The problem started in Europe. At the end of the war,
Soviet military forces occupied all of Eastern Europe
and the Balkans (except for Greece, Albania, and Yugoslavia),
while U.S. and other allied forces completed their
occupation of the western part of the continent. Roosevelt
had assumed that free elections administered by
“democratic and peace-loving forces” would lead to the
creation of democratic governments responsive to the aspirations
of the local population. But it soon became
clear that Moscow and Washington differed in their interpretations
of the Yalta agreement. When Soviet occupation
authorities turned their attention to forming a
new Polish government in Warsaw, Stalin refused to accept
the legitimacy of the Polish government in exile
—headquartered in London during the war, it was composed
primarily of representatives of the landed aristocracy
who harbored a deep distrust of the Soviets—and
instead installed a government composed of Communists
who had spent the war in Moscow. Roosevelt complained
to Stalin but was preoccupied with other problems and
eventually agreed to a compromise solution whereby two
members of the exile government in London were included
in a new regime dominated by the Communists. A
week later, Roosevelt was dead of a cerebral hemorrhage.
Similar developments took place elsewhere in Eastern
Europe as all of the states occupied by Soviet troops became
part of Moscow’s sphere of influence. Coalitions
of all political parties (except Fascist or right-wing parties)
were formed to run the government, but within a
year or two, the Communist parties in these coalitions
had assumed the lion’s share of power. The next step was
the creation of one-party Communist governments. The
timetables for these takeovers varied from country to
country, but between 1945 and 1947, Communist governments
became firmly entrenched in East Germany,
Bulgaria, Romania, Poland, and Hungary. In Czechoslovakia,
with its strong tradition of democratic institutions,
the Communists did not achieve their goals until 1948.
In the elections of 1946, the Communist Party became
the largest party but was forced to share control of the
government with non-Communist rivals. When it appeared
that the latter might win new elections early in
1948, the Communists seized control of the government
on February 25. All other parties were dissolved, and
Communist leader Klement Gottwald became the new
president of Czechoslovakia.
Yugoslavia was a notable exception to the pattern of
growing Soviet dominance in Eastern Europe. The Communist
Party there had led resistance to the Nazis during
the war and easily took over power when the war ended.
Josip Broz, known as Tito (1892–1980), the leader of the
Communist resistance movement, appeared to be a loyal
Stalinist. After the war, however, he moved toward the
establishment of an independent Communist state in Yugoslavia.
Stalin hoped to take control of Yugoslavia, just
as he had done in other Eastern European countries. But
Tito refused to capitulate to Stalin’s demands and gained
the support of the people (and some sympathy in the
West) by portraying the struggle as one of Yugoslav national
freedom. In 1958, the Yugoslav party congress asserted
that Yugoslav Communists did not see themselves
as deviating from communism, only from Stalinism. They
considered their more decentralized economic and political
system, in which workers could manage themselves
and local communes could exercise some political power,
closer to the Marxist-Leninist ideal.
To Stalin (who had once boasted, “I will shake my
little finger, and there will be no more Tito”), the creation
of pliant pro-Soviet regimes throughout Eastern Europe
may simply have represented his interpretation of
the Yalta peace agreement and a reward for sacrifices suffered
during the war while satisfying Moscow’s aspirations
for a buffer zone against the capitalist West. Recent evidence
suggests that Stalin did not decide to tighten communist
control over the new Eastern European governments
until U.S. actions—notably the promulgation of
the Marshall Plan (see below)—threatened to undermine
Soviet authority in the region. If the Soviet leader
had any intention of promoting future Communist revolutions
in Western Europe—and there is some indication
that he did—in his mind such developments would have
to await the appearance of a new capitalist crisis a decade
or more into the future. As Stalin undoubtedly recalled,
Lenin had always maintained that revolutions come in
waves.
World History
