Soviet-German Relations
In the 1980s, for many on the left in Germany, Moscow was not the enemy. Washington was: After all, many terrible wars — for example, in Vietnam and Latin America — had been waged by the United States. Less seemed to be known about the Soviet Union. Except that the Red Army had liberated Auschwitz. In any case, there were very different perceptions of aggressive behavior, depending on whether it came from the east or the west.
Since the end of World War II and the establishment of Soviet hegemony over Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union had five goals in regard to Western Europe: preventing the rearming and nuclearization of the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany); preventing the political, economic, and military integration of Western Europe; obtaining West European endorsement of the territorial status quo in Europe; encouraging anti-Americanism and troubled relations with the United States; and fostering neutralism, nuclear disarmament, and the creation of nuclear weapons free zones through the encouragement of peace groups and leftist movements.
Social Democratic Party (SPD) legend Egon Bahr is considered the architect of Chancellor Willy Brand's "Ostpolitik", the detente policy that resulted in treaties with the Soviet Union, Poland, and the communist East Germany (GDR). As early as 1963, Bahr advocated "change through rapprochement," which outraged many in the still young Federal Republic of Germany only two years after the construction of the Berlin Wall and in the midst of the Cold War. But the SPD strategist believed that the hardened fronts could not be dissolved by even more pressure and counterpressure.
The policy was based on recognizing the status quo and the assumption that economic openness would lead to political and social openings, as well. For Egon Bahr, successful diplomacy was the sober balancing of interests. "International politics is never about democracy or human rights," he once told schoolchildren. "It is about the interests of states. Remember that, no matter what they tell you in history class."
On 03 March 1918, Soviet government officials signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, relinquishing Poland, the Baltic lands, Finland, and Ukraine to German control and giving up a portion of the Caucasus region to Turkey. With the new border dangerously close to Petrograd, the government was soon transferred to Moscow. An enormous part of the population and resources of the Russian Empire was lost by this treaty, but Lenin understood that no alternative could ensure the survival of the fledgling Soviet state.
Soon after buying peace with Germany, the Soviet state found itself under attack from other quarters. Desiring to defeat Germany in any way possible, Britain, France, and the United States landed troops in Russia and provided logistical support to the Whites, whom the Allies trusted to resume Russia's struggle against Germany after overthrowing the Communist regime.
Blocking Soviet desires were lingering suspicions of communism on the part of the Western powers and concern over the foreign debts incurred by the tsarist government that the Soviet government had unilaterally canceled. In April 1922, the Soviet commissar of foreign affairs, Georgii Chicherin, circumvented these difficulties by achieving an understanding with Germany, the other pariah state of Europe, at Rapallo, Italy. In the Treaty of Rapallo, Germany and Russia agreed on mutual recognition, cancellation of debt claims, normalization of trade relations, and secret cooperation in military development. After concluding the treaty, the Soviet Union soon obtained diplomatic recognition from other major powers, beginning with Britain in February 1924.
To aid the triumph of communism, Stalin resolved to weaken the moderate social democrats of Europe, the communists' rivals for working-class support. Conversely, the Comintern ordered the Communist Party of Germany to aid the anti-Soviet National Socialist German Workers' Party (the Nazi Party) in its bid for power in the hopes that a Nazi regime would exacerbate social tensions and produce conditions that would lead to a communist revolution in Germany. Stalin thus shares responsibility for Hitler's rise to power in 1933 and its tragic consequences for the Soviet Union and the rest of the world.
The dynamics of Soviet foreign relations changed drastically after Stalin recognized the danger posed by Nazi Germany. From 1934 through 1937, the Soviet Union tried to restrain German militarism by building coalitions hostile to fascism. In the international communist movement, the Comintern adopted the popular front policy of cooperation with socialists and liberals against fascism, thus reversing its line of the early 1930s. In 1934 the Soviet Union joined the League of Nations, where Maksim M. Litvinov, the commissar of foreign affairs, advocated disarmament and collective security against fascist aggression. In 1935 the Soviet Union concluded defensive military alliances with France and Czechoslovakia, and from 1936 to 1939 it gave assistance to antifascists in the Spanish Civil War. The menace of fascist militarism to the Soviet Union increased when Germany and Japan (itself a threat to Soviet Far Eastern territory in the 1930s) signed the Anti-Comintern Pact in 1936.
Convinced now that the West would not fight Hitler, Stalin decided to come to an understanding with Germany. Signaling a shift in foreign policy, Viacheslav Molotov, Stalin's loyal assistant, replaced Litvinov (who was Jewish) as commissar of foreign affairs in May 1939. Hitler, who had decided to attack Poland despite the guarantees of Britain and France to defend that country, soon responded to the changed Soviet stance. While Britain and France dilatorily attempted to induce the Soviet Union to join them in pledging to protect Poland, the Soviet Union and Germany engaged in intensive negotiations. The product of the talks between the former ideological foes — the Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Pact of August 23, 1939 — shocked the world.
Stalin tried to avert war with Germany by concluding the Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Pact with Adolf Hitler in 1939, but in 1941 Germany invaded the Soviet Union. The Red Army stopped the Nazi offensive at the Battle of Stalingrad in 1943 and then overran much of eastern Europe before Germany surrendered in 1945. Although severely ravaged in the war, the Soviet Union emerged from the conflict as one of the world's great powers.
The Soviet Union compelled Soviet-occupied Eastern Europe to supply machinery and raw materials. Germany and former Nazi satellites (including Finland) made reparations to the Soviet Union. The Soviet people bore much of the cost of rebuilding because the reconstruction program emphasized heavy industry while neglecting agriculture and consumer goods.
At the Potsdam Conference ofJuly-August 1945, the Allied Powers confirmed their decision to divide Germany and the city of Berlin into zones of occupation (with the eastern sectors placed under Soviet administration) until such time as the Allies would permit Germany to establish a central government. Disagreements between the Soviet Union and the Western Allies soon arose over their respective occupation policies and the matter of reparations. Following the Berlin blockade, the West and the Soviet Union divided Germany into two countries, one oriented to the West, the other to the East.
A recurrent theme in Soviet propaganda concerning West Germany has been the supposed resurgence of revanchism and militarism, indicating to some degree real Soviet fears of a rearmed and nuclearized West Germany. The Soviet Union strongly opposed the creation of multilateral nuclear forces in Europe in the 1960s and demanded that West Germany sign the Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons, which the Soviet Union had signed in July 1968.
After Willy Brandt of the Social Democratic Party was elected chancellor in October 1969, he implemented a detente, termed Ostpolitik (literally, Eastern policy), with the Soviet Union. West Germany signed the nonproliferation treaty in November 1969. In August 1970, the Soviet Union and West Germany signed a treaty calling for the peaceful settiement of disputes, with West Germany agreeing to respect the territorial integrity of the states of Europe and the validity of the Oder-Neisse line dividing East Germany from Poland. The provisions of this bilateral treaty became multilateral with the signing of the Final Act of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (Helsinki Accords) in 1975, in which the Western signatories, including the United States, recognized the de facto hegemony of the Soviet Union over Eastern Europe and the existing territorial boundaries of the European states. The Helsinki Accords bound the signatories to respect basic principles of human rights.
Though it was initially heavily opposed by conservatives, Ostpolitik achieved a great deal and was later pursued by Brandt's successors Helmut Schmidt and Helmut Kohl. But when, in the early 1980s, Chancellor Schmidt stood behind NATO's Double-Track Decision, an offer of further mutual arms control negotiations with the Warsaw Pact while at the same time deploying more medium-range nuclear weapons in Western Europe, he lost the support of his Social Democratic Party.
In the early 1980s, the Soviet Union began a harsh propaganda campaign accusing West Germany of revanchism and militarism because of West German initiation and support of NATO efforts to counter the Soviet deployment of SS-20s targeted on Western Europe. The peace movement, which at the time was strong and particularly popular among young people in West Germany, put up a major fight against the decision. Protests culminated in the slogan "Raus aus der NATO, rein ins Vergnügen," which can loosely be translated as "Out of NATO, into fun." There was much less noise about the potential threat posed by Moscow.
Gorbachev remained cool toward West Germany because of its role in fostering a NATO response to SS-20 deployments and delayed scheduling his first visit until June 1989. This visit was very successful in emphasizing Gorbachev's message of the "common European home" and the peaceful intentions of the Soviet Union regarding Western Europe.
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