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After the murder of the director of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee in January 1948, a campaign against the Jewish intelligentsia ensued. The Union of Jewish Writers was closed, Jews were purged from political and cultural institutions and works in Yiddish were banned. The accusation was that 'some' Jews had become a fifth column allied with US and British intelligence. Just as the campaign had seemingly lapsed, it was revived in May 1952 with the public trial of those implicated in the Anti-Fascist Committee Affair', and then, in the winter of 1952-3, with the announcement of the 'Doctors' Plot', which only ended with Stalin's death. Other campaigns, in Georgia and Estonia, for example, connected local nationalism to an alliance with the West. In the 'Leningrad Affair', in which that party organisation was purged of 'saboteurs and wreckers', from 1949 to 1952, the vulnerability of even the highest ranks of the party to the allure of the West was revealed.[197]

The danger expected from difference was reflected in institutional modifications. In October 1949, the police, or militsia, was removed from the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) and shifted to the MGB. In July 1952, the Council of Ministers drafted an order to move all censorship responsibilities from local control to the MGB, as well.[198] The making of foreign-policy decisions remained tightly centralised around Stalin himself, Zhdanov, Molotov, Andrei Vyshinsky, who replaced Molotov in 1949, and Anastas Mikoyan. After 1948, the Presidium rarely met.[199] East European Communist elites continued to have institutionalised channels of communication with their Moscow colleagues.

Soviet participation in East European decision-making was as institutionalised as Moscow's participation in obkom decision-making at home.

East Europeans frequently appealed to the Soviet embassy to reverse decisions made by their own governments. Local elites competed to provide Moscow with compromising material (kompromat) on each other, hoping to gain Moscow's favour against local rivals. Accusations tracked perfectly with the kinds of dangerous deviance being rooted out in the Soviet Union. The Soviet leadership had its own channels of verification, as welclass="underline" its embassies, MVD, MGB, the Cominform and members of official Soviet delegations. East European allies adopted institutional forms to look like Soviet ones, right down to the number of members on the Central Committee (CC) Presidium, or number and names of CC departments.[200] MGB advisers would often take over the handling of local interrogations and 'affairs', establishing which charges were appropriate and which confessions should be coerced. All of this was done to ensure that the kinds of deviations revealed in, say, the 'Rajk Affair', would correspond to the particular deviation prevailing in Moscow.[201]

Soviet interests in Eastern Europe did not change from 1945 to 1953: regimes friendly to Moscow. But how Soviets understood what constituted friendly changed dramatically. Replications of the Soviet Union were now necessary. The Soviet need for similarity squandered genuine post-war support for the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe. Soviet practices there pushed the West to unite against it, forgetting about any German threat, and displaced Eastern European memories about Soviet liberation with apprehensions of the Soviets as occupiers. Especially in Poland and Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union was regarded as protection against Germany into 1947. But by 1948, both the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) and the CC were reporting less sympathy for Moscow, 'even among progressive parts of the population' in Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria. In January 1949, a poll in Slovakia showed that 36 per cent of those asked would prefer a war between the US and Soviet Union in which the US emerged victorious, versus 20 per cent who favoured a Soviet victory.

The poll was broken down by class, and only the working class narrowly supported a Soviet victory (by 35-32 per cent).[202]

Yugoslavia's Tito was doubly deviant, manifesting independence in both foreign and domestic matters. His territorial ambitions alarmed Moscow. It feared other East European allies might mimic Tito's behaviour, and that Tito might use the Cominform as an institutional vehicle to spread his heresy.[203]Tito's popularity in other East European countries was well known to Soviet political elites.[204] Stalin and Molotov deemed Yugoslavia's behaviour adventur- istic, as it threatened to unite the US and Britain against Moscow.[205] Moscow withdrew its advisers from Yugoslavia in March 1948, following up with a letter of excommunication distributed to all Cominform members.[206] Tito's codename within the CC was changed from Eagle (Orel) to Vulture (Stervy- atnik).[207] To Moscow's alarm, other East European Communist parties, with the exception of Hungary's, did not immediately support either Moscow's letter or the subsequent June 1948 Cominform resolution repeating Moscow's charges. The Romanian, Czech, Bulgarian and Polish Communist parties had to be prodded to hold meetings to discuss and approve the Soviet position. The problem was not only with Communist elites, but also with average folk on the street, who, it was reported back to Moscow, 'see Tito as a hero worthy of imitation'.[208]

As Volokitina and her co-authors put it, a 'new stage in the history of the region' began in 1948: 'the hot phase of Sovietisation'.[209] The Soviet continuum from difference to danger was evident in East European identity relations. Rudolf Slansky, for example, was initially charged with a 'nationalist deviation', permitting Czechoslovakia to embark upon a 'special path to socialism' which ignored the universality of the Soviet model. This then threatened the 'restoration of capitalism' in the republic, which in turn would have turned

Czechoslovakia over to 'the English and American imperialists'.[210] A Soviet consulate in Hungary approvingly reported the renaming of hundreds of sites for Lenin, Stalin, Molotov, the Red Army and Gorky, as well as the introduction of Russian language study. The works of Akhmatova, Zoshchenko and other 'disgraced' Soviet authors were removed from Hungarian libraries.[211]

Hungarian party elites told their Soviet counterparts that there was too much Jewish influence in their ranks. But in early 1950, the anti-cosmopolitan campaign had lulled, and so Hungarian reports were ignored. Less than two years later, however, as the Soviet trials in the Anti-Fascist Committee Affair' got under way, Hungarian and Czech Communists were instructed to unmask their own cosmopolitan fifth columns.[212] Just as attention to Western art, culture and science was being regarded at home as dangerous, Soviet officials reported that Western culture was exerting too much influence in Eastern Europe. In July 1949, the Soviet Union requested the closure of all Western culture and information centres in Eastern Europe, as well as the reduction of tourism and exchanges to a minimum. The allure of the West was related directly to the vulnerability of socialism in these countries.[213]