was conventionally given to youngsters on important occasions. Short of being called God on earth, Stalin had deified himself.
In 1949 when he (inaccurately) celebrated his seventieth birthday,25 a tremendous fuss was made of him. He made a limp attempt to stop it getting out of hand, telling Malenkov: ‘Don’t even think of presenting me with another star!’ By this he meant he had had enough awards (and he continued to regret allowing himself to be called Generalissimus: when Churchill asked him what to call him, Marshal or Generalissimus, Stalin answered Marshal).26 There was no chance that Malenkov would take this display of humility seriously. Laudatory books of memoirs were prepared for the great day. Articles proliferated in newspapers. On the day itself, 21 December, a vast balloon was sent up over the Kremlin and the image of Stalin’s moustachioed face was projected on to it. Processions in his honour had been organised the length and breadth of the USSR. The festival continued into the evening at the Bolshoi Theatre when guests from the Soviet political elite and from abroad assembled to do honour to the Leader. It was one of Stalin’s rare appearances and those who saw him were surprised at how physically diminished he seemed: they had been fed pictures from the cult and were unprepared for the human reality. Could it really be that the wizened old man before their gaze was the Great Stalin?
Yet they adjusted themselves to what they had seen. They reverted to admiration. Stalin might be elderly but he remained in their eyes the towering figure in the history of the USSR since the late 1920s. His had been the campaign to modernise, industrialise and educate in the 1930s, and — they thought — he had succeeded. His had been the leadership that had brought victory over the Nazi hordes. His was the firm hand at the helm of foreign policy in the storms of the Cold War. If the audience had doubts about his greatness, they quickly dispelled them. Hours of speeches reinforced the message that the world’s finest politician alive was present in the hall. Leader after leader extolled his significance for communism. The stage, decorated with banners and flowers, was occupied by foreign communist luminaries such as Mao Tse-tung, Palmiro Togliatti and Dolores Ibarruri (who had been in Moscow exile since the Spanish Civil War). Behind them was spread an enormous portrait of Stalin. He himself smiled occasionally and clapped the orators. Although he was hardly expansive in his gestures, he was a contented man. The entire communist movement was rendering him homage.
The cult of Stalin, lord of all he surveyed, spread far beyond Soviet borders. On posters and in the press his image was prominent, and failure by communist leaderships in eastern Europe to maintain public reverence was inconceivable. This attitude was internalised by individual leaders from the region whenever they had direct contact with him. Conversations with Stalin were treated as if subjects were being admitted to audiences with an emperor. The Hungarian Prime Minister, Ferenc Nagy, gushed at the outset of their exchanges: ‘The Hungarian government has recognised that a year after the [country’s] liberation it must come to Generalissimus Stalin to express its gratitude for Hungary’s liberation, for the freedom of Hungarian political life and for the independence of the Hungarian motherland.’27 Nagy was not alone. Polish Prime Minister Boleslaw Bierut declared: ‘We have come to you, comrade Stalin, as to our great friend so as to express our considerations on the course of events in Poland and check the correctness of our evaluation of the political situation in the country.’28 Stalin was usually pleased by this abject submission to his will. But occasionally the reports did not please him, and when he reprimanded the Romanian communist leader Georgiu-Dej for mistaken policies, there was nothing for it but for Dej to ‘confess the erroneousness of his views’.29
No one challenged this except, at a distance, the Yugoslavian communist leader Tito. Although fear of Soviet counter-measures against the communist leaderships of eastern Europe must have played a part, there was also genuine admiration for Stalin among them. Most of those communist parties in any case would have quickly been removed if the Soviet Army had not been in occupation. They depended heavily on Stalin’s goodwill, and they knew it. Even Mao Tse-tung, victor in the Chinese Civil War with little support and indeed much obstruction from Stalin, maintained an admiring public posture towards the Leader of the USSR. By 1952, when the Nineteenth Party Congress met in Moscow, the praise for Stalin from foreign leaders was downright glutinous. He was greeted with the shout: ‘Glory to the great Stalin!’ Statues, small metal busts and posters repeated the work of praise. To his dying day he heard hymns to himself as the master of the world communist movement.
51. DANGEROUS LIAISONS
The propaganda war intensified between the USSR and the Western Allies. Soviet diplomats treated their American and British counterparts as enemies and the feeling was reciprocated. Cultural contacts ceased. The countries of eastern Europe as well as the communist parties of western Europe fell in line with the Kremlin’s orders. In the West Stalin was depicted as the most evil dictator alive, quite as evil as the German Fuhrer whom he had defeated. At the same time
Neither camp, however, was looking for military conflict. Even Stalin, whose gloomy axiom was that a Third World War might be postponed but was ultimately inevitable,1 did not wish to bring the USA to blows with the USSR. But events were stiffening his resolve to face down the Americans. The coincidence of the Soviet Union’s acquisition of the A-bomb and the communist seizure of power in China altered the balance of power in the world. Although American weapons technology remained ahead of its rival, Stalin was no longer going to be easily intimidated in diplomatic exchanges.
Few gifts, of course, come without wrapping; and Stalin knew that China’s resurgent power under communist leadership had the potential to complicate his statesmanship. Mao might assert himself like a Chinese Tito. The world communist movement, until then largely unified, would undergo fissiparous strain. There might be a direct clash between the People’s Republic of China and the USSR. Or things might deteriorate more indirectly. The People’s Republic of China could start acting in international relations without consulting the Kremlin and yet somehow entangle the USSR in the adverse consequences.
Stalin with all this in mind sent out his Minister of Communications, Ivan Kovalev, to Beijing to see how closely the Chinese communists were following his recommendations. Unusually he showed Kovalev’s report to Mao.2 Stalin’s motives were hardly comradely. Probably he wanted to impress on Mao that the USSR knew more about China’s politics than Mao had imagined. Kovalev revealed that little serious effort had been made to win over the Chinese working class to the revolutionary cause. He mentioned that land reform was geographically patchy. Kovalev was also unimpressed by the ideological preparation of the party cadres. Indeed he noted tensions in the Beijing leadership. Kovalev told Stalin directly that some leaders were not only anti-American but also anti- Soviet. Mao’s close associate Chou En-lai had been heard to wonder why, if Beijing was being told to avoid annoying the USA, it should reject overtures from blackballed Yugoslavia.3 There was plenty to provoke Stalin’s suspicions and he let Mao know that, unless China toed the Soviet line, assistance from Moscow would not be forthcoming.
Diplomatic relations between the USA and the USSR were not broken, but both Moscow and Washington understood that global politics had entered a period of intensified uncertainty. Stalin especially wanted to secure Soviet interests vis-a-vis communist China. He started as he meant to go on. Devastated by decades of civil war, China urgently required foreign economic assistance, and the USSR was the sole possible source for it. Stalin intended to drive a hard bargain. While content to nudge China towards spreading communist political influence in eastern Asia, he demanded Chinese acceptance of the primacy of the Soviet Union in the world communist movement.
Yet events in the Far East tempted him to risk moving over to an offensive foreign policy. Since Korea’s liberation from Japanese occupation there had been intermittent civil war, and two separate states had emerged on the peninsula in 1948. The same American military shield which defended Japan protected southern Korea with
