Nations often have to make choices. Not long after the war ended, the United States chose Germany, once its bitter enemy, over Russia, its erstwhile friend. That great switch then set a pattern of international relations that lasted for 40 years, For today’s leaders, the lesson is plain: within a very short time the world can turn upside down.
Few sensible Americans or Britons ever had illusions about Stalin’s ambitions. But suspicion grew to something worse in the spring of 1948, when a mass grave of 5,000 Polish officers was found in the Katyn Forest, outside Smolensk. Churchill knew-though he did not say publicly – that the Russians were responsible, and according to Martin Gilbert, his biographer, he never put Katyn out of his mind. Doubts about Soviet conduct only grew. The Red Army refused to assist the Warsaw uprising in 1944; the Soviets reneged on their promises at Yalta to hold free elections in Poland. Since Franklin Roosevelt had no intention of sending U. S. troops to Eastern Europe, there was little that could be done to stay Stalin’s hand. As 1945 progressed, Americans in Berlin noticed small but significant changes in Soviet attitudes. German judges were arrested in the Soviet zone; Russian officials who had been friendly with the Americans were sent “on maneuvers” and never returned. When Richard Helms, an agent of the Office of Strategic Services (and later director of the CIA), arrived in Berlin in August 1945, he says it was clear that “the Germans weren’t the problem – the Russians were. To pretend that we were allies was silly.”
Officials higher than Helms were reaching the same conclusion. In early 1946, George Kennan wrote his “long telegram” from Moscow; then Churchill. in Fulton, Mo., said an “iron curtain” had descended across Europe. The Soviets were demolishing German factories and refusing to ship food to the west. In May 1946, Gen. Lucius Clay, the senior American in Berlin, suspended shipments of goods from the west of Germany to the Soviet zone.
It’s tempting to mark that moment as the end of the wartime alliance – and the beginning of a peacetime one. If the Soviet Union was now a hostile power, Germany had to be made both strong and friendly. The coming of the cold war. says Volker Berghahn of Brown University, strengthened the hands of those who wanted to “reconstruct” Germany over those who wanted its industrial power curtailed. A weak Germany, in a Europe where Communist parties were popular well to the west of Berlin, would be a constant temptation to Stalin. U.S. Secretary of State James Byrnes gave a speech in Stuttgart in September 1946 at which he committed the Western Alliance to building a strong Germany, in which Germans would have “primary responsibility for the running of their own affairs.”
And so the first bricks in the cold-war order were laid. That order itself toppled between 1989 and 1991 as communism fell, opening a new possibility. The United States, France and Britain could dream of being friends with the two nations that have contested the borderlands of eastern Europe for 200 years. In Moscow next week, as the memories of 1945 surround him, Bill Clinton will find out how hard that might be.
