In Moscow, that last week of April recalled a popular song that had always seemed too slushy: “When the lights go on again all over the world.” The facts surpassed the song. Blackout restrictions were removed April 30 to prepare for May-Day. People poured into the streets and went from square to square, admiring the bright electric globes they had not seen for four years. Men walked the streets all night to demonstrate that curfew was over. Everyone left windows unshaded, not caring that dining and dressing were in public view.
At the May-Day demonstration people spoke of the last time a parade had been held in the Red Square, on November 7, 1941, when German guns roared in the suburbs and Stalin had given confidence by reviewing the troops in the Square. Now, the Red Army fought in Berlin suburbs and Moscow had stripped herself of the garb of war and donned the garb of May-Day—red flags and streamers and portraits of leaders. The huge ruby stars blazed again at night over the Kremlin; garlands of light again traced the streets and the bridges over the Moscow River.
In Berlin, the “Cease Fire” came at 3:00 PM, May 2; the news reached Moscow in early evening, climaxing the two-day holiday. The citadel of Nazi-fascism had fallen; from east and west, the armies of the United Nations—Russians, Americans, British—flooded the German land. Colored salutes of rockets flamed into Moscow skies and were answered by fireworks in the streets. People went to bed exhausted and happy, knowing that they would awaken to problems of a new epoch—the repair of devastation, the establishing of peace.
Devastation was heavy. Twenty-five million people were homeless, over 1,700 towns and 27,000 villages largely or wholly destroyed. Some 38,500 miles of railway were torn up, far more than enough to encircle the earth at the equator. Ninety percent of the Donbas mines were wrecked and flooded. The great Dnieper Dam was gone and the industries around it; rapids had reappeared in the river and navigation had ceased. Seven million horses, seventeen million head of cattle, twenty million pigs had been slaughtered or taken. More than three thousand industrial plants had to be rebuilt.
Worst of all was the loss of manpower. The number of dead has been variously given, from seven to twenty million. If excess mortality among civilians is counted, there were twenty million and more. Every family had losses. Of eight male heads of families among my husband’s brothers and sisters, three were gone, including my husband; none of them were counted among war casualties, for all were civilians who died as a direct result of war. The Soviet Union’s losses went far beyond those of all the Allies together; they were a hundred times as great as those of the United States. There were villages in the south where no men were left for young women to marry, where many fatherless children remained from the occupation, and fatherless youth ran wild.
Reconstruction began before victory. In the previous chapter we saw how tractor stations moved back and plowed to the sound of retreating guns. The Stalingrad Tractor Plant had been wrecked, but within three months after the Germans were driven from Stalingrad, tanks again rolled from its conveyors. The rebuilding of the Dnieper Dam and the industries around it began in 1944, while the armies still fought on the borders of Russia.
When victory came, the Soviet Union’s planned economy switched to peace production without a jolt. A new Five-Year Plan proposed to complete by 1949 the restoration of the liberated areas, and to raise their industrial output fifteen percent above the prewar output by 1950. This meant starting all over again in many places, as once they had started after the Revolution. But whereas, in 1921, they built on the ruins of a feudal and capitalist economy, now they built on foundations of socialist economy which, though battered, had withstood the war. They had that great base of industry and farms in the Urals and Siberia, whose amazing wartime growth was now revealed. From 1940 to 1943, electric power in the Urals had doubled; iron production had more than doubled. This second rebuilding, moreover, had trained personnel to start with, from the economy they had built before.
Moscow snapped with speed into postwar building. Deputies to the Victory Session of the Supreme Soviet appeared in the streets. The November holidays celebrated, as usual, production records. Stalingrad Tractor Plant, converted to peace production, announced Praetor No. 3,000 as a holiday gift. Sevastopol, another almost obliterated city, announced that its power plant and largest shipyard operated again. Leningrad celebrated the restoration of its biggest shipyards. Meantime, in the ground swell of the coming elections, called for February, 1946, deputies everywhere reported to constituents on war records, telling what they had done that entitled them to re-election in the first national elections since 1939.
The building of the postwar world was not so simple. “Nothing guides Russian foreign policy so much as a desire for peace with the United States,” said General Dwight D. Eisenhower to a House Committee of the U. S. Congress, in November, 1945. His words were accurate; I know, for I was there. I saw the crowds in victory celebrations toss Americans and British into the air in typical tribute. All Russians I knew hoped passionately that, with Hitler beaten, the War Allies might continue friendship into long years of peace.
They knew, of course—they had known all through the war— that there were elements in America that sabotaged the alliance, and even some who would rather see Hitler win. For two years, while Russians perished by millions, they had watched their Allies delay the promised “second front” in the West. Molotov had discussed it with Roosevelt in Washington, in May, 1942; American headlines had said it was “promised” for autumn of that year. Churchill, while refusing to promise, had given to Molotov an “aide-memoire” which read: “We are making preparations for a landing on the continent in August or September, 1942.” Month after month, the Russians, bearing the brunt of war, had waited. The Anglo-American landing did not come until June 6, 1944, when the Russian army had already liberated most of the USSR and was driving across Poland. Many Russians had bitterly wondered whether the Allies delayed so that Russia might take the loss, and landed at last in Normandy because they could not afford to let Russians take Berlin alone.
These suspicions died when strategy was planned together, when Roosevelt and Churchill met with Stalin in Teheran, and then in Yalta, to arrange the end of the war and the postwar world. Churchill in his history of the war, tells of the almost naive toast that Stalin drank at Yalta “to the firmness of our Three Power Alliance,” saying “May it be strong and stable. May we be as frank as possible. … Allies should not deceive each other. … In the history of diplomacy I know of no such close alliance of three great powers as this.”
“I had never expected that he could be so expansive,” comments Churchill, the hard-boiled imperialist. Stalin was voicing the hunger of all the Soviet people in those words. Russians in their hour of victory really hoped that their long isolation was ended; that their terrible war losses had bought for them the friendship of America and Britain, with long generations of peace.
Week by week, I saw that hope die in their faces. The change began with our atom-bomb on Hiroshima. Fear came back into eyes that had hardly yet seen peace. After the fear came thought: Why had America slain a quarter of a million people in two Japanese cities, when Japan was already suing for peace? Was Washington monopolizing victory, freezing Russia out of the Far-Eastern settlement? In the next days, two American moves, one in the East and one in the West, made Russians say, in disillusion: “The Atom Bomb diplomacy begins.”
In the East, Washington not only took sole charge of the armistice with Japan, freezing both Russia and China out of the arrangements, but made supplementary terms with the Japanese generals, by which they kept on fighting the Chinese Communists until America’s $300,000,000 air-lift could bring Chiang Kai-shek’s troops north to accept the surrender. In the West, Washington ordered Bulgaria to add to her cabinet some men of America’s choice, if she wished to be recognized. Russians were astounded. “We don’t tell France, Belgium, Holland to change their cabinets,” they said. “Bulgaria is our sphere.”
The blow next fell on Russia’s own reconstruction. During the war they had been led to expect a big “Reconstruction Loan” from America to rebuild the ruins incurred in the joint war. Donald Nelson, who went to Moscow, in 1943, as Roosevelt’s emissary, talked of six billion dollars as the right amount. Other American representatives confirmed this in following years. Russians took it seriously; they were hungry, cold. Then Roosevelt died, and Truman stopped even Lend Lease aid so suddenly that Russia-bound shipments were taken off ships in New York harbor. When Russia, listing her losses, asked for “the first billion” of that loan, the State Department “lost” the letter for nearly a year. Many Russians died of hunger in that victory year, for lack of that loan.
Soon, it became clear that none of the ruined nations of East Europe could hope for reconstruction loans from Washington, unless they remade their governments to suit the U.S.A. To some extent they were willing to do this. Bulgaria changed its cabinet at Washington’s order and postponed an election when America protested its form. All of the East European nations hoped for American loans and were willing to make adjustments. They offered industrial concessions to foreign capital; they were ready to postpone socialism, as Lenin did in the days of NEP. Nor did Moscow object to this; Moscow was not at all anxious to take on the economic problems of East Europe, in addition to her own. If these lands could get American loans by concessions to capitalism, Moscow was not disposed to interfere.
In the first years after victory, Moscow handled affairs in East Europe with a loose hand. Americans supposed the arriving Red Army would at once “sovietize” these eastern nations, nationalize industry, collectivize farms. American correspondents were amazed to discover that the Red Army did not even stop King Michael’s jailing of Communists; they called it Romania’s affair. When I was in Poland in 1945, it was “treason” to urge collective farming, lest this alienate the peasant. Moscow intended to have “friendly nations” on her border but any of Moscow’s acts in 1945–46—the long tolerance of King Michael’s brutally reactionary regime in Romania, the lack of Russian support to Communists fighting in Greece, the calling off of Bulgarian elections because of an American protest, the acceptance of three Poles from London into the Warsaw cabinet—indicated that Stalin would make many concessions in East Europe to keep his wartime friendship with Britain and the United States.
This was the logical growth of the doctrine of “socialism in one country.” For twenty years the USSR, desperately busy with building, had ever less concern with revolutions abroad. The early “dark Russia” that looked for salvation to the German working-class had become a great power, holding its example of socialism a sufficient role. Its chief aim in foreign affairs had not been the promotion of revolutions but to keep the capitalist world from combining against it in war. When this was avoided, when Stalin found himself in alliance with Churchill and Roosevelt, he had furthered the dissolution of the Communist International. In the Teheran Conference, that early doctrine of socialism in one country had developed into the thesis of “peaceful co-existence with capitalist states.” At Yalta, Stalin had gone further, conceiving the dream that the three great Allies, continuing their “frank friendship,” might together stabilize world peace.
It was a strange dream for a seasoned Bolshevik, that world peace might be built on a partnership of the world’s first socialist state with the two greatest imperialist powers. But the United Nations was built on it. Moscow’s policy in East Europe was also built on it in the first postwar years.
The concessions Moscow made were not enough for America. Roosevelt might have understood them, for he was a world statesman who knew history. But with the accession of Harry S. Truman to the presidency, all that was narrow and grasping in American imperialism found its tool in a small-town politician, with the A-Bomb monopoly in his hand and with no historic sense. Truman ignored—and probably did not even know—the fact that Romania, Serbia and Bulgaria had been in Russia’s sphere of influence a hundred years; that they owed their very existence as states to Russia’s war with Turkey a century ago. In the time between the two world wars, their rulers, being despotic monarchs, were anti-Soviet, but their peasant peoples never lost their love for Russia. So when the Red Army drove out the German armies, the pro-Nazi officialdom lied and new regimes arose that began to fight on the Russian side. Washington—in the person of Truman—saw only subversion in this.
Washington, which had never accepted the “anti-fascist” nature of the war, fought everywhere the anti-fascist front that emerged in all liberated lands. In Western Europe, American pressure succeeded in splitting this front and driving Communists out of the participation in governments to which their votes entitled them. This American aim did not succeed in the East. All these nations followed a common pattern, based on their own experience in the war. All had big landlords who collaborated with the Nazis and who fled with the German army; this facilitated the long over-due division of land among the peasants. In all those nations, the Germans had a stranglehold on big industry; their flight left industries ownerless as well as ruined. Nationalization of big industry became not only easy but actually necessary, unless Americans would take concessions, which they wouldn’t. In all these nations, the war had smashed and discredited former political leaders, leaving only one line-up—those who had collaborated with the Nazis and those who had resisted. Hence, governments first arose by coalition of small splinter parties, that included everyone who had fought Germans. American Embassies, however, cultivated disgruntled former leaders and demanded their inclusion in the governments. Sometimes, East European nations yielded, hoping for American favor. To Washington’s view, they never yielded enough.
American loans, which all East Europe hoped for, did not materialize. East Europe had to depend for economic aid on war-cxhausted Russia. This led to tensions over goods and prices, for of nothing was there enough. It led to a firmer hand from Moscow, doling out the goods. As the cold war policy of Washington deepened, Moscow’s policy in East Europe changed.
The sign of the change was the sudden brutal expulsion of Yugoslavia from the Communist fellowship, for demanding the type of “national independence” that had been gospel for all East Europe only two years earlier. Stalin’s personal antagonism to Tito and Yugoslavia’s vociferous insistence on more industrialization than Moscow felt able to supply, played a role, but an underlying reason for the change lay not in Yugoslavia but in Harry S. Truman. After continuously needling the Russians, he had announced the “Truman Doctrine,” and that he was sending troops into Greece and Turkey to “contain Communism.” This out-flanking of East Europe by an increasingly hostile America had the natural result. Moscow tightened control of East Europe, sought to weld it into a firm military bloc, and damned Yugoslavia when she objected.
Here is no space to review the long talc of “get tough” policies with which Washington shattered Stalin’s dream—which was also Roosevelt’s—of a long friendship between the USSR and the USA. Truman insulted Molotov on his way to the first United Nations Congress in San Francisco. America made the first U.N. Assembly downgrade the USSR for “aggression” because Soviet troops were slow in leaving Iran, though American, British, and French troops stayed on uncensurcd in many parts of the world. The “Berlin blockade,” which Moscow began as a temporary measure to protect East Germany’s economy from a flood of new currency printed in the American zone, was turned by Washington into a long demonstration of America’s superfluity in planes and supplies. The “Baruch Plan” for control of the atom, announced by Washington as a “peace” gesture, was seen by every Russian as an attempt to take ownership of Soviet natural resources through a U.N. Authority—controlled by Washington.
Insult seemed added to injury when American commentators more and more grudged Russia “the great territory grabbed in the war.” To Russians, this was their own territory, lost in the first world war, only partially regained in the second. The Russians had lost or ceded 330,000 square miles in the first war, and regained 250,000 in the second, a net loss of 80,000 square miles, which roughly covered the territory ceded to Finland and Poland. Russians had not grudged it when the world war turned both Atlantic and Pacific into “American lakes,” but when these same Americans, who had taken all the oceans and who were building bases on their islands and shores, called Russia greedy for taking back what she formerly owned, this rankled.
Inside the USSR, the Truman doctrine of “containment,” and the constant baiting of Russia by an America for whose friendship Russia had longed, bred an irritated, excessive patriotism, which denounced as “cosmopolitanism”—and almost as treason—any belief that any land but Russia had ever invented anything good. This sick nationalism grew as defense against the bitter knowledge that they had paid more than all their allies together for the joint victory, and that victory had brought them, not a partnership in building world peace, but a new hostile encirclement by American bases which still had an atom-bomb monopoly, and the taunt of “aggressor” for any expansion other than their own.
In the same period, there was a growth of anti-Semitism, which I cannot yet fully analyze. It was never official; the law that made anti-Semitism a crime was never revoked. Yet many acts took place, not only by individuals but by government institutions, against Jews and Jewish culture. These were always illegal and hence evasive. It was hard to know if the reasons given were true. When the Yiddish press and theater were discontinued in 1948, the reason given was that “there was insufficient demand for it.” Since the Jewish population had been evacuated from the German-occupied area and scattered all over Siberia, and had not entirely returned, this “reason” may have been at least partially true. But the excessive Russian nationalism of the time no doubt contributed. In 1949, Moscow News, the English language paper, was also discontinued and its staff arrested.
The causes o£ anti-Semitism were many. When the government evacuated citizens from areas invaded by Hitler, deliberate preference was given to Jews. The reason was sound; Jews would surely be killed by the Germans while Russians had a better chance to survive. This policy saved some two million Jews from death, but did not endear them to the Russians left behind. It increased the proportion of Jews among the refugees all over the eastern areas; refugees are a strain on a local population, and never enjoyed. Moreover, die accession of territory that had formerly been East Poland, added a population in which anti-Semitism was strong. Government circles were probably influenced by the rise of Israel and the tremendous demonstration of Jews greeting the arrival of the Israeli ambassador. It seemed to indicate, at least superficially, a dual citizenship.
How much discrimination there was against Jews in educational institutions is hard to tell. It was never general but certainly there was some. It was evasive and struggles always developed against it. My best friend felt for a time undermined in her university job, because she refused to yield to the anti-Semitism which seemed to be promoted by the Party secretary at the university. One day she came home exultant. “Now I know the Party doesn’t stand for anti-Semitism,” she said. “They removed A. … He was in charge of universities here for the Central Committee, and was behind much of this anti-Semitism.” This anecdote shows the confusion that existed. Anti-Semitism was sometimes promoted by people high in office, but always with evasion. The basic law that made it illegal, was never attacked, challenged, or revoked.
The disease of anti-cosmopolitanism passed, and anti-Semitism with it. Not by law or decree, but because of three facts. In 1950, the USSR reached the highest production in its history, with comparative abundance of goods. The USSR also attained the A-Bomb—the threat of America’s monopoly was gone. And, also in 1950, the Chinese People’s Republic was established in Peking, and at once made alliance with the USSR. The sick, excessive patriotism bred by the cold war could not survive close contact with an eastern, equal ally, whose inventions began a thousand years before Russia’s, and whose present intelligence and achievements even the most successful Russians had to acclaim.
The doctrine that each nation would find its own road to socialism, which had been briefly announced in the first postwar years for East Europe, and then buried under the nationalism of the cold war, again appeared, this time to stay. The thirty-year nightmare of “capitalist encirclement” which Stalin had hoped to escape by alliance with Roosevelt and Churchill, was ended by alliance with Peking. American air-bases still threatened the Soviet land, but from a distant ring; they could no longer “contain Russia.” And the Soviet’s strengthened economy and developments in A-Bombs and H-Bombs already forecast that military stalemate between East and West in which trade and economic aid became the decisive weapons.
One other event, in 1950, hastened this development. Washington dragged the United Nations into a war in Korea which all Asia saw as an attempt to intervene in the New China. From that war, American world leadership began to decline, first in Asia and then in Europe. The Soviet people glimpsed at last, not only prosperity but peace. Even perhaps a long peace, based not on alliance with Washington and London but on the great hunger for peace and prosperity among the ex-colonial and newly independent peoples of the world.
So the wheel came full circle. The nation that, in 1927, withdrew from promoting world revolution, and isolated itself to build socialism in a single hostilely encircled land, again began a world crusade. Not for world revolution but for world peace. Not for peace “by situations of strength,” as the Dulleses of imperialism always declare, but for peace through active pressure of the world’s peoples, through governments and over the heads of governments. The USSR became known for its “peace offensives.” “The Kremlin’s peace offensives present difficult problems for the West,” said the N. Y. Times, December 28, 1952. Three times, in 1952, Stalin had shaken the stock market by insisting “co-existence is possible.” The USSR also became the inspirer of peace petitions which demanded the outlawing of the Atom-Bomb; the USSR, as a state, worked for this through diplomacy. The citizens of the USSR, mingling again among the nations, worked for it through Stockholm Peace Petitions, Five-Power Peace Pacts, the Partisans of Peace. On these petitions, they got signatures from almost half the world’s adult population!
In Stalin’s last years, this policy was supported, not only by diplomacy and propaganda but by the Soviet Union’s growing economic power. In April, 1952, and against the American-imposed blockade of trade with the Soviet bloc, a World Economic Conference was called in Moscow, for worldwide trade without discussion of ideologies. The only man among the 400-odd delegates who violated the unanimously adopted rule against ideological discussion, was a man from San Francisco who insisted on declaring: “Free enterprise is best.” The Russians seem only to have grinned; they could afford to. For, as Howard K. Smith that year noted: “The standard of living in Moscow has improved beyond all recognition.”
The Soviet delegates moved to their aim with businesslike smoothness. The Associated Press noted that “Mr. Nesterov, president of the Russian Chamber of Commerce, picked out the weak points in the economy of other nations and offered trade with the USSR as the solution.” “They offered,” said the Wall Street Journal, April 15, “to buy British and Japanese goods that are a drug on the market; to supply coarse grains, timber and raw materials that west Asia and Europe badly need. They offered structural steel to India. … They offered to accept pay in foreign currencies. … They offered barter. … All this sounds tempting.” The NY Times noted, April 20th: “It hit the West at its most vulnerable point, for unemployment has risen in Europe … due to absence of markets.”
The USSR in other words, offered to help the capitalist world stay on its feet a little longer. Why? To relieve tensions, to keep the boat of the world from rocking, while the people of the world made up their minds at leisure between economic systems. The Russians, at long last, could afford to wait.
Stalin’s last public work was the fifty-page report he wrote for the Nineteenth Party Congress, in October, 1952. There had been a gap of thirteen years since the previous Congress in 1939; the USSR had been all but destroyed and again rebuilt. “The Congress assembled in a mood of highest confidence that the Soviet bloc can meet and withstand any trials the future may bring,” wrote Harrison Salisbury in the NY Times, Georgi Malenkov replaced Stalin as key-noter; the Soviet people took this as a sign that Stalin was building up Malenkov as successor, that he prepared to pass on his job.
Stalin himself published a report on “Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR,” a thesis on the world situation and the way it might be expected to develop. He said that the economic result of the second world war had been “the collapse of the unified world market” and its replacement by “two parallel and opposing world markets.” The Soviet bloc, forced by the Western-imposed blockade, had strengthened its economy, filled in gaps and had now “a world market of its own.” The capitalist world market, narrowed by its own rejection of Soviet trade, would narrow still more, and this would increase antagonisms within the capitalist world. The USSR, he said “will not attack the capitalists and they know it.” This he had said before, but he added for the first time the prediction that the capitalist nations “will fear to attack the USSR, lest this destroy capitalism.” Therefore, he deduced, war is more likely between capitalist nations than between capitalists and the Soviet bloc.
This prediction, made while the McCarthy extreme of cold war still raged in Washington, seemed fantastic to many people. But Stalin saw symptoms of that military stalemate which was to produce the Geneva Summit Conference. And already the rise of the neutral bloc in Asia and of China’s influence in it, presaged for him the Bandung Conference, yet to come.
Lenin’s last testament had been an analysis for his comrades of the traits of different party leaders. Stalin’s was an analysis of trends among the earth’s nations.
So far had his country traveled in the thirty years in which he led.