relations with us are refraining from participation in this gathering whereas Czechoslovakia, which also has friendly relations with us, is participating.
Communist leader Gottwald left his liberal Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk to twist in the wind. Masaryk asked Stalin to bear in mind Czechoslovak industry’s dependence on the West; he added that the Poles had wished to go to Paris. But Stalin was unmoved. Resistance crumbled, and Masaryk begged Stalin and Molotov to help the Czechoslovaks to formulate the text of their withdrawal from participation. Stalin simply advised him to copy the Bulgarian model. Masaryk salvaged a scrap of national pride by pointing out that the government would not be meeting until the following evening; but the entire delegation ended by thanking Stalin and Molotov for the ‘necessary pieces of advice’.7
Stalin was flinging mud in the face of the USA, and the world was his witness. Overnight it became easier for Truman to get his way with governments which had doubts about the hardening American line towards the USSR; he was also helped in his campaign to convince the US Congress that financial aid at least to western Europe lay among the objective interests of the USA. Stalin had been pushed to the point of strategic decision. He confronted a definite challenge: the American President wanted to pull the greatest possible number of European states under his country’s hegemony and to bring benefit to its industrial and commercial corporations. The USSR’s economy remained in a desperate plight and the Americans had no objective incentive to facilitate its recovery. Even so, Stalin could have handled the situation with more finesse. Instead of tossing the terms back in Truman’s face, he could have drawn out the negotiations and proved to the world that the apparent altruism of the Marshall Plan concealed American self-interest. But Stalin had made up his mind. He never again met Truman after Potsdam and did not seek to. Nor could he be bothered with negotiating with Western diplomats. The USA had thrown down the gauntlet and he would pick it up.
Even so, the Americans declined to go further in trying to detach eastern Europe from the USSR. The policy of containment was interpreted as involving acceptance that such countries fell within the zone of Soviet influence. The chance of liberating these countries had been at its highest in 1945. Western public opinion could be manipulated, but only to a certain extent two years later. The Americans and the British had been taught to respect ‘Uncle Joe’; they had also been told that the war would be over when Germany and Japan had been defeated. It would not have been easy to induce British or American soldiers to start fighting in mid-1947.
Soviet retaliation against the American initiative was not long in coming. In September 1947 a conference of communist parties was convoked at Sklarska Poreba in Poland. Stalin did not deign to attend. Having ordered the creation of a tight system of co-ordination by telephone and telegram, he sent Zhdanov on his behalf. Zhdanov had been well briefed and contacted Moscow whenever anything unpredicted arose. The organisational objective was to form an Informational Bureau (or Cominform) to co-ordinate communist activity in the countries of eastern Europe as well as in Italy and France. As relations worsened with the USA, Stalin withdrew permission for a diversity of national transitions to communism. The call was made for an acceleration of communisation in eastern Europe; and, in western Europe, the French and Italian parties were reprimanded for their reluctance to drop their parliamentary orientation (even though it had been Stalin who had instigated it!). The completion of a rigid communist order was the goal to the east of the Elbe. Stalin also had his ambitions elsewhere. He intended to disrupt ‘Anglo-American’ hegemony in western Europe by the sole political means to hand: communist party militancy.8
Yet blatant American interference in the Italian elections through subsidies to the Christian-Democratic Party proved effective. In the two halves of Europe the armed camps of former allies confronted each other. Ambiguity, however, remained over Germany, where the USA, the USSR, the United Kingdom and France had occupying forces in their respective zones. Each of these powers also controlled its own sector in Berlin, which lay within the USSR’s zone.
Stalin, annoyed and frustrated by developments, decided to probe Western resolve at an early opportunity. Soviet representatives proposed the formation of a united German government. The condition for this would be Germany’s demilitarisation. Stalin seemed to want either a communist or a neutral Germany as his further aim. He also aspired to an increase in reparations to the USSR. On 24 June 1948 Stalin started a blockade of the American, British and French zones of the city. Unable to secure the kind of Germany he found acceptable, he opted to cut off the eastern zone under the USSR’s occupation from the rest of the country. The Soviet Army patrolled the border. Confrontation was inevitable, but Stalin gambled on the Western Allies being unwilling to risk war. He miscalculated. The Americans and British flew in supplies to their sectors of Berlin, and it was Stalin himself who had to decide whether to begin military hostility. The Berlin airlift continued through to May 1949. Stalin gave up. Western resolve had been tested and found to be too firm. Relations between the USSR and the USA deteriorated. A Western initiative inaugurated the Federal Republic of Germany in September 1949. In October the Kremlin sanctioned the German Democratic Republic’s creation in response.
This was a turbulent environment. Like everyone else, Stalin was surprised by particular events and situations, and much of his time was spent on reacting to successive emergencies. Yet nothing happened which challenged his general operational assumptions about global politics. He did not expect favours from the Americans, and the Marshall Plan confirmed his darkest suspicions. The phrase used by Zhdanov at the founding Cominform Conference about the existence of ‘two camps’ in perpetual, unavoidable competition appeared prophetic. First to form an overt military alliance was the capitalist camp. The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) came into existence in April 1949. Under the USA’s leadership it included the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Canada, Belgium, Holland, Portugal, Denmark, Norway, Iceland and Luxemburg. Greece and Turkey joined three years later and the Federal Republic of Germany in 1955. Most countries in North America and western Europe adhered to NATO: it was a mighty and coherent alliance with the obvious but unstated purpose of seeing off any Soviet attack; and for all its European members its great virtue lay in binding the American government and military forces into their endeavour to keep the Soviet Army behind the Iron Curtain. In 1936 there had been an Anti-Comintern Pact; in 1949 an Anti-Cominform Pact had been established in all but name.
Western security concerns were increased on 29 August 1949 when Soviet scientists successfully tested their own A-bomb. Beria had used the ebullient Igor Kurchatov as the technical chief of the project. Kurchatov assembled a team of capable physicists. Soviet intelligence agencies handed over secret material taken by their agents from the Americans, and this hastened progress. The quest for uranium was facilitated by the consignment of hundreds of thousands of repatriated POWs to the mines in Siberia. Few survived the experience. By mid-1949 the USSR, from its own mines as well as from deposits in Czechoslovakia, had acquired sufficient plutonium and uranium-235 to go ahead with the construction of a Soviet bomb.9
Stalin took an active interest. The main figures in the research project were called before him in a lengthy meeting. Each had to report on his progress, and Stalin fired questions at them. Mikhail Pervukhin had to explain to him the difference between heavy water and ordinary water.10 He told Stalin what he needed to know. Not having studied physics at the Tiflis Spiritual Seminary, the Leader started with only the most rudimentary grasp of the scientific principles. His ignorance had earlier been downright dangerous for the scientists. Having recently re-read Lenin’s
Kurchatov and his team pulled it off in the desert outside Semipalatinsk in Kazakhstan — and to his amazement, as the mushroom cloud gathered on the horizon, he was hugged by Beria. Such a display of emotion was unprecedented. But Beria, who had spent the past four years threatening Kurchatov, had lived under the same shadow cast by Stalin. A failed bomb test could have led to his death sentence. Instead he could report success to the Kremlin. Stalin was also delighted. The USSR had entered the portals of the world’s nuclear-powers elite, and Stalin himself could come to any future diplomatic negotiations as the equal of the American and British leaders.
This in turn opened him to persuasion that the USSR should assume an assertive posture in world politics. There were other reasons for his ebullience. Not only had the communist subjugation of eastern Europe occurred
