The spring of 1946 was an important turning point in the unraveling of the Grand Alliance. In his speech on February 9, Stalin presented his mobilization strategy: since capitalism remained a main source of wars, the Soviet people must steel themselves for a new and strenuous effort to insure their hard-won security "against any eventuality." That insurance was to be provided by accelerated economic development with the emphasis on heavy industry envisioned in the new Five-Year Plan. Targeted at a domestic audience, the speech was interpreted in the West as a call for a renewed ideological struggle and for revolutionary expansion. When Western policies hardened, for example, demanding that the Soviets leave Iran - as they were obligated to do - and when former British prime minister Winston Churchill delivered a stinging attack on Soviet policies in Fulton, Missouri, in March 1946, Stalin was further angered. Churchill’s speech - given with Truman at his side - sent a powerful signal to the Kremlin conveying the impression that the United States was, at best, conniving and, at worst, plotting with Churchill in a new anti-Soviet ideological offensive. The Soviet people now needed to be more vigilant than ever, and, accordingly, Stalin launched his famous propaganda campaign to guard against Western encirclement.
Stalin’s efforts to prevent further British-American collusion against the USSR were undermined by his own actions in Iran and Turkey. Determined to strengthen his vulnerable southern flank and get access to Iranian oil, he went to great lengths to create a pro-Soviet enclave in northern Iran, an area occupied by the Red Army and populated by ethnic Azeris and Kurds. By delaying the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Iran and by instigating a local Communist-led separatist movement, Stalin hoped at a minimum to wrest a favorable oil deal from Teheran. Faced with firm resolve on the part of the Iranian government, backed by the United States and Britain, he settled for a compromise (troop withdrawal followed by an oil deal), only to be outfoxed in the end by the Majlis’s refusal to approve it. Moscow did nothing to defend its Azeri clients in northern Iran as Teheran forces brutally crushed their resistance. Giving up this very expensive and promising investment while running no risk of serious military resistance from Iran and the West could be explained only by the dictator’s inner caution and reluctance to turn the British and the Americans against himself too soon.
The crisis regarding Turkey followed a similar pattern. Doubtful of Western support for Russia’s historical claim to the straits, Stalin first demanded their "joint defense," coupled with a request to regain small chunks of territory in Kars and Ardahan that had belonged to Armenia and Georgia before 1921. In August 1946, this scheme was repackaged into a proposal to secure control over the straits for the Black Sea powers. The Soviet position in this war of nerves was backed up by troop concentrations along Turkey’s northern borders. The Kremlin’s calculation that Ankara would yield to Soviet pressure while the Allies would stand aside proved to be wrong. Both crises revealed a lack of long-term strategic planning on the part of Stalin, who essentially was "knocking at the doors" in search of weak points around the Soviet periphery. He provoked the consolidation of an British-American bloc against the USSR and pushed Iran and Turkey toward the West.
By the summer of 1946, Stalin and his aides had made the key decisions about Soviet national priorities that would shape Soviet foreign policy for years to come. Postwar reconstruction was to be combined with massive rearmament, which included the acceleration of the atomic project plus crash programs in rocketry and air defense. Their achievement had to be a bootstrapping operation since all potential sources of outside assistance (except for industrial dismantling in the occupied territories) had failed to materialize. Greater reparations from Germany were blocked by the Allies. The Soviet request for a reconstruction loan was at first "lost" in Washington and then became encumbered with unacceptable political conditions. Soviet membership in the Bretton Woods system was ultimately prevented by the Kremlin’s own fears of opening up the Soviet economy. As a result, economic incentives to cooperate with the West were reduced to almost zero, making it much easier for latent ideological and political hostility to take hold. With its returns diminishing, the Big Three alliance was losing its former attraction to Stalin and his subordinates.
In Soviet internal assessments, the United States began to emerge as the main adversary, set on an aggressive course: resurrecting Russia’s old enemies, surrounding the Soviet state with military bases, and threatening it with atomic bombs. A vivid example of this new thinking was apparent in a long analytical report written by the Soviet ambassador in Washington, Nikolai Novikov, and supervised by Molotov himself. The essence was that the United States was pursuing "world supremacy."117 High-ranking officials in Moscow who did not share this black-and-white picture of the world lost influence. Maisky’s departure in 1946 was soon followed by the expulsion of Litvinov, who had the nerve to criticize Soviet policy (in an interview with a US news correspondent) as being overly offensive and ideological.
Growing international tensions provided a fitting background for tightening screws at home. The official campaign against "fawning" on the West, launched in August 1946, was a crude but effective way to extinguish the residual respect for Western culture and ideas by appealing to Russian national pride and a traditional sense of moral superiority over the "rotten West." The anti-Western ideological indoctrination was accompanied by a crackdown on British-American propaganda, curtailing subscriptions to foreign books and periodicals, and banning informal contacts with foreigners.
Busy with erecting the Iron Curtain at home, Stalin was still engaged in pragmatic bargaining with his former allies over a peace settlement in Europe. At the Council of Foreign Ministers sessions in Paris and New York, hardnosed Soviet diplomacy was able to achieve most of its aims. The peace treaties with former German satellites confirmed the new Soviet borders with Finland and Romania, provided reparations to the USSR and its new allies (or eased their burden), and in general contributed to Soviet dominance over the Balkans and Eastern Europe. At the same time, Molotov failed to get a foothold in the Mediterranean; he also had to compromise on the status of Trieste and the Italy-Yugoslavia border - much to the frustration ofMoscow’s new ally, the government of Josip Broz Tito. The latter concession was personally approved by Stalin who instructed Molotov "not to derail the conference because of the issue of Trieste."118
There could be adjustments on secondary issues, but not on the main ones. Creating a glacis ofpro-Soviet states along the western border remained at the top of the Kremlin’s agenda. Stalin’s overt strategy in Eastern Europe was to support "people’s democracies," a framework that postulated peaceful ways to socialism pursued by coalition governments in the various countries of the region. In Poland, through 1946, Stalin instructed local Communists to tolerate a legal opposition and not to alienate the country’s Roman Catholic Church. In Hungary and Czechoslovakia, Moscow continued to deal with non-Communist leaders. Communist control was more obvious in Romania and Bulgaria, but even there non-Communist political parties continued to function. Yet the "people’s democracy" formula faced mounting difficulties: harsh methods of "creeping Sovietization" were setting local populations against the USSR and its indigenous agents; Western-backed nationalist opponents would not give up; and local Communists were increasingly resentful of having to put up with their opponents, which Moscow instructed them to do. At the same time, diminishing returns of cooperation with the West were loosening external constraints on Soviet policy regarding compliance with democratic appearances. In early 1947, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union began to prepare plans for a forcible imposition of the Soviet model.
Germany was another top priority for the Kremlin, and the situation there did not look promising either. Soviet diplomats perceived the consolidation of the American and British zones as a means to undermine the influence of the USSR in Germany and to resurrect its power on a reactionary basis. Denial of reparation transfers from the American zone in 1946 reinforced this impression.
Stalin’s plans for postwar Germany still arouse considerable historical debate, but he appears to have pursued several contradictory options at the same time. The most tempting one was a united pro-Soviet Germany. He told Georgi Dimitrov, "All of Germany must be ours, Soviet."119 He also directed German Communists to merge with the Social Democrats to establish a nationwide Socialist Unity Party and to expand their influence westward, even with the help of former rank-and-file Nazis. But making the whole of Germany "ours" was too problematic, considering the Allies’ firm control over its larger and richer part. The middle option could be a demilitarized and neutral Germany serving as a buffer between Western and Soviet spheres of influence. Finally, there was always a minimum program designed to set up a client state in the Soviet zone of occupation which would at least preserve the Soviet presence in the heart of Europe. Stalin was establishing the material preconditions for this scenario by secretly Sovietizing the eastern zone, but he did not abandon his larger aims.
Growing international tensions notwithstanding, the USSR was not preparing for a major showdown with the West. By 1948, the Red Army was reduced to one-quarter of its 1945 strength, and the military budget of 1946-47 was only half of its wartime peak. The scarce documentation available on Soviet military planning reveals that, contrary to American assumptions, Soviet contingency plans did not envision any offensive operations in Western Europe, concentrating instead on holding the line of defense in Germany.120 121 Soviet naval commanders’ requests for a major buildup of an ocean-going navy were rejected by Stalin as too expensive and unnecessary for coastal defense.
World History
