On Sep 14, 2015, at 5:55 PM, Louis Proyect <[email protected]> wrote: > On 9/14/15 5:40 PM, Marv Gandall wrote: >> Louis has not read - or, more likely, would now repudiate - the >> interpretation of the origins of the Cold War commonly held by the >> so-called radical and left liberal “revisionist” historians: William >> Appleman Williams (Tragedy of American Diplomacy), Lloyd Gardner >> (Architects of Illusion), Barton Bernstein (“American Foreign Policy >> and the Origins of the Cold War”). Walter LaFeber (America, Russia, >> and the Cold War), Gabriel Kolko (Politics of War), Richard Barnet >> (Roots of War), Thomas Paterson (Soviet-American Confrontation), >> David Horowitz (Empire and Revolution), Bruce Kuklick (American >> Policy and the Division of Germany), Gar Alperovitz (Atomic >> Diplomacy), Harry Magdoff (Age of Imperialism), Ronald Steel (Pax >> Americana), Stephen Ambrose (Rise to Globalism), Richard Freeland >> (Truman Doctrine and the Origins of McCarthyism), Athan Theoharis >> (Seeds of Repression), Diane Shaver Clemens (Yalta), Lawrence Wittner >> (Cold War America), and D. F. Fleming (The Cold War and Its >> Origins). > > This is not about the origins of the Cold War, however. It is about how > Stalinist oppression created opportunities for the West.
I thought this thread was about the origins of the Cold War. At issue is whether “the encroachment of NATO at the doorstep of Russia is a direct outcome of the encroachment of the Red Army on nations throughout Eastern Europe.” Fact is that the Red Army “encroached”, as you put it, upon Eastern Europe in 1944-45, prior to the onset of the Cold War. Moreover, I would never cast the Soviet advance in this negative light, and, more to the point, neither did most East Europeans at that time. They regarded the Soviet troops as liberators from Nazi oppression rather than as invaders. This also included Ukraine, which you seem to regard as the most conspicuous example of popular hostility to the Soviet Union. In fact, up until the recent fostering of ethnic hatred which exploded into the country’s current civil war, polls showed a majority of Ukrainians, “not only in the East, the South, and the Center, but also in the historic Western Ukrainian regions of Volhynia, Bukovyna, and Transcarpathia” had negative attitudes towards Bandera’s pro-fascist OUN-B and the UPA. Support for the Soviet side in World War II was particularly pronounced in the older generation most closely connected to that period, but also included younger Ukrainians, many of them born after the dissolution of the USSR. For the details, see: http://www.cpsa-acsp.ca/papers-2010/Katchanovski.pdf As for the other examples you cite, the Soviet interventions in Czechoslovakia in 1948 and in Hungary in 1956, these did indeed “create opportunities for the West” but occurred well after the Red Army had chased the Nazi forces out of Western Europe. The widespread hostility which developed against the USSR in the postwar period was not a “direct outcome” of the Red Army advance which was also welcomed by all but the pro-fascist minorities in these countries. The subsequent Soviet actions in Eastern Europe, however wrongheaded and damaging to the cause of socialism everywhere, are also more complex than you make out, and were in many respects a defensive reaction to the initiation of the Cold War and formation of NATO by the Truman administration with the enthusiastic support of Churchill’s government. I recommend again that you read or reread some of the texts pertaining to the origins of the Cold War I cited above. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
