The letter to Razin contained another thought that preoccupied Stalin in the first months after the war: the need to avoid “kowtowing to the West,” including showing “unwarranted respect” for the “military authorities of Germany.” The first expression of this sentiment is found in a letter written by Stalin during the autumn of 1945 to his comrades in Moscow while he was vacationing in the south. Denouncing unnamed “senior officials” who were “thrown into fits of childlike glee” by praise from foreign leaders, he wrote, “I consider such inclinations to be dangerous since they develop in us kowtowing to foreign figures. A ruthless fight must be waged against obsequiousness toward foreigners.”8
These loosely formulated ideas were Stalin’s response to the “contamination” of Soviet society by the ideological influence of the Western allies and to the danger of an inferiority complex on the part of the impoverished victors. Over time, the “fight against kowtowing” took the form of specific campaigns and institutions. In August 1946 a Central Committee resolution was published on “The Magazines Zvezda and Leningrad” in support of an irate speech to Leningrad writers delivered by Central Committee secretary Andrei Zhdanov. The targets of his ire were the satirist Mikhail Zoshchenko and the poet Anna Akhmatova. The former’s writings, according to Zhdanov, were poisoned by the “venom of a brutish hostility to the Soviet system.” Akhmatova was labeled a “whore and a nun, in whom licentiousness is combined with prayer.”9 Discussion of the resolution was made mandatory at party meetings across the country—in regional party organizations, factories, and kolkhozes—and marked the beginning of a severe scolding given to the creative intelligentsia.
A leitmotif of the attack on writers was the unmasking of “kowtowing to the contemporary bourgeois culture of the West”—a formulation that clearly came from Stalin’s own pen. Indeed, archival documents show that Stalin was behind Zhdanov’s vitriol and that he read and edited his speech.10 The archives further reveal that Stalin was the driving force behind other actions designed to promote ideological lockstep, such as the well-known case of the married scientists Nina Kliueva and Grigory Roskin, who were developing a cancer drug in Moscow. In 1947 they were ground-lessly accused of passing secret information to the Americans. The couple was accused of “kowtowing and servility to anything foreign.”11
These shrill ideological clichés were variations on the canonical themes of Leninism and Stalinism: the USSR, since it was building the most advanced social system, would always and in all respects surpass the rest of the world; the capitalist powers, sensing their inevitable demise, would be ready at any moment to unleash war against the birthplace of socialism. The recent war and the gradual move toward a new “cold” war served to confirm this thinking.
Many years of research, especially since the archives of the former USSR and other countries of the socialist bloc have opened up, have provided a wealth of information on the origins of the Cold War. Nevertheless, scholars may never reach agreement about its real causes, which side should take the larger share of blame, and the true motives and calculations of the opposing powers. The Cold War was more a gradual evolution than an event with a clear beginning. The world leaders involved in this process were not simply looking out for their countries’ fundamental interests, but were also reacting to specific, often unexpected situations with decisions that were often illogical. Stalin was no exception.
The intensifying conflict between the World War II Allies was fed by the utter incompatibility of their systems, their competing desires to expand their spheres of influence, mutual grievances dating to the prewar years, and a shared need for a foreign enemy. Specific issues tended to exacerbate the general suspicion and animosity. America’s nuclear monopoly and its reluctance to let the Russians take part in the occupation of Japan were among the many frustrations Stalin felt in dealing with the United States. In a meeting with Averell Harriman at the Soviet leader’s southern dacha in October 1945, Stalin angrily wondered out loud whether the United States “needs not an ally but a satellite in Japan? I must say that the Soviet Union is not suited to that role.… It would be more honorable for the USSR to leave Japan entirely rather than remain there like a piece of furniture.”12 For his part, Stalin angered Western leaders, already fundamentally opposed to Soviet communism, with his thinly veiled desire to sovietize Eastern Europe using the Red Army and local Communists.
It is hard to imagine what mutual concessions might have prevented a breakdown in relations between two such different systems. Such a breakdown could only be delayed by tactical calculations and political factors, including the illusion on the part of Western public opinion that an enduring alliance was actually feasible (Soviet public opinion had little say in the matter). Relations also remained civil so long as Stalin harbored hope for Western concessions, particularly in the areas of economic aid and reparations from Germany. The devastation and famine afflicting the USSR after the war made the need for assistance particularly pressing. That Eastern Europe—now within the Soviet sphere of influence—not only suffered its own famine and devastation but was also home to significant anti-Communist sentiment also forced him to act with circumspection.
Stalin was restrained in his personal relations with Western leaders. He preferred to let Molotov take hard-line stances during diplomatic negotiations, while he himself would periodically step in and make demonstrative concessions that allowed the Western side to save face or prevented it from breaking off talks. As during the war, Stalin tried to play the Americans and British against one another. In April 1946, after Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” speech in Fulton, Missouri, Stalin met with the U.S. ambassador in Moscow. After accepting the gifts of a safety razor and transistor radio, Stalin offered a “friendly” warning: In pursuing their own interests, “Churchill and his friends” might try to push the United States away from the USSR.13
Such face-to-face diplomacy was no match for the powerful forces at play. Truman responded to Soviet attempts to gain footholds in Iran, Turkey, and Greece with a plan to help rebuild Europe, the centerpiece of which became known as the Marshall Plan. Stalin responded by turning down the aid offered under the plan (as did other East European states, under Soviet pressure) and by creating an international Communist organization, the Cominform. During the Cominform’s first conference, Zhdanov echoed Stalin’s idea that the world was being divided into “two camps.”14 Efforts to sustain the wartime alliance gave way to the traditional call to stand up to “international imperialism.”
On the domestic side, the return to prewar political thinking and practices occurred even earlier. Stalin’s conservative inclinations played no small role. Given the array of complex problems facing him, as he approached his seventieth birthday, he neither took an interest in reforms or experiments nor saw any reason to change his country’s long-range goals for economic development. He offered a number of production targets in a speech to an election meeting on 9 February 1946: 500 million tons of coal, 60 million tons of steel, 50 million tons of cast iron, 60 million tons of petroleum. Considering the actual figures for 1946—only 13.3 million tons of steel and 9.9 million tons of cast iron were produced, along with 163.8 million tons of coal and 21.7 million tons of petroleum—such targets were obviously wildly ambitious. Furthermore, as the economic historian Eugene Zaleski has noted, a program like Stalin’s, purely focused on output targets, reflected a simplistic understanding of economic development.15