Soviet Union–United States relations
Relations between the Soviet Union and the United States were fully established in 1933 as the succeeding bilateral ties to those between the Russian Empire and the United States, which lasted from 1809 until 1917; they were also the predecessor to the current bilateral ties between the Russian Federation and the United States that began in 1992 after the end of the Cold War.
The relationship between the Soviet Union and the United States was largely defined by mistrust and hostility. The invasion of the Soviet Union by Germany as well as the attack on the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor by Imperial Japan marked the Soviet and American entries into World War II on the side of the Allies in June and December 1941, respectively. As the Soviet–American alliance against the Axis came to an end following the Allied victory in 1945, the first signs of post-war mistrust and hostility began to immediately appear between the two countries, as the Soviet Union militarily occupied Eastern European countries and turned them into satellite states, forming the Eastern Bloc. These bilateral tensions escalated into the Cold War, a decades-long period of tense hostile relations with short phases of détente that ended after the collapse of the Soviet Union and emergence of the present-day Russian Federation at the end of 1991.
History
Pre-World War II relations (1917–1939)
Provisional Government
In wake of the February Revolution and Tsar Nicholas II's abdication, Washington was still largely ignorant of the underlying fractures in new Russian Provisional Government and believed that Russia would rapidly evolve into a stable democracy enthusiastic to join the western coalition in the war against Germany. With the establishment of the Provisional Government, United States Ambassador to Petrograd David R. Francis immediately requested from Washington authority to recognize the new government arguing the revolution "is the practical realization of that principle of government which we have championed and advocated. I mean government by consent of the governed. Our recognition will have a stupendous moral effect especially if given first." and was approved on 22 March 1917 making the United States the first foreign government to formally recognize the new government. A week and a half later when President Woodrow Wilson addressed Congress to request a declaration of war against Germany, Wilson remarked "Does not every American feel that assurance has been added to our hope for the future peace of the world by the wonderful and heartening things that have been happening within the last few weeks in Russia? Russia was known by those who knew it best to have been always in fact democratic at heart... Here is a fit partner for a League of Honor."Hoping the fledgling parliamentary democracy would reinvigorate Russian contributions to the war, President Wilson took sizable strides to build a relationship with the Provisional Government. The day following his request declaration of war on Germany, Wilson began offering American governmental credits to the new Russian government totaling $325 million – about half of which was actually used. Wilson also dispatched the Root Mission, a delegation led by Elihu Root and inclusive of leaders from the American Federation of Labor, YMCA, and the International Harvester company, to Petrograd to negotiate means through which the United States could encourage further Russian commitment to the war. By product of poorly chosen delegates, a lack of interest from those delegates, and a significant inattention to the role and influence of the Petrograd Soviet, the mission made little benefit to either nation. Despite the satisfactory reports returning from Petrograd, whose impression of the nation's conditions came directly from the Provisional Government, American consular and military officials in closer contact with the populace and army occasionally warned Washington to be more skeptical in their assumptions about the new government. Nonetheless, the American government and public were caught off-guard and bewildered by the fall of the Provisional Government in the October Revolution.
Soviet Russia
After the Bolshevik takeover of Russia in the October Revolution, Vladimir Lenin withdrew Russia from the First World War, allowing Germany to reallocate troops to face the Allied forces on the Western Front. This caused the Allied Powers to regard the new Russian government as traitorous for violating the Triple Entente terms against a separate peace. Concurrently, President Wilson became increasingly aware of the human rights violations perpetuated by the new Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, and opposed the new regime's militant atheism and advocacy of a command economy. He also was concerned that communism would spread to the remainder of the Western world, and intended his landmark Fourteen Points partially to provide liberal democracy as an alternative worldwide ideology to Communism.However, President Wilson also believed that the new country would eventually transition to a free-market economy after the end of the chaos of the Russian Civil War, and that intervention against Soviet Russia would only turn the country against the United States. He likewise advocated a policy of noninterference in the war in the Fourteen Points, although he argued that the former Russian Empire's Polish territory should be ceded to the newly independent Second Polish Republic. Additionally many of Wilson's political opponents in the United States, including the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Henry Cabot Lodge, believed that an independent Ukraine should be established. Despite this, the United States, as a result of the fear of Japanese expansion into Russian-held territory and their support for the Allied-aligned Czech Legion, sent a small number of troops to Northern Russia and Siberia. The United States also provided indirect aid such as food and supplies to the White Army.
At the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 President Wilson and British Prime Minister David Lloyd George, despite the objections of French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau and Italian Foreign Minister Sidney Sonnino, pushed forward an idea to convene a summit at Prinkipo between the Bolsheviks and the White movement to form a common Russian delegation to the Conference. The Soviet Commissariat of Foreign Affairs, under the leadership of Leon Trotsky and Georgy Chicherin, received British and American envoys respectfully but had no intentions of agreeing to the deal due to their belief that the Conference was composed of an old capitalist order that would be swept away in a world revolution. By 1921, after the Bolsheviks gained the upper hand in the Russian Civil War, murdered the Romanov imperial family, organized the Red Terror against "enemies of the people", repudiated the tsarist debt, and called for a world revolution, it was regarded as a pariah nation by most of the world. Beyond the Russian Civil War, relations were also dogged by claims of American companies for compensation for the nationalized industries they had invested in.
American relief and Russian famine of 1921
Under Herbert Hoover, very large scale food relief was distributed to Europe after the war through the American Relief Administration. In 1921, to ease the devastating famine in the Russian SFSR that was triggered by the Soviet government's war communism policies, the ARA's director in Europe, Walter Lyman Brown, began negotiating with the Russian People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs, Maxim Litvinov, in Riga, Latvia. An agreement was reached on 21 August 1921, and an additional implementation agreement was signed by Brown and People's Commissar for Foreign Trade Leonid Krasin on 30 December 1921. The U.S. Congress appropriated $20,000,000 for relief under the Russian Famine Relief Act of late 1921. Hoover strongly detested Bolshevism, and felt the American aid would demonstrate the superiority of Western capitalism and thus help contain the spread of communism.At its peak, the ARA employed 300 Americans, more than 120,000 Russians and fed 10.5 million people daily. Its Russian operations were headed by Col. William N. Haskell. The Medical Division of the ARA functioned from November 1921 to June 1923 and helped overcome the typhus epidemic then ravaging Russia. The ARA's famine relief operations ran in parallel with much smaller Mennonite, Jewish and Quaker famine relief operations in Russia.
The ARA's operations in Russia were shut down on 15 June 1923, after it was discovered that Russia under Lenin renewed the export of grain.
Early trade
Leaders of American foreign policy remain convinced that the Soviet Union, which was founded by Soviet Russia in 1922, was a hostile threat to American values. Republican Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes rejected recognition, telling labor union leaders that, "those in control of Moscow have not given up their original purpose of destroying existing governments wherever they can do so throughout the world." Under President Calvin Coolidge, Secretary of State Frank B. Kellogg warned that the Kremlin's international agency, the Communist International was aggressively planning subversion against other nations, including the United States, to "overthrow the existing order." Herbert Hoover in 1919 warned Wilson that, "We cannot even remotely recognize this murderous tyranny without stimulating action is to radicalism in every country in Europe and without transgressing on every National ideal of our own." Inside the U.S. State Department, the Division of Eastern European Affairs by 1924 was dominated by Robert F. Kelley, a dedicated opponent of communism who trained a generation of specialists including George Kennan and Charles Bohlen.Meanwhile, Great Britain took the lead in reopening relations with Moscow, especially trade, although they remained suspicious of communist subversion, and angry at the Kremlin's repudiation of Russian debts. Outside Washington, there was some American support for renewed relationships, especially in terms of technology. Henry Ford, committed to the belief that international trade was the best way to avoid warfare, used his Ford Motor Company to build a truck industry and introduce tractors into Russia. Architect Albert Kahn became a consultant for all industrial construction in the Soviet Union in 1930. A few intellectuals on the left showed an interest. After 1930, a number of activist intellectuals have become members of the Communist Party USA, or fellow travelers, and drummed up support for the Soviet Union. The American labor movement was divided, with the American Federation of Labor an anti-communist stronghold, while left-wing elements in the late 1930s formed the rival Congress of Industrial Organizations. The CPUSA played a major role in the CIO until its members were removed beginning in 1946, and American organized labor became strongly anti-Soviet.
Founded in 1924, Amtorg Trading Corporation, based in New York, was the main organization governing trade between the USSR and the US. By 1946, Amtorg organized a multi-million dollar trade. Amtorg handled almost all exports from the USSR, comprising mostly lumber, furs, flax, bristles, and caviar, and all imports of raw materials and machinery for Soviet industry and agriculture. It also provided American companies with information about trade opportunities in the USSR and supplied Soviet industries with technical news and information about American companies. Amtorg was also involved in Soviet espionage against the United States. It was joined, in both its trade and espionage roles, by the Soviet Government Purchasing Commission from 1942 onward.
During Lenin's tenure, American businessman Armand Hammer established a pencil factory in the Soviet Union, hiring German craftsmen and shipping American grain into the Soviet Union. Hammer also established asbestos mines and acquired fur trapping facilities east of the Urals. During Lenin's New Economic Policy, which stemmed from the failure of war communism, Armand Hammer became the mediator for 38 international companies in their dealings with the USSR. Before Lenin's death, Hammer negotiated the import of Fordson tractors into the USSR, which served a major role in agricultural mechanization in the country. Later, after Stalin came to power, additional deals were negotiated with Hammer as an American–Soviet negotiator.
Historian Harvey Klehr describes that Armand Hammer "met Lenin in 1921 and, in return for a concession to manufacture pencils, agreed to launder Soviet money to benefit communist parties in Europe and America." Historian Edward Jay Epstein noted that "Hammer received extraordinary treatment from Moscow in many ways. He was permitted by the Soviet Government to take millions of dollars worth of Tsarist art out of the country when he returned to the United States in 1932." According to journalist Alan Farnham, "Over the decades Hammer continued traveling to Russia, hobnobbing with its leaders to the point that both the CIA and the FBI suspected him of being a full-fledged agent."
In 1929, Henry Ford made an agreement with the Russians to provide technical aid over nine years in building the first Soviet automobile plant, GAZ, in Gorky. The plant would construct Ford Model A and Model AA trucks. An additional contract for construction of the plant was signed with The Austin Company on 23 August 1929. The contract involved the purchase of $30,000,000 worth of Ford cars and trucks for assembly during the first four years of the plant's operation, after which the plant would gradually switch to Soviet-made components. Ford sent his engineers and technicians to the Soviet Union to help install the equipment and train the workforce, while over a hundred Soviet engineers and technicians were stationed at Ford's plants in Detroit and Dearborn "for the purpose of learning the methods and practice of manufacture and assembly in the Company's plants".