worked to the Kremlin’s advantage that these countries had yet to remove the social and economic obstacles to meritocratic progress. Reactionary army corps and wealthy quasifeudal landlords had held enormous power. Popular educational advance had been fitful. The Christian clergy lacked openness to ‘progressive’ ideas about social change. Poverty was widespread. Foreign capital investment had always been low and the Nazi occupation had brought about a further degradation in conditions. By releasing eastern Europe from the chains of this past, communist administrations could count on a degree of popular consent. Industrial nationalisation and educational expansion were widely welcomed. The possibilities of promotion at work for those who belonged to the lower social orders were eagerly greeted.
Thus there were fewer obstacles to communisation in eastern Europe than would have been the case in western Europe. Stalin was assured of finding support east of the River Elbe even though communist parties had until recently been fragile in the region. The assumption in the Kremlin was that, once the reform process got under way, communisation would develop a momentum of its own.
The communists in Yugoslavia, having won their civil war with little assistance from Moscow, shared power with no other party and encouraged the Albanian communists to behave similarly. The process developed slowly elsewhere. Monarchs were removed in Romania and Bulgaria, and in all the states of the region there was an insistence on the inclusion of communists in government; but in most cases the cabinets were coalitional. Poland was a sore spot. The Provisional Government set up by Stalin grudgingly accepted members from the London-based government-in-exile; but the communists continued to harass all its rivals. Stanislaw Mikolajczyk’s Peasant Party was constantly persecuted. Elections were held elsewhere with considerable resort to malpractices which allowed communists to do better. Communists ruled Romania under Petru Groza. In Hungary Stalin faced greater difficulty. The elections of November 1945 had returned a huge anti-communist majority headed by the Smallholders’ Party. Communists, though, held many positions of power and, supported by the Soviet occupying forces, conducted arrests. Czechoslovakia was easier. President Benes, a liberal, advocated friendly relations with the USSR, and at the 1946 elections the communists emerged as the largest single party with 38 per cent of the vote. Communist leader Klement Gottwald became Prime Minister.
Yet the events of 1947 — the Marshall Plan and the First Conference of the Cominform — changed the whole atmosphere. The Cold War broke out in its most intense form. The east European communist parties discovered how things had been transformed at the First Cominform Conference at Sklarska Poreba in Polish Silesia. Malenkov was sent as Stalin’s chief representative, and gave a tedious introductory speech proclaiming that a million copies of the official biography of Stalin had been printed since the war.6 Zhdanov also attended. He and Malenkov functioned as Stalin’s mouth and ears at the Conference. Zhdanov made the decisive comment on behalf of the Kremlin when he stated that ‘two camps’ existed in global politics. One was headed by the USSR, the other by the USA. Supposedly the USSR led the world’s progressive forces. The Americans had no interest in the industrial recovery of Europe; Truman aimed at nothing less than the subjugation of the continent to his country’s capitalist magnates.7 The Marshall Plan was a trick designed to achieve this objective for Wall Street; it was nothing less than a campaign to consolidate the global hegemony of the USA.8
The Conference proceeded with unpleasantness. The Yugoslavs complained that the Italians had not behaved with revolutionary firmness. They accused the Greeks of lacking a commitment to insurgency.9 Obviously they acted in complicity with Moscow; Stalin was insisting on fixing the blame on the Italian and Greek parties even though they had been carrying out his orders. Malenkov and Zhdanov fulfilled his instructions to the letter. In Stalin’s opinion the Marshall Plan ruined the possibility of a durable understanding with the USA, and the Americans, if they hoped to destabilise eastern Europe, would have to accept that the USSR would attempt the same in western Europe. The Cominform was not the Comintern reborn; but it embraced communist parties in countries where the threat to the desires of the Western Allies was acute: membership included not only the countries occupied by the Red Army but also Italy and France.
Stalin made the most of the available opportunities. He had demanded a daily briefing on the proceedings hundreds of miles away in Sklarska Poreba; and by sending Malenkov and Zhdanov, who were comrades but never friends and allies, he would have competing sources of information. He aimed to seize back the international initiative and disturb Washington’s equanimity. A contest between the ‘two camps’ was declared. No word of dissent issued from the mouths of participants; fear of offending the absent Stalin was paramount. Amendments to resolutions arose mainly from changes of mind amid the Soviet leadership, and these changes needed and received Stalin’s sanction. The focus was on Europe. Stalin dealt with the situation without upsetting the status quo elsewhere in the world. This was why he had curtly rejected the request of the Chinese communist leaders to attend. The purpose of the Cominform Conference was to respond to the challenge thrown down by the Marshall Plan. Having proceeded carefully in the first couple of years after the victory over Nazism, Stalin indicated to communists in western and eastern Europe that a more militant programme had to be adopted.
Although he had succeeded in his task with Yugoslav assistance, Yugoslavia troubled him within months of the First Conference. Tito would not limit himself to his country’s affairs. He badgered Stalin for aid to give to the Greek communists in their civil war against the monarchists (who were abundantly supplied and militarily reinforced by the British); he also agitated for the creation of a Balkan federal state which he evidently expected to dominate. He demanded a more rapid transition to communist policies across eastern Europe than Stalin thought desirable. Stalin decided to expel him from the Cominform and to advertise his fate as a warning to those communists in eastern Europe tempted to show similar truculence. Stalin, using Molotov and Zhdanov as his spokesmen, started the anti-Tito campaign in earnest in March 1948. Yugoslav communists were accused of adventurism, regional over-assertiveness and a deviation from Marxist–Leninist principles. Stalin also rebuked Tito for poking his nose into politics in Austria, where the Soviet Army was among the occupying powers.10
The hardened line was expressed in an increase in communist political militancy across the region. Polish elections were held to the accompaniment of intimidation and electoral fraud. Boleslaw Bierut became President and the comprehensive communisation of the country proceeded. Wladyslaw Gomulka, the Party General Secretary, was judged too resistant to Stalin’s demands for more rapid installation of Soviet-style economic and social policies and was arrested as a Titoist. The communists absorbed the other socialist parties to form the Polish United Workers’ Party. In Hungary the Smallholders’ Party leaders were arrested and in 1947 fraudulent elections brought the communists to power. The Social-Democrats were eliminated by forcing them to merge with the communists in the Hungarian Working People’s Party. In Czechoslovakia the communists manipulated the police to such an extent that the non-communists resigned from the government. Fresh elections were held and the communists, facing few surviving rivals, won an overwhelming victory. Benes gave way to Gottwald as President in June 1948. In Bulgaria the Agrarian Union was dissolved and its leader Nikola Petkov executed. For most purposes the communists assumed monopoly of power. Georgi Dimitrov, Prime Minister from 1946, died in 1949 and his brother-in-law Valko Chervenkov took his place. After the Soviet-Yugoslav split the Albanian communist leadership under Enver Hoxha aligned itself with Moscow and executed Titoist ‘deviationists’.
All this took place against the background of Stalin’s onslaught on the Yugoslavs. Tito’s
Not a squeak of opposition to Stalin and the Kremlin was audible from the other communist parties. As the Soviet propaganda machine got going, Tito was depicted as a fascist in communist clothing and as Europe’s new Hitler. The entire Yugoslav political leadership were soon called agents of foreign intelligence services.13 The consequences of challenging Moscow were being spelled out. An Eastern Block was formed in all but name. With the exception of Yugoslavia the countries of Europe east of the River Elbe were turned into subject entities and all were thrust into the mould of the Soviet order. Political pluralism, limited though it had
