16. INSIDE THE PARTIES

The parties of Comintern had been organised according to the Soviet model since the early 1920s. They were centralised and disciplined. They rooted out factions and banned debate once the party line had been decreed. They propagated Marxism-Leninism, idolised Stalin and acclaimed the USSR’s economic and cultural achievements. They obeyed the Comintern orders issuing from Moscow: their members had become communists because they admired the Soviet Union and their objective was to establish a dictatorship of the proletariat in their own country. Communist parties recruited a mass membership wherever political conditions allowed. While contending that the global attainment of communism was inevitable, they knew an intense effort was needed to make this happen. Their belief was that, where the Soviet comrades had gone, they would sooner or later follow.

As yet they could only dream of governmental office. Communists in most countries were outlawed, persecuted or – at the very least – subjected to police surveillance. The Third Reich and fascist Italy arrested communists on sight. When confining young German suspects, the Gestapo encouraged individuals to talk about things other than politics. The calculation was that communists would sooner or later use Marxist-Leninist jargon. Arthur Koestler recalled that if they merely used ‘concrete’ as an adjective – as in the concrete conditions of the moment – they would be identified as proven Marxists.1 Usually the interrogators used more brutal methods. Nazi Germany put communist militants to hard labour in concentration camps. Mussolini locked up his communists and refused them decent care. The Italian communist theorist Antonio Gramsci died in prison of tuberculosis and medical neglect in 1937. Communist parties in Germany and Italy were pushed into the political underground. Conditions were little better in most countries of central and eastern Europe. Communists lost their mass membership and had to send representatives into Soviet exile in order to maintain party work.

People who became militants had to accept the possibility, even the probability in many countries, of eventual arrest. They who advocated a dictatorship of their own could hardly start whingeing. They believed that ‘class struggle’ needed to be fought with total ruthlessness, and their enemies in many countries had the same attitude. After Hitler closed down the Communist Party of Germany, only sixteen out of seventy-two parties represented in the Executive Committee of Comintern had legal status in their countries.2

Circumstances went on worsening for communist parties around the world. Imperial powers in Asia and Africa kept their communists under surveillance and frequently engaged in bouts of suppression. The situation was somewhat easier for Comintern in North, Central and South America. The Mexican Communist Party operated freely and noisily during the presidency of Lázaro Cárdenas from 1934 to 1940.³ (It was Cárdenas who granted asylum to Trotski.) The country had an abundance of groups of the political far left. Less fortunate was the Communist Party of Brazil, which had to work clandestinely while its leader Luis Carlos Prestes languished in prison.⁴ In the USA the communists enjoyed open conditions but, like their Mexican comrades, gained little electoral support even if their influence on public debates was on the increase.⁵ Comintern worked frantically to keep abreast of events in all such countries and gave peremptory instructions to its parties whether they enjoyed legal rights or worked secretly and outside the law. Moscow’s word in the many local disputes was final; but the functionaries in the USSR inevitably continued to depend on being supplied with information and suggestions from the parties themselves.

Comintern’s focus remained on Europe, and it was there that communism suffered the greatest deterioration in its situation as the Third Reich expanded its borders and its political and economic influence. The only durable success for Comintern was in France, where the communists had a third of a million members by 1937. This made them the largest such organisation ouside the USSR and China. But there could be no certainty that governments would not suddenly take to suppressing communist parties. When General Franco won the Spanish civil war, he spent years arresting, maltreating and executing communists of all types. The same had been true for remnants of the Chinese Communist Party who failed to join Mao Zedong on his Long March away from harm at the hands of the Kuomintang to Yanan district in Shaanxi province in China’s far north. Chiang Kai-shek dealt brutally with communists falling into his hands unless they could be dragooned into his own armed forces. In Europe – outside Scandinavia, the Low Countries, Britain and France – authoritarian right-wing regimes hounded their communist parties. Communists were more bullied than bullying outside the USSR, and they earned respect as fighters against fascism and antisemitism wherever it arose: their parties were often reckless about the risks they ordered them to take and they in turn willingly faced any danger.6

The average European communist militant’s existence was hemmed around. If such activists stayed on working in the clandestine organisations of the party, they could be caught and maltreated by the security agencies of their country. But if they moved to the USSR, they unknowingly entered a zone of still greater danger. Hundreds of Polish communists fled Piłsudski’s security agencies for exile in the USSR. There had long been concern in Moscow that this was one of the channels whereby Piłsudski infiltrated his agents through the border. In August 1938 Stalin commanded Dimitrov, Comintern’s Secretary-General, to shut down the Polish Communist Party. While this was being done, the Polish communist exiles were taken into custody by Yezhov’s NKVD. Most were shot. Those who avoided this end lived in fear of their lives.

The arm of Soviet security agencies stretched far beyond the frontiers of the USSR. Mongolia was formally a sovereign communist state but that did not stop Yezhov from sending his subordinates to arrest and execute political leaders in Ulan Bator. Soviet agents, working for either the NKVD or Comintern, allegedly ordered the torture and execution of POUM leader Andreu Nin as a Trotskyist and a counter-revolutionary. This is not proved beyond doubt. What is undeniable is that Nin disagreed with Trotski about revolutionary strategy and that this did not stop Stalin from trying to obliterate all communist organisations abroad which refused to recognise the Kremlin as the seat of supreme authority.⁷

The Chinese Communist Party conducted internal repression without needing to be prompted from Moscow. On the Long March from southern China in 1934 and later in the Red base in Yanan the comradely spirit was disrupted by Mao Zedong’s efforts to eradicate the slightest opposition. He concocted charges against rivals. To secure himself in Stalin’s eyes he cynically claimed they were Trotskyists. Stalin was not fooled and sent Wang Min – a trusted Chinese functionary of Comintern in Moscow – to act as a counterweight to Mao. But Mao accused Wang of counter-revolutionary treachery and only Moscow’s support saved him.⁸ Mao’s reaction was to get his personal physician Dr Jin to administer poison in the course of medical treatment. After months of worsening health, Wang tossed away the pills and straightaway felt better. He had phials of his urine examined, and proved to Stalin what had been going on.9 Yet Mao had achieved what he wanted: he remained the supreme leader of Chinese communism.

Mao was far from benign in the way he treated Red Army soldiers and party rank-and-filers. In Yanan he rounded up thousands he considered of suspect dependability and confined them in the local caves. Members of their own units guarded them; this was a way of making everyone complicit in the internal campaign of terror. Many young volunteers had trudged to Yanan expecting to find an atmosphere of free thought and egalitarianism. The young writer and communist Wang Shi-wei became their advocate by putting up wall-posters criticising the system of privileges:

. . . I do not think it necessary or justified to have multiple grades in food or clothing . . . If while the sick can’t even have a sip of noodle soup . . . some quite healthy big shots are indulging in extremely unnecessary and unjustified perks, the lower ranks will be alienated.

Mao flew into a rage, reducing Wang Shi-wei to compliance by denouncing him as a Trotskyist. But Mao neither forgave nor forgot the incident. Years later he turned on Wang again. Wang died a grisly death in 1947, when he was chopped into pieces and pitched into a dry well.¹⁰

Mao had not yet founded a totalitarian state, but his was already a totalitarian army. Torture was used in interrogations of suspected dissenters. Victims might be deprived of sleep for two weeks. If this did not work, they could be whipped, hanged by the wrists or have their knees wrenched to breaking point on the ‘tiger’s bench’. The screams at night terrified everyone who heard them in the encampments miles from the caves. Mass rallies were held to show off the ‘spies’ as they publicly repeated the ‘confessions’ agreed with their interrogators; and those who retracted their words were dragged off for renewed torture. While waiting to resume the civil war against the Kuomintang, Red Army units underwent ideological indoctrination as well as military training. Mao scoured the minds of his soldiers before they went into battle. The Japanese army practice was adopted whereby each man was required to write out ‘thought examinations’ so that – as Mao put it – they would ‘spill out every single thing they have ever harboured that is not so good for the party’. Informing on comrades became a party obligation. Trust between comrades was gnawed away while Mao tried to reserve confidence exclusively for himself.11

Mao Zedong Thought was the term already coming into use and its contents were dinned into the soldiers before they went into battle. All this was done informally since Mao lacked a formal ratification of his supreme power in party and army. Possibly he was wary of making a move until he had Stalin’s support. The reliance of the Chinese communists on Soviet military supplies in the 1930s made it impolitic to annoy the Kremlin. But Mao’s ambition was limitless and on 20 March 1943 he convened the Party Politburo and got himself elevated to Chairmanship of the Politburo and the Secretariat.¹² Not even Stalin, whose job title in the party remained General Secretary, regularised his grandeur like this.

At that time Stalin and Mao were unusual in battering their parties. The Soviet dictator wanted to secure communist power in the USSR and applied a policy of mass repression for that purpose. Although Mao did not yet wield state power, his Red Army was a communist state in the making and his repressive measures followed the same logic as Stalin. The Soviet and Chinese precedents were to be followed in eastern Europe, Cambodia and elsewhere after the Second World War.¹³ Whether Harry Pollitt, rough of tongue but an otherwise jovial leader of the Communist Party of Great Britain, would have taken the same road can never be known. In the unlikely event of a British communist revolution there would have been fierce opposition in the country as well as attempts from abroad to foment a counter-revolution. Such a scenario would have strengthened the arguments of those in the Communist Party of Great Britain who espoused political witch-hunts and vicious methods of settling revolutionary scores. Pollitt would have had to decide whether he wanted to be a victimiser or a victim. Establishing a one-party, one-ideology state had its own harsh logic even if the leaders themselves had not been attracted to repressive measures before they held power. Few of them were monsters in human form; it was the communist system that made them behave monstrously.

Pollitt’s bowing and scraping before Stalin anyhow does not induce confidence that he would have resisted an injunction from Moscow to root out ‘enemies of the people’. Secret plenipotentiaries of Comintern were attached to every party outside the USSR. They lived under aliases, transmitting central directives and reporting on national communist trends. The parties had their own representatives in Moscow, but these hardly enjoyed a congenial life in the Soviet capital: by the late 1930s it was not a posting craved by anyone. Moscow’s man in Paris was Eugen Fried. When he did not trust the French leadership he sought confidential conversations with lower officials and militants.14 Maurice Thorez, Secretary-General of the French Communist Party, had to keep on the right side of him, because if Fried were to send off a negative report Thorez would be in political trouble. The French communists, moreover, remained divided by internal dissensions. Organised factions no longer existed. But, while accepting orders from Comintern, the leaders at all levels frequently engaged in conflict over how to implement strategy. Communist parties seethed with political and personal tension, and Moscow continued to be used as a means of fighting local struggles. Snitching on high-ranking comrades was the norm.

Yet communist militants, aside from their disputes with each other, continued to struggle for the cause of working people. They strongly hoped to come to power and, living in a period of tumult, saw every reason for optimism. Capitalism in the 1920s had stabilised itself, reducing the opportunities for the political far left. Fascism, though, was confined to Italy. All this changed between 1929 and 1933. First came the Wall Street Crash, then Hitler’s rise to become German Chancellor. Europe’s politics were shaken to their core. This only served to strengthen the determination of communist parties to prevent the further expansion of right-wing dictatorships. The USA appeared to offer important chances for communist agitation and recruitment. Elsewhere in the world the anti-colonial movements was picking up in intensity. Confidence was boosted by the existence of a USSR which yearly increased in political and military strength. History appeared to be on the side of world communism.

Young men and women continued to find satisfaction in fighting for the communist cause, and few of them had easy lives. The life of an English comrade, Ernest Darling, demonstrates the depth of dedication. Darling was born in 1905; he left formal education after elementary school in London and took a succession of jobs in various trades. He joined the labour movement and was blacklisted after a bitter strike in the booksellers’ trade in 1925. Periods of unemployment followed, and Darling used his fallow periods to study communist literature. Like several on the British far left, he was not averse to living off the Labour Party and became a research assistant of the New Fabian Research Bureau as well as a Labour Party member. He joined the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1932. At last he had found his political home. As a member of the Adelaide Road communist party cell he highlighted the plight of tenants across north London. He collated statistics on poverty, poor hygiene and high rents and worked tirelessly to rectify the wrongs he saw around him. He prepared party material for parliamentary constituency elections. He joined in demonstrations against fascist meetings in Kilburn. When the Second World War broke out, he was taking an engineering course and wore himself out organising a protest against the uneatable food at his training centre: ‘It was part of “wages” and seventy-five per cent of it was left on the plates.’15

Darling was independently minded and resented being pushed around by his own party; and he wrote in annoyance to Pollitt: ‘There is only one Marxist, Party and working class answer to any one question or any one set of questions: the question is what is that answer today – in general and in particular? The answer is party policy: the question is therefore – is the Party always right?’¹⁶ His question expressed the conundrum of the communist militant’s existence. Communists were meant to be rebels; they had to stand up for themselves intellectually, politically and organisationally. But they were also expected to obey and change policies on demand. Every party member had to be like a mollusc: hard enough to repel unwanted attention from outside, yet soft enough inside to respond to pressures from Moscow. Pollitt and Darling had a lengthy exchange of letters. Darling never objected to current general strategy in a direct way and Pollitt, despite being an avid expeller, wanted to keep his awkward comrade in the party. But by September 1946 Pollitt had had enough and advised Darling to ‘reconsider [his] position in the party’.¹⁷ This brought Darling back into line: he found the thought of life outside the ranks unbearable.

The emotional existence of British communists, from Pollitt down to the latest recruit, was closely interwoven with the party’s activities. By entering the party, they had given up any aspirations to making their way into the higher echelons of society. The exceptions were spies such as Kim Philby, who became a communist as a Cambridge undergraduate in the early 1930s: these individuals had to keep their party membership a secret so as to be able to enter the British establishment.¹⁸ Most communist party members had a very different day-to-day experience. They could not imagine a life set apart from the party. Membership gave them their group of friends, their set of ideals, their whole belief system and their range of practical tasks to be discharged.

Intellectual curiosity was among the features of character that had drawn them to the party. They had sought answers about conditions in their country and the world, and they continued to discuss these questions through the 1930s and 1940s. Equipped with Marx’s methods of exposing the hidden economic and political mechanisms in public life, they condemned the failure of British, French and American governments to root out fascism and militarism in Europe and Asia. Communists declared that Europe’s colonies would never be liberated without the use of force. Anti-imperialism was a crusade that appealed to them. Their pamphlets denounced ‘the ruling classes’ for increasing the misery of the peoples they ruled. Canadian communists castigated working conditions in their mines and steel plants; communists in South Africa railed against racial discrimination in their country; Ceylon’s communists attacked the global financial system which oppressed labourers in the tea plantations. Party members were eloquent – at their cell meetings, during strikes and at demonstrations – in calling for revolutionary transformation.

The Land of the Soviets remained a conveniently unobserved object of devotion since few communists visited it. No foreign loyalist published a work of intellectual substance about the Soviet Union in the inter-war years.19 Ideological fervour and party discipline came together. The sole option for internal critics was to vote with their feet, and many did this in the 1930s. The turnover in the communist party membership in Europe and North America was high in the inter-war years. Most left their party out of boredom or disgust, others were thrown out. Suspicion of supporting Trotski or Bukharin was sufficient for a stern reprimand and, if behaviour stayed unchanged, for expulsion. Thus the communists lost some of their brightest minds. A process of inverted Darwinism was at work whereby the fittest individuals were the ones who failed to survive. Nearly all communist parties were headed by general secretaries whose chief distinction was an infinite willingness to toe the shifting line drawn for them by Stalin and explained to them by the Comintern apparatus.

The effect was to train the mental inquisitiveness out of their members. Richard Wright, the black American novelist, was to recall after leaving the communist party:

An hour’s listening disclosed the fanatical intolerance of minds sealed against new ideas, new facts, new feelings, new attitudes, new hints at ways to live. They denounced books they had never read, people they had never known, ideas they could never understand and doctrines they could not pronounce. Communism . . . had frozen them at an even lower of ignorance than had been theirs before they met Communism.²⁰

Liveliness of the intellect was frowned upon by the Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist adjudicators.

Most of the leavers abandoned communism for socialist parties or for political inactivity. A few turned into right-wingers who had seen communist methods from the inside and were determined to expose them to the world. Some communists, however, were attracted by the Trotskyist splinter organisations. In 1933 Trotski called for the inauguration of the Fourth International; this was duly realised five years later. Trotski designed the new organisation as the successor to the Communist (or Third) International. Until then he had hoped to win over recruits from the existing communist parties and eventually to take over the Communist International; he yearned to return to Moscow as head of the world communist movement. All Trotskyists claimed to uphold ‘democratic’ procedures in their internal organisation. The reality was more authoritarian. From his first place of exile on the island of Prinkipo near Istanbul he moved like a nomad to France, Norway and – at last – Mexico. He lacked the intimate knowledge to give sensible rulings to his acolytes in France, Germany and the USA. But he governed the Fourth International more firmly than Lenin had controlled the Bolshevik faction in the years of emigration.

This was to be the pattern for Trotskyist and other dissenting communist organisations. The USSR’s security agencies strove to penetrate and disrupt their activity. They were very successful before 1933 in Germany, where the Sobolevicius brothers Abraham and Ruvin led the Berlin Trotskyists while working for Moscow. Trotski felt Stalin’s barbarity at first hand. His younger son Sergei was arrested in the USSR in 1935; his elder son Lev died mysteriously, probably at the hands of a Soviet agent, in a Paris hospital in 1938. Trotski’s followers in Russia, both the real ones and those who had charges trumped up against them, suffered torture and the Gulag. His name was paddled through deep sewers of vilification and he himself was marked down for assassination. In June 1940 an amateurish attempt to kill him led by the muralist painter David Alfaro Siqueiros nearly succeeded. (Siqueiros fancied himself as a military man and dressed up in fatigues for the assault.) Despite every precaution that he took, Trotski did not prevent the infiltration of his home and office by Soviet agents. On 22 August 1940 the inevitable happened. Ramón Mercader inveigled himself into Trotski’s confidence and crashed an ice-pick into his cranium.

Trotski had supplied the intellectual rationale for the Fourth International; other leaders were to do the same in subsequent decades for the kaleidoscope of new groupings. From there it was but a short distance to establish an informal cult of the leader. Yet nothing done by the Trotskyists came near to the authority and influence exerted from Moscow. Trotski argued that the Fourth International would stand or fall depending on its capacity to recruit radical industrial workers. He had no realistic means of bringing this about. He never had more than a few thousand adherents across Europe and North America. Their financial condition was always fragile and their appeal was predominantly to young men of middle-class background. Moreover, one European state after another had moved towards right-wing dictatorship and the suppression of communism. Organisations in France, Belgium, Holland, Britain and the USA went on waving the flag of the Fourth International. But they made no general impact on the politics of the far left except in Ceylon and Bolivia. Trotski had said Stalinism could take proper root only in ‘backward’ Russia. He failed to note that Trotskyism was making little headway in most countries of advanced capitalism and that Stalinism was doing better.

Meanwhile no party belonging to Comintern could avoid, at the barest minimum, displaying its loyalty to Moscow. Mao Zedong succeeded in preserving a modicum of autonomy and self-esteem despite his reliance on military supplies from the USSR. Tito was to achieve the same in wartime Yugoslavia. Mao and Tito benefited from their countries’ isolation from the rest of the world: Stalin lacked the means to exercise a fine-tuned control over them. Yet the Communist Party of India and the Brazilian Communist Party were also distant from the Soviet capital and had only patchy contact with the Kremlin. Nevertheless both the Indians and the Brazilians, once they had expelled their malcontents (including the most famous Indian communist Manabendra Nath Roy), were dutiful executors of the USSR’s wishes.

Communist party members around the world genuinely adored Stalin; they conformed to his policies and were eager students of his works. Communism’s emphasis on book learning enhanced the education of thousands of members who had missed out on their schooling. Inquisitive working-class people gained a sense of worth about themselves. Recruits of a Jewish background found that their practice in dissecting contentious passages of the Talmud fitted them well for discussion of the finer points of Marxian texts.21 The traditions of the Protestant denominations of Christianity also assisted many newcomers to the parties. Communists who had been used to speaking out at Methodist or Congregational chapels managed the transition to far-left political activity with remarkable facility; and they were in the habit of constructing their argument with reference to the sacred texts. Thus Capital and the Short Course replaced the New Testament. Each communist party was a synod of hair-splitting political discussion. (The exceptions were the parties in the USSR and China where the internal reign of terror poisoned the wells of intellectual exchange.) The result was that communists also became more articulate than adherents of socialist, social-democratic or labour parties.

They rejected whole schools of social, political and economic thought by the act of becoming communists. Socialist openness to the general intellectual atmosphere of the time was abandoned. The choice of fundamental texts was determined in Moscow. Each party’s ‘theorists’ in reality were mere paraphrasers. The austere Anglo-Indian Oxford graduate Rajani Palme Dutt was a notable example in the British communist party. Revered and even feared by his party comrades for his intellectual mordancy, he was like a schoolboy owning up to naughtiness whenever he found his opinions athwart Moscow’s line of the day; and he delighted in rebuking comrades, including his own leader Harry Pollitt, whenever they failed to get down on their knees beside him. Europe’s communists had to accept that the sun, whatever the time of day, shone always from the east.22

Party discipline put a blind over their natural curiosity. They became accustomed to laughing at non-communists who expressed doubts about the October Revolution or the latest five-year plan. This necessitated continuous self-deception, and some managed it better than others. Pollitt was the master of the technique. The British General Secretary had friends who disappeared in Moscow. In fact he made strenuous enquiries about his former girlfriend Rose Cohen in 1937, who had received a proposal of marriage from him fourteen times. She had run off to Moscow with a Comintern agent and, equally foolishly, given up her British citizenship. Although Stalin told him he would do his best to get her released, in fact she had already been shot.²³ Pollitt coped with the grotesque brutalities of Stalin’s Soviet Union by declining to think about them. Not once did he criticise the show trials, collectivisation, the blood purges or – except for a few days in 1939 after the signature of the Nazi–Soviet pact²⁴ – the foreign policy of the USSR. Pollitt’s case was not unusual. Selective silence was a cardinal qualification for remaining a communist. This was easier for the mass of the party than for the central leadership. Local militants were unaware that policy was peremptorily handed down to London from Moscow. Information was not fully shared even inside the leadership. Only Pollitt and a small coterie knew about the party’s dependence on a regular subsidy from the USSR. The rest of the party was taught to regard talk of ‘Moscow gold’ as the vilest slander.

 

17. FRIENDS AND FOES

Stalin exerted a greater force of attraction and repulsion upon foreign minds than even Lenin had done. The whole world buzzed with interest in Soviet developments. Industrial, scientific and military success stimulated commentators to examine what was going on in the east. Few people assumed any longer that the USSR would soon implode. The Soviet Union was wielding authority on the European stage. It also constituted a model of state and society very different from those of rival powers. Efforts grew to take stock of the order which had arisen from the wreckage of the Russian Empire.

Trotski’s books produced an instant éclat. As an experienced journalist he understood that if he was to attract a wide readership he had to write in suitable genres. His autobiography My Life and his History of the Russian Revolution reached out to people who would otherwise have taken little notice.1 Sympathy for him was widespread and in 1937 the American philosopher John Dewey, no friend of communism, agreed to hold quasi-judicial proceedings in Coyoacán as if Trotski were being indicted on the very charges being laid against him in the Moscow show trials. The verdict was in Trotski’s favour and against the clumsy fabrications of the Stalinists.² Trotski went on developing his favourite themes. The October Revolution had been betrayed by Stalin and his group. Lenin and his legacy had been rejected. Russia in 1917 had been an economically and culturally backward country. The ‘class struggle’ had not produced a clear winner; the working class was incapable of competent self-rule and the old middle class was much too small to dominate politics after the fall of the Imperial monarchy. A bureaucratic stratum had taken advantage of the stalemate and became the guiding force in the USSR. These ideas were the cornerstone of the Trotskyist critique of the USSR.³

Other writers on the political left offered their distinctive answers. The Austrian Marxist Otto Bauer and the Russian Menshevik Fëdor Dan concluded that Soviet ‘socialism’ was probably the best and most appropriate form of socialism available to Russia. Other commentators suggested that New Russia was merely Old Russia in red disguise. Nikolai Berdyaev, who was deported in 1922, maintained that Tsar and Orthodox Christianity had given way to Party General Secretary and Marxism-Leninism. Another variant was the notion that Russia, caught geographically between Europe and ‘the East’, had developed its peculiar, separate civilisation with centralist authoritarianism at its heart – and the communists were seen as having continued the tradition. Nikolai Trubetskoi and the Eurasianists, as they called themselves, published in obscure Russian émigré journals; but it can scarcely be said that the other analysts – with the notable exception of Trotski – attracted much greater notice in the West.4

Fabian Society luminaries Sidney and Beatrice Webb in the United Kingdom were more influential than Bauer, Dan, Berdyaev and Trubetskoi. Both were prolific writers who influenced the social and economic thinking of the Labour Party. Beatrice was a stereotypical middle-class bluestocking who wanted a fairer social system and assumed that her own ‘scientific’ approach was required to provide the necessary ideas. Her husband Sidney was of like mind. Trimly bearded and attired, he navigated his way through the channels of power and scholarship and helped to found the London School of Economics. They had been critics of Soviet oppression in the 1920s, thinking that the political experiment in Russia damaged the cause of socialism elsewhere. Yet they were intellectually shaken by the global effects of the Wall Street Crash. Despairing of reform in the United Kingdom, they became entranced by the case for state economic planning.⁵ From elegant butterflies who reviled Lenin they turned into Stalin’s admiring slugs, and in 1932 they decided to find out for themselves about the USSR by taking an Intourist trip to Moscow.

Their lack of curiosity about current Soviet propaganda was a disgrace of the intellect. Whatever they were told by their OGPU minders, they believed. When they returned from Russia they expressed nothing – absolutely nothing – but praise for the sights they had seen, and in 1935 they brought out their Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation?⁶ Two years later they removed the question mark from the second edition – this must rank as the worst grammatical emendation of the twentieth century. The Webbs defended Stalin and his policies against Western critics; they even asserted, without the slightest expertise in the Russian language or in internal Bolshevik politics, that the show trials of 1936–8 were exemplars of due judicial process. Stalin could not have wished for more eager little helpers.

The Webbs ridiculed another visitor to the USSR who saw things differently. This was Malcolm Muggeridge, the Moscow correspondent of the Manchester Guardian newspaper. Muggeridge journeyed by train through the famine-stricken Ukraine, witnessing the consequences of official measures. Desperate peasants crowded railway-station platforms as he travelled south. The bloated bodies of starving children orphaned by the deaths of executed or malnourished parents horrified him. The dismissiveness of local party and government functionaries when he questioned what was going on failed to fool him. He refused to be lathered with communist soft soap. Unfortunately his editor in Manchester usually preferred a lighter treatment of the Soviet Union. Muggeridge resigned but not before he got at least some of his dispatches printed. Indeed the Manchester Guardian also accepted an account by Gareth Jones, the Russian-speaking former secretary of David Lloyd George. Jones was horrified by what he witnessed in Ukrainian villages, and gave vivid speeches on the subject after returning to Britain.7 Muggeridge wrote up a searing account of his own experiences in his book Winter in Moscow.⁸

It happened that Muggeridge’s wife Kitty was Beatrice Webb’s niece. Professor and Mrs Webb treated their nephew-in-law as a silly, misguided youth. Beatrice herself – Aunt Bo as they knew her – consulted Ivan Maiski, Soviet ambassador to the Court of St James’s, about conditions in the USSR. Maiski, she wrote in her diary, ‘comforted us about the food shortage’. Such was their trust in the ambassador that Sidney showed him drafts of Soviet Communism for his comments. They saw nothing odd in the fact that they enjoyed help offered ‘gratuitously from the USSR authorities’. Young Malcolm continued to write privately to them castigating the Soviet state order. Aunt Bo wondered grandly whether he might have been cured of his problems ‘by psychoanalysis and early treatment in the nursery and the school’.⁹

The Webbs declined to query the outlandish charges laid in the Moscow show trials of 1936–8. Only the Nazi–Soviet pact of August 1939 gave them pause for concern, but not for long. Beatrice confided to her diary in 1943: ‘we have lived the life we liked and done the work we intended to do; and we have been proved to be right about Soviet Communism: a new civilisation. What more can we want than a peaceful and painless ending of personal consciousness?’¹⁰ To the end of their lives both she and her husband were convinced they were right. The same was true of the Revd Hewlett Johnson, Dean of Canterbury, who wrote The Socialist Sixth of the World. In a decade when Stalin was exterminating tens of thousands of Orthodox Church priests, this prominent English cleric declared: ‘The communist puts the Christian to shame in the thoroughness of his quest for a harmonious society. Here he proves himself to be the heir of the Christian intention.’11 Johnson’s visit to the Soviet Union in 1937 left him permanently transfixed by its achievements; and as Vice-President of the Society for Cultural Relations with the USSR he spoke up for the communist spirit of the times more fervently than for the Holy Spirit.

H. G. Wells and André Gide were writers of greater renown who went out to Moscow. For Gide it was a journey to disillusionment. Even though he was shepherded away from the ghoulish sights witnessed by Muggeridge, he would not be fooled. He could not stomach the lies, the abject subordination and the official hostility to notions of charitableness.¹² Wells, now on his second visit to Russia, had a different impression which combined positive and negative aspects. He interviewed Stalin in 1934 for three hours and their exchanges were gentlemanly in manner. Wells began by telling the dictator how he had seen ‘the happy faces of healthy people’ in contrast with his earlier visit to Moscow in 1920. But he also bluntly criticised the lawlessness, class-based discrimination, state violence and absence of free expression.¹³ Stalin enjoyed jousting with him and gave back as good as he got, and he was pleased enough with his performance to permit publication of their conversation. Wells as chairman of the London-based PEN Club, which defended the rights of authors to write without being intimidated, had gone to the USSR hoping – ever the optimist – to win Stalin over by force of argument. By the end of his short stay he appreciated that no reform was likely in the near future. No other foreigner spoke to Stalin in that way in his period of supreme rule. No Soviet citizen could do so without inviting certain execution.

The Webbs were not the only writers who rejected the anti-Soviet standpoint. The dramatist and commentator George Bernard Shaw had been out to Moscow on a brief trip in 1931, returning full of enthusiasm. With his flaming red beard and pale Irish face, Shaw had the authority of an intellectual who was used to speaking ex cathedra. Like the Webbs, he was a socialist. He was also a vegetarian and teetotaller: words, not food and drink, were his self-indulgence. His romantic entanglements did not satisfy him; but this failed to bother him.¹⁴ Shaw was an intellectual peacock who preened himself on his reputation for understanding the realities of contemporary politics. It never occurred to him that he had been officially invited to visit Moscow because he was a gullible type. A flavour of his sagacity is conveyed by his comment on the purges: ‘We cannot afford to give ourselves moral airs when our most enterprising neighbour [that is, the USSR] humanely and judiciously liquidates a handful of exploiters and speculators to make the world safe for honest men.’ Shaw garlanded his elegant scorn round the necks of those who tried to claim otherwise.

He had no excuse. W. H. Chamberlin, Moscow correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor, had a Russian-Jewish émigrée wife who explained to Shaw that if they had to live on her ration book they would starve. Shaw advised her to breastfeed their infant. When she pointed out that the boy was already four years old the visitor replied that Eskimos gave mothers’ milk to their children up to the age of fourteen. On hearing the story from the Chamberlins, Muggeridge recorded his verdict in his diary: ‘He is a preposterous old fool.’15

The fools for Stalin included the American journalist Maurice Hindus. Hindus had fled the pogroms of the Russian Empire after the turn of the century, and declaimed after inspecting a Soviet prison that ‘the dictatorship . . . actually overflowed with kindness’.¹⁶ New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty announced: ‘Any report of a famine in Russia is today an exaggeration or malignant propaganda.’¹⁷ Duranty was a fraud who benefited from privileged treatment from the Soviet authorities; he knew differently about conditions in the USSR and his distant editors suspected as much. But he was on the spot. He wrote with undiluted confidence and ridiculed Muggeridge and Jones as fabricators of falsehood.¹⁸ Likewise the American journalist Edgar Snow journeyed out to northern China to interview Mao Zedong after the completion of the Long March. Snow produced a eulogistic account, Red Star over China, in which he voluntarily censored the grim conditions which had been inflicted by Mao on the local inhabitants and indeed on his own armed forces.¹⁹ At least Snow took his studies of communism seriously. Joseph Davies, the US ambassador to Moscow in the fateful years 1937–8, was much more casual. In his reports to Washington he contended that the indictments of the defendants in the Moscow show trials had been proved ‘beyond a reasonable doubt’ and that ‘the adjudication of the punishment’ had been entirely justified.²⁰

Of still greater political authority was Henry Wallace, US Secretary of Agriculture from 1932 and Roosevelt’s Vice-President from 1940. Wallace visited the eastern USSR in May 1944. He would automatically have become President in April 1945 when Roosevelt died if Roosevelt had not grown suspicious of him and chosen Harry Truman as Vice-Presidential candidate in the previous year’s election. Roosevelt himself had been soft in diplomatic negotiations with Stalin. But Wallace’s attitude was softer again. ‘When you look at Russia,’ he opined, ‘you have to consider the historical background. Compared to what they had under the Czar, the Russian people are well off today . . . I wouldn’t want communism over here, but it makes more sense in Russia.’21

The authorities in the USSR handled their visitors with cunning. Wallace was given a royal welcome. To allay any lingering doubts he may have had he was invited to the Vorkuta labour camp to inspect the programme of prisoner rehabilitation. The death rate of Vorkuta’s labourers was notorious. The NKVD therefore took the precaution of replacing the emaciated inmates with police operatives for the day of Wallace’s arrival. They were well fed and decently clothed and spoke confidently to the American delegation. Wallace was impressed by the humanitarianism of official policy, and spoke favourably about Stalin in Washington. The whole deception had been a spectacular success.²² Another useful device was to restrict the travel rights of correspondents. Bad as living conditions were in Moscow, they were much worse in Ukraine and Kazakhstan – and Muggeridge was unusual in snatching his chance to witness the famine while passing through Ukrainian territory on an officially sponsored trip to Dnepropetrovsk. The authorities, furthermore, got rid of uncooperative journalists by revoking their visas. Dispatches were therefore written with some caution. This was especially true if a correspondent happened to have a Russian spouse. Fear of retaliation against family members was constant – at least one Austrian writer withdrew his comments about the Gulag after threats were made.²³

Even so, this indulgence of the Soviet order is hard to understand or condone. Walter Duranty was a scoundrel who said anything that would prolong his comfort and commercial activity in the Soviet capital; according to Muggeridge, he exported goods illegally from the USSR.²⁴ Edgar Snow, Joseph Davies and Hewlett Johnson were out of their intellectual depth. Yet no one could fairly say that the Webbs and Bernard Shaw were lacking in analytical capacity. What inspired them to speak for Stalin? The answer lies mainly in the purposes they entertained for their own country. They believed in central state planning for social and economic improvements. They were cultural reformers. They were also unconscious authoritarians; they thought their own policies to be the sole rational vision of the future. The weakness of their position was that they had no power but only influence. They shared a lot of the ultimate assumptions of communists and saw Stalin as the builder of a civilisation to be admired. They suffered from a serious lack of imagination. Brought up in liberal democracies, they could not conceive that anyone sharing their objectives in social engineering could be murderous gangsters. They thought the USA and the United Kingdom to be the centre of world civilisation. For their generation it was conventional to regard Russia as an exotic country which probably needed the touch of severe rule to achieve transformation.

From 1933 they found an additional cause for backing Stalin in Adolf Hitler. German expansionism terrified the advocates of liberal democracy, who noted the ineffectuality of their governments’ reaction. No power in Europe but the USSR was willing to stand up against the Nazis. This did more than anything else to drum up sympathy for the Soviet Union. Poets such as Stephen Spender quashed their doubts about communism and went out to Spain to join the International Brigade. Working-class young men did the same. Only when they set foot on Spanish soil did they discover the internecine skulduggery instigated by Stalin within the republican forces themselves. Many who lacked direct experience simply refused to believe what was reported about his policies. Not until August 1939, when Stalin did a deal with the Third Reich, were supporters of Soviet policies shown beyond cavil to have erred in treating the USSR as the adamantine bulwark against Nazism.

Sympathy for the USSR had been strengthened by the proliferation of books and pamphlets published in the same mode by the Left Book Club founded by Victor Gollancz in 1936. The print runs went into the tens of thousands. Each month a new book would be recommended to subscribers and the list included gems of analysis such as Pat Sloan’s Soviet Democracy and R. Page Arnot’s A Short History of the Russian Revolution. Both authors were communist party members and their offerings took their place alongside those of authors who belonged to other parties of the political left.25 Communism was being lent political respectability. Gollancz’s initiative was matched by conservatives who set up the Right Book Club in London. It never reached the public with the same verve as its left-wing rival. One of the most striking denunciations came from the typewriter of United Press correspondent Eugene Lyons. Lyons had gone to Moscow as a communist sympathiser and returned angry and disillusioned. His reports and his later book Assignment in Utopia, like Muggeridge’s classic, nailed the lie that Ukrainian kolkhozniks were spending their time making corn dollies and dancing at village harvest ceremonies.²⁶ Lyons focused his book on Moscow politics, but he said enough about living conditions in the capital and a few regions to get his blistering points across.

The London Times correspondent R. O. G. Urch published The Rabbit King of Siberia with the Right Book Club. The contents were more indicative than factually grounded. Urch told a tale of adventurers who allegedly tricked Stalin into believing that the problems of food supplies in the USSR could be surmounted by millions of rubles being granted to establish large collective farms where they would use the latest biogenetics to develop gigantic rabbits to be raised for consumption by urban inhabitants. ‘Rabbit-wreckers’ were put on trial. Another idea was to solve difficulties in livestock husbandry by feeding pigs on a tadpole diet. Neither the pigs nor the peasants were eager about the projects.27

Emigré memoirs also entered public discussion. Defectors from the USSR included OGPU operative Walter Krivitsky and diplomat Sergei Dmitrievski.²⁸ There was even a set of recollections by Boris Bazhanov, who had served in Stalin’s secretarial entourage in the 1920s. Bazhanov had made a dash for Paris before he could be apprehended.²⁹ Such authors left no doubts about the peculiarly vicious personality of the General Secretary in a milieu populated by unpleasant politicians. They lived in constant fear of the Soviet police catching up with them. The OGPU and later the NKVD had penetrated the Russian communities across Europe and assassinations and even abductions of ‘enemies of the people’ were frequent. General Kutepov was kidnapped in 1930 and General Miller in 1937: both had indeed been organising anti-Soviet networks in the USSR. The Kremlin had a reach across the continents and a grip as tight as an anaconda’s. But plenty of accounts were available in French and English which exposed the iniquities being perpetrated in Stalin’s USSR. Their authors had turned up in Europe and, tossing aside their Soviet allegiance, had repudiated any association with left-wing politics.

At the more popular level, too, rejection of communism was widespread. The media were crucial in this. It is true that left-of-centre magazines in the USA such as the New Republic were impressed by Soviet policies against fascism in the second half of the 1930s. But American newspapers were less indulgent to the USSR; and although Stalin’s intervention in the Spanish civil war eased the criticism of him by liberals and the moderate left, this was the exception to the pattern.

Bestselling fiction reflected and confirmed anti-Soviet opinion. The heroes of Richmal Crompton’s children’s books, William and the Outlaws, held a mock general election in William – the Bad. Ginger, a fellow Outlaw, put himself up as the communist candidate:

‘Ladies an’ Gentlemen,’ he began. ‘Communism means havin’ a war against all the people that aren’t Communists an’ conquerin’ ’em an’ killin’ ’em.’

‘Killin’ people’s wrong,’ interposed the [unnamed] hope of the Sunday School. ‘People who kill people get hung. And serve them jolly well right too.’30

Ginger interjected that victory in the armed conflict would render the question obsolete.³¹ But as a communist he stood no better a chance than Henry as socialist or Douglas a liberal candidate; and William, more by force of personality than by political persuasion, won election to the Prime Minister’s office on behalf of the conservatives. The association of communism with murder and mayhem was taken for granted – and not only many children but also their parents read and took delight in the stream of books which came from Miss Crompton. Schoolboy naughtiness was condoned so long as it did not disturb the social status quo; adult communism was the infernal plague of humankind.

Another writer, Baroness Orczy, sold millions of books about the French Revolution. Her main character Sir Percy Blakeney was known to his enemies as the Scarlet Pimpernel. A master of disguise, he infiltrated himself into political circles in Paris and rescued aristocrats under threat of arrest and execution. The Baroness was Hungarian by origin and had started her series before the First World War. Although she wrote nothing directly about twentieth-century communism, her stories of terror, torture, arbitrary rule and despotism were relished by readers who made the connection between events in eighteenth-century France and more recent events in Russia and indeed her native Hungary.

Nor should Robert W. Service (no relation), one of the bestselling poets of the twentieth century, fall out of the picture. Service was born in England to Scottish parents and emigrated to Canada as a young man where he wrote verses which made his name as the poet of the Yukon. He visited the USSR in the 1930s and recorded his impressions. His Bar-Room Ballads contained ‘The Ballad of Lenin’s Tomb’, which included the lines:

I was a Cheko terrorist – Oh I served the Soviets well,

Till they put me down on the bone-yard list, for the fear that I might tell;

That I might tell the thing I saw, and that only I did see,

They held me in quod with a firing squad to make a corpse of me.

But I got away, and here today I’m telling my tale to you;

Though it may sound weird, by Lenin’s beard, so help me God it’s true.32

The ‘Cheko’ – or Cheka – operative had escaped from Moscow and ended up across the Atlantic telling his ‘yarn’ to a friend in ‘Casey’s Bar’. For Service, all was oppression, fraud and arbitrary rule in the USSR. He had seen it for himself and told the story in the doggerel style that delighted his legions of readers.

Thus the anti-communist case was not left exclusively to authors of the political right. Not only the then socialist Malcolm Muggeridge but also George Orwell of the Independent Labour Party smashed the plate glass of the USSR’s international reputation. Orwell (whose real name was Eric Blair) had been a pupil of Eton College. He had gone on to work for the British Empire as a policeman in Burma. He kicked against the conventions of his upbringing. Not only did he change his name and disguise his social background but also he campaigned as a novelist of growing distinction for the radical reform of British society. The Spanish civil war drew him to volunteer to fight on the Republican side.

No sooner had he arrived in Spain than he recognised the unbridgeable chasm between the communists and other parties on the political left. On orders from Moscow, Palmiro Togliatti – alias Ercole Ercoli – instructed the Communist Party of Spain to devote itself to purging the Republican forces of anarchists and Trotskyists. This involved mass executions. The butchery and the trickery appalled Orwell, who had gone out to Barcelona with a mind not closed to co-operating with the communists. But he had miscalculated. He joined the military organisation of the Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification (known by its Spanish initials POUM) founded by Andreu Nin in 1935. Nin, without being a consistent Trotskyist, was definitely a sympathiser. The POUM was therefore a particular target of Stalin’s anger. Many members were shot by firing squad and Orwell himself, returning from the front, owed his escape from this fate by a timely warning from his wife. He was invalided out of the military conflict in 1937 and wrote up his experiences pungently in Homage to Catalonia. His disgust with official communism was total.³³

Although he had already been published to acclaim in the Left Book Series, he could not persuade Gollancz to accept his account for publication. Orwell was saying that what he had seen in Spain was simply the transmission of Soviet political methods to foreign countries; he exposed the entire fallacy of the argument that socialists had no enemy on the left. He took his book to the Secker and Warburg publishing house and, while suffering criticism from his old comrades, did his duty as a citizen of the world. Part travelogue, part political tract, Homage to Catalonia remains one of the anti-Stalinist literary masterpieces.

Communism in the 1930s was the object of intense public dispute. The abrupt chasm between the left and right in the politics of the previous decade had given way to a messier landscape. Not every conservative or liberal opposed Stalin, and some of them – especially those who had business interests – positively sought warmer relations with the USSR. The White House under Roosevelt was prominent in making a gentle analysis of events in Moscow. But undoubtedly it was the socialists in Europe and North America who bowed lowest in their admiration of Stalin. If it had been otherwise, Orwell would have found it easier to get his critique of the Soviet Union into print. Above all, it was despair at the ineffectualness of liberal democracy in promoting economic and social reform and protection from fascism that addled some of the finest minds in Europe and North America. Most – but not all – of these people were to suffer a terrible shock in August 1939 when Hitler and Stalin concocted a plot to carve up the lands that lay between their two states. By then it was too late for writers who had always denounced the USSR to take pleasure in sinners who had repented.

 

18. COMMUNISM IN THE WORLD WAR

Hitler’s Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop flew to Moscow on 23 August 1939. In the early hours of the next day, Ribbentrop and his Soviet counterpart Molotov signed a non-aggression treaty between the Third Reich and the USSR. Stalin, who looked on, was in light-hearted mood. International relations had been complex and dangerous in the preceding years and Stalin had monitored the details on a daily basis. The USSR feared being caught in the pincers of invasion by Imperial Japan and the Third Reich. The Japanese, Germans and Italians were already conjoined by the Anti-Comintern Pact. When Japan’s Kwantung Army attacked Soviet forces in May 1939 at Nomonhan, Stalin sent tanks and aircraft to the Far East and appointed Georgi Zhukov to command the retaliatory action.1

Soviet leaders appreciated that the Japanese by themselves had the material and human resources to overrun Russia if Zhukov failed to hold them back. Yet the Soviet–Japanese conflict was happening at a time of acute tension across Europe. Germany had annexed Austria in March 1938, the Sudetenland in September 1938 and the rest of Czechoslovakia in March 1939. Hitler had never disguised his ultimate goal of attacking the USSR; his speeches had blazed with imprecations against Moscow as the centre of the ‘Judaeo-Bolshevist’ world conspiracy against the Aryan race. It was imperative for Stalin to seek diplomatic partners with a view to establishing ‘collective security’ in Europe against Nazi expansionism. Obvious candidates were the liberal democracies of the United Kingdom and France. Unfortunately for the USSR neither the British nor the French cabinet would offer reliable commitment to an alliance. There was ground for suspicion that the Western powers would not have been displeased if Hitler, instead of wreaking havoc in central Europe, turned his armed forces eastwards and demolished communism in the Soviet Union. Stalin’s purge of his own officer corps in 1937–8 had anyway made him an unimpressive military partner. Who afterwards could have confidence in the Red Army as a great force against the Wehrmacht?

The depths were plumbed in summer 1939 when the British sent only a low-level functionary for talks and arranged his journey by steamship. Stalin was getting desperate. Trade talks had been taking place for months in Berlin between Soviet diplomats and the Nazi administration as each side explored whether a deal of some kind was possible. The negotiations seemed to be getting nowhere when, out of the blue, Hitler made direct overtures to Moscow and dispatched Ribbentrop to put the German proposal. Within hours, the deal was done for a non-aggression treaty. Eastern Europe would be divided into zones of influence between the Third Reich and the USSR. Publicly the pretence was made that the two powers had simply agreed to increase mutual trade and not to attack each other. But the implication of the secret protocol about the zones was unmistakable: Germany wanted to invade Poland and to ensure the USSR’s compliance. Nazism and communism became allies in all but name.

It was the diplomatic sensation of the century. Maxim Litvinov, who until May had been People’s Commissar of External Affairs, exclaimed to his wife: ‘Do they really intend to link up with the Germans?’2 The swastika flag was run up at the Third Reich’s embassy in the Soviet capital. Anti-German films were withdrawn from circulation and Pravda explained that the treaty would ensure peace and security. Spokesmen for the USSR and Germany contradicted everything they had said about each other since 1933. However badly Stalin had behaved in the Spanish civil war, he had indisputably resisted the expansion of fascism. He had suddenly thrown the policy into reverse gear and enabled the Nazis to gobble up still more territory. On 1 September Hitler began a blitzkrieg against Poland and swept to victory. His great mistake was in underestimating British and French determination. But, when London and Paris delivered an ultimatum demanding his withdrawal, he ignored them and the Second World War began. Stalin held back the Red Army on the Soviet–Polish frontier for a fortnight until he could secure a peace agreement with Japan in the Far East. Then the Soviet tanks rumbled into the western lands of dismembered Poland. The USSR became Hitler’s active collaborator.

Stalin called Dimitrov and ordered him to issue fresh instructions to the parties of Comintern. The conflict in western Europe was to be condemned as ‘imperialist’ in nature. Communists were to refuse to take sides. Like Lenin in 1914, Stalin stipulated that Marxism required avoidance of military service or any other support for national governments. Instead, communist parties were to raise the banner of ‘class struggle’ and campaign against the capitalist bosses who stood to make their fortunes out of the carnage.

The world communist movement was profoundly shocked by the USSR’s diplomatic and military collusion. Party members had become communists precisely because the USSR and Comintern promised unconditional struggle against fascism. In England they had fought street battles with Mosley’s British Union of Fascists in London’s East End. Some of them had volunteered for service in the International Brigade in the Spanish civil war. They abhorred Hitler and all he stood for. Two communist parties, the French and the British, had to make a choice between their Comintern discipline and their anti-fascist commitment. The French comrades chose instant obedience and urged their government to sue for peace with the Third Reich.3 But, just as Lenin had failed to convince many Russian comrades in 1914, many communists in the United Kingdom could not stomach Comintern’s commands. British General Secretary Harry Pollitt was among those who supported Britain’s declaration of war. Comintern, however, cabled him that Moscow took the contrary position. He ignored the information, perhaps hoping that there had been some confusion in the Comintern apparatus.⁴ On 2 September his Central Committee issued a manifesto calling for resistance to Nazi aggression.⁵

At the Central Committee on 2 October he argued again for support for the British war effort. By then Dave Springhall, the party’s representative in Moscow, had arrived in London with Comintern’s orders in his pocket. Pollitt went down fighting. The Central Committee removed him as General Secretary and a new leadership under Rajani Palme Dutt took over and announced its refusal to takes sides in the ‘imperialist war’.⁶ This remained the official line of British communism for nearly two years. Palme Dutt and his allies chastised any resistance to the Third Reich; instead they called, in an almost surrealistic manner, for a ‘people’s peace’. They recognised that neither a ‘revolutionary workers’ government’ nor a ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ was currently possible. Instead they campaigned for a ‘people’s government’ which by implication would exclude Conservative and Labour MPs. The communist priority was to raise the political consciousness of the British people.⁷ (This was the ultimate impertinence at a time when that same people was standing alone in Europe against Nazi Germany.) The understanding of Marxism had to be deepened in the party. Scotland was hailed for the success of its study groups and the London branches should emulate this.8 Never had the country’s communist organizations been so far detached from popular concerns.

Yet the British government moved cautiously. It held back from arresting communists even though it banned the party’s newspapers. Pollitt jauntily toured the country espousing the party line he had previously opposed: this was good for communist discipline.⁹ In Glamorganshire in October 1939 he mocked the government for its previous policy of appeasing Hitler.¹⁰ Speaking in Cardiff in June 1940, he declared:

We sent millions to the support of fascism in Germany when Hitler was in difficulties. Why? . . . Why has our country built up this Frankenstein – because that is what it is now beginning to be? We have done it because there are men in power who would like to see the Miners’ Federation of G.B. destroyed, the Labour Party and the Communist Party destroyed, and would like to see Bolshevism destroyed . . . When someone comes to power in Germany and says that is what I intend to do, all the British gentlemen in this country were in full support . . . Somehow it has gone wrong, and we seem to have been putting money on the wrong horse.¹¹

Even so, the authorities still stayed their hand. They recognized that the communist party was more a nuisance than a menace. Much more dangerous, ministers thought, were Mosley and the British Union of Fascists, 747 of whose members were interned during the war.¹²

The French Communist Party was less troubled by internal tension. Its leader Maurice Thorez deserted the French armed forces in November 1939 after being conscripted; he was needed to keep the party leadership operational. While Thorez made his escape to Moscow, the remaining leaders continued to abide by instructions. When France fell to the Wehrmacht in June 1940, however, they were cut off and on their own. Pathetically they approached the Germans for permission to go on publishing their newspapers. They hoped that, if the Nazis had signed a treaty with the USSR, Hitler would see no reason to suppress French communism. The request was given short shrift. Across central and eastern Europe the SS and the local police rounded up the remnants of support for Comintern.¹³ Nevertheless the French Communist Party stuck by Moscow’s demand that the military conflict should be denounced as the ‘second imperialist war’ and that no preference should be shown as between the British and the Germans.

On 22 June 1941 Hitler ordered his forces across the River Bug to invade the USSR in Operation Barbarossa. At first Stalin refused to recognise what had happened. For hours his army command pleaded with him to permit them to retaliate. The German advance continued to be rapid in subsequent weeks. Lithuania and Belorussia were conquered. By autumn the Germans were on the outskirts of Leningrad and Moscow and had occupied Ukraine. Communism appeared on the point of being demolished in the sole powerful state where it had established itself. Stalin reacted positively to overtures from the beleaguered United Kingdom. At the end of the year he was delighted when the Americans entered the war after the Japanese air force bombed its fleet and air force at Pearl Harbor and Hitler declared war on the USA. A Grand Alliance was formed from the United Kingdom, the USSR and the USA – and Comintern instructed its member parties to back every anti-Nazi government and join every anti-Nazi resistance movement. Workers in the USA and the United Kingdom should no longer be called out on strike. They should be told that it was their political duty either to volunteer for the armed forces or to help boost armaments production. Operation Barbarossa had changed everything. Communist parties were no longer to be neutral about the war but were to disrupt the war-making capacity of the Third Reich and its allies.

The effect on communist parties in countries sympathetic to the anti-German and anti-Japanese cause was electrifying. From being wartime subversives, communists were turned into militant advocates of the struggle against the Third Reich. The parties in the United Kingdom and the USA resumed their public prominence. In France, Greece, Italy and Yugoslavia they formed armed groups and fought as best they could against fascism. The resurgence of communism was also remarkable in Latin America. In 1939 there were only 100,000 communists across that vast area of the world; by 1947 the number had risen to half a million.14

And against nearly universal expectation, the Soviet Union did not collapse. The autumn mud and the snows of the winter held up the Wehrmacht, and the Red Army defended every inch of ground. Stalin ranted at his generals, demanding that they organise a counter-offensive regardless of strategic risk. He insisted on this being attempted in spring 1942. The result was yet another disaster and the Germans pushed further forward. But Stalin kept up the pressure. Order No. 270 made it illegal for soldiers to allow themselves to be taken prisoner – an extraordinary prohibition in practical and moral terms. Soviet forces were put under savage compulsion. Order No. 227 proclaimed ‘not a step backwards’ as the official slogan. Even temporary retreats were prohibited. Quietly, though, Stalin brought his instincts under some control and, after exhausting all alternatives, started to behave more soundly. It still took a brave commander like Zhukov to query his proposals. But Stalin, unlike Hitler, began to accept professional advice. Apparently he scolded his unambitious son Vasili: ‘You should have got your diploma from the Military Academy long ago.’ Vasili was ready for this. ‘Well,’ he snapped back, ‘you haven’t got a diploma either.’15 Stalin himself worked hard at learning about war-making techniques and his commanders were glad of his growing competence.

Yet Leningrad remained under siege; Moscow was endangered. The Wehrmacht bludgeoned its way to the River Volga and planned an assault on Stalingrad. Somehow, however, the USSR found the resources to resist. Conscription at its peak placed twelve million Soviet men and women under arms. Factories were evacuated to the Urals and armaments were produced in growing abundance. The German forces were severely hampered by overstretched lines of supply. A carefully planned campaign by the Red Army encircled the Germans outside Stalingrad. Hitler prohibited a strategic withdrawal of his forces. This was a wildly foolish order and, after severe hand-to-hand fighting, Stalingrad was back in Soviet possession in January 1943. It was the first European defeat for the Third Reich in the Second World War.

The fighting on the eastern front was not yet finished. The Germans retook Kharkov in eastern Ukraine in March, proving their resilience. In July the two armies squared up for an enormous tank battle near Kursk. Although neither side achieved victory, Hitler could less afford an indecisive contest than Stalin. His factories failed to keep up with the USSR’s performance in the production of tanks and aircraft – and Soviet people were determined to win through to victory. The USSR also had an advantage in the number of troops it could muster. Kharkov fell back into the Red Army’s hands in August, Kiev in November. The siege of Leningrad was lifted in January 1944. On 22 June, the third anniversary of Operation Barbarossa, Stalin started Operation Bagration for the recovery of Belorussia and Lithuania. Minsk and Vilnius became Soviet cities again in July and the Red Army halted to recuperate on the east bank of the River Vistula; it stood aside as the Germans suppressed the Warsaw Uprising and razed the Polish capital to the ground. The offensive was resumed in January 1945 as Soviet forces at last crossed the Vistula. Despite a fierce defence by the Germans, the Wehrmacht could not stop the Soviet advance. The Red Army under Marshal Zhukov seized the Reichstag in Berlin on 30 April.

The spine of the Wehrmacht was shattered on the eastern front. British and American forces had taken until June 1944 to undertake their amphibious invasion of northern France across the English Channel. Stalin had frequently rebuked the Western Allies for their tardiness in opening a second front; he underestimated the logistical difficulties. Churchill bit his tongue and avoided replying that the United Kingdom had been bombed in 1940 when the USSR was an active ally of the Third Reich in all but name. The USA, moreover, needed time to counter the twin military threats of the Japanese and Germans. American factories were switched to military production. Conscripts were raised and trained. Roosevelt and his commanders were determined that, when the Americans struck back, they would hit the enemy with massively superior power. The USA’s entire economy benefited and the effects of the Wall Street Crash of 1929 were finally eradicated. American business flourished and the lacerations of mass unemployment were healed. Stalin anyway appreciated that the USA, the United Kingdom and the USSR had to stick together in order to defeat Hitler, and they kept their spats to a minimum. Roosevelt in the meantime included Moscow as well as London under the Lend–Lease scheme of his government. Soviet armed forces received enormous material assistance. Jeeps, sugar, gunpowder and Spam were sent to fill the gaps in the USSR’s output.

Each of the Big Three – Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill – had an expansive ego and limitless confidence in his capacity for analysis and negotiation. Roosevelt was determined to get along with Stalin, taking this to the length of treating Churchill with some gentle ridicule in the Soviet dictator’s presence at the conferences they held at Tehran in November 1943 and Yalta in February 1945.16 US ambassador Averell Harriman was convinced that his President failed to perceive the unbridgeable gap between the Soviet order and democratic states.¹⁷

The Western Allies started a propaganda campaign to drum up sympathy and finance for the Soviet war effort and for the Grand Alliance. Stalin was fêted in absentia. Fund-raising concerts were held for the USSR and a statue of Lenin was erected near one of his former lodgings in Percy Circus off London’s Pentonville Road. (This was not the most successful idea: anti-communist activists repeatedly vandalised the monument and the Metropolitan Police had to divert scarce manpower to guard it.) Soviet ambassadors were applauded whenever they stepped out in Washington and London. Pamphlets appeared, with governmental sanction, extolling the hardiness of Red Army soldiers. Stalin was made Time magazine’s Man of the Year for the second time in January 1943 – he had first won it at the start of 1940 for no other achievement than the signature of the Nazi–Soviet pact; only Roosevelt won the accolade more times. Sir Adrian Boult conducted a BBC concert of Prokofiev pieces in honour of Stalin’s birthday.18 King George VI sent him an engraved sword to commemorate the battle of Stalingrad.¹⁹ Churchill and Roosevelt regularly expressed their appreciation of Stalin and the Red Army in their broadcast speeches. The Allied forces went to war praising good old Uncle Joe. Gratitude for Soviet sacrifices on the eastern front was shared by everyone but a few anti-Soviet irreconcilables such as Evelyn Waugh. Polish military units in the British capital hated the USSR almost as much as Nazi Germany, but their opinion was not solicited.

British communist activists spoke at factory meetings. They even operated in the armed forces of the Western Allies. (Few rose to officer rank if ever their party allegiance was discovered: there were limits on their promotability.) Party members and sympathisers found their way into the highest echelons of the British administration. Washington and London were more eager to have warm relations with the USSR than to trouble with severe precautions against espionage – and Moscow took full advantage of this light touch. Stalin made fewer concessions. The Soviet intelligence agencies retained their ‘moles’ in the higher reaches of the Western establishments. American and British journalists were allowed into the country only on a restricted basis and newspapers such as Britanski soyuznik (‘British Ally’) appeared in a limited edition. Soviet citizens who were caught expressing admiration for American technology were liable to arrest, and American material assistance went largely unreported in Pravda.²⁰

Stalin meanwhile had been contemplating a reconstruction of the world communist movement. His astonishing objective was to close down the Communist International. Dimitrov, its Secretary-General, was used to his accusations against the organisation. In 1937 Stalin had barked at him that ‘all of you in Comintern are hand in glove with the enemy’.²¹ Dimitrov must have wondered how long he had left to live. In April 1941 Stalin came back to the matter in more temperate tones. This time he argued that communist parties had to be seen to be independent of Moscow and protective of national interests; he probably also hoped to reassure Hitler that he was not trying to stir up trouble in the countries occupied by the Third Reich:

The International was created in Marx’s time in the expectation of an approaching international revolution. Comintern was created in Lenin’s time at an analogous moment. Today, national tasks emerge for each country as a supreme priority. Do not hold on tight to what was yesterday.22

Operation Barbarossa deflected Stalin from this purpose. The disasters on the eastern front made it imperative to concentrate through every waking hour on the defence of the USSR – and there was no longer a need to show good faith to the Nazis.

Comintern’s staff – at least, those who had survived the Great Terror – were ordered to Ufa, south of the Urals. Dimitrov himself was dispatched to Kuibyshev on the Volga with several people’s commissariats of the USSR. Radio stations sent inspiring messages to eastern Europe about the ‘great patriotic war’ being fought by the Red Army. Couriers made their way to surviving underground communist groups. The Polish Communist Party, dissolved in 1938, was rebuilt from scratch as the Polish Workers’ Party from late 1941. Throughout the war there were efforts to prepare for a post-war world where the communists would be a political force. Word came back to Moscow about the achievements of communists in the resistance organisations of Europe. There was also news about the extraordinary resilience of the Yugoslav communist forces in tying down the Wehrmacht – and Comintern relayed a biographical sketch of the military leader Tito, whom Moscow had dispatched to head the communist party before the war.²³

After the battle of Stalingrad, as he thought urgently about how to spread communism in Europe, Stalin reverted to the idea of abolishing Comintern. Dimitrov, titular leader of world communism, was told on 8 May 1943 to put himself out of a job.²⁴ Immediately he organized the formalities at a hastily arranged Executive Committee meeting which keenly concurred that Comintern had outlived its purposes. Needless to stress, Stalin watched carefully from behind the scenes.²⁵ Since 1919 the Comintern and its communist parties had caused trouble for capitalism abroad wherever they could. Perhaps Stalin wanted to reassure the Americans and the British that he was no longer aiming at world revolution. He hoped to get them to lower their political guard before the upcoming conferences of the Big Three. But of greater importance to him, probably, was the urge to maximise communist appeal in the European countries about to be overrun by the Red Army. The reality was that the central apparatus of Comintern was simply transferred to the International Department of the Central Committee Secretariat of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks). The new head of the department was none other than Georgi Dimitrov. All this was done on the quiet. The important thing for Stalin was for each communist party to appear to be acting without instructions from Moscow.

Stalin’s attempt to reach out to eastern Europe in particular also involved the establishment of an All-Slavic Committee. The brotherhood of Slavic peoples was proclaimed. The fact that several peoples of the region, including the Hungarians, were not Slavs was overlooked: the idea was to appeal positively to the Poles, Czechs and others rather than to alienate the non-Slavs. This was nevertheless a chimerical plan. It was inconceivable that Hungarians would not see it as an anti-Magyar plot. A further initiative in September 1943, moreover, was surely a lightly disguised piece of Soviet-Russian imperialism. It was then that Stalin invited Russian Orthodox Church clerics to the Kremlin and offered to ease the repression on them in return for their political loyalty. This they eagerly acceded to. An additional blandishment for them was Stalin’s willingness to turn over the buildings of the Ukrainian Autocephalous Church to them as the Soviet armed forces moved westwards.26

Something which had seemed hardly imaginable before 1941 had occurred a few years later: the USSR began to be treated as a country worthy of normal ties with the rest of the world. American businessmen were looking forward to doing deals in Moscow and helping the economic reconstruction of the USSR. Vast profits were expected. Eric Johnston, President of the US Chamber of Commerce, stated in October 1944: ‘Russia will be, if not our biggest, at least our most eager customer when the war ends.’ The entrepreneurial elite had greater trust in Stalin’s post-war reliability than any other group in American society. The US Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce fostered such optimism and reckoned that at least a third of America’s exports would be directed at the Soviet Union in the post-war period.²⁷ President Roosevelt’s respectful diplomatic exchanges with the Kremlin strengthened hopes in Washington that peaceful economics would infuse the US–Soviet relationship. Both powers wanted the demise of the European empires. The USA and the USSR were resolved that neither Germany nor Japan would ever be able to threaten them again. There seemed a reasonable prospect that Moscow and Washington might agree on how world affairs were to be organised.

Communist parties in the great Western powers – the USA, the UK and newly liberated France – were operating freely, legally and with much prestige. They had their central offices, their press and their ebullient militants. In North America and Britain they had performed a useful role as cheerleaders on the political far left for the war effort. They looked forward to a period when they could increase their popularity. Communism was not quite respectable; but it was no longer a dirty word among most people. Stalin was a hero across the entire West.

In Yugoslavia, Italy, France and Greece the communists could claim a lot more than this. Although they received much aid from the Western Allies and not a little from the USSR, Tito’s partisans did a lot of the work of ridding themselves of the German occupiers. Churchill, veteran harrier of world communism, had plumped for Tito as the most effective Yugoslavian enemy of the Third Reich – and he took the controversial option of backing him rather than his Serbian nationalist foe Draa Mihailovi. A bloody ethnic and civil war had been tucked into the fight against Nazism. Among other dimensions of the struggle the communist partisans had taken on and defeated the pro-German regime of the Ustashas in Croatia. The Greek Communist Party sought to match this military victory to the south. As the Germans retreated northwards in October 1944, communists rushed to seize towns and strengthen their potential to take national power. Civil war was breaking out in Greece; it was an open question whether the communists or a monarchist right-wing administration would prevail. Meanwhile the communist-led partisan groups in France and northern Italy disrupted the Wehrmacht’s defences against the Western Allies. Communism in Europe was coming out of the Second World War stronger and more confident than it had been at the beginning.

 

19. FORCING THE PEACE

The destruction of the Third Reich crowned Stalin’s career. Yet he did not give himself long to celebrate. He was already thinking about the dangerous uncertainties of world politics. When Khrushchëv congratulated him on the German surrender, Stalin froze him to the spot with invective. He was just as angry after he tried to mount a white Arab stallion in preparation for the victory parade. The frisky steed threw him to the ground, and he passed the equestrian honour to Marshal Zhukov. Stalin briefly relaxed at a banquet he held for his commanders. The tables groaned with caviar and vodka as he praised the wartime accomplishments of the Russians. ‘Any other people’, he declared, ‘might have said to its government: “You’ve not lived up to our expectations, so go away and we’ll install another government which will conclude a peace with Germany and secure relief for us.” ’1 This was the nearest he got to apologising for his blunder at the start of Operation Barbarossa.

The last full conference of the Allies took place in July 1945 at Potsdam near Berlin. Two new members – Harry Truman and Clement Attlee – joined the Big Three after Roosevelt had died on 12 April and Churchill lost an election in the midst of the proceedings. The Potsdam decisions were quickly made. Japan was to be disarmed and Germany divided into four occupation zones. The USSR was promised the right to reparations from the defeated countries. There was agreement to eject Germans living in eastern Europe into a territorially reduced Germany. Truman, though, no longer wished to press Stalin to join the Japanese war. American scientists working on the Manhattan Project had invented a nuclear bomb. The US air force could now finish off Japan speedily and without assistance. Stalin already knew about this from his spies and insisted on making the territorial gains promised to him in the Far East at the Yalta Conference – and Truman did not demur. Other large questions of the post-war settlements were postponed. Although it was expected that Poland should have a ‘provisional government of national unity’, detailed planning for the political future of eastern Europe was not attempted.

As American forces fought their way to Japan by sea and air, Soviet forces overran Manchuria. Truman was eager by then to win the war with the minimum of assistance from Moscow. On 6 August US air force bombers flew over Hiroshima and exploded an atomic bomb for the first time. A second was dropped on Nagasaki two days later. The damage was on a scale unprecedented in all warfare, and Truman’s obvious resolve to go on using the A-bomb terrified Emperor Hirohito and the rest of the Japanese leadership into unconditional surrender. The Second World War was over. American troops, who days earlier had been preparing for a drawn-out campaign over every inch of Japan, installed an occupying administration. The Americans had played the decisive role in the Far East; but the Red Army had done enough at the last moment to ensure the acquisition of territory on the edge of the Pacific Ocean deemed vital by Stalin for the USSR’s security.

Appearances were deceptive. Although the USSR had defeated its enemies to become a world power, its internal situation was unenviable. Twenty-six million Soviet citizens had perished in the conflict with Germany. Deaths on the battlefield, in concentration camps or through malnutrition and overwork affected nearly every family. The country teemed with orphans and crippled invalids. As many as 1,710 cities lay in charred rubble. Seventy thousand villages had been razed to the ground. Stalin had not been an innocent spectator. His scorched-earth policy in 1941–2 had caused acute hardship, and the Gulag and the deportation operations of the NKVD added to the fatalities. While the economy met military requirements efficiently, this was at the expense of the other sectors. Agriculture was ruined. Factories had practically given up producing consumer goods. The strains of war had shredded the civilian administration. Officials had to confront grievous difficulties in their locality with little assistance from Moscow. At the same time the USSR had concerns about how to consolidate its authority over eastern Europe. Somehow, if Stalin was to hold on to his gains, the newly conquered half-continent needed to be fed and economically regenerated as well as administered by the USSR’s overstretched ministries, police and armed forces.

Soviet leaders paraded as democrats while strengthening tyranny. Stalin was frank among his intimates, ordering them to ‘land a heavy punch’ on any call for a relaxation of the regime in the USSR.2 The pre-war order was to be restored and the USSR’s expanded interests abroad protected.

The government and the communist party repaired the wartime damage to their administrative networks. The world heard that everything was in smoothly working order. If the USA were to discover the extent of ruination in the USSR, Stalin’s poker hand in negotiations would have been a weakened one. Terror was applied to suspect groups. Political, economic and cultural elites in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania were arrested and deported to Siberia – or at least individuals belonging to them who had escaped arrest under the first Soviet annexation in August 1940. Anyone who had studied Stalin should have expected this: surgical removal of the canker of potential opposition had been a constant feature of his rule. Even by his standards, though, he was vicious in his treatment of repatriated prisoners of the Germans. Order No. 270 had designated Soviet POWs as traitors to the Motherland. Then the news filtered back about the severe conditions they had to endure in the Third Reich. Stalin was implacable. Every liberated soldier was to be interrogated by the intelligence agencies and, in half of the cases, deposited in a forced-labour camp. Over a million people suffered this fate. Many were sent to mines to dig for uranium; this by itself was virtually a death sentence. Having survived the Nazi horrors, the ex-servicemen were transferred to misery in their own land.3

Ordinary civilians were treated little better. Initially the state planning bodies were under instructions to increase budgetary provision for consumer goods. The worsening of relations between the USSR and the USA ended all that. The fourth five-year plan, inaugurated in 1946, was jerked sharply towards the development and output of weaponry.⁴ The fiscal screws were tightened. The collective farm peasantry suffered badly as a tax was exacted for each cow and each fruit tree. This was done without regard to reported hardship. Famine occurred across Ukraine and cases of cannibalism were discovered. But when Khrushchëv asked for exemptions from the centrally assigned quotas for grain deliveries, he was denounced by Stalin for lack of Marxist-Leninist principle.

Stalin knew the kind of USSR he wanted and the kind of rulers he required for this. The Soviet state vaunted its military power and called upon citizens to forgo their comforts – and their lives – to defend the country’s interests. Pride was cultivated in the Russian past. This had been a growing trend since the early 1930s and Stalin now began to encourage a general xenophobia. ‘Bowing down before the West’ was treated as treason. Even Peter the Great, whom Stalin saw as a worthy predecessor as a moderniser, was said to have adopted Dutch and English models without discrimination. Soviet achievements were endlessly paraded. Russia had possessed a potential which allegedly the communist state alone had succeeded in fully tapping. The obstacle to the country’s progress had been the Imperial system of oppression and exploitation. The October Revolution had opened an avenue for promotion of individuals on merit; at last the full potential of the people was being released and supported. The goal of Soviet modernity was an industrialised, educated and collectivist society. To Stalinists it appeared obvious that the five-year plans and the victory in war proved the superiority of the communist order. They maintained that every other nation could and should copy the model.

People mattered to Stalin only as instruments for implementing state policy. He deferred satisfying the material needs of citizens; the security police arrested any grumblers. Heavy industry was the official strategic priority through to his death. The basic assumption was anyway that the expansion of the ‘means of production’ was the crucial way to generate economic growth. Also axiomatic was the belief that large-scale organisation was vital for success; Stalinism involved sheer gigantomania. Ruthless leadership and state power were intrinsic to the Soviet order as it had developed. The ‘masses’ were to be taught to obey whatever the Leader and his acolytes commanded. These attitudes were inculcated as fundamental constants of Marxism.

The Stalin cult gained in extravagance. The Leader was the god and the chief priest, and hundreds of millions of copies of his books and images were put before his fellow citizens. He no longer considered ways of making existing institutions work better but settled down as a communist conservative. He entrusted most authority to the organs of government. The party supervised ideology and the appointment of personnel and was stopped from interfering in other business. Any idea that the armed forces, fresh from their triumph over the Wehrmacht, might assert some autonomy was dispelled. Zhukov was demoted to the Odessa Military District; other generals were made to understand that the same fate – or worse – would befall them unless they showed exuberant obedience to Stalin. The intelligence agencies were at work everywhere. Their leaders were frequently reshuffled; Stalin let no police chief feel comfortable in office: there was an unceasing demand for loyal, punctilious discharge of duties under the watchful eye of the General Secretary. Institutions operated in a peculiar condition of agitated stability. Officials were no longer thrust into high office without qualifications, as had frequently been true in the late 1930s. Professional training and proficiency as well as a course in Marxism-Leninism were a prerequisite. The newer officials were unlikely to show Stalin anything but their deepest loyalty.5

He himself discouraged any thought that radical economic measures might be in the offing. The kolkhozes were not going to be turned into state farms employing peasants for wages regardless of the amount of work they did. Voluntaristic changes in policy were a thing of the past.⁶ Quite how the state would develop after his death was left unclear. Stalin instinctively avoided establishing formal procedures for the political succession and executed several Soviet leaders to bring the rest into line. In 1949–50 he was to liquidate the entire Leningrad political elite on suspicion of its members’ lack of total obedience to his will as well as their alleged support for Russian nationalism. Among the victims was Politburo member Nikolai Voznesenski.⁷ No politician was left in any doubt about Stalin’s continued readiness to use the bloodiest methods.

Yet policies were not yet fixed in cement. Planners were told to project a drastic increase in the output of consumer goods. The people of the Soviet Union had won the war and now they were to reap a material benefit. (Of course, nobody was meant to dream of electing their political leadership or being consulted about anything truly important.) Stalin did not immediately revoke the minor concessions to cultural expression first granted in wartime. Nor did he go back on his informal concordat with the Russian Orthodox Church. Popular expectations of further relaxation were high. Soldiers had joined the party in wartime confident that the regime would abandon its repressive zeal: this was one of the reasons why they had fought so hard against the Nazis. Stalin was regarded by many millions of Soviet citizens as a heroic leader. The authorities had frequently talked about the need for ‘party and masses’ to be brought together in indissoluble and harmonious union. People now wanted words to be matched by practice. They denounced officials who abused their position. They demanded more food, better housing and improved working conditions. Many did not hesitate to put their grumbles into writing. They had fought and won the war. In victory they were in a mood to assert their rights.

Active resistance to communism continued after the Second World War. In Russia it was weak: the levers of oppression were in good repair and had been vigorously manipulated for years. Peasants complained as they always had done. There were clandestine youth groups dedicated to a restoration of ‘genuine’ Leninism. The toughest rebels were to be found in the labour camps where national and religious critics of the Soviet order from the western borderlands of the USSR joined in attempts to disrupt the Gulag system. Yet generally the security police were not unduly pressed. In Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, west Belorussia and west Ukraine it was a different matter. Anti-Soviet partisan groups challenged the annexation of their lands. Based in woods and villages, the Forest Brothers carried out a campaign of assassination and sabotage as Soviet armed forces tried to hunt them down.8 The same happened further west. The Polish authorities treated the Home Army, which had led the Warsaw Uprising against the German occupation, as a national enemy. Patriots took to the countryside and re-formed their military units to strike at the official forces. The fighting was savage on both sides.

Meanwhile Stalin’s forces in the Far East had rampaged across northern Manchuria after being transferred from European Russia as had been agreed at Yalta in February 1945. They also grabbed the territories promised to the USSR by the Western Allies when Sakhalin and the northern islands of Japan were annexed. Stalin, cognisant of the humiliation suffered by the Russian Empire in the Russo–Japanese War of 1904–5, announced that a ‘blot of shame’ had been removed. He would have liked to exercise some direct power over the new Japanese government, but the Americans brusquely rejected his requests. They, and not the armed might of the Soviet Union, had reduced Japan to unconditional surrender and they were unwilling to let him poke his nose into politics in Tokyo. Stalin was more successful in regard to China. He remained sceptical about the Chinese Communist Party’s chances of gaining power. As its paymaster and military supplier he was able to insist that it stayed in alliance with Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang. Meanwhile Stalin signed a treaty with Chiang. China at the time was in no condition to resist Soviet demands. The USSR secured permission to use Port Arthur and Dairen for their naval facilities. Moscow also obtained rights over the railways in Manchuria.

The Big Three still stayed together despite rising mutual distrust. They had agreed before the end of the war to the formation of a body to succeed the League of Nations. This would be the United Nations Organisation (or UN). Inaugurated in San Francisco, it was given permanent premises in New York. Its main purpose was the prevention of war in general. The USSR took its majestic place on the UN’s Security Council along with the USA, the United Kingdom, France and China. Truly Stalin led a power of global power and renown.

His steadiest attention was on eastern Europe. He had said to Yugoslav emissary Milovan Djilas: ‘This war is not as in the past; whoever occupies a territory also imposes his own social system. Everyone imposes his own system, as far as his army can reach.’9 But as yet he was too weak to undertake comprehensive communisation in the countries of the region – and it is not impossible that he did not yet think this a feasible objective.¹⁰ Communists were very few and inexperienced except in Yugoslavia: the Nazis and their allies had seen to that. Although the Red Army was unchallengeable, Stalin lacked a reliable administrative apparatus of political and security-police control. He lacked the resources to put the economies of the occupied countries quickly back on their feet. Furthermore, his armed forces did not possess an atomic bomb. The Americans had shown their technological superiority by obliterating two Japanese cities; they could fly over Moscow and repeat the devastation. There was a further factor in Stalin’s mind. The Grand Alliance had elevated him and his country into a partnership with the USA and the United Kingdom. The USSR had received wartime material assistance from across the Atlantic, and Stalin and Molotov had not stopped hoping to obtain a loan to hasten Soviet economic recovery. Yalta, Tehran and Potsdam had left many basic matters undiscussed and Stalin resolved to act with caution.

The microfauna of Comintern in Moscow exile meanwhile returned to their native countries to lead the communist parties. There were exceptions, and one of them in Poland was Władysław Gomułka. Polish party functionaries arriving from Moscow could not tame him and complained about him to the Soviet authorities.¹¹ But Stalin still needed to proceed with prudence. While Gomułka appeared to him as unduly independent of mind and even somewhat nationalistic, many militants in Hungary had to be restrained from excessive impatience to communise the country.¹²

Rumours spread about Stalin’s intentions. Perhaps he was going to force the countries of the region to become republics of the USSR.¹³ In Romania it was being said the communist leadership was going to establish ‘kolkhozes of a militarised type’ and institute a twelve-hour working day.¹⁴ Denials by communist leader Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej cut no ice with popular opinion. Polish peasants too dreaded the prospect of a kolkhoz system, and Poland’s party boss Gomułka told Dimitrov: ‘Even if anyone expresses the wish to enter a kolkhoz, we still won’t be introducing them.’¹⁵ The awful record of communism in the USSR spoke for itself: collectivisation, purges, concentration camps, one-party dictatorship. Even if some rumours were wildly inaccurate, many were very plausible. There was agreement among the Big Three that the occupied countries should become independent, democratic states. Elections had to be held and economic recovery promoted. The USSR itself had limited options. It wanted to avoid war with the USA, especially when the Soviet armed forces lacked nuclear weaponry. It sought financial assistance from the Americans. It also heard the truth from communist parties in eastern Europe, in their moments of candour, about their own deep unpopularity.16

A softly-softly approach to communisation was required. Communists in eastern Europe were advised by Moscow that the USSR lacked the finances to regenerate their economies; indeed some of them were compelled to accept that their first national obligation was to pay off the reparations demanded by the USSR for the damage done by their armies as allies of the Third Reich. This was true of Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and East Germany, and the reparations paid by Budapest amounted to half the Hungarian state budget in 1947.¹⁷ Whole factories were crated up and sent eastwards to Russia. It also suited Stalin to insist that communist leaders did not bite off more than they could chew. If they took over their economies, they would get the blame for the hardships inevitable after the war. A degree of political sobriety was called for. To this end he stipulated that communist parties should advance behind the shield of multi-party democratic coalitions. He was willing to consider a ‘bloc’ even between the communists and the Catholic Church.¹⁸ Such manoeuvres would get the Western Allies off his back as well as diffuse responsibility for the difficulties of post-war rule. With a modicum of cunning the communist ministers could secure portfolios enabling them to deal ruthlessly with political enemies. Wherever possible, they were told to take posts in the security and police forces.

Moscow told the incoming communists to present themselves as patriots. National leaderships were wary of giving undue prominence to the Jews in their midst – and Stalin encouraged them in this caution.¹⁹ This was a notable difficulty in Poland, Hungary and Romania where popular antisemitism was strong. Jews held half the leading posts in the Polish security ministry.²⁰ In Romania there was unease that ‘the Jewess Pauker and the Hungarian Luka’ held positions of power.²¹ The danger was that communists would come to be seen as a party giving privileges to this disliked minority. Yet at the same time Stalin ordered Gheorghiu-Dej to hold back from comprehensive Romanisation of the party leadership; he objected to ideas about communists in Romania turning themselves into a ‘racial party’.²² Moreover, land reform proceeded without the collectivisation of farming. The old estates, including the vast holdings of the infamously right-wing Junkers in Prussia, were parcelled into smallholdings for peasants and the deserving rural poor.23 The Soviet leadership continued to urge caution. In Romania’s case Stalin maintained that the bourgeoisie had handed economic power to the communists so as to saddle them with an intractable task.²⁴

Truman, Attlee and other Western leaders implicitly acknowledged that the USSR would have a preponderant influence over eastern Europe. But they did not want to leave the countries of the region entirely to Stalin’s mercy. Bulgaria, Romania and Hungary had been allies of the Third Reich until late in the war. In accordance with their agreements, the Big Three set up Allied Control Commissions in their capitals. This enabled the Americans and British to witness what was going on and to hinder communist oppressiveness. They also had firm communications and eager collaborators in Poland and Czechoslovakia. The West stood for electoral democracy, an open economy and cultural and religious tolerance across the region and made this clear to Soviet ministers and diplomats.

For two whole years Stalin and the communist parties of the region probed the resolve of the other Allies; and, as he was to confide to Mao, he did not feel bound by any existing accords with the Western Allies.²⁵ Communists had already held most seats in the Albanian provisional government since October 1944 and had ratified their power in Yugoslavia in November through an election boycotted by the opposition parties. In Poland a coalition government was formed by communists – the Polish Workers’ Party – together with the Polish Socialist Party, the Democratic Party, the Labour Party and the Peasants’ Party. Communist dominance was ensured by the fact that most of the ministers had belonged to the USSR-dominated Lublin Committee which had acted previously as a provisional authority. Intimidation of Stanisław Mikołajczyk’s revived Polish Peasants’ Party, which was easily the country’s largest political organisation, intensified. The national election in January 1947 was a travesty of due procedure. Four-fifths of the votes were allegedly cast in favour of the Democratic Bloc to which the communists belonged; and although Józef Cyrankiewicz of the Polish Socialist Party became Prime Minister, decisive power passed to the Polish Workers’ Party. A similar transition took place in Hungary, but Stalin, being preoccupied with Poland, insisted that the communists took their advance at a slower pace. The Smallholders’ Party won an absolute majority of votes at the election of November 1945. Yet the communists held the Ministry of the Interior and ran the security police. From this base they could do much of what they wanted without interference.

Soviet troops withdrew from Czechoslovakia in December, leaving the socialist Eduard Bene in power. Bene, the country’s most popular politician, complied with the demands of the Soviet leadership, and the communist leader Klement Gottwald became Prime Minister. Elections were held in May 1946; the communists won 38 per cent of the votes. No communist party in the region did better in a reasonably free election. Indeed no election approached Czechoslovakia’s in political freedom. This went to show that if the communists were careful and moderate it was not impossible for them to appeal successfully to their electorate; but of course this was no guarantee that the votes would stay with them in future electoral contests.

Bulgaria was a harder nut to crack even after the communist-inspired execution of political leaders on the right of the public spectrum. Persecution of the other rivals of communism followed. Georgi Dimitrov returned from his Moscow exile to increase the standing of the communists. The communist-led Fatherland Front won 86 per cent of the votes in the election of November 1945, but the Western Allies objected strenuously to the amount of fraud and violence. A further election in the following year confirmed communist supremacy and Dimitrov became Minister-President amid continuing arrests. The Romanian communists too set up joint organisations. Only one communist became minister in the first coalition government after the collapse of German military power. Soviet pressure succeeded in disbanding the cabinet of Nicolae Radescu, a general, and replacing him with Ploughman’s Front leader Petru Groza, who was suitably malleable. The control of the USSR was still more direct in East Germany, but the local communists none the less needed to regularise their authority. Their preference was for fusing their organisation with the other parties of the left. Intimidation followed. In April 1946 the German Communist Party and Germany Social-Democratic Party, after months of threats from the Soviet army high command, were blended into the Socialist Unity Party. Even so, they failed to gain an absolute majority that August. The politics of eastern Europe eluded firm control.

Stalin at the same time was determined to eliminate the potential menace from Finland. This was a neighbouring state which had sided with the Third Reich in the world war. Finns were not fond of the Russians. They were also former subjects of the Russian Empire and Stalin believed they had been wrongly wrenched from Russia’s grasp in the revolutionary period. Western powers judged things differently, but in the event they did not face the question of intervention. Stalin was pleased that Finnish communists won a quarter of the parliamentary seats in 1945. But the growing evidence of anti-communist sentiment was unmistakable. Instead of sending in the Soviet army, he dispatched Andrei Zhdanov to secure a political compromise. In return for staying neutral in the disputes between the USSR and the West, Finland could retain its independence. The Finns under Juho Kusti Paasikivi handled the situation cleverly: they guaranteed never to side with the enemies of the Soviet Union and to observe permanent neutrality. In return they asked for freedom to maintain a capitalist economy and a liberal democracy; they also requested, firmly but politely, not to be incorporated in the USSR as a Soviet republic. Zhdanov, on Stalin’s orders, accepted the deal.26

Full communisation was avoided in eastern Europe, in line with Stalin’s wishes, in the first years after the Second World War. Nevertheless the Poles nationalised every factory with a labour force of at least fifty workers in January 1946.²⁷ Mass unemployment was declared forever ended. The promise was made that a system of comprehensive state welfare would be instituted as the economy recovered after the war. There was also land reform across the region and peasants received parcels of land even from the coalition cabinets. The monarchies in Albania, Bulgaria, Romania and Yugoslavia were abolished. Leading collaborators with the Third Reich were arrested and executed; the political right, whether or not its representatives had been pro-German, was eradicated from the public scene. Reports again and again told a story of persecution of political opponents, religious leaders and critical intellectuals. The USSR fobbed off the Western Allies whenever they complained. The fact that communists had invested themselves with portfolios in the security ministries gave them the appearance of procedural regularity. Every country in eastern Europe, moreover, was chaotic after the war. The communist parties exploited the situation. Deeds were done and then denied. An atmosphere of fear was created; and no serious measures could be taken against the abusers of power while Soviet armed forces stood willing to intervene.

American policy had stiffened with the defeat of Japan and Truman’s accession to power. Perhaps Roosevelt too would have gone this way. At any rate there was a growing intention in the USA to spread its military, political and economic power around the world – and Britain as well as the USSR would inevitably register the assertive pressure. American isolationism had faded. Yet Truman did not want to risk starting the Third World War; he was genuinely appalled by the human and ecological devastation caused by the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

 

PART FOUR

REPRODUCTION

1947–1957

 

20. THE COLD WAR AND THE SOVIET BLOC

The temperature of relations between the USSR and the Western Allies dropped like a stone in summer 1947. This was the year when the Cold War began in earnest. Political leaders in the West no longer expected anything but bad to come out of Moscow; Stalin and his comrades reciprocated the hostility. Neither side in fact wanted military conflict with the other. Truman, while publicly reaffirming his willingness to use nuclear bombs once again if his country’s vital interests were threatened, shuddered at the thought of a third world war: he well understood that nothing would be left on the planet but the insects.1 Stalin too affected to be unruffled by the new technology of warfare; he refused to exhibit any concern about his country’s security. He adhered to the Leninist precept that world wars would continue to occur among capitalist powers so long as capitalism retained its global influence. As previously, he declared that Soviet diplomacy should be geared towards keeping the USSR out of any such clash.² This was standard Leninism. Privately, though, he too saw that a third world war might make the world uninhabitable.³ At the same time he pressed for the acquisition of an A-bomb of his own. A team of scientists was hastily assembled. Beria was to oversee them and no resources were spared. Stalin was not going to be intimidated into compromises by the USA’s superior military technology.

Western strategy was supplied by two diplomats, George Kennan for the USA and Frank Roberts for the UK. Independently of each other they urged the need for ‘containment’; their idea was to resist all attempts at expanding communist power beyond existing territorial boundaries but to avoid provoking a third world war. Force, including nuclear weaponry, was to be used only if the Kremlin failed to accept this situation. Kennan and Roberts took the long view. They contended that at some future time, as yet unpredictable, the Soviet Union would undergo internal crisis and that communism would collapse.⁴

In June 1947 American Secretary of State George Marshall announced a programme for economic recovery in Europe – including countries in the east – by means of financial grants and loans. The Americans would be assisting the continent to surmount its devastation and penury while creating a market for their own surplus of industrial goods. Governments in western Europe welcomed the initiative. Czechoslovakia too expressed interest. Stalin and Molotov had been hoping that the USSR might be eligible for financial help. But it quickly became evident that Truman and Marshall expected recipient countries to guarantee open trade and the rule of law. Stalin drew back, horrified at the idea of American businessmen behaving in the USSR as if they were at home. When he discovered that Czechoslovak ministers, including communists, planned to go to Paris and explore what kind of deal was on offer, he summoned them to Moscow and gave them a verbal blistering.5 The European countries to the east of the Elbe were to remain strictly within the great zone of Soviet influence, and Stalin would use any means to defend that position. A turning point in post-war history was reached as the Grand Alliance of wartime, creaking since the end of the war, fell irretrievably apart.

Marshall never genuinely intended to bail out the economy of the USSR or any state under its suzerainty. Negotiations about an American loan to the Kremlin disappeared in smoke. A network of US military bases was being thrown around the globe and notice was given that friendly diplomatic relations with Washington would depend on unrestricted access being made available for the goods and services of the American economy. While offering to help Europe to recover from the war, Truman kept up the pressure on the old imperial powers – the United Kingdom, France, Holland and Portugal – to waive their commercial privileges in their colonies; his aim was that the empires should soon be dissolved.⁶

Stalin struck back by forming the Communist Information Bureau (or Cominform). This was accomplished at a founding conference in September 1947 where communist parties from several countries of eastern Europe as well as France and Italy would be represented. The purpose was to instruct communist parties to adopt a more aggressive posture. In eastern Europe this was to involve switching to a campaign of rapid communisation on the Soviet model; in western Europe it would mean a reinforced campaign against the Marshall Plan and a shift to more militant opposition to the existing governments. The possibility of reconciliation with the USA was discounted. Stalin was still not seeking war with the USA but intended to protect the gains made by the Red Army in the Second World War. European communism was to be redirected towards that objective. Stalin felt that he had nothing to lose. The USA had made its bid to become the dominant power across Europe. The Soviet economic base was weaker than the American one. Moscow had yet to develop an atomic bomb. The Soviet army, however, held the logistical advantage in eastern Europe, and communist parties in western Europe could stir up trouble.

The Conference was held in Szklarska Porba, a secluded village for holidaymakers at the foot of the Sudety mountains in Polish Silesia. It was practically the geographical centre of Europe – and this perhaps was not an accident. The proceedings had been arranged with conspiratorial thoroughness. (As if it would have mattered a jot if the Western powers had known what was happening!) Delegates assembled like Bolsheviks attending one of their clandestine congresses. But whereas the police before 1917 regularly spied on such gatherings, the Soviet security agencies guarded the Cominform Conference from prying eyes. The Polish communist leadership was kept in the dark about the details. Secrecy was obsessive. The delegates were not told the name of the village even after they had arrived.7 All meekly accepted this absurd way of going on.

Stalin decided who was to be invited. He refused a request from Mao Zedong, who obviously thought that the plan was to re-establish the Communist International. But Stalin had not dismantled Comintern for nothing; he wanted the world to think that communist parties operated independently of the Kremlin. More surprisingly, perhaps, he did not invite the Spanish and Portuguese. The likely reason is that they stood no chance against their fascist police and Stalin could not be bothered with them. Nor were the British given a place at the conference. Perhaps Stalin thought they were too weak a political force to merit inclusion. In any case he did not want communists in the United Kingdom to abandon the ‘parliamentary road’; their presence would certainly have complicated the message he aimed to deliver to the French and the Italians.⁸ Even the Greeks were kept away. This was a remarkable decision since the Greek Communist Party was fighting a civil war against a royalist army which was backed by London and Washington.⁹ Their absence signalled that Stalin judged it dangerous to commit himself militarily in a country that he did not regard as essential to the security of the USSR. While responding militantly to the American challenge, Stalin wished to avoid any danger unlikely to bring him any benefit.

Conference delegates were given no prior acquaintance with the agenda and were treated like detainees on arrival. A radio transmitter was installed to keep in constant touch with Moscow, and Stalin had regular reports from his men on the spot, Malenkov and Zhdanov. Only the Soviet participants, of course, could communicate in this way with the outside world. Malenkov and Zhdanov tore into the Poles for failing to introduce radical communist measures after the Second World War. The Red Army had given them every opportunity. The USSR offered a model. Yet the communists of Poland and elsewhere in eastern Europe had wheezed and blustered rather than discharge their revolutionary duty. Zhdanov argued that two ‘camps’ existed in global politics: the first was the camp of progressive, peace-loving democracies and was led by the Soviet Union; it was opposed by the camp of political reaction, militarism and imperialism under the USA’s leadership. The task of Malenkov and Zhdanov was made easier by the enthusiasm of the Yugoslav delegates Edvard Kardelj and Milovan Djilas, who strongly denounced the compromises of 1945–7 in the region conquered by Soviet armed forces. Western Europe’s communists too came in for a pasting. The Italian and French parties were castigated for having stuck to parliamentary and peaceful methods. Zhdanov declared that this was no way for communism to advance on power. Revolutionary action was required.

Polish party leader Gomułka was unique in defending himself and his search for a specifically national road to socialism. There was no criticism of him until Malenkov and Zhdanov spoke out. The troglodytes of world communism needed to know what the Father of the Peoples wanted before they dared to say anything.10 The Soviet leadership was behaving with transcendent hypocrisy. The communist movement in both halves of Europe had been forced to follow the Kremlin’s orders throughout the previous few years. It is true that such orders had often been confined to general strategy; but not one important step had been taken without consultation with Moscow.

The Marshall Plan and Cominform were early rounds in the contest between East and West. Tito’s boisterousness was no longer tolerable. The Yugoslav communists had been helpful in establishing Cominform but too often had intruded into matters of foreign policy which Stalin reserved for the Kremlin. At the Second Cominform Conference, in June 1948, Yugoslavia was expelled from the organisation without right of appeal.¹¹ Cominform itself was moved from Belgrade to Bucharest. It never truly imposed regular control over its member parties; its functionaries dished out propaganda and did little else. Stalin continued to use the International Department of the Central Committee Secretariat of the All-Union Communist Party in Moscow to co-ordinate and guide the activities of the rest of the world’s communist parties. Information came to him both directly from those parties and from his embassies and intelligence agencies. Funds continued to be secretly disbursed to communist leaderships. The Kremlin, as previously, expected to be consulted about important changes in policy or personnel. No communist party dared to express solidarity with the Yugoslavs – and this included parties outside eastern Europe. There were glimmerings of the idea that Chinese communism’s orientations towards the peasantry might offer a model for agrarian societies. The most striking example were the communists of the state of Kerala in India. But the Communist Party of India stamped on such heresy, announcing that its only figures of authority were Marx, Lenin and Stalin.12

After setting up Cominform, Stalin flexed his muscles in Berlin by denying the Western Allies’ access to the city through East Germany. The USA and the United Kingdom reacted by airlifting supplies to the people in the districts of the city which they occupied. The flights continued until Stalin acknowledged defeat in May 1949. But he did not give up the general struggle. In January of the same year he had approved the creation of the Council of Mutual Economic Assistance (or Comecon) to bind eastern Europe together under the USSR’s control. In April the Americans and their allies signed the military treaty which constituted the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO); the zones of Germany they controlled were formed into the Federal Republic of Germany while, in October, the Soviet zone was announced as a separate German Democratic Republic.

The symmetry was not total since the USSR refrained from signing an alliance to compete with NATO until 1955, when Stalin had been dead for two years: the Soviet dictator placed implicit reliance on his Soviet army and distrusted the armies under formation in eastern Europe. He was beginning to discern grounds for increased confidence. The USSR’s spies and scientists worked together to produce an A-bomb and it was exploded in Beria’s presence in August 1949. Global politics were becoming bipolar. The Kremlin felt more secure than at any time since the Japanese surrender. In October, quite against Stalin’s prognosis, the armed forces of Mao Zedong triumphed in the Chinese civil war and took power in Beijing.¹³ The map of the world was being redrawn as a quarter of the earth’s surface was tugged under direct communist control. In 1950 there was a further attempt at expansion when the Soviet and Chinese leaderships supported the military campaign of communists under Kim Il-sung’s leadership in North Korea to overrun and reunite the entire country.14 Stalin had misled himself into supposing that the Americans would lack the will to contain communist expansionism. He had also been worried that Mao might gain eminence as the world’s greatest exponent of the revolutionary spirit.

Kim had badgered Stalin into giving his consent to the campaign. He had emerged among Korean communists on the coat-tails of the Soviet armed forces’ campaign in the Far East in late summer 1945. Plucked from obscurity by his patrons in the USSR, he became the General Secretary of the newly amalgamated Labour Party of Korea. It was said that even his command of the Korean language was insecure after many years with the Russians in Siberia. A cult was immediately created for him. Two decades of his generalship among Korea’s communist insurgents were celebrated in 1946 even though this implied that Kim had been a general since the age of fourteen. But, once ensconced in the central party apparatus, he acted as if the throne of power was his birthright.¹⁵

But Stalin, Mao and Kim had all badly misread the situation. The Americans, exploiting a Soviet walkout from the United Nations Security Council, obtained the UN’s sanction to assemble a multinational force to defend South Korea against invasion.¹⁶ This was an important indication of Western resolve. If the whole of Korea had fallen to communism, the policy of global containment would have been utterly discredited. The Korean War involved vast numbers of troops. The Americans and their Western allies, boosting the South Koreans, faced a confident army of North Koreans which had the open participation of the Chinese and the covert support, both in armaments and even aviators, of the USSR. The fighting stopped just short of a direct confrontation between the USA and the USSR. What is more, Truman rejected the call by General Douglas MacArthur to use nuclear bombs and sacked MacArthur for his readiness to act outside instructions. But it was a war that constantly threatened to turn into a third world war. Capitalism and liberal democracy engaged in a titanic struggle with communism. Truman was determined to prove that no further country of geostrategic importance for Washington would succumb to a communist seizure of power. The fronts of the Korean War moved backwards and forwards without either side being able to pull off victory.¹⁷

More discreetly, the American and British intelligence services sent agents into Albania and Ukraine in these years in an attempt to subvert communist power. The Americans were going beyond the strategy of mere containment: Truman was not averse to probing whether there were weak links in the chain of communism in eastern Europe. It was a forlorn enterprise since it was monitored by Kim Philby, then working in the British embassy in Washington and spying for the USSR – and the result was a bloody débâcle.18

At the same time Truman took long-term precautions against communist economic parasitism. In 1949 he had ratified an export control act to prevent strategic materials being sold to the USSR. A Coordinating Committee (CoCom) was set up to ensure that other Western countries toed the same line.¹⁹ This was not a total economic blockade. Trade quietly continued with the USSR and eastern Europe. Ernest Bevin as British Foreign Secretary in May 1949 disliked the publicity given to commercial deals. The Canadians had been criticising the United Kingdom for buying products from communist countries – timber, metals and grain – which Canada itself could produce and sell.²⁰ Marshall Aid meanwhile produced its results slowly but surely. But Truman did not like to risk anything. The US State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency pumped money and political assurances into western Europe. Agents were simultaneously infiltrated into eastern Europe – this was less effective in part because the Soviet intelligence agencies had been alerted to what was going on. NATO, like its enemies, was engaged in a furious struggle short of provoking the Third World War. The USA did not expect to lose. Truman believed in national destiny and in the inherent greatness of the American political and economic model.

Stalin had ideas about historical inevitability derived from the Leninist ideological storehouse; and his regime also sought to enhance its regional security and maximise its power over eastern Europe. Communisation was reinforced. If polls of popular opinion had been held, communists would have been in the majority nowhere in the region. Communist leaders were regarded as Soviet stooges and communism itself as ‘Russian slavery’.²¹ Looting took place everywhere. Rape of local women by Red Army soldiers, especially when drunk, was a widespread scandal.²² A song became popular in the Soviet occupation zone in Germany:

Welcome, liberators!

You take from us eggs, meats and butter, cattle and feed.

And also watches, rings and other things.

You liberate us from everything, from cars and machines.

You take off with you train-carriages and rail installations.

From all this rubbish – you’ve liberated us!

We cry for joy.

How good you are to us.

How terrible it was before – and how nice now.

You marvellous people!23

East German communist leader Walter Ulbricht rejected complaints by his own comrades about Soviet soldiers’ misbehaviour: ‘People who get so worked up about such things today would have done much better to get worked up when Hitler started the war!’²⁴

Talk of national roads to socialism did not entirely cease,²⁵ but Stalin in practice now wanted eastern Europe to copy the Soviet model as closely as possible. Poland was the crucial country. Intensified persecution of Stanisław Mikołajczyk’s Polish Peasants’ Party (PSL) commenced. Learning that he was about to be arrested, Mikołajczyk had fled abroad in October 1947. Only the Polish Socialist Party (PPS) had any degree of independence, and pressure was applied for it to fuse itself with the communists. The PPS refused but agreed to purge itself of its right wing. The communist leadership underwent renovation in the following months. Gomułka’s habit of questioning ‘recommendations’ from Moscow together with his advocacy of a specifically ‘Polish road’ to socialism had made him suspect in Stalin’s eyes. Bolesław Bierut replaced Gomułka in summer and castigated him for thwarting the creation of collective farms and showing mistrust toward the USSR. Meanwhile the PPS’s nerve was cracking. In December 1948 it amalgamated with the communists in a Polish United Workers’ Party (PZPR). In reality the communists were gobbling up their main rivals.²⁶ Although a United Peasant Party was established in the following year, the country was already in essence a one-party dictatorship.²⁷

A similar fusion of parties on the left was engineered in Romania in autumn 1947. The atmosphere of repression thickened. The communists inside the United Workers’ Party ruled as if it was already a one-party state. King Michael was forced to abdicate. The United Workers’ Party pressed most of the few other surviving parties into a People’s Democratic Front which, benefiting from gross electoral fraud, won an easy victory in the March 1948 election.²⁸

The Communist Party of Czechoslovakia already dominated both the army and police. From co-operation with its cabinet partners it went over to confrontation. The non-communist ministers resigned in exasperation in February 1948; but, far from unnerving the communist leadership, the exodus opened a gap the communists filled with a single-party government under Klement Gottwald. Opposition was ruthlessly suppressed and the former Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk died mysteriously (he was probably murdered) in the following month. In Hungary the transformation appeared harder to engineer. Whereas the Czechoslovak communists had won 38 per cent of the votes in the 1946 election, their Hungarian comrades remained woefully unpopular. They jumped to 22 per cent in the election of August 1947 only by fiddling the returns.29 Their leader Rákosi, however, did not let up. He made life intolerable for leading enemies of the party and induced them to flee abroad. He forced through the amalgamation of the communists and the social-democrats into the Hungarian Workers’ Party. The security police – the ÁVO, later the ÁVH – mopped up the remaining spillage of overt dissent. Hungary had been turned into a communist one-party state in all but name.³⁰

Stalin reduced the new communist states to servility to the USSR. The three conferences of Cominform in September 1947, June 1948 and November 1949 were a useful weapon. Yet Cominform’s offices were allocated first to Belgrade and then to Bucharest so as to sustain the fiction that the Soviet leadership allowed freedom to the communist parties. More regular channels were maintained by the International Department of the Central Committee Secretariat of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The Ministry of External Affairs and the Ministry of State Security (MGB) also conveyed the wishes of the Kremlin. Stalin, moreover, established a direct telephone link with the communist party leader in each of eastern Europe’s capitals. Only Stalin could use it without permission. If President Bierut in Poland, for example, wanted to speak to the Kremlin, he had to arrange an appointment.³¹ Stalin became the master of half a continent’s chronometry: Berlin was put on to Moscow time.³² His puppet rulers in eastern Europe had to be ready to answer his questions at any moment and usually this meant in the middle of the night because Stalin slept through most of the day and worked through the hours of darkness.³³

Tito was not the only suspect leader in the eyes of the Soviet dictator. Every communist chief in the region had continually to prove his loyalty and obedience. Romanian communist leader Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej was being denounced as hankering after an economic deal with the ‘Anglo-Americans’.34 The Secretariat of the All-Union Communist Party in Moscow cooked up suitable grounds for condemning the Hungarian communists as vulnerable to ‘bourgeois influence’ and for indicting both the Polish and Czechoslovak communists for their ‘anti-Marxist ideological positions’.³⁵ Soviet political leaders also had to watch their step in eastern Europe. When Politburo member Kliment Voroshilov on a visit to Budapest in October 1945 failed to consult Moscow about the orders he was giving to the Hungarian leadership, the rest of the Politburo informed on him to Stalin.³⁶

A façade of inter-party formality was preserved. A typical message to the Polish Workers’ Party ran: ‘We express confidence that you will discuss our considerations and let us know of your decision.’³⁷ But sometimes the exchanges were more brusque. When the Bulgarians worked out a draft law on bank nationalisation, they were told to amend it forthwith.³⁸ The Soviet Military Administration conducted deep penetration of policymaking in East Germany:

Almost all the documents which issue from the [Socialist Unity Party] are prepared by us here. If they prepare the draft, then we look at it here and introduce all our comments. There are no documents that would not be formulated by us and which would not be fully affirmed by them; such documents do not exist.³⁹

So much for the Socialist Unity Party being the vanguard of revolution! The reality was that Moscow gave the orders and the communist parties obeyed them.

Behind the scenes the Soviet functionaries interviewed the national leaders, usually in one-to-one private conversations. They looked out for disagreements within a leadership. Bolesław Bierut vilified Gomułka in writing and Moscow conserved his letter for later possible use.⁴⁰ The Kremlin obtained confidences from all and sundry. The supreme leader in each country naturally hated this practice since it wrecked the possibility of an exclusive channel of communication with Moscow. Party chiefs Georghiu-Dej in Romania and Rákosi in Hungary went round asking who had snitched on them to Stalin.⁴¹ But they were powerless to stop the practice in case they angered Stalin. The Soviet authorities surreptitiously recruited their own informers. This too caused offence but only the Yugoslavs had the nerve to remonstrate with Moscow and remove the individuals from office – and they did this even before the split between the USSR and Yugoslavia.⁴² The Kremlin expected to be consulted about decisions on the composition of party leaderships and governmental cabinets in its outer empire. Georgi Dimitrov, becoming Bulgaria’s Prime Minister in 1946, provided Zhdanov with a ‘preliminary plan’ for the composition of his cabinet.43 If the Kremlin had objected, Dimitrov would have torn the list up. Parties in other countries behaved with similar deference. The supreme rulers of the region lived in Moscow.⁴⁴

Thousands of advisers and instructors were sent into the countries of eastern Europe after 1945. The armed forces and state security agencies teemed with Soviet personnel empowered to reconstruct institutions on Soviet lines. This caused disquiet even among communists, but no overt complaint was made.⁴⁵ Andrei Vyshinski, Molotov’s deputy in the Ministry of External Affairs, described the situation in blatant terms: ‘Our friends definitely stand in need of authoritative directions for their future work in the new conditions.’⁴⁶

Communists said they were introducing democracy to eastern Europe. But it would be democracy of a peculiar sort. Milovan Djilas in wartime had told Molotov that the Yugoslavs were aiming at a democratic republic but ‘not one like the French but instead like the Mongolian’.⁴⁷ The briefest stay in the People’s Republic of Mongolia might have cured Djilas of such nonsense; his visit to Moscow ought also to have performed this function. (He was to recognise his mistake about the communist order a decade later.)⁴⁸ Stalin adopted the term being used by the Yugoslavian communists: people’s democracy.⁴⁹ This is how he made the case to Polish communist leaders:

The order established in Poland is democracy, it is a new type of democracy. It has no precedent. Neither the Belgian nor English nor French democracies can be taken by you as an example or model. Your democracy is a special one. You don’t have a class of big capitalists. You’ve carried out the nationalisation of industry in a hundred days whereas the English have been struggling for this for a hundred years. So don’t copy the Western democracies, let them copy you!⁵⁰

He argued that eastern Europe, by taking advantage of Soviet military power, could be communised without the need for the proletarian dictatorship and civil war which had followed the October Revolution.

According to Stalin, there was no serious danger of counter-revolution.⁵¹ Falsifying The State and Revolution, Stalin contended that Lenin had never treated the dictatorship of the proletariat as a prerequisite for constructing socialism. Ideology was being conformed to the requirements of current geopolitics. Stalin was eager to prove that the communist states of the East – which were increasingly being described as the Soviet Bloc – were offering unrivalled levels of social tranquillity, progress and democracy to their peoples.

Civil rights, however, were suspended everywhere in eastern Europe; and the communists, true to their ideology, delighted in boasting that their policies discriminated in favour of the poorer citizens. The ‘people’ did not constitute the entire population. The gap between a manager’s salary and a labourer’s wages was narrowed. Universal and free schooling was introduced. Eligibility for housing, healthcare and pensions was granted to everyone in employment. The promise was made that individuals of proven talent would be enabled to rise up the ladders of public office. Communists shared a commitment to reforms with the other left-of-centre political parties. But no one implemented them with the same determination. Before the Second World War there had been practically no country in the region where the workers, peasants and other members of the lower social orders did not resent the authorities. This made it easier for communist leaderships to impose their regimes. They were realising changes that were uncontroversial among most people. But it was a class dictatorship of some kind. The truth was blurted out when Dimitrov defined people’s democracy as a new form of the dictatorship of the proletariat!52

 

21. THE YUGOSLAV ROAD

The split between the Soviet Union and communist Yugoslavia caused universal shock. Stalin had dominated world communism for years and could count on the obedience of most communists around the world. The searing dispute of 1948 was different from all previous quarrels in the ‘world communist movement’ inasmuch as it involved two sovereign states. Hardly had communism expanded beyond the frontiers of the Soviet Motherland when a deep fissure opened up. Unitary official communism was at an end.

Yugoslav communist leader Josip Broz Tito was as astonished as everyone else. He was ideologically a proven Stalinist. Son of a peasant family, he was brought up in poverty and left school early. He quickly became a communist. He was just the sort of militant being selected for training in the Moscow party schools before the Second World War. Comintern dispatched him back from Moscow in 1937 to organize the communist party in Yugoslavia, and he retained the Kremlin’s confidence in wartime. By raising a serious revolt against Nazi occupation, he deflected dozens of German army divisions from the eastern front. Tito’s military feats attracted the attention of the British. Emissaries from London were parachuted into Yugoslavia to assess which anti-German armed groups should be given material aid. The decision went in Tito’s favour. Churchill backed the communist partisans and turned a blind eye to their savagery and ideology in the civil war they were conducting against the Chetniks of Draa Mihailovi (who fought to expel the Wehrmacht from Serbian soil) and the Croat Ustashas (who held power by Nazi sanction). The communists were unusual in emphasising a commitment to ending inter-ethnic strife: they stood for a multinational federation. By October 1944 the Red Army of the USSR acting in alliance with Tito and the partisans had taken Belgrade. This was an achievement from which the German forces never recovered in Yugoslavia.

The wartime relationship between the British government and Yugoslav communism was a marriage of convenience. In summer 1945 British Labour leader Clement Attlee, newly elected as Prime Minister, objected to the policies of Tito’s regime. Likewise Tito, with Stalin’s support, took no notice of the deal done between Stalin and Churchill in Moscow in 1944 whereby the USSR would share an equal interest in Yugoslavia with the Western Allies.1 At the same time, however, Soviet officials were concerned that Yugoslav communist propaganda glorified Tito on a level with Stalin:² there was room for only one divinity in the world’s Marxist movement.

Meanwhile Tito ripped out the pockets of Ustasha and Chetnik resistance after the communist victory in the civil war. As many as a quarter of a million people perished in mass shootings, death marches and abusive treatment in concentration camps in the first couple of years after the Second World War.³ No political activity outside the Popular Front was allowed. Religious organisations were hounded. Communists persecuted the Catholic Church in Croatia since its priests had supported the Ustashas and the German occupation. The Moslems were harassed in Bosnia and their mosques and Koranic schools were shut down.⁴ Tito despised the slowness of communisation elsewhere in eastern Europe, and the Yugoslavs criticised this at the first conference of Cominform in September 1947.⁵ They also demanded the inclusion of Trieste in Yugoslavia as the price of their acquiescence in any European peace settlement. Trieste, though, was largely an Italian-inhabited city. The fact that Tito’s standpoint was an electoral embarrassment to the Italian Communist Party did not inhibit him – and initially he had Stalin on his side in the diplomatic wrangle with the government in Rome. It seemed that Stalinist faith was alive and well in Belgrade and that Tito was its vicar.

Stalin was not totally content but kept the Yugoslav comrades as bloodhounds to be turned on any European communists who failed to exhibit sufficient revolutionary ardour. The breaking point came over politics in the Balkans. In January 1948 Tito thought of sending Yugoslav troops to repel a possible Greek incursion into southern Albania. Stalin rebuked him for ignoring the danger of a British intervention. The last thing wanted by the Kremlin was armed conflict among the world’s great powers. If tensions increased with the West, in any case, Stalin wanted personal control of international communist policy. He ordered the preparation of a memorandum reprimanding the Yugoslavs for disregarding the USSR’s position as a global power. Allegedly they aimed to dominate the Balkans. They did not adhere to Marxism-Leninism. Why, Tito had mentioned Marx only once in the past three years and had never referred to Stalin!⁶ The Yugoslav leadership had made trouble over Trieste and interfered in the fraternal communist politics of Bulgaria, Albania and now even Greece. Stalin had until recently supported the idea of a Balkan Federation;7 but he came to the conclusion that Tito would exploit such a project to dominate these other countries. And while talking big about communism, Tito had underestimated the menace of the kulak in the countryside. According to the memorandum, he and his comrades were not genuine Marxists.⁸

Tito, however, stood his ground and called the USSR’s bluff – and he had the support of his Central Committee. This emboldened him to tell the Soviet adviser to Belgrade:

We consider that on a series of questions we’re . . . not worse than others who’ve tried to criticise us – and not only to criticise us but to deliver lectures to us. I have in mind the Hungarians, Romanians and Czechs. Do we really have more capitalistic elements than they have? Do they really have fewer kulaks than we do?⁹

Stalin’s démarche was a spectacular failure. Yugoslav communism was going to be a product made at home and foreign interference would be resisted.

After probing whether the Moscow–Belgrade scission was reparable, Tito went over to the attack. When his propaganda overseer Milovan Djilas drafted a newspaper article criticising Stalin, Tito at first spiked it but then changed his mind: ‘Good. Let it stand. We’ve spared Stalin long enough.’¹⁰ Yet Tito also went on installing a communist order remarkably similar to the USSR’s. A wild campaign was initiated in 1949 to collectivise agriculture. The same peasantry which had recently received individual smallholdings was forced into ‘peasant–worker co-operatives’ (SRZ). When the Bosnian Moslems put up stout resistance, the police and armed forces suppressed them.¹¹ Many party members, including leaders such as Andrija Hebrang and Sreten Žujovi, were expelled from the ranks on suspicion of pro-Soviet leanings; Hebrang was among the 16,000 put under arrest.¹² Tito and his grim security chief Aleksandar Rankovi informally agreed to expand the system of prison camps for ‘socially useful labour’. Conditions of detention were sometimes worse than in the USSR. Guards at the Bare Island camp in the north Adriatic got the inmates to beat up prisoners newly arrived from the mainland. The barbarity was systematic.¹³

The Yugoslav leaders soon revised their approval of Stalin’s industrial and agricultural methods. Quite apart from causing millions of deaths, the ultra-centralised administrative system generated obstructiveness and a lack of initiative at lower levels of the economy right down to the workers and peasants. Politburo member and Planning Commission chairman Boris Kidri was among the last to recognise this. He received progress reports every twenty-four hours from all the country’s factories and building sites: ‘Not even the Russians have managed that – they get only monthly reports. Two truckloads a day!’ It was pointed out to him that his staff lacked the time and expertise to process the incoming information. Rather than improving on Soviet procedures, Kidri was clogging the channels of production. But then he saw the light: ‘You know, those daily reports from every enterprise are the purest bureaucratic idiocy – a hopeless job.’14

Debate began about how to introduce a looser economic system than the Soviet stereotype. Yugoslavia’s communists intended ‘to create Marx’s free association of producers’. De facto decollectivisation was announced in March 1953. The compulsion for youth to carry out physical labour was revoked. Industry was reformed as the government, while retaining ownership of enterprises, set up schemes of ‘workers’ self-management’ from June 1950. Local councils gained some freedom to set their own budgets. The rationale was to enable city councillors, factory managers and the workers themselves to acquire a firm material interest in raising productivity. Meanwhile the peasant–worker co-operatives in the countryside provided farm labourers with a share of any profits accruing from a rise in productivity. The communist leadership hoped to avoid that spirit of popular resentment which pervaded the USSR.¹⁵ The purpose was explicit. Yugoslavia under communism was going to try to effect a revolutionary transformation without the degree of permanent coercion that was normal under Stalin. Although Tito remained eager to repress his open political enemies, he aimed at a form of communist rule that could win popular support.

Yugoslavia acquired a new constitution in 1946 and declared itself a people’s republic with six federal republics: Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Montenegro, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Macedonia. Two autonomous provinces were created in Serbia; these were Kosovo and Vojvodina. The titular nation of each republic was assured considerable freedom of self-expression within its borders. Provision was made for schools and media in Yugoslavia’s various languages. Despite official atheism, churches and mosques were left standing and in use by believers. The barbarous conflict between Serbs and Croats in the Second World War was to be dispatched to oblivion. Unfortunately the borders could not be drawn with ethno-demographic neatness. Serbs lived throughout Croatia and Croats inhabited parts of Serbia. Bosnia-Herzegovina was a tangled skein of Croats, Serbs and others – and many of its citizens were not Christians but Moslems. Kosovo was treasured by patriotic Serbs as the site of the battle against the Turks in 1389 but was inhabited mainly by Albanians (which is why the status of autonomous province was introduced). Communism claimed to be able to solve enmities better than any other imaginable Yugoslav state system, but old mutual enmities did not die off.

Tito was half-Slovenian, half-Croat. His mixed parentage helped to allay popular concerns. His ability to stand up for the country also assisted. Yugoslavia was friendless in eastern Europe and was agitated by war scares whenever Soviet troop movements took place. When the Korean War broke out in 1950 there was serious worry in Belgrade that Stalin might exploit the moment to invade Yugoslavia. Furthermore, post-war economic regeneration was painfully slow. Yugoslavia needed industrial growth to build up its military capacity, and its people were clamouring for more food, clothing and housing. The Yugoslav leadership looked for foreign partners. Tito made overtures to socialist and social-democratic parties in western Europe. The British Labour Party was sought out, and Attlee this time responded positively.16 The Yugoslav leadership was ceasing to bother about whether its helpers were fellow socialists. The reaction from outside the Warsaw Pact was enthusiastic. Lester Pearson, Canada’s Secretary of State for External Affairs, remarked: ‘I don’t suppose I’ll ever be a communist, but if I were, I’d be a Yugoslav communist.’¹⁷ (Pearson was a Liberal.) The US administration was similarly encouraging since it calculated that Tito was the enemy of the West’s principal enemy and should be treated as a friend regardless of his ideology and repressive practices.

Belgrade received emergency aid to the value of half a billion US dollars in 1949–52 alone.¹⁸ This counteracted the economic siege that Stalin was conducting. Military security was enhanced when countries in western Europe sold arms to Yugoslavia.¹⁹ This brought about the very situation which Stalin had wanted to avoid at all costs: the intrusion of Western capitalism into the communist East. Tito had also to pay a political price. He dropped active support for communist revolution in Greece and gave up his pretensions to Trieste. Greece and Italy were allies of the USA and Yugoslavia had to respect their territorial integrity or else forfeit American assistance.²⁰

The communist party was redesignated so as to distance it from association with the USSR. From 1952 it was called the League of Yugoslav Communists. Along with the change of name went a commitment to political reform. The League was meant to confine itself to discussing and teaching and to stop handing out commands.21 Licence was given to intellectuals to explore the foundations of Marxism. Critiques of Lenin and his policies began to appear. Tito sat back while the discussions proceeded. Unlike the communist leaders who were his contemporaries, he laid no claim to originality as a thinker. The aim was to recapitulate what had been originally intended by Marx and Engels. Looking at the USSR, Yugoslav writers denied that there would ever be ‘a withering away of the state’ in line with Lenin’s predictions in The State and Revolution. The Soviet political and economic system, they contended, was not socialist at all but a regime of ‘state capitalism’.²² The League of Yugoslav Communists claimed that its schemes of political federalism, institutional decentralisation and workers’ self-management constituted a long-overdue return to the sources of the Marxist tradition.

Not every leading communist in Yugoslavia felt comfortable about developments. The ruling group around Tito included Edvard Kardelj, Aleksandar Rankovi and Milovan Djilas. Steadily Djilas moved into opposition. He detested the political cult of Tito, who he thought had degenerated with the holding of supreme office. He also hated the Soviet Union as an oppressive bureaucracy and an imperial bully, and he exceeded even Tito in his willingness to say what he thought about the Kremlin. In 1954 he handed in his party card. In November 1956 he was arrested when Tito started to want to prove that he was committed to a rapprochement with Moscow. Djilas refused to recant his opinion. He went on to write The New Class, one of the most powerful exposures of the separation of communist rulers from the working class in whose name they had made the revolution. What Djilas revealed was not just true about Yugoslavia but applicable to every country where communism held state power.

Stalin’s death had relieved Yugoslavia’s situation as the Party Presidium (as the Politburo was renamed in 1952) in Moscow sought reconciliation with Belgrade. Tito welcomed the overtures of Nikita Khrushchëv, Stalin’s successor; but would not come to terms except as an equal negotiator.²³ He absolutely refused to go to Moscow. Khrushchëv by 1955 was getting impatient and flew with Malenkov to Yugoslavia. There he disgraced himself by telling filthy jokes at banquets and getting hopelessly drunk. Tito deftly pushed the Soviet leadership into accepting Yugoslavia’s right to take its own route to communism. Meanwhile he went about the task of finding other friends in the world. Along with Jawaharlal Nehru and Gamal Abdel Nasser, he helped to form the Non-Aligned Movement which sought to steer a neutral passage between the USSR and the USA. The idea was to protect the interests of the world’s smaller powers, and Tito set himself up as a tribune for the many struggles for national liberation. This made him a rival to Khrushchëv in international diplomacy. Things might soon have deteriorated into yet another rupture between Yugoslavia and the USSR. Events, though, pushed in the opposite direction. The Hungarian Uprising against communism in 1956 scared Tito into political support for the Soviet military invasion. Preservation of the communist one-party state was axiomatic for him. Hungary’s rebels, he thought, deserved to be suppressed.

Official hopes for the Yugoslav economy proved unrealistic. Although output in industry rose by 62 per cent between 1952 and 1956, most of the increase occurred in the capital-goods sector. Consumers grumbled about being neglected. There were also regional discrepancies. The north of the country had benefited from Habsburg rule and was consistently more successful than the ex-Ottoman south.24 Slovenia, Croatia and northern Serbia made their advance while the rest of Yugoslavia moved along at a sluggish pace. Tito cultivated an overarching sense of ‘Yugoslavism’ (Jugoslavenstvo) and strove for a consensual political order and a vibrant economy.²⁵ It anyway made no sense to ignore the south with its abundant mineral resources and its pool of unexploited labour.²⁶ The strains of rulership were immense. No leader of a republic could openly profess a nationalist agenda, but each could do this on the sly by calling for an ever bigger share of the state budget for his republic. What made things worse was the rising power of Serbia. The Serbs ran the officer corps of the Yugoslav armed forces, and police chief Aleksandar Rankovi quietly favoured Serbia’s interests to the detriment of the rest of Yugoslavia.

In 1968 Tito sacked Rankovi from the leadership. Rankovi, the hard man of the Yugoslav Revolution, broke down in tears as he left the meeting but was not much missed even by his friend Kardelj. When Tito discussed his decision about Rankovi, Kardelj surprised him by moaning about having had his private phone tapped for years. Tito snapped: ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ Kardelj replied: ‘I thought you might have ordered it . . .’²⁷

Rankovi’s enforced retirement was accompanied by a change of stance in national and security policy. Concessions were made to the republics. Tito demanded obedience, using his charisma and authority to stabilise the political situation. Kosovo’s cultural and administrative autonomy was enhanced and the Albanians acquired their own university in Pritina.28 Croats, who had been restive, obtained concessions for their republic. Reforms continued in the direction of loosening central economic controls from the 1960s. The fiscal demands of the Yugoslav government were lowered.²⁹ Yet no permanent basic improvement resulted and several problems were left festering. The brightest young workers were leaving for employment in West Germany. The exodus from agriculture left behind an agrarian sector dependent on an ageing workforce.³⁰ Students imitated the rebellious youth of North America and western Europe. In Belgrade they blockaded academic buildings crying: ‘There is no socialism without freedom, no freedom without socialism!’³¹ Yugoslavia was the single country in eastern Europe which looked as if it might be convulsed by a revolt of discontented, anarchic students such as had happened in France and Italy.

Tito alone could stop things getting out of hand when the republican leaderships failed to be even-handed in dealing with their national minorities. He rebuked Croatia’s leaders in 1971 in Zagreb: ‘This time I’m going to speak first. You see that I am very angry. That is why I have summoned you and the meeting won’t last long.’ Mass resignations and sackings followed. In 1972 he turned on the leadership of Serbia and called them to order.³² Yet the seams of the federal system were wearing thin and Tito alone held them together. Into his seventies he still seemed indestructible. The politicians of his generation were dead or no longer active in public life. He was fêted abroad as a leader who had refused to be intimidated by the USSR, and he remained an adornment of the Non-Aligned Movement.

On 4 May 1980 mortality intruded itself when the lion of Yugoslavia – founder of the post-war state and its uninterrupted leader – died. A joke had been doing the rounds:

Question: What’s the difference between Yugoslavia and the USA?

Answer: In the USA you work for forty years and then become president for four; in Yugoslavia you fight for four years and then become president for forty.³³

For a while the republican leaders stuck together, at least when they met in Belgrade. Agreement was reached on a collective presidency. The chair was held on a rotating basis.³⁴ Honour was continually paid to Tito’s memory. Yet he had left an unenviable economic legacy. The foreign debt had grown to 8 per cent of gross domestic product. Willing creditors were getting fewer for eastern Europe.35 Calls started to be voiced for the inception of a multi-party system. National resentments were expressed without the earlier inhibitions. Although the offices of preventive censorship were maintained, dissenting opinions were printed ever more frequently. Industrial stagnation deepened. Agriculture stalled. Nobody any longer believed that the ‘Yugoslav model’ of communism offered a credible rival to capitalist economics. The death of the patriarch aggravated an already critical situation.

The achievements of Yugoslav communism were not negligible. Tito had stood up to the USSR. Even though he would scarcely have lasted without Western economic assistance, his steadfastness was undeniable. He was also genuinely popular. As the acknowledged hero of the struggle for the country’s liberation, he experienced warmth from crowds that every communist ruler in eastern Europe envied. Yugoslavia’s people had the highest standard of living in the region and were the envy of the communist world. Furthermore, Tito’s management of the federal constitution was masterly. Civil war could easily have broken out among the several national and religious groups, but peace and order had prevailed. Citizens of Yugoslavia could travel abroad; indeed the state recognised the benefits of remittances from West Germany and permitted workers to ply their trades there as ‘guest workers’. Belgrade’s television, radio and newspapers had considerable latitude to criticise abuses of power. Food and clothing were more diverse than in other communist states. Rural households got on with life with little heed for what the government decreed.

Yet this was hardly the kind of society which had been aimed at by the comrades-in-arms before 1945, and dissenters like the ex-Marxist Djilas and the questing Marxist philosopher Mihaylov saw reality more clearly than Tito’s foreign groupies – from the Fourth International to the film stars Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor – who rendered him homage. The League of Communists ran a one-party state. Although Tito allowed wider scope for dissent than was the norm in eastern Europe, he clamped down on the slightest objection to communism. The economy was falling into a shambles long before his death: workers’ self-management was code for mismanagement. Indigenous research and development was negligible. National hostilities were barely disguised and resentment of Serbian power inside the Yugoslav state was intense. People knew a lot about conditions in western Europe. Financial assistance from abroad was what kept the budget afloat. Communism as an ideology touched few hearts; there no longer existed much sense of progress obtained or obtainable in communist Yugoslavia. Travelling out to West Germany in search of work, the ‘guest workers’ from Yugoslavia wrote home about the attractions abroad. The gap in freedom, comfort and expectancy between Balkan communism and the West’s liberal and capitalist democracies was wider than ever.36

 

22. WESTERN EUROPE

While the Soviet Bloc was being established in eastern Europe, the fraternal communist parties in most countries of the West adapted themselves to an open existence. From Greece to France there was a sustained spasm of activity in 1944–5 as liberation from Nazi occupation was achieved. The exceptions in western Europe were Spain and Portugal, where the fascist regimes of General Franco and Dr Salazar continued to ban communist parties and imprison their dwindling number of militants. Dolores Ibárruri – known as La Pasionaria – was regularly wheeled out in Moscow, where she had taken refuge after the Spanish civil war, to denounce the trampling of political and civic freedoms throughout the Iberian peninsula.

Liberal democracies had renovated their strategies for governance. Many of them in western Europe were committed to reducing social inequalities, enhancing mass education and increasing state economic ownership and regulation. Welfare provision rose on the public agenda in several countries. The British led the way with a comprehensive scheme for social security and public health. Planning was advocated by political groupings in the region. Having been general practice in all belligerent countries in time of war, it was retained as the key to industrial and agricultural recovery. Trade unions sprouted up. Multi-party democracy and cultural freedom were the norm except on the Iberian peninsula. Religion could be practised with little interference. International co-operation was hailed as a goal; there was constant talk about the need to build a just world.1 The Truman administration was satisfied that governments in western Europe were fostering market economies, facilitating Christian worship and permitting American access to their economies. Above all, such governments were hostile towards communism. British Labour Party politicians such as Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin matched Conservative Party leader Winston Churchill in denouncing communist abuses in the USSR and eastern Europe.

The communist parties were resilient under such pressure. Palmiro Togliatti, after years of Moscow exile, pestered Dimitrov for permission to return to Italy, where Pietro Secchia, soon to be made his party deputy, headed the Italian anti-fascist resistance.2 French communist leader Maurice Thorez too had spent the war in the Soviet capital, while his deputy Jacques Duclos stayed behind to co-ordinate the communist activity in the Maquis – and Thorez was itching to go back to his country. The communists in France, Italy and Greece had joined the anti-Nazi resistance, carrying out sabotage, disruption and killings. Capture by the Germans had meant certain death, usually after frightful torture. They put themselves forward in 1945 as champions of their liberated peoples.

They pointed to the woeful record of the Christian clergy in their countries during the war. The Vatican had colluded with Mussolini and Hitler. French Catholic bishops had supported Marshal Pétain’s puppet regime at Vichy until the moment of its collapse.³ Communists also highlighted the unwillingness of businessmen and conservative politicians to stand up to the Third Reich or to promote fundamental social reform. Official communism in western Europe, drawing down the blind on its advocacy of the Nazi–Soviet pact, claimed to be alone in its capacity to defend the national interest and stave off ‘American imperialism’. (De Gaulle, though, came to power in 1945 intending to arrest Thorez for having deserted from the French army and had to be persuaded to desist.)⁴ They pointed to the corruption in government, commerce and industry since the liberation. They noted that the big companies which had flourished during the German occupation were still prominent. They ridiculed other parties of the political left for colluding with the bourgeoisie and painted a bleak picture of the future unless the countries of western Europe ceased to dally with capitalism. The struggle against fascism was not enough: there had to be a total transformation of political, economic and social conditions.

By the end of the war there were already communist ministers in the coalition governments of France, Italy, Belgium, Finland and Denmark. Thorez and Togliatti had agreed their future policy with Soviet leaders before setting off home. Stalin talked at length with Togliatti in March 1944 and with Thorez in November.⁵ Information brought through from their countries was complex and fluid; and Stalin, Molotov and Dimitrov accepted, however reluctantly, that they had to rely on analysis and advice from the refugee communist leaders. At the same time both Thorez and Togliatti understood that the Kremlin was constrained by the USSR’s interests and especially by the need to avoid a rupture with the western Allies; they also knew that they would require Soviet support for the foreseeable future – and as old Comintern hands they never questioned the desirability of world communist unity. The discussions produced an agreed line of action. Togliatti’s instinct was to go for radical policies such as abolishing the monarchy and separating Church and state; but Togliatti and Thorez accepted Stalin’s advice to avoid overestimating their own strength.6 Stalin wished also to assure Roosevelt and Churchill that he had no desire to cause undue trouble in Europe’s western half at a time when he wanted them to keep their noses out of his business in the east. He even ordered communists to avoid displaying any ‘excess of zeal’ in defence of the Soviet Union.⁷

Togliatti arrived in Salerno on 27 March 1944 and urged the Italian Communist Party to compromise on its previous objectives. This was a hard message to deliver. Communists in Italy were confident in their ability to advance on power. They had armed groups. They saw no political group in the country which rivalled them as potential mobilisers of popular opinion. They wanted a strategy of dynamic direct action. Instead Togliatti told them that hopes of a communist-led insurrection should be put aside. A ‘national road to socialism’ had to be found. A ‘new party’ (partito nuovo) had to be built through mass recruitment, and the small underground party would be no more. This would involve a focus on getting communist candidates elected to parliament and on gaining places in a coalition ministry. Alliance with Christian Democracy in government should not be excluded. Conflict with the Catholic Church should be avoided and the campaign against the monarchy suspended. Togliatti wanted the communists to gain recognition as the country’s genuine patriots. In this way he hoped to win over those segments of society which had always been hostile to his party.

The French Communist Party took the same line. Thorez stated: ‘Production is today the highest form of class duty, of the duty of Frenchmen.’ He said this to a meeting of miners in the French north who had hoped he would lead them on strikes and demonstrations.⁸ Not all communists approved of the compromises. Many militants who had fought in the anti-German resistance were itching to take up arms again. Secchia in Italy indicated, if only to leading comrades, his wish to switch policy back to insurrection.⁹

The results for Thorez and Togliatti were at first impressive. The French communists emerged from the August 1945 elections as the largest party, albeit without achieving an absolute majority. The result, however, was not a communist-led government. De Gaulle as President refused their demand for ministerial posts in foreign policy, defence and security in the ensuing coalition. Thorez was entrusted merely with the public administration portfolio.10 Although De Gaulle resigned in January 1946, distrust of communist intentions persisted. Thorez fought on. His party was again the largest in the November 1946 elections. The socialist Paul Ramadier became Prime Minister, this time with Thorez as his deputy. It looked as though the ‘parliamentary road’ was a rewarding one for communists to travel. But Thorez was soon disappointed. The communist ministers were sacked from the cabinet in May 1947 and a fresh coalition was put together as the socialists sought political and financial assistance from the USA. When the First Conference of Cominform criticised the French Communist Party for its lack of revolutionary zeal, Jacques Duclos accepted the criticism without mentioning that his comrades had been toeing Moscow’s line at the time. (No one worried much about his feelings: Duclos had acted as the Soviet party leadership’s stooge in denouncing American communist leader Earl Browder in 1945 and setting up the situation which resulted in his expulsion from the party.)¹¹

In the Italian elections of April 1948 the communists and the Christian Democrats lined up against each other as the two most popular parties. It had been a brutal campaign which Togliatti expected to win in alliance with other parties of the left; indeed his main worry was about what to do if the enemies of communism tried to overturn the result. Should the communist party organise an uprising? The strong advice from Moscow was that Togliatti should do no such thing.¹² The USSR obviously could not afford yet another complication in its relations with the West. Meanwhile the USA was active behind the scenes, showering Alcide De Gasperi and the Christian Democrats with financial support. The Americans also promised to return Trieste to Italy in the event of a non-communist government being formed, and they threatened to cut off Marshall Plan aid in the event of a communist electoral victory. US forces were secretly kept in readiness to intervene if the voting went the wrong way.¹³

The Italian communists failed to shrug off the Christian Democrats’ accusation that they were Stalin’s errand boys – even Umberto Terracini, a leading party veteran, upbraided Togliatti for automatically obeying orders from the Kremlin. (Terracini was cajoled into recanting his criticism.)¹⁴ The Vatican pitched in with vitriolic attacks on atheistic communism; Pope Pius XII branded anyone voting for ‘parties and powers that deny God’ as ‘a deserter and a traitor’. The arrival of American ships with food supplies was broadcast on cinema newsreels. The government did everything to discredit and disrupt the communists short of banning them. The election was contested fiercely but without violence. Togliatti had formed a coalition for the campaign with the Italian Socialist Party under Pietro Nenni to fight the campaign, and they banged their drum about the problems of unemployment, poverty and social inequality yet to be tackled. The outcome stayed in doubt until polling day itself. In fact the Christian Democrats won 48.5 per cent of the votes; this was not quite an absolute majority but De Gasperi could celebrate a triumph. The alliance of communists and socialists took only 31 per cent and De Gasperi formed a coalition of the parties of the centre and the centre-right; he dispensed entirely with the communists.

From that moment until the self-abolition of the Italian Communist Party in 1991 no Italian government allowed communists into coalition. Italy entered NATO at its formation in 1949, choosing an orientation towards the USA and the West. The same was true of France until the return to power of Charles de Gaulle as President in 1958. (De Gaulle withdrew his country from NATO’s military structure in 1966 but continued to co-operate with the Americans behind the veil of assertive rhetoric.)

Togliatti, though, toured the great cities of north and south, affirming the party’s resolve to find a way to come to power. He rejected the request of ‘dear comrade Stalin’ to leave Rome and head the Cominform.15 Having escaped his cage in the USSR, he was not going to re-enter voluntarily. In July 1948 he experienced mortal danger in Italy when a student approached him and his companion Nilde Jotti and shot him in the chest. The party blamed the government and organised protest demonstrations. A general strike was called. Rumours grew that the communist leadership would organise an insurrection in reaction to the assassination attempt. Fortunately Togliatti made a quick recovery and he ordered his followers to avoid any wild action. ‘Calm down,’ he ordered. ‘Don’t lose your heads!’ The communists became the largest opposition party at successive elections in the decades ahead. Despite being criticised at the First Conference of Cominform, Italian communists continued to prioritise staying within the constitution, but they were not what they seemed. Although they raised funds from members, they also begged for and received secret subsidies from Moscow.¹⁶ They maintained a clandestine apparatus, supervised by Pietro Secchia, for any potential emergency when the government might seek to suppress the party. Togliatti planned for the worst while concentrating on progress by electoral means.

His worries that his party might be suppressed were not unusual at the time. John Gollan, Assistant General Secretary of the Communist Party of Great Britain, in a conversation with an unnamed visitor in 1948 compared the United Kingdom unfavourably with the Soviet Union. Most people in the USSR, he asserted, had ‘never seen a secret policeman and never would’. The visitor retorted: ‘But there is no beating here or secret executions!’ Gollan was unmoved: ‘No, because there is no need for executions yet. But one day there will be.’ Asked to justify his analysis, he told the story of a man he knew in south Wales who ‘was knocked down by a policeman and kicked about a bit’.17

Most Western governments in fact avoided violence in holding down their communists. There was recognition in Italy and France that outright suppression would provoke civil war, and the communist parties undeniably had huge support in both countries. Propaganda was intensified against Marxism, the USSR and the links between the Kremlin and European communist parties.¹⁸ Surveillance was increased. Schemes were devised for military action in the event that communists looked likely to come to office.¹⁹ American assistance for economic recovery was openly supplied through the Marshall Plan. But Washington also used covert techniques and poured its funds into Europe to support anti-communist parties. In the three decades from 1948 the CIA pumped in about sixty-five million dollars – and this total does not include money made available from private sources.²⁰ This called for a competing reaction from the USSR. The Italian Communist Party had always received funds from Moscow. These increased with Togliatti’s return to open politics. Couriers moved regularly between Moscow and Rome and a special section was attached to the Italian communist apparatus to launder the American currency.²¹ Italy and France were the key targets for Soviet subversion and for the USA to retain under its hegemony.

Stalin was probing ways to enhance the USSR’s influence in western Europe short of provoking a world war. Contrary to widely held belief, he did not feel bound by agreements made at Tehran, Yalta and Potsdam; he frequently tested the will of the USA, Britain and France. An early example was the situation in Greece. As the German forces withdrew in October 1944, the Greek Communist Party found its armed force – ELAS – subordinated to the British army with Moscow’s consent.²² But the Greek Communist Party soon opted for insurgency. Clashes occurred between the communists and the British together with the forces of the new British-backed Greek government. Stalin at the time, however, needed to keep good relations with the United Kingdom for strategic reasons, and he was annoyed with the Greek comrades for not having consulted him.23 Without outside help, the Greek Communist Party did not succeed and the revolt petered out. Then Stalin changed his mind, hoping to play off the Americans and the British over Greece. To this end he was happy that party leader Nikos Zachariadis should bait the government politically. Communists accused ministers of promoting ‘monarcho-fascism’; they also charged the British with wishing to dominate the whole Mediterranean.²⁴

By 1946 they were eager to resume armed struggle. The headstrong Zachariadis pursued his personal line, exposing himself to lively debate among fellow party leaders.²⁵ He needed support from communist states for military equipment, and he gained the desired consent on his trips to Belgrade, Prague and Moscow. The plan was to conquer the villages of Greece in an unobtrusive campaign which would avoid an early intervention by the British.²⁶ But Stalin changed his mind yet again and advised emphasis on political measures rather than the armed struggle.²⁷ Tito and the Yugoslavs, however, continued to render material assistance and advice to the Greek communists. Having won their own civil war, they thought the comrades in Athens could do the same and spread communist rule to the shores of the Aegean. Stalin reverted to a militant stance after the announcement of the Marshall Plan and ceased trying to restrain the Greek Communist Party. Soviet military equipment was covertly rushed to Greece.²⁸ A provisional revolutionary government was proclaimed. But it became clear that the Greek communists as well as their Yugoslav sympathisers had exaggerated their strength and potential. Stalin had been misled, and called for an end to the uprising in Greece.²⁹

What counted for Stalin was the fact that the enemy had vastly superior power in the Mediterranean region. He wanted to prevent the Western powers from being tempted to make incursions into Albania.³⁰ Eastern Europe was sacrosanct for him; he was determined to keep what had been won for the USSR by his armed forces. Pointless heroics and lost causes held no attraction for him and he expected the world communist movement to accept his judgement without demur.³¹ The Kremlin would have been delighted if Greece had gone communist. But it was not to be and Stalin demanded that other communist parties should accept this denouement.

The Yugoslav communists objected to Stalin’s change of policy. They were not alone. Bulgarian communist leader Traicho Kostov too urged that Soviet aid be sent to the Greek insurrectionaries.32 This had baleful consequences for the Soviet–Yugoslav relationship; it also brought doom on Kostov, who was executed with Stalin’s connivance at the end of 1948. Stalin himself wobbled on the Greek question in the following months: he was still tempted to back the insurrection or at least to cause trouble for the ‘Anglo-Americans’ in Greece.³³ But then he ordered the communists under Nikos Zachariadis and Markos Vafiadis to end the civil war. Zachariadis and Vafiadis were loyal Stalinists who took Stalin’s side when the split between the USSR and Yugoslavia occurred. Yet, despite being deprived of supplies from Moscow, they refused to stop fighting royalist forces which had abundant assistance from the Americans. Communist measures in the mountains grew desperate. Hostages were taken. Terror-massacres were perpetrated and mass forcible conscription of adolescents was introduced. Suspect villages were razed to the ground. Torture and butchery prevailed on both sides in the war. But the communist insurgency stood no chance. By the end of 1949 the communist revolt had been crushed and the remnants of the anti-government forces fled to Albania.

The vengeance against the Greek communists was ferocious. The government had sequestered the bleak island of Makronisos as a prison colony. Supposedly it was a centre for rehabilitation. Instead the communist convicts were forced to live in tents and went hungry and thirsty most of their time. They were regularly tortured. When their spirit was broken they were forced to enlist in the armed forces and fight against their former comrades. Recalcitrant individuals were put before firing squads. Communists remained in prison long after the end of the civil war. Makronisos rivalled Franco’s penal settlements after his military victory in Spain in the degree of brutality meted out to communist suspects. It was the worst instance of atrocities against communism in western Europe in the second half of the twentieth century.

Stalin’s goading of the French and Italian communists ceased within months of the First Cominform Conference. Recriminations were halted against leading comrades in western Europe. At the Second and Third Conferences of Cominform, in June 1948 and November 1949, the Soviet representatives were exercised primarily by the Yugoslav question. Stalin’s more sober attitude was reflected in his handling of the Communist Party of Great Britain. Its new programme, The British Road to Socialism, was published in 1951. This came out as a pamphlet which, according to the Executive Committee, proved that the party was not under Moscow’s thumb. British communists denied wishing to reconstruct the country on the model of the USSR. They dropped ‘communism’ and the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ from their stated objectives. Their current aim was basic social and economic reform and they would campaign for this in parliamentary elections and by other peaceful means. They argued that only they could bring this about and that the Labour Party was merely the left wing of the Conservative Party. They presented themselves as the sole British party striving after international peace. They even claimed to have been libelled as aiming at the destruction of the British Empire; their aim, they claimed, was to reorganise relations between Britain and its colonies on a ‘democratic’ basis.34

British communist independence, however, was a fiction. Stalin vetted the draft and deftly amended its contents. At a time of war in Korea and political show trials in eastern Europe he reserved time to edit the programme of a communist party that stood no chance of achieving power. At best this would be a nuisance to the British political establishment. But co-ordination and subordination were required in the world communist movement and no exceptions could exist. Harry Pollitt, who had again become General Secretary in 1941, took his thoughts to Moscow before the document appeared. Stalin instigated revisions which stressed that the party was committed to its programme for the long term. Pollitt, who often shuttled about on foreign trips, told hardly anyone exactly where ‘his’ ideas had come from. He therefore had a hard job persuading the austere Stalinist Rajani Palme Dutt of the desirability of changing the party’s long-term programme. But Pollitt wore down his Executive Committee. He got for Moscow what Stalin had demanded; and had Stalin not taken the initiative, the British comrades – it is now clear – would never have dreamed of issuing The British Road to Socialism. (The evidence of Pollitt’s subservience did not come to light for another forty years.)³⁵

Meanwhile Togliatti in Italy was not in the best position to refute the charge that the Kremlin lorded it over him. It was difficult to convince anyone but fellow party members that Trieste, the Italian-inhabited city on the north coast of the Adriatic, should pass to Yugoslavia. Togliatti also hated being asked by the party’s enemies why Italian POWs in the USSR – usually unwilling conscripts of Mussolini – should remain in captivity. The Italian and French communist leaderships did not help themselves by repeating that Stalin was the leader of the ‘democratic’, ‘peace-loving’ camp in world politics and ‘the leader of progressive humanity’.36 They worked hard to propose a positive case for communism; but on the brink of Italy’s 1948 elections the Hungarian communist leader Mátyás Rákosi told the Italian comrades he was going to lend them a hand by executing some Catholic clerics on charges of financial speculation. ‘Tell him’, Togliatti ordered, ‘that nothing [like that] should be done!’³⁷ Togliatti also refused to oppose Italy’s attendance at the Paris meeting in July 1947 to discuss the USA’s proposals for the Marshall Plan. He and the communist party leadership had to give the impression of having ‘an independent position’.³⁸

Togliatti was schizophrenic about the USSR. He regarded it as the great model of contemporary communism and ceaselessly spoke up for it. This came out in ways great and small. He asked Soviet leaders to invite the Italian football team to Moscow and give them a thrashing on the field of play: ‘Our gladiators strut around like peacocks too much and a lesson would be very useful for them!’³⁹ His argument – hardly that of an astute soccer fan – was that this would increase the USSR’s popularity in Italy. The Italian Communist Party under his leadership showed unfading loyalty to Moscow even though he had lost friends and associates, including fellow Italians, in the Great Terror. He was directly acquainted with the grotesque conditions in the Soviet Union. When he flew out of Moscow with his partner Nilde Jotti, he gasped to her: ‘Free at last!’⁴⁰ And he never returned until after Stalin’s death.⁴¹ Ana Pauker, a Romanian communist leader who spent the war years in the Soviet capital, put the matter in a neat aphorism: ‘To Moscow whenever you please, from Moscow whenever they let go of you.’⁴²

Meanwhile the American authorities appreciated – as they had done after the First World War – that communist appeal grew in direct proportion to shortages in food, shelter, employment and chances of individual and collective betterment. As economic recovery got under way, Soviet rhetoric about Europe’s ‘economic enslavement’ cut little ice and Togliatti and Thorez were regarded by most people as Moscow’s caged parrots.⁴³ Also important was the will of European governments and elites to press forward in the same direction. In western Europe, in contrast with countries to the east, the communist parties faced fierce competition from socialists. Communism had no monopoly in promoting the need for mass education, popular welfare and a commitment to ‘progress’ and an end to social privilege. It is true that material conditions were grim for several years after the war. Even in the United Kingdom, a victorious power, the government had to pursue policies of austerity. But there was also room for fun. Whereas the authorities in eastern Europe were trampling on the arts and restricting freedom, to the west there was a cultural extravaganza. Entertainment catered for high and low tastes. Who in Poland wanted to read contemporary Soviet novels? Who in the United Kingdom or Italy did not flock to the American musicals, crooners and, by the mid-1950s, rock-’n’-rollers?

People in the West valued their privacy after the wartime rigours. They were free to choose their religion, politics, hobbies and recreation and could close their door on the state. Word got about that things were not the same in eastern Europe. Communist parties continued to fight in elections and to recruit new and eager party members. They conserved the hope of gaining national power even if the immediate prospects were far from being wonderful. In France and Italy the communists maintained a serious challenge to the government. They had large followings. They were effective spokesmen for the radical sections of the labour movement. They were vocal critics of the USA, NATO and European imperialism. But they were running into the wind. Too many people knew what was happening to eastern Europe and China as they underwent communisation. Western Europe was too successful in its economic, social and political regeneration. Its communist parties did not lose their great opportunities after 1945. The reality was that their opportunities were never great.