Spying Through a Glass Darkly by David Alvarez Eduard Mark

Author:David Alvarez, Eduard Mark [David Alvarez, Eduard Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Russia & the Former Soviet Union, United States, 20th Century, Political Science, Intelligence & Espionage
ISBN: 9780700621927
Google: O0ypjgEACAAJ
Publisher: University Press of Kansas
Published: 2016-01-15T00:41:02+00:00

CHAPTER FIVE

A Distant Arena: Eastern Europe

Eastern Europe is the region most closely associated with the origins of the Cold War. This prominence is not unwarranted, but it must be kept in perspective. The nations east of the Elbe had nothing like the economic and military potential of Germany, let alone of Western Europe as a whole. While the rapid and sometimes brutal Sovietization of Eastern Europe had a large and enduring effect on American public opinion, the intrinsic importance of the region in the estimate of American policy makers was slight, its fate being significant chiefly in relation to larger geopolitical issues, particularly what it revealed about the wellsprings of Soviet policy and the consequences likely to follow for the international system. The economic importance of the countries east of the Elbe was relatively modest. Their trade with the part of Europe of primary interest to the United States had been mainly in agricultural products. North and South America were more than able to replace what had come from Eastern Europe. Trade with the United States had always been slight, and the region did not beckon as promising areas for investment. It was, of course, Washington’s policy to push for the development of international trade everywhere, but the specific reason for doing so in Eastern Europe was to dilute Soviet predominance.

The disillusionment in the United States at what befell most of Eastern Europe derived largely from a sense that the Kremlin had cynically violated wartime pledges not to interfere in the internal affairs of neighboring states. With the advantages of hindsight it now appears that Soviet policy was less cynical, if not necessarily less calculating and ambitious, than appearances might have suggested. When Stalin pledged free elections at the Yalta Conference in February 1945 he meant to keep his word, more or less. His fidelity, however, was predicated upon the expectation that the national front strategy would produce parliamentary regimes in which communist influence, while not exclusive, would be dominant and permanent. The enactment, under communist guidance, of social, agricultural, and economic reforms in countries where they were much needed would win the support of citizens and result in bourgeois democratic regimes responsive to Moscow but acceptable to the United States and Britain. In this way the wartime alliance might be preserved while the USSR recovered from the war and prepared for the day when inevitable economic crisis in the capitalist West created new opportunities to complete the Marxist-Leninist project in Europe.1

The national front strategy was well calculated to reconcile immediate Soviet priorities with the values and strategic interests of the Western democracies. Well before the end of the war, officials and opinion makers in the United States and Britain had become resigned to Soviet predominance in Eastern Europe exercised through treaties of mutual assistance and through parties of the left whose ranks were likely to swell as the war discredited the old political and social orders.2 By the middle of the war American thinking was clear about the acceptable limits of Soviet hegemony in the region.

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