NORMAN NAIMARK
The great Soviet victories at Stalingrad (January 1943) and Kursk (July 1943) reversed the tide of the war against the Nazis and made it likely that Soviet armies would occupy vast stretches of territory in Europe. Allied conferences at Teheran in November 1944 and Yalta in February 1945, and the notorious "percentages agreement" between Iosif Stalin and Winston Churchill in October 1944, confirmed that Eastern Europe, initially at least, would lie within the sphere of influence of the Soviet Union. Communists in the region also assumed that their countries would fall under Soviet sway in one form or another. Milovan Djilas famously recorded Stalin’s assertion during a wartime conversation: "This war is not as in the past: whoever occupies a territory also imposes on it his own social system. Everyone imposes his own system as far as his army can reach. It cannot be otherwise."223 Georgi Dimitrov, head of the Soviet Central Committee’s Department of International Information, noted in late January 1945 that Stalin expected a war with the capitalist world within two decades of the Nazi defeat, and therefore it would be necessary to maintain a strong alliance among the Slavic countries of Eastern Europe to counter that aggression.224
Yet there is very little evidence that Stalin had firm notions in 1944-45 about developing some sort of Communist bloc in Eastern Europe after the war. Instead, he probably shared many of the suppositions of two of the major policyplanning documents to emerge from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs during World War II, Maxim Litvinov’s "Memorandum" of January 11,1945, and Ivan Maisky’s "Note" of January 10, 1944. The Litvinov document was prepared in association with the Yalta Conference and explored the possibility of establishing an agreement about three spheres of influence on the continent. Linked to
The Soviet Union would be a zone in the east and north, including Finland, Sweden, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, and Turkey. A second zone would be dominated by Britain and would include the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Spain, Portugal, and Greece. Most interesting was the "neutral" sphere, which included Germany as well as Denmark, Norway, Austria, and Italy. In this sphere the great powers would share responsibility for the security of the area, cooperating on issues of reparations and trade.225 According to the Maisky note, continental Europe would inevitably transform itself into a series of socialist states, but, barring armed conflict, it would take somewhere between thirty and fifty years for this evolution to take place. Meanwhile, cooperation with the United States and Britain was critical for setting up democratic regimes and functioning economies in formerly Fascist and Fascist-occupied countries.226
To those East European Communists who spent the war years in Moscow, the advance of Soviet armies into Eastern Europe meant that they would have the opportunity to vie for political leadership in their homelands. They did not take it for granted that they would instantly come to power as a result of Soviet victory and occupation. Instead, in Moscow, in the underground, and in prison camps, East European Communists developed strategies to cooperate with other anti-Fascist parties of the Left and center to form national fronts to liberate their countries and to build new and "truly democratic" political systems. They would cooperate with socialist, populist, and democratic parties to bring about an anti-Fascist democratic revolution.
This was also Moscow’s line at the end of the war, which was implemented by Dimitrov and his staff of mostly foreign-born Communists.227 Broadcast over radio and communicated by telegrams, brochures, and newspapers all over Eastern and East Central Europe, the policy was unambiguous. There would be no Communist revolution in Eastern Europe and no dictatorship of the proletariat; no workers’ councils (soviets) were to be formed. Instead, the East European revolution would see the completion of the 1848 bourgeois democratic revolution, bringing to an end the remnants of feudalism in the region. Free of the influence of the landholding class and big capital, the will of the people would be expressed through democratically elected parliaments. The rights of peasants and workers would be guaranteed by constitutional law.
Communist Parties would operate in coalitions with agrarians, socialists, and true democrats to bring about a new stage in these countries’ histories, that of "people’s democracy.”
World History
