4 Whatever may have been Stalin's long range goals, his actions in the closing days of the war and the immediate post-war period clearly revealed that he was determined to assume a dominant position in Eastern Europe and to regain the Far Eastern Tsarist territories lost in the Russo-Japanese War. But his claims were even more far-reaching. They included a demand for a military base on the Turkish Straits which would enable the Soviet Union to control access to the Black Sea, trusteeship of one of the former Italian North African colonies which would establish the Soviet Union as a Mediterranean power, participation in control of the Ruhr as well as unilateral control of the East Zone of Germany, and an insistence on prolonging Soviet occupation of Iranian territory. It could be, and indeed was, argued that none of these actions directly affected American interests. But, as Harriman put it in a wartime dispatch (September 20, 1944) to the Secretary of State, “What frightens me however is that when a country begins to extend its influence by strong arm methods beyond its borders under the guise of security it is difficult to see how a line can be drawn. If the policy is accepted that the Soviet Union has a right to penetrate her immediate neighbors for security, penetration of the next immediate neighbors becomes at a certain time equally logical.” It was out of the fear of further penetration that the policy of containment was born.
In theory, at least, Stalin might have pursued an alternative course which would have eased the task of post-war collaboration with his wartime allies. Had he limited his expansionist claims and permitted regimes based on local preferences to emerge in Eastern Europe, the way might have been opened for a large American post-war reconstruction loan to aid in the rebuilding of the Soviet economy. Yet to state an option in this form is to fail to come to grips with Stalin's commitments and calculations. Deeply suspicious of his capitalist partners, he could not even conceive of entrusting his future security to their goodwill or good nature. As his Politburo associate, Mikhaiel Kalinin put it in an August 1945 address to a conference of party propagandists: “Even now after the greatest victory known to history we cannot for one minute forget the basic fact that our country remains the one socialist state in the world …. The victory achieved does not mean that all dangers to our state structure and social order have disappeared. Only the more concrete, most immediate danger, which threatened us from Hitlerite Germany, has disappeared. In order that the danger of war may really disappear for a long time, it is necessary to consolidate our victory.”
To consolidate the victory meant installing “friendly” regimes wherever the writ of Soviet power ran, and in the last analysis the only “friendly” regimes that could be fully trusted were Communist-dominated ones. As Stalin stated in an unusual moment of frankness, “A freely elected government in any of these countries would be anti-Soviet, and that we cannot allow.” Assured by Roosevelt at the Yalta Conference that there would be no American troops left in Europe two years after the war, he counted on the dissipation of American military forces to open up new opportunities for the Soviet Union as the dominant continental military power. At the same time he did not overestimate his strength and sought to avoid direct challenges which maximized the risk of war. Urged by Tito to help drive the Anglo-Americans out of Trieste, he gave the Yugoslavs diplomatic support, but stopped short of military action. In a revealing exchange with the Yugoslavs, he declared: “Since all other methods were exhausted, the Soviet Union had only one other method left for gaining Trieste for Yugoslavia—to start war with the Anglo-Americans over Trieste and take it by force. The Yugoslav comrades could not fail to realize that after such a hard war the USSR could not enter another.” Nor did Stalin at first believe that the policies which he was espousing necessarily meant that he would have to forego Western aid in Soviet post-war reconstruction. Convinced that the United States faced the prospect of large-scale unemployment and a major economic crisis at the end of the war, he apparently calculated that the Americans would be driven to extend sizable credits on favorable terms by their need to find outlets for their exports. In this, as in other appraisals of American reactions, Stalin turned out to be mistaken. The result was to force him back on his own resources, to lead him to exploit to the utmost such war booty and reparations as were available to him and to launch a new in-dustrialization drive at home with its attendant sacrifice of living standards to guarantee the “homeland … against all possible accidents.”
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