Stalin’s concern with countries of the region grew as the end of the war approached. In Moscow he received representatives of the communist parties. In January 1945 he discussed economic aid, military dispositions and even the official language, frontiers and foreign policy of the Yugoslav state with Tito’s emissaries. Informed of their desire to form a huge federation with Bulgaria and Albania, he urged caution. Continually he cajoled the Yugoslav leaders, who were more cocksure than others in eastern Europe, to ask his opinion in advance of large-scale action.1
Regular reports and requests came to Moscow after the war, and Stalin went on meeting communist visitors. His ability to issue impromptu decisions was extraordinary. In 1946 he had even set the timing of the following year’s elections in Poland.2 Polish President Bolesław Bierut prefaced his discussion with the following obeisance: ‘We’ve journeyed to you, comrade Stalin, as our great friend in order to report our consideration on the course of events in Poland and check on the correctness of our evaluation of the political situation in the country.’3 His control over eastern Europe was facilitated by the consolidation of communism’s organisational network across the region with the protection of the Soviet armed forces. Years of subordination, enforced by terror, ensured compliance. Communist leaders, with the exception of the Yugoslavs and perhaps the Czechs, also knew how weak their support was in their countries: dependency on the USSR’s military power was crucial for their survival. New police agencies were set up on the Soviet model, and Moscow infiltrated and controlled them. Soviet diplomats, security officials and commanders monitored eastern Europe as if it was the outer empire of the USSR.
Problems awaited the Kremlin across the region. Communists in eastern Europe had suffered persecution before and during the Second World War. Their organisations were frail, their members few. Most of their leaders were popularly regarded as Soviet stooges. Communism was envisaged as a Russian pestilence, and the Comintern’s dissolution had not dispelled this impression. It did not help the cause of national communists that the USSR seized industrial assets as war reparations in Germany, Hungary, Romania and Slovakia. The presence of the Soviet security police and the Red Army — as well as the continuing gross misbehaviour of Soviet troops — exacerbated the situation. A further problem for communist parties was the high proportion of Jewish comrades in their leaderships. Anti-semitism in eastern Europe was not a Nazi confection, and Jews in the communist leaderships bent over backwards to avoid appearing to favour Jewish people: indeed they often instigated repression against Jewish groups.4 Yet Stalin had no patience with the difficulties experienced by the foreign communist parties. He had set down a political line; and if problems arose, he expected Molotov or some other subordinate to resolve them.
Stalin and his underlings in the USSR and eastern Europe did not lack self-assurance. History helped them. While installing non-democratic political systems in eastern Europe, they proceeded in accordance with local tradition in most cases. Nearly all countries in the region had possessed authoritarian governments, even dictatorships, between the world wars. Czechoslovakia had been the exception; all the rest, even if they started with a democratic system after the First World War, had succumbed to harsh forms of rule.5 It worked to the Kremlin’s advantage that these countries had yet to remove the social and economic obstacles to meritocratic progress. Reactionary army corps and wealthy quasifeudal landlords had held enormous power. Popular educational advance had been fitful. The Christian clergy lacked openness to ‘progressive’ ideas about social change. Poverty was widespread. Foreign capital investment had always been low and the Nazi occupation had brought about a further degradation in conditions. By releasing eastern Europe from the chains of this past, communist administrations could count on a degree of popular consent. Industrial nationalisation and educational expansion were widely welcomed. The possibilities of promotion at work for those who belonged to the lower social orders were eagerly greeted.
Thus there were fewer obstacles to communisation in eastern Europe than would have been the case in western Europe. Stalin was assured of finding support east of the River Elbe even though communist parties had until recently been fragile in the region. The assumption in the Kremlin was that, once the reform process got under way, communisation would develop a momentum of its own.
The communists in Yugoslavia, having won their civil war with little assistance from Moscow, shared power with no other party and encouraged the Albanian communists to behave similarly. The process developed slowly elsewhere. Monarchs were removed in Romania and Bulgaria, and in all the states of the region there was an insistence on the inclusion of communists in government; but in most cases the cabinets were coalitional. Poland was a sore spot. The Provisional Government set up by Stalin grudgingly accepted members from the London-based government-in-exile; but the communists continued to harass all its rivals. Stanisław Mikołajczyk’s Peasant Party was constantly persecuted. Elections were held elsewhere with considerable resort to malpractices which allowed communists to do better. Communists ruled Romania under Petru Groza. In Hungary Stalin faced greater difficulty. The elections of November 1945 had returned a huge anti-communist majority headed by the Smallholders’ Party. Communists, though, held many positions of power and, supported by the Soviet occupying forces, conducted arrests. Czechoslovakia was easier. President Beneš, a liberal, advocated friendly relations with the USSR, and at the 1946 elections the communists emerged as the largest single party with 38 per cent of the vote. Communist leader Klement Gottwald became Prime Minister.
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.