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A rejoinder to Michael Cox

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 October 2010

Beatrice Heuser
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Extract

It is a great thrill to find that someone has picked up the gauntlet thrown into the arena at a time when the Cold War seems to many to be nothing but remote history. Here are my brief answers to Michael Cox's gallant repartee:

  • Tito did not ‘defect’ he was expelled from the Cominform by Stalin. Moscow did not ‘stay put’ altogether; Tito's expulsion was supposed to be followed by a putsch by the Stalinist faction within the CP of Yugoslavia, which failed, however. Here, as with the Berlin Blockade and later in condoning aggression in Korea (hardly ‘cautious, circumspect’ policy decisions), Stalin made a great mistake.

  • Western analysts did predict the attack on South Korea. In May 1950 Kennan himself thought Stalin was looking for an area to have a ‘limited war’, and thought Yugoslavia a likely danger area. Mr Kennan's later Memoirs and memory are here, once again, not very reliable.

  • The Communist victory in China and the Soviet explosion of an atomic device, far from being of little concern to the West, caused Truman to ask for NSC-68 to be written.

  • The economically weak USSR was far from inferior to the West in manpower, as Dr Cox rightly notes, and it should be remembered that the Red Army had held its own against the formidable Wehrmacht for quite a while. The massive rearmament of the satellites of the USSR only started in 1948. Matthew Evangelista's article only deals with the period up to 1948, and its findings can not be applied to the 1949–1953 period. Satellite rearmament took off in 1950, peaking in 1952. By 1952 Rumania, Hungary and Bulgaria alone had as many forces (including small naval and air forces) as the 800,000 Western troops available on the Central Front in 1948.

Type
Reply
Information
Review of International Studies , Volume 18 , Issue 1 , January 1992 , pp. 85 - 86
Copyright
Copyright © British International Studies Association 1992

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References

1 See my ‘Western Diplomats’ Perceptions of Origins of the Tito-Stalin Split', The South Slav Journal, 10 (1987), pp. 1–20.

2 My ‘NSC-68 and the Soviet Threat’, Review of Internationa! Studies, 17 (1991), pp. 24–5 and 26.

3 ‘NSC-68 and the Soviet Threat’, p. 26.

4 Matthew Evangelista, ‘Stalin's Postwar Army Reappraised’, International Security, 1 (Winter 1982/3), pp. 110–38.

5 For the figures, see my Western Containment Policies in the Cold War: The Yugoslav Case (London & New York, 1989), Appendix C.

6 Evangelista's estimat e in ‘Stalin's Postwar Army’, pp. 18–19.

7 ‘NSC-68 and the Soviet Threat’, nn. 91 and 112.

8 Western Containment Policies, pp. 103–9, 149–54; and ‘NSC-68 and the Soviet Threat’, pp. 35–7.

9 Western Containment Policies, pp. 44–6.

10 He approached France and even Britain slightly earlier, but again it must be recalled that the Yugoslav, and US and British military had fought each other in Greece as late as 1949; Western Containment Policies, pp. 160–3.

11 Timothy Aeppel: ‘Trove of Documents proves NATO's fears were well founded—Papers Seized in East Germany Outline Warsaw Pact Plans for a Push to the Atlantic—Going Nuclear on Day Two’, Wall Street Journal, 13 June 1991; Lothar Riihl, ‘Noch 1990 zielte die NVA Richtung Westdeutschland und Benelux’, Die Welt, 31 July 1991.