Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (31 page)

To implement the new approach, Stalin called a meeting in Szklarska Poręba, in Poland, for late September 1947. Invited to take part were the Communist parties of Poland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, France, Italy and of course the Soviet Union. The ostensible purpose of the meeting was to establish the ‘Cominform’—the Communist Information Bureau: a successor to the Communist International whose task would be to ‘coordinate’ international Communist activity and improve communication between Moscow and the satellite parties. But the real goal of both the meeting and the Cominform (which only ever met three times and was disbanded in 1956) was to re-establish Soviet dominion within the international movement

Just as he had done within the Bolshevik Party itself twenty years before, Stalin set out to penalize and discredit the ‘rightist’ deviation. At Szklarska Poręba the French and Italian representatives were subjected to patronizing lectures on revolutionary strategy from the Yugoslav delegates Edvard Kardelj and Milovan Djilas, whose exemplary ‘leftism’ was singled out for praise by Zdanov and Malenkov, the Soviet delegates. The Western Communists (along with the representatives of the Czech and Slovak Parties for whom the criticism was clearly intended as well) were taken quite by surprise. Peaceful co-existence, of the kind they had been pursuing in domestic politics, was at an end. An ‘anti-imperialist democratic camp’ (in Zdanov’s words) was forming and a new line was to be followed. Henceforth Moscow expected Communists to pay closer attention and subordinate local considerations to Soviet interests.

Following Szklarska Poręba, Communists everywhere switched to confrontational tactics: strikes, demonstrations, campaigns against the Marshall Plan and—in eastern Europe—acceleration of the take-over of power. The Central Committee of the French Communist Party met in Paris on October 29th-30th 1947 and officially inaugurated a campaign of denigration directed at their erstwhile Socialist allies. The Italian Communists took a little longer to make the switch, but at its January 1948 Congress the Partito Communista Italiano (PCI) too adopted a ‘new course’, whose focus was to be ‘the struggle for peace’. The western European Communists certainly suffered as a consequence—they were marginalized in domestic affairs and in the Italian case lost heavily in the April 1948 general elections, in which the Vatican and the US Embassy intervened massively on the antiCommunist side.
³⁸
But it didn’t matter. In Zdanov’s ‘two camps’ theory, Communists in the Western camp were now consigned to a secondary, spoiler role.

It might be thought that the Yugoslavs’ hyper-revolutionism, hitherto an impediment to Stalin’s diplomacy, would now be an asset—and so it had seemed at Szklarska Poręba, where the Yugoslav Party had been given the starring role. Certainly the French, Italian and other delegates never forgave the Yugoslavs for their condescending air of superiority and privilege at Szklarska Poręba: following the Soviet-Yugoslav split Communists everywhere were only too pleased to condemn the ‘Tito-ist deviation’ and needed little Soviet encouragement to pour obloquy and scorn upon the disgraced Balkan comrades.

Instead, however, the Tito-Stalin rift was publicly initiated by Stalin’s condemnation of the Balkan Federation idea in February 1948 and the Soviet cancellation of trade negotiations, followed by the recall from Belgrade of Soviet military and civilian advisers the following month. It was pursued through a series of formal communications and accusations in which both sides claimed the best of intentions, and culminated in Tito’s refusal to attend the forthcoming second Cominform conference. The split was then consummated at that conference, on June 28th 1948, with a formal resolution expelling Yugoslavia from the organization for its failure to acknowledge the leading role of the Red Army and the USSR in the country’s liberation and socialist transformation. Officially, Belgrade was charged with conducting a nationalist foreign policy and pursuing incorrect domestic policies. In fact, Yugoslavia represented the international equivalent of a ‘left opposition’ to Stalin’s monopoly of power and a conflict was inevitable: Stalin needed to break Tito in order to make very clear to Tito’s fellow Communists that Moscow would brook no dissent.

Tito, of course, was not broken. But both he and his country were more vulnerable than they seemed at the time, and without growing Western backing Tito would have been hard put to survive the Soviet economic boycott—in 1948 46 percent of Yugoslav trade was with the Soviet bloc, a figure that was reduced to 14 percent one year later—and credible threats of Soviet intervention. The Yugoslavs certainly paid a high rhetorical price for their opinionated actions. In the course of the next two years Cominform attacks were steadily ratcheted up. In the well-oiled lexicon of Leninist abuse, Tito became ‘Judas Tito and his abettors’, ‘the new Czar of the Pan-Serbs and of the entire Yugoslav bourgeoisie’. His followers were ‘despicable traitors and imperialist hirelings’, ‘sinister heralds of the camp of war and death, treacherous warmongers and worthy heirs of Hitler’. The Yugoslav Communist Party was condemned as a ‘gang of spies, provocateurs and murderers’, ‘dogs tied to American leashes, gnawing imperialist bones and barking for American capital’.

It is significant that the attacks on Tito and his followers coincided with the full flowering of the Stalinist personality cult and the purges and show trials of the coming years. For there is little doubt that Stalin truly did see in Tito a threat and a challenge, and feared his corrosive effect on the fealty and obedience of other Communist regimes and parties. The Cominform’s insistence, in its journals and publications, on the ‘aggravation of the class struggle in the transition from capitalism to socialism’ and on the ‘leading role’ of the Party risked reminding people that these had been precisely the policies of the Yugoslav Party since 1945. Hence the accompanying emphasis on loyalty to the Soviet Union and Stalin, the rejection of all ‘national’ or ‘particular’ roads to Socialism and the demand for a ‘redoubling of vigilance’. The second Stalinist ice age was beginning.

If Stalin went to such trouble to assert and re-assert his authority in eastern Europe, it was in large measure because he was losing the initiative in Germany.
³⁹
On June 1st 1948 the Western Allies, meeting in London, announced plans to establish a separate West German state. On June 18th a new currency, the
Deutsche Mark
, was announced; three days later it was placed in circulation (the banknotes had been printed in great secrecy in the US and transported to Frankfurt under US Army escort). The old
Reichsmark
was withdrawn, with every German resident entitled to exchange just forty of them for the new marks at a 1:1 ratio, thereafter at a ratio of 10:1. Initially unpopular (because it destroyed savings, pushed up real prices and put goods beyond most people’s reach) the currency was quickly accepted, as stores filled up with goods that farmers and traders were now willing to sell at fixed prices for a reliable medium of exchange.

On June 23rd, the Soviet authorities responded by issuing a new, East German
Mark
and cutting the rail lines linking Berlin to western Germany (three weeks later they would close the canals as well). The following day the Western military government in Berlin blocked Soviet efforts to extend the new Eastern zone currency to West Berlin—an important point of principle, since the city of Berlin was under four-power rule and the Western zone had not hitherto been treated as part of Soviet-occupied eastern Germany. As the Soviet troops tightened their control over surface connections into the city, the American and British governments decided upon an airlift to provision their own zones and on June 26th the first transport plane landed at Tempelhof airfield in (West) Berlin.

The Berlin airlift lasted until May 12th 1949. Over those eleven months the Western allies shipped some 2.3 million tons of food on 277,500 flights, at the cost of the lives of 73 Allied airmen. Stalin’s purpose in blockading Berlin was to force the West to choose between quitting the city (taking advantage of the absence in the Potsdam protocols of any written guarantee of Allied surface access to it), or else abandoning their plans for a separate West German state. This was what Stalin really wanted—Berlin for him was always a negotiating chip—but in the end he secured neither objective.

Not only did the Western allies hang on to their share of Berlin (somewhat to their own surprise, and to the amazed gratitude of the—West—Berliners themselves), but the Soviet blockade, following hard on the Prague coup, only made them more determined to move ahead with plans for West Germany, just as it made a division of the country more acceptable to Germans themselves. France joined the Bizone in April 1949, creating a single West German economic unit of 49 million inhabitants (against just 17 million in the Soviet Zone)

Like most of Stalin’s diplomatic adventures the Berlin blockade was an improvisation, not part of any calculated aggressive design (though the West could hardly be blamed for not knowing this at the time). Stalin was not about to go to war for Berlin.
⁴⁰
Accordingly, when the blockade failed, the Soviet leader changed tack. On January 31st 1949 he publicly proposed lifting the blockade in exchange for a postponement of plans for a West German state. The Western allies had no intention of making any such concession, but it was agreed to convene a meeting to discuss the matter and on May 12th the Soviet Union ended the blockade in exchange for nothing more than a conference of Foreign Ministers scheduled for May 23rd.

The conference duly took place and lasted for a month, but predictably found no common ground. Indeed it had only just begun when the West German parliamentary council in Bonn formally passed into effect the ‘Basic Law’ establishing a West German government; a week later Stalin responded by announcing plans for a complementary East German state, formally created on October 7th.
⁴¹
By the time the conference broke up, on June 20th, the military government in West Germany had been replaced by High Commissioners from the US, Britain and France. The Federal Republic of Germany had come into being, though the Allies reserved certain powers of intervention and even the right to resume direct rule if they judged it necessary. On September 15th 1949, following his Christian Democratic Party’s success at the elections a month earlier, Konrad Adenauer became the Republic’s first Chancellor.

The Berlin crisis had three significant outcomes. In the first place, it led directly to the creation of two German states, an outcome none of the Allies had sought four years earlier. For the Western powers this had become an attractive and attainable objective; indeed, for all the lip service thenceforth paid to the desirability of German unification, no-one would be in any hurry to see it happen. As the British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan replied to President Charles De Gaulle nine years later, when De Gaulle asked how he felt about a united Germany: ‘In theory. In theory we must always support reunification. There is no danger in that.’ For Stalin, once he appreciated that he could neither compete with the Allies for the allegiance of the Germans nor force them to abandon their plans, a separate East German Communist state was the least bad outcome.

Secondly, the Berlin crisis committed the United States for the first time to a significant military presence in Europe for the indefinite future. This was the achievement of Ernest Bevin, the British Foreign Minister—it was Bevin who successfully urged the Americans to lead the airlift to Berlin, once Truman had been assured by Marshall and General Clay (the US commander in Berlin) that the risk was worth taking. The French were all the less involved in the Berlin crisis because from July 18th to September 10th 1948 the country was in the midst of a political crisis with no clear governing majority in the Assemblée Nationale.

But thirdly, and this followed from the first two, the Berlin crisis led directly to a reappraisal of Western military calculations. If the West was going to protect its German clients from Soviet aggression then it would need to give itself the means to do so. The Americans had stationed strategic bombers in Britain at the start of the Berlin crisis and these were equipped to carry atomic bombs, of which the US had 56 at the time. But Washington had no established policy on the use of atomic bombs (Truman himself was especially reluctant to consider using them) and in the event of a Soviet advance US strategy in Europe still presumed a retreat from the continent.

Central and Eastern Europe after World War Two

The military rethinking began with the Czech coup. In its aftermath Europe entered a period of heightened insecurity, with much talk of war. Even General Clay, not typically given to hyperbole, shared the prevailing fear: ‘For many months, based on logical analysis, I have felt and held that war was unlikely for at least ten years. Within the last few weeks I have felt a subtle change in Soviet attitude which I cannot define, but which now gives me a feeling it may come with dramatic suddenness. ’ It was in this atmosphere that the US Congress passed the Marshall Plan legislation and the European allies signed the Brussels Pact, on March 17th 1948. The Brussels Pact, however, was a conventional 50-Year Treaty binding Britain, France and the Benelux countries to ‘collaborate in measures of mutual assistance in the event of a renewal of German aggression’, whereas European politicians were becoming markedly more aware of their helpless exposure to
Soviet
pressure. In this respect they were as vulnerable as ever: as Dirk Stikker, the Dutch Foreign Minister, would note in retrospect, ‘We in Europe had only a verbal pledge from President Truman of American support.’