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How Legitimate Were Soviet Russia's Security Interests in Eastern Europe After 1945?
On the evening of February 25th 1945 the RAF undertook what was to become one of the worst atrocities committed by the western powers throughout the entire war. The German army was in full retreat, surrender imminent, and the RAF took the now infamous decision to fire bomb Dresden. The city, one of the jewels of European culture, was of virtually no strategic, and was overflowing with refugees, was virtually razed to the ground. McKee, citing an RAF evaluation, stated “the goal is to disrupt the German rear…and incidentally, to show the Russians what we can do”. Indeed many have argued along the same lines that one of the things the Americans were thinking when dropping the atomic bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima was to act as something of a warning to the Russians.
It would be wholly wrong to assume that Allied policy in the dying months of the war, as the Axis powers crumbled, was directed too much towards the Russians, as a demonstration of power and a warning against future aggression towards the western Allies. The Dresden action does hint at a concern that must have been held at the time; the end of the war would remove the impetus for cooperation provided by the presence of a common enemy. Russia, Great Britain and the United States had always been incongruous allies; committed, as they were, to radically different socio-political ideologies. Only the common threat had united them, with that threat removed, a competitive edge (re)emerged between east and west.
Although it is common to describe the post war era as bipolar, that the world was essentially presided over by two great superpowers. The two powers were not evenly matched, however. American casualties for the war were very light in comparison to those suffered by the Russians. The American economy had been given a major boost by the increased production needed for the war effort: Russia on the other hand had been devastated. Much of its infrastructure lay in ruins, rebuilding took all of Russia’s efforts in the post war period. The situation in Europe after the war should have led to a period of peaceful coexistence as the participants recovered, but it did not.
In the initial post war period, the Russians essentially occupied Eastern Europe. The extent of control has been much debated, but given the numbers of Russian troops in the region, a level of control is obvious. Immediately after 1945, Stalin had to be careful both to avoid destabilization of administrative, economic or security processes, and also to avoid war with the west. The Russians had not yet developed nuclear power and were no doubt worried by the display of power upon the Japanese by the Americans. Russian ground forces were still very large, but so were those of the western powers, but the deprivations of the war meant continued conflict was unthinkable. To the Russians, however, fear of invasion was ever present. It was this ever present threat, perceived or real, that led to the build up of forces by the Russians, which was followed by the western powers.
At the end of the war, the western allies were in no shape to continue hostilities. There was a real perception, however, that the Russians would not be happy to stop at Berlin, but would wish to continue west to occupy the whole of Western Europe. With this threat in mind, Churchill issued “Operation Unthinkable”, recently declassified documents show that Churchill had a plan to incorporate the surviving elements of the German army, including the SS divisions, into those of the western powers to oppose the Russians in the event that they were not content with occupying Eastern Europe. It is highly likely that the Russians would have had similar fears, although their system, until very recently, has not been open enough to declassify important documents. This climate of mutual fear for the security of the newly acquired areas led to a military build up which we should now examine a little more closely.
In reality, relatively modest Soviet forces would have sufficed to safeguard Soviet security in the newly gained territories in Eastern Europe, but the Russians chose to keep significant forces there. Precisely how large the Soviet demobilisation was after the war, and thus determining the size of the Russian presence in Eastern Europe, is difficult to know, owing largely to Soviet secrecy, particularly on matters of security. Some official Soviet statements say that there was a reduction in stages from around the wartime peak of 12,000,000 men, but no figures were given as to what the post 45 level was until Khrushchev gave a figure of 2,874,000 by 1948. There followed a build up to 5,763,000 by 1955 following provocation by the West.
The 1948 figure for Soviet numbers cited by Khrushchev is generally regarded as understating the issue; Western estimates for the immediate post war period are in the region of 4,000,000. This includes the security police in Eastern Europe, perhaps 500,000 strong. Even if Khrushchev’s quoted figure is accurate, however, this still represents a massive disparity in numbers between post war Soviet forces and those maintained by the leading western powers. For example, by 1947 the American armed forces had been reduced to around 1,400,000, they remained around this number until the outbreak of the Korean war 5 years later; British and French forces were smaller still.
Whatever the actual levels of the Soviet post war military establishment, it is abundantly clear that the Russians held a massive combined arms advantage over the Western allies. The Russians left behind around 30 divisions in Eastern Europe and perhaps 500,000 men. This level would be roughly the equivalent of a Soviet wartime front. This force was opposed by 10 poorly organised and loosely coordinated allied divisions garrisoning Western Europe. This Soviet forward deployment remained almost totally stable for the next two decades.
It was this highly visible military presence in Europe that led Western allies to become seriously concerned with the imbalance of forces; an imbalance that they believed could compromise the security situation and prejudice post war discussions and negotiations. To the Soviets the forces were there to ensure control and security of the Western front.
One of the greatest failures of the post war period was the failure of the two newly emerged great powers to arrive at any form of lasting agreement, no doubt because of mutually held distrust. In the post 1945 years, Stalin chose a course which not only prejudiced the possibility of post war collaboration with the Western powers, but which also served to unite the west in opposition to his aims and policies. That Western governments, through their attitudes and statesmanship, also gave rise to what was to become known as the cold war, goes almost without saying. Many “revisionist” historians, largely in Americas, place almost all of the blame for the cold war squarely upon the Americans themselves. This school holds that Stalin was the injured party, and that Western powers did not give Russia time to recover from its almost fatal involvement in the war. They hold that Western governments were essentially bent upon humiliating the Soviets and their policy of containment was designed to deprive the Russians from claiming and benefiting from what was rightfully theirs, the spoils of Eastern Europe.
Many interpretations of Stalin’s motives and actions have been offered since the end of the war; they tend to fall into two categories. The first stresses his desire to exploit the post war situation ij order to make positive gains for Soviet policy; the second, those emphasising his security concerns: to ward off anticipated threats to the Soviet Union. The first category, for example, sees the view that Stalin, sensing that the floodgates of social and political upheaval would hot remain open for long, seized the chance to enhance what may be called the Soviet Empire, even at the risk of alienating her former wartime allies. A more cynical version would be that the defeat and collapse of Germany left a power vacuum at the very hearty of Europe that Stalin was keen to fill. The second category, one that is of most concern to us here, Stalin is thought to be primarily concerned to stave off anticipated efforts by his former Western allies to undermine his position and undo his wartime gains. He therefore sought to maintain Soviet security by a militant consolidation of Soviet control over the territories that were occupied by the red army at the end of the war.
A likely third argument is that Stalin was prone to hide his expansionist policy under the guise of security interests, and that, in fact, as he would have understood it, there was no real difference at all between the extension of communist rule throughout Eastern Europe and the securing of Soviet security issues. The revisionist school, mentioned above, would hold that Stalin was in fact open to dialogue with the West, but it was only after his mistreatment by America that he adopted an iron curtain policy.
Stalin was, to an extent, the captive of an ideology which led him to regard the capitalist west as an unappeasably hostile adversary, intent on ending communism everywhere; but he was also a cold political realist who weighed every interaction with the west in power terms.
In terms of the security question in Eastern Europe: the Soviets were ideologically opposed to the west, and vise versa; and both tended to see plots and security issues everywhere during the years of the cold war. As far as the Soviets were concerned, Russia had been invaded and devastated by a western power, Germany; and had at that time been caught virtually unprepared. This was a situation that Stalin could never allow to happen again. The Western powers had demonstrated, through the fire bombing of Dresden and the use of atomic weapons that they too could devastate Russia is they chose. Russia, on this analysis was, therefore forced to maintain a significant standing army and to follow the Americans in developing nuclear weapons as soon as was possible, she was also forced to treat the territories of Eastern Europe as a Western front in waiting and maintain large forces there. The reality of the situation was, however, that the security risk from the Western powers was probably quite slight, as was the threat to the west from Russia; the perception at the time from both however was quite another story: Each say a clear and present danger from the other which led, inevitably to the cold war.
Bibliography.
L. B. Ely, The Red Army Today (Harrisburg, Pa. 1949)
D. Horowitz, The Free World Colossus: A Critique of American Foreign Policy in the Cold War (New York 1965)
N. S. Khrushchev, Disarmament is the Path Towards Strengthening Peace and Ensuring Friendship Among Peoples, Pravda, January 15th, 1960.
J. M. MacKintosh, Strategy and Tactics of Soviet Foreign Policy (London 1962)
A. McKee, Dresden, 1945: The Devil’s Tinderbox (London 1982)
R. C. Nation, Black Earth, Red Star: A History of Soviet Security Policy, 1917-1991 (London 1992)
I. B. Neumann, The Soviet Union in Eastern Europe, 1945-89 (London 1994)
D. Shulman, Stalin’s Foreign Policy Reappraised (Cambridge, Ma. 1963)
S. M. Terry, Soviet Policy in Eastern Europe (London 1984)
T. W. Wolfe, Soviet Power and Europe, 1945-1970 (London 1970)
P. E. Zinner, The Ideological Bases of Soviet Foreign Policy, World Politics, July 1952, 497-99.
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