by Douglas Boyd
In neighbouring Greece, the Communist Party – Kommunistikó Kómma Elládas (KKE) – was controlled by Nikos Zachariadis, an alumnus of the Comintern’s Lenin School who had spent most of the war in Dachau concentration camp. In his absence, KKE members under the umbrella of EAM/ELAS – the Greek Liberation Front – fought a guerrilla war against the German, Italian and Bulgarian occupying forces. They had overrun the whole country after the withdrawal of Axis forces in October 1944, and then gone underground after British intervention to restore King George II of the Hellenes to his throne in December 1944. Freed when US troops liberated Dachau in late April 1945, Zachariadis resumed control of KKE. He fought a subsequent bloody civil war with atrocities on both sides, in which the KKE looked likely to come out on top after the departure of the British interventionist forces.
On the eastern border of Greece lies Bulgaria. During the country’s inter-war political unrest, lifelong Communist activist Georgi Dimitrov had been exiled under sentence of death after an attempted coup in 1922. After fleeing to Moscow, this shrewd operator was appointed by Stalin to head the Central European office of the Comintern, based in Weimar Germany. There, after the Nazis came to power in January 1933, Dimitrov was accused of complicity in the Reichstag fire, together with two other émigré Bulgarian Communists and Ernst Torgler, chairman of the German Communist Party – Kommunistiche Partei Deutschlands (KPD). At the trial in Leipzig before judges of the Reichsgericht – the Imperial German Supreme Court – Dimitrov refused counsel and conducted his own defence brilliantly. His calm and measured courtroom cross-examination of police supremo Hermann Göring, whom he reduced to shouting invective and insults, won Dimitrov international acclaim and so angered Reichskanzler Adolf Hitler that he decreed future such cases be tried by a new court, the Volksgericht, whose judges would be fanatical Nazis. Freed, Dimitrov returned to the USSR, took Russian citizenship and was made boss of the Comintern worldwide by Stalin from 1934–43; he survived the purges with impunity.
Bulgaria had not formally declared war on the USSR but was invaded by Soviet forces anyway in October 1944. After twenty-two years in exile, Dimitrov returned to Bulgaria as a protégé of the Red Army, to be appointed prime minister of a Communist-dominated coalition government. He was already assuming dictatorial powers, including the ruthless purging of all political opponents. So close was their relationship that Stalin had as near total confidence in Bulgaria’s new ruler as was possible for so paranoid a man as the vozhd.
Romania was the missing link between Bulgaria and the Soviet Socialist Republic of Ukraine. In 1940, when France and Britain had ceased being able to guarantee the country’s independence and territorial integrity, the Romanian government of King Carol II turned to Nazi Germany as a replacement guarantor, only to find that the German–Soviet Non-Aggression Treaty of 1939 had given back to the USSR large Romanian-speaking regions in the north and east of the country that had been awarded to Romania after the First World War. After King Carol was deposed by pro-German Maresal Ion Antonescu, then supported by the anti-Semitic Iron Guards, Antonescu appointed Carol’s son Prince Michael as puppet monarch in his stead. Declaring for the Axis powers, Romanian forces that peaked at 1.2 million men joined Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa – the invasion of the USSR in summer 1941. Their contribution to the long and ultimately unsuccessful siege of Stalingrad was to cost the country dearly after the Axis surrender.
Since one-third of Hitler’s oil came from the heavily defended oilfields at Ploesti, these attracted massive Allied bombing raids in 1943. The retreat of Romanian forces from occupied Soviet territory in the summer of 1944 led naturally to the invasion of Romanian territory by the pursuing Red Army. This in turn led to a coup d’état that nominally put young King Michael on the throne. One of his first acts was to declare war on the Axis powers, but this was too little and too late to deflect Stalin’s understandable lust for revenge – and for the oil at Ploesti. The indigenous Communist party Partidul Comunist Român (PCR) was not popular among Michael’s Russophobe subjects, who knew that Moscow would exact a terrible revenge for the country’s role in Operation Barbarossa, but the Soviet intervention brought it to power under hard-line Stalinists Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej and Anna Pauker, who had spent the war years in Moscow preparing for this moment.
Thus, with eastern Germany and Austria occupied by Soviet soldiery, a cordon sanitaire had been established from the Baltic Sea all the way to the Adriatic and Black Seas, leaving Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Poland geographically cut off from the West and vulnerable to Soviet takeovers, whether by military power from outside or domestic political parties controlled by Soviet protégés – with nothing, or very little, that the Western democracies could do to interfere.
In the Balkans – an area coveted by the tsars for several centuries before the October Revolution – Stalin could also be pleased that Major James Klugman, a pre-war member of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), had managed to get himself parachuted into German-occupied Yugoslavia as deputy head of Churchill’s Special Operations Executive (SOE). Once in-country, he and other SOE officers there persuaded the British Political Warfare Executive, MI6 and the Foreign Office in London that the predominantly Serbian royalist irregulars known as Cetniki should not receive any arms drops. As a result, Allied weapons and supplies went exclusively to their bitter enemies, the predominantly Croatian bands commanded by lifelong Communist Josip Broz, a former officer of the Comintern and member of the Narodny Komissariat Vnukhtrennikh Dyel (NKVD) secret police who had taken the nom de guerre Tito. The result was that, after the Axis retreat from the Balkans, Russia had an apparently secure foothold in Yugoslavia, where the Communist-dominated Federal People’s Republic was about to be proclaimed by Tito, a man Stalin thought at the time would be an obedient, even manipulable, puppet.3
However, ever since the October Revolution that brought Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin to power in 1917, the Kremlin’s aim had been a worldwide expansionism of Soviet power under the pretence of liberating the working classes in the capitalist countries. Much had been achieved during the inter-war years, especially through the Comintern’s campaign of espionage, massive financing of dissident factions and manipulation of industrial unrest, but Stalin was now preoccupied with continuing that expansion by exploiting the huge industrial problems of the European states whose infrastructure had been severely damaged in the war.
Italy seemed almost certain to fall under Soviet influence since the Partito Comunista Italiano (PCI) under Palmiro Togliatti had been the strongest single faction among the anti-German partisans. Togliatti was another European Communist who had spent many years in exile from his native land and passed the war safely in Moscow. Although a general election was planned for the following summer, the several centrist and right-wing Italian political parties were too busy squabbling with each other to concert their opposition to the PCI.
Similarly in France the Parti Communiste Français (PCF) had been the most numerous and best-disciplined armed element in the resistance, preparing to seize the reins of government in the power vacuum after the German retreat. After the liberation, although the other political parties resumed their internecine struggles that had weakened the country during the Third Republic and laid the foundation of the French defeat in 1940, the PCF’s strategy had been foiled by General Charles de Gaulle, the country’s first post-war head of government.4 He had amnestied Maurice Thorez, General Secretary of the PCF, a deserter under sentence of death who had spent the war safely in Moscow, and allowed him to return to France as a quid pro quo for the PCF’s temporary ‘good behaviour’.
De Gaulle was perfectly aware that the PCF had obeyed the instructions of Dimitrov’s Comintern to be pro-German for the first twenty-two months of the war, including the first year of German occupation of France – this in accordance with the Nazi–Soviet Non-Aggression Pact. The party’s daily newspaper, L’Humanité, printed editorials that were saccharinely pro-German: ‘It is particularly comforting i
n these times of misfortune to see numerous Parisian workers striking up friendships with German soldiers.’5
Articles in the paper urged PCF members to remember that German soldiers were workers like themselves who just happened to be in uniform. Party members should invite them into their homes and organise works’ picnics, to make them feel welcome.
Only after Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa in June 1941 did the PCF go underground and launch a campaign of assassinations of off-duty Wehrmacht personnel in France. This had nothing to do with the French war effort and everything to do with obliging the occupation authorities to take reprisals that alienated the previously passive mass of the population, encouraged resistance in all its forms and forced the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (OKW; German General Staff) to keep in France on garrison duty whole divisions that could otherwise swiftly have been transferred to the eastern front. Since the liberation, the PCF had reinvented itself as le parti des fusillés and claimed 75,000 martyrs shot by German firing squads, causing satirical journalist Jean Galtier-Boissière to remark scathingly, ‘Tiens! Of the 29,000 French victims (of the occupation), we now learn that 75,000 were apparently PCF members!’6
Notwithstanding the volte-face of 1941 and the transparent lie of 1944, both Moscow and the PCF placed their faith in the shortness of most people’s memories and the power of the oft-repeated lie. So, the party was still a powerful force in French politics.
Stalin prided himself on being a chess-player of Grand Master level. In the geopolitical game he was playing, he knew that his next move must be to isolate permanently the liberated territories of Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary – each of which had good historical reasons to mistrust and resist Russian moves – from the influence and support of the democratic countries of Western Europe, and particularly from American interference. Then, he could take them out of the game, one by one, while their shaky post-war coalition governments were grappling with the social problems of reintegrating their demoralised populations and facing the challenge of rebuilding their much-damaged industrial and commercial infrastructures.
The best way to do that without alerting the Western democracies too early was to impose on the Russian-occupied eastern regions of Germany and Austria superficially democratic governments in which the real power lay with pro-Soviet factions that would gradually assume the same total control over their citizens as had the government of the USSR. Perversely, Hitler’s dictatorship would make this easier: for twelve years in Germany and seven years in Austria the populations had been habituated to a slavish obedience to authority, with any sign of dissent brutally suppressed by the Gestapo.
It was no secret that the democratically elected British, French and US governments were under great domestic political pressure to demobilise the men who made up the bulk of the armies occupying their zones of Germany and Austria – a problem that did not arise in the USSR. In Stalin’s mind, free and secret elections were among the many weaknesses that would ultimately bring down the democracies.
At the Big Three summit conferences during the Second World War, he had taken the measure of the Western leaders and planned his moves accordingly, dividing the UK–USA alliance by bringing US President Franklin D. Roosevelt completely under his thrall and thus isolating the junior partner of the Atlantic Alliance, Britain’s wartime premier Winston Churchill, who certainly had no illusions about Soviet long-term aims. Roosevelt had for years been confined to a wheelchair as a result of polio, but was by this time also suffering from a complex of other health issues that seriously impaired his judgement, while leaving him convinced that he could ‘handle Stalin better than the [British] Foreign Office or my State Department’.7 This was a dangerous delusion.
A shrewd, although usually silent, observer at the wartime summit conferences was Churchill’s Scotland Yard-trained bodyguard Walter Thompson. He saw clearly what was going on at the Teheran Conference in November–December 1943 and the Yalta Conference in February 1945:
[Roosevelt’s] view of Stalin was emphasised on the occasion he remarked to Mr Bullitt, the American ambassador in Moscow, ‘Stalin doesn’t want anything but security for his country, and I think that if I give him everything I possibly can and ask for nothing in return, he won’t try to annex anything and will work for a world of democracy and peace.’8
Roosevelt’s ignorance of Russian history, which is a tale of constant expansion for the past thousand years, was to cost the inhabitants of Central and Eastern Europe and the Balkans dearly. The Russian term blizhneye zarubezhye translates as ‘the near abroad’. Although the expression may be modern, the idea that neighbouring states are the natural space which Russia – under tsarist, Soviet or post-Soviet governments – has a right to control and expand into, has been the motor of this millennial expansionism. A retired US diplomat, given a copy of the author’s history of Russian expansionism,9 commented that the implied right to independence of Poland and the other states falling within this area should be disregarded by Western leaders in order ‘not to rattle the bars of the bear’s cage’.10
Konstantin Rokossovsky, although a Soviet general, had a Polish father. Arrested during Stalin’s purges, he was lucky not to be shot along with many fellow officers. Instead, he suffered nine teeth knocked out, three ribs broken and his toes smashed by hammer blows in torture sessions during thirty months of imprisonment in Siberia before being released at Stalin’s whim to command six Soviet divisions that helped surround and force the surrender of General Friedrich Paulus’s 6th German Army at Stalingrad. Subsequently, when the men and women of the Polish Home Army or Resistance were fighting for their lives in summer 1944, while German troops razed Warsaw to the ground around them, Rokossovsky commanded the Soviet forces to halt on the opposite bank of the Vistula. Obedient to orders from the Kremlin, he made no serious attempt to interfere, and his forces did not enter what remained of the devastated capital until January 1945.
Roosevelt might have rethought his conciliatory policies in August 1944 when RAF and USAF aircraft flew from airfields in Italy at the limit of their range to drop arms to the beleaguered Polish Home Army men and women fighting for their lives in Warsaw. After one flight of American aircraft was allowed to refuel behind the Russian lines, Stalin refused further refuelling facilities. On 18 August the official reply to a British request from the Soviet Commissariat for Foreign Affairs contained the following statements:
The Soviet government cannot, of course, object to English [sic] or American aircraft dropping supplies in the region of Warsaw, since this is an American and British affair. But it decidedly objects to British or American aircraft, after dropping arms in the Warsaw region, landing on Soviet territory, since the Soviet government does not wish to associate itself either directly or indirectly with the adventure in Warsaw.11
A Polish-born colleague of the author’s BBC years named Andy Wiseman, then flying in RAF uniform, was forced to land in Soviet-occupied territory. To the amazement of the aircrew, they were not only refused refuelling facilities by their Russian ‘allies’, but saw their aircraft impounded and found themselves locked up behind the wire in a concentration camp. Wiseman had no way of knowing at the time that it was only his British uniform which saved him from being shot, as had happened to so many thousands of fellow Poles in Stalin’s deliberate campaign to emasculate the Polish nation so that the troubled country could more easily be controlled by its Soviet ‘liberators’ after the war.
Few people in the West knew at the time that, after the Russian invasion of Poland in 1940 and the occupation of the eastern half of the country under the German–Soviet Non-Aggression Pact, Stalin had decided to kill some 26,000 Polish officers and civilian intellectuals, held in three concentration camps after being taken prisoner while fighting in uniform against Soviet troops during the invasion. His decision was partially implemented at Katyn, near Smolensk, during April and May 1940, where 4,443 Poles held in the Kosielsk concentration camp on the Polish–Russian border were herded to
the edge of mass graves and machine-gunned into them. A further 3,896 officers held in a camp at Kharkov/Kharkiv in Ukraine were also murdered by security troops of the NKVD, one of the several forerunners of the KGB.12 In a way, the most gruesome executions of the captured Poles was effected at the camp of Ostrakhov, where Stalin’s favourite executioner, Vasili M. Blokhin, dressed in a slaughterhouse apron, rubber boots and leather gauntlets before arming himself with a 9mm Walther automatic pistol to shoot up to 250 Polish prisoners in the back of the head inside a specially soundproofed killing room on each of twenty-eight consecutive nights. For the shocking total of 6,287 murders in his month’s work, Blokhin was awarded the Order of the Red Banner and given a small cash bonus. Also executed at this time were 7,800 other Poles – some for no other reason than being osadniki or settlers, whose parents had moved into formerly Russian-occupied regions of their country that were awarded to Poland after the First World War. Tens of thousands more were imprisoned and tortured for no obvious reason at all.13
As far as the Western Allies were concerned, any help that enabled the Poles in Warsaw to hold at bay the German forces razing their city to the ground during August 1944 was also a way of tying down divisions that Hitler could otherwise employ against the advancing Allies in France or the Soviet forces on the eastern front. Churchill therefore desperately tried to gain Roosevelt’s support in the matter, having put in writing to Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden in 1942 that permanent Soviet occupation of Poland would be a violation of the principles of freedom and democracy set forth in the Atlantic Charter signed by Roosevelt. Cold-shouldered by the US president, the British prime minister was obliged instead to inform the Free Polish leader General Władysław Anders that Britain could not longer guarantee the territorial integrity of the country on whose behalf it had declared war in 1939.