Okay, so today we're going to talk about the end of the Second World War and the beginnings of the Cold War. And the first thing to understand about that is that the Cold War begins overwhelmingly and predominantly in Europe. It begins there because it's where the United States and the Soviet Union kind of first come into direct contact.
And this is a result of how the Second World War ends. A joint American, British and French invasion moving through France and into Germany from the West and Russian pushing back the German advance and pressing now into Eastern Europe and Germany from the East. And the Second World War leaves Eastern Europe and Germany absolutely devastated. 13 million...
Germans are expelled from Poland, Czechoslovakia, and other areas of Eastern Europe. Some Germans who had been in those regions for centuries, others who had moved there as a result of Nazi territorial takeover. In the process of this, about 250,000 of them are killed.
And most of those 13 million will find themselves homeless, or at least half will find themselves essentially homeless and penniless as they make their way into Germany. In addition to this, Germany is absolutely devastated. 75% of buildings in cities like Berlin are destroyed. Cologne's 72% of buildings. There are 20 million homeless people in Germany.
And in addition... 25 million homeless in the Soviet Union, 20% of pre-war Poland is dead, and two-thirds of German men born after 1918 are dead. Here's a picture of Berlin as you can see, most of the buildings are just totally caved through. Parts of the city are entirely leveled to the ground.
It's just really a total disaster. So this is kind of the ground in which the Cold War begins. And it begins overwhelmingly in the conditions set by the end of the Second World War.
And those conditions were something called unconditional surrender. And what unconditional surrender means is that, in essence, you have to, when you are defeated, you have to surrender without offering any counter-conditions whatsoever. So in other words, you're...
The victorious powers can do whatever they'd like and you have to accept those terms of surrender. The Allied powers decided that what they would do in the context of this was to divide Germany into four sections. Originally it was actually only three, but the Americans and the British kind of make room for France.
And they will divide Germany up into these four sections and then they're also going to take the city of Berlin, which is the capital of Germany, and divide that into four sections. And this will eventually, through this division of Germany, result in the coming of the Cold War. The Cold War refers to the sort of standoff between the United States on one hand and the Soviet Union on the other.
And it lasts from about 1947-48. There's a little bit of division as to when exactly it begins. Some put it as late as 1950 up until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 and 1990 Now this this division is called the Cold War because the United States and so you never actually come into direct military conflict There's lots of indirect conflict through proxy wars through divisions in other areas through spy games through you know a whole variety of activities but the United States and the Soviet Union never actually come to direct physical military conflict and this kind of sets the tone for the Cold War and what will end up happening is that both sides will pursue a series of allies and particularly Europe will essentially more or less be divided in half between those who ally with the West and those who don't with some countries remaining neutral like Sweden, Switzerland, Austria, Yugoslavia, Ireland. They each kind of have their own unique conditions at the time. And this will kind of set the tone for what's to come.
So the question we'll sort of be asking today is how do we get to this point? And here's the division of Germany in 1947. So as you can see, Germany is... broken up into these four zones that I mentioned before and with the British kind of in the north and the French and the Americans in the south and the Soviets in the east and largely speaking this this matched where troops were at the end of the war so this division was kind of in in coordination in part with literally where the troops met each other when conquering and taking over areas of Germany As you can see the capital city of Berlin is also therefore divided into sections.
So what this means is that the... the West will have a station in the Soviet zone of Berlin. This can be confusing if you don't kind of understand this geography, especially when we talk about the Berlin Airlift.
So understand that the Western allies, America, France and Great Britain, have a holding in the capital city of Berlin within the Soviet zone. Now, Scholars have a whole bunch of theories about the Cold War, and those theories can mostly be broken into three camps, an Orthodox camp, a revisionist camp, and a post-revisionist camp. And I would say, honestly, this debate over which Best describes and explains the Cold War is still very much alive.
It's very much alive. So the Orthodox perspective, which will emerge from overwhelmingly Western scholars and policy planners in the context of the early years of the Cold War and into the 1950s, will propose that it's the Soviet Union that is aggressive and the United States and the West that is operating defensively. Often this Orthodox perspective says something to the effect of, well, the Soviet Union's aggression in countries in Eastern Europe is demonstrated. or demonstrative of their sort of imperial ambitions and the West has little choice but to respond and defend against that.
In addition, it often sort of highlights the extreme nature of Stalinist oppression in the Soviet Union and therefore it kind of often tends to emphasize that like you know there can't really be any sort of major negotiation with uh with soviet powers to this regard now the revisionist perspective is going to take the opposite tact it's it's going to especially employ the ideas of soft empire and instead state that it's really the united states that is being aggressive and it's the soviet union that is being reactionary and defensive Unsurprisingly, perhaps you can understand that the revisionist theses started to come into being around and about the late 1960s when protests and criticism of Western action and anti-imperialist sentiment was reaching its highest point. And then the revisionist perspective tends to emphasize, for instance, that the Americans are funding international institutions like the World Bank. and promoting ideas like free trade, which will strongly put the Soviet Union on the back foot.
The Marshall Plan is a classic example of this. And the post-revisionist perspective, which is kind of a synthesis between these two ideas, will emerge at the end of, in the fall of the Soviet Union into the early 1990s, when Western scholars in particular have access to Soviet archives for the first time. Now...
This is not to say of course that there are not Soviet and is not Soviet scholarship on the Cold War but the difficulty with Soviet scholarship is that it is produced overwhelmingly and influenced overwhelmingly by the regime and has been found to fabricate evidence in other words produce archival documents that are not authentic in at numerous points in time So most scholars don't take scholarship produced by Soviet scholars very seriously today because of this. In any event, when we look at the origins of the Cold War, there are kind of four things that we could kind of consider. The first of which is ideology, the second of which is geography, which we've already kind of been talking about, and the way the war ended, which we've already been talking about, and the personalities of the leaders.
And all four of these are pretty crucial and specific as to why things play out the way they do. So what I'll do is kind of offer a bit of a summation of the major sort of points and aims of each side at the end of the Second World War. And then offer some analysis over the key events that lead to the sort of... creation of these firm alliance blocks that lead to the Soviet Union itself. So one of the first big questions on the table is the issue of reparations.
And reparations are crucial for several reasons. They are in direct response to, or in accordance to, or in relation to, the idea of whether or not Germany should be made to pay for the damages of the Second World War. They are immediately contentious because of the perceived failure of the reparation system at the end of the First World War. And indeed, Germany actually still owes money. to the Western Allies from the First World War, technically.
The second big question is what to do with Poland, with Western Allies very insistent on an independent Poland, and the Soviet Union very concerned with the status of Poland because of its proximity to Germany and the Soviet Union itself, its kind of in-between state. And then finally, I'll talk a little bit more specifically about the different goals. So let's start first with the Americans.
The United States, as it enters into the Cold War, is undergoing a series of switches. The first big switch is that the President, through the entirety of the Second World War, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, or FDR, who is well-liked and known for creating the New Deal, dies rather unexpectedly after winning... an unprecedented fourth term for presidency.
He is replaced by Harry Truman and Truman, for his part, did not and was not privy to almost anything to do with post-war planning. Indeed, he had very little to do with the war itself. Truman was really not participating in any of these negotiations.
Roosevelt tended to play things kind of very close to the vest and for this reason he is often criticized for this. In any case, when Truman becomes president he is kind of thrown very much into the lion's den and he quickly has to come up to speed with some very big problems. The first of which is that he becomes aware of the fact that the United States owns the atomic bomb. And this is kind of the first time that Truman is made privy to this information.
The second thing is that Truman was reviewing FDR's notes and comments from a conference between him, Joseph Stalin, and Winston Churchill in 1945 called the Yalta Conference. The Yalta Conference took place before the official end of the war in Europe. And Truman realizes that FDR got a couple of concessions from Stalin.
Amongst those concessions were the idea that there were supposed to be free and democratic elections in Poland in particular. And Truman kind of wants to hold things, hold Stalin to these. To understand kind of what happens between the personalities here, it's worth saying a little bit about FDR and Truman and their relationship to Stalin. The first thing that's kind of important to understand is that FDR develops a bit of a working relationship with Joseph Stalin.
It's difficult to say that they were really friends. It's hard to be friends with a narcissistic, paranoid, mass-murdering dictator. But the two had developed a level of mutual... respect, shall we say. Stalin at least trusted Roosevelt to participate in fighting the war effort to defeat Nazi Germany and to cooperate with Stalin insofar as that was the aim.
FDR was a silver spoon educated New Yorker, top of his, you know, every possible kind of advantage in the world he had. American pedigree, access to education in Europe, a very wealthy family. And this was rather typical of people who participated in foreign policy.
Foreign policy was, as I've said before, really kind of like the bastion of the social elite. Especially so in Europe, it still tended to be conducted overwhelmingly by aristocrats or those who had aristocratic ties. Even in Soviet Russia.
Now Harry Truman was none of those things He's the only American president not to complete a college education. He did not complete four years of college He had some business ventures that they relatively failed. He's from the Midwest a little bit of a fire and brimstone Presbyterian Protestant Tended to see the world in black and white But Truman was very principled, and he came at politics with a sort of midwesterner, everyman directness.
That earned him a lot of respect, but Truman and Stalin, you know, almost immediately fell into levels of distrust. Truman understood politics, as he put it, quote, as a poker game. end quote, where you're supposed to hold the best cards close to the vest.
In other words, you only play the ace when you realize you can win or to place your opponent off guard or something of the such. And Truman immediately does this with Stalin. He does not tell the Soviet Union that the United States had developed atomic weapons and successfully tested the atomic bomb.
And he in fact convinces Stalin, Roosevelt had kind of already laid the groundwork for this, But he convinces Stalin to participate in the war against Japan following the defeat of Germany. And even though Russia didn't really do a whole lot in that war, they did get into some minor conflicts with Japan in the northern part of Asia. And Stalin did shift a lot of his troops, or at least a fair portion of troops, from Eastern Europe all the way over to the other end of Russia, which is expensive and time-consuming. And then the United States dropped the atomic bomb and kind of only told Stalin about it as they were doing it.
This causes Stalin to immediately distrust Truman. He's severely criticized for this and Stalin, you know, being a paranoid dictator, deduces from this that he can't really trust Truman. The next thing that happens is that the sides sort of meet at a peace arrangement at Potsdam. And this is occurring after Germany has already been divided into districts and deciding sort of like the next course of action as to what to do in Europe. And Truman kind of pressures Stalin to hold free democratic elections in Poland.
And Stalin kind of pressures Truman, conversely, into accepting that the Soviet Union is going to maintain some kind of military occupation over Eastern Europe for a while. He especially is going to accept the fact that the Soviets and the Americans are disagreeing heavily over the issue of German reparations. In essence, what's happening is Russia is picking up almost everything they can. that seems of value from Germany, especially industrial factories, technology, and quite literally they are picking them up off the ground and taking them back to Russia. And Truman and the Americans kind of draw the opposite conclusion over what to do with reparations.
They see the reparations as totally having failed the first time around, and the best thing to do is not to punish Germany. They've already been defeated. Let's offer kind of a gracious peace and try to rebuild the country. This difference of opinion Truman kind of accepts out of Stalin, but he gets a lot of criticism.
So Truman gets a lot of flack for this, and especially he gets a lot of criticism from Americans, and particularly American Christians, for... allowing the Soviet Union to kind of maintain physical control over the parts of Eastern Europe and especially for the the violence of the the 13 million Germans being expelled now I should point out that that there are a lot of inflated numbers that kind of come out from German sources about several million people being killed which most scholars now kind of view is dubious But in the context of this 13 million expelled from the regions, a lot of Americans, and especially Americans who have contacts and friends in Germany, are critical of Truman's seemingly acquiescence to this Soviet position. Now, the next big kind of point of conflict emerges when Truman summons the Soviet equivalent of the Secretary of State, so the head of foreign policy and foreign diplomacy, to a meeting, a man by the name of Molotov. And Molotov is very much of this silver spoon aristocratic breeding.
And Truman essentially just yells at him for five minutes. When he walks out of the meeting, Truman, quite proud of himself, tells his advisors that he gave Molotov the ol'one-two punch. And he basically just dresses him down for the fact that, as far as Truman can tell, there is no progress toward democratic elections in Poland.
And Stalin and the Soviet Union agree to this, and the basis of the American alliance with the Soviet Union is on this point. And, you know, they need to get going. And Molotov is absolutely incensed. He calls Stalin up immediately after it happens and is absolutely livid. Says he's never been spoken to that way in his entire life and is appalled by this.
So his, you know, this once again kind of sours the personal level of distrust between Truman and Stalin and other Soviet leaders. And kind of leads things into the policy decisions that will end up making out or producing the Cold War. So I'll talk a little bit now, you know, I said I was going to do this before, but I'll talk a little bit now about kind of the American position.
The Americans draw several important lessons from history, as they understand it, and this is literally what they say, lessons of history, from the Second World War. And those lessons are kind of as follows. The first is that... The world needs free trade. Without free trade, prosperity will not be something that's likely possible in the future, and free trade helps eliminate the kind of nationalist boundaries that led to the Second World War in the first place.
This is also, and has been remarked by scholars, to be, in a lot of respects, a kind of self-serving position. Why? Well, one of the things that happens during World War II is that the production capacity of the United States soars.
And it doesn't just soar. The United States was already really the industrial leader of the world. But it grows exponentially so.
At certain points during the war, the United States is producing more aircraft than all other powers combined, to give just one example. The difficulty, as we've talked about with capitalism before, the difficulty with this production capacity is if you don't have markets, what are you going to do with all of this stuff you're making? And in addition to this, the question for the Americans becomes, well, the reason we got out of the Great Depression and grew in wealth and power and stature is because we were producing all these things that everybody wanted because of the war. But now that the war is over. What sort of things are we going to produce?
What's going to happen to all of these jobs that we've created in the United States and in industrial manufacturing businesses? What's going to happen when several million soldiers are decommissioned and returned home and there's a need to kind of balance this out? So the Americans pursue these policies of free trade in part because they need markets and they especially want access to the European market. Now...
There's a lot to be said about this as being mutually beneficial. Overwhelmingly because Europe is in ruins and Europe needs stuff. It needs capital investment.
It needs support. It needs to be able to purchase goods to help improve living standards and living conditions since people are homeless and jobless and lacking in a serious number of things in a whole variety of ways. So this kind of transformation is mutually beneficial for Western Europe and the United States. And the best example of this is in the creation of the policy known as the Marshall Plan. So the Marshall Plan is listed or created in 1947. And the Marshall Plan is in essence a $14 billion free...
It's $14 billion in free money. And this is $14 billion in... you know 1947 money it has almost no strings attached to it it's offered to any country in europe and including some in asia to a lesser extent and it's not alone you can there's no restrictions as to what you want to spend the money on and and it will be paid out over the next something like three to five years And this is an unprecedented policy move, right?
It's the opposite of the idea of reparations. It's actually the victorious party paying the defeated parties, and or those who were caught in the middle and their allies. The only real string attached to the Marshall Plan is that if you accept Marshall Plan money, you have to accept free trade with the United States, and you have to accept free trade with other recipients of the Marshall Plan.
So it's a plan, right, that in part solves or creates free trade arrangements between multiple nations. And as one historian has put this, this is an economic solution to a political problem. The Americans concern is this. If Europe remains destitute and poor, it will become a breeding ground for extremist ideologies like Nazism.
And people in the United States and Britain and most of Europe are very concerned with the return to extremist organizations. As the competition with communism is heating up, this concern becomes magnified as the US... As the sort of general in charge of the US occupation zone of Germany, Henry Clay, put it, you know, if the choice is between, you know, a thousand calories a day and freedom, or 1,500 calories a day and communism, no man can choose freedom. In other words, you'll starve to death on a thousand calories a day, but 1,500 calories a day you can actually survive.
So the United States, if it wants to sort of compete against this, needs to provide a level of material standards to Europe. And this is kind of the logic that emerges in the United States. Now the second big thing that they deduce from this struggle is that in order to maintain any kind of safety in Europe, they have to be the biggest, baddest power around.
And this is the policy created by NSC-68 and sets off really the arms race between the Soviet Union and the United States. So the idea, and this is essentially really the plot of Iron Man in the beginning, you know, how does Tony Stark make money? He makes money by providing weapons so strong that no one would dare challenge them.
This is the logic of the American kind of thinkers, that they are going to produce a military and military technology especially that is so big and so large that no... dictator or foreign power will dare mess with them. And Paul Nitze and Secretary of State Dean Ackeson, pictured here, are the planners of this NSC, stands for National Security Council, number 68. And this is what they propose and ends up being implemented.
And this is really the growth of American international military power. Before this, the United States, really before the Second World War, the United States did not have a very large army at all. and most certainly did not have a global military presence.
And this has changed. So the logic, right, is to have a military arsenal that is so powerful that no one will dare mess with us. Now, the Soviets, from their perspective, are going to come up with a different kind of plan, or a different sort of idea. Stalin and Soviet planners are deathly afraid of an invasion again from Germany.
From their perspective they've been gotten into two major wars with Germany. The first produced the Bolshevik Revolution, the second almost destroyed the world, resulted in 25 million Soviets dead. Of course Stalin contributed to that significantly but nonetheless and the costs are extreme.
So the thinking is that well you know it might be only a matter of time until the Germans come for us again. So what Stalin wants is a policy that's called buffer states. or he calls buffer states and the idea is really kind of simple it means that the soviet union needs to have between its and germany friendly regimes friendly regimes so the most important uh nations at stake here are poland czechoslovakia and to a lesser extent hungary so these friendly regimes In Stalin's mind, it actually means communist regimes.
See, because he's a Marxist, so a capitalist regime can't be counted on, if we remember our Marxist teleology, can't be counted on to be considered friendly to the Soviet Union in any capacity because capitalism could descend into fascism or it could transition into communism. So unless it's actually communist, it can't be counted on as being friendly. And this is the kind of logic that Stalin will apply to Eastern Europe.
Now the Soviets think that they can win democratic elections in Eastern Europe at first, but when this is kind of proven to be false, he will implement the idea of the buffer states and stage coups in Czechoslovakia and Hungary to ensure that communist parties remain in power in those regions. Now the Americans very much misinterpret this. They think and see it as being a form of Soviet aggressive expansion.
And really in Stalin's mind this is not aggressive expansion. This is holding on to what has been acquired and accrued in the course of the Second World War. And it's in relation to this sort of thing.
Stalin has no desire for a war with the United States. It has no desire to really expand its boundaries beyond this. But the buffer state thing is crucial.
to how the Soviet Union will prepare its defense against future aggression from Germany. This misunderstanding will set up the conditions through which two things sort of occur. The first of which is the Truman Doctrine, in which the United States will make a claim first to provide military support to Greece and Turkey against... or in support of factions who are fighting against communist forces, the Truman Doctrine will kind of unofficially become, or semi-officially become, kind of like the standing American policy, that if you're fighting against communist forces, you can count on the United States for military and financial support.
Naturally, you can understand how the Soviet Union responds to this. And this tension kind of comes to its head... at the Berlin blockade in 1948. So this is the quintessential Cold War example of the Cold War at its best and worst.
So in 1948 the Western Allies are looking at creating now a single unified Germany for economic and social and political purposes and one of the ways in which they want to kind of do this is to implement currency reform. They want to replace the old currency and give a new currency. And this is in part to help investment and Marshall Plan money come into Germany.
The Soviets don't like this. They see it as a threat. And in a lot of respects, it is kind of a threat to them. The new mark will be more valuable. And The Americans and the Western Allies are offering a one-to-one exchange for German citizens.
So in other words, if you have the old German mark, you can turn them in, and you can get an equal number of new German marks. So it's actually really like, to some extent, a money giveaway. The Soviet Union forbids the use of this new currency, and it threatens, in fact, to blockade out Berlin if the Allies don't relent, because the most... Prominent point of danger right is people citizens living in Berlin who just walk across the border There's no wall yet You just walk from East Berlin to West Berlin you get the currency exchange and then you can you know sell the Western currency On the black market which was even more valuable so so this move Causes Stalin says you know what if you're gonna do this We're gonna try to box you out of the city and the British and the French response to this they cut off all supply lines going in and out is okay well they're not stopping aircraft so we're going to send a non-stop stream of aircraft into Western Berlin to resupply the city and at first this is very dangerous and very challenging quite a few planes crash the citizens of West Berlin are starving for a little while but eventually the British and the Americans get this sorted out so much so that they are actually bringing in more supplies to West Berlin than were coming by train and truck prior to the airlift. In fact, if you've ever been to Berlin, there's an airport out in the middle of nowhere called Tempelhof that nobody ever uses because it's out in the middle of nowhere, that was built literally for the purposes of receiving more planes during the Berlin airlift.
And Stalin relents and things go back to how they were. And this is a classic case of Cold War standoffs, right? The Soviet Union could have easily provoked the United States by shooting down American planes.
They also really were provoking the United States by refusing to allow trains and cars into West Berlin. So both events, right, first by the Soviets blocking things off, second by the Americans daring the Soviets to shoot down the planes, could have resulted in war, but didn't. The standoff, the game of chicken, kind of endures throughout the Cold War.
And eventually this will magnify itself in 1949 when the Soviet Union will test nuclear weapons and then we will have kind of the conditions of nuclear war or the conditions of mad or mutually assured destruction in which both countries will be capable of destroying one another through nuclear weapons and this This only doubles down on the need for this. on the need for this cold war, this standoff. So that's kind of a breakdown as to how the Cold War begins.