United Kingdom - Soviet Policy
In the years immediately following the Bolshevik Revolution, the Soviet leadership assiduously pursued diplomatic relations with Britain, the archetypical "imperialist" power, as part of its efforts to win recognition as a legitimate regime. Relations with Britain’s closest ally, the USA, were fractious, while a Bolshevik government that had defied expectations (and hopes) by remaining firmly in power in Russia since 1917, pursued an aggressive campaign of espionage and subversion against the British Empire while insisting on being treated as a ‘respectable’ power.
After an inconclusive election on 6 December 1923, the British political mould was shattered by the election of the first Labour government. Relations with the Soviet Union were to prove Labour’s downfall. De jure recognition was one of the first acts of the government, as had been promised. MacDonald was well aware of Soviet shortcomings, and rejected the spread of Bolshevik ideas in the Labour movement—‘like trying to dance a Russian ballet in kilts’, he said, well aware of the need politically to distance his government from the excesses of communism. Conservatives and Liberals attacked the Labour government and damage its reputation by a campaign of press vilification and political dirty tricks (including making use of the forged Zinoviev Letter in October 1924 during the election campaign).
Both Britain and the US had spent the years since the 1917 revolution opposing the Bolshevik system and hoping it would not last. Just as it was impossible for the Soviets to forget Allied intervention in the Russian civil war after 1917, it was impossible for Britain and America to forget that Stalin had signed a pact with Hitler in August 1939. Nor could the British Government forget unremitting Soviet efforts to inspire revolt and revolution in the Empire, especially in the context of postwar revelations of ongoing espionage activities.
After World War II, the Soviet Union perceived Britain as an "imperialist power in decline," especially after Britain relinquished most of its colonies. Nevertheless, Britain remained an important power in Soviet eyes because of its nuclear forces, influential role as head of the British Commonwealth, and close ties with the United States.
By 1945, Churchill was well aware of the dangers that Yalta posed to British interests, to the future peace of Europe and the wider world. Above all, he needed hostilities to end quickly: the burden of fighting a long war, alone from 1939 to 1941, had crippled Britain financially and forced it into what J.M. Keynes called ‘Starvation Corner’. US support for and aid to Britain, and a major American commitment to European defence, would be essential. Churchill was frustrated by what he saw as Roosevelt’s lack of understanding of Britain’s global commitments, and of the threat perceived from Soviet dominance in Eastern Europe, but in the end his only weapon was persuasion.
In 1945 the UK, USA and USSR all thought they had won the war, individually as well as jointly, yet with the euphoria of hard-won victory came disappointment. The British, a weakened and exhausted power, sought to understand the Soviet Union in order to work with it. The Americans, a world superpower, sought to understand it in order to counter its ambitions.
Soviet policy was fundamentally hostile to Western liberal, democratic capitalist and imperialist conceptions. At the start of the Cold War, Clement Attlee’s calm, workmanlike attitude remained committed to preserving cordial Anglo-Soviet relations. Clement Attlee, voted by academics as the greatest twentieth century Prime Minister in a 2004 MORI poll, largely left the conduct of foreign affairs to his Foreign Secretary, the trade union leader Ernest Bevin, from 1945-51.
Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin, approached policy towards the Soviet Union with a much less rigid ideological approach than the US Government (which, indeed, mistrusted Britain’s ‘socialist administration’). There were to be deep Anglo-American divisions over Communist China. Stalin, however, disliked Britain’s ‘bourgeois liberalism’ much more than naked American capitalism.
Great Britain, as a goodwill gesture under the Labour Government, allowed Rolls Royce to sell the license to the Nene je engine to the Soviet Union in 1946. In the late 1940s the Nene was the most powerful jet engine of its day and the transfer of its technology to the US and USSR kick started their jet engine industries. The Nene in the hands of the Soviet Union made it imperative that American engines surpass the standard it had set. Because of the Nene's challenge to the American jet engine community, it became known as the "Needle engine." Although American military planners looked on the USSR as a possible enemy in the event of World War III as early as 1945, this threat did not seem immediate because of the perceived inferiority of Soviet technology. The Nene design in Soviet hands began to change that perception. In the Korean War, both the F-86 and the MiG-15 were powered by derivatives ofthe Rolls-Royce Nene.
In general, Soviet relations with Britain had never been as important a component of Soviet foreign policy toward Western Europe as have been relations with France (especially during the de Gaulle period) or with West Germany (especially during the Brandt period). Several reasons for Britain's lesser importance existed. Unlike West Germany, Britain was not subject to Soviet political pressures exerted through the instrument of a divided people.
Much smaller than its French counterpart, the British Communist Party exerted less influence in electoral politics. The British economy had also been less dependent than that of other West European states on Soviet and East European trade and energy resources.
In December 1984, shortly before Gorbachev became general secretary, he made his first visit to London. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher declared that he was a leader she could "do business with," an assessment that boosted Gorbachev's stature in the Soviet Union and abroad. This assessment was repeated upon Thatcher's visit to the Soviet Union in April 1987. Under Gorbachev's leadership, the Soviet Union renewed its attempts to persuade Britain and France to enter into strategic nuclear disarmament negotiations, which they resisted.
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