How we got the Soviets wrong

How did I, along with so many other cold war warriors, get the Soviet threat so grotesquely wrong? Looking back, 20 years on from the fall of the Berlin wall, I think I can identify the moment when I stumbled. It came from reading in swift succession Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon and George Orwell’s 1984, which together convinced me that communism represented a uniquely terminal challenge to the future of freedom; far graver than the threat from Nazism. By terminal I mean a psychological method—personified by Orwell’s Big Brother—that could erase the desire for freedom from human consciousness. So that while the allies had been able to liberate countries tyrannised by Nazi Germany, those conquered by Russia would have been “brainwashed” into willing slavery.

As we now know, of course, communism, awful as it was, did not succeed in this way. The idea that it—as opposed to the Soviet military—was taking hold of eastern Europe was really an insult to those peoples. It is clear now that by 1950 the only true believers were to be found on the western side of the iron curtain, where communism had never been experienced. Contrary to unfounded western fears, communism was actually a fatal handicap to the spread of Russian power, ensuring its early demise rather than its permanent dominion. None of this, sadly, was understood then.



The expansionary intentions of the Soviet Union were exaggerated, too. No evidence from the Soviet archives has come to light corroborating the west’s fears that Stalin would send the “red hordes” marching to the channel ports. Quite the reverse. Stalin’s attention during those postwar years was unsuccessfully concentrated on consolidating his hold over eastern Europe, most of whose inhabitants were showing an active disinclination for communist rule. To have launched an attack on western Europe—which would have meant his lines of communication running through manifestly hostile populations—would have been little short of military madness.

Still less was it the Soviet Union’s misbehaviour that first created the mutual suspicions and hostility which set off the cold war. The seeds of this were instead sown while the hot war was raging, when the US and Britain developed the atom bomb, but kept the Soviets in the dark—as hostile an act as anything done by Stalin. How can we have supposed that Stalin was going to trust the US and Britain after that?

Then, during the Cuban missile crisis, one can’t help recalling Khrushchev’s plaintive excuse to Kennedy for giving Castro nuclear missiles: “The US believes that it has the right to put military bases all along the borders of the USSR—and the few Soviet missiles up against America’s borders would serve it right.” It was a fair point. The Americans had surrounded the Soviet Union with military bases and threatened her with nuclear weapons, and, as Khrushchev said, “With missiles in Cuba they were learning just what it felt like to have enemy missiles pointing at them.”

I am not suggesting America was wrong to distrust the Soviet Union. Where the US went wrong, however, was to be so taken by surprise, so shocked and dismayed to the point of paranoia, by the Soviet postwar refusal to co-operate. Under the circumstances, it was inevitable. We would have done the same if Russia had gone ahead with an atom bomb without informing us.

Bad relations were inevitable. But what was not was the Manichaean anti-communism that not only tested the material strength of the Soviet Union to destruction, but also made deep inroads into America’s moral capital. Worst of all, it saddled the US with a neocon political class, nearly as narrow-minded in its determination to spread democratic capitalism as the Soviets had been to spread Marx.

For a short time at the end of the cold war America was urged by these neocons to refashion the world in its own image. If opportunities did not arise spontaneously the CIA must create them. Opportunities did arise, in the shape of 9/11, and the neocons made the best (worst) of them. Had it not been for the miracle of Obama they would no doubt be continuing to do so. Anti-communism had morphed into the war on terror, and just as the danger of the first had been paranoiacally exaggerated, so was the danger of the second. It seems that the US body politic can only be galvanised into action overseas by being fed toxic political substances. In the light of history, paranoid anti-communism—which for half a century became synonymous with US patriotism—may prove to have been almost as dangerous as communism itself.