Actors of the conference of Postdam: Churchill, Truman and Stalin
The German question in the middle of the cold war Until the beginning of the year 1945, the requirements of the common fight against the forces of the Axis made pass in the second plan the dissensions between the winners concerning the organization of the world after the defeat of Germany. The pretense of cohesion posted in Yalta (February 1945) is already nothing any more but one to remember at the time of the conference of Potsdam (July). Well too vague, the agreements of Potsdam - denazification of Germany, question of repairs - are not likely to offer to the Allies the means of slicing the disagreements which will be born from their application.
Thus the USSR, which leaves bloodless its fight against Germany, very quickly transforms its zone of occupation into zone of plundering. If the partition of Germany intervenes only in 1949, all indicates that it is contained in the antagonistic standpoint since 1946, which did not have escaped with Winston Churchill, whom, in March 1946, speaks already about a “iron curtain”.
Later, the hopes raised by the disappearance of Stalin (March 1953) make failure, as the failure testifies some to the conference of the Foreign Ministers, in Berlin, in 1954. Much more, while wanting to renegotiate the statute of Berlin, Nikita Khrouchtchev is far from alleviating the tensions. Key issues of the cold war If the Central Europe - where all the countries passed in the Soviet zone of influence between 1947 and 1948 - and Germany constitute the ground of the first confrontations of the cold war, this one extends in Asia with the come to power from the Communists in China (1949). Consequently, the East-West confrontation acquires a planetary dimension.
The invasion of South Korea by the troops North-Korean in 1950 is interpreted by the United States like a communist plot. However, China and the USSR by no means acted in concert on the matter . Moreover Beijing will decide to intervene only when the American advance appears to threaten its territory. First dramatic misadventure of the cold war, the business of Korea leads the United States to adopt a strategy of surrounding of the Soviet Union (damming up of Communism), on the one hand, by deploying a network of military bases, other, by concluding a series of peripheral alliances (NATO, OTASE). It is in the same spirit that Washington accelerates the rebuilding of Japan.
From the years 1950, the cold war moves in the Middle East, with the signature of the pact of Baghdad (1955). The American intervention in Lebanon, in 1958, pushes the USSR to support Syria. Moscow will bring its support to the Arab countries at the time of the Israeli-Arab war of 1967. Finally, the States of the Middle East will be divided between pro-Westerners and prosovietic under the effect of the cold war.
The strategists of the Pentagon then explain the Soviet expansion in the world using their “theory of the dominos”: the Soviet Union would seek to make one by one fall the countries allied from the United States, the fall of one of these countries involving a destabilization of the area likely in its turn to make rock new countries in the socialist camp. The United States answers it by the policy of “containment”: it is necessary to contain the socialist expansionism by intensifying the military intervention in the threatened countries. Thus, the United States is brought to intensify their military intervention, in particular in Laos, Kampuchea and finally in Viet-Nam. Triumph of Communism In 1920, whereas the troops of the Toukhatchevski general advanced on Warsaw, the Bolsheviks saw themselves soon in Berlin, second phase of the world revolution. Twenty-five years later, the dream took an option on reality: the Red Army is indeed in Berlin, occupying all space in the East, to the Kouriles islands. If the reconquest of this space does not involve a revolution procommunist, the military victory transforms the statute of the USSR radically: large triumphant victor of Potsdam, Stalin is in charge of the second world power. He then belongs to the USSR to capitalize the effects of his military prestige to draw some from solid political dividends.
The political triumph of Communism in 1945 free from an emotional dimension which roots in the feeling of the hello - born at the moment from the German capitulation with Stalingrad - and constantly is not revived with each new victorious offensive. With the Release, nobody can be unaware of that the heavy tribute paid by the Soviets is without common measurement with the British or American losses.
The most visible consequence, and most immediate, the Communist parties see flowing of new members, young people for the majority. The electoral translation of the communist dynamism is not made wait: the scores obtained place the Communist parties as inevitable actors of the political scene, in particular in the Eastern-European countries occupied by the Red Army and in three other countries, France, Italy and Finland. The defeat of Germany and Japan is also perceived like the defeat of totalitarianism. Communism can thus offer a new virginity that no suspicion is likely to sully.
Communism will be an actor except for whole in the general extension of the democratic phenomenon. The Communist parties, choked under the boot Nazi and the Italian occupation see an extraordinary progression of their forces as of the return to normal political conditions. One forgets the time of the Comintern - moreover dissolved in 1943 - more to remember but engagement of the USSR in the camp anti-nazi at the summer 1941, since it is necessary to drawing a feature on the pact germano-Soviet from August 1939.
Forts of an undeniable political influence, rich person of a moral capital intact and perceived like social actors impossible to circumvent, the Communists know that the report of the forces their is favorable. Also they will direct their efforts towards the seizure of power. The line of slope very whole is marked out by a confidence of Stalin with Tito: “This war does not resemble those of the past. Whoever occupies a territory imposes its social system on it.” The offensive, which will be the same one in the East and the West, is carried out under cover, purely formal, of new democracy. The first mechanism of the device is consisted the participation in the government, preferably in the police force and the army. The second spring of the offensive implies the mobilization of the masses on bottom of exaltation of the national union: put at the honor within the framework of the effort of war (“until the victory”), this one finds a new breath in the challenge of the rebuilding (the “battle of the production”). Lastly, by deploying a strategy of alliance with the Allies, the Communists make sure of the control, in fine, of the safety catch of the device. It is enough for them to play at the same time on patriotic fiber - a manner of alluring the nationalist right - and on social fiber while pushing with fusion with weakened socialist parties. It is not a chance so in all Eastern Europe the Communist parties are presented to the elections under the patriotic label of Face or National front. If fusions with the Socialists are without effect in Western Europe, the situation is quite different in the East, where they lead to the liquidation of the social democrat current. And one will not have a long time so that this strategy leads, in the countries under Soviet occupation, with the inversion of the democratic regimes which were born in 1945.
To have given up a time the framework of reference - the fight against capitalism for socialism - to the profit of the fight against Fascism, Moscow succeeded in operating a fundamental ideological inflection. By identifying Communism and democracy, the Muscovite strategists were confined of a bronze postulate whose first - and most durable - consequence was to mine the ground of the dispute, prohibiting that one wonders about the true face of the democracy in the USSR and in the communist camp.
Thanks to its decisive contribution with the allied victory, the USSR thus has the appearance of a super power, as well as the United States. As for the States which claimed, in the years 1930, with the statute of great power, three of them - Germany, Japan and Italy - know, with various titles, a “year zero”. Paradoxically, two other countries leave weakened by their victory: victory economically ruinous for the United Kingdom; victory in Pyrrhus for France, which knew the occupation, the plundering, and which must to the de Gaulle general, and with a very minority resistance, its place in the camp of the winners. But it is undoubtedly on the side of their colonial empires that London and Paris will take the measurement of their geopolitical lowering. In, as from 1945, the events of Sétif for France testify, of India and the Middle East for Great Britain.