8

Communism and the Second World War

For western and central Europeans, the Second World War began earlier than it did for Russians and Americans. German troops marched into Prague on 15 March 1939, but that was not yet the beginning of European war. The Czechs, having been deserted by their democratic allies (although France had been bound by treaty to come to their aid), offered no resistance. On 1 September 1939, Nazi Germany attacked Poland. The Poles did resist, and two days later Great Britain and France declared war on Germany. Earlier that year the British government had given the Poles advice similar to that which they had offered Czechoslovakia in 1938–namely, that it would be in Poland’s interest to reach a negotiated settlement with Hitler. They had also said, however, that they would fight if Poland were to be attacked, and this they did. Stalin’s pact with Hitler, already discussed in Chapter 5, delayed the war between the Soviet Union and Germany, although on neither side was there a belief that peace between them would be long-lasting. It was Hitler who ended it with the German invasion of the Soviet Union in the midsummer of 1941. The United States became a combatant country when the Japanese attacked the USA at Pearl Harbor later that same year – on 7 December. President Roosevelt had, though, already given much-needed economic aid to Britain’s war effort, with the Lend-Lease Act passed in 1940. This was extended to provide support for the Soviet Union once the USA had entered the war. Hitler declared war on the United States on 11 December 1941, and from 1942 the USA played a major part in the war in both Asia and Europe.

The Soviet Union, however, not only suffered the greatest losses, but also contributed most to the ultimate defeat of the Nazis. Stalin was taken completely by surprise when German troops crossed the Soviet border on 22 June 1941. He had received a number of warnings of impending attack, but chose to ignore them. There were Soviet spies in Berlin who picked up information about plans to invade the Soviet Union, and their agents were able to observe the movement of German troops and equipment towards the Soviet border. Stalin, however, assumed that this was no more than bluff on Hitler’s part (perhaps to confuse the British) and that Germany’s immediate priority was to knock Britain out of the war. Soviet military intelligence – the GRU – had a talented spy in Japan, Richard Sorge, whose intimate relationship with the wife of the German ambassador to Tokyo was one of his sources of valuable intelligence. Sorge warned the Soviet leadership of the impending attack on the USSR but was branded by Stalin as a liar. Warnings came also from Germans sympathetic to the Soviet Union as well as from Winston Churchill, who could hardly have been less sympathetic.¹ Churchill, however, did not want the USSR to suffer losses in a surprise attack, since he knew how badly Britain needed such a formidable military ally in the struggle against Hitler’s Germany.² (Having been the main proponent of armed intervention against the Bolsheviks in the Russian civil war, Churchill in 1920 had described Communism as ‘a pestilence more destructive of life than the Black Death or the Spotted Typhus’.³ When, however, Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, the British prime minister remarked that if Hitler invaded Hell, he would make at least a favourable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons.)⁴

Even the German ambassador to Moscow told his Soviet counterpart, Vladimir Dekanozov, in early June 1941 that Hitler had come to a firm decision to invade the Soviet Union, adding that he was conveying this information to him as he had been ‘raised in the spirit of Bismarck, who was always an opponent of war with Russia’.⁵ This led Stalin to complain to the Politburo that disinformation had now reached ambassadorial level. Since Stalin had convinced himself that a German attack was not imminent, no one close to him dared express a contrary view. The head of the NKVD, Lavrenti Beria, was especially zealous in following in his master’s footsteps. On 21 June 1941–one day before the Nazis invaded – he said that four NKVD officers who had persisted in sending reports of an impending invasion must be ‘ground into labour camp dust’⁶ and on the same day he wrote to Stalin:

    I again insist on recalling and punishing our ambassador to Berlin, Dekanozov, who keeps bombarding me with ‘reports’ on Hitler’s alleged preparations to attack the USSR. He has reported that this attack will start tomorrow…But I and my people, Iosif Vissarionovich, have firmly embedded in our memory your wise conclusion: Hitler is not going to attack us in 1941.⁷

Beria was surely aware that his head would potentially be on the block if there were a catastrophic failure of prediction. This, no doubt, explains his stress on the fidelity within the NKVD to Stalin’s view that there would be no German attack in 1941. That was a precaution lest things turned out differently from what Stalin and Beria expected, even though there could be no guarantees of immunity from Stalin’s wrath, with its appalling consequences for those at the receiving end. Dekanozov was himself a protégé of Beria and had been a brutal NKVD officer in Georgia. Far from being especially perspicacious about Hitler’s intentions, even as he passed on warnings of war, he was much more inclined than other senior members of his own embassy staff to regard all talk of a German invasion of Russia as deliberate disinformation.⁸ (Beria, unlike his purged predecessors as head of the NKVD, succeeded in outliving Stalin, though not by long. He was executed later in the year of Stalin’s death at the instigation of Khrushchev and the ruling group within the Politburo.⁹ And among those arrested along with Beria and similarly accused of the heinous – and at that time imaginary – crime of plotting ‘to revive capitalism and to restore the rule of the bourgeoisie’ was former NKVD officer and Soviet ambassador Dekanozov, who was also executed.)¹⁰

As a result of Soviet unpreparedness, in spite of all the warnings of impending attack – received substantially earlier, and from sources independent of one another – the Red Army suffered horrendous initial losses. Stalin greatly compounded his failures of interpretation of the intelligence he received by forbidding Soviet generals from implementing defensive measures against an invasion. He had no wish to provoke Hitler and, having persuaded himself that a German attack was not imminent, there seemed no need to do so. Although the Second World War was ultimately to strengthen both the Soviet system and the spread of Communism internationally, that was not the way things looked during the remainder of 1941. The Soviet army lost four and a half million men before the end of the year. Stalin’s culpability was immense. He had killed off a large proportion of the senior officer corps in the purges of 1937–38, including Marshal Tukhachevsky, who in 1936 had told the recently established General Staff Academy that the enemy against whom the Soviet Union should be preparing to defend itself was Nazi Germany, whose favoured form of attack was a lightning strike – the Blitzkrieg.¹¹ Tukhachevsky, who had first found himself on the opposite side of an argument with Stalin as long ago as the Soviet – Polish war in 1920, was arrested and shot in June 1937.¹² Three of the Soviet Union’s five marshals perished in 1937–38 and the two who were left, Voroshilov and Budenny, were far from the most impressive. Both were removed from important positions of command very early in the war after they had demonstrated their incompetence. And not only had Stalin refused to believe well-founded intelligence concerning the imminence of a German attack in 1941; he proceeded, in the earliest weeks of the war, to authorize the shooting of a number of senior officers for ‘cowardice’ when they failed to prevent the advance of the invading army.¹³ Later the NKVD would arrest not only Soviet troops who had been captured by the Germans and remained in captivity until the end of the war but also those who had succeeded in escaping from their captors. Moreover, senior officers who brought bad news were liable to be arrested on Stalin’s instructions.¹⁴ In his Order No. 270, issued on 16 August 1941, Stalin decreed that those who surrendered to the Germans ‘should be destroyed by all means available, from the air or from the ground, and their families deprived of all benefits’, while deserters should be shot on the spot and their families arrested.¹⁵

Soviet losses were much greater than they need have been for those and other reasons. An indirect result of the war was that many more political prisoners in Soviet labour camps died in the years immediately after June 1941 than in the 1930s, since shortages and privation were now such that they were more than ever undernourished. The ruthlessness with which the Red Army senior officers (including, notably, Marshal Zhukov) deployed their own troops – with punishment battalions being sent to clear minefields by marching through them – also contributed to the scale of the death toll. All that notwithstanding, it should never be forgotten (though it often is) that the Soviet Union lost a larger number of people than any other combatant state during the Second World War, that the great bulk of these deaths were caused by the barbarity of the Nazi invasion, and that it was the forces of the Soviet Union, more than those of any other country, which defeated Nazi Germany in the ground war in Europe. The Red Army war dead numbered nine million, and almost eighteen million Soviet civilians were killed in the war. The total was five times higher than the number of German war dead.¹⁶

Nazi ideology regarded Russians (and Slavs more generally)–as well as Jews, who came still higher on their hate list – as subhuman, and this dehumanization of entire populations led to a brutality on the Eastern Front far in excess of that in the western war zones. Politically, the Nazis saw Communists as their most bitter enemies, and so Communist Party members and Jews (categories which the Nazis often conflated) were killed in cold blood. Slav villagers who had assisted partisan fighters – even inadvertently, when guerrilla fighters entered their village and helped themselves to whatever they could find – were killed and the village destroyed.¹⁷ Not only in Russia, but in other Slav countries, among them Poland and Yugoslavia, German units would shoot a hundred civilians in retaliation for every German killed by partisans. Sometimes, as in Poland, they would take a hundred hostages in advance, publish their names on posters, and then execute them in public to discourage further resistance.¹⁸ The extraordinarily high proportion of Soviet prisoners of war who died in captivity –some 3,300,000 out of the 5,700,000 who fell into German hands – was a consequence of two main factors. The first was the aforementioned Nazi ideology, which placed no value on these lives, and the second Hitler’s concerns about the economic burden on the German population (which might have led to discontent on the home front) of keeping them prisoner. Many of the deaths occurred in the first months of the war before the Nazi leadership decided that bringing prisoners to Germany and making them do productive work would better suit their war aims. The death toll among those engaged in forced labour was somewhat lower than in the prison camps, but the ruthless manner in which the Soviet prisoners were exploited led to mass deaths among those workers also, especially in 1943.¹⁹

As Omer Bartov has written: ‘On the Eastern Front, Nazi Germany exercised barbarism on an unprecedented scale; its declared intention was extermination and enslavement; the only way to prevent her from achieving this goal was to defeat her militarily, for whatever we may think of the [German] resistance, it proved itself incapable of toppling the regime.’²⁰ The official figure for Soviet war dead now given in Russia is approximately twenty-seven million.²¹ Even the two western countries which played a great part in the war against Nazi Germany, the United States and Britain, suffered incomparably smaller losses – some 400,000 in the case of the USA and 350,000 in that of Britain, with the latter figure representing a substantially higher proportion of the population than the former.²²

In their advance into the Soviet Union in 1941, the German army had reached the outskirts of Moscow by November. There, however, they were stopped by the Soviet forces defending the city, and a counteroffensive, led by a new military elite, Georgy Zhukov, Ivan Koniev and Konstantin Rokossovsky, began in December.²³ In the battle for Moscow, which lasted from September 1941 until April 1942, 926,000 Soviet soldiers were killed. In other words, Soviet losses in that one battle came to more than the combined casualties of Britain and the United States in the whole of World War Two.²⁴ The Germans had hoped to take Leningrad as well as Moscow in 1941, but in the event captured neither. However, they began a blockade of Leningrad which lasted almost 900 days, causing over a million civilian deaths. The siege was finally ended only in January 1944.

Approximately 90 per cent of the German army’s fighting strength was tied down on the Eastern Front for as long as three years. The battles at Stalingrad in 1942 and Kursk in 1943 took a huge toll of German lives as well as, in still greater numbers, on the Soviet side. In one of the most celebrated of British victories over German forces, the battle at El Alamein in 1942, the German army under the command of Rommel lost 50,000 men, 1,700 guns and 500 tanks. At Stalingrad in the same year the Germans lost 800,000 men, 10,000 guns and 2,000 tanks.²⁵ The battle for the city of Stalingrad, waged in the winter of 1942 and the beginning of 1943, was of huge symbolic importance, since the old town of Tsaritsyn had in the Soviet period been renamed in honour of Stalin. (After Nikita Khrushchev exposed at least some of the crimes of Stalin, the city was renamed again – as Volgograd, which was safe enough, since the city was, and remains, situated on the banks of the River Volga.) In addition to the significance of the city bearing Stalin’s name, its capture was seen by Hitler as opening the way to exploitation of the Soviet Union’s oil resources. The horrendous battle which took place in and around Stalingrad became, in the words of Antony Beevor, ‘a personal duel by mass proxy’ between Hitler and Stalin which Stalin, at immense cost, won.²⁶ Although 50,000 Soviet citizens fought in the German army at Stalingrad,²⁷ the vast majority of the Soviet population – though driven to the limits, and often beyond, of human endurance – resisted the invaders. When the remnants of Hitler’s Sixth Army finally surrendered at Stalingrad, this was a massive boost for the Communist movement worldwide. It greatly strengthened Stalin’s hand in his negotiations with Roosevelt and Churchill.²⁸

Conscious of the huge contribution the Red Army was making to the defeat of Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union’s wartime allies turned a blind eye to atrocities committed by the Soviet side, although atrocities there were. One, which for long was mendaciously attributed to the Germans, was the slaughter of thousands of Polish officers in cold blood in Katyn forest, near Smolensk, in 1940.²⁹ This was the year before the Soviet Union entered the Second World War, but followed their acquisition of Polish territory as part of the partition of Poland agreed in the Molotov – Ribbentrop pact. The Russian archival evidence on the Katyn massacre is now available. A letter from the head of the NKVD, Beria, to Stalin of 5 March 1940 proposed the shooting of some 25,700 Polish prisoners, the majority of them officers, though Beria’s letter distinguishes between a group of 14,736 officers and officials held in prisoner-of-war camps, and a further group of 18,632 people being held in prisons in western Ukraine and Belorussia, of whom 10,685 were Poles. This latter group, Beria claimed, was composed of former officers, former police spies, actual spies and diversionists, and former landowners, manufacturers and bureaucrats. Stalin personally approved the proposal that they all be shot, and his signature was followed by that of Politburo members Klement Voroshilov, Vyacheslav Molotov and Anastas Mikoyan.³⁰

Between 1941 and 1944, during the Second World War, Stalin ordered the deportation of entire nationalities – including the Chechens, their neighbours the Ingush, the Volga Germans (who had been in Russia since the eighteenth century) and the Crimean Tatars – from their traditional homelands to Kazakhstan or Siberia. They were regarded as harbouring disloyal or potentially disloyal elements and so entire nations were victimized. Transported in cattle trucks, many of them died on the journey eastwards.³¹ When Soviet troops finally entered Germany in 1945 they took brutal revenge – on the civilian population as well as German combatants. It is estimated that more than 110,000 women were raped in Berlin, and there was massive looting.³²

Little attention, however, was paid on the Allied side to any of this. The British Foreign Office, for example, while aware that the Katyn killings had been the work of the NKVD rather than the Germans, took care to keep the information out of the public domain. Their priority was the decisive role the Soviet Union was playing in the defeat of Nazi Germany. Some aspects of the Communist system, such as its exceptionally rapid build-up of industrial capacity in the 1930s and its ability to mobilize vast numbers of people to meet specific targets, contributed to their ultimate wartime success. Thus, for example, Soviet industry, especially military production, was moved from western Russia to beyond the Urals at remarkable speed. Other features of the system – including NKVD surveillance and harassment of army officers (even one as high as Rokossovsky, who was to become a marshal in the course of the war but on its eve had been a political prisoner)–were wholly counterproductive.³³

Nevertheless, Stalin was sufficiently astute to realize that in a desperate war for survival, Communist ideology was not enough. It had to be supplemented by traditional beliefs and symbols if the population of Russia, in particular, were to be inspired to fight to the end in the face of immense sacrifice and suffering. Thus, persecution of religion largely ceased during the war years and the Orthodox Church was encouraged to add its patriotic weight to the struggle. Stalin, deeply shaken by the German invasion of the Soviet Union, did not broadcast to the Soviet people until eleven days into the war. In that speech, however, he addressed them not only as ‘Comrades’ but also as ‘Brothers and Sisters’. On the anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution, 7 November 1941, he took the risk of inspecting a parade on Red Square and, in a speech, invoked great names from Russia’s martial past – among them, Alexander Nevsky, a thirteenth-century Novgorod prince who was later canonized by the Orthodox Church; Alexander Suvorov, an eighteenth-century general regarded in pre-revolutionary times as the greatest of all Russian soldiers; and Mikhail Kutuzov, the military leader who outfoxed Napoleon in the Patriotic War of 1812–13. It is not for nothing that the Second World War became known in Russia as the Great Patriotic War. There was a conscious echo here of 1812, but the mid-twentieth-century conflict was a greater, and still more terrible, war. Most Soviet soldiers were fighting for their homeland, not for Stalinism or Marxism-Leninism. Indeed, in spite of the permeation of the army by a special category of political officers (successors of the commissars whom Trotsky had inserted in the Red Army during the civil war to ensure the political loyalty of officers who had formerly served the tsar), Communist doctrine was subordinated to patriotic and anti-German propaganda. Given the barbarous actions of the invading army, the latter met a ready response.

The Nazis were victims of their own ideology. If they had treated decently peasants who had lost family members during the forced collectivization of agriculture and who were still not reconciled to the Stalinist version of Soviet rule, they might have picked up more support. In western Ukraine, had they made concessions to nationalist sentiments, they would have won even more collaboration than they did.³⁴ In fact, German forces occupied Ukraine for longer than any other part of the Soviet Union and left it devastated. More than two million citizens of Ukraine were sent to Germany as slave labour.³⁵ The cities were deprived of sufficient food to sustain the life of their inhabitants. In December 1941, German economic administrators decided to increase the supply of foodstuffs from Ukraine to Germany by eliminating ‘superfluous eaters’, by whom they meant ‘Jews and the population of Ukrainian cities such as Kiev’.³⁶ The population of Kharkiv dropped from 850,000 in 1939 to 450,000 by December 1941, with between 70,000 and 80,000 residents of that Ukrainian city dying of famine during the German occupation. Two hundred and fifty Ukrainian villages and their inhabitants were totally annihilated in the Nazi response to resistance.³⁷

The Second World War was a period when the stock of the Soviet Union was higher in Western democracies than at any time before or after. American president Franklin D. Roosevelt and British prime minister Winston Churchill, in their wartime correspondence, habitually referred to Stalin as ‘Uncle Joe’ – often, indeed, by the abbreviation ‘U.J.’³⁸ (They also, as was common within their and other Western countries, called the people over whom ‘Uncle Joe’ ruled ‘Russians’ and spoke of the country as Russia rather than the Soviet Union. That obscured the fact that in this multinational state, Russians, although the most numerous, were far from being the only nationality suffering and fighting in the war against Nazi Germany.) After the dismay caused by the Molotov – Ribbentrop pact of 1939, the new esteem for the role being played by the Soviet Union came as a relief to many Communists throughout the world. As Donald Sassoon has observed, the Second World War, after the German attack on the Soviet Union, turned out to be the ‘finest hour’ also of Western Communists. For the first – and, indeed, last – time: ‘They could fight fascism and Nazism, be true internationalists, defend the USSR, be flawless patriots and all without inconsistency.’³⁹ In occupied Europe, Communists were particularly active participants in partisan resistance to fascism, whether in its German Nazi or Italian manifestations.

In Greece and Yugoslavia this took the form not only of resistance to German occupation but also of bitter civil wars. In the case of Greece, it was war between two wings of the resistance movement. If the Soviet Union had put its weight behind the Greek Communists, they might have come to power in 1944 after the Germans withdrew from Greece, but on this occasion an agreement made between Stalin and Churchill that the Soviet Union would not intervene in Greece was adhered to. It is likely that it was not so much his promise to Churchill as the priority Stalin gave to gaining control of east-central Europe which persuaded the Soviet leadership to stand aside and allow British troops to play an important role in defeating the Communist insurgency in Greece during the last year of the Second World War.⁴⁰ As usual, the interests of ‘fraternal’ Communist parties were subordinated to those of the Soviet Union as Stalin perceived them, and the Greek Communists were mistaken in thinking that their armed struggle ‘would receive Moscow’s blessing as part of a broad move to expand Soviet control into the Mediterranean’.⁴¹

In Yugoslavia, civil war consisted of both ideological and military struggle between Communists and anti-Communists and bitter conflict among the country’s different nationalities, especially between Serbs and Croats. In Croatia, where a puppet fascist state was established under extreme Croat nationalists called the Ustaše, a policy close to genocide was pursued against the Serbian part of the population as well as against Serbs in Bosnia and Hercegovina. The Communist partisans in Yugoslavia were led by Josip Broz, who had become known since 1934 as Tito – the name he then assumed on his release from prison for Communist activity. One of the strengths of the Communists was that they transcended the ethnic divide. On the eve of World War Two they were, in the words of a historian of Communism and nationality in the Balkans, ‘perhaps the only truly Yugoslav party’.⁴² They recruited people on the basis not only of their willingness to risk their lives in the fight against the German occupiers of their country but also of their readiness to work for the creation of a post-war Communist state. Serbs and Montenegrins were disproportionately strongly represented in the ranks of Communist guerrilla fighters, but Tito was born in a Croatian village in 1892 to a Croat father and Slovene mother. Among the Serbs there was a fierce struggle between the Chetniks, the Serbian nationalist part of the guerrilla resistance to the Germans (who at times, however, collaborated with them), and Tito’s Communists, with their large Serbian contingent.

Given that Tito did succeed in establishing a Communist state in Yugoslavia when the war ended, the decision of Winston Churchill and his government in 1943 to transfer British logistical support from the Chetniks, led by Draža Mihailovi, to Tito’s partisans became controversial in the post-war years. As Dennison Rusinow observed: ‘While Western military aid was of only marginal if welcome importance, Churchill’s advocacy of the Partisans and the King’s reluctant acquiescence gave the nascent regime a much needed international recognition and legitimacy.’⁴³ Nevertheless, the Communists, led by Tito, took power largely as a result of their own efforts. Unlike a majority of the post-war European Communist states, they had not been propelled into the offices of state by Stalin and the Soviet army. The Red Army did play a very important role by liberating Belgrade, but by far the greatest part of the fighting on Yugoslav soil had been conducted by the partisans, and, in contrast with most of east-central Europe, the Soviet forces departed once the immediate task had been accomplished. Thus, when the war ended, it was the Yugoslav partisans who were in charge. It was not accidental that the first great split in the Communist movement to affect ruling parties was that between the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. Communist leaderships which had made their own revolutions were able to sustain a position independent of that of Moscow (China and Albania were later examples) in a way in which regimes that were essentially Soviet-created found far harder to achieve, even when some of them tried.

For Churchill, during the Second World War, the overriding issue was which resistance movement to the Nazis was holding down more German divisions and killing more German troops. Two military missions, the first led by Captain (subsequently Lieutenant-Colonel) Bill Deakin – who, in the later 1940s, became the first head of St Antony’s College, Oxford – and the second by Brigadier Fitzroy Maclean, who was both then and later a Conservative MP, helped to convince Churchill that Tito’s partisans were the people to back. Deakin was parachuted into Yugoslavia and pitched immediately into battle, fighting alongside Tito. Less than two weeks after he made contact with the partisans, he and Tito were wounded by the same bomb in an attack which killed many of the partisans and the only other British officer who had accompanied Deakin on this dangerous mission.

Milovan Djilas, a close ally of Tito during the war and a leading figure among Yugoslav Communists who was later to become Tito’s most notable domestic political opponent, observed on the arrival of the British military mission on 29 May 1943: ‘The mission was led by Captain F.W. Deakin, who was outstandingly intelligent despite his general reserve. We found out that he was a secretary of a sort to Churchill and this impressed us, as much for the consideration thus shown to us as for the lack of favouritism among the British top circles when it came to the dangers of war.’⁴⁴ In that context, it is worth noting that Churchill’s son Randolph, a Conservative MP as well as an army officer at the time, later joined the British military mission to Yugoslavia. As Djilas recalled:

    We, of course, felt honored, though it did occur to us that Randolph might be the gray eminence of the mission. But he himself convinced us by his behaviour that he was a secondary figure, and that his renowned father had decided on this gesture out of his aristocratic sense of sacrifice and to lend his son stature. Randolph soon enchanted our commanders and commissars with his wit and unconventional manner, but he revealed through his drinking and lack of interest that he had inherited neither political imagination nor dynamism with his surname.⁴⁵

Winston Churchill himself sent a number of letters to Tito, hand-delivered by members of the British military mission. He tried unavailingly to persuade Tito to take a more favourable view of Yugoslavia’s young king in exile, and to retain the monarchy after the war, while enthusiastically backing the partisans’ current military efforts. On 17 May 1944 he wrote: ‘I congratulate you once more upon the number of enemy divisions which you are holding gripped on your various fronts.’⁴⁶ Just one week later, writing again to Tito, Churchill said: ‘I wish I could come myself, but I am too old and heavy to jump out on a parachute.’⁴⁷

The limited Soviet participation in the war in Yugoslavia did not prove decisive. In Albania the Communists came to power without any Soviet help at all. They did, however, get assistance from the Yugoslavs – both instruction on party organization and guidance on how to conduct guerrilla warfare. Initially, Tito and his colleagues were mentoring the Albanians as part of a division of labour agreed by the Comintern. On the day the Italians invaded Albania–7 April 1939–King Zog, who had been the authoritarian ruler of Albania for fifteen years, left the country immediately with his entourage, creating a political vacuum.⁴⁸ Mussolini’s army was far less effective than Hitler’s, and gradually the Communists, allying organization to willpower, became the major element in the resistance. There was no Albanian government in exile or any other political parties with whom they needed even the pretence of sharing power. In October 1944, the Anti-Fascist National Liberation Committee became the provisional government and subsequently, under the same leadership, the rulers of a monolithic Communist state.⁴⁹

Elsewhere in Eastern Europe, the Soviet Army played a decisive role in establishing the conditions for Communist takeover. It was the Red Army which recaptured the Baltic states from the Nazis. They had been taken into the Soviet orbit by Nazi – Soviet agreement before Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union, but were occupied by German forces during the conflict. The Red Army also liberated from Nazi domination Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria and Romania. They ended Nazi control over the greater part of Czechoslovakia, including the capital Prague, but departed after the war ended. There had been no widespread resistance or partisan movement in Czechoslovakia during the war, in which the Czech lands of Bohemia and Moravia were a German protectorate while the Slovaks had their own clerico-fascist state. The head of the Czech protectorate, Reinhard Heydrich, was killed in 1942 on the initiative of the democratic Czech government in exile in London. However, the revenge the Nazis took, with the villages of Lidice and Ležaky destroyed, all the men in the villages shot, and the women and children sent to concentration camps, was enough to ensure that little further resistance ensued. In Slovakia in 1944, Communists and social democrats co-operated in an abortive rising, one of whose leaders was Gustáv Husák, who was later to become a political prisoner in Communist Czechoslovakia, and later still, the party’s leader and the country’s president. In Czechoslovakia, the Communist Party had sufficiently widespread support that there was a real possibility of its gaining power without the need to rely on Soviet armed force. It became, indeed, an intermediate case between that of the Yugoslavs and Albanians, on the one side, and states such as Poland and Hungary, on the other. The latter pair could not have become Communist in the absence of Soviet power and presence, whereas no Soviet troops were present in Czechoslovakia when the Communists (as described in the next chapter) seized full power in 1948.

Meanwhile, the Second World War had an effect also on the fortunes of Communists in Asia, where it was linked to national liberation. Japanese expansionism became a catalyst for Communist advance in China. The Japanese had seized Manchuria in 1931 and established a client state there. This did not stop the Chinese Nationalist leader of the Kuomintang, Chiang Kai-shek, from focusing on the extermination of Communists in the rest of China. As noted, however, in Chapter 5, a nucleus of Communist Party members survived the Long March to the north-western province of Shaanxi in 1934–35. One reason why the Nationalists and the Communists were such bitter rivals was not that they were polar opposites but that they had significant things in common.⁵⁰ They were both believers in modernizing China and the Nationalists did not in reality have a monopoly of national appeal. That the Communists could respond to the desire for national liberation as well as to local peasant grievances was to serve them well.

Chiang Kai-shek was on the verge of another extermination campaign aimed at the Chinese Communist Party when the Japanese forces invaded in 1937 and attempted to take control of the whole of China.⁵¹ The Communists then became, along with the Nationalists, one of the two wings of the resistance. The Nationalists bore the brunt of the fighting, the Communists being the junior partner.⁵² The Communist forces developed effective guerrilla warfare but they gave priority to building up their strength for the post-war struggle with the Kuomintang.⁵³ By the time the Japanese were defeated – above all, by the United States – the Kuomintang had been worn down by eight years of warfare. Chiang Kai-shek’s government was also blamed for much of the hardship, including food shortages, of the war years. Thus Chiang ended the war weaker than he had been at the beginning, whereas the Communists had been able to gather strength and consolidate. In areas they controlled during the war, the Chinese Communist Party were often able to win local support with reform policies, by distributing land to poor peasants, and by punishing unpopular local elites.⁵⁴ Thus, in China, too, though in different ways from Eastern Europe – where the advance of the Soviet army was generally the most decisive factor – war turned out to be the prelude to, and facilitator of, the Communist seizure of power.