Partly because Stalin cut the Soviet Union out of the Marshall Plan, its economy fell behind Western Europe’s and never caught up. Ordinary people in the Soviet Union and its satellites paid the price. Their standard of living and life expectancy was, and remained, persistently lower than that of their neighbors, with contrasts between West and East growing more obvious with every passing year. Communists in Western Europe never again put in a serious bid for political power.
SECURING THE COMMUNIST FORTRESS
For years Stalin told foreign Communists to avoid ostentatiously copying the Soviet Union. However, while each nation was advised to take its “own road” to socialism, he never seriously doubted that all roads would be under the Kremlin’s direction and that they all had the same destination, Communism. Up until 1946 or 1947, the question of how closely the satellite states would be tied to Soviet imperatives rarely came up. Faithful comrades everywhere certainly felt an allegiance to Moscow, and some assumed that, while sharing the Communist dream, they would have a degree of independence. Perhaps even Stalin had not thought through the place of the Soviet Union in the Red Empire beyond the borders of the USSR.
The first indication that he envisaged more vigorous control from Moscow came in Germany, where the Soviet zone already was ruled directly from the Kremlin. Wolfgang Leonhard, a former exile in Moscow and a true believer for decades, noted that a month after the disastrous 1946 autumn elections, the notion of taking a German “road to socialism” began to be subtly discouraged. An SED insider, he recalled that in contrast to the year before, the speeches of the leaders in Moscow, given on the Soviet National Day (November 7), were published verbatim: no fine-tuning for locals. The German-born Leonhard, having lived in Moscow as a schoolboy since the 1930s, had returned home with the Walter Ulbricht group. Mischa Wolf, a close friend, told him in August 1947 that “higher authorities” had decided it was time to forget about a special path to socialism. Wolf said the party program would soon be rewritten, as indeed it was. The Soviet impositions and complete lack of concern for local hopes and dreams eventually led to Leonhard’s disillusionment with the Moscow variety of Communism, and he moved to Yugoslavia.38
Conformity with Stalin’s will among the Eastern Europeans varied according to circumstances, as in Romania, where a “fake pluralism” persisted during the Petru Groza government (March 1945–December 1947). In fact the Communists were in a dominant position, and as they began to feel safe from Western eyes, they set about establishing a Stalinist regime. In August 1947 the most important opposition parties were dissolved. Iuliu Maniu, the leader of the historic National Peasant Party, was arrested in October. After a show trial for conspiring with the Americans and British, he was given a life term and died in prison. On December 30 King Michael was forced from the throne, and Romania became a people’s republic.39 Thereafter, internal threats were taken care of by the secret police, and the Romanians were saddled with Communism for generations.
The Bulgarian Communists went from a tiny prewar minority to victory as part of the Fatherland Front, admittedly in rigged elections to the Grand National Assembly in October 1946.40 As we saw in Chapter 14, the nail in the coffin of political freedom came when Nikola Petkov, the leader of the Agrarians and a symbol of continuing resistance, was unceremoniously dragged from the National Assembly in August 1947 and put on trial. Stalin quickly agreed with the death sentence, and Petkov was executed on September 23. That happened one day after Western Europeans finished their recovery plan, to be submitted to the United States for Marshall Plan funding. The two events symbolized the starkly contrasting futures of Eastern and Western Europe.41
In Hungary the Communists were completely dependent on Moscow, and yet they still had high hopes of participating in the Marshall Plan meetings. Their leader, Mátyás Rákosi, had a tough time finding popular support, and in the elections of November 7, 1945, the Communists were trounced by the Smallholders Party, which won an outright majority. In early 1947, with instructions from Moscow, the secret police traced an alleged antigovernment conspiracy to the Smallholders’ leader, Béla Kovács, who was arrested by Soviet military police on February 25. In May the Soviet secret police (MGB) revealed that it had wrested incriminating information from Kovács and others about Prime Minister Ferenc Nagy. He was vacationing abroad and decided not to return. On May 21, Molotov advised Rákosi “to switch to more emphasis on class struggle” and to move away from national unity government.42
With new national elections scheduled for August, the Hungarian Communists almost certainly would have preferred to be among the recipients of U.S. recovery funding, and yet they had to reject it. József Révai, one of the hard-line Stalinists who had been socialized during the war in Moscow, responded to the invitation to attend the event in Paris by saying that it would be impossible to participate in such an “anti-Soviet” endeavor.43 In the Hungarian elections, the Communists obtained only 22 percent of the vote, no doubt partly because they were blamed for missing out on American assistance.44 By December, when party boss Rákosi was convalescing in a hospital near Moscow, he developed a plan, in consultation with Stalin, for the complete transformation of Hungary along Soviet lines, and that followed in 1948 without much resistance.45
In Czechoslovakia the situation was more awkward. When Communist Party leader Klement Gottwald met with Stalin in autumn 1946, he was told it was perfectly acceptable to pursue the “Czechoslovak path to socialism.”46 The Czech party had more than a million members and won enough support at the polls to form a government with the Socialists.
On July 4, 1947, when the Americans and British called on Czech foreign minister Jan Masaryk to invite him to Paris for the Marshall Plan meetings, he accepted immediately, a decision the government discussed and unanimously endorsed. The next day the Soviet Central Committee wrote Prime Minister Gottwald to inform him that the USSR would not be in Paris, but the Czechs, and other countries like Poland, could go ahead. They should disrupt the meeting and then walk out to give the Americans a rebuff. The Kremlin at first wanted to play a double game and then on July 6 issued new instructions to Soviet representatives in Warsaw, Prague, Bucharest, Sofia, Belgrade, Budapest, Tirana, and Helsinki. They were to tell the Communist Party leaders not to reply to the invitation for several days, and because the USSR was not going to Paris, they should not go either.47 Finally on July 7 the Kremlin ordered all of them to refuse the invitation outright and said that they could give their own reasons for doing so.48
The Czech Communist Party faced a dilemma, as did the Poles, for both were part of coalition governments. Gottwald told the Soviet representative they could not follow Stalin’s orders because the rest of the government would not support them. When Stalin heard, he was infuriated and ordered them to Moscow at once. A delegation consisting, among others, of Gottwald, Foreign Minister Masaryk, and Minister of Justice Prokop Drtina went there and on July 9 met twice with Stalin and Molotov.
The extraordinary conversations, recorded by the Soviets and the Czechs, show how Stalin crushed Czechoslovakian hopes. Masaryk and Drtina explained that their country’s imports and exports were 60 percent dependent on the West and that because of that fact, they had agreed to attend the Paris meetings. Drtina said that if they did not participate in the Marshall Plan, the Czech standard of living would be adversely affected. Of course, they certainly did not wish to offend their Soviet ally.