Doing Justice to the Cold War: A Review Essay

January/February 2008 · Historically Speaking 19 Doing Justice to the Cold War: A Review Essay William Stueck ^^ uring the summer of 1986 a group ^H of U.S. scholars selected to partici- ^^ pate in a conference on the Cold War in Beijing traveled to Washington for a briefing . There they learned that die origins of the Korean War were off limits for discussion. Jonathan Pollack, the scholar assigned to write the paper on the war, was not to mention that the fighting had started widi a North Korean military offensive across the 38th parallel. Two years later, at a conference of American and Soviet scholars at Ohio University, the two groups sparred over who had initiated the fighting on June 25, 1950 that began the Korean War. The senior members of the Soviet delegation insisted that it had been South Korea whereas the Americans were adamant that North Korea had been the initiator. Suddenly a young Soviet historian broke in: "I think we should all agree that North Korea attacked South Korea and move on to more important issues." For a moment the conferees fell into stunned silence.' How times have changed since the 1980s! The Cold War has ended, North Korea no longer can dictate what is said by scholars in China about the outbreak of the Korean War, and large bodies of documentation from the former communist nations have become available, thus settling once and for all such issues as who started the shooting in Korea in June 1950. Many mysteries remain, of course, as do many disagreements on interpretation. But no one can reasonably deny that over the last generation Cold War scholarship has been enormously enriched. The five books reviewed here represent some of the most ambitious work published by senior scholars over the last three years. The complaint has been made that, too often, historians treat World War II as the gateway into the Cold War rather than a distinct and important entity unto itself.2 Stalin's Wars clearly avoids such a complaint , as Geoffrey Roberts devotes the bulk of his space to the notion that the Soviet dictator was "a very effective and highly successful war leader" between 1941 and 1945, especially as the conflict progressed . Since this review focuses on the Cold War, I will limit my comments on this book to Roberts's second and third arguments, namely that Stalin "worked hard to make the Grand Alliance a success and wanted to see it continue after the war" and that his "domestic regime [in his last years] was very different from the Soviet system of the prewar years." Roberts makes a strong case that Stalin sought to perpetuate the Grand Alliance after the war. He did so, Roberts asserts, because he needed peace to rebuild his country, because U.S. loans could help in this process, and because he believed that the Americans and the British would accept his primarily defensive goals beyond his borders. Thus he showed considerable flexibility in negotiations and often retreated when faced with U.S. resistance. With the unveiling of the Marshall Plan in mid1947 , however, after the Americans and the British had persistendy revealed insensitivity to his legitimate security concerns and an unwillingness to grant him the gains that superior Soviet contributions to the war effort entided him, he determined that his only choice was to rally his country and die international communist movement to staunch resistance. Even then, from 1949 to his death in 1953 he pursued a measure of détente with the West and, with the exception of Korea, adopted a course of "restraint " that not only sought to maintain peace but looked to a resolution of the critical German question . Roberts does not claim that the United States alone was responsible for the breakdown of the Grand Alliance. Yet he does argue that the United States failed to see "that beyond the alleged communist threat was an opportunity to arrive at a postwar settlement that could have averted the cold war and avoided the ideological warfare that obscured the paradoxical truth that Stalin was the dictator who defeated Hitier and helped to save the world for democracy." Most Cold War historians...