It is doubtful if any geopolitical thesis has received more widespread—and unquestioning—acceptance in America and Western Europe than that which explains the expansion of Russia in terms of a conscious “urge to the sea,” a desire for “warm water ports.”
The thesis has respectable support from historians and geographers. Thus, Robert J. Kerner, a life-long student of Eastern European and Slavic history, writing on “The Soviet Union as a Sea Power” in the geopolitical symposium, New Compass of the World, refers to the “Russian urge to the sea—a centuries-old national longing—because its independence and security depended upon access to the seas.” The geographer, George Cressey, one of the few American geographers who has travelled widely in the Soviet Union, puts the thesis quite dramatically in his Basis of Soviet Strength: “The history of Russia may be written in terms of its search for ocean ports. The Russian Bear will not be content until it finds warm water. ...”
No geographer has played a greater role in shaping American thought and policies regarding international affairs than the late Isaiah Bowman. As President Wilson’s principal geographic adviser at the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919, and as an adviser to President Roosevelt during World War II, he occupied an influential position during two critical periods in the evolution of our foreign policy. His book, The New World, which was first published in 1921, was regarded as the law and the prophets in the field of political geography by a whole generation of college students. Here is how Bowman explained the territorial growth of Russia: “In Mongolia and Tibet, in Persia and Afghanistan, in Caucasia and at Constantinople, the Russian has been pressing forward for three hundred years, and no system of government can stand that denies him proper outlets. His slogan has been a ‘warm water port.’ That explains his reaching out in the Far East to Vladivostok . . . ; it explains his effort to reach the Persian Gulf . . . ; it explains the development of the Murman Coast. . . ; it explains the struggle with Turkey and the West-European powers for Constantinople.”
The impression which these and similar statements give is one of a land-locked people driven by an elemental urge to break through the ring of selfish border states which shut it off from the life-giving sea. To Americans and the peoples of Western Europe whose history and development are so closely related to the sea, there is a natural sympathy for the aspirations of another people to enjoy the benefits of close contact with the world- ocean. It makes Russian expansion seem reasonable and even justifiable.
But it does not appear that this urge has ever been felt by the Russian people. Nor does it appear that the Russian rulers, with the single—and notable—exception of Peter the Great, have ever been sea-minded. Their own histories do not explain the territorial growth of their country in terms of an “urge to the sea,” and the writer has yet to find a Russian who recalls having been taught that his country had to expand until it reached the sea, until it had “warm water ports.”
If the notion is strange to the Russians, where did it come from and how account for its unquestioning acceptance in the Western world?
Who first gave expression to the thesis the writer is unable to say. It may be surmised, however, that contemplation of Peter’s passionate, dramatic, and quite un-Russian interest in the sea was chiefly responsible for its first pronouncement. The dynamic tsar who “took Russia by the scruff of its neck and pitched it into Europe” made a profound impression on Western Europe during the fourteen months he spent in its shipyards and workshops. His subsequent long war with the Swedes to secure an opening on the Baltic and the building of his new capital in the opening thus acquired were to the West impressive evidence of the Russian longing for the sea. Once the notion was implanted it was easy to see Russia’s earlier eastward movement to the Pacific and her subsequent southward expansion to the Black Sea as further proof of the existence of this elemental urge. The continuation of Russian expansion after long coastlines had been secured on the Baltic, the Black Sea, and the Pacific was easily explained: Russia needed warm water ports, or direct access to the high seas.
The wide acceptance of this thesis is undoubtedly due to its beautiful simplicity. It seems to be a common human weakness to prefer broad, sweeping generalizations about nations and peoples to careful, balanced appraisals. One would expect historians, geographers, and other students of national growth to be skeptical, however, of a thesis which attributed the territorial expansion of a country to a single cause. Unfortunately, the virus of geographic determinism, more prevalent, perhaps, among historians, but not wholly absent from the writings of geographers, appears to have • dulled the instinct which normally should have led them to examine carefully the historical record of Russian expansion before accepting so pat an explanation.
The Expansion to the Baltic
A study of this record reveals that in only one direction has Russian expansion been motivated persistently, consciously, and primarily by a desire for better outlets to the sea; namely, the expansion to and along the Baltic. Not only was the Baltic coast from earliest times the nearest coast to Russia’s economic center of gravity,1 but it was the coast toward Western Europe upon which Russia depended for the weapons and manufactures, the ordnance experts and artisans, she needed to prevail against her enemies. Peter the Great was not the first Russian ruler who sought to establish Russian power on the Baltic littoral. Two centuries before him Ivan III sought unsuccessfully to gain a foothold on the Baltic. During the next three centuries Russia fought nine wars with Sweden alone for control of the eastern Baltic lands. In our own time Stalin’s seizure of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia may be regarded as motivated by the desire to regain the ice-free ports on the Baltic which Russia had acquired under Peter and Catherine the Great and lost after the Revolution. However, this was not the only factor; the desire to widen the defensive glacis before Leningrad, Stalin’s urge to reach and exceed the borders reached by the tsars, and the Kremlin’s strong inclination to remove examples of the democratic way of life as far as possible from the Soviet people were perhaps of equal importance. Yet in the historical perspective, we may regard Russia’s expansion to and along the Baltic as being primarily due to a desire for an outlet to the sea.
The Expansion to the Black Sea
The expansion southward which brought the Russians to the Black Sea toward the end of the 18th century, cannot be explained so simply.
The initial impetus for the southward expansion of the Muscovite state was the need for grain land and for better defence against the Tatars of the southern steppes. The soil in the Russian “Mesopotamia” between the Upper Volga and the Oka was not very fertile to begin with and the yield of bread grains under the primitive agricultural methods practiced was low. Furthermore, during the 12th and 13th centuries there was a steady migration of Slavs into this forested region from the wooded steppe and steppe lands to the south in order to escape the constant raids of the nomads. The result was that population in this relatively unfavored region began to press on the food supply at a rather early time. More grain land was needed and this could only be obtained south of the Oka in the wooded steppe zone where the rich black earth’ was capable of far heavier yields than the poorer soil of the forest zone north of the Oka. But this better land could not be settled until the settlers could be given protection against the Tatars of the steppe.
The Tatars not only made settlement in the black earth zone perilous, but even after the Muscovite rulers ceased paying tribute to the Tatar khan, they frequently raided north across the Oka into the heart of Muscovy, returning to their strongholds on the lower Volga and in the Crimea with slaves and booty. As late as 1571 Tatars from the Crimea seized and burned Moscow itself. Because of the distance of the Tatar strongholds and the greater mobility of the Tatars in the intervening steppe country, their subjection by the Russians was bound to be a slow process. However, as the Muscovite state grew in strength it established a series of fortified lines south of the Oka. Besides providing a glacis for the Muscovite heartland and cities north of the river, they also provided a measure of protection behind which emigrants from the over-populated lands to the north could cultivate the black earth and provide bread grains for the towns and cities of the older area between the rivers. The last of these lines was well into the steppe proper and extended between the Dnieper bend and the Donets River; it was only 200 miles from the Black Sea and thus within striking distance of the Crimea, the last Tatar stronghold. But this was not until 1735; by that time Turkey controlled the Black Sea and the Tatar khan of the Crimea was a Turkish vassal. War with the Tatars meant war with Turkey. Nevertheless, until the Tatar stronghold in the Crimea was in Russian hands, the Tatars would continue to threaten the Russian settlements. In two wars with Turkey in the latter part of the 18th century, the Russia of Catherine the Great not only seized the Crimea, but also acquired a considerable frontage on the Black Sea to the west of that peninsula and the shores and entrance of the Sea of Azov to the east of it. Later wars with Turkey extended Russia’s frontage on the Black Sea during the 19th century.
We see, then, that Russia reached the Black Sea not in fulfillment of an urge to the sea, but to secure more agricultural land and to eliminate the threat of nomad incursions. It is only in the 19th century, with the development of an extensive wheat-growing economy in the Black Sea steppes and thus after Russia had acquired a long coastline on that sea, that it became important as an outlet to the world ocean.2
With the development of an important export trade to Western and Southern Europe through Russia’s new ports on the Black Sea (grain from the northern ports and oil from Batum), it was inevitable that Russia would seek to insure that this trade would not be cut off by hostile control of the straits between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. The legacy of war and hatred between Moslem Turkey and Orthodox Christian Russia could hardly make Turkish control of these straits seem anything but hostile in Russian eyes. Furthermore, there was always the possibility that one of the other powers would acquire control of this strategic waterway. As the Russian foreign minister, Sazonov, expressed it to the tsar in 1913, “The Straits in the hands of a strong state means the full subjection of the economic development of South Russia to that state.” However, there were also other reasons for Russia’s interest in the Turkish Straits and Constantinople. The religious interest in the recovery of the ancient seat of Orthodox Christianity from Islam had wide popular support. Moreover, after the Crimean War demonstrated what hostile naval strength could accomplish in the Black Sea, the St. Petersburg government had a powerful strategic interest in holding the entrance to this sea.
The Expansion into the Trans-Caucasus and Central Asia
To attribute Russia’s expansion across the Caucasus (a natural frontier, if there is such a thing), her conquest of the Trans-Caucasian trough, and the establishment of a firm foothold on the Armenian plateau beyond to a reaching out for ports on the distant Persian Gulf is to reveal not only an ignorance of the actual history of this phase of Russian expansion, but also of the geography of this part of the Near East.
Peter’s expedition down the Volga and southward along the west shore of the Caspian in 1722-23 was undertaken primarily to secure control over the rich trade between India and the West which passed through the Trans-Caucasus and Persia. But it was also necessary to keep occupied the army which he had built up during the long war with Sweden and which the defeat of that country had left idle. Like the earlier sortie into the Sea of Azov, this last of Peter’s campaigns had no permanent consequences. Baku was ceded to Russia by the Persian Shah, but was regained after Peter’s death by Nadir Shah, the last of the great Persian conquerors.
The permanent establishment of the Russians south of the Caucasus did not begin until the end of the 18th century. Their appearance on the scene at this time was in reply to a cry for help from the Christian kingdom of Georgia which was under attack by the Moslem Persians; the Georgian king had placed himself under the protection of Catherine. However, the government in St. Petersburg could not decide how far it was willing to commit itself in this region, so different from anything the Russians had acquired previously. Twice—in 1783 and 1795—the Russians crossed the high Central Caucasus by the Gorge of Daryal and the Gudaur Pass and entered Tiflis, the Georgian capital, only to return after defeating the Persians. It was not until 1799 that they came to stay after the last Georgian king had named the Russian tsar as his heir. Such hesitation would hardly comport with a planned advance to the Persian Gulf. Nor did the subsequent expansion eastward to the Caspian and southward onto the Armenian plateau at Persia’s expense indicate a decision to advance to the distant warm water. These territorial acquisitions came as a result of wars with Persia caused by misguided attempts of that nation to push the Russians back across the Caucasus. During the last of these wars (1826-1828) the Russians occupied Tabriz, Persia’s second largest city and a strategic center of great importance; had the Russians been planning a further advance southward, they would hardly have returned such a key position to a country which they had decisively defeated.
Western Georgia, the Black Sea littoral of the Trans-Caucasus, and the adjoining provinces of Turkish Armenia (Kars and Ardahan) were acquired from Turkey as byproducts of wars with Turkey during the 19th century in which the major issues and campaigns lay at the other end of the Black Sea. These territorial gains were not part of a southward push through Eastern Turkey to Mesopotamia and the head of the Persian Gulf. The pressure on Turkey’s northeastern frontier was the eastern jaw of a gigantic Russian pincers, the western jaw being the Russian push toward Constantinople and the Straits. Between the two jaws lay Anatolia, the Turkish homeland and the source of Turkey’s best troops. If the Russians contemplated an advance southward to the Mesopotamian lowland from their broad foothold on the Armenian plateau, the nature of the intervening terrain must have discouraged it. Their campaigns in Turkish Armenia had been difficult enough, but they would have been promenades compared with what they would have encountered in the wild mountain masses of Kurdistan, south of Armenia.
The Russian expansion into Central Asia in the latter part of the 19th century was as unpremeditated and casual as the earlier expansion across the Caucasus. Yet it, perhaps more than any previous Russian expansive move, was regarded in England as merely the initial stage of a carefully planned, albeit well-concealed, scheme for the attainment of more distant and more valuable goals. In the last years of the 19th and the early years of the present century, there was scarcely a Briton alive who did not believe that the Russian conquest of the Central Asiatic khanates of Bukhara, Khiva, and Kokand was merely the curtain-raiser in an advance which would culminate when hordes of shaggy Cossacks issued from the mouth of the Khyber Pass onto the plains of the Punjab. This apprehension had its basis in the rapidity of the Russian advance, the fact that it was supported by railway building,3 and above all by the well-known historical fact that all of the landward invasions of India had come from the northwest. Rudyard Kipling, of course, fanned the popular conviction by his inimitable stories and the oft-quoted poem about the “Bear that Walked Like a Man.”
Yet the Russian conquest of Central Asia, although carried out more rapidly and by different methods, was not very different in purpose from the British conquest of India from the original small foothold on the Hooghly. Even British statesmen recognized the justice of Prince Gorchakov’s (the Russian foreign minister) explanation that Russia was compelled by the existence of semi-barbarous predatory states on her southeastern frontier to push on until she came in contact with the frontiers of a civilized power.
The expansion of the Russian empire into Central Asia was in large measure the byproduct of a punitive expedition against the Turkomans of the Khanate of Khiva on the lower Amu Darya (Oxus) immediately south of the Aral Sea. These Turkomans had long raided Russian traders and the Kazakh (Kirghiz) subjects of the tsar in the steppes north of the Aral Sea. The Khan of Khiva paid no attention to Russian protests, feeling secure against reprisals because of the hundreds of miles of desert between the Khiva oasis and the Russian frontier garrisons in the steppe far to the north. The only approach by which a punitive expedition could reach Khiva was from the south, down the Amu Darya. But to reach the middle Amu Darya the Russians had to conquer a large part of what later came to be known as Russian Turkestan, including the Amirate of Bukhara. Following the subjection of Khiva, operations against the Turkomans in the oases along the northern base of the Kopet Dagh, whose depredations against Persia had caused that country to request Russian assistance, brought the Russian into direct contact with Persia and Afghanistan.
It is probable that young Russian officers, hungry for fame and the legendary riches of India, had visions of leading their sotnias of Cossacks in a heroic dash to the shores of the Indian Ocean. General Skobelev is even said to have had a plan for the invasion of India. But we may be sure that the Russian General Staff in St. Petersburg, with a vivid memory of what British sea power had accomplished in the Crimean War, and recognizing the overwhelming logistic problems of such an operation, had no such ideas. To have had a reasonable hope of overcoming the strong defence which the British-Indian army, close to its bases of supplies, would have put up, the Russians would have required a force far larger than could have been moved across the hundreds of miles of roadless desert in Persia and western Afghanistan or by the shorter but even more difficult route across the towering Hindu Kush in central and eastern Afghanistan.
The historical record thus shows rather clearly that the expansion of the Russians across the Caucasus and in Central Asia, insofar as it had any specific objectives at all, aimed at quite other goals than ports on warm water. Even the most cursory consideration of the geography—military and economic—of this part of the world reveals that ports on the Persian Gulf or Indian Ocean could have been of no value to tsarist Russia and would be of only negligible value to the U.S.S.R. Even with a railway across the intervening mountains and deserts (enormously difficult to construct and operate, as the subsequently built Trans-Iranian Railway proved), it is inconceivable that such remote ports could have served tsarist Russia’s foreign trade. Oil from the Baku district would most certainly have continued to move to its European markets by the much shorter route across the Caucasian isthmus to Batum and thence by tanker across the Black Sea to the Mediterranean. The Persian Gulf route would not only have required a rail haul (assuming one had been built for the purpose) nearly three times and a sea haul over five times as long, but would also have involved the payment of the heavy Suez Canal tolls. For grain exports from the South Ukrainian and Volga regions, the disadvantages would have been even greater. And since the bulk of Russia’s imports entered through the Baltic ports, close to northwest Europe, this trade would not have come in question. Strategically, a Russian port on the Persian Gulf or Indian Ocean would have been completely at the mercy of the British Navy which controlled the seas in that part of the world.
Soviet Russia has even less economic need for such a port than tsarist Russia, since its foreign trade is only a fraction as much. A nation which is striving for self-sufficiency in its economy has no need for more ports to serve foreign trade. Strategically, a base on these waters might have slightly greater value for the Kremlin than for the St. Petersburg government because of the relaxation of British control in these regions and the large Soviet submarine fleet. However, a Soviet naval output in this region would of necessity be at the end of a long and vulnerable line of communications back to the Soviet zone of the interior. Furthermore, the Kremlin would have to count on U.S. reinforcement of the British naval strength in these waters in the event of war. Soviet pressure on Iran has other aims in view than the warm water ports in the south of that country.
The Eastward Expansion to the Pacific
To explain Russia’s sweep across Asia to the Pacific in terms of an “urge to the sea,” a desire for “warm water ports,” is to imply that when the Cossack Yermak crossed the Urals in 1581 the gleam of the far-off Pacific was in his eyes. It may be doubted that Yermak had ever heard of the Pacific; the only gleam in that ex-bandit’s eyes was the gleam of furs. And it was the desire for furs, especially the valuable sable which was so much in demand in Europe, that led the Russians ever farther to the east, until, a century after Yermak crossed the Urals, they reached the bleak shores of the Okhotsk Sea.
Once they reached the Pacific in their search for furs, the Russians could utilize the sea route for provisioning their posts in eastern Siberia instead of the immensely long and tedious overland supply route, a route which generally took two years to traverse. Having acquired possessions, including Alaska, on the Pacific in the course of the search for furs, there was need for their naval defence against possible attack by the maritime nations of Western Europe whose vessels sailed the seven seas. Petropavlovsk in Kamchatka, the first base of the Russian Far Eastern squadron, while located on one of the most magnificent bays in the world, suffers from having its harbor closed by ice several months each year. Nikolayevsk at the mouth of the Amur, which succeeded Petropavlovsk as base for the Far Eastern squadron in 1854, is open no longer and, in addition, ships entering it have to contend with the bar at the mouth of the river. The acquisition of a better natural base for the Russian Far Eastern squadron was one of the reasons for the acquisition of the so-called Maritime Province between the Ussuri and Lower Amur on the west and the Sea of Japan on the east. For near its southern tip is one of the finest natural harbors in the Far East, and one open nearly 11 months in the year, that on which Vladivostok was subsequently established. But it was not the only reason; Chinese control of this region was extremely tenuous, it was only sparsely settled by primitive tribes, and along the Ussuri there was good grain-growing land, something which the Russians badly needed in the Far East. Even before the cession of the region to Russia in 1861 there was considerable settlement there, principally by Ukrainians. It is one thing to say that one of the reasons for acquiring the Maritime Province, a small part of Russia’s territorial acquisitions in the east, was to obtain a better harbor; it is quite another to say that Russian expansion to the Pacific was because of a desire for a warm water port.
Similarly, the lease of the Liaotung Peninsula in southern Manchuria from China at the turn of the century was only in part due to a desire for a warm water port to serve as a naval base. As a matter of fact, Russian naval opinion, while urging the need of an all-year naval base in the Far East, was not at all enthusiastic about the harbor of Port Arthur which was regarded as a trap; an all-year port in northern Korea was preferred. However, China appeared to be in the process of breaking up; with control over the southern gateway to Manchuria and over the railways leading to it from the north, Russia could be assured that it would at least acquire Manchuria in the division of spoils, and it would be in a favorable position to contest control of North China with the other powers.
To say that Russia needed Dairen as an “outlet to the sea” is a complete misreading of geography as well as history. For Dairen to serve as a port for the economically developed part of the empire, i.e., Russia west of the Yenisei river, would be like Acapulco serving as a port for the United States east of the Mississippi. Dairen is not the natural port for the Russian Far East. It is not even the natural port for northern Manchuria, which finds its nearest sea outlet at Vladivostok or the ice-free port of Rashin in northern Korea. Dairen is the natural port for southern Manchuria.
Expansion to the Arctic
If Russian expansion was primarily due to an urge to the sea, the desire for a warm water port, it could have ceased in the middle of the 13th century! For the Russians of old Novgorod, in their search for furs, reached the ice-free Murman Coast by that time and it has remained in Russian hands ever since. Yet it was not until World War I, nearly seven centuries later, that an effort was made to develop an outlet to the sea on this short segment of Russia’s Arctic coastline which is kept open the year around by the effects of the Gulf Stream. The failure to develop a port here earlier is the more surprising—if the desire for a warm water port be accepted as the primary reason for Russian expansion—in that the Murman Coast has the added advantage of fronting directly on the high seas, and not, as in the case of the Baltic and Black Seas coasts, on an inland sea, the entrance to which can be easily closed by a hostile power. To be sure, the Murman Coast was distant from the old cities and producing regions of European Russia and the terrain between presented formidable obstacles to overland transportation. Yet it was not nearly as remote as the Pacific coast and the difficulty of building a railway to it was certainly not as great as building the Trans-Siberian and no greater than pushing the Trans-Caspian Railway across the deserts of Central Asia.
Further east, the Arctic coast was reached almost everywhere before Peter the Great had won a foothold on the Baltic. But it was always as a result of the search for furs. In any case, the Arctic littoral, except for the Murman Coast, is open for so short a period in the year that it hardly comes in question as providing an outlet to the sea.4
This rapid survey of Russian expansion in its several directions reveals only one in which it was due primarily and persistently to a desire for an outlet to the sea, namely, the expansion to and along the Baltic coast. The record provides no justification for the generalization that “the Russian Bear will not be content until it finds warm water.”
Consequences
The wide and unquestioning acceptance of this erroneous generalization is of more than mere academic concern. For it can lead, consciously or unconsciously, to a justification of Soviet Russian expansion. It can even result in the unnecessary surrender of an important strategic position to a regime which has proclaimed the inevitability of war to the death between the U.S.S.R. and the non-Soviet world.
President Roosevelt apparently was one of the many who did not question this simple explanation of Russian expansion. And he was convinced that a need so long and so deeply felt must be satisfied. In his book Roosevelt and the Russians, the late Edward Stettinius, who, as Secretary of State, accompanied the President to the Yalta Conference, notes that “Roosevelt had a firm conviction that the Soviet Union should have unhampered access to a warm water port.” Maj. Gen. Patrick Hurley, who carried out a number of special missions for the President during the war, has also stated that the President hoped the Russians could obtain a warm water port.5 Moreover, Roosevelt was not averse to using the satisfaction of this need as a bait for bringing the Soviet Union into the war against Japan. While the bargain which brought this about was sealed at the Yalta Conference in February, 1945, the preliminary discussion on this subject between the Big Three was held at the Teheran Conference fifteen months earlier.
On this earlier occasion the matter was discussed at a luncheon given by Roosevelt for Churchill and Stalin on November 30, 1943. Only the three leaders and their interpreters were present. Two accounts of this luncheon discussion have been published, one by the British Prime Minister himself in Volume V (Closing the Ring) of his monumental history of World War II, and the other by Robert Sherwood in his Roosevelt and Hopkins. While agreeing in the main, they disagree in one important detail—the question of who first brought up the question of providing Russia with better access to the sea. Churchill states clearly that it was Stalin; Sherwood just as unequivocally asserts that it was Churchill. One cannot dispose of this discrepancy by the obvious observation that since Churchill was a participant and Sherwood’s principle source, Harry Hopkins, was not, the Churchill account must therefore be accepted as correct. Churchill makes it clear that he was writing from a record of the discussion, presumably written down immediately after it took place by his interpreter, Major Birse. While Sherwood does not give his source for this particular episode, it may be assumed that the President’s interpreter, Charles E. Bohlen, made a similar record and that Sherwood, who had access to a great variety of official documents, consulted it.6 If these assumptions are correct, and if the two accounts correctly cite their respective sources, the discrepancy must lie between the records of the two interpreters.
In any case, Churchill makes it clear that he shared Roosevelt’s conviction about the importance of a warm water port to Russia: “I had always thought it a wrong thing, capable of breeding disastrous quarrels, that a mighty land-mass like the Russian Empire, with its population of nearly two hundred millions, should be denied during the winter months all effective access to the broad waters.”7 If such access to the sea were so vital a matter to the Russians, one would have supposed that sentiments such as these would have been expressed by Stalin rather than by the Briton. Yet neither the Churchill nor the Sherwood accounts indicate that Stalin did more than express interest.
From neither account of the discussion does it appear, however, that the Prime Minister made any specific offers. He apparently was willing to leave the matter in general terms. But not so the American President.
According to the Sherwood account— Churchill is silent on this point—it was Roosevelt who suggested that the Russians might “have access to” the port of Dairen in South Manchuria. When Stalin observed that the Chinese would object, Roosevelt replied that he thought the Chinese would agree to having Dairen made a free port under “international” supervision. Sherwood observes that the President “was not merely guessing about this—that he had, in fact, discussed this very point with Chiang Kai-shek in Cairo a few days previously.” Sherwood seems not to see anything unusual in the President’s proposing to Chiang the sharing of a Chinese port with the Russians before the latter had even asked for it.
At all events, it was clear to Stalin that both Roosevelt and Churchill were most sympathetic to providing Russia with better access to the sea, according to the Sherwood account, something he hadn’t asked for. It was also clear to him that Roosevelt had actually offered him Dairen and was prepared to bring pressure to bear on the Chinese if necessary. The Soviet leader was thus in a most favorable bargaining position when it came to making the written agreement at Yalta under which the U.S.S.R. agreed formally to enter the war against Japan. Having offered “access to Dairen” at Teheran, the President was in no position at Yalta to refuse Soviet participation in control of the railways leading from the Soviet Far Eastern territories to that port. Furthermore, Stalin must have been convinced by this time that the United States, in its anxiety to tie down the Japanese Kwangtung Army in order to save the lives of its own soldiers, would agree to almost any concession to bring Russia into the war against Japan. Also, .as Sherwood points out in explaining these concessions to the Russians, the conference was at an end and Roosevelt was tired and in a hurry to get home.
In all the recent discussions—most of them passionately partisan—about this phase of the Yalta agreements there has been little or no attention given to the private discussion of the Big Three at Teheran fifteen months earlier when Stalin, probably to his surprise, learned that not only was he to “have access” (he would know how to exploit that phrase) to Dairen, which he had not asked for, but that Roosevelt gave the appearance of having already taken the first steps toward persuading the Chinese to acquiesce.
One may ask why Stalin accepted the original Teheran offer and pushed for further concessions at Yalta, if Dairen and its surrounding territory were of no value to Russia as an outlet to the sea. The answer may be given in terms of what has happened since. Soviet occupation and control of the Liaotung Peninsula permitted the Chinese Communists to establish themselves in Manchuria and gain control over that economically most valuable part of China. It also gave them something they had not enjoyed before—direct access to the U.S.S.R. Yennan and the surrounding areas in West China offered no such advantages. With the natural resources of Manchuria—especially the food—and the military supplies and equipment of the surrendered Kwangtung Army left by the Russians where the Chinese Communist forces would be sure to find them, they were able to mount the offensive which eventually brought their armies to the borders of Indo-China. Control of Manchuria also necessarily placed them on the borders of Korea—as we have learned to our cost. To Stalin, Dairen had the same significance it had for the Russian imperialists of half a century before—a strategic position from which the Russians could hope to expand their control over China easily and cheaply. If the Westerners insisted on believing that Russia needed Dairen as an “outlet to warm water,” he had no objection and certainly would not disabuse them.
Probably Roosevelt should not be blamed for failure to foresee what subsequently transpired. He did not have the advantage of the hindsight which so many of the critics of his Yalta agreements enjoy. Furthermore, the atmosphere at both Teheran and Yalta was cordial, Russia was our “brave fighting ally,” and many thought that with the official dissolution of the Third International Moscow had given up the idea of world revolution. The few voices which warned that the Soviet long-run aims had not changed were silenced by the general desire to maintain the “great fighting alliance,” at least until the defeat of the common enemy.
On the other hand, those who excuse the turning over of Dairen to the Russians on the ground that Russia had to be “bought into” the war against Japan in order to save the lives of American soldiers are on shaky ground. There is no doubt that some, at least, of the President’s military advisers feared that either the defence of the Japanese main islands would be reinforced by the supposedly powerful Kwantung Army from Manchuria and thus increase American casualties in the planned assault on the Japanese homeland, or that the Japanese government would retreat to the mainland and with the Kwantung Army continue the war after the loss of the homeland. Hence, in the view of these advisers, everything possible should be done to bring Russia into the war in the Far East in order to tie down the Kwangtung Army. Yet by the time of the Yalta Conference enough intelligence reports on the strength of that army had accumulated to justify considerable skepticism as to its capabilities. The rapidity of the Russian conquest of Manchuria proved the correctness of these reports.
A more serious error was the assumption that the Russians would have to be bought into the war against Japan. Even before Dairen had been offered to Stalin at Teheran, he had assured his American and British confreres that Russia expected to enter that war. Furthermore, at least some specialists on the U.S.S.R. in Washington held the view that the Soviet leadership was bound to feel that it could not afford to stay out of the war against Japan if the U.S.S.R. was to have any voice in the post-war settlement in the Far East, but that the strain of the war with Germany would cause her to wait until the last possible minute. The writer knows of at least one paper which presented this view six months before the Teheran Conference.
It will be argued that the Russians would have occupied Dairen in any case. Quite so, but there was no need to legitimize their occupation. And it could be argued that without the agreement concerning Dairen we would have been free to back up a Chinese Nationalist occupation, or to have occupied the port ourselves. In view of the great military strength of the United States at that time and Russia’s exhaustion, it is doubtful if the Kremlin would have risked a head-on collision over a position which was not, after all, vital to the Soviet Union’s economic or military security.
The overestimate of the Kwangtung Army’s strength and the assumption that Russia would have to be bought into the war against Japan are errors which cannot fairly be laid exclusively at President Roosevelt’s door. These judgements were the responsibility of his military advisers, the Joint Chiefs of Staff. However, it would be surprising indeed if, under the tremendous pressures of a global war, there had been no intelligence failures. Our record in this respect compares favorably with the records of the German and Japanese general staffs.
As to Roosevelt’s obsession with the need for providing Russia with better access to the sea, it must in all fairness be admitted that his misconception as to the causes of Russian territorial expansion was one which is still shared by practically all Americans (and British) who have given any thought to the matter. In addition to the scholars quoted at the beginning of this article (one of whom, Isaiah Bowman, was close to the President) and many others who could be cited, several public figures are on record with the same misconceptions. For example, in his testimony before the Senate Armed Services and Foreign Relations Committees in the spring of 1951, General Douglas MacArthur had this to say about Russia’s territorial expansion: “The Russian has always believed that he could not take his rightful place in the international sphere of commerce and industry unless he shared the commerce of the seas. For centuries he has been seeking warm water. ...” Even so well-informed a writer on international affairs as C. L. Sulzberger, the senior foreign correspondent of the New York Times, writing in that paper’s issue of August 19, 1951, refers to “the normal course of Russian political action in the slow search for warm- water outlets in the Eastern Mediterranean and Persian Gulf, in the massive push toward China and the Pacific.”
At this writing there is no danger of our voluntarily handing over any strategic position to the U.S.S.R. Yet the history of our relations with Russia reveals many ups and downs. It would have been a reckless person indeed who would have predicted in the winter of 1939-40 that in less than two years the United States would be rushing to Russia arms badly needed at home. Soviet foreign policy, while holding to the same long range goals, is capable of radical shifts. It is conceivable that the Soviet leadership might decide that a détente in their relations with the Western powers is necessary, that the cold war (and the hot war in the backyard) is not paying dividends, and proceed to make a number of concessions designed to restore the popularity which the U.S.S.R. has enjoyed in wide circles in the West in the past. In such an atmosphere Soviet expansionism could be made to appear merely an effort to satisfy “the age-old Russian urge to the sea” and seem eminently reasonable.
“What man ever divined that Moscow would become a kingdom? What man ever guessed that Moscow would become an empire? Once by the River Moskva stood only the goodly hamlet of a noble.” So begins a tale of 17th century Russia. The rise of this town to dominion over all the Russian lands, the conquest by its rulers of non- Russian lands from the Baltic to the Pacific and from the Arctic to the great mountain barriers of mid-Asia, and its emergence from the most destructive war in its history in control of more territory than ever before— this is certainly one of the most dramatic and intriguing chapters of world history. To explain it in terms of a simple urge to the sea, of a search for warm water ports, is a geopolitical oversimplification which is justified neither by the historical record nor by the realities of geography. At best it deflects attention from the real aims of Russian expansion; at worst it can lead to the unnecessary surrender of important strategic positions which can cost us dearly.
1. Kiev, which was Russia’s greatest city in the 9th to 12th centuries, was nearer to the Black Sea, but it was on the periphery of the Russian lands of the period.
2. Peter the Great’s expedition down the Don and his capture of Azov on the sea of that name in 1696, while clearly due to that restless ruler’s passionate interest in the sea, could hardly be called a response to a deep- seated urge of his people for a sea outlet. Peter was determined to build a navy, and since he was not yet strong enough to force an outlet on the Baltic from Sweden, he turned to what he believed to be an easier outlet. However, his foothold on the Sea of Azov was of little use to him as the Turks continued to hold the exit into the Black Sea. And they soon recaptured Azov itself.
3. The fact that the Russians built a branch line from Merv on their Trans-Caspian Railway to Kushka on the Afghan frontier, only about 70 miles from Herat, and maintained there a large supply of rails and other railways construction material, has often been cited as evidence of Russian intentions to move against India around the western end of the Hindu Kush. However, the similar accumulation by the British at New Chaman on the opposite frontier of Afghanistan and terminus of a military branch line from the important British- Indian military base at Quetta has not been given as evidence that the British were planning an invasion of Turkestan. From New Chaman it is only about 80 miles to Kandahar, second city of Afghanistan; if Herat was the “gateway to India,” Kandahar with equal right could be called the “gateway to Turkestan.” The rival preparations probably were intended to insure that in the event Afghanistan ceased to be a buffer between the two great powers, each would be able to acquire a maximum slice of Afghan territory.
4. Igarka on the lower Yenisei has developed as a lumber export port only in recent years. It is open about 21 months in the year.
5. Interview in the Denver Post, July 10, 1951.
6. Bohlen’s training as a foreign service officer and his long experience in dealing with the Russians would have disposed him to make a written record of such an important meeting. Although Sherwood does not mention Bohlen as the source for his account of this luncheon, he mentions in his introduction that he had talked with him; he can hardly have failed to bring up such an important episode.
7. New York Times, October 20, 1951. Apparently Churchill overlooked Murmansk.