Post on 26-Jan-2023
Jonathan Morales December 17, 2013HIST 674
Security or Revolution?
Scholarship since the Collapse of the Soviet Union on Communist Ideology, National
Security, and the Origins of the Cold War
Winston Churchill famously remarked in an October 1939 radio
address that Russia is “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an
enigma.” In the decades after the Second World War, as the Grand
Alliance gave way to bitter Cold War, the source of Soviet
conduct—be it national security interests, Stalin’s dysfunctional
personality, or Marxist-Leninis ideology—was the subject of
rancorous debate among historians in determining the origins of
East-West confrontation.
The collapse of the Soviet Union and the partial opening of
Russian and former Eastern Bloc archives brought a wave of new
scholarship on the origins of the Cold War. Yet rather than
settling the debates of Cold War-era historiography, these
studies revived and recast old controversies in more detailed and
more nuanced ways. This essay will review recent scholarship on
1
Jonathan Morales December 17, 2013HIST 674postwar Stalinist grand strategy and new interpretations of the
origins of the Cold War, focusing on the reinvigorated debate
over the role of ideology in shaping Stalin’s foreign policy. Did
Stalin seek national security, or did he seek global revolution?
Archival research in the early 1990s, fitting into a dominant
realist paradigm in diplomatic historiography, tended to see
security imperatives rather than ideological imperatives as the
driving force behind Stalinist grand strategy. Yet new
documentation revealed that ideology interacted with security in
ways that were difficult to disentangle. Marxist-Leninist
ideology affected the way Stalin and his comrades perceived
threats and opportunities, making the realist paradigm, which
emphasized a spiraling circle of provocations based on rational
but incompatible security requirements, alone an unsatisfying
explanation for the cause of East-West confrontation.
2
Jonathan Morales December 17, 2013HIST 674Keep the ideology out, the realism in, and the
traditionalists down
Churchill continued with his complaint about the foreignness of
Russia, adding that the key to deciphering Russia might be
understanding her “national interest.” Scholars working in the
bevy of documents to flow from newly opened archives in the
aftermath of the Soviet collapse seemed to agree. Scholarship in
the early 1990s was dominated by studies on the role of
realpolitik and security in guiding postwar Soviet foreign
policy. Following a wider trend in Cold War historiography that
emphasized the role of the superpowers’ mutually incompatible
national security interests over their ideological differences,
realism was in, and Marxism-Leninism was out.
During the 1960s and 1970s, historians bitterly debated the
causes of the Cold War. Revisionists challenged traditional views
of the origins of the Cold War, insisting that the United States
was not without blame. Focusing on American traditions of
expansionism and investment capitalism, revisionists argued that
deeply ingrained ideological and economic imperatives drove the
3
Jonathan Morales December 17, 2013HIST 674United States to assume imperial responsibilities.1 Others
focused on the ghost of Depression past, which, they said,
reinforced the drive to outward expansion in order to avert
domestic stagnation and unpredictable market cycles.2 Others
criticized the presidency of Harry Truman, which, they argued,
reversed Franklin D. Roosevelt’s desire to continue the alliance
with Soviet Union after the war.
Departing from traditional orthodoxy on the origins of the
Cold War, revisionist arguments angered many retired politicians
and orthodox scholars. Traditionalists re-emphasized that fault
for the Cold War lay with the Kremlin. They pointed to the Joseph
Stalin’s paranoia and brutality, to historic expansionist
tendencies, and to the revolutionary aspirations of Marxist-
Leninist ideology as driving factors in Soviet policy. Given the
United States’ experience of totalitarian aggression in the
interwar period, and the failure of appeasement to contain it,
American policymakers had no choice but respond defensively to
Russian expansionism.
1 William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2009. First published in 1959.2 Walter LaFeber, America, Russia, and the Cold War, 1945-1966. New York: Wiley, 1967.
4
Jonathan Morales December 17, 2013HIST 674
By the 1980s, the controversy was subsiding, and John Lewis
Gaddis, a historian of the traditionalist bent, declared a “post-
revisionist consensus.” The United States took on an imperial
role after World War II, not because of greed or fears of postwar
depression, but by the consent of peoples threatened by Soviet
aggression. The United States responded these pleas and became
embroiled in international disputes that policymakers would have
rather avoided.3
Just as Gaddis declared a draw, his influential revisionist
counterpart Melvyn Leffler published an account of postwar U.S.
national security policy that was irreconcilable with the Gaddis’
post-revisionist paradigm. Drawing on a body of newly
declassified armed forces and intelligence documents, Leffler
argued that before the war ended, U.S. policymakers had a clear
definition of national security. Influenced by lessons from World
War II, this definition of security was inherently in conflict
with the imperatives of the Soviet Union. Leffler argued that
fears of social, political, and economic upheavals brought on by
British imperial decline, revolutionary nationalism, and vacuums 3 John Lewis Gaddis, “The Emerging Post-Revisionist Thesis on the Origins of the Cold War” in Diplomatic History 7 (Summer 1983), 171-190.
5
Jonathan Morales December 17, 2013HIST 674of power in Europe and Asia prompted American initiatives to
shape the postwar world into the United States’ definition of
security. Influenced by the work of political scientists such as
Robert Jervis, Leffler argued that the Cold War was the result of
a security dilemma, where nations taking action to enhance their
own security infringe on that of their adversaries, provoking a
spiral of enmity and distrust.4
Leffler’s account of the origins of the Cold War provoked
criticism by both traditionalists and post-revisionists, but his
integration of the security dilemma reshaped and redefined the
debate on the origins of the Cold War. Leffler’s subsequent book
on the Truman administration’s development of national security
policy, A Preponderance of Power, further developed his 1984 essay.
“Prudence” was the defining characteristic of Truman
administration’s policies, but prudent strategies had the effect
4 Melvyn P. Leffler, “The American Conception of National Security and the Beginnings of the Cold War” in American Historical Review 89 (April 1984), 346-381;Robert Jervis, “Cooperation under the Security Dilemma,” in World Politics 30, no.2 (January 1978), 167–174; Robert Jervis, Perception and Misperception in International Politics. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978.
6
Jonathan Morales December 17, 2013HIST 674of raising the cost and the risk of maintaining American security
imperatives in the postwar world.5
The debate over the comparative weight of ideology and
security interests was often a cover for laying blame for
starting the Cold War. The implication of the dichotomy is that
security interests are rational and therefore legitimate, whereas
ideology, especially Marxist-Leninist ideology, is irrational and
therefore illegitimate. Leffler’s work excised ideology from the
origins of the Cold War, and, incorporating the idea of the
security dilemma, saw the origins of the Cold War as a clash not
of irreconcilable and opposing worldviews, but of a spiraling
confrontation of rational but opposing security imperatives.
It was in this historiographical context, which downplayed
the role of ideology and emphasized the role of security
interests, that historians working in Soviet bloc archives
integrated their findings. To Leffler’s approval, the consensus
of scholarly work based on primary sources was on Soviet
5 Melvyn P. Leffler, A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992.
7
Jonathan Morales December 17, 2013HIST 674realpolitik.6 Early 1990s scholarship tended to emphasize that
Stalin had no master plan to bolshevize Eastern Europe, export
socialism, or undermine the Grand Alliance. Practicality,
scholars argued, not ideology, guided Stalin’s relationship with
China and his policy towards the war in Korea.
Spreading Revolution?
Dismembered into zones of occupation after World War II, Germany
was a central point of East-West confrontation in the Cold War.
But as Norman Naimark showed in his highly influential study of
the Soviet occupation of Germany, the Kremlin had no master plan
for the bolshevization of their zone of occupation. Rather,
Moscow hoped to accomplish a few immediate tasks, including
restarting the Soviet economy using German resources. There was
no master plan akin to JCS 1067—the American policy statement on
their occupation zone—but only a number of guiding principles,
such as the responsibility of landowners and capitalist
6 Melvyn P. Leffler, “The Cold War: What Do ‘We Now Know?’” in American Historical Review 104, no. 2 (April 1999), 501-524, 508; Melvyn P. Leffler, “Inside EnemyArchives: The Cold War Reopened” in Foreign Affairs 75,no. 4 (July-August 1996), 120-135, 122.
8
Jonathan Morales December 17, 2013HIST 674bourgeoisie for Nazism, and the need to carry out an “antifascist
democratic transformation” of Germany. This transformation,
Naimark argued, grew more militantly communist over the years of
direct Soviet rule, but this was not the result of a
preconceived, socialist vision of Germany from the Kremlin.
Indeed, Stalin himself was ambivalent and vacillating, unable to
decide whether Germany should be unified under German communists,
demilitarized and neutral like the Weimar Republic, or divided
and Sovietized as a vassal state. Soviet officers went into
Germany with commonly shared experiences and social instincts
that influenced occupation policies as much as, if not more than,
stated Marxist-Leninist ideology. Drawing on NEP, the first Five-
Year Plan, and collectivization, Soviet occupation officers
“bolshevized their zone not because there was a plan to do so,
but because that was the only way they knew to organize
society.”7
Archival research elsewhere in the former Eastern bloc
likewise revealed an ambivalent relationship between Moscow and
local communist parties. Analyzing newly available documents on 7 Norman Naimark, The Russians in Germany: A History of the Soviet Zone of Occupation, 1945-1949Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997, especially 467-468.
9
Jonathan Morales December 17, 2013HIST 674Soviet-Bulgarian relations, Vesselin Dimitrov showed that Stalin
reined in the communist party in Bulgaria, discouraging socialist
revolution.8 Likewise, Eric Roman found not “a shred of evidence”
that Stalin had a preconceived plan to bolshevize Hungary.
Roman’s argument seems an exaggeration, but his study emphasized
the moderation of Hungarian communist leaders and Stalin (“ever
the pragmatist’) over the inevitability of sovietization.9 A
volume edited by Naimark and Leonid Gibianskii likewise
questioned the assumption among Western analysts that the
imposition of communism in Eastern Europe was “designed and
executed by Moscow for the purpose of extending its sphere of
influence in Europe and the world.” East European states and
communist parties were hardly the servants of Stalin that
traditional orthodoxy holds. Jan Gross, for example, showed that
the economic isolationism, state intervention, and autarky of
postwar Eastern Europe were not communist inventions, but
processes underway before the start of World War II. Igor Lukes
8 Vesselin Dimitrov, “Revolution Released: Stalin, the Bulgarian Communist Party and the Establishment of the Cominform” in The Soviet Union and Europe in the Cold War, 1943-53, edited by Francesca Gori and Silvio Pons. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996.9 Eric Roman, Hungary and the Victor Powers, 1945-1950. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996, 167, 15.
10
Jonathan Morales December 17, 2013HIST 674argued that for the Czechs and many other Europeans, capitalism
itself was discredited by decades of depression and war.
Economically and socially, the East-West rupture was an ongoing
process, not a direct result of Soviet takeover. The cumulative
argument was to suggest that the Kremlin was not at the center of
process leading to communism in Eastern Europe, and local
communist parties in face chafed under Stalin’s control and
demands for moderation ahead of revolution.10
Scholars of the 1990s pointed to restraint outside of Europe
as well. Natalia Yergova’s “view from Russian archives” on the
1945-1946 Iran crisis depicted Stalin as overridingly concerned
Soviet security interests. During World War II, the Soviet Union
and Britain jointly occupied Iran—an important transit corridor
for war supplies to the Soviet Union and a vital source of oil—
but crisis ensued when the Soviet Union refused to relinquish its
occupied territory after the mutual withdrawal date passed.
Contemporaries in London and Washington feared that the Soviets’
continued occupation and assistance to a rising Azeri separatist
movement in Iran was part of Stalin’s master plan to spread 10 Norman Naimark and Leonid Gibianskii, eds., The Establishment of Communist Regimes in Eastern Europe, 1944-1949. Boulder: Westview Press, 1997, 7.
11
Jonathan Morales December 17, 2013HIST 674communism wherever vacuums of power existed. Yergova’s analysis
modified this view, downplaying the role of communist
proselytizing and emphasizing the importance of national
security. Stalin had no apparent plans to overthrow the Iranian
government. Yergova argued that Stalin viewed the presence of
American and British oil interests on the Soviet border to be a
threat to Soviet security interests. Stalin hoped to win an oil
concession from the Iranian, enhancing Soviet resource security
and state prestige as a political and economic power on par with
the West.11
Scholarship on Stalin’s East Asia policy likewise depicted
security interests, rather than global revolution, as the guiding
principle in Soviet grand strategy. In the Sino-Soviet
relationship, Sergei N. Goncharov, John W. Lewis, and Xue Litai
argued, ideology played a secondary role. While adherence to
Marxism-Leninism and similarities in socioeconomic systems
suggest an ideological link between the Stalinist and Maoist
states, security was the overriding concern that shaped the Sino-
11 Natalia Yegorova, “The ‘Iran Crisis’ of 1945-46: A View from the Russian Archives.” Washington: Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Cold War International History Project Working Paper No. 15, 1996.
12
Jonathan Morales December 17, 2013HIST 674Soviet alliance. The link that enjoined the two powers, the
authors argued, was the temporary confluence of larger goals of
grand strategy. Ever confident that Chinese moral and cultural
superiority would eventually lead China to triumph over the
barbarians—including those to the north—Mao calculated that China
would need to temporarily align with one of the blocs to ensure
safety as China proceeded towards unification and centralization.
The sharpening of the Cold War in Europe led Stalin to view
communist China as a counter for future Japanese aggression and
potential capitalist “encirclement,” and in the years after World
War II, used the alliance to subsume an independent Chinese
foreign policy towards the United States to that of the Soviet
Union.12 In a contemporaneous study on Sino-Soviet relations, Odd
Arne Westad emphasized the erratic nature of Stalin’s foreign
policy, famously calling it “not as much inexplicable in its
parts as incoherent in its whole.” Stalin vacillated in the
Chinese Civil War between support of the nationalists and the
Chinese communists to serve his interest in retaining territorial
12 Sergei Goncharov, John W. Lewis, and Xue Litai. Uncertain Partners: Stalin, Mao and the Korean War. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993.
13
Jonathan Morales December 17, 2013HIST 674control of Outer Mongolia and secure control over Manchuria, and
was willing to sacrifice the communists to do so.13
Studies on the Korean War likewise pointed to limited goals
and to the primacy of national security in explaining Soviet
involvement. Kathryn Weathersby argued that new documents from
Russian archives indicated that the North Korean invasion of
South Korea in June 1950 was not the result of Soviet
determination to expand its territory or attack the American
sphere of influence. Rather, Stalin sought to force Mao to
continue his alliance with the Soviet Union by instigating a war
that would prevent Sino-American rapprochement.14 Goncharov,
Lewis, and Litai’s study corroborated this interpretation, adding
that Stalin’s reluctance to send Soviet aircraft to North Korea
and troops to China until he was sure that China were fully
engaged in the fighting suggests that Stalin was determined not
13 Odd Arne Westad, Cold War and Revolution: Soviet-American Rivalry and the Origins of the Chinese Civil War, 1944-1946. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993. 14 Kathryn Weathersby, “Soviet Aims in Korea and the Origins of the Korean War, 1945-1950: New Evidence from Russian Archives.” Cold War International History Project Working Paper No. 8, Woodrow Wilson International Center, 1993.
14
Jonathan Morales December 17, 2013HIST 674to fight the United States in Korea, even if that meant losing
the communist regime in Pyongyang.15
Stalin’s grand strategy may have been “incoherent in its
whole,” but scholarship from the 1990s on regional policies shows
that for Stalin, the primary concern driving Soviet foreign
policy was security of the Soviet state. In Germany, Soviet
policy was more extractive than constructive. Co-opting German
resources to rebuild the Soviet Union was given priority over
exporting socialism. In Eastern Europe, Stalin sought stability
over revolution, restraining local communist parties. In Asia,
Stalin proved willing to cut his losses and allow local allies to
perish before embroiling the USSR in any potentially destructive
situation. In Iran, Stalin used the Azeri separatist movement to
press for mining concessions and consolidate the southern borders
of the Soviet Union, but abandoned them rather than risk
escalated confrontation. Stalin’s relationship with Chinese
Communists fluctuated, and his alliance with Mao was one of
convenience, not ideology. Soviet support for the war in Korea
was not one of ideological affinity either—scholars argued that
15 Goncharov et al, Uncertain Partners, 187-202.15
Jonathan Morales December 17, 2013HIST 674Stalin hoped to use the war to maintain the peninsular balance of
power and seal off the possibility of Sino-American cooperation.
In sum, Eastern bloc archival research in the early 1990s argued
that security interests, not a messianic vision of global
socialist conquest, motivated Stalinist grand strategy. Stalin
sought to rebuild the Soviet Union and consolidate his sphere of
influence, not precipitate world revolution.
If security concerns drove Stalinist foreign policy towards
the periphery, what about his relationship with his wartime
allies, Britain and the United States? One of the most thought-
provoking discoveries after the fall of the Soviet Union was that
of a collection of policy planning memos written by three ranking
Foreign Ministry officials (Gromyko, Litvinov, and Maisky) in
late 1944 and early 1945. Comparing the writings, Vladimir
Pechatnov found that all three expected a continuation of the
Grand Alliance, regarding it as the only means of preserving both
peace and Soviet security interests. The United States, Britain,
and the Soviet Union would divide the world into spheres of
influence, defined in terms of “traditional geostrategic
16
Jonathan Morales December 17, 2013HIST 674importance”—not “Sovietization.”16 For all three, cooperation
with the United States was both desirable and likely in the
postwar world, but Leninist presaging about “intercapitalist
contradictions” heavily influenced this interpretation. Maisky
advocated “strengthening of friendly relations with the United
States and England” in order to exploit the “Anglo-American
contradiction.”17 Gromyko thought that the United States would be
interested in “economic and political cooperation with the Soviet
Union,” optimistically adding that the “necessary conditions are
clearly present for a continuation of cooperation between our two
countries in the post-war period.” The United States, Gromyko
thought, would have an interest in preserving peace in order to
allow the capitalists “maximum utilization of the gains and
advantages already achieved”—referring to American predominance
in trade and finance.18 Litvinov also found “no deep reasons for
serious and long-term conflicts between the USA and USSR in any
part of the world.” To this, Litvinov added that the “inevitable
16 Vladimir Pechatnov, “The Big Three After World War II: New Documents on Soviet Thinking about Post War Relations with The United States and Great Britain,” Cold War International History Project Working Paper No. 13, WoodrowWilson International Center, 1995, 17.17 Maisky quoted in ibid 6.18 Gromyko quoted in ibid 6, 8.
17
Jonathan Morales December 17, 2013HIST 674intensification of economic competition throughout the world
between the United States and Great Britain” (i.e.,
intercapitalist conflict) meant that the Soviet Union would
benefit from positive relations with both (annotations in the
document suggest that Molotov approved of this point).19 While
the three differed slightly in interpretation, ideology steered
predictions of future relations with the capitalist world—
especially the prospect of future Anglo-American rivalry.
Gromyko’s assertion that the United States would continue to
“remain interested in the military defeat of Germany and her
subsequent economic and military enfeeblement” as much from
security reasons as for preventing the reemergence of an economic
competitor is likewise indicative of the importance of ideology
in predicting future relations with the capitalists.20
Despite the persistent theme of intercapitalist conflict,
Pechatnov argued that the common theme was the “primacy of Soviet
security interests.” Strategic objectives were “fairly limited
and realistic in a Realpolitik sense.” A resurgent, revanchist
Germany was the greatest security threat to the Soviet Union, and19 Litvinov quoted in ibid 11.20 Gromyko quoted in ibid 7.
18
Jonathan Morales December 17, 2013HIST 674the principal goal among the three officials was to prevent any
formation in Europe of powerful armies.21 Yet the ideal of three
spheres of influence was predicated on a relatively equal
tripartite relationship, with no two powers uniting against the
third. The Leninist assumption that the intercapitalist
contradiction would be strong enough to prevent an Anglo-American
alliance against the Soviet Union was strategically indispensable
to these policymakers’ postwar strategies, and suggestive about
the role of articulated ideology in formulating a supposedly
“Realpolitik” foreign policy. While Pechatnov tried to emphasize
the primacy of security and “Realpolitik,” ideology emerged as an
important—if ambiguous—factor in Soviet policy planning. The
Foreign Ministry officials adhered to doctrine on the likelihood
of intercapitalist conflict, yet they were unanimous in their
favor of maintaining the Grand Alliance and accommodating a
British and an American sphere of influence.
Moscow’s rejection of Soviet and East European participation
in Marshall Plan aid has been seen by many historians as an
important moment—if not the moment—in the origins of the Cold
21 Ibid 17.19
Jonathan Morales December 17, 2013HIST 674War. Two contemporaneous yet divergent accounts by Scott Parrish
and Geoffrey Roberts based new sources underscore similar
ambiguity between ideology and national security interests.
According to Parrish, Stalin had no interest in grandiose plans
of expansion. Soviet leadership viewed themselves as vulnerable,
with weak military and industrial capabilities. Stalin’s overall
concern, therefore, was to consolidate the territorial and
security gains won in World War II. A policy of confrontation
would only serve to undermine it. Stalin held out hope for
continued cooperation with Britain and America, but the Marshall
Plan radically changed Stalin’s plans, leading him to adopt a
strategy of confrontation. In this interpretation, Soviet
leadership was motivated by fear and vulnerability. Downplaying
Soviet or American “aggression,” Parrish extended Leffler’s
security dilemma to the Soviet Union’s rejection of the Marshall
Plan. The unstable economic and political conditions of Europe
led the U.S. and West European powers to design the Marshall plan
in a way that would stabilize Western Europe, but at the cost of
provoking confrontation with the Soviet Union. In that same
environment, Stalin responded with maneuvers that further fanned
20
Jonathan Morales December 17, 2013HIST 674confrontation. For Parrish, the moment of the Cold War’s
emergence was a story of “tragedy,” as conditions in postwar
Europe compelled both sides to pursue policies that were “largely
defensive, but had the unfortunate consequence of provoking
conflict with the other.22
Geoffrey Roberts presents a “commensurate” view with
Parrish’s analysis, but sharply diverges over the role of the
security dilemma as the source of Stalin’s turn to confrontation
with Britain and America. According to Roberts, Moscow was
uncertain and hesitant in approach the Marshall plan. Only during
negotiations with Britain and France in the summer of 1947 over
the plan’s implementation did Soviet leaders arrive at their
final decision to reject Marshall Plan aid. Roberts pointed to
several signs that Stalin was hoping for a continuation of
détente. Even after the announcement of the Truman Doctrine in
March 1947 and the breakdown in negotiations over the future of
Germany in April 1947, Stalin stated publicly that compromise was
22 Scott D. Parrish and Mikhail M. Narinsky, “New Evidence on the Soviet Rejection of the Marshal Plan, 1947: Two Reports.” Cold War International History Project Working Paper No. 9, Woodrow Wilson International Center, 1994, 5.
21
Jonathan Morales December 17, 2013HIST 674possible.23 Furthermore, Stalin sent Molotov to Paris with one
hundred advisers, suggesting, Roberts argued, that Moscow was
taking the proposal seriously.24 It was after the Soviets found
their suspicions about the Marshall Plan confirmed, and Moscow
rejected Soviet and East European participation, that the Cold
War on the Soviet side began.25 Yet for Roberts, a realist
response to the Marshall Plan was not the only factor in the
“turn” to Cold War in Soviet foreign policy. While Roberts
accepted that Stalin sought to preserve the Grand Alliance after
World War II and acted accordingly, he argued that Soviet
ideology made Cold War almost inevitable. Ideology, Roberts
argued, was a “language of political communication” to which
political discourse conforms. The Marshall Plan presented a new
course of policy that had to be discussed and legitimated in a
narrow range of terms that encouraged a bifurcated worldview.
“The effect of processing policy through ideology was, instead of
a simple adaptation to a more defensive and anti-Western posture
in foreign relations, the adoption of a radical, aggressive 23 Geoffrey Roberts, “Moscow and the Marshall Plan: Politics, Ideology and theOnset of the Cold War, 1947” in Europe-Asia Studies, 46, No. 8 (1994), 1371-1386, 373-1374.24 Ibid 1375.25 Ibid 1371.
22
Jonathan Morales December 17, 2013HIST 674ideological posture. Given the existence of a discourse that
denoted capitalist hostility to the USSR, the inevitability of
war and conflict in an imperialist world, and the universal
validity of a single, Soviet model of revolution and socialism,
such an outcome was highly likely.”26
The dominant framework in Cold War historiography
overwhelming emphasized national security over ideology. This
insistence that Soviet security interests subsumed Marxist-
Leninist ideological imperatives revealed much about the logic of
Soviet foreign policy and about the spiraling security
confrontation between the West and the East, but it glossed over
the ambiguous role that ideology played in shaping Soviet
perceptions of security itself. The sharp dichotomy between
security and ideology, along with the failure of the national
security paradigm to go beyond escalation and explain the root
causes of confrontation, set the stage for a resurgence of
interest in ideology as a factor in Soviet grand strategy.
26 Ibid 1382.23
Jonathan Morales December 17, 2013HIST 674Ideology is Back
In his 1996 book, Vojtech Mastny flipped the national security
paradigm. “Insecurity,” Mastny argued, was the primary cause of
the Cold War. Stalin and his comrades were well aware that they
did not have the support of their people. Worse, ideology
supposing capitalist hostility to the Soviet state reinforced
Soviet insecurity. Joseph Stalin was the embodiment of paranoia.
With those sources of insecurity, Mastny saw no way for the West
to allay Soviet fears. The roots of the Cold War were therefore
ideological, and Stalin conjured foreign threats to cement his
own rule at home: “Rather than sharing with his people relief at
the end of their wartime suffering, Stalin saw a threat to his
tyranny in the expectation of a better life. He needed to justify
it by convincing them that they remained surrounded by
enemies.”27 The interpretation is traditional, but recast with
new archival documentation. “Perhaps the greatest surprise so far
to have come out of the Russian archives is that there is no
surprise,” Mastny quipped.28 Departing from a traditionalist
27 Vojtech Mastny, The Cold War and Soviet Insecurity: The Stalin Years. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996, 24.28 Ibid 9.
24
Jonathan Morales December 17, 2013HIST 674perspective, Mastny argued that Stalin and his regime were
interested primarily in preserving their regime, and were
cautious. Empire, Mastny stressed, was a response to the rising
German threat in the 1930s, not an ideological goal. There was no
evidence that Stalin had a grand design to impose communism on
his neighbors after the war: “Nowhere beyond what Moscow
considered the Soviet borders did its policies foresee the
establishment of communist regimes.”29 In sum, ideology ensured
that Stalinist foreign policy would be defined by insecurity and
that confrontation between the Soviet Union and the capitalist
world was inevitable, but it did not dictate revolutionary
expansionist foreign policy. Rather, pathological insecurity
encouraged caution.
Zubok and Pleshakov’s study also sought to revive the
importance of ideology. The central interpretive thesis of their
1996 book is the revolutionary-imperial paradigm, a “symbiosis of
imperial expansionism and ideological proselytism” that enjoined
the imperial interests of Russia’s expansionist past with the
revolutionary aspirations of Russian messianism and Marxism-
29 Ibid 12-21.25
Jonathan Morales December 17, 2013HIST 674Leninism.30 Stalin, Zubok and Pleshakov argue, was guided by the
“promise of Communist revolutionary universalism combined with
the necessities of survival for the Soviet Union.”31 Like Mastny,
they found no “master plan” for the establishment of a communist
empire in the archives, but flexibility in foreign policy
planning. After World War II, Stalin was prepared to set aside
revolution in order to consolidate Soviet conquests in Eastern
Europe and wait for the foretold intercapitalist conflict. Stalin
knew, they wrote, that “once a revolutionary leader becomes a
state potentate, he acts according to geopolitical realities,
national conditions, the logic of power itself”32
Mastny, Zubok, and Pleshakov reintegrated ideology into
their grand narratives of Stalin’s foreign policy, but both
studies conclude that ideology was a one source of policy, and as
but one source, sustained a variety of policies. As implied by
Pechatnov’s analysis of foreign policy planning and Robert’s
discussion of the anti-West turn in Soviet policy after the
30 Vladislav Zubok and Konstantin Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War: From Stalin to Khrushchev. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996.31 Ibid 11-12.32 Ibid 62.
26
Jonathan Morales December 17, 2013HIST 674Marshall Plan, ideology was a lens through which interpretations
of events and decisions were filtered.
In his synthesis of new research, the preeminent Cold War
historian John Lewis Gaddis took ideology to be not only a
guiding factor in Stalin’s policy, but the guiding factor.
Gaddis, deservedly so, received much criticism for the
presumptuous title of We Now Know, which conveys a wildly
unfounded sense of certainty in the scholarship up until 1997 and
confidence in Gaddis’ own interpretation of other scholars’
archival research. Gaddis integrated the new corpus of research
into his traditional interpretation of the Cold War and Stalinist
grand strategy. We now know, Gaddis argued, that Stalin’s
personal paranoia made cold war “unavoidable.” Stalin was an
ideologue, for whom Marxism-Leninism was the source of behavior
and understanding of the world. His ambitions were unlimited,
although he had “no timetable for achieve them.33 Ideological
euphoria wedded Stalin’s policy with the aspirations of Mao and
Kim Il Sung.34 Unlike liberal democracies, which are embedded
33 Gaddis, John Lewis. We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998, 290, 31.34 Ibid 77-83
27
Jonathan Morales December 17, 2013HIST 674with checks and balances, free markets, systems that encourage
compromise and prudence, authoritarian systems like that of
Stalin’s regime, are prone to arbitrary and self-destructive
behavior. More importantly, Gaddis argued, contemporaries
understood the superiority of the western capitalist democracies.
They understood the Cold War as a “contest of good versus evil,”
desired democratic capitalism, and fled to the West when the
opportunity arose.35
Scholars criticized Gaddis’ interpretation heavily, but even
the most critical—while noting that the sheer diversity of Cold
War literature by the late 1990s would ensure that “the Cold War
will defy any single master narrative,” in contrast to the claims
of We Now Know—admitted Gaddis’ insights would “set the
parameters for a whole new generation of scholarship.”36 The
cumulative effect of Gaddis’ urge for scholars to consider
seriously the role of ideas in the Cold War and the integration
of ideology into the discoveries of the early 1990s, led Nigel
35 Ibid 286-287.36 There are few unqualified, favorable academic reviews of We Now Know. The most systematic refutation of the basic themes is from (unsurprisingly) MelvynLeffler. See Melvyn P. Leffler, “The Cold War: What Do ‘We Now Know?’” in The American Historical Review 104, no. 2 (April 1999), 501-524.
28
Jonathan Morales December 17, 2013HIST 674Gould-Davies to announce, “ideology is back.”37 The debate over
ideology and security in divining Stalinist grand strategy,
Gould-Davies argued, was in desperate need of theoretical
coherence. To fruitfully debate the role of ideology in Soviet
foreign policy, a definition of ideology was in order. Gould-
Davies pointed to a list of fallacies about ideology and the
pursuit of security that scholars of the national security bent
tended to commit:
1. Ideologues must have a master plan, a detailed strategy to
achieve an ideological goal.
2. Ideologues must be inflexible, and fluidity in policy
implies yielding orthodoxy to security concerns.
3. Ideologues must be “unremittingly aggressive.” Caution
implies not the absence of recklessness, but the primacy of
security over ideology.
4. Ideologues do not cooperate with adversaries.
5. Ideology and security are mutually exclusive.
37 Nigel Gould-Davies, “Rethinking the Role of Ideology in International Politics During the Cold War” in Journal of Cold War Studies 1, no. 1 (Winter 1999),90-109, 90.
29
Jonathan Morales December 17, 2013HIST 674
6. Ideology and security are alternative terms of explanation.
38
The broad implication of these fallacies is that historians have
mistaken ideologically motivated policies for extremism and
reckless behavior. They conflated “arguments about ends with
assumptions about means.”39 In other words, Gould-Davies argued
that historians have equated rationality in policymaking for a
dismissal of ideological goals. Returning to the source, Gould-
Davies pointed out that “compromise, retreat flexibility,
avoidance of war, protection of the Soviet state” were concepts
not alien to Lenin, who emphasized expedience and self-
preservation over poorly planned revolution. For Lenin, this was
a “revolutionary obligation.”40 Realists like Leffler, therefore,
miss the ideological underpinnings of Stalin refraining from
exporting revolution, compromising with Britain and the United
States, and keeping other his socialist brethren in China and
North Korea at arm’s length. 41 Realpolitik it may have been, but
Soviet restraint and cooperation does not imply the primacy of 38 Ibid 95-96.39 Ibid 96.40 Ibid 98-100.41 See Leffler, “The Cold War: What Do ‘We Now Know?’” 507-512.
30
Jonathan Morales December 17, 2013HIST 674security over commitment to ideology. The proper criteria for
assessing the role of ideology, Gould-Davies argued, is “how much
power states seek, what kinds of power they use, and how they use
it.”42
Gould-Davies’ conceptual piece on ideology provoked a
pleasantly productive exchange about realism and the distinction
between security interests and ideology. In his response, Paul
Schroeder, an eminent diplomatic historian of modern Europe,
praised Gould-Davies for challenging the realist paradigm by
pointing out the false dichotomies that “distort the terms of the
debate and stack the deck in its favor.”43 Among other things,
Schroeder debated Gould-Davies’ isolation of ideology as a
distinct agent. The implication of Gould-Davies’ assault on the
realist paradigm’s false dichotomy between ideology and security,
Schroeder argued, is that ideological motives are so
“inextricably intertwined and mixed up with ‘realist’ power-
political ones, and the practices and behavior which both lead to
42 Gould-Davies, “Rethinking the Role of Ideology in International Politics During the Cold War,” 108.43 Paul Schroeder, “Commentary by Paul W. Schroeder.” H-Diplo article commentaries. http://www.h-net.org/~diplo/reviews/PDF/Schroeder-Gould-Davies.pdf (accessed November 17, 2013), 1.
31
Jonathan Morales December 17, 2013HIST 674are so similar, that no useful general rules for distinguishing
the two and deciding which is uppermost are possible.”44
Schroeder’s comments got at the difficulty in isolating the
ideological or practical sources of policy that the studies by
Pechatnov and Roberts tackled. For example, Soviet policy showed
willingness, even optimism, to continue to cooperate with the
West. At the same time, that willingness was based largely on an
assumption rooted in Marxist-Leninist thought that
intercapitalist conflict would encourage the United States and
Britain to keep German economic strength down to prevent the rise
of an economic competitor, and that intercapitalist conflict
would also prevent the emergence of an Anglo-American bloc.45
These policies defy either classification. Gould-Davies
acknowledged in a response that indeed ideology and security are
deeply intertwined. However, abstraction and examination allows
the historian to assess the relative importance of each.46
44 Ibid 4.45 Geoffrey Roberts, “Moscow and the Marshall Plan: Politics, Ideology and theOnset of the Cold War, 1947” and Vladimir Pechatnov, “The Big Three After World War II: New Documents on Soviet Thinking about Post War Relations with The United States and Great Britain.”46 Nigel Gould-Davies, “Author’s Response by Nigel Gould-Davies, Oxford University.” H-Diplo article commentaries. http://www.h-net.org/~diplo/reviews/PDF/Gould-Davies-response.pdf (accessed November 17, 2013).
32
Jonathan Morales December 17, 2013HIST 674
Looking at Melvyn Leffler’s latest contribution to the Cold
War historiography, For the Soul of Mankind, offers some insight into
the merging of the realist paradigm with the reintegration of
ideology. In terms of sources, Leffler did draw on more recent
studies, but for his interpretation of Stalin and the Soviet
side, he relied overwhelmingly on the historiography that emerged
in early 1990s. Tellingly, Leffler retreated from the security
dilemma paradigm that so heavily influenced his and other
scholars’ thinking in the 1980s and 1990s. But Leffler did not
abandon as tools for analysis threat, risk, and opportunity.
Instead, he integrated ideas and beliefs as filters through which
leaders perceived their situation: “Ideas, ideologies, beliefs,
and experience shaped their perceptions of threat and opportunity
arising from circumstances often beyond the control of even the
most powerful men on earth.”47 Indeed, not only did both Soviet
and American leaders believe that their nations embodied a
superior way of life, their “beliefs and memories affected their
construction of ‘reality’—their perceptions of threat and
47 Melvyn Leffler, For the Soul of Mankind: The United States, the Soviet Union, and the Cold War. Hill and Wang, 2008, 7.
33
Jonathan Morales December 17, 2013HIST 674opportunities in a turbulent world.”48 Leffler carefully
distinguished between ideological motivation and revolutionary
activity. Ideology was paramount in Soviet perceptions and
responses, yet preservation of the revolutionary state was the
dominant trend of Stalinist foreign policy, not spreading
revolution.
Scholarship in the 2000s shifted away from the unreformed
realism of the 1980s and early 1990s, and tended to integrate
ideology as a factor in shaping how Stalin interpreted the
movements of the West. Geoffrey Roberts’ “re-vision” of Stalin as
a war leader argues that he was an “idealist,” yet his ambition
was equally limited. “He was a realist and a pragmatist as well
as an ideologue, a leader prepared to compromise, adapt and
change, so long as it did not threaten the Soviet system or his
own power.”49 In his more neo-traditional synthesis, Vladislav
Zubok drew on Gaddis’ interpretation to produce a highly critical
48 Ibid 8.49 Geoffrey Roberts, Stalin’s Wars: From World War to Cold War, 1939-1953. New Haven: YaleUniversity Press, 2006.
34
Jonathan Morales December 17, 2013HIST 674portrait of Stalin, emphasizing “ideological baggage” that
explained Soviet perceptions and miscalculations.50
As many scholars have pointed out, the public declarations
of Stalin and his cadres made often corresponded with what they
said in public, and the evidence convincingly shows that Stalin
and his comrades were true believers in Marxist-Leninist
ideology.51 The realist paradigm had much explanatory power for
the escalation of East-West tension, yet in mitigating the role
of ideology in shaping Soviet perceptions, it offered only
limited and unsatisfying conclusions for its root causes.
Understanding the ambiguous role of ideas and ideologies in
shaping perceptions of risk, threat, and opportunity will
undoubtedly be the next step for historians in divining the
origins of the Cold War.
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35
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39