Ukraine, so Putin takes Europe back to the Cold War: a step back half a century

And so Vladimir Putin, with the help of some mistakes of the West since the 90s, has brought Europe back to the Cold War. A leap back about half a century. It is a long story that began much earlier, in 1941.

Everyone knows that Putin's goal is to review the massif from a strategic and geographical point of view collapse of Russia's geopolitical position in Europe after the end of the Soviet empire in 1989-1991. But how was that position achieved? 

Putin's requests 

History inspires all Russian moves. Last December 17, Moscow presented a draft treaty to the Atlantic Alliance and above all to the United States. There are two main requests. Ukraine and other states that gained independence in the post-Soviet era had to commit to neutrality, not to ask for NATO membership and the latter not to grant it. NATO then had to return in some way to the reality of 1997, before the new accessions (initiated by Poland and Hungary and by the then Czechoslovakia in 1999) undertaking to do not maintain ready-to-use departments and missile installations and more in the countries that joined the Alliance after 97, i.e. throughout central-eastern Europe. Washington and the allies were willing to negotiate, but anticipating that various requests, starting from the two plants mentioned here, were totally unacceptable. In January, Moscow added that Sweden too –  Sweden always independent and neutral for two centuries – he had to commit himself to being born and so Finland, semi-autonomous from Moscow from the second post-war period to 1991, and since then fully sovereign, on pain of "serious consequences" for the European balance. More than unacceptable.

What history teaches us

Stalin was attacked by Hitler on 22 June 1941 after 20 months of alliance (Molotov-Ribbentrop non-aggression pact of 25 August 1939) and economic collaboration between Moscow and Berlin. It was in reality a pact of aggression which, in its secret clauses, allowed Germany to attack Poland from the West and to Russia from the East, which happened almost simultaneously in September 39. There was the green light for the USSR to also recover the former tsarist territories, independent after the First World War, of the three Baltic countries, and part of Finland under Russian control from 1809 to 1918.

It is useful to remember that for Russia, and so it is taught in Russian schools, the Second World War began in June 1941 and not in September 1939, as history textbooks around the world say. If it is 1939, in fact, it is necessary to recognize that together with the Nazis, the Stalinists unleashed the war. A first Soviet attempt to retake tsarist Poland had failed in 1920. 

The vision of Moscow

An extensive analysis of the former Soviet archives conducted, with American, European and Russian historians by the Wilson Center in Washington (Cold War International History Project) has allowed significant progress in the reconstruction of how Moscow saw the future, of Europe in particular, starting from at least 1941. 

They emerge or are confirmed three points, in extreme synthesis, of the vision since then. A crucial date. And a firm belief. And it is under the banner of all this that Putin still moves today. 

The first point is the intangibility of the borders reached in '41, after the military attacks of 39-40 made possible by the Molotov-Ribbentrop treaty. When British Foreign Minister Anthony Eden went to Moscow in early December 1941, a few hours after Pearl Harbour, he found Stalin insensitive to the fact that German troops were now in sight of the Kremlin and determined to fix, together with the intangibility of the Russian borders , the fate of European nations, defeated and demilitarized like Germany, or liberated from the Nazi yoke. A view from Moscow to the English Channel. 

The second point, which had already emerged in Moscow and which will be better defined later, envisaged that they should remain after the war was over only two military powers in Europe: one on land, the USSR, and one on the sea, Great Britain. France itself was never to return to the military preeminence enjoyed at times between the 800s and 900s. It was the concept of spheres of influence, very dear to Moscow, and the attempt to make the whole of continental Europe, in various ways and degrees, the sphere of influence of the USSR, far beyond the sanitary and protective cordon of vassal states on its western borders.

The third point, a corollary of the second if you like, was “to prevent the formation in Europe of any power or combination of powers with mighty armies” The quotation comes from a memorandum prepared in 1944 for Foreign Minister Molotov and for Stalin by Ivan M. Maisky, a highly authoritative former ambassador to London, on future arrangements in Europe and relations with the United Kingdom and, above all, the United States. Two similar memoirs, one by the then very young (35 years old) ambassador to Washington, Andrei Gromyko, the other by the former foreign minister of the 30s, Maxim Litvinov, should be read together. The three documents give a very useful picture of the Soviet geopolitical thought while victory was now near. Litvinov adds a point, after having said that the USA is far away, two great oceans separate them, and are interested in an inevitable economic-financial dominance, but not a strategic one. However, they remain capable, observes Mainsky, “…of creating many serious problems for us…by stimulating them the resurrection of Germany and Japan…and building an anti-Soviet bloc in Europe based on countries like France…” Just as it would soon end. 

Italy was "irrelevant" for Maisky. And for Stalin the north-eastern part had to be cut off to be ceded to Tito's Yugoslavia. Maisky Litvinov and Gromyko were on "open" positions, to continue Allied collaboration after the war, above all on economic issues; then there were the "hard guys".

The Marshall Plan

The date that materialized Maisky's fears about the United States and that changed everything, much more than the Truman Doctrine of March 12, 47 (US aid, in an anti-USSR key, to democracies against internal guerrilla warfare and external pressure) is that of June 5, always of 47, when it was announced the Marshall Plan, in theory also open to the East. The United States, which had largely demobilized, returned to Europe. Donald Mclean, the Soviet spy then First Secretary of the British Embassy in Washington, informed Stalin that the real target was a rebirth of Europe not at all desired by the USSR but vital for Washington, to stop Moscow's ambitions on the entire continent. 

Molotov attended the beginning of the organizational meeting of the Plan in Paris in early July, but left early with a very polemical speech. From Moscow's point of view, the Plan would have blown up the economy of the buffer states of the East, already oriented by Moscow towards the USSR by various bilateral treaties. 

The Soviet no was “a declaration of war of the Soviet Union on the pressing issue of control of Europe”, said Walter Bedell Smith, US ambassador in Moscow. And Moscow saw it all as the complete American opposite. It remains for the Europeans to judge which fate was better, or less worse.

Finally, the firm Soviet conviction: the United States does not belong to Europe, and therefore cannot claim to determine its destiny. That of Atlantic community (formula launched in New York by the Wilsonian journalist and political scientist Walter Lippmann, back in 1917), is a "fantastic and unrealistic, impossible to treat seriously" concept Maisky wrote in 44. And instead it worked. 

The goals of the Kremlin

Still recently, by attacking the presence of NATO (American) anti-missile bases less than 1000 kilometers from Moscow, while Russia has nothing less than 1000 kilometers from Washington, Putin made up for America's estrangement from Europe. Like 80 years ago the goal is break the Europe-America nexus. The alternative, who knows if Moscow is considering it, is true German rearmament in tandem with France and the other European partners, something that Moscow would do its utmost to nip in the bud. 

The Western mistake was, on the part of Bill Clinton and Bush jr. above all, that of humiliate Moscow too much with the excessive, perhaps, Nato advance towards the East. But in many respects Putin speaks as if the USSR still existed. It acts like he's a direct line to that season 80 years ago. And NATO and the EU should be opposed as Moscow did in 49 or 57. For this reason the moribund NATO, devoid of goals and of a future it was said after 91, is reborn to new life obtaining a gerovital which ensures at least a decade of guaranteed and honored existence. Who says in these hours that it's useless? We would have done without it, after so many years, because we would do without a reincarnation of the USSR.