The Red Flag: A History of Communism (42 page)

The power and ambitions of the United States were much greater. The Americans were determined to stop a repeat of the 1930s by preventing any one power dominating the whole of Eurasia; isolation, as the war had shown, only allowed enemies to build up their resources and ultimately threaten the United States. A huge network of bases was constructed worldwide, and America showed its technological and military superiority by exploding the atom bomb. America was just about prepared to accept the Soviet domination of the area the Red Army occupied in Eastern Europe, but no more. If the Soviets controlled Western Europe and Japan, they might use their resources to challenge America, just as the Nazis had done.
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Conflicts over many of the Soviet demands strained relations between the United States and the USSR in the course of 1945, but their immediate geopolitical interests were not necessarily incompatible. On the face of it, the informal division of Europe in 1945 could have worked; Stalin won some of his demands and lost others. Truman’s judgement of Stalin at Potsdam – ‘I like Stalin. He is straightforward. Knows what he wants and will compromise when he can’t get it’
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– was being borne out. Stalin was indeed willing to make concessions, pulling troops out of Manchuria and Czechoslovakia.

In 1946, however, relations began to deteriorate more seriously. In part, Stalin’s inconsistency, brinkmanship and opportunism were responsible.
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In attempting to extend Soviet influence in Iran and Turkey, he fuelled suspicion of his motives and his intentions became difficult to predict; the Soviet realization that the United States would not give it aid without imposing political conditions also contributed to tensions. But an important force underlying the change in relations was the ideological nature of the conflict, and the obsession of both sides with what might be called ‘ideological security’ – an anxiety that made peace very unlikely.

Stalin, as has been seen, had been obsessed with this issue for many years, and it appeared especially worrying to him after the War, for the relaxation of ideological controls alongside greater contact with the West had generated expectations of further liberalization as reward for wartime sacrifices. This was something that Stalin, now fearing a possible struggle with the United States, would not permit. For him, liberalism would open the USSR to Western influences, and only a wholly ideologically committed population could resist a Western challenge. In a speech of 9 February 1946, he warned of the possibility of this new struggle. It was a defensive speech, addressed to a domestic audience.
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But American observers interpreted it as a sign of aggressive intent. This in turn triggered anxieties about Soviet subversion and the internal stability of the United States. The deputy head of the American mission
in Moscow, George Kennan, wrote his highly influential ‘Long Telegram’ less than a fortnight after the speech, arguing that Stalin planned to ‘roll back’ American influence through Communist subversion in the West. Stalin, he suggested, might not be an ideological fanatic, but he was a security fanatic; he had a ‘neurotic view of the world affairs’, fuelled by a ‘traditional and instinctive’ Russian sense of insecurity, intensified by Communist ideology and an ‘Oriental secretiveness and conspiracy’. Stalin’s USSR was bound to launch a sustained campaign to destabilize the West, and its main weapon was a network of collaborators within Western Communist parties:

America had to respond by ‘containing’ Soviet power within its current borders, whilst preserving ideological unity and confidence within the United States.

Kennan’s analysis of Stalin’s thinking in early 1946 exaggerated Moscow’s ambitions in Western Europe. Stalin and the Western Communist parties remained committed to Popular Fronts even as relations between the two sides deteriorated. The Soviets did not support the radicals in Greece and were unhappy about Yugoslav pretensions. But the Americans’ anxieties were understandable. From their perspective, Communism was on the march throughout the world – in Europe and Asia. They might not be able to do anything about Eastern Europe, but the USSR had to be contained within its sphere of influence. And as Western Europe suffered from economic collapse after the War, the Truman administration became increasingly worried about the West’s ideological security.
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Conditions in the winter of 1946–7 were bad (though not catastrophically so), and American officials warned that unless the United States provided aid and support, Communists would exploit the disillusionment. According to the newly founded Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in September 1947, ‘the greatest potential danger to U.S. security’ lay in the ‘possibility of the economic collapse of Western Europe and of the consequent accession to power of elements subservient to the Kremlin’.
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Communists were particularly strong in Italy. Once they came to power, it was feared, they would use
the unscrupulous bullying tactics they were employing in Eastern Europe. What the Soviets had failed to achieve by force of arms they might gain by internal subversion.

The new American attitude further strengthened hard-line opinion within the Soviet leadership, including Stalin’s.
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Their suspicions seemed to be borne out when Truman began to challenge Communism in the Western sphere of influence from early 1947, and in the more radical South, this included military force. Congress was asked for aid to Greece and Turkey and the ‘Truman Doctrine’ promised American support for all ‘free peoples’, throughout the world, ‘who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures’.
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In 1948 plans were also made for a military intervention in Italy if the Popular Front won the elections. Secret paramilitary groups were to be supported and Sicily and Sardinia occupied.
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But, in general, the Americans relied on the carrot rather than the stick. In 1946 Kennan himself had described Communism as a ‘malignant parasite which feeds only on diseased tissue’, and which could best be challenged by ‘courageous and incisive measures’ to ‘solve internal problems’.
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This was the principle that lay behind the European Recovery Program, better known as the Marshall Plan, announced in June 1947.

The Marshall planners were learning the lessons of the failures of laissez-faire free markets in the 1920s and nationalistic protectionism in the 1930s. To avoid a new Nazism, Washington elites believed international cooperation and free trade were essential. Also, the prosperity of the United States demanded European, and especially German markets. These economies therefore had to be restored through massive injections of aid, and protectionism resisted. But at the same time, the Marshall planners were trying to reconstruct Western Europe along more leftist lines. Pure free-market capitalism, they were convinced, would only push workers into the arms of the Communists. The working class, which had remained so marginalized and insecure in the 1920s, had to be absorbed into the political system and given higher living standards. The Marshall aiders’ goal was a functioning market economy, but they were convinced that only state regulation and collaboration between labour and capital would create it. They therefore involved trade unions, as well as employers, in the planning; if both capital and labour were committed to growth and high living standards for all, they argued, the old class struggles of the past could be overcome.
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The Marshall Plan was part of a general move towards a more regulated and egalitarian economic system, and at home Truman was determined to expand the welfare benefits of the New Deal, whilst increasing the military preparedness of the United States. The result was a new, massively expanded ‘military-welfare state’.
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Internationally, too, statist principles were to operate in a new financial system established at the Bretton Woods conference of 1944. Efforts were made to return to the global markets of the pre-1914 era, but without unregulated capitalism and the discredited gold standard, which had put so many restrictions on wages and economic growth in the 1920s. The Americans ran a system of fixed exchange rates, with the dollar at the centre, whilst a new institution – the International Monetary Fund (IMF) – was established to help states in temporary financial difficulties. This was, then, a highly controlled system in which states had the whip hand, not private banks. It was remarkably successful in reviving the economies of the ‘West’ (including Japan), but it was founded on an implicit bargain: the United States secured powerful allies in the war against Communism, but at the cost of helping to build up their domestic industries and to compete in world markets. In the longer term, America’s competitors – and especially its former enemies, Germany and Japan – benefited at the superpower’s expense. But immediately after the war, the United States, massively wealthier than the rest of the world, could afford the deal. America was building a set of alliances, the so-called ‘Free World’, strong and wealthy enough to resist Communism.

Marshall Aid was not as important economically as its cheerleaders claimed; nor was the European economic crisis as dire as the Americans thought. But the Plan had a profound political impact. It forced Western Europeans to choose between capitalism and Communism. And it showed that capitalism had changed: it was finally trying to end European social conflict by making serious concessions to the working class. Liberals were now offering an attractive alternative to the Popular Front – a coalition that included reformist socialists but excluded Communists.

The Marshall Plan put all Communists, including the Soviets, on the defensive. They knew it would be popular, but it came with strings attached, and Moscow rightly saw it as a mechanism that would pull Central and Eastern Europe into an American economic sphere of influence. The Americans offered participation to everybody, including the
Russians and East Europeans, and initially Molotov thought that the Soviets might be able to neutralize Marshall Aid, detaching it from American leadership. But when he discovered that this was impossible, he and Stalin concluded that America was determined to destroy Soviet influence in its buffer states.
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The Czechoslovak Popular Front’s enthusiastic reception of the Marshall Plan only proved to Stalin that it was designed to lure East Europeans out of the Soviet camp. The Czechoslovak Communist Prime Minister, Klement Gottwald, was summoned to Moscow and angrily instructed to denounce the Marshall Plan, as were all Communist parties and all other countries under Soviet control (except partitioned Austria).

The Marshall Plan was decisive for Stalin, and convinced him that the emergence of two blocs was unavoidable.
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America, he concluded, was trying to revive German industrial power and use it to build an anti-Soviet coalition in Europe. In response he decided that Soviet security required the sovietization of Central and Eastern Europe. He let local Communists off their leashes, and the Popular Fronts were destroyed, one by one – most dramatically in the ‘Prague coup’ of February 1948, when Gottwald forced Beneš to accept a single-party Communist government. Local Communists had no qualms about abandoning democracy. Jakub Berman justified the Communists’ undemocratic behaviour decades later, when the Communists themselves were being challenged by the Polish Solidarity trade union:

As Berman makes clear, many of the Stalinist leaders were true believers, convinced that the Soviet system was best for their countries. They were eager for the rapid transition to socialism. Most of the new leaders, the ‘little Stalins’ of the new order, had spent a good deal of time in the Hotel Lux and other Comintern establishments: Poland’s Bołeslaw Bierut, Czechoslovakia’s Klement Gottwald, Hungary’s Mátyás Rákosi and Bulgaria’s Vulko Chervenkov – Dimitrov’s brother-in-law – had all spent
long periods in exile in Moscow. Only two were ‘locals’: Romania’s Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, a railway engineer who helped to lead the party from a Romanian prison cell, and the now pro-Soviet Albania’s Enver Hoxha, a teacher educated at the University of Montpellier, forced to become a tobacconist when sacked by the Italian occupying forces.

This group of Communist leaders was joined in October 1949 by Walter Ulbricht, another Hotel Lux resident, who led the new East German state, the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Germany and Austria had been split into occupation zones after the war, and the Americans, British and French had precipitated the formal division of Germany in June 1948 by announcing plans to create a separate West German state out of their zones, introducing a new currency. Stalin had responded by cutting off Berlin – a jointly administered city within the Soviet zone – in an attempt to force the Allies to back down. Between then and the following May the Allies organized a massive airlift to keep West Berlin from starving. But Stalin was ultimately not prepared to go to war and his bullying tactics failed. Germany, the centre of the struggle between classes in the 1920s, by the 1940s had become the cockpit of the struggle between systems.