Holloway, David, Stalin and the Bomb: The Soviet Union and Atomic Energy 1939-1956, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994.

At the Potsdam conference in July 1945, Harry Truman told Joseph Stalin about the bomb.  “Truman casually mentioned to him ‘that we had a new weapon of unusual destructive force.’  He did not say, however, that this was an atomic bomb.”  (Holloway, p. 117)  But both men left much more unsaid.  While he may have been purposefully oblique, Stalin no doubt knew what Truman was talking about.  The “secret” of the atomic bomb was not nearly as secret as Truman suspected.  David Holloway, in his monograph, Stalin and the Bomb, provides glimpses into the Soviet side of the development of nuclear weapons, focusing on Stalin’s understanding and interpretation of military power, foreign policy, and diplomacy in the atomic age.

David Holloway tackles three major themes concurrently in his monograph.  First, he studies the development of nuclear technology and weapons of mass destruction in the Soviet Union from the 1930s to the 1950s.  Second, and perhaps most interesting and unfamiliar, he analyzes the relationship between the scientific community and the political system under Joseph Stalin.  Third, he examines the effects of nuclear weapons on international relations, specifically Stalin’s foreign policy.
Several major factors contributed to the unique way the Soviet Union developed nuclear weapons.  World War II both helped and hindered the development of atomic industry in the Soviet Union.  The war devastated the Soviet economy and infrastructure due to invasion and heavy casualties.  German advances forced Soviet scientists to resort to burying their equipment and materials to protect their research.  On the other hand, Soviet forces occupied German and Czech territory, including uranium mines, providing much-needed sources of raw materials.  Tenuous relations between the Allies also influenced nuclear development. Holloway points out that none of the Allies wanted to share all of their information with each other.    Soviet intelligence supplied information regarding atomic research in the United States and Britain, setting the course of Soviet science in the footsteps of the Americans, who possessed a sizeable technological lead.
Internal politics also played an important role for the scientific community in the Soviet Union.  Beginning with Abram Ioffe as a sort of model for patriotic Soviet science in the 1920s and 1930s, Holloway examines the inherent contradictions between scientific development and intense government control.  Ioffe, though educated in Germany and offered positions in the West, returned to Russia because he considered it his patriotic duty to help the cause of Soviet science.  Yet Ioffe and many others like him failed to receive the support of the government they were trying to help.  Resolving the conflicts between Stalin’s distrust of Soviet scientists like Ioffe (who were widely considered to be “backward” compared to Western scientists) and his patriotic zeal for his country’s need to “catch up and surpass” technology in the West remains a puzzle.  It placed Soviet scientists in a difficult, if not impossible, position.  They needed to make theoretical progress, apply their solutions to industry, and gain technical superiority over the West.  However, they were expected to accomplish this without the support of engineers and politicians, who generally refused to accept any conclusions or theories that weren’t substantiated by similar work outside of the Soviet Union.  Furthermore, Soviet scientists were isolated from the international scientific community, thus slowing progress even more.

Stalin’s foreign policy during the Cold War remains a popular question for historians.  The existing historiography of the Cold War and the arms race often dwells on counterfactual history: what could the United States have done differently to stop the escalation?  Holloway refutes many historians’ claim that Truman could have somehow stopped the arms race by sharing information with the Soviets before Hiroshima, or by calling off America’s development of the “superbomb.”   Holloway uses Sakharov’s memoirs to support his own conclusions about Stalin’s possible reactions.  He argues that no course of action available to Truman would have alleviated Stalin’s distrust of the United States and the West.  Stalin would have perceived such actions as “cunning, deceitful maneuver[s], or as evidence of stupidity or weakness” and would have continued on his present course. (Holloway, p. 318)

 Holloway further argues that Stalin failed to fully understand the impact of nuclear weapons on international relations.  Stalin believed that nuclear weapons were not practical for combat, and were used by the United States largely as a threat to procure greater concessions in diplomacy.  Stalin’s stock answer was to show his toughness:  “the Soviet Union will not be intimidated” became his battle cry and non-cooperation the order of the day.  Not until after his death in 1953 did Soviet leaders admit the possibility of “peaceful coexistence.”  Technologically, with the advent of the hydrogen bomb and the development of massive arsenals for both of the superpowers, nuclear war took on a dimension of being unthinkable.  Of course, that still didn’t prevent the continued buildup of strategic nuclear arsenals, as well as the delivery systems necessary to make them effective.  But Stalin’s driving assumptions about the inevitability of a third world war – he predicted the rise of Germany or possibly Japan within fifteen to twenty years – died with him.

“If ever personality mattered in politics, it surely did so in the Soviet Union under Stalin.”  (Holloway, p. 370)  The very title of Holloway’s monograph, Stalin and the Bomb, suggests the significance he places on the Soviet leader before, during, and after World War II, while the Soviet Union worked to develop nuclear weapons.  In the same way the totalitarian regime shaped all aspects of life in the Soviet Union, Stalin himself influenced the course scientific research and industrial development would take.

Melvin Leffler, in his article, “Inside Enemy Archives: The Cold War Reopened” argues that newly declassified information “reveal[s] a Soviet system as revolting as its worst critics charged long ago.”  (Leffler, p. 120)  Holloway’s sources agree with this conclusion.  Holloway utilizes Western sources on nuclear research and international relations in order to set Soviet information into a historical context.  In addition, due to the Russian government’s recent declassification of much information from the Cold War era, Holloway is able to draw a fuller picture of Soviet goals, methods, and motivations than previously available to scholars. The use of memoirs and interviews with Soviet scientists and politicians, while sometimes subject to censorship (and selective memory), also contributes greatly to his analysis.  Holloway convincingly argues where speculation is required, and points out where the limits of historical knowledge and available sources leave him without clear-cut solutions.  A major strength of the book, Holloway concentrates on the Soviet perspective without trying to interpret Soviet actions from a Western viewpoint.  Critics praise his comfort level with Russian as well as Western sources, and his ability to immerse himself in the atmosphere of the Russian scientists.

The historiography of the Cold War and nuclear history has evolved through several phases, reflecting political attitudes toward the Soviet Union before and after its collapse.  The orthodox viewpoint, popular during the Cold War, blamed the tensions and the arms race on the Soviet Union.  “Revisionist” historians, calling into question American motivations, focus on the aggressive strategies of the United States and their contribution to escalation.   The new consensus again shifts focus to the totalitarian aspects of Soviet leadership.  Holloway, while agreeing with the new consensus, provides a more complex analysis of Soviet foreign policy, viewing it from the Soviet perspective rather than the American perspective.  Yet unlike MccGwire’s article, “National Security and Soviet Foreign Policy,” Holloway refuses to create a deliberate bias toward the Soviet viewpoint.  While sympathetic to some of the scientists within the Soviet nuclear project, he never allows the reader to forget the nature of the Stalinist regime.  For instance, the description of successful nuclear tests both communicate the euphoria of scientific triumph and the relief that the scientists must have felt; failure would have cost them their freedom or their lives, and Stalin and Beria made that fact painfully obvious.

Nuclear technology did not develop in a vacuum.  Internal and external factors influenced Soviet scientific development.  Stalin’s own striking personality dominated policy regarding nuclear development and the arms race.  Holloway begins his introduction by declaring that the “history of nuclear weapons… is at once fascinating and repulsive.” (Holloway, p. 1)  Stalin and the Bomb allows it to be both.