Did Britain, France and the US consider the Soviet Union an enemy from inception, or was it a progressive thing, and why?

by extra_specticles

The cold war followed hot on the heels of WW2, but at what point did the western powers start to consider the Soviet Union as a potential threat/enemy? Was it just a continuation of relationship with the Russian Empire, or has this no bearing on the subsequent relationship with the USSR.

PhillipLlerenas

The Western Powers (not only France, Great Britain and the US...but also the German and Austrian-Hungarian Empires) were hostile to the Soviet Union from its inception. This is for a variety of reasons:

  1. Communism was not new. Marxist parties had been around for more than 40 years before the October Revolution in almost every single Western country and in every one of those countries they were seen by their governments as radicals stirring up the working class and the peasants and potential internal enemies. Since Marxism is also rabidly anti-monarchist you can predict that the old monarchies of Europe (the British, German and Austria-Hungarian Empires) were never too fond of it. Naturally then, any State founded on the principles of Marxism would be seen as an enemy.

  2. The Bolsheviks made no secret of their opposition to World War I and their view that it was an illegitimate war. As soon as they toon power they negotiated peace with the German Empire. This earned them the wrath of the Allies who now had to face the full wrath of the German Army which no longer had to fight on two fronts.

  3. The Soviet Union, perhaps unwisely, almost from the get go, publicly declared their support for revolutionary movements in those countries. It was more than verbal support: they created an entire organization (the Comintern) to ferment revolution in those countries, trained tens of thousands of German, French and British Communists and then financially supported them when they returned to their countries to ferment revolution.

So from the beginning the USSR was on a collision course with the countries you mention. In 1918 all of those countries in fact entered the Russian Civil War on the side of the anti-Bolshevik forces. The only time American soldiers ever "officially" fought Russian soldiers was in 1918-1919 during the American intervention in the Soviet Union.

Following the Bolshevik victory the Soviet Union was still viewed as an enemy state by most countries in the West. It really wasn't until Trotsky was removed from power in the late 20s and Stalin publicly repudiated "spreading Communism" and declared a policy of concentrating on building up the USSR ("Socialism in one country") that a tenuous rapprochement started with the West.

The rise of Fascism in the 1930s in Germany and Italy...both rabidly anti-Communist and anti-Soviet...helped push the USSR And the West slightly closer. In the mid-1930s the USSR started the "Popular Front" policy commanding Communist Parties worldwide to create alliances with other left wing movements to oppose Fascism.

All this was undone in 1939 when the USSR and Nazi Germany signed a non-aggression pact. Between 1939 and 1941 the relations between the USSR and the West became frosty and hostile again. When Germany invaded the USSR in 1941 an Alliance of necessity was created between the West and the Soviets that lasted til 1945.

You know the rest.

rocketsocks

Yes, the Soviet Union was widely opposed by the existing industrialized governments of the day, indeed it was effectively perceived as the Islamic State of its time.

From the mid 19th century through the early 20th century there was a rough agglomeration of Anarchist and Socialist/Communist movements which on the one hand had their saner adherents in the political sphere but on the other hand were responsible for numerous terrorist attacks throughout the industrialized world. Anarchist/Communists attacked and murdered powerful industrialists, they attacked civilians with bombs, they attacked government offices and officials.

In 1892 a Russian anarchist attempted to assassinate the chairman of the Carnegie Steel Company. In 1893 a bomb planted by anarchists exploded in the Liceu opera house in Barcelona killing dozens. Also in 1893 a small shrapnel bomb was thrown into the French house of parliament by an anarchist, injuring 20 members. In 1894 anarchists bombed a cafe in Paris, killing one and injuring 20. Also in 1894 they assassinated the president of France. In 1896 anarchists assassinated the prime minister of Spain. In 1900 Italy's King was assassinated by anarchists. In 1901 US President McKinley was assassinated by an anarchist of Polish-Russian descent. In 1906 the marriage of the King of Spain was marred by a bomb attack by anarchists that killed 25 and injured over 100. In 1919 numerous anarchist/communist bomb attacks hit 7 cities on the same day, targeting government officials and businessmen. In 1920 a bomb inside of a wagon went off in front of the offices of JP Morgan & Co. on Wall Street, killing 39 and injuring hundreds.

At the time of the late 19th century there was considerable overlap between anarchist and socialist/communist movements, all of which had as their primary enemies the established "bourgeois" power structure. Before the advent of modern widespread socialist democracies or authoritarian "communist" regimes the core of socialist/anarchist thought derived from the works of socialist theorizers (such as Marx) and concerned itself primarily with the overthrow of existing oppressive power structures, and not, yet, with the advent of replacement structures. And, indeed, there was considerable naive optimism in those days that simply eliminating oppressive regimes could naturally lead to the establishment of communist utopia, in many ways such "anarchists" are a more pure expression of Marxist ideology.

It should come as little surprise, then, that western powers chose to intervene in the Russian civil war of 1918 in opposition to anarchist/communist forces, perceiving them to be hostile to "capitalist" governments and institutions as well as intrinsically violent. The UK, Japan, the US, France, Italy and others actively fought against socialist/communist forces in the Russian civil war, though unsuccessfully. Though it's fair to say that concerns about the impact of the civil war on WWI were as important in regard to the intervention as opposition to Bolshevism. After the withdrawal of Allied forces from the civil war after 2 years of largely ineffective activity the western powers continued to back anti-communist forces in the civil war, though indirectly.

At the advent of the Soviet Union there was no love lost between them and the Western capitalist governments. The Soviets continued to call for communist revolutions internationally (meaning: the overthrow of currently ruling western governments) while at the same time many socialist/communist movements in western countries were targeted and oppressed. The history of anti-communist sentiment in the west during the Cold War is fairly well known but between WWI and WWII events were no less dramatic. As I mentioned above there were anti-capitalist bombings and assassinations, some of them, like the Wall Street bombing, on quite a large scale. This forms the background of the "Red Scare" of the 1910s which reached a peak in 1919-1920, where numerous bombings, anti-establishment riots, worker strikes and demonstrations, and reactionary counter-attacks, raids, and lynchings terrorized the US. It was at this time that socialist organizations were pushed outside the protections of civil society by the establishment. Hundreds of Soviet anarchists were forcefully deported. The New York State Assembly suspended the membership of 5 elected Socialist members. Many states passed (blatantly unconstitutional) laws banning communist/anarchist flags. There was even widespread fear of an attempt to overthrow the US government by Bolsheviks.

So it was not simply a matter of mutual distrust between governments but generally of hatred and fear between bitter ideological opponents, from the very beginning. Without the rise of Fascism as a common enemy the history of Western-Soviet relations would likely have been an unbroken period of mutual hatred.