Russia

The curtain fell only over a year later, when the Marshall Aid programme was introduced to help Western European countries to recover from the war. Its terms had been designed to be unacceptable to the Soviet Union and its followers. We have this on the authority of George Kennan, the architect of American post-war foreign policy. ⁹ So, when the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia applied for Marshall Aid, and learned that as beneficiaries they would be subject to public American scrutiny on a collective basis, like all other beneficiaries, they withdrew. It was, after all, unthinkable that the Power which had done most to defeat the common enemy should be exposed to what was tantamount to public humiliation. That was what Washington had been counting on.

From that point in 1947 tendencies in Eastern Europe hardened into firm trends. The coalition governments which had been the norm there, as in most of continental Europe, were transformed into obedient satellites following policies of planned production, collectivization of farming, and obedience to Moscow’s political line. Five-year, even six-year, plans were introduced; agriculture was collectivized; the Communist Party, sometimes with a more agreeable local name, assumed authority in almost every institution; and the secret police thrust out their tentacles in all directions. With these systems in place Moscow had no fewer than three channels through which to control its new European empire: diplomatic relations, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, to which all satellite parties were expected to defer, and the security services which shared intelligence and took their cues from NKVD headquarters. Those who fell under suspicion were purged. In time other institutions would be established to knit the region together for purposes of defence and economic co-operation, but Stalin always preferred bilateral to multinational dealing.

The fiat of the Soviet Party ran far wider than Europe, however, and in 1948, when the Chinese Communist Party took power from the Nationalists under Chiang Kai-shek, its leader, Mao Zedong, publicly accepted Stalin’s line. The new state of Israel, however, to which the Soviet Union had been the first power to extend de facto recognition and which, with Moscow’s blessing, had been supplied by Czechoslovakia with arms for its war of independence against the Arabs, disappointed Stalin’s hopes and aligned with the West (which may help to explain the subsequent purges in Czechoslovakia and the execution of its Jewish Party Secretary Rudolf Slansky). The Yugoslav Communist Party was excommunicated because its leader, Josef Tito, fell foul of Stalin by trying to form a Balkan confederation. Another purge - of Titoists, Zionists and other ‘deviants’ -was expected in the Soviet Union itself, but at the beginning of March 1953 Stalin collapsed and died.

The news was greeted with relief by many, but the predominant reaction was sorrow. This was only partly a result of deliberate image-building, which presented him as a great war leader with an affinity to Ivan IV in his youthful, conquering phase. Stalin was genuinely popular, despite — even because of - the blood he had shed. As a British historian writes, ‘Unpalatable as it may be … for liberals both East and West to admit that tyranny and terror can have a certain popular appeal, to pretend otherwise does not help us understand these phenomena’. ¹⁰ But with Stalin gone the atmosphere slowly changed.

The telephone rang in a flat overlooking Suvorov Avenue in Leningrad. A young woman answered. A harsh voice, sounding like a demon from Hades, asked rudely who had answered the call. She gave her name. Then the voiced rasped out her father’s name. Her father had been arrested in the 1930s; there had been no news of him since. He would arrive within the hour, barked the caller, and hung up. Minutes later there was a knock at the door. Her father, long feared dead, had returned. ¹¹ There were many such reunions in this period — and many sadder resolutions too.

Fears of another period of terror, which had grown again with the alleged ‘Doctors’ Plot’ of 1952, slowly cleared. It was three years after Stalin’s death, in February 1956, that a new Party Secretary, Nikita Khrushchev, addressed a secret session of the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. His text was soon leaked, no doubt deliberately, through a fraternal Polish delegate. And so the shattering news reached the Soviet people and the world: Khrushchev had denounced Stalin for making costly mistakes and ordering unnecessary killings. From then on changes came faster.