The revolutionaries had bigger dreams, centering on the creation of a Red Empire that would be a novel “anti-imperial state.”25 This “new Russia” would ride the waves of Communist revolutions that would sweep over Europe, then the rest of the world. Of course, many millions of ordinary people in Finland, the Baltic states, Ukraine, Poland, Hungary, and Germany, and not least in the former tsarist-ruled Russia, looked upon the Russian Revolution and the Communism to which it gave birth as something akin to a plague. Even in 1917 a few thoughtful sympathizers despaired as they witnessed how basic freedoms were trampled underfoot.26 For all that, Stalin embraced the Bolshevik vision and saw chances to foster it in the wider world during and immediately after the Second World War. How far he might have carried the Red flag had he not run into opposition remains an open question.
As Hitler’s ally in September 1939, Stalin began imposing Communism on eastern Poland, the Baltic states, and with less success, Finland.27 These initial efforts were soon undone, and the Wehrmacht nearly overran Leningrad and Moscow in late 1941. Even so, Stalin remained the consummate strategic thinker. He soon perceived that the new war had the effect of leveling “old regimes” and blurring national borders. With states and societies and the international order in disarray, he had a chance to build the Red Empire that he, along with Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks, had wanted at the end of the First World War.
As it happened, in 1944 and 1945 and even later, the disorder offered more opportunities to build the Red Empire than Stalin thought it prudent to exploit. Ironically, this self-proclaimed revolutionary ended up restraining some of his ardent disciples in places like Iran, Greece, Yugoslavia, Korea, and China—not because he wanted to discourage the Communists as such but out of concern not to irritate his Western Allies. For the same reason, he held back his comrades who returned to France and Italy, where an unusually favorable alignment of forces existed at war’s end. The Communist parties in both countries, the backbone of the resistance and still armed to the teeth, enjoyed far more support than any others. The Vozhd, or Leader, sometimes also called the Khozyain, the Boss or Master of the Kremlin, directed them to proceed slowly. So too did he counsel Mao Zedong, who politely ignored the advice and in 1949 stormed to power.
The Soviet Union under Stalin might well have advanced the Red Empire to the shores of the English Channel, had not the United States in 1947, with the support of Great Britain, become more deeply involved in Europe. Washington, a reluctant warrior, at first simply offered generous aid through the Marshall Plan. This funding was designed to overcome the postwar social crisis gripping the Continent and to restore hope there. The money was also made available to the Soviet Union and those in its sphere of influence, but Stalin rejected it, notwithstanding the desperate situation in his own country and all of Eastern Europe. As I maintain, confronted with the offer of American aid, Stalin was forced into a corner largely of his own ideological making. Were the USSR and Soviet satellite states to receive financial support, he reasoned, it would benefit the starving, but it would have an adverse effect on the Soviet mission to bring Communism to the world. According to this cost-benefit analysis, allaying suffering in the present would only prolong the struggle for a total revolutionary solution.
In this matter as in many others, the Soviet leader kept this “truth” to himself. He was willing, actually only too happy, to face the fact that capitalists were not, and could not, be friends of the Communists. Privately, and more than once, he confided to comrades that there was little to choose among “fascist countries,” whether they were Germany and Italy or the United States and Great Britain. In his eyes, all of them were fundamentally inveterate enemies, and any agreements with them were no more than short-run tactics. Stalin had been predicting a final showdown with the capitalists since the 1920s, but in 1945, with his country reeling from the conflict with Germany, the time was inopportune. Nevertheless, in the latter part of the war, he had forged ahead wherever possible, with considerable success. One moment he could be up to his neck scrambling to get the Red Army first in Berlin, or scurrying to make gains against Japan, and in the meantime he would be coaching Communist exiles in Moscow before they returned home to set up new regimes.
In 1944 or 1945 the Kremlin Boss was too shrewd to think that the Red Army could simply occupy Poland, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Romania, and Hungary and then openly hoist Communist leaders into Soviet-style dictatorships. That would have set off alarm bells in Britain and the United States, from whom he wanted loans, not hostility. Therefore, and on his express orders, the native Communists parachuted into place back home were to create “national front” coalition governments. That strategy was followed all over Eastern and Central Europe, and Stalin wanted it everywhere in Asia as well. It was strictly a transition stage to quiet the fears of his Western Allies as well as the local population.
His preference was to continue the wartime alliance, to milk it for all it was worth, while at the same time planting regimes to his liking wherever the Red Army went. He stage-managed these moves and upbraided any acolytes who tried to go too fast. Although all were instructed to maintain the facade of a multiparty system, there was not the slightest chance that genuine liberal democracy would ever be permitted.
The challenge for the Soviets and those they helped into power was that for years all these countries had exhibited extreme anti-Russian and/or anti-Communist attitudes. And yet before the dust of war had settled, Stalin saw to their transformation into police states on the Soviet model.28 He exercised a profound influence, far more hands-on than often supposed. Although he was especially cautious about getting involved in armed conflict with the West, he was always prepared to go over to the offensive, or to encourage others to do so, when the chances of success for the Communist cause looked good. As he put it succinctly to Yugoslav comrades in 1948: “You strike when you can win, and avoid the battle when you cannot. We will join the fight when conditions favor us and not when they favor the enemy.”29
I use the term Stalinization to characterize this process, rather than Sovietization, but either concept fits the essence of how Moscow established control over what became its satellite countries.30 Of course, Stalin put his personal stamp on the ideology and system of rule he exported, and his foreign disciples, convinced as they were that his was the winning brand, copied everything they could; even the independent-minded Yugoslavs at first begged to be instructed by advisers of all kinds from Moscow. Most of the new leaders, far from getting to know Stalin only gradually, as some historians have suggested, worked hand in glove with him.31 They willingly went to Moscow to pay homage or to seek advice or aid from the Master as regularly as he permitted. They fell over themselves in trying to emulate the great man, while he responded to circumstances, changed the party line as needed, and enforced it on foreign comrades just as he did on those at home.
In 1947 and 1948 he called for a new wave of controls across Eastern Europe, partly as a response to the Marshall Plan, the program of aid that had also been offered to the Soviet Union. He had turned it down, then recommended and finally ordered that the leaders of the satellite states do so as well. A few muttered but then tightened the shackles on their people and saddled them with an economic system that was doomed to fail. Stalin increased Soviet defense spending at the expense of popular welfare, and in early 1951 he made a special point of demanding that Eastern European countries under Communist governments do so as well.32