HIST363: Global Perspectives on Industrialization

Whether the Cold War divide, the formation of the Soviet Bloc and the imposition of socialist one party economic and political systems of government on much of East Central Europe was planned by Joseph Stalin (1879–1953)  from the beginning has been much debated. Hugh Seton-Watson's (1916–1984)  The East European Revolution (1950) identified a pattern for the Communist seizure of power and Zbigniew Brzezinski (1928–2017)  in The Soviet Bloc: Unity and Conflict (1960) identified a similar process. Anne Applebaum (born 1964) , Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944-56 (2012) has, more recently, provided support for this thesis.

Certainly the take-over of the Baltic States had already provided a taste of what was to come, while Communist parties in states overrun by Russian forces clearly expected full support for their seizure of power. Against this interpretation, there is Stalin's apparent flexibility in making his "back of an envelope" Percentage Agreement with Churchill, while Mark Mazower has queried whether over Italy and Poland there was not, "at the highest levels, a tacit quid pro quo?"¹⁴ In addition, the fact that the process of establishing one-party governments was not complete until 1948 has enabled some historians to claim that there was no overall blueprint.¹⁵

Blueprint or not, the fact remains that, one by one, socialist states, closely allied to the Soviet Union  or "people's democracies" emerged: Bulgaria, where from 1944 a Communist-dominated Fatherland Front was the only legal political group; Poland and Romania, where a strong parallel state was dominated by Communists; and Hungary and Czechoslovakia, where, until 1948, a limited degree of democracy was permitted.

Some have argued that the timetable of the Soviet takeover was dependent on Stalin's reactions to US policies – the ending of aid to the Soviet Union, the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan – but there are good reasons for believing that whatever flexibility he demonstrated elsewhere, as in Greece, Stalin was determined to place sympathetic governments and economic systems in the countries "liberated" by the Soviet forces. As he said to Milovan Djilas (1911–1995) , the Yugoslavian partisan, who eventually fell out with Marshal Josip Broz Tito (1892–1980) , "This war is not as in the past: whoever occupies a territory also imposes his own system".¹⁶

That the USSR would reject the aid proffered by the Marshall Plan of 1947 to it and its satellites had been foreshadowed by its refusal to be bound by the conclusions of the Bretton Woods Conference of July 1944 or to join the two economic organisations set up by it, the International Monetary Fund and the International Bank for Reconstruction and development, considering, correctly, that the new economic order they represented gave a considerable advantage to the USA and to the US dollar which became the lynchpin of the world's financial system. Essentially the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan represented the policy of the containment of Soviet power and influence and they and the Soviet reaction reinforced the emerging division of Europe.