Prolonged competition and confrontation, with brief periods of cooperation and conciliation, have marked Soviet-American relations. When the preeminent capitalist nation and foremost communist country have had shared interests, as in the late 1980s and early 1990s, they have practiced accommodation and détente. More characteristic of their historical relationship, however, have been sharp differences, especially evident in the period 1917-1945, as their empires and ideologies have clashed. Virulent anticommunism has coursed periodically through domestic American politics, just as a deep suspicion of the "West" has typified the Soviet leadership. If the Soviets have feared "capitalist encirclement," Americans have feared an "international communist conspiracy." Each side, in mirror image, has seen the other as intransigent and aggressive.
In early 1917 Americans applauded the Russian Revolution that ousted the czar. But when the Bolshevik, or October, Revolution rocked Russia, Americans grew wary. Adherents of Marxism, the Bolsheviks (Communists or Soviets), vowed to mount an anticapitalist world revolution. President Woodrow Wilson's goal of a liberal, capitalist international order seemed threatened by what he called the "poison of Bolshevism." He pursued several policies to topple or at least contain the Soviets: nonrecognition, economic blockade, aid to non-Bolshevik forces, exclusion of Soviet Russia from the postwar peace conference in Paris, and military intervention (1918-1919 in northern Russia and 1918-1920 in Siberia). At home the Wilson administration's antiradicalism manifested itself in the red scare.
During the 1920s the Republican administrations continued Wilson's nonrecognition policy. They complained that the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (ussr) refused to pay Americans about $600 million for confiscated property and repudiated debts, and they objected to communism's hostility to religion. Still, in the early 1920s, the American Relief Administration sent food to famine-stricken Russia. During the decade American businesses like General Electric and International Harvester began to enter the centrally planned Soviet marketplace; Henry Ford signed a contract to build an automobile factory. By 1928 a quarter of all foreign investment in the Soviet Union was American, and trade in American agricultural and industrial equipment was substantial.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt reasoned in 1933 that nonrecognition had failed and that improved relations might stimulate trade to help pull America out of the Great Depression and deter Japanese expansion in Asia. He extended formal diplomatic recognition to the Soviet Union and agreed to settle the debts issue at future meetings. But as General Secretary of the Communist party Joseph Stalin's bloody purges terrorized his people and five-year plans, including forced labor and the collectivization of agriculture, transformed the Soviet economy, U.S. relations with the ussr deteriorated.
Especially upsetting to Americans was the 1939 Nazi-Soviet pact. Now the Soviet Union seemed just another aggressor, especially after it seized part of Poland and attacked Finland. Americans did not appreciate the Soviet viewpoint: that Great Britain and the United States, by practicing appeasement toward Nazi Germany, had left the Soviet Union no choice but to make peace with Berlin in order to buy time to get ready for an expected German attack. That attack came in June 1941. Roosevelt sent Lend-Lease aid (by war's end a total of $11 billion), calculating that the Soviets could hold down scores of German divisions in the East to ease German pressure against Great Britain in the West.
When the United States entered the war in December 1941, it formed a Grand Alliance with the Soviet Union and Great Britain. Although always tension-ridden, the alliance was held together by the common objective of defeating the Axis. The Allies differed most vigorously over the timing for the opening of a second, or western, front. Stalin frequently urged a British-American assault against German-occupied France, and Roosevelt repeatedly promised and then delayed the cross-channel landing. At the Tehran Conference of December 1943, Roosevelt met with Stalin and Winston Churchill and they agreed to open the second front (code-named Operation Overlord) in early 1944. Later in 1944, at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C., the Allies mapped plans for the United Nations Organization, with the United States, the Soviet Union, and three others holding veto power in the Security Council. Both Washington and Moscow sought a postwar world dominated by the great powers.
The three leaders met again at the Yalta Conference in February 1945, a time when the Red Army was fighting through Eastern Europe and into Germany. In a series of trade-offs, they agreed to create a "more broadly based" coalition government in Soviet-dominated Poland, to draw a boundary line favorable to the ussr in eastern Poland, and to transfer certain Asian territories to the Soviets. They also divided Germany into zones and required it to pay reparations. The Soviet Union agreed to negotiate a treaty with America's ally Chiang Kai-shek (Jiang Jieshi) in China and to enter the war against Japan two to three months after the defeat of Germany.
The hopes for continued Soviet-American accommodation inspired by the Yalta compromises were soon dashed as the Allies jockeyed for international influence at the close of the war. The Potsdam Conference in July 1945, after the defeat of Germany, saw as much disagreement as accord. The Soviet Union fulfilled its Yalta pledge to declare war against Japan in August, but it came after the American atomic bombing of Hiroshima, when U.S. leaders no longer wanted Soviet participation in the Pacific theater. The traditional Soviet-American friction--intensified in the postwar period through rival military alliances, propaganda wars, competing reconstruction programs, interventions in weaker states, and a dangerous and expensive nuclear arms race--soon took a new name: the cold war.
Bibliography:
John Lewis Gaddis, Russia, the Soviet Union, and the United States: An Interpretive History, 2nd ed. (1990); Joan Hoff Wilson, Ideology and Economics: U.S. Relations with the Soviet Union, 1917-1933 (1974).
Author:
Thomas G. Paterson
See also Anticommunism; Potsdam Conference; World War II; Yalta Conference. For Soviet-American relations after 1945, see Cold War.
