ARMED TRUCE
Hugh Thomas
New York: Atheneum, 1987
667 pp., $27.50
Since the publication in 1961 of his classic work, The Spanish Civil War, Hugh Thomas has had a well-deserved reputation as one of the great historians of our day. Few have demonstrated his ability to handle large, complicated, controversial subjects, or to write about them in so lucid and effective a way for a general audience.
In Armed Truce, Thomas has produced a work that will add to an already great reputation. In it he analyzes the starting point of the great crisis of our time - the beginning of the Cold War and the nuclear arms race. This is the first volume of what is to be a series on the Cold War, a series that promises to be a decisive contribution to historiography. Although Armed Truce contains little that is not known to the Cold War specialist, Thomas has performed an important service for the general reader by pulling together many threads and weaving them into a uniquely comprehensive account. Many books, some of them splendid, have been written on the policy of this or that government during this period, or on particular events in a single theater of the Cold War - such as Eastern Europe, Germany, or the Greek Civil War. There have been a number of valuable interpretive works, notably by John Lewis Gaddis, Adam Ulam, Vojtech Mastny, and Victor H. Rothwell. But no one before Thomas has produced a coherent, up-to-date, detailed history of the origins of the Cold War.
The Soviet factor
Thomas' account is tightly focused on the period between the end of the war in Europe in May 1945 and the turning point of the first great postwar crisis over Iran in March 1946. It also acknowledges the central role of Soviet policy: Armed Truce begins with a lengthy examination of communism and the Soviet system - which, in 1945, were still approximately identical - and the personalities who ran the Soviet state. (That, to be sure, is a rational starting point for any student of the Cold War, but it is amazing how many people have chosen to ignore it.)
Thomas leaves little doubt that the doctrine of Marxism-Leninism and Stalin's "terrorist, dogmatic despotism" ultimately caused the Cold War. Nevertheless, in a somewhat contradictory manner, he occasionally stresses - and almost certainly overstresses - the heritage of traditional Russian imperialism as an additional factor that created the drive for power and expansion in the Soviet state in the 1940s. In any case, Thomas has little use for the idea that the antics of the Soviet regime from the 1920s until 1953 were the result merely of "Stalinism" or the angularities of Joseph Stalin's peculiarly unpleasant personality.
Thomas shows that despite the difficulties created by Stalin's murderous suspiciousness, the Soviet state was well-fitted for a policy of aggression, possessing an enormous apparatus for gathering intelligence and exerting convert influence through networks of communist parties and intelligence agents. Nor, as Thomas shows, were communists and other direct agents the only ones in favor of the Soviets during and immediately after World War II; non-communists, even anticommunists, made their contribution to Soviet expansion. For example, in 1943
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