But he also had a sense of strategy in foreign affairs. Stalin may have been absolute master at home, but he had the modern countries all against him, and a war was going on, pointlessly, in the middle of Korea. In 1945, when Hitler’s Germany had been smashed, the USSR had been in alliance with the West, and various arrangements for the post-war period had been drawn up. From Beria’s viewpoint, these had gone very badly wrong: the West had been misplayed. NATO now existed and it united western Europe, despite the existence in France and Italy of strong Communist parties; West Berlin was a leech attached to a main artery of the Soviet system; West German industry was recovering fast and would clearly be used for the rearmament of the country. The same was coming to pass in Japan. What had the USSR got in return for this? Peasant countries on her borders, each quite complicated. It had also gained East Germany, now dressed up as the ‘German Democratic Republic’, but everyone knew that it was a fake state. The chief element was that American troops were stationed in western Europe, that nuclear weaponry was in the air, that western Europe was overcoming the post-war crises, and American officials were all around, to encourage freer trade, both within Europe and with the USA. From Moscow’s viewpoint this was all very alarming, maybe presaging a general attack, and in his last years Stalin himself expected a war. Beria knew different: no-one knowing, through the extraordinarily highly placed Soviet spies, what was really being calculated in the West could have any serious idea that it would go to war. If NATO existed, if the Americans maintained a military presence in Europe, this was purely in response to Soviet provocations — a long list of cruelty and unnecessary aggression, including even the continued use of old Nazi concentration camps. There were still some idealists who chose to go and live in the ‘German Democratic Republic’, or ‘the other Germany’ — Bertolt Brecht the main one, though there were other men and women who had detested California. Disillusionment followed.
At this stage, German reunification was still a matter for diplomatic competition. The West argued for free elections, and meanwhile got the United Nations, which the West at the time controlled, to set up a commission to study the subject (it was refused entry to East Germany). At the time, there was also question of a German contribution to defence — the European Defence Community being the chief vehicle for this, and part of the post-Marshall arrangements that were the basis of the later European unification. This of course worried Moscow — she had always feared an alliance against her of the entire West, Germany included. Now, some of those same German generals who had reached Leningrad, Moscow, the lower Volga and the Caucasus were apparently being groomed again for an attack. Stalin himself had responded with a note, of 10 March 1952, which became famous, and over the interpretation of which some foolish historical statements have been made. He proposed the formation of a German government, to include the East; it would be recognized for the purposes of a peace treaty; Germany would be neutral, i.e. would not join any Western organization at all, including the economic ones; and might have her own army; and would be able to return civil and political rights. East German Communists proudly assured the Left-leaning Italian socialist Pietro Nenni that they would soon be in much the same position as the Italian Communist Party, i.e. waiting in the wings for power. Stalin also still had millions of prisoners in his thrall, whose return would be a considerable gift. The aim, overall, was at German national sentiment — there was even mention of giving political rights back to SS men — at the very moment when treaties signed in Bonn and Paris for a European army were supposed to be ratified, and the timing was not coincidental. The three Western powers consulted, and they then put the question as to free elections; they also said that a future German government should be free to choose alliances. The exchanges went on until September, always failing on these two points, since the USSR would never accept a united Germany, allied with the West, and despite some effort with the small print, never accepted that the elections would be really free. Anti-Cold War historians held the Stalin note up as evidence that the man was sincere about German neutrality and unification, ‘Finlandization’ as it came to be called, but subsequent evidence shows that he gave the matter much thought — the note went through fourteen versions, three of them annotated by him — and seems to have been possessed by the notion that he could deliver a Communist Germany, just as Czechoslovakia had produced a strong Party. The Party of Socialist Unity (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschland, or SED) in East Germany was groomed for control of the entire country, and was told to accelerate ‘the construction of socialism’ in April 1950. The next Party congress, in July, went ahead with collectivization of agriculture, heavy-industrial plans and the extinction of small-scale trade and workshops. If Stalin did not get the Germany he wanted, he would in other words at least get his bit of Germany to fall into line.
In any event, the West Germans quite clearly preferred their freedom to their national unification. Adenauer, the Christian Democratic leader, was certain that there could be no honest arrangement with the USSR and was determined to go ahead with the Western programme, even if that meant accepting a divided Germany. He worried that the West might let him down, with some Allied conference that would leave Germany at Moscow’s mercy — some European security arrangement of the sort had even been suggested by an American Secretary of State (James F. Byrnes) in 1946. He also had an argument, that a prosperous and democratic West Germany would in the end act as a magnet for the East as a whole: and so indeed it did, though Adenauer (and the Frenchman, Schuman) were reckoning on up to ten years, and not nearly forty. The West Germans went ahead with rearmament plans and even conscription, although many of the Social Democrats detested the idea, as for that matter did some of the Christian Democrats. The French, too, had swallowed their doubts, despite threats of ‘Guns for Huns’. The Soviet side had offered (and Molotov stressed the offer again in 1954) some European security system that would include the USSR but exclude the USA and of course NATO Germany. This idea, to be launched with the sort of large international conference that the USSR could quite easily manipulate (the other countries being divided among themselves, with a number of small ones to cause trouble), was now in the air. It was ‘Europe for the Europeans’, and it later grew nuclear-free extrapolations; in time it became ‘our common European home’ — a famous enough expression, later on, under Gorbachev, but promoted before him by much harder men. The idea was not unpopular in some circles in Germany and elsewhere, and even had attractions on the Right. But there was one unshakably strong argument against it: Stalin and all his works, particularly the repulsive little state in East Germany. Its capital, East Berlin, had been rebuilt in homage to Moscow. The centre, the Alexander-Platz, was a gigantic field of concrete, and off it marched the Stalin-Allee, another hideous boulevard of concrete, with a peculiar smell, partly made-up of local low-quality coal and partly of the Soviet method of oil refinery. Along it went lorries, packed with rubble, and occasional large, curtained, black cars, carrying the unlovely Communist bosses. There was another peculiarity to East Berlin. Bomb damage did not mean that old buildings were torn down, as in the West. Instead, they were patched together, at least in areas such as the Schönhauser Allee or the Vinetastrasse, outside of the international gaze, ripe for ‘gentrification’ two generations down the line, but at the time almost uninhabitable. No German in his senses would want to live there.