Comment on Adam Ulam, "A Few Unresolved Mysteries about Stalin and the
Cold War in Europe: A Modest Agenda for Research," _Journal of Cold War
Studies_ Volume 1, Number 1 (Winter 1999), pp. 110-116

Marc Trachtenberg <cram@sas.upenn.edu>
University of Pennsylvania


        Adam Ulam, in his short article about Stalin and the Cold War in
Europe, noted that if scholars are interested in coming up with the right
answers about that conflict, they first need to figure out what the right
questions are. And his goal in the piece was to propose a "modest agenda
for research" by developing certain questions about Stalin's policy in two
areas: his policy toward eastern Europe at the end of World War II and in
the immediate postwar period, and his policy on the German question. Was
the Soviet leader determined to dominate and communize the part of Europe
his armies controlled in 1945?  Was it the case that "short of a military
confrontation with Moscow," the western powers could have done nothing to
prevent the communization of the eastern half of the continent?  How
susceptible was Soviet policy to lesser forms of foreign pressure?  And,
similarly, was Soviet policy on the German question simply set in concrete
from the start?  Was Stalin determined from the very outset to create a
Soviet satellite state in his zone of Germany, or was his policy
considerably more flexible than that?  Was the USSR willing to consider
some kind of reunification-cum-neutralization deal at the time of the
Moscow Conference on the German question in the spring of 1947 and again
during the "Stalin Note" affair in 1952?

        All these questions are, of course, quite important, but how
exactly should we go about answering them?  In the case of eastern Europe,
the obvious answer is through a series of case studies: studies of the
communization of all the different countries in the area, studies rooted
in whatever new archival evidence is available and sensitive to the
question of whether outside pressure made, or would have made, any
difference at all.  The Polish case is of prime importance here: how did
the Soviets react to American and British policy on this question in the
immediate pre-Yalta period, in the course of the Yalta conference, right
after Yalta, and so on, and how did those reactions affect, if at all,
what was going on in Poland itself? And, of course, as Ulam suggests, the
analysis of this issue should not be limited to a study of Soviet policy
toward those areas that were in fact communized.  Soviet policy toward
Finland in this period, and especially policy toward Iran, also need to be
studied in detail.  In the Iran case, the key question is whether the
Soviets pulled back in 1946 because of the possibility of war with the
United States.  Some important work on this latter subject, and on the
related subject of Soviet policy toward Turkey at the time, has come out
recently (especially a major article by Eduard Mark), and Fernande Schaud
of Yale University is preparing a study based in part on an important
trove of Stalin correspondence she found in Baku. If this work shows that
Stalin was deterred by the prospect of armed conflict with the United
States, this case would not support the conclusion that something short of
a military confrontation might have prevented the satellization of eastern
Europe.  But it's hard to know what this sort of work will reveal; these
are all still very much open issues.

     The German question is even more of an open issue, because here the
Soviet position was weaker: the western powers, with the largest and most
valuable part of Germany under their control, had a much stronger hand to
play. Once again, this question has to be analyzed by studying key
episodes very closely, and Ulam refers specifically to the 1947 Moscow
conference and the Stalin Note business in 1952. Of these two, I
personally think the 1947 affair is more puzzling. There is a vast, mostly
German language, literature on the 1952 episode, and there is a good deal
of evidence bearing on this issue in U.S., British and French archives.
Many of the documents to be found in those western sources are quite
suggestive, but the piece of evidence that struck me as decisive came from
a Soviet source. This new evidence was cited on p. 127 of John Gaddis's WE
NOW KNOW: "Soviet diplomat Vladimir Semyonov," Gaddis writes, "recalled
Stalin asking: was it certain the Americans would turn the note down? Only
when assured that it was did the Soviet leader give his approval, but with
the warning that there would be grave consequences for Semyonov if this
did not prove to be the case." (Gaddis's source for this is an unpublished
1994 paper by Alexei Filitov.) This, I thought--and if I'm wrong, I'd
appreciate it if someone could tell me why--was as close to a smoking gun
as we ever get in historical work.

        There are other reasons for not taking the Stalin Note affair too
seriously, but the 1947 business is another matter entirely.  The puzzle
here is that when you read the records of the Moscow conference, Soviet
policy does not seem the least bit intransigent.  But the Americans, and
especially Secretary of State Marshall, had exactly the opposite
impression. You have the sense, therefore, that you must be missing
something; it really is very hard (for me, at any rate) to understand what
exactly was going on there, and, in particular, whether the Soviets really
would have accepted a unified, and, in the western sense, democratic
Germany--and if so, at what price.

        There is a more basic issue here having to do with Soviet policy
on the German question as a whole throughout the Cold War period.  The
Soviets, like the western powers (and, indeed, like the Germans
themselves) had to decide what was preferable from their point of view:
the Cold War status quo, with western Germany dependent on the western
powers for protection (and thus, basically, locked into the status quo,
which was not a bad thing from the Soviet point of view), or a reunified
Germany, not part of either bloc, perhaps ultimately a rearmed Germany,
able to chart its own course in international affairs.  Each alternative
had something to say for it, and each had certain drawbacks: which, on
balance, was better for the USSR?  This had to have been a fundamental
question for Soviet leaders in the early Cold War period; it would be very
interesting to know how the issue was dealt with, how the discussion ran
its course, what conclusions were reached, and how they affected actual
Soviet policy.  But in analyzing this issue, scholars should not simply
assume that the reunification-cum-neutralization concept was obviously the
way to go--that is, that a solution of this sort would obviously have been
better for everyone all around.

        Ulam concludes that the time has come to get away from what he
calls the "'who is guilty' syndrome," and to study the Cold War in a more
dispassionate way.  He is certainly right about this; this sort of
approach is, in fact, long overdue.  But it is not the new archival
material from the east that will bring about a new understanding of the
Cold War. (I personally am less impressed with what we have been getting
in recent years from Soviet and other former east-bloc sources than Ulam
evidently is; we have, I think, gotten a lot of interesting tidbits, but
nothing like the sort of evidence we really need.) The basic approach is
changing because the question of who is to be blamed for the Cold War now
seems terribly old-fashioned and ahistorical, while at the same time
people are coming to see how interesting the straight historical issues in
fact are. Those issues can be dealt with quite effectively by examining
existing sources with a fresh mind--and by far the great bulk of the
relevant material comes from western archives.

Marc Trachtenberg

Humanities & Social
Sciences Online

Copyright © 1995-2006 - Contact Us
RSS | Validate: XHTML | CSS