The Frontline by Serhii Plokhy

Author:Serhii Plokhy [Plokhy, Serhii]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 2022-01-26T15:55:01+00:00

208 Jan Tomasz Gross, Revolution from Abroad: The Soviet Conquest of Poland’s Western Ukraine and Western Belorussia (Princeton, N.J., 2002), 71–114, 125–43; Serhii Plokhy, Yalta: The Price of Peace (New York, 2010), 166–82; Viktor Koval´, “Borot´ba za mizhnarodne vyznannia ukraïns´koho vidtynku novoho Zakhidnoho kordonu SRSR (1941–45),” in Ukraïna: politychna istoriia, 814–48.

10.

The Battle for Eastern Europe 209

“The combination of Russian revolutionary sweep with American efficiency is the essence of Leninism,” declared Joseph Stalin in 1924, the year of Lenin’s death.210 Stalin’s fascination with American culture and business ethic was shared by many Bolsheviks of the 1920s. The last words read by Lenin’s wife to her dying husband came from a short novel by the American author Jack London. While the United States was among the last countries to establish diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union, American companies were open for business with the Soviets earlier than their European competitors, supplying expertise and equipment for Soviet construction sites from Magnitogorsk in the Urals to the Dnieper Hydroelectric Station in Ukraine.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s speedy recognition of Stalin’s government in Moscow soon after his inauguration, along with his New Deal policies, helped create in the Soviet media an image of the American president as the kind of capitalist with whom one could do business. With Stalin fearing encirclement by Germany and Japan and mistrusting Britain and France, the United States emerged in Soviet public discourse of the 1930s as the least hostile, if not the friendliest, capitalist country in the world. US military intervention in the Far East during the Russian Civil War was largely forgotten, if not forgiven, by the Europe-­obsessed Bolshevik leadership in the Kremlin.

When Hitler turned against Stalin in 1941, the Soviet leader found it much easier in historical, political, and psychological terms to ally himself with Roosevelt than with Winston Churchill—in Bolshevik eyes, the embodiment of British imperialism since the 1917 revolution. Until Roosevelt’s death in April 1945, he remained Stalin’s favorite capitalist leader. The United States was not only the country on which the Soviet Union most relied during the war with Germany but also the one with which it was most comfortable when it came to building the postwar future: unlike the British, the Americans were not going to stay in Europe. In the Far East they were willing to accommodate Soviet territorial claims, and in the newly created United Nations Organization they treated the Soviets as equals, extending to them the right of veto reserved for major powers.

What went wrong in Soviet-­American relations after 1945? This question, central to the debate on the causes of the Cold War, has been answered in various ways. Without dismissing the historical, cultural, and personal factors that led to the dramatic change in Soviet-­American relations after World War II, I put the main emphasis on geopolitical factors. In the summary that follows I propose that it was Soviet expansion, or rather the return of Russia to Eastern and Central Europe, and direct American involvement in that part of the European subcontinent

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