Thus, lacking the necessary forces or a navy in the Mediterranean, the Soviet Union was bound to remain circumspect about the Greek revolutionaries and would have Yugoslav and Bulgarian comrades follow that lead. Stalin acknowledged the new U.S. engagement to some extent in March 1948, when he advised the KKE leadership to yield. Zachariadis agreed, but the Greek government wanted to finish off the Communists, and the civil war dragged into 1949. After years of political instability and turmoil, in 1967 a colonels’ coup d’état imposed a right-wing dictatorship. Only after it was toppled in 1974 did real democracy finally arrive in its ancient home.
CHAPTER 16
The Passing of the Communist Moment in Western Europe
Stalin’s restraint in Greece came from the fact that he was simultaneously operating on so many fronts. He was quietly pressing forward into the very heart of Western Europe, where in the first postwar years, the prospects for Communist takeovers looked better than any time since the end of the First World War. Not only did Communist parties have deep roots in Western Europe, but Communists had played leading roles in the resistance and could ride the wave of popular fury against Nazism, Fascism, and the collaborators. The Left was resurgent, the Right was discredited or silent, and people flooded to the ranks of the Communist parties. The prospects for Soviet influence appeared even stronger, given that the new governments faced enormous problems, even in providing enough food and fuel to meet immediate needs.
Stalin had thought that the war would open unprecedented political opportunities, and planning had begun early. Among other career diplomats, Maxim Litvinov and Ivan Maisky formulated specific proposals. Taking their cue from the Kremlin, however, they did not envision the expansion of the USSR through the incorporation of new territories.
SOVIET PLANS FOR WESTERN EUROPE
On January 11, 1944, Maisky sent Molotov a detailed outline for the “postwar order.” Although he was commonly regarded as a “moderate,” Maisky was a Stalinist, and even though he had spent a great deal of time in the West, he did not hold their democracies in high regard. He visualized “proletarian revolutions” in postwar Eastern Europe and anticipated inevitable tensions with the United States, which he thought would build a postwar empire of a “new kind.” Instead of taking over countries outright, as empires of old had done, the United States would seek their “financial-economic annexation.” He was apparently blind to the fact that, with his own blessing, the Soviet Union was also becoming a new-style empire. It would be somehow more righteous, based on fraternally shared Communist ideas, and involve mutual security arrangements, but all would be firmly under Moscow’s political and ideological control.1
Maisky advised negotiating loans via Lend-Lease as soon as possible, when “the Americans and the English were still hypnotized by the war.” Moscow would get a better deal now, he reasoned, because with the return of peace, the “basic merchant psychology” of the Anglo-Americans would take over again. It did not seem to occur to him that, by making his own calculations, he was following this same merchant psychology. He went on to advise that staying out of the Japanese war would “save us losses in men and matériel.” The Soviet Union should let the United States and Great Britain take the heavy casualties, which “would also cool down a little the imperialistic zeal of the USA for the postwar period. At the same time that would be our revanche for the tardiness of the Anglo-Americans” in opening a second front in Europe, as Stalin had demanded so often.2
Ambassador Maisky also headed a “special commission for compensation of the damage inflicted on the USSR by Hitlerite Germany and its allies.” In July his preliminary report called for Germany and its allies to pay between $70 and $75 billion in reparations—very large sums for those times. To afford them, the country’s living standards would be cut in half, in comparison to the 1930s. The implications would be dramatic: “Everything that Germany possesses ‘above the minimum necessary to survive,’ has to contribute to the reparations fund for compensating the allied nations, in the first instance the USSR for its losses.” Germany could meet part of these costs by conscripted labor. If around five million Germans were drafted each year, then in ten years they would pay off $35 to $40 billion. Thus “reparations through labor” (reparatsii trudom) would cover half of what was due. That approach had the additional advantage of paralyzing Germany’s economy, since of course millions of men and women would be condemned to years of slavery.3
In 1944 the United States and Great Britain flirted with imposing a similarly harsh peace. The plan, identified with Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, Jr., would have changed Germany into a nation that was “primarily agricultural and pastoral in its character.”4 The Soviet ambassador in the United States got all the details over dinner from Morgenthau himself and passed on the information to Moscow.5
Among others in Roosevelt’s cabinet, Secretary of War Henry Stimson was outraged at the Morgenthau plan and that September sent the president a withering critique. A nation such as Germany, he said, could not “be reduced to a peasant level” without providing the breeding ground for another war. He noted that “sound thinking” suggested that prosperity in one part of the world helped to create it in others, and that the same was true about poverty. However, “enforced poverty is even worse, for it destroys the spirit not only of the victim but debases the victor. It would be just such a crime as the Germans themselves hoped to perpetrate upon their victims—it would be a crime against civilization itself.” For Stimson, the drastic measures proposed were “an open confession of the bankruptcy of hope for a reasonable economic and political settlement of the causes of war.”6
Although Roosevelt, Churchill, and their successors ultimately rejected a punitive peace, Stalin did not, and the Soviets later publicized Morgenthau’s idea to run down the Anglo-Americans in the eyes of Germans.
Ambassador Maisky thought the Soviet Union had no direct interests at stake in Western Europe. The Boss, however, had grander ideas, as had Maurice Thorez, the leader of the French Communist Party (PCF), in for talks on November 19, 1944. Backed by Molotov and Beria, Stalin’s “advice” to Thorez was that the PCF should keep a low profile and forge links with other parties in a “Left bloc.” The Soviet dictator believed that French Communism was not strong enough to achieve power on its own and needed allies in a national front. Otherwise it risked being destroyed.7
Thorez had been one of the key leaders of the PCF since the late 1920s, and he was associated with the Popular Front government formed in 1936. At that time there was genuine all-party concern to stop Hitler, but even then it was Stalin who “suggested” forming broadly based coalition governments.8 As we have seen, beginning in 1944, as the Wehrmacht was pushed back in Eastern Europe, he recommended creating similar “fronts” there, as Trojan horses that concealed the dominant position of the Communists.9