Continued from P.1, Truman believed in American power and American righteousness. So did his newly appointed secretary of state, James F. Byrnes. Byrnes was a longtime Washington power broker, a former conservative senator from South Carolina, Supreme Court justice, and wartime overlord of the American economy. Truman liked Byrnes, who had befriended him as a new senator in the mid-1930s, and thought him shrewd, knowledgeable, and tough. He let Byrnes do most of the contentious bargaining at Potsdam on German reparations, Polish borders, and the composition of the new governments in Eastern Europe. Once Stalin agreed in the first days of the conference to attack Japan, Truman felt satisfied. "I've gotten what I came for," he confided to Bess on July 18. "Stalin goes to war August 15 with no strings on it. ... I'll say that we'll end the war a year sooner now, and think of the kids who won't be killed. That's the important thing."111

To Truman and Byrnes, the atomic bomb meant more than the weapon that could defeat Japan and save American lives. It was a vast new instrument of American power. Truman went to Potsdam not knowing it would work; Admiral Leahy said it wouldn't; Byrnes thought it might "but he wasn't sure." 112 By all accounts, and there are many, news of the successful testing of the bomb enormously buoyed Truman's self-confidence. It "took a great load off my mind," he confided to Joe Davies.ll3 The president did not order the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima to impress the Russians, as some historians claim; but nevertheless he believed that it would impress them and make them more manageable.

At Potsdam, Truman quietly took Stalin aside and elliptically mentioned that the United States had a powerful new weapon to use against Japan. Nothing more needed to be said. Nor did all the pressing issues have to be resolved at Potsdam. Truman was eager to go home. He grew impatient with the incessant haggling at the conference. Stalin, he thought, was stalling. He "doesn't know it," Truman again wrote his wife, "but I have an ace in the hole and another one showing-so unless he has threes or two pair (and I know he has not) we are sitting all right." 114 The "atomic bomb," Byrnes also was thinking, "had given us great power, and ... in the last analysis, it would control." 115

When Truman ordered that atomic bombs be dropped on Hiroshima and then Nagasaki, these were not tough decisions for him. They were necessary, in his mind, to save American lives. They vividly demonstrated American power; they confirmed that enemies of America would pay for their transgressions. The Japanese did pay, and then they capitulated, unconditionally, except for the preservation of the emperor. They had little choice, for Stalin's troops attacked at the same time, seized parts of Manchuria, invaded northern Korea, and set their sights on Hokkaido, Japan's northernmost home island.116

The war ended. The American people celebrated. Truman breathed a sigh of relief. He now eagerly delegated the responsibility for peacemaking to Secretary of State Byrnes, who he thought had performed ably at Potsdam. Truman wanted to turn his own attention to demobilization, reconversion, and the domestic issues he knew and understood. Byrnes for his part was eager to take command of the nation's foreign policy. He was sure of himself. The atomic bomb, he told his closest colleagues, was a great weapon that could be used to exact concessions from potential adversaries.117 But experienced colleagues in the State and War departments had their doubts. They deeply resented Byrnes's attempts to monopolize American diplomacy. Many of them left office in September and October 1945, however, exhausted from years of wartime responsibility, and Byrnes was now in charge.

Byrnes was not as shrewd as he thought he was, nor was the Soviet Union easily threatened. At the first postwar meeting of foreign ministers in London in September, Byrnes thought he could outmaneuver Molotov and arrange for more representative governments in Romania and Bulgaria. But Molotov chafed at Byrnes's procedural moves and sneered at his not very subtle efforts to use America's atomic monopoly to leverage concessions. In fact, the Soviet foreign minister was willing to negotiate on some of these points-that is, until Stalin ordered him to stiffen his resolve. Let the conference end in deadlock, Stalin wired Molotov. Let Byrnes stew for a while. Stalin's adulatory comments about Byrnes in front of Truman at Potsdam had, typically, concealed the dictator's emerging contempt for a man who wielded power so flagrantly. 118

Byrnes returned to Washington chastened. The Russians would not be intimidated, he realized. Perhaps, Byrnes now thought, the bomb could be used as a carrot rather than a stick. Perhaps the Soviets could be lured into a favorable agreement to regulate the future of atomic energy. Some of the Soviets' arguments, he believed, had merit. He had to concede a certain hypocrisy in the American insistence that the Soviets open up eastern Europe while the United States locked the Kremlin out of Japan. He could understand why the Soviets feared the revival of German power and why they wanted friendly governments on their periphery. It might make sense, he thought, to acquiesce to what was happening in Bulgaria and Romania, more or less, if in return the Kremlin promised to withdraw Soviet troops as soon as the peace treaties were negotiated. Moreover, a four-power treaty guaranteeing the demilitarization of Germany might hasten this process. In other words, Stalin's obsession with security might be assuaged by a demilitarization treaty while his domination of eastern Europe might be diluted by his agreement to withdraw Soviet troops from Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria, as they just had been withdrawn from Czechoslovakia.1l9

To achieve an open sphere in eastern Europe, contain Soviet power, sustain the wartime alliance, and avoid hostile confrontations with Soviet Russia may have made sense, but Byrnes's swift tactical changes coupled with his arrogant behavior alienated cabinet colleagues, powerful senators, and key presidential aides. Truman grew frustrated with Byrnes, as he did with so many of his advisers in that autumn of 1945. The end of the war provided no respite for the inexperienced president. He was worried by labor strife and spiraling inflation. He was agitated by the biting criticism he was experiencing and by the souring of his party's prospects to win the 1946 midterm elections. "The Congress," he noted in his diary, "is balking; labor has gone crazy; management is not far from insane in selfishness." His cabinet had "Potomac fever."120 Byrnes was conniving, striving for too much publicity, acting too independent, arousing too much controversy, trying to be too clever, and alienating friends and foes alike.

Truman liked things in black and white. His closest advisers knew that he did not like nuance or ambiguity. 121 In a major speech on Navy Day, 27 October, he set forth his views. The United States, he said, forswore the acquisition of any new territory. It championed democracy and self-determination. It favored freedom of the seas, open trade, and global economic cooperation. It supported the United Nations and Pan-Americanism. There would be no return to isolationism. ever again, said Truman, would the United States be caught by surprise. Never again would it relinquish its military superiority. It would hold the atomic bomb as a "sacred trust" for all mankind. Its air and naval forces would control the seas and dominate the skies. Aggression would not be tolerated. America's interests would not be slighted nor would its ideals be compromised. The United States would not "compromise with evil." 122

Although his writers designed the speech to force "our diplomatic appeasers to pay closer attention to the vital interests of America," there is no reason to think that Truman thought he was breaking new ground with this speech.123 These ideals and interests were like apple pie and ice cream to Truman. The nation had to be strong and it had to be involved. Its interests and ideals had to be protected. This was, after all, God's country. The war had taught key lessons: no more surprise attacks, no more aggression. The United States had to be able to project its power far from American shores. The country needed bases around the globe. And no nation could be permitted to upset the balance of power in the Old World and gain control of the industrial infrastructure, raw materials, and skilled manpower of Europe and Asia. Germany and Japan had almost achieved this in the late 1930s and early 1940s, and American interests and ideals had been jeopardized. This could not be allowed to happen again.

The president jotted his thoughts on a piece of paper. Byrnes had to stop "babying" the Soviets. The Soviets had to get out of northern Iran, where they had been slow to withdraw their troops. They had to stop putting pressure on Turkey for bases in the Dardanelles. They had to install more democratic governments in Bulgaria and Romania. They had to agree to strong central governments in Korea and China. "Unless Russia is faced with an iron fist and strong language another war is in the making." 124

By the end of 1945 Stalin and Truman were eyeing each other warily. They were both angry with their foreign ministers for inclining toward compromise. They felt that their respective nations had the power and the right to forge a new international order that would enhance their security and their ideals. They were not inclined to tolerate opposition. But they also grasped that confrontation made little sense. They had more to gain from sustaining the alliance than from rupturing it, though cooperation was logical only if it served national interests. During 1946, they wavered between toughness and conciliation.

Stalin distrusted capitalists, and fear of encirclement by them was a constant in his thinking. Nonetheless, he had worked collaboratively with Roosevelt and Churchill during the war, thinking the conflict would end with Germany's dismemberment and a secure periphery. But then, suddenly, Roosevelt had died and Truman dropped two atomic bombs on Japan. Stalin was shaken by Roosevelt's passing. He was wary of Truman, but not disinclined to cooperate with him.125 Yet Truman had great power and used it.

Stalin immediately interpreted Hiroshima as atomic blackmail against the U.S.S.R. "Hiroshima has shaken the whole world," he said. "The balance has been destroyed." He thought the Americans and the British were backtracking on the promise they had given at Yalta to allow the Russians to rule their sphere as they liked. "They want to force us to accept their plans on questions affecting Europe and the world. Well, that's not going to happen," Stalin told his closest confidants. Even before Truman told Byrnes to stop babying the Soviets, Stalin told Molotov that in dealing with the Americans and the British, "we cannot achieve anything serious if we begin to give in to intimidation or betray uncertainty. To get anything from this kind of partner, we must arm ourselves with the policy of tenacity and steadfastness." 126

On 9 February 1946, Stalin gave a famous "election" address at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow, transmitted by radio to every part of the Soviet Union. Reviving the ideological language that was his lodestar, he said the war had not been an accident, nor was it the product of the mistakes of statesmen. "The war arose in reality as the inevitable result of the development of the world economic and political forces on the basis of monopoly capitalism." Perhaps peace could be preserved if capitalists redistributed markets and raw materials without conflict, "but this is impossible under the present capitalist development of the world economy."

The Soviet Union had become ensnared in this intracapitalist conflict, but World War II was "radically different" from World War 1. The fascist states had extinguished" democratic liberties" in their own countries, established "cruel, terrorist regimes," and sought "world domination." "As far as our country is concerned," Stalin said, "the war was the most cruel and hard of all wars ever experienced in the history of our motherland." But it proved the superiority of the socialist system, the vitality of the multinational state, and the resiliency and heroism of the Red Army. The war also demonstrated the wisdom of collectivization and industrialization. "The party remembered Lenin's word that without heavy industry it would be impossible to safeguard the independence of our country, that without it the Soviet system could perish." Hence the need "to organize a new mighty upsurge of the national economy," seeking the production of fifty million tons of pig iron annually, sixty million tons of steel, five hundred million tons of coal, and sixty million tons of oil. Alluding implicitly to the atomic bomb, Stalin said that science, too, had to be promoted "to surpass the achievements" of other countries. "Only under such conditions will our country be insured against any eventuality." 127

Stalin's ideological preconceptions and personal paranoia made him suspect enemies everywhere. As the war drew to a close he confided: "The crisis of capitalism has manifested itself in the division of the capitalists into two factions-one fascist, the other democratic .... We are currently allied with one faction against the other, but in the future we will be against the first faction of capitalists, too." 128 Suspicious of the capitalists, fearful of Germany and Japan, and proud of Soviet achievements, he would be satisfied with nothing less than a friendly periphery. He wanted "to consolidate Soviet territorial gains, establish a Soviet sphere of influence in eastern Europe, and have a voice in the political fate of Germany and-if possible-of Japan."129 He wanted security, and hoped to get it without rupturing the grand alliance.

This explains why he was so furious with Churchill's speech in Fulton, Missouri, in March 1946, when the former British prime minister declared [hat Stalin was building an iron curtain from the Baltic to the Balkans. "The following circumstances should not be forgotten," Stalin stated in a Pravda interview. "The Germans made their invasion of the USSR through Finland, Poland, Rumania, Bulgaria, and Hungary. The Germans were able to make their invasion through these countries because at the time, governments hostile to the Soviet Union existed in these countries." As a result millions of people in Russia died, many more than from the United States and the United Kingdom combined. Perhaps Churchill was inclined to forget these colossal sacrifices, but Stalin could not. "What can be surprising," Stalin fumed, "about the fact that the Soviet Union, anxious for its future safety, is frying to see to it that governments loyal in their attitude to the Soviet Union should exist in these countries?"130

Stalin thought the Americans and the British were maneuvering to squeeze the Soviet Union out of Germany, undermine its position of power in eastern Europe, and deny it the ten billion dollars in reparations it thought it had been promised at the Yalta Conference.l31 Soviet officials looked cynically upon the four-power German demilitarization treaty that Byrnes repeatedly proposed. Even Maxim Litvinov, the prewar foreign minister who was known for his pro-Western orientation, expressed dismay about U.S. motives. In July 1945, Litvinov had noted that the Ruhr and other industrial parts of western Germany, now in French, American, and British hands, produced 75 percent of Germany's coal and 70 percent of its steel and pig iron. The industry of the Ruhr, he warned, could be completely restored within one year and could support an army of several million soldiers. "If a serious conflict escalates between us and Western states, we will not be able to prevent the Western powers from turning the Ruhr region into a supply base either for Germans, whom they would enlist as Allies, or for their own armed forces." The Americans, Litvinov believed, were seeking to dupe the Russians by creating the impression that Soviet security could be guaranteed through this demilitarization treaty. In his view, which Stalin shared, Byrnes was trying to lay the groundwork for the most dangerous scenario imaginable, a premature termination of the occupation of Germany. 132

It was not only that Stalin imagined threats; there were threats. Famine stalked his country. Unrest pulsated through the lands he annexed. Low-scale insurgencies and guerrilla war challenged his rule in the countries the Red Army occupied. Russian, Polish, and Ukrainian documents make it clear that Stalin and his internal security services "were profoundly concerned" with how Churchill's Fulton speech might buoy the morale of rebels and insurgents. Speculation about a third world war between the Anglo-Saxons and the Russians percolated through the resistance movements against Soviet power and inspired Ukrainian and other nationalists to imagine that in a new world conflict they might be liberated. "Throughout Soviet-occupied Eastern Europe, Churchill's Fulton speech was like a call to arms," or so it seemed inside the Kremlin and among Stalin's police chieftains.133

Ideology conditioned Stalin's thinking, but his suspicions were reinforced by experience and reality. In Romania, Poland, the Balkans, Ukraine, and Turkey, British and American officials conducted clandestine operations, albeit on a small scale, to nurture unrest and establish ties with opposition leaders. Of course, Stalin's brutal repression, his transfer of subject nationalities, and his wrangling for bits of Iranian and Turkish territory also fomented instability and encouraged the policies that exacerbated his suspicions.134

Yet Stalin was not embarked on a cold war. He was vacillating, saying contradictory things, pursuing divergent policies. Historians violently argue about Stalin's motivations and his goals precisely because his rhetoric and his actions were so inconsistent. In 1993, when Soviet documents from this period were first becoming available, the Norwegian historian Odd Arne Westad wrote, "Stalin's foreign policy is not as much inexplicable in its parts as incoherent in its whole." This description seems even truer now, in view of still more documents that have been brought to light.135

For although Stalin delayed the withdrawal of his troops from northern Iran, asked for new rights in the Turkish Straits, and installed progressively more communist governments in Poland, Romania, and Bulgaria, he also withdrew Soviet troops from Czechoslovakia and from the island of Bornholm in the Baltic; allowed free elections in the Soviet occupation zone in Austria and in parts of Hungary and Czechoslovakia; pulled Soviet troops out of Manchuria; and continued to discourage revolution or communist seizures of power in Greece, Italy, and France. In Germany, Stalin consolidated the Soviet hold over the Soviet occupation zone yet talked repeatedly, both privately and publicly, about honoring the Potsdam pledges to keep Germany unified and demilitarized. He told the German communists whom he had placed in power in Berlin to cease radical actions and plan for a unified Germany. He instructed them to join with Social Democrats in a new Socialist Unity Party (SED) and to position themselves to win elections in all four occupation zones. Yet the actions of Soviet armies in eastern Germany brutalized the people and eroded any popular support the communists might have garnered. Stalin, writes Norman Naimark, an eminent historian of Stalin's European policies, "had no firm plan for post-war Europe, not even what we would call today a 'road map.' ... He was too tactically inclined for that" and too responsive to local circumstances and unforeseen developments.136

Stalin did not want a rift with the Western powers. Agreement with the United States, he told Polish communists in late 1945, was still possible.137 Knowing that his election speech of 6 February 1946 had been interpreted in the West to mean that he was sundering the wartime alliance and resuming an ideological offensive, Stalin made repeated public and private efforts to clarify his views. After telling the new U.S. ambassador in Moscow, Walter Bedell Smith, that he believed the United States and Britain were united to thwart Soviet Russia, he insisted that he wanted to cooperate with them. "We should not be alarmed or apprehensive," said Stalin, "because of differences of opinion and arguments which occur in families and even between brothers because with patience and good will these differences would be reconciled."

He said the same to Labour delegates and to journalists from Great Britain. There will be no war, he told Alexander Werth, the correspondent of Britain's Sunday Times. "I absolutely believe," he said, in the possibility of long-standing cooperation with his wartime allies. "Communism in one country is entirely possible, especially in such a country as the Soviet Union." If he had been seeking to orchestrate opinion against the Americans and British, it is hard to comprehend why he would have permitted such interviews to be printed in the Soviet press. 138 And in his last meeting in January 1946 with departing U.S. ambassador Averell Harriman, just two weeks before his Bolshoi speech, Stalin told him, "As to our foreign policy conceptions, the Soviet Union and the United States can find a common language." He then inquired whether it might still be feasible to get a large loan from the United States, as previously had been promised. He made clear that he would not make political concessions in return for the loan, but the money was still needed for postwar reconstruction. It would take six or seven years, he admitted, to restore the devastated districts of western Russia.139

But Stalin wanted Western cooperation also in order to control the possible revival of German and Japanese power. He was angered that the United States so blatantly monopolized the occupation of Japan, a nation that he deemed a perennial threat to Russia, and he could not accept American indifference to his strategic imperatives. He wanted to be treated as a partner, albeit a junior one.140 In Germany, understanding that the Western allies would not agree to dismembering the country into separate zones and believing they were maneuvering to harness the Western zones' latent power to serve Western interests, Stalin shifted course. In mid-1945, he started to champion German unification and to favor German economic revival. His aim was a unified, demilitarized Germany in the Soviet sphere of influence, which he now believed would compete with Britain and America and constrain their domination of the international economy. Still, a unified, revived Germany might also maneuver out of control and join a Western capitalist alliance against Soviet Russia, or it might act independently, rearm, and aim for revenge and territorial revision. Conciliating the Germans, Stalin grasped, might make Germany less revanchist, but it would be risky. Hence cooperation with the Americans and the British was imperative, however suspicious he might be. At the very least, he knew that cooperation was indispensable if he was to get reparations from the western zones of Germany, which he desperately wanted for Russian reconstruction.141

A unified Germany, with all its attendant uncertainties, also made it more imperative to dominate the Soviet Union's Eastern European borderlands. Hence throughout 1946 and 1947, Stalin ordered Molotov to work with Byrnes and British foreign minister Ernest Bevin to complete peace treaties with the Eastern European nations that had fought with Germany during the war. Stalin wanted, writes one of Hungary's leading Cold War historians, to foster a communist "takeover in East Central Europe by peaceful means, while preserving Soviet-Western cooperation as well." 142

Truman did not know how to deal with these twists and turns in Soviet policy, with the signs of truculence and the contrary evidence of self-restraint. In February 1946, his ablest diplomat in Moscow, George F. Kennan, sent a long telegram to Washington, saying that "at the bottom of the Kremlin's view of world affairs is a traditional and instinctive Russian sense of insecurity." The Soviets, Kennan concluded, did not believe in the possibility of any permanent reconciliation with the West,143 But Ambassador Harriman left Moscow at about the same time with a typically ambivalent view of the Soviet dictator:
It is hard for me to reconcile the courtesy and consideration that he showed me personally with the ghastly cruelty of his wholesale liquidations. Others, who did not know him personally, see only the tyrant in Stalin. I saw the other side as well-his high intelligence, that fantastic grasp of detail, his shrewdness and his surprising human sensitivity that he was capable of showing, at least in the war years. I found him better informed than Roosevelt, more realistic than Churchill, in some ways the most effective of the war leaders .... I must confess that for me Stalin remains the most inscrutable and contradictory character I have known-and leave the final word to the judgment of history. 144

President Truman did not have the luxury of waiting for the judgment of history, of course. He had to make decisions in real time. He, too, wavered. He was angry with Byrnes's temporizing. He was outraged by news of Soviet wartime espionage against the Allies. He liked Churchill's tough words in his Fulton address. He told the Soviets to get out of northern Iran. He instructed the Joint Chiefs of Staff to draw up contingency war plans. He encouraged Byrnes to unite the British and American zones in western Germany, to ameliorate conditions there, and to win the support of the German people. If the Kremlin objected to Anglo-American moves, their views could be ignored. 145

But Truman did not seek a showdown. He recognized the unrepresentative, Soviet-imposed governments in Romania and Bulgaria. In late 1945, he asked General George C. Marshall, the renowned wartime army chief of staff, to go to China to work out a settlement between the Communists and Nationalists there. He encouraged Under Secretary of State Dean G. Acheson and his aides to work on a plan for the international control of atomic energy. He continued to oversee the demobilization of U.S. forces. He instructed Byrnes, much as Stalin instructed Molotov, to finish the peace treaties regarding Eastern Europe, Italy, and Finland. He wanted General Lucius D. Clay, the deputy military governor in Germany, to keep meeting with his Soviet, British, and French counterparts on plans for the nation's unification. Truman's closest aides, Clark Clifford and George Elsey, drew up a long report in the summer of 1946 claiming that the Soviet Union was not simply chiseling on its earlier agreements, as the president already believed, but intent on world domination. When Secretary of Commerce Henry Wallace remonstrated against this view and spoke publicly in behalf of a more conciliatory policy toward the Kremlin, Truman fired him. Yet at the same time, the president locked the Clifford-Elsey report in a safe and bided his time.

Truman was not eager to sunder the great wartime coalition he had inherited from Roosevelt. A breakdown would complicate his domestic priorities and weaken his party. Strife with the Soviet Union, Truman knew, would require foreign aid to beleaguered countries, more defense spending, fewer tax reductions, and spiraling inflation. Republicans were already lambasting him for rising prices, labor unrest, and high taxes. Notwithstanding the consensus among his foreign-policy advisers that the Soviet Union was a great threat, Truman did not quite know what to do. After his party suffered a humiliating defeat in the congressional elections of November 1946, he asked General Marshall to become his secretary of state, but gave him no marching orders, and the general himself was known for his prudence and restraint. Marshall did not want confrontation. He wanted to negotiate a German peace treaty with the Russians. Before he arrived in Moscow, however, worsening international conditions dashed any lingering hopes for a sustained detente.146

Neither Truman nor Stalin wanted a cold war. Yet it came. Why? The Cold War came because conditions in the international system created risks that Truman and Stalin could not accept and opportunities they could not resist. Neither the president of the most powerful country the world had ever known nor the cruelest dictator the world had ever witnessed was in control of events. And the beliefs and experiences of both men magnified their perception of threat and fear of betrayal. Each felt he had to act because danger loomed. Each felt he had to act because opportunity beckoned.

From the time World War II drew to a close, nothing frightened American policymakers more than the economic plight and social strife that the war had bequeathed. In April 1945, as the fighting in Europe was in its last stages, John J. McCloy, the influential assistant secretary of war, returned from a trip to Europe and presented an apocalyptic account of conditions. "There is a complete economic, social and political collapse going on in Central Europe, the extent of which is unparalleled in history." The situation in Germany, he told Secretary of War Henry L. Stin1son, was "worse than anything probably that ever happened in the world." Writing in his diary, Stimson noted that he "had anticipated the chaos, but the details of it were appalling."137

A few months later, in July, Dean Acheson presented a similar view to the Senate Committee on Banking and Currency: "There is a situation in the world, very clearly illustrated in Europe, and also true in the Far East, which threatens the very foundations, the whole fabric of world organization which we have known in our lifetime and which our fathers and grandfathers knew." In liberated Europe, Acheson reported, railway and power systems had ceased to operate, "financial systems are destroyed. Ownership of property is in terrific confusion. Management of property is in confusion." Not since the eighth century, when the Muslims split the world in two, Acheson said, had conditions been so serious. Europe's industrial and social life had "come to a complete and utter standstill." The "whole fabric of social life," Acheson warned, "might go to pieces unless the most energetic steps are taken on all fronts." 148

People suffered. People endured. People yearned for a better future. People discussed, disputed, and imagined alternative political and economic orders. Capitalism was blamed for the Depression, the war, and genocide. Describing conditions in Czechoslovakia, the historian Igor Lukes writes that after the war, "Many in Czechoslovakia had come to believe that capitalism ... had become obsolete. Influential intellectuals saw the world emerging from the ashes of the war in black and white terms: here was Auschwitz and there was Stalingrad. The former was a by-product of a crisis in capitalist Europe of the 1930s; the latter stood for the superiority of socialism." 149 In November 1945, the British historian A.J.P. Taylor commented: "Nobody in Europe believes in the American way of life-that is, in private enterprise." People, he said, "want Socialism, but they also want the Rights of Man."150

This was not mere rhetoric. What concerned U.S. officials was what was happening on the streets and in the voting booths. Everywhere in Europe, communist and socialist support seemed to be mounting. In Belgium, the Communist Party grew from 9,000 in 1939 to 100,000 in November 1945; in Greece, from 17,000 in 1935 to 70,000 in 1945; in Italy, from 5,000 in 1943 to 1.7 million at the end of 1945; in Czechoslovakia, from 28,000 in May 1945 to 750,000 in September 1945. In France, Italy, and Finland, communists were already getting 20 percent of the total vote; in Belgium, Denmark, Norway, Holland, and Sweden, it was close to 10 percent. In Eastern European countries, 20 to 50 percent of the populace aligned with leftist parties.1511 Support for socialist parties made the left appear even more threatening to those in the center and on the right. In Great Britain, the Labour Party emerged triumphant in July 1945 and, to the astonishment of Americans, unseated Winston Churchill. Everywhere, people seemed to be clamoring for land reform, social welfare, and nationalization of industry. "They have suffered so much," said Acheson, "and they believe so deeply that governments can take some action which will alleviate their sufferings, that they will demand that the whole business of state control and state interference shall be pushed further and further." 152 To many Americans, private enterprise and free markets appeared endangered by a resurgent left.

Conditions in Asia, the Middle East, and Africa were no more reassuring. In Japan, fifteen million people were homeless and the economy near collapse. China was engulfed by political strife and civil war. In South Asia, the Congress Party under Mohandas K. Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru was continuing India's long struggle for independence. In Southeast Asia, revolutionary nationalist movements were blossoming. The communist leader Ho Chi Minh clamored for France's recognition of Vietnam's independence. Achmed Sukarno pleaded for Dutch recognition of Indonesia's sovereignty. Indeed, embedded in the entire international system was the problem of Europe's former colonies in Asia and Africa that now wanted independence; the solution to this problem would gradually reconfigure the international order, kin dling in Moscow immense hopes for progress and change and generating in Washington immense fear and never-ending frustration.

U.S. officials hoped conditions would improve. In many places they did, but not enough to allay officials' apprehensions. In March 1946, Acheson told a congressional committee, "The commercial and financial situation of the world is worse than any of us thought a year ago it would be. Destruction is more complete, hunger more acute, exhaustion more widespread than anyone then realized. What might have been passed off as prophecies have become stark facts."153 At cabinet meetings, Truman's advisers discussed food shortages and the social disorder and political upheaval they were engendering. "More people face starvation and even actual death," the president acknowledged, "than in any war year and perhaps more than in all the war years combined."154

What hovered over these deliberations were fears that Stalin would try to capitalize on these conditions. There would be "pestilence and famine in Central Europe next winter," Secretary of War Stimson had told President Truman on 16 May 1945. "This is likely to be followed by political revolution and Communistic infiltration." The next month, Undersecretary of State Joseph Grew gave the president a long report on the international communist movement. "Europe today," it concluded, was a breeding ground for "spontaneous class hatred to be channeled by a skillful agitator." Over the next two years, while Soviet and American officials wrangled over Eastern Europe, Iran, and Turkey, this perceived threat did not abate. The "greatest potential danger to U.S. security," the newly formed Central Intelligence Agency concluded in September 1947, "lies ... in the possibility of the economic collapse of Western Europe and of the consequent accession to power of elements subservient to the Kremlin." 155

Heavy snows and frigid temperatures during January and February 1947 transformed alarm to action. British officials confided that financial exigencies would force His Majesty's government to withdraw from the eastern Mediterranean, thereby exposing Greece and Turkey to additional risk. "The reins of world leadership," Assistant Secretary of State Will Clayton wrote, "are fast slipping from Britain's competent but now very weak hands. These reins will be picked up either by the United States or by Russia. If by Russia, there will almost certainly be war in the next decade or so with the odds against US."156 Clayton feared that the Greek communists would gain power and align Greece with the Soviet Union. The success of the communists in Greece would have a bandwagon effect throughout Europe. President Truman put it this way:

If we were to turn our back on the world, areas such as Greece, weakened and divided as a result of the war, would fall into the Soviet orbit without much effort on the part of the Russians. The success of Russia in such areas and our avowed lack of interest would lead to the growth of domestic Communist parties in such European countries as France and Italy, where they already were significant threats. Inaction ... could result in handing to the Russians vast areas of the globe now denied to them.157

Truman took action. He delivered a special address to Congress on 12 March 1947, setting forth what became known as the Truman Doctrine. Thereafter, it "would be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures." He asked Congress to allocate four hundred million dollars in aid for Greece and Turkey. A "fateful hour" had arrived. Nations had to choose "between alternate ways of life .... If we falter in our leadership," Truman warned, "we may endanger the peace of the world." 158

Three months later, after failing to make headway on a German settlement at a conference in Moscow, Secretary of State Marshall gave a commencement address at Harvard in which he proposed that the United States help to fund Europe's reconstruction should Europeans design a satisfactory plan for it. The Soviet Union was not acting aggressively, but it was consolidating its influence in Eastern Europe and maneuvering to capitalize on mounting unrest in Western Europe. "Europe is steadily deteriorating," said Assistant Secretary Clayton on 27 May. "Millions of people in the cities are slowly starving .... Without further and substantial aid from the United States, economic, social, and political disintegration will overwhelm Europe."

In the western zones of Germany, rations were cut to twelve hundred calories per day per person. Marshall and his assistants feared that without additional food deliveries they would lose "the great struggle ... to prevent [Germany] going communistic." 159

Truman understood that he needed to put events in a context that the American people could comprehend if they were to support the initiatives he was now contemplating. He explained that it was a struggle berween alternative ways of life. It was not a military struggle but a political one, an ideological struggle, a spiritual struggle. Nations in much of the world, Truman stated in a speech at Baylor University just days before he announced the Truman Doctrine, were heading toward central planning. Free enterprise was challenged everywhere. And where free enterprise was endangered, so were other cherished freedoms, such as freedom of speech and of religion. In the president's view, all these freedoms were indivisible. 160 They were at risk because of the devastation wrought by the war, because of people's yearnings for a better future. They were at risk because strong communist parties were competing successfully for office, because armed minorities were willing to use force to seize power, and because the Kremlin hovered in the background willing to give succor to such efforts and eager to capitalize on them.

America's own future was at risk. "Our deepest concern with European recovery is that it is essential to the maintenance of the civilization in which the American way of life is rooted," Truman explained. "If Europe fails to recover, the people of these countries might be driven to the philosophy of despair [of totalitarianism]. Such a turn of events would constitute a shattering blow to peace and stability in the world. It might well compel us to modify our own economic system and to forgo, for the sake of our own security, the enjoyment of many of our freedoms and privileges." 161

U.S. officials were motivated to act, then, not because Stalin was an evil dictator, killing millions of people in his own country and subjugating peoples on the periphery of the Soviet Union, but because of conditions in the international system, and out of fear that social turmoil and economic paralysis in Europe would play into communist hands, affording Stalin new opportunities to expand Soviet power. They also feared that floundering occupation policies in Germany and Japan might allow those countries to gravitate into a Soviet orbit and that decolonization in the third world would be exploited by the Kremlin. They had learned that once a totalitarian government possessed great power, it was likely to wage war, and even if it did not wage war, its control of huge resources and markets throughout Eurasia meant that it endangered America's free political economy. "If communism is allowed to absorb the free nations," Truman subsequently explained, "then we would be isolated from our sources of supply and detached from our friends. Then we would have to take defense measures which might really bankrupt our economy, and change our way of life so that we couldn't recognize it as American any longer." 162

No country was more critical than Germany. The integration of Germany into the postwar international system was the overriding issue. "The only really dangerous thing in my mind," said George Kennan in 1946, "is the possibility that the technical skills of the Germans might be combined with the physical resources of Russia."163 From the moment the war ended, top u.s. officials recognized that the revival of German coal production was essential for the economic revival of the rest of Europe, on which, in turn, social peace depended. During the Potsdam Conference, President Truman had ordered General Dwight D. Eisenhower, then commander of American troops in Europe, to make the production and export of twenty-five million tons of coal the number one priority of U.S. occupation policy in Germany (other than the health and safety of U.S. troops themselves). This priority had far reaching implications. The successful large-scale mining of coal, acknowledged General Clay, meant "some restoration of the German economy, and some industrial activity to support coal mining." 164

But the economy in the British, French, and American occupation zones floundered during 1946, causing immense consternation in Washington. When officials went to work designing the Marshall Plan, Kennan and his associates in the State Department maintained that reviving German production was the key to European recovery, yet they feared that a revived Germany might not be within their power to control. There was no certainty how it would behave once the occupation was over or how it would orient itself in the international system. When Marshall went to Moscow to discuss the future of Germany at the Big Four Council of Foreign Ministers in March 1947, he took John Foster Dulles, the prominent Republican foreign-policy spokesman, with him. Germany's economic potential, Dulles told Marshall, had to be integrated into western Europe without "giving economic mastery to the Germans." This was a daunting challenge, as Dulles recognized. Once they began recovering, he acknowledged, the Germans would "almost certainly be dominated by a spirit of revenge and ambition to recover a great power status." They might align with the Soviet Union or act independently. Either way, danger lurked.165

But it could not be avoided. Steps had to be taken to expedite coal production in the Ruhr. No reparations in the form of raw materials, machine tools, or anything else should be given to the U.S.S.R. German resources had to be harnessed for the recovery of western Europe. The Moscow conference partly foundered on this issue of reparations. Although Marshall hoped to sustain wartime cooperation, he told Stalin, he could not continue to haggle about the future of Germany. Action was imperative.166 At a meeting on 3 July, Secretary of State Marshall, Secretary of War Robert Patterson, and Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal agreed: "Germany must cooperate fully in any effective European plan, and that the economic revival of Europe depends in considerable part on a recovery of German production-in coal, in food, steel, fertilizer, ete., and on efficient use of such European resources as the Rhine River."l67 A week later, General Clay was instructed to boost the level of industrial production in the western zones.

The American offensive-the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, and the rebuilding of western Germany-was a reaction to the anarchy in the international system, upon which the United States believed the Kremlin might capitalize. Fear drove policy. Truman and his advisers understood they were placing the reconstruction of western Europe and the cooptation of western Germany over their desire to sustain their wartime cooperation with the Soviet Union. They did not seek to provoke Stalin or to endanger Soviet security, but they believed they had to act as they did, even if it meant that the U.S.S.R. would feel provoked. Prudence demanded action.

Stalin was not surprised. The capitalists were acting as capitalists, seeking to form a bloc against Soviet Russia. Initially, he pondered Soviet participation in the Marshall Plan. He sent Molotov and a hundred technical advisers to a conference in Paris in July 1947 to discuss Marshall's overture for the European Recovery Program. But while Molotov negotiated, Stalin changed his mind. He saw encirclement. He believed, quite rightly, that the terms for participation included the opening of the east European nations where the Red Army was still enforcing Soviet control. The financial credits would prove illusory, he said, and would form a pretext to isolate the Soviet Union.

The Americans were trying to maneuver their way into Eastern Europe. They were seeking to harness German power against the Soviet Union. Stalin ordered the governments of Czechoslovakia and Poland, which were mightily enticed to participate, not to permit themselves to be lured by the American offer. 168

But Stalin did much more than pressure his allies to rebuff American overtures. Seeing danger, he orchestrated a new round of purges in Eastern Europe, reshuffled the composition of governments, and planted his minions in power more firmly. Soviet delegates walked out of the Allied Control Council that was supposed to be governing Germany. The Kremlin tightened controls over access to Berlin, and suppressed opponents of the SED in the Soviet zone in eastern Germany. In Czechoslovakia, Stalin supported a communist seizure of power in February 1948; almost overnight a democratically elected government was transformed into a "People's Democracy." With other nations on the Soviet periphery, Stalin negotiated defense agreements. Inside his own country, he boosted military expenditures. "We do not wish for war," he said, "but we are not afraid of it." 169

Stalin believed the capitalists had thrown down the gauntlet. Although he had been planning the move for quite some time, he convened a meeting in Poland in September 1947 and established the Communist Information Bureau (Cominform) to improve his control over and coordination among European communist parties. At this meeting, his representatives announced that the world was being divided into two camps. Peaceful coexistence was impossible. Western capitalist initiatives had to be thwarted. The Marshall Plan had to be defeated. Efforts to unite and reconstruct the western zones of Germany had to be challenged. If necessary, Stalin would blockade Berlin. The former capital of Nazi Germany, although officially administered by the four occupation powers and divided into four zones, lay inside Soviet controlled east Germany and could be easily squeezed to counter Western initiatives. At a special session of the Politburo on 14 March 1948, Stalin explained his thinking: "The innumerable conferences taking place in recent years indicated clearly to us that we cannot come to an agreement with the camp opposing us just as water and fire are unable to come to terms. The present situation of a hostile yet peaceful world may still last for a long time but there will come a time when conflict, I repeat, will be inevitable." 170

Ideology shaped Stalin's interpretation of the actions of America and Britain, and provided a menu of possible responses. He could try to exploit divisions among the capitalist powers. He could try to mobilize the European proletariat to thwart the actions of their bourgeois governments. In fact, Stalin denounced French and Italian communists for their previous postwar collaboration with other political parties and now encouraged them to obstruct implementation of the Marshall Plan, but he also cautioned against adventurism, against acting too crudely, against provoking even more ominous reactions from the capitalist adversary.171 Stalin told the Yugoslav communists that they should stop supporting the communists in Greece. That struggle should be postponed for a more propitious time, he insisted. "The entire question rests in the balance of forces. We must go into battle not when the enemy wants us to, but when it's in our interests." 172

But if there were dangers in the international environment, communist ideology also postulated opportunities. Ever since the 1920s, Stalin had ruminated about a "coalition between the proletariat revolution in Europe and the colonial revolution in the East ... against the world front of imperialism."173 Now, in late 1947 and early 1948, Stalin returned to this theme with greater emphasis than ever before. He told a special session of the Politburo, on 14 March 1948, "we should energetically support the revolutionary struggle of the oppressed peoples of the dependent and colonial countries against the imperialism of America, England, and France." Many countries once controlled by European powers, Stalin explained, already "had entered the path of national liberation." Their struggles would help precipitate the crisis of capitalism long postulated by Marxist-Leninist theory. The Kremlin, he said, could do much to hasten the revolutionary process in Central and South America and, even more so, in Asia. We have already done a lot, he told his comrades, to "accelerate the emancipation of Asiatic peoples, although I think henceforth we should increase tenfold our work in this direction." China's liberation movement, Stalin maintained, would become a model for the future. Revolutionary nationalist turmoil in the third world provided boundless opportunities for the expansion of communist influence and the erosion of capitalist power.174

While Stalin acknowledged weakness in Europe and opportunity in Asia and Latin America, Truman and his advisers believed that they still had an opportunity to act from a position of strength in Europe. "In the necessary delicate apportioning of our resources," wrote Assistant Secretary of War Howard C. Petersen in mid-1947, "the time element permits emphasis on strengthening the economic dikes against Soviet communism rather than upon preparing for a possible eventual, but not yet inevitable war." 175 If the passage of time was likely to mean the further accretion of state power, more experiments in central planning, and proliferating trade and exchange controls, it was urgent to act now while the correlation of forces was still in America's favor. If the food shortages, work stoppages, and political turmoil in the western zones of Germany portended uncertainty about the future of Germany, it was imperative to act now before the German communists and their Soviet backers outmaneuvered Western-oriented parties and politicians.

By the fall of 1947, U.S. officials no longer felt they had the time to try to work out cooperative agreements. They had to act quickly to mobilize West German resources for the economic reconstruction and financial stabilization of western Europe. At a London meeting of foreign ministers in December, Soviet officials continued to bargain meaningfully over the future of Germany even while the Kremlin fomented riots and demonstrations in France and Italy against the proposed Marshall Plan. Precisely because the international environment was so fraught with risk, and precisely because the communists in Italy had a real chance to win the elections scheduled for April 1948, Truman and Marshall pressed Congress to pass emergency relief legislation, and then they capitalized on the news of the communist coup in Prague to push for passage of the legislation supporting the Marshall Plan.

Even more important, they could no longer afford to haggle over the future of Germany. The Americans and British wanted to unify the British, French, and American zones in a federal republic, implement currency reform there, and boost industrial production, thereby integrating this new West Germany into a plan for European recovery. France equivocated and remonstrated, fearful that such Anglo-American initiatives might provoke Soviet aggression in the short run or create a German Frankenstein in the long run. "The thing that impressed me," said Will Clayton after talking to French officials in the fall of 1947, "was the intensity with which the French people ... regarded the possibility of an attack by Germany again." Marshall tried to allay these worries, but he was insistent on moving ahead. "Maximum German contribution to European recovery," he wrote, "cannot be obtained without establishment of political organization of western Germany. ... Failure to proceed would appear to Soviets as sign of weak ness .... While appreciating French concern, US government does not believe that western nations can permit themselves to be deterred." 176

In other words, the Soviet threats to blockade Berlin must not thwart the Western initiatives. Truman, Marshall, and their colleagues did not think the Soviet Union would go to war over Germany. George Kennan and Charles Bohlen, the nation's foremost experts on Soviet Russia, did not believe Stalin would attack. Indeed, the United States could try to build up West German power and leverage its way into the Soviet sphere precisely because it calculated that the Soviet Union was too weak to respond militarily. Stalin might threaten, might clamp down in his own sphere, and might try to blockade Berlin, but he was not ready for war. He could not ignore America's atomic monopoly. Stalin would defer to American power, Marshall calculated, even while he denounced it or denied it. The Soviet leader would bluster. He would repress. He would foment unrest. But these actions, Marshall told his cabinet colleagues, reflected Soviet "desperation," not strength. They are bluffing, said General Clay on 17 June 1948, "and their hand can and should be called now. "177

Conditions in the international arena encouraged U.S. officials to go on the diplomatic offensive in 1947 and 1948. Digesting the lessons of recent history, U.S. officials believed they had to act before the skilled labor, resources, and industrial infrastructure of Europe fell into the grasp of a totalitarian adversary, which would put America's free political economy at risk. But if the existing correlation of forces enabled the United States to act swiftly in Western Europe and Japan, opportunities still abounded for the Kremlin to further its influence and its power in Eastern Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

Stalin never forswore his determination to safeguard Soviet security and to oversee the forces of worldwide revolution. So long as cooperation with the West promised the possibility of expediting reconstruction at home and controlling the revival of German and Japanese power abroad, he was prepared to cool the ardor of his revolutionary comrades and sometimes even betray them. But once Truman declared that he was waging a war against evil for the soul of mankind, Stalin saw that the international landscape was fraught not only with the dangers postulated by Marxist-Leninist ideology, but also with opportunities.

Indeed, danger and opportunity would define the Cold War. Embedded in the international system were social forces of order and disorder, vacuums of power, and wars of national liberation. Who would win the spiritual battle for the soul of mankind after depression, war, and genocide? Who would fill the vacuums of power in central Europe and northeast Asia after the defeat of Germany and Japan? How would wars of national liberation in Asia and Africa shape the international configuration of power after the demise of Europe's colonies? Stalin and Truman pondered these questions. They were wracked with fear and inspired by hope. Ideology and historical experience shaped the way they saw the dangers and the opportunities that lurked in the international system. But so did domestic politics.

Truman was not eager to go on an offensive against the Soviet Union and international communism. By 1947-48, he knew that American public opinion had grown deeply suspicious of Russia, and that the Republican Party was eager to attack him for appeasing another totalitarian adversary. Yet he was far from certain that the public would support a vigorous foreign policy, which would be costly. In November 1946, voters had repudiated his party and put Republicans in control of both houses of Congress for the first time since the 1920s. But the election had been fought primarily on domestic issues. Many newly elected senators, such as Joseph McCarthy from Wisconsin and John Bricker from Ohio, were economic nationalists and political isolationists, more eager to attack the president for being soft on communists at home than to press him to do anything abroad.178

Truman's prestige was at rock bottom after the elections of November 1946, with only about 30 percent of Americans thinking he was doing a good job. Fed up with shortages and strikes, they were primarily concerned about the costs of housing and the price of meat. Businessmen wanted to crush unions; southern segregationists wanted to keep blacks in their place; America Firsters wanted to rid the country of domestic spies and communist traitors.

Truman acted in the international arena because he feared Stalin would exploit conditions to aggrandize Soviet power, not because he felt a groundswell of public opinion demanding new foreign-policy initiatives. The president and his advisers believed they were far ahead of the public in wanting to take action, and thought they had to "shock" or "electrify" the American people into support. In meetings with Democratic and Republican leaders of Congress, Secretary Marshall and Under Secretary Acheson realized they had to pose the threat in stark ideological terms if they were to garner congressional support for a policy of "containment." Truman's aides and State Department officials invested a huge amount of time in drafting the president's address to Congress asking for aid to Greece and Turkey. Truman insisted that the message be framed in simple language that the American people could understand. The looming contest was a struggle between good and evil, between freedom and slavery.179 "I wanted no hedging in this speech," he recalled in his memoirs. "This was America's answer to the surge of expansion of communist tyranny. It had to be clear and free of hesitation and double talk." 180

Domestic opinion was ripe. Support for Truman soared in the spring of 1947 as he took the offensive against the Soviet Union. Truman's intent was not to launch a crusade that would entrap him and his successors, but he did. His ideological language deeply resonated. Religious evangelicals and racial segregationists, right-wing extremists, and anti-New Dealers thrived on anticommunist rhetoric. Truman's creation of loyalty boards to screen the backgrounds of federal employees and his support of legislation to create the CIA and the National Security Council "neutered the Republican resurgence."181

But the president also became a prisoner of his own rhetoric.182 Highlighting the communist menace abroad, how could he ignore it at home? In July 1946, 36 percent of Americans told pollsters that domestic communists should be either killed or imprisoned.l83 Truman's conservative foes exploited this public attitude and manipulated the president's language to suit their purposes. They wanted to expel communists from the government, crush "leftists," and repudiate the New Deal. Two weeks after the president delivered his Truman Doctrine message to Congress, J. Edgar Hoover, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, told the House Un-American Activities Committee that the administration was not doing enough to root out subversives. Public ire, he said, needed to be aroused. "Victory will be assured once communists are identified and exposed, because the public will take the first step of quarantining them so they can do no harm. Communism, in reality, is not a political party. It is a way of life-an evil and malignant way of life." 184

The struggle to contain Soviet power became an ideological crusade. This was understandable. The American people had just vanquished one totalitarian foe; they now faced another. They knew Stalin's regime was ruthless and knew he was imposing "godless" communist governments on countries such as Poland and Romania, from which some Americans had themselves emigrated. They did not ask if Stalin was different from Hitler. They assumed the answer was clear. And they realized that Stalin had support in many lands beyond the Soviet periphery. Richard Nixon, a newly elected Republican congressman from California who had run a strong anticommunist campaign, visited Europe in early 1947. He saw that French and Italian communists were capitalizing politically on Europe's dire economic conditions. The threat was real, he believed, and immediate. "Communists throughout the world owe their loyalty not to the countries in which they live but to Russia," he said.185

Domestic political battles, therefore, reinforced the ideological and geostrategic convictions of U.S. officials. But Republicans and Democrats shared a common vocabulary: they believed they were in a battle to preserve the American way of life. "If Western Europe goes behind the Iron Curtain," declared Republican senator William Knowland, "the whole productive potential of that section of the world will fall into the Russian orbit ... [and] the repercussions upon our own domestic economy would be ... terrific." If the United States did not employ its vast power when it still had an opportunity to do so, George Kennan warned, it would face a Europe that "would be no less hostile" than the Europe of Hitler's dreams. Such a Europe would force the United States to change, requiring increases in defense spending, controls over the economy, more intense hunts for domestic subversives, and more infringements on personal freedoms. The United States, Truman predicted, might have to become a garrison state with "a system of centralized regimentation unlike anything we have ever known."186

Stalin's evolving policies were also a response to his domestic polity. Geopolitics, ideology, and personality shaped his attitudes, but his behavior cannot be fully understood except in the domestic context in which he operated. The Soviet people, Stalin knew, wanted a better way of life. They expected benefits, not more calls for sacrifice. Everybody, wrote the journalist ilya Ehrenburg, "expected that once victory had been won, people would know real happiness." The war itself was already being "remembered as a time of freedom." It had catalyzed feelings of community and unleashed people's creativity and ingenuity, since they had been forced "time after time to make their own decisions, to take responsibility for themselves." It had been a period almost of spontaneous de-Stalinization. After victory, they expected better. We "believed that victory would bring justice," wrote Ehrenburg, "that human dignity would triumph." 187

Stalin was not blind to the realities around him. His country was devastated, his people impoverished. His armies had conquered new lands, but ones inhabited by millions of discontented people. His soldiers returned with ideas and hopes that could not be trusted. The U.S.S.R. contained subject peoples and nationalities whose desire for autonomy had been intensified by resistance and war. The Soviet armed forces had performed heroically but now might capitalize on their popularity and challenge his power. Stalin had more stature than ever before, but he was personally insecure and fearful for his life. The nation had more power than ever before, but its long-term safety was far from assured. Communism had more resonance than ever before, but the system tottered within.

Rumblings of discontent abounded. Food was scarce, housing conditions abominable. In 1946, the Soviet grain harvest sank to 39.6 million tons compared with 95.5 million in 1940; in 1947, the nation had 14 million tons of flour compared with almost 29 million in 1940. And where food could be had, it was often inedible. "Workers and even low-level managers in rural areas endured a state of poverty which was almost beyond description." Parents could not feed or clothe their children. "Dreams of a calm, even if slow, advance forward were dashed forever." 188

Demoralization prevailed everywhere, and Stalin's spies vigilantly reported news of spreading discontent. General V. N. Gordov, conqueror of Prague and Berlin, ruminated on conditions with F. T. Rybalchenko, his former chief of staff. "People are angry about their life and complain openly," Gordov said. "There is incredible famine." Rybalchenko retorted, "Policies are such [that] nobody wants to work. All collective farmers hate Stalin and wait for his end." The recorded conversation was sent to Stalin. Gordovand his wife were executed.189

There was seething discontent in the western borderlands of Soviet Russia and in the recently annexed territories. Suppressed nationality groups and ethnic minorities wanted a softening of the Soviet way of life and an opportunity for self-expression. During 1946, Ukrainian nationalist rebels continued to fight tenaciously. Stalin's secret police reported growing foreign espionage activity. Captured suspects said they were paid by Americans and British intelligence to gather information. Rebels spread rumors of an impending war between the United States and the U.S.S.R. that would lead to the liberation of Ukraine. 190

Stalin's suspicions were stirred anew. He was determined to "deliver a blow" against any talk of "democracy," let alone subversion. He reorganized the internal Soviet police system throughout the western borderlands. He ordered Andrei Zhdanov to take charge of the propaganda administration in the party secretariat and to re-impose ideological purity on the nomenklatura and apparatchiks. He instructed Lavrenty Beria, the head of the secret police, to use slave labor to accelerate the Soviet atomic project. He reshuffled the top brass of the army and demoted Zhukov. The population of political prisoners held in a huge network of Soviet labor camps grew from 1,460,677 in 1945 to 2,199,535 in 1948; the numbers of ethnic minorities and repatriated soldiers forced to live in special settlements in forsaken places totaled almost 2.5 million at the end of 1946. Prisoners died each year by the tens of thousands: 81,917 in 1945; 30,715 in 1946; 66,830 in 1947; 50,659 in 1948.191

Stalin intimidated his subordinates one by one, not killing them but striking fear into their hearts, stripping away their independence, and reminding them that he was the source of their authority, even of their lives. Yet it was often difficult to discern what he wanted beyond a few key fundamentals: his unchallenged power, a single-party state guided by Marxist-Leninist ideology, and Soviet imperial control over the peoples of the U.S.S.R. and Eastern Europe. Over many economic matters Stalin allocated responsibility to his Council of Ministers. Defense and foreign-policy matters and ideological issues stayed within the province of the party's Politburo, which met informally and infrequently and which Stalin dominated. But the dictator's domination did not mean that his views were predetermined.192

Soviet records reveal that on many issues Stalin had no clear policy. On many matters he suspended action. Top officials discussed complex, often intersecting issues among themselves and with him-relations with the United States, the security of the Soviet Union, the future of Germany, the orientation of the communist parties abroad, the allocation of resources to industry and agriculture, the degree of national and cultural self-expression. But Stalin intervened only episodically and inconsistently.193 Russocentrism, however, loomed larger and larger in his thinking. "The patriotic [Russian] component steadily increased its relative weight in comparison with the Marxist." 194

But the mix remained inchoate. Stalin's ideology did not provide him with clear answers, nor did domestic politics shape his foreign policy. But at a time of international turmoil and internal ferment, the ideology, mixed with his personal paranoia, oriented his thinking and shaped his domestic crackdown. Nobody could be trusted, least of all capitalists. He was prepared to work with the United States, just as Truman wanted to get along with him, but on his own terms and to serve his own interests. Cooperation with the Western powers did not mean that he could allow Soviet security to be endangered or the communist experiment to be imperiled. Capitalists were stirring up discontent and brewing rebellion inside Eastern Europe and the western borderlands of the Soviet Union. They were thwarting his ambitions in Iran and Turkey. They were intent on rebuilding western Germany. They were dangerous scoundrels. The Marshall Plan confirmed his worst suspicions. It "tore the alliance apart," writes a recent biographer. Stalin regarded it as a device "to destroy Soviet military and political hegemony over Eastern Europe."195

Stalin now had no alternative but to confront his foreign adversaries. Ideology and history instructed that they could not be appeased. The loyalty and discipline of his subordinates were deemed imperative not only at home but throughout Eastern Europe. Dissidents were purged, obeisance demanded. As the iron curtain descended across Europe, opportunity beckoned in Asia. Communists were waging a tenacious struggle to gain power in China, and revolutionary nationalist leaders such as Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam and Sukarno in Indonesia were battling the French and Dutch in behalf of their people's freedom.

After the war, Stalin initially did rather little to support prospective communist allies in Asia, Africa, or Latin America. His attitude toward Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communist Party's war against the Guomindang illustrated that his priority was Soviet Russia. Stalin claimed that conditions in China were not ripe for revolution, nor the material base and class structure  conducive to success. In August 1945, he had signed an agreement with the Nationalists, since he wanted to secure Russia's periphery in northeast Asia, avoid a rift with the United States, and temper Washington's penchant to intervene in Asia on behalf of Jiang Jieshi. On key occasions, the Soviet army in Manchuria did provide arms and assistance to the Chinese communists, but Stalin urged Mao to compromise, share power, and reach a modus vivendi with the Guomindang. These actions disheartened Mao but did not alter his quest to gain power. As Stalin recounted to Bulgarian and Yugoslav communists in February 1948, the Chinese comrades agreed "in words," "but in practice kept accumulating forces." 196

Stalin's priority was not revolution in Asia and the third world but the reconstruction of Soviet Russia and protection of its frontiers. Revolution, the ultimate goal, could be deferred, even subordinated, while the Kremlin assessed whether and for how long it could collaborate with its wartime allies in shaping the future of Germany and Japan, Russia's traditional enemies. Because of Stalin's desire to "take care of [his] relations with the United States," Mao had acknowledged in December 1945, Soviet forces had not done all they might have done to thwart the movement of Nationalist troops into key cities in Manchuria. Mao's revolution could wait, Stalin thought, until he assessed the Americans' willingness to share power in Japan. Revolution against France in Vietnam could also wait, Stalin calculated, until he could determine Ho's reliability and evaluate the evolution of French domestic politics. 197

But once the Americans opted in the spring and summer of 1947 to focus on the reconstruction of Western Europe, and once French officials aligned their nation with the Americans and British in Germany and excised communists from the governing coalition in Paris, Stalin turned his attention to the vast opportunities that he thought he had to weaken the capitalists and encourage revolution in Asia. When the Truman administration reversed course in Japan in early 1948 and concentrated on rehabilitating Japan's economy rather than reforming its prewar institutions, Stalin, too, reversed course in China. He told Mao's emissaries that they now could count on him. "If socialism is victorious in China," Stalin said, "and [if] other countries follow the same road, we can consider the victory of socialism throughout the world to be guaranteed." 198

World revolution remained a distant goal, however, not to be pursued at the expense of the interests and power of the Soviet Union. When he formed the Cominform in September 1947, Stalin's aim was to gain tighter control over his minions in Europe, not to encourage worldwide revolution. In fact, he chastised French and Italian communists for allowing themselves to be outmaneuvered and warned them not to engage in insurrectionary activity.199 Ideology did not breed affinity for Stalin's communist comrades in foreign lands or make him more amenable to their wishes. His allies and clients learned to their dismay that they had to accommodate the twists and turns of his policies, even when they conflicted with their own interests and aspirations.200

Stalin despised signs of their independence and autonomy. He often was tentative and vague in communicating with communists in other nations, masking his own uncertainties. But when they acted on their own in ways he deemed harmful to Soviet interests, he could be brutally clear. He would not allow the national interests of other communist leaders to usurp his authority or interfere with his priorities. In August 1947, he was furious with Bulgarian and Yugoslav communist leaders for signing agreements without first consulting him. They were foolishly supporting the insurgency in Greece, in his view, and mistakenly seeking to intimidate Albania through the movement of Yugoslav troops. "These are leftist infatuations," he declared. Hereafter, Bulgaria and Yugoslavia must coordinate their foreign policies with the Kremlin. They must not do anything to provoke the capitalist adversary. "Right now a great electoral struggle is going on in America," Stalin lectured. "For us, it is of great importance to see what the future government there will be, because America is a powerful country, well armed. Its government is headed not by intellectuals but by moneybags who hate us terribly and look for any pretext to do us harm. "201

Stalin, alone, would shape the foreign policies of his communist neighbors. Believing that Marshal Tito in Yugoslavia was defying his leadership, Stalin tried to destroy him. In June 1948, he orchestrated Yugoslavia's expulsion from the Cominform. And at the same time he took action that provoked the United States far more than anything Tito did: Soviet troops imposed a blockade on Berlin, stopping all railroad traffic between the isolated capital and the West.

Stalin wanted to prevent the formation of an independent West German republic that might become part of a Western bloc led by the United States.If Great Britain, France, and the United States repudiated the agreements they had just signed regarding their zones in Germany, he said, he would lift the blockade. Otherwise, he would keep Berlin isolated from the rest of western Germany and seek to incorporate it into the Soviet zone.

Nothing he had done since the war had been quite so daring. If the Americans were to challenge the Soviet blockade, they might start a war in the heart of Europe. In fact, Stalin hoped that fear of such hostilities would induce France to force a reversal of the Anglo-American initiative.202

But Truman, Marshall, and their colleagues worked brilliantly to reassure their European allies. Believing that their own initiatives were critical to rebuilding Western Europe and restoring hope in democratic capitalism, they would not back off. Calculating that Stalin would not shoot down American planes and risk war, they decided to airlift supplies to Berlin. Understanding that they were asking their friends in Western Europe to take grave risks, Truman and Marshall acted to allay their fears: Marshall made it clear that U.S. troops would stay in Germany indefinitely, that Washington would provide military aid to France, and that emergency war planning would begin in earnest. More important, he and President Truman decided that the United States would join an alliance of likeminded democratic nations in the North Atlantic region, an alliance designed to deter Soviet aggression and provide reassurance against the Germans.

For some time British foreign secretary Ernest Bevin had been pressing the Americans to sign a North Atlantic treaty that would guarantee peace and security in the Old World. For 150 years, the United States had eschewed "entangling" alliances, and neither the public nor the Congress was demanding a rupture with this tradition. But Truman and Marshall knew they had to satisfy their European friends and guarantee their security. They knew they were asking the French and other Europeans to incur risks that their electorates might not support. The peoples of Europe, after all, yearned for peace and stability, not new crises and new confrontations. If American leaders were asking them to comply with American initiatives that might provoke a Soviet attack in the short run or spur German revanchism in the long run, the United States had to assume unprecedented risks and make unprecedented sacrmces.203

By responding to British overtures and French pleas, Truman and his advisers were demonstrating a capacity to empathize with allies in ways that Stalin could never emulate. But Allied pressures did not motivate U.S. actions. Fear and opportunity lay behind American actions: fear that the Soviets might otherwise gain control of much of Eurasia without war unless the United States went on the offensive, and opportunity in knowing that the United States still had the power and wealth to defeat communism, contain Soviet power, and revive democratic capitalism. Once these beliefs prevailed in Washington policymaking circles, prospective allies were able to exert leverage in Europe and beyond.204 Very soon thereafter, Truman and his advisers decided to support France in its war against communist-led insurgents in Indochina. The struggle for the soul of mankind was already assuming global dimensions.

Truman and Stalin became locked in a worldwide struggle, yet the shape of the struggle was not predetermined. Initially, both men saw reason to collaborate with their ideological adversaries. Both men grasped that national self interest could be served through cooperative arrangements. As much as each leader preferred a world ordered along lines of either democratic capitalism or communism, neither initially believed that postwar reconversion, reconstruction, or security necessitated confrontation. Indeed, both men had reason to believe and did think that immediate goals could be served by containing competition and modulating conflict.

But the Cold War came, and it engulfed the world. Why? Truman and Stalin could and did articulate the reasons for national self restraint. They could and did warn friends and potential allies not to fuel the suspicions of sensitive and powerful adversaries. But they could not control their own fears and instincts, their passions and aspirations. The structure of the international system and their ideological mind-sets overcame their initial desire to sustain their nations' collaboration.

The condition of the international system engendered fears and opportunities. At the end of the war, international society was astir with demoralized peoples yearning for a better future after decades of depression, war, genocide, and forced migration. In the center of Europe and in northeast Asia the defeat of Germany and Japan left huge vacuums of power. In time-and not a very long time, contemporaries assumed-the occupations would end and the Germans and Japanese would reconstitute their governments and political economies. They would then decide how they would configure themselves in the international system, but their future trajectory was a huge, unsettling question mark. Elsewhere in the world-in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East-local leaders and indigenous elites felt emboldened to seek independence as they witnessed their colonial masters' strength erode. They were inspired by the rhetoric of freedom and the affirmations of the principle of national self-determination. They wanted to modernize their countries, overcome the humiliations of dependency, and extinguish the misery that came with poverty. Would they choose free enterprise and liberal democracy, or planned economies and the dictatorship of the proletariat?

Stalin and Truman had to make sense of these realities, to integrate them into belief systems that comported with their rational calculations of national self-interest, the exigencies of domestic politics, and the aspirations and sensibilities of potential friends and clients. They were agents of change and shapers of international history. But they were enveloped by structure and belief.

Stalin had an immense task of reconstruction ahead within the Soviet Union and confronted huge uncertainties abroad. Germany and Japan were defeated, but they would recover, as they had before, and they would have to be dealt with. Britain and America had been partners in the war, but they were also potential rivals and they could not be trusted. If there were challenges, there were also opportunities. Soviet armies were spread across Eastern Europe and parts of northeast Asia. Stalin had a unique opportunity to secure his borders and control Russia's periphery for the indefinite future. Free elections in many of the nations occupied by the Red Army would, he knew, bring in anti-Soviet governments. Why permit them? Yet free elections in Western Europe and self-determination in the colonial world offered considerable advantages.

Stalin had to balance incentives to cooperate and temptations to compete. More than anything else Stalin wanted to protect Soviet Russia against the revival of German and, secondarily, Japanese power, goals mandated by tradition and experience, by strategic necessity and national revenge. After World War II, no Russian or Soviet leader could forsake the opportunity to control me periphery and to shape developments in Germany and Japan.

The international landscape was permissive. No nation existed that could contain Russian expansion; the vacuums could be filled to secure long-term ambitions. Marxist-Leninist thinking lurked in Stalin's actions. Cooperation with capitalist countries might be possible, indeed desirable, at least in the short term, but it was not likely to endure. Capitalist wars might engulf the U.S.S.R., as had just occurred, or, more likely, capitalists might again seek to crush the Bolshevik experiment. Even while he confided to Polish communists that he was not ruling out agreement with the United States, Stalin believed, not without cause, that Washington was seeking to use its atomic monopoly "to intimidate us and force us to yield in contentious issues concerning Japan, the Balkans, and reparations." Likewise, he thought the United States was trying to maneuver its way into Eastern Europe and was hoping to divide Russia from its newfound allies in Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, and Yugoslavia. Beware of this, he told Polish leaders.205

Suspicion pulsated through all his transactions. Capitalists would trick, deceive, and try to crush communists. Don't accept the invitation to go to London, he warned his Polish comrades in 1945. "I assure you they are not inviting you for a good purpose .... There is a group of complete rascals and ruthless murderers in the Intelligence service who would fulfill any order given to them. "206 Marxist-Leninist thinking about the world inclined Stalin to exaggerate the dangers both of American atomic diplomacy and of AngloAmerican espionage, which was occurring in the Soviet sphere of influence in Eastern Europe and even within Soviet Russia's western borderlands. Knowing the magnitude of discontent and the possibilities for widespread unrest, Stalin let his Bolshevik mentality and personal paranoia take over. He accepted the division of Europe into two camps as soon as he was convinced that the Americans were on the offensive, as they seemed to be when they announced the Truman Doctrine, articulated a program for European recovery, and orchestrated plans for the revival of the economies of Germany and Japan. Marxist-Leninist theory provided Stalin with no blueprint for a cold war, but it did give an explanation for the actions of capitalist adversaries and did outline a vision of endless possibilities for communist advancement in the third world.

Truman could not but fear, and he, too, had to act, although he did not seek a cold war. Stalin might not be seizing every opportunity to expand, as intelligence analysts repeatedly pointed out, and might be smart enough to back down when resisted, but he made enough aggressive moves to intensify Truman's anxieties. Just a few years before, other totalitarian foes had made menacing signs and then, unchecked, had declared war on the United States and dared to conquer much of the world. Why wait to take action, Truman thought, when America's wealth and power enabled it to act wisely and swiftly, if provocatively, to promote Europe's recovery, coopt western Germany and Japan, lift morale among dispirited peoples, and ignite hope in free-enterprise democracy?

Truman was a straightforward man and saw things in black and white. What he saw now was the incipient rise of another totalitarian power with an expansionist ideology. He was motivated not by Stalin's brutality-indeed he rarely talked about it-but by the challenge he saw toAmerica's way of life. Our foreign policy, he said, "is the outward expression of the democratic faith we profess."207

Inaction or retreat meant that the American way of life would be endangered not simply abroad, but also at home. It meant that prospective allies would be abandoned and their resources and manpower relinquished to a potential adversary. Should this happen, Truman warned, "it would impose upon us a much higher level of mobilization than we have today. It would require a stringent and comprehensive system of allocation and rationing in order to husband our smaller resources. It would require us to become a garrison state, and to impose upon ourselves a system of centralized regimentation unlike anything we have ever known. "208 The president understood that the distribution of power in the international system had immense ramifications for democratic capitalism in the United States.

The structure of the international system intersected with the beliefs of human agents to produce the Cold War. Truman wanted to be sure that power centers such as Western Europe, West Germany, and Japan were kept out of Stalin's grasp. But these efforts had to be supplemented with additional irlitiatives. As Stalin turned eastward and southward in accord with Marxist-Leninist thinking about opportunities for communist advancement, Truman and his advisers realized that the sources of raw materials, investment earnings, and markets of the industrialized democracies in the third world had to be preserved. "Curiously enough," Kennan wrote to Secretary of State Marshall in December 1948, "the most crucial issue of the moment in our struggle with the Kremlin is probably the problem of Indonesia. "209

A world in turmoil, where decolonization and revolutionary nationalism were embedded realities, meant that the Cold War could not be contained in Europe and northeast Asia. The lure of future victories in distant lands tempted Stalin; the fear of losses there agonized U.S. officials. In their very first national security strategy statement, approved by the president in December 1948, Truman's advisers explained their thinking: Soviet domination of Eurasia, they said, "whether achieved by armed aggression or by political and subversive means, would be strategically and politically unacceptable to the United States. "210

Believing that "Communist ideology and Soviet behavior clearly demonstrate that the ultimate objective of the USSR is the domination of the world," Truman and his aides agreed that containment would not suffice. Their first objective, they said, was "to reduce the power and influence of the USSR to limits which no longer constitute a threat to the peace, national independence and stability of the world family of nations." Their second goal was "to bring about a basic change in the conduct of international relations by the government in power in Russia."211
 

111.  Ferrell, Dear Bess, 522.

112.  Davies Diary, 28 and 29 July 1945, box 19, Davies Papers.

113.  For the end of the war, see Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005).

114.  For Byrnes's thinking about the atomic bomb, see Brown Log, 16 July-1 August 1945, James F. Byrnes Papers, Clemson University Library, Clemson, S.C

115.  Davies Diary, 28 and 29 July 1945, box 19, Davies Papers.

116.  For the end of the war, see Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the Surren­der ofJapan (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005).

117.  For Byrnes's thinking about the atomic bomb, see Brown Log, 16 July-1 August 1945, James F. Byrnes Papers, Clemson University Libraty, Clemson, S.c.

118.  For information on Stalin, Molotov, and the meeting of the council of foreign ministers, see V. O. Pechatnov, " 'The Allies Are Pressing on You to Break Your Will .. .': Foreign Policy Correspondence between Stalin and Molotov and Other Politburo Members, September 1945-December 1946," CWIHP, Working Paper No. 26 (Woodrow Wilson International Center, 1999), 18-32; Gorlizki and Khlevniuk, Cold Peace, 19-23.

119.  For insight into Byrnes's thinking, see Messer, End of an Alliance, 137-55; Gregg Herken, The Winning Weapon: The Atomic Bomb in the Cold War (New York: Knopf, 1980),66-94; Eduard Mark, "American Policy Toward Eastern Europe and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941-46: An Alternative Interpretation," Journal of American History 68 (September 1981): 313-36.

120.  Ferrell, Off the Record, 72; Blum, Price of Vision, 512-13; Minutes of Cabinet meetings, October-December 1945, Matthew J. Connelly Papers, box 1, Harry S. Truman Library (HSTL), Independence, Mo.

121.  Clark Clifford Oral History, pp. 180-84, HSTL.

122.  "Address on Foreign Policy," 27 October 1945, Harry S. Truman, Public Papers of the Presidents, 1945 (Washington, D.C: Government Printing Office, 1961),431-38 (hereafter cited as PPP: HST, year, page).

123.  For the quotation, see Diary of William Leahy, 27 October 1945, William L. Leahy Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C

124.  Ferrell, Off the Record, 79-80; Messer, End of an Alliance, 156-66; Spalding, First Cold Warrior, 24-35.

125.  Pechatnov, "Harriman's Mission to Moscow," esp. 26--27; Geoffrey Roberts, "Sexing Up the Cold War: New Evidence on the Molotov-Truman Talks of April 1945," Cold War History 4 (April 2004): 105-25.

126.    Montefiore, Stalin, 445; Vladislav Zubok and Constantine Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin's Cold War:
From Stalin to Khrushchev (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), 42-43; Jonathan Haslam, "The Cold War as History," Annual Review of Political Science 6 (2003): 92-93; Pechamov, " 'The Allies Are Pressing on You,' " 31.

127.    Joseph Stalin, "New Five Year Plan for Russia," 9 February 1946, Vital Speeches of the Day 12 (1 March 1946): 300-304.

128.   Banac, Diary of Georgi Dimitrov, 358.

129.  David Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1994), 168.

130.  Joseph Stalin, For Peaceful Coexistence: Postwar Interviews (New York: International Publishers, 1951),11-12.

131.  Transcript of interview between Stalin and Byrnes, 24 December 1945, G. P. Kynim and Y. Laufer, eds., SSSR i germanski vopros, 1941-1949: documenty iz arkhiva vneshnei politiki Rossiiskoifederatsii [USSR and the German Question: Documents from the Foreign Policy Archives of the Russian Federation], Vol 2: May 9, 1945-0ctober 3, 1946 (Moskva: Mezhdunarodnye, omosheni, 2000), 335-36; Pechamov, " 'Allies Are Pressing on You,' " 10-11.

132.    Memorandum, by Litvinov, 5 July 1945, in Kynim and Laufer, USSR and the German Question, 171-75; Litvinov to Stalin, 25 May 1946, ibid., 517-19; draft statement prepared by Litvinov and 1. M. Maiskii, 12 June 1946, ibid., 596--98.

133.    Jeffrey Burds, "The Early Cold War in Soviet West Ukraine, 1944-1948," The Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East European Studies, No. 1505 (Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001),25-30; Kuromiya, Freedom and Terror in the Donbas, 251-323.

134.  Burds, "Early Cold War in Soviet West Ukraine"; Jeffrey Burds, "The Soviet War Against 'Fifth Columnists': The Case of Chechnya, 1942-4," Journal of Contemporary History 41(2): 309-14; Eduard Mark, "The War Scare of 1946 and Its Consequences," Diplomatic History 21 (Summer 1997): 406-407,410-11; Richard J. Aldrich, The Hidden Hand· Britain, America, and Cold War Secret Intelligence (New York: The Overlook Press, 2002), 142-45; Kuromiya, Freedom and Terror in the Donbas, 313-16; Itina Mukhina, "New Revelations from the Former Soviet Archives: The Kremlin, the Warsaw Uprising, and the Coming of the Cold War," Cold War History 6 (August 2006): 397-411.

135.  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),55; also see Haslam, "Making of Foreign Policy under Stalin"; for most recent assessments, see Norman M. Naimark, "Stalin and Europe in the Postwar Period, 1945-1953: Issues and Problems," Journal of Modern European History 2 (2004): 28--56; Roberts, Stalin's Wars; Vladimir O. Pechatnov, "The Soviet Union and the Outside World, 1944-1953," Cambridge History of the Cold War, ed. by Melvyn P. Leffler and Odd Arne Westad, 3 vols. (London: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).

136.  Naimark, "Stalin and Europe in the Postwar Period," 36.

137.  Gomulka's Memorandum of a Conversation with Stalin, third quarter of 1945, in "Conversations with Stalin," 272, CWIHP.

138.  Walter Bedell Smith to Secretary of State, 5 April 1946, ibid., 293-94; "Report of the Labour Party on Its Goodwill Mission to the USSR," [Summer 1946], ibid., 330-32; "Answers to the Questions Posed by A. Werth," 17 September 1946, ibId., 339-40; "Answers to the Questions of Mr. H. Bailey," 26 October 1946, ibid., 341-44; for the rheme of cooperation, also see esp. Roberts, Stalin's Wars; Pechamov, "The Soviet Union and the Outside World."

139.  Pechatnov, "Harriman's Mission to Moscow," 45-46; "Answers to the Questions of Mr. H. Bailey," 26 October 1946, in "Conversations with Stalin," 344, CWIHP.

140.  Stalin's concern with Japan emerges clearly in all the recent research. See, for example, Pechatnov, " 'The Allies Are Pressing on You,' " 11-16.

141.    These generalizations have been shaped by Naimark, The Russians in Germany; Naimark, "The Soviets and the Christian Democrats"; Roberts, Stalin's Wars, 228-45, 350-55; Vladimir K. Volkov, "German Question as Stalin Saw It," draft paper for the conference "Stalin and the Cold War, 1945-1953" (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University, 1999); Wilfried Loth, Stalin's Unwanted Child: The Soviet Union, the German Question and the Founding of the GDR (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998).

142.  Csaba Bekes, "Soviet Plans to Establish the Cominform in Early 1946: New Evidence from the Hungarian Archives," CWIHP Bulletin 10 (March 1998): 135. These generalizations emerge from my reading of the many documents assembled in "Conversations with Stalin," CWIHP; Roberts, Stalin's Wars, 245-53; Mark, "Revolution by Degree"; Zubok, Inside the Kremlin's Cold War; Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb; Mastny, Cold War and Soviet Insecurity; Pechatnov, "'The Allies Are Pressing on You'"; Pechatnov, "The Soviet Union and the Outside World."

143.  The "Long Tdegram" can be found in George F. Kennan, Memoirs, 1925-1950 (New York: Bantam, 1967),583-98.

144.  W. Averell Harriman and Elie Abel, Special Envoy to Churchtll and Stalin, 1941-1946 (New York:
Random House, 1975),535-36.

145.  For U.S. policy in Germany, see especially Carolyn Eisenberg, Drawing the Line: The American Decision to Divide Germany, 1944-1949 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996),71-276; for Soviet espionage, see Katherine A. S. Sibley, Red Spies in America: Stolen Secrets and the Dawn of the Cold War (Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 2004); Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev, The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America-The Stalin Era (New York: Random House, 1999).

146.  These generalizations about Truman's policies in 1945 and 1946 are elaborated upon in my book A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1993),25-181; for different interpretations, see Offner, Another Such Victory, 1-184; Marc Trachtenberg, A Constructed Peace: The Making of the European Settlement (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999),3-65; McCullough, Truman; Hamby, Man of the People; Deborah Welch Larson, Origins of Containment: A Psychological Explanation (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985); John L. Gaddis, The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941-47 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972).

147.  Memorandum for the president, by McCloy, 26 April 1945, box 178, President's Secretary's File (PSF), Harry S. Truman Papers (HSTP), HSTL; Diary of Henry L. Stimson, 19 April 1945, Henry L. Stimson Papers, Yale University.

148.  Acheson testimony, 12 June 1945, U.S. Senate, Committee on Banking and Currency, Bretton Woods Agreements, 79th Cong., 1st sess., (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1945), 1-51, esp. 19,20,21,48-49.

149.    Quoted in Igor Lukes, "The Czech Road to Communism," in Naimark and Gibianskii, eds., Establishment of Communist Regimes in Eastern Europe, 249; for an elaboration of this idea, see Abrams, Struggle for the Soul of the Nation.

150.  A.J.P. Taylor, "The European Revolution," Listener 34 (22 November 1945): 576; see Judt, Postwar, 215-19.

151.  Adam Westoby, Communism Since World War II (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1981), 14-15; Roberts, "Ideology, Calculation, and Improvisation," 671; Abrams, Struggle for the Soul of the Nation, 9-38.

152.  Acheson testimony, 8 March 1945, U.S. Senate, Committee on Banking and Currency, Bretton Wood Agreements, 1: 35.

153.  Acheson testimony, 13 March 1946, U.S. Senate, Committee on Banking and Currency, Anglo­American Financial Agreement, 79th Cong., 2nd sess. (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Of­lice, 1946),306.

154.  "Statement by the President," 6 February 1946, PPP: HST, 1946, 106; Cabinet Minutes, January-March 1946, Connelly Papers, box 1.

155.  Stimson to Truman, 16 May 1945, box 157, PSF, HSTP; Joseph Grew to Truman, 27 June 1945, Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, Potsdam, 1: 267-80 (hereafter cited as FRUS); Central Intelligence Agency, "Review of the World Situation," 26 September 1947, box 203, PSF, HSTP.

156.    Memorandum, by Will Clayton, 5 March 1947, Frederick J. Dobney, ed., Selected Papers of Will Clayton (Baltimore, Md.: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971), 198.

157.  Harry S. Truman, Memoirs: Years of Trial and Hope, 1946-1952 (New York: Signet, 1956),124-25.

158.  "Special Message to the Congress," 12 March 1947, PPP: HST, 1947, 176-80.

159.  For Marshall's speech, see Department of State Bulletin 16 (15 June 1947): 1159-60; Clayton to Acheson, 27 May 1947, FRUS, 1947,3: 230--32; Howard C. Petersen to Robert P. Patterson, 12 June 1947, box 8, general decimal@e, Robert P. Patterson Papers, Record Group 107, National Archives (NA), Washington, D.C.

160.  "Address on Foreign Economic Policy," 6 March 1947, PPP: HST, 1947, 170--71.

161.  "Special Message to the Congress," 19 December 1947, ,b,d., 516-17.

162.    "Radio and Television Address," 6 March 1952, ibid., 1952-1953, 194-95; also see "Special Mes­sage to the Congress," 6 March 1952, ibid., 189.

163.  Kennan, "Russia's National Objectives," 10 April 1947, box 17, George F. Kennan Papers, Seeley Mudd Library, Princeton University, Princeton, N.J.

164.  Directive to Dwight D. Eisenhower, 26 July 1945, FRUS, Potsdam, 2: 1028-30; Jean Edward Smith, ed., The Papers of General Lucius D. Clay: Germany, 1945-1949, 2 vols. (Bloomington: Indiana Uni­versity Press, 1974), 1: 44.

165.  Memoranda, by John Foster Dulles, 26 February and 7 March 1947, box 31,John Foster Dulles Pa­pers, Mudd Library, Princeton University.

166.  Memorandum of Conversation, 15 April 1947 ,PRUS, 1947,2: 339-44; Robert H. Van Meter, "Sec­retary of State Marshall, General Clay, and the Moscow Council of Foreign Ministers of 1947: A Response to Philip Zelikow," Diplomacy and Statecraft 16 (2005): 139-67.

167.  Meeting of the secretaries of state, war, and navy, 3 July 1947, box 3, safe@e, Robert P. Patterson Papers, Records of the Office of the Secretary of War, RG 107, NA.

168.  Minutes of a Visit to Generalissimo J. V. Stalin, by Czech delegation, 9 July 1947, in "Conversations with Stalin," 395-99, CWlHP; Geoffrey Roberts, "Moscow and the Marshall Plan: Politics, Ideol­ogy, and the Onset of the Cold Wat," Europe-Asia 46 (1994): 1371--85.

169.  For the quotation, see "Stenographic Record of a Speech by Comrade J. V. Stalin at a Special Ses­sion of the Politburo," 14 March 1948, in "Conversations with Stalin," 432, CWlHP; Mastny, Cold War and Soviet Insecurity, 23-46; Zubok and Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin's Cold War, 50--52, 104-108; Kramer, "Soviet Union and the Founding of the GDR," 1099-1102.

170.  "Stenographic Record," Stalin speech, 14 March 1948, "Conversations with Stalin," 429, CWIHP.

171.  Record of a Meeting of Comrade 1. V. Stalin with the Secretary of the CC French Communist Party Thorez, 18 November 1947, ibid., 403-405.

172.  Report of Milovan Djilas about a Secret Soviet-Bulgarian-Yugoslav Meeting, 10 February 1948, CWlHP Bulletin 10 (March 1998): 128-34.

173.  Stalin, "Foundations of Leninism," 110.

174.  "Stenographic Record," Stalin speech, 14 March 1948, "Conversations with Stalin," 429CWIHP.

175.  Memorandum by chief of staff, ND Uuly 1947], ABC 471.6 Atom (17 August 1945), section E American-British Conversations, Records of the War Department General and Special Staffs, 165, NA; also see Walter Millis, ed., The Forrestal Diaries (New York: Viking, 1951),350-51.

176.  For Clayton's statement, see Dabney, Selected Papers, 208; for Marshall's views, see Marshall to (fery, 26 May 1948, FRUS, 1948,2: 284.

177.  Marshall statement, in cabinet meeting, 23 July 1948, box 1, Connelly Papers; for Clay, see Smith, (Papers, 2: 708; for the views of Kennan and Bohlen, see FRUS, 1948,3: 152-54, 157-58, 177, 186; II nan to Lauris Norstad, 4 May 1948, box 33, Records of the Policy Planning Staff, RG 59, NA.

178.  Randall B. Woods and Howard Jones, Dawning of the Cold War: The United States' Quest for 0, (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991), 98-102; Meg Jacobs, Pocketbook Politics: Econo Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton, N.].: Princeton University Press, 201 222-31.

179.  Memo, by Clayton, 5 March 1947, Dabney, Selected Papers, 198; Minutes of the First Meeting of Special Committee to Study Assistance to Greece and Turkey, 24 February 1947, FRUS, 194i 47; Dean Acheson, Present at the Creation: My Years at the State Department (New York: Nor! 1969),218-19; Joseph M. Jones, The Fifteen Weeks (New York: Viking, 1955), 129-70.

180.    Truman, Memoirs: Years of Trial and Hope, 128.

181.  Jonathan Bell, The Lzheral State on Trial: The Cold War and American Politics in the Truman ~ (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004),80.

182.  Ibid., 46-120; Richard M. Freeland, The Truman Doctrine and the Origins of McCarthyism: For, Policy, Domestic Politics and Internal Security, 1946-48 (New York: New York University Pr 1985); Thomas]. Christensen, Useful Adversaries: Grand Strategy, Domestic Mobilization, and S American Conflict, 1947-1958 (Princeton, N.].: Princeton University Press, 1996), 49-69; Me Small, Democracy and Diplomacy: The Impact of Domestic Politics on u.s. Foreign Policy, 1789-1 (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996),84-86.

183.    Christensen, Useful Adversaries, 52.

184.    Richard Gid Powers, Not Without Honor: The History of American Anti-Communism (New Y. The Free Press, 1995),217.

185.    Ibid., 223; Bell, Liberal State on Trial, 92.

186.  For Knowland's quotation, see Appendix to the Congressional Record, vol. 93, p. A4915; for II nan's view, see Policy Planning Staff Paper No. 20, "Effect Upon the United States If the Europ Recovery Plan Is Not Adopted," Policy Planning Staff Papers, ed. by Anna Kasten Nelson, 3 , (New York: Garland, 1983),2: 78-79; for Truman, see "Special Message to Congress," 6 M, 1952, PPP: HST, 1952-53, 189.

187.    Ehrenburg, The War, 124; Merridale, Night of Stone, 213-14; Overy, Russia's War, 329.

188.  Donald Filtzer, Soviet Workers and Late Stalinism: Labour and the Restoration of the Stalinist Sys After World War II (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 46-47, 76; Kurorr Freedom and Terror in the Donbas, 300-308.

189.  Vladislav Zubok, "Limits of Empire: Stalin and the Lean Year of 1946," unpublished paper; slightly different renditions of this conversation, see Kuromiya, Stalin, 177; Robert Service, A, tory of Twentieth-Century Russia (London: Penguin, 1997),299.

190.    Burds, Early Cold War in Soviet West Ukraine; Kuromiya, Stalin, 174-80; Kuromiya, Freedom Terror in the Donbas, 310-20; Swain, Between Stalin and Hitler.

191.    Service, Russia, 299; Applebaum, Gulag, 516-20; Gorlizki and Khlevniuk, Cold Peace, 31. Werner G. Hahn, Postwar Soviet Politics: The Fall of Zhdanov and the Defeat of Moderation (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982).

192.   Service, Russia, 301; Gorlizki and Khlevniuk, Cold Peace, 1-65;}. Eric Duskin, Stalinist Reconstruction and the Confirmation of a New Elite (Houndsmills, Eng: Palgrave, 2001).

193.   Service, Stalin, 531-40; Gorlizki and Khlevniuk, Cold Peace, 45-65; Naimark, "Soviets and the Christian Democrats," 370-71; Kotkin, "A Conspiracy So ltnmense."

194.    Ree, Political Thought of Joseph Stalin, 282-83; Brandenberger, National Bolshevism.

195.   For the quotations, see Kuromiya, Stalin, 188; Service, Russia, 308; also see Volkogonov, Stalin, 531, 534; Zubok and Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin's Cold War, 50-51,104-108.

196.   For Stalin's negotiations with T. V. Soong, see the many documents in "Conversations with Stalin," 144-246, CWIHP; for Stalin's reflections on his own actions, see "Report of Milovan Djilas about a Secret Soviet-Bulgarian-Yugoslav Meeting," 10 February 1948, CWIHP Bulletin 10 (March 1998): 131; for Stalin and Mao, see S. N. Goncharov, John W. Lewis, Xue Litai, Uncertain Partners: Stalin, Mao, and the Korean War (Stanford, Calif.; Stanford University Press, 1993); Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, Mao: the Unknown Story (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), 175-89, 281-92, 337-55; Michael}. Sheng, Battling Western Imperialism: Mao, Stalin, and the United States (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997); Chen Jian, China's Road to the Korean War: The Making of the Sino-American Confrontation (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 66ff

197.   Shuguang Zhang and Jian Chen, Chinese Communist Policy and the Cold War in Asia: New Documentary Evidence, 1944-1950 (Chicago, lli.: Imprint Publications, 1996),54; llya V. Gaiduk, Confronting Vietnam: Soviet Policy Toward the Indochina Conflict, 1954-1963 (Stanford, Calif., and Washington, D.C.: Stanford University Press and Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2002), 3.

198.    Quoted in Ree, Political Thought ofJoseph Stalin, 252.

199.   Record of the Meeting of Stalin and Thorez, 18 November 1947, "Conversations with Stalin," 403-406; also see Pons, "Stalin, Togliatti, and the Origins of the Cold War"; Judt, Postwar, 139-45.

200.   This is abundandy clear in the collection of documents "Conversations with Stalin," CWIHP; also see Banac, Diary of Georgi Dimitrov, 421-23, 437-40; Pons, "Stalin, Togliatti, and the Origins of the Cold War"; Iatrides, "Revolution or Self-Defense?"; for Stalin's relations with Mao, see citations in note 196 above.

201.   Banac, Diary of Georgi Dimitrov, 439-440; "Report of Djilas," 10 February 1948, CWIHP Bulletin 10 (March 1998): 129-33; Leonid Gibianskii, "Stalin's Policy in Eastern Europe, the Cominform, and the First Split in the Soviet Bloc," 17-22, paper prepared for the conference "Stalin and the Cold War."

202.  Loth, Stalin's Unwanted Child, 84-94; Roberts, Stalin's Wars, 354-55.

203.  Leffler, Preponderance of Power, 182-286.

204.   William Hitchcock, France Restored: Cold War Diplomacy and the Quest for Leadership in Europe, 1944-54 (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); Geir Lundestad, "Empire by Invitation? The United States and Western Europe, 1945-1952," Journal of Peace Research 23 (September 1986): 263-77; Mark Lawrence, Assuming the Burden: Europe and the American Commitment to War in Vietnam (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2005).

205.   Conversation between Wladyslaw Gomulka and Stalin, 14 November 1945, CWIHP Bulletin 11 (Winter 1998): 136.

206.   Ibtd.

207.   "Annual Message to the Congress on the State of the Union," 5 January 1949, PPP: HST; 1949, 6.

208.   "Special Message to the Congress," 6 March 1952, ibid., 1952-53, 189.

209.   Kennan to Marshall and Robert Lovett, 17 December 1948, box 33, Records of the Policy Planning Staff, RG 59, NA.

210.   NSC 20/4, "U.S. Objectives with Respect to the USSR to Counter Soviet Threats to U.S. Security,"

211.  ibid., 204-209.

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