Why Did the Cold War End, in a Nutshell

Michael Gorbachev, starting very soon after he became General Secretary of the Communist Party (the defacto head of state) in 1985, set out to establish democracy and freedom of speech "with all deliberate speed" -- i.e. as quickly as he could accomplish it without losing power or throwing the USSR into chaos.

Why did such a man get to the top of the USSR? I think part of the answer is hypocrisy. The Soviet Communist Party, like the corrupt church of the Middle Ages, preached ideals very different from their practice. Soviet children were brought up on the idea that they were on a crusade to make the world better and freer. While the doctrine was no doubt encrusted with rationalizations of the current practice, a deep thinker might go to the root of things and realize that the most central ideal is to make the world a better place, whereas in fact, they had a class of people, just like the old aristocracy, running the nation for their own benefit at the expense of the vast majority of people. Similarly Martin Luther saw a contradiction between what Jesus preached and the selling of indulgences -- essentially tickets to heaven in his time which among other practices was making the Holy See obscenely rich.

Even a leader who came up under Stalin, like Nikita Khrushchev was apt to find the gory history of the party too much at odds with some basic pull toward decency. In 1956, he gave a speech about the insane excesses of party purges under Stalin, and other inhuman policies, with the hope that the party would turn its back on that sort of thing. He allowed Alexander Solzhenitsyn to publish A Day in the Life of Alexander Denisovich, a short novel describing life in the prison camps or Gulags, and even permitted a movie to be made from it. Gorbachev was among those who, going to school at the time, found hope in the new developments. One of the problems with understanding the dynamics of a nation like the Soviet Union is the oversimplified image of a static dictatorship. Dictators such as Stalin, Mao, Saddam Hussein, and Hitler, seem to me from my reading, to have held and consolidated power only through deft orchestration of crises. They require demonic enemies out to crush the nation at the moment when extreme discipline is dropped. They have to foment the sort of hysteria that justifies trying and executing not just anyone, but people close to the top -- those who might engineer a coup against the dictator.

In the case of Stalin, he was able to keep redefining the ideology so as to marginalize whoever threatened him most at a given time. Khrushchev was playing somewhat by the same rules, but did not have Stalin's extreme lack of scruples to just execute anyone for convenience sake. The people who lost power under Khrushchev just went into obscurity; some of them outlived him. Nevertheless, Khrushchev combined Liberalization with the ejecting of his main competitors from power, and this provided for a while the sort of disorientation among the party that helped Stalin and Mao maintain one man rule.. Had he been more like them, he would probably have, as things began to stabilize and people began to feel more safe, generated a new anti-liberal hysteria and ridden that for a while.

Instead, events took on a life of their own. Rumors and excitement over liberalization spread to the Warsaw Pact nations which lead to an embarrassing degree of liberalization in Poland, and outright revolt in Hungary. Khrushchev did not have sufficient sway to survive the disintegration of the Warsaw Pact, so the pendulum started swinging the other way, and the brakes were put on liberalization. Still, there had been an awakening, and many people, like Gorbachev, never forgot it.

I suspect Khrushchev was never again so confident as to how far he could go in transforming the USSR, and this in part led to a need for various sorts of posturing such as the famous shoe pounding at the U.N. He was also barely literate and uncouth which did not serve him well on the world stage and had to be a disadvantage at home as well.

A coup was engineered by Brezhnev and others in 1964, which led to Brezhnev's rule until 1982. I think it is safe to say that Brezhnev stayed in power so long largely by staying in the center of the ideas and attitudes of the ruling class, and under him, party members lost much of their sense of insecurity, and lived a fairly comfortable life while the rest of the country scraped by. Tension with the West, in my opinion, helped maintain solid and consistent structure of the Soviet state in that period. It is often called the "period of stagnation". Peoples lives remained about as miserable as they had been, but I suspect there was a subtle change over time. The USSR "lost" the space race. Memories of the "Great Patriotic War", or World War II (in which approx one tenth of the population died in a war on their own territory) faded, and by the end of the Brezhnev era, the population seemed burnt out and cynical, and this attitude, and envy of the West's consumer culture extended into high levels of leadership - especially among those who got to travel abroad. For a few years after Brezhnev's death, there may have been a low key struggle between the "old guard" and the many people who thought that something needed to change, and there was a series of octogenarian successors.

The choice of Gorbachev signaled a strong movement of sentiment towards change. Though it is hard to say who wanted how much change, Gorbachev's ability to stay in power for several years suggests he was not so radically out of touch with the mood of the country. According to a recent Gorbachev interview, he went around to the Warsaw Pact governments and told them not to expect Russian troops to keep them in power, suggesting they had better go with the times.

In my estimation, for too long Gorbachev's principled attempts to steer his country into normalcy and modernity and away from being a police state, were treated, in much of the West, as symptoms of weakness, or some kind of ploy, certainly not as a potentially epochal change. Rather than offer help in getting through a dangerous period of change, the US mostly "kept up the pressure".

There is a lot to say about the various crises. As in 1956-7, the mood of change was seen by various ethnic groups as an opportunity to try to break free -- this time the USSR was affected while the Warsaw Pact nations were simply allowed to be what they had always pretended to be - independent nations. By 1990, there were free multiparty elections in which Gorbachev was elected the first President of the USSR, and a transition away from remote control of the government by the Communist party was in full swing if not completed.

In October 1991 some coalition of the KGB and the military tried to overthrow Gorbachev, holding him captive in his vacation dacha. Gorbachev managed to somehow face them down as demonstrations went on in Moscow lead by Boris Yeltsin, and it became clear that the highest officers of the military could not command the troops to put the demonstrations down. Gorbachev was soon released, but the facade of solidity of the USSR was shattered, and Yeltsin and others quickly engineered a splitting up of the USSR into its constituent "republics".

The end of the USSR was seen by the US at least as the end of the Cold War. In fact there was no more Cold War once Gorbachev showed his willingness to democratize the USSR and allow the Warsaw Pact nations to go their separate ways. In my opinion if the US and other Western nations had supported Gorbachev's prestige, and embraced a new era of cooperation with the USSR, and a need to help the USSR come back from the brink of mass poverty, the USSR would not have broken up, or might have partly broken up in a more orderly way, but democracy and freedom of the press would have been maintained. As it is, democracy and freedom steadily deteriated. Russia is very weak except that it has the ability to destroy civilization. Not much to cheer about in my opinion. Certainly the idea that we "won" the Cold War seems like a foolish illusion.

Whittaker Chambers on Ayn Rand

Whittaker Chambers spent a long time in the American Communist party and came to regret it, writing a book called Witness, about his experiences, and also serving as star witness against Alger Hiss in his perjury trial when Hiss denied his association with Chambers in the Communist underground in the mid 1930s (My impression, impressionistic as it is, is that Hiss did perjure himself, though this does not necessarily make him Stalin's man in the White House, nor make the United Nations a Stalinist plot -- the conclusion that some, I think, jumped to). The case remains controversial, but Hiss was sentenced and spent 3-4 years in prison. The Hiss case also helped launch Richard Nixon's career as he played a leading role in getting Hiss convicted.

For a while, Chambers wrote for William F. Buckley's National Review magazine, and while there (in 1957) wrote an extremely negative review of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, which is available online (Big Sister is Watching You by Whittaker Chambers -- It was at http://old.nationalreview.com/flashback/flashback200501050715.asp but that link has been removed and the "New" NR-ers are doing their best to explain/refute Chanbers). Rand's books have become extremely popular in the last few years, and much of what Chambers says about Atlas Shrugged would apply to quite a lot of today's political writting and commentary.

He described the book as "The War between the Children of Light and the Children of Darkness. ... Both sides of it are caricatures". The Children of Darkness at least "are caricatures of something identifiable. Their architypes are Left-Liberals, New Dealers, Welfare Statists, One Worlders or, at any rate such ogreish semblances of these as may stalk th4e nightmares of those who think little about people as people, but tend to think a great deal in labels and effigies. ... In Atlas Shrugged, all this debased inhuman riffraff is lumped as "looters." ... "Looters" loot because they believe in Robin Hood, and have got a lot of other people believing in him, too. Robin Hood is the author's image of absolute evil — robbing the strong (and hence good) to give to the weak (and hence no good). All "looters" are base, envious, twisted, malignant minds, motivated wholly by greed for power, combined with the lust of the weak to tear down the strong, out of a deepseated hatred of life and secret longing for destruction and death. There happens to be a tiny (repeat: tiny) seed of truth in this. The full clinical diagnosis can be read in the pages of Friedrich Nietzsche. (Here I must break in with an aside. Miss Rand acknowledges a grudging debt to one, and only one, earlier philosopher: Aristotle. I submit that she is indebted, and much more heavily, to Nietzsche. Just as her operatic businessmen are, in fact, Nietzschean supermen, so her ulcerous leftists are Nietzsche's "last men," both deformed in a way to sicken the fastidious recluse of Sils Maria [referring I think to Nietzsche]. And much else comes, consciously or not, from the same source.)

So the Children of Light win handily by declaring a general strike of brains, of which they have a monopoly, letting the world go, literally, to smash.

"When she calls "productive achievement" man's noblest activity," she means, almost exclusively, technological achievement, supervised by a managerial political bureau.... this can only head into a dictatorship, however benign, living and acting beyond good and evil, a law unto itself ... and feeling any restraint on itself as, in practice, criminal, and, in morals, vicious (as Miss Rand clearly feels it to be). Of course, Miss Rand nowhere calls for a dictatorship. I take her to be calling for an aristocracy of talents."

"Something of this implication is fixed in the book's dictatorial tone, which is much its most striking feature. Out of a lifetime of reading, I can recall no other book in which a tone of overriding arrogance was so implacably sustained. Its shrillness is without reprieve. Its dogmatism is without appeal. In addition, the mind which finds this tone natural to it shares other characteristics of its type. 1) It consistently mistakes raw force for strength, and the rawer the force, the more reverent the posture of the mind before it. 2) It supposes itself to be the bringer of a final revelation. Therefore, resistance to the Message cannot be tolerated because disagreement can never be merely honest, prudent, or just humanly fallible. Dissent from revelation so final (because, the author would say, so reasonable) can only be willfully wicked."

Chambers, whether generally admirable or not, was a fine writer who among other things translated the German book Bambi, which was made into a Walt Disney movie (probably not a good way to judge its literary merits). I read  Witness, which seemed to me to criticize Communism largely for "Godlessness" and consequent hubris on behalf of the human race. It was a bestseller and book of the month club selection and I think an obvious subject for exploration of the development of major ways in which Communism was construed during the Cold War.

The Korean War

The Korean War lasted from July 1950 to the armistice of July 27, 1953, the last years of the Truman administration, and the first months of the Eisenhower administration. It took place against a background of consolidation of mainland China under Mao Tse Tung and growing awareness by most people that the "Nationalist" government of Chiang-Kai Shek did not stand a chance against the mainland. The mainland consolidation was considered essentially complete by 1949, and much finger-pointing ensued over "Who lost China". From my reading, the answer seems to be that Chiang's government was weak, corrupt, and inept, and the Maoist forces, whatever one thinks of their ideology, had grown into a formidable apparatus while carrying on a disciplined fight against the Japanese occupation, and maintained good relations with the populations among which they lived, and after the Japanese left, there wasn't much that could be done about it. Some of this may be mythology, but just looking at the hundreds of thousands of effective troops they were able to throw into Korea.

It was also the final years of the Soviet dictator Stalin, who died March 5, 1953, a few months before the armistice, and between the Soviet failure to liberate the nations it traversed on its way to Germany, and this apparent united Communist empire over most of Europe and Asia, there was plenty of reason for the west to be alarmed. It would later transpire that China and Russia's still nationalist impulses, and distrust of eachother would not permit such a unified Communist empire, but if both nations had been true to Communism's "One World" pretensions, there would indeed have been such a Communist collosus. So some of the alarm, not for the first or last time, was due to a mistaken belief that Communists were totally driven by their ideology. Perhaps the communist footsoldier was, but at the highest levels, Communist leaders were much like other national leaders of a particularly unconstrained and brutal type, and between Mao and Stalin, and the later Kremlin leaders, neither was about to yield to the other, and over time they came to criticize eachothers actions and ideology.

At the end of WWII, Korea, which had been occupied by Japan since 1910, came under joint control by the U.S. and the USSR, with the US controlling territory below the 38th parallel and the USSR controlling territory to the north of that line, which bordered on the USSR (though it had a much longer border with China).

Many of the core leaders and soldiers of the North Korean army had fought alongside the highly effective Maoist army, and they showed themselves to be ready for action when the war commenced. The South seemed to have no such advantages of discipline and morale. The North and South Korean leaders, Kim Il-sung and Syngman Rhee both wished to unite Korea on their terms. It appears that Kim might well have succeeded had the Koreans been left to their own devices.

[to be continued]

What Kind of Project is This?

It is very difficult to get a real sense of any major episode of history. If you approach any such episode with no knowledge, skillful writers with their own strong senses of what it represents can probably convince you of any of a number of contradictory "lessons of history".

In trying to make sense of the transformations of America that happenned in the early decades of the 1800s, I adopted a scheme of delaying the big picture, and looking at one tiny event, or person, or place at a time and trying to relate to that. An early taste of where that lead can be seen in Jacksonian Miscellanies - Highlights of First 24 Issues. At history conferences I used to attend, historians who drew very different conclusions about a subject listened to and learned from eachother. Sometimes there was heated debate, but respect was also present.

While I may have read a few dozen books related to the Cold War, there is very little about which I can give a coherent satisfactory explanation, whereas many Americans, having read a lot less, won't hesitate to sumarize the whole thing in 25 words or less. One of the problems is the way that belief systems and our (social) identity become almost impossible to separate. "I and other right-thinking people know that this: ... is how and why it happenned. Others, whose identity is often summed up in some pejoritive way, make this ridiculous claim: ...".

The email newsletter Jacksonian Miscellanies consisted of roughly chapter sized excerpts from real period documents, with maybe 20% context and interpretation added. My general approach was to try to surprise myself, shifting from time to time based on the question "What have I not been paying attention to?". When I was trying to get a handle on (printed) source material from the 1820s-1840s, it seemed, at least, finite. I felt like one of the blind men with the elephant at least, not like a blind ant crawling on an elephant, but with the Cold War I feel more like the ant, and what, anyway, are "original source materials" on the Cold War? I am trying to understand simultaneously both major happenings, like the Berlin Air Lift, or the Korean War, or the first visit to America by a Soviet leader, and major initiatives taken by various entities to tell us what it all meant at the time it was happenning, whether it was by ex-Communists like Whittaker Chambers, people in Eisenhower's or Kennedy's White House, the founder of the John Birch Society, or influential members of the "new left".

One surprise I have had already is that Catholics seemed to have had an unusually large part in the early days of the formation of anti-Communist views of the USSR. Also that even earlier, the alarm was sounded to a large part by left-leaning Europeans who might have been initially attracted to the USSR, but saw what was really going on there, and went around the world and across the U.S. trying to get us over our war propaganda inspired illusions about "Uncle Joe" Stalin. See Dr. America: The Lives of Thomas A. Dooley, 1927-1961 (Culture, Politics, and the Cold War)


I will mostly stick to one narrow subject at a time, so anyone following this blog will take a long time getting any idea of a "big picture". But for people willing to be exposed to surprising aspects of Cold War thought, even aspects you would have tended to stay away from out of repugnance for one point of view or another, I am hoping to provide something of interest. Hopefully, by focusing on undeniably influential (in one war or another) sources, even a "learning-on-the-job" historian can succeed to some extent, as I seemed to do with Jacksonian Miscellanies, which for a while made me pretty well known to scholars of the period, many of whom read it.

A Very Brief Early History of the USSR.

The Russian Empire teetered on the edge of revolution for almost 100 years. Between the mid 17th century and 1861 about a third of the population was held in serfdom, a condition close to chattel slavery; they were bound to the land, lived in extreme poverty, and could be beaten by the landowners they served. Nicholas II in 1861 declared serfdom abolished, but the freed serfs owned far too little property to live on (although they did receive some, in a state financed transfer, it was on the order of 1-3 acres and had severe strings attached). Large numbers, however, were freed to leave the countryside, providing labor for a weak and belated industrial revolution.

In the first World War, Russia suffered the loss of millions of soldiers, as did the nations to its west, but this was on top of still nearly medieval conditions. The new middle classes wanted to bring Russia into the modern world with some sort of constitutional democracy, while the poor in countryside and city suffered from increasingly disfunctional government, and involuntary soldiers starved or were blown up in the trenches.

The old regime fell apart in 1917 leaving proponents of landowner democracy, true democrats, and a few different flavors of socialist to try at first to cooperate somewhat. The followers of Marx were divided into Mensheviks and Bolsheviks
...
The different parties eventually descended into a Civil War which lasted several years, but Bolsheviks had effective rule of most of what was renamed the USSR by 1922-24. During the war, an extreme state of martial law was in effect, and the government unceremoniously took what it needed. Afterwards, this policy was seen by many as a necessary evil or war, and some sort of rules of society would have to be rebuilt. One thing that resulted was a loosening of the rule, and resumption of some of the old style of economic life, including a good deal of small to medium scale free trade. This was called the NEP or New Economic Policy.

Winston Churchill said of the Russian people and Lenin: "Their worst misfortune was his birth . . . their next worst his death." This occurred in 1924 due to multiple severe strokes. The Communist Party, at this point was the supreme force in the nation. There was, however, some degree of democracy within the party. Lenin was a harsh believer in the efficacy and rightness of violence for reshaping the world. He had, however, a vision of ultimately improving people's lives, which is not to say his plans would have worked, but he was not such an ideogue as to be totally out of touch with reality, and the actual results of current policies, and the NEP was a response to the realization that current policies were generating widespread misery and starvation.

What followed was 12-13 years of clawing for power, in which for the winning party (Stalin) at least, ideology was more of a tool than a guide. There was a sequence of two or three man executive coalitions of which Stalin tended to be the one constant. If another party was blocking Stalin's advancement, he was prone to shift his ideological position so as to oppose theirs, find new partners, demonize the other position, and do his best to permanently wreck his strongest rival's reputation, and drum them out of the party. His overall strongest rival, Trotsky, he managed to exile first to Siberia (at this point, at least in Trotsky's case, an exile to the middle of nowhere rather than an imprisonment in a "Gulag"), and after Siberia, he was put on a steamer and deposited in Turkey, from which he began wanderings that led him to Mexico.

Stalin's last position involved the "liquidation of the Kulaks" and mass collectivization, Kulaks being small property holders able to support themselves and maintain independence by raising and selling food. This was only after idological maneuvers in which Stalin leaned towards the NEP and some degree of reasonableness, and demonized those who wanted to proceed more quickly towards the Communist ideal. With them out of the way, having been forced to confess their ideological errors, he became the most extreme of the forced marchers and began to demonize and get rid of the moderates.

In 1928, Stalin began the forced collectivization which resulted in the starvation of millions in the countryside, coupled with the declaration of the first "Five Year Plan" for the building up of heavy industry, in which the USSR was still far behind the west.

What You Can Do About Khrushchev's Visit

There's not much to thie post except this pointer:

What You Can Do About Khrushchev's Visit

in case you want to read what Freedom House advised Americans to do when Khrushchev visited the U.S. in 1959. There is a sort of awkward interface provided by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette which lets you pan through the article with a virtual "magnifying glass". It was supposed to be half of an exchange of visits, however some developments increased US-USSR tensions between the U.S.

I was actually looking for, and am still looking for a copy of the full page (I think) ad by the Committee Against Summit Entanglements, a temporary sub-organization, perhaps "front" is a reasonable word, for the John Birch Society. It was one of their first significant acts. Some sources are saying that William F. Buckley was the "public face" of the Committee Against Summit Entanglements, although he would soon put some distance between himself and the JBS, after founder Robert Welch called Dwight Eisenhower a “conscious, dedicated agent of the communist conspiracy” and said the U.S. government was “under operational control of the Communist party.”

The JBS is, by the way, after decades in the political wildernes, a co-sponsor of the 2010 CPAC (Conservative Political Action Conference) -- see Article Provided by ABC News.

Speaking of ABC News, I'm somewhat confused -- do they have nothing to do with WABC (Radio) in New York, which is "all talk, all the time", and features Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Monica Crowley (who seemed, when I once listened to her, to never speak of the HR leader except as "Whorehouse Harry Reed", and never speak of the President as anything but "The Bama"). But the ABC News artical is titled "Far-Right John Birch Society 2010", and I see no evidence of "Liberal Baiting Merchandise" or other signs that their slant is at all like that of WABC Radio.

The Man With Only a Hammer

A major and perhaps the greatest problem with the purist libertarian position -- that the ideal government should only stop crime, enforce contracts, and protect us from outside threats -- is summed up in the aphorism "To the man with only a hammer, the whole world looks like a nail." The Cold Warriors who wrote The Ugly American were quite ready to celebrate smart applications of violence. But they had quite a list of things for which the U.S. needed something other than that hammer with which to fight the Communist powers, and blamed much of our failure up to that time to our lack of capacity and willingness to use imaginative non-military methods to push back against the Communists. They pointed out things that the enemy did, like having embassy staff that knew the local language and lived much like the locals, like running schools in Southeast Asian countries teaching the skills people needed most -- a sort of Soviet Peace Corps 10 years before the U.S. tried that. The Communists seemed to value provision of peaceful benefits, as much as they valued the ability to pull off vicious underhanded dirty tricks, and both served them well, while U.S. policy-makers seemed to only envy their efficiency and freedom from scruples. It is a shame the title "Ugly American" became a byword for something that only played a small part in the book -- American boorishness. It was much more about lack of imagination (to use something besides the hammer) and common sense together with the ability to connect to people of dramatically different culture.