journal of european integration history revue d'histoire de l ...

88
Vladislav Zubok
new communist ally Mao Zedong that “if war is inevitable let it happen now,”
before the United States managed to restore and rearm Germany and Japan. “Other
European capitalist states do not possess any serious military power,” Stalin wrote,
“save Germany, which cannot provide assistance to the United States now.” 9 At the
last stage of his life Stalin attempted to throw a monkey wrench into this by
announcing in March 1952 his proposals for a “united democratic Germany.” The
Russian archives which are accessible do not allow us to provide a conclusive
answer to the question as to whether Stalin’s note reflected a serious policy or was
just a device to torpedo the EDC as a way towards European integration. In a strategic
sense, as can be inferred from the archival evidence, Stalin did not believe that
Germany would be divided for long, and thus preferred to hold a scenario for Germany’s
unification ready at hand. At the same time, Stalin’s strategy was consistently
opposed to Germany’s integration with Western Europe. But by that time the
image of the USSR was already so tarnished in Western Europe both by the Korean
War and the mounting repression in Eastern Europe that the Americans could easily
ignore Stalin’s proposal as a propagandist trick. 10
Only two years later after Stalin’s death, following a period of bitter power
struggle, the Soviet leadership developed a new diplomacy, adjusted to the fact of a
politically united Western Europe. In the course of the power struggle the new
Soviet elite criticized the foreign policy of Stalin and Molotov on the grounds that
“it integrated the capitalist world, because it was too transparent for them, it armed
them against our socialist camp.” “Today’s foreign policy,” one critic claimed, “is
flexible and manoeuverable, it splits [the capitalist countries].” 11 Although Stalin’s
successors continued to equal capitalist integration with an external threat, they no
longer feared an imminent European war (nuclear armaments helped the most in
this regard). They sought to thwart this process by denying the West a convenient
image of the communist enemy: putting a smile on the face of the Soviet regime,
legitimizing the Eastern bloc by the creation of the Warsaw Treaty Organization,
the reduction of troops, etc. Khrushchev even began to nourish schemes of splitting
NATO, and perhaps, rolling back the progress made by the Americans in the years
of the Korean War. Khrushchev did not hide his belief that, when “all would see our
peaceful nature, then it would be hard for [the West] to preserve NATO (...)”. 12 In a
9. A cable from Stalin to Kim II Sung (with attached letter to Mao), October 7, 1950, The Archive of
the President of the Russian Federation (APRF), f. 45, op. 1, d. 347, pp.65-66.
10. There is a serious school in Germany that regards the Western response to Stalin’s March 1952 note
as a missed opportunity for German reunification. See R. STEININGER, “Eine Chance zur Wiedervereinigung?
Darstellung und Dokumentation auf der Grundlage unveröffentlichter britischer und
amerikanischer Akten”, Archiv für Sozialgeschichte, Beiheft 12, Bonn 1985; R. STEININGER, The
German Question: The Stalin Note of 1952 and the Problem of Reunification, New York 1990. The
opposite side points out that no such possibility existed under Stalin and even after his death. See G.
WETTIG, “Die Deutschland-Note vom 10. März 1952 auf der Basis diplomatischer Akten des russischen
Aussenministeriums”, Deutsches Archiv, 7, 1993, pp.786-805; Stalin and the SED leadership,
7 April 1952: “You must organize your own state”, The Bulletin of Cold War International
History Project, no. 4 194, pp.34-35, 48.
11. “Posledniaia ’antipartiinaiia’ gruppa” [The last “anti-party” group]. The minutes of the July 1957
Plenum of the CC CPSU, Istoricheskii arkhiv, Moscow, no. 1, 1994, p.60.