Stalin's Foreign Policy
by Ernst Henry
Click here to read the author's biography
Click here to read a synopsis
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Sample translation by Nick Allen
Chapter 1. The Forbidden Revolution
In December 1952, three months before Stalin’s death, the French Communist Party abruptly expelled two of the most distinguished members of its Politburo, André Marty and Charles Tillon. These were exalted veterans of the revolutionary movement in France, having risen to prominence as far back as the 1920s. Both belonged to the party’s founding core but had enjoyed Lenin’s trust even during the Russian Civil War.
At Lenin’s behest, Marty had helped incite mutiny in the French fleet in the Black Sea in April 1919. He served as secretary to the Party’s Executive Committee in the 1930s, when he also established the International Brigade in Spain, leading it as chief political commissar. From 1944 he directed the Party’s underground organizations in France from Algeria. Marty won little affection with his iron-fisted, despotic character, drawing comparisons with Robespierre. In Spain, he was behind some notable excesses but nonetheless won recognition as a stalwart and unwavering revolutionary leader.
Tillon, another ringleader of the Black Sea mutiny of 1919, was a member of the Central Committee from 1932 and led the French partisan movement during WWII, commanding units of the Resistance set up by the Communists. Following orders of French Communist Party leaders residing in Moscow, the two men essentially ran the entire underground apparatus of the party.
Damning accusations were made against them when their expulsion was announced in 1952. Although a veteran of the Lenin years, Marty was denounced as a longstanding police agent, as was the practice then in the Soviet Union. But what exactly was the crime of these old Communists? In some respects, they were guilty of some indefensible acts. And not only did they know of one of Stalin’s most monumental mistakes before the end of the war, but they allowed themselves to discuss it in public, and this was to be their undoing.
In the summer of 1944 France was caught in a total state of upheaval and thus represented typical revolutionary ground. The German Army, or Wehrmacht, had begun its long flight back to the Reich, being pursued towards Paris by Eisenhower’s Allied forces, although not at full pace. Meanwhile, across almost the entire territory of the country, including regions that were still occupied, the French rose up against the Germans and the Communists were at the forefront everywhere.
The authority of the Communists and their insurgent branch was now so great that the entire population recognized this, including the bourgeoisie. During the years of Occupation the Communists emerged as the backbone of the Resistance, and now fighting groups of the ‘Maquis’ led by Marty and Tillon emerged as the basis of the new governing structures in many of the liberated regions. In towns ruled by the Party and its followers, Resistance committees played a comparable role to the revolutionary committees and the Red Guard in Russia during the Civil War. The French Red Guard, which was also led by Tillon and his staff, bore the name Patriotic Militia. Such revolutionary committees already wielded power in many parts of France, and with the Germans in retreat the Communists were effectively in charge.
The situation was particularly indicative in occupied Paris, where events should as always have set the pattern for the fate of the whole country. In August 1944, on the eve of the ouster of the German forces, the Communists held almost every position of power in the capital. Suffice it to say that two of the three members of the COMAC (military action committee) were Communists, namely Tillon and Maurice Kriegel-Valrimont. Their chief of staff was a General and Communist, Alfred Malleret-Joinville, the commander of resistance units in Paris was a Colonel and Communist, Henri Rol-Tanguy, the deputy chairman of the Paris Liberation Committee was the Communist Georges Marrane. The permanent standing board of the National Resistance Council, the movement’s highest political branch, was led by the Catholic politician and supporter of de Gaulle, Georges Bidault, but the Communists and their allies were still in the majority.
Before the Germans were driven from Paris, the building of the police prefecture was occupied by Communist-led units. Altogether these comprised some 30,000 members under arms but hundreds of thousands more Parisien workers were only waiting to be armed themselves. They chose their own leaders and almost everywhere these were Communists or people close to them. From August 14 the city was paralysed by a general strike and the leadership of the workers was also largely controlled by the Party.
On August 22, while preparing to seize power from within, the head of the Paris ‘revolutionary committee’ Henri Rol-Tanguy issued his famous orders, “Everyone, kill a Hun! Cover Paris with barricades!”, thus embodying the spirit of the Paris Commune of the 1789 French Revolution. After the terrible suffering of the Occupation the people could not be contained and now everyone took part, including bourgeoisie activists. It was now impossible to avert revolution, the Communists only needed to want it and Paris would have been theirs in a day.
General de Gaulle wrote the following in his memoirs about those August days:
“If (the Communists) had successfully incited an uprising and gone on to seize Paris it would have been easy for them to form a de facto government in which they took the lead. It was their intention to profit from the turmoil of the fighting and bring the National Resistance Council over to their side … use the sympathy felt towards them by many people across the population because of the persecution they had been subjected to, losses they suffered, and the courage they showed; they could have exploited the alarm caused by the absence of any form of public authority … and stood at the forefront of a rebellion much like the Commune, which would then proclaim a republic and restore order and justice … On my arrival I should find this “popular” government already functioning: it would crown me with a laurel wreath, invite me to take my place within its organization, and then the trap would have snapped shut!”
De Gaulle goes on to write that according to his information, the Communists intended to task the Patriotic Militia with establishing a new police force in the people’s name, create new institutions of justice and then implement a broad purge. This was a typical revolutionary situation as defined by Lenin: the former rulers, in this case the Germans and Pétain’s government in Vichy, could neither continue to rule nor carry on existing, while those called upon by history to take the reins of power enjoyed suitable objective and subjective conditions for this. If there ever existed a genuine revolutionary situation as defined by Lenin since the Paris Commune of Paris, then it was during the last ten days of August 1944.
Everything was ripe for the decisive move. As the people burst onto the streets the initiative lay entirely in the hands of the working class, while the now impotent bourgeoisie made only one last ditch attempt to contain and steer events, an attempt that was put to shame before the entire country. On August 20, following secret negotiations with the German commander in the capital, General Dietrich von Choltitz, de Gaulle’s representatives in Paris brokered a ceasefire agreement in order to avert a popular uprising in Paris and to give de Gaulle time to bring his forces up to the city. In seeking to collude with the Germans, the General was trying to repeat the tactic employed against the Paris Commune by Adolphe Thiers, the head of the new provisional national government in 1871.
But the Parisians had no desire to comply with a ceasefire concluded without their knowledge and consent. At a meeting of the COMAC Tillon furiously denounced de Gaulle and his representatives, saying, “You are afraid of the people. You have abandoned the fight in order to steal their victory. The ceasefire you have reached with the Germans is like Pétain’s ceasefire, and the spirit of Munich and Vichy is usurping the true spirit of the Resistance. You have stabbed the uprising in the back!”
The knife was promptly pulled out and barricades sprang up around the city. The Revolutionary Committee was now only waiting for the signal to take the uprising to its conclusion and to seize power, and other large cities in the country were poised to follow the example of Paris.
That signal never came.
On August 19, the head of the Revolutionary Committee, Rol-Tanguy, orders the general mobilization of Parisians into units of Resistance and the Patriotic Militia, and the rebels storm and seize the city hall.
August 20: De Gaulle’s representatives reach their ceasefire agreement with the Germans. On the same day de Gaulle flies to Normandy from North Africa.
August 21. The Parisians refuse to acknowledge the ceasefire and barricades appear across the city.
August 22. The Revolutionary Committee instructs the population to be ready to destroy the German garrison.
August 23. Fighting continues. There is no signal to seize power.
August 24. The Revolutionary Committee declares Paris liberated. The city is controlled by the people. There is no signal to seize power.
August 25. General Philippe Leclerc’s 2nd Armoured Division enters Paris from the south under an emergency arrangement between de Gaulle from Eisenhower. De Gaulle arrives in Paris the same day. There is still no signal from the Communists and from this moment on everything disintegrates for the Resistance. As is invariably the case with failed revolutions, the wheel starts to turn in the opposite direction.
De Gaulle steps in to take power where the Communists had failed to do so, marking the start of what is effectively a genuine counter-revolution, but one that meets no resistance. He moves with great speed, as one would expect of a good general, acting decisively, hour by hour, day by day. De Gaulle forms a government, dissolves the National Resistance Council with its Communist majority, prohibits the further existence of the COMAC, demands the dissolution of the Patriotic Militia and the revolutionary partisans and their absorption by the regular army forces under his command.
He appoints one of his close entourage favourite, General Marie-Pierre Koenig, as military governor of Paris and entrusts the maintenance of order to his police and gendarmerie. On August 29, de Gaulle dissolves the regional headquarters of the Resistance across the country and transfers their function to newly named generals and governors of his apparatus.
A few months later, in January 1945, there ensues a sequence of monumental events. Supposedly acting with the agreement of the Communists themselves, de Gaulle dissolves the Patriotic Militia - the French Red Guard - and its function is transferred to de Gaulle’s regular police.
The French Communists are astounded but have no choice other than to fall in line. Subordination is demanded of Marty and Tillon and they also comply. No longer does any one recall Leninist notions about the existence and use of objective and subjective conditions for revolution. It transpires that there are also other conditions more important than those pondered by Lenin. These are adhered to, although no one publicly discusses these secret conditions that are evidently only known to a select few.
One way or another power is voluntarily ceded to the General, who does not yet ride on a white steed, although it won’t be long. De Gaulle takes two Communists into his government, one of whom is Tillon, and may keep his laurel wreath despite his original expectation that things would work out quite the reverse and that it would be the Communists who afforded him a place in their triumphant government. But now the wheel swings the other way.
The second Paris Commune, which might have changed the face of Western Europe, is smothered in the cradle according to Churchill’s recipe. There is a modern-day Thiers but no ‘white terror’ - there is no need because the Commune offers no resistance. Everything happens peacefully under some kind of secret agreement forged on high. Responsibility for this cannot be apportioned to the French Communists, who had done everything they could. Two and a half years later they are ejected from the government, France reverts irrevocably to a capitalist oligarchy and the anti-Soviet headquarters of NATO is then situated in Paris.
All of this comes across like some kind of bizarre stage comedy, extremely hard to fathom and digest. In revolutionary history, the events that unfolded in Paris in August 1944 were unprecedented. Leafing through the memoirs of de Gaulle, one senses how he too was astonished by the actions of the Communists as they neglected to embrace the power that was straining into their clutches. Of course, he doesn’t say so - de Gaulle was far too shrewd - but as a politician who had acted extremely decisively and swiftly when required, he is still unable to conceal between the lines a slightly contemptuous tone towards his adversaries.
Interestingly, Yugoslavia’s Marshall Tito was one of those who later voiced criticism of those responsible for the absence of a Communist revolution in August 1944. Tito evidently did not understand how in France, where the Communists led the popular Resistance as they did in his country, events did not unfold as they did in the Balkans.
So what exactly happened in Paris during those critical days?
Marty, who as a member of the Politburo and in his effective capacity of executive leader of the French Communist Party was better informed than most, provided this answer following his 1952 expulsion from the Party:
“It should be ascertained why the leadership in 1944 decided not to even attempt to seize power at that moment, when the opportunity for this was objectively the most favourable in the entire history of the Party. But the leadership doesn’t want this question to be raised and discussed,” he said, adding that this suppression of any methodical discussion of the subject also extended to Party congresses.
“Surely the Party had to seek preliminary permission from the Soviet Union? In 1944 Soviet diplomacy subordinated everything to its alliance with America, so could it be that the Communists’ rise to power in France threatened the Soviet plan with the Americans? Quite possibly. But what then was to come of the interests and aspirations of the French workers’ movement?”
Although Marty cautiously notes that it was impossible to guarantee the success of the Communists’ rise to power in 1944, he again stresses that the decision was not theirs: “The USSR, which was striving at the time to maintain its alliance with Washington, forbade the Party to seize power in France to avoid alarming the Americans.” And this was his last public utterance on the matter.
Marty and also Tillon never mentioned Stalin’s name in this context, even though the French Communist leader had been branded a ‘police agent’ at Stalin’s orders and being at a safe distance in Paris both men could have spoken their minds. But there was no need to go this far, it was all self-evident. There was only one person in the world who could give the French Communists such an order, just as there was only one person they would have obeyed, all the more so because the Comintern no longer existed, having been dissolved by Stalin a year earlier.
The authenticity of Marty’s information is beyond question. In his book about France the impeccably well informed English journalist Alexander Werth touches on the events in Paris, noting that Tillon was bitter about “advice to show restraint that was received from Moscow on the eve of the Liberation”. Not that it was a question of advice, of course, but a direct and categorical order. Stalin forbade - Marty’s choice of word - the French Communist Party to carry out a popular democratic revolution and to take charge of government. Stalin recognized de Gaulle and subsequently invited him to Moscow three months later on December 10, 1944, where they signed the Franco-Soviet pact of alliance and mutual assistance. The Soviet leader forbade a revolution in France not because he believed the objective and subjective conditions for this were lacking. No one could doubt that these were in place. Rather, he forbade it because he did not want to spoil his relationship with the Americans, as Marty supposes.
So what exactly was Stalin afraid of? That the Americans and British, whose forces were pushing towards Paris under Eisenhower, would prevent the Communists from seizing power and that they would resort to armed intervention? Hardly. If he truly believed this to be the case then he would also have been unable to avert it.
The French Communists had every reason to believe they could successfully create and consolidate a national government of the Resistance without triggering full-blown civil war and armed intervention by Eisenhower’s forces. As for the real prospects of such foreign intervention, the situation in the summer of 1944 was far more favourable for the Communists than that in the Soviet Russian republic after the October Revolution, when their predecessors faced a White counter-revolution on the same soil, had to fend off the Germans in the west and the Ukraine, and additionally faced the Franco-British intervention in the Black Sea and the north, not to mention the Japanese and Americans in the Far East.
First of all, the Communists could have fully controlled Paris before August 25 if they had so wished, that is to say before Leclerc’s division pushed into the city and General de Gaulle arrived there. If a government of the Resistance had been created there was nothing that could have been done about it as the entire city would have been armed.
Secondly, there were no serious grounds to suppose that the provinces would not this time support a capital plunged into revolution and would not rise up against any foreign intervention, as happened with the Paris Commune in 1871. In such key centres like Marseilles, Lyons and other cities, power had effectively been transferred to the Communists and their allies, who in such places headed the governing apparatus as well as the rank and file of the Resistance.
Even before the Normandy landings, a number of French departments or regions already had unofficially active prefects who were appointed by the National Resistance Committee, where the Communists were in the majority. De Gaulle’s efforts to have these revolutionary prefects replaced with his own people were unsuccessful. According to the French Communist Marcel Cachin, the army of the Resistance across the whole country in 1944 had grown to 800,000 members, forming the basis of the “new national and democratic army”. Even if this figure was inflated, Eisenhower and de Gaulle could not dismiss such a powerful force.
Thirdly, the Americans clearly had no wish to redirect Leclerc’s division to Paris and would hardly have done so if the step would have inevitably pitched them into conflict with the French Resistance. As de Gaulle himself hints, Eisenhower agreed to send the division only under pressure by the French general, and according to Werth, it was “not without great difficulty” that de Gaulle was able to exact this concession from the Americans.
As Eisenhower writes in his memoirs: “We wanted to avoid turning Paris into a battlefield … At the time we were trying to conserve every gram of gasoline and ammunition for combat operations [against the Germans – E.H.] and to move our frontline forward as far as possible, and I had hoped to delay taking the city, provided that the population would not start to suffer from starvation and other hardships. In this case I would have been forced to activate the forces of the Free French in Paris,” that is to say de Gaulle’s supporters.
President Roosevelt generally opposed to the very end a transfer of power in liberated France to de Gaulle, who he found intolerable. It should be noted that the Americans at the time already saw in de Gaulle a future adversary in Europe and had no desire to clear the way for him. The imperialistic contradictions were all too evident here. Roosevelt’s foreign policy chief Cordell Hull writes in his memoirs: “During my tenure as Secretary of State, de Gaulle seldom displayed signs of political acumen … The President and I soon came to the conclusion that we should not do anything that would help cement him as the ruler of the French people. We decided that it was necessary to grant the French total freedom in choosing their own government when things got to this stage.” And this total freedom was precisely what the leftist Resistance was preparing to demand in the summer of 1944.
Everything points towards the outcome that if an expediently created popular government in Paris had dug its heels in Eisenhower would have refused to dispatch Leclerc’s division, let alone resort to military intervention against the revolutionary capital of France. At the time the Americans assiduously sought to avoid any clash with the Resistance movement under the Communists. Their priority was to continue the fight against the far from vanquished Wehrmacht in the West, still fearing that the Germans would soon launch a counter-attack, which did indeed occur in December 1944 in the Ardennes. With that threat looming, the Americans had no wish to create problems for themselves in rear areas.
They were still more afraid of complications with the Red Army, which was steadfastly advancing on Germany. Considerations about the war against Japan were also high among American priorities. In the summer of 1944 the United States still did not have the atomic bomb, acquiring it only in the following year. In Washington it was anticipated that victory over Japan would take another two years or more, and from this point of view there was no sense in falling out with the Soviet Union. On the contrary, Washington was ready to assure Stalin’s support in the Far East at practically any cost.
This is evidenced by numerous comments after the war by prominent American figures of the era about Roosevelt’s policies. For example, we see written in the notes of the President’s closest advisor and friend, Harry Hopkins, as he refers to the plans of the US military command against the Japanese in 1944-45: “We were facing undoubtedly costly operations on Iwo Jima and Okinawa [Pacific islands off mainland Japan – E.H.] and plans had also been drawn up for large-scale landings on the Japanese mainland in the fall of 1945. The calculations of MacArthur [US commander in chief in the Pacific - E.H.] were based on the assumption that the Russians would tie up the bulk of Japanese forces on the Asiatic mainland in the same way that they had tied up the Germans in Eastern Europe.
“It was clear that if the Soviet Union threw major forces against the Japanese in mid-summer, i.e. before the main landings [of the Americans in Japan – E.H.], this would save countless American lives and could even render unnecessary the final landings. Of course, during the Yalta Conference the completion of the work on the atom bomb still seemed a remote prospect in a murky future; assurance of the success of many years of research and experimentation with this decisive weapon came from Los Alamos [US atomic research and bomb building centre - E.H.] no sooner than three months after Roosevelt’s death.”
This well articulated confirmation comes from a highly authoritative source. It becomes clear what great importance the Americans attached in the final years of the war to the military assistance afforded by the Soviet Union in Asia. They wanted no more no less than to win the war against Japan using Soviet resources, just as Churchill before the start of the Second Front envisaged winning the war against Germany. Saving large numbers of American lives in Asia at the expense of Soviet lives was Washington’s primary interest at the time, and once again we may note that to this end the Americans were prepared to pay any price in Europe. Politically this was a matter of survival for Roosevelt, Hopkins, MacArthur and others, and without considering the importance of the war with Japan for the United States in 1944 one could never hope to unravel the international situation of that period.
Stalin accepted the American proposal. In October 1943, half a year before the Conference, he pledged to go to war with Japan. When the Paris events unfolded ten months later Stalin knew he had the Americans where he wanted them. With the Germans breathing down Eisenhower’s neck in the west and the Japanese down MacArthur’s in the East, Roosevelt simply could not chance a rift with the Soviet Union. Anyone with an ounce of common sense could see this, let alone someone as familiar with the motives of the US President as Stalin was. On August 20, 1944, as events in Paris were reaching their crescendo, Stalin received the following personal secret communique from Roosevelt:
“I have just met with our commanders in the Pacific theatre. Although I am extremely satisfied with progress there, I am deeply aware of the vast nature of this task. [US Ambassador to Moscow William] Harriman has informed me of your willingness to make swift preparations for the future joint cooperation between our armed forces. I trust that you will instruct your headquarters to work vigorously with the US military mission in Moscow to jointly prepare these plans in readiness for the moment you act…”
Stalin knew very well that Roosevelt would not argue with him over Europe. Six months later in Yalta he once again promised Roosevelt to go to war against Japan three months after Germany was defeated. But in the summer of 1944 he was already in a position to hold Roosevelt and Churchill to ransom.
But there was still Churchill to deal with. The British, who were primarily interested in Europe rather than the Pacific, understood the significance of any transfer of power to the Communists in France. Churchill, who like Roosevelt could not stand de Gaulle and for a long time refused to recognize him, then fully supported him in his efforts to dislodge Marty and Tillon in Paris in 1944. This much is true, but it was the Americans and not the British who determined the policy of the Allied forces in France, and Eisenhower preferred where possible to avoid interfering in the internal affairs of the French.
Moreover, as strange as it sounds today, the fact remains that the Americans did not adopt an aggressive anti-Soviet policy until the summer of 1947. Since the end of the war Churchill had prodded them in this direction but without success. One factor bears witness to this state of affairs more than any other. Addressing the subject of Anglo-American relations in the final years of the war, Churchill’s right-hand man in foreign affairs Anthony Eden writes in his memoirs: “The President [Roosevelt – E.H.] shared suspicions prevalent among the Americans about the British Empire, imagining it as it was in the past, and, regardless of his familiarity with international affairs, constantly sought to convince Stalin that the United States was not forming a block with Britain against Russia. The result of this was a certain confusion in Anglo-American relations which played into the hands of the Soviets.”
Eden goes on to say that at the Yalta Conference, unbeknown to his British colleagues or Chinese ally [Chang Kai-shek – E.H.], “Roosevelt found time to hold secret talks with Stalin about their Far East agreement. In my opinion, this document became a reproachful side-product of the conference.”
Thus in this period the Americans not only refused to pull any ‘anti-Soviet chestnuts’ from the fire for Britain, but matters actually went as far as the conclusion of secret US-Soviet agreements behind Churchill’s back. As we shall see, apart from Eden, former US Secretary of State Hull also maintains that Roosevelt would not contemplate any kind of estrangement from Stalin.
If Marty, Tillon and others had taken decisive action in Paris then Eisenhower would not have initiated any military intervention against them and Stalin need not have feared that he might. But it is possible that there were other factors in play to explain his policy in France at that time. Could it even be the case that the French Communists were forbidden to stir revolution because Stalin feared that their rise to power might lead to a separate agreement between the Western allies and the Germans? I personally do not give this any credence. There could be no question of a separate peace between the British with Hitler, let alone the Americans with Hitler, but since one still encounters such speculation it should be addressed.
We have already examined Roosevelt’s stance towards the USSR. A separate peace with the Germans would have immediately forced Stalin to reverse his relations with the United States and would have wrecked Roosevelt’s calculations. Peace with Japan was also absolutely unacceptable for the US President. After Pearl Harbour, Roosevelt, reacting to both domestic and external factors, could not reasonably come to any agreement with Hitler or Tojo. And if he had failed to settle scores with the Japanese the Republicans would have toppled him as a traitor in the next elections, and in Asia and beyond America would have lost face. From Roosevelt’s point of view all of this was far more dangerous than the creation of a government of Marty-Tillon-de Gaulle in France.
Nor was the situation so very different in Britain, although Churchill unlike Roosevelt was of an anti-Soviet disposition and the British had already started to weigh up the future set-up in Europe as a priority. It is quite possible that some elements among the adherents of old-school diplomacy in Britain might have entertained thoughts of a truce with the Germans. But even if we suppose that certain circles in Britain in 1944 could see advantage in such a truce, it was in practice impossible for Churchill to consider this path. Those people in the Soviet Union who cited fears of a separate peace treaty between the Western allies and Germany, had consciously or more likely unwittingly overlooked one of the most important and inviolable elements of contemporary British politics, namely the role of public opinion.
Failure to take this factor into account was also an intrinsic part of Stalin’s mental outlook, causing harm to Soviet foreign policy on more than one occasion. Stalin, for whom public opinion in the Soviet Union did simply not exist, regarded it as impossible that this could seriously influence state policy in another country. Ruling despots generally refuse to believe such a thing possible. Having learned about international relations from books and newspaper articles at the start of the century, Stalin believed that British policy in the 1940s was formed on the basis of practical realities as it had been during the reign of Queen Victoria or Edward VII: the newspapers cause a commotion, the left wing is in an uproar, the intelligentsia criticises and squawks, and the ministers, generals and politicians then formulate their reaction.
Stalin could probably not imagine any other mode of conducting big foreign politics in the West, or only with great difficulty. One cannot even rule out that he believed in the existence in Britain of something akin to an all-powerful imperialist politburo led by Churchill and Chamberlain before him that does precisely what it wants. But all of this was of course far removed from the reality of Britain’s political mechanics.
If in 1938 Chamberlain had still been able to dupe the public in Britain and get away with the Munich pact permitting the Nazi German annexation of Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland, then barely two years later, when the Germans launched their surprise attack on Norway, the resultant eruption of public outrage that consumed the Conservatives also precipitated his immediate resignation in the House of Commons. The next spring, when Churchill was already in power, Rudolf Hess landed in Britain and proposed that Churchill seek peace with Germany. Why did he reject this proposal, which at the time was a source of considerable alarm for Stalin? It is difficult to dispute that from a purely imperialist standpoint it would indeed have been advantageous for the British. Their besieged country was still teetering on the edge of the abyss. After the disaster of the British Army at Dunkirk, the fall of France, and the Blitz of the Luftwaffe over London, Britain still had the opportunity to emerge relatively unscathed through the conclusion of a second Munich pact, not at its own expense but the expense of the Soviet Union and partly at the expense of France, which was now on its knees.
But Churchill still refused, not because he believed that together with America it was still possible to defeat Hitler and eventually take back Western Europe, but because he knew full well how the public would regard such a treacherous deal with Hitler. This would be the end of his career.
So if in the spring of 1941 a weakened, half-beaten Britain rejected peace with Germany, why would it seek peace with Hitler in the summer of 1944 after five years of war, after the British victory over Rommel in North Africa, after the successful landings of Eisenhower in France and General Alexander in Italy, and finally, after the crucial Soviet victory at Stalingrad, when it became clear to the world that Hitler had been beaten by the Red Army and that no one could not stop its subsequent march west?
Let us suppose for a moment that Churchill, startled by the prospect of revolution in Paris and now contemplating turning British bayonets against the Soviet Union, did indeed pitch in his lot with Hitler. In this event he would have been overthrown in the House of Commons the very next day and he knew this better than anyone. Not one British prime minister or one American president could have resorted to a separate peace treaty with Hitler, and only people with no knowledge of the western political situation could doubt this. Regardless of his great suspicion and ignorance of the West, it is also impossible that Stalin did not know this, given that there were people working at the Foreign Ministry in Moscow who were well acquainted with Britain.
Finally, one more circumstance should be considered in this context. It can be taken as beyond doubt that Marty and Tillon had no intention of creating a purely Communist or largely Communist government in France in August 1944. By all appearances they didn’t contemplate forming even a leftist government like the Popular Front. As we see from de Gaulle’s memoirs, the plan evolved differently and was geared towards creating in France something similar to the variant that Stalin had in mind for Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Romania, and also favoured for Yugoslavia and China, namely the formation of a ‘national government’ from the forces of the entire anti-Hitler (or anti-Japanese) Resistance, with certain key positions earmarked for Communists but not being under their exclusive control by any means.
In France such a coalition would most likely have had an even less pronounced leftist composition. The basis for such a government already existed in the form of the National Resistance Council, the structure which the Communists joined in 1944 in agreement with de Gaulle and occupied about half of the key posts. The transformation of this National Resistance Council into a government of liberated France would at that juncture have been totally natural and lawful for most of the French population. Apart from the Communists, it would have included Catholics, de Gaulle’s people, radicals and others. The chairman of the National Resistance Council was still, regardless of the Communist majority, the Catholic de Gaulle supporter Bidault. Moreover, it is quite possible that the French Communists would themselves have proposed that de Gaulle take the top seat in the new national government or the presidency. He does not say this himself in his memoirs, only that in the event of a successful Communist bid for power they would probably have offered him “a place in the popular government”. Let us recall, however, how the question of new leaders was resolved in other liberated countries in Europe, where the Communists essentially resolved matters in accordance with Stalin’s instructions.
In Czechoslovakia Edvard Beneš returned from Britain and resumed his place as president, in Romania Petru Groza, the leader of the pre-war peasant based political organization the Ploughmen’s Front was installed as premier and for a while King Michael I remained on the throne. In Hungary, Ferenc Nagy from the Smallholders Party was appointed chairman of the Council of Ministers, and in Bulgaria the former prime minister of the bourgeoisie government and representative of the right-wing military-political organization Zveno, Kimon Georgiev, became leader of the government of the Patriotic Front. In Poland the government was headed by the Socialist Edward Osobka-Morawski, while in Yugoslavia Stalin recommended that King Peter remained on the throne. This is how the Communists proceeded in countries occupied by the Red Army and its allies, and it was clear that in France they could not act any differently. On the contrary, their policy there had to be even more flexible and accommodating. For the first period and particularly while the US and British forces remained in France, the Communists would have undoubtedly been satisfied with receiving a few important key positions. Of course, they would have had to negotiate as successfully as they did in Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary and Romania to secure a share of power. But consequently in France a coalition government with considerable Communist influence and supported by armed workers would have come into existence instead of the general’s government of de Gaulle, which only came to power after the Communists pulled back. The French Communists would not have had to relinquish positions acquired under the Resistance movement as then happened in 1947, and having struck roots deep in the power structures they would not have had to yield to others.
It is also clear that if power in Paris had passed to the revolutionary workers in August 1944, the French bourgeoisie would have gone along with it. It had no strength to fight a civil war and act in the fashion of Thiers and its leaders had only tenuous relations with the Americans and British. An invitation from the Communists to create a coalition government led by de Gaulle, would have been the best option for it in the prevailing conditions.
Could the Americans and British have refused to have any dealings with a coalition government from the ranks of the Resistance that comprised Communists, de Gaulle’s supporters, Catholics, Socialists and others? Would they have resorted to armed intervention against such a government and forged a separate peace with the Germans because of this, while alienating themselves from the Soviet Union? This can probably be safely ruled out, and this is acquires further credibility in view of the fact that there were no grounds for a ban on such a party in Paris.
There are no ‘mitigating circumstances’ to be cited here in Stalin’s favour. If he was indeed more concerned that the Americans and British would conclude a separate peace with the Germans or use military intervention in France, and therefore forbade a revolution in Paris, then this was just another glaring miscalculation on his part. But we should also not attribute to him that which didn’t exist and heap the blame on him for everything without investigating further. For it does seem that Stalin saw matters quite differently and simply gave up Paris in exchange for Warsaw.
Chapter 2. A Bad Deal
We know that during those summer days of 1944 Stalin held extremely tense negotiations with Churchill and Roosevelt regarding the future set-up in Poland. On July 23, 1944, exactly one month before the Paris events peaked, Soviet troops took the city of Lublin where the Polish National Liberation Committee under Bolesław Bierut was based. This organization was the prototype for the government of the People’s Republic of Poland.
That same day Stalin sent Churchill a secret communique in which he said: “I am writing to you now only about the Polish question … We now face the practical matter of administration in the Polish territories.” From this day on, apart from purely military matters, the Polish question would figure prominently in all further correspondence between Stalin and the Western allies.
The trump card of the British and Americans was the London-based Polish government-in-exile of Stanisław Mikołajczyk, while Soviet policy was geared towards creating a popular-democratic Poland. Since it was the Red Army that swept the German forces from the country, the implementation of the Soviet programme was basically assured. But Stalin evidently regarded it as necessary to specifically coax this from the Americans and especially the British. This he achieved by granting concessions in Western Europe.
Judging from Stalin’s correspondence with Churchill and Roosevelt, the Polish question outweighed everything else for him apart from the matter of Germany itself. (As we shall see, Stalin’s interest in Poland stemmed primarily from the issue of Germany.) This correspondence does not of course contain a single word about any deal trading France for Poland and it is hard to imagine there being any kind of direct formalised agreement with the Western allies over the matter apart from a ‘gentleman’s agreement’, as was the case with their agreement with de Gaulle. It is quite possible that some corresponding documents or confidential notes still exist somewhere today, and if so, they will one day be published and finally cast light on the affair. Nonetheless, there are some specific indications that such an agreement was reached, and since this plays a particular role in criticism of Stalin’s foreign policy, we should pause to examine the evidence.
Three months before the situation in Paris came to a head, Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin began talks on a highly secret matter: the division of spheres of influence in post-war Europe. Stalin acted through his ambassadors in London and Washington and appears to have avoided putting anything down on paper, with one notable exception. But Churchill, Eden and Cordell Hull all recount quite openly about these talks. The initiative regarding the division of spheres of influence came from the old imperialist past master Churchill.
Hull recalls that as of late May 1944 Washington began to receive telegrams from London in which Churchill sought the agreement of Roosevelt to the following deal with Stalin: Stalin would be the principal beneficiary in Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary; the British would call the shots in Greece, and Yugoslavia would be split between them. Churchill states that on May 18, 1944, Stalin gave his agreement but still asked for Roosevelt’s approval.
In drawing up these spheres of influence exact percentages were determined for the sides, although Hull writes that he actively opposed the deal: “I was firmly against any sort of division of Europe into spheres of influence and objected vociferously to the idea at the Moscow Conference”, (the meeting of foreign ministers of the USSR, Britain and the United States with Stalin and Molotov). Roosevelt still gave his consent but on the condition that the agreement should be regarded as temporary. Final confirmation came during a private meeting of Churchill and Stalin in Moscow in October 1944, and the British premier recalls the event in his book about the Second World War with characteristic cynical candour.
“The moment was apt for business, so I said, ‘Let us settle about our affairs in the Balkans. Your armies are in Rumania and Bulgaria. We have interests, missions and agents there. Don’t let us get at cross-purposes in small ways. So far as Britain and Russia are concerned, how would it do for you to have ninety per cent predominance in Rumania, for us to have ninety per cent of the say in Greece, and go fifty-fifty about Yugoslavia?” While this was being translated I wrote out on a half-sheet of paper:
Rumania
Russia 90%
The Others 10%
Greece
Great Britain 90% (in accord with U.S.A.)
Russia 10%
Yugoslavia 50:50%
Hungary 50:50%
Bulgaria
Russia 75%
The Others 25%
I pushed this across to Stalin, who had by then heard the translation. There was a slight pause. Then he took his blue pencil and made a large tick upon it, and passed it back to us. It was settled in no more time than it takes to set down...
After this there was a long silence. The pencilled paper lay in the center of the table. At length I said, ‘Might it not be thought rather cynical if it seemed we had disposed of these issues, so fateful to millions of people, in such an offhand manner? Let us burn the paper.’
‘No, you keep it,’ said Stalin.”
Has Churchill’s account ever been overturned? I believe that is for each person to decide for themselves, but that meeting was conveyed to us in the Soviet Union the following way. In August 1958 an article appeared in the Moscow magazine ‘International Life’ in which Churchill’s account was partially reprinted, up to the words, “It was settled”, after which it was noted that the British premier “clearly passes off his wish as reality”. The article went on to say:
“The Soviet record of the conversation between Stalin and Churchill that is kept in the USSR Foreign Ministry Archive says: Churchill states that he had prepared a rather grubby, vulgar document which indicated the division of influence of the Soviet Union and Great Britain in Romania, Greece, Yugoslavia and Bulgaria. The table was drawn up by him to show what the British think about the matter … Churchill’s claim that Stalin gave his consent to such division into spheres of influence is conjecture. Moreover, the table cited by Churchill does not even figure in the Soviet minutes of the meeting. If there was an agreement on this matter, then it could not have been excluded from such an important document as the minutes.”
How are we to interpret this? Churchill’s account is dismissed as “conjecture” rather than “invention”, which is somewhat odd and perhaps significant. It is emphasised that the table with the percentages did not figure in the Soviet minutes of the meeting, although later in his account Churchill himself says that this table was by no means a formal diplomatic document and was merely a hasty note scrawled in pencil to clarify an unspoken, undrafted private agreement. Moreover, it was scrawled on a scrap of paper that Churchill proposed burning so as not to leave any traces, and which Stalin immediately returned to him with a tick but no signature. Furthermore, would Churchill really have said that he had prepared a “rather grubby, vulgar document”?
To my mind the matter should not have been approached in this way. Clarifying historical truth today, 22 years on, is more important for Marxists than their concern for exonerating Stalin, who had in any case committed many crimes and made many errors to the detriment of the Soviet Union.
The exculpatory magazine article goes on to include another excerpt from Churchill’s memoirs where he quotes the following message sent to him by Stalin on June 23, 1945, after the end of the war in Europe:
“Thank you for your telegram of June 21. In October in the Kremlin we had proceeded on the understanding that matters in Yugoslavia should be decided on the basis of a 50:50 split between Russian and British influence. In practice the proportions now resemble 90:10 and Marshall Tito is already applying great pressure on us because of those remaining 10 paltry per cent.”
So what does the article in question have to say about this message which appears to confirm Churchill’s original account?
“No such message was ever received by the Soviet Union,” followed by the conclusion that, “The text of the message of June 23, 1945, that was published in Churchill’s memoirs is therefore essentially a falsification.” (But the question begs how should we understand the word “essentially” here?)
I am personally unconvinced by these arguments and one wonders who they did convince. Better still for the magazine would have been to make no comment at all on the matter. Moreover, to this day survives a witness to the conversation between Stalin and Churchill in October 1944, then Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov, although it is not clear if he will eventually choose to speak on the subject and what he will say. I was always of the opinion that when political figures approach the end of their life they want or should want to tell the truth, even if they do not speak it aloud. For ultimately they will be judged not by their contemporaries but by history, which for the most part passes fair judgement, and in the end there is no getting away from it, for it knows too much.
There is one more thing to be said at this juncture. Knowing what we now do about Stalin’s deals with Hitler, on this basis alone one cannot to simply dismiss the possibility of such a deal with Churchill.
But the British premier is not the only witness of the West in this matter. Eden also broaches this deal in his own memoirs, in which he says that after the leaders held this conversation he was instructed to finalise the matter with the Soviet Foreign Minister.
“Since I had to hammer this out with Molotov we met at seven o’clock,” he writes. “Stalin had already acknowledged that Britain should have the main say in Greece but Molotov started to haggle over the percentages in other countries. In the end I told him that I was not interested in numbers. I only wanted to receive assurances that we would have more influence in Bulgaria and Hungary than we had agreed we would have in Romania, and that policy in Yugoslavia would be jointly implemented.” Eden adds that as a result of these talks he received Molotov’s agreement that the order to withdraw Bulgarian troops assisting Communist partisans in Greece would be given that very evening.
In the course of these ministerial talks Stalin’s share in both Bulgaria and Hungary was raised to 75-80 per cent, or this is at least how Cordell Hull portrays matters, adding: “Consequently the Russians regarded this to be the end to the matter, in accordance with the June 1944 agreement [when Churchill first proposed trading Romania for Greece – E.H.]. Britain and the United States offered him part of the Balkans as his sphere of influence. This opinion of theirs was to have unpleasant repercussions at the Yalta Conference in February 1945.”
Churchill’s share in Greece was in the end evidently also increased to 100 per cent. It should be noted that these talks ended at the time when, as we shall see, Tito was leading a bitter struggle in Yugoslavia with both the German occupiers and with agents of the former Yugoslav King Peter, while in Greece the partisans of the Greek People’s Liberation Army (ELAS) were awaiting an attack by the British and forces of the king that they had armed. Sure enough, British paratroops landed in Athens four days after the talks between Churchill and Stalin. The Greek Communists had been sold down the river. Nor is anything said about Greece in the International Life article.
Churchill addresses his reasons for proposing the deal to Stalin in a letter to his ally Roosevelt on October 11, 1944, three days after he met the Soviet leader. Explaining his motives, he writes: “It is absolutely essential to come to a common understanding [with Stalin – E.H.] about the Balkans so that we can avert an outbreak of civil war in a string of countries, in which case you and I are likely to back one side and Uncle Joe the other. I will keep you completely informed and nothing more than provisional agreements will be reached between Britain and Russia without further discussion and coordination with you. I am sure that you will not object to our efforts to achieve a total convergence of understanding with the Russians.”
It is no surprise that Churchill was so confident that Roosevelt would understand this striving to “avert an outbreak of civil war in a string of countries”, i.e. social revolution. From both leaders’ point of view this was worth any percentage deal. Churchill was so satisfied and proud of his success in the matter that he initially thought of openly expressing his thoughts in a letter to Stalin himself. The draft, written by Churchill on that day of October 11, is also included in his memoirs. “The percentages that I proposed … cannot serve as a basis for any kind of public document, at least not at the present time. But they may later serve as a useful guide in our joint undertakings. If we handle matters well we may possibly avert civil war and great bloodshed and strife in the small countries we are talking about.”
We may presume that someone on the British side who was better versed in our ideology than Churchill advised him not to send this letter, which would have been offensive for any Marxist recipient. The sense of Churchill’s message to Stalin can be reduced to a few simple sentences: Let us on the basis of our amicable division of spheres of influence avert social upheavals in Europe. We need only to apply the principles of business: you get your share and we get ours. If you refrain from revolution we will refrain from counter-revolution, and thus to our mutual satisfaction there will be no civil wars.
In Churchill’s understanding this amounted to “total convergence of understanding with the Russians”. It was patently obvious that he saw in Stalin not a revolutionary and Marxist but rather the same sort of business partner as the British found in Wilhelm II or former German Chancellor and Foreign Minister Gustav Stresemann.
What Churchill and his invisible partner Roosevelt wanted is clear but what was Stalin’s motivation in the percentage agreement? The Soviet leader was pursuing the policy he had himself devised and which he presumably saw as ingenious and worthy of Talleyrand, a policy of reshuffling the world order not through revolution as Lenin envisaged and as the international workers’ movement expected, but by means of secret, backstage collusion with the imperialists. In 1938 Stalin had colluded with Hitler over Poland and the Baltic republics, and in 1940 he sought to reach agreement with Hitler over Bulgaria, Turkey and, as we will see, the Persian Gulf region. Now, in 1944, on the basis of equally underhanded deals Stalin carved up Europe with Churchill and Roosevelt.
In principle it is impossible to object to negotiations with imperialists. But the question arises about what price Stalin was prepared to pay this time? He handed Churchill the whole of Greece and half of influence in Yugoslavia, he extended Roosevelt a promise concerning Japan and China, so what else had he promised the two leaders and de Gaulle?
Hull writes in his memoirs that “relations between the United States and Russia were closer in 1944 than at any point ever before. … Unfortunately, we agreed to the temporary division into spheres of influence between Russia and Britain in the Balkans … The Soviet government dissolved the Communist International, the job of which it was to spread Communism in other countries.” Nevertheless, Hull omits to say one thing. He does not link the deals between Stalin and the Western allies regarding Southeast Europe and Eastern Asia with his own deals in the remaining main areas of the liberated European mainland – France and Poland. Meanwhile, from Stalin’s point of view this was all part of one and the same large-scale political operation.
We know that by this point Roosevelt and Churchill had effectively agreed that in accordance with Stalin’s demands a government friendly to the Soviet Union would be established in Poland. It is true their agreement was accompanied by all manner of provisos about the inclusion in this government of the London Polish group of Mikołajczyk. Such stipulations, however, did not carry much value. Churchill was more than willing to sell out Mikołajczyk for the right price. After arriving in Moscow on 9 October, 1944, for his meeting with Stalin, he telegraphed Mikołajczyk in London and summoned him to Moscow for talks with the Soviet government and the Polish committee of Bierut, which categorically refused to recognize the government-in-exile. Churchill insisted that Mikołajczyk held a “friendly discussion” with Bierut, who was already demanding three quarters of the ministerial places in the new government for his Lublin Committee.
“I made it very clear,” Churchill writes in his memoirs, “That any refusal to join the talks would be tantamount to a direct refusal to follow our advice and would free us from any further responsibility towards the London government of the Poles.” He did attempt to secure a 50:50 split of the government seats but when Stalin refused, Churchill effectively left Mikołajczyk high and dry.
As far as Roosevelt was concerned, Eden details his reversal in the Polish question in a Foreign Office memorandum that was written in summer 1944 and reprinted in his memoirs. “The President will do nothing for the Poles, just as Mr Hull did nothing for them in Moscow and the President himself in Teheran. The poor Poles are in distressing fashion deceiving themselves if they give the slightest credence to these generous and nebulous promises. Later on the President will not feel bound by them.” The British and Americans were apparently already willing to accept Stalin’s conditions regarding Poland, both sides having been bought off in specific ways. What we cannot find in the memoirs of Churchill, Eden and Hull memoirs becomes abundantly clear in details published by the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs pertaining to the talks between Stalin and de Gaulle in 1944.
From the moment the Soviet Union entered the Second World War, de Gaulle was especially interested in securing Stalin’s agreement to the transfer of power in France to himself following Hitler’s defeat. He started to influence Stalin even before the Allied invasion of Normandy and thereafter redoubled his efforts.
De Gaulle’s envoy in Moscow, Maurice Garreau, repeatedly visited the Foreign Ministry and openly spoke of de Gaulle’s sharp disputes with Churchill and Roosevelt. In 1944 the British and Americans were already preparing to thrust their own occupational rule upon the French while de Gaulle was demanding that his authority be recognized, and Stalin took advantage of these contradictions.
On June 9, 1944, two months before the decisive events in Paris, Molotov received Garreau and, responding to his request that the Soviet Union recognize the temporary French government in Algeria, said: “We attach special significance to agreeing our position with our allies. It is impossible for our position to not depend to a certain extent on these allies, that is to say the British and Americans.” Thus prior to his imminent direct talks with de Gaulle, Stalin drove up the price.
It is true that soon after this the British and Americans came to their own agreement with de Gaulle about the transfer to him of civil power in liberated parts of France, but their relations with him remained extremely tense. Apart from the personal dislike of Roosevelt and Churchill for de Gaulle, both were working towards making the now war-weakened France into a satellite of the Anglo-American block. De Gaulle was already considering his country’s independent role in the world arena and one way or another he desperately needed to receive support from the Soviets. Consequently, Franco-Soviet diplomatic contacts were maintained uninterrupted. This is what transpired after Molotov’s June talks with Garreau.
In July 1944 de Gaulle’s representative in Britain, René Massigli, proposed to the Soviet envoy to de Gaulle’s circle, Alexander Bogomolov, that the Soviet government discuss a “draft document in which in which there could be formulated the basic provisions of relations between France and the USSR”. Bogomolov replied that “this would be better to do after the government [of de Gaulle – E.H.] moves to France.” This relocation took place that August.
No signal is given to the French Communists to seize power and de Gaulle makes a triumphant return to the capital and consolidates his power. Several weeks later his new Minister of Foreign Affairs Bidault solemnly announces at a session of the temporary French Parliament: “Alliance with the West? Of course yes. How else could we proceed? But there must also be an alliance with the East! France will never agree to be linked only to the West.”
In early December 1944 de Gaulle and Bidault arrive in Moscow to conclude the Franco-Soviet pact on mutual assistance.
On December 5, Molotov receives Bidault and according to the official Soviet minutes of their meeting announces the following: “The Soviet side likes the French draft of the pact but the Soviet Government links the question of this pact with France with the resolution of French-Polish relations through the line of contact between Paris and the Polish National Resistance Committee [the de facto government of Berut in Lublin – E.H.]. The Soviet Government believes that these issues should be resolved simultaneously … The Polish question is a political one for us. If the French cannot take a step forward in these relations then doubts will arise about the political basis of the pact … A convergence of the positions of the Soviet and French government in the Polish question would form the basis for the conclusion of the Soviet-French pact.”
It could not have been made any clearer. This was essentially a polite ultimatum to de Gaulle to either support Stalin’s demands regarding Poland or lose the Soviet signature of the Franco-Soviet pact, with all the consequences this would bring for de Gaulle’s international and domestic position. Not a word was said aloud to this effect but the French could not fail to understand what was meant.
And this was just the prelude to Stalin’s meeting with de Gaulle the next day. The following was recorded in the official Foreign Ministry minutes:
“Stalin says he would like to address the question of Poland … Historically France has always been a friend to Poland and its independence. One can say that France was a protector of this independence. In this respect its policy differed from that of other countries. Stalin says that in this context he thought that the current French policy would be beneficially different to that of Britain and America. Stalin said he was counting on this.”
De Gaulle understands perfectly what Stalin wants from him, what deal he is proposing, but at first tries to bargain and pay less, since he does not wish to spoil relations with Mikołajczyk’s Polish government in London. The minutes continue: “De Gaulle says that if France at the moment of the liberation of Poland or before has the opportunity to influence the Poles, it will do so in the spirit of strengthening friendly relations between Poland and France and Poland and the Soviet Union … As far as concerns the Polish government in London then France supports relations with this government just as other governments do. It is possible that at a later stage the French government will recognize a different government [the Lublin Committee of Bierut – E.H.] in unison with the other allies. The Soviet government proceeded in the same manner when it recognized the French government in unison with other countries. … The main task of the French now is to turn towards Moscow … The French wish to act in unison with the Soviet government. There is not much they can do at the current time but they will do much in future…”
De Gaulle was playing the usual diplomatic game but knew very well what they were offering him in exchange for recognizing the Polish Lublin committee and what could happen tomorrow in France if he were to refuse. He yielded to Stalin.
“However,” the Soviet minutes add, “On the last day of the talks, faced with the facts of the situation, de Gaulle agreed to effect an exchange of representatives with the Polish National Liberation Committee,” that is to grant de facto recognition to the authority of Bierut. This was all Stalin wanted.
On December 10, 1944, the Franco-Soviet pact of alliance and mutual assistance was signed and de Gaulle left Moscow with the document in his pocket. Although he already had a functioning government in Paris, the armed forces of the French Communists had not yet been dissolved. One word from Stalin could have altered the situation in France and rocked the still unconsolidated power of the bourgeoisie. But the following occurred instead. On January 21, 1945, exactly six weeks after the signature of the Franco-Soviet pact and de Gaulle had recognized Stalin’s conditions regarding Poland, the dissolution of the Patriotic Militia was announced, supposedly in agreement with the leadership of the Communist Party.
The deal was complete. Stalin had now paid all that was required of him, with an obligation to Roosevelt to go to war with Japan and a pledge to pursue a policy in China that was agreed with the US President and Chang Kai-shek, and also the dissolution of the Comintern; an agreement with Churchill to split Yugoslavia 50:50 and to grant the British 100 per cent influence in Greece; and support for de Gaulle in relations with Britain and the United States and not implementing revolution in France. But the only direct documental evidence regarding the deal over Poland is to be found in the records of the talks between Stalin and de Gaulle.
Paris for Warsaw! It is hard to imagine a more reckless trade agreement. Undoubtedly it was extremely important for the Soviet Union to consolidate the Socialist position in Poland but still there was no need to sacrifice the position of the Socialists in France. In Poland the Red Guard and the new Polish armed forces were stood to and no Mikołajczyk or Churchill could prize the country away from the Polish Communists. But even now Stalin was thinking according to the geopolitical notions that prevailed in the 1920s and 1930s, as if after the downfall of Hitler’s regime and on the eve of the final occupation of eastern Germany Polish territory was still part of some ‘sanitary cordon’ or Munich block. And as if not Western Europe but the course of the River Vistula determined the balance of power in the post-war world.
In contrast to Henry IV, Stalin believed that Paris was not worth the cost, in this case his falling out with Churchill, Roosevelt and de Gaulle, and that Mikołajczyk was a suitable price for a deal with them. He failed to understand that at this moment it was the French capital that formed the fulcrum of international events and which Socialism could use to lever the continent upside down. In other words, Stalin could not see what was staring him in the face. At the most critical moment of the post-war era he lacked sufficient understanding of international relations, understanding of the West, imagination for the global chess game, everything that had been inherent in Lenin and other old Party stalwarts like Georgy Chicherin and Maxim Litvinov.
His devious but cumbrous mind had once again failed to rise above events. This mind, so trained in the tactics of a latent, inner-political struggle waged with the help of the security services, never rose higher in the field of international relations than the level of some trite eastern version of Talleyrand. Stalin’s mode of thinking always unfurled itself across the soil, which together with its semi-formed condition set the limitations on his political outlook. As a rule, Stalin regarded those elements that lay close to the surface such as proximity to state boundaries as both real and realistic in foreign policy. He approached global politics in precisely this way, but in the mid-20th Century former yardsticks of security and political might of the great powers relating to the situation on their borders had already become largely obsolete with the advent of new political and military mechanisms.
The realism of Stalin that made such an impression on so many people, and still does, was actually pseudorealism. Such realism sees only its shallow surrounds and not the bigger picture, and so ultimately loses. This man held sway over a vast state and had unprecedented, incomparable powers but he did not know how to apply this power where and when most needed. Such aptitude for international affairs was denied to him and in this sphere his customary tactics were of no use. He remained a wily amateur and this was as insufficient in the 1940s and 1950s as it had been in the 1930s. And if in the past this limited cunning had cost the Soviet Union millions of lives, then now in peacetime it was to cost international Communism and the global revolutionary process decades of lost time.
So in historical retrospect, what exactly lay at the core of Stalin’s miscalculation in 1944, when he ‘forbade’ the Socialist revolution in France, trading it for Western concessions in Poland and then again at the Yalta and Potsdam conferences in agreements with Britain and the United States over Germany?
This should have been obvious not only to every Marxist but also every thinking person when looking at the political map of Europe. A basic element of every strategy, including class-oriented ones, dictates that one should strike the main blow at the enemy at the point where the prospects for your attack, breakthrough and consolidation are the most favourable. For an advancing army it is best to move in the direction or region where apart from suitable military conditions, it will encounter the least resistance and the most amicable response from the local population. This is the ABC not only of the art of war but of politics too.
Where after the defeat of Fascism in Western Europe could Socialism have found the most fertile ground? Where from its specific point of view would it have the best chances of successfully fighting the decisive post-war class battle?
In a place where after a lost war and horrific bombings, as in Germany, a large proportion of the population saw in Socialism a victorious and implacable enemy? Or in a place where as in France the Communists represented liberators and true and tested defenders for much of the population?
Was it worth applying leverage in a country where much of the population regarded it as necessary to run from the Red Army and its own Communists, or one where not only the working class with its old revolutionary traditions but also a considerable part of the petty bourgeoisie impatiently awaited the establishment of a new popular power?
France was an extremely suitable and favourable bridgehead for Socialism’s offensive after the Fascist defeat, while Germany was quite the opposite. Stalin chose Germany and it was precisely because of his aim to doubly reinforce his position there that he traded Paris for Warsaw.
This is beyond doubt. As soon as the Red Army went on the counter-attack against the Axis, Stalin concentrated all his attention on Germany and could see no further. Charging headfirst at the German bridgehead, this poor strategist was unable to shift from that course. The Polish question was for him like a sub-division of the German one, and the settlement of the first was only a military and political prerequisite for the second. Berlin should follow Warsaw, and because of Berlin Stalin bet everything on this, including the genuine prospect of the Communists rising to power in Paris and the emergence of a Socialist France.
If he had ever offered a candid explanation why had he gave so much in 1944 in the settlement of the dispute with Churchill and Roosevelt over Poland, he would have answered: To strengthen and consolidate the Soviet position west of Poland tomorrow, when the wrangling will begin over Germany. Stalin looked in only one direction. In the 1940s the Brest-Warsaw-Berlin axis undoubtedly seemed to him to be the most important, obviously because it was the closest to the Soviet border. It is a fallacy to say that in 1944-45 he outsmarted Churchill and Roosevelt by reinforcing on both the Vistula and the River Elbe. This much was achieved for him by the Red Army. Far more accurate to say that in giving France to them and de Gaulle, Stalin took the bait and missed a unique historical opportunity.
By concentrating on Germany and choosing it as the primary post-war battlefield with Imperialism, Stalin froze the forces of Socialism in the least favourable position, both militarily and politically. Instead of a dynamic offensive he precipitated the prolonged equivalent of trench warfare, since it was precisely here that his adversary was at its strongest. This is born out by history, which shows that Socialism was not only forced to halt at the borders of the later German Democratic Republic, where the Red Army had reached the extent of its conquests, but beyond this point also encountered the makings of a new Wehrmacht. This much becomes evident from the fact that it was precisely because of this positional or ‘trench’ warfare on the German bridgehead that we now face the bulwark of NATO, which had already swallowed West Germany, Britain and the other western European countries. For us, post-war Germany became not so much as a breakwater or even buffer as a constant source of terrible military danger. But more about this later.
But Stalin suspected nothing of this as he proceeded, we can now say with assurance. So hypnotised was he by his Brest-Paris-Berlin axis that he failed to understand in time the great potential offered by the Washington-London-Paris-Bonn axis, the counter-line, which without the penultimate link of Paris would have been unthinkable in the 1940s and 1950s. Having missed the new pattern of thinking on the international chess board within the framework of the old and familiar set-up, Stalin gave everything a purely mechanical assessment: Before the Second World War everything had revolved around Germany, and so everything after the war, including Soviet politics, had to revolve around Germany. And this was all that Imperialism needed, from then on out it only had to draw upon its own resources.
But it was not only Stalin who held such a view of the international situation at the end of the war. The idea that everything in the world arena and in Soviet foreign policy should depend on German territory had engrained itself so deeply in the minds of our people that even today there are many who have difficulty seeing thing differently. Now it seems that after the decisive victories over Hitler everything could be decided inside Germany alone, that everything began and will end there. Stalin himself thought as much and wanted others to follow suit. The fact that the German question could really have been decided before the fall of Berlin and the Potsdam and even the Yalta conferences, that the German bridgehead could have been forged from the west by encircling Germany and then seizing it in a pincer movement between the Soviet Union and a popular democratic France, evidently never occurred to Stalin. From the very beginning he could have undermined a new ‘sanitary cordon’ created in the form of NATO but he failed to do so. His inherent cunning was of no help to him here, what was needed was analysis and imagination, creative Marxist strategy, but this was not to be found in Stalin’s toolbox. Only an amateur and limited pragmatist in the art of revolutionary strategy could fail to see that since the end of the war the key to the continent lay in France, and that France was the social detonator; that victory here would essentially decide the fate of the whole European continent. Aligned with Moscow, revolutionary Paris would also have radiated this energy upon Italy, although the situation was more complex there, not to mention Spain and the Benelux. Naturally this would not have happened everywhere at once, but it only needed time. And it is equally doubtless that the post-War German question would have been decided on a totally different footing. If there had only been a leftwing popular government in France then there would have been neither NATO nor a Common Market, and probably no armed West German revanchism. Today, everything to the east of the Rhine would have looked completely different.
The first consideration should have been not the Brest-Warsaw-Paris axis but the continent as a whole, to adopt a more advantageous stance for the Soviet Union in its western area and to surround more impenetrable areas for us in the region between the Rhine and the Elbe. A dynamic strategy should have been adopted rather than a static one. But once again, Stalin proved to be the bad general he had been in 1920 and 1937-41. Instead of a dominant international, popular revolutionary policy, he adhered to a small-scale White Russian policy which essentially came from such short-sighted and long-since discarded techniques as the old Tsarist policies. Again, Stalin viewed the map of Europe not as Lenin would have done, from the point of view of revolutionary strategy, but from the point of view of a local, eastern European frontier strategy.
Consequently Stalin’s entire foreign policy was once again aimed on the wrong trajectory and today we can appreciate the seriousness of the consequences of this. After Stalin had wasted this unique historical opportunity the Imperialists were in turn poised to go on the counter-offensive and that is exactly what they did. This we know only too well, all we have to do is look around ourselves. But how much longer we will have to pay for this we have no way of knowing. This is why I have given so much attention to the events in France in 1944. What happened then was not merely an episode of domestic French politics. Along with the Russian and Chinese revolutions, the French Revolution could have been one of the key events of our century, and one that would have ultimately unfolded in our favour. But Stalin forbade it, thus pre-determining our post-war situation and our entire post-war politics.
Some people will undoubtedly say that Stalin was right to forbid the French Communists to take power in 1944, saying it was too risky. Each person is entitled to their view, but the facts speak for themselves. I would advise these people to read the arguments advanced in 1917 by Zinovyev and Kamenyev (and also Stalin’s own thoughts on the matter), when in contradicting Lenin they so agitatedly cited the risk and prematurity of the October Revolution. Here I can also cite the conclusions of Heinrich Brandler and August Thalheimer, who after the failure of the long overdue German revolution of 1923 also justified themselves by saying the risk was too great. Like us, they never saw any revolution take place without any risk. It just doesn’t happen.
The French Revolution was doomed with one stroke of the pen. You may ask how did this go unknown for so long? How does one explain that a mistake that changed the course of post-war history and which despite denying Socialism victory for decades has escaped the attention of the global Communist movement? And when other often extremely banal mistakes and foul-ups of some foreign Communist party caused indefinite resonance?
I see no need for lengthy explanations. Here the truth was always hidden in the wild blue yonder. A matter that would once have caused a giant uproar in the Comintern is simply unknown to people or they do not believe it could be true. Or they blindly follow Party discipline and refuse to allow themselves to think and doubt as they once might have. Not one word was said in the Soviet Union about Stalin forbidding the French Revolution. People were not allowed to refer to this in the French Communist Party, although many of its members were witnesses to this tragedy. I have already cited Marty’s statement as a member of the Politburo and secretary to the Communist Party that not even Party Congresses were not allowed to broach this matter, evidently so as not to discredit Stalin and those who implemented his orders. When after the late and unsuccessful efforts of the French Communist Party to come to power in the early 1950s Marty and Tillon dared to open their mouths and say even a few words about the matter, these veteran Leninists were immediately condemned as agents and traitors.
Marty died in 1956. Tillon was rehabilitated and restored to the Party one year later, four years after Stalin’s death, but made no further allegations. In his 1962 book about the French partisan movement he touches upon the matter but stresses that the Resistance did not aim to overthrow the Capitalist order. Then, almost casually, he immediately adds following phrase: “Could we possibly forget what we all knew back then, that in respect of the Nazi German capitulation, Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill tied up agreements on the territorial stabilization of the allied armies.” That is to say that the West would get the West and the East would get the East. Tillon, clearly, had not forgotten.
In conclusion we might ask if this flash in the pan was Stalin’s giant mistake of 1944? But the answer must be no. The coincidence here finds its origin in Stalin’s actions in the pre-war years. On the contrary, the second error confirms and underscores the first, or vice versa. And both correspond to this person’s real level of competence, his international outlook, character and psychology. Stalin never had wings, he had only tenacity and the might of the state apparatus. Never did he really understand international politics like he understood the tactics and workings of the inner-political struggle. And he never really believed in the working class, only in himself, in the armed forces, in cunning, and in the state apparatus of repression. And since these are insufficient to engage successfully in international politics he had no hope of prevailing.
As some old Bolsheviks insist, Stalin did not really believe in the October Revolution in 1917. In 1939-1941 he believed Hitler and traded anti-Fascism for strategically useless territory to the west of the old Soviet border. Not believing in the French working class in 1944 he traded the River Seine for the Vistula. Nor do I think he ever truly believed in the Soviet people, who paid for his career with a sea of blood.
I regard the failure of the French Revolution in 1944 to be the greatest error in Stalin’s international policy in the last ten years of his life. As a result of this error a unique opportunity to change the entire post-war situation in Europe, and indeed the whole world, in favour of Socialism was squandered.