in Poland was the single most potent source of fuel for the growing Western suspicion
that their current, soon to be erstwhile, ally was going to pose a major problem for
stability and order in post-war Europe. After all, Poland was not only a friendly state
but the country that had provided the trigger for British and French belligerency in
September 1939. The future of Germany was of far greater political and strategic
importance than was the future of Poland, but at least the Western members of the Grand
Alliance had a real vote there, a vote which rested on a physical presence as well as
on prior agreements. With respect to Poland, Stalin did what he wanted, regardless of
promises made to Roosevelt and Churchill at a summit meeting in Yalta in February
- June 1950 is the most suitable date to select for the full emergence of the Cold War,
because the invasion of South Korea by the North on the 25th of that month had a near-
traumatic, and certainly a galvanizing, effect upon American and some other Western
opinion, policy and defence spending. The Korean invasion promoted the militarization
of the Cold War as nothing to that date had done. A communist power crossed a recog-
nized border in a campaign of conquest. That was a new development and it caused the
United States and the recently established NATO to redefine their understanding of the
character of threat they faced. This, though, is not to deny that America’s South Korean
client, Syngman Rhee, was at least as willing to invade the North as his counterpart in
Pyongyang was to move south.
It is not difficult to trace the political course of mounting suspicion and outright
hostility between the Soviet Union and the United States which marked the years 1944
to 1950. One needs to recognize the relatively slow-moving, but inexorable, Soviet
campaign to install ‘friendly’ governments in those countries liberated (or conquered –
the difference between the two was not always obvious) by the Red Army. The final straw
which broke the camel’s back of Western optimism was the Soviet staging of a coup in
Prague in February 1948. The coup was completed with the murder (or assisted suicide)
of Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk. In June 1946, Stalin had rejected the Baruch Plan to
place all developments in nuclear energy under the authority of the United Nations.
A year later, he had been equally negative towards the Marshall Plan. The United States
had hoped that the plan’s financial infusions would jump-start the moribund economies
of devastated Europe. Seeking to demonstrate to the people in the Western zones of
Berlin that they could not be protected by the Americans, the British or the French, Stalin
imposed a blockade on the city on 24 June 1948. It lasted until 12 May 1949. And so it
went on. Year after year, from 1944 to 1950, there was fresh evidence of ill intent on the
Soviet part, evidence to which the Western powers reacted. Of course, in some cases the
Soviet moves were, in their turn, reactions to what Stalin perceived, generally correctly
in his terms, to be unfriendly Western acts.
But the story just outlined selectively and in only the barest of detail was not merely
one of Western perception and recognition of Soviet perfidy and aggressive purpose.
From the Soviet, which is to say Stalin’s, perspective, the Western powers played their
role, as Moscow had expected them to do, in promoting harm to Soviet interests. The
Cold War emerged by a process of interaction; it was by no means entirely a product of
Western reactions to Soviet initiatives. One must hasten to add that to recognize an
interactive dynamic is not to assert a moral or political equivalency between East and
West. The fact that both sides contributed to the escalation of political hostility should
not be permitted to obscure the evidence which points overwhelmingly to Stalin’s
Cold War: politics and ideology 189