The expansion of communism was facilitated by the fact that soon after the war the United States, in part relying on its monopoly in atomic weapons and in part responding to popular pacifism, disbanded its armies and left in Europe only a token occupation force. Stalin now knew that he could go ahead with the establishment of communist regimes, without exposing Russia to effective retaliation from the West. Had he had any ground to fear such retaliation, he would hardly have risked the drift away from self-containment.
So far, the expansion of communism was still confined to the countries which had by common Allied agreement been allotted to the Soviet sphere of influence —
Yugoslavia being the only exception. The terms of the Teheran-Yalta-Potsdam pacts had been so ill-defined and vague that Stalin could still maintain that he was acting within his rights and that it was the Western powers who illegitimately tried to interfere in the internal affairs of the Soviet zone. Once again he tried to go back to self-containment, self-containment, that is, within an area expanded in agreement with the Western Allies. He was still confident that beyond that area no revolutionary development would upset or disturb the balance of power which had resulted from the war. He cold-shouldered the embattled Greek communists; and he bluntly urged Tito to withdraw support from them. He believed that he still wielded the magic wand, cracked and split though it was, which would enable him to control the tides of revolution.
Then, in 1948-9, the magic wand finally broke in his hands. The Chinese revolution overtook him; and at a stroke it threw his calculations out of balance and upset the whole international s
In February 1948 Stalin confided to Kardelj, Tito's Foreign Minister, that after the war he ‘bluntly’ told Mao Tse-tung that the Chinese revolution ‘had no prospects’, that Mao should ‘seek a
Yet Stalin's part in the Chinese revolution was somewhat more complex than his own confidences to Kardelj might suggest.
After Japan's capitulation the Russian armies in Man-churia and Northern China handed over Japanese Stores of munitions to Mao's partisans. Without these supplies Mao might not have been able to hold his ground against Chiang Kai-shek, whose troops were equipped and supported by the United States. Thus Stalinist Russia made a direct material contribution to the victory of Chinese communism.
There remains the strange fact that having helped to equip Mao's armies Stalin then urged Mao to disband them. How is this paradox to be accounted for?
Psychologically and morally it was almost impossible for the Soviet troops in Manchuria and Northern China to debar Mao's partisans from the Japanese army stores. The partisans were taking possession of those stores on their own initiative and interference might have led to clashes. Once again Stalin had to surrender to the revolutionary dynamics of the Soviet State and to his own communist reputation.
And once again he was still confident that he was arming merely his pawn, not a force that would make its own revolution. A fairly strong communist army in North China might be a useful instrument of pressure against Chiang Kai-shek and the United States — an expendable bargaining counter. When Stalin thought the moment had come to expend it, he told Mao to lay down arms and to submit to Chiang Kai-shek. But once again the ‘pawn’ played its own game.
In February 1948, Stalin admitted to Kardelj his ‘mistake’ over the Chinese revolution. Yet six months later, just before the last phase of the civil war, he repeated the ‘mistake’ and made a last attempt to hold Mao back.
‘As late as July 1948, the Russians neither expected nor desired an immediate communist victory in China. In that month the Chinese Communist Party held a conference to discuss plans for the coming autumn campaign. The advice from Russia was to continue guerrilla warfare for the coming year in order to weaken America, who was expected to continue to pour arms into China in support of the Kuomintang. Russia opposed any plan to end the civil war by taking the large cities. Russian advice was rejected by this conference, the contrary policy was adopted…’[17]
Overtaken by the Chinese revolution, Stalin had to keep after it, to adopt it, father it, and give it all his ideological tenderness. The tenderness had to be all the more effusive because the child knew very well what desperate efforts the ‘father’ had made to bring about an abortion.
Statesmen in the West at once believed in Stalin's paternity and took at its face value his display of parental virtue. Even after Stalin's death, Mr. John Foster Dulles stated that ‘In Asia, Stalin's plans, laid twenty-five years ago, achieved a dramatic success through the communist civil war’. If this were true, Stalin would indeed have deserved to be called the greatest political genius in history. But it is not true.
The appearance that Stalin's
Tito alone dared to rebel (rather late in the day), because he could rely on strong domestic support, and also because he hoped to find security in a neutral recess between the two blocs. The other communist leaders had neither Tito's self-confidence nor his illusions. Some of them had an acute sense of their own weakness at home; and none appeared to believe that it would be possible for them to survive in a no-man's-land between East and West. Incidentally, the West as well as the East did its utmost to reduce the no-man's-land, with the result that while Stalin inadvertently worked long and hard to produce many Titos, the West did its best to ensure that he should produce but one.
Thus came into being the vast realm of Stalinism which stretches from the Elbe to the Chinese Sea and is inhabited by nearly 800 million people, five times the number of Russia's population at the beginning of the Stalin era. There was originally no design for this gigantic structure. It piled up while the supposed master builder suffered frequent bouts of absent-mindedness. The edifice grew seemingly of its own accord by a series of historical ‘accidents’, through which the revolutionary trend of the age performed its work.
Stalin had been willing to content himself with ‘socialism in one country’. He had wished to keep Russia in her place and to refrain from antagonizing the world by international revolutionary aspirations. All that he had expected in return was that the world would leave him alone with his Russia. But the tempest of the time drove Russia out of her national shell; and it let loose the furies of revolution which drove Stalin from his retreat, hoisted him to a dizzy eminence, and from there forced him to throw down a challenge to the world.
As the expression of Bolshevism's isolation and self-isolation, Stalinism had been dead and buried long before Stalin died. It fell to Stalin himself to make the long overdue funeral oration on ‘socialism in one country’, for this is what his last public speech at the Nineteenth Congress of the party in October 1952 amounted to. In it he recalled the far-off days when Soviet Russia had been the only ‘Shock Brigade of international communism’ and he welcomed and extolled the many new ‘Shock Brigades’ in Europe and Asia which had since taken their place by Russia's side.
Yet even at this stage he attempted to escape the consequences of a destiny which, he feared, might ruin if not himself then the far-flung realm he was leaving behind.
He tried to revive his old formula of communist self-containment. But this was to be self-containment ‘on a higher level’, as he himself might have put it — ‘socialism within one-third of the world’ instead of within one country.
He had come to realize that any further expansion of communism would almost certainly lead to a world war, for which Russia was not ready. It is difficult to indicate the last critical point in the development of his policy. It may be that the war in Korea gave him a warning signal of the dangers ahead. But it is by no means certain that the initiative for the attempt to carry communism into southern Korea had come from Stalin — it may have come
