large and strong Communist and allied parties in France and Italy, very prominent in the first years following the war, were forced out of coalition governments and had to limit themselves to the role of an opposition bent largely on obstruction.
It has frequently been said that communism won in Europe only in countries occupied by the Red Army, and that point deserves to be kept in mind. Yet it does not tell the whole story. Whereas in Poland, for example, native Communists were extremely weak, in Yugoslavia and Albania they had led resistance movements against the Axis powers and had attained dominant positions at the end of the war. Perhaps more important, the Soviet Union preferred to rely in all cases on local Party members, while holding the Red Army in readiness as the ultimate argument. Usually, the 'reactionary' elements, including monarchs where such were present and the upper classes in general as well as Fascists, would be forced out of political life and a 'united front' of 'progressive' elements formed to govern the country. Next the Communists destroyed or at least weakened and neutralized their partners in the front to establish in effect, if not always in form, their single-party dictatorship even though the party might be known as the 'workers' ' or 'socialist unity' party rather than simply 'Communist.' It is worth noting that the eastern European Communists had the most trouble with agrarian parties, just as the Bolsheviks had met their most dangerous rivals in the Socialist Revolutionaries. In Roman Catholic countries, such as Poland and Hungary, they also experienced strong and persistent opposition from the Church. The Communist seizure of power in Czechoslovakia proved particularly disturbing to the non-Communist world, because it occurred as late as 1948 and disposed of a regime headed by President Benes which had enjoyed popular support and maintained friendly relations with the Soviet Union. The new totalitarian governments in eastern Europe proclaimed themselves to be 'popular democracies.' They followed the Soviet lead in introducing economic plans, industrializ-,. ing, collectivizing agriculture - sometimes gradually, however - and establishing minute regulation of all phases of life, including culture. As in the U.S.S.R., the political police played a key role in social transformation and control. An 'iron curtain' came to separate the Communist world from the non-Communist.
Churchill, at the time out of office, in a speech in Fulton, Missouri, in March 1946, stressed the danger to the democratic world of the Communist expansion. He was one of the first Western statesmen to point out this danger. When another year of negotiations with the U.S.S.R. produced no results, President Truman appealed to Congress for funds to provide mili-
tary and economic aid to the neighbors of the U.S.S.R. - Greece and Turkey - the independence of which was threatened directly or indirectly by the Communist state; this policy came to be known as the Truman Doctrine. In June 1947 the Marshall Plan was introduced to help rebuild the economies of European countries devastated by war. Because the Soviet Union and its satellites would not participate, the plan became a powerful bond for the Western bloc. Next, in 1949, twelve Western countries, the United States, Great Britain, Canada, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Norway, Denmark, Iceland, Italy, and Portugal signed the Atlantic Defense Pact of mutual aid against aggression. A permanent North Atlantic Treaty Organization and armed force were subsequently created, under General Eisenhower's command. Also in 1949, the U.S. Congress passed a broad Mutual Defense Assistance Program to aid American allies all over the world. With these agreements and with numerous bases girding the U.S.S.R., the United States and other countries were finally organized to meet the Soviet threat.
The Communist bloc also organized. In 1947 the Communist Information Bureau, known as Cominform, replaced the Communist International which had been disbanded in 1943. Bringing together the Communist parties of the U.S.S.R., eastern Europe, France, and Italy, the Cominform aimed at better co-ordination of Communist efforts in Europe. Zhdanov, who represented the Soviet party, set the unmistakably militant tone of the organization. But Communist co-operation was dealt a major blow by the break between Yugoslavia and the U.S.S.R., backed by its satellites, in the summer of 1948. Tito chose to defy Stalin because he wanted to retain full effective control of his own country and resented the role assigned to Yugoslavia in the economic plans and other plans of the Soviet bloc. He succeeded in his bold undertaking because he had a strong organization and support at home in contrast to other eastern European Communist leaders, many of whom were simply Soviet puppets, and because the Soviet Union did not dare invade Yugoslavia, apparently from fear of the probable international complications. Tito's unprecedented defection created the new phenomenon of 'national' communism, independent of the Soviet bloc. It led to major purges of potential heretics in other eastern European Communist parties, which took the lives of some of the most important Communists of eastern Europe and resembled in many respects the great Soviet purge of the thirties.
The Western world confronted the Soviet in many places and on many issues. Continuous confrontation in the United Nations resulted in little more than Soviet Russia's constant use of its veto power in the Security Council. Thus, of the eighty vetoes cast there in the decade from 1945 to 1955, seventy-seven belonged to the Soviet Union. The two sides also faced each other in Germany. Because of the new enmity of the wartime allies, the
Allied Control Council in Germany failed to function almost from the beginning, and no agreement could be reached concerning the unification of Germany or the peace treaty with that country. Finally, the Federal Republic of Germany with its government in Bonn was established in the Western-occupied zones in May 1949, while the German Democratic Republic was created in the Soviet-held area in October of the same year. The first naturally sided with the West and eventually joined NATO. The second formed an integral part of the Soviet bloc. Cold war in Germany reached its height in the summer of 1948 when Soviet authorities stopped the overland supply of the American, British, and French sectors of Berlin. Since that city, located 110 miles within the Soviet zone, was under the jurisdiction of the four powers, three of them Western, it, or rather West Berlin, remained a highly provocative and disturbing 'window of freedom' in rapidly Communized eastern Germany and eastern Europe. But Soviet hopes to force the Western powers to abandon their part of the city failed: a mammoth airlift was maintained for months by American and British planes to keep West Berlin supplied until the Soviet Union discontinued its blockade.
Postwar events in Asia were as important as the developments in Europe. Communists made bids to seize power in such different areas as Indonesia, Malaya, and Burma. They succeeded in China. The great Chinese civil war ended in 1949 with Chiang Kai-shek's evacuation to Formosa - or Taiwan - and the proclamation of the Communist Chinese People's Republic, with Mao Zedong at its head, on the mainland. While the Soviet Union took no direct part in the Chinese war and at first apparently even tried to restrain Mao, it helped Chinese Communists with supplies and backed fully Mao's new regime. And indeed Communist victory in a country of great size inhabited by some half a billion people meant an enormous accretion of strength to the Soviet bloc, although it also created serious problems: China could not be expected to occupy the role of a satellite, such as Bulgaria or Czechoslovakia, and the Communist world acquired in effect a second center of leadership. By an agreement concluded in 1950, the U.S.S.R. ceded to Communist China its railroad possessions in Manchuria, although briefly retaining a naval base at Port Arthur.
In Korea cold war turned to actual hostilities. There, as in Germany, no agreement could be reached by the victorious powers, and eventually two governments were formed, one in American-occupied southern Korea and the other in the Soviet north, the thirty-eighth parallel dividing the two. At the end of June 1950, North Korea attacked South Korea. In the ensuing years of fighting, which resulted in the two sides occupying approximately the same positions when the military action stopped as they had in the beginning, U.S. forces and some contingents from other countries came to the assistance of South Korea in execution of a mandate of the United Na-
tions, whereas tens and even hundreds of thousands of Chinese 'volunteers' intervened on the North Korean side. The Soviet army itself did not participate in the war, although the North Koreans and the Chinese used Soviet-made aircraft and weapons, and although Soviet advisers, as well as Soviet pilots and other technicians, were in North Korea. Although the front became stabilized in the summer of 1951, no armistice could be concluded until the summer of 1953, after Stalin's death.
Stalin's final months had a certain weird quality to them. It could be that the madness that kept peering through the method during his entire rule asserted itself with new vigor. In any case, events which then transpired will have to be elucidated by future historians. With international tension high, dark clouds gathered at home. In January 1953, nine doctors were accused of having assassinated a number of Soviet leaders, including Zhdanov. Beria's police were charged with insufficient vigilance. The press whipped up a campaign against traitors. Everything pointed to another great purge. Then on March 4 it was announced that Stalin had suffered a stroke on the first of the month, and on the morning of the sixth the news came that he had died the previous night. Some of
