The Soviet World Faces West: 1945–1970

Abstract

H TISTORY'S wheels have spun round several times since the Potsdam Conference of victorious Powers in 1945.1 The policies of the wartime allies have passed through several major revolutions, with one major factor remaining constant: their inability to come to terms on the future of Germany. Unable to agree on this central problem, the erstwhile allies have created bilateral and then multilateral alliances which have formalised the split between East and West; they have climbed escalation ladders to demonstrate their determination to hold fast in Central and Eastern Europe; and, in so doing, they have jeopardised the internal political stability and economic prosperity of their respective countries. Twenty-five years after the Second World War, however, some hope exists that the belligerents in that conflict and the rival Powers in the ensuing cold war may be groping toward an accommodation, with regard both to Germany and to the existing armed confrontation in Europe. To use the language of model builders, they may be ready to move from a major concentration on maintaining the cold war status quo to a strategy premised on interdependence. If this shift becomes a reality, however, the results will differ profoundly from the post-war arrangements envisaged at Yalta and Potsdam, for Germany will have become a partner and not just an area for the practice of East-West collaboration. Germany provided the raison d'etre of the Second World War alliance. If that coalition were to endure, the Big Three believed that Germany would have to remain its focal point. At Teheran and at Yalta they undertook to keep Germany demilitarised and disarmed, and to keep the peace through an international security organisation. In the months between the Yalta and Potsdam conferences, however, the allies began to fall out over the very principles on which agreement seemed to have been reached at Yalta. As their armies closed in upon the Third Reich, mutual suspicion and distrust mounted. Stalin seemed to fear that the West might use the secret negotiations on the Northern Italian front to obtain a conditional German surrender that would be utilised against Russia. The West objected to Moscow's policies directed towards