On 19 May 2010, IDC was honoured to host Professor Edouard Husson of the University of Amiens who spoke on “1945: Stalin, Germany and the beginning of the Cold War”.

This lectures was organised in the context of the celebrations held across Europe to mark the 65^th anniversary of the victory over Nazi Germany.  For the first time, British, French and American troops were invited to Moscow where they took part in the traditional parade on Red Square.

Before the lecture, the President of IDC, Natalia Narochnitskaya, said a few words about the latest publication of the Foundation for Historical Outlook in Moscow, a book on Yalta composed largely of documents from Stalin’s personal archive.

Edouard Husson began by emphasising the fact that there are numerous myths surrounding the Cold War.  West Germany has played a particularly important role in promoting these.  The work of the controversial historian, Ernst Nolte, has been especially influential:  his major book, “The European Civil War 1917 – 1945” argues that Nazism was born out of a legitimate fear of Bolshevik barbarism.  For Nolte, the roots of Nazism do not lie in German history or political culture, but on the contrary in the “totalitarianism” invented by Lenin.  By a sort of dialectical process, the Bolshevik revolution is said to have caused the birth of Nazism in Germany. Edouard Husson emphasised to what extent this thesis has been accepted, especially in Germany but also throughout the West during the radicalisation of the Cold War in the 1980s.  The collapse of the Soviet system in 1990 seemed to prove Nolte’s thesis, inasmuch as what he had identified as the original evil had finally been vanquished by the Western camp.

Communism was therefore, for Nolte, the cause of the evil and specifically Russian communism.  His arguments were picked up by former Trotskyites and Maoists in France for whom the only thing that remains of their Marxism is a hatred of the (Stalinist) Soviet Union and Russia.  This view of the world, in which a barbaric East is liberated by a civilised West, is based on glossing over the most important thing of all, namely the war between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.  By supporting the concept of “totalitarianism”, the uniquely evil and criminal nature of the Nazi regime is obscured.  Nolte uses numerous clichés in his apparently sophisticated argument, notably the idea that the East equals Asia which equals barbarism. 

His ideas were well received in a Germany which obviously condemned the crimes of the Nazis but which at the same time believed that the Wehrmacht, the Germany army, had, in the final analysis, been fighting an even more barbaric enemy, Bolshevism.  According to this version of events, the Wehrmacht was a sort of early NATO.  Even the great German historian of Nazism, Andreas Hillgruber, has defended this argument, claiming that the Wehrmacht saved Europe from Stalin.

This version of events, according to Husson, is rooted in the ideology of the cold war.  It has allowed Germany to present herself as having been on the right side twice, once in having opposed Stalin in 1941 and then again when opposing his successors, and Soviet Communism generally, during the Cold War.

Now, it is no exaggeration to say that the germano-soviet war was the most atrocious war in human history.  The most recent estimates are the 27 million people died, 14 million civilians and 13 million soldiers.  The Soviets were accused of artificially inflating the numbers of their war dead but in reality Stalin underestimated the figures.  Probably he did not want to highlight the catastrophe of June 1941. Nazi Germany is directly responsible for this number of victims in the USSR, which shows the gigantic military weight which Germany brought to bear on the Soviet Union.  The figures also show that it is the Red Army, and the Red Army alone, which broke the back of the Germany army.  Nazi Germany would never have been defeated without the sacrifice of more then 10 million Soviet soldiers.  The reality of the Second World War is that the Germano-Soviet war forms the largest part of it, next to which the war in the West was a minor affair. 

Husson continued by saying that it was therefore regrettable that the two great gestures of German reconciliation – Adenauer’s visit to Reims and Willy Brandt’s kneeling at the monument to the victims of the Warsaw ghetto – have never been completed by a third gesture of reconciliation, towards Russia.  Logically, such a gesture ought to occur.

The way in which 15 million German soldiers treated their Soviet prisoners of war deserves to be pondered.  More than 3 million died in captivity, over two-thirds of those captured.  In the period June 1941 – June 1942, the mortality rate of Soviet prisoners of war was 90%.  We know now that the decision was deliberately taken by the Wehrmacht to let them die, and herein lies the reality of the Germano-Soviet war.  It was part of a general plan for all the peoples of Eastern Europe, the so-called “Generalplan Ost”.  Drawn up in 1939 and 1940, the plan provided for the deportation or death of between 30 to 50 million people in Eastern Europe.  The extermination rates imagined by the Nazi ideologues were enormous.  To this day, all those who talk of an “alliance” between Nazi Germany and the USSR is based on a refusal to take on board the reality of Nazi racism towards Slavs.  The Nazis considered that the Soviet Union was nothing but a living space (Lebensraum) for the German people, and the Germano-Soviet war was nothing but a war of extermination.  Even if one estimates the atrocities committed by the Red Army at a high level, the figures still fall very far short of those committed by the Nazis.

Edouard Husson insisted that it was essential to take account of these facts in order to understand what happened in 1945.  In 1945, the USSR had the right to formulate a certain number of legitimate demands.  In view of the sacrifice the Soviets had made, there is no doubt that these demands were justified.  For Edouard Husson, Stalin’s geopolitics was simple and unchanging: he wanted three zones in Europe, a zone of Western influence, a zone of Soviet influence, and a zone of security in Central Europe which would be neutral, demilitarised and independent of both East and West.  His fundamental idea was that 1938 should never be allowed to happen again, when the West tried to turn Germany against the Soviet Union. It is impossible to understand the Germano-Soviet pact of 1939 without reference to the Munich agreement of the previous year.  Stalin wanted for Germany and for Czechoslovakia what he had obtained for Finland and Austria.  He did not want direct domination of Central Europe, he wanted an agreement with the West.  Edouard Husson insisted that Stalin did not want Germany to be divided into two: he wanted Germany to be united, capitalist and neutral.

As for Churchill, his major aim was to limit the weakening of the United Kingdom.  He was worried not only about the USSR but also about the USA.  The famous episode in which Churchill and Stalin divided up zones of influence in Europe according to percentages on a piece of paper does indeed correspond fundamentally to the British view of foreign policy – a vision of power relationships based on the assumption that the Great Powers will always negotiate with one another.  It is even possible to speculate that if Britain had remained a great power after the war, then the Cold War would never have taken place.  Churchill was able to accept the idea of a Russian sphere of influence and the old British idea of the balance of power in Europe would have carried the day.

Professor Husson argued that it was therefore the United States which provoked the Cold War.  The American vision of foreign policy made the Cold War inevitable because it excludes the very concept of zones of influence.  In reality, all American presidents are Wilsonians.  Their basic idea is that American values know no boundaries.  For them, the idea of dividing Europe up into three zones was therefore inadmissible.  How could one accept the idea that Central Europe should not be open to American ideas and products?  Justine Faure has shown in her book, “The American friend” how Czechoslovakia was pushed into the Communist camp following the installation of Radio Free Europe in Prague, and following the revelation of American plans to use Slovakia to destabilise Ukraine.  One can very easily see how Moscow was forced to gain control of Czechoslovak foreign policy.

When one studies  the US documents from the first half of 1945, one can see clearly that the Americans were afraid of Russian influence.  Not one of the American analysts was capable of analysing the Russian and Soviet point of view in historical terms.  Kennan’s long telegram is totally lacking in any sense of the historical context: for the author, Russia is always struggling to achieve domination.  There is an America Messianism which is hostile to the concept of spheres of influence.  The Americans conceived of the organisation of the world only according to the American model.  Their tradition is in sharp contrast to the European tradition of recognising the rights of others.  Europe has a long tradition of coming to terms with people with whom one does not agree.  There is a long tradition of refusing to allow ideology to dominate foreign policy.

The American vision, by contrast, is purely ideological. They are the opposite of Stalin’s concept which was far closer to the European model.  Stalin never wanted the whole of Europe to be Communist.  His geopolitics was based on the idea of a balance of power in Europe.  In 1945, American flags were waved in the streets of Moscow but the Soviets were shocked and terrified by the dropping of the nuclear bomb on Hiroshima that August.  This was a great turning point.  The sense of a common victory was quickly replaced by the fear of a new threat.  The way in which Truman announced to Stalin that he had dropped the bomb could only be interpreted as a threat.

Edouard Husson concluded his talk by saying that the difference in the American and Soviet approaches could be seen as early as 1945.  The ideology is not where one might think it is.  Moreover, it was not the Americans who won the Cold War but instead the Soviets who decided to put at end to it.