Edgar Snow’s Dashed Predictions/Hopes for a post WW2 world without a Cold War

Yalta (1986). The site of the peace conference between Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin in April, 1945

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1,

This is little more than a personal reflection about the political wrangling maneuvering between the United States and the Soviet Union over the postwar (World War II) global political arrangements. It is a reflection of what could have been, but wasn’t: a postwar era of peace in which, given their World War II alliance against Nazism, Italian Fascism and Japanese militarism, the United States and the Soviet Union might have entered into some kind of more respectful, productive, cooperative relationship.

This did not happen, of course, and the blame for the collapse of relations since then has been placed on the Soviet Union and at the time on “the evil Stalin.” And yet, there is much evidence that this is a false narrative, in contradiction to the facts and the balance of power at the end of the war.

Of late I have been reading A LOT about China and the former Soviet Union… less about the current moment and how China has emerged as a world power but more about the origins of its success, the Chinese Revolution of 1911 (associated with the leadership of Sun Yat-sin), the extraordinary emergence, survival and ultimate victory of the Chinese Communist Party in 1949 and the twists and turns in China’s development since.

Along the same lines, I still want to get a deeper understanding as to why it was that the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. why the Gorbachev reforms, which I whole heartedly supported, failed.  Frankly  the more I probe the Soviet collapse, the more I conclude that those reforms, however urgent they were, never had a chance. It has taken me decades to come to the conclusion that Gorbachev’s reforms were ill conceived and doomed to failure.

In retirement, this has also led me, once again, to reading a fair amount about World War II itself, the main lines of which I am  familiar, and to the period that started with the Soviet victories at Moscow, Stalingrad and historic tank battle at the Kursk salient, the Yalta Agreement and the complex political maneuvering which followed the war’s end that led to the opening of the Cold War shortly thereafter.

For those interested in exploring this period there are a few sources that I recommend concerning the Soviet Union, which I will be dealing with below, the best of being Alexander Werth’s Russia At War, Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate and Stalingrad (all 2000 pages of the two combined), and although he is known more generally for his classic work on China, Red Star Over China, journalist-author Edgar Snow’s People On Our Side, Harrison Salisbury’s 900 Days. This last title is about the Nazi siege of (what was then called) Leningrad, today’s Saint Petersburg, itself a model for Israel’s genocidal war against Gaza. Indeed, my hunch is that that Israel’s studied what the Nazis did in Leningrad and applied those lessons to the horrors Tel Aviv is inflicting on Gaza, and more recently Lebanon.

Although generally lost in time, for anyone familiar with the history of the Soviet Union both during and after World War Two, the above sources are well known, standard fare. To these valuable historical portraits, however I would add one more which I am in the midst of and finding  a rich and insightful volume: John Maxwell Hamilton’s biography of Edgar Snow, entitled Edgar Snow: A Biography  It is to this volume, at least a section of it that I want to consider in the comments that follow below. First a brief bio of Snow before turning to his unusual – for the times – vision of what postwar relations between the United States and the then Soviet Union.

2.

Few American thinkers understood the potential for U.S.-Soviet peaceful relations after the war than the journalist and historian, Edgar Snow, whose thinking I will explore below. His life and work is “up there” with a few others, among them Wilfred Burchett, Martha Gellhorn, IF Stone, Ilya Ehlenburg. Although Snow’s main intellectual contribution by far was the publication of Red Star Over China, he visited and wrote about much of Eurasia, including India, the USSR, postwar Europe. Along with Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth, “Red Star,” became one of the most influential books on the causes of the Chinese Revolution of 1949.

Strong’s work had a mass readership in the USA the likes of which political journalists today, a repressed and battered class, would literally drool over. He had the kind of influence, along with Harrison Salisbury, that present day investigative journalists can only dream of. Snow wrote regularly and became an associate editor of the immensely popular Saturday Evening Post. Red Star Over China was reprinted by Readers’ Digest. President Roosevelt, always weary of the official intelligence on China (and Russia) he was receiving through the State Department and what would become the Central Intelligence Agency, the O.S.S., met on a number of occasions with Snow and corresponded with him until Roosevelt’s death in April 1945. At different times in his travels during the end of the war and its immediate aftermath, he met, interviewed, had contact with many of the major intellectual and political figures of those times, among them Generals George Patton and Omar Bradley, Nehru, Gandhi, many of the leaders of the Chinese Revolution including Mao Tse-tung, Chou En-lai, Chu Te, the list goes on.

Edgar Parks Snow was born and grew up in Kansas City, Missouri on July 15, 1905. He died of cancer, at the age of 66, at his home in  Eysins near Nyon, Vaud, Switzerland, having been driven from the United States by the McCarthyite terror of the late 1940s and the early 1950s. He briefly studied journalism at the University of Missouri before moving to New York City to pursue a career in advertising. He found that particular line of work, as it is, boring in the extreme, and left it in what was a daring move to see the world and write about it. As John Maxwell Hamilton notes in his Snow biography, Snow was deeply influenced by Mark Twain’s writings, especially his anti-racist adventure, Huckleberry Finn. The Huck Finn tail, Hamilton writes, wet Snow’s appetite for adventure and at the age of 17 he set off with two friends on a trip to California along the Sante Fe Trail most of the way. Running out of money in Los Angeles, Snow was forced to ride the rails hobo-style back to Missouri. But his taste for travel and for “adventure” was only enhanced by that trip and in fact, using journalism has his pretext, Snow would spend most of his adult life “seeking adventure” internationally during the decades of the 1930s through 1960s.

Through the intervention of a friend, Snow’s early travel bug was given a boost by a meeting with one Kermit Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt’s son, at the time – late 1920s – was president of the Roosevelt Steamship Line. (1) Roosevelt offered Snow and his buddy Charlie Towne jobs as deckhands on the Radnor en route to Panama, Hawaii, the Philippines and, depending on circumstances, onward to India. The ship had engine trouble leaving Snow off in Hawaii. There he met another “acquaintance”, one Dan Crabb, “a Princeton man” on his way to Port Said in Egypt in a first class cabin on a Japanese vessel, the Shinya Maru. In what biographer Hamilton described as “an impetuous decision”, Crabb permitted Snow to share his cabin as a stowaway to Japan where he stayed for several months. Then on July 6, 1928, having sailed from Japan in a third class cabin on the Empress of Japan, Edgar Snow set foot on dry land at Shanghai at the outset of what was to be a most extraordinary physical, emotional, intellectual, political journey to China, one he would share with Americans back home and with the whole world.

Snow would go on to document China’s civil war between the nationalists and communists, would be among the very few to visit the communist base in Yenan in the late 1930s where he interviewed Mao on several occasions as well as Chou En-lai who would stay in touch with Snow for the rest of their lives. The material for that visit would be put into Red Star Over China, one of the great investigative America journalistic efforts of the past century – no exaggeration! It is still read to day by those who want to understand the breathtaking trajectory that is China in the 20th century. Snow went on to try to influence U.S. postwar Asian policy towards China to be more cooperative than adversarial but in that effort he failed, was victimized by the McCarthyite attacks and purges of the 1950s and forced to emigrate from his home in Connecticut to Switzerland where he lived till his death.

In another volume written in the last years of World War II, People On Our Side, Snow shows his political acumen was not limited to China. For the Saturday Evening Post he covered the war’s termination in both Europe and Asia. Some years ago I literally stumbled upon that volume (for $1) in a used bookstore in Denver (where I live) and was impressed with his understanding of the situation in the Soviet Union as the war was coming to a close. In his biography of Snow (mentioned above), Hamilton elaborates upon Snow’s analysis of the Soviet situation at the end of World War II.  And it is to that I turn to now.

3.

Two days after the Nazi surrender at Stalingrad, the battle that helped break the back of the German offensive in the Soviet Union, Edgar Snow was there with a small delegation of foreign and Soviet journalists. Among them was Alexander Werth, British journalist whose extensive volume, Russia At War is still a classic. At Stalingrad the Soviets took 91,000 Nazi prisoners, including 250 officers, 24 German and two Rumanian generals and one field marshal, Frederick von Paulus. (4) Axis casualties during the Battle of Stalingrad are estimated to have been around 800,000, including those missing or captured. Soviet forces are estimated to have suffered 1,100,000 casualties, and approximately 40,000 civilians died. The Battle of Stalingrad was one of the deadliest battles in World War II. One battle, 2 million casualties.

Edgar Snow saw the Red Army, the Soviet Army as a liberating force.

By the time of the Stalingrad victory, Snow had become one of the most prominent war correspondents in Eurasia, covering the war both in Europe and Asia. Although “only” a journalist he saw himself as an “unofficial envoy, the eyes and ears of average Americans whose attitudes shaped official diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union” in the post war period, or so he thought. His understanding of his mission was not pure narcissism; as mentioned above, Snow had been in regular contact with Franklin Roosevelt (as well as other powerful allied personalities – Averill Harriman, US Ambassador to Moscow) throughout the war. As the war was coming to an end, Snow was concerned about what a writer like himself might do to improve U.S.-Soviet relations and to “keep things from getting worse and leading to more war” – this time with the USSR. Put another way, Snow was aware of the possible deterioration of U.S.-Soviet postwar relations that would, unfortunately lead to the opening of the Cold War shortly after 1945 and tried to mobilize whatever political support he could for that not to happen.

Snow understood the Soviet situation at the war’s end better and more accurately than most Americans – insider or outside government. He understood that as the war was coming to an end that the USSR was an exhausted and insecure country.

The fighting had devastated the Soviet Union beyond anything most Americans imagined; 27 million dead among soldiers and civilians dead or missing – compared to 322,000 American casualties – millions more homeless, many living in caves and holes in the ground. Twenty out of twenty three million pigs lost; 65,000 kilometers of railroad track lost; factories, dams, bridges, tractors all lost while the infrastructure of the USA was not only untouched during the same period, but renovated, updated. Snow realized something else: that World War II was only one of a series of blows during the early 20th century. The German offensive against Russia in World War I had also been devastating and the humiliating Brest-Litovsk peace imposed upon (then) Russia by Germany had cost lives and territory. With the Russian Revolution of 1917, the United States and Britain had launched a major military offensive against Russia to overthrow the young Soviet government “in its cradle”. While the intervention failed it only added salt to the wounds Russia had suffered and greatly complicated the new Soviet government’s reconstruction plans.

Snow understood the Soviet military steamroller westward into Eastern Europe after the three historic battles of Moscow (1941-2). Stalingrad (1942-3), and Kursk (1943) as less about Soviet expansionism but as the long term goal of creating a buffer zone between it and its historic enemies (Germany, France, UK and … the USA). It was much less of an expansionist thrust to gobble up territory but rather, as Hamilton noted in his biography of Snow “as an effort to regain lost territory (in the Western USSR itself) and as a means to protect itself against further attack. (5). During the war Washington never spelled out possible postwar relations with Moscow, leaving Stalin unsure as to if and how the wartime alliance might continue. Given the ambiguity and uncertainty of Washington’s Soviet posture, Stalin – and much of the rest of the Soviet leadership felt it imperative to establish a cordon sanitaire – a safe zone – to insure that another Operation Barbarossa would not ambush the Soviets once again.

From the very outset of the war’s end, the notion that the Soviets would continue in their military victories to invade and occupy Western Europe always was completely ludicrous. The balance of power between it and the United States was such that Washington had the upper hand politically and militarily. In 1945 it was the United States that had a monopoly on the production and use of nuclear weapons. Creating a cordon sanitaire is quite different than pursuing a policy of Soviet expansion once the security zone was establish at the war’s end. It is essentially defensive in nature and although, it did result in an often harsh rule in the Eastern European countries, first liberated by the Red Army and then turned into satellites soon thereafter, History must acknowledge that the USSR never went beyond the boundaries agreed to at Yalta, and never intended to.

That even prior to the war’s end, Washington already had plans to take advantage of Soviet post-war weakness, to invade and destroy it, is usually left out of the American narrative. For example, the Joint Chiefs of Staff had already conceived of a plan referred to as TOTALITY, “the first emergency war plan by one [WW2] erstwhile ally against the other”. (1) It was a plan to destroy the Soviet Union using conventional weapons.

A few months later, after the two nuclear weapons had been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki igniting the nuclear age, the Joint Chiefs of Staff began to put into motion what is cryptically referred to as “JIC 329/1” a plan to destroy the Soviet Union using nuclear weapons. As noted in The Herald, n July 1945 the US Joint Chiefs of Staff noted “with atomic weapons a nation must be ready to strike the first blow” The resultant war plan, JIC 329/1,  singled out for obliteration 20 Soviet cities. The plans to nuke the Soviet Union were codified in the first of many war plans. JIC 329/1 called for a surprise attack without provocation of the Soviet Union. “The study recommended that the US launch a surprise attack on the Soviet Union not only to stop Soviet aggression but also if appeared that the U.S.S.R. would eventually gain the capability of either attacking the U.S. or rebuffing a U.S. attack.” (2)

JIC 329/1 was the first of many plans to nuke the USSR into oblivion organized at the highest levels of the U.S. government with full support of the different presidents to follow.

So much for peaceful coexistence.

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End Notes

(1) The same Kermit Roosevelt’s son, Kermit Roosevelt Jr,  would become one of the key operatives in the postwar formed Central Intelligence Agency (C.I.A.) and would play a decisive role in the overthrow of Iranian Prime Minister, Mohammad Mossadegh in April, 1953.

(2) Edgar Snow. People on our Side, Random House. 1944, p.118-119

(3) John Maxwell Hamilton. Edgar Snow A Biography. Indiana University Press. 1988, p 149

(4) Michio Kaku/Daniel Axelrod. To Win A Nuclear War: The Pentagon’s Secret War Plans.  South End Press: 1987. p. 31

(5) ibid.