Armed Truce [antikvár]

Preface This volume, the first of several about the Cold War, is a picture of the world in early 1946 insofar as it was a battleground in an undeclared war between the two new great powers, the Soviet Union and the United States, and their allies. The conflict was still one of metaphor so far as the great powers were concerned but was nonetheless violent at the level of the political life of small states. The book is a narrative for only a few chapters at the end. The rest of the volume sets the scene at the beginning of a quarrel of large dimensions which is in many respects still with us and whose end cannot be foreseen. A characteristic of the book deliberately emphasised by me is the role of individuals. Marx made a major contribution to thought when, in the 1840s and 1850s, he worked out a scheme of history based on technology rather than personality. But after his day, the development of technology under the control of governments has placed vast power, for good or evil, in the hands of those who lead their nations. Hence the men - there were no women of the slightest political consequence at that time - who led the world in 1945 and 1946 require special attention. Book I in this volume discusses the view of the world in 1946 of the Soviet Union under Stalin: a nation which aspired to world influence if not hegemony. For this section, I seek to interrelate the joint importance of Russian imperialism and Marxist-Leninist ideology and how each gave support to one another. Given what I explain above, I have naturally laid special attention on the personality of Stalin. In Book II, I discuss the character of the United States and her leaders: in particular the new President Truman and his recently dead predecessor, Franklin D. Roosevelt. I devote a long chapter to the British under Clement Attlee and the Foreign Office under Ernest Bevin. I have some pages on the most prominent Commonwealth leader, Mackenzie King, the prime minister of Canada. In Book III, I consider, briefly, the different nations about which the world was quarreling or about whose future there was a question mark. In this section, I include not only Poland and East Europe, already forcibly gathered under the Soviet umbrella, but the great nations of Western Europe including France, Italy, Germany, Spain and Austria whose future in 1946, despite two thousand years of civilisation, was not altogether easy to predict. I also discuss the East as it began to slip out of the direction exercised by the West for a century or more. Then, in Book IV, I consider the poUtical and military significance of the atom bomb, used in 1945 for the first time. Finally, in Book V, I discuss how the Soviet Union and the West