viewing those countries as future provinces of his empire, it would have been the height of folly on his part to insist on levying in the most unrelenting manner heavy reparations and enforcing expulsions. He expected, of course, that victorious Russia would enjoy a position of diplomatic and economic preponderance in neighbouring countries ruled by ‘friendly governments’, to quote the insipid cliche then fashionable. But he also expected that those governments would remain essentially bourgeois.
The fact which emerges with equal clarity from the internal evidence of Stalin's own moves and from the numerous memoirs of Western statesmen is that Stalin gravely underrated the revolutionary ferment which was to engulf Europe and Asia towards the end of the war and after. In his calculations he either made no allowance for it or, if he did, he took it for granted that through his Communist Parties he would be able to master and calm the ferment. He looked at the post-1945 world through the prism of the pre-1939 era.
The state of the world in the decades between the wars had convinced him that he had been right all along in discounting or disregarding the revolutionary potentialities of foreign communism; and he continued to disregard them. He saw every foreign nation as a bulwark of social and political conservatism. He tried to persuade Roosevelt that the overwhelming majority of the French were loyal to Petain. ‘Communism would fit Germany as a saddle fits a cow’ — in this mordant phrase he expressed his view of Germany's revolutionary potentialities to the Polish politician Mikolajczyk. He urged the French communists to take their cue from General de Gaulle at a time when they were the chief driving force behind the French Resistance. He urged the Italian communists to make peace with the House of Savoy and with the government of Marshal Badoglio, and to vote for the re-enactment of Mussolini's Lateran pacts with the Vatican. He did his best to induce Mao Tse-tung to come to terms with Chiang Kai-shek, because he believed, as he said at Potsdam, that the Kuomintang was the only force capable of ruling China. He angrily remonstrated with Tito because of the latter's revolutionary aspirations, and demanded his consent to the restoration of the monarchy in Yugoslavia.
Nothing could sum up Stalin's mood better than this war-time dialogue with Tito:
‘Be careful, [says Stalin] the bourgeoisie in Serbia is very strong!’
‘Comrade Stalin, [says Tito] I do not agree… The bourgeoisie in Serbia is very weak.’
‘The bourgeoisie is very strong!’ not only in Serbia but in China, Poland, Rumania, France, Italy — everywhere! This might have been the pivot of Stalin's policies.
He stared with incredulity and fear at the rising tides of revolution which threatened to wash away the rock of ‘socialism in one country’, on which he had built his temple. This so-called prophet of Marxism and Leninism appears at this moment as the most conservative statesman in the world.
He was still confident that he could stem the rising tides — he still wielded the magic wand which made these tides ebb and flow. It did not occur to him that the magic wand might break in his hands and that its fragments might soon be tossing about on the currents and cross-currents of contemporary history.
How Stalinist self-containment was subsequently wrecked, partly by forces beyond Stalin's control and partly by Stalin himself, is a complex story which can be only briefly summarized here.
The Yugoslav revolution inflicted the first telling blow on Stalin's policy. In the Teheran-Yalta period Yugoslavia had not been allotted to the Soviet sphere of influence — it was to have been a border zone between the British and the Russian spheres. Stalin was therefore doubly anxious to keep in check the revolutionary forces of Yugoslavia, whose ascendancy threatened to compromise his relations with the Western Allies. For long he disparaged Tito's partisans and extolled the counter-revolutionary Chetniks of Drazha Mikhailovich as the alleged heroes of anti-Nazi resistance. The embittered Tito, still one of the most faithful agents of the Stalinist Comintern, implored him: ‘If you cannot send us assistance, then at least do not hamper us.’ Stalin, so Tito relates, ‘stamped with rage’ and tried to induce Tito to agree not merely to the restoration of the monarchy but to a possible British occupation of Yugoslavia, which would have secured the monarchy's survival. Then, at Yalta, he forced Tito into a coalition with the men of the old regime, a decision which, according to Tito, ‘provoked the deepest indignation among the supporters of the National Liberation Movement in Yugoslavia’. Tito's unruly revolutionary moves were to Stalin a ‘stab in the back of the Soviet Union’.[14]
Stalin's ‘rage’ and ‘anger’ can easily be understood. It came to him as a shock that he was beginning to lose control over the revolutionary ferment and even over his own Communist Parties. He had been confident that he could at any time use them as pawns in his great diplomatic game of chess. The pawns were now showing a life of their own and beginning to play their own game. The great chess master, confounded and furious, could not even lay hands on them. For one thing, the Communist Parties concerned were not always within his reach. For another, he had to save his reputation as the friend, inspirer, and leader of world communism — he could not afford the odium of an open betrayal. He had to yield to the will of the pawns and then pretend that it was he who moved them.
This inevitably produced deep cracks in the Grand Alliance. Was it perhaps after all Stalin who was moving the pawns? Roosevelt and Churchill began to wonder; and they prepared and made their own counter-moves. Was it perhaps Stalin after all? we may still ask. Even now, eight or nine years later, it is still impossible to say exactly what happened in each particular case. The ‘accident’ of Tito's break with Moscow has brought to light a few significant episodes in Stalin's struggle to preserve self-containment, which might otherwise have remained hidden in the archives for a long time to come. How many such incidents relating to other East European countries still remain hidden?
What is certain is that as Stalin began reluctantly to identify himself with the rising forces of foreign communism his Western allies also began to identify him with those forces. The Grand Alliance was giving place to the Great Enmity. Stalin then sought reinsurance against the West; and communist regimes in the Russian sphere of influence promised to provide it. And then it was without a doubt he who moved the pawns.[15]
This departure from self-containment was caused, however, not only by the new international tension but also by the latent forces of revolutionary dynamics within the Soviet Union. The Grand Alliance had kept those forces in check; the break-up of the Alliance released them.
The urge to carry revolution abroad ‘on the bayonet points’ is alive in any revolutionary State which has been compelled first to defend itself against a foreign aggressor and then to send its armies to conquer the aggressor's lands and dominions. In Napoleon's France the urge was even stronger than in Stalin's Russia. In both cases armies raised in the climate of revolution came to dominate and administer countries where the
Stalin's generals and colonels had from their earliest years imbibed hatred and contempt of capitalist enterprise; they had been taught to consider bourgeois and Social Democratic Parties as implacable enemies; and had been conditioned to think and act within the framework of a single party system. Is it to be wondered at that as Military Governors of Saxony, Brandenburg, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Rumania they were little inclined to administer these countries in such a way as to allow capitalist business to function as usual and non-Communist Parties, whose leaders did not even conceal their hatred and contempt of the communist conquerors, to carry on their activities without hindrance?
From the beginning, the Soviet Military Governors were caught up in a conflict between their own ingrained beliefs and their new duties. They could not sincerely carry out these duties without betraying their upbringing and outlook, or even without becoming disloyal to their own government, as some of them did. If they were to remain loyal Stalinists, they had to treat the demand of ‘non-interference in domestic affairs’ as mere make-believe. It would have been miraculous if they had managed to adjust their own minds to that demand; but even a totalitarian regime cannot work psychological miracles in its citizens.[16]
Stalin could well promise in all sincerity that he would not strive to impose communism on the occupied countries, but the men deputed to give effect to this promise on the spot could not but act in a way which made his words sound like deliberate falsehoods.
Thus at least three factors combined to undo Stalin's policy of self-containment: genuine revolutionary ferment abroad; the revolutionary urge in Stalin's own armies; and the jockeying for positions among allies rapidly turning into potential enemies.
