Editor's Note

This issue begins with an article by Geoffrey Roberts that reassesses Josif Stalin's views in 1943–1945 of how to deal with Germany after World War II. By comparing the published records of Stalin's remarks at the Tehran, Yalta, and Potsdam conferences with the verbatim, uncensored transcripts in the Russian archives, Roberts demonstrates that at least until 1945 (and perhaps well after) Stalin was a vehement supporter of the permanent dismemberment and occupation of Germany. By the time the records of these three wartime conferences were first published in the USSR in the 1960s, Stalin was long gone from the scene, and the Soviet Union was closely allied with the Communist regime in East Germany. Stalin's wartime comments favoring the dismemberment and permanent subordination of Germany were excised from the published Soviet records (as were some other remarks of his, notably those disparaging the French leader Charles de Gaulle). Although Roberts acknowledges that the publication in the 1950s and 1970s of the American and British records of the Tehran, Yalta, and Potsdam conferences had already enabled scholars to discern that the published Soviet transcripts did not accurately convey Stalin's wartime conception of the German question, the verbatim Soviet records confirm this important finding.

The next article, by Nikolai Krementsov, explores the impact of science outside the military sphere on the Cold War. Although the role of science in military technology (e.g., nuclear missiles) during the Cold War is well known, Krementsov demonstrates that scientific activities with no military relevance also became bound up in the U.S.-Soviet confrontation. In 1946, oncological researchers in both the Soviet Union and the United States were hoping to expand their cooperation in developing a cure for cancer, but Stalin and other Soviet officials nipped this effort in the bud. Because Soviet political leaders wanted to maintain strict secrecy around Soviet science and to ensure that the USSR would gain exclusive credit for major advances in cancer research, they barred any cooperation in this field with the United States, disrupting the efforts of scientists on both sides. Moreover, the controversy that arose in late 1946 and 1947 about the inadvertent disclosure of information to the United States about Soviet cancer research became the pretext for the inception of a hardline patriotic campaign in Soviet science that essentially cut off all ties between Soviet scientists and their counterparts abroad during the remainder of the Stalin era. This campaign, reflecting the broader xenophobic paranoia of Stalin's final years, marked a striking reversal of the policy in early 1946 to pursue greater scientific cooperation, Stalin came to fear that joint efforts would enable the United States to claim credit for Soviet advances. The article thus shows how Stalin perceived even the most seemingly benign applications of science as crucial propaganda weapons in the Cold War.

The third article, by Christopher Cradock and M. L. R. Smith, discusses the impact of the theory of guerre révolutionnaire (revolutionary war) on the French Army's tactical performance in the Battle of Algiers in 1956–1957, an event that set the stage for the rest of the Algerian war. The Battle of Algiers proved highly controversial and politically detrimental because of brutal fighting and the use of torture, but at a tactical level the French Army performed much better in this battle than it had earlier in the decade against the Viet Minh in Indochina. This tactical success has at times been credited to the influence of guerre révolutionnaire, a theory that was shaped largely by a desire to avoid a repeat of the dismal experience in Indochina. The theory took account of the political nature of anti-colonial insurgencies and the tactics used by insurgents to win popular support, but it depicted anti-colonial insurrections as part of the broad Cold War struggle between Western democracies and the Communist bloc. Cradock and Smith acknowledge that the theory had some influence on French tactics during the Battle of Algiers, but they demonstrate that in fact most of the tactics used by the French Army in that battle had less to do with the theory than...