The Carl Beck Papers in Russian & East European Studies Number 1505

In 1989, when archival discoveries were about to revolutionize the history of the Cold War, John Lewis Gaddis published a pathbreaking article entitled “Intelligence, Espionage and Cold War Origins.” While Gaddis expressed serious doubts as to whether anyone had ever established that espionage had positively affected larger historical developments, he did render one sober and perceptive conclusion that did not rely on unencumbered access to Soviet, American, or British archives: espionage had heightened the atmosphere of distrust on all sides, and probably did more to escalate tensions than to abate them. “Was it all worth it, from the Russians’ own standpoint? There is good reason to doubt whether the benefi ts Stalin gained from spying on his allies during and after the war counterbalanced the problems created for him once his indulgence in espionage became known.”

Gaddis’s principal challenge was that it was not enough for historians or pundits to show whether there was or was not espionage activity. The key issue was to tie the clandestine world of spies, sabotage, and espionage to large-H History—to determine whether any new information to emerge from that covert world in any way revised or altered our perspectives on major issues. “As great stacks of books that have been written about the history of espionage amply demonstrate, it is easy to get so caught up in the fascination of esoteric minutiae that one loses sight of what, if anything, it all meant. What difference did it make that the Russians spied on their Anglo-American allies throughout the war, that they knew much of what went on within the British and American governments during the early postwar years, and that London and Washington failed to discover this until 1951? Is the world today—was the world then—discernibly different as a result?”

The end of the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the opening of archives East and West have over the last decade deeply affected the way we think about the early years following World War II, and certainly offer scholars the opportunity—more than a decade later—to return to Gaddis’s basic challenge: what effect, if any, did Soviet or Western espionage have on the early history of the Cold War?

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