The Cold War, 1944-1992...The Cold War, 1944-1992 Northern Vietnam, 1954 Colonel Nguyen peered through the binoculars at the French encampment in the valley below. From his left, he

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20

Red Scared The Cold War, 1944-1992

Northern Vietnam, 1954 Colonel Nguyen peered through the binoculars at the French encampment in the valley below. From his left, he heard the pop and crack of mortars while down below, the puff of dirt and clouds of smoke signaled the impact of the shelling. "Do you think the Americans will come?" asked Lt. Kam, Nguyen's aide. He stood beside but slightly behind his superior. A third man stood alongside the two Viet Minh officers, also viewing the scene below with binoculars. His white skin and blond hair obviously marked him a foreigner. Rather than the usual brown uniform with major’s epaulets and insignia in Cyrillic script that he wore in his barracks at home outside Minsk, he now wore nondescript green camouflage fatigues without official markings, and he snorted as he spoke badly accented French, the only language they shared in common. "The Americans are still stinging from Korea. They send their dollars to the French, but they would not send their men to die here." Nguyen slowly lowered the binoculars and turned. "And why would they not Ivan? You are here. They are here," he said, gesturing toward the French below. "Why will the Americans not come as well?" "Because, comrade," replied the Russian, "Americans are comfortable people. They are tired of war. They are fat and happy. And to be blunt, Vietnam has nothing they want." "If our country is so insignificant," Nguyen challenged, "why are you here? What do you want?" The Russian paused, then grinned wolfishly. "But of course you know, Comrade Nguyen, we are here to show solidarity for our communist brothers in arms and for the greater good of world socialism." Lt. Kam undiplomatically spat on the ground. They all looked up as a bladed roar overhead announced the arrival of a French cargo plane. They watched it swoop heavily down over the surrounded French encampment, noted the blossoming white parachute bundles tumbling out of its hold, and followed its line of flight up out of the valley. They raised their binoculars again to more closely watch the scramble for the fallen supply blossoms; some fell in the camp, but many fell in the no man's land beyond the French defenses. For the next thirty minutes they watched as French Legionnaires and their Vietnamese allies made brave attempts to procure the supplies, engaging in brief but sporadic gun battles over the boxes of food and ammunition with the attacking Viet Minh.

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"It will not be enough," said Nguyen. He let his binoculars hang by the leather strap around his neck, rubbed his eyes gently for a moment, then spoke confidently. "The French are finished. And I agree, comrade major, the Americans will not come here, not now. Their president, Eezen-, Ice-an..." "Eisenhower," Ivan said helpfully. "Yes. He is a war hero, is he not? A real fighter, not a bureaucrat or demagogue like their Rose-felt..." "Roosevelt," said Ivan. "And you say our language is hard," muttered Kam. "Quite so," continued Colonel Nguyen. "This American knows not to come. He knows not to waste his men, because he is a soldier himself. He ended the war in Korea, did he not?" "Yes," Ivan pointed out emphatically, "by threatening to use the atomic bomb." "Ah yes. Well, if he would not actually use the bomb to win against the Chinese, but rather only to get out of a stalemate, he will certainly not risk an atomic war with...," and here the Viet Minh officer smiled ever so slightly, "...our dear socialist brethren in Moscow, especially over such a – How did you say it Major Timoteovich? – a country as insignificant as ours. And yet," the colonel said, shaking his head, "the French still control Saigon and the south. The Americans will most likely prop up a government there. They will use either that fat fool Bao Dai or some other French puppet." "But we will defeat the Americans more easily than we would the French," protested Kam. "After all, the French have been here for a century. If they cannot win, how can the southern puppets of Paris or the Americans who know nothing of our country or General Giap and his brilliant tactics?" The Russian looked at the colonel who was shaking his head again. "They can’t, comrade Kam, though of course they don’t know that yet,” Nguyen said, "because we Vietnamese are like fighting roosters. We are fed and bred by our masters to be set upon other roosters, like the French or the Saigon traitors. But we are, like puppets, controlled by events and great powers. Our strings run to Moscow. Others have strings to Paris, and even Paris now has strings that stretch tightly to Washington. We Vietnamese will have to fight more wars before the present puppet masters of the world leave us alone." The Russian major opened his mouth to protest but Nguyen cut him off. "Please, my dear Comrade Major." The colonel dismissed the Russian’s aborted words with an almost disdainful hand gesture. “Spare me the propaganda about socialist brotherhood. We are soldiers, not politicians, so let us be frank. I fight to liberate Vietnam, not for the economic theories of some long dead European theoretician, even if I do prefer Das Kapital to Wealth of Nations." He glanced at the major whose eyebrows were raised, somewhat surprised but definitely impressed. "Oh yes," Nguyen continued, "I have read them. I studied in Paris in the 30’s. I know you are here to fight for the glory of Russia, Comrade Major, that you think of us Vietnamese no better than the French do, and I know that those Legionnaires down there," he waved his hand over the valley, "are dying for the same reasons Napoleon’s legions died in the last century. We may discuss socialist and capitalist and democratic theory all we wish, Comrade Major, but we still die for the same old reasons – our race and our pride. Nothing has changed, Comrade Major, nothing." The Russian saluted Nguyen’s speech with a nod and said, "Spoken bluntly Comrade Colonel, as soldiers should speak to each other." All three again turned to survey the valley of the shadow of death below as black clad Viet Minh fighters began to close the noose tighter around the embattled

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French. All three also knew time was running out for the French in the steamy, jungle basin known as Dienbienphu.

Ice Age: The Cold War Begins 1944-1961 Until 1944, Franklin Roosevelt and most Americans were under the impression that Josef Stalin would be content with defeating Hitler. But they forgot that Russia has suffered a long history of foreign intervention through the flat lands stretching from Germany to Moscow. Stalin certainly had not forgotten that Russia had often been attacked over the flat plains of Poland by western nations, particularly France and Germany. Stalin also had not forgotten western interference in the birth of the USSR, so he had no trust whatsoever for the West1, though he certainly exploited Roosevelt's war-time alliance as much as he could. As early as 1944, and even while allegedly allied with the West against Hitler, Stalin announced to his commanders, "The war on fascism ends; the war on capitalism begins." At the Yalta conference of 1945, Stalin asserted control over Eastern Europe. His mighty Red Army already occupied the area, and even his arch-foe Winston Churchill had been forced to acknowledge that the Soviets would dominate that sphere of influence in the postwar world. However, Marxist ideology called for world revolution and

domination, rhetoric not forgotten by the opponents of communism. After Hitler's defeat, the wartime alliance continued to disintegrate rapidly. Stalin was not able to outwit the dry and direct Harry Truman (Pres. Dem. 1945-53), who nevertheless could do little about Soviet control of east Europe. In June 1945, the Truman and Stalin confronted each other in Germany at the Potsdam Conference. Tensions ran high, because, after World War II, the USA and the USSR were the only powers still standing, and they were not only geopolitical rivals but ideological enemies

as well. Yet the carnage of two world wars combined with the realization that atomic weapons had created a war scenario in which the victors stood to lose as much as the vanquished. Both sides want to avoid direct confrontation. For almost half a century afterwards, the world stage was dominated by the Cold War (a term coined by George Orwell in October, 1945) which was a succession of crises between the United States and the USSR that occurred as the two superpowers waged a war of diplomacy and manipulation, dares and bluffs and standoffs through proxies, their protectorates and smaller allies. Both sides aimed rhetorical and economic weapons at each other, played spy games, and fought propaganda battles trying to outmaneuver each other in a game of political chess that most often involved no actual military engagement. Despite Western efforts to contain the spread of Soviet influence, and even though Marx had predicted the spread of communism by revolution, it was initially spread by Soviet conquest. A New Kind of War In Eastern Europe, the battle against Hitler had spawned both communist and non-communist resistance groups. The Polish resistance, for example, rose up against the Nazis at a time when Stalin's Red Army was approaching. Stalin intentionally stalled his army's advance to allow the Germans and Poles more time to kill each other; this made it easier for him, once he did enter Poland, to win. The Communists executed

1 Throughout the Cold War, the pro-American democracies called themselves “The Free World” or, more

easily, were simply called “The West”, a term we will use. The pro-Soviet nations were sometimes called

“The East,” “Soviet Bloc,” or “The Iron Curtain,” a phrase used by Churchill in 1946.

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Polish officers, bureaucrats, and other enemies, just as Stalin had done at the start of the war. Stalin placed Polish communists in power, ignoring the democratic Polish government exiled in London which had continued to function throughout the war. The Soviets also instated former resistance leaders who embraced communism in the seats of power in Bulgaria, Romania, Albania, and Hungary. The Czechs, who had the only true democracy before the war, restored their democratic system in 1945. Throughout Eastern Europe, Soviet troops and local communist movements marched to grab power. In some places like Yugoslavia, the communists had a large, armed contingent that had fought the Nazis; they not only hunted down collaborators, but killed other anti-Nazi resisters that wanted to bring back the king. In other places like Romania and Hungary, where the communist party was a tiny couple thousand, resistance to the occupying Soviets proved futile. In Greece and Turkey, communist movements attacked the established, pro-western governments in 1945. The British helped Greece, but devastated by their own war losses, could not afford to support the Greek government very long. By 1946, Great Britain turned to the United States for help. Winston Churchill2 stated at a speech in Missouri that an "iron curtain" had descended across the center of Europe, and he urged Americans to lead the resistance to the new threat of global communism. Declared the old warrior:

From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic3 an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia; all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject, in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and in some cases increasing measure of control from Moscow.

…In a great number of countries, far from the Russian frontiers and throughout the world, Communist fifth columns are established and work in complete unity and absolute obedience to the directions they receive from the Communist center. Except in the British Commonwealth and in the United States where Communism is in its infancy, the Communist parties or fifth columns constitute a growing challenge and peril to Christian civilization.

Truman faced a difficult decision. The United States had already decommissioned millions of troops and equipment, reducing the U.S. presence in Europe from 3 million

2 Churchill and the Conservative Party had been ejected from power in the election of 1945; Labour Prime

Minister Clement Atlee led Britain from 1945-51; then Churchill – in his 80s – returned for a brief last term

as Prime Minister, 1951-55. 3 Stettin is on the border between east and west Germany; Trieste on the Yugoslav border with Italy.

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Get Technical: Pseudonym: a fake name to hide

identity; also nom de plumme or “pen

name” for a made up name for an author,

like Mark Twain, who was realy Sam

Clemens;, or nom de guerre or “name of

war” for a fake identity for a fighter, like

Lenin, who was really named Ulyanov.

in 1945 to only 500,000 in 1946. The American people were tired of war. But could he convince the nation that there was a new enemy, the Soviets, who had so recently been an ally? In a crucial speech to Congress in 1946, the President proposed the Truman Doctrine. The United States, he declared, would not attack a nation with an existing communist government, but it would provide aid to any democratic government seeking to defend itself against internal communist insurgents or external invasions. He then appealed for assistance and military advisors for the Greek and Turkish governments. Congress approved the funds and the two Mediterranean nations repelled the communist threat. The battle lines between Moscow and Washington had been drawn. In 1947, a U.S. State Department officer, George Kennan wrote a key paper under the pseudonym "X." He stated that the Soviets had assumed a posture of hostility the United States could not avoid. While the U. S. could not risk direct confrontation, it

could block further communist expansion by implementing a policy he called containment. To accomplish this, however, Kennan claimed that America would need to do something unprecedented: maintain a large military in peacetime. Kennan also noted the additional benefit that employing a peacetime military would fuel the postwar economy. His recommendations were adopted and carried out in the National Defense Act of 1947, which established three permanent agencies: a large Department of Defense, a

National Security Council of top military and intelligence leaders, and a secret Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).4 In addition, American Secretary of State George Marshall (1880-1959) announced the Marshall Plan, which gave European nations U.S. dollars to rebuild if the countries guaranteed free elections. Western European nations quickly accepted the offer, and growing communist movements in Italy and France lost momentum and appeal as prosperity was quickly restored by American funds. The United States spent $12.5 billion (at 1950s rates), and by 1963 Western Europe was producing double its 1940 industrial output. The eastern Europeans, on the other hand, were not allowed by their puppeteers in Moscow to accept the plan; instead they rebuilt with Soviet funds, sparse as those were. In fact, the Allies created a world wide financial agreement at the Bretton Woods Conference in New Hampshire in 1944 which led to the founding of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank in 1946. These organizations issued loans and monetary aid to nations to encourage free trade in a capitalist context and to avert future financial crises by unifying all economies in a global network. The Soviet bloc opted out of this network which was eventually dominated by the so-called G7 nations.5 Any doubts about Soviet imperialism evaporated with the Czech crisis in 1948. When Czech Marxists lost the election of 1948, Soviet troops and Czech communists murdered the elected prime minister, Jan Masaryk, and forcibly put a communist regime in power. Also, in 1948, Stalin created a face-off in Germany tantamount to drawing a line and daring the western Allies to cross it. After WW II, Germany had been divided into three western zones controlled by France, Britain, and the United States, while the remaining eastern zone had been left under Russia's control. When anti-

4 A key aspect of the Cold War was covert operations by the CIA and its British and French counterparts

against the Soviet intelligence agency, the NKVD, which was renamed the KGB (Russian initials) in the

1950’s. 5 USA, Canada, Britain, France, (West) Germany, Holland, and Japan.

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Russian demonstrations in the Soviet occupied zone of Germany were crushed, thousands of Germans fled the eastern zone for the three areas occupied by the western nations. Similarly, the old German capital of Berlin had been divided among the four occupying powers, except that geographically the city itself was completely enclosed by the Soviet controlled East German territory. This island of western influence in a sea of communism was a constant irritant to Stalin, and in 1948, ostensibly in response to a new Allied economic restructuring of West Germany, he cut off all supply corridors through eastern Germany to Berlin, essentially daring the West to challenge his Soviet strength and resolve. This created a new dilemma for the Western powers: if they tried to run the blockade, they ran the risk of instigating a wider, and potentially, a more dangerous and destructive conflict. Instead, they decided to provide supplies for the entire city of West Berlin by air. This seemed an impossible task, but for the next few months, the Allies successfully conducted the Berlin Airlift, completing thousands of supply flights to the besieged city, and West Berlin hung on. Then it was Stalin's turn to take the dare or avoid conflict; he feared triggering a war by shooting down a supply plane, but he did not believe the Allies could supply a major city by air for so long. He was wrong. By 1949, the Allies had proven their resolve and Stalin had agreed to reopen the supply corridors. The Berlin incident convinced all doubters that the world was in for a protracted conflict between the East (the Soviet bloc) and the West (the "Free World"). In 1949, the democratic states of Western Europe (including Greece and Turkey) joined the United States and Canada in a permanent anti-Soviet alliance called the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).6 Included in the alliance was the new German Federal Republic, or West Germany, formed from the three western zones. On the other side of the Iron Curtain, the Soviets formed the Warsaw Pact in 1955, the same year they created a German Democratic Republic (GDR or East Germany). While the nations of Switzerland, Finland, Sweden, Ireland, and Austria (whose occupation ended in 1955) all embraced capitalist economies, they remained politically neutral.

Two communist states refused to join the Warsaw Pact and frustrated the Soviets by their independence: the tiny and mysteriously isolated dictatorship of Enver Hoxha in Albania, and Yugoslavia, ruled by an anti-Nazi guerrilla fighter and socialist named Josef Broz Tito (1892-1980). By 1948, Yugoslavia had sent its Soviet advisors home and established a stubborn independence from Moscow, one it maintained for years under Tito's dictatorship, even though it was also hostile to the west. The Yugoslav state hoped to use force and Marxist brotherhood to hold together a nation composed of three faiths and several ethnicities.

Dr. Strangelove: Nuclear Policy The Soviets and Americans continued their research and development of nuclear science and atomic weapons. In 1948, the Soviets announced a successful atomic program, and in 1951, tested their first bomb. The U.S. countered by testing a hydrogen bomb on the Bikini atoll in the Pacific in 1952, but the Soviets followed suit in 1953. The realization that both superpowers had the capacity to wage nuclear war sent a chill of

6 USA, Canada, Norway, Denmark, Iceland, Italy, France, Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg, and Britain as

well as the West Germans, Greeks, and Turks formed NATO. After the death of the fascist Franco in Spain

in 1975 and the fascist Salazar in Portugal that same year, those two nations eventually joined NATO as

well. The Warsaw Pact included Poland, Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Romania,

and the USSR.

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Get Technical: Ballistic means it

goes in space.

horror throughout the world. Albert Einstein once quipped that he did not know what World War III would be like but that the fourth world war would be fought with only sticks and stones. Originally, atomic weapons were designed to be delivered by bombers, but both nations recruited former Nazi rocket scientists to develop missile and space technology to be used as payload carriers. Meanwhile, terrified Americans were swept up in a wave of fear that communist spies were everywhere, especially after two American born scientists, Julius and Ethel Rosenburg, were convicted of passing highly classified military secrets to the Soviets during WW II that purportedly enabled Russia to develop its first atomic bomb. In 1953, they became the first American civilians to be put to death for spying during peace time.

The hysteria died down significantly after the death of Stalin in 1952 and the end of the Korean War in 1953, but the threat of nuclear annihilation caused both superpowers to sidestep carefully around any direct confrontation. By the 1960’s, both sides had developed long range missiles and Inter-Continental

Warsaw Pact Communist, not in Warsaw Pact

Anti-communist risings

Communist rebels suppressed, 1945-1948

Nationalist rebels

France out of NATO from 1960s to 1975

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Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs) that could be launched from the homeland and hit enemy cities within an hour or even minutes. Ironically, the arms race itself made each superpower less likely to actually use the weapons, because the devastating destruction of such a war would negatively affect everyone, win or lose. The acronym MAD – Mutual Assured Destruction – was used to describe the reality that essentially nobody would win in a nuclear conflict; so in theory, the fact that both sides had missiles is what would ultimately keep both sides from using them. That is, unless something went terribly wrong.

Red Stars Rising: The Cold War Expands As the Second World War ended, both Chang Kai-shek and his Kuomintang and Mao Zedong and his communist forces knew they would soon engage in an epic struggle for China. Mao renewed his revolution against Chang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang (KMT). The KMT had become brutal and corrupt at the end of World War II, while Mao’s one million communist troops were well-armed, disciplined, and respectful of villagers. With Soviet help, they ruled Manchuria and the area around Peking, and they moved southward. Chang, a former gangster and militaristic ruler, had done little to appeal to the Chinese masses. In fact, his army had often raided the very people they were supposed to protect, and his regime was rife with corruption. After 1947, even Chang’s American allies ended support for the KMT, and by 1949 the KMT fled to Taiwan, where they created a separate China behind the shield of a U.S. fleet. Mao declared a new mainland state, the People’s Republic of China (PRC), and set about to collectivize and industrialize his vast new realm. In 1951, his troops seized Tibet, whose priest-king, the Dalai Lama, fled to India.7

In response, the United States ended its occupation of Japan in 1951 and focused its Asian policy on “Red” China’s Mao Zedong and North Korea. General Douglas MacArthur had basically run and re-created post World War II Japan, writing its constitution and creating a constitutional monarchy under Emperor Hirohito. Japan was banned from having armed forces, but became the forward base for the American presence in East Asia. The western world assumed that Mao was a puppet of Stalin. Indeed, the west trembled at the potential might of China and Russia combined under the red banner of Marxism. However, within a decade, it became readily apparent that the Chinese were not kowtowing to Moscow, but that they were instead pursuing their own path, even to the point of open hostility with the Soviets. China wanted to be once again the "middle kingdom," a great power among the nations. The Dragon and Bear are old foes, and not even the revolutionary brotherhood of socialism changed that. The Red Emperor: Mao’s China 1949-76 “Chairman” Mao began his rule almost immediately by implementing plans for national land reform. While Marx and the Soviets had argued that socialism could occur only in an industrial context, Mao’s revolution took place in a nation of rural peasants. Thus, his first priority was to reform China’s thousands of villages where 10% of the people controlled 75% of the land.

7 Tibet has at times in the past been a Chinese sphere and at other times been independent. In the late

1800s, it had regained independence with British aid.

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Get Technical:

Draconian harsh use of force.

Landlords and their social class were rounded up; over a million were executed as giant government communes replaced individual rented farm plots. Millions were sentenced to "re-education camps" where forced labor and indoctrination might "rehabilitate" them. Like other 20th century dictators, Mao combined brutality and propaganda to make himself the object of official worship; the former university librarian tried to replace Confucius as the law giver to China. His book The Sayings of Chairman Mao (or the "Little Red Book") was ubiquitous by decree, and those who resisted his attempts at cult of personality were punished in the Chinese gulag, a string of prison camps in the rugged deserts and mountains of Xiajiang in western China. Resenting competition, Mao adopted atheism as state dogma; Confucianism, Buddhism, and other faiths were persecuted. Buddhist monasteries were closed and monks put in labor camps. Confucian books were suppressed and Christians targeted for imprisonment and execution. Ethnic minorities, such as the Tibetans and Muslim Uzbeks, were also strictly controlled and suppressed. In 1956, Mao expelled his Soviet advisors after an ideological spat over the interpretation of Marxist theory. Two years later he announced his Great Leap Forward, an attempt to create a Stalinesque 5 Year Plan that attempted to make micro-factories out of Chinese villages. Farmers were ordered to abandon farming and make steel in backyard forges; much of what they made was brittle and cracked when used. Along the way, many were harmed by forced reallocations, harsh labor, or centralized

mismanagement. The Great Leap Forward resulted in a very modest expansion of industrial capability, and in the end produced little of value, though it did result in regional famines. All of this took place in a nation with an expansion in birthrate

that even the deaths in famine and oppression could not stop. In 1950 China had 520 million people; within half a century they had more than a billion. Mao enacted draconian birth control measures to curb the multiplying population, including forced abortions and punishments for families who bore more than one child. 8 After the tepid results of the Great Leap Forward and as China’s relations with Moscow worsened, some within the party challenged Mao. He responded in 1966 by calling for more revolution, by appealing to the young while at the same time undermining his rivals, the older party leaders. In a surreal echo of events occurring simultaneously in western culture, Mao told the youth of China that people over 30 were not to be trusted. Gangs of young Maoist zealots, the Red Guards, roamed the land seeking out anyone with a connection to China’s imperial past or to foreign influence. The possession of Buddhist scripture, Quran, or Bible; wearing European clothes; or even the ability to speak a European language could instigate beatings, imprisonment, and death. Many leaders and even some of Mao’s own advisers who advocated a more moderate application of Marxism were exiled to labor or "re-education" camps. Millions died and millions more were imprisoned. This purge of China was called the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. While Mao’s motives are a bit mysterious, perhaps (like Stalin) he feared his old, revolutionary comrades as he got older, so he sought to build a new power base among the youth. He had accused the Soviets of stagnation and compromise, and he may have wanted to somehow initiate a "permanent revolution." Whatever his motives, by the

8 This has resulted in a shortage of females, as prenatal testing for gender has allowed Chinese families to

abort females until they conceive a boy; Marxism has apparently not changed the traditional male bias of

that society.

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early 1970s he realized the Cultural Revolution was too extreme, that it was actually damaging China, and he had the army crack down on the Red Guards to end the chaos. As the Cultural Revolution waned, Mao accepted the olive branch offered by U.S. President Richard Nixon (Pres. Rep. 1969-74). In 1971, the People’s Republic replaced Taiwan in the official Chinese seat on the UN Security Council, and a symbolic visit by an American ping pong team to the previously closed-off country led to Nixon's presidential visit in 1972. Normalized relations were established by the end of the decade and the Chinese eagerly welcomed Western trade and technology. They also hoped that ties with the United States would serve as a defense against the USSR. By the time of his death in 1976, Mao had restored China to the status of a great power (though not yet a “superpower”), and made it independent of both the West and the Soviets, but at a terrible price. Other than Stalin, no 20th century dictator had more blood on his hands. Peninsula Problems The major confrontation in Asia exploded on the Korean peninsula, which was occupied by the Soviets in the north and the Americans in the south. As in Germany, the Soviets created a puppet state, led by Korean KGB major Kim Il Sung (r.1945-1994). Syngman Rhee (r.1945-1964), a pro-American, along with his successors, ruled South Korea with an iron hand. When the United States in 1950 declared Japan its forward base in Asia, Kim Il Sung assumed the southern portion of the Korean Peninsula was excluded from American protection, and surprised everyone with an invasion of South Korea.9 Under the unexpected onslaught, American and South Korean forces reeled backwards to the southeast corner of the country, the "Pusan pocket." The UN (with the USSR absent from the Security Council meeting) voted to condemn the North and organize a "police action," but of course, it was a war. The U.S. went back on a full war alert, and along with the South Koreans provided 95% of the

9 Even Stalin was taken somewhat by surprise – his puppet had acted independently.

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forces in the Korean War (1950-53). It was an odd war because most Americans at home were hardly affected by it. In fact, to this day it is often called the Forgotten War, even though 45,000 Americans and a million Koreans were killed. General MacArthur led the counterstrike after the initial invasion, staging a brilliant amphibious assault at Inchon behind communist lines. The North Koreans were hurled back Yalu River, the border with the new Peoples Republic of China, Mao flexed his military muscle and warned the UN forces to back off. The Chinese feared the Americans would not stop at the Yalu but keep advancing instead, following the same route through Manchuria that Russia and Japan had used to invade China in previous wars. President Truman had no such intention, but he asked MacArthur about the Chinese threat. MacArthur confidently predicted that the Chinese did not dare attack and that if they did, the threat of atomic weapons would scare them off. However, in December 1950, a million Chinese troops crossed the border into Korea, and UN forces were once again taken by surprise. The Americans and their allies fled back down the peninsula. MacArthur asked for atom bombs; Truman turned him down. The president had no desire to bring the Soviets into the war or allow this skirmish over Korea to escalate into World War III. MacArthur criticized Truman to the press, and Truman fired him. The war stalled in the center of Korea until 1953, when the new president, Dwight Eisenhower (Pres. Rep. 1953-61), forced an end to the fighting.10 The Korean War was a stalemate. The United States had defended its client state, but it had also been dealt a severe blow by the Chinese who drove back American forces. It also raised the level of world tension by reinforcing western fears of the Soviet goal of global Marxist hegemony. Though in truth the North Koreans, Soviets, and Chinese coordinated their efforts poorly, at the time it seemed like a smoothly implemented component of a Moscow driven plan for conquest. On the other hand, American restraint in not using nuclear weapons provided a hopeful signal to everyone. Finally, it reaffirmed the American doctrine of avoiding wars on the Asian land mass, a policy that later affected a decision by Eisenhower regarding Southeast Asia, but one evidently forgotten almost entirely by his Democratic successors. Khrushchev and Ike Toward the end of his rule, Stalin showed signs of renewing his purges. In 1945 and 1946, thousands of Red Army veterans were exiled or killed, because Stalin thought they had been contaminated by their contact with Allied forces during travels in Europe. In 1949, in order to win friends in the Arab world, he made Jews in the Soviet Union the

target of his brutal exterminations. But in 1953 Stalin suddenly died. There was a brief power struggle between several high-ranking Politburo members, or upper level Soviet bureaucrats.11 By 1954 though, Nikita Khrushchev (r.1954-1964), Stalin’s ruthless Ukrainian lieutenant, emerged as the leader of the USSR. Khrushchev was directly responsible for the execution of thousands under Stalin, so it shocked the USSR and the world when, in 1956, he publicly and thoroughly denounced Stalin’s cruelty. However, Khrushchev knew the only way he could take Stalin's place in the hearts of the Soviet people was to destroy the Stalin cult. Khrushchev went on to blame Stalin for underestimating

10 Technically, no peace has been signed between North and South which are still in a state of war, but very

little shooting has occurred since 1953. 11 Rumor has it that Stalin was planning another purge when he died suddenly – (back) in the USSR, one is

left to wonder about causes of death.

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Hitler in 1941 and for abandoning true Marxism to create and nurture his cult of personality. In a speech to party leaders Khrushchev presented a list of accusations:

Stalin…used extreme methods and mass repression at a time when the revolution was already victorious, when the Soviet state was strengthened, when the exploiting classes were already liquidated and

Socialist relations were rooted solidly in all phases of national economy, when our Party was politically consolidated and had strengthened itself both numerically and ideologically. It is clear that here Stalin showed in a whole series of cases his intolerance, his brutality and his abuse of power. Instead of proving his political correctness and mobilizing the masses, he often chose the path of repression and physical annihilation, not only against actual enemies, but also against individuals who had not committed any crimes against the Party and the Soviet government....

Khrushchev’s speech also signaled (if only slightly) an easing of the Soviet police state. Artists and intellectuals began to tentatively experiment with ideas beyond the narrow, prescribed Stalinist party outlines. In 1956, Boris Pasternak (1890-1960) was allowed to release Dr. Zhivago, a novel about a pre-revolutionary physician who neither loves the czar, nor embraces the Bolsheviks and suffers greatly under communist tyranny, but survives because of his Christian faith.12 Some thought the novel symbolized a more tolerant regime, though Pastenak was not allowed to go to Sweden to collect his Nobel Prize for Literature. In 1962, Alexander Solzynetsin (1918-2008) released his condemnation of the gulag penal system, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, a novel in the classic Russian psychological style of Dostoevsky and Chekhov. By that time, Khrushchev was cracking down again and Solzynetsin, who had been imprisoned under Stalin, was harassed and briefly imprisoned again before being allowed to flee to the United states in the 1970s. Eastern Europeans also hoped that a softer Khrushchev would allow them national expression. In 1956, the Poles rejected Moscow’s choice of a new leader and were allowed to choose a moderate communist, Wladyslaw Gomulka (1905-1982) instead, and within a decade, most Polish farmland was privatized. Encouraged by this, moderate socialist leader Imre Nagy (1896-1958) actually withdrew his country of Hungary from the Warsaw Pact and appealed to the West for aid in gaining freedom from beneath the Soviet boot. Although Khrushchev was no Stalin, he was not about to lose the Soviet empire either. After several weeks of fighting in the streets of Budapest, while the West did nothing, the Red Army crushed the 1956 Hungarian uprising, and Nagy later died mysteriously under a cloud of suspicious circumstances. At the same time, The Suez Crisis occupied Eisenhower. Egypt’s monarchy had fallen in a military coup to Gamel Abdel Nasser (r.1954-1970). Emboldened by Soviet aid and support, Nasser expelled the British from the Suez Canal. Israel (newly formed in 1948 and angry at cross-border raids from Egypt) retaliated and attacked Egypt in alliance with France and Britain, but without consulting the United States. The Soviets threatened to send forces to the region, until Eisenhower angrily pressured Britain and France to withdraw – a sign to those nations that the age of Europe was over – and the Soviets backed away. Egypt and Israel (which had seized the Sinai Peninsula) agreed to a cease fire and Nasser kept the canal, though he was required to leave it open to all nations. Eisenhower had averted another potential world war.

12 Pasternak was not allowed, however, to accept the 1960 Nobel Prize for literature.

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The other U2

So no one would mistake America's intentions in the Middle East however, the Eisenhower Doctrine declared unequivocally that the U.S. would act assertively to protect its Middle Eastern interests – Oil. In 1954, the CIA engineered a coup to remove a socialist president in Iran and gave power directly to pro-western Shah Reza Pahlavi II. In 1958, U.S. marines intervened in Lebanon to stop a communist coup, while British paratroops intervened in Iraq and Jordan to prevent socialist takeovers there. The United States also acted to sustain client states closer to home by lending support to a wide range of corrupt but anti-communist dictators in Latin America, like Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua, Papa Doc Duvalier (and his son "Baby Doc") in Haiti, and Fulgencio Batista in Cuba, and by sponsoring another CIA conducted coup in 1954 against the democratic socialist Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala. Arbenz, elected in 1951, had moved to end the United Fruit Company’s control of vast banana estates in his country and to nationalize the land. The army took over and brutally crushed the socialists and the minority Mayan natives in the highlands. These actions ended the good will image of Franklin Roosevelt’s "Good Neighbor" policy and generated resentment against the USA in Latin nations. Indeed, during a trip to Latin America in 1959, angry mobs attacked Vice President Richard Nixon’s motorcade, almost overturning his limousine. Nevertheless, there appeared to be a "thaw" in the Cold War when Premier Khrushchev visited the United States in 1959, and at a world exposition engaged Vice

President Nixon in a "kitchen debate" over the merits of capitalism and communism. Khrushchev seemed to respond positively to Eisenhower, and they planned to meet for talks in Paris at a "summit" in 1960. The friendliness fell back into a deep freeze before the summit because the Soviets downed a U2 spy plane conducting surveillance over Russia. Eisenhower, who had denied the over-flights, was

caught red-faced in a blatant lie. Khrushchev made threatening noises about the western presence in Berlin, and in 1961, the flood of East German refugees trying to escape to western zones was blocked by the Soviets' construction of the Berlin Wall, a concrete and wire barrier. Over the next two decades, dozens of would-be refugees were killed trying to escape over or through the armed border. A coup by the pro-Soviet Fidel Castro in Cuba and other Third World communist movements also contributed to increased tensions, and Eisenhower left office with US-Soviet relations as cold and strained as they had been when he took over. Red Stars? Soviet citizens continued to be part of a massive industrial economy that accomplished large scale projects but failed to adequately provide the basic necessities of life. While the Soviets rapidly recovered from World War II, their economy by the early 1960s had once again stagnated under the burden of inefficient, centralized, bureaucratic management, though they had at least recovered to pre-Stalinist levels of production. The Cold War itself is to blame, because the Soviets spent 40-50% of their budget on defense and space programs, while the Americans spent only 15% on average (25% during the Vietnam conflict). Soviet citizens began to wonder when the workers’ paradise would deliver its blessings. Indeed, the standard of living for Soviet citizens did gradually improve, and by the mid-1950s, old age pensions and minimal free health care had been instituted. But bureaucratic torpor, stasis, and inefficiency plagued the system. Party members, who

629

comprised only 10% of the population, received the best goods. But even those were limited; members had to wait several years for a better apartment, a car, or even a refrigerator. While czarist Russia had fed Europe, Soviet agriculture could not feed itself,

and the USSR was forced to import grain from the United States. In addition, the Soviet military and industrial complexes caused massive environmental destruction and degradation. Unlike American industry, which by the late 1970s was under government regulation to protect the environment, the Soviets made almost no provision to protect its natural setting and ecosystems. Satellite development and rocket science advances were used not just as propaganda games played to claim cultural and national superiority, but more importantly as technology vital to the development of more efficient,

accurate, and powerful military missiles. In 1957, the Soviets successfully launched Sputnik, the world's first satellite. Aided by a former Nazi rocket scientist, Werner von Braun, the United States joined the space race and established the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to chase the Russians, launching a satellite of its own in 1958. In 1961, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin (1934-1978) became the first man in space, and in 1963 Valentina Tereshkhova13 became the first woman cosmonaut. Increasing the stakes of the game, President John F. Kennedy (Pres. Dem. 1961-63) vowed the U.S. would put a man on the moon by the end of the decade, and in 1969, Neil Armstrong (b.1930) became the first man to set foot on the lunar surface. Both sides accomplished amazing technological and scientific feats in the space race, but they came at tremendous economic costs, especially for the Soviets. Under Khrushchev, some limited freedoms were allowed, though both he and his

successor, Leonid Brezhnev (r.1964-1982), continued to arrest, harass, exile, and execute political and religious dissidents. Because of the Soviet alliance with Arab states, Jews again became targets of harassment, echoing the old czarist pogroms. Other ethnic groups also faced persecution and discrimination after 1970 when Russian speaking citizens became the minority in the USSR. Brezhnev continued the Soviet military buildup and Russian people saw their consumer needs sacrificed so the country could build jet fighters and nuclear missiles. In 1968, Czech leader Alexander Dubcék attempted to break his satellite country out of the Soviet orbit, but the "Prague Spring" was suppressed by Soviet tanks.

Brezhnev's slogan was "no innovations." Meanwhile the West enjoyed the longest run of uninterrupted prosperity and growth in human history. Although they made up only 6% of the global population, Americans produced half the world's goods during the first two decades after World War II. With years of war savings at their disposal, American consumers became a powerful force. The American government maintained the welfare state, and even under Republican presidents, expanded the social safety net. The U.S. government became ubiquitous in American life and the American economy, and not until the 1970s did the nation experience any leveling of its amazing economic climb or face any serious economic competition.

13 Today, in her 80s, she sits in the Russian Duma (legislature) and recently proposed extended President

Putin’s terms in office.

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Rumbles in the Jungles: 1959-1975 As the European brand of nationalism spread to the rest of the world and contributed to the demise of imperialism, former colonies that became nations were also dragged into the Cold War. Some of them embraced Marxism, others allied with the West, and still others tried to stay on a neutral course, but several became battlegrounds for the Cold War. At times, the United States and the Socialist Soviets used proxies, or client states to fight each other; on occasion, the two superpowers intervened directly. It was a global game of geopolitical chess that often caused far too real suffering. Yanqui Go Home

Beginning in 1952, the United States supported the brutal regime of former Cuban army sergeant Fulgencio Batista. Havana was an accessible, elite playground for gangsters, gamblers, and wealthy Americans, Cuban agricultural income was almost entirely dependent on sugar exports to the United States, which controlled fully 25% of the Cuban economy. Batista himself was cruel and corrupt, and by the late 1950s even the U.S. was soured by his excesses. In 1958, Fidel Castro (r.1959-2016), who led a small band of rebels in the mountains of Cuba, along with his associate Che Guevara (1928-1967), staged a revolt against Batista. Castro was a former lawyer and minor league baseball

player, and Guevara was an Argentine communist prophet /mercenary /doctor who was involved in several other Latin American nations spreading Marxist ideals. Castro was as popular as Batista was despised, and by 1959 he had seized power. At first, the U.S. welcomed Castro, because he seemed to be an only vaguely socialist popular leader. But when Castro also seized U.S. assets and confiscated property from the wealthy, the United States condemned him as a radical. By 1960, refugees had begun to flee to

Florida, because Castro and Guevara were rounding up and killing opponents. Even worse for the U.S. he was welcoming Soviet military advisers. Americans were shocked at the establishment of a communist state less than 90 miles from Miami. In 1961, President Kennedy authorized the CIA to fund the infamous Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba by political exiles. The invasion was a disaster, and the Cuban people, still nationalistically proud of a leader who would not kowtow to the mighty Americans, backed Castro. Castro, fearful of U.S. attacks, called on Khrushchev for aid. Although he denied it, Khrushchev placed nuclear

missiles in Cuba. At that time, missiles had a range of about 3000 miles, which meant that placement in Cuba threatened most American cities. Kennedy revealed to the world U2 spy plane photos of the missiles and angrily demanded their withdrawal. Further, Kennedy blockaded Cuba with U.S. navy ships and the world waited tensely as a Soviet fleet steamed toward Cuba. Indeed, it seemed as if the goblin of nuclear war would be let loose in a Cuban Missile Crisis. At the last minute, Khrushchev backed off. In exchange, Kennedy secretly agreed to remove U.S. missiles from Turkey, near the Soviet border. Publicly, Khrushchev removed the missiles from Cuba. The United States promised not to invade Cuba, though U.S. economic sanctions remained in place. The leaders on both sides were sobered by their brush with nuclear war, and a direct phone line was established between the two capitals to avert future misunderstandings at moments of crisis.14 In 1963, the two powers (and several others)

14 During the Cuban crisis, the two sides had actually communicated by passing messages to journalists and

making public radio broadcasts.

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signed a ban on above-ground tests, the first agreement regarding nuclear weapons. In 1968, Russia and the U.S. signed a treaty to slow the spread, or proliferation, of nuclear weaponry. As for Khrushchev, his actions discredited him among his own comrades and in 1964, he was quietly removed (though not killed) and replaced by Leonid Brezhnev. The United States continued to intervene in Latin America, however. Kennedy tried to use aid and American expertise to win friends and allies, but force remained an option. President Lyndon B. Johnson (Pres. Dem. 1963-69) used 20,000 marines to prop up the dictatorship of a pro-American general in the Dominican Republic in 1965. These Machiavellian maneuvers backfired in later years though. When the elected socialist government of Salvador Allende (r.1970-73) appeared to drift toward Marxism in Chile, American President Richard Nixon, (Pres. Rep. 1969-74) allowed the CIA to sponsor a coup, and the dictatorship of General Augustin Pinochet (r.1973-89) began with the murder of Allende and continued with the killing of hundreds of opponents. As guerrilla movements appeared throughout Latin America, the United States acted assertively to send aid and intelligence to pro-American leaders engaged in counterinsurgency efforts. Che Guevarra was killed in 1967 in Bolivia by government forces aided by the CIA. While communist guerrillas created havoc in El Salvador, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, Uruguay, Nicaragua, and Honduras, opposition right wing "death squads" (sometimes sponsored and connected with by pro-U.S. governments) murdered anyone – including peasants, Catholic priests, nuns, and occasionally visiting American activists – who dissented against the state or spoke out against government abuses. Threatened by socialist victories at the polls, military dictators in Brazil and Argentina took power. There was blood guilt on both the right and left, while the moderate middle and poor peasants paid the price. The Vietnam Fiasco In 1960, few Americans could locate Vietnam on a map. Unlike the Middle East, it was not an important contributor to the American economy, and unlike Latin America, it did not seem to pose a geographic threat or even have any noteworthy significance. Yet

the Vietnam conflict became a crisis of conscience for America and one of the bloodiest confrontations of the Cold War. With American support, the French reasserted their imperial hold on Indochina in 1945, ignoring Ho Chi Minh’s (1890-1969) declaration of a Vietnamese republic. Ho had studied and trained in Paris and Moscow. He had also established the Viet Minh, a nationalist and communist movement in 1930; these forces received American aid to resist Japanese occupation

during the Second World War. But after the war, Truman ignored Ho and acquiesced to the French return to Vietnam. A bloody conflict, the First Indochinese War (1945-54) erupted as the Viet Minh, led by their brilliant General Vo Nguyen Giap (1912-2013), waged a canny guerrilla war against the French. Eventually, the United States was paying 80% of French costs. The French set up the Vietnamese emperor, Bao Dai, as a puppet ruler, but the Vietnamese people were not fooled. Bao Dai’s cronies were all French-speaking, Catholic Vietnamese, but the vast majority of Vietnamese (90%) were Buddhists who, of course, did not speak French. Ho wisely appealed to the Vietnamese with nationalist terms rather than with Marxist rhetoric. In 1953, France recognized the kingdoms of Laos and Cambodia. Then, in 1954, half the French forces in Vietnam were trapped in the valley of

632

Dienbienphu. Eisenhower resolutely refused to commit American forces to an Asian war that, as far as he could see, was pointless for the United States. The French surrendered, and all sides sat down in Paris to negotiate. The 1954 agreement created a northern zone under Ho Chi Minh with its capital at Hanoi. The southern zone passed to a Francophile (pro-French) leader named Ngo Dien Diem (r. 1954-1963), with its headquarters in Saigon. In 1956, an election was supposed to be held to unite the two zones under one ruler, but the CIA warned Eisenhower that Diem, seen as a collaborator with the French, would lose overwhelmingly to Ho, a nationalist hero: the election was never held and two separate nations emerged. North Vietnam began to sponsor the Viet Cong, a communist insurgency in the south. Diem’s government, which was corrupt, cruel, and inefficient, was propped up by American funds, but it quickly lost control of the countryside. In 1961, President Kennedy dispatched American "advisors" to teach the South Vietnamese army (ARVN) counterinsurgency methods. Finally, Kennedy agreed to look the other way as South Vietnamese generals overthrew Diem and took over South Vietnam. But the coup was bloody, Diem was gunned down, and a shocked President Kennedy began to consider pulling out of Vietnam altogether, but six weeks after Diem’s assassination, Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas.

His successor, Lyndon Johnson subsequently raised the amount of aid to South Vietnam. Fearful that the fall of Vietnam would lead to an explosion of communism throughout Southeast Asia, Johnson was determined to hold the line at Vietnam.15 In 1964, Johnson alleged that North Vietnamese gunboats had attacked U.S. naval vessels, and as a result, Congress issued the Tonkin Gulf Resolution authorizing Johnson to use any amount of force he deemed necessary. By 1967, the U.S. (and a smattering of allies) had 500,000 troops in Vietnam, embroiled in what became the Second Indochinese War (1964-75), or what Americans call the Vietnam War. Much of the war was fought in South Vietnam, as combined ARVN and American forces battled against the Viet Cong (VC). The VC were supplied from the north via sea and by the land route called the Ho Chi Minh Trail that ran along the border with Cambodia and

15 In 1957, the British had stopped a communist insurgency in nearby Malaysia, inspiring Johnson to think

he could do the same. However, the Malaysian situation had subtle but vital differences not comprehended

by the Americans.

Ho Chi Minh Trail

633

An accused Viet Cong is executed by a South Vietnamese official

Laos. The U.S. staged air raids on North Vietnam, in part to try to cut off these supply lines. In Laos, the Pathet Lao, a Chinese sponsored communist group, and the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia waged parallel wars against their respective ruling parties. The Vietnamese people suffered from the ravages of war and the brutality of both the Viet Cong, who used assassination, random terror, and extortion against civilians, and the ARVN, whose methods were equally brutal. American soldiers who initially believed they were fighting for democracy, instead found themselves fighting in a new kind of war, a civil war, a war that was less about Marxist theory than about nationalism. Frustration also mounted because the Viet Cong tactics defied American experience and attempted to minimize American technological advantages by engaging in unorthodox guerrilla warfare. The peasant who smiled at American soldiers by day might very well be a Viet Cong commander who launched mortars at the U.S. base by night. In 1967, American commander William Westmoreland announced that victory was "just around the corner." But shortly thereafter the communists staged a major attack, the Tet Offensive.16 Communist guerrillas penetrated the heavily defended American embassy in Saigon, seized the old Vietnamese capital of Hue for a month, and trapped American troops for a time at a rural base called Khe Sanh. Though the offensive cost the Viet Cong heavily and they were driven off, it was a major blow to the American psyche. Americans had been generally positive about the war, but after Tet, public opinion in the States gradually turned against the war as people began to question the validity of U.S. presence and involvement in far off Asia, as well as the cost in deaths of American soldiers. Privately, Johnson harbored doubts about the war.17 His presidency was made unpopular by the war, and in 1968 Johnson announced he would not run for reelection, even if he were nominated by his Democratic Party. The new president, Richard Nixon, immediately began to reduce American efforts in Vietnam, though he escalated

bombings of the North to pressure them during secret negotiations (beginning in 1970) to end the war. The carnage dragged on and the war spread to Laos and Cambodia where communist movements were gaining strength, but by 1973 the Americans had withdrawn from the area. However, Hanoi and Saigon continued their war. The U.S. stopped giving aid to Saigon in early 1975, and by the end of the year, communists had unified Vietnam, renaming Saigon "Ho Chi Minh

City" in memory of their leader who had died in 1969. Over a million Vietnamese were dead, as were 54,000 Americans, and Southeast Asia

16 Tet was the name of the Vietnamese New Year, a traditional period of cease-fire. 17 Revealed recently (2001) by previously secret White House tapes.

1945-1954 First Indochinese War

1956 –

Cancelled

election

Ngo Dien Diem in S. Vietnam, 1954-1963

1961-1975 Second Indo Chinese War

(America’s Vietnam War, 1961-1973) 1978-1994 Third Indochinese War

1975 – S. Vietnam, Laos, &

Cambodia fall to communism

1969 – Tet

Offensive

1964 – Tonkin

Gulf incident

Timeline: Conflict in Indochina

634

remained one of the poorest places in the world. In all three nations, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, brutal communist dictators murdered thousands of opponents, put thousands more into forced labor in “re-education camps,” and created yet again totalitarian states. In Cambodia, a particularly brutal Khmer Rouge regime under Pol Pot (r. 1975-78) was directly responsible for the mass murder of 2 million Cambodians. The Khmer Rouge leaders tried to carry out a bizarre combination of Rousseauist idealism, Marxist collectivism, and anti-Western fanaticism. They ordered city dwellers to march to “reeducation camps” in the countryside and armed children, echoing a strange interpretation of Rousseau’s belief in nature and childhood goodness in pursuit of a new utopia. But what resulted was more like Lord of the Flies and resulted in a genocide. Anyone who spoke French or English, anyone with an education, anyone even remotely suspected of less than total loyalty to Pol Pot was rounded up and placed in a death camp. The capital of Phnom Penh was emptied out; within 24 hours a city of a million was reduced to 100,000. The bones and skulls of the "killing fields" piled up as about 2.5 million people in a nation of 8 million died in a 3 year holocaust. In 1978 the pro-Soviet Vietnamese invaded Cambodia. By this time, China and the USSR were in their own inter-communist cold war over who would control the Southeast Asian sphere, long the domain of the Chinese empire. The Chinese invaded northern Vietnam, but after a few months, retreated. The thousand-year-old ethnic strife between the two nations was far more significant than any imported European economic doctrine. The Khmer Rouge were driven from power by Vietnamese forces in the Third Indochinese War (1978-1990). The Vietnamese withdrew in 1990 and by 2000 the last of the Khmer Rouge had been hunted down. Today Cambodia, under a UN peacekeeping regime, is rebuilding after decades of war. Laos remains a hidden, mysterious, and desperately poor communist state, and Vietnam has begun to open to the world, allowing some capitalism and foreign investment in the late 1990s.

Detente and One Last Deep Freeze 1970-1985 By the 1970s, when neither side in the Cold War feared world domination by the other, both sides abandoned the fiery rhetoric of victory for the cool composure of realpolitik and a balance of power. Though both sides continued the battle of ideological propaganda, Cold War policies were more often based on geopolitical calculations. And, the socioeconomic reality was this: the Free World was tremendously wealthy and successful (though its blessings were, as Churchill put it, unevenly spread), while the Soviets and Chinese and their minion states languished in a gloomy, drab, bureaucratic swamp of near-poverty and mediocrity. To be fair, not all was dreary in the East. The socialist world had its accomplishments: there was little unemployment; health care and education, though of only middling quality at best, were wide spread and free; sports and the arts were sponsored by the state for those who were adequately talented (an oddly competitive anomaly in the supposed egalitarian paradise); and women achieved a measure of equality in previously male-dominated societies (still, socialist women ran into a glass ceiling, too; for example, they made up more than 50% of the doctors in the USSR, but few were allowed to rise above that level to become surgeons or administrators). By the 1970s however, people everywhere under communist rule were becoming increasingly

635

more dissatisfied with the lack of true freedom in a monotonously drab and poor daily life. Internationally, both East and West had settled into a relatively peaceful coexistence. Under President Nixon and his brilliantly Machiavellian advisor Dr. Henry Kissinger (b.1923), the Americans pursued a realistic policy of detente, or acceptance of and dialogue with the communist side. Nixon and Kissinger also sought closer ties with Moscow. Nixon visited Moscow in 1972, and in exchange for Russia's willingness to negotiate arms limits at the SALT talks, the U.S. sold grain to the Soviets, whose agricultural inefficiencies forced them to seek food abroad just to feed their own masses. The American withdrawal from Vietnam noticeably relieved tension, and in 1972, Nixon and Brezhnev signed the first Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT), which imposed limits on nuclear arms for both sides. Nixon also became the first American president to visit Beijing18 and Moscow. In 1975, both the USA (under President Gerald Ford) and USSR signed the Helsinki Accords, an agreement to respect human rights, negotiate boundaries, and renounce war. Cracks in the Curtain The great monolith of communism proved to be a myth. Cracks appeared in East Europe from the beginning, but the world was shocked by the rift that broke open between China and the USSR in 1956 when Mao expelled Soviet advisers. The Soviets provocatively cut all aid to Beijing in 1960, and in retaliation, the Chinese sent advisers to the independent minded Marxist regimes in Albania and Yugoslavia. Both sides condemned the other's version of Marxism as illegitimate. The Chinese, ancient rivals with Russia, were sensitive about Moscow’s interference and claims to leadership rights in East Asia particularly. For centuries, East Asia had been the domain, more or less, of the Chinese. Soviet intervention and attempts at control in old Chinese spheres in Mongolia, Vietnam, and (North) Korea angered Mao, as did the Kremlin's support for India in a brief border flare up in 1963. Chinese and Soviet forces actually exchanged shots over the Amur River which separated Chinese Manchuria from Siberia. Nixon and Kissinger exploited this chasm when the U.S. withdrew from Vietnam. Nixon opened relations with China and visited that nation in 1972. By 1978, the United States reversed its previous stance and recognized the legitimacy of the People’s Republic of China, and Beijing replaced Taiwan on the UN Security Council in the China seat. The

18 The modern spelling for Peking.

Freeze: 1960-1972 Freeze: 1944-1956 Thaw:

1956-1960

Thaw (Détente)

1972-1979

Freeze: 1979-

1986 Meltdown

1986-1992

1944 1953 1960 1961 1962 1972 1979 1985

Yalta Death U2 Berlin Cuban Nixon Soviets invade Gorbachev

Conference of Stalin incident Wall Missile Recognizes Afghanistan to power

China / SALT

Vietnam War Korean

War Soviet-Afghan War

Cold War: Freezes and Thaws

636

Chinese, who had tested their own atomic bomb in 1964, were lured by quiet promises of American support against the Soviets. Within the Soviet bloc, dissidents such as Solzhenitsyn and Nobel prize-winning physicist Andrei Sakharov (1921-1989) were exiled to Siberia or expelled from the USSR altogether. It was an embarrassment to the regime to have such renowned men of letters point out the failures of the Soviet system, but because the days of Stalin were over, the two could not simply be killed. In fact, Brezhnev's rule was more Orwellian in its subtle yet dark efficiency. Instead of large scale purges and massive executions, people were declared insane and shut away in mental institutions where they were basically lost and forgotten; or they were exiled to some remote Siberian town far from any contact with others or access to communication; or – as in the days of the czars – they simply disappeared; and still, the chain of Siberian forced labor camps called the gulag continued to operate a brisk business. Central America and Afghanistan The Vietnam War and the U.S. withdrawal from Southeast Asia, along with the politically embarrassing Watergate scandal19 shook the confidence of not only the United States itself, but also of her allies. The military and intelligence communities likewise were demoralized by the Vietnam debacle. The European nations, uniting under an economic treaty, were becoming more independent, and the American economy was beginning to sag under pressure from rising Middle-Eastern oil prices and heavy

competition from Japan and Europe. President Jimmy Carter (Pres. Dem. 1977-81) vowed to base his foreign policy on human rights. The United States was learning too late about the perils of supporting anti-communist dictators who were, in actuality, brutally uninterested about the needs of their people. Carter cut aid to several pro-American dictators and he tried to make amends for America’s imperial past when he signed a treaty with Panama to give the Canal Zone back by the year 2000.

In 1978, a Marxist movement in Nicaragua, the Sandinistas, overthrew the Somoza regime which had ruled that nation with American aid since the 1930s. The Sandinista leader, Daniel Ortega (r.1978-90), had promised to instill democracy, but his regime acted ruthlessly and limited dissent. Still, the United States initially acted with restraint. In fact, Carter remained hopeful that goodwill and peaceable negotiation would prove more effective than espionage or force had in dealing with communist states and other international issues. But the seemingly mild-mannered President was infuriated by the sudden Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December of 1979, the start of a decade long Soviet-Afghan War. A pro-Soviet republic had existed in Afghanistan, but its ruler had been at best a shaky ally for Moscow. In addition, a pro-American ruler in Iran had been deposed by an Islamic revolution in 1978 and some thought that the Soviets, sensing American weakness, planned to use Afghanistan as a base for an invasion of the Persian Gulf region. Carter called for a massive military buildup and the CIA moved to aid the mujahedeen (holy warriors), Afghan guerillas resisting the Russian invasion. The CIA also began to aid Contras, anti-Sandinista fighters in Nicaragua. American athletes boycotted the 1980 Moscow Olympics, and the Soviets boycotted the 1984 Olympiad in Los Angeles. To many the United States seemed impotent and the Soviets seemed as

19 Nixon resigned after it was revealed he had abused the power of the Presidency to intimidate opponents

during the election in 1972; among other things, his aides had bungled a burglary of Democratic offices in

the Watergate Hotel in Washington.

637

aggressive as ever as the world plunged into yet another freeze. Worried Americans responded in the election of 1980 by electing a strongly anti-communist president, Ronald Reagan (Pres. Rep. 1981-89). The Iron Curtain Cracks Reagan’s rhetoric toward the Soviet Union proved as tough as Truman’s had been. He denounced what he called the "evil empire" and continued to escalate both the military buildup and CIA involvement in the struggle against the Soviets. He encouraged research for a futuristic satellite-based anti-missile shield, the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), nicknamed "Star Wars." Along with stalwart ally Britain, under Prime Minister Thatcher, Reagan vowed to stand firm against Soviet expansionism. In 1982, Reagan ordered the invasion of the tiny Caribbean isle of Grenada. Ostensibly, he intervened to protect American students there, but the ruse was a transparent excuse to oust the Marxist government that had assumed power with the aid of Cuba. The U.S. supported anti-communist rebels in Angola and increased aid to Nicaragua's Contras, mining Nicaraguan harbors to stop Soviet ships from reaching the Central American country. Meanwhile, the Soviet invasion in Afghanistan had turned into a disaster. Afghan cities were overrun, but the deserts and mountains swarmed with guerrillas, and Soviet soldiers found themselves mired in their own Vietnam-like confrontation. The Soviets killed thousands – even disguising land mines as toys to kill children – but the Afghans refused to quit. The CIA supplied hand held missiles to the mujahadeen so they could shoot down Soviet helicopters, and hundreds of Islamic volunteers went to help the Afghans. Meanwhile, the Soviet economy continued to totter along. "Star Wars" terrified the Soviets; even if they could match the technology, they could never afford the price, and the possibility of a missile-proof America meant the Soviets would be basically helpless in a nuclear war. In 1980, an anti-communist labor strike broke out in the Gdansk shipyards in Poland. Shipyard worker Lech Walesa (b. 1944) formed a labor movement called Solidarity that stood up against the Soviet regime. The irony of an anti-Marxist labor movement stung the communist party, but the Polish communist regime gave in and granted reforms, including greater tolerance of

Catholicism. Poles were further inspired by their ardent devotion to the Catholic religion and the election of a Polish cardinal to the Papacy. Pope John Paul II (r. 1978-2005) proved an inspiring and articulate opponent to communism and it galled the Soviets that a pontiff had been elected from a communist nation. In December 1981, the Polish army and the Soviets declared martial law in Poland under General Wojciech Jaruzelski. The Polish government, no doubt under directives

from Moscow, blundered by murdering several priests, jailing Walesa, and outlawing Solidarity, which only angered the Poles against Marxism even more. The Soviets even attempted to assassinate the Pope, but John Paul survived the wound.20 In 1982, Brezhnev died. Power passed first into the hands of an elderly Stalinist, the chief of secret police, Yuri Andropov (r.1982-84), but he died within a couple years. His successor was another elderly Stalinist, Konstantin Chernenko (r. 1984-1985),

20 The assassin was captured and implicated the Soviets; he turned out to be an agent of the Bulgarian

secret police. The Pope recovered and visited the agent in prison to forgive him.

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but he died within a year. The Politburo then turned to a younger generation, choosing a man who had been raised in the post-Stalinist era, an energetic economist named Mikhail Gorbachev. The Cold War world was about to turn upside down.

The Party’s Over: The Fall of the Red Empire As late as 1985, almost nobody would have predicted the complete collapse of the USSR. Despite its problems, it was a real superpower, with the world's largest military, a successful space program, and a government that maintained an iron grip. Yet hidden beneath the surface, the Soviet Union had some deep, undermining fissures. 1. In 1970, the Soviet population was over 50% non-Russian speakers. These ethnic groups and nationalities often faced discrimination, and many had long histories of conflict and old resentments against the czars and commissars from Moscow. Millions of Soviets were Muslims who, in addition to years of communist persecution, had much less love for Marx than faith in the message of Mohammed. 2. The Soviet economy was broken. With over half of their budget spent on defense,21 little was left to provide benefits for the average citizen. Soviets were growing tired of waiting for the supposed Marxist paradise when basic consumer goods were in short supply and they could not even get a decent apartment or refrigerator. 3. The Soviet system was inefficient. There was little motive for innovation or hard work. The massive bureaucracy did not reward ingenuity or industriousness as much as it took care of its own. Children of party members got the best university spots, government jobs, and military promotions, because talent was less relevant than connections. In other words, it wasn't what you did but who you knew, and the new party elites were as corrupt as the old czarist nobility. 4. The war in Afghanistan was going badly. Soviet soldiers found themselves in a situation very like America’s debacle in Southeast Asia; Islamic guerrilla fighters defied superior Soviet military technology with fanatical, unyielding resistance. Drug use and desertion plagued the once proud Red Army, and these facts began to leak out to the Soviet public. As one historian writes, “It was in Afghanistan that the Soviet Union discovered the power of militant Islam and eventually understood that it was so much easier to invade a deeply religious country than to reshape its society. By the time Moscow sent military forces into the country, the Soviet Union had revealed its cardinal weakness: imperial overreach.”22 5. Radios, computers, and more open relations with the West had exposed the Soviet people to the fantastic prosperity of the West. Many Russians had relatives who had escaped and written home of the comparative luxuries of France and America. Soviet propaganda was no longer capable of fooling an increasingly cynical Soviet citizenry. It was painfully obvious that Soviet-style Marxism simply could not deliver that same quality of life that the vast majority of westerners enjoyed. 6. The Soviet people wanted to be free. They were tired of living with tyrannical restrictions imposed on their basic liberties. In this context, Soviet citizens were apathetic and cynical about their nation. In the first part of the 1980s the elderly leaders in the Kremlin – Brezhnev, Andropov, and Chernenko – died in quick succession, all the while oblivious to the possibility that the USSR, like the Titanic, was sailing toward disaster.

21 Versus 15-25% in the USA. 22 Dmitri Trenin in Foreign Policy, April 2020.

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A Different Kind of Soviet: Mikhail Gorbachev In 1985, the accession to power of Mikhail Gorbachev (r.1985-1991; here pictured with Reagan), a relative unknown to outside observers, came as a great surprise. At 52, he was much younger than his elderly predecessors, and he was an economist, not an old party politician. Very quickly, Gorbachev confronted the weaknesses of the Soviet system. While professing to be a true communist, he called for perestroika or the "restructuring" of the economy. It became apparent that changing the Soviet economy meant allowing profit motive and private property to have some role in the Soviet system, and that it would in some ways weaken the power of the vast, centralized, controlling Soviet bureaucracy. Secondly, Gorbachev called for glasnost, or "openness," a loosening of the iron grip the Soviet state held over the minds and wills of the people. Faced with the American plan to build a nuclear shield, Gorbachev was ready to abandon the Cold War. The USSR could no longer afford the financial and technical strains of keeping up with the Americans in military technology. The Americans, it might be said, won the Cold War by spending the Soviets into the ground. In 1986, the weakness of the Soviet system was dramatically exposed by the explosion of a nuclear power plant at Chernobyl in the Ukraine. However, instead of employing the usual Soviet response and denying the incident, Gorbachev unexpectedly asked the West for help. The West responded with expert aid. Ultimately though, the explosion showed that while both the US and USSR could create technological wonders, the Soviets' finished products were of inferior and even dangerous quality, a revelation which began to erode the myth of Soviet invincibility. Reagan, Thatcher, and other western leaders rapidly and astutely perceived the possibilities for peace and reversed their hostility toward the Soviet regime. They welcomed the new Soviet attitude of openness. In 1986, Reagan and Gorbachev had a warm and friendly meeting at Reykjavik in Iceland. Later, both leaders visited each other's capitals. Meanwhile, Gorbachev relaxed some of the restrictions on freedom in the USSR. By 1987, the two nations had agreed to reduce nuclear arsenals, and by 1989 the Soviets had abandoned Afghanistan. Also in 1989, Soviet dissidents were allowed to run for a new Congress of People’s Deputies; it was a sign that Gorbachev was serious about glasnost. Eastern Europeans, long resentful of being policed by the Red Army, began to strain at the ties that bound them to Moscow. The Hungarians had begun to capitalize their economy and to allow freedoms as early as 1985. In 1988, demonstrations erupted in East Germany, Poland, and Czechoslovakia. The Czechs formed a pro-democracy movement under the poet and activist Vaclev Havel, while the Poles continued to rally behind Solidarity leader Lech Walesa. When Pope John Paul II visited Poland, millions rallied to welcome him home in open defiance of the communist hostility toward faith. The Czechs and Hungarians dismantled their border defenses, and thousands of East Europeans went “on vacation” – a pretense to never return home as they took advantage of the open Czech and Hungarian borders to flee the police state. In 1989, the Red Empire began to implode. In November, protests in East Germany caused government leaders to resign, and the protesters spontaneously tore down the Berlin Wall, a process completed by the government itself within a few days. In December, the Czech communists resigned and Havel was elected to head a new, democratic government after a peaceful agreement between activists and the communist regime known as the “Velvet Revolution.”

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The Ceausescu’s at trial - they were shot hours later.

In Romania, brutal dictator Nikolai Ceausescu23 sent troops to shoot protesters who were trying to prevent the arrest of a Christian pastor. After his security police shot into the crowd, a general uprising occurred and spread quickly to the capital city. The army joined the revolt against the dreaded security police. Within three weeks Ceausescu and his wife were arrested, tried and shot on Christmas day, 1989. In March of 1990, the Hungarians and East Germans elected non-communist governments and the Albanians threw out their communist regime. The Bulgarians held elections in June, and the Poles made Solidarity’s Lech Walesa their president by December. In October of 1990, east and west Germany were reunified as one democratic nation. The Czechs and Slovaks peacefully divided into two nations after a vote in

1993, a so-called “Velvet Divorce.” By 1994 the last Russian soldiers were gone from Eastern Europe. Meanwhile, the USSR itself began to fracture. In March of 1990,

the Lithuanians seceded from the USSR. At first, Soviet security forces beat and arrested Lithuanian leaders, but Gorbachev restrained them from widespread lethal violence. Encouraged by Gorbachev’s forbearance, other nationalist groups throughout the USSR increased their demands for autonomy and even dared to dream of independence. In August of 1991, militant generals and secret police (the dreaded KGB) arrested Gorbachev himself while he was in the Ukraine and tried to seize power. However, when they ordered the army into the streets, the coup attempt failed. Some Soviet troops joined the citizens who massed in protest in the streets of Moscow and other key cities. The governor of the Russian province, Boris Yeltsin, led the protesters, climbing onto a tank to plead with the soldiers to join their comrade citizens against the party elites. The coup faded away and the old hardliners were defeated. Though Gorbachev was rescued, the coup attempt symbolized the imminent collapse of the USSR. By December 1, Latvia, Estonia, and the Ukraine had all declared independence. On December 25, Gorbachev resigned and the Soviet Union was abolished. In its place were 15 new nations, including a new "Russian Federation" under Yeltsin (r.1992-2000). On January 1, 1992, the West (and much of the Eastern Bloc) rejoiced that the Cold War was over. Conclusions The Cold War can be viewed as an ideological struggle: two political beliefs, Democracy and Marxist authoritarianism, were locked in a mortal struggle. Two economic beliefs, capitalism and communism, were locked in a battle of productivity and basic survival. Neither side could fight a direct war because of nuclear weapons and their ultimate destructiveness, so the combatants instead waged war through propaganda, espionage, and proxy states. Viewed in this way, the Marxist version lost decisively. Indeed, dollars proved far more effective than bullets for the United States. By the 1980s, Soviet citizens were disgusted with their own poverty and lack of freedom. They were truly living an Orwellian nightmare, and the propaganda veneer posted by Moscow could not hide the misery of the USSR from the world or from the Soviet people themselves.

23 Ceausescu was so bizarre, that even the Soviets thought he was crazy; he ran Romania as a personal fiefdom to enrich his family.

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The Cold War can also be seen as a classic struggle about balance of power, a geopolitical or nationalist struggle between the two competitive superpowers. Here, victory is less clear. At times, American leaders proved to be just as Machiavellian – that is, willing to abandon their own stated values – as the comrades in the Kremlin.24 Often, the Americans blundered badly, alienating the very people whose hearts and minds they were trying to win. Of course, the Soviets also blundered and their methods were cruel and harmful to their supposed allies. But when all was said and done, the verdict of history was the utter collapse of Red Empire.

24 The Kremlin is the old czarist fortress in Moscow that became the headquarters of the Soviet – and now

the Russian – government.

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Words in courier italic font have been added by A. Frye.

Chapter 20 PRIMARY DOCUMENTS

Vietnamese Declaration of Independence, 1945

Ho Chi Minh (1890 1969 - the name is a nom-de-guerre), a man from a

poor family who had nevertheless been able to acquire an education in

Paris, founded a communist party in Vietnam in the 1930s. He expanded

his group to include other nationalists in 1941 when he founded the

Viet Minh (Vietnamese League for Independence) to resist Japanese

occupation. The Viet Minh – trained and supplied by the US - fought a

guerilla campaign against the Japanese and the Vichy French. But after

the war, the Viet Minh demanded independence rather than a return to

French control. In 1946, the French re-invaded Vietnam, seizing major

cities, and beginning the First Indochinese War, with the USA

supporting France.

"All men are created equal. They are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness."

This immortal statement was made in the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America in 1776. In a broader sense, this means: All the peoples on the earth are equal from birth, all the peoples have a right to live, to be happy and free. The Declaration of the French Revolution made in 1791 on the Rights of Man and the Citizen also states: "All men are born free and with equal rights, and must always remain free and have equal rights."

Those are undeniable truths. Nevertheless, for more than eighty years, the French imperialists, abusing the standard of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, have violated our Fatherland and oppressed our fellow citizens. They have acted contrary to the ideals of humanity and justice. In the field of politics, they have deprived our people of every democratic liberty. They have enforced inhuman laws; they have set up three distinct political regimes in the North, the Center, and the South of Vietnam in order to wreck our national unity and prevent our people from being united. They have built more prisons than schools. They have mercilessly slain our patriots; they have drowned our uprisings in rivers of blood.

They have fettered public opinion; they have practiced obscurantism against our people. To weaken our race they have forced us to use opium and alcohol. In the field of economics, they have fleeced us to the backbone, impoverished our people, and devastated our land. They have robbed us of our rice fields, our mines, our forests, and our raw materials. They have monopolized the issuing of banknotes and the export trade. They have invented numerous unjustifiable taxes and reduced our people, especially our peasantry, to a state of extreme poverty. They have hampered the prospering of our national bourgeoisie; they have mercilessly exploited our workers.

In the autumn of 1940, when the Japanese Fascists violated Indochina's territory to establish new bases in their fight against the Allies, the French imperialists went down on their bended knees and

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handed over our country to them. Thus, from that date, our people were subjected to the double yoke of the French and the Japanese. Their sufferings and miseries increased. The result was that from the end of last year to the beginning of this year, from Quang Tri province to the North of Vietnam, more than two million of our fellow citizens died from starvation. On March 9, the French troops were disarmed by the Japanese. The French colonialists either fled or surrendered showing that not only were they incapable of "protecting" us, but that, in the span of five years, they had twice sold our country to the Japanese.

On several occasions before March 9, the Vietminh League urged the French to ally themselves with it against the Japanese. Instead of agreeing to this proposal, the French colonialists so intensified their terrorist activities against the Vietminh members that before fleeing they massacred a great number of our political prisoners detained at Yen Bay and Caobang.

Notwithstanding all this, our fellow citizens have always manifested toward the French a tolerant and humane attitude. Even after the Japanese putsch of March 1945, the Vietminh League helped many Frenchmen to cross the frontier, rescued some of them from Japanese jails, and protected French lives and property.

From the autumn of 1940, our country had in fact ceased to be a French colony and had become a Japanese possession. After the Japanese had surrendered to the Allies, our whole people rose to regain our national sovereignty and to found the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. The truth is that we have wrested our independence from the Japanese and not from the French. The French have fled, the Japanese have capitulated, Emperor Bao Dai has abdicated. Our people have broken the chains which for nearly a century have fettered them and have won independence for the Fatherland. Our people at the same time have overthrown the monarchic regime that has reigned supreme for dozens of centuries. In its place has been established the present Democratic Republic.

For these reasons, we, members of the Provisional Government, representing the whole Vietnamese people, declare that from now on we break off all relations of a colonial character with France; we repeal all the international obligation that France has so far subscribed to on behalf of Vietnam and we abolish all the special rights the French have unlawfully acquired in our Fatherland.

The whole Vietnamese people, animated by a common purpose, are determined to fight to the bitter end against any attempt by the French colonialists to re-conquer their country. We are convinced that the Allied nations, which at Tehran and San Francisco have acknowledged the principles of self-determination and equality of nations, will not refuse to acknowledge the independence of Vietnam. A people who have courageously opposed French domination for more than eight years, a people who have fought side by side with the Allies against the Fascists during these last years, such a people must be free and independent.

For these reasons, we, members of the Provisional Government of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, solemnly declare to the world that Vietnam has the right to be a free and independent country-and in fact is so already. The entire Vietnamese people are determined to mobilize all their physical and mental strength, to sacrifice their lives and property in order to safeguard their independence and liberty.

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Alexander Solzhenitsyn “Live Not By Lies” (1974)

Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008) had been a loyal Soviet military officer in World War II, but a letter to his wife contained mild

criticism of Stalin. Solzhenitsyn spent years in prison camps. His book The Gulag Archipelago documented the cruelty of the camps and he became

a well-known and eloquent critic of Soviet cruelty. Finally, in 1974,

he was allowed to leave the USSR. He eventually became a teacher in the

USA and in the late 1990s, returned home to Russia. He won the Nobel

Prize for Literature in 1970. This essay was written the year he

finally fled the USSR.

At one time we dared not even to whisper. What kind of tricks are they playing on us, and where are they dragging us? Gratuitous boasting of cosmic achievements while there is poverty and destruction at home. Propping up remote, uncivilized regimes. Fanning up civil war. And we recklessly fostered Mao Tse-tung at our expense -- and it will be we who are sent to war against him, and will have to go. Is there any way out? And they put on trial anybody they want, and they put sane people in asylums -- always they, and we are powerless.

Things have almost reached rock bottom. A universal spiritual death has already touched us all, and physical death will soon flare up and consume us both and our children -- but as before we still smile in a cowardly way and mumble without tongues tied. But what can we do to stop it? We haven't the strength.

We have been so hopelessly dehumanized that for today's modest ration of food we are willing to abandon all our principles, our souls, and all the efforts of our predecessors and all the opportunities for our descendants -- but just don't disturb our fragile existence. We lack staunchness, pride and enthusiasm. We don't even fear universal nuclear death, and we don't fear a third world war. We have already taken refuge in the crevices. We just fear acts of civil courage. We fear only to lag behind the herd and to take a step alone -- and suddenly find ourselves without white bread, without heating gas and without a Moscow registration.

We have been indoctrinated in political courses, and in just the same way was fostered the idea to live comfortably, and all will be well for the rest of our lives: You can't escape your environment and social conditions. Everyday life defines consciousness. What does it have to do with us? We can't do anything about it.

But we can -- everything. But we lie to ourselves for assurance. And it is not they who are to blame for everything -- we ourselves, only we. One can object: But actually you can think anything you like. Gags have been stuffed into our mouths. Nobody wants to listen to us, and nobody asks us. How can we force them to listen? It is impossible to change their minds.

It would be natural to vote them out of office -- but there are not elections in our country. In the West people know about strikes and protest demonstrations -- but we are too oppressed, and it is a horrible prospect for us: How can one suddenly renounce a job and take to the streets? Yet the other fatal paths probed during the past century by our bitter Russian history are, nevertheless, not for us, and truly we don't need them.

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Now that the axes have done their work, when everything which was sown has sprouted anew, we

can see that the young and presumptuous people who thought they would make our country just and happy through terror, bloody rebellion and civil war were themselves misled. No thanks, fathers of education! Now we know that infamous methods breed infamous results. Let our hands be clean!

…The simplest and most accessible key to our self-neglected liberation lies right here: Personal non-participation in lies. Though lies conceal everything, though lies embrace everything, we will be obstinate in this smallest of matters: Let them embrace everything, but not with any help from

me. Let us refuse to say that which we do not think. That which should be naked would then really appear naked before the whole world.

So in our timidity, let each of us make a choice: Whether consciously, to remain a servant of falsehood -- of course, it is not out of inclination, but to feed one's family, that one raises his children in the spirit of lies -- or to shrug off the lies and become an honest man worthy of respect both by one's children and contemporaries. And from that day onward he:

Will not henceforth write, sign, or print in any way a single phrase which in his opinion distorts the truth.

Will utter such a phrase neither in private conversation nor in the presence of many people, neither on his own behalf nor at the prompting of someone else, neither in the role of agitator, teacher, educator, nor in a theatrical role.

Will not depict, foster or broadcast a single idea which he can see is false or a distortion of the truth, whether it be in painting, sculpture, photography, technical science or music.

Will not cite out of context, either orally or written, a single quotation so as to please someone, to feather his own nest, to achieve success in his work, if he does not share completely the idea which is quoted, or if it does not accurately reflect the matter at issue.

Will not allow himself to be compelled to attend demonstrations or meetings if they are contrary to his desire or will, will neither take into hand nor raise into the air a poster or slogan which he does not completely accept.

Will not raise his hand to vote for a proposal with which he does not sincerely sympathize, will vote neither openly nor secretly for a person whom he considers unworthy or of doubtful abilities.

Will not allow himself to be dragged to a meeting where there can be expected a forced or distorted discussion of a question.

Will immediately walk out of a meeting, session, lecture, performance or film showing if he hears a speaker tell lies, or purvey ideological nonsense or shameless propaganda.

Will not subscribe to or buy a newspaper or magazine in which information is distorted and primary facts are concealed.

Of course, we have not listed all of the possible and necessary deviations from falsehood. But a person who purifies himself will easily distinguish other instances with his purified outlook. No, it will not be the same for everybody at first. Some, at first, will lose their jobs. For young people who want to live with truth, this will, in the beginning, complicate their young lives very much, because the required recitations are stuffed with lies, and it is necessary to make a choice.

But there are no loopholes for anybody who wants to be honest: On any given day any one of us will be confronted with at least one of the above-mentioned choices even in the most secure of the technical sciences. Either truth or falsehood: Toward spiritual independence, or toward spiritual servitude.

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And he who is not sufficiently courageous even to defend his soul -- don't let him be proud of his "progressive" views, and don't let him boast that he is an academician or a people's artist, a merited figure, or a general --let him say to himself: I am in the herd, and a coward. It's all the same to me as long as I'm fed and warm.

Even this path, which is the most modest of all paths of resistance, will not be easy for us. But it is much easier than self-immolation or a hunger strike: The flames will not envelope your body, your eyeballs, will not burst from the heat, and brown bread and clean water will always be available to your family.

So you will not be the first to take this path, but will join those who have already taken it. This path will be easier and shorter for all of us if we take it by mutual efforts and in close rank. If there are thousands of us, they will not be able to do anything with us. If there are tens of thousands of us, then we would not even recognize our country. If we are too frightened, then we should stop complaining that someone is suffocating us. We ourselves are doing it. Let us then bow down even more, let us wait, and our brothers the biologists will help to bring nearer the day when they are able to read our thoughts are worthless and hopeless.

And if we get cold feet, even taking this step, then we are worthless and hopeless, and the scorn of

Pushkin25 should be directed to us: "Why should cattle have the gifts of freedom? Their heritage from generation to generation is the belled yoke and the lash."

Vaclav Havel “The Power of the Powerless” (1979)

Vaclav Havel was a Czech playwright and novelist who became the leader

of the Czech intellectual resistance to communism. He was imprisoned

briefly, but later became the first president of a liberated

Czechoslovakia in 1989. He wrote this work in 1979. Havel believed that

more than political rebellion was needed; the resistance needed to have

the moral high ground by developing what he called a "sphere of truth,"

will ultimately destroy the totalitarian communist government. His

nonviolent resistance theory stated that if individuals cease to

participate in lies, they are no longer bound by the lies of the

dictatorship, and therefore, create a zone of freedom untouchable by

the regime.

A specter is haunting Eastern Europe26: the specter of what in the West is called "dissent" This specter has not appeared out of thin air. It is a natural and inevitable consequence of the present historical phase of the system it is haunting. It was born at a time when this system, for a thousand reasons, can no longer base itself on the unadulterated, brutal, and arbitrary application of power, eliminating all expressions of nonconformity. What is more, the system has become so ossified politically that there is practically no way for such nonconformity to be implemented within its official structures.

Our system is most frequently characterized as a dictatorship or, more precisely, as the dictatorship of a political bureaucracy over a society which has undergone economic and social leveling. I am afraid that the term "dictatorship," regardless of how intelligible it may otherwise be, tends to obscure rather than clarify the real nature of power in this system. . . Even though our dictatorship

25 Famous 19th century Russian poet Alexander Pushkin. 26 Havel is quoting the opening words of the Communist Manifesto, with irony.

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has long since alienated itself completely from the social movements that give birth to it, the authenticity of these movements (and I am thinking of the proletarian and socialist movements of the nineteenth century) gives it undeniable historicity.

The profound difference between our system-in terms of the nature of power-and what we traditionally understand by dictatorship, a difference I hope is clear even from this quite superficial comparison, has caused me to search for some term appropriate for our system, purely for the purposes of this essay. If I refer to it henceforth as a "post-totalitarian" system, I am fully aware that this is perhaps not the most precise term, but I am unable to think of a better one. I do not wish to imply by the prefix "post" that the system is no longer totalitarian; on the contrary, I mean that it is totalitarian in a way fundamentally different from classical dictatorships, different from totalitarianism as we usually understand it.

(Havel now illustrates his ideas with an imaginary story or word-picture) The manager of a fruit-and-vegetable shop places in his window, among the onions and carrots, the slogan: "Workers of the world, unite!"27 Why does he do it? What is he trying to communicate to the world? Is he genuinely enthusiastic about the idea of unity among the workers of the world? Is his enthusiasm so great that he feels an irrepressible impulse to acquaint the public with his ideals? Has he really given more than a moment's thought to how such a unification might occur and what it would mean?

I think it can safely be assumed that the overwhelming majority of shopkeepers never think about the slogans they put in their windows, nor do they use them to express their real opinions. That poster was delivered to our greengrocer from the (government) headquarters along with the onions and carrots. He put them all into the window simply because it has been done that way for years, because everyone does it, and because that is the way it has to be. If he were to refuse, there could be trouble. He could be reproached for not having the proper decoration in his window; someone might even accuse him of disloyalty. He does it because these things must be done if one is to get along in life. It is one of the thousands of details that guarantee him a relatively tranquil life "in harmony with society," as they say.

Obviously the greengrocer . . . does not put the slogan in his window from any personal desire to acquaint the public with the ideal it expresses. This, of course, does not mean that his action has no motive or significance at all, or that the slogan communicates nothing to anyone. The slogan is really a sign, and as such it contains a subliminal but very definite message. Verbally, it might be expressed this way: "I, the greengrocer X, live here and I know what I must do. I behave in the manner expected of me. I can be depended upon and am beyond reproach. I am obedient and therefore I have the right to be left in peace." This message, of course, has an addressee: it is directed above, to the greengrocer's superior, and at the same time it is a shield that protects the greengrocer from potential informers.

Let us take note: if the greengrocer had been instructed to display the slogan "I am afraid and therefore unquestioningly obedient;' he would not be nearly as indifferent to its semantics, even though the statement would reflect the truth. The greengrocer would be embarrassed and ashamed to put such an unequivocal statement of his own degradation in the shop window, and quite naturally so, for he is a human being and thus has a sense of his own dignity. … Thus the sign helps the greengrocer to conceal from himself the low foundations of his obedience, at the same time concealing the low foundations of power. It hides them behind the facade of something high. And that something is ideology.

27 Another quote from the Communist Manifesto.

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Ideology is a specious way of relating to the world. It offers human beings the illusion of an identity, of dignity, and of morality while making it easier for them to part with them…It is a veil behind which human beings can hide their own fallen existence, their trivialization, and their adaptation to the status quo. It is an excuse that everyone can use, from the greengrocer, who conceals his fear of losing his job behind an alleged interest in the unification of the workers of the world, to the highest functionary, whose interest in staying in power can be cloaked in phrases about service to the working class. The primary excusatory function of ideology, therefore, is to provide people, both as victims and pillars of the post-totalitarian system, with the illusion that the system is in harmony with the human order and the order of the universe.

The post-totalitarian system touches people at every step, but it does so with its ideological gloves on. This is why life in the system is so thoroughly permeated with hypocrisy and lies: government by bureaucracy is called popular government; the working class is enslaved in the name of the working class; the complete degradation of the individual is presented as his ultimate liberation; depriving people of information is called making it available; the use of power to manipulate is called the public control of power, and the arbitrary abuse of power is called observing the legal code; the repression of culture is called its development; the expansion of imperial influence is presented as support for the oppressed; the lack of free expression becomes the highest form of freedom; farcical elections become the highest form of democracy; banning independent thought becomes the most scientific of world views; military occupation becomes fraternal assistance. Because the regime is captive to its own lies, it must falsify everything. It falsifies the past. It falsifies the present, and it falsifies the future. It falsifies statistics. It pretends not to possess an omnipotent and unprincipled police apparatus. It pretends to respect human rights. It pretends to persecute no one. It pretends to fear nothing. It pretends to pretend nothing.

Individuals need not believe all these mystifications, but they must behave as though they did, or they must at least tolerate them in silence, or get along well with those who work with them. For this reason, however, they must live within a lie. They need not accept the lie. It is enough for them to have accepted their life with it and in it. For by this very fact, individuals confirm the system, fulfill the system, make the system, are the system.

Let us now imagine that one day something in our greengrocer snaps and he stops putting up the slogans merely to ingratiate himself. He stops voting in elections he knows are a farce. He begins to say what he really thinks at political meetings. And he even finds the strength in himself to express solidarity with those whom his conscience commands him to support. In this revolt the greengrocer steps out of living within the lie. He rejects the ritual and breaks the rules of the game. He discovers once more his suppressed identity and dignity. He gives his freedom a concrete significance. His revolt is an attempt to live within the truth.

The bill is not long in coming. He will be relieved of his post as manager of the shop and transferred to the warehouse. His pay will be reduced. His hopes for a holiday in Bulgaria will evaporate. His children's access to higher education will be threatened. His superiors will harass him and his fellow workers will wonder about him. Most of those who apply these sanctions, however, will not do so from any authentic inner conviction but simply under pressure from conditions, the same conditions that once pressured the greengrocer to display the official slogans. They will persecute the greengrocer either because it is expected of them, or to demonstrate their loyalty, or simply as part of the general panorama, to which belongs an awareness that this is how situations of this sort are dealt with, that this, in fact, is how things are always done, particularly if one is not to become suspect oneself. The executors, therefore, behave essentially like everyone else, to a greater or lesser degree: as components of the post-totalitarian system, as agents of its automatism, as petty instruments of the social auto-totality.

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Thus the power structure, through the agency of those who carry out the sanctions, those anonymous components of the system, will spew the greengrocer from its mouth. The system, through its alienating presence in people, will punish him for his rebellion. It must do so because the logic of its automatism and self-defense dictate it. The greengrocer has not committed a simple, individual offense, isolated in its own uniqueness, but something incomparably more serious. By breaking the rules of the game, he has disrupted the game as such. He has exposed it as a mere game. He has shattered the world of appearances, the fundamental pillar of the system. He has upset the power structure by tearing apart what holds it together. He has demonstrated that living a lie is living a lie. He has broken through the exalted facade of the system and exposed the real, base foundations of power. He has said that the emperor is naked. And because the emperor is in fact naked, something extremely dangerous has happened: by his action, the greengrocer has addressed the world. He has enabled everyone to peer behind the curtain. He has shown everyone that it is possible to live within the truth. Living within the lie can constitute the system only if it is universal. The principle must embrace and permeate everything. There are no terms whatsoever on which it can co-exist with living within the truth, and therefore everyone who steps out of line denies it in principle and threatens it in its entirety….If living within the truth is an elementary starting point for every attempt made by people to oppose the alienating pressure of the system, if it is the only meaningful basis of any independent act of political import, and if, ultimately, it is also the most intrinsic existential source of the "dissident" attitude, then it is difficult to imagine that even manifest "dissent" could have any other basis than the service of truth, the truthful life, and the attempt to make room for the genuine aims of life.

U.S. President Ronald Reagan, Berlin Wall Speech (1987) On June 12, 1987, President Ronald Reagan delivered a major speech with

the Brandenburg Gate and the Berlin Wall as a back drop. Reagan hoped

to draw a parallel with the historic speech delivered in Berlin by

President John F. Kennedy in July 1963. It was in this speech that

President Kennedy spoke the famous phrase: "All free men, wherever they

may live, are citizens of Berlin, and, therefore, as a free man, I take

pride in the words Ich bin ein Berliner ["I am a Berliner]." In

Reagan's 1987 talk, he recalled this famous speech and added his own

historic phrase: " Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear

down this wall!"

Behind me stands a wall that encircles the free sectors of this city, part of a vast system of barriers that divides the entire continent of Europe. From the Baltic, south, those barriers cut across Germany in a gash of barbed wire, concrete, dog runs, and guardtowers. Farther south, there may be no visible, no obvious wall. But there remain armed guards and checkpoints all the same--still a restriction on the right to travel, still an instrument to impose upon ordinary men and women the will of a totalitarian state. Yet it is here in Berlin where the wall emerges most clearly; here, cutting across your city, where the news photo and the television screen have imprinted this brutal division of a continent upon the mind of the world. Standing before the Brandenburg Gate, every man is a German, separated from his fellow men. Every man is a Berliner, forced to look upon a scar.

President von Weizsacker has said: "The German question is open as long as the Brandenburg Gate is closed." Today I say: As long as this gate is closed, as long as this scar of a wall is permitted to stand, it is not the German question alone that remains open, but the question of freedom for all mankind. Yet I do not come here to lament. For I find in Berlin a message of hope, even in the shadow of this wall, a message of triumph.

650

…In West Germany and here in Berlin, there took place an economic miracle, the Wirtschaftswunder. Adenauer, Erhard, Reuter, and other leaders understood the practical importance of liberty--that just as truth can flourish only when the journalist is given freedom of speech, so prosperity can come about only when the farmer and businessman enjoy economic freedom. The German leaders reduced tariffs, expanded free trade, lowered taxes. From 1950 to 1960 alone, the standard of living in West Germany and Berlin doubled.

In the 1950's, Khrushchev predicted: "We will bury you." But in the West today, we see a free world that has achieved a level of prosperity and well-being unprecedented in all human history. In the Communist world, we see failure, technological backwardness, declining standards of health, even want of the most basic kind-too little food. Even today, the Soviet Union still cannot feed itself. After these four decades, then, there stands before the entire world one great and inescapable conclusion: Freedom leads to prosperity. Freedom replaces the ancient hatreds among the nations with comity and peace. Freedom is the victor.

And now the Soviets themselves may, in a limited way, be coming to understand the importance of freedom. We hear much from Moscow about a new policy of reform and openness. Some political prisoners have been released. Certain foreign news broadcasts are no longer being jammed. Some economic enterprises have been permitted to operate with greater freedom from state control. Are these the beginnings of profound changes in the Soviet state? Or are they token gestures, intended to raise false hopes in the West, or to strengthen the Soviet system without changing it? We welcome change and openness; for we believe that freedom and security go together, that the advance of human liberty can only strengthen the cause of world peace.

There is one sign the Soviets can make that would be unmistakable, that would advance dramatically the cause of freedom and peace. General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization: Come here to this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!

…Because we remained strong, today we have within reach the possibility, not merely of limiting the growth of arms, but of eliminating, for the first time, an entire class of nuclear weapons from the face of the Earth. As I speak, NATO ministers are meeting in Iceland to review the progress of our proposals for eliminating these weapons. At the talks in Geneva, we have also proposed deep cuts in strategic offensive weapons. And the Western allies have likewise made far-reaching proposals to reduce the danger of conventional war and to place a total ban on chemical weapons.

In Europe, only one nation and those it controls refuse to join the community of freedom. Yet in this age of redoubled economic growth, of information and innovation, the Soviet Union faces a choice: It must make fundamental changes, or it will become obsolete. Today thus represents a moment of hope. We in the West stand ready to cooperate with the East to promote true openness, to break down barriers that separate people, to create a safer, freer world.

…Perhaps this gets to the root of the matter, to the most fundamental distinction of all between East and West. The totalitarian world produces backwardness because it does such violence to the spirit, thwarting the human impulse to create, to enjoy, to worship. The totalitarian world finds even symbols of love and of worship an affront. Years ago, before the East Germans began rebuilding their churches, they erected a secular structure: the television tower at Alexander Platz. Virtually ever since, the authorities have been working to correct what they view as the tower's one major flaw, treating the glass sphere at the top with paints and chemicals of every kind. Yet even today when the sun strikes that sphere--that sphere that towers over all Berlin--the light makes the sign of the cross. There in Berlin, like the city itself, symbols of love, symbols of worship, cannot be suppressed.

651

As I looked out a moment ago from the Reichstag, that embodiment of German unity, I noticed words crudely spray-painted upon the wall, perhaps by a young Berliner, "This wall will fall. Beliefs become reality." Yes, across Europe, this wall will fall. For it cannot withstand faith; it cannot withstand truth. The wall cannot withstand freedom.

And I would like, before I close, to say one word. … I have been questioned since I've been here about certain demonstrations against my coming. And I would like to say just one thing, and to those who demonstrate so. I wonder if they have ever asked themselves that if they should have the kind of government they apparently seek, no one would ever be able to do what they're doing again. Thank you and God bless you all.