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There was a certain 'Frankenstein effect' at work. Eastern European Communists who had remained in Moscow had become more 'orthodox than the Patriarch'. Soviet leaders faced demands from their allies to support more radical Stalinisation than Moscow itself was imagining. In May 1945 Finnish Communists petitioned Moscow to make Finland a Soviet Republic! Zhdanov replied by advising them to become a parliamentary party in coalition with others in Finland.[180] Soviet leaders reined in their allies. As Stalin told the Czech leader Klement Gottwald in the summer of 1946, 'the Red Army has already paid the price for you. You can avoid establishing a dictatorship of the proletariat of the Soviet type.'[181]

Soviet foreign policy correlates with the evolution of Soviet identity at home. An initial expectation of Great Power condominium rapidly gave way to a binarised conflict with former allies. On 10 January 1944 Maksim Litvinov and Ivan Maiskii gave Molotov a memorandum about the post-war world, in which the world was divided largely between the United States and the Soviet Union, the latter having indirect control over much of Europe.[182] Even as late as November 1946, and from the Soviet leader most closely associated with the division of the world into 'two camps', Zhdanov, there were calls for maintenance of this coalition.

The partially pluralist domestic scene was reflected in Soviet views of the imperialist world as differentiated. In Lenin's contribution to international relations theory, 'Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism', wars among imperialist powers are inevitable, since they will compete over global resources.[183]The Second World War apparently having validated this theory, Stalin expected differences between Britain and the US after the war, but he was disappointed by British agreement to US policies on Turkey and Iran, and the Truman Doctrine, which assumed British obligations 'east of Suez'. The Marshall Plan, announced only three months after the Truman Doctrine was promulgated, struck Stalin as an effective effort by the US to establish its hegemony over all of Europe, hence muting any differences between Europe and the US, and threatening Stalin's more coercive forms of control. Just as Stalinist society was becoming binarised, so too was international society.

Regimes which had been discouraged from Stalinising were now deemed insufficiently 'friendly' to the Soviet Union. East European publics were turning against their Soviet occupiers and those they perceived as Moscow's local agents.[184] The NSM must be replicated in Eastern Europe. The 'peaceful path' to socialism had come to nothing in France, Italy and Finland; and the civil war had been lost in Greece.[185] By the middle of 1947, Molotov and Zhdanov were advising allies in Eastern Europe to 'strengthen the class struggle', that is, stamp out difference that could become dangerous deviation, entailing a turn towards imperialism.[186]

On 5 June 1947 US Secretary of State George Marshall outlined the European Recovery Program. Just two days before the Paris meeting on the plan was to commence, Soviet ambassadors in Eastern Europe delivered the message from Moscow demanding its allies stay away from Paris.[187] If in 1945 and 1946, Soviet embassies in Eastern Europe had active contacts with non-Communist political parties, then by the second half of 1947, these had all but stopped, and completely ended by 1948. Election results in Poland, Romania and Hungary in 1947 were openly falsified. All police forces in Eastern Europe slipped under the control of Moscow's Communist allies. In September 1947, the Cominform was established, an international institution designed to ensure conformity with the Soviet model.[188]

How to explain the self-defeating policies of Stalin in Eastern Europe? Self- defeating in the near term, as they accelerated Western unity before an apparent Soviet threat; in the medium term, as popular support for its allies was very thin; and in the long term, as the Soviet-subsidised alliance stood as evidence of Soviet expansionism. At Yalta in February 1945 Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt agreed that East European governments should be 'free, and friendly towards the Soviet Union'. This was an oxymoron. Freely elected governments would not choose friendship with Moscow and Moscow's idea of friendship necessitated forms of government that were not free. Some twenty-five years after Yalta, Molotov reminisced that Poland should have been 'independent, but not hostile. But they tried to impose a bourgeois government, which naturally would have been an agent of imperialism and hostile towards the Soviet Union'.[189]

Here is captured the connection between the NSM, fear of difference, and Soviet foreign policy. Stalinist identity politics implied that any non-socialist government in Eastern Europe would be naturally hostile to the Soviet Union and an ally ofthe most hostile imperialist Other-the US. Just as the bourgeoisie or landlords at home were dangerous deviants allied with foreign capitalists, so too any deviant governments in Eastern Europe. As Soviet fear of difference becoming bourgeois degeneration increased at home, fears of the threat from the US correspondingly increased, and then so too did the belief that allies must be as similar to the NSM as possible. This helps explain the connection between orthodoxy at home, increased threat abroad and increasing demands on allies in Eastern Europe to become more Stalinist.[190]

The mixed Soviet strategy of formal co-operation with its wartime allies and sympathy for the emergence of new socialist allies abroad was evident in policy towards the Chinese civil war.[191] In August 1945, Moscow signed a treaty of friendship and alliance with Chiang Kai-shek's nationalist Chinese against Japan. This was the legal foundation for the presence of Soviet forces in Port Arthur and Dalian, gave Moscow control over Manchurian railroads and gave Outer Mongolia independence. Soviet military aid to Mao's army in and through Manchuria did not end, however, and when Soviet forces withdrew from China in the spring of 1946, they left this territory to Mao's forces. As late as April 1947 Molotov was assuring Secretary of State Marshall of a continued Soviet commitment to the August 1945 agreement with the Guomindang.[192] But by October 1947, the Soviet Union transferred to the Red Army enough materiel to equip 600,000 soldiers.[193] Stalin later admitted to the Yugoslav Communist Miloslav Djilas that he had mistakenly advised Mao to continue co-operating with Chiang Kai-shek, rather than push for armed

victory.[194]

Stalinism's two camps at home and abroad, 1947-53

The dangerous deviants in these last years of high Stalinism - slavish worshippers of all things Western, rootless cosmopolitans and wreckers and saboteurs - shared one feature. They were all accomplices of the West in overthrowing socialism in the Soviet Union. Zhdanovshchina had already condemned as deviant the failure to extol the virtues of the NSM in all cultural products. But kowtowing to the West was associated with disdain for Russian and Soviet achievements, and an unpatriotic preference for life in the West. The official launch of this campaign came a month after the Marshall Plan was announced.[195] It was accompanied by a new official celebration of Russia, punctuated by Moscow's 800th birthday party in September 1947.[196]