Russia

Such an agreement [he added] can only be brought about on the basis of an amiable delineation of spheres of interest in Europe … The Soviet Union can consider Finland, Sweden, Poland, Hungary, Romania, the Slavic countries of the Balkan peninsula, and also Turkey as [constituting] its maximum sphere of interests. Holland, Belgium, France, Spain, Portugal and Greece [on the other hand] can certainly be included in the English sphere. ²

When Churchill met Stalin in Moscow in 1944 they agreed a division of the Balkans into spheres of influence, subsequently known as the ‘percentages agreement’. According to this, Romania and Bulgaria would be in the Soviet sphere, Greece in the British, while Soviet and British influence in Hungary and Yugoslavia would be split fifty-fifty. It was also agreed that the three Allied Powers, plus France, would occupy Germany at least until it was de-Nazified. It seemed unlikely that the Western Powers would yield the Straits, however, so in June 1945 Moscow proposed joint Soviet—Turkish responsibility for their control, and pressed the Turkish government to allow Soviet troops to be stationed on the Bosphorus and at the Dardanelles. It even proposed that part of Trabzon and Karasund be transferred to Soviet control — but Turkey stood firm. So did Iran when it was pressed to cede some territory on the frontier with Azerbaydzhan. ³ At Potsdam in July—August 1945 the Allies called on Japan to surrender unconditionally, and agreed that the Soviet Union should receive southern Sakhalin and the Kurile Islands, and reparations from all those countries that had fought against it. It also made provision for continuing co-operation between the Allies after the war. Not everything had turned out as expected, however.

Stalin had undertaken to declare war against Japan within three months of Germany’s defeat, but when the time came the United States no longer needed Soviet participation and did not want it - but Stalin insisted on joining in for fear that the Americans would otherwise dictate peace terms and so threaten Soviet interests in the Far East. Britain and the United States refused to recognize Soviet retention of the Baltic countries, yet did not dispute it. It transpired that, while most Romanians and Hungarians would have preferred their countries to have been included in the West’s sphere of influence, most Greeks — and for a time most Frenchmen and Italians too — were sympathetic to Communism and would have preferred inclusion in the Soviet sphere.

Contrary to popular belief, Stalin stuck to the letter of his agreements with the Western Powers. Rather than being ideologically motivated, he believed that ‘whoever occupies at territory also imposes his own social system on it.’ ⁴ Not only did he sacrifice the Communists in Greece and allow those of France and Italy to be thwarted, he conceded rather more in Hungary than he need have done. In brief, he was a cautious empire-builder of the old Russian type — a realist, intent on achieving concrete objectives. To this end he used the Communist Party as an Established Church, as a means of controlling his own followers, like Russian grand princes of a former age; and he adapted Communist ideology quite freely to direct the faithful at home and around the world in the directions he desired. Until the Soviet Union acquired its own atomic bomb in August 1949, however, his posture to the West remained defensive. Both Russia and its Western allies were subject to similar pressures, economic and popular, to demobilize quickly and most of the victorious Soviet troops who had first occupied central Europe were soon ordered home.

High though the German casualty rate had been, Soviet casualties were higher. ⁵ Certainly the Soviet command had been less careful with lives, and when the war ended it was just as careless in demobilizing soldiers. In the summer of 1945 an Italian Jew recently released from a concentration camp in Germany observed squads of recently demobilized soldiers on their way home, singing songs. They

had been demobbed in the crudest, simplest fashion; their commanders had said to them: ‘You have finished fighting the war, now go home’; and home they went, on foot. Now anyone with any idea of the size, the distance along parallels within the Soviet Union, will realize what sort of a repatriation this was. There were squads on foot, some even barefoot, carrying their boots over their shoulders so as not to wear them out. Others had found the most incredible means of transport, clambering up onto lorries, onto Berlin buses towed along like trains. We saw one motor unit towing two or three Berlin city buses still with the Berlin signs as they travelled east, homeward with still another thousand, two thousand, three thousand kilometres to go, perhaps into the heart of Siberia; and they sang [the popular song] ‘Kalinka Kala’ as they passed by in front of us, this and other songs, waving to us all, survivors and the rest. ⁶