Who is Responsible for Initiating the Cold War

Stalin and the Grand Alliance The Grand Alliance had all but begun to crack by the end of WWII, though it remained intact if only in name up to the end of the 1940s. To some degree, the crumbling of the Alliance by 1949 was due in part by Stalin and his paranoia over what the West was plotting. On the other hand, the Alliance could be said to have been nothing more than a ploy by the Western powers to lure Stalin along, getting Russia to take on Germany directly and decisively, while conspiring amongst themselves on how to divvy up the spoils of war. The fact of the matter is that Stalin did not have a monopoly on paranoia. Churchill and Roosevelt had entertained just as much of it as Stalin did and Churchill’s discomfort at the Big Three summits (Tehran in 1943 and 1944, Yalta in 1945 and Potsdam in 1945) showed just how tense the relationship had become between Churchill and Stalin. Neither trusted the other, and though FDR was able to ease some of that tension by his personal charisma, his death ushered Truman onto the stage—and the latter had every ambition to put the Soviet Union in its place (which he felt he did by dropping two atomic bombs on Russia’s neighbor in 1945 in what could only be called a sheer and uncalled for demonstration of absolute force). Thus, how the Allied leaders acted on their own paranoia may have been different (Churchill drank, Stalin purged, Roosevelt, Truman, and later Eisenhower all turned to building up the military), but the Grand Alliance itself was never really that substantially built: it did not rest on sturdy foundations of trust and respect to begin with.

The Grand Alliance was entered into more for practical purposes than it was for ideological reasons. The U.S., the UK, and Russia all stood to gain from Germany’s destruction. In the post-War world, each of the three would vie for power—but the mutual distrust underlying their relationship would surface. Stalin would demonstrate this distrust in his increasingly paranoid acts in the 1940s—but his paranoia was almost certainly not the main reason for the failure of the Grand Alliance. The Grand Alliance was doomed from the beginning, because it was in reality an alliance built on sand, meant to serve a geopolitical purpose—i.e., the defeat of Germany: and once that purpose was fulfilled, the Alliance for all intents and purposes was no longer needed—for at that point it was every world power for himself. Stalin felt by 1944 that the US and the UK were delaying to open a second front against Germany (they were) and that the Soviets were doing most of the fighting on the ground. Stalin’s paranoia was not unjustified: the US had stepped into WWI at the last minute to alter the peace process—and Stalin could see the same thing playing out again in 1944 and 1945. When Stalin insisted on occupying Bornholm at the end of the war, the Germans refused to surrender to anyone but the Western Allies. Stalin aggressively bombed Bornholm and then oversaw the invasion of a region that had largely been untouched by war violence up till then. This aggression on Stalin’s part in 1945 was rooted in his deep suspicion of the Western Allies taking the spoils for themselves—but this essentially what the Western Allies had in mind.

With the end of WWII, the Cold War began (and Stalin’s invasion of Denmark in 1945 could very well mark that moment). But it was not entirely born out of his paranoia. The Cold War was a continuation of the hot war that came to a close with the defeat of Germany and the submission of Japan, a new chapter based on the simmering conflict between the East and the West, a power play between the two dominant forces. Stalin’s paranoia did not wholly bring it about, though his paranoia increased with his recognition of the fact that the West was not going to play nice with Russia any longer. But just as a feedback loop will reintroduce new information into the old algorithm, Stalin’s behavior served as justification (in the eyes of the West) for more severe actions against the wartime ally. In other words, sanctions led to paranoia which led to more sanctions and so on. Nor was the paranoia all on Stalin’s side. Truman wanted to demonstrate his bravado by decimating two cities in Japan with the Bomb—an act of merciless cruelty that had as much to do with paranoia as anything. The effect, of course, was that with the introduction of this new destructive technology, no world power could feel safe unless it too possessed it. And so the arms race began.

Truman’s demonstration of ballistic force in Japan was just as much responsible for crumbling the Grand Alliance as any paranoia coming from Stalin. The creation of the CIA in 1947 and the establishment of spy bases across Europe and Asia also did not help the Alliance to stand. Radio Free Europe, for example, was a CIA front operation designed to monitor and agitate Communist forces in Eastern Europe and to oppose the ideology of the Soviet Union. Stalin’s paranoia in the 1940s could be argued to be said justified by the bellicosity of Truman and the rise of the military-industrial complex under Eisenhower, as well as by the encroaching activities of the newly-minted CIA operating with a seemingly bottomless purse thanks to the Marshall Plan. Churchill’s 1946 speech in which he identified that an “iron curtain” had fallen over Europe and that the Soviets were engaged in a seizure of power (as they had done in Denmark) ratcheted up the tension. Churchill attempted to make it look as though the Soviets were the only ones interested in expansion. The West was just as interested in that: they were hungry for the oil rich region of the Middle East and the resource-rich region in Asia. Stalin’s Berlin blockade in 1948 was his response to the West’s accusations of Soviet aggression: Stalin saw the Western powers as infiltrative and destabilizing. The UK and the US airlifted supplies to Berlin, and in 1949 the blockade was lifted—and by then the Grand Alliance was all but dead: it was clear the sides were not going to work together any longer.

In conclusion, the paranoia of Stalin was one reason the Grand Alliance fell apart by 1949—but it was not the main or only reason. The Western Allies were just as paranoid about the Soviet Union as Stalin was of the West. Both sides engaged in militaristic expansion, and neither side was willing to trust the other. The Soviet Union had been helpful to the Western Alliance in subduing Germany, but the West was not about to repay Stalin for his role in the War with many of the spoils. Thus, Stalin’s paranoia was to some extent justified—but it did not help, of course. And neither did the paranoia of the West, evident in the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the “iron curtain” speech, and the creation of the CIA.