Stalin: A Biography

Yet the events of 1947 — the Marshall Plan and the First Conference of the Cominform — changed the whole atmosphere. The Cold War broke out in its most intense form. The east European communist parties discovered how things had been transformed at the First Cominform Conference at Sklarska Poręba in Polish Silesia. Malenkov was sent as Stalin’s chief representative, and gave a tedious introductory speech proclaiming that a million copies of the official biography of Stalin had been printed since the war.⁶ Zhdanov also attended. He and Malenkov functioned as Stalin’s mouth and ears at the Conference. Zhdanov made the decisive comment on behalf of the Kremlin when he stated that ‘two camps’ existed in global politics. One was headed by the USSR, the other by the USA. Supposedly the USSR led the world’s progressive forces. The Americans had no interest in the industrial recovery of Europe; Truman aimed at nothing less than the subjugation of the continent to his country’s capitalist magnates.⁷ The Marshall Plan was a trick designed to achieve this objective for Wall Street; it was nothing less than a campaign to consolidate the global hegemony of the USA.⁸

The Conference proceeded with unpleasantness. The Yugoslavs complained that the Italians had not behaved with revolutionary firmness. They accused the Greeks of lacking a commitment to insurgency.⁹ Obviously they acted in complicity with Moscow; Stalin was insisting on fixing the blame on the Italian and Greek parties even though they had been carrying out his orders. Malenkov and Zhdanov fulfilled his instructions to the letter. In Stalin’s opinion the Marshall Plan ruined the possibility of a durable understanding with the USA, and the Americans, if they hoped to destabilise eastern Europe, would have to accept that the USSR would attempt the same in western Europe. The Cominform was not the Comintern reborn; but it embraced communist parties in countries where the threat to the desires of the Western Allies was acute: membership included not only the countries occupied by the Red Army but also Italy and France.

Stalin made the most of the available opportunities. He had demanded a daily briefing on the proceedings hundreds of miles away in Sklarska Poręba; and by sending Malenkov and Zhdanov, who were comrades but never friends and allies, he would have competing sources of information. He aimed to seize back the international initiative and disturb Washington’s equanimity. A contest between the ‘two camps’ was declared. No word of dissent issued from the mouths of participants; fear of offending the absent Stalin was paramount. Amendments to resolutions arose mainly from changes of mind amid the Soviet leadership, and these changes needed and received Stalin’s sanction. The focus was on Europe. Stalin dealt with the situation without upsetting the status quo elsewhere in the world. This was why he had curtly rejected the request of the Chinese communist leaders to attend. The purpose of the Cominform Conference was to respond to the challenge thrown down by the Marshall Plan. Having proceeded carefully in the first couple of years after the victory over Nazism, Stalin indicated to communists in western and eastern Europe that a more militant programme had to be adopted.

Although he had succeeded in his task with Yugoslav assistance, Yugoslavia troubled him within months of the First Conference. Tito would not limit himself to his country’s affairs. He badgered Stalin for aid to give to the Greek communists in their civil war against the monarchists (who were abundantly supplied and militarily reinforced by the British); he also agitated for the creation of a Balkan federal state which he evidently expected to dominate. He demanded a more rapid transition to communist policies across eastern Europe than Stalin thought desirable. Stalin decided to expel him from the Cominform and to advertise his fate as a warning to those communists in eastern Europe tempted to show similar truculence. Stalin, using Molotov and Zhdanov as his spokesmen, started the anti-Tito campaign in earnest in March 1948. Yugoslav communists were accused of adventurism, regional over-assertiveness and a deviation from Marxist–Leninist principles. Stalin also rebuked Tito for poking his nose into politics in Austria, where the Soviet Army was among the occupying powers.¹⁰