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UNDERSTANDING
THE COLD WAR
HISTORY, APPROACHES AND DEBATES

ELSPETH O’RIORDAN
Understanding the Cold War
 Elspeth O’Riordan

Understanding
the Cold War
History, Approaches and Debates
Elspeth O’Riordan
Defence Studies Department
King’s College London
London, UK

ISBN 978-3-031-06074-8 ISBN 978-3-031-06075-5 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06075-5

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature
Switzerland AG 2023
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For Patricia, Ailsa, Daniel and Callum
 Preface

A little over ten years ago I returned to university teaching after a break of
several years. At that time the digital Cold War landscape was very different
from today’s online community and keeping in touch with the scholarship
was more difficult, but I was also entirely occupied running after four young
children and had neither the time nor energy to stay fully attuned to the field.
My return to work thus provided me with the opportunity to reappraise my
approach both to my subject and my teaching and, in anticipation, I embarked
on an ambitious programme of preparation. Discounting the fact that I had
formerly spent ten years teaching the Cold War at university level, and ignoring
my own personal background of growing up in the latter stages of the contest
and experiencing first hand the threat of nuclear war and fear elicited by ‘evil
empire’ rhetoric, or the joy and hope as I watched, alongside my fellow sixth
form classmates, live television coverage as the Berlin Wall fell, I instead set
about re-immersing myself in the field’s scholarship.
I soon discovered that a perhaps unintended consequence of my period of
absence was that it afforded me the opportunity, space and distance to review
my understanding of the subject, and the chance to look at it anew. Rather
than onerous, the reading quickly became cathartic; my caution was replaced
with a rediscovered passion and enthusiasm for the subject. Revisiting, often
fully rereading, earlier seminal texts felt like a homecoming, an opportunity
to reacquaint with old friends. At the same time, I was struck by the scale
and scope not only of the earlier scholarship but also of the additional recent
material. During my absence a new generation of research, the seeds of which
had germinated in the years following the Cold War’s end and which there-
fore addressed the subject from a new perspective, had truly burst forth to
fruition in the published literature. The availability of material online, partic-
ularly source material, had also transformed. I was tremendously excited by
the maturing and blossoming of this new raft of scholarship with its emphasis
on new approaches, often grounded in multidisciplinary understanding and

vii
viii PREFACE

cooperation, and increasingly using previously inaccessible sources. I was

determined in my teaching to convey a sense of the current dynamism and
momentum in Cold War scholarship but also appreciated that for students to
fully grasp this, they also needed a solid foundational understanding of the
earlier debates and developments in the literature.
Returning to university, I found things had also changed. During my
absence, my university had fully embraced semesterisation, with all the advan-
tages and disadvantages this entailed for those used to a more extended,
three-term approach to writing and delivering courses. Having students
with different perspectives and disciplinary backgrounds in seminars certainly
enhanced the vibrancy of debate, but also entailed significant pedagogical chal-
lenges of how to distil complex material into a more concentrated semester
format for students with widely differing levels of background knowledge.
Over subsequent years I felt real empathy with my students and a recog-
nition of the scale of their achievements in rising to the multiple challenges
of studying the Cold War. Partly because of my own career break and
intensive re-immersion in the literature, I genuinely appreciated the magni-
tude and difficulty of the reading required to even begin to understand
the Cold War at an advanced level, and how demanding the debates and
approaches were to navigate without a strong background framework in both
twentieth-century International History and International Relations theory.
I sympathised when students found the material inaccessible, the language
jargon-laden and opaque.
All of these factors have informed this book. It is, in essence, the book I
think is helpful for students to have. Furthermore, since embarking on the
project I have been quite overwhelmed by the interest shown by friends and
acquaintances outside the ivory towers of academia, many of whom demon-
strate a genuine passion and are impressively well-informed on the subject. I
hope, therefore, that this book will be of use also to the curious lay reader.
What follows is not intended as a comprehensive general history of the Cold
War, but rather as a transitionary work designed to enable those new to the
area to access the advanced community of scholarship. Its aim is to provide a
toolbox of frameworks, debates and approaches to the Cold War which will
equip the reader with an appreciation of the subject’s scope and scale and the
confidence to tackle its myriad different aspects.

, Elspeth O’Riordan
King’s College London
London, UK
 Acknowledgements

This book would not have been possible without the support I have received
from King’s College London. I am particularly indebted to Professor Wyn
Bowen, Professor Niall Barr and Dr Kate Utting. War Studies at King’s is
a very special community and it has always been for me an absolute privi-
lege to be part of the Defence Studies family. Indeed, my connection with
King’s began in the 1990s when, as a young master’s student, I first met
the wonderful Professors Mike and Saki Dockrill. It was the start of a lasting
friendship and I am so grateful to Mike for his constant support and advice.
He encouraged me as I embarked on this project, and I am deeply saddened
that he is no longer with us as it reaches publication.
I would also like to express my appreciation to my editors, especially
Rachel Bridgewater and Lucy Kidwell, for their support as I have prepared the
manuscript, and also to the anonymous peer reviewers who have provided an
enormous service through their detailed comments and constructive, informed
advice.
I would like to extend special thanks to two dear friends. First, Professor
Alastair Munro, who kindly read earlier drafts of the manuscript and joined me
for numerous, most enjoyable ‘Cold War Coffees’ and discussions. Second,
my fellow amateur musician, Philip Smith, who not only gently nudged me
forward by enquiring about the book’s progress at every orchestra rehearsal
we attended together, but who also read each draft chapter and cast his critical
eye over references and bibliographical entries.
Finally, I am so grateful to my amazing family—my wonderful husband,
Jonathan, and my four fantastic children, Patricia, Ailsa, Daniel and Callum.
Thank you so much for all the enthusiasm and encouragement—I really
couldn’t have written this without you.

ix
 Contents

1 Introduction 1

Part I Early Cold War: Origins and Development

2 Historical Background: World War II and Tensions
in the Wartime Alliance 17
Wartime Diplomacy 20
The Teheran Conference, 28 November–1 December 1943 22
The Fourth Moscow (‘Tolstoy’) Conference, 9–19 October 1944 24
The Yalta Conference, 4–11 February 1945 25
From Yalta to Potsdam 30
The Potsdam Conference, 17 July–2 August 1945 31
Conclusion 32
3 The Origins of the Cold War in Europe: From World War
II to the Berlin Blockade 37
The Council of Foreign Ministers (CFM) 37
1946: Suspicion Intensifies 39
The Iran Crisis, Spring 1946 41
Germany 42
The Truman Doctrine and Marshall Plan 43
The Consolidation of Soviet Control Over Central and Eastern
Europe 45
Germany and the Berlin Blockade 48
Conclusion 49
4 Studying the Cold War: Core Themes and Concepts—Is
There a New International History of the Cold War? 55
Historiographical Approaches to the Cold War 56
The Orthodox School 56
The Revisionist School 56

xi
xii CONTENTS

Post-Revisionist Approaches 57
‘New’ Cold War History 59
Cold War ‘Studies’? 63
The Development of International Relations as an Academic
Discipline and Its Relationship with International History 64
Liberalism 66
Realism 66
Behaviouralism 67
Neorealism 68
The English School 69
Foreign Policy Analysis 70
Constructivism 70
International Political Economy and Neo-Marxist Theories 72
International Relations Since the End of the Cold War 73
Conclusion 75
5 The Early Development of the Cold War in Europe:
The Division of Germany, the Formation of NATO
and European Integration 81
The Division of Germany 81
The Formation of NATO 86
European Integration and the Cold War 89
Conclusion 92
6 The Origins of the Cold War in East Asia: The Emergence
of Communist China, Japan and the Korean War 97
The Chinese Civil War and the Emergence of Communist China 100
The Soviet Union 101
The US 103
Japan 107
The Korean War 109
Korea’s Conflict 110
The Cold War and the Outbreak of the Korean War 112
Kim Il Sung’s Decision to Invade ROK 112
Mao’s Decision to Intervene 116
Conclusion 117

Part II Mid-Cold War: The Widening Contest

7 The Superpowers and the Cold War in the 1950s 125
The Soviet Union 126
Domestic-Political and Economic Context 126
The ‘Thaw’ 128
1956: Crisis in Eastern Europe 131
The US 134
Domestic Context 135
 CONTENTS xiii

Containment 135
McCarthyism 137
The Eisenhower Presidency 138
The New Look 139
Conclusion 143
8 Crises, 1958–1962 147
The Berlin Crises 148
Background 148
Khrushchev’s Motives 150
The Crises 152
The Offshore Islands Crises and the Sino-Soviet Split 155
Mao’s Motives 156
The United States’ Role 158
Summary: The Significance of the Offshore Islands Crises
to the Cold War 159
The Cuban Missile Crisis 161
Overview 162
Khrushchev’s Motives 163
The CMC Legacy 166
Conclusion 168
9 The Vietnam War 173
A Struggle for Colonial Independence and National Liberation 174
The Impact of World War II on Southeast Asia 175
The First Vietnam War: France and the Viet Minh, 1946–1954 177
Vietnam Divided, 1955–1959 179
America’s War, 1960–1968 183
Towards a Resolution, 1968–1973 189
The Vietnam War and Cold War Scholarship 192
Regional Perspective 194
Global Perspective 197
10 The Cold War and the Third World: Latin America 203
The US and the Third World: Modernisation Theory 205
The Soviet Union and the Third World: Peaceful Coexistence 208
China and the Third World 210
Latin America 212
Background 212
1950s 214
1960s 216
The US 216
Soviet Union 219
1970s 222
The US and Chile 223
The Soviet Union and Latin America in the 1970s 224
xiv CONTENTS

Angola 225
The Ogaden War 226
1980s 227
Latin America and Cold War Scholarship 228
Conclusion 230
11 The Middle East and the Cold War 237
The Interwar Years 239
The Early Cold War 240
The 1950s 241
The Iran Coup, 1953 242
Nasser and the Rise of Arab Nationalism 243
The Suez Crisis 244
The ‘Arab Cold War’ 245
The 1960s 248
The Six Day War, 1967 249
The 1970s 253
Black September 254
The Yom Kippur War, 1973 255
The Camp David Summit, September 1978 257
The Iranian Revolution 258
The 1980s 260
Conclusion 261
12 Waging the Cold War 265
Military Competition: Nuclear 265
Early Cold War 266
Nuclear Strategy 272
Later Cold War 274
Military Competition: Conventional 275
Conventional Military Strategy and the ‘Revolution
in Military Affairs’ 276
Science and Technology 279
Intelligence and Covert Operations 282
Espionage 283
Surveillance 284
Covert Operations 286
Conclusion 287

Part III Late Cold War: Détente and the Final Years
13 Détente 297
European Détente 298
Context and Rationale 298
Key Developments 301
Superpower Détente 308
 CONTENTS xv

‘Triangular Diplomacy’ and the Opening to China 311

Superpower Summits 315
Conclusion 319
14 The Travails of Détente 325
Global Influences 325
European Complications 329
Superpower Relations 331
The Vienna Summit, June 1979 336
Soviet Intervention in Afghanistan 338
The Collapse of Détente 340
Conclusion 341
15 Beyond Geopolitics: Economics, Culture
and the Transnational Cold War 347
Introduction 347
Economics 347
Trade 348
Agriculture 349
Aid 351
Culture 352
Culture as Creative Output 353
The Relationship Between Culture and Propaganda 355
Culture as an Anthropological Discourse 358
Gender 359
Religion 360
Human Rights 362
Early Cold War 362
Mid-Cold War 363
Late Cold War 365
The Counter-Culture 366
The Environment and the Biosphere 369
Medicine 371
The United Nations 373
Conclusion 377
16 The Superpowers and the End of the Cold War 387
Ronald Reagan’s Foreign Policy and the Cold War in the 1980s 388
Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet Union and the Cold War
in the 1980s 394
Superpower Summits and Arms Control Negotiations,
1985–1988 399
The Geneva Summit, 19–21 November 1985 399
The Reykjavik Summit, 11–12 October 1986 400
The Washington Summit, 7–10 December 1987 402
The Moscow Summit, 29 May–2 June 1988 404
xvi CONTENTS

The Neoliberal Turn 406

Conclusion 410
17 Regional Finales 417
The Middle East 417
Latin America 423
Soviet Pullback in the Third World 425
East and Southeast Asia and China 427
Europe 432
The Reunification of Germany and Disintegration of the Soviet
Union 436
Conclusion 440

Bibliography 447
Index 491
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction

In writing this book, my purpose has been to offer an accessible introduction

to studying the Cold War at an advanced level, providing a foundation for both
students and general readers alike from which to navigate the field in terms
of developments in ideas, arguments and the parameters of scholarly debates.
What follows is not intended as a general history of the Cold War; rather its
objective is to provide a broad basis of understanding and thereby equip the
reader to engage with the subject’s extensive academic literature and numerous
analytical approaches.1 My aims are thus twofold. First, to encourage the
reader to approach the subject, in line with recent academic research, not
simply as a bipolar superpower relationship, but as an organic, dynamic inter-
action between the superpower confrontation and complex regional and local
situations. The current study of the Cold War emphasises interdisciplinary
perspectives including anthropology, area studies, economics and international
relations and seeks to position the Cold War alongside enduring themes of
twentieth-century history, particularly decolonisation, globalisation and the
progress of modernity. In consequence, there lies a paradox at the heart of
today’s Cold War scholarship of reducing the contest’s significance to simply
one strand in wider twentieth-century history while simultaneously magnifying
its importance by identifying it as omnipresent: in gender, popular culture,
aid, technology, the environment and so on. My second aim in this book is
to explain the evolution of these current trends in Cold War scholarship by
grounding them in a thorough understanding of how they have developed
and to recognise that, lying at the heart of the evolution of Cold War scholar-
ship, is an essential interface between International History and International

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2023
E. O’Riordan, Understanding the Cold War,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06075-5_1
2 E. O’RIORDAN

Relations. In essence, the journey to the current landscape of ‘Cold War stud-
ies’ has been informed by a triangular paradigm of mutual interdependence
between the disciplines of International History, International Relations and
the influence of the Cold War dynamic itself. Once this is appreciated, then
charting the panoramic and on occasion seemingly unnavigable landscape of
Cold War scholarship becomes an accessible, exciting enterprise.
These aims have informed the three-part structure of this book. Perhaps
somewhat counterintuitively, given my overall goal is to introduce the reader
to both the scholarship and analysis of the Cold War at an advanced level,
Chapters 2 and 3 present a traditional, brief historical background of the
origins of the Cold War in Europe essentially from the perspective of the
initial generation of Cold War scholarship—in Cold War terminology, they
adopt a post-revisionist approach, although they also address the main debates
in earlier orthodox and revisionist schools. I must appeal for some patience
from more informed readers, but after experimenting with various pedagogical
approaches, I have found that this method, introducing historical background
prior to a discussion of the scholarly discourse, the most successful for students
new to the subject. Chapter 4 then examines the field’s multifaceted historio-
graphical debates, charting the journey of Cold War scholarship from its initial
focus on questions of responsibility and an interpretation of the conflict as
a predominantly Eurocentric, bipolar contest, to current perspectives centred
on an appreciation of multiple experiences and perspectives of the Cold War
as a truly global and transnational phenomenon in twentieth-century history.
In addition, this chapter assesses the central role of International Relations
theory in the evolution of Cold War scholarship and the importance of appre-
ciating that both International History and International Relations developed
as academic disciplines during the Cold War and were themselves shaped by
this context—in a sense, therefore, the very scholarship of the Cold War needs
to be understood as part of the Cold War itself. I examine the influence of the
Cold War on the development of International Relations theory and the inter-
face between it and International History, and argue that the journey in Cold
War historiography towards a more collaborative, ‘transdisciplinary’ approach
is synonymous with the development of academia itself.
Having established this theoretical and historiographical framework, the
remaining chapters in Part I revisit the origins of the Cold War, building
new layers of analysis on the initial foundations of post-revisionism laid in the
opening chapters. Chapter 5 returns to the division of Europe in the 1940s
and 1950s, but shows that, rather than a hierarchical or great power narra-
tive, a regional focus centring on the agency of European powers and their
desire to address the security challenges posed by the Germany question (an
approach which can be termed the ‘Empire by Invitation’ thesis) is important
to understanding the Cold War’s origins.2 Chapter 6, examining the origins
of the Cold War in East Asia, also explores the Cold War’s early stages as an
interaction between the superpower relationship and a complex regional and
local situation. Again, this enables another stratum of historiographical debate
 1 INTRODUCTION 3

to be added—the first layer in the ‘global’ levels of analysis. The emergence of

communist China would not only lead to challenges to the bipolar Cold War
paradigm but would also point to the complexity of ideology, challenging the
notion of communism as monolithic or homogeneous. This chapter also exam-
ines the wider security landscape in East Asia and the outbreak of war on the
Korean peninsula—a war which ignited amidst regional security constraints,
ideological considerations and developing Cold War tensions combined with
a chronically unstable local situation in the aftermath of Japan’s collapse in
World War II. While challenging earlier historiographical narratives viewing
the Korean War as a ‘proxy’ war within a wider framework of superpower
competition, this chapter does emphasise the significance of the Korean War
as a pivotal moment in the Cold War’s internationalisation and a harbinger not
only of the two-way relationship between superpowers and their clients (the
‘tail wagging the dog’ hypothesis) but also of the violence and bloodshed that
the Cold War had potential to cause in the global south.
Like Part I, Part II begins by establishing earlier analytical frameworks,
with Chapter 7 examining the Soviet Union and the US in the 1950s. Subse-
quent chapters chart how traditional notions of a superpower duopoly have
been challenged. Chapter 8 emphasises the central role played by China,
and analyses three interlocking but separate crises during the late 1950s and
early 1960s: the Offshore Islands, Berlin and Cuba. Chapters 9–11 develop
discussion surrounding the ‘global’ Cold War, looking at three regional case
studies: the Vietnam War, Latin America and the Middle East. In each of
these chapters, emphasis is on the complex relationships between the super-
power conflict, regional security dynamics and local perspectives in the context
of development and nation-building. I focus particularly on the discourse in
current scholarship which approaches the Cold War from the perspective of
the global south and on the devastating impact of Moscow and Washington’s
Third World approaches premised on ‘peaceful coexistence’ and ‘modernisa-
tion’ theories. Finally, Part II concludes with a chapter on the nature of Cold
War competition and the practicalities of waging the Cold War in the military
sphere as well as intelligence and covert operations. Once again, this marries
with historiographical debates: assessing the nuclear stalemate, for example,
emphasises a conundrum at the Cold War’s heart—its extreme danger yet its
paradoxical stability and longevity. In addition, underpinning both military
and intelligence competition was a rivalry in science and technology, a contest
with implications for societies, economies and the development of strategic
thought.
Part III draws these trends in the Cold War’s rich tapestry together. I begin
with two chapters on the 1970s and détente, before moving on to a trio of
chapters covering the Cold War’s closing stages. The first of these, Chapter 15,
looks beyond geopolitics to the Cold War’s competition in economics, culture
and transnational arenas. Focussing on intangibles and soft power makes a
useful counterpoint to the earlier chapter (Chapter 12) on nuclear and mili-
tary facets of competition, and also underlines a number of core themes,
4 E. O’RIORDAN

largely implicit in the preceding chapters, but which need to be addressed

more explicitly when approaching the Cold War’s end and seeking to assess it
as a whole. First is the challenge of historicising the Cold War and situating
it both within a broader understanding of world history and in relation to
wider intellectual discourses including the debate on modernity. Second is the
relationship between the Cold War and the process of globalisation, and the
extent to which, rather than being purely a source of division and separation,
the Cold War contributed to cross border links, for example in aid, culture or
Human Rights. Thirdly, this chapter emphasises the ideational aspects of the
Cold War and raises the question of who tells the story of the Cold War and
whether it was primarily about power (a realist interpretation) or rather about
ideas or culture. Chapters 16 and 17 return to a more geopolitical coverage
of the final stage of the Cold War, examining the role of the superpowers,
the relationship between Reagan and Gorbachev, and looking at the contest’s
endings in those regional case studies focussed on earlier: the Middle East,
Latin America, the Far East and Europe. Yet the importance of other facets
is also emphasised: the role of Human Rights, the revolution in information
and technology, and the significance of the overall development of the inter-
national economy since the early 1970s, particularly the implications of the
neoliberal turn both for the survival of the Soviet Union and for its effects on
the West’s ‘ideology’.
In summary, the scope of this book is extensive, seeking to convey an
understanding of the Cold War as an evolving, dynamic ecosystem which tran-
scended different strata in the international system and different geographic
locations across the world, which encompassed great power politics and
diplomacy and the interconnection between domestic and foreign policy
making, which involved an interactive dynamic between great powers, regional
powers and developing nations, and which incorporated competition between
(and within) imperialism, communism and liberal democracy/capitalism, but
which also needs to be conceptualised as a cultural and ideational contest
reaching deep into the lives and experiences of ordinary people throughout
the world. Thus, although a cursory glance at my table of contents might
suggest a conservative, somewhat familiar progression through the Cold War’s
traditional well-travelled path, my aim throughout has been to lead the
reader through a journey of Cold War understanding from its earlier, more
two-dimensional approach to an appreciation of the richness of its current
landscape. Only with a thorough background in the earlier generations of
scholarship can one fully appreciate and contextualise the paradigm shift
offered by, for example, Lorenz Lüthi’s recent book approaching the Cold War
as three distinct but intersecting regional conflicts, beginning with a focus on
Asia and relegating Europe to third place.3 Only with a thorough background
in geopolitical interpretations of the Cold War can one really grasp the value
of alternative perspectives emphasising the growth of transnational organisa-
tions, or the role of culture and Human Rights, or the lived experience of
the Cold War for ordinary people the world over. Petra Goedde, for instance,
 1 INTRODUCTION 5

focusses on transnational aspects of the Cold War, seeking to deconstruct ‘the

assumed binary between realist and idealist foreign policy approaches generally
accepted among contemporary policymakers’.4 That said, I must apologise for
the omissions. This book’s aim is to act as an introduction to a more advanced
study of the Cold War, emphasising both the development of its scholarship
(notably the relationship between theory and history) and highlighting the
need to approach the Cold War as a complex, interactive and shifting dynamic.
It does not attempt to cover the entire subject, and I have inevitably—given
constraints of space and scope—had difficult decisions to make. In Europe,
for example, I have focussed on the East/West divide rather than on South
Europe or the Balkans; in the developing world I have chosen Latin America
as a case study rather than Asia; in Southeast Asia, I have focussed on Vietnam
rather than Indonesia. This may leave me open to the criticism that I have
covered traditional subjects rather than more current ones (the role of the
Non-Aligned Movement, which is currently receiving considerable attention
in the literature, is a case in point), or that, despite my attempt at balance, I
have devoted more space to geopolitical aspects than ideational ones; but my
response is that this foundational framework of knowledge enables students to
then contextualise and engage with such further areas of research.
While, in order to make the subject accessible for those new to the subject,
I have opted for a largely chronological structure, I have throughout sought
to highlight three themes particularly resonant in current scholarship. These
themes resonate throughout and provide an overarching unifying analytical
thread. In broad terms these can be summarised as the global turn; discourse
surrounding ideology; and the move to widen the Cold War lens. I think it
helpful to introduce each of these briefly at the outset.
There has long been emphasis on ‘global ’ themes in Cold War scholarship.
At first, such approaches involved a rejection of superpower or Euro-centric
narratives, for example, by emphasising multipolarity and the role of China
or by focussing on complex regional frameworks.5 Over the last twenty years,
however, and particularly following the publication of Odd Arne Westad’s The
Global Cold War, there has been a fundamental shift in emphasis in Cold War
scholarship from the centre to the periphery, and on the need to focus on
the impact and consequences of the Cold War for the Third World. Westad
presented a sophisticated analysis, portraying the Cold War as a global contest
over competing world visions between an empire of ‘Liberty’ and one of ‘Jus-
tice’ and played out with devastating consequences through approaches to
modernisation and development in an international landscape experiencing
the process of decolonisation.6 The subsequent debate has focussed on the
complexity of the North/South dynamic and the need to establish a nuanced,
multifaceted picture of the Cold War’s impact on the Third World, recognising
that while Cold War antagonism may not have created Third World conflicts, it
exacerbated them by pouring in money, weapons and ‘advisers’. Today’s schol-
arship appreciates that Europe’s ‘long peace’ married with highly destructive
‘killing fields’ in the global south, but the Third World is no longer portrayed
6 E. O’RIORDAN

as a passive, at times heroic, victim of a series of Cold War proxy wars.7 In

the words of one historian, ‘the Cold War played a galvanizing role in Third
World conflicts rather than a causative one’. Another summarises, ‘Yet Third
World players were no mere pawns in a superpower game. They fought not
to defend superpower-endorsed political ideologies but to advance their own
strategic interests’.8
Much valuable work in this field has been provided by area specialists.
Working with newly available sources, scholars have provided in-depth studies
on, for instance, China, Vietnam, India and Latin America.9 Rather than
focussing on the motivations and dynamics of the superpowers and their allies,
attention has moved to local actors and national conflicts, their agency, culture
and politics. Indeed, over the last two decades, emphasis on middle powers
and smaller actors has gone a considerable way toward addressing the previous
imbalance in Cold War historiography towards American-based authors which
tended to approach the international system as hierarchical and focussed on the
Washington/Moscow conflict. Furthermore, scholars are now taking a further
step on this path, with the publication of a number of works which synthesise
the findings from different regional specialists and adopt an interpretive lens
that deliberately blurs the traditional dichotomy between international histo-
ries and area studies and seeks a more nuanced, differentiated understanding
of the Cold War’s reach.10 Thus the earlier fragmentation between different
regional fields and the disconnect between general interpretations and detailed
studies are now being explicitly addressed.
Yet while the direction of much recent research centres on the Third World
as the most violent and disruptive arena of Cold War antagonism, it does not
necessarily follow that the Third World was decisive for the wider outcome
of the Cold War. Certainly many global interpretations have involved a reap-
praisal of the superpower framework—notable here is the focus on China’s
role, not simply for auguring geopolitical multipolarity but also by exploring
the Sino-Soviet split’s impact on the Socialist camp’s ability to project its
hegemony on the Third World, or the repercussions of the post-Mao capi-
talist economic reforms as the ideological deathblow to anti-capitalism. A
fundamental question, however, underlying the trend to refocus on areas in
the global south is whether these actually changed the balance of bipolar
antagonism. With the possible exception of Afghanistan, it is hard to argue
convincingly that any single Third World conflict significantly altered the wider
framework of superpower enmity. Despite recent arguments refocussing the
Cold War’s centre of gravity to the south, it remains important to underline
the position of Europe in any Cold War grand narrative. It was the division
of Europe which, punctuated by its alliance systems and visible divides and
underwritten by the nuclear standoff, provided the Cold War’s structure and
grammar. The policies and procedures devised for ordering, connecting and
managing Cold War Europe shaped the tone of the wider Cold War conflict
as a struggle for hearts and minds and a contest for hegemonic influence on
 1 INTRODUCTION 7

fabrics of societies and development. As Federico Romero argues, ‘Provin-

cializing Europe is an epistemological necessity for global and international
history, but hardly a scholarly strategy applicable to a conflict spawned in and
about Europe, pivoted on the continent’s destiny, and eventually solved where
it had its deepest and more relevant roots’.11 A truly global understanding of
the Cold War, therefore, needs both to recognise the role of the Third World
and the utility of a multi-regional global analytical paradigm whilst at the same
time retaining an appreciation of the significance of Europe and the wider
superstructure of superpower relations.
The second theme helpful to highlight at the outset is the discourse
pertaining to ideology and the role of ideas in the Cold War. This, too, has
evolved with successive generations of Cold War literature. At heart is a
theoretical dilemma as to whether the Cold War was primarily about power
(a realist approach) or whether it was more about ideas (an ideationalist
approach). Historians have long rejected binary explanations of the Cold War
as a clash between communism and democracy/capitalism as overly simplistic,
with emphasis instead given to the complexity on both sides of such an
ideological divide: to the differences, for example, between interpretations
of Marx’s theories emphasising an industrial proletarian model and those
translating them for an agrarian peasant context; or to the emergence of vari-
ation within ideologies, particularly in the capitalist camp in the later stage
of the Cold War between purist neoliberal approaches and those advocating
governmental responsibility in blending economic issues with social justice.
Recent discourse on the global turn also has implications for the ideational
debates by conceptualising competing notions of modernity as an ideological
framework for the Cold War. Third World approaches of ‘modernisation’ have
been described as part of a wider ideological construct of American excep-
tionalism which was essential to the Cold War, but which both predated and
outlasted it.12 Similarly, despite the opposing theoretical genomes of Marxism
and Capitalism, weight is given to shared commonalities between Soviet and
American ideology. The Soviet Union, like the US, saw its system as supe-
rior and destined to spread throughout the world; like the US it inferred that
states’ foreign policies were influenced by their domestic systems; like the US,
the Soviet Union sought transformations in states’ domestic-political systems.
And yet, in an interesting caveat, there was also an aspect of interdependence
within Soviet ideology: in Henry Kissinger’s words, ‘It has always been one
of the paradoxes of Bolshevik behaviour that their leaders have yearned to be
treated as equals by the people they consider doomed’.13 In sum, a binary
Cold War lens of communism versus democratic capitalism has been replaced
with a broader ideational paradigm: by 1945, it is argued, ‘these ideas – indi-
vidual liberty, anticollectivism, and market values on the US side; social justice,
collectivism, and state planning among the Soviets – had hardened into ideolo-
gies, in which universalist political ideals mixed freely with older and more
specific cultural traits. The elites of both countries believed that the future
was theirs, because the world was unavoidably moving in the direction of the
8 E. O’RIORDAN

aims they themselves had set’.14 The result was a fundamentally ‘malign envi-
ronment’; cooperation might be achieved on a temporary basis, but was not
possible in the long run.15 Thus the theme of ideology is, like the global
turn, central to navigating the current landscape of scholarship, a landscape
coloured by interpretations of the Cold War as much more than a contest for
power, more even than a struggle for survival; rather it is approached as a
battle between two alternative visions for the future, two versions of progress
or modernity—it was a battle ‘for the soul of mankind’16 and as such its
battleground transcended traditional forms of warfare and encompassed the
innermost essence of hearts and minds—ideas, beliefs, cultures, even language
itself.
This leads to the third of the themes which underpin the analysis
throughout this book: that of widening the Cold War lens. As discussed,
scholars analysing the Cold War from a geopolitical tradition have, particularly
over the last twenty years, broadened their interpretive gaze. The interna-
tional system is viewed as multi-dimensional, with attention focussing both
on vertical relationships between superpowers and regional players and clients
and the interface of influence and power across these, and on horizontal rela-
tionships—the links between different regions and the interconnectivity of the
geographic Cold War. It is also recognised that different players had very
different motives—ideology, for example, mattered more for some actors than
others—and the Cold War therefore interacted differently in different times
and places across the globe. Furthermore, scholars have sought to embrace
a wider methodological approach welcoming interdisciplinary and collabora-
tive perspectives and re-evaluating their very conceptualisation of the Cold
War. In deliberate contrast to preceding realist approaches, over the last two
decades, a strong focus in Cold War scholarship has been on the role of ideas,
ideologies and culture. The Cold War is now approached as a ‘kaleidoscopic
multiplication of prospects, contextualisations, methodological approaches,
and meanings’.17 Scholars now look at a vast array of contexts and processes
to evaluate experiences and perception in the Cold War environment—youth
rebellions, tourism, leisure, travel, popular culture, film, television and many
more.
In addition, academics also seek to contextualise the Cold War, positioning
it within a broader chronological and conceptual framework of historical
discourses. The Cold War contest itself needs to be approached as a fluid,
evolving entity rather than a static or stable structure: the Cold War world of
the 1970s or 1980s, for example, was very different from the 1940s or 1950s.
Furthermore, the Cold War was but one aspect of the international history of
the twentieth century and needs to be understood in terms of its relationship
with other pivotal axes—the retreat of European imperialism, the economic
rise of East Asia or the upsurge of political Islam, in addition to the history of
science and technology, intellectual and cultural history, the growth of inter-
nationalism or transnational forces. These attempts to understand the Cold
War within a framework which includes global social, economic and cultural
 1 INTRODUCTION 9

developments as well as international relations and national foreign policies

have undoubtedly enriched our study and understanding of the subject, but
have also brought great challenges, raising difficult questions of perspective
relating to the Cold War’s overall importance: was the Cold War merely a
footnote to more long-lasting and significant elements of historical transfor-
mation? Is it not just as compelling to periodise the twentieth century in terms
of decolonisation, internationalism, Human Rights, economic globalisation or
environmentalism? As Akira Iriya explains, ‘…it can even be argued that the
cold war was a minor theme in the broader history of globalisation or of
such other themes as environmentalism and human rights’.18 Conversely, as
the world today witnesses a resurgent and aggressive Russia led by Vladimir
Putin, while at the same time comes to terms with Xi Jinping’s increasingly
powerful China, the Cold War period may be seen as but one episode in
a broader, longer geopolitical power contest. This leads to a final challenge
when widening the Cold War lens—that of historicising its legacy. Only eight
years ago, as the Cold War appeared to retreat into the past, Federico Romero
asked if it might increasingly be seen as, ‘an expansive, bloody but relatively
inconsequential conflict’.19 Yet today, as scholars and analysts assess the global
security landscape, the Cold War seems ever more relevant and consequential.
Together the perhaps unintended consequence of these three themes domi-
nating Cold War debate—the global turn, the discourse surrounding ideology
and the trend to widen the Cold War lens—has been to present Cold War
scholarship with a still deeper and more profound impact: have we lost any
real definition of what the Cold War actually was? It might be expected of a
book entitled ‘understanding the Cold War’ to commence with a clear defini-
tion of the concept ‘Cold War’. Indeed, it is customary when introducing the
Cold War to open with a precis of the term’s origins—such synopses habitually
mention George Orwell’s use of the term in 1945, when he envisaged a Cold
War in which the major powers had a ‘tacit agreement never to use the bomb
against one another’.20 They might point to the French use of the term ‘la
guerre froide’ in the late 1930s referring to escalating tensions with Germany,
and would almost certainly highlight Walter Lippmann’s 1947 book entitled
‘The Cold War’.21 In addition, it is often observed that the term Cold War
was quintessentially a Western one, in effect coming to embody the Amer-
ican approach to the Soviet Union as one of aggressive containment without
recourse to hot war; it was not used in the Soviet Union prior to Gorbachev’s
tenure as the Soviets preferred to view themselves as peaceful, in contrast to
the aggressive Americans. And yet, while fascinating, such background history
of the phrase ‘Cold War’ seems far removed from the scholarly discussion of
the term today, when any notion of a bipolar paradigm has long been aban-
doned. Now scholars are more likely to question whether the superpowers
matter at all in the Cold War, or, indeed, whether the very notion ‘Cold
War’ has enduring relevance. Academics approach the subject from a myriad of
perspectives and intellectual paradigms. Westad, for example, suggests, ‘In its
prime the Cold War constituted an international system, in the sense that the
10 E. O’RIORDAN

world’s leading powers all based their foreign policies on some relationship
to it’.22 Lorenz Lüthi suggests a ‘dynamically developing global system with
distinctive regional incarnations’.23 In contrast Petra Goedde’s focus is on the
gradual ‘convergence between idealism and realism’ during the 1950s which
resulted in the emergence of a ‘politics of peace’.24 In the Oxford Handbook
of the Cold War, Richard Immerman and Petra Goedde view the Cold War as
a historical period, ‘The cold war was a distinct period in 20th-century history
that cannot be wished away, although some have tried. Yet albeit distinct, the
cold war must be understood and evaluated within the broader context and
contours of global political, economic, social and cultural developments, some
of which preceded the cold war and some of which persist to the present
day and doubtless will continue into the future’.25 Westad, in the opening of
the three-volume, multi-contributor Cambridge History of the Cold War also
emphasises the lack of consensus in the field, ‘Very few of our contributors
believe that a “definitive” history of the Cold War is possible (or indeed that
it should be possible)’ and similarly underlines the need to ‘place the Cold
War in the larger context of chronological time and geographical space…’.26
Such approaches have elicited criticisms. Holger Nehring argues that
current global readings of the Cold War are at risk of making the notion
meaningless if they lose sight of its core antagonistic nature, its ‘war-like char-
acter’27 ; while Lawrence Freedman agrees, pointing out for example that the
Cambridge History fails to ‘untangle the Cold War from all the other strands
of twentieth century history, work out what was distinctive and special about
it…’28 Scholarly efforts to pin down the concept demonstrate these challenges:
metaphors such as ‘mirage’ seek to avoid the pitfall of over-simplification and
are helpful in encapsulating the multifarious polyphonic permutations of the
term.29 As Masuda Hajimu contends, the Cold War can be approached as a
‘constructed nature of a conflict that became “reality”, as opposed to some-
thing that existed as an objective situation’—in other words, the Cold War
‘existed not because it was there but because people thought that it existed’.30
Holger Nehring makes a similar point in relation to Cold War scholarship: his
description of the use of the term Cold War as being ‘a bit like the Cheshire
Cat from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. Everyone has seen it, but it is
not really there’, is both skilful and ironic.31
In short, if there is any scholarly consensus surrounding defining the Cold
War, it seems simply that an agreed definition is neither possible nor, interest-
ingly, particularly desirable. For though debates surrounding what constitutes
the Cold War may be lively, often contentious, and while attempts at definitive
interpretations may be destined to end in frustration, their variety and multi-
plicity without doubt enrich our overall understanding and appreciation of the
subject. Exploring the history, approaches and debates surrounding the Cold
War cannot and should not lead to a definitive endpoint of understanding;
rather its purpose is to embark on an adventure of discovery, a voyage of
engagement with a dynamic, vibrant landscape of scholarship.
 1 INTRODUCTION 11

Notes
1. There are a number of admirable general histories of the Cold War. Particu-
larly helpful are: Fink, Carole K., Cold War: An International History, second
edition (London, Routledge), 2017; Westad, Odd Arne, The Cold War: A
World History (New York, NY, Basic Books), 2017; McMahon, Robert J., The
Cold War: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, Oxford University Press), 2003;
Painter, David S., The Cold War, An International History (London, Rout-
ledge), 1999; Ball, S.J., The Cold War: An International History, 1947–1991
(New York, NY, Bloomsbury Academic), 1997; Barrass, G.S., The Great Cold
War: A Journey Through the Hall of Mirrors (Stanford, CA, Stanford University
Press), 2009; Gaddis, J.L., The Cold War: A New History (London, Penguin),
2006; and Reynolds, D., One World Divisible: A Global History Since 1945
(London, Penguin), 2001. See also Keylor, W.R., The Twentieth-Century World
and Beyond: An International History Since 1900 (Oxford, Oxford University
Press), 2011.
2. G. Lundestad, ‘Empire by Invitation? The United States and Western Europe
1945–1952’, Journal of Peace Research, vol. 23, no. 3 (1986), pp. 263–277.
3. Lüthi, L.M., Cold Wars: Asia, the Middle East, Europe (Cambridge, Cambridge
University Press), 2020.
4. Goedde, Petra, The Politics of Peace: A Global Cold War History (Oxford,
Oxford University Press), 2019, p. 2.
5. See, for example, Anders Stephanson, ‘Fourteen Notes on the Very Concept of
a Cold War’, in Tuathail, Gearoid O. and Dalby, Simon, (eds.), Rethinking
Geopolitics (New York, NY, Routledge), 1999, pp. 62–85; and Lundestad,
‘Empire’.
6. Westad, O.A., The Global Cold War. Third World Interventions and the Making
of Our Times (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press), 2005.
7. Chamberlin, P.T., The Cold War’s Killing Fields: Rethinking the Long Peace
(New York, NY, HarperCollins), 2018. The term “Long Peace” refers to John
Lewis Gaddis’s influential thesis, Gaddis, J.L., The Long Peace: Inquiries into
the History of the Cold War (New York, NY, Oxford University Press), 1987.
8. McMahon, R.J., The Cold War in the Third World (Oxford, Oxford University
Press), 2013, p. 7; and Chamberlin, The Cold War’s Killing Fields, p. 15.
9. See for example, Chen Jian, Mao’s China and the Cold War (Chapel Hill,
NC, University of North Carolina Press), 2001; Pierre Asselin, Hanoi’s road
to the Vietnam War, 1954–1965 (Berkeley, CA, University of California Press),
2015; Srinath Raghavan, War and Peace in Modern India: A Strategic History
of Nehru Years (Ranikhet, Permanent Black), 2010; Lien-Hang T. Nguyen,
Hanoi’s War: An International History of the War for Peace in Vietnam (Chapel
Hill, NC, University of North Carolina Press), 2012; and Thomas C. Field Jr.,
Stella Krepp, and Vanni Pettinà, (eds.), Latin America and the Global Cold
War (Chapel Hill, NC, University of North Carolina Press), 2020.
10. Outstanding examples of this approach are, Lüthi, Cold Wars; and Chamberlin,
The Cold War’s Killing Fields. Sergey Radchenko’s forthcoming work also
promises a valuable contribution to this literature, applying insights from both
IR and psychology and challenging traditional chronological compartmentali-
sation of the Cold War. Sergey Radchenko, History of the Cold War and After
(Cambridge, Cambridge University Press), forthcoming.
12 E. O’RIORDAN

11. Federico Romero, ‘Cold War Historiography at the Crossroads’. Cold War
History, vol. 14, no. 4 (2014), pp. 685–703, 701.
12. See Latham, Michael, Modernisation as an Ideology: American Social Science
and “Nation Building” in the Kennedy Era (Chapel Hill, NC, University of
North Carolina Press, 2000); David Ekbladh, H-Diplo Article Review No. 238-
A on “Special Forum: Modernisation as a Global Project”, Diplomatic History,
vol. 23, no. 3 (June 2009); and David C. Engerman, Nils Gilman, Mark H.
Haefele, and Michael E. Latham, (eds.), Staging Growth: Modernisation, Devel-
opment, and the Global Cold War (Amherst, MA, University of Massachusetts
Press), 2003. A helpful discussion of ideology and culture is provided by Naoko
Shibusawa, ‘Ideology, Culture and the Cold War’ in Richard Immerman and
Petra Goedde (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of the Cold War (Oxford, Oxford
University Press), 2013, especially pp. 36–40. These ideas are also discussed in
Chapter 10, ‘The Cold War and the Third World: Latin America’.
13. “Memorandum from the President’s Assistant for National Security Affairs
(Kissinger) to President Nixon,” (undated), US Department of State, Foreign
Relations of the United States, 1969–1976, vol. XII, Soviet Union, January
1969–October 1970 (Washington, DC, Government Printing Office), 2006,
p. 603. This was in a memo to prepare Nixon for a possible meeting with
Alexsei Kosygin.
14. Odd Arne Westad, ‘The Cold War and the International History of the Twen-
tieth Century’, in Leffler, M.P. and Westad, O.A., (eds.), The Cambridge
History of the Cold War, Vol. I (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press),
2010, p. 13.
15. Robert Jervis, ‘Identity and the Cold War’, in Leffler, M.P. and Westad, O.A.
(eds.), The Cambridge History of the Cold War, Vol. II (Cambridge, Cambridge
University Press), 2010, p. 26.
16. President George Bush Sr., cited in Leffler, M.P., For the Soul of Mankind: The
United States, the Soviet Union, and the Cold War (New York, NY, Hill and
Wang), 2007, p. 3.
17. Romero, ‘Cold War Historiography’, p. 686.
18. Akira Iriye, ‘Historicizing the Cold War’, in Immerman, R.H. and Goedde,
P., (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of the Cold War (Oxford, Oxford Univer-
sity Press), 2013, p. 17. These arguments are also explored by Patrick
Major and Rana Mitter, ‘Cold War Culture’ in Saki R. Dockrill and Geraint
Hughes, (eds.), Palgrave Advances in Cold War History (Basingstoke, Palgrave
Macmillan), 2006.
19. Romero, ‘Cold War Historiography’, p. 693.
20. George Orwell, ‘You and the Atomic Bomb’, Tribune, October 19, 1945,
reprinted in Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, (eds.), The Collected Essays: Jour-
nalism and Letters of George Orwell, Vol. 4 (New York, Harcourt Brace and
World), 1968, pp. 8–10.
21. Walter Lipmann, The Cold War, A Study in US Foreign Policy (New York,
NY, Harper & Row), 1947. For more on the origins and development of the
term, see William Safire, Safire’s Political Dictionary (New York, NY, Oxford
University Press), 2008, pp. 134–135.
22. Odd Arne Westad, The Cold War: A World History (New York, NY, Basic
Books), 2017, p. 1.
23. Lüthi, Cold Wars, p. 5.
 1 INTRODUCTION 13

24. Goedde, Politics of Peace, p. 2.

25. Richard H. Immerman and Petra Goedde, ‘Introduction’, in Immerman, R.H.
and Goedde, P (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of the Cold War (Oxford, Oxford
University Press), 2013, p. 1.
26. Odd Arne Westad, ‘The Cold War and the International History of the Twen-
tieth Century’, in Leffler, M.P. and Westad, O.A. (eds.), The Cambridge History
of the Cold War, Vol. I (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press), 2010, p. 2.
27. Holger Nehring, ‘What was the Cold War?’ The English Historical Review, vol.
127, no. 527 (August 2012), pp. 920–949, especially p. 923.
28. Lawrence, D. Freedman, ‘Frostbitten, Decoding the Cold War 20 Years Later’,
Foreign Affairs, vol. 89, no. 2 (March/April 2010), pp. 136–144.
29. Pierre Grosser, ‘Looking for the Core of the Cold War, and Finding a Mirage?’,
Cold War History, vol. 15, no. 2 (2015), pp. 245–252.
30. Masuda Hajimu, ‘Introduction: What was the Cold War?’, in Masuda Hajimu,
Cold War Crucible: The Korean Conflict and the Postwar World (Cambridge,
MA, Harvard University Press), 2015, p. i.
31. Nehring, ‘What was the Cold War?’, pp. 930–931.
 PART I

Early Cold War: Origins and Development

 CHAPTER 2

Historical Background: World War II

and Tensions in the Wartime Alliance

While current Cold War historiography, driven by the unlocking of archives

since the 1990s, is largely dominated by ‘global’ interpretations which seek
to widen the interpretive lens, to decentre understanding of the subject
geographically and to analyse the contest from multiple perspectives and
experiences, previous historiographical approaches were very different. Earlier
generations of Cold War scholarship, written during the contest and so
influenced by the more limited availability of source material and inevitably
lacking the knowledge of hindsight afforded by its finale, were dominated by
American-based authors who concentrated on the relationship between the
US and Soviet Union and focussed primarily on the Cold War in Europe,
though East Asia, Indochina and the Arab–Israeli conflict did receive some
attention. The initial debate centred on the Cold War’s origins, emphasising
issues of responsibility and blame, concentrating on the European theatre, and
examining motivating forces as a relatively straightforward equation between
ideology (viewed largely as a binary communism versus democratic-capitalism
dichotomy) and national interest (defined essentially as geopolitical or power-
related). This chapter and the next provide a brief overview of the main
evidence and arguments upon which these first generation Cold War debates
centred, focussing particularly on the pivotal years in the mid-1940s when the
relationship between Washington, Moscow and London shifted from that of
a functioning, albeit strained and tense wartime alliance, to one in which the
continent of Europe had been divided by an ‘iron curtain’ and any expecta-
tion of continued cooperation into the post-World War II period had been
superseded by deep-rooted suspicion and hostility.1
The Cold War’s roots can be traced to forces of alienation and rejection
from the political and economic structures embedded in the West since the

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 17

Switzerland AG 2023
E. O’Riordan, Understanding the Cold War,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06075-5_2
18 E. O’RIORDAN

Enlightenment. Prior to 1917 this atmosphere of dissent spawned a recep-

tive environment for socialist theory, fuelling the revolutionary dynamic in
Russia; subsequently, it underpinned the contest between the Soviet model
and its opponents. In 1917 the international system, already strained from the
impact of World War I, faced an unprecedented challenge from the October
Revolution, with Bolshevik policies signifying an assault on the established
world order of the nature not seen since the French Revolution. The Bolshevik
leader, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, antagonised the British government in particular
by refusing to recognise treaties made by predecessor Russian governments
and further compounding this by publishing the terms of secret wartime
treaties made between Russia and its allies. The Bolsheviks quickly concluded
the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Germany, thereby ending the eastern front
and enabling Germany to concentrate all its might on the western front.
Lenin’s refusal to recognise debts incurred by the Russian government seemed
calculated to undermine the international economic system, while the offer of
an immediate ceasefire to all the belligerents in World War I on terms which
afforded liberation to colonies caused consternation in Europe’s imperial capi-
tals. Moreover, international revolution was central to Bolshevik thinking
and Lenin, predicting that the Russian Revolution would inspire workers
elsewhere, called on all workers in the world to overthrow their bourgeois
governments and instal soviets. Lenin realised that his fledgling national revo-
lution faced not simply domestic but also international foes: ‘The Russian
revolution has a great international ally both in Europe and in Asia, but, at
the same time, and for that very reason, it has not only a national, not only
a Russian, but also an international enemy. Reaction against the mounting
proletarian struggle is inevitable in all capitalist countries, and it is uniting
the bourgeois governments of the whole world against every popular move-
ment…’2 Lenin established the Communist International (the Comintern) to
promote revolution abroad and in many European countries the threat of
communism in the interwar period was real indeed.3
The international reaction to the October Revolution was one of outrage.
Troops from Britain, France, Japan and the US were sent to support the
‘Whites’ against the communist ‘Reds’ in Russia’s ensuing Civil War, and
by December 1918 200,000 foreign troops were fighting in Russia against
pro-Bolshevik forces.4 Following the Civil War, there was little improve-
ment in relations between Moscow and the Western powers, which remained
characterised by deep and profound enmity. US diplomat George Kennan
subsequently recalled that, ‘Never were American relations with Russia at a
lower ebb than in the first 16 years after the Bolshevik seizure of power in
1917’,5 while relations between Britain and Russia throughout the 1920s
have been described as a ‘veritable cold war’.6 Yet although both London and
Washington were appalled by events in Russia and were united in their view
of the Bolshevik revolution as an assault on their very value systems, Amer-
ican and British perceptions of those value systems and their overall world
views differed: it is thus important to recognise that Western opposition to
 2 HISTORICAL BACKGROUND: WORLD WAR II AND TENSIONS … 19

the Soviets lacked homogeneity. The British empire, despite its many chal-
lenges, remained the predominant global power and was more engaged in the
international system in the post-World War I period than the US, which had
adopted isolationism and had rejected ratification of the Treaty of Versailles.
For the British, the Bolshevik Revolution was not only an assault on concepts
of property and authority, but also embodied a tangible threat to both the
notion and reality of their empire and so endangered the very foundation of
their sense of identity, international outlook and global power. In contrast,
for the Americans, who had little sympathy for the old European empires,
the Soviet system challenged an emerging sense of national identity and world
vision, fluid but potent, which while comprising a combination of Wilsonian
idealism and libertarianism was also founded upon an entrenched and growing
sense of American exceptionalism.
For Lenin, the international dimension to his outlook created a constant
tension and contributed to his willingness to act pragmatically in international
affairs. As he explained, ‘…an alliance with one imperialist state against another
to consolidate the socialist republic is not objectionable in point of princi-
ple’. This has been termed an approach of ‘the exploitation of inter-imperialist
contradictions’,7 and became a recurring theme in Soviet foreign policy, partic-
ularly under Joseph Stalin. A loyal revolutionary, Stalin was an active member
of the Bolsheviks and became General Secretary of the Communist Party in
1922. Outmanoeuvring his rival, Leon Trotsky, he transformed this position
from a primarily administrative role to one of power and, following Lenin’s
death in 1924, succeeded in emerging as his successor, in time consolidating
this position into that of a dictator. Ruthless and driven, Stalin combined
a fervent commitment to the socialist revolution with passionate patriotism.
His domestic initiatives of collectivisation and industrialisation entailed a high
human cost for ordinary Russians, while his notorious purges demonstrate
ample evidence of his capacity for cruelty and paranoia. Early scholarly debates
on the Cold War are dominated by the issue of Stalin’s responsibility for the
contest and the extent to which his foreign policy was motivated by communist
ideology or traditional geopolitical considerations.8
By the 1930s Stalin’s foreign policy problems were mounting. The rise of
Nazism in Germany presented a severe international challenge and, as Hitler
embarked on increasingly expansionist policies, so the possibility of an alliance
between Britain, France and the Soviet Union seemed a potential last resort.
So concerned was Stalin at the threat to the Soviet Union’s security after
Germany’s Anschluss with Austria in 1938 that he was willing to countenance
an agreement with London despite the ingrained differences between the two
governments.9 Yet even as appeasement fractured and British fears regarding
Germany mounted, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain remained inherently
suspicious of the Soviet Union and final diplomatic feelers in the summer of
1939 for an alliance between London and Moscow failed.10 Suspecting that
Britain’s grand plan was for communism and fascism to destroy each other in
conflict, Stalin now abruptly changed tack: Vyacheslav Molotov was appointed
20 E. O’RIORDAN

foreign minister and on 23 August 1939 the Nazi-Soviet Pact, which provided
the catalyst for World War II, was signed. Horrified by this pact, the West
interpreted Stalin’s acts as a cynical betrayal, a sell-out to Hitler. Yet Stalin,
facing mounting threats and diminishing options, had acted with character-
istic shrewdness: his policy henceforth was to avoid involvement in a European
war while bolstering Soviet security by building up spheres of influence in
Eastern Europe. While Stalin recognised that he would eventually have to
confront Nazi Germany, he sought to delay for as long as possible, convinced
that Hitler would not attack Russia until he had first secured victory over his
capitalist-imperialist adversaries.11 On 22 June 1941, therefore, when Hitler
launched Operation Barbarossa and German forces attacked deep into Russia’s
heartlands, Stalin was deeply shocked; indeed the trauma of Russia’s wartime
experience of betrayal and attack left a profound and defining scar on the
psyche of an entire generation of the Soviet Union’s policy-making elite.
Britain’s Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, was quick to take advantage
of the developing situation. Delighted with the direction Hitler’s war was
now taking, he immediately offered his hand of friendship to Stalin. Facing
invasion and defeat, Stalin opted for survival. He pragmatically shelved revo-
lutionary ideology, rallying his country with calls to a ‘Great Patriotic War’,
and accepted the olive branch offered by his erstwhile imperial adversary. The
wartime alliance between the Soviet Union and Britain, and subsequently
the US, was, first and foremost, a superficial expedient based on the shared
aim of the defeat of a common foe. Essentially a ‘marriage of convenience’,
differences and suspicions certainly continued between the alliance partners.
In particular, tensions coalesced over the issue of London and Washington’s
reluctance to open a second front in Europe, as well as Stalin’s relentless pres-
suring of his alliance partners for political concessions regarding the future map
of Europe. Andrei Gromyko, an official in the Soviet Embassy in Washington
from 1941 to 1942, later recalled that the Cold War, ‘began as “the secret
cold war”, accompanying the “hot” war, as the allies at Churchill’s insistence
without justification delayed the opening of the second front in Europe’.12
And yet despite the multiple problems, a significant degree of cooperation
did develop between the ‘Big Three’. By the end of 1944, there was a func-
tioning, working relationship and, importantly, there existed an expectation
that cooperation would continue into peacetime. Understandably, therefore,
analysing the detail of the relationship between the Big Three and explaining
the disintegration of this wartime Grand Alliance forms a key element in initial
historiographical discussion on the origins of the Cold War.

Wartime Diplomacy
In response to constant pressure from Stalin for a more far-reaching polit-
ical agreement with Britain instead of the primarily military one, the British
Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, undertook an exploratory mission to
Moscow in December 1941. Here Stalin demanded the recognition of the
 2 HISTORICAL BACKGROUND: WORLD WAR II AND TENSIONS … 21

1941 frontiers which the USSR had been granted under the terms of the
Nazi-Soviet Pact: in effect these comprised Russian control of Estonia, Latvia
and all of Eastern Poland. Eden relayed this to his Cabinet colleagues but
Churchill and the Cabinet refused, arguing that agreeing might jeopardise
relations with the US. The US had finally entered the war following Japan’s
attack on Pearl Harbour and Hitler’s subsequent declaration of war on 11
December. Although, ostensibly, Britain remained the senior partner in the
Anglo-American relationship until the Teheran conference in the autumn of
1943, in reality, London’s policy-makers had long appreciated the necessity of
prioritising good relations with Washington. Unofficially a close relationship
had already developed between Britain and the US before December 1941,
with the US Congress approving Lend-Lease aid in March 1941 and, on 14
August 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt meeting with Churchill to agree
the ‘Atlantic Charter’. This laid down principles of international behaviour,
including that no territorial changes should be made which did not accord
with the freely expressed wishes of the people involved and that the right of
all people to choose their own form of government should be accepted.13
After Eden’s Moscow trip, the Cabinet was concerned that Stalin’s political
demands went against the spirit of this Atlantic Charter, and Eden therefore
refused the Soviet leader’s requests.
Angered by Eden’s refusal, Stalin took every opportunity to revisit the
subject and it soon became evident that he was using the question of the
1941 frontiers as an acid test of British commitment. Although the British
remained reluctant to acquiesce, from 1942 Eden did begin to give ground.
For Churchill and Eden, it was imperative that the Soviets keep fighting.
Struggling for her very survival, Britain had stood alone against Nazi Germany
prior to Barbarossa and even once America joined the war, still shouldered
much responsibility in the European theatre while the Americans focussed
on the war in the Pacific. Meanwhile, Japanese advances had inflicted devas-
tating losses in East and Southeast Asia. Memories of the Russian collapse in
World War I and the separate Treaty of Brest-Litovsk of March 1918 between
the Bolsheviks and the Germans cast a long shadow: at this point worrying
about the detail of a post-war Europe seemed meaningless until it was clear
the war was going to be won. Stalin needed a second front, but the British
were anxious to avoid becoming embroiled in a quagmire in France as had
happened during the First World War, and so tactically it seemed opportune
to cede some ground politically as there was little Britain was prepared to do
militarily to help the Soviets. This thinking explains why, on 26 May 1942, an
Anglo-Soviet Twenty-Year Mutual Assistance Agreement was signed in which
Britain essentially acquiesced to Stalin’s demands regarding the Baltic States.
Over subsequent months the question of a second front remained contentious,
and in August Churchill flew to Moscow for conversations during which he
explained that autumn 1942 would herald Operation Torch into North West
Africa with the second front into France finally being scheduled for spring
1943. He also informed Stalin that, in view of the heavy losses inflicted by
22 E. O’RIORDAN

German U-boats and aircraft, Britain could no longer sustain its role in the
Atlantic convoys. In January 1943 Churchill and Roosevelt met in Casablanca
to discuss strategy. Here, although they agreed on the need to seek uncon-
ditional surrender from Germany, Italy and Japan, as well as their desire to
bolster the Soviet Union while focussing on bombing efforts in Germany, they
once more decided to postpone the invasion of France, instead prioritising an
attack on Sicily.14
These episodes provide the subtext for the latter stages of the war. After
victory at Stalingrad in January 1943, the tide turned on the eastern front and
Stalin became more assertive, though he remained dissatisfied and suspicious
that the West were conspiring to leave the Soviet Union with the burden of
militarily defeating Germany—the same fears which in August 1939 had driven
him to form the Nazi–Soviet pact. Britain and the US remained morally on the
defensive, culpable because despite providing support, they had not afforded
the practical military measures demanded by Stalin. Still anxious that the
Soviets might form a separate agreement with Hitler or that the Soviets would
not join the war in the Pacific once Hitler had been defeated, London and
Washington continued to countenance political concessions to placate their
Soviet ally. In addition, Churchill seems to have genuinely warmed towards
Stalin. In January 1944 he wrote to Eden, ‘Undoubtedly my own feelings
have changed in the two years that have passed… The tremendous victories
of the Russian armies, the deep-seated changes which have taken place on the
character of the Russian state and government, the new confidence which has
grown in our hearts towards Stalin—these have all had their effect’.15 The
mood of the British public thawed towards their wartime ally and the British
press began referring to Stalin rather affectionately as ‘Uncle Joe’. Naturally,
Stalin shrewdly encouraged this—in May 1943, for example, he dissolved the
Comintern.

The Teheran Conference, 28

November–1 December 1943
Against this backdrop, the first wartime conference of the Big Three took place
at Teheran in autumn 1943. By this stage a meeting between the three wartime
leaders was needed for progress on a number of issues: militarily, operations
against Germany needed coordination; the Soviets wanted an answer to the
second front question; and there was also the matter of whether the Soviets
should enter the war once Hitler had been defeated. In addition, prelimi-
nary discussions over the treatment of Germany after the war now needed to
begin, and, finally, the question of Poland required addressing. At the Teheran
Conference, it was decided that the invasion of France (Operation Overlord)
would take place in May 1944, a decision of long-term significance as it meant
that the land war in Europe would in effect be decided on the eastern front. In
return for accepting this further delay to the second front, Stalin was granted
concessions regarding Poland.16
 2 HISTORICAL BACKGROUND: WORLD WAR II AND TENSIONS … 23

Poland encapsulated a number of contentious issues which would, over

the next years, coalesce to poison any atmosphere conducive to coopera-
tion within the Grand Alliance. For Stalin, ensuring a quiescent Poland on
the Soviet Union’s western border was an essential security requirement as
Germany had twice in living memory attacked the Russian motherland via
Poland. Since 1917 Moscow had repeatedly sought to topple the Polish
government and replace it with communism, while the Nazi–Soviet Pact had
at its core been designed to achieve a geographical security buffer by carving
up Poland between the Soviet Union and Germany. Since the autumn of
1941 Stalin had pressured Eden for international recognition of the Soviet
conquests into Poland made at the beginning of the war and by 1943, as
the tide of war turned and Stalin’s thoughts gradually moved from immediate
survival to the post-war future, Poland came to the fore. In April 1943 the
Germans discovered the Katyn massacre, the mass execution of 22,000 Polish
officers and intelligentsia which had taken place from April–May 1940, and
publicly blamed the Russians. When the Polish government in exile in London
demanded an investigation by the International Red Cross, the Germans
agreed, but Stalin objected, fuelling suspicions that the Soviets were respon-
sible for the atrocity. Churchill bowed to Soviet pressure, agreeing to oppose
the investigation, but even so Stalin used the episode as an excuse to break
off diplomatic relations with the Poles. Meanwhile, he drove a wedge between
Poland and Czechoslovakia by concluding a treaty with the Czechs in June
1943.
At the Teheran Conference, Churchill was again willing to compromise over
Poland for the sake of maintaining the wartime alliance with Stalin, and the
allies agreed that Poland would lose eastern territory to the Soviet Union but
would gain at the expense of Germany in the west. In effect Poland would be
shifted westwards and so would be bound to be more dependent on Moscow
than Germany; in practice, therefore, Churchill and Roosevelt were acknowl-
edging Poland as a Soviet puppet and betraying the principles of their Atlantic
Charter. In return Stalin agreed to enter the war with Japan once the war with
Germany was over. The Teheran conference, however, did not solve the Polish
question as, despite pressure by Churchill and Eden, the Polish government in
exile in London refused to accept the terms. The result was a stalemate and it
was increasingly apparent that the question of Poland was becoming a test case
for the future shape of Central and Eastern Europe. Furthermore, the inimical,
transactional nature of these negotiations regarding Poland contributed to the
establishment of an injurious pattern of perception and misperception within
the Grand Alliance. Stalin’s approach may have been fundamentally defensive,
grounded in fears for the future security of the Soviet Union, but his antago-
nistic negotiating style created the opposite impression. Yet, by his persistence,
Stalin had extracted genuine concessions from his alliance partners over Poland
and so the apparent success of his tenacity in negotiations reinforced his abra-
sive methods, creating an escalating cycle of distrust. For their part, the British
and Americans, although recognising the essential security concerns facing the
24 E. O’RIORDAN

Soviet Union, had little genuine sympathy with the communist power and,
once the wartime emergency passed, became concerned more with Stalin’s
aggressive tactics than with his basic security conundrum.
On 6 June 1944, the second front was finally launched with the D-Day
landings on Normandy’s beaches. Meanwhile, rapid gains were now being
made on the eastern front by Soviet troops. Romania was occupied, and the
Soviet Union declared war on Bulgaria even as its government asked for peace
from Britain and the US. The Red Army also advanced into Poland, occu-
pying Lublin. This raised practical issues regarding the administration of Polish
territory: the Red Army was on the spot; the Polish government was based in
exile in London. On 1 August the Polish resistance began the Warsaw Rising,
anticipating support from the Red Army. Although scholars now recognise
that Soviet forces were overextended and unable to assist in the face of fierce
German counterattacks, the narrative at the time blamed Stalin for cynically
encouraging Polish resistance (he suggested, for example, that he had no
intention of communising Poland and that the frontier question was post-
poned until there was a regular government in Warsaw) and then standing by
as the rising collapsed, the Polish home guard destroyed, and the prestige of
the Polish Government in exile in London greatly undermined.17

The Fourth Moscow (‘Tolstoy’)

Conference, 9–19 October 1944
By autumn 1944 another conference was necessary to address the issues left
unresolved at Teheran, notably the rapidly developing situation in Central
and Eastern Europe, and so from 9 to 19 October the Tolstoy Conference
convened in Moscow. Although both Stalin and Churchill attended, Roosevelt
was engaged at home with the presidential election and so was represented by
his Ambassador in Moscow, Averell Harriman. Churchill was keen to discuss
a Russian declaration of war against Japan and wanted a friendly settlement
regarding Poland, but he also took advantage of the opportunity to hold
a discussion with Stalin on the future of Central and Eastern Europe. In a
private conversation, they agreed on the ‘Percentages Agreement’, a contro-
versial exchange in which Churchill scrawled spheres of influence for post-war
Europe on the back of an envelope and Stalin ticked them with a blue pencil
to indicate his approval. The ratios agreed were: Romania 90 (Russia): 10
(The others); Greece 90 (Great Britain, in accord with USA): 10 (Russia);
Yugoslavia 50:50; Hungary 50:50; Bulgaria 75 (Russia): 25 (The others).
Churchill recalled, ‘The pencilled paper lay in the centre of the table. At length
I said, “Might it not be thought rather cynical if it seemed we had disposed
of these issues, so fateful to millions of people, in such an offhand manner?
Let us burn the paper”. “No, you keep it”, said Stalin’.18 Much has been
made of the fact that in Roosevelt’s absence old-fashioned, imperialistic power
politics triumphed, and interesting themes in early historiographical discus-
sion of the origins of the Cold War are the extent to which both Stalin and
 2 HISTORICAL BACKGROUND: WORLD WAR II AND TENSIONS … 25

Churchill subsequently adhered to this understanding and the significance of

the Percentages Agreement in illuminating the central tension in Stalin’s poli-
cies between security considerations and ideology.19 In the weeks following
the Tolstoy Conference, Stalin once again amplified the pressure on Poland.
The Soviets, as the occupying force, had already established an administra-
tive committee in occupied Lublin; in December 1944 Stalin recognised the
Lublin committee as the official government of Poland, but Britain and the
US continued to recognise the government in exile in London.

The Yalta Conference, 4–11 February 1945

Since 1941 the Grand Alliance had endured, but within it tensions and anxi-
eties constantly chafed. At key moments the same trade-off had been made:
concessions to Stalin’s territorial security demands, instead of military assis-
tance. By the beginning of 1945, as the Big Three prepared to gather at Yalta
for their last wartime conference, the consequences of that policy were thrown
into focus: the Soviets were now in control of most of Eastern Europe and
could only have been evicted by force. Thus the unintended consequence of
the West’s military strategy had been to dictate a diplomatic reality limiting
Anglo-American influence over Eastern Europe. Decisions taken at the Yalta
conference are central to understanding the origins of the Cold War and, in
particular, the debate has focussed on whether the conference augured a spirit
of accommodation between the allies that could have nurtured a cooperative
post-war environment; or whether the Yalta agreements were mere superficial
expedients, papering over long-established cracks in the alliance which were
bound to result in a schism. Before examining the Yalta agreements in more
depth, it is helpful to look in greater detail at the specific aims of the ‘Big
Three’.20
Franklin Roosevelt (or ‘FDR’, as he was oft referred to) was a confident,
charismatic politician determined to be as successful in foreign affairs as he
had been in domestic politics, where his ‘New Deal’ left a lasting legacy. A
committed Democrat, he was first elected president in 1933 and won a record
four terms in office, an achievement all the more remarkable as he had had
to overcome ill health—in 1921, aged 39, he suffered from polio and was left
paralysed. By 1945, though only 63, his health was failing and the arduous
journey to Yalta in the Crimea probably contributed to his death a short time
later. While Roosevelt had an international outlook and was a supporter of
establishing a United Nations, it would be simplistic to classify him as simply
a liberal idealist. Rather he had a shrewd grasp of the realities of power and
international relations, favouring a ‘Four Policemen’ approach whereby the
US, Britain, the Soviet Union and China would enforce peace for a period
following the war while the world recovered and former enemies could be
disarmed.21 At Yalta, therefore, his key priority was to draw the Soviets into
a durable post-war community. Operating on a blend of intuition and experi-
ence, he thought his personal negotiating skills superior to the discredited ‘old
26 E. O’RIORDAN

diplomacy’ epitomised by traditional European imperial powers.22 In March

1942 he told Churchill: ‘I think I can personally handle Stalin better than
either your FO or my State Department’.23 This conviction was not shared by
the British Foreign Office who were reluctant to view anybody else’s diplo-
matic skills as equal to theirs and tended to dismiss the Americans as mere
inexperienced amateurs in the field of international diplomacy.
Like Roosevelt, Winston Churchill was a forceful, compelling personality.
A somewhat maverick political figure, he had swapped party allegiance repeat-
edly, but throughout the 1930s he had opposed Hitler and criticised the policy
of appeasement. As wartime leader, he came into his own, charismatically
rallying the British people to the war effort. Churchill too had an articu-
late international outlook. Recognising the need to learn the lessons of both
World War I and the interwar period, he accepted the centrality of Germany to
future European security and wanted Germany to be rebuilt and ‘re-educated’
rather than dismembered. But stability in Europe was only a means to an
end—necessary to enable Britain to concentrate on more important matters:
her empire and world role. For Churchill, Britain’s vital interests lay in the
Mediterranean and the Middle East, and he never lost sight of this. Churchill
reviled Soviet ideology and distrusted historical Russian imperialism. He also
felt a special responsibility towards Poland: after all Britain had gone to war
because of the guarantee to Poland in September 1939 and the Polish govern-
ment in exile had been located in London. Yet Churchill felt that Stalin was
amenable to negotiation, particularly if the negotiator was someone as finely
skilled as himself. Churchill commented in January 1944, ‘if only I could dine
with Stalin once a week, then there would be no trouble at all. We get on
like a house on fire’.24 For Churchill the litmus test of the extent to which he
could do business with Stalin was Stalin’s promise to respect Britain’s predom-
inance in Greece, laid down in the Percentages Agreement. In December 1944
Churchill wrote to Eden, ‘I am increasingly impressed (up to date) with the
loyalty with which, under much temptation and very likely pressure, Stalin has
kept off Greece in accordance with our agreement’.25
World War II inflicted immeasurable destruction and devastation on the
Soviet Union, with casualties estimated at over 20 million dead. Stalin never
truly trusted Britain and the US, always fearing that they might conclude a
separate peace with Hitler; yet, given the scale of Soviet sacrifices, it was natural
for him to expect special treatment from the Western powers—for example
regarding economic assistance and recognition of spheres of Soviet influ-
ence in Europe. Indeed, a letter from Soviet official Ivan Maisky to Foreign
Minister Molotov in January 1944, which was forwarded to Stalin, identifies
a number of specific Soviet aims: to prevent a future German threat, probably
by dismembering Germany; to secure an acquiescent client state in Poland and
therefore prevent Poland again becoming a gateway for future German aggres-
sion; to regain Russian territories lost in World War I including eastern Poland
and the Baltic states; to fulfil the ‘eternal Russian dream’ of acquiring the
 2 HISTORICAL BACKGROUND: WORLD WAR II AND TENSIONS … 27

Straits, the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles; and to regain the Russian sphere
of influence in Xinjiang, Outer Mongolia and Manchuria and Korea.26
Notwithstanding the Soviet Union’s dominant military position, Stalin
knew that the USSR was in no position to sustain the strain of another war
and was accordingly prepared to work with the West to try to achieve these
aims, while at the same time remaining convinced that the Soviet Union must
provide for its own post-war security rather than rely on unreliable promises.
Despite appreciating the advantage of maintaining functioning relations with
his wartime allies, Stalin was at the same time ready to exploit any differences
between the US and Britain. And yet, interestingly, a degree of camaraderie
did develop among the wartime leaders. As historians Zubok and Pleshakov
explain, ‘by the end of the war, the big three behaved almost as a private
club, with shared memories and jokes that only they could understand. At last
Stalin felt that he had found the company of equals, statesmen who could fully
appreciate his political genius…’.27
In summary, the wartime leaders each approached the Yalta Conference
with different aims. Roosevelt sought to secure the establishment of the
United Nations and to ensure the early entry of the Soviet Union into the
war against Japan. Churchill was less concerned about the United Nations;
rather, he wanted to settle the Polish question and was also anxious to avoid
the mistakes which he felt had been made in the post-World War I settlement,
in particular, punitive reparations. Keen to avoid Britain being left as the sole
upholder of a new European settlement, he desired France to have a full role
in the occupation of Germany. He also wanted to secure continued American
engagement, anxious to avoid a repeat of Washington’s 1920s isolationism.
Stalin wanted to settle the Polish question and also sought agreement on how
to deal with Germany, apparently favouring some form of dismemberment.
He also sought reparation for the loss and damage that the Soviet Union had
suffered during the war. The delays in the opening of the second front by the
British and Americans still rankled with Stalin and he suspected that the Soviet
Union had carried a disproportionate weight of responsibility for defeating the
axis powers. Ivan Maisky, who Stalin had appointed head of a special commis-
sion to look at post-war reparations, had estimated that the Soviet Union’s
‘direct material losses’ from the war exceeded the entire national wealth of
Britain.28 Stalin proposed a figure of $20 billion in reparations; in reality he
expected to get far more than this by taking payment in kind unilaterally from
the Soviet zone of occupation.
For both Churchill and Roosevelt the journey to the Crimea was logistically
challenging in the wartime conditions of 1945. Reluctant to fly, Roosevelt set
out on 22 January on a 10 day, 5000 mile sea journey to Malta. Churchill
flew to Malta, leaving London on 29 January. The Prime Minister and Pres-
ident had dinner together in Malta on 2 February, but Roosevelt, anxious
not to appear to be uniting against Stalin, avoided Churchill’s attempts to
discuss serious business. Both Roosevelt and Churchill then took a 7 hour
flight from Malta to Saki, followed by a 4.5 hour car journey to Yalta.29 The
28 E. O’RIORDAN

last meeting of the Big Three, Yalta was the most consequential of the wartime
conferences; the compromises and agreements which the three leaders, along
with their foreign ministers and diplomatic teams, teased out had far-reaching
significance.30
Agreement on establishing a United Nations was relatively straightforward
to achieve. Stalin, ambivalent towards the United Nations concept and scep-
tical of its future effectiveness as the guarantor of international security and
cooperation, was content to accept Roosevelt’s favoured project, shrewdly
using Soviet support to extract concessions from Roosevelt on other issues.
The outcome regarding the Pacific War was also satisfactory from Roosevelt’s
perspective: Stalin agreed that the Soviet Union would enter the war against
Japan once Germany was defeated. In return Stalin was promised key territo-
ries (Southern Sakhalin and the Kurile Islands) which were strategically vital
to the Soviet Union’s eastern boundaries. This was a significant triumph for
Stalin. These concessions were substantial and were also kept secret, suggesting
a desire on the part of the British and American leaders to avoid drawing public
attention towards them and a reluctance to be seen as involved in cynical
territorial bargaining reminiscent of ‘old diplomacy’.
The question of Germany was more contentious. Before the Yalta confer-
ence convened, events on the ground had moved rapidly. The Allies had
agreed to divide Germany into zones of occupation and administer these, as an
interim measure, through an Allied Control Council. After considerable wran-
gling over Germany at Yalta, Churchill ended the conference reasonably happy
with the outcome, Stalin considerably less so. A vague agreement was reached,
as Stalin wished, to dismember Germany, but the detail was imprecise and
British officials still felt that they had a fair amount of latitude. In particular,
the method of dismemberment was deferred for further study and, despite the
separate occupation zones, Germany was to be treated as a single administra-
tive unit by the Control Council. Moreover, Churchill secured an occupation
zone for France, thus ensuring a role for France in the future administration of
Germany. On the question of reparation, agreement was yet more elusive. The
British refused to accept Molotov’s figure of $20 billion as a basis of discus-
sion, though Roosevelt was prepared to countenance a sum of $10 billion
to the Soviet Union as a starting point for further dialogue. In the end, all
Stalin could secure was an acceptance that the issue would be examined by a
commission sitting in Moscow.
Despite making concessions regarding the UN and entry into the Pacific
theatre, Stalin had not been recompensed as he hoped regarding Germany
and, in consequence, the issue of Poland assumed even greater importance in
his quest for post-war Soviet security. Stalin was certainly in a strong posi-
tion to make demands regarding Poland: the Red Army was the army of
occupation, and he had already secured concessions from his Allies at the
Teheran Conference (although these had been rejected by the Polish govern-
ment in exile in London). On 7 February, Stalin agreed to the establishment
of the UN; over the next few days Roosevelt and Churchill backed down over
 2 HISTORICAL BACKGROUND: WORLD WAR II AND TENSIONS … 29

Poland, essentially accepting the Soviets’ Lublin government (rather than the
Polish government in exile in London) with a vague proviso that it would
be reorganised on a broader democratic basis. In return, Stalin accepted a
loosely worded ‘Declaration on Liberated Europe’, drafted by the US State
Department. This declaration, which stated that the great powers would
utilise the period of stability which would inevitably follow war to ‘assist the
peoples liberated… to solve by democratic means their political and economic
problems’31 has been compared to Hitler’s ‘peace in our time’ promise to
Chamberlain at Munich. Roosevelt was the main advocate for the declaration,
Stalin was unconcerned, and Churchill wary. Indeed, when Churchill thought
it might be applied to the British Empire he ‘blew his top, shouting “Never,
never, never”’.32 Although Roosevelt and Churchill have been accused of
appeasement over these decisions at Yalta, at the time, both felt that they had
done the best that they could for the Poles. Transcripts of the Yalta discussion
reveal just how unwavering Stalin was on the issue, and, crucially, the Red
Army was on the spot and no amount of diplomacy could alter this. Churchill
now recognised the ramifications of this military reality and entreated the
American military to occupy as much territory as possible before the Soviets
did. But by this stage, it was essentially too late.
In summary, throughout the wartime alliance, and especially at the
Yalta conference, there were differences between all three leaders—between
Churchill and Roosevelt as well as between the Western leaders and Stalin. Yet
despite these differences a working relationship was established and progress
was made in difficult and contentious areas. All three statesmen could view
Yalta with a degree of satisfaction. Alexander Cadogan of the British Foreign
Office felt, ‘I think the Conference has been quite successful’.33 During the
tough negotiations, a rapport did develop. Churchill reported to Cabinet, ‘I
am profoundly impressed with the friendly attitude of Stalin and Molotov. It
is a different Russian world to any I have seen hitherto’.34 Cadogan, too was
impressed with Stalin, ‘I must say I think Uncle Joe much the most impres-
sive of the three men. He is very quiet and restrained’.35 Furthermore, there
was an expectation that this cooperation would continue into the post-war
period. Yalta was not intended to be the last word on the future of Europe;
Churchill and Roosevelt assumed that there would be a full peace conference
which they would attend and so there would be plenty of future opportu-
nity to barter with Stalin and steer the Grand Alliance through the transition
to peace. Nevertheless, a detailed examination of the Yalta negotiations has
revealed how contentious the issues facing the allies were. On key areas such
as German reparations the solution had merely been to delay matters rather
than resolve them. Perhaps more seriously, throughout the wartime negotia-
tions Stalin could justifiably feel that he had secured tacit acceptance of, even
agreement to, his concept of a security buffer in Eastern Europe. He also
felt that the wartime conferences signalled the Soviet Union’s acceptance as
a ‘great power’ by the other members of the club. In brief, much had been
30 E. O’RIORDAN

achieved, but for the Grand Alliance to successfully navigate into the post-war
period, great challenges remained. The next few months would be crucial.

From Yalta to Potsdam

Sadly, any positive momentum from the Yalta meetings quickly stalled. Stalin
became increasingly obdurate: he procrastinated over the repatriation of pris-
oners of war and did not send representatives to London to start up the new
Control Commission on Germany; he declared that Molotov would be too
busy to go to San Francisco for the conference setting up the UN, sending the
middle-ranking Andrei Gromyko instead. Perhaps more ominously, he began
consolidating his hold over the governments in Eastern Europe. The mili-
tary situation in Europe was moving rapidly: German troops were trying to
surrender to the Western allies in the expectation of more favourable treatment
than they would receive from the Soviets and Stalin had only a brief window
of opportunity to maximise his influence in Eastern Europe, particularly in
eastern Germany and Poland. On 27 February, the Soviets intervened in
Romania to instal a puppet regime under the cover of the ‘democratic front’;
democratic elements in Poland were constricted and the Lublin government
was not in fact broadened, in breach of the Yalta agreements. Communists
were moved into key government posts in Bulgaria, Hungary and Czechoslo-
vakia. As a result, by March 1945 the British and US concluded that Soviet
policy had shifted though interestingly the prevailing narrative, certainly in
Britain, was not to blame ‘Uncle Joe’ Stalin for this shift, but rather to point
to unspecified darker forces within the Kremlin.
In this context, the transformation in the Grand Alliance which occurred
over the next months was significant. In April 1945 Roosevelt died and Harry
S. Truman assumed the Presidency. Truman delayed the next alliance confer-
ence (the Potsdam Conference) until the end of July. This was over two
months after the surrender of Germany and, as it would transpire, only weeks
before Japan surrendered. Meanwhile, Churchill suffered a shock election
defeat and was replaced as Prime Minister by the Labour Party leader, Clement
Attlee, on 26 July. Stalin had come to accept Roosevelt and Churchill as part-
ners; not so their successors. In Stalin’s eyes, President Truman, Secretary
of State James F. Byrnes, Prime Minister Clement Attlee and Foreign Secre-
tary Ernest Bevin were inexperienced and inferior, the products of flawed and
weak democratic systems. In the words of Zubok and Pleshakov, ‘In a matter
of months what looked like a classic trilateral diplomacy had deteriorated
before Stalin’s eyes into a hopeless international morass’.36 Both Molotov and
Stalin tended to underrate and dislike Truman, dismissing him as less intelli-
gent than Roosevelt and, lacking experience in foreign affairs, susceptible to
manipulation by Byrnes, whom they disliked even more.
Problems quickly became manifest at the international level. On 23 April,
Truman told Molotov that the Soviets should uphold their agreements and,
 2 HISTORICAL BACKGROUND: WORLD WAR II AND TENSIONS … 31

with the German surrender in May, Lend-Lease aid to Moscow was termi-
nated. At the end of May, Truman sent special envoy Harry Hopkins on
a mission to Moscow in an attempt to get an agreement with Stalin over
Poland. In response, on 21 June, the Soviets agreed to four non-Lublin Poles
joining the Polish government: thus the letter of Yalta was adhered to, but
not the spirit. Meanwhile, the Mediterranean, a traditional arena of competi-
tion between Britain and Russia, began to emerge as a key area of contention.
In June 1945 Stalin precipitated a long-running crisis regarding Turkey when
he informed the Turks of his desire to have bases in the Bosphorus Straits.
Stalin gradually increased the pressure, culminating in a war scare with the US
in 1946.

The Potsdam Conference, 17 July–2 August 1945

By the time of the Potsdam Conference at the end of July, relations in the
wartime alliance had deteriorated from those at Yalta only a few months
previously: the personnel of the Big Three had changed and the spirit of coop-
eration of Yalta, such as it was, had dissipated. At Potsdam, there was little
attempt to do more than paper over differences and avoid an obvious breach.
For example, Byrnes managed to cobble together a deal whereby the Soviets
got their way on the western border of Poland but were denied a figure for
reparations from Germany. Instead each would take equipment, food and raw
materials from their zone and, in addition, the Soviets would receive transfers
from the western zones. In another fudge, a Council of Foreign Ministers was
established to draw up peace treaties with Germany and her allies.
The most significant event during Potsdam happened outwith the formal
conference proceedings. As the Plenary Session at Potsdam ended on 17 July,
Truman took Stalin to one side (with an interpreter), to let him know that the
previous day the US had successfully tested a bomb of ‘unusual destructive
power’.37 Stalin, much to Truman’s amazement, remained totally impassive
as he heard the news, but in reality Stalin fully grasped the atomic bomb’s
significance.38 He recognised the power it placed in the hands of Truman and
Byrnes, whom he despised, and interpreted it as atomic blackmail of the Soviet
Union.39 When the US used the bomb, destroying Hiroshima on 6 August,
the timing could scarcely have been worse for the Kremlin. Afraid that Japan
would capitulate before the USSR entered the war and therefore deny him
the key concessions, the Kurile Islands and Southern Sakhalin, which he had
put so much store by at the Yalta conference, Stalin rushed to issue a Soviet
declaration of war on Japan on 8 August. On 9 August the US dropped a
second bomb, on Nagasaki, and the following day the Japanese government
issued a statement accepting surrender terms on the understanding that the
emperor’s position as sovereign ruler would not be prejudiced. On 15 August
Emperor Hirohito formally announced Japan’s surrender.
The atomic bomb forced a revision to Stalin’s approach: the security belt
of friendly regimes around the Soviet Union now acquired new urgency; and,
32 E. O’RIORDAN

in August 1945, Stalin instigated the Soviet Union’s own atomic project. The
scale of this task, undertaken so quickly after the effort and sacrifice demanded
of his people by the Great Patriotic War, should not be underestimated. To
transform the Soviet Union into an atomic power required a huge programme
of rearmament and necessitated a massive shift in policies, both internal and
external; it precipitated substantial changes in the relationship between Stal-
in’s police state and the scientific community; ultimately it created a modern
Soviet military-industrial complex. As Zubok and Pleshakov summarise, ‘On
the ashes of peasant Russia, and amid the rubble of a war-torn country he
ordered the creation of a nuclear superpower’.40

Conclusion
This chapter has introduced the long-term origins of antagonism between the
Soviet Union and the established great powers and outlined the development
of this antagonism throughout the interwar years, before undertaking a more
detailed analysis of relations within the Grand Alliance during the Second
World War. There were multiple tensions inherent in the uneasy wartime
alliance which emerged after the Germans reneged on the Nazi–Soviet pact
and launched their surprise attack deep into the heart of Russia in 1941,
tensions that coalesced in trade-offs between political concessions versus a
second front. And yet, despite the entrenched differences and suspicions, a
working relationship did develop between the partners. Although difficul-
ties remained, and there was always a likelihood that they would increase
when negotiating the post-war settlement, it was by no means inevitable
that relations between the Grand Alliance partners would break down so
catastrophically as they did.
These themes, with their emphasis on the detail of wartime diplomacy,
form a central tenet in the initial generation of Cold War historiographical
debate, a debate largely directed at understanding the superpower relation-
ship and explaining the division of Europe into eastern and western blocs.
The nuance within this debate, particularly the differences between what
are termed the ‘orthodox’, ‘revisionist’ and ‘post-revisionist’ schools, will be
explored in Chapter 4, but it is useful here to highlight that a key strand in
this discourse related to the question of responsibility, an issue which largely
centred on differing interpretations of Stalin’s foreign policy—the extent to
which it was either consistent, planned or opportunistic, and the extent to
which it was motivated by an expansionist communist ideology or traditional
geopolitical considerations. On the one hand, Stalin can be seen as the main
architect of the Cold War: persistently tenacious in negotiations, obstinate in
his territorial demands for Eastern Europe, and cavalier in his approach to the
Yalta Agreements of early 1945. On the other hand, Stalin’s demands can be
viewed as understandable, even reasonable, given his security concerns, and the
response of the Americans and particularly the British meant that he could with
justification feel that they had tacitly accepted his entitlement to some kind of
 2 HISTORICAL BACKGROUND: WORLD WAR II AND TENSIONS … 33

sphere of influence in Eastern Europe. Rather, it was the British and Americans
who misinterpreted Stalin’s actions. These questions concerning the sources
of superpower antagonism—of motivation and responsibility, of perception
versus misperception, and of ideology versus security—which underpin the
initial Cold War historiographical discussion of the war years, also shape the
debate’s analysis of the immediate post-war environment, the years 1945–1947
which, as Chapter 3 will discuss, proved so pivotal to the division of Europe
and the breakdown in relations between Washington and Moscow.

Notes
1. Good examples of earlier historiography can be found in William Appleman
Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (Chicago, IL, Ivan R. Dee),
1959; LaFeber, W., America, Russia, and the Cold War, 1945–1966 (New
York, NY, Wiley), 1967; Feis, H., From Trust to Terror: The Onset of the Cold
War 1945–1950 (New York, NY, W. W. Norton), 1970; while those wanting
to explore more fully the development of these historiographical debates on
the Cold War’s origins should see: Michael F. Hopkins, ‘Continuing Debate
and New Approaches in Cold War History’, Historical Journal, vol. 50, no.
4 (2007), pp. 913–934; Levering, R.B., Pechatnov, V.O., Botzenhart-Viehe,
V., and Edmondson, E.C., Debating the Origins of the Cold War: Amer-
ican and Russian Perspectives (Lanham, MD, Rowman & Littlefield), 2002;
Harold James and Marzenna James, ‘The Origins of the Cold War: Some
New Documents’, The Historical Journal, vol. 37, no. 3 (1994), pp. 615–
622. For further discussion on the different arguments within initial debate on
the Cold War’s origins, particularly the differences between orthodox, revisionist
and post-revisionist strands, see below, Chapter 4.
2. ‘Inflammable Material in World Politics’, vol. 15, F. Sorge correspondence,
Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 15 (Moscow, 1973), pp. 182–188, cited in Haslam,
J., Russia’s Cold War: From the October Revolution to the Fall of the Wall (New
Haven, CT, Yale University Press), 2011, p. 3.
3. Haslam, Russia’s, p. 3.
4. For further reading on foreign intervention in the Russian Civil War see Jabara
Carley, M., Silent Conflict: A Hidden History of Early Soviet-Western Relations
(Lanham, MD, Rowman and Littlefield), 2014; and Foglesong, D.S., Ameri-
ca’s Secret War against Bolshevism: U.S. Intervention in the Russian Civil War,
1917–1920 (Chapel Hill, NC, University of North Carolina Press), 1995.
5. Kennan, G.F., At A Century’s Ending: Reflections, 1982–1995 (New York, NY,
W.W. Norton and Co.), 1996, p. 152.
6. Haslam, Russia’s, p. 1.
7. Speech, 21 December 1920, to the 8th All-Russia Congress of Soviets, Lenin,
Collected Works, vol. 42 (Moscow, 1969), p. 245; see Haslam, Russia’s, p. 5.
8. Tucker, R.C., Stalin as Revolutionary: A Study in History and Personality,
1879–1929 (New York, NY, W. W. Norton and Co.), 1973; Tucker, R.C.,
Stalin in Power: The Revolution from Above, 1928–1941, new edition (New
York, NY, W.W. Norton and Co.), 1992; Kotkin, S., Stalin, Vol. I: Paradoxes
of Power, 1878–1928 (London, Penguin), 2015; and Kotkin, S., Stalin, Vol. II:
Waiting for Hitler, 1929–1941 (London, Allen Lane), 2017.
Another random document with
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I feel the rebuke—
George, I must leave thee—I hear footsteps. Farewell—
So soon—so very soon! Say to her, I beseech you—say to her as
you have said to me, that she may confess if she will; that we have
been together, and that we have both agreed in the opinion that she
had better confess and throw herself on the mercy of her judges, till
the fury of the storm hath passed over.—It will soon have passed
over, I am sure now—
No George, no; but I will say this. I will say to her—
Go on—go on, I beseech you—
—I will say to her—Elizabeth, my dear Sister; go down upon thy
knees and pray to the Lord to be nigh to thee, and give thee
strength, and to lead thee in the path which is best for his glory; and
after that, if thee should feel free to preserve thy life by such means
—being on the guard against the love of life, and the fear of death—
the Tempter of souls, and the weapons of the flesh—it will be thy
duty so to preserve it.
Burroughs groaned aloud—but he could prevail no further. Enough,
said he, at last: write as much on this paper, and let me carry it with
me.
Carry it with thee—what do thee mean?
I hardly know what I mean; I would see her and urge her to live, but
when I consider what must follow, though I have permission to see
her, my heart fails me.
Thee is to meet her with me, I suppose?
No, I believe not—
How—alone?—
No no—not alone, said the jailor, whom they supposed to be outside
of the door, till he spoke.
More of the tender mercies of the law! They would entrap thee
George—
And you too Rachel, if it lay in their power—
Give me that book—it is the Bible that I gave thee, is it not?
It is—
It belonged to my mother. I will write what I have to say in the blank
leaf.
She did so; and giving it into the hands of the Jailor she said to him
—I would have her abide on earth—my dear, dear sister!—I would
pray to her to live and be happy, if she can; for she—O she will have
much to make life dear to her, even though she be left alone by the
way-side for a little time—what disturbs thee George?——
I am afraid of this man. He will betray us—
No—no—we have nothing to fear—
Nothing to fear, when he must have been at our elbow and
overheard everything we have whispered to each other.
Look at him George, and thee will be satisfied.
Burroughs looked up, and saw by the vacant gravity of his hard
visage, that the man had not understood a syllable to their prejudice.
But Elizabeth—I would have her continue on earth, I say—I would—
if so it may please our Father above; but I am in great fear, and I
would have thee tell her so, after she has read what I have written
there in that book. She will have sympathy, whatever may occur to
us—true sympathy, unmixed with fear; but as for me, I have no such
hope—and why should I wrestle with my duty—I—who have no
desire to see the light of another day?
None Rachel?
None—but for the sake of Mary Elizabeth Dyer—and so—and so
George, we are to part now—and there—therefore—the sooner we
part, the better. Her voice died away in a low deeply-drawn heavy
breathing.
Even so dear—even so, my beloved sister—
George—
Nay, nay—why leave me at all?—why not abide here? Why may we
not die together?
George, I say—
Well—what-say?
Suffer me to kiss thee—my brother—before we part....
He made no reply, but he gasped for breath and shook all over, and
stretched out his arms with a giddy convulsive motion toward her.
—Before we part forever George—dear George, putting her hand
affectionately upon his shoulder and looking him steadily in the face.
We are now very near to the threshold of death, and I do believe—I
do—though I would not have said as much an hour ago, for the
wealth of all this world ... nay, not even to save my life ... no ... nor
my sister’s life ... nor thy life ... that I shall die the happier and the
better for having kissed thee ... my brother.
Still he spoke not ... he had no tongue for speech. The dreadful truth
broke upon him all at once now, a truth which penetrated his heart
like an arrow ... and he strove to throw his arms about her; to draw
her up to his bosom—but the chains that he wore prevented him,
and so he leaned his head upon her shoulder ... and kissed her
cheek, and then lifted himself up, and held her with one arm to his
heart, and kissed her forehead and her eyes and her mouth, in a
holy transport of affection.
Dear George ... I am happy now ... very, very happy now, said the
poor girl, shutting her eyes and letting two or three large tears fall
upon his locked hands, which were held by her as if ... as if ... while
her mouth was pressed to them with a dreadful earnestness, her
power to let them drop was no more. And then she appeared to
recollect herself, and her strength appeared to come back to her,
and she rose up and set her lips to his forehead with a smile, that
was remembered by the rough jailor to his dying day, so piteous and
so death-like was it, and said to Burroughs, in her mild quiet way—
her mouth trembling and her large tears dropping at every word—
very, very happy now, and all ready for death. I would say more ...
much more if I might, for I have not said the half I had to say. Thee
will see her ... I shall not see her again....
How—
Not if thee should prevail with her to stay, George. It would be of no
use—it would only grieve her, and it might unsettle us both—
What can I say to you?
Nothing—Thee will see her; and thee will take her to thy heart as
thee did me, and she will be happy—very happy—even as I am now.
Father—Father! O, why was I not prepared for this! Do thou stay me
—do thou support me—it is more than I can bear! cried Burroughs,
turning away from the admirable creature who stood before him
trying to bear up without his aid, though she shook from head to foot
with uncontrollable emotion.
Thee’s very near and very dear to Mary Elizabeth Dyer; and she—
she will be happy—she cannot be otherwise, alive or dead—for all
that know her, pity her and love her——
And so do all that know you—
No, no, George, love and pity are not for such as I—such pity I
mean, or such love as we need here—need I say, whatever we may
pretend, whatever the multitude may suppose, and however ill we
may be fitted for inspiring it—I—I—
Her voice faltered, she grew very pale, and caught by the frame of
the door—
—There may be love, George, there may be pity, there may be some
hope on earth for a beautiful witch ... with golden hair ... with large
blue eyes ... and a sweet mouth ... but for a ... for a ... for a freckled
witch ... with red hair and a hump on her back—what hope is there,
what hope on this side of the grave?
She tried to smile when she said this ... but she could not, and the
preacher saw and the jailor saw that her heart was broken.
Before the former could reply, and before the latter could stay her,
she was gone.
The rest of the story is soon told. The preacher saw Elizabeth and
tried to prevail with her, but he could not. She had all the courage of
her sister, and would not live by untruth. And yet she escaped, for
she was very ill, and before she recovered, the fearful infatuation
was over, the people had waked up, the judges and the preachers of
the Lord; and the chief-judge, Sewall had publicly read a recantation
for the part he had played in the terrible drama. But she saw her
brave sister no more; she saw Burroughs no more—he was put to
death on the afternoon of the morrow, behaving with high and steady
courage to the last—praying for all and forgiving all, and predicting in
a voice like that of one crying in the wilderness, a speedy overthrow
to the belief in witchcraft—a prophecy that came to be fulfilled before
the season had gone by, and his last words were—“Father forgive
them, for they know not what they do!”
Being dead, a messenger of the court was ordered away to apprise
Rachel Dyer that on the morrow at the same hour, and at the same
place, her life would be required of her.
She was reading the Bible when he appeared, and when he
delivered the message, the book fell out of her lap and she sat as if
stupified for a minute or more; but she did not speak, and so he
withdrew, saying to her as he went away, that he should be with her
early in the morning.
So on the morrow, when the people had gathered together before
the jail, and prepared for the coming forth of Rachel Dyer, the High-
Sheriff was called upon to wake her, that she might be ready for
death; she being asleep the man said. So the High-Sheriff went up
and spoke to her as she lay upon the bed; with a smile about her
mouth and her arm over a large book ... but she made no reply. The
bed was drawn forth to the light—the book removed (it was the
Bible) and she was lifted up and carried out into the cool morning air.
She was dead.
 HISTORICAL FACTS.

That the reader may not be led to suppose the book he has just
gone through with, a sheer fabrication, the author has thought it
adviseable to give a few of the many facts upon which the tale is
founded, in the very language of history.
The true name of Mr. Paris was Samuel, instead of Matthew, and he
spelt it with two r’s; that of his child was Elizabeth and that of her
cousin, Abigail Williams. With these corrections to prepare the
reader for what is to follow, we may now go to the historical records
alluded to.
And first—Of the manner in which the accused were treated on their
examination, and of the methods employed to make them confess.
John Proctor, who was executed for witchcraft, gives the following
account of the procedure had with his family, in a letter to Mr. Cotton
Mather, Mr. Moody, Mr. Willard, and others.
“Reverend Gentlemen,—The innocency of our case, with the enmity
of our accusers and our judges and jury, whom nothing but our
innocent blood will serve, having condemned us already before our
trials, being so much incensed and enraged against us by the devil,
makes us bold to beg and implore your favourable assistance of this
our humble petition to his excellency, that if it be possible our innocent
blood may be spared, which undoubtedly otherwise will be shed, if the
Lord doth not mercifully step in; the magistrates, ministers, juries, and
all the people in general, being so much enraged and incensed
against us by the delusion of the devil, which we can term no other, by
reason we know in our own consciences we are all innocent persons.
Here are five persons who have lately confessed themselves to be
witches, and do accuse some of us of being along with them at a
sacrament, since we were committed into close prison, which we
know to be lies. Two of the five are (Carrier’s sons) young men, who
would not confess any thing till they tied them neck and heels, till the
blood was ready to come out of their noses; and it is credibly believed
and reported this was the occasion of making them confess what they
 never did, by reason they said one had been a witch a month, and
another five weeks, and that their mother had made them so, who has
been confined here this nine weeks. My son William Proctor, when he
was examined, because he would not confess that he was guilty,
when he was innocent, they tied him neck and heels till the blood
gushed out at his nose, and would have kept him so twenty-four
hours, if one, more merciful than the rest, had not taken pity on him,
and caused him to be unbound. These actions are very like the popish
cruelties. They have already undone us in our estates, and that will
not serve their turns without our innocent blood. If it cannot be granted
that we have our trials at Boston, we humbly beg that you would
endeavor to have these magistrates changed, and others in their
rooms; begging also and beseeching you would be pleased to be
here, if not all, some of you, at our trials, hoping thereby you may be
the means of saving the shedding of innocent blood. Desiring your
prayers to the Lord in our behalf, we rest your poor afflicted servants,
John Proctor, &c.

Jonathan Cary, whose wife was under the charge, but escaped, has
left a very affecting narrative of her trial, and of the behavior of the
judges.
“Being brought before the justices, her chief accusers were two girls.
My wife declared to the justices, that she never had any knowledge of
them before that day. She was forced to stand with her arms stretched
out. I requested that I might hold one of her hands, but it was denied
me; then she desired me to wipe the tears from her eyes, and the
sweat from her face, which I did; then she desired that she might lean
herself on me, saying she should faint.
Justice Hathorn replied, she had strength enough to torment those
persons, and she should have strength enough to stand. I speaking
something against their cruel proceedings, they commanded me to be
silent, or else I should be turned out of the room. The Indian before
mentioned was also brought in, to be one of her accusers: being come
in, he now (when before the justices) fell down and tumbled about like
a hog, but said nothing. The justices asked the girls who afflicted the
Indian; they answered she, (meaning my wife) and that she now lay
upon him; the justices ordered her to touch him, in order to his cure,
but her head must be turned another way, lest, instead of curing, she
should make him worse, by her looking on him, her hand being guided
to take hold of his; but the Indian took hold of her hand, and pulled her
down on the floor, in a barbarous manner; then his hand was taken
 off, and her hand put on his, and the cure was quickly wrought. I,
being extremely troubled at their inhuman dealings, uttered a hasty
speech, That God would take vengeance on them, and desired that
God would deliver us out of the hands of unmerciful men. Then her
mittimus was writ. I did with difficulty and chagrin obtain the liberty of a
room, but no beds in it; if there had been, could have taken but little
rest that night. She was committed to Boston prison; but I obtained a
habeas corpus to remove her to Cambridge prison, which is in our
county of Middlesex. Having been there one night, next morning the
jailer put irons on her legs (having received such a command;) the
weight of them was about eight pounds; these irons and her other
afflictions soon brought her into convulsion fits, so that I thought she
would have died that night. I sent to entreat that the irons might be
taken off; but all entreaties were in vain, if it would have saved her life,
so that in this condition she must continue. The trials at Salem coming
on, I went thither, to see how things were managed; and finding that
the spectre evidence was there received, together with idle, if not
malicious stories, against people’s lives, I did easily perceive which
way the rest would go; for the same evidence that served for one,
would serve for all the rest. I acquainted her with her danger; and that
if she were carried to Salem to be tried, I feared she would never
return. I did my utmost that she might have her trial in our own county,
I with several others petitioning the judge for it, and were put in hopes
for it; but I soon saw so much, that I understood thereby it was not
intended, which put me upon consulting the means of her escape;
which through the goodness of God was effected, and she got to
Rhode-Island, but soon found herself not safe when there, by reason
of the pursuit after her; from thence she went to New-York, along with
some others that had escaped their cruel hands.
Of the trial of “good-wife Proctor,” the following interpretation was
had.
“About this time, besides the experiment of the afflicted falling at the
sight, &c. they put the accused upon saying the Lord’s prayer, which
one among them performed, except in that petition, deliver us from
evil, she expressed it thus, deliver us from all evil: this was looked
upon as if she prayed against what she was now justly under, and
being put upon it again, and repeating those words, hallowed be thy
name, she expressed it, hollowed be thy name: this was counted a
depraving the words, as signifying to make void, and so a curse rather
than a prayer: upon the whole it was concluded that she also could
 not say it, &c. Proceeding in this work of examination and
commitment, many were sent to prison.
“In August, 1697, the superior court sat at Hartford, in the colony of
Connecticut, where one mistress Benom was tried for witchcraft. She
had been accused by some children that pretended to the spectral
sight: they searched her several times for teats; they tried the
experiment of casting her into the water, and after this she was
excommunicated by the minister of Wallinsford. Upon her trial nothing
material appeared against her, save spectre evidence. She was
acquitted, as also her daughter, a girl of twelve or thirteen years old,
who had been likewise accused; but upon renewed complaints
against them, they both flew into New-York government.

Second—Of the Confessions.—The following is a letter written by six

of the confessing witches, by which it may be understood in some
degree how they came to accuse themselves.
“We, whose names are under written, inhabitants of Andover, when as
that horrible and tremendous judgment beginning at Salem Village, in
the year 1692, (by some called witchcraft) first breaking forth at Mr.
Parris’s house, several young persons being seemingly afflicted, did
accuse several persons for afflicting them, and many there believing it
so to be; we being informed that if a person were sick, the afflicted
person could tell what or who was the cause of that sickness: Joseph
Ballard of Andover (his wife being sick at the same time) he either
from himself, or by the advice of others, fetched two of the persons,
called the afflicted persons, from Salem Village to Andover: which was
the beginning of that dreadful calamity that befel us in Andover. And
the authority in Andover, believing the said accusations to be true,
sent for the said persons to come together to the meeting-house in
Andover (the afflicted persons being there.) After Mr. Barnard had
been at prayer, we were blindfolded, and our hands were laid upon
the afflicted persons, they being in their fits, and falling into their fits at
our coming into their presence [as they said] and some led us and laid
our hands upon them, and then they said they were well, and that we
were guilty of afflicting of them whereupon we were all seized as
prisoners, by a warrant from a justice of the peace, and forthwith
carried to Salem. And by reason of that sudden surprisal, we knowing
ourselves altogether innocent of that crime, we were all exceedingly
astonished and amazed, and affrighted even out of our reason; and
our nearest and dearest relations, seeing us in that dreadful condition,
and knowing our great danger, apprehending that there was no other
way to save our lives, as the case was then circumstanced, but by our
 confessing ourselves to be such and such persons, as the afflicted
represented us to be, they out of tender love and pity persuaded us to
confess what we did confess. And indeed that confession, that it is
said we made, was no other than what was suggested to us by some
gentlemen; they telling us, that we were witches, and they knew it,
and we knew it, and they knew that we knew it, which made us think
that it was so; and our understanding, our reason and our faculties
almost gone, we were not capable of judging our condition; as also
the hard measures they used with us rendered us uncapable of
making our defence; but said anything which they desired: and most
of what we said was but in effect a consenting to what they said.
Sometime after, when we were better composed, they telling of us
what we had confessed, we did profess that we were innocent, and
ignorant of such things. And we hearing that Samuel Wardwell had
renounced his confession, and quickly after was condemned and
executed, some of us were told that we were going after Wardwell.
Mary Osgood, Abigail Barker,
Mary Tiler, Sarah Wilson,
Deliv. Dane, Hannah Tiler.”
“It may here be further added, concerning those that did confess, that
besides that powerful argument, of life (and freedom from hardships,
not only promised, but also performed to all that owned their guilt)
there are numerous instances, too many to be here inserted, of the
tedious examinations before private persons, many hours together;
they all that time urging them to confess (and taking turns to persuade
them) till the accused were wearied out by being forced to stand so
long or for want of sleep, &c. and so brought to give an assent to what
they said; they then asking them, Were you at such a witch meeting?
or, Have you signed the devil’s book? &c. Upon their replying, Yes, the
whole was drawn into form, as their confession.
“But that which did mightily further such confessions was, their
nearest relations urging them to it. These, seeing no other way of
escape for them, thought it the best advice that could be given; hence
it was that the husbands of some, by counsel often urging, and utmost
earnestness, and children upon their knees intreating, have at length
prevailed with them to say they were guilty.

Third—Of the character of Burroughs;—about which there has been

from that day to this, a great difference of opinion. His readiness to
forgive.
 “Margaret Jacobs being one that had confessed her own guilt, and
testified against her grandfather Jacobs, Mr. Burroughs and John
Willard, she the day before execution came to Mr. Burroughs,
acknowledging that she had belied them, and begged Mr. Burroughs’s
forgiveness; who not only forgave her, but also prayed with and for
her.
Apparitions at the trial.—
“Accordingly several of the bewitched had given in their testimony,
that they had been troubled with the apparitions of two women, who
said they were G. B.’s two wives; and that he had been the death of
them; and that the magistrates must be told of it, before whom, if B.
upon his trial denied it, they did not know but that they should appear
again in the court. Now G. B. had been infamous, for the barbarous
usage of his two successive wives, all the country over. Moreover, it
was testified the spectre of G. B. threatening the sufferers, told them
he had killed [besides others] Mrs. Lawson and her daughter Ann. And
it was noted, that these were the virtuous wife and daughter of one, at
whom this G. B. might have a prejudice, for being serviceable at
Salem Village, from whence himself had in ill terms removed some
years before; and that when they died, which was long since, there
were some odd circumstances about them, which made some of the
attendants there suspect something of witchcraft, though none
imagined from what quarter it should come.
“Well, G. B. being now upon his trial, one of the bewitched persons
was cast into horror at the ghosts of B.’s two deceased wives, then
appearing before him, and crying for vengeance against him.
Hereupon several of the bewitched persons were successively called
in, who all, not knowing what the former had seen and said, concurred
in their horror of the apparition, which they affirmed that he had
before. But he, though much appalled, utterly denied that he
discerned any thing of it, nor was it any part of his conviction.

His bodily strength.—

“A famous divine recites this among the convictions of a witch; the
testimony of the party bewitched, whether pining or dying; together
with the joint oaths of sufficient persons, that have seen certain
prodigious pranks, or feats, wrought by the party accused. Now God
had been pleased so to leave G. B. that he had ensnared himself, by
several instances, which he had formerly given, of a preternatural
strength; and which were now produced against him. He was a very
puny man yet he had often done things beyond the strength of a giant.
 A gun of about seven feet barrel, and so heavy that strong men could
not steadily hold it out, with both hands; there were several
testimonies given in by persons of credit and honour, that he made
nothing of taking up such a gun behind the lock with but one hand,
and holding it out, like a pistol, at arm’s end. G. B. in his vindication
was so foolish as to say, that an Indian was there, and held it out, at
the same time; whereas, none of the spectators ever saw any such
Indian; but they supposed the black man (as the witches call the devil,
and they generally say he resembles an Indian) might give him that
assistance. There was evidence likewise brought in, that he made
nothing of taking up whole barrels filled with molasses, or cider, in
very disadvantageous postures, and carrying them off, through the
most difficult places, out of a canoe to the shore.
“Yea, there were two testimonies, that G. B. with only putting the fore-
finger of his right hand into the muzzle of a heavy gun, a fowling piece
of about six or seven feet barrel, lifted up the gun, and held it out at
arm’s end; a gun which the deponents, though strong men, could not
with both hands lift up, and hold out at the butt-end, as is usual.
Indeed one of these witnesses was over-persuaded by some persons
to be out of the way upon G. B.’s trial; but he came afterwards, with
sorrow for his withdrawing, and gave in his testimony.

His death.—
“Mr. Burroughs was carried in a cart with the others, through the
streets of Salem to execution. When he was upon the ladder, he made
a speech for the clearing of his innocency, with such solemn and
serious expressions, as were to the admiration of all present: his
prayer [which he concluded by repeating the Lord’s prayer] was so
well worded, and uttered with such composedness, and such [at least
seeming] fervency of spirit, as was very affecting, and drew tears from
many, so that it seemed to some that the spectators would hinder the
execution. The accusers said the Black Man stood and dictated to
him. As soon as he was turned off, Mr. Cotton Mather, being mounted
upon a horse, addressed himself to the people, partly to declare that
he [Burroughs] was no ordained minister, and partly to possess the
people of his guilt, saying that the devil has often been transformed
into an angel of light; and this somewhat appeased the people, and
the executions went on.

Fourth—A trial at length. Indictment of Elizabeth How.

ESSEX ss. Anno Regni Regis & Reginæ Willielmi & Mariæ, nunc
Angliæ, &c, quarto——
 The jurors for our sovereign lord and lady the king and queen present,
that Elizabeth How, wife of James How, of Ipswich, in the county of
Essex, the thirty-first day of May, in the fourth year of the reign of our
sovereign lord and lady William and Mary, by the grace of God, of
England, Scotland, France and Ireland, king and queen, defenders of
the faith, &c. and divers other days and times, as well before as after,
certain destestable arts, called witchcrafts and sorceries, wickedly and
feloniously hath used, practised and exercised, at and within the
township of Salem, in, upon and against one Mary Wolcott, of Salem
Village, in the county aforesaid, single woman; by which said wicked
arts the said Mary Wolcott, the said thirty-first day of May, in the fourth
year above-said, and divers other days and times, as well before as
after, was and is tortured, afflicted, pined, consumed, wasted and
tormented; and also for sundry other acts of witchcrafts, by said
Elizabeth How committed and done before and since that time,
against the peace of our sovereign lord and lady, the king and queen,
and against the form of the statute in that case made and provided.
Witnesses—Mary Wolcott, Ann Putman, Abigail Williams, Samuel
Pearly, and his wife Ruth, Joseph Andrews, and wife Sarah, John
Sherrin, Joseph Safford, Francis Lane, Lydia Foster, Isaac Cummins,
jr·

Fifth—Recantation of the chief judge and the jurors.—A general fast

was appointed by the following proclamation, after the accusers had
become so bold as to accuse even the wife of Gov. Phips.—
By the honourable the lieutenant governor, council and assembly of
his majesty’s province of the Massachusetts-Bay, in general court
assembled.
Whereas the anger of God is not yet turned away, but his hand is still
stretched out against his people in manifold judgments, particularly in
drawing out to such a length the troubles of Europe, by a perplexing
war; and more especially respecting ourselves in this province, in that
God is pleased still to go on in diminishing our substance, cutting
short our harvest, blasting our most promising undertakings more
ways than one, unsettling us, and by his more immediate hand
snatching away many out of our embraces by sudden and violent
deaths, even at this time when the sword is devouring so many both
at home and abroad, and that after many days of public and solemn
addressing him: and although, considering the many sins prevailing in
the midst of us, we cannot but wonder at the patience and mercy
moderating these rebukes, yet we cannot but also fear that there is
something still wanting to accompany our supplications; and doubtless
there are some particular sins, which God is angry with our Israel for,
that have not been duly seen and repented by us, about which God
expects to be sought, if ever he turn again our captivity:
Wherefore it is commanded and appointed, that Thursday, the
fourteenth of January next, be observed as a day of prayer, with
fasting, throughout this province; strictly forbidding all servile labour
thereon; that so all God’s people may offer up fervent supplications
unto him, for the preservation and prosperity of his majesty’s royal
person and government, and success to attend his affairs both at
home and abroad; that all iniquity may be put away, which hath stirred
God’s holy jealousy against this land; that he would shew us what we
know not, and help us wherein we have done amiss to do so no more;
and especially that whatever mistakes on either hand have been fallen
into, either by the body of this people, or any orders of men, referring
to the late tragedy, raised among us by Satan and his instruments,
through the awful judgment of God, he would humble us therefor, and
pardon all the errors of his servants and people, that desire to love his
name; that he would remove the rod of the wicked from off the lot of
the righteous; that he would bring in the American heathen, and cause
them to hear and obey his voice.
Given at Boston, December 12, 1696, in the eighth year
of his Majesty’s reign.
Isaac Addington, Secretary.
“Upon the day of the fast, in the full assembly at the south meeting-
house in Boston, one of the honorable judges, [the chief justice
Sewall] who had sat in judicature in Salem, delivered in a paper, and
while it was in reading stood up; but the copy being not to be obtained
at present, it can only be reported by memory to this effect, viz. It was
to desire the prayers of God’s people for him and his; and that God
having visited his family, &c, he was apprehensive that he might have
fallen into some errors in the matters at Salem, and pray that the guilt
of such miscarriages may not be imputed either to the country in
general, or to him or his family in particular.
“Some, that had been of several juries, have given forth a paper,
signed with their own hands, in these words:
“We, whose names are under written, being in the year 1692 called to
serve as jurors in court at Salem on trial of many, who were by some
suspected guilty of doing acts of witchcraft upon the bodies of sundry
persons:
“We confess that we ourselves were not capable to understand, nor
able to withstand, the mysterious delusions of the powers of darkness,
and prince of the air; but were, for want of knowledge in ourselves,
and better information from others, prevailed with to take up with such
evidence against the accused, as, on further consideration and better
information, we justly fear was insufficient for the touching the lives of
any, (Deut. xvii. 8) whereby we fear we have been instrumental with
others, though ignorantly and unwittingly, to bring upon ourselves and
this people of the Lord the guilt of innocent blood; which sin the Lord
saith, in scripture, he would not pardon, (2 Kings, xxiv. 4) that is, we
suppose, in regard of his temporal judgments. We do therefore hereby
signify to all in general (and to the surviving sufferers in special) our
deep sense of, and sorrow for, our errors, in acting on such evidence
to the condemning of any person; and do hereby declare, that we
justly fear that we were sadly deluded and mistaken; for which we are
much disquieted and distressed in our minds; and do therefore
humbly beg forgiveness, first of God for Christ’s sake, for this our
error; and pray that God would not impute the guilt of it to ourselves,
nor others; and we also pray that we may be considered candidly and
aright, by the living sufferers, as being then under the power of a
strong and general delusion, utterly unacquainted with, and not
experienced in matters of that nature.
“We do heartily ask forgiveness of you all, whom we have justly
offended; and do declare, according to our present minds, we would
none of us do such things again on such grounds for the whole world;
praying you to accept of this in way of satisfaction for our offence, and
that you would bless the inheritance of the Lord, that he may be
entreated for the land.
Foreman, Thomas Fisk, Th. Pearly, sen,
William Fisk, John Peabody,
John Bacheler, Thomas Perkins,
Thomas Fisk, jr, Samuel Sayer,
John Dane, Andrew Eliot,
Joseph Evelith, H. Herrick, sen.”

Transcriber’s Notes:
Variations in spelling and hyphenation are retained.
Perceived typographical errors have been changed.
*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK RACHEL DYER
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