Defensive Expansion in Post War Europe

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Paul Stein reviews 'Communist Power in Europe 1944-49", edited by Martin McCaule published by MacMillan, 1977, at £10.

In May 1943, as the Red Army was forcing Hitler mto the retreat, Stalin disbanded the Communist nternational. The first of the reasons he gave was hat its dissolution 'exposes the lie of the Hitlerites to the effect that "Moscow" allegedly intends to ntervene in the life of other nations and 'Bolshevise" them'. There can have been few predicpook on a very importants subject. The essential political khape of Europe today was Formed during the period which it covers.

At the end of the Second World War the 'allied' great powers (the USA, the USSR ind Britain) had a common policy of reconstructing apitalist states right across ontinental Europe-under loviet occupation in the east, ind under the Anglo-Amercan armies in the west and buth.

At that time it was xpected that private roperty, in land, industry nd banking would continue verywhere outside the Soviet mion.

Not foreseen Few people-and least of | Stalin-had any inkling hat by 1948-9 an iron urtain' would divide the two ostile, armed camps, and hat to the west of it trociously anti-communist gimes would be in power, hile the countries to the Ist would be transformed ¡to smaller images of the ›viet state. manian fascist leaders to mentously inaccurai. -leT Cannontate Togliatti The 'grand alliance' for 'democracy' against German fascism had completely broken down and the 'cold war' against the Soviet Union was in full swing.

This collection of papers aspires to say of Stalinist policy in this period what happened, how it happened, and why.

In the first aim it has some, relative, success; in the other two it completely fails.

Even so, merely to provide an overview of some of the main diplomatic and political events in a period which has been SO systematic ally distorted by Stalinist and bourgeois historians gives the book some value.

But the genesis of the book cuts it off from any serious attempt at explanation.

The individual chapters aravamt atenased as contriStudies, London University, in 1974-6.

Anti-communists Most of them deal with their selected countries in isolation from the European or international political situation.

All of the authors are anti-communists and several have acquired their specialist knowledge partly by working for the British intelligence services.

What, then, is there in this book to recommend it to workers and socialists class struggle today?

Simply the fact that it collects between two covers details of the policies of the European Communist Parties during the most critical years of the post-war perioddetails which cast a sharp light on the political character of Stalinism and which, consequently, the leaders of today's Communist Parties (many of whom served their political apprenticeships in that period) would much rather keep discretely buried.

The point is best

Monarchy

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the first. two countries the Red Army entered: Rumania and Bulgaria, both of whom had been allied with Germany.

In Rumania, where the monarchy had traditionally been backed up by the native anti-semitic Iron Guard fascist movement, King Michael was kept on the throne and given, in 1944-5, a substantial political role.

He was regularly toasted by Stalinist officials as 'the people's king' and continued to reign, protected by Soviet bayonets, until the 'Cold War' was well under way.

very end of 1947.

Wedding

He had just returned from London, (where he had been attending the wedding of Elizabeth Windsor) with a prospective bride of his own -Princess Anne of Bourbon Parma-and he seems to have expected (reasonably enough, given the circumstances) to continue the dynasty indefinitely.

Stalin, though, apparently drew the line at this prospect and His Progressive Highness was sent packing-along with d large quantity of the Rumanian people's property —into exile (the Soviet bureaucracy was never inclined to treat autocrats too unkindly).

In the chapter by Professor Bela Vago the role of the King and monarchist politicians in alliance with the Stalinists in Rumania are usefully sketched, including several of the details given above.

Strength In Bulgaria, the strength of the wartime resistance and of the underground Communist Party were much greateran estimated 15,000 members compared with 883 in illustrated by refe ring some of the bun described indi chapters.

lish 'socialism' in eastern - is 1944-5. that he Rumania, on the ève of the Red Army's entry.

Moreover the monarchy was in suspension; the last occupant, the notoriously savage and decadent King Boris, had died after returning from a visit to Hitler in 1943..

But the Stalinists did not simply let the monarchy lapse. They appointed The chief figure on this body was the official 'theoretician' of the Bulgarian Communist Party, Todor Pavlov!

Referendum

Only later, when a referendum (the first and only free vote in Bulgaria's history)

massively rejected the monarchy, was the heir, Prince Simeon, sent into exile (with £5 million to console him).

Rumania and Bulgaria were destined for the Soviet 'sphere of influence' . In Italy the Communist Party leadership slavishly respected Stalin's agreement that the country should be restored to the old ruling class and brought within the Anglo-American orbit.

'Ex'-fascist

In July 1943, with the alliance with Hitler obviously hopeless, Mussolini was ousted by a palace coup.

In September King Victor Emmanuel (who had not liftad a finger against fascism in almost twenty years) and his government under the 'ex'-fascist Marshall Badoglio werè forced to flee from Rome to the south, where they surrendered to the American and British forces landing on the mainland.

But, with Hitler having taken over direct control of almost the whole peninsula, and with such recent and flimsy 'anti-fascist' . credentials, their political authority was virtually nil, and the Americans hesitated to give them any sort of recognition.

It was Stalin who injected life into Badoglio's monarchist circus, and in so doing paved the way for the rescue of capitalism in Italy.

CP leader Palmiro Togliatti

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20 years after Stalinism's defensive expansion into the buffer states, Stalinist tank enforces Kremlin domination over Czechoslovakia the Soviet Union (which was the first power to recognise the Badoglio government) demanded that the entire left collaborate with Badoglio and the King, postponing "political questions' until the war was over, and himself accepting a cabinet post.

Only the left camouflage which this provided enabled the government and the Anglo-American military command to reassert their control after the insurrection of April 1945, when the mass uprising of the working class and the partisans liberated virtually all the cities of northern Italy ten days before allied troops arrived.

Chapter 10 outlines this and later policies of the Italian CP.

Church privilege

The monarchy was finally ended by referendum, though the new constitution preserved most of the privileges of the Catholic Church.

In France it was a little late to retrieve the monarchy. But Edward Mortimer's lively chapter describes how the French CP gave its full support to the next best thing: de Gaulle's government.

•Returning from Moscow Cr chiei Maurice Ihorez concentrated his political fire against the left and the most militant sections of the working class.

The partisan detachments : were disarmed and dissolved, or absorbed into the Gaullist army, though not before a number of political opponents of the Stalinists within the resistance and the trade unions had been liquidated' Battle for Production From autumn 1944 the French Stalinists threw their full weight behind the 'battle for production', ', abandoning the wartime wage demands, branding strikers as 'agents of the trusts' (!), and so on.

France was the only nation of continental Europe with a substantial empire to recover. In this task the Communist Party assisted de Gaulle with the maximum of nationalist gusto. and ought to remain a great African power' The nationalist demonstrations for independence in Algeria in May 1945 were accordingly condemned as a 'fascist conspiracy, a lie which helped to hold back opposition within France to the bloody reprisals unleashed by de Gaulle in Algiers.

In 1946 Communist ministers voted for the credits to escalate the agression in Indochina against the Vietminh, clearing the way for seven years of the most brutal colonial war.

Immediately after the war, therefore, Stalinist policy right across Europe supported capitalism. In the west and south Stalinist leaders collaborated with the new governments (France and Italy) OI retreated before them, as in the British-backed civil war to restore the King and his profascist politicians in Greece, where Stalin cynically sacrificed tens of thousands of Communists to his agreement with Churchill.

French imperialist troops murde In Eastern Europe the nationalisations that were carried out in the immediate post-war period were not done to establish a planned economy, but to ship more resources to the Soviet Union or, sometimes, to recover control over factories whose owners had fled and which had been occupied by the workers.

The main socially progressive steps at this time were partial land reforms (without would have been paralysed, anyway).

Dr. McCauley's book includes many political details of this period, but it never identifies the continent-wide process that gave rise to them: the enormous growth, from 1943 on, of revolutionary mass movements right across Europe, which thrust the Stalinist parties in many countries to the head of events (for lack, usually, of any other leadership) but which Stalin's men then systematically deceived, betrayed and derailed.

What is virtually ignored in the book is the extent to which in Eastern Europe, the Stalinists and the Red Army command contained and suppressed the many organs of workers' power that were formed spontaneously as the rule of the Nazis collapsed.

Disorientated

By 1947, therefore, the working class in most of Europe was disorientated and confused by the retreats which had been forced on it by its leaderships.

Largely as a result of this, imperialism felt strong enough to resume the offensive against the Soviet Union and its territories in Eastern Europe.

In the spring the Stalinists were unceremoniously chucked out of the French and Italian governments: the US launched a strategy (the Marshall Plan) for economic penetration and recovery into both East and West Europe.

Truman announced the US's responsibility to rescue peoples threatened by 'Communist agression'-external or internal.

It was this renewed offensive which brought, as a pragmatic reaction by the Kremlin, the piecemeal social transformation of the Eastern European countries, mainly in the years 1947-9.

By a combination of police action, political mergers, and ballot rigging they were all converted into 'People's Democracies' modelled on the Soviet state.

Almost everywhere the working class played a passive role as spectators to a police operation.

Only in the last country to be 'sovietised'-Czechoslovakia, with more industry, a larger workers' movement and a more well-established Communist Party than the rest of Eastern Europe-was there any scale of mobilisation, and even that was short-lived and carefully controlled.

In any case, the very fact that the political takeover came last (February 1948) in Czechoslovakia, the country Algerian nationalists which was politically and socially most advanced, shows how subordinate was the role of the working class.

There was, in fact, much greater Stalinist mobilisation of the working class in west Europe. The Italian and (even more so) the French Communist Parties were turned sharply to the left to serve the requirements of Soviet foreign policy.

At the founding conference of the Cominform (in Thorez was torn off a strip for his opportunist policies at the end of the war, and sent back to lead a suicidal strike movement against the government and its pro-American policies.

But the essentials of the war-time agreements Stalin had made with the imperialist powers were not breached.

Europe remained carved into 'spheres of influence' and the fate of a nation was decided by where it lay.

Peoples' Democracies

Thus France, Italy and Greece, which had had powerful Communist Parties even under the illegal conditions of the war period, remained capitalist, while Rumania and Hungary, both very backward countries in which wartime Communism was a negligible force, were transformed into 'People's Democracies'.

Dr. McCauley and his colleagues are prevented by their method of approach from examining this process : a whole, and therefore from understanding it. They have no sympathy with (and very slight appreciation of) Marxism.

And, reflecting this, they have "balkanised' their subject to give a 'country-by-country' treatment of it. Theoretically speaking, they are disciples of the school of studying 'socialism in one country'.

What never emerges clearly from their book is that behind all the national peculiarities international political forces were at work.

Stalin and the Soviet bureaucracy occupied Eastern Europe at the close of the war for essentially defensive purposes, to use it asa buffer and hostage to protect them in their future dealings with imperialism.

It was not, initially, a matter of concern to them what the class character of the states was; they were prepared to work with whatever political forces were to hand and appeared (like the monarchy and a number of 'reformed' fascists) cooperative.

Only when the Cold War showed that they could not have stable political and military conditions while leaving the old ruling classes in place, did they move to depose them.

Not local State power in Eastern Europe had never been a purely local or national question; in the years after the War it almost entirely ceased to be so.

The essential decisions were taken not in Warsaw, Budapest, Sofia or Bucharest, but in Moscow and Washington.

An interesting exaple is that of the Czech Communist Party, whose leadership 1: - 17_- _hat alana the rest of the government, the attractive terms of the US's Marshall 'aid'; only after urgent redirection from Moscow did they turn round and refuse.

Communism in Europe 1944-49 almost entirely loses sight: of the general forces acting on Stalinist policies, allowing each individual academic author to indulge his prejudices and impressions about the country he is writing on.

Its standpoint is the polar opposite of (and presumably intended as an antidote to) the theory widely offered to students that every step taken by any Communist Party, anywhere and ever, is part of a Machiavellian Leninist plot, coordinated from Moscow for the last sixty years, for the world conquest of power-a plot miraculously frustrated by the representatives of bourgeois democracy (with the help of a number of happy accidents).

Dr. McCauley's book is an improvement on this genre, but not by very much. Its contributors share a taste for realpolitik.

This is occasionally reflected in an unintentional appreciation of the essentially bourgeois, hypocritical and profoundly anti-democratic character of Stalinist political methods,as when one of the doyens in the subject (Prof. Seton-Watson) concedes that:

"the manoeuvres and ingenuity of the Communists in Eastern Europe can provide a good deal of intellectual pleasure"

Patchy

But the book is patchy not only in method, but in selection. It lacks, for example, any treatment of the Yugoslav revolution or even any systematic discussion of Stalin's split with Tito (June 1948) which affected the world Stalinist movement, and the Eastern European states most of all.

As compensation, however, it covers some topics on which little material is available.

There is an informative chapter on the assimilation of the 'Baltic states' (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania) into the Soviet Union.

And there is a chapter on the little-known exception which proves the general rule of 'defensive expansion' in the Stalinist takeovers of Eastern Europe in 1947-9: Finland.

Early in 1948 the Finnish CP leadership made a 'left' turn, led major strikes and even prepared for insurrection under the impression (held by some of them, at least) that, backed by the threat of Soviet force, they were going to take power.

But there was to be no 'Prague coup' in Helsinki. At the height of the political crisis Stalin signed a treaty with the right-wing government leaders which secured Finland's military neutrality.

He gave the right wing economic concessions which brought them a consequent landslide electoral victory over the Finnish Communist Party, which was driven into the wilderness for over a decade.

The Kremlin had decided that a weak 'neutral' state, out of bounds to foreign armies, between them and the Baltic, offered just as good protection, with much less fuss, than 'liberating' the Finnish people.

This book, therefore, uneven and partial though it is, is, has value as a source of facts and further references for a crucial period of the European Stalinist movement.

Its value, however, is nothing like sufficient to justify its price: at £10 (slightly over 4p a page) all but the most devoted students of the subject will wish to order it through their public library

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A Review of 'Political Imprisonment in South Africa'

----- pull-quotes -----

He was forced to abdicate, almost by accident, at the

Take the question of monarchy. So far was Stalin from any intention to estab-

1290 as soon as he returned from

with his policy of 'One nation, one state, one army!'