The Red Flag: A History of Communism (41 page)

In Romania, the Soviets had hoped that their moderate social policies, and willingness to work with those parts of the elite untainted with pro-German sympathies, would win over local opinion. Yet liberals, socialists and elites resisted Soviet demands and were reluctant to work with Communists, some of whom were pushing for radical land redistribution. The Popular Front on the ground clearly was not working, and each side tried to secure the support of the great powers: the Communists told the Soviets that the West was intervening on the side of the liberals and undermining the Yalta agreements, whilst the liberals alleged that the Soviets were Communizing Romania. In February 1945 negotiations had ceased, and the Soviet emissary, former show-trial judge Andrei Vyshinskii, angrily instructed King Michael to install a Communist-dominated government. Storming out of the meeting, he slammed the door so hard that he cracked the plaster on the wall.
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More solidly based were the Popular Fronts in Hungary and Czechoslovakia. The Hungarian Communists, part of a leftist government, presented themselves as nationalists and did not press for radical social change. Meanwhile in Czechoslovakia, the Communists were the strongest in the region. The betrayal of Czechoslovakia by the Western powers at Munich and the victory of the Red Army over the Nazis gave the Czechs a particular reason to feel sympathetic to a new socialist course. There was also a great deal of sympathy for Stalin’s Slavic nationalist project after the Nazis’ imperial racism.
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As Zdeněk Mlynář explained when he described why he had become a Communist in 1946 at the age of sixteen:

Yet here also the Popular Fronts lost support as they were beset from left and right. Workers and poor peasants wanted more radical change, whilst the majority of the population feared Communist redistribution. It was no surprise that the conservative smallholders’ party won the Hungarian elections of 1945 with 57 per cent of the vote, compared with the Communists’ almost 17 per cent.
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The Czech Communists also lost support. The Soviets and their Communist allies soon realized that only rigged elections and intimidation would secure the Popular Front’s power.

The main threat to the Popular Front model in Central and Eastern Europe therefore came from the centre and right – as it did in Western Europe. Here, the 1939–45 War had different effects from those of 1914–18. Whereas World War I had mobilized workers and peasants in vast armies, who then demanded compensation once the fighting was over, the Nazi occupations had shattered working-class organizations, already weakened by Depression and right-wing regimes; and whilst World War I had discredited the failed, aristocratic elites, the chaos of World War II had given local notables a new role in defending their communities, at the same time creating a new group of officials and bureaucrats.
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Perhaps most importantly, the violence, which had affected civilians as well as soldiers, had shown at its most devastating the consequences of the social conflict that had lasted since 1918. Most wanted a quiet, private life; they might have wanted planning and welfare, but there was little desire for a radical transformation of society. Figures like Togliatti and Thorez understood this, and were intent on remaining within a liberal political consensus.

Yet the Popular Front was also challenged from the left, by a more Radical Communism – largely in Southern and South-Eastern Europe. Here Communists led the partisan struggle against the Nazis. They had mobilized peasants who favoured land redistribution, and supported a more radical social revolution. Conditions were closer to Western
Europe in 1917–19 than elsewhere: old, narrowly based elites had been seriously discredited and the Communists alone seemed untainted. This world favoured not masters of the ‘war of position’ like Togliatti, but militants of the Béla Kun type. In Greece, the Communists created a powerful resistance organization, EAM-ELAS, which could not reach a compromise with the British-backed monarchist resistance. The conflict led to a vicious civil war. Stalin refused to help the rebels, sticking to the percentages agreement, and the fighting continued until 1949.

The Communists were more successful in Bulgaria. Though not as large a group as in Greece, they had been actively involved in resistance. Stalin tried to persuade them to include their rival Agrarians in a Popular Front, but they only did so reluctantly, and were determined to destroy their opponents and rule alone.
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The Bulgarian Communists’ room for manoeuvre was, however, limited by the occupying Red Army. Tito’s Yugoslav Communists, in contrast, had liberated the country themselves, and were in a stronger position to ditch the Popular Front. They also had the confidence to challenge Stalin’s unrevolutionary but politically overbearing model of Communism.

Tito’s friend-turned-enemy, Milovan Djilas, began his work on Tito’s life with the sentence: ‘Tito was born a rebel.’
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Tito came from a family of respectable, though indebted Croatian peasants, and he was proud of their history of rebellion against the Hungarian gentry.
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He was a charismatic man with a quick intellect and a dandyish style – as a child he wanted to be a tailor. He was, however, apprenticed to a locksmith. As a youth he travelled around Europe looking for work, ending up in the Daimler-Benz factory south of Vienna, where he mutilated his finger in an accident – a badge of his working-class origins. However, as with so many Communists of his generation, it was the Great War and the Bolshevik revolution that radicalized him. Like Béla Kun, he was drafted into the Austro-Hungarian army, taken prisoner by the Russians, and joined the Red Guards in Russia during the revolution. He then returned to Yugoslavia, where he joined the Communist party, was imprisoned in 1928 and tortured, and on his release became an organizer for the Com-intern in the Balkans. He spent some time in Moscow ensconced in the Hotel Lux, and gave lectures at the Lenin School on trade unionism. One of his tasks was to organize the (illegal) transport of volunteers to fight in Spain. He based his office in Paris. Fighters could secure visas on the pretext of seeing the 1937 Exposition, and it was then easy to
smuggle them into Spain. Later in 1937, he benefited from Stalin’s purge of the Comintern, and was appointed head of the Yugoslav Communist Party. From this position he led the resistance to the Germans.

According to Djilas, admittedly not a neutral observer, Tito ‘was conspicuously without a[ny] particular talent except one – political’.
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But Djilas was willing to concede that this sole talent was a powerful one. Tito was not a deep thinker. Despite reading basic Marxist texts in prison and in the Comintern school in Moscow, he was weak on ideological issues and was embarrassed by his poor education. Nor was he a rousing speaker. But his strength lay in his self-belief, energy and charisma. He identified wholly with the Communist cause, partly because he was steeped in the Comintern’s culture. As Djilas remembered, with some condescension, his ‘speech and delivery overflowed with clichés and concepts inherited from Marxism and folk wisdom’.
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But Tito also saw Communism as a system for the aspirational and ambitious: it helped lowly people like himself to better themselves.

Tito’s confidence and political nous helped him to establish an independent Communist regime, free of Soviet domination. Unlike rival resistance groups, the Communists stressed multi-ethnic harmony – a powerful message after the vicious conflicts between Serbs and Croats during the war. Tito also succeeded in securing international support, from both Churchill and Stalin, in 1945. However the fact that he came to power through Yugoslav, rather than Soviet, efforts allowed him to follow an independent, more radical line than other East European regimes. The ‘Popular Fronts’ in Yugoslavia and its satellite Albania were complete shams from the start, despite Stalin’s efforts to broaden them. Tito engaged in brutal massacres of opposition forces, and began to pursue ambitious Stalinist planning and radical reforms in the countryside. He also backed the insurgent Communists in Greece.

Tensions between the Soviets and Yugoslavs were in part caused by a clash of cultures, between a young Communism in its Radical puritanical phase, and a mature, more inclusive Communism that had made
some compromises with the broader population. A dinner, organized by Marshal Koniev for Yugoslav Communists visiting the Ukrainian front, encapsulated the differences between the two. Djilas recounts how much the Soviet officers enjoyed the extravagant feast of caviar, roast pigs and cakes ‘a foot thick’, washed down with plenty of vodka. The Yugoslavs, however, ‘went as if to a great trial: they had to drink, despite the fact that this did not agree with their “Communist morality”’.
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Stalin, though, had hoped that Slavic unity would attract the Yugoslavs into the Soviet fold. As he told Djilas, ‘By God, there’s no doubt about it: we’re the same people.’
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Stalin himself was less concerned with Tito’s radicalism within Yugoslavia than with his threat to Soviet international dominance. Yugoslav help for the Greeks threatened to scupper the agreement with Churchill, giving the Allies an excuse for intervening in turn in Bulgaria and Romania. Stalin was further angered by broader Yugoslav ambitions in the Balkans: Tito’s involvement in Albania; his conclusion of an agreement with Bulgaria in 1947 without Moscow’s permission; and his claims on lands in Italy and Austria. In early 1948 Stalin engineered a series of threatening encounters with the Yugoslavs. In one letter, delivered by the Soviet ambassador, the Yugoslavs were warned: ‘We think Trotsky’s political career is sufficiently instructive.’
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Yet Tito refused to give in to Soviet bullying, and the Yugoslavs were expelled from the Comintern’s replacement – the Cominform – on 28 June, the anniversary of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo. Neither side wanted the split. For Tito it was a ‘bitter psychological and intellectual blow’, which, so he believed, brought on the gall-bladder attacks that plagued him for the rest of his life.
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Yet the split also damaged Stalin’s authority in Central and Eastern Europe. A leader in the Soviet sphere had stood up to Moscow and survived.

The Greek and Yugoslav models were not a significant threat to the Popular Fronts. There were pockets of Radical Communism in Southern Europe: the Italian Communists, especially, had an important – though minority – left-wing. But the parties of Western Europe were wedded to moderation. Even so the radicalism of the Left contributed to fears that the moderation of the Popular Fronts in the West was a sham. This fear was a major factor in the transition from uneasy peace to the Cold War and the end of the Popular Fronts.

Debate still rages on the causes of the Cold War, that epochal struggle between liberalism and Communism, and this is not the place for a detailed discussion. A traditional Western account blamed a millenarian Communism or nationalistic Stalin, driven by the search for global domination; a 1960s ‘revisionism’ accused a greedy capitalism, desperate for world markets; but neither explains a complex reality.
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Neither side desired conflict, but given the mistrust between the Soviets and the West, which had prevailed throughout the War, it is no surprise that the alliance broke down. Stalin’s behaviour was probably most destabilizing, for whilst he hoped that peace with the West would last for some time, he never abandoned his ideologically inspired view that capitalism and socialism were in conflict, and the latter would ultimately prevail. He also behaved opportunistically, seeking to expand his sphere of influence.
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For their part, the Americans and the British acted in ways that frightened a suspicious Stalin.

Stalin, as always obsessed with the weaknesses of the Soviet borderlands, was primarily intent on securing a sphere of influence around the USSR. To the west, there would be a stockade of ‘friendly’ East European states, including, he hoped, a pro-Soviet, united Germany; to the east territories lost earlier to the Japanese and now reclaimed, in Manchuria and the Kuriles; and possibly to the south an enclave in Northern Iran, influence in Turkey and the Bosporus and trusteeship over former Italian colonies in North Africa. This was a maximum programme, and Stalin realized that achieving it would be a struggle, but he was probably confident that a great deal could be secured by agreement with the Allies.
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The United States would be given the Western hemisphere and Pacific, whilst Britain and the Soviet Union would reach agreement based, as the foreign minister Maxim Litvinov put it in November 1944, on ‘amicable separation of security spheres in Europe according to the principle of geographic proximity’.
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