Stalin: A Biography

Communist leader Gottwald left his liberal Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk to twist in the wind. Masaryk asked Stalin to bear in mind Czechoslovak industry’s dependence on the West; he added that the Poles had wished to go to Paris. But Stalin was unmoved. Resistance crumbled, and Masaryk begged Stalin and Molotov to help the Czechoslovaks to formulate the text of their withdrawal from participation. Stalin simply advised him to copy the Bulgarian model. Masaryk salvaged a scrap of national pride by pointing out that the government would not be meeting until the following evening; but the entire delegation ended by thanking Stalin and Molotov for the ‘necessary pieces of advice’.⁷

Stalin was flinging mud in the face of the USA, and the world was his witness. Overnight it became easier for Truman to get his way with governments which had doubts about the hardening American line towards the USSR; he was also helped in his campaign to convince the US Congress that financial aid at least to western Europe lay among the objective interests of the USA. Stalin had been pushed to the point of strategic decision. He confronted a definite challenge: the American President wanted to pull the greatest possible number of European states under his country’s hegemony and to bring benefit to its industrial and commercial corporations. The USSR’s economy remained in a desperate plight and the Americans had no objective incentive to facilitate its recovery. Even so, Stalin could have handled the situation with more finesse. Instead of tossing the terms back in Truman’s face, he could have drawn out the negotiations and proved to the world that the apparent altruism of the Marshall Plan concealed American self-interest. But Stalin had made up his mind. He never again met Truman after Potsdam and did not seek to. Nor could he be bothered with negotiating with Western diplomats. The USA had thrown down the gauntlet and he would pick it up.

Even so, the Americans declined to go further in trying to detach eastern Europe from the USSR. The policy of containment was interpreted as involving acceptance that such countries fell within the zone of Soviet influence. The chance of liberating these countries had been at its highest in 1945. Western public opinion could be manipulated, but only to a certain extent two years later. The Americans and the British had been taught to respect ‘Uncle Joe’; they had also been told that the war would be over when Germany and Japan had been defeated. It would not have been easy to induce British or American soldiers to start fighting in mid-1947.

Soviet retaliation against the American initiative was not long in coming. In September 1947 a conference of communist parties was convoked at Sklarska Poręba in Poland. Stalin did not deign to attend. Having ordered the creation of a tight system of co-ordination by telephone and telegram, he sent Zhdanov on his behalf. Zhdanov had been well briefed and contacted Moscow whenever anything unpredicted arose. The organisational objective was to form an Informational Bureau (or Cominform) to co-ordinate communist activity in the countries of eastern Europe as well as in Italy and France. As relations worsened with the USA, Stalin withdrew permission for a diversity of national transitions to communism. The call was made for an acceleration of communisation in eastern Europe; and, in western Europe, the French and Italian parties were reprimanded for their reluctance to drop their parliamentary orientation (even though it had been Stalin who had instigated it!). The completion of a rigid communist order was the goal to the east of the Elbe. Stalin also had his ambitions elsewhere. He intended to disrupt ‘Anglo-American’ hegemony in western Europe by the sole political means to hand: communist party militancy.⁸

Yet blatant American interference in the Italian elections through subsidies to the Christian-Democratic Party proved effective. In the two halves of Europe the armed camps of former allies confronted each other. Ambiguity, however, remained over Germany, where the USA, the USSR, the United Kingdom and France had occupying forces in their respective zones. Each of these powers also controlled its own sector in Berlin, which lay within the USSR’s zone.