The War after the War: Liberating Eastern Europe

The series of conferences during WW2 - including Cairo and Tehran in late 1944, Malta and Yalta in early 1945, and Potsdam in late 1945 - included among their agenda items the future of eastern Europe. Once Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Germany had been liberated from Nazi control, who would govern them? And how would they be governed?

While it was clear that the advancing Soviet army gave Stalin a chance to exercise his imperialistic ambitions, the other Allies felt the need to give him some leeway, because they wanted to keep the anti-Nazi coalition strongly together.

The Allies knew that, if they did not appease Stalin, there remained the possibility that he would switch sides again, and the massive resources of the Soviet Socialist dictatorship would be placed at Hitler’s disposal. Additionally, the Allies wanted Stalin’s support in the Pacific, where the fight against the Japanese was even more brutal than the fighting in Europe.

The capital city of Iran can be spelled either ‘Tehran’ or ‘Teheran,’ and it was in this city that the Allies met in late November and early December 1943, as historians Herb Romerstein and Stan Evans write:

While military matters were the immediate topics at Teheran, postwar political and diplomatic issues would be considered also. Of special interest were the states of Eastern Europe that lay in the path of the Red Army advancing west from Russia, and what would happen to them when they were “liberated” by Soviet forces. Foremost among the nations getting notice in this context were Yugoslavia and Poland, the first the subject of extended comment by Churchill, the second stressed by Stalin as a security issue for Moscow.

At Tehran, then, Churchill backed Stalin’s man in Yugoslavia: Josip Broz Tito. The nickname ‘Tito’ had appeared when Josip Broz began a Soviet-backed communist group which hoped eventually to govern Yugoslavia.

From the time the Nazis had invaded Yugoslavia, Draza Mihailovich had been leading an underground resistance group in an effort to push the Nazis back out of Yugoslavia. The group was called the Chetniks, and Mihailovic - his surname is sometimes spelled without the final ‘h’ - rallied the cause of freeing Yugoslavia.

Because Hitler and Stalin were allies until June 1941, Tito, as Stalin’s agent, offered no resistance to the occupying Nazis until Hitler broke his alliance with Stalin.

In a stunning and masterful propaganda effort, Stalin suddenly directed his radio and print media to portray Tito as a resistance leader, and to denounce Mihailovic as a traitor who’d collaborated with the Nazis. The effort was so successful that even Churchill and the British government were fooled.

While Mihailovic continued his efforts against the occupying Nazis, Tito’s guerrillas attacked Mihailovic’s fighters. Tito conducted occasional token raids against the Nazis to support the propaganda effort portraying Tito as the true resistance hero.

Churchill agreed, at Teheran, that Tito would be the postwar leader of Yugoslavia, and so unwittingly delivered the Yugoslavs from Hitler’s dictatorship into Stalin’s dictatorship. Tito would function as Stalin’s puppet from 1941 until 1948/1949.

As soon as he consolidated power at the war’s end, Tito ordered Mihailovic to be arrested and executed after a show trial. Stalin’s misinformation effort had succeeded, and the western Allies had support Tito, a communist dictator, over Mihailovic, who had been the authentic leader of the anti-Nazi resistance.

China and the USSR: Unstable Alliances

The motives of the international communist conspiracy often caused it to make moves which surprised observers during its heyday between 1917 and 1991. In hindsight, there is an underlying logic to what seemed like unexpected changes.

Leaders like Lenin, Stalin, and Mao were balancing ideology and opportunism. In borderline situations, the winner was usually whichever policy option did the most to obtain, retain, and maintain power for the Soviet Socialist dictatorship.

Allies of the USSR and enemies of the USSR could exchange roles in an instant. As historians Herb Romerstein and Stan Evans write,

Understanding who stood where in the often confusing propaganda battles of the Cold War depends on knowing what the interests of the Soviet Union were at any given moment and how these could abruptly change when the global balance of forces shifted.

The most notable example, of course, was the “Hitler-Stalin Pact,” a treaty of nonaggression between the Nazis and the USSR. Also known as the “Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact” or the “Nazi-Soviet Pact,” the treaty was signed in August 1939. The Soviets and the Nazis were then allies, and cooperated in the invasion and oppression of Poland.

This came as a surprise to the rest of the world because Hitler and Stalin had publicly opposed each other prior to August 1939. Stalin had decried Hitler as an imperialist. Hitler had denounced Stalin as a communist.

Just as the Hitler-Stalin Pact reversed, in a moment, the previous opposition between the two, so in June 1941, the situation reversed itself again in a flash. Hitler and Stalin, who’d been allies only a few days before, were now at war with each other.

This was not the only situation in which the USSR’s allegiances reversed themselves suddenly. Stalin, needing an organized China to prevent Japan from attacking the USSR, backed Chiang Kai-shek, even though Chiang was sustaining free China against Mao’s communist revolutionaries.

While Stalin’s ideology should have dictated him to befriend Mao, Stalin’s instinct for power directed him to ally with Chiang:

Less often noted but equally telling was the zigzagging Communist line on China. As seen, a main Soviet concern of the later 1930s was the danger of invasion from Japan, then on the march in Asia and long hostile to the USSR. This threat dictated a temporarily friendly view of China’s Chiang Kai-shek, then pinning down a million or so Japanese who might otherwise have invaded Russia. The same Soviet interest meant blocking an American modus vivendi with Japan concerning China, as this too could have freed up the empire for an assault on Soviet Asia. In both respects, Chiang’s then-high standing with U.S. opinion trumped notions of accommodation with Tokyo in the Pacific.

As in the case of Germany, so also in the case of China. In mid-1943, Stalin would suddenly drop his relationship with Chiang, support Mao, and direct the USSR’s efforts against Chiang.

When Mao Tse-Tung, whose name is also spelled ‘Mao Zedong,’ finally defeated free China in 1949, Stalin formed an official alliance with the communist dictator of China. But like all other communist alliances, it was an arrangement of convenience, which ended in the early 1960s, when the Soviets and the Maoists decided that they didn’t need each other.