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.

Works Cited

Gaddis, John Lewis. We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History. New York:

Oxford University Press, 1998.50 Vladislav Zubok, A Failed Empire: The Soviet Union in the Cold War from Stalin to Gorbachev. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007.51 This is a well-established observation. See Leffler, For the Soul of Mankind, 8; Hiroaki Kuromiya, “Stalin and his Era” in The Historical Journal 50, no. 3 (September 2007), 711-724, 717-722.

35

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39