The World

The victory of Mao was not inevitable. As soon as Stalin withdrew Soviet troops from Manchuria in May 1946, essential for his relations with the USA, Chiang, now deploying 4.3 million troops, seized most of the province, driving back 1.27 million Communists. Mao panicked and prepared to return to guerrilla warfare but was saved by the Americans. Truman’s envoy General George Marshall, wartime chief of staff, was deceived by Mao, who played down his links to Stalin and played up his openness to American friendship. Marshall forced Chiang Kai-shek to stop the civil war and negotiate a ceasefire – a fatal mistake. Stalin had starved Mao of arms during the war, helping Chiang against the Japanese. Now Stalin pivoted towards Mao, transferring stashes of Japanese and Soviet arms, training the Japanese-allied Manchukuo army as Red soldiers and lending 200,000 Koreans from the Soviet northern sector of Korea.

At home, Stalin deported tens of thousands from his retaken regions, causing – though denying – a second Ukrainian famine in which almost another million died: he joked that he would have deported the entire Ukrainian nation but there were too many of them. He now saw the world divided into ‘two armed camps’ and envisaged, one day, war against the capitalist states led by America. Close to getting the Soviet Bomb – he tested his first in August 1949 – Stalin forced his own vassals onto eastern Europe, believing as he told the Yugoslavs that ‘Each side will impose their own system.’ For a Russian leader, Poland was the first and most important of those countries to secure. In Romania, Mihai of Romania, still only twenty-six, was forced to appoint a Communist-dominated government that arrested and tried liberal leaders and supporters, decrees he refused to sign. In November 1947, after attending the London wedding of his cousins, Princess Elizabeth of England and a naval officer Prince Philip of Greece, where he met his future wife, he returned home. There on 30 December he was summoned to the Elisabeta Palace. The Communist leader Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej and Stalin’s henchman Andrei Vyshinsky, the shrieking prosecutor of the show trials, threatened, ‘If you don’t sign this [an instrument of abdication] immediately, we’re obliged to kill more than 1,000 students in prison.’ But Mihai refused to abdicate, hoping to call in loyal troops.

‘Your guards have been arrested,’ said Dej, ‘the telephones have been cut and artillery are pointed at this office.’ He drew a pistol. ‘I looked out of the window,’ Mihai recalled, ‘and saw the howitzers. I signed.’ Dej declared a ‘people’s republic’ that day. Bulgaria^*

had fallen much earlier, but now similar coups, orchestrated by Stalin, were taking place in Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia; in the latter country the former foreign minister and son of the country’s founder, Jan Masaryk, either committed suicide or was defenestrated. Yugoslavia and Albania, the countries that had liberated themselves from the Germans, were more idiosyncratic: the regal Josip Tito, half Croat, half Slovene, who had survived the Terror in Moscow, reunited Yugoslavia, purging enemies. But Tito resisted Stalin’s bullying. Infuriated by such lese-majesty, Stalin ordered his killing. In a very rare example of anyone defying Stalin, Tito wrote him a letter: ‘Stop sending assassins to kill me … If you send another, I’ll send one to Moscow and I won’t have to send another.’^*

As he secured this unprecedented Russian empire, larger than the Romanovs’, Stalin calculated that the capitalist democracies lacked the will to fight for eastern Europe and he was right: the peace of the next forty years was based not just on the rules of international law but on the western recognition that half of Europe belonged to Moscow. On Europe’s western extremity, Spain was still ruled by Franco, who frantically trimmed his Fascistic dictatorship to win American favour as an anti-Communist crusader, calling himself ‘Caudillo of the War of Liberation against Communism’ and restoring the Bourbon monarchy with himself as regent. His less rebarbative Portuguese ultranationalist neighbour, Salazar, delivered stability at home and vigorously maintained the empire abroad, sending thousands of white settlers to his African colonies.

European democracy was limited to the centre and even there it wavered. Impoverished Italy looked likely to embrace Communism. In France, where a weak fourth republic proved unmanageable, Premier de Gaulle retired to his bleak Colombey house. Governments were short-lived. France, like Portugal, consoled itself with empire.