The Arms Race and Command Economies since 1945 363
thanks to its unique adaptation of traditional forms of social solidarity
to industrial and urban conditions of life.
With the defeat of Germany and Japan, the four transnational war
economies dissolved into two rival blocs. Germany was divided into
zones of occupation. Its wartime dependencies in Europe split into an
eastern zone dominated by the USSR and a western zone where the
United States soon took the leading role. Japan’s Co-Prosperity
Sphere also split up. Mainland China went Communist in 1949; Korea
and Indochina divided; most of the rest, including Japan itself, came
within the American sphere of influence. The “iron curtain” in Europe
provoked noisy controversy, but no actual fighting. Partitioning the
Co-Prosperity Sphere, on the contrary, triggered long-drawn-out wars
in China (1944–49), Korea (1950–53), and Indochina (1946–54,
1955—75), as well as lesser armed conflicts in Indonesia, Malaya, and
Burma.
Many former colonial lands tried hard to protect newly won politi
cal sovereignty by resisting more than marginal association with either
the Soviet or the American power blocs. In practice however, new
governments needed economic help and found themselves dependent
on credits from abroad, provided either by their former imperial
masters or by the American or Russian aspirants to vacated imperial
roles. The “Third World” of new nations and uncommitted peoples
was, nonetheless, a reality in the postwar decades, modifying the sim
ple polarity of the cold war,
Despite intense initial difficulties, the USSR reverted to autarky
after 1945, casting off the reliance on Lend Lease supplies from the
United States that had developed in the last stages of the war. To be
sure, reparations in kind from conquered Germany and trade deals
with east European countries that were markedly advantageous to the
USSR helped the Russians to survive the first desperate months when
war damages were only beginning to be repaired. Frictions first with
Britain, then with the United States, kept alive a sense of beleaguer
ment among the Communist elites. Stalin declared and probably be
lieved that there was only a “temporary political” difference between
Nazi Germany and other capitalist states.^1 Stalin’s Marxism thus took
it for granted that the imperatives compelling Hitler to attack the
Motherland of Socialism in 1941 were just as ineluctably at work
- In an interview with the American politician Harold Stassen on 9 April 1947,
published in New York Times, 4 May 1947. For a collection of Stalin’s most striking
references to the inevitable final conflict between capitalism and socialism see Historicus,
“Stalin on Revolution,” Foreign Affairs 27 (1949): 175 ff.
