A People's History of the World: From the Stone Age to the New Millennium (74 page)

The fate of the liberation movements in western and southern Europe was matched by what happened in the Russian sphere of influence in eastern Europe. The Western powers agreed to incorporate eastern Poland into the USSR as ‘Western Ukraine’, stood back while Stalin allowed the German army to crush the Warsaw Rising, and then accepted the ‘people’s government’ he appointed as rulers of the country. In the same way they allowed him a free hand in Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia and East Germany. They made plenty of propaganda about the ills that Stalin inflicted on these countries, just as Stalin made propaganda about the crimes of the West, but they did nothing to stop him having his way. Both sides kept to the main points of their wartime agreements until 1989, when the Russian bloc collapsed from its own internal difficulties.

There was one important country in Europe which did not fall into either camp. This was Yugoslavia, where the Communists led by Tito (himself of mixed Croat and Slovenian ancestry) had succeeded in building a multi-ethnic resistance movement against both the German occupation and the Croat Ustashe fascists—and had obtained arms from the Allies because of its willingness to fight the Germans while the royalist Serb Chetniks refused to do so. The partisans were able to take control of the country and set up a regime which—although it initially slavishly copied Stalin’s regime in the USSR—had a strong independent base of its own. This was demonstrated in 1948 when Tito suddenly broke with Stalin to follow a policy of neutrality which lasted for the next 40 years.

The agreements between the Western powers and Russia were not confined to Europe. Britain and Russia had divided Iran into two spheres of influence during the war and maintained their forces there for a couple of years. The Russian and US division of Korea in the summer of 1945 was more permanent—along a line drawn by the US’s General MacArthur. Each picked a dictator to rule its half: on one side a small-scale guerrilla leader, Kim Il Sung, who had spent the war in the USSR; on the other, right wing nationalist Syngman Rhee, who could be relied upon to do what the US wanted. The division of Korea was the last great act of cooperation between the wartime allies. Within five years it was to be the cause of the biggest collision between them.

The ‘Big Three’ powers celebrated their victory over Germany and Japan by establishing a new international organisation, the United Nations. Its founding conference in San Francisco in May 1945 promised the peoples of the world a new order of peace and cooperation which would vanquish war forever. It was claimed that this was going to be very different from its inter-war predecessor, the League of Nations, which had not been able to do anything to stop the Second World War. The claim struck a chord among people who had suffered and fought for what they genuinely thought was going to be a better world.

However, the ‘failure’ of the League of Nations had not been accidental—it followed from an intrinsic fault. It was set up by the victorious powers after 1918 as part of the Treaty of Versailles by which they parcelled out the world among themselves. Lenin described it as a ‘thieves’ kitchen’—and, as the saying goes, ‘thieves fall out’. The United Nations was no different, even if it had a ‘soup kitchen’ annexe in Geneva (comprising the children’s fund UNICEF, the World Health Organisation, and so on). Decision-making lay with four permanent Security Council members
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—Britain, the US, France and Russia—and between them these dominated, oppressed and exploited the rest of the world.

They were already falling out behind the scenes by the time of San Francisco. Churchill discussed drawing up plans for the ‘elimination of Russia’, arming defeated German troops for a surprise attack ‘to impose on Russia the will of the United States and the British Empire’
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—a suggestion which, it seems, his own generals would not take seriously. The US did more than just talk: its decision to use the nuclear bomb against Japan in August 1945 was clearly motivated, at least in part, by a desire to show Stalin the enormity of the destructive power at its disposal.

Tension festered below the surface for more than a year, while each of the powers consolidated its position—reorganising industry now the war was over, overseeing the parts of the world it had recently occupied, and dampening domestic expectations. Britain’s Labour government sought to placate the wave of radicalism of 1945 with plans to improve welfare provision and nationalise the railways and mines. The US experienced a level of strikes even higher than in 1936-37. The Russian occupying forces in Eastern Europe oversaw the transformation of what had been small Communist parties into mass bureaucratic organisations.

The rulers of each needed a sense of international harmony as a cover for consolidating structures of control. In France, Italy and even Britain, governments still benefited from Communist Party opposition to strikes. In Eastern Europe it suited Stalin that the states occupied by Russian troops should be run by coalition governments involving figures from the pre-war right, centre and social democratic parties.

The quarrels between the powers became public in 1946-47. Churchill, now in opposition in Britain, opened fire with his speech in Fulton, Missouri, in March 1946, declaring, ‘From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended on the continent.’ Of course, he did not mention his own role in bringing this about through his cynical deal with Stalin in Moscow only 18 months before. Nor did he see any contradiction in repeating his declamation about ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ two days later in the segregated Jim Crow state of Virginia. A year later Truman translated Churchill’s words into action, taking over from Britain the role of sustaining the repressive regime in Greece which had been responsible for the assassination of 1,300 EAM-ELAS supporters in the previous year.

The Marshall Plan, the scheme to revive the economies of Europe under US hegemony, soon followed. It was presented as an offer of aid to all of Europe, including those areas under Russian occupation. But W W Rostow, an economist who worked on implementing it—and who later played a key role in the US’s war against Vietnam—reveals that the plan was part of an ‘offensive’ which aimed ‘to strengthen the area still outside Stalin’s grasp’.
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Within weeks of the announcement of the plan, and prompted by the US, the parties of the right and centre had forced the Communists out of the governments in France and Italy.
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This was Thorez and Togliatti’s reward for their three years of work opposing strikes (including a major strike at Renault in Paris at precisely the time the government crisis erupted). In the spring of 1948 the US poured funds into Italy to try and prevent a joint list of Communist and Socialist candidates winning the general election—and began to recruit ex-fascists to an armed underground organisation, Gladio (later to come under NATO’s wing), in case they did win.

Stalin was taking similar measures to clamp down on potential dissent in Russian-occupied Eastern Europe. The Russian army had ensured the police and secret police were in the hands of its appointees. Now a series of moves were used to destroy resistance to Russian dictates. First, non-Communist ministers were forced out of office; the social democratic parties were forced to merge with Communist parties regardless of the feelings of their members; then Communist Party leaders who might show any degree of independence from Stalin (including virtually anyone who had fought in Spain) were put on trial, imprisoned and often executed. Kostov in Bulgaria, Rajk in Hungary, and Slansky in Czechoslovakia were all executed. Gomulka in Poland and Kadar in Hungary were merely thrown into prison. Stalin was not only keen to remove pro-Western supporters of market capitalism. He was terrified of independent Communist-led regimes emerging—especially after the break with Tito’s Yugoslavia in 1948. A wave of show trials of Eastern European Communist leaders followed, accused, like Tito, of being ‘imperialist agents’ and ‘fascists’.

The most visible expression of what soon became known as the ‘Cold War’ came in the summer of 1948. Germany had been divided into four occupation zones, and so had its capital, Berlin. Now the US, Britain and France merged their zones and introduced a new currency, which had the effect of cutting them off from the Russian zone. Russia reacted by imposing a blockade on the movement of goods and food by road and rail to West Berlin, which was an isolated enclave in the midst of their zone. A huge US and British airlift succeeded in keeping the supplies flowing—and became part of an Anglo-US propaganda campaign about the ‘defence of freedom’.

The campaign provided the background for a campaign against Communist and left wing activists in the West. In the US the Taft Hartley law required trade unions to purge Communist officials; government employees (including teachers and college lecturers) were sacked for refusing to sign ‘loyalty oaths’ and directors and writers who would not denounce alleged ‘Communist’ contacts were banned from working in Hollywood by Senator Joe McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee. Writer Dashiell Hammett was among the many alleged Communists imprisoned. Charlie Chaplin was banned from entering the country, and Paul Robeson from leaving it. In a grisly climax, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were sent to the electric chair for allegedly passing atomic secrets to Russia. In France and Italy anti-Communist splits tore the trade union movement apart. In Britain several major unions banned Communists from holding office.

While this was happening in the West, the most sterile form of Stalinist ideology was imposed in Eastern Europe, with prisons and labour camps for anyone who objected.

The two blocs were quickly organised into rival military alliances, NATO and the Warsaw Pact, and to a large extent cut off from one other economically. The US banned a massive range of ‘strategic’ exports to the Eastern bloc, while within it Russia insisted on ‘the unreserved subordination of politics, economics and ideological activity to the needs of the bloc as a whole’.
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Military expenditure on both sides leapt to heights unprecedented in peacetime, reaching about 20 percent of US national output and up to 40 percent of Russia’s smaller output. Russia built secret cities to develop an atom bomb to rival the US, while the US developed the H-bomb—100 times more destructive than the atom bomb—and maintained a fleet of armed nuclear bombers permanently in flight. It was not long before the combined arsenals of the two superpowers were enough to destroy the world many times over. Yet generals on both sides played war games which assumed the use of these weapons.

As ideological conformity was imposed on either side of the ‘iron curtain’, a generation grew up under the shadow of ‘the bomb’. Anyone in either camp who dared to oppose this monstrosity could expect to be labelled a supporter—or even an ‘agent’—of the other. All too often this labelling was accepted by those in opposition. Many socialists in the West and the Third World were misled into believing the rulers of the USSR were on their side, while many dissidents in the Eastern bloc believed Western leaders who claimed to stand for ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’. Those who stood out against this nonsense at the beginning of the 1950s were tiny in number.

The Cold War never became hot on a world scale. If it had, few of us would be around. But it did become hot in Korea. The rival dictators established North and South of the partition line in 1945 each sought to gain legitimacy by unifying the country, and there were clashes from the spring of 1949 onwards. The Northern dictator, Kim Il Sung, decided to act before his Southern rival, Syngman Rhee, got the chance. He launched an attack in June 1950, after receiving the go-ahead from Stalin, expecting it to cause an immediate collapse of the Southern regime. Neither he nor Stalin thought the US would intervene. But the army of the South did not collapse, although it retreated to the southern tip of the country, and the US rushed to intervene. It was worried about the impact that an Eastern bloc victory in Korea would have on a still devastated and impoverished Japan, where a powerful Communist Party was using revolutionary rhetoric. US president Truman also saw war in Korea as an excuse for persuading a previously reluctant Congress to approve a massive increase in military spending.

The war lasted three years. The human cost was enormous. There were 500,000 Western casualties and three times that number on the other side. Two million Korean civilians died, and half the Southern population lost their homes or became refugees. The mass of the Korean people gained nothing at all. The final demarcation line was the same as at the beginning, and millions of people were precluded from ever seeing friends and relatives on the other side. There had been considerable support for Kim Il Sung in the South when the war began, and some guerilla activity to back his armies. Those Southern leftists who stayed behind in the South remained in prison for decades; those who retreated North with Kim Il Sung’s armies were imprisoned or executed as ‘unreliable elements’. Meanwhile a succession of dictators ruled South Korea, and it would be almost 40 years before its population had a chance to exercise even the most limited ‘democracy’ for which the war was supposedly fought.

This futile and barbaric war summed up the Cold War. The massive technological advances of the previous two centuries were marshalled to threaten humanity with destruction by rival ruling classes. Each used the language of the Enlightenment to subjugate as much of the world as possible, and each succeeded in convincing large numbers of people it was right to do so.

The shortest golden age

These were the words of British right wing social democrat Anthony Crosland in 1956. His conclusion, like Bernstein’s 60 years earlier, was that capitalism had overcome its crises and that ‘we stand…on the threshold of mass abundance’.
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Subsequent events proved him wrong. But there was no challenging the statistics he marshalled. World capitalism went through the most sustained boom it had ever experienced. By 1970 the US economy was turning out three times as much as in 1940, German industrial output was up fivefold on 1949, and French output up fourfold. Italy was transformed from a peasant country into a major industrial power, and Japan leapt ahead to take second position behind the US. No wonder many economic historians today describe the period as a ‘golden age’.

The lives of vast numbers of people were transformed. Unemployment fell to levels only known before in brief periods of boom—3 percent in the US in the early 1950s, 1.5 percent in Britain, and 1 percent in West Germany by 1960. There was a gradual and more or less uninterrupted rise in real wages in the US, Britain and Scandinavia in the 1950s, and in France and Italy in the 1960s. Workers were living better than their parents, and expected their children to live better still.

It was not just a question of higher incomes. Wages could be spent on a range of consumer goods—vacuum cleaners, washing machines, refrigerators, televisions, instant hot water systems. There was a qualitative leap in the working class standard of living. Housework remained a chore for women, but no longer entailed endless hours of boiling and kneeling and scrubbing. Food could be purchased weekly rather than daily (opening the door for the supermarket to replace the corner shop). Entertainment of sorts was on tap in the home, even for those who could not afford the cinema, theatre or dancehall.

There were other changes as well. Employers conceded the five day rather than the five and a half day week, and more than a one week annual holiday. Concessions which had seemed a great gain for workers in France in 1936 became commonplace in Western Europe and North America. Holidays for the masses came to mean more than a couple of days in the country or a week at the seaside. Workers whose ambition in the past had been restricted to buying a bicycle could now save up for a second hand car. For the first time young workers had incomes high enough to constitute a market in their own right. ‘Youth culture’ was born in the mid-1950s out of the seemingly insatiable demand for pop songs and fashions fuelled by teenage dreams and adolescent insecurities.