Norman Stone - The Atlantic and Its Enemies

The German problem went together with others, worldwide. Japan, her capital almost flattened, and two principal cities nuclear ruins, was prostrate; European colonies in south-eastern Asia were hardly governable. Especially, a vast civil war was brewing in China. The Chinese Communists had acquired a solid base, with Soviet help and with captured Japanese weaponry, in Manchuria, and it was traditionally from there that China was conquered. But Stalin was probing in other areas as well. Himself from the Caucasus, he wanted to reassert Russia’s old dominance in the northern Middle East, a dominance that had been lost after the First World War, and he prided himself on restoring the Tsarist empire. It had collapsed, ran the thinking, from backwardness and exploitation by foreigners, with native collaborators. Communism had re-established the empire, and now he aimed at the Istanbul Straits, the most important waterway in the world, Europe’s way to Asia. During the war there had been a British and Russian occupation of Iran, and Soviet troops stayed there. The north of the country was largely Azeri and Kurdish, and Stalin encouraged both elements: Soviet Azerbaidjan, centred on the oil of Baku, was in theory an independent place, but the real Azerbaidjan was mainly in old Persia, and Stalin urged on Azeri nationalism. He did the same with the Kurds of northern Iran, some of whose tribesmen briefly declared a republic. This might have been the nucleus of a Kurdistan that would have taken Turkish territory; and Stalin anyway threatened Turkey, which had entered the war only at the last moment, with an insultingly worded demand for bases, along with a further demand, that the Turks should give back three provinces in the north-east that had once belonged to Tsarist Russia. For the West this was a step too far, the eastern Mediterranean being a very sensitive spot, and it was over Turkey that the first Cold War crisis came up. In spring 1946 the Americans sent warships to the Straits, and Stalin, his hands already full with Germany, backed off.

The Communist takeover of what came to be known as ‘eastern Europe’ was becoming a fact, and the process was very ugly indeed: a blanket tyranny was falling on countries that had already been semi-wrecked by the war. In the Soviet zone, there had been an orgy of killing and rape; the concentration camps themselves were still open, sometimes for Germans quite innocent of involvement with Nazism; and in some countries liberated by the Red Army, there were outright massacres. Later on, ‘Yalta’ became a code-word for the willingness of the Western Allies to consign half of Europe to Stalin.

Churchill had agreed in 1944 that the British would take scant interest in the fate of Romania or Bulgaria, but he wanted security in the eastern Mediterranean above all, and that meant Greece, or, to some extent, Yugoslavia. The latter occupied a strategic position on the Adriatic, and in the war the British had been the essential element in supplying arms to the Communist partisans who, in 1945, took over. Their leader, Marshal Josip Broz Tito, was a man of infinite guile, whose chief ambition in 1945 was to take over the great port of Trieste from Italy; and that mattered to the British, the more so as an Italy deprived of Trieste might easily be tipped over into Communism. It is tempting to think, though the evidence is conjectural, that relations between the British and Tito carried on surreptitiously, through such men as Sir Fitzroy Maclean. He had been dropped into Yugoslavia to make contact with the partisans and he knew them as brothers — or comrades: some were women — in arms. He had also been foremost in getting weapons for them from British rather than Communist sources, and, like so many others, he believed that Yugoslavia was the only possible answer to the problems of nationality in the western Balkans. Here were half a dozen quite different but often intermingled peoples, and the alternative to coexistence was endless mutually hostile tinpot nationalistic states. A great many people on the ground agreed (a prominent Croat writer, contemplating folklore dances and fancy invented words, said, ‘God save us from Serbian bombs and Croat culture’). In 1945, as the partisans tried to take over Trieste and parts of south-eastern Austria, there were clashes with British troops, but personal contacts remained and in 1948 came to life again (Maclean was given a house on the island of Korčula in the Adriatic and wrote one of the war’s classics). Tito himself was quite capable of singing in different keys. He had been in Moscow, and had worked as an agent for the NKVD, or People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs. He knew his Stalin: suspicious and murderous. Churchill had got Stalin to approve a fifty-fifty deal over Yugoslavia, and in due course — in 1948 — that became reality.

Elsewhere, in 1945 and 1946, the Communists took over. The techniques of takeover amounted to a choreography which they had learned mainly in the Spanish Civil War: indeed, some of the people they used had had experience in Spain. There, the Communists had had to play a complicated game — how to infiltrate trade unions, to destroy anarchists, to exploit minority nationalism, to keep poor peasants and middle-class progressives in step, to gull the foreign press, to recruit concealed agents (one of them, the Spanish foreign minister himself). Controlling the media was important, and there were specialists in this: before the war Willi Münzenberg had built an empire on Moscow money and, carefully keeping a neutral face, lined up the grand intelligentsia of Europe and America at prominent platforms on the Left. Tito himself had been involved in this, and so, in Hungary, was Ernő Gerő; Georgy Dimitrov, who took over Bulgaria, had been secretary of the Comintern, managing much of the game from Moscow. Grim bare-floorboard Party schools taught Marxist political science, and it was often enough quite accurate. It was also ruthless against the rest of the Left. Anarchists, moderate socialists, trade unionists only wanting better wages and lower hours: all might be enemies. In Spain, to the disgust of George Orwell, the Communists in Barcelona had killed or imprisoned members of the POUM, an independent Communist organization that wanted revolution there and then, which did not fit with Soviet Communist purposes. In Spain, Stalin’s real aim was not victory, but a continuation of the civil war. It divided Italy and Germany from Britain and France. He sent weaponry to the Republicans when they seemed likely to collapse, and stopped deliveries when they were winning. He also used Catalan nationalism, which the POUM opposed. It was a cunningly played game, and had lessons for the men and women who emerged from the Party schools to take over central Europe.

That sophistication was not needed in the Balkans, where there was not much between lord and peasant. There, the choreography was simple, brutal, and short: terrorize any opposition, offer land reform and grant property to new Party members. They were easy enough to recruit: disgruntled peasants (the village bad-hats) and the local minorities, including gypsies. In Romania some of the Hungarian minority were mobilized, and there were always Jews, though not of course the religious Jews, who suffered as much persecution as did other religious. However, even with religion, there were hatreds that could be exploited. Most Orthodox followed their own Patriarch, but there were other Orthodox — the Uniates, especially strong in Romania and the western Ukraine — who followed the Pope. The Communists might gain Orthodox support by campaigning against Uniates, and they did so. Elections in such circumstances were a sinister pantomime. The presence of Western representatives did mean, in Bulgaria and Romania, that some token elements from the old order were permitted to stay on. Some might be straightforward opportunists, such as the one-time Romanian foreign minister Gheorghe Tătărescu, who, with thirties manners, perfect French, and a habit of adultery, could be indulged or blackmailed into acting as a non-Communist front man. Even the young king of Romania was kept going until early in 1948, when he was bullied into abdicating and sent (not penniless: four automobiles of his collection, and some jewels, accompanied him) abroad. But these figureheads were powerless and were soon eliminated. Stalin got the Balkans, and a tyranny emerged: deportations in the hundreds of thousands, public executions, concentration camps, rigged elections and purge trials. Albania and Yugoslavia did not even need the Moscow bargain: they had strong Communist movements which took power as soon as the Germans had retreated, and they disposed early enough of the non-Communist furniture. The Western Allies were not consulted (in Bulgaria, Marshal Fyodor Tolbukhin, chairman of the supposed Allied Control Council, attended only once and otherwise did as he pleased) and there was some shabby behaviour, as when the British revealed to Moscow what their agents had been told by non-Communist Romanians, or threw a would-be Bulgarian refugee out of their embassy at 2.30 a.m. People’s Republics soon emerged. But a Communist takeover elsewhere was more difficult, requiring a more complicated choreography. The media had to be controlled, and you had to win elections that might be supervised by foreign observers. There were middle-class sympathizers to be brought along, and you had to make some appeal to peasant farmers who were not obvious Communist supporters. The trade unions mattered, especially, because they could mobilize hundreds of thousands of demonstrators or strikers, and if, say, you wanted to shut down an opposition newspaper you could do it either by rationing its paper quota or by getting the printers to strike against ‘anti-democratic’ writings. A secret police, keeping a close eye on it all, therefore became very important and even central. These things happened, with variations, in Poland and Hungary. Czechoslovakia came later, early in 1948.