Marshall Plan was regarded by him as an economic device to destroy Soviet military and political hegemony over Eastern Europe.
Relations between the USSR and the former Allies had worsened. The USA, Britain and France were resisting demands for continued reparations to be made to the USSR by regions of Germany unoccupied by Soviet forces, and Germany’s partition into two entirely separate administrative zones was becoming a reality. Stalin feared that the western zone was about to be turned into a separate state that would re-arm itself with the USA’s encouragement and would belong to an anti-Soviet alliance. In the Far East, too, the USA seemed interested mainly in rehabilitating Japan as an economic partner. As in the 1930s, Stalin felt threatened from both the Pacific Ocean and central Europe.
Stalin could do little about the Far East except build up his military position on Sakhalin and the Kurile Islands acquired at the end of the Second World War; and in March 1947 he decided to withdraw from northern Iran rather than risk confrontation with Britain and the USA. But in Europe he was more bullish. On 22 September 1947 he convoked a conference of communist parties from the USSR, Poland, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, France and Italy. The venue was Szklarska Poreba in eastern Poland. Soviet politicians dominated the proceedings. Stalin was not present, but was kept closely informed by his Politburo associates Zhdanov and Malenkov about what was said. The organizational aim was to re-establish an international communist body, which would be called the Information Bureau. Several delegates were uneasy about the proposal and stressed the need to co-operate with non-communists in their country and to avoid agricultural collectivization.
But in the end they agreed to the creation of an Information Bureau, which quickly became known as Cominform. Ostensibly it was a very different body from the defunct Comintern: Cominform was to be based not in Moscow but in Belgrade; it was to involve only the parties present at the Conference and to have no formal control over these parties.39 Yet Stalin clearly intended to use Cominform so as to impose his will on the communist leaderships with delegates at the Conference.
In 1948, as he continued to harden his purposes towards the communist parties in Eastern Europe, he sanctioned the replacement of the various coalition governments with communist dictatorships. One-party communist states were formed by a mixture of force, intimidation and electoral fraud; and the Soviet security police operated as overseers. If Ukraine and other Soviet republics were the inner empire ruled from Moscow, the new states were the outer imperial domains. They were officially designated ‘people’s democracies’. This term was invented to emphasize that the East European states had been established without the civil wars which had occurred in Russia.40 Thus the Soviet Army inhibited any counter-revolution and the social and economic reconstruction could proceed without obstruction. The term also served to stress the subordination of the East European states to the USSR; it was a none too discreet way of affirming imperial pride, power and cohesion.
The main impediment to cohesion in the politics of Eastern Europe was constituted not by anti-communists but by the Yugoslav communist regime. Its leader Josip Broz Tito was a contradictory figure. On the one hand, Tito still refused to de-kulakize his peasantry; on the other, he castigated the slow pace of the introduction of communism to other countries in Eastern Europe. Both aspects of Tito’s stance implied a criticism of Stalin’s policies for Eastern Europe after the Second World War. Stalin was accustomed to receiving homage from the world’s communists whereas Tito tried to treat himself as Stalin’s equal.
There was also a danger for Stalin that Tito’s independent attitude might spread to other countries in Eastern Europe. In 1946–7 Tito had been canvassing for the creation of a federation of Yugoslavia and other communist states in south-eastern Europe. Stalin eventually judged that such a federation would be hard for him to control. Tito also urged the need for active support to be given to the Greek communist attempt at revolution. This threatened to wreck the understandings reached between the USSR and the Western Allies about the territorial limits of direct Soviet influence. And so Stalin, in June 1948, ordered Yugoslavia’s expulsion from the Cominform. Tito was subjected to tirades of vilification unprecedented since the death of Trotski. This communist leader of his country’s resistance against Hitler was now described in
In the same month there were diplomatic clashes among the Allies when Stalin announced a blockade of Berlin. The German capital, which lay in the Soviet-occupied zone of Germany, had been divided into four areas administered separately by the USSR, the USA, Britain and France. Stalin was responding to an American attempt to introduce the Deutschmark as the unit of currency in Berlin, an attempt he regarded as designed to encroach on the USSR’s economic prerogatives in the Soviet zone. His blockade, he expected, would swiftly produce the requested concessions from the Western powers. But no such thing happened. After several weeks he had to back down because the Americans and her allies airlifted food supplies to their areas in the German capital. Neither side in the dispute wished to go to war over Berlin, and tensions subsided. But lasting damage had been done to relations between the USSR and USA.
The expulsion of the Yugoslavs from the fraternity of world communism and the recurrent clashes with the USA terrified the communist governments of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Albania, Romania and Hungary into servility. None was allowed to accept Marshall Aid. Instead, from January 1949 they had to assent to the formation of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (Comecon). In October 1949 Stalin also decided that, if the USA was going to dominate western Germany, he would proceed to form a German Democratic Republic in the zone occupied by Soviet armed forces. Private economic enterprise, cultural pluralism and open political debate were eliminated throughout Eastern Europe. Exceptions persisted. For example, agricultural collectivization was only partially implemented in Poland. But in most ways the Soviet historical model was applied with ruthlessless to all these countries.
Furthermore, Wladislaw Gomulka, who had shown an independent turn of mind at the Cominform Conference in 1947, was pushed out of power in Warsaw and arrested. Another delegate to the Conference, Hungary’s Internal Affairs Minister Laszlo Rajk, was arrested in June 1949. Bulgarian former deputy premier Trajcho Kostov was imprisoned in December 1949 and Rudolf Slansky, Czechoslovakia’s Party General Secretary, was imprisoned in December 1952. Of these leaders only Gomulka escaped execution. Bloody purges were applied against thousands of lower party and government officials in each of these countries from the late 1940s through to 1953.
Soviet and American governments used the most intemperate language against each other. At the First Cominform Conference in September 1947 a resolution was agreed that the USA was assembling an alliance of imperialist, anti-democratic forces against the USSR and the democratic forces. On the other side, the Western powers depicted the USSR as the vanguard of global communist expansion. Soviet self-assertion increased in subsequent years after the successful testing of a Soviet A-bomb in August 1949 had deprived the Americans and British of their qualitative military superiority. Stalin’s confidence rose, too, because of the conquest of power in Beijing by the Chinese Communist Party led by Mao Zedong in November. The People’s Republic of China quickly signed a Treaty of Friendship, Alliance and Mutual Assistance. A great axis of communism stretched from Stettin on the Baltic to Shanghai in the Far East. A quarter of the globe was covered by states professing adherence to Marxism-Leninism.
Since 1947, furthermore, Stalin had begun to license the French and Italian communist parties to take a more militant line against their governments. He remained convinced that ‘history’ was on the side of world communism and was willing to consider schemes that might expand the area occupied by communist states.
One such possibility was presented in Korea in 1950. Korea had been left divided between a communist North and a capitalist South since the end of the Second World War. The Korean communist leader Kim Il-Sung proposed to Stalin that communist forces should take over the entire country. Stalin did not demur, and gave support to Kim in a civil war that could eventually have involved the forces of the USSR and the USA facing each other across battlefields in the Far East. Mao Zedong, too, was in favour. Given the political sanction and military equipment he had requested, Kim Il-Sung attacked southern Korea in June 1950. Foolishly the Soviet Union temporarily withdrew its representative from the debate on the Korean civil war at the Security Council of the United Nations. Thus Stalin robbed himself of the veto on the United Nations’ decision to intervene on the southern side with American military power. China supplied forces to assist Kim Il-Sung. A terrible conflict ensued.41
Kim Il-Sung seemed invincible as he hastened southwards, but then the arrival of the Americans turned the tide. By mid-1951 there was a bloody stalemate across Korea. Soviet forces were not seriously involved; but President Truman justifiably inferred that the USSR had rendered material assistance to Kim. Millions of soldiers on
