No one challenged this except, at a distance, the Yugoslavian communist leader Tito. Although fear of Soviet counter-measures against the communist leaderships of eastern Europe must have played a part, there was also genuine admiration for Stalin among them. Most of those communist parties in any case would have quickly been removed if the Soviet Army had not been in occupation. They depended heavily on Stalin’s goodwill, and they knew it. Even Mao Tse-tung, victor in the Chinese Civil War with little support and indeed much obstruction from Stalin, maintained an admiring public posture towards the Leader of the USSR. By 1952, when the Nineteenth Party Congress met in Moscow, the praise for Stalin from foreign leaders was downright glutinous. He was greeted with the shout: ‘Glory to the great Stalin!’ Statues, small metal busts and posters repeated the work of praise. To his dying day he heard hymns to himself as the master of the world communist movement.
51. DANGEROUS LIAISONS
The propaganda war intensified between the USSR and the Western Allies. Soviet diplomats treated their American and British counterparts as enemies and the feeling was reciprocated. Cultural contacts ceased. The countries of eastern Europe as well as the communist parties of western Europe fell in line with the Kremlin’s orders. In the West Stalin was depicted as the most evil dictator alive, quite as evil as the German Führer whom he had defeated. At the same time Pravda denigrated Truman and Attlee, characterising them as having the global ambitions — and the methods to match — which Hitler had developed. The two sides shared the assumption that a Third World War might occur between states which until 1945 had been united in armed struggle against the Wehrmacht. Two camps existed around the world, armed to the teeth and rivals for supremacy.
Neither camp, however, was looking for military conflict. Even Stalin, whose gloomy axiom was that a Third World War might be postponed but was ultimately inevitable,1 did not wish to bring the USA to blows with the USSR. But events were stiffening his resolve to face down the Americans. The coincidence of the Soviet Union’s acquisition of the A-bomb and the communist seizure of power in China altered the balance of power in the world. Although American weapons technology remained ahead of its rival, Stalin was no longer going to be easily intimidated in diplomatic exchanges. Pravda announced the achievement with pride. The USA was depicted as a militarist menace to world peace and the Soviet state was put forward as the sole power which could resist American pretensions. What is more, the Chinese Revolution meant that the geopolitics of Asia in particular could never be the same again. Mao Tse-tung’s initial willingness to defer to Stalin in the interests of obtaining economic assistance was especially cheering to Moscow. Fours years after the end of the Second World War the Soviet Union was reclaiming its right to be treated as a global power on a level with the USA.
Few gifts, of course, come without wrapping; and Stalin knew that China’s resurgent power under communist leadership had the potential to complicate his statesmanship. Mao might assert himself like a Chinese Tito. The world communist movement, until then largely unified, would undergo fissiparous strain. There might be a direct clash between the People’s Republic of China and the USSR. Or things might deteriorate more indirectly. The People’s Republic of China could start acting in international relations without consulting the Kremlin and yet somehow entangle the USSR in the adverse consequences.
Stalin with all this in mind sent out his Minister of Communications, Ivan Kovalëv, to Beijing to see how closely the Chinese communists were following his recommendations. Unusually he showed Kovalëv’s report to Mao.2 Stalin’s motives were hardly comradely. Probably he wanted to impress on Mao that the USSR knew more about China’s politics than Mao had imagined. Kovalëv revealed that little serious effort had been made to win over the Chinese working class to the revolutionary cause. He mentioned that land reform was geographically patchy. Kovalëv was also unimpressed by the ideological preparation of the party cadres. Indeed he noted tensions in the Beijing leadership. Kovalëv told Stalin directly that some leaders were not only anti-American but also anti-Soviet. Mao’s close associate Chou En-lai had been heard to wonder why, if Beijing was being told to avoid annoying the USA, it should reject overtures from blackballed Yugoslavia.3 There was plenty to provoke Stalin’s suspicions and he let Mao know that, unless China toed the Soviet line, assistance from Moscow would not be forthcoming.
Diplomatic relations between the USA and the USSR were not broken, but both Moscow and Washington understood that global politics had entered a period of intensified uncertainty. Stalin especially wanted to secure Soviet interests vis-à-vis communist China. He started as he meant to go on. Devastated by decades of civil war, China urgently required foreign economic assistance, and the USSR was the sole possible source for it. Stalin intended to drive a hard bargain. While content to nudge China towards spreading communist political influence in eastern Asia, he demanded Chinese acceptance of the primacy of the Soviet Union in the world communist movement.
Yet events in the Far East tempted him to risk moving over to an offensive foreign policy. Since Korea’s liberation from Japanese occupation there had been intermittent civil war, and two separate states had emerged on the peninsula in 1948. The same American military shield which defended Japan protected southern Korea with Seoul as its capital. Meanwhile northern Korea had a communist government, based in Pyongyang, which looked to Moscow for assistance. The armies confronting each other had abundant supplies of equipment and advisers; and both Korean states behaved on the assumption that sooner or later a definitive resumption of hostilities would take place. The Korean communist leader Kim Il-Sung went to Moscow in March 1949 and requested a large increase in assistance so that he might attack the south.4 Stalin refused, advising the Korean comrades to get on with their preparations but to fight only if invaded. Kim Il-Sung, however, wanted to go to war and continued to act provocatively towards Seoul. He refused to cease making representations to Stalin. In March 1950 he returned to Moscow and argued passionately that the south was there for the taking. If China could be unified under Mao Tse-tung, he asserted, Korea was ready for similar treatment under Kim Il-Sung.
Stalin had customarily parried such demands from foreign communist leaders, but Kim Il-Sung touched a raw nerve and Stalin suddenly gave way. It cannot have been the Korean’s persuasiveness which led to the turnabout: Stalin was too circumspect for that. Much had happened since 1945. The USSR’s acquisition of both its own nuclear-bomb capacity and a powerful communist ally in China encouraged him to think that it no longer needed to play its hand weakly against the USA.