In Europe

speech at Fulton College in Missouri: ‘From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia …'Western politicians and commentators spoke of the ‘great international communist conspiracy’ and about ‘Moscow blueprints’ for taking over Western Europe. In reality, as we know now, Stalin's basic stance in the years following the war was primarily a defensive one. The Soviet Union was completely exhausted, completely incapable of turning around and starting a new war. Stalin's greatest trauma had been the German invasion of 1941, a repetition of which he hoped to avoid at all costs. He lived in deep fear of an armed conflict with the West, and particularly of the enormous preponderance of American air power, America whose bombers could make of the Soviet Union ‘one huge target’. It is true that from 1949 the Russians had the atom bomb as well, but in those first yearsRussian nuclear technology lagged far behind that of the West. ‘Stalin trembled in fear’ at the prospect of an American attack, Khrushchev wrote in his memoirs. ‘Oh, how he shook! He was afraid of a war!’
    There was yet another reason why there could be no such thing as a fixed ‘Moscow blueprint’ for a communist offensive: the political situations in the individual countries of Europe were too different. Local leaders, national characteristics and patriotic feelings played such a great role in those first post-war years that no country would have fitted an imposed Soviet scheme.
    The clearest example of ‘popular communism’ was that of Josip Broz, otherwise known as Tito. This former Yugoslav partisan leader enjoyed enormous authority. He had led an extremely active resistance movement, and he had also succeeded in bringing together the sharply divided ethnic groups of Yugoslavia into one large, well oiled underground movement. He did not shrink from applying Stalinist methods of terror, he kept the various ethnic groups under his thumb by means of a risky policy of divide and conquer, but for the vast majority of Yugoslavs he was the natural leader. And he continued to be exactly that, for thirty-five years.
    In Greece, the communist resistance of the EAM/ELAS was at least equally popular. It had a moderate socialist programme, it was a local and patriotic movement, and by the end of the war it comprised at least half a million partisans, including many non-communists. In 1944, however, Churchill and Stalin had made some clear agreements: their ‘naughty documents’ stipulated that Greece was to remain ninety-per cent Western. In October 1944, a sizeable British military force landed in Greece to disarm the resistance – later always referred to as ‘bandit gangs’ – and support a right-wing coalition government. The vicious civil war that followed ended only after the United States took over from Britain and Tito closed his borders to the guerrillas with their communist sympathies. In November 1949, after ‘analysing the situation’, the central committee of the Greek Communist Party decided to lay down its arms. The country had been at war for almost ten years. Half a million Greeks had died under the German occupation, and the civil war had claimed 160,000 more and left 700,000 homeless. A quarter of all the country's houses had been destroyed. All the Greeks wanted was peace and quiet.
    In Poland, power was assumed by a man rather like Tito: Wladyslaw Gomulka, the leader of the communist underground. His movement too soon enjoyed a great deal of support, because it addressed those problems which all pre-war parties had ignored: widespread poverty, ethnic conflicts, the anxious relationships with Germany and the Soviet Union. In 1945 he stamped out the Farmers’ Party, declaring that the communists ‘will never surrender power once they have it’, but at the same time he was a typical Polish patriot. He abhorred Stalin's brand of rigid coercion.
    The communists in Czechoslovakia were initially in favour of a multi-party system, and there is nothing to indicate that they intended to ban other parties during those early days. They were popular enough as it was: in the May 1946 elections they won thirty-eight per cent of the vote, making them the country's largest party by far. Their movement had more