Apparently Stalin was not sure how to address these challenges. In the immediate aftermath of victory, he sent mixed messages to the country, including hints at a coming liberalization. Take, for example, the remarks made at a reception honoring Red Army commanders on 24 May 1945:
Our government made more than a few mistakes; there were moments of desperation in 1941–1942, when our army was on the retreat, abandoning our native villages and cities.… Another people might have told its government: you have not met our expectations; go away; we will put another government in your place that will sign a truce with Germany and ensure us peace. But the Russian people did not choose to do that since they believed in the correctness of their government’s policies and chose to make sacrifices in order to secure the destruction of Germany. And this trust the Russian people placed in the Soviet government proved to be the decisive force that secured a historic victory against an enemy of humanity—against fascism. Thanks to the Russian people for this trust!
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This hint of penitence was an effective gesture by a confident, popular, and triumphant leader. But soon Stalin began to sense that such statements could be perilous. They opened the door to discussion of critical questions about the past war, and echoes of these discussions were starting to reach him. In November 1945, he was told about a letter from a propagandist in the Buriat-Mongol republic who was being asked during lectures just what Stalin meant when he mentioned mistakes by the Soviet government: “I, of course, was not able to answer this question.… I earnestly ask you, Com. Stalin, for your explanation as to what should be the answer to this question.”
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More to the point was a letter from N. M. Khmelkov from the village of Maly Uzen in Saratov Oblast that asked, “How could we allow it to happen that when the war broke out the German Army was better armed than our army?” Khmelkov recalled prewar promises that the Red Army would soon be fighting “on the territory from which the enemy comes” and concluded by asking Stalin a central question, the validity of which Stalinists reject to this day: “Victors are not judged. But a victorious people is obliged to figure out whether victory was achieved with the least possible expenditure of effort and resources and with the fewest possible casualties, and if it was not, then why: were we given too little time to prepare for war, were the cogs in a complex machine operating poorly … and failing its more complicated parts?”
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Stalin instructed that Khmelkov’s letter be filed away.
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He had no intention of responding to such questions or “figuring out” what mistakes the government might have made. To forestall undesirable discussion of the price of victory, the performance of the military leadership, and hopes for postwar liberalization, he launched a series of ideological counterattacks.
The first of these was a reappraisal of the toll taken by the war and the reasons for defeat. In an obvious attempt to downplay the nation’s losses, in March 1946 Stalin officially stated that “as a result of the German invasion, the Soviet Union irretrievably lost approximately 7 million in fighting with the Germans and because of the German occupation and the driving of Soviet people into German hard labor.”
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This was a strange number to pick, and it was far from accurate, but it is possible to see how Stalin might have arrived at it. According to General Staff estimates, approximately 7 million Red Army soldiers were killed in the war or died of wounds and disease.
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He must have known that he was distorting the truth when he included the victims of occupation and those taken to work in Nazi labor camps in this figure. Soviet war losses no longer looked quite so terrible, and the matter was put to rest for many years.
While it may have been easy enough to hide the true number of Soviet war dead, the Red Army’s catastrophic retreat was another matter. How had the Germans been able to advance all the way to the Volga? At best, discussion of this ignominious episode could be suppressed. The horrible defeats suffered during the war’s first eighteen months cast a shameful light on the regime and on Stalin himself, diminishing his stature as the architect of victory. Soviet propaganda had a few stock arguments to explain those early defeats: the might of Hitler’s war machine, which enslaved Europe; the fact that the Red Army had not finished rearming; and the Nazis’ perfidious surprise attack. Apparently Stalin felt these arguments were not enough. Cautiously and gradually, he tried to introduce another idea into the propaganda arsenal, one that exonerated him as supreme commander: that the Red Army’s retreat was a calculated move designed to wear down the enemy. There was a well-known historical precedent that made this argument understandable and familiar: Kutuzov’s 1812 strategy of allowing Napoleon’s army to enter deep into Russian territory, even relinquishing Moscow, before counterattacking, a strategy that is credited with preserving the army and saving the country.
An opportunity to promote this new way of explaining the retreat came in the form of a letter Stalin received in early 1946 from Ye. A. Razin, a military academy instructor. Razin was writing the
vozhd
with general questions about doctrine, but Stalin responded in a letter by offering specific and far-reaching guidelines for understanding Soviet military history. He underscored two central ideas. First, Lenin was not “an expert in the military sciences” during the Civil War years or at any other time. Thus Stalin was the only Soviet leader who qualified as a true commander in chief. The second idea offered a more favorable interpretation of the early, catastrophic stage of the war. “A retreat, under certain disadvantageous conditions,” Stalin wrote, “is just as legitimate a form of combat as an offensive.” He noted the need to take a closer look at the counteroffensive “after an enemy’s successful offensive, [when] the defender gathers strength, switches to a counteroffensive, and hands the enemy a decisive defeat.” Bolstering this idea with historical parallels, Stalin cited the example of the ancient Parthians, who “lured” Roman forces deep inside their country and then “struck with a counteroffensive and annihilated them.” He also offered the example of Kutuzov’s counteroffensive against the French, calling him a “brilliant” commander.
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Of course, Stalin did not draw a direct line between these historical precedents and the events of 1941–1942, but the implication was obvious. The defeats of the war’s first stage were transformed into a manageable phase of preparation for a counteroffensive, a “legitimate form of combat,” and not a catastrophe caused by egregious blunders at the top or a broken chain of command. Aware of the questionable validity of this recontextualization, Stalin did not widely disseminate his letter at first. It was written in late February 1946 but not published until a year later.
The letter to Razin contained another thought that preoccupied Stalin in the first months after the war: the need to avoid “kowtowing to the West,” including showing “unwarranted respect” for the “military authorities of Germany.” The first expression of this sentiment is found in a letter written by Stalin during the autumn of 1945 to his comrades in Moscow while he was vacationing in the south. Denouncing unnamed “senior officials” who were “thrown into fits of childlike glee” by praise from foreign leaders, he wrote, “I consider such inclinations to be dangerous since they develop in us kowtowing to foreign figures. A ruthless fight must be waged against obsequiousness toward foreigners.”
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These loosely formulated ideas were Stalin’s response to the “contamination” of Soviet society by the ideological influence of the Western allies and to the danger of an inferiority complex on the part of the impoverished victors. Over time, the “fight against kowtowing” took the form of specific campaigns and institutions. In August 1946 a Central Committee resolution was published on “The Magazines
Zvezda
and
Leningrad”
in support of an irate speech to Leningrad writers delivered by Central Committee secretary Andrei Zhdanov. The targets of his ire were the satirist Mikhail Zoshchenko and the poet Anna Akhmatova. The former’s writings, according to Zhdanov, were poisoned by the “venom of a brutish hostility to the Soviet system.” Akhmatova was labeled a “whore and a nun, in whom licentiousness is combined with prayer.”
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Discussion of the resolution was made mandatory at party meetings across the country—in regional party organizations, factories, and kolkhozes—and marked the beginning of a severe scolding given to the creative intelligentsia.
A leitmotif of the attack on writers was the unmasking of “kowtowing to the contemporary bourgeois culture of the West”—a formulation that clearly came from Stalin’s own pen. Indeed, archival documents show that Stalin was behind Zhdanov’s vitriol and that he read and edited his speech.
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The archives further reveal that Stalin was the driving force behind other actions designed to promote ideological lockstep, such as the well-known case of the married scientists Nina Kliueva and Grigory Roskin, who were developing a cancer drug in Moscow. In 1947 they were ground-lessly accused of passing secret information to the Americans. The couple was accused of “kowtowing and servility to anything foreign.”
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These shrill ideological clichés were variations on the canonical themes of Leninism and Stalinism: the USSR, since it was building the most advanced social system, would always and in all respects surpass the rest of the world; the capitalist powers, sensing their inevitable demise, would be ready at any moment to unleash war against the birthplace of socialism. The recent war and the gradual move toward a new “cold” war served to confirm this thinking.
Many years of research, especially since the archives of the former USSR and other countries of the socialist bloc have opened up, have provided a wealth of information on the origins of the Cold War. Nevertheless, scholars may never reach agreement about its real causes, which side should take the larger share of blame, and the true motives and calculations of the opposing powers. The Cold War was more a gradual evolution than an event with a clear beginning. The world leaders involved in this process were not simply looking out for their countries’ fundamental interests, but were also reacting to specific, often unexpected situations with decisions that were often illogical. Stalin was no exception.
The intensifying conflict between the World War II Allies was fed by the utter incompatibility of their systems, their competing desires to expand their spheres of influence, mutual grievances dating to the prewar years, and a shared need for a foreign enemy. Specific issues tended to exacerbate the general suspicion and animosity. America’s nuclear monopoly and its reluctance to let the Russians take part in the occupation of Japan were among the many frustrations Stalin felt in dealing with the United States. In a meeting with Averell Harriman at the Soviet leader’s southern dacha in October 1945, Stalin angrily wondered out loud whether the United States “needs not an ally but a satellite in Japan? I must say that the Soviet Union is not suited to that role.… It would be more honorable for the USSR to leave Japan entirely rather than remain there like a piece of furniture.”
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For his part, Stalin angered Western leaders, already fundamentally opposed to Soviet communism, with his thinly veiled desire to sovietize Eastern Europe using the Red Army and local Communists.
It is hard to imagine what mutual concessions might have prevented a breakdown in relations between two such different systems. Such a breakdown could only be delayed by tactical calculations and political factors, including the illusion on the part of Western public opinion that an enduring alliance was actually feasible (Soviet public opinion had little say in the matter). Relations also remained civil so long as Stalin harbored hope for Western concessions, particularly in the areas of economic aid and reparations from Germany. The devastation and famine afflicting the USSR after the war made the need for assistance particularly pressing. That Eastern Europe—now within the Soviet sphere of influence—not only suffered its own famine and devastation but was also home to significant anti-Communist sentiment also forced him to act with circumspection.
Stalin was restrained in his personal relations with Western leaders. He preferred to let Molotov take hard-line stances during diplomatic negotiations, while he himself would periodically step in and make demonstrative concessions that allowed the Western side to save face or prevented it from breaking off talks. As during the war, Stalin tried to play the Americans and British against one another. In April 1946, after Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” speech in Fulton, Missouri, Stalin met with the U.S. ambassador in Moscow. After accepting the gifts of a safety razor and transistor radio, Stalin offered a “friendly” warning: In pursuing their own interests, “Churchill and his friends” might try to push the United States away from the USSR.
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Such face-to-face diplomacy was no match for the powerful forces at play. Truman responded to Soviet attempts to gain footholds in Iran, Turkey, and Greece with a plan to help rebuild Europe, the centerpiece of which became known as the Marshall Plan. Stalin responded by turning down the aid offered under the plan (as did other East European states, under Soviet pressure) and by creating an international Communist organization, the Cominform. During the Cominform’s first conference, Zhdanov echoed Stalin’s idea that the world was being divided into “two camps.”
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Efforts to sustain the wartime alliance gave way to the traditional call to stand up to “international imperialism.”
On the domestic side, the return to prewar political thinking and practices occurred even earlier. Stalin’s conservative inclinations played no small role. Given the array of complex problems facing him, as he approached his seventieth birthday, he neither took an interest in reforms or experiments nor saw any reason to change his country’s long-range goals for economic development. He offered a number of production targets in a speech to an election meeting on 9 February 1946: 500 million tons of coal, 60 million tons of steel, 50 million tons of cast iron, 60 million tons of petroleum. Considering the actual figures for 1946—only 13.3 million tons of steel and 9.9 million tons of cast iron were produced, along with 163.8 million tons of coal and 21.7 million tons of petroleum—such targets were obviously wildly ambitious. Furthermore, as the economic historian Eugene Zaleski has noted, a program like Stalin’s, purely focused on output targets, reflected a simplistic understanding of economic development.
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