from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean Sea. In Iran, the Soviet Union sought to establish an independent Communist government in the northeast sector of the country contiguous to the Soviet Republic of Azerbaidzhan under the heading of the Democratic Republic of Azerbaidzhan. And in Greece, the Soviet Union sought to assist a native partisan Communist movement to seize postwar political power with economic and military assistance from the surrounding Peoples’ Democracies of Albania, Yugoslavia, and Bulgaria.

President Truman took immediate action in 1946 to check such Soviet foreign policy objectives by declaring that the United States would thwart such Communist objectives by the Soviet Union and her East European satellites by direct military action, including the use of nuclear power (over which the United States at the time still held a monopoly). Truman followed up his pronouncement by a successful congressional request of $400 million in military assistance to the governments of Greece and Turkey and an open offer of such military assistance to any other governments vital to American national security under pressure from outside Communist aggression. Truman announced the policy of an American willingness to engage Communist expansion at strategic flashpoints anywhere in the world in his famous “Truman Doctrine” on March 12, 1947, when he declared:

I believe that it must be the policy of the United Stes to support free people who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressure. If we falter in our leadership, we may endanger the peace of the world – and we shall certainly endanger the welfare of this nation.

Recognizing that economic recovery from World War II was a key to Communist expansion not only in the

Middle East and the Balkans but also in Western Europe, the Truman Doctrine was followed by a corollary economic commitment set forth by Secretary of State George C. Marshall on June 5, 1947. In what later became known as the “Marshall Plan,” the United States committed $12 billion (a sum of $120 billion in current United States dollars) in economic recovery to Western Europe with more than 50 percent going to the Allied occupation sectors of Germany. The Marshall Plan represented a follow-up in an abrupt change in the attitude of the United States toward the postwar Western Power occupation zones of Germany from one of political-economic disinterest to one of rapid recovery as a friendly geographical check against any further Soviet expansion in Europe. The Doctrine of Containment: Within the framework of the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan the question became just how broad was the widespread pledge of American political-military assistance against Communist expansion. George F. Kennan, the American ambassador to the Soviet Union during the Second World War and later a professor of Political Science at Princeton University, is credited with providing the parameters of the scope of American political-military assistance to foreign governments against Communist expansion. In a seminal article in Foreign Affairs in July 1947, Kennan argued that the struggle against the Soviet Communist world must be seen

112 as a long-term struggle; and the United States must husband its resources so that they would always be available in defending the strategic areas of America’s vital interests. If such a strategy were followed with patience and wisdom, the Western world would eventually emerge the victor Soviet Communism, because Communist rule on the Soviet model – being by its very nature contrary to individual freedom and human well-being – would eventually implode from within. Kennan’s long-term global strategy came to be called the doctrine of “containment” insofar as it stressed checking any Soviet advances in strategic areas of American vital interests. In this, it came to be distinguished from a contrasting strategy of “rollback,” first advanced by John Foster Dulles as the American Secretary of State in the mid-1950s, and later, at least for a time, suggested by President Ronald Reagan. Notable in the containment doctrine of Kennan was caution against the United States pre-emptively engaging in both overly costly full-scale conventional wars in Eastern Europe and non-vital proxy brush-wars in other far-flung areas of the world. The Establishment of NATO: The organizational centerpiece of the doctrine of containment was the establishment of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) on April 4, 1949. Originally composed of twelve members – the United States, Canada, Iceland, Norway, Denmark, Portugal, Great Britain, France, Italy , Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands – it has since been expanded to include twenty-eight nations, including the former Peoples’ Democracies of Eastern Europe after the fall of Soviet Communism.

The critical provision of the NATO Charter is Article 5 which stipulates that an attack on one will be considered by Treaty members as an attack on all, and enjoining all treaty members to mutual military action. For some sixty-six years NATO has been judged to be the bedrock of American foreign policy by both political parties, and largely viewed to have the same bedrock longevity by all non-American members as well. Only in the last months of the 2016 American presidential election campaign did Donald Trump question NATO’s continued existence as being “obsolete.” And since Donald Trump’s comments several prominent European political leaders (most notably Marine Le Pen in France and Jeremy Corbyn in Great Britain) have also registered reservations about the continued usefulness of NATO. Most European political leaders, however, notably Angela Merckel of German and Emmanuel Macron in France, reject such any such revisionist outlook and still see NATO as the anchor of North Atlantic Security.

The Status of Germany The Establishment of Two Germanys: Recognizing by late 1946 that Soviet-Allied Power agreement on a reconstituted single German nation-state would not be achieved, the United States in 1947 joined the British and the French to unite their three occupation zones under a single Western allied authority in a “trizonal agreement.” In this, the United States was looking toward the establishment of a separate sovereign West German state. Stalin, recognizing that such a West German state would be vastly more powerful than that of the remaining area of the East German Soviet zone, sought to block the establishment of a separate West German state by imposing a “Berlin blockade” on June 24, 1948. On the pretext of attending to necessary repairs Stalin ordered a shutdown of all rail and highway traffic in the 90-mile access through East Germany from the West to the city of Berlin, where the Western Powers still held wartime agreed quadripartite occupation rights with the Soviet Union. In an ingenious and remarkably well executed counter maneuver, the Allies led by President Truman instituted the “Berlin Airlift.” With American DC-3 transport aircraft the Western Powers supplied their entire occupation sector of Berlin consisting of a population of two-and-a half million people with the necessities of life for almost an entire year. Allied supply aircraft landed and took off every thirty seconds in what seemed an impossible feat of air transport.

Seeing that his strategy of starvation blackmail had failed, Stalin finally called off the Soviet blockade on May 12, 1949. Then almost straight away, West Germany was declared to be an independent sovereign state as the Federal Republic of Germany on May 23, 1949, popularly known as West Germany. The Soviet Union quickly responded by sponsoring the establishment of a separate state of the German Democratic Republic in October 1949, popularly known as East Germany; but, as noted above, the territory of West Germany more than doubled that of East Germany and its population more than tripled that of East Germany. West Germany also had far more natural industrial resources in serving as the historic heartland of German heavy industry. Assisted by

113 Marshall Plan reconstruction aid along with the German work ethic, West Germany astounded the world in what became known as the “German economic miracle.” By 1954, West Germany literally rose from its own ashes to again become the leading industrial power in Western Europe. West German Foreign Policy 1949-1969: For the first two decades of its existence the West German state followed a hard-line and rather aggressive foreign policy against the East European Communist world. The policy was expressly captured in the “Halstein Doctrine,” named after the pronouncement of Walter Halstein as the first West German Foreign Minister. The Halstein Doctrine declared: (i) that the state of West Germany did not recognize the official existence of the state of East Germany (the constitution of the German Federal Republic actually made express provision for the potential reunification of East Germany); (ii) that the state of West Germany did not recognize the Oder-Neisse Line as the postwar German frontier with Poland; (iii) and that the state of West Germany would not have any diplomatic or economic relations with any Communist country in Eastern Europe that did recognize the state of East Germany and the Oder-Neisse line.

Beginning in 1950, the United States pushed hard for the rearmament of West Germany as a bulwark against any further Communist expansion in central Europe. France, however, remembering three wars with Germany in 1870, 1914, and 1939, was less than enthusiastic to support West German rearmament. France had even sponsored the establishment of the Brussels Treaty Organization of 1948 that provided for a mutual defense pact with Great Britain and the Benelux countries against any future German aggression. Protracted and failed discussions between the United States and France between 1949 and 1954 regarding the rearmament of West Germany failed to produce any concrete results. Only when the United States threatened to proceed forward with a unilateral rearmament of West Germany did France finally relented at the end of 1954.

France then agreed to the rearmament of West Germany under an expanded membership of the Brussels Treaty Organization called the Western European Union to include West Germany. The Western European Union itself was reorganized to simultaneously act as regional collective security pact within its own membership and a mutual defense pact against the Communist world camp. Under such an umbrella a rearmed West Germany also joined NATO in May 1955, and it was at this point that the Soviet Union responded by formally proclaiming the establishment of the Warsaw Treaty Organization as the Soviet military alliance structure of the Communist states of Eastern Europe. The bottom line was that with the establishment of two German states respectively rearmed and aligned with two competing alliance systems – the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the Warsaw Treaty Organization – and with West Germany officially committed to the demise of the East German state and its Oder-Neisse frontier with Poland, the postwar situation in Germany hardened the cold war rivalry between the Soviet Communist World and the West.

The New International Role of Communist China Maoist Communist Ideology: Maoist Communist Ideology argued that it was the true successor to the Kuomintang movement as the three people’s principles of Sun Yat-sen. It argued that Communist political rule in the new People’s Republic of China stressed “nationalism” in the removal of all foreign domination, “livelihood” in the removal of all capitalist exploitation, and “democracy” as represented the rule of a true class majority of the proletariat and the peasantry. And that all such foundations rested on the rule of the political hegemony of the Communist Party. And given the political hegemony of the Communist, Maoist China would naturally “lean to one side” in foreign policy, that is, as opposed to the political neutralist foreign policy of Jawaharlal Nehru’s India it would naturally side with the Communist world camp headed by the Soviet Union.

But this in turn meant that the Soviet Union could be expected to be equally supportive of its Chinese Communist counterpart, particularly in renouncing the imperialist concessions granted to Tsar Russia and reestablished under the Sino-Soviet Treaty of August 15, 1945, agreed to by the Nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek. To this end Mao journeyed to Moscow in December 1949, for six weeks of negotiations that was concluded with the signing of Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship and Alliance between the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China on February 16, 1950.

114 Terms of the Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship and Alliance: The Treaty, which was to be valid for thirty years and subject to renewal, contained the following provisions: (i) a mutual defense pact against any “violation of peace” by Japan or any other state collaborating “directly or indirectly” with Japan; (ii) a Soviet guarantee to hand over the Chinese Eastern Railway and South Manchurian Railway to sole Chinese possession without compensation; (iii) a Soviet guarantee to cede its leasehold on Port Arthur on the Darien Peninsula; and (iv) the promise of a Soviet five-year loan of $300 million to help finance the socialist economic reconstruction of China. The first provision of the Treaty was clearly intended to discourage the United States from not only signing any mutual defense pact with Japan but also from assisting in Japanese rearmament. Both China and the Soviet Union wished to prevent any future Japanese advance on Korea and Manchuria, and the Soviet Union was concerned about holding on to Southern Sakhalin and the Kurile Islands. The second and third provisions of the Treaty were most certainly a Chinese given for the recovery of her own territory as a condition for any Sino-Soviet agreement. And the fourth provision was hardly an expression of Soviet economic largesse; the $300 million was only a five-year loan, and paled in comparison to the American $12 billion in Marshall Plan aid to Western Europe.

Despite the sudden fear of a “Moscow-Peking Axis,” many China experts already saw deep complications in Sino-Soviet relations even under a Communist Maoist regime. They argued that the history of Russian-Chinese relations based on Tsarist expansion from the Treaty of Nerchinsk in 1689 throughout the Sino-Soviet Treaty of August 14, 1945 was not a history to suggest an enduring Russian-Chinese Communist fraternity. The American Response to Chinese Communism: At the outset the American response to the Communist regime in Mainland China was rather ambivalent. On the one hand, it evoked an extreme right-wing denunciation of what was seen as a “Moscow-Peking Axis,” portending a new world Communist monolith presenting an immediate threat of a world Communist takeover. This view was especially propounded by a “China Lobby” in the United States Congress, which called for the United States to support a vow by Chiang Kai-shek to lead a Nationalist military invasion of the Mainland from Formosa to “liberate” China from Communist rule. Likewise, the Communist conquest of Mainland China helped to fuel the emerging political paranoia of “McCarthyism,” with the argument that China was lost to Communism from a lack of proper American political-military support spawned by a political constituency at home who either knowingly or unwittingly aided and abetted the spread of Communism abroad. But despite pressure from the China Lobby, the initial official attitude of the Truman administration toward the new Communist Chinese government was non-committal. While Washington withheld recognition of the Chinese Peoples’ Republic and therefore tacitly continued to formally recognize the Nationalist government on Formosa, it clearly was not about to commit to support a Chiang Kai-shek Nationalist invasion of the mainland as an exercise of pure folly. Furthermore, recognizing that Chinese Communist forces were already preparing for their own invasion of Formosa – always recognized as an integral part of China – President Truman went on to declare on January 5, 1950, that “the United States will not provide military aid or advice to Chinese forces on Formosa.” This seemed to imply that the ultimate recognition of the Peoples’ Republic of Chinese was inevitable.

The Korean Conflict

Background: After having been occupied by Japan in 1911 and completely detached from Chinese suzerain rule, the “Cairo Declaration” in November 1943, of the Allied Powers supported by the Soviet Union called for the political independence of the Korea as a sovereign nation-state. And, as already noted, at the Potsdam Conference of 17 July-2 August, 1945 it was agreed that the 38th parallel would divide Soviet and American postwar occupation zones. Shortly after the surrender of Japan a Moscow Conference of foreign ministers further agreed that a Joint Commission of Soviet and American representatives would be constituted to establish the economic and political integration of the two occupation zones to establish a single provisional government of “democratic parties” from the two occupation zones. The provisional government would then serve as a trust government under the United Nations for a five-year transition period leading to full independent sovereignty, at which time all Soviet and American occupation forces were to be withdrawn.

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The temporary occupation zone of Soviet authority north of the 38th parallel included a territory of 47,000 square miles (about the size of the state of Mississippi) and a population today of 24 million people. The headquarters of the Soviet zone of occupation was the city of Pyongyang. The temporary occupation Zone of American authority south of the 38th parallel included a territory of 38,000 square miles (about the size of the state of Indiana) and a population today of 48 million people. The headquarters of the American zone of occupation was the city of Seoul, the largest city in Korea and located only some 35 miles south of the 38th parallel. The Emergence of Two Koreas: in mid-January 1946, a conference of the Joint Commission of Soviet and American representatives announced that they had “failed to reach agreement” on the economic and political integration of the two occupation zones. As such, the 38th parallel became a permanent boundary dividing the Soviet and American zones of occupation into two Koreas, by then called North Korea and South Korea. Kim Il-sung became the Communist leader of a “People’s Democratic Republic of Korea” (PDRK) in North Korea; and Syngman Rhee became the non-Communist leader of a Republic of Korea (ROK) in South Korea. Both governments claimed that the other had blocked the unification of Korea, and both governments claimed that they had a mandate from the whole of the Korean people to carry out the unification of Korea as an independent nation-state on their own authority.

Having strongly armed ten military divisions in North Korea, the Soviet Union announced on September 20, 1948, that it was withdrawing its own occupation forces from North Korea and leaving it up to the Korean people to settle their political future. The United State responded with an accelerated program of armament of South Korean military forces. Then, except for 500 remaining military advisers, the United States in June 1949 also announced that it was withdrawing its occupation military forces from South Korea, declaring that the South Korean military forces were by that time capable of their own defense. Finally, in June 1950, the United States announced that it was also withdrawing its remaining military advisers. The latter announcement seemed to imply that the United States was completely detaching itself from the Korean Conflict, because on January 12, 1950, Secretary of State Dean Acheson declared that the American perimeter of military defense in the Far East ran from Japan through the Philippines leaving out both Korea and Formosa. The First Phase of the Korean War: Sensing that it had an opportunity to seize the initiative in the Korean conflict in advancing against South Korea, North Korean military forces crossed the 38th parallel on June 25, 1950, in an all-out military offensive. Being dependent on Soviet military assistance, it is certain that North Korea would not have done so without the encouragement and even promotion of the Soviet Union. Many argue that being stymied against any further gains in Europe with the establishment of NATO, Stalin decided to probe for further Communist gain in Korea where he determined that the United States had implicitly renounced any recourse to military engagement. In this, the Soviet Union was taken by surprise when the United States immediately responded by having the United Nations declare North Korea guilty of aggression on June 27, 1950, and calling for collective United Nations military action against the North Korean military advance. The United States accounted for 90 percent of the United Nations forces fighting in support of the South Korean government, but with significant military assistance from Canada, Great Britain, the Philippines, and Turkey.

The Soviet representative on the United Nations Security Council was not present to exercise a Soviet absolute veto power over the United Nations resolution authorizing United Nations military action in defense of South Korea. The Soviet representative had been under instructions to boycott the Soviet seat on the Security Council in protest for the failure of the United Nations to replace the representative of the Chinese Nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek on the Security Council with a representative from the Chinese Peoples’ Republic. The Soviet government eventually took the position that the North Korean attack was a “defensive response” to repeated South Korean military provocations, and that its failure to have the opportunity to cast an absolute veto made the United Nations authorization of collective military force illegal, and in consequence the Soviet Union had the right to continue its assistance of military hardware to North Korea.

General Douglas MacArthur was placed in charge of the United Nations forces on July 7, 1950, but it still took several months to marshal a sufficient combat force for a successful counteroffensive against the North Korean advance. Taken by surprise and not nearly initially as strong as the North Korean invading forces, the original

116 contingent of South Korean military forces were pushed back to a narrow 60-mile strip of land in southeast Korea called the Pusan Perimeter. However, on September 15, 1950, MacArthur masterminded the “Inchon Landing” as an amphibious operation just below the 38th parallel and some 150 miles behind North Korean military lines. Threatened with being completely rolled up, the North Korean military was forced into a desperate retreat which within a month was driven back across the 38th parallel. At this point, United Nations forces had fulfilled their initial mandate to drive North Korean military forces out of South Korea, but MacArthur insisted on carrying his offensive across all of North Korea to the Chinese border at the Yalu River.

The Second Phase of the Korean War: MacArthur was committed to establishing a united non-Communist Korean government, and in this he more or less forced the hand of President Truman to promote the passing of a new “Uniting-for-Peace” resolution by the General Assembly of the United Nations on October 7, 1950. The resolution called for elections throughout the whole of Korea for a single government under the auspices of United Nations military forces headed by the United States. Since the population of South Korea doubled that of North Korea, such all-Korean elections were certain to ensure an all-Korean non-Communist government. The vote had to be passed in the General Assembly because the Soviet Union was bound to veto any such resolution in the Security Council in that it would not only sanction the advance of United Nations forces into North Korea but lead to a unified all-Korean non-Communist government. The Soviet Union in opposition argued that according to the United Nations Charter any collective military action by the United Nations was the sole responsibility of the Security Council, and that the American sponsored “Uniting-for-Peace” resolution was illegal and non-binding. MacArthur’s force reached the Yalu River by the end of October; and already the United States had been warned through the Indian Embassy that American sponsored United Nations forces at the Yalu River boundary of North Korea and China would provoke Chinese military intervention. And in early November 48,000 “Chinese volunteers” began to mix in with the North Korean military forces. Then, on November 25, 1950, some 200,000 regulars of the Chinese Peoples’ Liberation Army attacked in full force, but only to retreat back across the Yalu River after a short advance. This was a clear signal that unless MacArthur’s United Nations forces pulled back to the 38th parallel a full-scale counteroffensive by the People’s Liberation Army was imminent. MacArthur failed to heed the warning. Instead he spoke brazenly about bombing Manchuria in the event of any further Chinese intervention. Ten days later on December 3, 1950, regulars of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army again advanced into North Korea in full force, and this time to stay. Overextended, MacArthur’s forces were trapped and were only saved from wholescale capture by a heroic march to evacuation at coastal cities. Chinese forces pushed all the way back across the 38th parallel by the end of December and for a brief period of time captured Seoul. But by January 1951 MacArthur’s force were able to fight their way back to the 38th parallel and recapture Seoul. There the lines of the two sides stabilized, and in March 1951 Truman seeing the stalemated nature of the conflict called for a stand down armistice and an end to hostilities based on the status quo ante. This of course meant abandoning the “Uniting-for-Peace” resolution, which Truman, despite MacArthur’s confidence, was only moderately enthusiastic about to begin with. This led to an immediate conflict between Truman and MacArthur as MacArthur was still calling for total victory in Korea; and, despite the iconic popularity of MacArthur among much of the American public, Truman had the courage to summarily dismiss MacArthur from his command and replace MacArthur with General Matthew Ridgeway in April 1951. Peace negotiations then immediately began at Panmunjom, a site in northwest South Korea, and were drawn out for two years over the issue of the exchange of prisoners-of-war. Many North Korean and Chinese prisoners-of-war did not wish to return to their homelands. After the death of Stalin on March 5, 1953, the issue of prisoners-of-war exchange was resolved after four more months of discussions. As determined by the United Nations, prisoners-of-war who did not wish to return to their original homelands would not be forced to do so. Many North Korean prisoners-of-war stayed in South Korea, and about three-fourths of the Chinese prisoners-of-war chose to go to Taiwan rather than go back to the Chinese Mainland. Finally, on July 27, 1953, the Korean Armistice was signed which restored the pre-June 25, 1950 boundary between the two Koreas at the 38th parallel.

117 Outcomes of the Korean Conflict: In terms of cold-war rivalry there were three important outcomes of the Korean Conflict. First, it manifested the military power of Communist China’s Peoples’ Liberation Army in fighting the American led United Nations forces to a standstill. Second, it prompted the United States to respond the challenge of Communist China’s military by President Truman dispatching the American Seventh Fleet to the Taiwan Straits on June 27, 1950, to block any Mainland Chinese invasion of Formosa, and then in 1952 signing an agreement to provide United States military assistance to Formosa in the event of an attack by Mainland China. This effectively tied the hands of the United States to the Formosan government for the next two decades until the sudden and remarkable new opening under the Nixon administration in 1972. Third, contrary to what the extreme right preached in the United States, it is highly doubtful that Communist China supported the North Korean invasion of South Korea. Rather, it was promoted by the Soviet Union and left Communist China to bear the military brunt of the fighting in a costly campaign that she could ill afford after some fifty years of domestic and foreign conflict. Indeed, it is questionable as to whether Communist China was even aware of Soviet plans, for in the months immediately preceding the North Korean invasion Chinese Communist military forces were being mobilized in southeast China across the Taiwan Straits presumably for a campaign to oust Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government rule from Formosa.

Stalin’s Final Legacy

The Soviet State and the Law of Economic Value: In 1952, Stalin published one of his most important ideological works entitled Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR. The work served as the basis of two new ideological pronouncements set forth at the Soviet Nineteenth Party Congress (5-14 October, 1952). The first Stalinist ideological pronouncement held that the “law of economic value” would not disappear under Communist society. It had been a traditionally accepted Marxist proposition that once human labor became “life’s prime want” with the abolition of the division between mental and physical labor, society would be crowned with an economic abundance that would eliminate all economic scarcity. This, in turn, would eliminate the necessity to ration goods based on the individual input of human labor and the need for a coercive state apparatus to enforce the law of economic value under socialism.

But now Stalin argued that even under Communist society there would be a relative scarcity of economic goods simply based on a temporary scarcity of new products when they first come into production; and this would mean an on-going temporary scarcity of new economic goods. This in turn would require a coercive state apparatus to enforce the proper distribution of new economic goods even under Communist society owing to an on-going temporary scarcity of new economic goods. In making this new ideological pronouncement that a certain coercive state apparatus would continue to exist even under Communist society, Stalin was anticipating Nikita Khrushchev’s subsequent elaboration of the Soviet Communist doctrine of the “state of the whole people.”

The Soviet State and the Capitalist World Camp: The second Stalinist ideological pronouncement was an altered characterization of Western imperialism. Although in keeping with traditional Marxist-Leninist theory Stalin argued that international wars are contested by western capitalist powers seeking expanded colonial holdings to forestall a falling rate of domestic profit, Stalin now argued that the capitalist powers had learned from World War Two in the Soviet defeat of Nazi German that they could not conduct successful military conflict against the Soviet Union. Any imperialist military challenge to the Soviet Union would only guarantee their own self-destruction. Therefore, the Soviet Union could reasonably conclude that the western imperialist powers would never again risk an all-out military conflict with the Soviet Union. As such, Stalin went on to argue that future capitalist imperialist wars would be limited to internecine wars among themselves in pursuit of greater colonial possessions. Stalin’s position therefore tended to abrogate Andrei Zhdanov’s two-camp theory, at least as it addressed direct military conflict between the Soviet Union and the Western Powers. Here it is to be noted that by the time of the Nineteenth Party Congress in 1952, the United States had already successfully tested a thermonuclear device (hydrogen bomb); and, as noted below, the Soviet Union had already successfully tested its own a nuclear device (atomic bomb) in 1949, and was to also test its own thermonuclear device (hydrogen bomb) in 1953. Most experts therefore see Stalin’s denouncement of military

118 confrontation with the Western Powers – carrying with it the risk of mutual nuclear annihilation – as also foreshadowing Nikita Khrushchev’s subsequent doctrine of “peaceful coexistence.”

Stalin’s Final Planned Purge and Death The “Doctor’s Plot”: On January 13, 1953, the Kremlin announced that the MGB (the Soviet Secret Police of the former NKVD renamed in 1946) had uncovered a “Doctors’ Plot” to murder high-level Communist officials with poisonous injections. Nine doctors were specifically mentioned. All were prominent academicians as well as practicing physicians and six of the nine were of Jewish extraction. This almost certainly presaged another major purge instigated by Stalin, especially since Viktor Abakumov had been replaced in 1952 by Semion Ignatiev as head of the MGB. Supposedly, Stalin had threatened Ignatiev as the new head of the MGB to “shorten him by head” if he did not make a “clean sweep” of a “new nest of counterrevolutionary conspirators.” The question of the kind and number of Communist Party members Stalin intended to target his so-called “Doctors’ Plot” is still not fully answered to this very day. The Doctors’ Plot was formally declared to have targeted an Jewish Zionist organization codenamed “Joint,” that worked in conjunction with the United States and Great Britain to support the state of Israel in an effort to undermine Soviet influence in the Middle East. And the naming of six Soviet Jewish doctors suggested that a general campaign was planned against the entire Soviet Jewish population as holding a “cosmopolitan persuasion” that compromised Soviet interests in the name of Jewish Isreali state. Indeed, such a cosmopolitan persuasion was said to have been identified with a conspiracy to assassinate Andrei Zhdanov, who died under mysterious circumstances on August 31, 1948. The theme of such a Jewish conspiracy must have particularly frightened such old-guard Bolsheviks as Lazar Kaganovich and Viacheslav Molotov. Kaganovich was of Jewish extraction, and Molotov, although not himself of Jewish extraction, saw his Jewish wife sent away to a concentration camp. Molotov already had to give up his position as Minister of Foreign Affairs to Andrei Vyshinskii in 1949. But the new purge went beyond an anti-Semitic theme. Lavrentii Beria who had headed the Soviet counter intelligence center since the Second World War also had to be concerned when a so-called “Mingrelian nationalist conspiracy” was declared to have been uncovered in Georgia of his native identity and in whose Communist Party organization he first rose to power. And even Klimet Voroshilov, Stalin’s military crony extending back to the Russian Civil War, was twice accused by Stalin of being a suspect British agent and had been replaced as Minister of Defense by Nikolai Bulganin in 1948. Another old-guard Caucasian Bolshevik, Anastas Mikoyan was removed as Minister of Trade. And finally, the agrorgorod scheme of consolidated collective farms of Nikita Khrushchev was roundly denounced at the Nineteenth Party Congress leaving Khrushchev to wonder about his own fate as one of the top members of the Politburo. Looking Toward the Future Party Leadership: The 10-member Politburo was itself reconstituted as an enlarged 25-member Presidium combining both the former Politiburo and Orgburo. This has left many experts to conclude that in his overall quest Stalin wished to use the Doctors’ Plot to undermine any independent power base of his political lieutenants, especially those long-standing party leaders who had built up a personal base of political loyalty. If any single party member came out of the Nineteenth Party Congress as the presumed heir apparent to the mantle of Stalin, it was Georgii Malenkov as Chairman of the Council of Ministers. Stalin apparently wished to shift the focus of power from the Communist Party apparatus to the Communist state apparatus. Stalin had Malenkov, rather than Stalin himself, to read the official Report of the Central Committee to the Nineteenth Party Congress.

But suffice it to say, that probably all of the existing leading members of the Soviet Communist Party leadership were enormously relieved when Stalin himself died on March 5, 1953, after suffering a brain hemorrhage on February 28, 1953.

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Questions for Reflection

(1) What were the several reasons why Stalin wished to avoid war with Nazi Germany right up to the German invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941? What took place from June 1941 through December 1941 in the first German military campaign to occupy Moscow? What took place from July 1942 through January 1943 in the second German military campaign to occupy Stalingrad? What took place in July 1943 in the third German military campaign to against advance eastward from Kursk?

(2) What areas were involved in the 180,000 square miles of Soviet postwar territory recognized by the United

States and Great Britain at the Teheran Conference (28 November-1 December 1943) that the Soviet Union did not possess prior to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August 23 and September 27, 1939? What did the agreement at Teheran that Soviet forces would liberate East-Central Europe portend for the type of postwar governments that would be established in East Central Europe?

(3) As set forth at Yalta and delineated at Potsdam (17 July-2 August 1945), what was to be the purpose of the postwar occupation of Germany by the Allied Powers and the Soviet Union? What was the significance of the Oder-Neisse line established as the new postwar frontier between Germany and Poland, and what was the significance of the establishment of a Soviet Kaliningrad Oblast’? What ultimately emerged of the status of postwar Germany in 1949 as a result of the hardening of the Cold War?

(4) What did Stalin pronounce in early 1946 about the imperialist nature of capitalism that presaged the postwar political confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union? How did Andrei Zhdanov’s “two camp theory” extend the political confrontation to the notion of a universal intellectual confrontation? What type of political crackdown took place in the Peoples’ Democracies of Eastern Europe beginning with the establishment of the Cominform in May 1947? What happened in the unique transformation of the relation between Tito’s Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union under Stalin?

(5) How did the United States react to the new postwar Soviet threat under the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall

Plan? How, then, did the doctrine of “containment” as expounded by George F. Kennan call for a long-term strategy for the West to prevail in the Cold War? What does Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization adopted on April 4, 1949, provide for? What did the Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship and Alliance of February 16, 1950 call for as a mutual defense pact and what did it call for regarding existing Soviet concessions in Manchuria? What was the outcome of the Korean Conflict after General MacArthur’s successful Inchon Landing on September 15, 1950?

(6) What did Stalin have to say in his Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR about the on-going requirement of a coercive state apparatus even under Communist society owing to the “economic law of value”? And, again in his Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR what did Stalin have to say about the nature of imperialist wars that seemed to presage Khrushchev’s later doctrine of “peaceful coexistence”? What was entailed in Stalin’s campaign against a “Doctor’s Plot” announced on January 13, 1953, just before his death on March 5, 1953?