Jonathan Haslam

Russia’s Seat at the Table: A Place Denied or a Place Delayed?

Equivocation by Western governments about the place of Russia in Europe in the context of the enlargement of NATO and the EU leaves a critical issue unresolved. In effect, Russia has been excluded from the Euro-American ambit. Russia’s present weakness has enabled its own reservations about these developments to be sidelined; but an economically rejuvenated Russia could pose a threat of dominance in eastern and central Europe every bit as substantial as the military dominance of former times. A way needs to be found to incorporate Russia into a modified European system to avoid its retreating into a potentially dangerous isolation.

Online Roundtable: Hal Brands' Latin America's Cold War Hal Brands, Latin America's Cold War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010, £21·80). Pp. 385. isbn 978 0 674 05528 5.

Latin America, Hal Brands tells us, has been twice the Cold War’s victim. Much Latin American blood was spilled during the ColdWar itself, frequently in internecine wars that make the adjective “civil” inappropriate. But with the passage of time, Brands suggests, Latin America has become a victim of historical condescension too. Denuded of agency, Latin Americans have become Cold War innocents, buffeted by interventions for which the United States was largely responsible. Apart from the military officers, reactionaries, and “master architects of evil” who aligned themselves with Washington’s Cold War agenda, Latin Americans, for too many historians, played bit parts in their own tragedy (uf644uf645uf649). To correct this bias in the historiography, as he characterizes it, is among Hal Brands’s central purposes. By rebalancing our understanding of agency and by revealing the complexity of causation, Brands proposes to rescue Latin America’s Cold War from the genre of morality tale and to enrich our understanding. This is a tall task, and it is a measure of his accomplishment that he substantially succeeds. Hal Brands has, in my view, written a most impressive book. Latin America’s Cold War is not without its shortcomings, but these are in many cases the limits of the historiographical genre – international history – within which he works. I imagine that some historians who focus on the national histories that Brands engages may find points of disagreement in his handling of particular episodes, crises, and personalities. Not being a specialist, I will not engage Brands on these grounds. I will instead consider some of the methodological issues that the book raises and its implications for Cold War historiography and the international history of the twentieth century more broadly construed. First off, the methodological issues. Brands approaches Latin America as an international historian working in breadth. Even by the standards of the field, Journal of American Studies, uf647uf649 (uf645uf643uf644uf645), euf644.

Zhukov's Greatest Defeat: The Red Army's Epic Disaster in Operation Mars, 1942

One of the least-known stories of World War II, Operation Mars was an epic military disaster. Designed to dislodge the German Army from its position west of Moscow, Mars cost the Soviets an estimated 335,000 dead, missing, and wounded men and over 1,600 tanks. But in Russian history books, it was a battle that never happened-a historical debacle sacrificed to Stalins postwar censorship. David Glantz now offers the first definitive account of this forgotten catastrophe, revealing the key players and detailing the major events of Operation Mars. Using neglected sources in both German and Russian archives, he reconstructs the historical context of Mars and reviews the entire operation from High Command to platoon level. Orchestrated and led by Marshal Georgi Kostantinovich Zhukov, one of the Soviet Unions great military heroes, the twin operations Mars and Uranus formed the centerpiece of Soviet strategic efforts in the fall of 1942. Launched in tandem with Operation Uranus, the successful counteroffensive at Stalingrad, Mars proved a monumental setback. Fought in bad weather and on impossible terrain, the ambitious offensive faltered despite spectacular initial success in some sectors: Zhukov kept sending in more troops and tanks only to see them decimated by the entrenched Germans. Illuminating the painful progress of Operation Mars with vivid battle scenes and numerous maps and illustrations, Glantz presents Mars as a major failure of Zhukovs renowned command. Yet, both during and after the war, that failure was masked from public view by the successful Stalingrad operation, thus eliminating any stain from Zhukovs public image as a hero of the Great Patriotic War. For three grueling weeks, Operation Mars was one of the most tragic and agonizing episodes in Soviet military history. Glantzs reconstruction of that failed offensive fills a major gap in our knowledge of World War II, even as it raises important questions about the reputations of national military heroes.

The Chinese Communist Party and the Comintern

Whether in Europe or Asia, Soviet foreign policy amounted to more than diplomacy. There was also the Comintern which, although an international organisation of Communist Parties, was under the ultimate control of the Soviet Communist Party and therefore could not afford to ignore the interests of the Soviet state. In the conflict with Japan, Soviet needs were pressing; but those needs were extremely hard to meet. The Japanese Communist Party (JCP) had been suppressed almost to the point of extinction and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was of little use. From the Manchurian incident in 1931 until 1934 the CCP, concentrated in Kiangsi, a province to the south-west of Shanghai, was too far from the Japanese front to offer any resistance. And Kuomintang (KMT) encirclement of these soviets made any enlargement of Communist power most unlikely. Indeed Chiang Kaishek’s campaign very nearly succeeded in wiping them out. On 16 October 1934 the Communists escaped by forced march — the Long March — to the north and west. Under the direction of Mao Tse-tung, who secured his supremacy en route at Tsunyi in January 1935, battered remnants of the Red forces reached the poverty-stricken province of northern Shensi that October.

Negotiation from Weakness to Negotiation from Strength, 1932–34

It is easily forgotten that the Soviet Union was not merely a European but also an Asian Power. And, despite the bold declarations of revolutionary principle at the time of the October revolution, Soviet foreign policy bore the ambiguous hallmarks of both Tsarist geopolitics and revolutionary internationalism.

Frontier Fighting: Lake Khasan (1938) and Khalkhin-Gol (1939)

In the absence of foreign diplomatic support and in the face of only limited resistance to the Japanese from China, much still depended upon the deterrent value of Soviet military power in the Far East. Since the 17th Party Congress in February 1934 the reinforcement of the Soviet armed forces in the region had continued apace. By 1939 capital investment in the region stood at many times the level of 1928.1 The railway line from European Russia had been doubled as far as China by the autumn of 1934.2 By the end of 1935 the Far Eastern army was reported to be able to fight alone for at least six months.3 Nonetheless British military Intelligence (MI2) pointed out in October 1935 that Soviet railway capacity strictly limited the quantity of forces that could be maintained in the Far East and meant that the Soviet rate of mobilisation was seriously inferior to that of the Japanese.4 For supplies the Russians were still dependent upon ‘slow moving and vulnerable columns of horse transport’.5 By December 1937, however, the Amur railway line — a continuation of the Trans-Siberian — was double-tracked to Khabarovsk, 400 miles short of Vladivostok.6 Between 1934 and 1939 the number of tanks in the Far Eastern army was doubled; the number of armoured cars rose by a factor of eight.7

Deterrence and Attempted Dètente, 1934–36

Growing Soviet self-confidence in the Far East could be seen not only in Moscow’s belligerent attitude towards Japan, but also in its treatment of the United States. Having secured diplomatic recognition from Washington, but certain the United States was uninterested in an entangling alliance, the Russians turned their backs on US demands that they repay pre-revolutionary debts. Even the Commissariat of Foreign Trade had no vested interest in appeasing the Americans: the Johnson Act had effectively prevented the US Government underwriting loans to the Russians as a quid pro quo for debt repayment. The American diplomats who arrived in Moscow early in 1934, expecting to find their new partners pliant, instead found them polite but coolly indifferent.

The Sino-Japanese War and Soviet Aid to China, 1937–38

Extremely uncertain of its position in Europe and before long gravely weakened economically and militarily by Stalin’s terror, the Soviet Union was not about to take any uncalculated risks in relation to Japan in 1937. Yet the maintenance of the status quo in the Far East — with Manchuria securely in the hands of the Japanese and with the Western Powers loath to intervene — was not to Soviet advantage either. Moscow therefore did its best to revive Chinese resistance to Japanese occupation, and in the spring of 1937 renewed its offer of arms to the KMT as a means to that end.1 For Chiang Kai-shek, however, there was little to be gained by accepting such an offer if it provoked the Japanese into further aggression. Nothing therefore came of the proposal. Furthermore the prospects for involving the Western Powers in a collective security system to contain Japan appeared as bleak as ever in Soviet eyes. Britain, under its new Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, used the growing crisis in Europe as a reason for appeasing Japan in Asia, and the threat from Japan to British colonies in Asia as a reason for appeasing Germany in Europe. France was now reeling from the belated impact of the Depression on its economy; it was increasingly polarised between left and right under the impact of the civil war in Spain; and its forces were self-evidently incapable of deterring both Germany in Europe and Japan in Asia. Roosevelt was by nature an internationalist, but his country was still stubbornly isolationist; thus although the United States unquestionably had the naval power to act against Japan, it lacked the will to intervene.

The Tables are Turned: Japan Appeases Russia, 1939–41

At the very moment when the Japanese were fighting the Russians on the Mongolian frontier, they were hit by nothing less than a diplomatic typhoon on 23 August when the German Government signed the non-aggression pact (and secret protocol) with the Soviet Union. On the following day the Soviet charge d’affaires in Tokyo reported: ‘News of the conclusion of a non-aggression pact between the USSR and Germany has had a stunning impact here, leading to obvious confusion especially among the military and the fascist camp.’1 The Russians noted: Just two weeks before the signature of the Soviet-German non-aggression pact the Hiranuma Government decided to strengthen the “Anti-Comintern” pact. The signature of the Soviet-German non-aggression pact which was unexpected for Japanese ruling circles overturned all their calculations.’2 The Marquis Kido, for one, wrote that ‘this action may well be characterised as treachery’.3

SALT I and Nuclear Weapons in Europe, 1969–72

US Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Affairs Richard Perle told the Senate Armed Services Committee on 1 March 1982 that ‘the development and deployment of the newest and most capable Soviet theater nuclear system, the SS-20, is almost certainly a product of the interim agreement on offensive arms signed in 1972 …’1