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In the press the basic theses of Leninism on the origin and character of wars under imperialism are explained in insufficient depth, the designs of the Americo-English imperialists who are conducting an aggressive policy of unleashing a new war are poorly unmasked, and the profound contradictions in the camp of the imperialist aggressors are not properly reflected.

The CC VKP(b) resolves:

1. To oblige the editorial staff of the central and local newspapers, and also the staff of social-political and literaryartistic journals, to eliminate the shortcomings in the propaganda of the struggle for peace noted in this resolution. 2. To require the editorial staff of newspapers and journals to improve the coverage of the struggle for peace, bearing in mind the necessity of raising the political and labor activity of the masses and their vigilance against the intrigues of imperialist aggressors, and of mobilizing the workers to selfless labor, overfulfilment of production plans, and improvement of work in all spheres of economic and cultural construction. In the press it is necessary to unmask the criminal machinations of the war hawks - their mendacious, ostensible peacefulness in word, their aggressive measures and plans in deed. The successes of the movement of supporters of peace and the growth of the forces of the international camp of peace, democracy and socialism should be fully reflected in the pages of newspapers and journals. It is necessary to explain that the Soviet peace-loving foreign policy relies on the might of the Soviet state and, that reinforcing its might with their creative labor, Soviet people are strengthening the security of the people of our country and the cause of peace in the whole world, and that a new world war, if it is unleashed by the imperialist aggressors, can lead only to the collapse of the capitalist system and its replacement by the socialist system.

3. To instruct the Department of Propaganda and Agitation of the CC VKP(b) and the Foreign Policy Commission of the CC VKP (b) to carry out the following measures:

to conduct a meeting of editors of central newspapers and of social-political and literary-artistic journals, to discuss measures for eliminating shortcomings in the coverage in

the press of the struggle for peace.

b) jointly with the All-Union Society for the Dissemination of Political and Scientific Knowledge to organize the reading of lectures explaining the Marxist-Leninist teaching on the character, sources and causes of wars, on the significance of an organized front of peace in the struggle for the preservation of peace against those who seek to ignite a new war, on the sharpening of the general crisis of capitalism in the post-war period, and on other subjects.

4. To oblige Gospolitzdat in the next one to two months to publish in mass editions works of Lenin and Stalin devoted to Marxist-Leninist teachings on wars, on the defence of the fatherland and on the struggle for peace.

[Source: RTsKhIDNI, Fond 17, op.132, d.507, ll.18-19; obtained and translated by Nigel Gould-Davies.]

Nigel Gould-Davies is Lecturer in Politics at Hertford
College, Oxford University. He is completing a study on
"The Logic of Ideational Agency: the Soviet Experience in
World Politics".

NEW CWIHP FELLOWS

THE COLD WAR INTERNATIONAL HISTORY PROJECT IS PLEASED TO ANNOUNCE THE AWARD OF CWIHP
FELLOWSHIPS FOR THE 1998-1999 ACADEMIC YEAR TO

MRS. LI DANHUI (doctoral candidate, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing), "Sino-Soviet Relations and the Vietnam War"

MR. KRZYSZTOF PERSAK (PhD candidate and junior fellow at the Institute of Political Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences), "The Establishment of Communist Rule in Poland"

DR. JORDAN BAEV (Senior Fellow at the Institute of Military History, Sofia), "The Cold War and the Build-up of Militry-Political Alliances in the Balkans, 1945-1990."

Between Solidarity and Neutrality:

The Nordic Countries and the Cold War, 1945-1991

By Valur Ingimundarson

A

ny attempt to point out the similarities in the Nordic experience during the Cold War is futile without taking into account the differences. For one thing, Sweden and Finland (despite its treaty obligations with the Soviet Union) opted for neutrality in the East-West struggle, but Denmark, Norway, and Iceland for NATO membership. Some saw this diversity as a unifying strand, arguing that what became euphemistically known as the "Nordic Balance" gave the Nordic countries some freedom of action within the sphere of low politics and mitigated Cold War tensions in Northern Europe. The Nordics were reluctant Cold Warriors and tried, with varying degrees of success, to assume some sort of a "bridgebuilding" function in the Cold War. But there were many things that set the Nordic countries apart. All efforts to create a Nordic bloc in the military, economic, and political field were doomed to fail. Despite shared cultural values, the Nordic countries were simply too small, too diverse, and too weak to offer a credible alternative. Yet the only way to grasp their importance in the Cold War is to put them in a broader Nordic framework—to pay attention to common characteristics, as expressed in interlocking relationships, interactions, and mutual influences.

In recent years a major scholarly reassessment has been undertaken over the role of the Nordic countries in the Cold War. Numerous books and articles have attracted much scholarly and public attention. The Cold War International History Project, the London School of Economics, and the Historical Institute of the University of Iceland brought together about 30 scholars and officials, in Reykjavik, to discuss these new findings at an international conference 24-27 June 1998. To put the topic in a broader international context, the Reykjavik conference began with a lively roundtable on the "New Cold War History" with the participation of John Lewis Gaddis (Yale University), Geir Lundestad (Norwegian Nobel Institute), Odd Arne Westad (London School of Economics), James Hershberg (George Washington University), and Krister Wahlbäck (Swedish Foreign Ministry). Gaddis's We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History has stirred up the scholarly community, and the roundtable centered-to a large degree on his argument about the role of Soviet conduct and ideology in the origins of the Cold War. Taking issue with Gaddis's line of reasoning, Lundestad argued that the "New Cold War History" is too moralistic and too much preoccupied with questions of guilt and Communist ideology. Odd Arne Westad stressed, however, that ideology was an important element in Soviet foreign policy, as evidenced by Stalin's

belief, in the 1940s, that the Chinese nationalists were better suited to rule the country than the Communists because of the historical-developmental state of China. To James Hershberg, the verdict is still out on the question of ideology in Soviet (and particularly Stalin's) foreign policy until more archival evidence is uncovered.

Within the Nordic context, most participants at the Reykjavik conference seemed to agree that Soviet policy vis-a-vis the Nordic countries was determined by a mixture of Realpolitik and ideology. On the basis of the evidence presented, one can detect several strands in Soviet foreign policy during the early Cold War. First, the Soviets pursued a cautious, if erratic course in the Nordic region. An "expansionist tendency" was curbed by "one that was soberly pragmatic," as Alexei Komarov (Russian) Academy of Sciences) put it.' While the Soviets never saw Norway, Denmark, Iceland, and Sweden as belonging to their sphere of influence, they showed considerable interest in the Nordic area based on their historical experience and ideological outlook. They made, for example, territorial demands on Norway and Finland. Buoyed by the imminent defeat of Nazism, in 1944, they insisted on a joint Norwegian-Soviet condominium over the Norwegian archipelago of Spitzbergen. According to the armistice agreement, the Finns had to cede the Petsamo region to the Soviets and to accept a 50-year Soviet lease on a naval base at Porrkala. At the same time, the Soviets made conciliatory moves by withdrawing their military forces from Northern Norway in 1945 and the Danish island of Bornholm in 1946. And when the Norwegian rejected the Soviet claim to Spitzbergen, the Soviets abandoned it in 1947.

The Finnish-Soviet Treaty of Friendship (FCMA) of 1948 was, of course, concluded under strong Soviet pressure. Kimmo Rentola (University of Helsinki) showed, however, that after encouraging the Finnish Communist Party to go on the offensive in the spring of 1948, the Soviets suddenly changed course after the FCMA was signed. Whether the Finnish Communists were, in fact, prepared to go as far as staging a coup from above (as om Czechoslovakia shortly before) is a matter of debate among Finnish historians. Yet the Communist Party was clearly intent on raising the stakes in its efforts to assume a predominant role in Finnish political life.

Rentola and Maxim L. Korobochkin (Russian Academic of Sciences) credited skillful Finnish "diplomacy of consent" with achieving semi-neutral status. for Finland in the late 1940s.3 The Soviets initially wanted to conclude a military treaty with Finland akin to those signed by Hungary and Romania that would reaffirm

Soviet hegemony in these countries. In the end, the FCMA gave the Soviets less than they bargained for and recognized the limits of Soviet influence in Finland. By offering Stalin the necessary minimum in terms of military security, the Finns managed to prevent the Sovietization of the country. This does not mean that no costs were involved: Finland always had to take into account Soviet foreign policy priorities-a fact which did not go unnoticed in the other Nordic countries. Soviet pressure on Finland and the Friendship Treaty gave strong impetus to Norway's insistence on establishing a formal military relationship with the West in the spring of 1948. According to Korobochkin no evidence has been found to confirm Norwegian fears that a similar Soviet treaty offer to Norway was in the works. Yet the Finnish case showed how a superpower's hard-line approach toward one Nordic country could affect threat perceptions in another.

The Soviets reacted with diplomatic threats against Norway's NATO membership and extracted, in 1949, a promise from the Norwegians not to allow foreign military bases on their soil. Surprisingly, the Soviet Union spared Denmark, even as it stressed in Soviet propaganda that the political leaders of the Nordic members of the Western alliance had sold out to American "imperialists." It was not until 1953 that the Danes under Soviet pressure prohibited foreign bases in Denmark. The policy prohibiting nuclear weapons on Danish and Norwegian soil also reflected a desire not to provoke the Soviets. Iceland, however, did not adopt such a policy, even if it shared Norwegian and Danish anxieties about the role of nuclear weapons in Western military strategy.

995

The Soviets gradually came to see the Nordic countries in less threatening terms than other members of the Western Bloc. Since the attitude of the Nordic countries was friendlier, they had the potential of becoming what a leading former Soviet official, Georgi Arbatov (Director Emeritus of the then-Soviet Academy of Sciences' Institute of USA and Canada) termed "a weaker link in the chain of the enemies of the Soviet Union." Thus by returning the Porkkala military base and allowing Finnish membership in the Nordic Council in 1955, the Soviets wanted to strengthen anti-NATO elements in Denmark and Norway as well as to elevate Sweden's neutral position. The Soviets scored some propaganda points in these efforts, but did not succeed in splitting NATO. And although less suspicious of the Nordic countries than other NATO-members, they did not treat them more leniently in their military planning. According to K.G.H. Hillingsø (Royal Danish Defense College), the Soviets consistently overestimated NATO forces, underrated effects of NATO nuclear weapons, and planned to use nuclear weapons as heavy artillery." What was surprising from the Western perspective was the planning for the early and massive Soviet use of nuclear weapons, if war broke out in Northern Europe.

Secondly, during the early Cold War, the Soviets took an inflexible attitude toward the Nordic Communist parties

and displayed on ideological grounds-unmitigated hostility toward Social Democracy in the Nordic region. One can argue that the relationship between the Soviet Communist Party and those of the Nordic countries was problematic from the beginning. Having adopted National Front tactics in 1945 (promoting Communist participation in mixed governments) the Soviets changed course in 1947, partly in response to the Marshall Plan. By forming the Cominform, the Kremlin sought to keep the emerging Communist parties as pure as possible and rejected any cooperation with Social Democrats. This position would, of course, allow the Soviets to exert more influence on these parties' policies, but deprived them of tactical flexibility and tended to reinforce their marginal status.

Only the Finnish Communist Party and the Icelandic Socialist Party maintained substantial electoral strength throughout the early Cold War. This did not, however, translate into tangible power gains. After its electoral defeat and removal from the Finnish Government in 1948, the Finnish Communist Party did not hold ministerial posts until the 1960s. The Icelandic Socialist Party had a similar experience, even if the circumstances were different. In contrast to the ouster of the Communists from coalition governments in Europe in 1947-1948, the Icelandic Socialist Party itself had been responsible for the downfall of a Left-to-Right coalition government in 1946 by opposing a treaty on landing rights for American military aircraft. After a 10-year exclusion, it managed briefly to join a coalition government from 1956 to 1958 as part of an electoral alliance with the non-Communist Left. After that sobering experience, they were left out in the cold for another 12 years.

8

There was a marked tendency within the Nordic Communist Parties to rely on nationalism to maintain political viability. Jón Ólafsson (Columbia University) emphasized that the Soviets could never accept the nationalistic agenda of the Icelandic Socialist Party, even if they knew that it was politically effective, especially in the struggle against U.S. military interests in Iceland." When the head of the Danish Communist Party, Aksel Larsen, decided to renounce Soviet ties and to form a new party in Denmark, the Soviets did nothing to repair the damage and turned down an offer by Einar Olgeirsson, the chairman of the Icelandic Socialist Party, to act as a mediator between the Danish Communist factions. The Soviets were, of course, fully aware of the limited influence of the Nordic Communist parties, especially after their electoral defeats in 1947-1948. But during the late 1940s and early 1950s, they relied to a large extent on local Communists parties for information. Only slowly did the Soviets begin to establish contacts with center parties, particularly farmers' parties in Denmark, Finland, and Iceland. The close relationship with Finnish President Urho Kekkonen, the leader of the Agrarian Party, was in a special category. But the Soviets also cultivated influential members of the Icelandic agrarian Progressive Party and the Danish Liberal-Agrarian Party (Venstre).

The Bulgarian Communist Party did the same thing, as Jordan Baev (Bulgarian Defense Ministry) pointed out." The relationship did not result in any political victories for the Soviets, but it gave them greater access to the political elite in these countries.

Conference participants stressed the negative Soviet position towards Nordic Social Democracy in the early Cold War. The Social Democratic parties dominated political life in Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, and were not prepared to give ground to the Communist Parties in these countries. As governing parties, however, they sought to avoid a confrontational course in international affairs and hoped to maintain good relations with the Soviet Union. The Finnish and Icelandic Social Democratic parties, in contrast, were far smaller and much more anti-Soviet than their other Nordic counterparts. As Mikko Majander (University of Helsinki) showed, the Finnish Social Democratic Party was extremely hostile toward the Communists at home and played an important role in keeping them out of power during the crucial years 1948-1949. A similar scenario was played out in Iceland, where there was a sharp divide between the Social Democrats and the Socialists.

9a

With some justification, the Soviets blamed rightwing Social Democrats for the decision by Sweden, Norway, Denmark to join the Marshall Plan and for the integration of the Nordic countries into Western economic structures. As it turned out, only Iceland and Finland came close to dependence on barter trade with the Soviet Union during the 1950s. In the former case, the trade volume with the East Bloc reached a record of 35% of the total trade volume in 1957. But this trade was conducted for political rather than economic advantage. For a while in the early 1950s, the Soviet Bloc trade was approximately 18-20% of Finland's total trade. There is more than a touch of irony in the statistics. The Nordic country with the closest military and economic ties with the United States proved to be more dependent on the Soviet Bloc than the country with the closest political ties with the Soviet Union!

Third, the Soviets were, at the outset, suspicious of any attempts to promote Nordic cooperation or neutrality in the region. In the 1940s, the Soviet Union considered Nordic cooperation only a prelude to Western integration. It opposed, for example, the creation of a Scandinavian Defense Union in 1948-1949 and it prevented Finland from joining the Nordic Council until 1955, four years after its foundation. This policy could be criticized on the grounds that the Scandinavian Defense Union served the function of weakening Western solidarity in the crucial months leading up the formation of NATO. Similar arguments could be made with respect to the initial Soviet opposition to Swedish neutrality policies. In the 1950s, the Soviets finally reversed course and began to support Nordic cooperation and neutrality schemes. What was more, they began to prod-with no success, it turned out -the Nordic members of NATO to leave the Western

Alliance and to revert to their traditional policy of neutrality. In the end, Soviet suppression of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution effectively scuttled Moscow's neutralist offensive in the Nordic countries. These twists and turns-so characteristic of Soviet policies vis-a-vis the Nordic countries-pointed to a sense of improvisation and probing rather than extensive planning in the postwar period. The Soviets realized that they would not be able to reverse the Western integration of Denmark, Norway, and Iceland in the 1950s. By playing the neutralist card, however, they managed to weaken it.

One of the most interesting aspects of the Reykjavik conference was how intertwined were the seemingly disparate security issues in the Nordic region. Self-interest certainly constituted the overriding foreign policy guide. But the Nordic countries were extremely sensitive to the impact of great power politics as well as of their own actions on each other during the East-West struggle. The question of military bases in Greenland, Bornholm, and Iceland is a case in point. In 1945, the Danes were reluctant to allow the Americans to maintain the military presence in Greenland established during World War II, because they were afraid that the Soviets would insist on analogous military rights in Bornholm. For the same reason, the Danes did not welcome the American request for a long-term lease of military bases in Iceland in 1945. This view was shared by the Norwegians, who feared that U.S. base rights in Iceland would strengthen the Soviet demand for joint control over Spitzbergen.

The story of how the Americans achieved their military goals in Greenland and Iceland is another example of these interlocking relationships. During the early postwar period, the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff considered Greenland, Iceland, and the Azores a military base area of primary importance. But when they sought military rights in these areas, they quickly ran into opposition. The Danes wanted to terminate the U.S. military presence in Greenland in the early postwar period, even if they did not press the issue. But to the surprise of the Danish Government-and in stark contrast to their anti-colonial public posture—the Americans went so far as to offer to buy Greenland in 1947! As Thorsten B. Olesen (University of Aarhus) showed, the war scare triggered by the Korean War neutralized Danish resistance to continued U.S. pressure, paving the way for the Danish-American base treaty in 1951.10 What transpired in Iceland was very similar: Because of Icelandic domestic political opposition, the Americans obtained only landing rights in 1946, but no military rights. Iceland even made the nonstationing of foreign troops a precondition for its NATO membership in 1949. Yet, in the wake of the Korean War, it abandoned this principle and concluded a bilateral defense treaty with the United States in 1951. These actions showed that the need for an American defense umbrella overrode, in the end, any qualms about the risks of being drawn into an East-West conflict and about the potential offensive use of Greenland and Iceland.

The process leading to NATO membership for Denmark, Norway, and Iceland is also illustrative of how the action of one Nordic country influenced the foreign policies of the others. If the Norwegians had not decided to join the Western Alliance for their own security reasons in 1949, the Danes-who had been the most enthusiastic supporters of the failed Scandinavian Defense Unionand the Icelanders undoubtedly would have rejected NATO membership. This display of interdependence was not limited to Nordic governments. The British and Americans often used Nordic contacts to influence the foreign policies of other Nordic countries. In 1950, the Norwegian foreign minister, Halvard Lange, agreed to press the Icelandic government to beef up military security in Iceland. When a left-wing government in Iceland threatened to close down the U.S. military base in 1956, the Norwegians tried to have the decision reversed. These Norwegian efforts were never decisive in influencing Icelandic policy. But the Americans and British got what they wanted in both cases.

The question of why the Norwegians played such a role cannot be explained solely in terms of Western military solidarity. There was an important element of self-interest at play here. Rolf Tamnes (Norwegian Defense Institute) demonstrated that the Norwegians placed much emphasis on a strong U.S. military presence in Iceland. During the tenure of another left-wing government in Iceland from 1971 to 1974, which promised to abrogate the defense agreement with the United States, the Norwegian government feared that a reduced U.S. military activity in Iceland would result in added American pressure on Norway in the military field. As it turned out, the Keflavik Base played a very important role in this area during the 1970s and 1980s. As Albert Jónsson (Office of the Icelandic Prime Ministry) pointed out, the U.S. Air Force aircraft intercepted more Soviet military aircraft near Iceland than anywhere in the world in the early 1980s.12

A central point made by many participants at the Reykjavik conference was the influence of domestic political opinion on foreign policy. Specific policiessuch as the Danish and Norwegian decisions to exclude foreign bases or the stationing of nuclear weapons in Denmark and Norway-reflected public unease about the military costs and dangers of the Cold War. In some areas, the Americans seemed to have taken into account these preferences. According to Mats Berdal (Oxford University), there was hardly any U.S. pressure to reverse the Norwegian policy on military bases and nuclear weapons.13 To be sure, these declared policies amounted to little in practice, because NATO was a nuclear alliance. But the crux of the matter is that the political elites in Denmark, Norway, and Iceland always had to take one thing into account: that public sentiments were heavily influenced by a tradition of neutrality. Indeed, cabinet ministers in all the Nordic countries strove to refrain from taking any steps that could be interpreted by the Soviets as

being provocative. In the words of Bent Jensen (University of Odense), the Danes often behaved as if they were "semi-aligned" after having "half-heartedly joined the Western Alliance."4 Poul Villaume (University of Copenhagen) stressed the aversion of the Danes to crude American Cold War propaganda and showed how the United States increasingly relied on local organizations in Denmark to do the work for them, albeit with mixed results. 15

The downside of this political timidity was a government tendency in all the Nordic countries to minimize public debate about security issues-a tendency that, in some cases, came dangerously close to being a concerted effort to deceive the public. This has, for example, led to a major reassessment of key factors in Finnish, Swedish, and Danish foreign policies during the Cold War, one that has received much media attention in the Nordic countries in the last few years. Iceland was, to some degree, in a special category because of the U.S. military presence and because of its status as an unarmed country in NATO. This author argued that compared to other NATO-members, Iceland was in an inferior role in the Western Alliance from the beginning.16 It was considered a security risk, because it had no adequate system for protecting classified information during the 1940s and 1950s. It was NATO policy not to send any military documents classified above "confidential" or any important strategic-military plans to Iceland. The frequent tensions in U.S./NATO-Icelandic relations during the 1950s can no doubt be explained in part by this lack of communication.

The revelation, in 1995, that contrary to official policy, Danish Prime Minister H.C. Hansen gave the Americans a "green light" to station nuclear weapons in Greenland in 1957 has been widely debated in Denmark. In his presentation, Svend Aage Christensen-who was among the authors of a highly publicized Danish government report on the issue in 1997—made it clear that Hansen's concession was made under conditions of secrecy.17 In this way, the Soviet Union was not only prevented from exploiting this issue in the Cold War but also from exerting pressure on the Danes. Even more important, Hansen avoided a public debate about the new nuclear policy at a time when it did not have full backing at home or abroad. This policy put much strain on the Danish decision-making system. On the one hand, very few people had direct knowledge of the American storage of nuclear weapons in Greenland or of nuclear overflights over the island. On the other hand, many in government circles suspected what was going on. From 1959 to 1965, the Americans stationed NIKE surface-to-air missiles with nuclear warheads in Greenland. Interestingly enough, they also planned to store such weapons in Iceland during this period, but decided against it in the end, because they were needed in elsewhere.18 The Danes abandoned their dual nuclear policy in 1968 after a SAC B-52 bomber carrying nuclear weapons crashed in Thule. From then on,

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