V o L u m e I : a d

quantities of supplies to the Soviet Union. Sometimes the West made con-

cessions that have been criticized from a political perspective, as with Gen-

eral Eisenhower’s decision, late in World War II, to halt the Western armies

on the lines of the Elbe and Mulde Rivers rather than race the Soviets to

Berlin. Regardless of military considerations, that decision was totally con-

sistent with President Roosevelt’s desires. Since the West was generous, we

argued, that fault must lay with the Soviets.

Some years after the war, however, some historians came up with the revi-

sionist view that trade policies and other considerations forced the Soviets’

hands and made them feel on the defensive. So the blame was laid, at least

for a while, on the West. And later still, a group of postrevisionists, led by the

prominent historian John Lewis Gaddis, have come to lay the causes at the

feet of both sides, although they emphasize the belligerent attitude of Stalin

as being a major factor.

The important thing right now is the future. Happily, the West has joined

the Russians in working together in many fields. Russian acceptance of

NATO expansion to the East, including even the Baltic states, is a develop-

ment unthinkable only a few years ago.

We should not, however, view the end of the Cold War as a Western tri-

umph in the spirit of winning or losing a football game. I understand that some

years ago a NATO commander, visiting the Soviet Union, boasted about how

the West had “won” the Cold War. Such an attitude can be nothing else than

counterproductive.

In these pages I have said little about the role played by the U.S. gov-

ernment, particularly the presidents and the troops who held the line in

Europe, in bringing the Cold War to an end. I have avoided that issue prin-

cipally because it is loaded with American politics, and in my opinion the

Western nations did little of a positive nature to accelerate the march of

change in the Soviet Union. The idea has been touted that President Ronald

Reagan’s promotion of the Strategic Defense Initiative, the ambitious and

expensive antimissile program, frightened the Soviet leaders so as to bring

about their economic collapse. I reject that theory. The disintegration of the

Soviet Union had begun too long before.

This introduction has attempted to furnish an outline only. The entries

in this encyclopedia will provide the reader with discussions of detailed facets

of the problems of the Cold War. In many cases the experts will disagree with

my thoughts, which are admittedly affected by my own experiences. But this

much is certain: the fact that the world survived the Cold War has made it

possible for all of us to study it and express our views on it frankly.

John S. D. Eisenhower

A Personal Perspective

15

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The deadlock between East and West was the single most momentous

development in the post–World War II period and dominated the next half

century. The term “Cold War” apparently originated in 1893 with German

Marxist Edward Bernstein, who used it to describe the arms race in pre–

World War I Europe in which there was “no shooting” but there was “bleed-

ing.” Its usage for the East-West confrontation, however, seems to have orig-

inated with the British writer George Orwell in an article of 19 October 1945.

More famously, American financier Bernard Baruch used the phrase in the

course of a speech in 1947. Put in its simplest terms, the Cold War was the

rivalry that developed between the two superpowers—the Soviet Union and

the United States—as each sought to fill the power vacuum left by the defeat

of Germany and Japan. Leaders on each side believed that they were forced

to expand their national hegemony by the “aggressive” actions of the other.

Misunderstandings, bluff, pride, personal and geopolitical ambitions, and

simple animosity between the two sides grew until the struggle became the

Cold War.

At the end of World War II, Washington, D.C., and Moscow each had dif-

ferent views of the world. The United States sought a system based on the

rule of law and placed high hopes on a new organization of states known as

the United Nations (UN), which took its name from the victorious powers

of World War II. The UN closely resembled the old League of Nations, the

organization that President Woodrow Wilson had championed at the Paris

Peace Conference following World War I and that the United States had then

refused to join.

Typically for the United States in wartime, leaders in Washington had

paid scant attention to trying to shape the postwar world. During World

War II, President Franklin Roosevelt had not greatly concerned himself with

postwar political problems, working on the assumption that the UN could

resolve them later. Washington’s preoccupation throughout the conflict was

winning the war as quickly as possible and at the least cost in American lives.

This frustrated British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who, as was the

case with his Soviet counterpart Josef Stalin, sought to establish spheres of

Origins of the Cold War to 1950

17

Origins of the Cold War to 1950

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influence. U.S. leaders held—at least overtly—to the Wil-

sonian position that a balance of power and the spheres of

influence were both outdated and immoral.

At the end of the war, a power vacuum existed through-

out much of the world. In defeating Germany and Japan,

the United States had in fact destroyed traditional bulwarks

against communist expansion, although the fact was largely

unappreciated at the time. In Europe there was not a single

strong continental state able to bar Soviet expansion. In

the Far East there was only China, which Roosevelt had

expected to be one of the great powers and a guarantor of

a peace settlement, but China had been badly weakened

by the long war with Japan and was in any case about to

plunge into a full-scale civil war of its own.

Americans assumed that wars ended when the shoot-

ing stopped, and thus domestic political considerations

compelled the rapid demobilization of the armed forces

before the situation abroad had stabilized. Although the

Soviet Union was actually much weaker in 1945 than was

assumed at the time, Churchill expressed the view that

only the U.S. nuclear monopoly prevented the USSR from

overrunning Western Europe.

In 1945, though, the Soviet Union had just emerged

from a desperate struggle for survival. The German and

Soviet armies had fought back and forth the western USSR

and had laid waste to vast stretches of the region. Twenty-

five million people were left homeless, and perhaps one-

quarter of the total property value of the country had been lost. The human

costs were staggering, with as many as 27 million dead. The effects of all this

upon the people of the Soviet Union can scarcely be comprehended. Cer-

tainly for the indefinite future whatever government held power in Moscow

would be obsessed with security. This, rather than expansion, was the Krem-

lin’s paramount concern in the immediate postwar years.

Despite all the destruction, the Russians emerged from the war in the

most powerful international position in their history. The shattering of Axis

military might and the weakness of the West European powers seemed to

open the way to Soviet political domination over much of Eurasia and the

realization of long-sought aims.

Stalin, who had seen the Western powers after World War I erect a cordon

sanitaire in the form of a string of buffer states against communism, now

sought to do the same in reverse: to erect a cordon sanitaire to keep the West

out. This was for security reasons, as Russia had been attacked across the

plains of Poland three times since 1812, but it was also to prevent the spread

of Western ideas and political notions. To Western leaders, the Kremlin

seemed to have reverted to nineteenth-century diplomacy, establishing

spheres of influence, bargaining for territory, and disregarding the UN. West-

18

Origins of the Cold War to 1950

U.S. President Harry Truman (center) shakes the hands of

British Prime Minister Winston Churchill (left) and Soviet

Premier Josef Stalin (right) on the opening day of the Pots-

dam Conference in Germany, 17 July–2 August 1945.

(U.S. Army, Harry S. Truman Library)

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