Soviet Security Concerns After World War II
In the aftermath of World War II and the allied agreements made at Yalta and Potsdam, half of Europe was occupied by the Red Army. Those nations would shortly be identified by the Iron Curtain, a phrase Winston Churchill used to describe the borders between the Soviet-controlled “East” and the free democracies of the “West.” Josef Stalin’s motives are usually explained by defining traditional Russian security concerns that paralleled Tsarist diplomacy before the October 1917 Revolution. Stalin’s motives, however, may have been more complex.
Soviet Goals Before the Nazi Invasion of 1941
The Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact of August 1939 contained secret protocols that allowed Stalin to occupy large areas of “Eastern Europe,” including parts of Poland, once the Germans began their advance into Polish territory. The lands subsequently occupied by Russia would never be freed, even after Hitler invaded Russia in 1941 and Stalin became, by default, an ally of Britain and the United States.
Soviet Claims to Eastern Europe During the War
According to historian and diplomat George F. Kennan [1], Churchill never challenged the Soviet position in the early years of the war while President Franklin D. Roosevelt by 1942 opted to relegate any such questions to post-war negotiations. The primary goal was to defeat Germany. But until the pivotal battle of Stalingrad, Stalin demanded that the allies open a second front in Western Europe.
The opening of a second front would draw German forces from Russia, where initially, spectacular military successes seriously threatened Stalin’s position. The Soviets long maintained that, “the defeat of fascism in the Second World War [occurred because of]…the decisive part…played by the Soviet Union.” [2] In many ways this was true. The war cost twenty million Russian lives.
Stalin’s Motives for Soviet Expansion and Occupation
Western Russian historians cite traditional Russian fears of encirclement and invasion from the West, notably Germany [3]. Imperial Germany invaded Russia during World War I, occupying large areas of “European Russia.” Russian history mythologizes Alexander Nevskii – a saint in the Orthodox Church, for defeating the Germanic Teutonic Knights in the 13th century. A 1938 Soviet film by Sergei Eisenstein about the event popularized anti-German sentiment in Russia.
The occupation and control of “buffer” states on Russia’s borders was partial assurance that the Soviet Union would not again be invaded from the West. Additionally, as Stalin himself stated at Yalta and Potsdam, Russia had suffered the greatest in the war and deserved these lands as reparations. Thus, Poland’s borders were moved west and Germany was kept weak, divided by the allied occupation.
Soviet apologists after the war, however, had other motives. A 1964 commentary on Soviet aims [4] states that, “The Soviets view their foreign policy as a means to spread proletarian revolution. The neo-Czarist interpretation sees it as a means to expand Russian power and influence and to enhance the national security.”
Exporting Revolution and Creating the Socialist Commonwealth
In 1964 Soviet Premier A. N. Kosygin gave a speech in which he said, “I can assure you, comrades, that our party and the Soviet government consider it their primary task to do everything to strengthen the unity and solidarity of the socialist commonwealth…”[5] This goal, as Kennan also addresses, goes back to 1945.
The Allies may have never fully understood the tenacity of Soviet goals and aims. These were played out in the Cold War and the numerous proxy wars fought between the Soviet Union and the Western democracies, led by the U.S. Capitalism was not only economic imperialism, but contributed to western decadence. Stalin knew this in 1945, maneuvering the best deal for Soviet Russia and, according to Kennan, playing a superb hand of cards.
Stalin’s Motives After the Defeat of Hitler
Encirclement may have been a dominant aspect of Stalin’s demands, yet he opposed a Chinese invasion of India, preferring a democratic state rather than one tied to Communist China. (See Kennan) Reparations were also on his agenda: the Soviets dismantled factories and carried them east to be reassembled in Russia; local populations in countries like Romania were forcibly deported to Siberia to work.
[1] George F.
[2] A. Sovetov, “Leninist
Foreign Policy and International Relations,” International Affairs, No. 4, April 1960
[3] David MacKenzie and
Michael W. Curran, A History of
[4] Current Digest of the Soviet Press, December 23, 1964,
[5] Pravda, December 10, 1964
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