15
According to Tito, Stalin finally decided to bring Eastern Europe under close Soviet control in 1947, at the time when the Truman doctrine was proclaimed.
16
As early as the beginning of 1946 the author watched this conflict in Eastern Germany and described it in a series of articles. He watched the same conflict, but in reverse, in the British and American Zones, where Military Governors who had been business-men in civilian life gave vent to their revulsion against the at first faintly-socialist flavour of Allied occupation policy.
17
The quotation is from a report in
18
From a series of articles on mid-century Russia published in
19
These lines were written at the beginning of April 1953.
20
The Ministry may have aimed even further. The arrest of the doctors may have been intended as a preliminary to the arrest of Malenkov himself. The doctors were said to have speeded the death of Zhdanov. Since it was widely believed that Zhdanov had been Malenkov's rival, it would have been easy at the next stage to point to Malenkov as the chief instigator of the ‘assassins’. But this is only a hypothesis. The special role of the military leaders in the whole affair is, however, not hypothetical, although certainly not all those mentioned in the communique are implicated.
21
22
See above, p. 153.
23
See above, p. 164.