11.1: Geopolitical Strategies- USSR and US

Soviet Geopolitical Strategy

Geography has shaped Soviet history. After World War II, the USSR sought to create buffers against external threats. Given the lack of natural barriers and loss of territories after the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (1918), Soviets went to great lengths to enhance their national security beyond national borders. The main goal of Soviet foreign policy was to launch a proletarian revolution worldwide. The Soviets claimed that the only path to an egalitarian society was through the unification of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie. Marxist-Leninism legitimized Soviet expansion to “liberate” oppressed peoples. Communist parties were specifically instructed to support revolutionary movements to subvert capitalism and provoke racial conflicts in the US. The Cold War was not only a contest between the Soviet Union and the US to establish a new world order but also of articulating racism. Between 1945 and 1989 over 90 new countries came into existence. Both the Soviet Union and the US tried to integrate newly decolonized nations into their spheres of influence and economic development through diplomatic missions, cultural initiatives, covert activities as well as outright military interventions in Asia and Africa. Soviet geopolitical doctrine was designed to impede American influence through several tactics that included massive disinformation campaigns in the US. Russia’s anti-capitalist and anti-colonial propaganda campaigns were designed to portray the Soviet Union as a haven for multiethnic coexistence. Figure 11.1.1 shows a Soviet propaganda poster printed in 1930 in the Soviet Bezbozhnik u Stanka magazine. The poster mocks religion and racism in the United States by showing an African American hanging from the Statue of Liberty. In the background there are images of Jesus as well as the US flag held by angels at both ends. Soviet propagandists repeatedly used the race card to emphasize overt racism in the US. Communist parties worldwide advanced Soviet supremacy by proclaiming the universality of communist ideology. 

 

  Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\): A Soviet poster shows an African American being lynched from the Statue of Liberty, in the Public Domain. 

 

 Figure \(\PageIndex{2}\): Paul Robeson, Gordon Parks, Library of Congress, in the Public Domain.

Soviet propaganda showcased racial tensions in the US to highlight American hypocrisy: How could the United States protect the rights of people in the non-western world when it cannot guarantee freedoms for its own citizenry? The Soviet Union attracted a small but powerful cadre of African American intellectuals and activists, including W. E. B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, and Paul Robeson, who traveled to the USSR in the 1930s, before the Cold War. Figure 11.1.2 portrait photo of Paul Robeson, who was a famous African American athlete, film actor, concert singer, and activist. He first visited Russia in 1934, and he felt that he received more respect in Russia than in the US. Robeson performed in many countries, and used his musical talent to promote peace and justice. He often gave speeches that condemned fascism and racism, and performed at labor festivals. He was one of the top American performers during the 1930s and 1940s and internationally famous. He was blacklisted for his political activism during the McCarthyist era, and eventually he was marginalized from mainstream US culture and history. The experiences and life stories of African Americans who traveled to the USSR during the 1930s give us an opportunity to understand pre-war Soviet history from a unique perspective. Most African Americans viewed the Soviet Union, despite the atrocities carried out against its own people, as a more egalitarian society. Before World War II Comintern used racism as a tool to create social tensions in the US. Soviet propaganda projected an aura of racial equality that was clearly attractive to African Americans, but it did not turn them en masse into communists. Before World War II, most African Americans traveled to the USSR because their opportunities to travel, work, and study in the US were limited, and not because they were fascinated by Marxist ideology. Soviet anti-racist campaigns were designed to claim a spot “on the right side of history.” As European colonial empires crumbled in Africa and Asia, the USSR actively intervened in the struggles for independence and claimed that Marxism-Leninism was the only path to national liberation against imperialist colonial oppression. Anti-imperialist struggles during the Cold War made racism an important international issue. During the 1950s and 1960s, at the height of decolonization and against the background of the growing Civil Rights Movement in the US, the Soviets weaponized race and connected the US civil rights struggle with the Cold War. However, simplistic Marxist-Leninist prescriptions rarely worked for addressing racism. The Soviets tried to subvert capitalism by using wedge politics, fomenting revolutions, and staging riots. 

The US military that had fought in World War II was segregated. Despite racism and segregation in the U.S. military, more than two and a half million African American men registered in the military draft, and more than a million served in the armed forces during World War II. Most African Americans served in segregated, non-combat units led by white officers. Marxist-Leninist critiques of racial segregation in the US emphasized that the oppression of black people has been an integral part of capitalism since its inception. Influenced by this idea, Malcolm X said, "you can't have capitalism without racism." This quote, along with a headshot of Malcom X dressed in a suit and tie and wearing eyeglasses on the right side of the image, are shown in Figure 11.1.3. Malcom X's quote about capitalism and racism should not be read as a shallow reaction to racism. Malcolm X was a civil rights leader who pinpointed the root causes of the oppression and discrimination of African Americans. He was a critic of capitalism and white supremacy, and believed that racism was an integral part of the capitalist system.

 Figure \(\PageIndex{3}\): Malcolm X’s quote, International Socialist Alternative, is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA.

For the Soviets, the struggle against racism had to be a fight for socialism. This was a very seductive argument that became increasingly popular with workers and the poor who sought better living conditions and social justice. After the 1957 Youth Festival in Moscow, Premier Nikita Khrushchev extended generous educational scholarships to African students. During the Cold War Soviet special agencies became the conduit for Kremlin’s geopolitical doctrine, which was designed to systematically destabilize enemy nations (US and other NATO member nations). The special agencies implemented “active measures,” overtly or covertly, to drive wedges in communities, meddle in elections, infiltrate media, promote disinformation, sabotage, etc. The KGB, for example, consistently organized youth congresses, festivals, campaigns for women’s and workers’ rights to spread disinformation and gather compromising information about political candidates. The USSR established front organizations, aka “transmission belts” to meddle in US presidential elections, defame candidates (specifically Barry Goldwater in 1964, Richard Nixon in 1968, and Ronald Reagan in 1984), bribe pro-Soviet journalists, etc. The Soviets severely criticized the US for its failure to pass the Equal Rights Amendment. Soviet propaganda flaunted Valentina Tereshkova’s famous flight into space in 1963 and used it to highlight the Soviet Union’s commitment to gender equality. The Soviet Constitution expressly guaranteed equality before the law without distinction based on sex. It took 20 more years for the first American woman, Sally Ride, to enter space in 1983. 

American Grand Strategy

The US portrayed the USSR as a cruel totalitarian state that was incapable of peaceful coexistence with capitalist nations. Figure 11.1.4 shows an American anti-communism poster from the 1950s. The propaganda poster shows a skull behind a mask of Stalin. The skull symbolizes death. The caption on the poster reads "Look Behind the Mask! Communism is Death." The goal was was demonize the enemy, in this case, the Soviet leader Stalin. To contain the spread of Soviet communism, the US designed and constructed a liberal international system to sustain its hegemony. This international order, which includes the UN, IMF, NATO, is so complex and multifaceted that it is impossible to reduce it to a single category of analysis or explanation. The US has deployed its military to promote globalization and democracy, and actively contained threats, as part of its grand strategy. Figure 11.1.5 is a map that shows European military alliances during the Cold War. The NATO founding member nations shown in the map are Belgium, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxemburg, the Netherlands, Norway, and Portugal, and the United Kingdom. The map also shows the founding members of the Warsaw Pact, namely, Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland and Romania, and the Soviet Union. Albania withdrew from the Warsaw Pact in 1968. During the Cold War, US foreign policies focused on containing communist expansion. However, it is important to note that, as stated in NSC-68, the US would probably have pursued its grand strategy even in the absence of a Soviet threat. Although the purpose and organizational structure of NATO evolved in the context of the Cold War, NATO was not dissolved after the collapse of the USSR in 1991. NATO’s membership increased from 16 at its peak during the Cold War to 30 nations in 2020. 

 Figure \(\PageIndex{4}\): An anti-communism poster from the 1950s. Library of Congress, in the Public Domain.

 Figure \(\PageIndex{5}\): European Military Alliances during the Cold War, San Jose, is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

 

Figure \(\PageIndex{6}\): Little Rock State Capitol Rally, Library of Congress, in the Public Domain. 

Racism guided and sustained the liberal international order. The struggle for civil rights had few victories before World War II. The “Double V Campaign" as well as the postwar economic boom led to rising expectations for many African Americans. Southern racists used red-baiting to label the demand for civil rights as a communist plot. They used anti-communism to promote white supremacy and framed the civil rights movement as a threat to national security. Racism and anti-communism were closely connected. Anti-communism during the Cold War solidified the role of the Jim Crow South within American nationalism. That explains why Southern racists were among the most ardent anti-communists who discredited the civil rights struggle as a communist conspiracy. Some African American liberal intellectuals were implicated in this collusion and their ideologies became hegemonic in the production and articulation of Black liberation. Figure 11.1.6 is a photograph showing several people protesting at a 1959 rally in Little Rock, Arkansas. The protestors are carrying US flags and signs that read "race mixing is communism" and "stop the race mixing." Even though the US Supreme Court had declared in 1954 that segregation in schools was unconstitutional, many segregationists in Little Rock, Arkansas, protested against the admission of nine African American students, now known as the "Little Rock Nine," in the previously all-white Little Rock Central High School. 

The Cold War highlighted the stark contradictions in American democracy and set the terms for a new racial liberalism. US elites created a discourse that insisted that racism was being eradicated, but it never was. The US also engaged in massive “soft diplomacy” by sending Black artists and musicians abroad to serve as goodwill ambassadors to show that racism was an artifact of the past.Cold War brought some measure of civil rights: overt racism in the US became a liability in the fight against the Soviets. Although de jure segregation ended, de facto segregation exists. President Truman established the state as the arbiter of anti-racism and federalized civil rights. However, the civil rights state did not redistribute resources because that would have resembled the policies of the rival communist state. Instead, liberal anti-racism called for short-term action that resulted in an ideology of color-blindness which made racism and white supremacy invisible. The US never dismantled the economic or sociopolitical frameworks that privileged whites. Instead, political parties have pursued policies that racialize welfare to avoid implementing meaningful socioeconomic reform. Racialized welfare measures separate economic issues from the concerns of race and gender. Americans increasingly embraced racial diversity as a positive value but most often approached the issue through an individualistic—not a systemic—framework. American capitalism has always been at the heart of US domestic and foreign policies, yet most African American intellectuals did not completely reject liberal democracy or challenge their exclusion from the state based on economic dispossession and maldistribution of resources. Instead, African Americans mobilized around cultural specifications for civil rights. In the postwar period, Blackness came to be understood in cultural terms of exclusion. African Americans sought an end to Jim Crow by making cultural claims to equality. Unfortunately, that validated a European civilizing discourse in which culture became a marker of human development and failed to question the root causes of exploitation. This practice of disconnecting racial disparities from financial inequality is part of liberalism’s history.

Figure \(\PageIndex{7}\): FBI Director, J. Edgar Hoover, Library of Congress, in the Public Domain.

Anti-radical and anti-Black statist narratives became entangled with anti-communism as an instrument of surveillance and racism. Only two years after World War II, President Truman issued Executive Order 9835, which required loyalty reviews for federal employees. The FBI assessed potential “security risks” among Foreign Service officers. Figure 11.1.7 is a portrait photo of long-serving FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover wearing a suit and holding documents in his hand. Under Hoover's management, the FBI began a counterintelligence program, COINTELPRO, in 1956 to disrupt the Communist Party of the USA (CPUSA). The scope of Hoover’s suspicions and COINTELPRO’s targets grew to include civil rights groups, black activists, feminists, environmentalists, Native American activists, and anti-war protestors before the program’s dissolution in 1971. The program’s domestic espionage and psychological warfare tactics were widely criticized, and many believed the FBI had greatly overstepped its authority. In Congress, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations held over a hundred investigations and hearings on communist influence in American society between 1949 and 1954. The Internal Security Act, passed by Congress in September 1950, required all “communist organizations” to register with the government, gave the government greater powers to investigate sedition, and made it possible to prevent suspected individuals from gaining or keeping their citizenship. 

The Korean War was a watershed moment in US military history because it was the first overseas conflict that put President Truman's Executive Order 9981, which desegregated the US military, into action. An estimated 600,000 African Americans served in the armed forces during the Korean War; roughly 9.3% of Americans killed in Korea were African American.

Primary Source: Civil Rights or Freedom, 1962

In this activity, students will analyze a letter written by baseball player Jackie Robinson to President Johnson. The goal is to examine the intersectionality of the Civil Rights Movement and the escalating conflict in Vietnam. The activity is intended to help students to better understand US race relations in the context of overlapping international events during the 1960s.

Discussion Questions

• What was Robinson concerned about?
• The Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964, almost 2 years before this letter was written. What continuing issues did Robinson bring up to the President?
• What does Robinson allude to as a result or consequence for the United States if President Johnson does not continue to hold firm on civil rights?
• How do you think President Johnson felt when he received Jackie Robinson's letter? What thoughts were going through his head regarding civil rights and the conflict in Vietnam?

Review Questions

• What strategies did the Soviet Union use to subvert American democracy?
• Why did some Americans frame the Civil Rights movement as a threat to national security?