The Marshall Plan

by Benn Steil

  London-based German writer Sebastian Haffner (né Raimund Pretzel) observed that the Paris conference had been “the first [since the war’s end] held, not only without Russia, but in defiance of Russia, and under a barrage of hostile Russian propaganda. It was the first uniting friend, foe, and neutral of the late war. . . . And it was the first completely successful postwar conference”102—one that set the stage for the next great challenge: advancing the Marshall Plan through a skeptical United States Congress.

  OVER IN MOSCOW, THE FOREIGN department of the central committee of the Communist Party was preparing its own analysis of the Marshall Plan, one that would form the basis of Moscow’s coming public assault on it.

  Their spravka, or “reference,” explained that the Truman Doctrine had been intended not only to support the “monarchic-fascist clique” in Greece, and the Nazi accomplices in Turkey, but to buttress “reactionary” regimes in China, Iran, France, and Italy. Its openly aggressive tone, however, had been “a clumsy move,” one that came under instant attack in America itself. Even Walter Lippmann, “one of the more zealous defenders of American imperialism,” pronounced it “the wrong method for achieving the right aims.” Marshall’s initiative in June was, therefore, a hasty political corrective, dressing up the Truman Doctrine as generosity.

  Though received by “the ruling circles of England and France . . . as a ‘Gift from Heaven,’ ” the Marshall Plan, the Central Committee explained, in fact “presents the European people with a reckless lie [that] cover[s] up the true aims of American imperialist ‘philanthropic’ ideas.” Soviet rejection of the ruse, however, had done “a great service” by “exposing [its] true nature [and] help[ing] in the refusal of eight governments of central and southern Europe” to participate.

  The aims of the Plan, the Central Committee went on, were fourfold. The first was “to bypass the UN” and destroy “the principle of unity among the great powers.” Together with the Truman Doctrine, it gave America a free hand to do as it chose in Europe and beyond. The second was “to prevent or hinder the onset of an overproduction crisis in the USA as well as to exert economic dominance over the entire world.” One method would be the “seizure of European markets.” The third aim was to staunch the “crisis” in England, “one of the causes of which was the disturbance brought on by the conditions on the first post-war [American] loan.”

  The fourth aim was the most “dangerous and far-reaching.” It was to “reorder the whole of Europe to [America’s] advantage.” The key to this was the “restoration of German imperialism”—a policy “directed against the USSR . . . the European people, and the German people.” The Americans were “obstructing the payment of German reparations to the Soviet Union and to other European countries that suffered from the German aggression,” blocking “the rise of democratic movements in Germany,” and “striving for the division” of the country. This contrasted with actions in the Soviet zone, where “a deep process of democratization is taking place through the reconstruction of the economy and everyday life.”103

  As for Marshall himself, he had during the war been “an adherent to Roosevelt’s foreign policy”—a military general who acted “in counterbalance to the reactionary politicians.” But “after the war, he joined more reactionary imperialist circles.” Following the March meetings in Moscow, he “pervert[ed] the meaning of Soviet proposals on the various questions of the German problem.” His “Marshall Plan” was now “regarded by the democratic public of the entire world as an expression of the openly expansionist politics of American financial capital, directed at the creation of a West European bloc under the auspices of the United States, for the rebirth of the German economy as a military-economic base for the USA.”104 (“Marshall Plan” was almost always in quotation marks, and referred to by the word zateiia—here meaning “trick” or “freak.”)105

  “The governments of England and France,” the report continued, have “acted as the initiators of the ‘Marshall Plan.’ At the Paris conference,” which they organized, “sixteen European governments gathered with haste, hoping to receive American dollars.” But President Truman appeared to be in no rush to get Congress to provide those dollars. “[T]he more important part of the ‘Marshall Plan’ ” was clearly “to achieve the stabilization of the industrial capacity of Western Germany as the economic and political center of the Western bloc.” For that task, promises of “American dollars are being used to put pressure on European governments in order to achieve more concessions from them relating to Germany.”106

  Germany being the heart of the Marshall Plan, in the Kremlin’s analysis, Stalin could be expected to oppose it there hardest. And indeed, sage American analysts would in the coming months sound the alarm over the obvious point of Allied vulnerability in the country: the isolated and indefensible enclave of West Berlin (see Map 2).

  Herter Committee congressmen on a fact-finding mission to Europe stand with farmers in southern Italy, September 1947. Representative Richard M. Nixon (R-CA) is third from right.

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  SEVEN

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  PERSUASION

  EVEN AFTER THE APRIL STALEMATE with Marshall in Moscow, Stalin expected the Americans to keep talking about Germany and to avoid provocations. The Marshall Plan knocked him off balance. Convinced Washington was now determined to encircle the Soviet Union with hostile capitalist regimes, pushing as far eastward as it could, he shifted to a more aggressive strategy.

  On September 18, 1947, Andrei Vyshinsky delivered an angry ninety-two-minute indictment of the Marshall Plan before the United Nations General Assembly. The Polish-descended Soviet representative, the star prosecutor of the late 1930s Moscow show trials, “made up with his zeal for his unworthy origins”—in Bidault’s words.1 Jabbing his finger into the podium repeatedly, Vyshinsky condemned the Plan as “an attempt [by the United States] to split Europe into two camps and . . . to complete the formation of a bloc of several European countries hostile to the interests of Eastern Europe and . . . the Soviet Union.” Its “intention is to make use of Western Germany and German heavy industry as one of the most important bases for American expansion in Europe, in disregard of the national interests of the countries which suffered from German aggression.” These facts, he said, showed “the utter incompatibility of this policy . . . with the fundamental principles of the United Nations.”2

  The purpose of Vyshinsky’s “smear campaign,” Ambassador Smith told Marshall, was to “discredit our motives and falsify our intentions.” The Soviets want to “sabotage economic recovery” by discouraging smaller governments from accepting “American ‘imperialist aid’ ” and Congress from authorizing it—for “fear [that] war and general unrest” would render it useless.3 But what truly bothered the State Department, James Reston observed, was not so much embroidered Russian charges of imperialist interventionism but the feeling that the United States was intervening “just enough to be blamed for it and not enough to be effective at it.” The department still held up political nonintervention as a quasi-religious principle, yet had not figured out “how to intervene economically without intervening politically.”4

  Central to Stalin’s new offensive strategy was the creation of an institution—the Communist Information Bureau, or “Cominform”—to coordinate action among Europe’s Communist parties and to reinforce Soviet control in the East. To bring it to life, the Kremlin convened a six-day conference of nine such parties in the scenic Polish mountain village of Szklarska Poręba—home of the first winter games of the International Workers Olympiad two decades prior.5 Only the Soviet delegation to the conference, to be chaired by CPSU Central Committee secretary Andrei Zhdanov, was told in advance about the new organization, or that the gathering’s main objective was to mobilize “the struggle against attempts by American imperialism to enslave economically the countries of Europe”—otherwise known as the Marshall Plan.6

  The event opened on September 22 with the delegations delivering r
eports on the political situation in their respective countries. Zhdanov intended these to bring out the sharp divide opening between the Communists of the East and those of the West. Hungarian József Révai decried threats to their new “people’s democracy” from the forces of “Anglo-American imperialism.” Czech Rudolf Slánský reported that President Beneš “is interfering in government affairs” to assist “the reactionary forces.” Yet whereas “the Anglo-Americans are acting through Beneš [and] Masaryk,” he told those gathered, the Communists still “retained the upper hand” on “major foreign policy questions” such as “posture toward the Marshall Plan.” The easterners, echoing Moscow’s wishes, called for an abandonment of the wartime strategy of cooperating with “non-fascist” political parties. Reactionary agents now needed to be “purged” by whatever means necessary.

  The western Communists, represented only by France and Italy, had thus far resisted abandoning electoral politics or adopting extralegal means of seizing power, despite having been booted from government by their coalition partners in May.7 These were temporary setbacks, as they saw it. The key to taking power was persuading their respective publics that they were “nationalist first and Communist second.”8 As Life magazine said of Italian Communist leader Palmiro Togliatti, he “has won many Catholics by playing down Marx and playing up the corruption and red tape of the government.”9

  The Kremlin, however, was growing impatient with their passivity. “Many think that the French Communists coordinate their activities” with Moscow, Zhdanov wrote to their leader, the brawny ex-miner Maurice Thorez, in June, but “your steps [to cooperate with other parties] were a total surprise to us.” (Given the sensitive nature of Zhdanov’s message, Molotov ordered it destroyed once Thorez had read it.) The Central Committee in Moscow also documented its frustrations with the Frenchman. “Despite the concessions in foreign policy that France has exhibited in the face of the Anglo-Saxon bloc [and] the clear contradiction of this foreign policy with French national interests, the [French] Communist party does not see it as necessary to expose it before the masses.” It noted further that Thorez had repeatedly failed to give “the working class of France . . . a clear representation of the threat . . . posed by the sweeping offensive against democratic powers, internationally as well as domestically, led by the Anglo-American and French reactionaries.”10

  Zhdanov cabled Stalin from the conference. French delegation head Jacques Duclos, the only one present not to speak Russian,11 was making an “extremely unfavorable impression” with his tales of the “unprincipled swinging of [his] party from one parliamentary coalition to another.” Stalin ordered Duclos whipped into line.

  “While you are fighting to stay in the Government,” Zhdanov spat out at the Frenchman, in front of the packed hall, “they throw you out!” Then he turned on Italian delegate Luigi Longo. “[They] carried out a coup against [you], the biggest party in the nation! And you leave the field without battle!”12 Under the Russian’s approving glances, Yugoslav delegates Edvard Kardelj and Milovan Djilas bludgeoned the westerners with condescending lectures on revolutionary tactics. Belgrade would be rewarded for such exemplary “leftism” by being named Cominform’s home base.

  Duclos and Longo thus became the whipping boys for Stalin’s frustration at his own failed strategy of “cooperation” with the West. At Szklarska Poręba, he terrorized them into line. Both issued sheepish, apologetic addresses, duly condemning American imperialism and the Marshall Plan.13 Their parties thereafter stayed on message, even through the notorious political show trials of the 1950s. But this fidelity came only at the cost of undermining their political credibility at home, a blind spot for Stalin when dealing with Communists in western democracies.14

  The gathering’s main event was Zhdanov’s own address, a lengthy polemic titled “On the International Situation.” In it, he assumed the mantle of communism’s Kennan, pronouncing on the sources, and implications, of American conduct.

  What Zhdanov lacked in originality and eloquence, the brutish fifty-one-year-old made up for in ideological correctness and personal loyalty to the vozhd.15 The latter, in return, treated him with a curious mixture of affection and contempt. Despite successfully urging his daughter, Svetlana, to marry Zhdanov’s son, Stalin had no compunctions about berating the boy’s father in front of her, even as Zhdanov recuperated from heart failure. “Look at him, sitting there like Jesus Christ!” Stalin would say of his pale, sweating guest at the dinner table a few weeks after the conference; it’s “as if nothing were of any concern to him.”16 Zhdanov would die of a coronary the following August.

  In Poland, however, he was still very much alive, and making the speech of his life. “America,” he told the assembled, had “departed from Roosevelt’s old course and [was] transitioning . . . for the preparation of new military undertakings.” The world had become divided into two hostile and irreconcilable camps—the “democratic” camp led by the Soviet Union, and the “imperialist” camp led by the United States. For the former, the “motives of aggression and exploitation are utterly alien.” For the latter, in contrast, aggression and exploitation were essential to forestall the crisis of monopoly capitalism.

  The Marshall Plan, Zhdanov explained, was a necessary reaction to “the unfavorable reception which the Truman doctrine was met with” owing to its “frankly imperialistic character.” But it was merely “a more carefully veiled attempt to carry through the same expansionist policy.” Its essence is “a scheme to create a bloc of states bound . . . to the United States, and to grant American credits to European countries as recompense for their renunciation of . . . independence.” Moreover, the United States intended “to render aid . . . not to the impoverished victor countries, America’s allies in the fight against Germany, but to the German capitalists . . . making the countries which are in need of coal and iron dependent on the restored economic might of Germany.” That recipients would be reduced to the status of vassal states was clear in American demands that, as a condition for the credits France was granted in May, “Communists [had to] be eliminated from the French government.”

  Of course, the Soviet Union had been invited to discuss the Marshall initiative in Paris. But the purpose was “to mask the hostile nature of the proposals with respect to the USSR, [as] it was well known beforehand that the USSR would refuse . . . the terms proposed by Marshall.” If the Soviet Union had “consent[ed] to take part in the talks, it would [have been] easier to lure the countries of East and South-East Europe into the trap.” But “the USSR will bend every effort in order that this plan be doomed to failure.”17

  With competent propaganda of any sort, important elements of truth help sustain the narrative logic, even under the weight of passages built on overwrought adjectives or falsehood. Zhdanov’s speech was no exception. The Truman Doctrine was, even within the State Department, seen as overly bellicose in tone, and the Marshall Plan had been aimed partly at casting it in a gentler light. There was indeed concern in the United States that Europe’s incapacity to produce and to purchase would harm American economic interests. There was a determination to bury the Morgenthau Plan and to revive German industry, for the purpose, among others, of alleviating burdens on the United States. The State Department did want to get and keep Communists out of government in western Europe, and wanted Europe to adopt market- and trade-friendly policies. It did lure Molotov to Paris under false pretenses, knowing that Soviet “cooperation” would doom the plan. And it did hope, though without great expectations, to pry loose some eastern countries from Moscow’s grip. Stalin did not have to deduce all this; his spies in London and Washington informed him.

  The speech’s final task was to lay the groundwork for the new anti-Marshall Cominform. This was not as easy as it might have seemed. The sixty-five-member Communist International, or Comintern, had been abolished in 1943,18 as Zhdanov acknowledged, because of charges “that Moscow was interfering in the internal affairs of other states, and that the Communist P
arties in the various countries were acting not in the interests of their nations, but on orders from outside.” These were, he emphasized, “slanderous allegation[s] of the enemies of Communism and the labour movement.” But Stalin himself had assured Tito in June of 1946 that he had no intention of resurrecting the Comintern and issuing diktats to foreign Communist parties from Moscow. A reversal of this pledge required a compelling pretext.

  It was clear from “experience,” Zhdanov said, that “mutual isolation of the Communist Parties is wrong, harmful and, in point of fact, unnatural.” Given “that the majority of the leaders of the Socialist parties [were] acting as agents of United States imperialist circles,” he concluded, “the Communists must be the leaders in enlisting all anti-fascist . . . elements in the struggle against the new American expansionist plans for the enslavement of Europe.”19 This was his coded call for the Communist parties to renounce coalition politics and to seize power by more aggressive means.

  Prior to the summer of 1947, when the Marshall Plan progressed from speech to program, Stalin had never been dogmatic about the forms of socialism pursued by countries within the Soviet sphere. Bulgaria,20 Czechoslovakia,21 Hungary,22 Poland,23 and Romania24 all had coalition governments of sorts. His demand had merely been fealty to Moscow on foreign policy. As Kennan himself had written in 1944, “it [was] a matter of indifference to Moscow whether a given area is ‘communistic or not. . . . [T]he main thing is that it should be amenable to Moscow influence, and if possible to Moscow authority.”25 But the Czechs and Poles had swooned before the vapors of American aid. Even in front of Zhdanov at Szklarska Poręba, Polish delegate Władysław Gomułka had the temerity to praise his own country’s “peaceful road of social change” and to oppose the Soviet demand that Cominform states unanimously endorse collectivization of agriculture. Hard-line Polish delegation adviser Jakub Berman had to talk him out of voting against the new body itself, and soon after had Gomułka censured by the Polish Politburo.26 Stalin would no longer tolerate such impertinence and bourgeois deviationism among European Communists; they were threatening to undermine his hard-won military victories. Throughout the East, the remaining elements of non-Communist political participation would, by the end of 1948, be fully co-opted or crushed.