The Transformative Impact of World War II
The Cold War Divide
Whether the Cold War divide, the formation of the Soviet Bloc and the imposition of socialist one party economic and political systems of government on much of East Central Europe was planned by Joseph Stalin (1879–1953) from the beginning has been much debated. Hugh Seton-Watson's (1916–1984) The East European Revolution (1950) identified a pattern for the Communist seizure of power and Zbigniew Brzezinski (1928–2017) in The Soviet Bloc: Unity and Conflict (1960) identified a similar process. Anne Applebaum (born 1964) , Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944-56 (2012) has, more recently, provided support for this thesis.
Certainly the
take-over of the Baltic States had already provided a taste of what was
to come, while Communist parties in states overrun by Russian forces
clearly expected full support for their seizure of power. Against this
interpretation, there is Stalin's apparent flexibility in making his
"back of an envelope" Percentage Agreement with Churchill, while Mark
Mazower has queried whether over Italy and Poland there was not, "at the
highest levels, a tacit quid pro quo?"14 In addition, the fact that the
process of establishing one-party governments was not complete until
1948 has enabled some historians to claim that there was no overall
blueprint.15
Blueprint or not, the fact remains that, one
by one, socialist states, closely allied to the Soviet Union or
"people's democracies" emerged: Bulgaria, where from 1944 a
Communist-dominated Fatherland Front was the only legal political group;
Poland and Romania, where a strong parallel state was dominated by
Communists; and Hungary and Czechoslovakia, where, until 1948, a limited
degree of democracy was permitted.
Some have argued that the timetable
of the Soviet takeover was dependent on Stalin's reactions to US
policies – the ending of aid to the Soviet Union, the Truman Doctrine
and the Marshall Plan – but there are good reasons for believing that
whatever flexibility he demonstrated elsewhere, as in Greece, Stalin was
determined to place sympathetic governments and economic systems in the
countries "liberated" by the Soviet forces. As he said to Milovan
Djilas (1911–1995) , the Yugoslavian partisan, who eventually fell out
with Marshal Josip Broz Tito (1892–1980) , "This war is not as in the
past: whoever occupies a territory also imposes his own system".16
That
the USSR would reject the aid proffered by the Marshall Plan of 1947 to
it and its satellites had been foreshadowed by its refusal to be bound
by the conclusions of the Bretton Woods Conference of July 1944 or to
join the two economic organisations set up by it, the International
Monetary Fund and the International Bank for Reconstruction and
development, considering, correctly, that the new economic order they
represented gave a considerable advantage to the USA and to the US
dollar which became the lynchpin of the world's financial system.
Essentially the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan represented the
policy of the containment of Soviet power and influence and they and the
Soviet reaction reinforced the emerging division of Europe.