Practical Lessons From History, For Today
Practical Lessons From History, For Today
The Cold War between the USSR and the Western Allies led by the United States ended nearly four decades after the death of Joseph Stalin. On December 25, 1991, the massive Marxist experiment came to an end. Never declared, the Cold War started during World War II or immediately after, when the USSR installed a puppet Communist regime in Poland in violation of the Potsdam agreement.
Very early in his writings, the “father” of international Communism, V. I. Lenin, presented Communism as an international movement that would ultimately include all countries. Stalin was, in many ways, his protégé before becoming his successor.
Stalin began building his personal power base well before Lenin’s death. Sometime in the late 1920s or early 1930s, he evolved from a power-seeking opportunist to an aggressive ideologue seeking world domination. His views dominated Soviet leadership and behavior well into the mid-1980s. Stalin displayed his adamant aggressor colors in 1939 when he entered an alliance with Adolph Hitler’s Germany. Ostensibly a pact to divide the territorial spoils of their joint Polish conquest less than a month later, the pact also provided for a secure eastern flank for Hitler’s aggression in Western Europe. In rapid succession after signing the pact, Stalin forced Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Romania into the Soviet empire, USSR, as agreed to with Hitler. (Finland was the only Soviet-designated country in the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact that avoided annexation by the USSR.)
Germany’s invasion of the USSR in June 1941 forced Stalin to join the Allies, but he didn’t set aside his aggressive ambitions. He gained hegemony over Eastern and Central Europe in negotiations with the Allies. Even after refusing to aid in the war against Japan until its last month, Stalin also gained influence in Mongolia, China, Indo-China, and Korea as well as the territory of
While a formal concept of adamant aggressor had not been articulated in the mid-twentieth century, and guidelines for dealing with such had not been summarized, the failure / danger of prewar appeasement and isolationism was much on the minds of many postwar Western leaders, especially in the United States. So they embarked upon not-always-consistent responses to contain Soviet aggression and related Communist expansion throughout the world.
Stalin was not recognized by many Western leaders (except perhaps Winston Churchill) as aggressively seeking world domination until after the conclusion of World War II. However, Truman perceived the Soviet threat even before becoming president following Roosevelt’s death in 1945, and soon after, the United States overtly engaged the Soviet Union in the Cold War.