Ideology and the Real Origins of the Cold War (1848 - 1918)

Karl Marx was born in the city of Trier in 1818. In the 1830s he studied law and philosophy at the Universities of Bonn and Berlin. In the fall of 1841, he received a doctorate in philosophy. From 1842-43, Marx edited the newspaper Rheinishe Zeitung. A government censor put an end to Marx's tenure with the newspaper after Marx commented on the lack of democracy in Prussian politics..

In 1844, Marx entered self-imposed exile in Paris, where he began publishing socialist literature and started a life-long collaboration with the wealthy Frederich Engles (1820 - 1895). Marx's writings again resulted in a tangle with the government and he was expelled from Paris. He took up residence in Belgium and continued to publish his work. In 1848, he published his most infamous yet influential work; the Manifesto of the Communist Party.

Marx called for world revolution by the working class in 1848, not much happened. In 1901, Lenin added to the writing done by Marx in that he allowed more space for the wide-spread use of terror tactics as a revolutionary tool. Revolutionary Marxism-Leninism was the cause for friction between the US and USSR even before the post WWII period. The actual roots of the Cold War lie in the end of WWI.

The Russian Revolution of 1917 brought Lenin's leadership to the fore in Russia. That government came into direct conflict with America's leadership. President Woodrow Wilson, who was initially slow to anger at the Soviets, eventually became a chief vocal opponent of the Soviets and their Marxist-Leninist based doctrines. A Political Science professor and President of Princeton University prior to becoming the 28th president, Wilson was no stranger to Marxist thought. He had tested his students on Marxism as a part of his course on advanced political economy in 1891. In 1922, after dealing with the Soviets for a number of years as president, Wilson said of Marx, "I know of no man who has more perverted the thinking of the world."

One misinterpretation of history has often been that the Soviets became a problem for US foreign relations only after WWII, when the Red Army occupied Eastern Europe. There was disharmony with the Soviets from the beginning of their revolution and even "hot" war between the two countries in 1918 - 1920. After that, it was some 14 years before America recognized the genocidal Soviet government. It was following this that there was temporary tolerance of Soviets with Lend-Lease (1941 - 1945); because of US war aims concerning Nazi Germany. This was followed by a return to the status quo of hostile US-Soviet relations in the closing stages of WWII.

Political Reaction to Early Soviet 'Red Terror' - 1918
President Woodrow Wilson's frustrations concerning the combined US, British, and French military action in north Russia was put aside when he received word of the horrific 'red terror' launched by Lenin and the Communists in September 1918. On receiving notice from Secretary of State Lansing that the Communists were on a mass killing spree, the president put his planned removal of the troops from north Russia on hold and issued the following anti-Communist directive to all U.S. diplomatic stations throughout the world. This statement of Wilson's defines the first coordinated American effort to fight Marxism-Leninism. In large measure this dispatch represents the real beginning of the US-Soviet Cold War because it lays out why America would oppose Soviet Marxism-Leninism for the next 73 years. The text of the dispatch follows:
TEXT FROM MESSAGE - WASHINGTON TO ALL U.S. DIPLOMATIC STATIONS - September 18, 1918

"This government is in receipt of information from reliable sources revealing that the peaceable Russian citizens of Moscow, Petrograd, and other cities are suffering from an openly avowed campaign of mass terrorism and are subject to wholesale executions. Thousands of persons have been shot without even a form of trial; ill administered prisons are filled beyond capacity and every night scores of Russian citizens are recklessly put to death; and irresponsible bands are venting their passions in the daily massacre of untold innocents.

In view of the earnest desire of the people of the United States to befriend the Russian people and lend them all possible assistance in their struggle to reconstruct their nation upon principles of democracy and self-government and acting therefore solely in the interest of the Russian people themselves, this government feels that it cannot be silent or refrain from expressing its horror at the existing state of terrorism. Furthermore it believes that in order successfully to check the further increase of the indiscriminate slaughter of Russian citizens all the civilized nations should register their abhorrence of such barbarism.

You will inquire, therefore, whether the government to which you are accredited will be disposed to take some immediate action, which is entirely divorced from the atmosphere of belligerency and the conduct of the war, to impress upon the perpetrators of these crimes the aversion with which civilization regards their present wanton acts." Source: The Papers of Woodrow Wilson

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