Armed truce: the beginnings of the Cold War, 1945-46.

Armed Truce: The Beginning os the Cold War, 1945-46

HUGH THOMAS'S immense historyof "the beginnigns of the cold war"--the first volume in a projected series--comes close to telling more about the years 1945-46 than most readers will want to know. mr Thomas's theme is the gradual dawning upon Western leaders in 1946 that Josef Stalin was not really their friend--an illusion whose persistence, in the last months of World War II and during its aftermath, had enabled the Soviet dictator to consolidate power in Eastern Europe and come close to receiving atomic secrets as an open gift from the West.

Mr. Thomas's development of thistheme is erudite, though sometimes obscured by the detail in which he envelops it. He focuses on the personalities of the leaders of East and West and not on the economic interests, national ambitions, or intellectual preconceptions that other historians have emphasized. If the debate over the "origins of the cold war" he has little to say, except for occasional remarks on the wrongheadedness and irrelevance of the New Left revisionists. But he also omits any discussion of the roots of the illusion that possessed Western leaders then (and still affects their successors, perhaps more than ever), and that led some men into ill-starred careers of espionage and treason.

These fantasies about Stalin and theSoviets were not limited to the inanities of men like Joseph Davies, who held that the Soviet Union had "every moral right" to steal atomic secrets, or Henry Wallace, who found S. A. Goglidze, one of Beria's hatchetmen, "a very fine man, very efficient gentle and understanding with people." Such remarks merely provide comic relief to the sadder, similar, and more influential notions of more important leaders.

Franklin Roosevelt found Josef Stalinat the Teheran Conference "truly representative of the heart and soul of Russia" and was certain "we are going to get along very well with him and the Russian people--very well indeed." Harry Truman confided to his diary that the Russian people have "always been friends, and I can't see any reason why they shouldn't always be." Winston Churchill, after the Yalta Conference, told his ministerial colleagues, "Poor Neville Chamberlain believed that he could trust Hitler. He was wrong. but I don't think I'm wrong about Stalin." After meeting Stalin in Moscow, Churchill reported that they talked together "with an ease, freedom, and cordiality never attained before between our two countries." Similar bubbly assessments of the greatest killer in history were common on the lips and in the heads of Western leaders in these years.

particularly useful is Mr. Thomas'seffort to place into perspective the role of those Western officials who, at a lower level, were actual agents of the Soviets: Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, the atom-bomb spies, and less notorious agents like leo Long in MI-5 and John Cairncross in the Foreign Office, as well as American spies and/or "extravagant sympathizers" such as Mr. Thomas believes Harry Dexter White, Frank Coe, and HArold Glasser to have been. The defection of the Soviet cipher clerk Igor Gouzenko in Canada in 1945 alerted Mackenzie King to the fact "that the Soviet Union was concerned in intrigue on a vaster scale than Germany, Italy, or Japan had ever been," and King's conversation with Truman about Soviet espionage was probably influential in confirming the President's growing suspicion of the Soviets. It was during this conversation, on September 30, 1945, that Truman first learned from King that Gouzenko knew of "an Assistant Secretary" in the State Department as a Soviet agent, and Thomas reproduces a memorandum of a conversation in October 1946 between "Mr D. D. Maclean" and "Mr. Alger Hiss." Thomas considers Hiss's guilt probable, though he may err on the side of caution in weighing the loyalty of other possible agents.

The compound of naivete and treasonin the West was instrumental not only in the ingestion of Eastern Europe by the Soviets and their surrogates but also in the perpetration of what is perhaps the most evil act in American history, the forced return to the USSR of Russians who had fled or defected to the Axis during the War. In January 1946, about four hundred Russians who had served under General Vlasov were delivered to Stalin by American troops.

The men had been held in the ex-Nazicamp of Dachau. They refused to move. They begged to be shot rather than handed back. The embarrassed American soldiers turned tear gas on the huts and drove the unfortunates into the snow. Nine men hanged themselves, two stabbed themselves to death, six men escaped en route, and twenty lingered in hospital from self-inflicted wounds. The events concerned were among the most brutal aftermaths of the war. The numbers handed back exceeded two million in all, of whom several hundred thousand may have escaped and become absorbed in Western countries in the end.

Perhaps the Office of Spcial Investigationscan locate these survivors and dispatch them back to Russia.

Eventually, of course, most Westernleaders began to see what was going on in Moscow, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East, but even Churchill's Fulton speech in 1946, the first explicit public warning about Soviet aims by a major Western leader and the culmination of Mr. Thomas's book, was poorly received in the United States and Britain. The only people who seem to have been enthusiastic about it were the major Nazi war criminals, who would soon be hanged in Nuremberg. Mr. Thomas's own conclusion about Stalin and the menace he represented is firm and unexceptionable:

There is no sign that Stalin wanted, orexpected, to remain on friendly terms with the Western Allies in peace as he had done in war; or indeed could have done, given his loyalties, career, and personality. He was a Communist; after his fashion, a sincere one. He believed in peaceful co-existence where suitable, war where appropriate, and hostility without outright war where it seemed profitable. He would keep agreements till the "correlation of forces" dictated otherwise: "The Soviet Union always honors its word," he once told [Harry] Hopkins, adding sotto voce, "except in cases of extreme necessity."

Why more than forty years has beenrequired for the Western mind to grasp the truth of this assessment is a subject with which Mr. Thomas should deal more deeply in subsequent volumes of his series.