Conventional Wisdom tells us that the Cold War started in the aftermath of World War II and ended with the fall of the Soviet Union when the first George Bush was president. In this version of the story, World War II changed the complexion of the world and there were only two super-powers left: the United States, which always strived to do the right thing and help to foster freedom for all people everywhere; and the Soviet Union, which was inhabited by freedom-hating, vodka-drinking Communists who had revolted against the freedom-loving czars and just hated the democracies of the West because they hated freedom, and that's all there was to it.
(More below the fold. Much more.)
The world was divided between evil Communists and their satellite countries behind the Iron Curtain, and freedom-loving non-Communists -- which included numerous brutal dictators who were happy to sell out their people for American corporate money and to pretend to be fighting Communism if it meant a U.S. handout -- led by the Americans, who, after losing their innocence every generation or so for several hundreds of years, would lose their innocence again during Vietnam, and again, after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
Both sides had nukular weapons, so war was unthinkable. Therefore, it became known as the Cold War because there wasn't any actual fighting
-- aside from the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Iraq-Iran War, the Falklands War, the Bay of Pigs invasion, Russia's intervention in Afghanistan (which showed what a push-over Afghanistan was), numerous wars between Israel and its neighbors, American-led coups in Guatemala, Iran, Chile, etc., brutal dictatorships, various civil wars and uprisings of one sort or another.
For a time, it was fashionable for ambitious politicians, especially Republicans (who were not yet known as Repugs, though some of them should have been) to fight Communism by accusing their opponents of being Communists. This got them a lot of publicity and ruined the careers of dozens or hundreds of innocent people, and it deflected a lot of energy away from real security problems and towards investigations that were politically-charged and did not turn up any Communists that were not already known to federal law enforcement agencies. But the witch hunts were good at getting unscrupulous politicians re-elected. The smart ones (like Nixon) knew when to back off. Fortunately, Joe McCarthy (still a hero to many of the deluded conservatives that infest the current Zeitgeist) was there to serve as a stalking horse to show the others where the limits were.
After fifty years of this divisive and unproductive nonsense -- it's a good thing the Communist World was never as unified and dangerous as the right-wingers said they were or we would all be speaking Russian and waiting in long lines for the latest Paris Hilton video -- the over-rated conservative scarecrow deity Ronald Reagan stood up to repression everywhere (except among our dictator allies) and scared the Communists so badly that they immediately started to dismantle the system. I assume they were real impressed with the way he bravely stood up to Lebanon and Grenada. (Meanwhile, China, Vietnam, Cuba, North Korea and Laos were laughing themselves silly over the idea that Reagan had ended Communism. The right-wingers gave themselves a well-deserved pat on the back for the masterful handling of the post-Reagan spin.)
I drifted a little bit away from the conventional wisdom. But many people think that the Cold War started about 1945 and ended about 1990. And many people are wrong.
The Cold War has not yet ended, but that is the subject of another essay. Today, I will be talking about the real beginning of the Cold War, when American troops invaded Russia in the closing days of World War I. It is not a well-known topic, and there is a reason it is kept out of history books.
"We remember the grim days when American soldiers went to our soil headed by their generals to help our White Guard combat the new revolution. All the capitalist countries in Europe and America marched upon our country ... never have any of our soldiers been on American soil, but your soldiers were on Russian soil."
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Nikita Khrushchev, 1959, when he visited Los Angeles
"If we reflect today on the psychological background of the great conflict of outlook and aspiration between the United States and the ruling party of the Soviet Union, we see that whereas the bitterness of feeling among Americans relates mainly to things the Soviet government has done since the final phases of World War II, Soviet grievances against the United States have a longer historical background and include the behavior of the United States government around the time of the Russian Revolutions of 1917 and in the years immediately following those events. The Allied military intervention of the years 1918 to 1920, in particular, continues to occupy a prominent position in Soviet memory."
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George F. Kennan, 1958
March 1918. From the perspective of the 21st century, we might think that World War I, which would end in November, was winding down. We would be wrong.
It certainly didn't look like it was winding down to the people who were fighting it. Except maybe to Imperial Germany. They had just signed a peace treaty with the Russians, putting an end to fighting on the Eastern Front. Germany could now move forty divisions to the Western front where they already enjoyed a slight advantage in manpower.
It was a development that could prove fatal to the Allies, Britain France and their new ally, the United States. No one was eager to face the horrors of the trenches, and it would only get worse with the infusion of the German troops who were being transferred from the East.
The United States had declared war on Germany in April 1917, three years after the war had started in Europe, but American troops did not begin to arrive in Europe in large numbers until early in 1918. The Allied Powers hoped that enough Americans could be thrown into combat to offset the increase in German combatants during the spring offensive.
Meanwhile, the Allies were trying to decide what to do about Russia. Lenin's Bolsheviks had seized power from the Provisional government that had ruled Russia since the revolution of March 1917. The idea of a hostile communist government terrified the Western Powers, independently of any concerns about the role of Russia in World War I. But the Western Powers, especially Great Britain, thought that most Russians were anti-Bolshevik, and that large numbers of them would be happy to see an invading army, and they would join up with any Allied Expedition, help to overthrow the Bolsheviks, then join in the fighting against Germany.
Exactly why they believed this fantasy is not clear to me. It sounds like the arrogance of power that we have become accustomed to in our own time.
Britain, France, the U.S., and Japan -- an Allied Power that did very little aside from occupying a few German island colonies in the Pacific -- began to plan several different scenarios for an Allied Expedition to Soviet Russia. The first phase of the intervention seems largely justifiable, if it had been limited to its originally stated goal. The Allies had supplied czarist Russia with a large amount of arms and ammunition, and they were stored in the port cities of Murmansk, Archangel and Vladivostok. The Allies feared these military supplies might be captured by the Germans ... or the Bolsheviks. The British sent troops to Murmansk in March 1918, and they were soon joined by French, Czechoslovak and Serbian troops. Japanese and British troops landed in Vladivostok in April. The British also sent troops to Archangel. Aside from securing these supplies, the Allies were hoping to enlist and train Russian citizens to fight against the Germans.
Early in the fall of 1918, 5000 American troops were sent to Archangel and another 8000 went to Vladivostok.
Allied troops remained in Russia until long after World War I had ended. The last American troops did not leave until April 1920. It was a very chaotic time for Russia as the Bolsheviks fought a Civil War against the anti-Bolshevik faction (commonly called the White Army) as well as wars with Turkey, Ukraine, Poland and various separatist movements. The invasion by the Western Powers did not help at all.
With the end of the war, the pretext that the Allies were helping Russia against the Germans evaporated and the differing motives of the Allies began to manifest. The Japanese wanted to extend their growing Pacific empire into Eastern Siberia with a puppet government. The British feared that a Bolshevik Russia would be a threat to their profitable colony in India. America, especially after the end of World War I, had very little reason to continue the Siberian Expedition. But Woodrow Wilson hated radical ideas - such as racial equality and socialism - and he was sure that because he hated Bolshevism, the people of Russia must surely hate it as well, and they would welcome the Allies and help them overthrow the Bolsheviks.
And then there was the Czech Legion, 40,000 Czech soldiers who had refused to fight for the Austrian Empire (which claimed Czechoslovakia as part of its empire) and had fled to Russia where they formed a battalion to fight the Central Powers. The end of the war found them stranded in the Soviet Union, surrounded by suspicious Bolsheviks who feared they would join the Allied Powers who were only a few hundred miles away. The Bolsheviks offered to let them leave Russia by the eastern route, across Asia along the Trans-Siberian Railroad to the Pacific, where they could ship out at Vladivostok. The Allied Army hoped to persuade the Czech Legion to help in the fight against the Bolsheviks.
The following year and a half is filled with often simultaneous, futile, chaotic, tragicomic events. I had to sleep on it last night because I couldn't deal with sorting it out. Briefly, the various anti-Bolshevik elements separated in the fulfillment of their own goals and the Bolsheviks united well enough to smash all their enemies. The White Guard leadership turned out to be especially incompetent, dishonest and duplicitous, fighting amongst themselves and with other anti-Bolshevik forces as often as they fought Lenin's forces. The Czech Legion, which really had no desire to fight the Bolsheviks, fought its way across Russia along the Trans-Siberian Railroad. The Japanese stayed away from the Bolsheviks, remaining in eastern Siberia as they imported more troops and unsuccessfully tried to set up a sphere of influence in Russia. The Americans camped and waited, not particularly sure what they were there for, as they alternatively fought Red Armies, White Armies, and Russian peasant partisans just trying to survive.
The Bolsheviks succeeded because they successfully, if dishonestly, appealed to the people of Russia with promises of land reform, peace and equality. It sounded like a paradise after the fall of the czars, a repressive monarchy that the Western Powers had never deemed repressive enough to invade. The Bolsheviks were organized, dedicated, pragmatic and tough. The Whites were none of these things. They had no program beyond restoring aristocratic rule and denying the peasants any reform.
I am not justifying any of the brutality of the Soviet regime after the Civil War. I am just trying to provide a little context for understanding the history of Soviet-Western relations.
From the Russian perspective, not just that of the Bolsheviks, the Western Powers had shown relentless hostility and incompetence by taking part in the Siberian Expedition. Russia was suffering an epic struggle of national identity, a very bloody Civil War that makes the American Civil War look like a schoolyard fight, and the Western Powers wandered in with a whole range of contradictory goals and just started kicking indiscriminately, to no purpose, without a single constructive mission in mind except "Stop the Commies!"
Why was Stalin and the rest of the Soviet leadership so paranoid and how would that cloud their conduct in the 1920s? Why was Stalin able to get away with the brutality and isolation of his regime? How easy was it for him to claim that the Russians needed to endure his programs because they had to be prepared to stand against the hostility of the West? Was it because it was very easy to point to an example that everyone remembered, the Siberian Expedition?
When Stalin made the pact with Hitler in the 1930s, was he thinking of the Siberian Expedition, and did he decide he trusted Hitler more than the Western Powers? Was he driven by the same paranoia when he doubted the motives of Churchill (who had been a forceful advocate of the Siberian Expedition in 1918) and FDR when they seemed to him to be stalling over the opening of a Western Front during World War II? What motivated his demands for such a large Eastern European buffer zone between Russia and the West at Yalta, aside from the fact that the Red Army already occupied it?
America can not grow and become the country it should be if Americans do not learn the truth about its history. I am not blaming America for the Cold War, as many dishonest conservatives may claim. I am just trying to provide a little context for the conflict. It didn't have to be that way.
We ignore the lessons of history at our own peril. We need to stop squandering our gifts as human beings and start living up to the potential we hold as the most magnificent of God's creations.