UC Berkeley - HIST 186 - 2012 Spring - Sargent - International and Global History Since 1945 - Lecture 03 - The Division of Europe - 01h 20m 27s

Introduction: The Importance of the Cold War

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Today we're going to be talking about the origins of the Cold War.

The Cold War is a definitive theme of the postwar era. Sometimes when historians of international relations talk about the postwar era they describe it simply as the era of the Cold War, i.e. the Cold War is such a big, such a crucial theme, that it can be a synonym almost for postwar international history.

[0:31]

Personally I wouldn't want to go that far. I think that there are dangers in seeing the Cold War as sort of the singular overarching framework within which the history of the postwar world needs to be understood. I think that we get a better historical understanding of the postwar world if we see the Cold War as one of a number of defining themes or struggles which we might use to comprehend the postwar era.

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But even if we try to situate the Cold War in context, if we try to take the Cold War as one of a range of important historical themes that we need to understand its significance is still very substantial. The Cold War was a defining geopolitical confrontation of the postwar era and it will be one of the central issues that we have to try to comprehend as we move forward this semester.

Aspects of the Cold War

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What then was the Cold War? How should we understand it? And the Cold War had a number of different faces or aspects.

Geopolitical and Ideological Struggle

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At one level the Cold War was simply a great power rivalry between two superpowers. A geopolitical confrontation between the United States of America and the Soviet Union.

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But at the same time the Cold War also had a central ideological aspect. It's difficult to understand the Cold War without paying central attention to the struggle between communism as an ideological system and capitalism as an ideological system. After all during the Cold War both Communists and capitalists claimed to be able to offer a superior way of organizing societies and economies. Both Communists and capitalist claimed that history was on their side.

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So when we think about the history of the Cold War we ought to think not only about the confrontation between two great powers: the United States and the Soviet Union, but also about the confrontation between two rival ideological systems: Communism and capitalism.

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The slide shows you a photograph of Richard Nixon↗ and Nikita Khrushchev↗ arguing in the late 1950s about which of their social systems: Communism or capitalism was superior. It's significant that the debate took place inside a model kitchen because the kitchen was part of the American exhibition at the Moscow World's Fair and it modeled what Nixon saw as the superior merits and virtues of the capitalist system.

Kitchen Debate between Nixon and Khrushchev

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So the Cold War was both an ideological struggle and a geopolitical confrontation. But there were more aspects to the Cold War than these.

The Nuclear Arms Race

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The history of nuclear weapons has a central role in the history of the Cold War. And at some level we ought to see the nuclear arms race, the struggle for strategic superiority, and then from the early 1970s the struggle to control the nuclear arms and to inhibit the proliferation of nuclear weapons as a history that is to some extent autonomous from the history of the geopolitical rivalry and the ideological struggle.

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Nuclear weapons were an invention of the postwar era. It might not be an exaggeration to say that nuclear weapons invented the postwar era in international relations and their history is from a certain point of view distinct from the history of the Cold War of which they were such a central part.

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After all dilemmas over nuclear proliferation have continued beyond the end of the Cold War. This is a history that is both part of the Cold War and which transcends the Cold War itself.

Struggle Over the Developing World

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Besides the history of nuclear weapons as a central theme of Cold War history we ought to think too about the struggle to influence the postcolonial or decolonizing world that was such a central aspect of the Cold War's history.

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The Cold War was not just a struggle between social systems. Not just a struggle between great powers, superpowers, it was also a struggle for the soul of the developing world. And this was a struggle in which developing world actors like Ho Chi Minh ↗ played central roles themselves.

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It was not just a history in which the superpowers did things to the developing world. It was also a history in which developing world leaders and actors were themselves central players.

Conclusion: Aspects of the Cold War

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The Cold War had many different facets and during the course of the semester we will be visiting as many of them as we have time to.

Understanding the Cold War

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How then do we explain the Cold War? How did it come to pass? Was the Cold War inevitable or was the Cold War a product of specific choices, specific actions, for which we might hold individual historical actors accountable?

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Historians of the Cold War have tended to fixate on the question of origins. In part this is a reflection of sort of when the history of the Cold War was written. After all a great deal of Cold War historiography↗ was written before the Cold War ended.

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Historians writing in the 1970s and 1980s could not very well be concerned with the question of endings. They sort of had to as a function of their own perspectives be concerned with the question of origins because that was really all that there was to write about the '70s and '80s.

Cold War Historiography and the Question of Accountability

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One of the sort of central preoccupations for historians who have dealt with the origins of the Cold War has been the question of accountability. Who ultimately was to blame for the Cold War's arrival?

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I don't want to belabor the historiographical discussion. It would be more appropriate in a class on the history of US foreign relations than it is this semester's lecture series.

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But it's still worth thinking a little bit about the sort of ways in which scholars have tried to ascribe responsibility for the coming of the Cold War.

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And let me just give you a very simple run down of how this history works.

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I don't know what that noise is.

Does anybody have any idea?

I'm sorry.

Okay, let's ...

I could do without the microphone in a room of this size but it's essential for the podcast so ...

Orthodox View of the Cold War

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Okay, so sort of the first generation of Cold War scholarship in the United States. Genre of scholarship which we commonly refer to as sort of orthodox history of the Cold War laid the blame for the Cold War's origins on the Soviet Union.

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They said, well really the Cold War emerged out of Stalin's efforts to create a empire in Eastern Europe and the history of the early Cold War can be understood as a series of sort of Western reactions to Soviet provocations.

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That's in a nutshell the first generation of Cold War historiography.

Revisionist View of the Cold War

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During the 1960s this sort of one dimensional interpretation of Cold War history is counted by an alternative one dimensional interpretation of Cold War history which sort of inverts responsibility for the coming of the Cold War.

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It says, well, you know really the Cold War was about American efforts to create an empire of sort of economic exploitation and influence in Western Europe and the origins of the Cold War can be understood in terms of a series of rational Soviet responses to American expansionism.

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This emphasis on sort of American expansion as the root cause of the Cold War, an interpretation that flourishes in the 1960s, has something to do with the Vietnam War and the influence that the Vietnam War has on historians who are working at the time of it.

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This genre of scholarship that tries to lay the blame for the Cold War on the United States is usually referred to as revisionist historiography.

Post-Revisionist View of the Cold War

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Out of this conflict between revisionists and orthodox historians of the Cold War something akin to a synthesis begins to emerge in the 1970s. The synthesis is usually labeled a sort of post-revisionist synthesis. And its great virtue I would suggest is that it seeks to transcend the question of accountability entirely. Rather than sort of looking to blame either side for the origins of the Cold War the post-revisionists are more concerned with understanding how the Cold War came to pass.

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They tend to emphasize sort of the conflicting visions that American and Soviet leaders had for the postwar order and the essential incompatibility between the expectations of the two sides. Post-revisionists tend to see two, the two sides, as sometimes unintentionally creating the sensation of insecurity on the part of the other superpower.

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So the post-revisionists understand the Cold War less as a case of provocation and reaction but rather as a series of escalations sometimes unintentional that have the effect of reinforcing the mutual insecurities that both sides feel as they sort of look at the map of Europe and look at the actions of the other superpower.

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So that's a very quick overview of Cold War historiography.

Questions about the Cold War

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What do we need to know about the Cold War in this class? In History 186? This is not a class on sort of the historiography of international relations.

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What it is important for you to think about as the semester moves forwards: I would say that the first question that you want to think about is how the Cold War came to pass. How did the world transition from a condition of world war between sort of 1939 and 1945 and a condition of Cold War from the late 1940s? How was this transition accomplished? Was it inevitable or was it the achievement of specific choices and actions?

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So the question of origins is a question that it is important to reflect upon just as generations of Cold War historians have concerned themselves with origins so too should you be concerned with the question of origins because it's really important.

The Cold War International System

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Beyond the question of origins you should think about how the Cold War functioned as an international system. How did the Cold War world work? Did the Cold War transform the world into a bipolar world in which two superpowers predominates it and everybody else was subject to them?

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Or did smaller powers, did second tier powers, retain a certain historical autonomy? Did they retain a capacity to influence events despite the overarching condition of Cold War bipolarity? How did the Cold War system work?

Internal Politics and International Relations

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You might also think about the relationship between internal politics, the domestic politics of nation-states, and the larger condition of global Cold War division. This relationship between sort of interior politics and international politics is one of the defining characteristics of the Cold War era. And it's something which you should reflect upon when you think about how the Cold War system worked.

The Cold War and Other Historical Themes Such as Decolonization

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It's also very important, sort of in a third theme, to consider how the Cold War related to other major historical themes of the postwar era.

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How do we relate the history of the Cold War, for example, to the history of decolonization? Decolonization as a historical theme was in some ways autonomous from the history of the Cold War. After all decolonization antedated the Cold War by decades if not by centuries. But the last phase of decolonization, the phase of decolonization that follows the Second World War, will be profoundly affected by the simultaneous outplaying of Cold War rivalries in the postwar world.

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How did the two themes intersect? How did they interact? That's something which you should sort of think about as you try to sort of locate the Cold War in relation to other major historical developments of the postwar era.

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The End of the Cold War

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And finally the question of endings. Why did the Cold War end as it did and when it did? This we will come to in due course.

Conclusion: Understanding the Cold War

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But as we reflect upon these various aspects of Cold War history I hope that we will come to some deeper understanding not only of the Cold War, what was it, how did it work, and why did it end but also of the Cold War's significance for understanding our own times.

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We are very much the products of the Cold War world. Our era is fundamentally a Cold War era, so we should try to think out the ways in which the realities of our own times have been shaped and defined by the experiences of the Cold War era.

Organization and Schedule as Relates to the Cold War

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So how are we going to do this? We will be returning to the Cold War at various points during the course of the semester. This week we're really concerned with the question of origins. The other is sort of aspects of Cold War history which I've just outlined we'll be reserved for subsequent weeks. This week we're going to deal with the question of origins.

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Today we will focus on Europe, Thursday we'll focus on Asia. When we think about the Cold War in Europe, which is our task for today, we're going to think first of all about the Soviet Union, and Communism, what was the Soviet Union, what was Communism, what were the Soviet Union's aspirations for the postwar world?

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We'll think next about the United States. What kind of postwar order did the United States want to create? And we'll think about the condition of Europe at the end of the Second World War.

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In what situation did Europeans find themselves subsequent to the end of the Second World War? How did the vacuum of European politics following the defeat of Nazi Germany help to precipitate confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union.

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And finally how did the division of Europe between the two superpowers play itself out in the late 1940s. That's what we're going to deal with today.

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And then on Thursday we'll deal with the parallel history of East Asia in the period between the end of the Second World War, the defeat of Japan's new order in the Asia Pacific region, through to the sort of formal military division of East Asia at the end of the Korean war. So Asia we'll wait for Thursday today we're going to deal with Europe.

Communism

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A fundamental question that we have to address when we think about the history of the Cold War is the question of communism. What is communism? Perhaps it would be more historically accurate to ask what was communism. Why did it have such a sort of disruptive impact on the international politics of the twentieth century?

Karl Marx

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Of course to understand the history of communism it's not sufficient to deal with the history of the twentieth century. We have to go back to the history of the 19th century and to the political philosophy and economic sociology of Karl Marx↗.

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How many of you have had a chance to read Marx in your undergraduate studies so far? Okay, about half of you which is sort of a testament to Marx's enduring significance as a sociologist of capitalism which is really what he was.

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Let me push that question a little further though. Of those of you who have read Marx how many of you have read The Communist Manifesto↗? Okay. How many of you have read something other than The Communist Manifesto?

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Okay, what have you read?

(Student response)

Das Kapital↗. All of it? Okay, that's hardcore (laughter). So...

Marx's Views on Capitalism

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Okay, those of you who have read Das Kapital will know that what Marx is really concerned about is capitalism not communism. This the grand irony of Karl Marx.

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For a thinker who is so singularly associated with the political and economic project of communism. He actually had a lot more to say about capitalism than he did about communism.

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Besides an expansive analysis of capitalism as a productive system, which is really what constitutes the greater part of Karl Marx's work and writings, Marx offers a sort of political doctrine of revolutionary communism.

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This is doctrine that is stated most succinctly, most quotably, in The Communist Manifesto, sort of political pamphlet, published in 1848.

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To understand Marx's vision of communism, of the communist future (static like sound) ... alright.

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It's important to think about what Marx says about capitalism too. We should remember that Marx is writing in the middle of the 19th century in Great Britain at a moment when the Industrial Revolution is utterly transforming British society, but also a moment in which memory of the preindustrial world is still sort of tangible.

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For Marx the accumulation of wealth, the accumulation of capital, in a capitalist system depends fundamentally upon the expropriation of labor. This a really sort of crucial insight for Marxist economic sociology.

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The accumulation of wealth depends upon the expropriation of labor -- since it's your labor that pays for somebody else's prosperity. Marx argues that the capitalist system depending as it does upon the expropriation of labor and upon the accumulation of capital via labor expropriation is inherently unstable because it has a built in tendency towards the concentration of wealth, the concentration of resources in the hands of a few.

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In the hands of a very wealthy, a very affluent minority. Ultimately, Marx argues, the history of capitalism veers unavoidable towards conflict. In a world in which resources are finite, which Marx profoundly believed, the concentration of more and more resources in fewer and fewer hands will produce conflict amongst those in whose hands wealth is vested.

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That sort of makes sense as abstract theory, right. The concentration of resources in the hands of the few will produce a situation of conflict between those in whose hands wealth is concentrated.

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Because as a smaller and smaller number of sort of powerful, of empowered capitalists, fight over finite resources, their confrontation will become increasingly bitter, increasingly, sort of ferocious.

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So Marx offers a theory of capitalism in which all wealth derives from exploitation, from the exploitation of labor, and in which the accumulation of wealth tends over time to produce a concentration of resources in the hands of a few. That's really exactly to understanding sort of Marx's theory of capitalism.

Marx's Meta-Historical Framework

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Besides sort of offering a sociological analysis of capitalism that emphasized labor expropriation as the ultimate source or engine of wealth and accumulation and concentration of wealth as sort of capitalism's inner dynamic Marx also offered a historical framework, a framework, a sort meta-historical framework, that tried to situate capitalism in relation to earlier phases of history defined by the relationship of labor to production.

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For Marx history in the very largest sense had an internal logic. History Marx argued could be divided into a series of stages or phases each of which could be defined by the relationship between labor and production. For Marx this with really the crucial relationship in human history.

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Marx argued that we could understand the entire course of human history as a sort of progression from one historical phase defined by the relationship of labor to production to another.

Marx's Stages of History

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To understand this it might help to sketch out the stages of history as Marx construed them.

For Marx the first stage of history is what Marx called a stage of sort of primitive communism and this is what we sort of more commonly identify as a hunter-gatherer stage of human existence. A sort of sociology in which human beings lived in small bands of a dozen, two dozen, individuals no larger than that. Subsisted on hunting and the gathering of plant stuffs, and in which, this is really fundamental, all food was shared more or less equally amongst members of the hunter-gatherer band. Marx characterized this kind of very small-scale subsistence lifestyle as a condition of primitive communism.

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How do we get from a world of hunter-gatherer tribes to a world of vast empires capable of orchestrating large construction projects like the pyramids of Egypt or the Roman Coliseum? For Marx the answer is slavery.

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Only the legal enslavement of labor and the exploitation thereof will permit the creation of sort of vast complex societies on the model of Greco-Roman antiquity.

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So for Marx slavery as a social institution is absolutely crucial to understanding how we get from sort of a world of primitive hunter-gatherer tribes to a world of sophisticated urban imperial structures like Rome.

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The slave societies of the ancient world, Marx argues, eventually deteriorate into a feudal order. The transition to the feudal order is characterized by the tethering of slaves to particular plots of land. Individuals in effect become sort of the wards of the land rather than of powerful owners. This is for Marx what defines the transition from a slave society to a feudal society.

[25:27]

None of this is going to be on the exam by the way, so...

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Then following the sort of creation of a feudal economic sociology Marx identifies in the late 18th century the advent of a capitalist system. And this is really what Marx is concerned with explaining. How does the capitalist world come to be?

Marx on the Advent of Capitalism

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What defines the advent of capitalism? And for Marx capitalism has to do fundamentally with the transition or with the transfer of power from the feudal aristocracy, from landowners, to an urban bourgeoisie↗ whose wealth is defined not in terms of ownership of land but in terms of the ownership of industrial production.

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So with industrialization, the mill owner, the railroad baron, will replace the feudal lord as the sort of dominant economic figures of their times.

Marx on the Fate of Capitalism

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For Marx though, capitalism as we've already discussed, is inherently unstable. Moreover it depends upon exploitation, upon the appropriation of labor, the labor of the many, by the sort of vested power of the few.

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And for Marx capitalism is destined to collapse. This is really, really, important. It's a sort of historical inevitably as Marx puts it.

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That capitalism will eventually collapse because of its own internal contradictions. Perhaps capitalists will fight amongst themselves in the internal struggle for finite resources. Or perhaps workers, who grow tired of being exploited, will raise up and overthrow the capitalist plutocracy↗ in a revolution.

Marx on Socialism Replacing Capitalism

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And what will follow capitalism, Marx argues, is a new stage of history, a stage that Marx defines as the socialist stage of history, an era in which a revolution will create a new socialist order, an order in which a sort of powerful state will seize control of factories, of the means of production, and will utilize those resources to benefit the many and not the few.

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And this transition from capitalism to socialism is what Marx is really concerned with in his writings. How will it come about? How can it be achieved?

Marx on Communism after Socialism

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Finally the socialist order as Marx prophesies it will be followed by a communist era of history. Sorry the slide says capitalism but it should read communism. A communist era of history in which the revolutionary state withers away and in which sort of workers administer their own affairs.

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For Marx the existence of a revolutionary state is a sort of necessary aspect of the socialist transition between capitalism and communism.

Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto, and the Russian Revolution

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So that in a nutshell is Karl Marx's sociology of capitalism and his conception of the course of world history. Capitalism is unstable and it's destined to collapse.

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And what Marx offers in his sort of political pamphlet, The Communist Manifesto, which famously begins with the declaration, "Workers of the world, unite!", is a program, a very skeletal program, but a program nonetheless, for achieving the transition from a capitalist world to a socialist world. Marx calls for a revolution, a revolution of workers, to rise up and overthrow the capitalist order, and to create in its wake a new socialist world.

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Marx might have been surprised that the sociologist revolution that he prophesied and called for occurred ultimately when it did occur, not in Germany, not in Great Britain, but in Russia.

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Insofar as Marx believed that revolution would emerge out of a sort of crisis of capitalism it was plausible to imagine that the revolution would come first of all to Europe's most developed capitalist economies, namely...

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I don't know what the problem with this is.

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Not to Russia, or ... But to Germany, or ... I'm sorry ...

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Apparently my cell phone is responsible for the interruption with the microphone and this actually works much, much better so thank you very much.

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Okay, now, I can concentrate on this and not on that.

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So Marx predicts that the revolution will occur in the most advanced, most developed, capitalist economies of Europe, which is to say Germany, Great Britain.

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Of course that's not where the revolution ends up happening. The revolution ends up in happening in Russia -- a vast overwhelmingly agrarian society on the periphery of the European economy.

The Russian Revolution

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Why does the revolution happen in Russia? Why does it not happen in Germany or in Great Britain? A simple answer to that question is that Russia is devastated, exhausted, and impoverished by the First World War.

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The First World War exhausts Russia. It exhausts Russia's limited industrial resources. Russia is also you know very badly afflicted by the fighting on the Eastern Front.

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The czarist regime, an autocratic monarchy which ruled Russia, had already been weakened even before the First World War by the pressure of political reform within the Russian state.

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There were a handful of liberal reformers who envisaged that Russia would sort of reform itself in a state resembling Britain or France or the United States. The opponents, among the opponents, of the czar, sort of radical revolutionary socialists, were more numerous and more capable often than were the sort of liberal reformers.

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The disruption that the First World War produces in Russia creates avenues of opportunity for the czar's opponents as the sort of men of the Russian imperial armed forces experience the sort of upheaval and convulsions of war. They become radicalized. The Russian army becomes a sort of potential source of political instability for the state.

The Kerensky Regime

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And for reasons that are far too complicated to get into today Russia ends up experiencing a revolution early in 1917. The czar abdicates and a liberal regime comes to power under the leadership of Alexander Kerensky↗, a progressive, sort of non-Communist politician.

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This is never a terribly strong regime. But it is a regime that seeks to sort of remake Russia, an authoritarian monarchical society, in a sort of liberal democratic mold.

The October Revolution and the Rise of the Bolsheviks

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The Kerensky regime does not last a year. It comes to power in February of 1917. In October 1917 it is overthrown in a coup. And the person who overthrows it is Vladimir Lenin↗ -- the leader of Russia's Bolshevik↗ Party.

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The Bolsheviks are a minority faction of the Revolutionary Socialist Left in Russia. This is really important to remember. Lenin does not represent the socialist left in Russia. The socialist left is divided into multiple parties. And Lenin's party represents a small but unusually radical faction of the Russian revolutionary left.

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It's Lenin's conviction that a determined Communist Party can orchestrate a revolution on its own accord. Most other Russian leftists say: look, this is ridiculous, Russia is a big poor country, we need to wait for Russia to develop, for Russia to industrialize, before trying to create something like a socialist society.

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How do you create a socialist society in a predominantly agrarian context? That's what Lenin's critics say. Lenin has no time for this. Lenin says, well, all we have to do is seize control of the state -- is to seize the control of the levers of the power, and we can use the state as an instrument for orchestrating social and economic transformation of the profoundest kind.

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This is Lenin's revolutionary theory. It's a theory that tells us that a determined vanguard party can seize control of the state and use the state as an instrument of social and historical transformation.

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This is what Lenin tries to do in October 1917 -- when his Bolsheviks come to power in a coup d'etat.

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Lenin in October 1917 seizes control of the state, or at least he seizes control of the state's capital, St. Petersburg, but he does not seize control of the country writ large.

The Russian Civil War

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The Bolshevik Revolution in October 1917 will be followed by a long period of civil war in which anti-Communist White Russians who predominate in the countryside struggle to sort of regain control against the Bolsheviks, the revolutionary Communists, who predominate in St. Petersburg and Moscow.

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This war ultimately ends in 1921 with the triumph of the Bolsheviks but there is great deal of consequence that happens between 1917 and 1921.

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Great Britain and the United States send limited military forces and economic aid to help the White Russians. This is really important because the Bolsheviks remember that.

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The Russian Civil War↗, as it is known, also involves an international war. Poland goes to war against Russia in 1919. Essentially what Poland tries to do is to achieve a land grab at Russia's expense while Russia is preoccupied with its internal civil war.

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And both of these sort of aspects of the civil war, the war with Poland and the allied intervention are really, really important for sort of shaping the Bolshevik concept of the external world.

Conclusion: The Russian Revolution

[37:09]

So that's the Russian Revolution in about two minutes. And next let's deal with the transition from Lenin to Stalin in a similarly cursory manner.

From Lenin to Stalin

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Lenin↗ is the singular charismatic leader of the Russian Revolution. It's hard to conceive of the Russian Revolution without Lenin.

[37:31]

His death in 1924 is a catastrophe for the Revolution that he led and for the party that he created, the Bolshevik party. The question of what comes next and what comes after Lenin is a profoundly divisive one amongst Lenin's potential heirs.

Leon Trotsky

[37:50]

Perhaps Lenin's most sort of brilliant and charismatic would be successor -- Trotsky↗ -- argues that a continuation of Lenin's work would involve an export of the Russian Revolutionary model to the larger world. Trotsky, who is the one of the figures vying to succeed Lenin, argues that Russia should now take it upon itself to create a sort of global revolutionary front.

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The Bolsheviks, Trotsky argues, should build alliances with Communists in other countries, specifically in Western Europe.

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Trotsky is sort of concerned that the Russian Revolution having occurred as it did in a poor agrarian country may not survive unless the larger revolution which Marx prophesied -- the revolution in Germany -- also sort of takes place. Consolidating and broadening the gains of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia.

Joseph Stalin

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Joseph Stalin↗, another putative successor to Lenin, takes a very different view of the revolution's future. Whereas Trotsky favors a globalization of the revolution Stalin instead argues that the Bolsheviks should focus upon the construction of an effective socialist system within Russia. His slogan will be socialism in one country.

Trotsky and Stalin

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To see the struggle for succession as a struggle between Trotsky and Stalin is an oversimplification, but we don't have time for much else. Ultimately it is Stalin who wins. Stalin wins in large part because he controls the party apparatus.

[39:32]

Trotsky controls the Red Army but Stalin controls the internal sort of bureaucratic apparatus of the party and this proves to be a very useful asset in seizing control of the state.

Stalin's Rule

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Having seized control of the party in the mid 1920s, Stalin in the second half of the 1920s, consolidates his personal power. And he does this by first of all purging the Bolshevik left, and by then at the end of the 1920s, turning against the moderates within the Bolshevik Party.

The Great Turn

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As he turns against the moderates, you know those who favor a more gradual transition to socialism, Stalin in 1928 embarks what is known as the Great Turn↗.

[40:16]

He launches a five year plan for the rapid industrialization of the country. What Stalin initiates in the late 1920s is an effort to transform the Russian economy, to transform Russian society, through the orchestration of a sort of gargantuan process of top down change.

The Transformation of Agriculture and Turning Peasants into Industrial Workers

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Besides creating new factories, state owned enterprises, Stalin will try to sort of transform Russian agriculture. And this is really important because most Russians in the late 1920s are still peasants.

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Stalin's purpose is to take these peasants, remove them from the land and transform them into factory workers. After all this is what a Marxist theory of history dictates will happen. Having committed himself to accelerating the transition to communism Stalin will try to transform peasants into industrial workers.

The Repression of Joseph Stalin

[41:21]

Doing this will entail the construction of a vast apparatus of political repression. Having alloyed the party to the power of the state Stalin will turn the instrument of the party-state into a machinery of repression. Who is repressed? Anybody who stands between Stalin and the accomplishment of his sort of radical transformative agenda. Anybody who represents a threat to the personal authority of Joseph Stalin.

[41:59]

The death toll in the 1930s will be catastrophic. The imposition of a forced top down campaign of agricultural collectivization claims millions and millions of victims.

The Ukrainian Famine

[42:20]

In the Ukraine, which is the most agriculturally productive part of the Soviet Union, Stalin introduces a program of collectivization which forcibly removes peasants from their small plots of land and concentrates them in collective farms. This is done with the purposes of making agricultural production more efficient.

[42:45]

In practice, of course, what it enables the state to achieve, is to requisition grain from the peasantry, to take grain from the countryside, and to use it to feed urban workers.

[42:57]

As a consequence of the famine↗ that collectivization causes in the Ukraine about 3 million people die. And those who die are often amongst the youngest and the oldest and the otherwise most vulnerable members of Ukrainian society.

Stalin's Campaign of Political Terror

[43:17]

Besides the millions of peasants who succumb to the collectivization campaign Stalin launches a campaign of political terror against his political opponents. During the 1930s a series of purges remove and then liquidate individuals and factions whom Stalin considers to be sort of a threat to his own personal authority.

[43:45]

The death toll of the purges of the 1930s amounts to the hundreds of thousands. So we're not talking about as many human victims as the campaign of agricultural collectivization produces but we are talking about a campaign of intentional state murder.

The Death Toll of Stalinization

[44:03]

The consequences of Stalinization will be sort of catastrophic in terms of the overall death toll. It's really hard to estimate the total number of human fatalities that we can ascribe to the Stalin regime. One estimate which was sort of put together by a group of admittedly sort of anti-Communist historians about fifteen years ago puts the death toll at somewhere around 20 million human deaths that can be ascribed to the project of Stalinization in the Soviet Union.

[44:44]

It's a death toll that sort of pales by comparison with the death toll that could be ascribed to the Maoist regime in China but that's a topic that we will come to in due course.

[44:55]

Whatever way you look at it the human costs of Stalinization in the 1930s are very, very high.

Western Response to the Human Toll of Stalinization

[45:02]

How does the West react to this? How do Western intellectuals, Western public leaders, respond to the vast human upheaval and human misery that the Stalinist experiment produces in the Soviet Union.

[45:20]

Western intellectuals for the most part are not particularly bothered by the crimes of Stalinism. We should remember that the West itself is in the 1930s enmired in a Great Depression. The Soviet system seems for some sympathetic Western intellectuals to represent the wave of the future.

[45:40]

Some sympathetic Western observers are willing to overlook and disregard the crimes of Stalinism as simply being sort of the necessary detritus of the revolution.

Beatrice and Sidney Webb's Laudatory Reports on the Soviet Union

[45:57]

Two prominent British socialists, Beatrice↗ and Sidney Webb↗ travel to Russia in the early 1930s and they, on their return to London, publish a very kind of laudatory book titled Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation? which lauds the accomplishments of the Stalinist state and praises Stalin for sort of leading humanity forward into a new era of history.

[46:22]

That represents one reaction to the Soviet project.

Western Governments' Hostility to Stalinism

[46:27]

Western governments on the other hand are much more hostile to Stalinism. We should remember that Great Britain and the United States tried to intervene in the Soviet Union in order to aid the opponents of the revolution after 1917, and the governments of Britain and the United States remain hostile to Bolshevism, to the Soviet Union, through the 1920s and into the 1930s.

[46:53]

The United States does not even recognize the Bolshevik regime as the legitimate government of the Soviet Union until 1933 when Franklin Roosevelt↗, Roosevelt, becomes President of the United States.

Stalin's Popular Front Strategy

[47:06]

Stalin in the 1930s is focused much more upon the accomplishment of rapid domestic transformation than he is upon foreign policy. But he is concerned by the rise of fascism↗ in Europe.

[47:22]

In order to sort of create an international coalition to contain the fascist threat Stalin in the mid 1930s promotes what becomes known as a popular front strategy -- a strategy that tries to rally progressives and leftists of all kinds: liberals, socialists, revolutionary as well as non-revolutionary, anarchists, everybody except the Trotskyites, into a broad coalition known as a sort of popular front.

[47:55]

It's ironic in some ways that Stalin promotes an ecumenical international strategy at the same time as he is purging his ideological opponents at home, but that is what he does.

[48:07]

He tries to promote a sort of popular front approach in the 1930s that will rally anti-fascists of all kind into a grand coalition.

[48:19]

The West, or at least the governments of the Western Powers, the French, actually, the French are somewhat more sympathetic to this for a period in 1936, but the British and the Americans have very little interest in joining with the Soviet Union in an anti-fascist popular front. Instead they sort of continue to spurn the USSR.

The Nazi-Soviet Pact and its Termination

[48:41]

Having failed to create a coalition with the West, Stalin will in 1939, sign a pact with Hitler, the Nazi-Soviet Pact↗. This represents a very different kind of response to the fascist threat. Stalin continues to believe that Nazi Germany represents a mortal threat to the Soviet Union but he decides in 1939 to sign a pact with Hitler in the hope of buying time that will enable the Soviet Union to better prepare itself for confrontation with Nazi Germany.

[49:12]

This strategy endures until 1941, until June 1941, when Hitler of course invades the Soviet Union -- an invasion that really took Stalin by surprise.

[49:26]

Stalin had not expected that Hitler would turn on the Soviet Union as quickly as he did. Having been sort of surprised by the Nazi attack Stalin will forge in the early 1940s a grand alliance with Great Britain and the United States for the purposes of waging war against Nazi Germany.

[49:49]

But it's really important to remember that the grand alliance emerges in the very unusual circumstance of 1941. Only after Hitler has attacked the Soviet Union will a coalition between the Western Democracies and the Soviet Union emerge.

[50:08]

The democracies in the 1930s had not allied with the Soviet Union for the purposes of containing fascism. That happened only in the context of the Second World War.

Grand Alliance between the Soviet Union and the Western Democracies during the Second World War

[50:21]

The wartime grand alliance↗ is highly effective. It ultimately accomplishes the defeat of Nazi Germany but that is not to say that the alliance is without internal friction. There are profound disagreements between the Allies particularly over the issue of the second front. The question of how soon the British and the Americans will attack Nazi Germany and the West is a really contentious issue amongst the wartime allies. Insofar as the Soviet Union between 1941 and 1944 is the only power that is waging a land war against Nazi Germany Stalin can't wait for the British and the Americans to join the Second World War to open a second front in France.

[51:09]

Because you know Stalin expects that will ease the pressure on Soviet forces in the east -- because Germany's resources will be divided by the opening of the second front.

[51:19]

The fact that it takes the British and the Americans so long to open a second front is an irritant to Stalin during the Second World War.

[51:30]

It should be said, just to give you a little more background on that issue, that the United States under Franklin Roosevelt is eager to open a second front. It's Britain which is really the major obstacle to the opening of a second front earlier than 1944.

[51:48]

It's not until 1944 with D-Day↗ that the Anglo-Americans finally attack continental Europe, but they do so later than FDR and the United States would have wanted.

[52:01]

So that is the grand alliance, an alliance that finally brings the Soviet Union together with the Western Democracies, in a coalition intended to defeat Hitlerism.

From the Grand Alliance to the Cold War

[52:16]

But this hardly explains why American forces will by the 1950s be permanently stationed in Europe, their mission being the containment of the Soviet Union.

[52:31]

Elvis Presley↗ in the late 1950s has to do military service, and this is a unprecedented thing in the American experience. Never before in the United States had there been a peacetime military draft -- a peacetime military draft which capable of taking a sort of popular entertainment figure like Elvis across the seas to Germany where he would be tasked with sort of serving in the American army of occupation in Germany, in that country.

[53:09]

The question of explaining sort of how the United States transitions from the grand alliance, an alliance of convenience with the Soviet Union, to a state of Cold War in which American forces will be permanently located in Europe in order to contain Soviet power is sort of the question of the Cold War's origins.

[53:32]

How did we get from the alliance of the early 1940s to the estrangement of the late 1940s? Was that transition inevitable or was it a consequence of specific circumstance and specific choices that might have been made differently that could have produced different kinds of outcomes.

Origins of the Cold War

US Aspirations and Goals for the Postwar Era

[53:53]

Let's start by asking what American wanted from the postwar settlement? What kind of world did American leaders want to create?

[54:04]

It's important to remember that the United States in 1945 is very much the world's dominant power. American military forces are victorious in Europe and Asia. The United States is by far and away the world's predominant economic power as well.

[54:23]

What do Americans want to accomplish from this position of paramount power and influence what kind of world does the United States want to create?

[54:35]

There is a prehistory and it weighs powerfully on the minds of American decision-makers. The experiences of the 1930s, the experiences of a decade in which an integrated global economy broke apart, the experiences of a decade in which America experienced unprecedented economic misery weighs powerfully on the minds of American policy planners as they look at the postwar world.

[55:03]

Americans to put it succinctly want to put the world economy back together. They want to reintegrate a world that came apart in the 1930s and they want to create new international institutions that will superintend an integrated global system.

[55:22]

There are political aspects to this as well and economic aspects. The primary economic institutional framework which we're going to talk about in more detail next week will be the Bretton Woods system↗, the political institution that Americans promote to sort of put the world back together is the United Nations↗.

[55:44]

And there is strong, strong public support for the United Nations in the United States during the Second World War. And this may surprise those of you know anything about American attitudes towards the UN today. But during the Second World War leaders of both major parties support active American involvement in the United Nations and public support for the United Nations is overwhelming.

[56:08]

You know 85% of Americans are strongly in favor of active American involvement in the UN during the Second World War.

[56:18]

Americans want to lead the world and they want to make a world safe for globalization. They want a world in which free trade will prevail as a worldwide norm. And this is what the Bretton Woods institutions will try to accomplish.

[56:36]

This commitment to the reintegration of the world is powerfully informed, as I've tried to emphasize, by the experience of the 1930s. Convinced as they are that the American economy requires an open world economy in order to be prosperous American leaders in the 1940s will try to sort of put the world back together, to put the world economy back together, in order to avoid a return to the depression conditions of the 1930s.

[57:12]

What should we call this American vision of the postwar world? It's easy enough to pin a label on Stalin's ideological agenda. We simply call it Communism. But what do we call the American ideological project for the postwar world?

[57:29]

Do we call it sort of a democratic project? There would be good reason to do so. Democracy, self-government, and human rights, are central aspects of the American vision for the postwar world. FDR, after all, talks about four freedoms: freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from want, and freedom of fear, which he argues everybody in the entire world should enjoy at the end of the Second World War.

[57:56]

So there's a strong sort of democratic aspect to the American vision of the postwar world.

[58:02]

It's also a liberal vision, liberal in the sense that it promotes free trade, free economic exchange as a universal standard. It's a capitalist vision too. The United States is an economy in which the means of production reside in private hands. Americans presume capitalism to be sort of the natural condition of a market society and the condition best configured to produce widespread growth and prosperity.

[58:35]

So this is a world order that will be democratic, liberal, and capitalist.

[58:40]

But it's also a world order that defines itself in opposition to its antagonist. It is anti-Communist. It is opposed in the world vision that Stalin projects. So whether we call this an anti-Communist liberalism, or capitalist democracy, what the United States tries to create is a sort of liberal democratic world order in which the private sort of market economy will prevail.

[59:12]

I would suggest that sort of Cold War liberalism is as succinct a label as any other for this ideological synthesis, but you can call it whatever you like. The key elements will be sort of individual rights, democratic self-government, capitalist economics and, and this is sort of interesting -- a modicum of welfare protection for ordinary people.

[59:37]

It's really important to remember that the experience of the 1930s tempers American capitalism in important ways. Roosevelt creates an array of new social protections for workers in the United States. Social Security for example is introduced in 1935. Extensive new regulations are introduced, to provide say, a minimum price for farm production, and the international synthesis that the United States offers in the mid 1940s is very much a product of the New Deal era transformation of American capitalism. In a sense what American leaders in the 1940s propose to do is to make the lessons of the New Deal globally applicable.

[60:26]

So this Cold War liberal synthesis, this capitalist anti-Communist synthesis, is a synthesis which includes a sort of range of social protections as well as protections for property and political rights.

[60:43]

And it's a synthesis that American leaders hold to be universally applicable. It's a synthesis that manifests itself in particular institutions: Bretton Woods and the United Nations. These are institutions that are conceived respectively in New Hampshire and San Francisco.

[61:02]

The sites of conception tell you something about the influence of the United States upon the postwar design. None of this is to say that Americans act in isolation when they create a new order for the postwar world. Non-Americans play really important roles in the construction of the postwar institutions.

[61:23]

John Maynard Keynes↗, about whom we're going to talk a great deal more, is instrumental to the creation of the Bretton Woods settlement. Jan Smuts↗ a South African political leader is one of the central figures involved in the creation of the United Nations, so non-Americans are crucial to this postwar project too.

The Soviet Union and American Goals and Aspirations

[61:41]

But if South African politicians and British economists can assimilate themselves relatively easily to an American led world order the role of the Soviet Union in this Americanized postwar world is much less clear.

[62:01]

Will the Soviet Union be able to participate in the open and integrated world that American leaders project and hope to create? Franklin Roosevelt hopes that cooperation between the United States and the Soviet Union will continue.

[62:17]

Whether Roosevelt was guilty of sort of wishful thinking in imagining that it might is something that we'll have to answer for ourselves.

[62:29]

But there are key questions to be answered. At the end of the Second World War, in August 1945, there are sort of key questions that will ultimately determine the extent to which the Soviet Union participates in the Americanized postwar order.

[62:43]

Will the Soviet Union, for example, join the International Monetary Fund↗? To do so would be to commit the Soviet Union to participating in a liberal world economy. Will the United States provide material assistance to the Soviet Union? Aid to facilitate the USSR's recovery from the Second World War and to sort of facilitate the accommodation of the Soviet Union to a liberal US led international order?

Context at the End of the Second World War

[63:12]

These are important questions.

[63:14]

The world in which these questions will be answered is a world transformed by the outcome of the Second World War. Europe in August 1945 is dominated by external powers. In the east, it's dominated by the Red Army, which pushes through Eastern Europe all the way to Central Germany.

[63:42]

In the west, the forces of the US Army, and the British Army hold sway over the other half of the continent.

[63:52]

The future of the continent and the future of the relationship between the Soviet Union and the United States will hinge upon, sort of, choices.

[64:06]

We've talked about the ways in which the expectations and visions of the two sides for the postwar world might vary, but the outcomes of this conflicting set of expectations will ultimately depend upon the choices that historical actors, leaders for the most part, end up making.

Deterioration in U.S.-Soviet Relations

[64:29]

Relations between the Soviet Union and the United States begin to deteriorate fairly quickly -- even before the end of 1945. The reasons for this are complicated.

Soviet Occupation of Eastern Europe

[64:46]

The Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe is offensive to American public opinion. As Americans who have fought for the freedom of Europe see the Red Army sort of ride roughshod over democratic freedoms in Poland and in Czechoslovakia, American public opinion always somewhat suspicious of the Soviet Union, turns fairly hard against Stalin.

[65:09]

The occupation of Eastern Europe, as it proceeds, sort of conjures the specter of an Eastern Europe dominated by Soviet imperial power. And Americans ask themselves, with some reason, whether this is what they fought the Second World War to accomplish? Of course they're not in much of a position to do anything about it.

[65:33]

What can the United States do? Could continue to provide aid to the Soviet Union. Perhaps it could attach political conditions to that assistance, but it does not.

Termination of Lend-Lease to the Soviet Union at the end of the Second World War

[65:44]

In August 1945, immediately upon the conclusion of hostilities, the United States cancels the lend-lease assistance program under which material aid had been sent to the Soviet Union during the Second World War.

[65:58]

The reasons that it does that are fairly straightforward and they have to do with domestic policy. The Congress doesn't want to continue to fund an assistance program to the Soviet Union after the war has been won. But the cancellation of lend-lease sort of comes as an affront to Stalin and to the Soviet leadership.

The Soviet Union's Absence from Bretton Woods

[66:18]

In December 1945 the Soviet Union decides that it not will participate in the Bretton Woods institutions. The Soviet decision not to participate in Bretton Woods is understandable enough. What Stalin has tried to construct in the 1930s is a very centralized planned economy in which all production is owned by the state. The Soviet economy, as it developed in the 1930s, was almost entirely separated from the larger world economy.

[66:52]

Insofar as the Bretton Woods institutions envisage the reintegration of the world economy it's not likely that the Soviet planned and closed economy could be easily assimilated to them.

[67:05]

But Stalin's announcement of Soviet non-participation in Bretton Woods nonetheless marks an important turning point. It sort of marks a clear declaration on the Soviet Union's part that the Soviet Union will not participate in the open integrated postwar world order that the United States starts to build.

[67:27]

Subsequent to this declaration in 1945, in December 1945, of Soviet non-participation in Bretton Woods, there begins to be, sort of more powerful discursive acknowledgment, on both sides of the inevitably of postwar estrangement between the United States and the Soviet Union. Stalin in February 1946...

[67:50]

(Student question)

[67:58]

No, it really was that key in the postwar world. You're absolutely right to caution against reading history from a particular national standpoint. But the power, importance, and influence of the United States in 1945 I don't think can be overstated.

[68:16]

This is not like 1919. At the end of the First World War the United States is one of several victorious powers. In 1945 the United States really is the victorious power. The West Europeans are absolutely devastated by the war. They look to the United States to restore prosperity, to provide security.

[68:35]

The Soviet Union is the only power that begins to compare with the United States in terms of its wealth and military capabilities in 1945. But it's a poor second.

[68:45]

So I would not in this case want you to sort of avoid focusing on the United States as a central aspect of the international settlement because of a sort of wariness of reading history through an American lens.

[69:04]

When we sort of come to talk a little bit more about the West Europeans will see just how dependent they believed themselves to be on the United States.

Soviet Hostility to Capitalism and the United States

[69:12]

So Stalin in February 1946 gives a speech called The Election Speech, even through there was no real election, in which he denounced capitalism and denounced the United States, accusing the capitalists of seeking to encircle and destroy the Soviet Union.

[69:31]

This was not unprecedented. He had offered similar speeches in the 1930s but coming after the Second World War it represented a reversion to a sort of hostile rhetoric which had been dormant for the duration of the war itself.

George Kennan and the Long Telegram

[69:47]

The next month, in March 1946, George Kennan↗, the attaché at the US embassy in Moscow sends to the State Department a document which has become known as the "Long Telegram"↗.

[70:00]

It's still the longest telegram that the State Department has ever received from one of its officers overseas. And in it Kennan offered a very lengthy analysis of Soviet behavior. His central point is that the Soviet Union is intractably opposed to the liberal integrated postwar order that the United States wants to build.

[70:22]

Kennan argues that it's foolish to even try to integrate the Soviet Union to the US led postwar design. Instead he argues the Soviet Union should be carefully contained.

[70:32]

Note that Kennan does not say that the Soviet Union should be confronted through military means. Kennan simply says that the United States ought to focus on building up the strength of its allies, on building a Europe which that will be sort of resilient in the face of Soviet power.

Winston Churchill and the Iron Curtain Speech

[70:50]

Later that month, later in March 1946, Winston Churchill, who's no longer the Prime Minister of Great Britain, he lost an election at the end of the Second World War, but he's still a public figure of great consequence, gives a public speech in Fulton, Missouri.

[71:06]

Sitting next to him on the podium is Harry Truman -- the President of the United States of America. In this speech Churchill offers an analysis of the European situation. He proclaims that an iron curtain has divided the European continent.

[71:20]

And this is the first sort of very public acknowledgment by a leading Western politician that Europe has been sort of irrevocably divided between the United States and the Soviet Union.

[71:34]

So there is a sort of growing rhetorical acknowledgment of a situation of Cold War on both sides in the early months of 1946.

Conflict Between the Soviet Union and the US in Iran and Turkey

[71:45]

Later that year the two sides, East and West, begin to encounter, serious substantive crises.

[71:52]

The Soviet Union in September refuses to withdraw occupation troops from Northern Turkey. The United States sides powerfully with the Turkish government and eventually helps to compel the Soviet Union to withdraw its armed forces from Turkey.

[72:06]

I'm sorry I got that a little bit mixed up. That happens in Iran at the end of the year.

[72:12]

What happens in Turkey is that there is a, is that the Soviet Union demands passage for Soviet naval vessels through the Dardanelles Straits↗.

[72:21]

The Turkish government is unwilling to grant this and the United States stands with the Turkish government and US support bolsters Turkish resolve and ultimately that concession is not granted.

[72:35]

But in both circumstances the dynamic is basically the same. The Soviet government makes demands against its neighbors, Turkey and Iran, and the United States stands by the affected countries and sort of helps to persuade local leaders to stand firm and to reject Soviet demands for territorial and military concessions.

[72:58]

I'm not going to play that because we're running out of time but I have a video clip of Churchill speaking at Fulton and I can put it online for you.

Tumult in Europe After the Second World War

[73:07]

Okay, so as relations between the two sides become more fractious during 1945 and into 1946 the attention of American policy planners comes to fixate more and more upon Europe. Europe was devastated by the Second World War.

[73:25]

Capital plant was destroyed, the economy is in chaos, there is widespread price instability, a lack of convertible currency. Europe is in a state of great tumult.

[73:36]

It's not only Europe's economy that is in crisis. European societies have been torn apart by the Second World War. They've been torn apart and they are being put back together in altered configurations.

Ethnic Cleansing in the Postwar Period

[73:49]

Europe during and after the Second World War experiences a prolonged bout of what we might euphemistically describe as ethnic cleansing. The most notorious effort to ethnically cleanse Europe is of course Adolf Hitler's. But ethnic cleansing in Europe does not end with Hitler's suicide in a Berlin bunker.

[74:08]

With the end of the Second World War, the Germans who inhabit the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia, the Germans whose presence in Poland had provided Hitler with a sort of justification, specious as it was, for the invasion of Poland will be ejected from the countries which they have long inhabited.

[74:30]

The ejection of ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe is one of the major aspects to the postwar European sort of ethnic sorting that is a powerful legacy of the war itself.

[74:46]

It's not only Germans who are ejected from Eastern Europe. Poland ejects the few surviving Jews who have survived Hitler's Holocaust. It says that they have no place in the postwar Polish state.

[74:59]

The logic of ethnic cleansing in postwar Europe produces a continent that is sort of by 1947-48, more ethnically homogeneous that at any other point in its history.

[75:12]

It's ironic in a way that postwar Central and East European governments ultimately accomplish and realize what Hitler set out to do.

Europe in the Winter of 1946-47

[75:21]

This forced movement of populations exacerbates the economic and social instability of Europe. It doesn't help that the winter of 1946-47 is one of the coldest winters in European history.

[75:35]

Transportation links, canals, and railroads freeze and become inoperable. It becomes very difficult to move food from ports and storage depots to markets. By consequence Europe experiences widespread starvation. Millions of people subsist in refugee camps. Displaced persons camps operated by the United Nations and funded almost entirely the United States.

American Fears that European Tumult Will Lead to Gains for Socialists and Communists

[76:00]

This is a very volatile situation. Europe in the winter of 1946-47 does not appear to be recovering from the Second World War. On the contrary, Europe's economic situation, its political tumult, appear to be getting worse.

[76:16]

American policy planners fear that this upheaval and uncertainty in Europe's affairs will ultimately produce gains for Communist parties in Europe.

[76:31]

You know disenchanted, disillusioned hopeless people, so the logic goes, may ultimately end up voting for radical political alternatives, for socialists and Communists, who promise a radical new order of things.

Allied Postwar Policy Concerning Germany

[76:44]

There are also major geostrategic issues to be confronted -- none greater than the question of Germany. What ultimately is to be done with Germany?

[76:55]

Germany as we've already acknowledged, you know, in the first meeting of this class, is a problem for Europe's international relations. Germany is too big, too powerful, to be easily contained by a European balance of power. Germany twice in the space of a generation in 1914 and in 1939 tried to conquer Europe.

[77:18]

Can Germany continue to exist as a unified state or should Germany be dismantled? Be transformed into a number of successor states which would presumably be less threatening to the overall European balance of power.

[77:33]

This is one of the really big questions that American and British and French and Russian policy makers face at the end of the Second World War.

[77:41]

How to keep Germany down? How to stop Germany from ever again threatening the peace of Europe?

Allied Occupation of Germany

[77:48]

The initial interim answer to that question is a joint occupation. At the end of the Second World War Germany is divided into four occupation zones: a Soviet occupation zone in the east, an American occupation zone in the south, a French occupation zone in the west, and a British occupation zone in the north.

[78:07]

But this is only an interim solution. It's clearly not the case that the four victorious powers can continue to occupy Germany indefinitely.

[78:18]

But there's no clear political solution in 1945. A long term political future for Germany remains to be determined.

Germany's Political Future and Europe's Economic Future

[78:27]

But the question of Germany's political future is intimately linked to the question of Europe's economic future, right?

[78:35]

Europe is devastated, it's economically distraught at the end of the Second World War, and the catastrophe that is Germany doesn't help matters. Because Germany is not only Europe's dominant sort of political force. It's also the heart of the European economy.

[78:51]

Can Europe recover economically without German recovery? After all Germany is the center of Europe's industrial production. The factories of the Ruhr in Western Germany are the center of the European industrial economy.

[79:08]

French and Belgian and Dutch industry is intimately linked to German industry. Whether Western Europe can recover without some rehabilitation of Germany is you know a good question and the obvious answer is no it cannot.

[79:27]

So the dilemma that the victorious allies face at the end of the Second World War, is the dilemma of how to rehabilitate Germany without restoring German political power. Can you make Germany a vibrant sort of economic center of Europe again without sort of unleashing the potential political and military power of a would be European hegemon.

[79:54]

(Student question)

That comes much later. It comes subsequent to a process of Cold War division. But you're absolutely right that the creation of European wide institutions will be the ultimate answer to that question.

Cold War Division of Europe and Division of East Asia for Next Lecture

[80:09]

To understand how we get to that question we have to think about how the Cold War divides Europe, which we should have done at the end of this lecture, but we'll do it on Thursday at the beginning of that lecture. And then we'll go and talk about sort of the parallel division of East Asia.