Stalin took an active interest. The main figures in the research project were called before him in a lengthy meeting. Each had to report on his progress, and Stalin fired questions at them. Mikhail Pervukhin had to explain to him the difference between heavy water and ordinary water.10 He told Stalin what he needed to know. Not having studied physics at the Tiflis Spiritual Seminary, the Leader started with only the most rudimentary grasp of the scientific principles. His ignorance had earlier been downright dangerous for the scientists. Having recently re-read Lenin’s Materialism and Empiriocriticism, he was convinced that space and time were absolute, unchallengeable concepts in all human endeavours. (This contrasted with his dismissal of the controversy over the same book before the First World War as ‘a storm in a teacup’.)11 Einsteinian physics were therefore to be regarded as a bourgeois mystification. The problem was that such physics were crucial to the completion of the A-bomb project. Beria, caught between wanting to appear as Stalin’s ideological apostle and wishing to produce an A-bomb for him, decided he needed clearance from the Boss for the Soviet physicists to use Einstein’s equations. Stalin, ever the pragmatist in matters of power, gave his jovial assent: ‘Leave them in peace. We can always shoot them later.’12
Kurchatov and his team pulled it off in the desert outside Semipalatinsk in Kazakhstan — and to his amazement, as the mushroom cloud gathered on the horizon, he was hugged by Beria. Such a display of emotion was unprecedented. But Beria, who had spent the past four years threatening Kurchatov, had lived under the same shadow cast by Stalin. A failed bomb test could have led to his death sentence. Instead he could report success to the Kremlin. Stalin was also delighted. The USSR had entered the portals of the world’s nuclear-powers elite, and Stalin himself could come to any future diplomatic negotiations as the equal of the American and British leaders.
This in turn opened him to persuasion that the USSR should assume an assertive posture in world politics. There were other reasons for his ebullience. Not only had the communist subjugation of eastern Europe occurred without serious setbacks but also the Chinese Communist Party had seized power in Beijing in October 1949. Communism had acquired possession of a third of the world’s land surface. Mao Tse-tung had won his victory in the teeth of Stalin’s reluctance to support him against the nationalist Chiang Kai-shek. The revolutionary outcome in China did not soften Stalin’s attitude to Mao: he expected the new communist state to submit itself to the higher interest of world communism as delineated by Moscow. In practice this meant accepting the priority of Soviet needs over Chinese ones. Stalin continued to regard it as the USSR’s right to hold on to Port Arthur as a military base and to dominate Manchuria. The USSR’s military superiority and its willingness to render economic assistance compelled Mao to bite his tongue when he made a lengthy visit to Moscow from December 1949. The direct talks between Mao and Stalin became tricky when Stalin made clear from the start that he would not repeal the Sino-Soviet treaty of 1945, which had been concluded at a moment of China’s extreme weakness and before the communist seizure of power.13
Mao did not secure all the military and economic assistance he was after. Stalin assured him that China was not yet threatened by foreign powers: ‘Japan is still not back on its feet and is therefore not ready for war.’14 As usual he added that the USA was in no mood for a big war. Stalin, hoping to distract his Chinese comrade with a campaign which would not upset the Soviet–American relationship, advised that Beijing should confine itself to conquering Taiwan and Tibet. Mao’s frustration grew. Having taken power in China only weeks before, he was almost under house arrest at a government dacha outside Moscow as Stalin and he conferred. But then on 22 January 1950 Stalin suddenly reversed his position and told Mao of his willingness to sign a new Sino-Soviet treaty.
The question arises as to who or what was to blame for the descent into the Cold War. President Truman played his part. His language was hostile to the USSR and communism. The Marshall Plan in particular was framed in such a way as to make it well nigh inconceivable that Stalin would not take offence. Yet at the start even Molotov was inclined to accept the aid.15 Truman was determined to promote the American economic cause in the world; he also had a genuine concern about the oppression which his predecessor’s deals with Stalin had spread across eastern Europe. The USA had an economy undamaged by war and a society which, apart from its soldiers, had no direct experience of it. Its state and people were committed to the economics of the market. Its economic interest groups sought access to every country of the world. It was a military power greater than any rival. The USA did not threaten to declare war on the USSR, but it acted to maximise its hegemony over world politics and the result was a set of tensions which could always spill over into diplomatic confrontation or even a Third World War.
There remained the speculation that, if the wartime negotiations had demanded more of Stalin, the situation might not have arisen; yet not only Roosevelt but also Churchill had made commitments to him which were difficult to overturn unless the Anglo-Americans were willing to break with Stalin entirely. Even Churchill was averse to a military incursion over the agreed boundaries between the hegemonic zones of the USSR and its Western allies. Churchill had a long memory. At the end of the First World War many socialist and labour militants had been active in opposing military intervention in Soviet Russia after the Civil War. But from 1945 it was Attlee who governed the United Kingdom, and no public figure of importance advocated an incursion over the River Elbe. Truman and Attlee might well have had trouble mobilising popular support for any such action. The troops of the USA and the UK had been trained to regard the Soviet forces as allies. Civilians had heard the same propaganda. Germany and Japan had been identified as the only enemies and the task of orientating public opinion towards active military measures would have been extremely difficult. The chance had been lost at Yalta, Tehran and Potsdam — and even at those three Allied Conferences it would have been a tricky feat to pull off without trouble at home.
The USA and USSR were great powers which assumed that permanent unrivalrous coexistence was an implausible prospect. Stalin, moreover, was more active than Truman in making things worse. He grabbed territory. He imposed communist regimes. He anyway took it for granted that clashes with ‘world capitalism’ were inevitable. Indeed he was mentally more ready for war than were the American and British leaders. The Cold War was not unavoidable but it was very likely. The surprise is that it did not become the Hot War.
47. SUBJUGATING EASTERN EUROPE
There was little interference with the USSR’s actions in Soviet-occupied eastern Europe after the Second World War. Truman and Attlee grumbled but they did not act far outside the scope of the agreements at Tehran, Yalta and Potsdam. The tacit deal remained in place that the USSR could get on with its military occupation and political domination while the USA, the United Kingdom and France imposed their control in the West. Stalin had small acquaintance with his vast zone. He had been to Kraków, Berlin and Vienna on his trip before the First World War, but his subsequent interest had been limited to the internal affairs of the Comintern. Yet he was a fast learner when events drove the need for knowledge. Already in the Second World War, as Hitler occupied countries near the USSR, Stalin took account of the situation in consultation with Dimitrov and Litvinov. He also recognised that unless communist parties adopted a more obviously national image they would never succeed in appealing to their electorates. He had planned in 1941 to abolish the Comintern. In 1943 this aim was fulfilled. Behind the scenes, though, the International Department of the Party Central Committee Secretariat commanded the foreign communist parties everywhere. Once given, orders were obeyed.