USSR-USA Relations
On December 6, 1917, the US Government broke off diplomatic relations with Russia, shortly after the Bolshevik Party seized power from the Tsarist regime after the “October Revolution.” President Woodrow Wilson decided to withhold recognition at that time because the new Bolshevik government had refused to honor prior debts to the United States incurred by the Tsarist government, ignored pre-existing treaty agreements with other nations, and seized American property in Russia following the October Revolution. The Bolsheviks had also concluded a separate peace with Germany at Brest-Litovsk in March 1918, ending Russian involvement in the Great War.
Winston Churchill spoke about trying to 'strangle the Bolshevik baby in its cradle'. After the signing of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk on March 3, 1918, Japanese and Allied forces, including US troops, occupied parts of Northern Russia, the Ukraine, and Siberia to protect vital areas from falling into the hands of the Germans, as well as to provide assistance to the White Russians. When the Great War ended, however, Allied leaders found it difficult to justify leaving tens of thousands of war-weary troops in Russia.
William Christian Bullitt, an attaché to the U.S. delegation to the Paris Peace Conference, visited Soviet Russia on a clandestine mission. On March 6, 1919, the Bullitt Mission (comprised of Bullitt, journalist Lincoln Steffens, and a US Army intelligence officer) crossed the Russian border. Although Secretary of State Robert Lansing only authorized him to report on political and economic conditions, Bullitt’s actual objective was far more ambitious: to broker an agreement between the Allies and Russia’s Bolshevik government that would end the Russian Civil War, lift the Allied blockade of that country, and allow the Allies to withdraw the troops dispatched to Russia in 1918. Bullitt eventually received a proposal from the Bolshevik government that would have realized these goals, but the Allied leaders at the Paris Peace Conference were unwilling to accept the offer.
Despite extensive commercial links between the United States and the Soviet Union throughout the 1920s, Wilson’s successors upheld his policy of not recognizing the Soviet Union.
Almost immediately upon taking office, however, President Roosevelt moved to establish formal diplomatic relations between the United States and the Soviet Union. His reasons for doing so were complex, but the decision was based on several primary factors. Roosevelt hoped that recognition of the Soviet Union would serve US strategic interests by limiting Japanese expansionism in Asia, and he believed that full diplomatic recognition would serve American commercial interests in the Soviet Union, a matter of some concern to an Administration grappling with the effects of the Great Depression. Finally, the United States was the only major power that continued to withhold official diplomatic recognition from the Soviet Union.
Roosevelt managed to secure guarantees that the Soviet Government would refrain from interfering in American domestic affairs (i.e. aiding the American Communist Party), and would grant certain religious and legal rights for U.S. citizens living in the Soviet Union. On November 16, 1933, President Franklin Roosevelt ended almost 16 years of American non-recognition of the Soviet Union following a series of negotiations in Washington, DC with the Soviet Commissar for Foreign Affairs, Maxim Litvinov.
On November 16, 1933, in the document pertaining to the establishment of relations between the two countries Commissar Litvinoff gave a specific pledge that there would be no interference by organizations in the Soviet Union in the internal affairs of the United States. The next day in a press interview Litvinoff specifically stated that the pledge did not relate to the Communist Party of the United States as “The Communist Party of Russia does not concern America and the Communist Party of the United States does not concern Russia”.
Unfortunately, the cooperative spirit embodied in the Roosevelt-Litvinov agreements proved to be short-lived. Shortly after his arrival in Moscow in December 1933, Bullitt became disillusioned with the Soviets as an agreement on the issue of debt repayment failed to materialize. Moreover, evidence emerged that the Soviet Government had violated its pledge not to interfere in American domestic affairs. Finally, the killing of the Leningrad Communist Party boss, Sergey Kirov, launched the first of the “Great Purges” that led to the death or imprisonment of millions of Soviet citizens as the Stalinist regime liquidated any potential critics of the government. The wide scope and public nature of the purges horrified both American diplomatic personnel stationed in the Soviet Union, and the world at large.
On August 25, 1935, as a result of inflammatory speeches made in Moscow by American Communists at the Seventh Congress of the Communist International this government made sharp protest to the Soviet Government charging violation of the Litvinoff pledge.4 In declining to receive the protest Acting People’s Commissar Krestinsky wrote: “It is certainly not new to the Government of the United States that the Government of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics can not take upon itself and has not taken upon itself obligations of any kind with regard to the Communist International.”
In the hope of improving relations, President Roosevelt dispatched businessman Joseph E. Davies to Moscow as Bullitt’s replacement in 1936. While Davies managed to reestablish amicable relations with the Soviet leadership, his dismissive attitude concerning the purges alienated other American diplomats. Moreover, Davies faced unprecedented new challenges as a result of the worsening political situation in Europe.
US-Soviet relations reached their nadir in August 1939, when the Soviets signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact with Nazi Germany after the British and French rejected Soviet offers to establish a military alliance against Germany. Not until the German invasion of Soviet Union began in June 1941 would the United States and the Soviet Union once again find a way to make common cause on any meaningful issue.
After the Great Patriotic War, few in the ruling circles of the American or European bourgeoisie could be confident that the economic boom that followed the war would last long beyond the immediate period of post-war reconstruction. While the West faced the prospects of long term economic stagnation, there seemed no limits to the planned economic growth and transformation of the USSR and the Eastern bloc. Indeed, even as the late as the early 1960s Khrushchev could claim, with all credibility for many Western observers, that having established a modern economic base of heavy industry under Stalin, Russia was now in a position to shift its emphasis to the expansion of the consumer goods sector so that it could outstrip the living standards in the USA within ten years!
A central concern of Soviet foreign and military policy since World War II, relations with the United States have gone through cycles of "cold" and "warm" periods. A crucial factor in Soviet-American relations has been the mutual nuclear threat. A high point in Soviet-American relations occurred when the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks ( SALT) resulted in the May 1972 signing of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and the Interim Agreement on the limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms. This event marked the beginning of the beginning of Soviet-American detente.
The Soviet Union and the United States differed over the meaning of the detente relationship. In the West, detente has usually been considered to mean a nonhostile, even harmonious, relationship. The Soviet Union, however, has preferred the terms mirnoe sosushchestvovanie (peaceful coexistence) or razriadka napriazhennosti (a discharging or easing of tensions) instead of the term detente. Brezhnev explained the Soviet perception of the detente relationship at the 1976 and 1981 CPSU party congresses, asserting that detente did not mean that the Soviet Union would cease to support Third World national liberation movements or the world class struggle. In the Soviet view, detente with the West was compatible with sponsoring Cuban intervention in the Third World. However, Soviet-sponsored intervention in the Third World met with growing protest from the United States. The detente relationship conclusively ended with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979.
Following the Soviet invasion, the United States instigated a number of trade sanctions against the Soviet Union, including an embargo on grain shipments to the Soviet Union, the cancellation of American participation in the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow, and the shelving of efforts to win ratification in the United States Senate of the Second SALT agreement. In April 1981, under the new administration of President Ronald Reagan, the United States announced the lifting of the grain embargo but also moved to tighten procedures concerning the export of strategically sensitive technology to the Soviet Union. As part of this effort to limit such exports, the Reagan administration in 1982 unsuccessfully attempted to convince West European governments to block the sale of American-developed technology for the construction of Soviet natural gas pipelines. A freeze on cultural exchanges that had developed after the invasion of Afghanistan continued during Reagan's first term in office.
The Soviet Union began deploying SS-20 intermediate-range ballistic missiles equipped with nuclear warheads along its western and southeastern borders in 1977. The United States and its NATO allies regarded this deployment as destabilizing to the nuclear balance in Europe, and in December 1979 NATO decided to counter with the deployment of Pershing II intermediate-range ballistic missiles and ground-launched cruise missiles (GLCMs), both equipped with nuclear warheads. In November 1981, Reagan proposed the "zero option" as the solution to the nuclear imbalance in Western Europe. Basically, the zero option included the elimination of SS-20s and other missiles targeted against Western Europe and the nondeployment of countervailing NATO weapons. The Soviet Union refused to accept the zero option and insisted that French and British nuclear forces be included in the reckoning of the balance of nuclear forces in Europe and in any agreement on reductions of nuclear forces.
Feeling forced to match the Soviet nuclear threat, NATO began countervailing deployments in late 1983. As the deployment date neared, the Soviet Union threatened to deploy additional nuclear weapons targeted on Western Europe and weapons that would place the territory of the United States under threat. Also, Soviet negotiators walked out of talks on the reduction of intermediate-range nuclear forces (the INF talks) and strategic forces (the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks, or START). The refusal to come back to the negotiating table continued after General Secretary Iurii V. Andropov's death and Konstantin V. Chernenko's selection as general secretary in early 1984. The Soviet Union finally agreed to resume the INF and START talks around the time of Chernenko's death and Gorbachev's selection as general secretary in March 1985. Progress was then made on the revamped INF talks. In 1987 the Soviet Union acceded to the zero option, which involved the elimination of NATO Pershing IIs and GLCMs targeted against the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe and Soviet missiles targeted against Western Europe and Asia. The Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF Treaty) was signed in Washington on December 8, 1987, during a summit meeting between Reagan and Gorbachev.
Between November 1982 and March 1985, the Soviet Union had four general secretaries (Brezhnev, Andropov, Chernenko, and Gorbachev) while the United States had a single chief executive. The changes of leadership in the Soviet Union had a noticeable effect on Soviet-American relations. Until Gorbachev assumed power and partially consolidated his rule by 1986, the frequent changes in Soviet leadership resulted in the continuation of policies formulated during the late Brezhnev period. Soviet foreign policy toward the United States during this period increasingly took the form of vituperative propaganda attacks on Reagan, who, it was alleged, was personally responsible for derailing Soviet-American detente and increasing the danger of nuclear war.
The low point in Soviet-American relations occurred in March 1983, when Reagan described the Soviet Union as an "evil empire . . . the focus of evil in the modern world," and Soviet spokesmen responded by attacking Reagan's "bellicose, lunatic anticommunism." The Soviet shoot-down of a civilian South Korean airliner in September 1983 near the Soviet island of Sakhalin shocked world public opinion and militated against any improvement in Soviet-American relations at that time. In 1983 the United States was increasingly concerned about Soviet activities in Grenada, finally directing the military operation in October 1983 that was denounced by the Soviet Union. In November 1983, the Soviet negotiators walked out of the arms control talks.
In August 1985, Gorbachev declared a unilateral moratorium on nuclear testing. The United States, in the midst of a nuclear warhead modernization program, refused to go along with the moratorium. Some Western analysts viewed Gorbachev's unilateral moratorium as a Soviet attempt to delay weapons modernization in the United States and, in the event that the United States refused to abide by the moratorium even unofficially, an attempt to depict the United States and the Reagan administration as militaristic. The Soviet Union ended the moratorium with an underground nuclear test in February 1987.
A general improvement in Soviet-American relations began soon after Gorbachev was selected general secretary in March 1985. Annual summit meetings between Reagan and Gorbachev were held at Geneva (November 1985); Reykjavik (October 1986); Washington (December 1987); and Moscow (May 1988). At the Geneva summit meeting between Reagan and Gorbachev in November 1985, a new general cultural agreement was signed that involved exchanges of performing arts groups and fine arts and educational exhibits. At the Reykjavik summit, some progress was made in strategic arms reductions negotiations, although no agreements were reached. At the Washington summit, the INF Treaty was signed. At the Moscow summit, an agreement increasing the level and type of educational exchanges was signed. Although no major arms control agreements were signed during the Moscow summit, the summit was significant because it demonstrated a commitment by both sides to a renewed detente.
During the mid- to late 1980s, the Soviet Union also stepped up media contacts. Soviet spokesmen appeared regularly on United States television, United States journalists were allowed unprecedented access to report on everyday life in the Soviet Union, and video conferences (termed "tele-bridges") were held between various United States groups and selected Soviet citizens.
Mirror-Imaging
One of the great flaws of Western analysis of the Soviet army was the ever-present tendency to 'mirror image,' to assume that the Soviets do or perceive things in the same way as Western armies. This applied especially to Soviet weapons strength and policy. It was incorrect simply to perceive Soviet equipment policy as a mirror of a Western model. Nowhere was this tendency to "mirror image" the Western approach less valid than in the Soviet weapon-development process. Even the-basic-concept of the "development process" was different.
Production in the Soviet Union was driven by cultural and economic forces just as it was in the West; the fundamental difference is that the two worlds had different realities, and the Soviet production processes were optimized to their economic reality, not to those of the West. What Westerners saw when they looked at a piece of Soviet equipment was not incompetence and lack of skill: when was interpreted as such Westerners were suffering from industrial culture shock.
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