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Professors Miscamble and Trachtenberg have raised certain questions regarding my contribution to the roundtable on the former's book, _From Roosevelt to Truman_. I reply to the former scholar with this post, and to the latter with another that will follow in due course. In the course of his gracious reply to those who commented on his work Professor Miscamble asked of me whether he had "drawn as accurately" as he had thought from my essay, "Revolution by Degrees: Stalin's National Front Strategy for Europe, 1941-1947." To this he added that he had thought that the national front strategy represented an effort by Stalin "to advance his version of Socialism by 'caution and deception.'" Professor Miscamble then asks whether I deny that "'from the very beginning of their of Eastern Europe manipulated East European leaders, bullied and deceived the populations, arrested and shot political opponents.'" How seriously, then, are we to take the supposed Soviet commitment to 'bourgeois democracy?'" My answers to these questions are that Professor Miscamble did not misconstrue my article, and that, yes, the Soviets did from an early date engage in repression, but that we should nonetheless take "bourgeois democracy" very seriously as a tactic, if not as a true political commitment. My answers may appear self-contradictory, but they are not. The beginning of wisdom in analyzing complex historical events is to make the necessary distinctions. In approaching developments in East Central Europe and the Balkans during the early Cold War one must carefully distinguish between the Soviets' plans and the actions that they later took in political contexts they had not foreseen. The elder von Moltke is famously reputed to have said that no plan survives contact with the enemy. I propose a corollary: no political strategy survives prolonged contact with refractory human realities. That, at least, was Stalin's experience in East Central Europe and the Balkans. The central thesis of my essay is that Stalin wanted the Grand Alliance to endure after the war at least until the postwar depression he expected created new opportunities for the expansion of Socialism and/or brought conflict as the capitalist states sought to resolve their internal contradiction through aggression against the USSR. There were many reasons why postwar cooperation would have been in Stalin's interest; that he hoped for it is not longer to be doubted. (I refer readers to my article and to Geoffrey Roberts' new book, Stalin's Wars.) The evidence is equally strong, however, that he retained a strong commitment to advancing the cause of Socialism. These goals were potentially in conflict, seemingly so much so in fact that scholars tend to be seized with cognitive dissonance when they confront the evidence that Stalin sought both of them. They usually resolve their conflict by emphasizing his interest in cooperation to the exclusion of his commitment to Socialist revolution, or vice versa, although a few throw up their hands and say that Soviet policy was confused or incoherent. Stalin, though, thought that he could square the circle by the gradualism of a strategy that in the first instance stressed reform rather than revolution. To see that one must understand that the Soviets did not think that any of the European peoples were intractably hostile to them. They expected admiration for their role in the war and gratitude for making the largest contribution to the defeat of Germany. They thought that their success had demonstrated the excellence of their model of economic development and made it appealing to others. They believed as well - and American officials agreed - that the political mood in Europe was developing in a "progressive" direction but away from political authoritarianism. It therefore seemed possible to assemble left-leaning coalitions in which the Communists would figure as creative agents of good government as well as subtle manipulators, and also that these coalitions could be able to win more-or-less honest elections by enacting much needed reforms designed to appeal to workers, peasants, and the petty bourgeoisie. The Communists through what Rakosi called "salami tactics" would subtly increase their influence until their control of the national fronts was effectively complete. At a propitious point thereafter the construction of socialist societies could begin, although not necessarily exactly on the Soviet model. The political calculation vis-a-vis the western states was this: since the process of political consolidation in the eastern bloc would at least appear to be democratic, the United States and its allies could make no sustained opposition on grounds of principle. Rich trade with the USSR, moreover, would induce the western powers to forget their scruples, and the whole process in any case proceed very gradually. The theoretical justification for this was that the backward states of East Central Europe and the Balkans had to complete the bourgeois revolution before they could move on to Socialism. (Stalin told the Hungarian Communists that this intervening stage might last for several decades.) That this - or something very like it -- was the Soviet plan is amply shown by documents from the archives of Moscow and Eastern Europe. The instructions first from the International and then from its successor, the OMI, could hardly have been more explicit. (I refer readers once more to my paper.) That is why one must take "bourgeois democracy" seriously both as a policy and as an intention, although certainly without supposing that the Soviets were democrats in a western sense. What actually happened on ground east of the Elbe and south of the Danube is more complicated. While the national front strategy met with some success in a few places, on the whole its failure was evident by the end of 1946. There were for many reasons for the failure, some of which I discuss in my article. The Cominform Conference of 1947 in any case put a formal end to it. The very short life of "Popular Democracy" is one reason why it has been little understood or dismissed as a mere slogan. But neither its brevity nor its failure are reasons for doubting the significance of "bourgeois democracy" as a tactic of Soviet policy. Professor Miscamble's questions amalgamate Soviet intentions in, say, 1944, with what happened two years later without asking into account what happened in the interim. In my commentary I instanced Romania. Professor Miscamble asks, in effect, how can Stalin have been serious about "bourgeois democracy" when Andrei Vyshinskii imposed Petre Groza on Romania in March 1945 and thousands of arrests followed? "Bourgeois democracy," as I have stressed, was a calculated simulacrum of democracy, not the thing itself. But there also were intervening developments almost everywhere that made the national front strategy difficult and even impossible to sustain. In Romania, for example, the Soviets uncovered late in 1944 a massive plot involving the Romanian Army, the Iron Guard's underground, and parts of the National Peasant Party, to bring Romania back to the side of the Axis. Signals intelligence now available shows that both the US and the UK knew about the plot, and knew too that the leading Romanian democratic politician, Iuliu Maniu, was witting. How were arrests and a change of government to be avoided? Quite obviously, the implications of this affair for our understanding of both Soviet and Anglo-American polices in Romania are enormous. Romania was but one country, and like Tolstoi's unhappy families, each country of East Central Europe and the Balkans was unhappy in its own way. But in their sum all the ways had the effect of unsettling Soviet policy sufficiently to alter its methods, if not its ultimate ends. We know the tricks that fate played on the plans and expectations of western leaders. We should not suppose that the masters of the Kremlin any more than their western counterparts enjoyed some exemption from the truth reflected in the old adage, "Man proposes, God disposes." For too long it has been assumed that since in the end Soviet power was controlling in Eastern Central Europe and Balkans, events must have fallen out as Stalin planned and preferred. But they did not. It is in fact nearer the truth to say that the Cold War developed as it did and when it did not because Stalin's plans succeeded but because they failed. Eduard Mark
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