SubscribeThere was a similar dispute in the beginning of the Cold War when Khrushchev said, "We will bury you." Now, I'm not saying that it was mistranslated, but there were those who argued that the Russian, in fact, was closer to "I will attend your funeral" or "I will be there at your burial," and that it wasn't quite the attack that it seemed to be to Americans at the time.(Emphasis added.) In point of fact, "Мы вас похороним!" means exactly "We will bury you!"—no more, no less. Of course you can argue interpretation, as you can for anything anyone says, but there's no question of mistranslation.
Soviet mobilization in 1948 and afterward did indeed provide the capability of an attack on Western Europe. Nikita Khrushchev admitted in his famous speech of 1960 that the Soviet armed forces (and therefore presumably the army as well) nearly doubled between 1948 and 1955. Western intelligence certainly detected a growth in the Soviet army in Eastern Europe and the Western zones of the Soviet Union during that time. In 1948, three of the four mechanized Soviet armies stationed in Eastern Europe were cadred at about 1/3 of their TO/E manpower (but 100% of their armament, including tanks). By May 1949 all of those divisions were at 70% of their manpower, a level at which they could either go into combat immediately at this reduced strength or be quickly brought up to full strength by mobilization. Western intelligence also saw the deployment of ten armies (40 divisions) in the Western zones of the Soviet Union to support the 25 divisions in East Germany and Poland, although they did not have clear knowledge of how much the divisions in the western Soviet Union were building up. By 1952 all of the Soviet divisions in East Germany were at close to 100% of their manpower. This was clearly a transition from an occupation to an offensive army that had both the manpower and armament to invade Western Europe, whether or not Stalin had any intention to do so and whether or not, if he did so, he would have considered it a defensive measure against the superior U.S. atomic force. Meanwhile, NATO did not have more that 18 ready divisions in Western Europe at any time during this period, so it posed no military threat whatever to the Soviet sphere.Louis J. Halle, The Cold War as History (1967):
Acheson and Nitze did not fear an immediate Soviet invasion of Europe in 1948, and they only temporarily feared in 1950 that the Soviets might use their conventional superiority in Europe and the diversion of the Korean War to take Berlin or some other limited object in Europe. They did fear however, that once the Soviets had accumulated a hundred or so atomic bombs (perhaps by 1954), even if those could be delivered only by one-way suicide attacks on American cities, the Soviets might think that even though such an attack would not defeat the United States, the potential damage and casualties might be enough to deter the Americans from launching their superior nuclear force in response to a mere conventional attack in Europe. (By the way, NSC-68 said only that the Soviets might think the U.S. would be deterred from a nuclear attack in response to a conventional invasion of Europe, not that it actually would be.) Readers will have to decide for themselves whether that was a rational fear, but I think there is no question that the Soviets had or were developing the capabilities that Nitze and Acheson thought they were.
The great fear in the West was of what would happen when, as was inevitable in time (assuming that a preventive war would not be launched), Moscow did acquire such [a nuclear] armament. Its acquisition, everyone supposed, would deter and thereby neutralize the Western atomic armament, leaving the Red Army free to advance once more. This logic seemed unassailable, and the fear it inspired in the West made us all contemplate the future with awful foreboding. For years one had the feeling that the time left for the enjoyment of a tolerable existence was running out. Thinking of the fate of the Carthaginians, one wondered what except tribal habit caused one to take such pains in the rearing of one's children. Historians may recapitulate events such as these, but they can never recapture the emotion.Douglas J. Macdonald, Communist Bloc Expansion in the Early Cold War: Challenging Realism, Refuting Revisionism:
Although many critics of the Cold War concentrate their attention on alleged U.S. misperceptions of Soviet expansion, it is worth noting that most other non-communist nations shared these perceptions in the early Cold War with unusual consensus. This included not only governments but also many groups not afraid to criticize the United States or to attempt to get along with the Soviets, such as the British Labour Party or the French Socialists. Even such an unexpected source as Bertrand Russell wondered aloud whether a preemptive attack on Stalin might not be necessary in the 1940s.(15) This particularly challenges those analysts who utilize cognitive theories of decision-making and domestic politics explanations for U.S. foreign policy. Many such critics emphasize Soviet defensiveness, caution, and decidedly limited aims, disparaging the very notion of a unified communist bloc.(16)
British and other allied threat perceptions were often higher than U.S. fears prior to the Korean War, both in Europe and in the periphery. This phenomenon cannot be explained by reference to internal U.S. psychological or political processes. Indeed, in congruence with traditionalist interpretations, recent British historical works emphasize that prior to the Korean War, the Foreign Office saw the United States as too sanguine about the Soviet bloc threat and felt it necessary to prod the Americans into action in Asia and elsewhere.(17) Fears of Soviet bloc expansion became widespread among the other Western powers also, especially following the Czech coup in February 1948, the onset of the Berlin Blockade in June, and the beginning of the collapse of the Chinese Nationalist armies in the fall of that year.(18)
The traditionalist view that European threat perceptions precipitated U.S. threat perceptions is supported by historian Geir Lundestad's "Empire by Invitation" thesis.(19) Lundestad argues that, far from thrusting itself upon Europe in an anti-communist crusade, as the revisionists would have it, the United States was invited into a position of hegemonic leadership by European states who still faced the abysmal aftereffects of World War II and who believed they were facing an expansionist Soviet Union. Several of these countries, especially France and Italy, were also facing the challenge of large and vigorous local communist movements who were very likely to align with Moscow should they come to power.(20) Although some critics play down the Western European fears of Soviet expansion and emphasize that their need for aid for internal reconstruction influenced their desire for a U.S. effort in Europe,(21) these issues were strongly interconnected in the minds of many in the West.
I'm not sure what your point is in terms of this question.
It was not only that the peoples of the West had to contemplate the destruction of all their hopes, of everything they cherished, of their civilization, their families, their homes, and themselves, in a sudden exchange of blows that might, it seemed, leave the northern hemisphere a radioactive desert. They were being asked to accept the risk of this for the sake of one local community [Berlin] belonging to the nation that, in the course of bitter and still recent experience, they had learned to regard as the enemy of mankind itself. To many who not only remembered Hitler vividly, but who still identified the whole German nation with what he had represented, it seemed intolerable that they should be expected to take such terrible risks for the inhabitants of Hitler's capital, the traditional center of Prussia and Prussianism. In 1939, when Britain and France went to war, there were many in their midst who asked: Why die for Danzig? Inevitably, now, there were many to ask: Why die for Berlin? In this, rather than in the declarations of the governments, lay Moscow's hope that its nuclear diplomacy would succeed.[2]
[2] A personal note may help make vivid, although it cannot truly recall, the fear that now gripped the populations of the West. One [Halle] who, living in Geneva, is on record as having consistently supported a firm stand at Berlin, recalls how, nevertheless, he lay awake night after night, thinking of his wife, thinking of his children one by one, thinking of what might be the end for them after so much of love, of promise, and of hope as had become associated with them in his mind over the years. Still he recalls the physical sensation in the abdomen, preventing sleep, that the imagination of the possible horror in store for them produced in him. Multiply this man, now, by millions, spread over half the earth, think of the sum of their fear, with its physical manifestations, and it seems a wonder that the very air which wrapped our planet was not visibly altered by it.
The key thing to remember is that NATO never had a conventional army that could stand up to the Soviet army.
In these circumstances, ever since the beginning of the revolution it had been orthodox Communist strategy not to seek an open and general military confrontation with capitalist power, but rather precisely to avoid such confrontation and to conduct the attack on the capitalist world in a much more cautious manner, representing what Lenin termed a "state of partial war," and involving the elastic and opportunistic use of a wide variety of tactics including outstandingly such things as deception, concealed penetration and subversion, psychological warfare, and above all the adroit exploitation of every conceivable form of division in capitalist society, whether on the international scale or within the domestic framework of capitalist states. By such means it was considered, the Soviet Union could avoid the danger of annihilation that had always to be considered to reside in a general war between communism and capitalism, and yet make the most of those weaknesses, divisions and diseases to which the capitalist world was held to be a prey.Kennan argued that the US response was too militarized--that the Marshall Plan, which strengthened Western Europe economically and politically, was a more appropriate response than NATO.
Actually, the conditions that existed as World War II came to an end seemed to offer high promise for the success of such tactics. The effects of Nazi rule on the social fabric of the occupied countries, as well as of Germany herself, had weakened the traditional institutions of those countries, and had in fact performed a good deal of the work which the Communists would in any case have wished to carry out in order to soften these countries up for seizure of power by Communist minorities. The postwar exhaustion and bewilderment of peoples everywhere heightened vulnerability to Communist pressures and deceits. The positions gained in Eastern Europe by the advance of the Red Army in the final phases of the war, plus the Soviet right, on the basis of Yalta and Potsdam, to a prominent voice in the determination of the future of Germany, protected by the veto power in the Council of Foreign Ministers, made it seem to Moscow implausible that vigor and hope and economic strength could ever be returned to the Western European area otherwise than on Moscow's terms; and these terms, in the Kremlin's mind, would be built around a set of conditions in which the triumph of Soviet-controlled forces would be assured. In France and Italy, furthermore, the Communists had succeeded in exploiting both the resistance to the Germans and ultimately the liberation from them, for purposes of infiltration into every possible point of political, military and economic control, and had thereby reached positions of influence from which it seemed most unlikely that they could be dislodged without chaos and civil war. In these circumstances the Kremlin had good reason to hope that a relatively brief period—let us say three to five years—would see Communist power, or at least Communist domination, extended to the Western European area in general, even in the absence of any further military effort by the Soviet Union. By virtue of such a development, as Moscow saw it, the preponderance of military-industrial strength in the world would be assembled under Soviet control. England would represent at best an isolated industrial slum, extensively dependent on the Communist-controlled Continent across the channel. Taken together with the possibilities for Communist success in China, where the immediately desired phase of "expelling the imperialists" seemed to he progressing almost unbelievably well with no effort at all on Moscow's part, all this meant that prospects were not bad for the rapid advance of the Kremlin to a dominant and almost unchallengeable position in world affairs. Thus the lack of desire or expectancy for a new major foreign war did not mean that Moscow had no hope for the expansion of Bolshevik power in the postwar period.
posted by Mr. Six at 9:51 PM on June 30, 2006