by Tony Judt
In the West, Prague awoke Socialists to the realities of political life in eastern Europe. On February 29th 1948 the ageing Léon Blum published in the French Socialist paper Le Populaire a hugely influential article, criticizing western Socialists’ failure to speak out about the fate of their comrades in eastern Europe. Thanks to Prague, a significant part of the non-Communist Left in France, Italy and elsewhere would now firmly situate itself in the Western camp, a development that consigned Communist parties in countries beyond Soviet reach to isolation and growing impotence.
If Stalin engineered the Prague coup without fully anticipating these consequences, it was not just because he had always planned to enforce his writ in a certain way throughout the bloc. Nor was it because Czechoslovakia mattered much in the grand scheme of things. What happened in Prague—and what was happening at the same time in Germany, where Soviet policy was moving swiftly from stonewalling and disagreement to open confrontation with her former allies—was a return by Stalin to the style and strategy of an earlier era. This shift was driven in general terms by Stalin’s anxiety at his inability to shape European and German affairs as he wished; but also and above all by his growing irritation with Yugoslavia.
. . .
In 1947, the Communist government in Yugoslavia under Josip Broz Tito had a unique status. Alone of the Communist parties in Europe, the Yugoslavs had come to power by their own efforts, depending neither on local allies nor foreign help. To be sure, the British in December 1943 had stopped sending aid to the rival Chetnik partisans and had swung their support behind Tito, and in the immediate postwar years the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) spent more money (US$415 million) in aid to Yugoslavia than anywhere else in Europe, 72 percent of that money coming from the United States. But for contemporaries what mattered was that the Yugoslav Communist partisans had fought the only successful resistance war against the German and Italian occupiers.
Buoyed by their victory, Tito’s Communists had no truck with coalitions of the kind being set up elsewhere in liberated eastern Europe and set about immediately destroying all their opponents. In the first post-war elections, in November 1945, voters were presented with an unambiguous choice: Tito’s ‘People’s Front’ . . . or an urn publicly labeled ‘opposition’. In January 1946 the Communist Party of Yugoslavia introduced a constitution directly modeled on that of the USSR. Tito pressed forward with mass arrests, imprisonment and execution of his opponents, together with forced collectivization of the land, at a time when Communists in neighbouring Hungary and Romania were still carefully calibrating a more accommodating image. Yugoslavia, it seemed, was on the hard, cutting edge of European Communism.
On the surface, Yugoslav radicalism and the success of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia in taking firm control of a strategically crucial region appeared to Soviet advantage and relations between Moscow and Belgrade were warm. Moscow lavished unstinting praise on Tito and his party, evinced great enthusiasm for their revolutionary achievements and held Yugoslavia up as a model for others to emulate. The Yugoslav leaders in return took every occasion to insist on their respect for the Soviet Union; they saw themselves as introducing the Bolshevik model of revolution and government into the Balkans. As Milovan Djilas recalled, ‘all of us were pre-disposed towards [the USSR] in spirit. And all of us would have remained devoted to it, but for its own Great Power standards of loyalty’.
But Yugoslav devotion to Bolshevism was, from Stalin’s point of view, always a little too enthusiastic. Stalin, as we have already seen, was interested less in revolution than in power. It was for Moscow to determine the strategy of Communist parties, for Moscow to decide when a moderate approach was called for and when a radical line should be adopted. As the origin and fountainhead of world revolution, the Soviet Union was not a model for revolution but the model. Under the appropriate circumstances lesser Communist parties might follow suit, but they were ill advised to trump the Soviet hand. And this was Tito’s besetting weakness in Stalin’s eyes. In his ambition to plant the Communist standard in south-east Europe, the former partisan general was running ahead of Soviet calculations. Revolutionary successes were going to his head: he was becoming more royalist than the king.
Stalin did not come to these conclusions all at once, although his frustration with the ‘inexperienced’ Tito is recorded as early as January 1945. Beyond the growing sense in Moscow that Tito was getting above himself and setting up the indigenous Yugoslav revolution as a counter-model to that of the Soviets, the disagreements between Stalin and Tito arose over practical issues of regional policy. The Yugoslavs under Tito nursed ambitions, rooted in earlier Balkan history, to absorb Albania, Bulgaria and parts of Greece into an expanded Yugoslavia under a new ‘Balkan Federation’. This idea had a certain appeal beyond Yugoslavia’s borders—it made economic sense for Bulgaria, in the view of Traicho Kostov, one of the Communist leaders in Sofia, and would represent a further break with the small-state nationalism that had so hampered these countries’ prospects before the war.
Stalin himself was not initially averse to talk of a Balkan federation, and Dimitrov, Stalin’s confidante in the Comintern and the first Communist leader of Bulgaria, spoke openly of the prospect as late as January 1948. But there were two problems with the otherwise appealing plan to embrace all of south-eastern Europe into a common federal arrangement under Communist rule. What began as a basis for mutual co-operation among local Communists soon came, in Stalin’s suspicious eyes, to appear more like a bid for regional hegemony by one of them. This alone would probably, in time, have led Stalin to cap Tito’s ambitions. But in addition, and crucially, Tito was making problems for Stalin in the West.
The Yugoslavs openly backed and encouraged the Greek insurgency, both in 1944 and, more significantly, when the Greek civil war flared up again three years later. This support was consistent with Tito’s own rather narcissistic activism—helping the Greek Communists to emulate his own successes—and it was coloured, too, by Yugoslav interests in the disputed ‘Slav’ regions of Greek Macedonia. But Greece was in the Western sphere of interest, as Churchill and subsequently Truman had made very clear. Stalin had no interest in provoking a quarrel with the West over Greece, a secondary issue for him. The Greek Communists naively supposed that their uprising would trigger Soviet help, perhaps even the intervention of Soviet forces, but this was never in the cards. On the contrary, Stalin regarded them as undisciplined adventurers pursuing a lost cause and likely to provoke an American intervention.
Tito’s provocative encouragement to the Greek insurgents thus annoyed Stalin—who rightly reasoned that without Yugoslav assistance the Greek imbroglio would long since have resolved itself peacefully37—and alienated him still further from his Balkan acolyte. But it wasn’t just in the south Balkans that Tito was embarrassing Stalin and fuelling Anglo-American irritation. In Trieste and the Istrian peninsula, Yugoslav territorial ambitions were an impediment to Allied agreement on an Italian Peace Treaty: when the Treaty was finally signed, in September 1947, it left the future of the Trieste region uncertain, with Allied troops still garrisoned there to block a Yugoslav takeover. In neighbouring Carinthia, the southernmost district of Austria, Tito was demanding a territorial settlement in Yugoslavia’s favour, while Stalin preferred the unresolved status quo (which had the salient advantage for the Soviets of allowing them to keep an army in eastern Austria, and thus in Hungary too).
Tito’s combination of Yugoslav irridentism and partisan revolutionary fervour was thus a growing embarrassment to Stalin. According to the Official British History of the Second World War, it was widely believed in Western military circles after May 1945 that if a Third World War were to break out soon, it would be in the Trieste region. But Stalin was not interested in provoking a Third World War, and surely not over an obscure corner of north-east Italy. He was also not well pleased to see the Italian Communist Party embarrassed by the unpopular territorial ambitions of Italy’s Communist
neighbour.
For all these reasons, Stalin was already privately exasperated over Yugoslavia by the summer of 1947. It cannot have pleased him that the railway station in the Bulgarian capital was covered with posters of Tito as well as Stalin and Dimitrov, nor that Hungarian Communists were beginning to speak of emulating the Yugoslav model of Communist rule—even the slavishly loyal Rákosi reportedly sung Tito’s praises to Stalin himself, at a Moscow meeting in late 1947. Tito was not just a diplomatic embarrassment for the Soviet Union in its relations with the Western Allies; he was causing trouble within the international Communist movement itself.
To outside observers, Communism was a single political entity, shaped and run from the Moscow ‘Centre’. But from Stalin’s perspective matters were more complicated. From the late Twenties through to the outbreak of war, Moscow had indeed succeeded in imposing its control over the world Communist movement, except in China. But the war had changed everything. In its resistance against the Germans the Soviet Union had been forced to invoke patriotism, liberty, democracy and many other ‘bourgeois’ goals. Communism had lost its revolutionary edge and become, deliberately, part of a broad anti-Fascist coalition. This had been the tactic of the pre-war Popular Fronts too, of course, but in the Thirties Moscow had been able to keep tight control of its foreign parties—through financial aid, personal intervention and terror.
In wartime that control had been lost—symbolized by the shutting down of the Comintern in 1943. And it was not fully recovered in the immediate post-war years: the Yugoslav Party was the only one in Europe that actually came to power without Soviet intervention, but in Italy and France the Communist parties, while professing continued loyalty to Moscow, functioned on a day to day basis without advice or instruction from abroad. The Party leaders there were not privy to Stalin’s intentions. Like the Czechs, but with even less guidance from the USSR, they pursued what they described as the French or Italian ‘road to Socialism’. working within governing coalitions and treating national and Communist objectives as unproblematically compatible.
All that began to change in the summer of 1947. Communist ministers were ejected from the governments of France and Italy in May 1947. This came as something of a surprise to them and Maurice Thorez, the French Communist leader, continued for some time to expect that his Party would soon be able to rejoin the governing coalition; at his Party’s June 1947 Congress in Strasbourg he described those who advocated all-out opposition as ‘adventurers’. Communists in Western Europe were unsure how to respond to the Marshall Plan, only belatedly taking their cue from Stalin’s rejection of it. In general, communications between Moscow and its Western parties were poor. Following the French Communists’ departure from office, Andrei Zdanov sent a confidential letter to Thorez (copied, significantly, to the Czech Communist leader Gottwald): ‘Many think that the French Communists’ actions were concerted with [us]. You know this is untrue and that the steps you took were a perfect surprise for the Central Committee.’
Clearly, the Western Communists were falling behind the curve. Within weeks of the dispatch of the letter to Thorez, on June 2nd, Moscow was establishing commercial treaties with its eastern European neighbours and satellites, part of a concerted reaction against the Marshall Plan and the threat it posed to Soviet influence in the region. The policy of cooperation, pursued in Prague, Paris and Rome and hitherto tacitly approved by Stalin, was swiftly being replaced by a retreat to the strategy of confrontation represented by Zdanov’s promulgation of the theory of two irreconcilable ‘camps’.
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 inter
vention. 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.