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The turning points came late in 1947, when Stalin created the Communist Information Bureau as a smaller successor to the Comintern, signaling his intention to maintain formal control over his comrades. In February 1948, a government crisis in Czechoslovakia led the Communists under Klement Gottwald to form “action committees” and with some Soviet prompting, to seize power. The constitutional president Edvard Beneš soon resigned and the Communists were now in complete control. By various devices the Communists took power in all the other East European countries. The new governments then moved way beyond the original slogans of “people’s democracies” (though officially the term remained) toward full nationalization and collectivization of agriculture. The new Communist governments also deployed the full arsenal of terror against their opponents, executions and imprisonment for hundreds of thousands. Show trials of allegedly dissident Communist leaders, like that of Rudolf Slansky in Czechoslovakia, imitated earlier Soviet show trials. With opposition cowed, the East European states began huge construction projects on the Soviet model, relying on very real enthusiasm for socialism, especially among youth, but nowhere did they approach a level of support large enough to maintain themselves without the threat of force and Soviet backing.

The one exception to many of these rules was Yugoslavia, which provided Stalin with a challenge from within the Communist movement that he never succeeded in crushing. Unlike his neighbors, Josip Broz Tito had come to power with considerable mass support, the fruit of his years leading the partisans against German and Italian occupation. In the postwar years Tito was more Stalinist than Stalin, and also had tactical disagreements over post-war Balkan structures and over the Greek Civil War, where Stalin ended his support of the Communists and thus enraged Tito. Finally in 1948 Stalin condemned Tito’s “deviations” and tried to isolate Yugoslavia, without much success given tacit Western support. Later Tito came up with the idea that his socialist industries would be “self-managed” to differentiate them from Soviet practice, but fundamentally the issue was simply that Tito was not dependent on the Soviets for survival and did not see any reason to follow orders.

The other area in which Stalin was at least partially stymied was Germany. The four-power occupation gave the Soviets control over the eastern part of the new Germany and the eastern part of Berlin. As in Eastern Europe, the Soviets set up a people’s democracy in the eastern zone with the Communists at the center. Otherwise the situation was somewhat different from East Europe. Germany was an industrialized country with much of that industry in the Soviet zone. The German Communists before Hitler had been a major political force and the tiny anti-Nazi resistance in Germany was heavily Communist. At the same time almost all of the Communists’ pre-1933 supporters had enthusiastically embraced Hitler. The new German Communist leader Walter Ulbricht and his comrades were generals without an army. Furthermore, Stalin wanted to solve the German problem as a whole, not just set up a rump Communist state, so that all the decisions about the eastern zone were in effect temporary measures. He seems to have hoped for a united neutral Germany with major Soviet influence. Part of his reasoning was that such a policy would be a successful propaganda ploy, but he also seems to have believed that a neutral Germany would necessarily differ in its interests from the United States and Britain and even come into conflict with them. Molotov would stick to this policy well after Stalin’s death. It was not until western Germany began to coalesce, starting in 1947 with the Marshall Plan, then the establishment of a common west zone currency, the failure of the Berlin blockade (1948–49), and finally the foundation of the Federal Republic in the West that Stalin accepted the inevitable. He allowed Ulbricht to form the German Democratic Republic in 1949, though even then it remained somewhat provisional into the 1950s.

Thus Europe was divided by 1949. Stalin had already abandoned the Greek Communists just as the West abandoned its allies in Eastern Europe, for both sides realized that Soviet and Western power were unshakeable in their respective spheres of influence. Stalin discouraged any adventures by Italian or other Communist hotheads in Western Europe, telling them instead that their goal was to maintain their structures intact and fight for peace against the possibility of a Western attack on the Soviet Union. As it turned out, events were unfolding in Asia that would come to put European affairs in the shadow.

Stalin had not paid much attention to Mao Tse-tung and the Chinese Communist party for years. After the Communist defeat in 1927 the party had spent years forming a guerilla base around Yenan, remote from the centers of the country. The Japanese invasion had led to a sort of Popular Front with Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalists and in the course of the war the Communists grew immensely in numbers and strength. With the defeat of Japan, Chiang’s troops moved into northern China and Manchuria, where the Communists had strong bases in the countryside. Initially Stalin assumed that the Communists would not be able to match Chiang’s professional army and were too weak politically to matter, but by 1947 Mao had proved his ability to hold off the apparently superior forces of the enemy. The Soviets upgraded their support, and Stalin began to send the Chinese telegram after telegram with advice on how to organize power as well as answers to questions of Marxist ideology. By the summer of 1948, the Communists were clearly winning, but even Mao thought victory might come in only three to five years. Even he did not expect the decisive Communist victories ending with the rout of Chiang’s troops at the giant battle of Huaihai at the end of the year. The battle smashed the corrupt and incompetent Nationalist regime and the People’s Liberation Army entered Peking in January 1949, sweeping on into southern China. Mao proclaimed the People’s Republic of China on October 1. The Communist world had more than doubled in size.

One of the first international consequences of Mao’s victory was in Indochina. Since 1940 the Vietnamese Communists under Ho Chi Minh had been battling first the Japanese occupation and then France, which was trying to rebuild its colonial empire. The Vietnamese Communists followed a variant of the people’s democracy strategy, stressing opposition to colonial rule and land reform rather than an immediate transition to socialism. Ho’s bases were in the north, and with the Chinese Communist victory he turned to link up with China, a ready source of supplies. The French fought on, but in 1954 made a fatal error in establishing a base in the mountainous northwest of the country to cut off Ho’s links with Laos. The Communist army, no longer just a guerilla force and now equipped with heavy guns, surrounded the French and forced the garrison to capitulate after a siege of several months. The Geneva settlement divided the country at the seventeenth parallel, and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam now held the north. Vietnam would come to play a crucial role in the Cold War, but the most important immediate consequence of the Chinese Communist victory was in Korea.

In Korea events had moved very much as in China and Vietnam. Soviet troops had briefly occupied the north, giving a boost to the Communists under Kim Il Sung. Kim too followed the line of people’s democracy rather than proletarian dictatorship but found himself stopped in the south, occupied by American troops. In 1948 American-sponsored elections led to the formation of the Republic of Korea under the despotic Syngman Rhee. From 1949 Kim began to press Stalin to allow him to invade the south, where Communist guerillas were active and victory seemed within grasp. Stalin was initially very skeptical, but in 1949 changed his mind, in part because of the Chinese revolution and in part as a response to the formation of NATO in that year. Mao had similar doubts, but both approved the plan. The Soviet Union provided North Korea with massive military aid and in June 1950, Kim’s troops invaded South Korea, quickly defeating both American and South Korean troops. Soviet confidence in victory was such that they continued to boycott the UN Security Council over American policy toward Taiwan, allowing the United States to fight an American war under the UN flag. Stalin monitored the war’s progress in detail, sending regular advice and instructions until the American landing at Inchon in September 1950, which turned the tide against the Communists. It seemed that Kim would go down to defeat, for Stalin had no intention of sending in Soviet troops. A request for Chinese troops met with refusal, to the surprise of both Stalin and Kim, and Stalin ordered the Korean leader to prepare for guerilla warfare and evacuate to the Soviet Union. Then the Chinese changed their minds, apparently in response to General Douglas MacArthur’s bellicose talk of “rollback” and its implied threat to China. Chinese “volunteers” poured across the border, pushing the Americans and their allies back to the thirty-eighth parallel, more or less the starting point. By 1951 the war was at a stalemate, to be resolved only by the truce concluded a few months after Stalin’s death. Kim had failed to conquer the south, but the Chinese and North Korean armies, barely out of their own revolutions and with only backward economies (and some Soviet aid) had held off the United States for three years.