But what to do about the countries directly under Soviet occupation? At the Potsdam Conference of Allied leaders in July 1945 Stalin, on his last ever trip outside the USSR, secured the territorial settlement he demanded. The boundaries of Lithuania and Ukraine were extended westward at the expense of pre-war Poland while Poland was compensated by the gift of land previously belonging to the north-eastern region of Germany.37 Yet the Western Allies refused to recognize the USSR’s annexation of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. Wishing to affirm that the post-war boundaries would be permanent, Stalin therefore decided that Königsberg and the rest of East Prussia would belong not to Lithuania or Poland but to the RSFSR. Consequently a ‘Russian’ territory was to act as a partial wedge between Poland and Lithuania. The RSFSR would have a military base and an all-season port at Königsberg – now renamed as Kaliningrad – in order to deter any attempt to redraw the map of Europe.
The Soviet occupying authorities also inserted communists into the coalition government formed in Poland at the war’s end. The same process occurred in Hungary even though the communist party received only seventeen per cent of the votes in the November 1945 election. Elections in Czechoslovakia were delayed until May 1946, when the communists won nearly two fifths of the vote and were the most successful party. A coalition government led by communist Clement Gottwald was established in Prague.
In all countries where the Red Army had fought there were similar arrangements: communists shared power with socialist and agrarian parties and the appearance of democratic procedures was maintained. In reality there was unremitting persecution of the leading non-communist politicians. Everywhere in Eastern Europe the Soviet security police manipulated the situation in favour of the communists. Defamatory propaganda, jerrymandering and arrests were the norm. Teams of police operatives were sent to catch the large number of people who had actively collaborated with the Nazis. In Germany a Soviet organization was installed to transfer industrial machinery to the USSR. Local communist leaders were carefully supervised from the Kremlin. They were selected for their loyalty to Stalin; and they in turn knew that, with the exception of Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia, their positions of influence in their own countries would be fragile in the absence of support from the Soviet armed forces.
Yet these same leaders were aware of the awful effects of Stalin’s policies on his own USSR. Polish communists wanted to avoid mass agricultural collectivization; and even the Yugoslav comrades, who generally rebuked the East European communist parties for a lack of revolutionary resolve, refused to de-kulakize their villages. Several parties, including the Poles, Hungarians and Czechoslovaks, aimed to form left-of-centre governmental coalitions; there were few proponents of the need for the immediate formation of one-party states. The Soviet road to socialism was not regarded by them as wholly desirable.38
Stalin permitted these divergences from Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism in 1945–6 while the general world situation remained in flux. But he was unlikely to tolerate heterodoxy for long, and it was only a matter of time before he moved to strap an organizational strait-jacket around European communist parties. Furthermore, in 1946 there was a hardening of the USA’s foreign policy. President Truman resolved to contain any further expansion of Soviet political influence; he also decided in 1947, on the suggestion of his Secretary of State George Marshall, to offer loans for the economic reconstruction of Europe, East and West, on terms that would provide the USA with access to their markets. Stalin was aghast at the prospect. As he saw things, the problem in Eastern Europe was that there was too little communism: a resurgent market economy was the last thing he wanted to see there. The Marshall Plan was regarded by him as an economic device to destroy Soviet military and political hegemony over Eastern Europe.
Relations between the USSR and the former Allies had worsened. The USA, Britain and France were resisting demands for continued reparations to be made to the USSR by regions of Germany unoccupied by Soviet forces, and Germany’s partition into two entirely separate administrative zones was becoming a reality. Stalin feared that the western zone was about to be turned into a separate state that would re-arm itself with the USA’s encouragement and would belong to an anti-Soviet alliance. In the Far East, too, the USA seemed interested mainly in rehabilitating Japan as an economic partner. As in the 1930s, Stalin felt threatened from both the Pacific Ocean and central Europe.
Stalin could do little about the Far East except build up his military position on Sakhalin and the Kurile Islands acquired at the end of the Second World War; and in March 1947 he decided to withdraw from northern Iran rather than risk confrontation with Britain and the USA. But in Europe he was more bullish. On 22 September 1947 he convoked a conference of communist parties from the USSR, Poland, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, France and Italy. The venue was Szklarska Pore¸ba in eastern Poland. Soviet politicians dominated the proceedings. Stalin was not present, but was kept closely informed by his Politburo associates Zhdanov and Malenkov about what was said. The organizational aim was to re-establish an international communist body, which would be called the Information Bureau. Several delegates were uneasy about the proposal and stressed the need to co-operate with non-communists in their country and to avoid agricultural collectivization.
But in the end they agreed to the creation of an Information Bureau, which quickly became known as Cominform. Ostensibly it was a very different body from the defunct Comintern: Cominform was to be based not in Moscow but in Belgrade; it was to involve only the parties present at the Conference and to have no formal control over these parties.39 Yet Stalin clearly intended to use Cominform so as to impose his will on the communist leaderships with delegates at the Conference.
In 1948, as he continued to harden his purposes towards the communist parties in Eastern Europe, he sanctioned the replacement of the various coalition governments with communist dictatorships. One-party communist states were formed by a mixture of force, intimidation and electoral fraud; and the Soviet security police operated as overseers. If Ukraine and other Soviet republics were the inner empire ruled from Moscow, the new states were the outer imperial domains. They were officially designated ‘people’s democracies’. This term was invented to emphasize that the East European states had been established without the civil wars which had occurred in Russia.40 Thus the Soviet Army inhibited any counter-revolution and the social and economic reconstruction could proceed without obstruction. The term also served to stress the subordination of the East European states to the USSR; it was a none too discreet way of affirming imperial pride, power and cohesion.
The main impediment to cohesion in the politics of Eastern Europe was constituted not by anti-communists but by the Yugoslav communist regime. Its leader Josip Broz Tito was a contradictory figure. On the one hand, Tito still refused to de-kulakize his peasantry; on the other, he castigated the slow pace of the introduction of communism to other countries in Eastern Europe. Both aspects of Tito’s stance implied a criticism of Stalin’s policies for Eastern Europe after the Second World War. Stalin was accustomed to receiving homage from the world’s communists whereas Tito tried to treat himself as Stalin’s equal.
There was also a danger for Stalin that Tito’s independent attitude might spread to other countries in Eastern Europe. In 1946–7 Tito had been canvassing for the creation of a federation of Yugoslavia and other communist states in south-eastern Europe. Stalin eventually judged that such a federation would be hard for him to control. Tito also urged the need for active support to be given to the Greek communist attempt at revolution. This threatened to wreck the understandings reached between the USSR and the Western Allies about the territorial limits of direct Soviet influence. And so Stalin, in June 1948, ordered Yugoslavia’s expulsion from the Cominform. Tito was subjected to tirades of vilification unprecedented since the death of Trotski. This communist leader of his country’s resistance against Hitler was now described in Pravda as the fascist hireling of the USA.
The expulsion of the Yugoslavs from the fraternity of world communism and the recurrent clashes with the USA terrified the communist governments of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Albania, Romania and Hungary into servility. None was allowed to accept Marshall Aid. Instead, from January 1949 they had to assent to the formation of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (Comecon). In October 1949 Stalin also decided that, if the USA was going to dominate western Germany, he would proceed to form a German Democratic Republic in the zone occupied by Soviet armed forces. Private economic enterprise, cultural pluralism and open political debate were eliminated throughout Eastern Europe. Exceptions persisted. For example, agricultural collectivization was only partially implemented in Poland. But in most ways the Soviet historical model was applied with ruthlessless to all these countries.
Furthermore, Władisław Gomułka, who had shown an independent turn of mind at the Cominform Conference in 1947, was pushed out of power in Warsaw and arrested. Another delegate to the Conference, Hungary’s Internal Affairs Minister László Rajk, was arrested in June 1949. Bulgarian former deputy premier Trajcho Kostov was imprisoned in December 1949 and Rudolf Slánsky, Czechoslovakia’s Party General Secretary, was imprisoned in December 1952. Of these leaders only Gomułka escaped execution. Bloody purges were applied against thousands of lower party and government officials in each of these countries from the late 1940s through to 1953.
Soviet and American governments used the most intemperate language against each other. At the First Cominform Conference in September 1947 a resolution was agreed that the USA was assembling an alliance of imperialist, anti-democratic forces against the USSR and the democratic forces. On the other side, the Western powers depicted the USSR as the vanguard of global communist expansion. Soviet self-assertion increased in subsequent years after the successful testing of a Soviet A-bomb in August 1949 had deprived the Americans and British of their qualitative military superiority. Stalin’s confidence rose, too, because of the conquest of power in Beijing by the Chinese Communist Party led by Mao Zedong in November. The People’s Republic of China quickly signed a Treaty of Friendship, Alliance and Mutual Assistance. A great axis of communism stretched from Stettin on the Baltic to Shanghai in the Far East. A quarter of the globe was covered by states professing adherence to Marxism-Leninism.
Since 1947, furthermore, Stalin had begun to license the French and Italian communist parties to take a more militant line against their governments. He remained convinced that ‘history’ was on the side of world communism and was willing to consider schemes that might expand the area occupied by communist states.
One such possibility was presented in Korea in 1950. Korea had been left divided between a communist North and a capitalist South since the end of the Second World War. The Korean communist leader Kim Il-Sung proposed to Stalin that communist forces should take over the entire country. Stalin did not demur, and gave support to Kim in a civil war that could eventually have involved the forces of the USSR and the USA facing each other across battlefields in the Far East. Mao Zedong, too, was in favour. Given the political sanction and military equipment he had requested, Kim Il-Sung attacked southern Korea in June 1950. Foolishly the Soviet Union temporarily withdrew its representative from the debate on the Korean civil war at the Security Council of the United Nations. Thus Stalin robbed himself of the veto on the United Nations’ decision to intervene on the southern side with American military power. China supplied forces to assist Kim Il-Sung. A terrible conflict ensued.41
Kim Il-Sung seemed invincible as he hastened southwards, but then the arrival of the Americans turned the tide. By mid-1951 there was a bloody stalemate across Korea. Soviet forces were not seriously involved; but President Truman justifiably inferred that the USSR had rendered material assistance to Kim. Millions of soldiers on both sides were killed in 1952–3.
But how had the USSR and the USA allowed themselves to come so close to direct armed collision so soon after a world war in which they had been each other’s indispensable allies? The apologists for either side put the respective cases robustly. Indeed it took no great skill to present the actions of either of them as having been responsible for the onset of the Cold War. The Americans had acted precipitately. They formed a separate state in western Germany; they flaunted the possession of their nuclear weaponry; they built up Japan as an ally and established the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. The Soviet Union had also behaved provocatively. It had terrorized Eastern Europe, delayed its withdrawal from Iran and supported Kim Il-Sung. Each successive crisis left the two sides ever more intransigent in their postures towards each other. Clashes between American and Soviet diplomats became normal over every matter of global politics.
Yet it would have taken little short of a miracle to avoid a Cold War. The USSR and the USA were states with diametrically-opposite interests. Both states, indeed, aimed to expand their global power and were not too scrupulous about the methods used. They also had opposing ideologies. Each thought the principles of human betterment were on its side. Each was armed to the teeth. Each operated in an environment of considerable ignorance about the politicians and society of the other side. So was the balance of responsibility equal? No, because the USSR depended much more directly than its rival upon militarism, terror and injustice to get its way. There was as much financial blandishment and political persuasion as manipulativeness and force at work in the American domination of Western Europe. But manipulativeness and force, involving systematic savagery, was the predominant method of the USSR in Eastern Europe.
The USSR and Eastern Europe were an armed camp confronting the Western Allies. The USSR itself was an armed camp charged with maintaining the subjugation of Eastern Europe. In the USSR, the Soviet political order applied the most brutal repression to its society. Stalin’s domestic order was inescapably militaristic; and only by maintaining such a posture in its foreign relations could it contrive to justify and conserve its power at home. Stalin expected to find trouble in the world and was not averse to seeking it out.
16
The Despot and his Masks
Stalin could not dominate by terror alone. Needing the support of the elites in the government, the party, the army and the security police, he systematically sought favour among them. The privileges and power of functionaries were confirmed and the dignity of institutions was enhanced. By keeping the gulf between the rulers and the ruled, Stalin hoped to prevent the outbreak of popular opposition. What is more, he tried to increase his specific appeal to ethnic Russians by reinforcing a form of Russian nationalism alongside Marxism-Leninism; and Stalin cultivated his image as a leader whose position at the helm of the Soviet state was vital for the country’s military security and economic development.
Such measures could delay a crisis for the regime; they were not a permanent solution. In any case Stalin did not adhere to the measures consistently. He was far too suspicious of his associates and the country’s élites to provide them with the entirely stable circumstances that would have alleviated the strains in politics, the economy and society. His health deteriorated after the Second World War. His holidays in Abkhazia became
longer, and he sustained his efforts much more concentratedly in international relations than in domestic policy. But he could intervene whenever he wanted in any public deliberations. If an open debate took place on any big topic, it was because he had given permission. If a problem developed without reaction by central government and party authorities, it was either because Stalin did not think it very important or did not think it amenable to solution. He remained the dictator.
He so much avoided flamboyance that he refrained from giving a single big speech in the period between mid-April 1948 and October 1952. At first he declined the title of Generalissimus pressed upon him by Politburo colleagues. In a characteristic reference to himself in the third person, he wondered aloud: ‘Do you want comrade Stalin to assume the rank of Generalissimus? Why does comrade Stalin need this? Comrade Stalin doesn’t need this.’1
But assume it he did, and he would have been angry if the torrents of praise had dried up. His name appeared as an authority in books on everything from politics and culture to the natural sciences. The Soviet state hymn, which he had commissioned in the war, contained the line: ‘Stalin brought us up.’ In the film The Fall of Berlin he was played by an actor with luridly ginger hair and a plastic mask who received the gratitude of a multinational crowd which joyfully chanted: ‘Thank you, Stalin!’ By 1954, 706 million copies of Stalin’s works had been published.2 In 1949 a parade was held in Red Square to celebrate his seventieth birthday and his facial image was projected into the evening sky over the Kremlin. His official biography came out in a second edition, which he had had amended so as to enhance the account of his derring-do under Nicholas II. His height was exaggerated in newsreels by clever camera work. The pockmarks on his face were airbrushed away. This perfect ‘Stalin’ was everywhere while the real Stalin hid himself from view.
The Penguin History of Modern Russia Page 37
