Soviet Union’s End Deprives Americans of a Top Attraction : Attitudes: The Kremlin’s empire was variously a bugaboo, a utopia, an ally and a terrifying enemy.

WASHINGTON — No one ever branded Herbert Hoover a Red-tinged fellow traveler. Yet in 1921, as secretary of commerce, he led an American relief drive to feed the people of the new Communist Soviet state. “Mr. Secretary,” a woman protested, “aren’t we going to help Bolshevism by feeding these people?”

The future President banged his fist angrily on the table. “Twenty million people are starving,” he said. “Whatever their politics, they shall be fed.”

Hoover’s impatience reflected the reality and vagaries of the troubled relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union for more than 70 years--a relationship that ended on Christmas Day when the Soviet state vanished as swiftly as it once had emerged.

The disappearance of the Soviet Union leaves a void in America. Ever since 1917, the Soviets have in one way or another fascinated Americans, their system drawing attention like a constant, heavenly star. For different Americans at different times, the Soviet Union has been an unpleasant irritant, a bugaboo, a utopia, a wartime ally and an implacable, terrifying enemy.

For most of the last 40 years of Cold War, of course, the Soviet Union--intent, as Nikita S. Khrushchev, once said, on burying the American system--had the nuclear power to destroy the United States. And the United States, of course, could unleash the same terror on its enemy. Half the staff of the CIA devoted itself to Soviet affairs.

The obsession with Moscow seemed to color U.S. foreign policy, just as the Soviets’ obsession with America colored their policy. When the United States supported Ethiopia in the 1960s and early ‘70s, the Soviet Union poured money into Somalia, Ethiopia’s neighbor in the Horn of Africa. When the Soviet Union supported Ethiopia in the late ‘70s and ‘80s, America poured money into Somalia.

Then suddenly, in a few short years, Soviet power unraveled under the reforms of Mikhail S. Gorbachev and the rot in the system, and the Soviet Union finally disappeared. Americans had to contemplate the reality that they had been fascinated not by a constant star but by a shooting star that had flashed across the heavens for seven decades and then lost its light.

Most Americans, of course, remember the Soviet Union as enemy. But the leading capitalist and Communist nations on Earth were not always locked in cold war. Threats loomed and then receded. Although suspicion was probably ever present, it did not prevent eras of good feelings. And the two antagonists stood shoulder to shoulder during World War II to trample down the evil of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany.

When the Russian Revolution overthrew Czar Nicholas II in 1917 during World War I, the news was welcomed in the United States. President Woodrow Wilson called the tumultuous events “wonderful and heartening.” After all, the czar, in the words of Theodore Roosevelt, was “a preposterous little creature.” Wilson told Americans that Russia “was known by those who knew it best to have been always in fact democratic at heart,” and he welcomed the new Russia as “a fit partner for a league of honor” in the war against Germany.

But after V. I. Lenin’s Communists seized control of events in their own October Revolution that year, the American mood soured. The Communists withdrew from World War I by making a separate peace with Germany, seized American and other foreign assets in Russia and created the Communist International with the unabashed goal of overthrowing capitalist regimes throughout the world.

President Wilson refused to recognize the new Communist state. His secretary of the interior said that it would be worth “a million lives” to destroy the revolution. In an act trumpeted again and again by later Soviet regimes to prove American duplicity, Wilson, yielding to entreaties from Britain and France, sent 10,000 troops to Siberia and the northern port of Murmansk in 1918, during a civil war that pitted anti-Communist Russians against the Bolsheviks. Wilson said that the troops would mainly protect war supplies from German seizure, but they ended up fighting the Red Army in several skirmishes. The Americans were not withdrawn until mid-1920.

American leaders also perceived great threats at home. After a flurry of mail bombs arrived at the homes of Atty. Gen. A. Mitchell Palmer, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, industrialist John D. Rockefeller, banker J. P. Morgan and a dozen other prominent Americans, Palmer ordered police and federal agents to raid Communist Party offices throughout the country. On the night of Jan. 2, 1920, 4,000 people were arrested and kept in jails in 33 cities. The government weeded through the cases and eventually deported 556 Communist aliens.

Red hysteria so pervaded American life that in 1920 a boy was sentenced to six months in prison in Connecticut for telling a customer in a clothing store that Lenin was “the most brainiest man” who had emerged from World War I.

“The people are shivering in their boots over Bolshevism,” newspaper columnist Walter Lippmann wrote in a letter to art historian Bernard Berenson after World War I. “They are far more afraid of Lenin than they ever were of the (German) Kaiser. We seem to be the most frightened lot of victors that the world ever saw.”

Despite the absence of diplomatic relations, the United States did not ignore the Soviet Union in the 1920s. Responding to an appeal from Russian novelist Maxim Gorky, Hoover coordinated the distribution of $78 million worth of food to the hungry in the Soviet Union. In gratitude, the Communist government presented him with a fancy scroll crediting his “entirely unselfish efforts” with saving the lives of millions.

Nor were all American businessmen frightened by dealing with the Communists. After Hoover called the Soviet Union “an economic vacuum,” American businessmen tried to fill it. The value of American exports to the Soviet Union increased rapidly, reaching a high of $115 million in 1930.

But exports dropped after that. Convinced that they were losing money because of the lack of diplomatic relations, some businessmen petitioned President Franklin D. Roosevelt to change the American policy of non-recognition.

Roosevelt called Soviet Foreign Minister Maxim Litvinov to Washington for discussions and then formally recognized the Soviet Union in November, 1933--despite angry objections from the Daughters of the American Revolution, the American Legion, the American Federation of Labor and his own State Department. AFL President Samuel Gompers decried the role of greedy American bankers trying to help Lenin for their own profit at the same time that Bolsheviks were trying to undermine the U.S. government.

Recognition ushered in a decade or more of warmer feelings. There had always been a small but strong group of Soviet sympathizers in the United States. An American journalist, John Reed, had produced a coherent and glowing account of the October Revolution in his book, “Ten Days that Shook the World.”

Many American leftists looked on the Russian Revolution as a culmination of the American Revolution--after the masses achieved political equality in the first revolution, they wrested economic equality in the second. The numbers of sympathizers swelled in the 1930s as the Soviet Union, frightened by the emergence of fascism and Nazism in Europe, instructed Communist Party chiefs throughout the world to halt their revolutionary activities and instead seek an accommodation with bourgeois democratic governments and parties.

Sympathy for the Soviet Union gradually seemed fashionable. Although the DAR vehemently opposed recognition in 1933, Mrs. William A. Becker, its president, showed up at a reception at the Soviet Embassy in 1937 in honor of the 20th anniversary of the October Revolution, wearing a black gown with orchids at the shoulder.

It was easy to delude oneself about the nature of Stalinism. For the post of ambassador to Moscow, Roosevelt in 1936 named Joseph E. Davies, a lawyer and Democratic Party organizer. Four foreign service officers, including George F. Kennan, staffed the embassy when Davies arrived.

After spending one day with the new ambassador, the four assembled in private, according to Kennan’s memoirs, to consider “whether we should resign in a body from the service.” Kennan wrote: “We doubted his seriousness. . . . We saw every evidence that his motives in accepting the post were personal and political and ulterior to any sense of the solemnity of the task itself.”

The four did not resign but remained unhappy with Roosevelt’s choice. Davies attended the despicable purge trials of the 1930s and believed what Kennan called “the fantastic charges leveled at these unfortunate men” who had fallen out of Josef Stalin’s favor.

In 1941, Davies published his best-selling account of his two-year tour, “Mission to Moscow.” It was “bad Christianity, bad sportsmanship, bad sense” to question the integrity of the Stalin government, he said, for it had “a record of keeping its treaty obligations equal to that of any nation on Earth.” His book was transformed into a popular wartime movie starring Walter Huston as Davies. The movie extolled the virtues of a Soviet Union moving toward a new capitalism with a human face.

Although the Nazi-Soviet nonaggression pact of 1938 shocked and confused liberals, Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 lifted the confusion. With enormous sacrifice of life to both the fighting and starvation, the Soviet Union earned grateful tribute as a wartime ally struggling against the common evil.

President Roosevelt told Stalin in a letter: “I can’t tell you how thrilled all of us are because of the gallant defense of the Soviet armies.” Wendell Wilkie, the 1940 Republican candidate for President, wrote “One World,” a book in which he described the Soviet Union as “an effective society; it works.”

Wartime comradeship blinded some American leaders to the true nature of Stalin and the Soviet Union. In a history of Russia’s relationship with the West, Kennan wrote that President Roosevelt believed that if only Stalin “could be exposed to the persuasive charm of someone like F.D.R. himself, ideological preconceptions would melt and Russia’s cooperation with the West could be easily arranged.” At summit conferences, Roosevelt often tried to disassociate himself from British Prime Minister Winston Churchill so that Stalin would not feel the English-speaking democracies were ganging up on him.

“For these assumptions,” Kennan said, “there were no grounds whatsoever; and they were of a puerility that was unworthy of a statesman of F.D.R.’s stature.”

Roosevelt died before World War II came to a close, never charming Stalin enough to soften his demands. Harry S. Truman, the new President, chafed continually under signs of Stalin’s truculence and aggression. As the war ended in 1945, the Soviet armies installed Communist regimes in Eastern Europe, and dynamic Communist parties threatened democracy in war-ravaged Western Europe.

Roosevelt had envisioned a postwar world of American-Soviet cooperation but, less than six months after the defeat of both Germany and Japan, Truman was saying: “I am tired of babying the Soviets.”

Then in February, 1946, Kennan, now in charge of the American Embassy in Moscow, sent a memorandum--now known as “the long telegram”--to the State Department that forced the top officialdom to examine their attitudes toward the gallant wartime ally.

Kennan warned that the Soviet regime represented “a political force committed fanatically to the belief that with the U.S. there can be no permanent modus vivendi , that it is desirable and necessary that the internal harmony of our society be disrupted, our traditional way of life destroyed and the international authority of our state be broken.” Instead of trying to understand and cooperate with the Soviet Union, Kennan insisted in another article, the United States must do everything to contain it.

The Kennan analysis had tremendous influence in official Washington. But many Americans still looked kindly on the Soviet Union. Elliott Roosevelt, who had accompanied his father, the President, to the wartime summit conferences, blamed hard-line British leaders for swaying Truman against the Soviets.

“If Father had lived,” Elliott wrote, “. . . British ambitions to play off the U.S.S.R. against the U.S.A. would be a dead duck.”

Historians believe that the Cold War was declared by two speeches made in 1946. Stalin told a Soviet rally that war was inevitable in the world as long as capitalism existed. And Churchill, warning of the Soviet desire for “indefinite expansion of their power and doctrines,” told a Westminster College audience in Fulton, Mo., that “an iron curtain” had descended across Europe.

Echoing this, President Truman issued his Truman Doctrine in 1947, sending aid to Greece and Turkey to shore them up against Communist aggression. This was soon turned into the Marshall Plan that gradually restored the sick economies of Western Europe to full health and thus guaranteed their resistance to domestic Communists.

American public opinion swung quickly behind the government’s moves to meet a Soviet Communist threat. Former Vice President Henry A. Wallace railed against the betrayal of Franklin Roosevelt’s policies of cooperation with the Soviets. But Wallace and his Progressive Party amassed only 1.5 million votes in the 1948 presidential election that saw Truman score the biggest upset victory in U.S. political history--over New York Gov. Thomas E. Dewey.

By 1949, when the Soviet Union developed its own atomic bomb, the Cold War meant that the world’s two antagonist superpowers would soon have the means to destroy much of each other and the rest of the world if their hostility could not be controlled. Soon the two sides confronted each other in Europe with a pair of military alliances ready for war--the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the Warsaw Pact.

The anti-Soviet mood was solidified by the McCarthy era. Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-Wis.) and others such as the members of the House Un-American Activities Committee stifled dissent in the 1950s and early ‘60s with relentless attacks on “fellow travelers” and suspected Communists. Although McCarthy was finally brought down and censured by the Senate for his excessive zeal and smears, his era made it difficult (though, as Vietnam finally proved, not impossible) for Americans to challenge the rationale of U.S. foreign policy.

America, according to one of the assumptions of this foreign policy, faced the threat of a global communism that took many forms but ultimately stemmed from the machinations of the Kremlin. This assumption led to American participation in the Korean and Vietnam wars; 100,000 Americans died in these wars while the Soviet Union watched from afar (though it did later have its own costly adventure in Afghanistan at a sacrifice of almost 15,000 Soviet lives). The United States managed to push North Korea’s Communist troops back into their half of the peninsula but failed to get rid of them. In Vietnam, the United States was unable to prevent the Communist takeover of South Vietnam and found itself enervated economically and emotionally by years of war.

The Cold War had two key moments when the United States and the Soviet Union faced each other directly rather than through proxies like North Vietnam. In 1948, the Soviets, trying to force the United States, Britain and France out of West Berlin, stopped all road and rail traffic from West Germany to Berlin. President Truman refused to budge. “We are going to stay, period,” he said.

The United States launched the massive Berlin Airlift, delivering 13,000 tons of supplies a day for 324 days. Still possessing a monopoly of atomic weapons, Truman ordered two groups of B-29 bombers, equipped to carry and drop A-bombs, to England. The Soviets finally relented and lifted the blockade.

The Cuban missile crisis of 1962 was far more dangerous than the Berlin blockade because the United States, though it had more nuclear bombs, no longer possessed a monopoly, and the Cuban crisis pitted President John F. Kennedy against Khrushchev in a taut game of nerves.

More than a year after the 1961 failure of the CIA-controlled Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba by exiles, Khrushchev armed Cuba with nuclear missiles aimed at the heartland of America.

In a televised address to the nation, President Kennedy disclosed the existence of these missiles, warned the Soviet Union that the United States would retaliate against the Soviet Union itself if any of the missiles were fired in the Western Hemisphere, and ordered what amounted to a blockade of Cuba. Telex messages clanged between Khrushchev in Moscow and Kennedy in Washington.

Khrushchev’s letters were reportedly rambling and even incoherent. Kennedy chose to ignore all but one letter that offered to remove the missiles if the United States would pledge not to invade Cuba. Kennedy accepted.

Midway through the Cold War, the United States tried a new strategy--detente. Rather than just contain the Soviet Union, the United States would try to deal with the Soviets as best it could, working out agreements for the benefit of both.

But detente fell out of favor in the United States as more and more evidence mounted that the Soviet Union was intent on huge increases in military spending.

The Cold War seemed to intensify after the 1980 election of President Ronald Reagan, who condemned the Soviet Union as “an evil empire” and launched an extraordinary defense buildup to make sure that the United States and its allies were far more than a match for the Soviet Union.

But Gorbachev’s accession to power in 1985 changed all equations. The new Soviet leader not only introduced glasnost and perestroika but a “new thinking” in foreign affairs as well. And the new thinking led to nuclear disarmament agreements with the United States and an acceptance of the dismantling of the Soviet empire.

The signal that the Cold War was dwindling to its close came in the spring of 1988 when Gorbachev led Reagan on a jaunty walk though the Kremlin grounds and then around Red Square. Asked if he still believed that the Soviet Union was the evil empire, Reagan looked puzzled, hesitated and then replied: “No. You are talking about another time, another era.”