The Marshall Plan

by Benn Steil

  The Soviet deputy foreign minister arrived in Prague unannounced the following day, February 19. Officially, Valerian Zorin was on a mission to inspect Russian grain supplies. Masaryk and Ripka were incredulous. They understood that Zorin’s presence was meant to demonstrate Moscow’s support for the new Communist security measures.

  Zorin, according to Ambassador Steinhardt, was “not a forceful, door-slamming type” like Vyshinsky. But he delivered his boss’ messages clearly enough. Meeting with Gottwald, the Russian told him the time had come to “be firmer” and to stop making “concessions to those on the right.” The premier had “to be ready for decisive action and for the possibility of breaching the formal stipulations of the constitution and the laws as they stand.”

  Gottwald, Zorin reported back to Molotov, did not want to move against the president, who had wide popular support. The premier still clung, Zorin lamented, to “the idea of a normal, parliamentary path . . . without any collisions.” Yet he was ready to act more forcefully with Moscow’s support. Gottwald wanted Soviet troop maneuvers on the country’s borders to pressure Beneš. Stalin, however, still acting in accordance with Kennan’s script, refused to provide such overt cover. As Washington had neither the will nor the means to resist, there was no need to show his hand: he would rely on the Secret Police he had sent into Prague a few days earlier. Communist minister of information Václav Kopecký, however, declared that the Red Army was massed on the frontiers, ready to intervene against the “reaction.” The Soviet embassy remained silent.

  On February 20, with no sign that the Communists would abandon their takeover of the police, the twelve non-Communist ministers submitted their resignations. Gottwald rejoiced at the naïveté of their tactic. “I could not believe it would be so easy. . . . I prayed that this stupidity over the resignations would go on and that they would not change their minds.” He denounced them publicly as “lackeys of domestic and foreign reaction, traitors to the nation” who could never be part of a new government. They want, he said, to make the country “a paradise for all the spies and saboteurs sent among us from abroad against our Republic and our allies, particularly against the Soviet Union.”

  Beneš tried to reassure the democrats. “Naturally, I shall not accept your resignation[s],” he told the anxious ministers. “The Communists must give in,” he insisted. “I will not compromise.” But the president had also been speaking to Gottwald, and his public comments were less clear cut. He told the press he would accept neither “a Cabinet of technicians”—which Gottwald falsely claimed his opponents wanted to impose—nor one without Communists. There was no defense of the democrats, nor any demand that the entire cabinet resign.

  Meanwhile, the Communists were organizing Bolshevik-style “Committees of Action” around the country and ordering police officials to pledge their “loyal[ty] to the Government of Klement Gottwald” and to “obey all the orders of the Minister of the Interior.” Workers were instructed to attend Communist rallies around the country. Those who refused were locked out or beaten. Ripka found the rhythmic ovations at the events terrifyingly similar to those delivered at demonstrations staged by the Nazi occupiers just a few years earlier.

  On February 21, Gottwald told Beneš that if he refused to accept the resignations and allow the formation of a Communist government there would be a general strike and workers’ militias in the streets. “Then there is also the Soviet Union!” he added pointedly.9 The next day, Zorin and the entire Soviet embassy staff attended a Communist-organized congress of the Union of Soviet-Czechoslovak Friendship, timed to commemorate the thirtieth anniversary of the Red Army. Gottwald used the occasion to blast “the Western imperialists” who were “trying to revive capitalism” and fuel German “irredentism.” It was, he said, necessary to stand with the country’s Soviet ally. “The law,” he closed, “should strike all those who undermine the basis of our foreign policy.” Pravda and Radio Moscow backed the Czech Communists unreservedly, which was duly reported in the Czech Communist press. Still, Beneš insisted to the National Socialist ministers that he would “not give way” to a “coup d’état” or “second Munich.”

  But Beneš was ill and infirm, and the pressure around him was growing by the hour. On February 23, Minister of Defense General Ludvík Svoboda declared that the Army “stands today, and will stand tomorrow, beside the U.S.S.R. and its other allies, to guarantee the security of our dear Czechoslovak Republic.” The Communist-controlled Interior Ministry occupied the offices of the non-Communist press, instituting measures to prevent them “from disturbing public opinion by lies and provocations.” By the 25th, they were taking the same editorial line as Moscow and the Communists.

  Gottwald secured the cooperation of rebel members of the non-Communist parties, effectively making them part of his own party, and submitted a new cabinet list to the president. A communiqué declared the commitment of the new “Renovated National Front” to “the purging of the political parties, whose responsible leaders have abandoned the principles of the National Front,” and to “tighten[ing] the alliance with the Soviet Union and the other Slav States.” Steinhardt cabled Washington, comparing Gottwald’s political tactics to those of Hitler.10 Bohlen had years earlier opined that “a non-Communist Premier with Communist ministers would be like a woman trying to stay half-pregnant,”11 but Gottwald’s action suggested that a Communist premier with non-Communist ministers was also implausible.

  At noon on February 25, to the shock of the now former National Socialist ministers, the country learned from the radio that Beneš had accepted their resignations. Telephoning his office, Ripka would be told only that the president had approved Gottwald’s cabinet list. Swearing in the new ministers on the 27th, Beneš would explain that he was trying to prevent the crisis escalating. “[T]he people were so divided that everything might end in confusion.” The chief of his Chancellery, Jaromír Smutný, later told foreign journalists that the president had “wanted to avoid the danger of a civil war.”12 Beneš would resign a few months later, on June 7. Gottwald would be elected president the following week.

  “Ten years ago Czechoslovakia fell under the sword of the hereditary enemy who had threatened her throughout the centuries,” Ripka wrote. “In 1948 she was subjected by Soviet Russia, her ally, from whom she had expected aid and protection against the German danger.”13 The Czech democrats had made a grievous miscalculation—both that a postwar Germany would threaten her security and that the Soviet Union would guarantee it.

  In the weeks following the coup, there would be mass purges and arrests. These were followed by a rewriting of the constitution and rigged parliamentary elections. Although non-Communists had garnered 62 percent of the vote in the last free elections, in May 1946, Gottwald’s power grab took place in a general atmosphere of resigned calm. A prewar Czechoslovak population—with 357,000 Jews and 2.5 million Sudeten Germans, the cosmopolitan commercial and industrial backbone of the country—might have offered more spirited resistance. But the postwar population, now dominated by small farmers and artisans, was more inclined, as they had been during the war, to adapt than to fight.14

  Masaryk accepted reappointment as foreign minister, explaining to Steinhardt tearfully that he wanted “to soften the impact of Communist ruthlessness . . . and perhaps aid others in leaving the country.”15 But his tenure was brief. In the early morning of March 10, his body was found on the ground below his third-story office in the Foreign Ministry. Steinhardt and Ripka thought it was suicide. Drtina had tried to kill himself in a similar fashion only two weeks prior.16 A forensic investigation by the Prague police over half a century later, however, concluded what many had believed at the time, that Masaryk had been pushed.17 An earlier journalist’s investigation also concluded that the Soviets and the Czech Communists knew that Masaryk had been planning to flee the country, which threatened to turn him into an embarrassing cause célèbre. They therefore took preventive action.18 Ripka himself only escaped, to France, by dint o
f some remarkable good timing and fortune.19

  KENNAN LATER WROTE THAT MASARYK’S death “Dramatized, as few other things could have, the significance of what had just occurred” in Prague.20 The Communist Clementis took over as foreign minister. In short order, Washington’s carefully assembled intelligence network in the country was dismantled, its leaders executed.21

  The coup raised the uncomfortable question, “Who lost Czechoslovakia?” As Office of European Affairs director John Hickerson put it to Marshall, the “absence of any sign of friendly external force was undoubtedly a major factor in the limp Czech collapse.”22 Unlike in Poland, it had not been preordained that the country would be swallowed by the Russian Bear. Czechoslovakia had emerged from the war unaligned. Hitler and Stalin had not allocated it in their pact; Stalin and Churchill had not included it in their “percentages” deal; the Allies had not discussed its orientation at Yalta or Potsdam; both the Soviets and the Americans had liberated it. Kennan had thought it inevitable that Moscow, which saw “only vassals and enemies” near its borders, would do whatever was required to make it one of the former. But others disagreed. Hawkish scholar and State Department official Eugene Rostow later reflected that “failure to deter the Communist takeover of Czechoslovakia in 1948 was one of the most serious mistakes of our foreign policy since the war.” Allen Dulles, who would become director of the CIA five years later, blamed the calamity on incompetent American diplomacy and intelligence operations.23

  Whatever cards Washington had to play, diplomatically and militarily, it gave up most of them in 1945. “I believe that Russia wants to and will cooperate” in Czechoslovakia, Roosevelt told Masaryk. Red Army officials, however, made clear to their Czech counterparts that the country would be brought within the Soviet sphere. Beneš was ordered, under the threat of losing Czech territory, to cut ties with the Polish government-in-exile in London, with whom he had braved the war years, and to recognize the Soviet-controlled Lublin Poles.24 What capacity the U.S. Army had to countervail was circumscribed by the decision of Generals Marshall and Eisenhower to stop its advance fifty miles west of Prague.25

  The Red Army, which had been 150 miles further from the Czech capital than Patton, marched into Prague on May 9. It was one of its easier victories, but also one of great subsequent historical significance. “We could have liberated Prague,” lamented one bitter U.S. embassy official. “After the war we spent a lot of time trying to convince the Czechs that they weren’t part of the East Bloc. But no matter what we said the Soviets came to Prague first.”26 The Czech Communists used this to great advantage, proclaiming it as evidence that only the Russians cared about the Prague citizens being brutalized by the Nazis.

  In the months that followed, the War Department agitated for a complete withdrawal of U.S. troops from Czechoslovakia. There was, Murphy said from Germany on August 31, no “overriding political necessity” for their presence. Steinhardt was appalled, arguing that it would make the Czechs “feel that they had been morally as well as physically abandoned by the Americans at the very time they were just beginning to show signs of courage in standing up to the Russians.” No one knew for sure how many Soviet troops were in the country at the time, but estimates ran from 165,000 to more than twice that.27 Truman decided to write to Stalin on November 2 proposing a simultaneous American and Soviet withdrawal by December 1. Given that such a deal would tip the military balance of power in the country overwhelmingly to the Soviets, who would have hundreds of thousands of soldiers available near its borders to smother the country as necessary, Stalin agreed.

  Beneš was thrilled to see the foreign forces leave his country, assuming naively that it signaled Stalin’s commitment to its independence. He as well as Steinhardt also thought, wrongly, that Gottwald and his fellow Communists were Czech patriots—patriots who would be content to take a backseat in government, rather than appeal to Stalin to put them in front and kick the democrats out. By the summer of 1946, however, it had become clear to Beneš and Masaryk that the Communists were taking orders from Moscow, and that keeping the Red Army out was worth more than bringing U.S. aid in. They had seen the fate of the non-Communist London-based Polish government-in-exile, at Moscow’s hands.

  When at a Paris gathering of foreign ministers in August 1946 Masaryk applauded Vyshinky’s condemnation of American loan offers as “economic enslavement,” Byrnes and the State Department turned against them. Beneš begged Steinhardt to understand that such regrettable public gestures were the price his country paid for being permitted a measure of domestic democracy. But with Masaryk’s behavior being called out in The New York Times, and the Communists, who railed against “dollar imperialism,” blocking any progress on compensating Americans for nationalized property, there was no way diplomatically to repair the breach.28

  When the following summer the Czechs, under orders from Stalin, rejected the Marshall Plan, the State Department wrote them off as a natural part of the Communist East. It did so despite important voices arguing otherwise. The U.S. chargé in Prague, John Bruins, said that “80 percent of Czech people favor western style democracy over Communism,” and pleaded for the United States to help “consolidate this pro-western sentiment.”29 Steinhardt pointed out that “nearly 80 percent of [the] country’s total foreign trade is still with [the] west.”30 Masaryk begged Washington to understand the “difficult situation caused by [Czechoslovakia’s] contiguity to the Soviet sphere.”31 His pleas fell on deaf ears. Division of Central European Affairs chief James (Jimmie) Riddleberger dismissed him as “weak or blind.”32

  This thinking was both self-justifying and self-fulfilling. The State Department relied on it to make the case, to themselves and the rest of the world, that they could not help those who would not help themselves. After all, Kennan, Clayton, and Marshall had attached this fundamental principle to the Marshall Plan. The initiative had to come from Europeans themselves. America could not save nations that had lost the will to fight. This was a convenient rationalization, as it meant that the State Department had not “lost Czechoslovakia.” The country, rather, never had what it took to be a Marshall Plan state.

  As for the Czechs, abandoned as they were by the West in 1938, they saw the State Department’s froideur as confirmation that America was still uninterested in them. Many saw its growing support for rapid German recovery as outright hostility toward their interests. Masaryk and his fellow democrats believed they had no alternative but to reach an accommodation with Moscow. That they could not, in the end, do so showed starkly how seriously Stalin took the threat to his eastern security buffer represented by the Marshall Plan; he could not ultimately abide non-Communists having any real power in the country.

  “Those goddamn Americans,” Ripka said after agreeing to a grain deal with Moscow in December 1947:

  It’s because of them that I’ve had to come here to sign on the dotted line. . . . We told the Americans, and asked for 200,000 or 300,000 tons of wheat. And these idiots started the usual blackmail. . . . At this point, Gottwald got in touch with Stalin, [who] immediately promised us the required wheat. . . . [T]hese idiots in Washington have driven us straight into the Stalinist camp. . . . The fact that not America but Russia has saved us from starvation will have a tremendous effect inside Czechoslovakia—even among the people whose sympathies are with the West rather than with Moscow.33

  It is of course far from clear that Washington could have prevented the collapse of democracy in Czechoslovakia. Stalin may well have used force to ensure it, and the United States would have had few attractive options to counter it. But the converse is clear—that democracy could not have survived without diplomatic and economic assistance from Washington.

  When the Communist putsch came in February 1948, Marshall was unmoved. “[A] seizure of power by the Communist Party in Czechoslovakia would not materially alter . . . the situation which has existed in the last three years,” he wrote to Caffery in Paris on the 24th, the day before Beneš gave Gottwald the green lig
ht to form a new government. “Czechoslovakia has faithfully followed the Soviet line in the United Nations and elsewhere, and the establishment of a Communist regime would merely crystallize and confirm for the future previous Czech policy.” Marshall was only “concerned about the probable repercussions in Western European countries.”34

  In acknowledgment of the role the Marshall Plan had played in Moscow’s toppling of the Czechoslovak government, Washington became more cautious with aid to avoid giving it a pretext for interference in “border states.” Stalin told a Finnish delegation in 1945 that Soviet policy toward their country was one of “generosity by calculation.”35 But such forbearance, Washington knew, would cease once it failed a cost-benefit test. After receiving $35 million in U.S. Export-Import Bank credits in 1945–46 ($452 million in today’s money), Finland would thenceforth receive only warm indications of American regard and respect for its “special position.” Further large loans, the State Department reasoned, risked provoking Soviet “counter-measures” that would reduce “Finland’s freedom of action and access to the west.” Even after the Marshall Plan had been wound down in 1952, the National Security Council would warn of the need to steer clear of any action that could give rise to “drastic Soviet measures inimical to Finnish independence.”36

  In the case of Tito’s Communist Yugoslavia, however, which shared no border with the Soviet Union, Washington ramped up economic and military assistance, in line with Kennan’s urging, to help deepen the rupture with Moscow. The aid at times included a humanitarian component, such as $38 million ($381 million in today’s money) for famine relief in 1950 (which was gratefully welcomed by the populace), but was manifestly geostrategic in nature. It would pay off with Tito’s abandonment of the Greek Communist insurgents in 1949 and condemnation of North Korean aggression in 1950.37 And with regard to Germany, Washington would move with renewed urgency to claim the zones under Western occupation as a permanent part of the democratic-capitalist sphere.