US and Russian Relations:Stalin vs Truman

Introduction

The Bolshevik-led Soviet Russian republic was born into a hostile international environment. In late 1917 the Bolsheviks had to deal with the German threat which had played a crucial role in bringing down both the tsarist regime and the weakening of the provisional government. Peace with Germany at the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in March 1918 came at the temporary price of vast swathes of Russian imperial territory, including the Ukraine, and marked the longer-term separation of the Baltic republics and Finland from the former empire. The peace also brought the Bol-sheviks into direct confrontation with the Entente, determined to preserve an eastern front in the war against the Central Powers. British and French input into the civil war undoubtedly prolonged the fighting, and would not be forgotten quickly by Soviet leaders.

While by 1921 the Bolsheviks found themselves nominal masters of much of the former Russian Empire, they faced a population and particularly a peasantry weary of the excesses of the politics of “war communism” and the bloodshed of war, prompting the Bolsheviks under Lenin's leadership to take a step back from propelling the fledgling republic toward communism, a key dimension of which, for many within the party, was “forced,” or at least intensified, industrialization. War communism was replaced by the semi-capitalist New Economic Policy (NEP).

There was an uneasy peace not only in Soviet society and within the Communist Party, but also between the Soviet Union and the capitalist world. While both sought to normalize relations (particularly in trade), the Soviet Union was aware of the latent hostility toward the regime, while the capitalist world was convinced that the international revolutionary project had merely been placed on hold by the Bolsheviks. Under Lenin's leadership the development of the Soviet military power required to spread “revolution” by force - as attempted in Poland in 1920 - was increasingly of secondary importance to stability, both internally and in relations with other powers. This situation was to remain under the collective leadership following Lenin's death in January 1924.1 With the rise of Stalin, however, the pursuit of military power for use against an abstract capitalist threat would become a key justification for the ending of NEP and the associated projects of forced collectivization and industrialization from 1928 onwards, Stalin's “revolution from above.”

The Cold War

A term first used by the financier Bernard Baruch in 1947 and popularized by the journalist Walter Lippmann. It refers to the confrontation of the superpowers (the US and the Soviet Union) and their allies, which involved rivalry (ideological, military and economic) without resort to open war. The wartime alliance soon broke down after the Second World War as the capitalist and communist worlds opposed each other, stalin was determined to have a line of satellite buffer states in Eastern Europe as a first line of defence against any further attack from the West. With the Soviet economy in ruins and his country exhausted, he did not look for an expansion of Soviet borders beyond those ...