Of course, another development that panicked Stalin was the emergence of an independent-minded communist leader who wasn’t prepared to do his bidding in Yugoslavia. Tito made Stalin fearful because his model was quite attractive, not just in the Balkans. The Greek communists were attracted by the Yugoslav model, as were many in Eastern Europe. They said, if Tito can be independent minded, why can’t we? Why do we have to be under the Soviet thumb? And this encouraged the crushing of dissent within the communist parties and the communist movements. In the big show trials that took place in 1948 and 1949 in Hungary, Poland, and Czechoslovakia, the charge was not simply that you were an agent of Western imperialism. You were also labeled an “agent of Titoite revisionism.” They didn’t want to lose control, and that was very shortsighted of them.
We know there was a Russian Empire in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. We know they fought Poland and various countries, but when was the Soviet Empire at its height?
The tsarist empire had been an internal empire. Russia added countries on its borders, much like the United States did in its early days. And these countries were then pretty much assimilated, though not completely assimilated. And it was only in the early 1990s that they began to want to move away. And that, too, largely because that was a direction in which the West wanted to take them. But the Eastern European countries weren’t an empire in the traditional sense, because it was largely a political empire, a socio-political empire, more than an economic one, and that’s what made it very different from the West.
Was the Soviet Union able to extract raw minerals from their satellite countries? Or you’re saying was it a trade policy that was highly favorable to the Soviet Union?
It was a trade policy, which was highly favorable to the Soviet Union in the sense that these countries were forced to buy Soviet goods or the economies were run in such a way that they were very heavily interdependent with the Soviet Union. But often the Soviet Union gave out more than it got back.
Such as in Cuba?
Cuba is a classic example of that. And even in East Germany, though they did dismantle a lot of factories in East Germany immediately after the war, so it took the East Germans a long time to recover, whereas what the United States was doing in West Germany was exactly the opposite, rebuilding the country in order to make it a showcase for the market. And they succeeded in doing that. The Russians didn’t do that.
How do you respond to the argument that, at the end of the day, the countries under the influence of the American empire to a large degree have prospered, such as Japan, and to a certain degree, Latin America, and to a certain degree elites in Africa, and certainly Western Europe—whereas the Soviet empire made Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Poland, which were rich countries at one point, poor?
Well, the argument against that is that Eastern European countries were, with the exception of Czechoslovakia, largely economically underdeveloped. Poland was a very undeveloped, largely peasant country. East Germany, of course, was part of the old Germany, but Allied bombing had destroyed Dresden, which was an East German city. The Soviet Union didn’t have the wherewithal to rebuild these countries. It was mainly interested in rebuilding itself. We have to remember that the Russians suffered more during the Second World War than any other country in Europe. You know, they lost twenty million people. Their industries were destroyed, smashed. The United States lost people, but American cities were never bombed or attacked. What the United States did after the Second World War is unique in imperial history. They rebuilt their old rivals and brought them up to speed economically. No one has ever done that before, and I doubt whether any power will do it again. And the reason they did that is because they perceived that communism was a threat. They couldn’t allow these countries to go under because they would become very susceptible to communism. They had to be built up.
The Russians provided countries with a crude but effective infrastructure, a social structure. Education was free, health was free, housing was heavily subsidized. It was a sort of public utility socialism. You didn’t have freedom, but if you were a citizen in these countries, this is what you got. And you travel to these countries now, as I sometimes do, and the number of people who come up and say to you, we miss that period because that is all gone, is legion. So they did it in their own way. And the United States did it in its own way, creating rich elites in all these countries where the conditions of the poor didn’t necessarily improve.
How about the middle class?
There was a large middle class in some of them. Not all the Latin American countries developed a large middle class, but some of them did, Brazil for instance. In the Soviet satellite states of Eastern Europe, you also saw the development of a middle class, but with constrictions and restrictions.
France certainly was very poor after the war, and it did come back.
But this is the point I’m making: all these countries came back because of the Marshall Plan. The aim of the Marshall Plan was to rebuild Western European capitalism and Japanese capitalism. Why? Because we were now in a battle to the death against the communists, who have a different social system. So we have to show them that our social and political system is much better, which is why, if you compare the media that existed in the 1950s through the 1970s in the United States, and in most of the European countries, there was far more diversity, discussion, debate on the networks, in the press than there is today. Many, many more divergent voices were allowed to write then now that they no longer have to demonstrate this to anyone. You can censor at will, you can marginalize voices you don’t like. At that time they couldn’t do this as much because they were trying to show our big rivals: this is how we’re different than you. And it was effective. Lots of these German friends said we used to watch West German television, and see people like you on it, saying things that we could never say against our government, and that had an impact on us.
Could you talk about the conflicts over the division of East and West Berlin?