Geir Lundestad pointed out that the West Europeans "invited" the United States to construct an empire and include them within it, in the hope of containing the empire the Russians were imposing on eastern Europe.

H/T Brian Micklethwait. From We Now Know by John Lewis Gaddis. Page 286. Its a long excerpt, but given how much apparently has already been forgotten about the nature of the Soviet Union, context is necessary.

Another hypothesis that emerges from the "new" Cold War history is that the United States and the Soviet Union built empires after World War II, although not of the same kind.

Most "old" Cold War historians acknowledged that despite its anti-imperial traditions the United States constructed an empire after 1945: what they debated was whether this happened intentionally or by inadvertence. Was the American empire the result of a domestically rooted drive for markets and investment opportunities abroad? Or was it an accidental by-product of having rushed to fill a power vacuum in Europe, a reflex that would cause Americans to meddle wherever else in the world they thought there might be a Soviet threat? Either way, credibility became the currency in which the United States, like most empires in the past, counted its assets.

Much the same was true, it now appears, of the Soviet Union. Partly driven by ideological and geostrategic ambitions, partly responding to the opportunities that lay before him, Stalin too built a postwar European empire. With Mao's victory, he hoped--not quite trusting his own good fortune--to extend it to China; Khrushchev sought similar objectives in the "third world." But as problems developed, whether in Korea or later in Cuba, fears of falling dominoes surfaced about as often in Moscow as in Washington: hence Stalin's extraordinary pressure on the Chinese to save Kim Il-sung; hence Khrushchev's remarkable risk-taking in defense of Fidel Castro.

From an imperial perspective there was little new here. All empires fear losing credibility; one might conclude, therefore, that the Soviet and American empires did not differ all that much from one another. But other findings from the "new" Cold War history suggest that such an "equivalency" argument, at least as far as Europe and Japan are concerned, would be quite wrong. To see why, consider another issue all empires have had to face: will their subjects collaborate or resist? The difficulty of managing any empire is bound to vary accordingly; but it is the occupied, not the occupiers, who make this choice. Even the apparently powerless have that much power.

More than a decade ago, the historian Geir Lundestad revealed distinctive patterns of collaboration and resistance when he pointed out that the West Europeans "invited" the United States to construct an empire and include them within it, in the hope of containing the empire the Russians were imposing on eastern Europe. This argument still makes sense, but with certain refinements.

One is that Stalin appears also to have hoped for an "invitation," especially in Germany, perhaps elsewhere in Eastern Europe, possibly even in Japan. The disarray now evident in his policies toward these regions may reflect the fact that it never came. If so, the Europeans and the Japanese become critical players, for while it was hardly within their power to prevent Soviet or American domination, they were free to welcome or fear that process. Their responses were not always overt, especially in countries the Red Army occupied. Resistance is no less significant, however, for taking sullen or subtle forms: officials in Moscow soon lost whatever illusions they might have had that they could count, in a crunch, upon their East European and German "allies." The Americans, if anything, underestimated the loyalty of their NATO partners and the Japanese. In Europe and Northeast Asia, then, these were hardly equivalent empires. The American presence had a strong base of popular support, confirmed repeatedly as free elections kept the governments in power that had invited it. The Soviet presence never won such acceptance: that, no doubt, is why free elections within Moscow's sphere of influence ceased to be held.

Patterns blur, to be sure, when one looks elsewhere. It is clear now that the Chinese--or at least their new communist leaders--initially extended an invitation to the Russians and resisted what they saw as threats from the Americans. In Southeast Asia as well as the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America, invitations to both superpowers were periodically advanced and withdrawn. Whether the Russians or the Americans responded more brutally--or more humanely-- is difficult to say: as always, the "third world" defies easy generalizations. Decisions to collaborate or resist depended upon time, place, and circumstances.

But the "third world" did not, in the end, determine the Cold War's outcome. What took place in Europe and Japan largely did, and there the results were decisive: where possible, the inhabitants resisted the Soviet Union and collaborated with the United States; where impossible, most wished passionately that they could have done so. That raises the question of why Washington's empire, in those pivotal regions, generated so much less friction than Moscow's.

One answer may be that many people then saw the Cold War as a contest of good versus evil, even if historians since have rarely done so.

Let me focus here on a single significant case: it has to do with what happened in Germany immediately after the war as its citizens confronted their respective occupiers. What Stalin sought there, it now seems clear, was a communist regime in the east that would attract Germans in the west without requiring the use of force, something the Russians could ill afford given their own exhaustion and the Americans’ monopoly over the atomic bomb.

Obviously, this is not what he got. Germans first voted with their feet – fleeing to the west in huge numbers to avoid the Red Army – and then at the ballot box in ways that frustrated all of Stalin’s hopes. But this outcome was not fore-ordained. There were large numbers of communist party members throughout Germany at the end of the war, and their prestige – because of their opposition to the Nazis – had never been higher. Why did the Germans so overwhelmingly welcome the Americans and their allies, and fear the Russians?

It has long been known that the Red Army behaved brutally toward German civilians in those parts of the country it occupied, and that this treatment contrasted strikingly with that accorded the Germans in the American, British, and French zones. What we had not known, until recently, is how pervasive the problem of rape was: Red Army soldiers may have assaulted as many as two million German women in 1945-6. There were few efforts for many months to stop this behavior, or to discipline those who indulged in it. To this day, some Soviet officers recall the experience much as Stalin saw it at the time: troops that had risked their lives and survived deserved a little fun.

Now, obviously rape in particular, and brutality in general, is always a problem when armies occupy the territory of defeated adversaries. Certainly Russian troops had good reason to hate the Germans, given what they had done inside the Soviet Union. But these semi-sanctioned mass rapes took place precisely as Stalin was trying to win the support of the German people, not just in the east but throughout the country. He even allowed elections to be held inside the Soviet zone in the fall of 1946, only to have the Germans – women in particular – vote overwhelmingly against the Soviet-supported candidates.

The incidence of rape and other forms of brutality was so much greater on the Soviet than on the western side that it played a major role in determining which way Germans would tilt in the Cold War that was to come. It ensured a pro-western orientation from the very beginning of that conflict, which surely helps to account for why the West German regime was able to establish itself as a legitimate government while its East German counterpart never did.

What happened here was not a reflection of high policy; it was rather a matter of occupying armies, in the absence of clear orders, falling back upon their own domestic standards of acceptable behavior. The rules of civil society implicit in democratic politics made the humanitarian treatment of defeated enemies seem natural to the Western allies. Their troops did not have to be ordered to do this – they just did it, and it did not occur to them to do otherwise. Much the same thing happened, with equally important results, in occupied Japan. But thanks to Stalin and Hitler, Russian troops came out of a culture of brutality with few parallels in modern history. Having been brutalized themselves, it did not occur to many of them that there was anything wrong with brutalizing others. And it did not occur to their leaders to put a stop to this process until after it had lost them Germany.

In this instance, then, civility on one side and its absence on the other played an enormous role in shaping the course of events. The rapes dramatized differences between Soviet authoritarianism and American democracy in ways that could hardly have been more direct. Social history, even gender history, intersected with inhumanity to make diplomatic history. What this suggests, then, is that historians of the Cold War need to look quite carefully at what those who saw distinctions between good and evil thought and did about them. For when people vote with their feet, it generally means they have ideas in their minds. But to understand these, we have to take seriously what they at the time believed.

No historian looking at the religious practices of late antiquity, or at the medieval peasantry, or even at revolutions in America, France, or Russia would doubt the importance of seeking out the voices and viewpoints of everyday life. And yet, when looking at the origins, the evolution, and the end of the Cold War – or for that matter at the gap between popular and academic perceptions of the past today – historians seem to want to tell the public what its memories ought to be. A little self-scrutiny might be in order here, to see whether we are treating the distant past and the recent past in exactly the same way.