Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

As early as March 19, 1945, Russia denounced its treaty of friendship with Turkey and within a few months made demands, both official and unofficial, for Kars, Trebizond, and other areas of northeastern Turkey. Anti-Turkish agitation was encouraged among the Kurds (a non-Turkish people living at the base of the Anatolian peninsula and divided among Turkey, Iran, and Iraq), and the Georgia Socialist Soviet Republic demanded eight Turkish provinces covering much of the Black Sea coast and Kurdistan. On August 8, 1946, Molotov demanded a joint Soviet-Turkish defense of the Straits. Only after Stalin’s death, on May 30, 1953, did the Kremlin renounce the earlier territorial demands on Turkey, but by that time the alienation was complete: Turkey had been driven into the Western camp, soon allied with Greece and Yugoslavia in a defensive alignment against the north Balkan Soviet satellites (August 1954), and became the eastern pillar of NATO.

The Soviet aggressions on Iran began in 1945 when Soviet-sponsored Communists, under the protection of the Russian armies occupying northern Iran, set up “independent” Communist governments at Tabriz and in Iranian Kurdistan. These were apparently intended to be incorporated into Soviet Azerbaidzhan with the Kurdish areas to be taken from Turkey, but the failure of the latter scheme made this impossible. Nevertheless, the Russian Army refused to evacuate northern Iran in March 1946, as it was bound to do by the agreement of January 29, 1941, which had admitted it. Only in May did Iran win Soviet evacuation of its forces by agreeing to form a joint Soviet-Iranian oil company to exploit the petroleum resources of northern Iran (a project which never was fulfilled).

By the end of 1946 Britain found the burden of providing military and economic aid to Greece and Turkey too heavy for its overstrained resources. It was, moreover, eager to overcome the American aloofness in the Near East, where it felt it was bearing much of the Soviet pressure alone. Accordingly, in February 1947, it threatened to withdraw completely from Greece and Turkey by April 1st. On March 12th the American President enunciated the “Truman Doctrine” to a joint session of Congress. This stated that “it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.” He asked for financial assistance to “free peoples to work out their own destinies in their own way.” His request for $400 million for aid to Greece and Turkey was granted, after considerable debate, in May 1947. Two weeks later, at Harvard’s commencement, Secretary of State General George C. Marshall enunciated the “Marshall Plan,” which offered American economic support for a European Recovery Program which would include the Soviet Union and other Communist states. Once again Stalin’s ignorance committed him to an unrewarding path. He rejected this offer, and forced Czechoslovakia, which had previously accepted, to do the same.

The path Stalin was following took a more aggressive turn in 1947 and 1948. This involved complete Soviet domination of the area already under Communist control, the shift of Communist parties from coalition to opposition in other areas, the instigation of Communist outbreaks in “colonial” areas (especially in the Far East), and the expulsion of the Western Powers from their enclave in Berlin. All this was to be achieved while avoiding an open clash with the United States. As part of this process, which was badly bungled everywhere except in Czechoslovakia, the Communists withdrew from the “bourgeois” coalition governments which they had joined in 1944-1945: in Belgium in March 1947, in France and Italy in May, and in Austria in the autumn. At the same time, agitation from Communist-dominated trade unions was increased, and the first postwar large-scale strikes began at the end of the year. As part of this same harassment, the Soviet Union in the UN vetoed applications for membership by Italy and Finland.

In the states already under Communist control, the Soviet influence was intensified by efforts to establish a system in which the local parties and secret police were controlled by Soviet agents in the Russian embassies. As part of this effort, the Third International, or Comintern, which had been dissolved in theory by Stalin in December 1943 (but had continued to operate secretly out of Moscow), was reestablished under the new name “Cominform.” This was done under Zhdanov’s direction at a meeting of representatives of the Communist parties of France, Italy, Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, Yugoslavia, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia held in Poland in September 1947. The delegates were told by Zhdanov and Georgi Malenkov of the Soviet Union that the world was now divided into two antithetical forces—the “imperialist group” headed by the United States and the “peace-loving” group headed by the Soviet Union—and that it was necessary to reestablish direct operational control of the Communist parties.

The Soviet effort to obtain operational control of the party in Yugoslavia was vigorously resisted by Tito. As a final effort in this direction, Stalin in February 1948 tried to force Yugoslavia into a federation with more docile Bulgaria. Tito flatly refused. As a result, Yugoslavia was expelled from the Cominform in June 1948, and all-out economic, propaganda, ideological, and political warfare was begun by the Soviet bloc against Tito. The conflict was used by Stalin as an excuse to purge all oppositionist Communists within the bloc as “Titoists.” As part of this struggle, Tito closed the Yugoslav border to the Greek guerrillas, with the result that they, with General Markos, ended their disturbances in 1949, and Tito became a recipient of American economic aid which eventually reached $700 million. This process reached its climax with the achievement of a Greek-Yugoslav alliance in 1954.

A parallel effort by Stalin to take Czechoslovakia completely into the Communist camp was more successful, and was, in fact, the most successful of his numerous efforts to increase his power in the last six years of his life. In Czechoslovakia the Russian-trained Communist Klement Gottwald had become prime minister in a coalition government in July 1946. In February 1948, the Communist minister of the interior replaced eight Prague police officials by Communists, was overruled by the Cabinet, but refused to back down, calling out into the streets the workers’ militia, armed factory workers, and the police (all three under Communist control) to sustain his refusal. When the non-Communist ministers protested and some threatened to resign, Gottwald threatened the ill President Beneš with civil war if he did not dismiss twelve non-Communist ministers. Beneš, who had been determined to seek support from Russia and not from the Western Powers since his unhappy disillusionment with the latter at Munich in September 1938, yielded to Gottwald’s demands on February 25, 1948; he himself resigned on May 4th and died in September 1948. His friend, Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk, son of the founder of Czechoslovakia, and the chief Czech advocate of a proWestern policy, died mysteriously by a fall from a window on May 10th. The Communist control of Czechoslovakia was then complete.

Stalin’s victory in Czechoslovakia was followed by an even more dramatic defeat, in an effort to eject the United States, France, and Britain from their sectors in West Berlin. Apparently he believed that the United States was considering a withdrawal from Berlin and that a Soviet push would hasten that event. The former belief may have been based on good evidence, but the latter inference from it was quite mistaken.

American policy in Germany for almost three years (April 1945-April 1948) was a confusion of conflicting and ambiguous objectives. The basic idea, going back to 1942, was to make it impossible for Germany to wage aggressive war again, but no plans had been made, even on a tentative basis, as to how this goal should be sought. Two decisions left unsolved were whether Germany would be broken up and how reparations might be obtained from her without building the country up economically to provide these. Efforts by the State Department to settle these questions were blocked by other departments, notably by the Civil Affairs Division of the War Department, which wanted them left unsettled, and by the Treasury Department, which had totally different aims from State.