The Red Flag: A History of Communism

by Priestland, David

  According to Djilas, admittedly not a neutral observer, Tito ‘was conspicuously without a[ny] particular talent except one – political’.88 But Djilas was willing to concede that this sole talent was a powerful one. Tito was not a deep thinker. Despite reading basic Marxist texts in prison and in the Comintern school in Moscow, he was weak on ideological issues and was embarrassed by his poor education. Nor was he a rousing speaker. But his strength lay in his self-belief, energy and charisma. He identified wholly with the Communist cause, partly because he was steeped in the Comintern’s culture. As Djilas remembered, with some condescension, his ‘speech and delivery overflowed with clichés and concepts inherited from Marxism and folk wisdom’.89 But Tito also saw Communism as a system for the aspirational and ambitious: it helped lowly people like himself to better themselves.

  In the Communist messianic historical role of the working class, Tito found personal and sacrificial social meaning… Whenever he used the phrases ‘the working class’, ‘workers’, ‘working people’, it sounded as if he were talking about himself – about the aspirations of those in the lowest ranks of society to the glamour of government and the ecstasy of power.90

  Tito’s confidence and political nous helped him to establish an independent Communist regime, free of Soviet domination. Unlike rival resistance groups, the Communists stressed multi-ethnic harmony – a powerful message after the vicious conflicts between Serbs and Croats during the war. Tito also succeeded in securing international support, from both Churchill and Stalin, in 1945. However the fact that he came to power through Yugoslav, rather than Soviet, efforts allowed him to follow an independent, more radical line than other East European regimes. The ‘Popular Fronts’ in Yugoslavia and its satellite Albania were complete shams from the start, despite Stalin’s efforts to broaden them. Tito engaged in brutal massacres of opposition forces, and began to pursue ambitious Stalinist planning and radical reforms in the countryside. He also backed the insurgent Communists in Greece.

  Tensions between the Soviets and Yugoslavs were in part caused by a clash of cultures, between a young Communism in its Radical puritanical phase, and a mature, more inclusive Communism that had made some compromises with the broader population. A dinner, organized by Marshal Koniev for Yugoslav Communists visiting the Ukrainian front, encapsulated the differences between the two. Djilas recounts how much the Soviet officers enjoyed the extravagant feast of caviar, roast pigs and cakes ‘a foot thick’, washed down with plenty of vodka. The Yugoslavs, however, ‘went as if to a great trial: they had to drink, despite the fact that this did not agree with their “Communist morality”’.91 Stalin, though, had hoped that Slavic unity would attract the Yugoslavs into the Soviet fold. As he told Djilas, ‘By God, there’s no doubt about it: we’re the same people.’92

  Stalin himself was less concerned with Tito’s radicalism within Yugoslavia than with his threat to Soviet international dominance. Yugoslav help for the Greeks threatened to scupper the agreement with Churchill, giving the Allies an excuse for intervening in turn in Bulgaria and Romania. Stalin was further angered by broader Yugoslav ambitions in the Balkans: Tito’s involvement in Albania; his conclusion of an agreement with Bulgaria in 1947 without Moscow’s permission; and his claims on lands in Italy and Austria. In early 1948 Stalin engineered a series of threatening encounters with the Yugoslavs. In one letter, delivered by the Soviet ambassador, the Yugoslavs were warned: ‘We think Trotsky’s political career is sufficiently instructive.’93 Yet Tito refused to give in to Soviet bullying, and the Yugoslavs were expelled from the Comintern’s replacement – the Cominform – on 28 June, the anniversary of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo. Neither side wanted the split. For Tito it was a ‘bitter psychological and intellectual blow’, which, so he believed, brought on the gall-bladder attacks that plagued him for the rest of his life.94 Yet the split also damaged Stalin’s authority in Central and Eastern Europe. A leader in the Soviet sphere had stood up to Moscow and survived.

  The Greek and Yugoslav models were not a significant threat to the Popular Fronts. There were pockets of Radical Communism in Southern Europe: the Italian Communists, especially, had an important – though minority – left-wing. But the parties of Western Europe were wedded to moderation. Even so the radicalism of the Left contributed to fears that the moderation of the Popular Fronts in the West was a sham. This fear was a major factor in the transition from uneasy peace to the Cold War and the end of the Popular Fronts.

  VIII

  Debate still rages on the causes of the Cold War, that epochal struggle between liberalism and Communism, and this is not the place for a detailed discussion. A traditional Western account blamed a millenarian Communism or nationalistic Stalin, driven by the search for global domination; a 1960s ‘revisionism’ accused a greedy capitalism, desperate for world markets; but neither explains a complex reality.95 Neither side desired conflict, but given the mistrust between the Soviets and the West, which had prevailed throughout the War, it is no surprise that the alliance broke down. Stalin’s behaviour was probably most destabilizing, for whilst he hoped that peace with the West would last for some time, he never abandoned his ideologically inspired view that capitalism and socialism were in conflict, and the latter would ultimately prevail. He also behaved opportunistically, seeking to expand his sphere of influence.96 For their part, the Americans and the British acted in ways that frightened a suspicious Stalin.

  Stalin, as always obsessed with the weaknesses of the Soviet borderlands, was primarily intent on securing a sphere of influence around the USSR. To the west, there would be a stockade of ‘friendly’ East European states, including, he hoped, a pro-Soviet, united Germany; to the east territories lost earlier to the Japanese and now reclaimed, in Manchuria and the Kuriles; and possibly to the south an enclave in Northern Iran, influence in Turkey and the Bosporus and trusteeship over former Italian colonies in North Africa. This was a maximum programme, and Stalin realized that achieving it would be a struggle, but he was probably confident that a great deal could be secured by agreement with the Allies.97 The United States would be given the Western hemisphere and Pacific, whilst Britain and the Soviet Union would reach agreement based, as the foreign minister Maxim Litvinov put it in November 1944, on ‘amicable separation of security spheres in Europe according to the principle of geographic proximity’.98

  The power and ambitions of the United States were much greater. The Americans were determined to stop a repeat of the 1930s by preventing any one power dominating the whole of Eurasia; isolation, as the war had shown, only allowed enemies to build up their resources and ultimately threaten the United States. A huge network of bases was constructed worldwide, and America showed its technological and military superiority by exploding the atom bomb. America was just about prepared to accept the Soviet domination of the area the Red Army occupied in Eastern Europe, but no more. If the Soviets controlled Western Europe and Japan, they might use their resources to challenge America, just as the Nazis had done.99

  Conflicts over many of the Soviet demands strained relations between the United States and the USSR in the course of 1945, but their immediate geopolitical interests were not necessarily incompatible. On the face of it, the informal division of Europe in 1945 could have worked; Stalin won some of his demands and lost others. Truman’s judgement of Stalin at Potsdam – ‘I like Stalin. He is straightforward. Knows what he wants and will compromise when he can’t get it’100 – was being borne out. Stalin was indeed willing to make concessions, pulling troops out of Manchuria and Czechoslovakia.

  In 1946, however, relations began to deteriorate more seriously. In part, Stalin’s inconsistency, brinkmanship and opportunism were responsible.101 In attempting to extend Soviet influence in Iran and Turkey, he fuelled suspicion of his motives and his intentions became difficult to predict; the Soviet realization that the United States would not give it aid without imposing political conditions also contributed to tensions. But an
important force underlying the change in relations was the ideological nature of the conflict, and the obsession of both sides with what might be called ‘ideological security’ – an anxiety that made peace very unlikely.

  Stalin, as has been seen, had been obsessed with this issue for many years, and it appeared especially worrying to him after the War, for the relaxation of ideological controls alongside greater contact with the West had generated expectations of further liberalization as reward for wartime sacrifices. This was something that Stalin, now fearing a possible struggle with the United States, would not permit. For him, liberalism would open the USSR to Western influences, and only a wholly ideologically committed population could resist a Western challenge. In a speech of 9 February 1946, he warned of the possibility of this new struggle. It was a defensive speech, addressed to a domestic audience.102 But American observers interpreted it as a sign of aggressive intent. This in turn triggered anxieties about Soviet subversion and the internal stability of the United States. The deputy head of the American mission in Moscow, George Kennan, wrote his highly influential ‘Long Telegram’ less than a fortnight after the speech, arguing that Stalin planned to ‘roll back’ American influence through Communist subversion in the West. Stalin, he suggested, might not be an ideological fanatic, but he was a security fanatic; he had a ‘neurotic view of the world affairs’, fuelled by a ‘traditional and instinctive’ Russian sense of insecurity, intensified by Communist ideology and an ‘Oriental secretiveness and conspiracy’. Stalin’s USSR was bound to launch a sustained campaign to destabilize the West, and its main weapon was a network of collaborators within Western Communist parties:

  Efforts will be made… to disrupt national self-confidence, to hamstring measures of national defense, to increase social and political unrest, to stimulate all forms of disunity… poor will be set against rich, black against white, young against old, newcomers against established residents etc.103

  America had to respond by ‘containing’ Soviet power within its current borders, whilst preserving ideological unity and confidence within the United States.

  Kennan’s analysis of Stalin’s thinking in early 1946 exaggerated Moscow’s ambitions in Western Europe. Stalin and the Western Communist parties remained committed to Popular Fronts even as relations between the two sides deteriorated. The Soviets did not support the radicals in Greece and were unhappy about Yugoslav pretensions. But the Americans’ anxieties were understandable. From their perspective, Communism was on the march throughout the world – in Europe and Asia. They might not be able to do anything about Eastern Europe, but the USSR had to be contained within its sphere of influence. And as Western Europe suffered from economic collapse after the War, the Truman administration became increasingly worried about the West’s ideological security.104 Conditions in the winter of 1946–7 were bad (though not catastrophically so), and American officials warned that unless the United States provided aid and support, Communists would exploit the disillusionment. According to the newly founded Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in September 1947, ‘the greatest potential danger to U.S. security’ lay in the ‘possibility of the economic collapse of Western Europe and of the consequent accession to power of elements subservient to the Kremlin’.105 Communists were particularly strong in Italy. Once they came to power, it was feared, they would use the unscrupulous bullying tactics they were employing in Eastern Europe. What the Soviets had failed to achieve by force of arms they might gain by internal subversion.

  The new American attitude further strengthened hard-line opinion within the Soviet leadership, including Stalin’s.106 Their suspicions seemed to be borne out when Truman began to challenge Communism in the Western sphere of influence from early 1947, and in the more radical South, this included military force. Congress was asked for aid to Greece and Turkey and the ‘Truman Doctrine’ promised American support for all ‘free peoples’, throughout the world, ‘who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures’.107 In 1948 plans were also made for a military intervention in Italy if the Popular Front won the elections. Secret paramilitary groups were to be supported and Sicily and Sardinia occupied.108 But, in general, the Americans relied on the carrot rather than the stick. In 1946 Kennan himself had described Communism as a ‘malignant parasite which feeds only on diseased tissue’, and which could best be challenged by ‘courageous and incisive measures’ to ‘solve internal problems’.109 This was the principle that lay behind the European Recovery Program, better known as the Marshall Plan, announced in June 1947.

  The Marshall planners were learning the lessons of the failures of laissez-faire free markets in the 1920s and nationalistic protectionism in the 1930s. To avoid a new Nazism, Washington elites believed international cooperation and free trade were essential. Also, the prosperity of the United States demanded European, and especially German markets. These economies therefore had to be restored through massive injections of aid, and protectionism resisted. But at the same time, the Marshall planners were trying to reconstruct Western Europe along more leftist lines. Pure free-market capitalism, they were convinced, would only push workers into the arms of the Communists. The working class, which had remained so marginalized and insecure in the 1920s, had to be absorbed into the political system and given higher living standards. The Marshall aiders’ goal was a functioning market economy, but they were convinced that only state regulation and collaboration between labour and capital would create it. They therefore involved trade unions, as well as employers, in the planning; if both capital and labour were committed to growth and high living standards for all, they argued, the old class struggles of the past could be overcome.110

  The Marshall Plan was part of a general move towards a more regulated and egalitarian economic system, and at home Truman was determined to expand the welfare benefits of the New Deal, whilst increasing the military preparedness of the United States. The result was a new, massively expanded ‘military-welfare state’.111 Internationally, too, statist principles were to operate in a new financial system established at the Bretton Woods conference of 1944. Efforts were made to return to the global markets of the pre-1914 era, but without unregulated capitalism and the discredited gold standard, which had put so many restrictions on wages and economic growth in the 1920s. The Americans ran a system of fixed exchange rates, with the dollar at the centre, whilst a new institution – the International Monetary Fund (IMF) – was established to help states in temporary financial difficulties. This was, then, a highly controlled system in which states had the whip hand, not private banks. It was remarkably successful in reviving the economies of the ‘West’ (including Japan), but it was founded on an implicit bargain: the United States secured powerful allies in the war against Communism, but at the cost of helping to build up their domestic industries and to compete in world markets. In the longer term, America’s competitors – and especially its former enemies, Germany and Japan – benefited at the superpower’s expense. But immediately after the war, the United States, massively wealthier than the rest of the world, could afford the deal. America was building a set of alliances, the so-called ‘Free World’, strong and wealthy enough to resist Communism.

  Marshall Aid was not as important economically as its cheerleaders claimed; nor was the European economic crisis as dire as the Americans thought. But the Plan had a profound political impact. It forced Western Europeans to choose between capitalism and Communism. And it showed that capitalism had changed: it was finally trying to end European social conflict by making serious concessions to the working class. Liberals were now offering an attractive alternative to the Popular Front – a coalition that included reformist socialists but excluded Communists.

  The Marshall Plan put all Communists, including the Soviets, on the defensive. They knew it would be popular, but it came with strings attached, and Moscow rightly saw it as a mechanism that would pull Central and Eastern Europe into an American economic sphere of influence. The A
mericans offered participation to everybody, including the Russians and East Europeans, and initially Molotov thought that the Soviets might be able to neutralize Marshall Aid, detaching it from American leadership. But when he discovered that this was impossible, he and Stalin concluded that America was determined to destroy Soviet influence in its buffer states.112 The Czechoslovak Popular Front’s enthusiastic reception of the Marshall Plan only proved to Stalin that it was designed to lure East Europeans out of the Soviet camp. The Czechoslovak Communist Prime Minister, Klement Gottwald, was summoned to Moscow and angrily instructed to denounce the Marshall Plan, as were all Communist parties and all other countries under Soviet control (except partitioned Austria).

  The Marshall Plan was decisive for Stalin, and convinced him that the emergence of two blocs was unavoidable.113 America, he concluded, was trying to revive German industrial power and use it to build an anti-Soviet coalition in Europe. In response he decided that Soviet security required the sovietization of Central and Eastern Europe. He let local Communists off their leashes, and the Popular Fronts were destroyed, one by one – most dramatically in the ‘Prague coup’ of February 1948, when Gottwald forced Beneš to accept a single-party Communist government. Local Communists had no qualms about abandoning democracy. Jakub Berman justified the Communists’ undemocratic behaviour decades later, when the Communists themselves were being challenged by the Polish Solidarity trade union: