A People’s History of the World

by Chris Harman

  France differed from Greece and Italy in one respect. The first call to build underground resistance had not come from the left, for the majority of Socialist Party MPs had voted for the Pétain government, and the Communist Party – following orders from Moscow during the period of the Hitler–Stalin pact – opposed resistance until the summer of 1941. The call came from a representative of the old ruling class, a middle-ranking army officer, Charles de Gaulle, who had escaped to Britain. But de Gaulle’s British-based ‘Free French’ forces were small, and the US would not recognise him, trying right through to the end of 1943 to do a deal with the pro-German Vichy government. Once Germany had invaded Russia, the Communist Party set up its own resistance organisation, the FTP. It soon outgrew the Gaullists, since resistance had a class character for most people. The old ruling class had half-welcomed the German forces in 1940 and was collaborating wholeheartedly with them. As in Greece and Italy, it was the lower classes who bore the suffering of the occupation. Some 88 per cent of those arrested in the Pas-de-Calais and Nord were from working-class backgrounds. While railway workers made up only 1 per cent of Brittany’s population, they provided 7 per cent of its resistance members. When the resistance seized Paris from the German army in advance of the Allies in 1944, everyone knew that the key controlling force was the Communist Party. The only question – as in Greece and Italy – was whether it was going to use its position to push for revolutionary change or do a deal with de Gaulle to keep capitalism going.

  Hope strangled again

  In a famous passage, Winston Churchill recalled how he met Stalin in Moscow in October 1944 and said to him, ‘So far as Britain and Russia are concerned, how would it do for you to have 90 percent predominance in Romania, for us to have 90 percent in Greece and go 50–50 about Yugoslavia?’

  Churchill wrote down a list of countries with the appropriate percentages next to them, and Stalin wrote a large tick on it.

  At length I said, ‘Might it not be thought rather cynical if it seemed we had disposed of these issues, so fateful to millions of people, in such an offhand manner? Let us burn the paper.’ ‘No, you keep it,’ said Stalin. 250

  It was not the resistance fighters in Greece, Italy and France who decided Europe’s destiny, but meetings such as this. At conferences in Tehran, Yalta and Potsdam, Stalin agreed with Churchill and Roosevelt to divide Europe into spheres of influence. The US was not happy with this division at first. It hoped to use its massive industrial superiority to transform the whole world into a single US sphere of influence, free trade providing it with open markets everywhere. 251 Churchill, committed as ever to maintaining an empire run exclusively from London, would not countenance this, and neither would Stalin, who had the sheer size of Russia’s army to counter US economic power. Between them they persuaded Roosevelt to accept the division they wanted.

  The deals were a death blow to the hopes of the resistance movements. They gave Stalin’s armies a free hand in eastern Europe. Stalin was not going to let Communists elsewhere upset the arrangement by attempting to lead revolutions, however favourable the mass of people might be. His former foreign minister Litvinov spelt it out bluntly to US representatives in Italy in September 1944: ‘We do not want revolutions in the West’. 252

  This was not just a matter of words. In the spring of 1944 the Italian Communist leader Togliatti had returned to Italy from Moscow. He announced that his party was joining the despised Badoglio government and was prepared to leave the monarchy untouched until the war was over. 253 The French leader, Maurice Thorez, insisted from Moscow that the biggest resistance group, the Communist-led Francs-Tireurs et Partisans (FTP), should integrate into and accept the leadership of de Gaulle’s smaller French Forces of the Interior (FFI). After his return to Paris in January 1945, Thorez called for militants to abandon all resistance to the institutions of the old state. He insisted that there had to be ‘one state, one army, one police’. 254

  In Italy and France the restoration of the old order occurred more or less peacefully. In Greece the eventual outcome was civil war, although this did not result from any serious attempt by the resistance leaders to carry through revolutionary change.

  The retreat of the German army at the end of 1944 left EAM-ELAS in control of virtually the whole country. It would have required minimal movement on the part of its forces to occupy Athens. They knew that Britain’s intention was to impose the old monarchy and a government run by politicians from the old discredited ruling class. Britain had already used force to break an attempted mutiny against this arrangement by thousands of exiled Greek troops in Egypt. Yet it allowed British troops and the new government to take over the city. 255 The only forces the government could rely on were the police and right-wing groups which had collaborated with the Nazis and were intent on humiliating the resistance. Early in December the government demanded the immediate disarming of the resistance throughout the country, and its forces opened fire with machine-guns on a huge protest in Athens, killing 28 and wounding many others. 256 EAM-ELAS had no choice but to fight back, and the British generals found themselves hard-pressed. Field Marshal Alexander warned Churchill that he would not be able to reconquer more than the Athens-Piraeus area.

  Churchill had already told Anthony Eden, ‘I hope the Greek brigade will not hesitate to shoot when possible’, and he ordered the British commander on the spot, Scobie, ‘Do not hesitate to act as if you were in a conquered city where a local rebellion is in process’. 257 At this point Churchill flew to Athens to announce that the British operation had ‘the full approval of President Roosevelt and Marshal Stalin’. 258 The EAM-ELAS forces withdrew from the capital, and formally disbanded a month later in return for an agreement which the government had no intention of keeping. On 8 March Stalin told Churchill at Yalta, ‘I have every confidence in British policy in Greece’. 259

  Soon government forces were hunting down anyone who had been part of the resistance. At least 50,000 EAM-ELAS supporters were imprisoned and interned during 1945, while right-wing paramilitary groups operated with government protection. C M Woodhouse, a British representative who was to become a Tory member of parliament, later wrote, ‘Up to the end of 1945 … the blame for bloodshed lay primarily on right wing forces’. 260

  Many historians argue even today that the leaders of the resistance organisations in all three countries had no choice but to accept the restoration of the pre-war ruling classes. If they had tried to overthrow these, it is argued, they would have been crushed by the might of the British and US armies. Paul Ginsborg accepts this in the case of Italy, and Eric Hobsbawm insists more generally, ‘The Communists … were in no position anywhere west of Trieste … to establish revolutionary regimes’. 261 Yet as Gabriel Kolko rightly argues, such judgements ‘entirely disregard the larger context of the war with Germany, the purely military problems involved, as well as the formidable political difficulties that sustained counter-revolutionary wars would have encountered in England and the US’. 262

  The popular mood in Britain and the US in 1944–45 made it difficult for them to mount massive repression. The British actions in Greece caused major political storms both in Britain and the US, and there was massive desire in the ranks of their armies to return home as soon as possible – a mood which was to find expression in mutinies among British forces stationed in Egypt. Above all, it is highly unlikely that a revolutionary movement would have been confined to a single country. Churchill’s great fear was that revolution in Greece would inspire moves in the same direction in Italy – and if that had happened it is hard to imagine France would not have been affected. Indeed, even in Germany, the collapse of the Nazi regime in May 1945 saw workers flocking to their old socialist and Communist allegiances, setting up popular anti-Nazi committees and taking over the running of factories from which pro-Nazi managers had fled – until the occupation armies restored ‘order’ with the help of politicians who had returned from exile with them.

  The re-establishment of
the old order in Greece, Italy and France meant that those who had prospered under the fascist and collaborationist regimes were soon back to their old ways. In Greece the ‘truce’ between the government and the resistance fighters was soon forgotten. Fascist sympathisers and former collaborators were to be found at every level of the army and police, and they began systematic persecution of the left until open civil war broke out. US arms ensured that the right won the civil war, governing via rigged elections through the 1950s and early 1960s. Then, in 1967, the fascist sympathisers and former collaborators in the army seized power through a military coup rather than risk an electoral victory by left of centre politicians. Not until after the military regime collapsed in the mid-1970s did anything like a normal capitalist democracy exist in Greece.

  In Italy genuine parliamentary institutions were established, but beneath them the composition of the state machine remained very much as before. This was shown vividly in the early 1970s, when sections of the secret services and the armed forces worked with fascists to plant bombs in the hope of providing a pretext for a coup.

  In France the continuity of the state machine was exposed in the mid-1990s by the trial of the former Vichy police chief in Bordeaux, Papon, for deporting thousands of Jews to the death camps. After the war he had been able to rise to the position of police chief in Paris and order a police attack on an Algerian demonstration which killed more than 100. However, the real horror to arise from the continuity of the French state came outside France. On VE Day (marking the defeat of Germany), Arabs took to the streets of Setif in Algeria waving the green and white flag of resistance to French rule. French police opened fire, and in the subsequent fighting at least 500 Algerians and 100 French settlers were killed. 263 The French state’s determination to keep the colony was to cost a million lives over the next 20 years. In Vietnam the Communist-led nationalist resistance movement, the Vietminh, had taken control of the country when Japan surrendered. British troops commanded by Lord Mountbatten landed in the southern city of Saigon, armed Japanese prisoners of war and used them to disarm the Vietminh, and then handed the city to the French colonial authorities. After a brief lull, during which the Communists tried to implement Stalin’s general line by cooperating with the French, a war broke out which was to last for almost 30 years and cost more than two million Vietnamese lives.

  The fate of the liberation movements in western and southern Europe was matched by what happened in the Russian sphere of influence in eastern Europe. The Western powers agreed to incorporate eastern Poland into the USSR as ‘Western Ukraine’, stood back while Stalin allowed the German army to crush the Warsaw Rising, and then accepted the ‘people’s government’ he appointed as rulers of the country. In the same way they allowed him a free hand in Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia and East Germany. They made plenty of propaganda about the ills that Stalin inflicted on these countries, just as Stalin made propaganda about the crimes of the West, but they did nothing to stop him having his way. Both sides kept to the main points of their wartime agreements until 1989, when the Russian bloc collapsed from its own internal difficulties.

  There was one important country in Europe which did not fall into either camp. This was Yugoslavia, where the Communists led by Tito (himself of mixed Croat and Slovenian ancestry) had succeeded in building a multi-ethnic resistance movement against both the German occupation and the Croat Ustashe fascists – and had obtained arms from the Allies because of its willingness to fight the Germans while the royalist Serb Chetniks refused to do so. The partisans were able to take control of the country and set up a regime which – although initially it slavishly copied Stalin’s regime in the USSR – had a strong independent base of its own. This was demonstrated in 1948 when Tito suddenly broke with Stalin to follow a policy of neutrality which lasted for the next 40 years.

  The agreements between the Western powers and Russia were not confined to Europe. Britain and Russia had divided Iran into two spheres of influence during the war and maintained their forces there for a couple of years. The Russian and US division of Korea in the summer of 1945 was more permanent – along a line drawn by the US’s General MacArthur. Each picked a dictator to rule its half: on one side a small-scale guerrilla leader, Kim Il Sung, who had spent the war in the USSR; on the other, right-wing nationalist Syngman Rhee, who could be relied upon to do what the US wanted. The division of Korea was the last great act of cooperation between the wartime allies. Within five years it was to be the cause of the biggest collision between them.

  Chapter 9

  The Cold War

  The ‘Big Three’ powers celebrated their victory over Germany and Japan by establishing a new international organisation, the United Nations. Its founding conference in San Francisco in May 1945 promised the peoples of the world a new order of peace and cooperation which would vanquish war for ever. It was claimed that this was going to be very different from its inter-war predecessor, the League of Nations, which had not been able to do anything to stop the Second World War. The claim struck a chord among people who had suffered and fought for what they genuinely thought was going to be a better world.

  However, the ‘failure’ of the League of Nations had not been accidental – it followed from an intrinsic fault. It was set up by the victorious powers after 1918 as part of the Treaty of Versailles by which they parcelled out the world among themselves. Lenin described it as a ‘thieves’ kitchen’ – and, as the saying goes, ‘thieves fall out’. The United Nations was no different, even if it had a ‘soup kitchen’ annexe in Geneva (comprising the children’s fund UNICEF, the World Health Organisation, and so on). Decision-making lay with four permanent Security Council members 264 – Britain, the US, France and Russia – and between them these dominated, oppressed and exploited the rest of the world.

  They were already falling out behind the scenes by the time of San Francisco. Churchill discussed drawing up plans for the ‘elimination of Russia’, arming defeated German troops for a surprise attack ‘to impose on Russia the will of the United States and the British Empire’ 265 – a suggestion which, it seems, his own generals would not take seriously. The US did more than just talk: its decision to use the nuclear bomb against Japan in August 1945 was clearly motivated, at least in part, by a desire to show Stalin the enormity of the destructive power at its disposal.

  Tension festered below the surface for more than a year, while each of the powers consolidated its position – reorganising industry now the war was over, overseeing the parts of the world it had recently occupied, and dampening domestic expectations. Britain’s Labour government sought to placate the wave of radicalism of 1945 with plans to improve welfare provision and nationalise the railways and mines. The US experienced a level of strikes even higher than in 1936–37. The Russian occupying forces in eastern Europe oversaw the transformation of what had been small Communist parties into mass bureaucratic organisations.

  The rulers of each needed a sense of international harmony as a cover for consolidating structures of control. In France, Italy and even Britain, governments still benefited from Communist Party opposition to strikes. In eastern Europe it suited Stalin that the states occupied by Russian troops should be run by coalition governments involving figures from the pre-war right, centre and social democratic parties.

  The quarrels between the powers became public in 1946–47. Churchill, now in opposition in Britain, opened fire with his speech in Fulton, Missouri, in March 1946, declaring, ‘From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended on the continent.’ Of course, he did not mention his own role in bringing this about through his cynical deal with Stalin in Moscow only 18 months before. Nor did he see any contradiction in repeating his declamation about ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ two days later in the segregated Jim Crow state of Virginia. A year later Truman translated Churchill’s words into action, taking over from Britain the role of sustaining the repressive regime in Greece which had been respon
sible for the assassination of 1,300 EAM-ELAS supporters in the previous year.

  The Marshall Plan, the scheme to revive the economies of Europe under US hegemony, soon followed. It was presented as an offer of aid to all of Europe, including those areas under Russian occupation. But W W Rostow, an economist who worked on implementing it – and who later played a key role in the US’s war against Vietnam – reveals that the plan was part of an ‘offensive’ which aimed ‘to strengthen the area still outside Stalin’s grasp’. 266 Within weeks of the announcement of the plan, and prompted by the US, the parties of the right and centre had forced the Communists out of the governments in France and Italy. 267 This was Thorez’s and Togliatti’s reward for their three years of work opposing strikes (including a major strike at Renault in Paris at precisely the time the government crisis erupted). In the spring of 1948 the US poured funds into Italy to try and prevent a joint list of Communist and Socialist candidates winning the general election – and began to recruit ex-fascists to an armed underground organisation, Gladio (later to come under NATO’s wing), in case they did win.

  Stalin was taking similar measures to clamp down on potential dissent in Russian-occupied eastern Europe. The Russian army had ensured the police and secret police were in the hands of its appointees. Now a series of moves were used to destroy resistance to Russian dictates. First, non-Communist ministers were forced out of office; the social democratic parties were forced to merge with Communist parties regardless of the feelings of their members; then Communist Party leaders who might show any degree of independence from Stalin (including virtually anyone who had fought in Spain) were put on trial, imprisoned and often executed. Kostov in Bulgaria, Rajk in Hungary, and Slánský in Czechoslovakia were all executed. Gomulka in Poland and Kádár in Hungary were merely thrown into prison. Stalin was not only keen to remove pro-Western supporters of market capitalism. He was terrified of independent Communist-led regimes emerging – especially after the break with Tito’s Yugoslavia in 1948. A wave of show trials of eastern European Communist leaders followed, accused, like Tito, of being ‘imperialist agents’ and ‘fascists’.