Russia After Stalin

Tito Speaks, by V. Dedijer.

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 The Times (27 June 1950) by a Special Correspondent returned from Peking. This report has been independently checked at another source in fairly close contact with the Chinese communist leaders. The general account of the interplay between domestic Chinese factors and Soviet policy in the Chinese revolution is based on the author's recent study of Chinese communist sources, Maoist and Trotskyist.

18

From a series of articles on mid-century Russia published in The Reporter (New York), August-November 1951.

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

Nagan — a revolver, originally of Belgian make, which was the standard weapon of the security police during a long period.

22

See above, p. 153.

23

See above, p. 164.