Journal of Contemporary History
(Sage Publications, London, Newbury Park and New Delhi),
Vol. 28 (1993 January), 53-73.
R.C. Raack :
As a result of the recent opening to independent researchers of many archives in European nations once behind the Iron Curtain, new histories of the Stalinist period, and succeeding years of Soviet control and intensive political interest in these states, are now being researched and written. These accounts will require major changes in the general histories of the second world war and its origins, and of the Cold War.
The archives of the former Institute of Marxism-Leninism of the Central Committee of the Socialist Unity Party (SED) in east Berlin(1) were one of the first to open. These rich holdings tell us much previously unknown about Germany under Soviet occupation. They give us a totally new picture, in particular of Joseph Stalins intentionally direct role in bringing about the post-war division of Germany as part of his effort to organize through his clients in the German Communist Party (KPD) a Soviet future for all Germans. How many opinions, how much historical literature on the causes of the division of Germany and other subjects, controversial until now, will be set aside following scholarly review of these previously long secret documents ?
These records also give us valuable historical vignettes straightforward views of the contemporary Kremlins modes of operation, especially those which over the years have formed a Stalinist political record akin to the productions of an occult theatre, a record seemingly unsusceptible to rational understanding hence more often than not misunderstood by contemporary diplomats and later historians. What we now see in these peculiar politics appears to have been largely determined by Stalins character, by his ignorance of the world beyond his reach and his evidently irresistible whims.(2) He, though, would have surely considered the latter the inner promptings of history itself. His is a biography which historians, with so many additional facts now becoming available, must hasten to complete. His record revealed in the historical events described below is a contribution to that biography.
Most important among Stalins German agents was Walter Ulbricht (from 1949 long-term party head and Chairman of the Council of State of the [east] German Democratic Republic). He came to Germany in late April 1945 from Moscow as part of the baggage of the Red Armys Political Administration (PURKKA). Ulbricht, we can judge from newly available photographic evidence, was a person who, at least during his Moscow exile and the first years after his return to Germany, preferred to keep out of the political spotlight. He almost always stood at the side or back of a group or meeting ; calculatedly, one assumes, away from the focus of attention.(3) Perhaps, as an adaptable tactician and evidently persuasive conniver, he had learned the trick from his Soviet boss. Yet it was nonetheless he from among the Moscow-exiled Germans with whom Stalin and his Moscow subaltern in the Division of International Information, the Foreign Bureau of the Soviet Communist Party, Georgii Dimitrov, had entrusted the most important preparatory organizational work in post-war Germany.
Former Comintern General Secretary Dimitrov described by friendly witnesses as untiring, and a stalwart champion of the ideological purity and steel unity of the party and its unshakeable loyalty to the Soviet Union(4) continued to play virtually the same role as head of the Bureau. He had played this role in the Comintern before 1943, when Stalin had suddenly dissolved that organization, a move probably made for propaganda purposes. The Bureau seems to have been then suddenly readapted to replace the Comintern. In terms of its worldwide political works, it became an almost perfect if, outside the Soviet Union, usually invisible, image of its Comintern predecessor.
Ulbricht was one of the core Bolshevik faithful, a firm believer in the wisdom of Comrade Stalin, terming him, the head of the Communist Party and the Soviet Union, leader of all the progressive forces of the world. Perhaps, if there be an iota of sincerity in these words (for Ulbricht was quite capable, like his chief, of amending remarks to suit his tactical purposes), we can understand why he seems to have been the most efficient German implement of Stalins will over the next few months and even years. What made Ulbricht all the more dangerous to enemies was that, in other respects, he resembled his Georgian leader. He could, in the course of carrying out his major duties for the Kremlin and the shadow German state he already, in 1945, served, still find time to contemplate personal acts of proletarian justice even against a single offending member of the bourgeoisie. This sort of personal involvement by the effective head of government, if not first born in the Kremlin, had been established by Stalin as native to that environment.(5)
From the outset, therefore, Walter Ulbricht was well suited to take on the role of Stalins head man in the KPD, and main political organizer in Berlin. He was quickly to take a more important role, always moving about in company with, or vouchsafed unimpeded passage by Red Army officers from the powerful Political Administration. Before long he became the effective, Soviet-installed, Moscow-directed dictator of all of Soviet-occupied Germany, taking over in the rest of the Soviet Zone of Occupation (SBZ) as soon as the Red Army could establish effective communications throughout the area.(6)
Ulbricht brought with him a public political and economic programme, one which he could announce. Behind it lurked a private organizational programme. The latter was shielded, as far as possible, by secrecy, highly inexact description, distracting propaganda generalities, and other Moscow-developed varieties of disinformation, as well as by whatever other Soviet-style tricks Ulbricht could manage to squeeze into the velvet glove he had donned for his political purpose. Both programmes, the second of which was aimed at putting a masked KPD hand in command of all the important political, social and economic functions in the SBZ, had been closely worked out with Dimitrov, and with representatives of the Soviet Communist Partys Central Committee and, if not directly, most likely through the latter with Stalin, the boss, himself.(7)
As the details of this history already reflect, the KPDs effective leadership was tightly runhow tightly we only now knowby Moscow.(8) But it appears that Ulbricht, when he arrived in Germany, really did not know all of what Stalin had in mind for that country. Indeed, it seems that Stalin himself had not wholly settled what he intended when Ulbricht left the Soviet Union. The Soviet leader at that time was preoccupied with the war and post-war politics on every front, as well as with his haberdasher. He had just created himself a generalissimo, whereupon he also suddenly broke with the plain style of dress he had for years affected, equipping himself with a sartorial elegance reflecting his changed status. He also had in mind many rather odd details of the final wartime settlement with what, in Moscow, was generally fitted under the rubric, for Stalins purposes a vast category indeed, of fascism. Among his settlement schemes were some which have to be regarded as bizarre, even downright macabre. (But, as some recent reviewers of parts of his career have made clear, so was Stalins circle of confidants, the entire Kremlin ambiance, and the society over which its dark rays fell.)(9) In any event, what Stalin soon had in mind for Germany, if his plan was not already clear in early May when Berlin surrendered, was not going to be easy to achieve, even for a generalissimo.
Beyond the Foreign Bureaus conduct of the general, and often quite specific, business of foreign parties, if we may judge from this short period in the history of the KPD and other contemporary evidence, Stalin himself, the great engine driver of historys [Marxist-Leninist] locomotive, not infrequently personally intervened to manage the local business of foreign parties. In fact, such Stalinist interventions, as we shall see in the German case, were not at all unusual. Referring to the conduct of international matters, Viacheslav Molotov, head of the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs, later said : Everything was snuggled in Stalins fist and mine.(10) Hence, what appears from the German record is that there were sometimes two organizational centres co-ordinating and directing the conduct of Soviet foreign relations with the multiple agencies of post-war power in defeated Germany. One was Dimitrovs office, with its international connections and concerns, apparently dedicated to the long and steady view ; the other, the Kremlin. The former seems to have yielded, as necessary, wholly to the latter as, for Dimitrov, that much praised loyalty to the Soviet Union had to mean complete loyalty to Stalin.
The end of the European war permitted Stalin to focus closely on German political matters. He, like his predecessor Lenin, regarded Germanys future as of central importance to Soviet foreign plans. So Stalins interventions in Germany became more or less routine. These were to continue well after spring 1945, the period of Soviet-KPD relations examined here. Nor, as the newly opened records make plain, did they cease in the following months and years, that crucial post-war period which ended with the complete separation of the Soviet Zone of Occupation in Germany from the rest of that defeated land.(11)
Stalin, undoubtedly through the co-ordinating activities of the Foreign Bureau, at that time was manifestly dedicated to trying to align communist parties elsewhere in most of Europe to post-war paths of co-operation and reconciliation with the other parties of the left and centre. It is now clear that the staged demise of the Comintern was designed to convince the world that the communists were not exclusive. Through inter-party collaboration on various national political stages the Kremlin, using the national communist parties, could successfully continue to maintain, at least temporarily, its intentionally disarming participation in the pluralistic electoral systems of the democratic states of Europe. Moreover, it could continue in the uncertain post-war era what appeared as its wartime collaboration with its Western allies. Stalins European programme was then, in effect, an early post-war version of his wartime participation in that anti-fascist coalition, the gathering together of anti-Axis clans, then propagandistically labelled the United Nations. It is hard to discern from the fragmentary evidence so far available if the Western parties were in fact any less dependent on Moscows word than the parties directly under the thumb of the NKVD and Red Army in Soviet-occupied, post-war Eastern Europe.(12) They certainly did not act as if they were.
In the course of the war, Stalins Western communist associates had revived the genus, popular front. This particular Stalinist technique it would severely tax the imagination to believe there was no input from Dimitrovs office there the popular front (or anti-fascist front [or bloc], or united front), with all its overtones of moderation and democratic solidarity, was well practised, and not only in pre-war France and Spain. Stalin liked to operate behind a collective facade of leftists and centrists, or leftists and non-party people. He did so earlier, for example, when he approved governments for Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania prior to the complete takeover of these Baltic states in 1940. He did the same when he began to organize the liberation committee which became the government he had in mind for post-war Poland in 1943, and he operated, at the beginning of Red Army rule in 1945, in the same fashion in Soviet-occupied Austria and Hungary.(13)
In the spring and summer of 1945, the encouragement of national anti-fascist fronts of collaborating parties defined the general programme of the Foreign Bureau. Moscows representatives at that time absolutely denied, with atheistic eyes cast toward heaven, the notion that the Soviet Union had a plan, or a variety of plans, to Bolshevize Europe.(14) Whether it did or not, the collaborative antifascist front policy was calculated to make it appear unlikely. Meanwhile, it gave the various national communist parties time to reconstruct themselves and gather their strength in the still tangled post-war circumstances. Economic hard times and a great post-war depression and collapse in the West were then widely predicted, although not immediately, at least by Stalins favourite economist. National communist parties could, in the right future circumstances, move toward power in the Western countries where they were strong, either through the ballot box (Stalin suggested just that to British Professor Harold Laski, who disarmingly passed on the message at home), or by mass strikes and revolutionary action. Certainly the Foreign Bureaus efforts were designed to keep a wide range of options open.(15)
Stalin had publicly changed his mind on the key issue of dismembering Germany after the war in May 1945. As recently as the Yalta Conference, just a few months before, he had been urgently pressing that very policy in secret discussions with his allies. In fact, he had been the original author of this proposal back in 1941.(16) With his abandonment of the policy of dismemberment he automatically acquired a far greater stake in a reborn, post-war all-German politics, and in encouraging the growth of a renascent German Communist Party so long as that party was under his control.(17) The KPDs large national membership before the nazi takeover in 1933 had been both politically and culturally influential in German life. Its post-war revival would occur in circumstances in which the Kremlin could organize through Ulbricht and his group obvious advantages in the Soviet Zone of Occupation for loyal members.(18) Stalin might expect that in the German Western zones as well as in his own, some pre-war communists and non-communist anti-nazis from before the war, as well as most of those who had come to such political views since, might have forgotten the disastrous, divisive anti-democratic politics of the pre-war KPD. A popular, anti-fascist KPD policy, stressing interparty harmony and collaboration, could contribute much to eradicating past doubts.
The march eastward through Germany of the Western allied armies in spring 1945, as Stalin undoubtedly saw, at first limited his effective direct influence beyond the area of Soviet occupation in middle and eastern Germany. For some reason his early suggestion that the Allies collectively control the German economy had not been pressed in later diplomacy. Most likely he had realized that collective control would extend to his zone and, as we shall see, he wanted no interference there. Yet his original design, to expand Soviet control westward, is at least retrospectively self-evident.
For example, he was interested in obtaining a stake in an internationalized Ruhr area, with its large working-class population, and a hand in government there through an international control commission. In return for this proposed expansion of Soviet influence westward the Ruhr was well within the earlier assigned British Zone of Occupation no suggestion had ever been made in wartime negotiations that he would have to give up something to the Westerners. Stalin, who had more than avidly been bringing up the subject of the Ruhr in conference ever since American President Roosevelt had first begun vacantly musing on its post-war fate in the formers presence at the Teheran Conference in late 1943, still obviously expected to play a key role there at the end of the war. Dimitrov in fact suggested sending trusted comrades by plane to the Ruhr to play the roles Ulbricht and his companions were playing in the Soviet Zone of Occupation in the dying days of the Third Reich. It was the only specific place west of the agreed western border of the Soviet Zone for which he made that proposal. So strong was Stalins determination to get a foothold there that he and his agents repeatedly suggested the internationalization of the Ruhr to his Western allies as late as the Potsdam Conference in summer 1945, and even after.(19)
Just as the war ended in fact on the very day the Soviets declared victory, Stalin openly denied that they had any plans for German dismemberment, while omitting to mention that there had been such a plan, and that he was its first author. His country, he insisted in a widely publicized Moscow speech, had no desire to divide or destroy Germany.(20) He even, all the while feigning the holiest innocence, repeated this fable to his most faithful German agents. In a closed session in the Kremlin, he told Wilhelm Pieck, one of Ulbrichts closest co-workers during the Moscow exile and later President of the east German state, that it had been the West, not the Soviet Union, which had wanted to dismember Germany. He made this claim in front of Soviet Peoples Commissar of Foreign Affairs Viacheslav Molotov, and another member of Stalins inside political clan, Andrei Zhdanov.(21) In the Kremlin, there was small honour even among the thieves, and honesty was clearly not defined locally as the best policy. Pieck, who for years in Moscow exile had, in apparent admiration of his vozhd, affected Stalins daily uniform, a tunic, jodhpurs and boots, was not the sort to doubt what the leader gave him to understand.(22) Nor, surely, was Ulbricht.
Before then, in Berlin, Ulbricht had been straining for weeks to tame vengeful would-be social revolutionaries of the pre-war KPD (although this work did not hinder, as noted, his contemplating his own individual acts of proletarian justice). They saw the coming of the Red Army as a grand chance to impose at last their long-harboured fantasy of a dictatorship of the proletariat in Germany. Many local communists had spent the war years in terrible conditions in nazi concentration camps, where thousands of comrades had died or been killed. Others had had to seek twelve years of inconspicuous repose in the shadows and background of Third Reich society in order to avoid a similar fate. Many of them, rather than accepting the slow pace of political action to take care of their former oppressors, understandably preferred more radical measures to deal with the nazis and the capitalist order the simplicities of Marxist doctrine connected with the nazi path to power.(23)
But Ulbricht, who had spent virtually the entire nazi period in exile in Paris and Moscow, wanted no public mass bloodletting in revenge for what had befallen his German party comrades at home. Nor did he want a forward march of the Soviet zonal comrades wholesale into a Red Army-guaranteed local victory of the proletariat. His socially placatory purposes, clearly intended to polish the German facet of that then current pan-European communist co-operative facade, were a contribution to front-building. But they clashed directly with those of the mass of his party comrades.
In post-war Germany the nazis were down and all but out, but the national trauma their twelve-year Reich of terror and destruction had created lived on everywhere. So Ulbrichts carefully thought-out public programme, synchronized with the contemporary collaborative anti-fascist front, was, as characterized by its widely appealing, if anachronistic, political title, an exhortation to a popular battle against the enemies of the past and those who had allegedly supported them.
The front, as noted, was in action elsewhere in Europe, whether as a facade to conceal Stalins heavy bolshevizing hand, as in Poland, or as a popular politics of hope, as in France (there not unlike the fronts the Comintern had officially furthered in the mid-1930s). Politics in postwar Germany, Foreign Bureau planners obviously assumed, would be more like the latter. Therefore Ulbrichts first goal, hidden behind the popular anti-fascist front, was to secure and spread KPD influence by making the party in Germany politically salonfähig. He also needed to craft for the party firm lines of influence to the Western power-occupied zones so that it could strengthen itself as a popular force all over Germany.
A spontaneous, bloody, anti-nazi purge in the Soviet Zone of Occupation and speedy introduction of a local socialism as that term was understood in the Kremlin could only undermine Ulbrichts programme for all of Germany. We can perhaps assume that eager Berlin party comrades who naively closed a report to the KPD Central Committee in Berlin in the early days of the occupation with the reactionary-ringing closing salutation, Heil Moskau, caused Ulbricht involuntarily to shudder. Perhaps they also earned a tick on his list of those who were not to receive a vital monthly food packet (a paiok). That the comrades who wrote this also simultaneously complained bitterly about the abundant and scandalous local depredations of the Red Army, for months one of Ulbrichts most insoluble problems, quite possibly guaranteed them an indelible tick.(24)
Any radical economic programme in a country with so many middle-class aspirations and a middle class as large as Germanys much reduced in status as it then was through poverty and insecurity would soon, even in 1945, have gained an articulate set of opponents. Hence Stalins observer, Anastas Mikoian, sent to size up the situation in May 1945, ostentatiously tried to set aside local fears of sovietization. He publicly proclaimed to the defeated nation the virtues of a free-enterprise economic system. Ulbricht about that time sponsored the same ideas in the name of the KPD. Odd, indeed, it must have been (as it still is today), to read such a testimony in the Stalin-controlled press, but it was evidently an illusion they needed to float. Only by peacefully and painstakingly building up public support behind the KPD and its ancillary mass organizations, not only in the Soviet Zone but in the rest of Germany as well, could the Foreign Bureau help Ulbricht create a basis for party power in post-war Germany.(25)
Ulbricht, long before the Western allies got round to permitting political groups in their zones, helped in his to prepare the founding of local governments seeming to represent a number of popular political shades. But from the first moment communists were carefully placed in key positions in all agencies. Then, before long, word came from the Kremlin to start up the popular political front (Einheitsfront) in the Soviet Zone. Ulbricht was told to establish his own party officially, and to permit the founding of socialist (specifically mentioned by Stalin) and middle-class parties. Yet this undertaking was also only a scheme to generate temporary, if necessary, window-dressing for the anti-fascist front. Even earlier Ulbricht had noted : We shall ... bring them in in order to tie them closer to us. He had already determined, and, as we shall see, Stalins mind was just as firmly set, on the ultimate creation of one single German workers party. The life of an independent socialist party, specifically the one to be permitted in the SBZ, they expected to be short. While it and the other parties did live, Ulbricht planned to bind, and succeeded in binding, all Soviet Zonal parties to his KPD in a bloc of anti-fascist parties.(26) Ulbrichts behind-the-scenes role was to steer the policies of the entire bloc towards collaboration with the KPD .(27)
Then, in Moscow, only a month after Stalin had publicly disowned German dismemberment, twenty days after Mikoian had sung the praises of free enterprise, and a week or so after the order had gone out to launch a multi-party system in the SBZ, Stalin set out in more detail his plans for Germanys future. He did so at the very same meeting at which he strung along Pieck the other comrades of the KPD leadership, doubtlessly flown in for the very purpose, may also have been there with the story that he, Stalin, was against German dismemberment. He then outlined the details of a grandiose programme for the whole of Germany, evidently worked out on the basis of his changed plans regarding dismemberment and the recent information he had from his agents on the spot. It is likely that he had already heard a personal report on Germany from Mikoian, who by then had returned to Moscow. Stalin was now set, as he told the Germans, on re-establishing a united Germany under Soviet influence. The KPDs programme, over the next few days, was then drafted to fit in with Stalins recently expressed wishes. Then Ulbricht and his entourage flew back to Berlin, carrying with them the newly edited, made in Moscow, founding manifesto for the post-war German Communist Party.
Stalin, revealing at length what he wanted in post-war Germany, first of all required the creation of two Germanies. This he stated directly. We may assume, however, that the two parts were not to be formally identified by anyone on his side as having in fact been separated. From their Germany, Stalin stressed, the KPD, firmly cradled there, could reach out to gather strength in the other, Western zones of Germany, then push for German unity (Secure the unity of Germany via a united KPD [and a] united central committee, . . . a united workers party in the centre . . .).(28) Implicit was Stalins determination that the ultimately unified Germany be effectively controlled through the Moscow-directed KPD, which was to bring about that unity.
Or it is unclear in Piecks notes of that days meeting were the two traditional German working-class parties, the Social Democrats (SPD) and the KPD, to be fused into one, and on this potentially powerful, popular, mass basis, was Germany to be united ? Since, well before the year was out, forcing the union of these two parties became one of Stalins more urgent concerns, it is likely that it was this unity which he had on his mind in June 1945. Similar unifications of the two workers parties, communist and socialist, shotgun marriages likewise organized in Moscow, characterized Stalins other east central European satrapies in the years immediately following.(29) But, outside Germany, no other unified party was challenged to recreate the unity of the nation then divided among four outside powers. From popular anti-fascist front, to unity of the party, to unity ; Stalin had delivered his German agents a formidable task.
At that June meeting, Stalin went on to enumerate detailed instructions they were expected to transmit back to Germany. Three aspects of this plan and its method of delivery stand out as characteristic of the vozhd, and thereby contribute to the developing historical portrait of Stalin. First of all, the mode of delivery itself. There is no copy of Stalins German programme in the archive. It was evidently not set down in writing by Stalin or a secretary. What seems likely is that the Germans were summoned to an audience in the Kremlin and told to apply what they learned there to the preparation of the party programmes and other plans. Stalin, manifestly paranoid he had, given his past, good reason to be so was fearful of writing things down when he did not intend their publication.(30) Perhaps the vozhd had made some private notes of what he would say, and later saved them somewhere. But so far, we only know from Piecks record of the conversation what was said at that crucially important meeting that fourth day of June with respect to the future of Germany.
What is also strange, albeit not for Stalin, is the casual nature of the conduct of such important business. In such circumstances, which, again, do not seem unusual set against the known Stalinist record (of which we know much more today than we did just a few years ago), the historian is bound to ask, was the policy itself perhaps equally casually made ? For, on this 4 June Stalin unilaterally commanded what ended up as the post-war division of Germany. He simultaneously arranged, whatever his actual design, the circumstances for many of the great confrontations over that nation which marked the earlier years of the Cold War.
Dimitrov was not on hand for the meeting. Had he been there among the inner circle, he might have felt moved to comment on what was said in light of general, or even specific German Foreign Bureau business. He certainly occupied a position from which he could have put together a general picture of communist affairs abroad. Pieck and the others did, in fact, consult him during the next few days, but specifically about the KPD platform, visibly set to put the party on Stalins ostensibly pluralist course. Yet it seems odd that Dimitrov was not there in the Kremlin. Nor was he at the later meeting when Pieck and the others took the programme back to Stalin for review. In any event, neither Molotov and Zhdanov, who were there, nor Pieck and Ulbricht, were likely to try to restrain Stalin in his international fancies. And, in the light of the international circumstances in which Stalins plans would have to be carried out in Germany, they were obviously fanciful. In fact, Molotov and Zhdanov already had a record of sharing and purveying Stalins wilder political notions.(31)
A second aspect of Stalins would-be cautious approach to his complicated, ultimately dangerous machinations was his intention to hold tightly in his grip that zone of Germany the Red Army already possessed before he risked an adventure to the west. Having just denied to his Germans that he had ever been in favour of dismembering Germany, he went on to describe it to them as already more than slightly mutilated that is, missing the territories the boss had just lopped off for himself and his Polish clients east of the Oder-Neisse Line and to express himself ready to dismember it further, should he not get his way with all the rest of it. Something, some gain, would remain to him even if his adventurous plan for the bolshevization of the rest of Germany failed. Pieck must have been genuinely relieved to hear this. He would not have to go back to the evidently inappropriately named Hotel Lux in Moscow, where he and no doubt many others among Stalins devotees had spent more than a few uncomfortable periods of their exile without light or heat.(32)
Third, the scheme was marked by Stalins typical determination to direct nearly every aspect (he left out very little) of life under his control, although frequently urging his agents to conduct an elastic policy. For example, he told the KPD leaders he required no religious instruction (no popy) in the Soviet zonal schools, and suggested the establishment of a German theoretical political journal. The latter was not at all a chance remark. Stalin, whose historical record establishes him as often weirdly garrulous, liked to discuss philosophy and the arts and to play the great thinker. He probably expected to have the pleasure one day of seeing his loftier thoughts published in Berlin, too. In this connection, it seems appropriate to recall Milovan Djilas, a perceptive observer of the Kremlin of those days. Not long after, he described the great leader and teacher as a little grandfather ... who would look after the success and happiness of the whole communist race.(33) Look after it, and everyone else, to be sure, in his own way.
Finally, it should be recalled that Ulbricht had already been toiling for over a month to create the organizational conditions and units for establishing the general party line and building the strength of the KPD in Germany when Stalin outlined the key details of his completed, private programme for the whole of Germany. Ulbricht had been working hard to prepare for the anti-fascist, united front. A month or so after he had begun this work, Stalin came up with a new set of orders. It was only the beginning. What followed over the next few months and years, as the newly-opened records show, proves that Ulbricht and Pieck were used to such unsystematic behaviour, yet were prepared to carry out as systematically as possible orders given.
Stalin, it is clear, had by this time taken over the conduct of German affairs himself, actually intending Piecks notes provide continuing testimony for the next several years to how much he really intended, and how long Germany, and its unity, kept his attention to manage a foreign revolution by command from the Kremlin. And to manage it a revolution which was to occur within the sphere of direct interest of the strongest Western powers on his schedule. These powers were in no way given a say in his new plan for post-war Germany. Innocent of this secret scheming, they expected, indeed, had long planned, and were still intending to collaborate with him in governing all of post-war Germany.
Viewing Stalins scheme as a whole, where is that political caution of which he was, by his own testimony, ever so conscious ? It evidently extended little beyond his secretive and duplicitous methods of operation. Neither cautious nor well considered can describe the more grandiose portions of his plan. How, it must be asked, were two ancient German political parties, enemies for years, to be successfully merged to the general satisfaction of the majority of the leaders and members of both ? Before the accomplishment of that task alone lay a forbidding thicket of historical attachments, antagonisms and memories, and of intense personal and political involvements. And, even if that task were ever successfully completed, just how were the united socialist-communist party members to find that key, but unmarked, path from A to C, that is, from unified socialist-communist German party along an unknown road to unified socialist-communist, not to mention (as Stalin no doubt planned) bolshevized, German state ? Neither did Stalin explain how he planned to organize his Kremlin variety of politics, which was, in all likelihood, the only variety he knew, to effect his purpose in the complex German political environment, especially in that part beyond the immediate reach of the NKVD and the Red Army. With Stalin, all of these questions and countless others that should have been put seem to have gone unasked, as their answers, if there were such available, went undelivered. Out there, to the west of Red Army lines in central Europe, these schemes, without the actual coming of the anticipated post-war chaos and subsequent communist-inspired revolutions which could lay low the Western governments and their military forces, were absolutely certain to run head on into heavy opposition. If this likelihood had escaped Stalins calculations, as it must have, he was building his hopes for bolshevisms German tomorrows on sand like that then falling away with ever increasing speed from the futures half of his personal hour-glass.
Such was all the building he appears to have accomplished, if the total separation of the two parts of Germany and the popular collapse of the KPD in the German west which came about over the next few years are to be considered measures of the success of his programme of June 1945. Djilas was again visiting Moscow for interparty discussions seven months after Piecks audience with the vozhd. While there, Djilas heard that Stalin was still broadcasting to international comrades his expectation of creating a sovietized, communist Germany. A Yugoslav with some sense of the world beyond the Kremlin, Djilas privately asked how the Soviets expected to succeed in this. I dont know myself, came the answer from one astonishingly candid Soviet adviser.(34) Djilas was, to be sure, one of few who asked the questions which normally went unasked in the Kremlin.
The directorial force in Moscow, the key to understanding three decades of history in the USSR and what came to pass, beginning in 1945, as the Soviet Zone of Germany, was Stalins untrammelled will. It was a will honed by years of effort to create his brand of bolshevik power at home. Its strength was founded on his determination and ability to carry it out forcefully, irrespective of local circumstances, apparently according to a private timetable he had drawn up to support his general Marxist-Leninist revolutionary dreams. He had, in twelve years before the German war began, realized his fateful schemes all across the gigantic bulk of the USSR and in much of east central Europe. In mid-1945, his armies stood victorious in the middle of that continent. It is hard to imagine why he, by then a generalissimo in charge at the peak of Soviet prestige and power, would not have wished to realize just as promptly the rest of his ageing imaginings.
As certain as any conclusion about Soviet behaviour written without access to the Kremlins archives can be is the following : Stalin had taken on unbeknownst to himself the task of directing his infamous locomotive of history along two inevitably diverging tracks. One track led to the renascent, collaborative popular front designed for Germany and all of Europe ; for that world out there he barely knew. The other clearly followed from Stalins perhaps whimsical, more likely obsessive, personal urge to command and control. While urging an elastic course on his agents, he himself took firm control of even the smallest details. The first track was directed to bring him influence in the West, to maintain and strengthen the towering prestige which he and the Soviet Union had gained from their victorious participation in the war. Its goal was to gain Bolshevik successes at the ballot box and rally Bolshevik masses for the later revolutions doctrine predicted and many people then anticipated. The benign aspects of that same line could also serve, at least temporarily, as an effective facade to cover the maintenance of cordial relations with his Western allies. He vitally needed their friendship to achieve other goals, such as getting a hand on the Ruhr, most assuredly a giant, and very desirable, step to the west for Soviet power.
The other track led elsewhere. It was crudely, all too crudely, designed to turn what was now in fact his German section of Europe, and eventually all of Germany, into a replica of the Soviet state he had created at home. So, when his plans went awry, instead of his grander wish, all he actually achieved in Germany was to make his own zone into a dwarfish replica of the Soviet Union. In the course of his efforts, his crude political machinations there soon brought that zone to confront on its western edge just what the rest of his satellite empire in Europe also confronted within a few years : an iron wall of political and military opponents. By then it was the latter who had the mass popular support, while Stalin had forfeited all the rewards of influence and prestige in the west the grand Soviet victory over Hitler had brought him.
A dispassionate and honest adviser in the Kremlin, perceiving back in June 1945 these mutually exclusive courses of action, would most likely have insisted that Stalin carefully reconsider his options, reassess his strengths and goals, and relate all of them directly to those potentially achievable ends he desired most of all. But the Ulbrichts and Piecks and the Molotovs and Zhdanovs, with whom Stalin surrounded himself, whatever their own national origins and goals, were his uncritical handmaidens, hardly the sort of advisers to stand in the way of the unruly self-anointed boss of the Marxist-Leninist heritage and his infamous repressive forces. If Stalin never got to Paris, one triumph he is said to have much regretted not celebrating, he definitely had only himself to blame.(35)
Notes
1. Now called the Institut für die Geschichte der Arbeiterbewegung, Zentrales Parteiarchiv (hereafter cited as IfGA, ZPA).
2. Churchills famous remark, dating from October 1939, about Russias mysterious behaviour (his attribution of that behaviour to Russian national interest was far from correct, as this article makes clear) is reflected many times over in the confusion about Soviet purposes all during the war as shown in the British Foreign Office Northern Department documents. The same was true of the American Foreign Service and State Department analysts. See, for example, Great Britain, Public Record Office, Foreign Office 371, files (for the first half of 1945) 47881-47883, passim (hereafter cited as PRO, F0371).
3. Well documented in IfGA, ZPA, Pieck Nachlass, 36/629, and Ulbricht Nachlass, 182/851. There are not many photos of Ulbrichts time in exile and his first months in Germany in the IfGA, ZPA photo collection. But those there are are indeed revealing, as are the abundant post-war shots of Ulbricht in the documentary and newsreel film collection of the former Staatliches Filmarchiv der DDR (now part of the Bundesarchiv), in Babelsberg. In this case, the noticeable staging of Ulbricht in group scenes effectively makes my point ; in the still photos it is made more candidly.
4. The quote from Franz Dahlem in IfGA, ZPA, Dahlem Nachlass, Dahlem Erinnerungen, EA 1078, 72.
5. On the dissolution of the Comintern, Reuters correspondent Henry Kings interview with Stalin, 28 May 1943, in Nowe widnokregi, no. 11 / 1943, 8, and many other places. Background : Lilly Marcou, Le mouvement communists internationale depuis 1945 (Paris 1980), 3-4; Veselin Zhadzhinikolov, Georgii Dimitrov i Sovetskaia obshchest vennost 1934-1945 (translated from the Bulgarian, Moscow 1975), 277-9. Molotov had a representative at the meeting where, a year or so after the Comintern was publicly dissolved, the continuation of its work with the German party was discussed. See : Besprechung bei Dimitrov, 26 July 1944, IfGA, ZPA, Pieck Nachlass, 36/545. How tightly Stalin ran the Comintern is revealed in Institut MarksizmaLeninizma pri TsK KPSS, Komintern i sovetsko-germanskii dogovor o nepadenii, Izvestiia TsKKPSS, no. 12/1989, 202-15. Ulbricht on Stalin: Ulbricht to Galadchev, 12 May 1945, ibid., Ulbricht Nachlass, 182/851. See also Wolfgang Leonhard, Die Revolution entlässt ihre Kinder (third ed., Cologne 1981), 221-5. Ulbrichts personal justice : Ulbricht to Serov, 6 May 1945, IfGA, ZPA, Ulbricht Nachlass, 182/851.
6. Original planning for the groups going to Germany : Pieck notes, Besprechung mit Paniushkin ZK, 17 February 1945, IfGA, ZPA, Pieck Nachlass, 36/545. Ulbricht to Pieck, 30 May 1945, Pieck Nachlass, 36/629. Two other KPD groups, organized to take control in Saxony and Pomerania, were sent there as Red Army-supported agents of Stalin shortly after Ulbricht left Moscow. Their purpose was to take political control for the KPD in collaboration with the Red Army in these other Soviet occupied areas. Background : Leonhard, chapter VII.
7. Planning for these units had been going on for months. See Vereinbarung von Vorschlagen auf der Sitzung von 6. Februar mit Genossen Chwostow, and a second meeting with the same person, 12 April : Besprechung mit Paniushkin (ZK), 17 February 1945; also Besprechungen with Dimitrov (19 February and 1 April 1945), and Richtlinien für die Arbeit der deutschen Antifaschisten in dem von der Sowjetarmee besetzten deutschen Gebiet, 5 April 1945, all in IfGA, ZPA, Ulbricht Nachlass, 182/851; Pieck notes, Sitzungen des Zentralsekretariats des ZK, 2 August 1945, ibid., Pieck Nachlass, 36/631. Zhadzhinikolov has it that Dimitrov held an important planning meeting on 7 July with PURKKA and important KPD representatives with respect to the democratic transformation of Germany and (or, by means of?) the creation of a single working-class party. But I see no evidence that Pieck and Ulbricht were out of Berlin on this day, or that Dimitrov was in Berlin (281). Perhaps Zhadzhinikolov means 7 June, when Pieck and probably Ulbricht met Stalin for a second time (Pieck Tagebuch, IfGA, ZPA, Pieck Nachlass, 36/23), that is, three days after Piecks meeting with Stalin referred to later in the text. Leonhard has Pieck in Berlin at the beginning of June (344).
8. The KPD leadership was wholly dependent, once it came to liberated Germany, on the power of the Red Army for its local influence and financing, including its daily provisioning and the roof over its functionaries heads. For the entire period of exile before the move west Ulbricht and his associates had been dependants of Dimitrov, first through the Comintern and later through the Foreign Bureau, for their Moscow and international support. See Dimitrov-Pieck letters, 1943-5, IFGA, ZPA, 36/544, 36/734, passim. The German agents continuing close connections with Moscow: IfGA, ZPA, Ulbricht Nachlass, 182/851, passim for 1945. Pieck, in Moscow, received information from the PURKKA, which obtained some of it from the Central Committee, which presumably gained it from the telephone and couriers. See Pieck notes, Material erhalten von PUR. . . , 15 May 1945, ibid., Pieck Nachlass, 36/734.
This situation did not change, could not change, for a number of years, during which Ulbricht and his group willingly accepted that support. Their work in the Westernoccupied zones of Germany was likewise based on Moscows financial support. See Pieck notes of 1 July 1945, ibid., Pieck Nachlass, 36/630, and, ibid., passim; Grundlage fur den Etat des ZK der KPD [Moscow, 9 June 1945], and Kostenvorschlage fur die Angestellten des Parteiapparates pro Monat, etc., ibid., 36/734.
9. See, on Stalins Kremlin ambiance, Robert C. Tucker, Stalin in Power(New York 1990), passim; Walter Laqueur, Stalin. The Glasnost Revelations(New York 1990), chapters 8-11, passim; Robert Conquest, Stalin. Breaker of Nations (New York 1991), 209-327, passim, and R.C. Raack, Stalins Plans for World War II, Journal of Contemporarv History, 26, 2 (April 1991), 220-1. It may also be that Stalin was overworked and distracted at the time, as American diplomat Charles Bohlen, who saw him in late May 1945, reported. See John Russell, Washington, minute [to FO] of Journal of Contemporary History 19 June 1945, PRO, F0371, 48883, N4909.
10. Stalin the engineer, quoted by Tucker, Stalin in Power, 608; on Germany: Robert C. Tucker, The Emergence of Stalins Foreign Policy, Slavic Review, 36 (1977), 576; IfGA, ZPA, Pieck Nachlass, 36/734, passim. Molotovs confession: V.V. Sokolov, Narkomindel Viacheslav Molotov, Mezhdunarodnaia zhizn, no. 5, 1991, 110. An entire, but separate, history of Stalins interventions in his Polish clients affairs in Teresa Toranska, Oni (Warsaw 1989), passim.
11. As the IfGA, ZPA sources for the period clearly establish. The German example: Dimitrov-Pieck letters, 1943-5, ibid., Pieck Nachlass, 36/544, 36/734, passim. See also Rolf Badstubner, Zum Problem der historischen Alternativen im ersten Nachkriegsjahrzehnt, BzG, no. 5/1991, 579-92; and Dietrich Staritz, Die SED, Stalin and der "Aufbau des Sozialismus" in der DDR, Deutschland Archiv,no. 2/ 1991,687-700.
12. On the popular front before the war: Tucker, op. cit., 339-62. Its revival during the war: William J. McCagg, Jr, Stalin Embattled, 1943-1948(Detroit 1978), 31-71. The role of the Western communist parties toward the end of the war: Fernando Claudin, The Communist Movement from Comintern to Cominform, II (translated from the Italian, New York 1975), 317, 321-70. Examples of Comintern directives to the foreign parties: Komintern i sovetsko-germanskii dogovor . . . , 202-15, passim.
13. The united [popular] front (Einheitsfront): Ulbricht notes, 13 May 1945, IfGA, ZPA, Ulbricht Nachlass, 182/851. The Baltics: Seppo Myllyniemi, Die Baltische Krise 1938-1941 (translated from the Finnish, Stuttgart 1979), 122-4, 131. Poland: R.C. Raack, Stalin Fixes the Oder-Neisse Line, Journal of Contemporary History, 25, 4 (October 1990), 471-3. On Austria: Manfred Rauchensteiner, Der Sonderfall. Die Besatzungszeit in Osterreich (Graz 1979), 66-220, passim. On Hungary, Charles Gati, Hungary and the Soviet Bloc(Durham, NC 1986), 4-6, 15-43.
14. Stalins denial: Research Department of the Foreign Office, The USSR and the Principles of the Atlantic Charter and of the Four Freedoms, 3 February 1944, PRO, F0371, 43332, N744; and Richtlinien fur die Propaganda in Deutschland (vertraulich .~, 1 February 1945, IfGA, ZPA, Pieck Nachlass, 36/734.
15. On Stalins economists: Garrel D. Raanan, International Policy Formation in the USSR. Factional Debates during the Zhdanovshchina (Hamden, CT 1983), 62-74. Stalin to Laski, quoted by Karel Kaplan, Der kurze Marsch. Die kommunistische Machtubernahme in der Tschechoslowakei 1945-1948 (Munich 1981), 91, fn 131.
16. Lothar Kettenacker, Krisg zur Friedenssicherung. Die Deutschlandplanung der britischen Regierung wdhrend des Zweiten Weltkriegs (Gottingen 1989), 501. Dismemberment at Yalta: Alexander Fischer (ed.), Teheran, Jalta, Potsdam (third ed., Cologne 1985), 109-12, 139. Stalin had proposed to dismember Germany at his first meeting with Eden in 1941, just after the German army had been driven from the gates of Moscow. See Eden to Foreign Office, 17 December 1941, PRO, F0371, 29655, N7463; and Minutes of a Meeting Attended by Strang, etc. (notes by Dew of 23 April 1942), ibid., 32880, N2182.
Lev Bezymenskii, in a note published to an article by Marat Zubko, Stalin govoril o razdele Germanii eshche v 1941-m, in Novoe Vremia, no. 44/1990, 39, says that Ivan Maiskii was told by Churchill on 5 December 1941 that Germany must be reduced to its geographical components. I have searched several editions of Maiskiis memoirs for this quotation without success.
17. Background of the German Communist Party, see Horst Duhnke, Die KPD von 1933 bis 1945 (Cologne 1972), passim.
18. By means of paioki; place, and accommodation.
19. Teheran, Jalta, Potsdam, 107 (on Yalta); 321, 352-3 (on Potsdam). Kettenacker, 494; W. Averill Harriman and Elie Abel, Special Envoy to Churchill and Stalin, 1941-1946 (London 1976), 375. The suggested internationalization of the Ruhr first appeared among Roosevelts tentative dismemberment proposals at Teheran (Teheran, Jalta, Potsdam, 85), then reappeared in the Morgenthau Plan of 1944, some of whose ideas undoubtedly came from Roosevelt as well. The Soviets were still pushing for a share in the Ruhr as late as December 1945 (Clark-Kerr, Moscow, to FO, 16 December 1945, PRO, F0371, 47911, N 17101). They had suggested a plan for central control of the German economy in November 1944: Strang, Draft policy analysis for use at Yalta [January 1945] PRO, F0371, 47881, N390. See also Hermann Weber, Von der SBZ zur DDR, I (Hanover 1966), 10. Dimitrovs suggestion: Pieck notes, Ausfiihrungen von D, 6 February 1945, IfGA, ZPA, Pieck Nachlass, 36/545. He did propose sending groups to the West and a specific comrade to Bavaria (ibid., 36/500, Besprechung mit Dimitrov, 19 February 1945 and Besprechung mit Dimitrov, 30 May 1945).
20. Weber, 11; Russian Propaganda to and about Europe, 11-17 May 1945, PRO, F0371, 47893, N5490.
21. Pieck notes of 4 June 1945, IfGA, ZPA, Pieck Nachlass, 36/629. Stalin went on at the same meeting to tell Pieck of the rounded down borders he had prepared for the Soviet Zone, from which he had lopped off for his own purposes and those of his Polish clients of the Temporary Government of National Unity in Warsaw, about a quarter of pre-war Germany. Pieck then, for the first time, learned the complete dimensions of this monumental tonsuring of his native land the boss had organized.
22. See the many pictures of Pieck, far more than of Ulbricht, in the IfGA, ZPA photo archive. Pieck dropped this costume during the war, perhaps in order to establish among the German prisoners he worked with his ostensibly independent Western ways.
23. Ulbricht to Pieck, 17 May 1945; Rekonstruirte Notizen aus einem Bericht, von Ulbricht to Dimitrov, 17 May 1945; Ulbricht to Pieck, 23 May 1945, ibid., Pieck Nachlass, 36/629; telegram, Ulbricht to Dimitrov, 9 May 1945, ibid., Ulbricht Nachlass, 182/851.
24. Party influence in the Western zones: Der Freie Deutsche Gewerkschaftsbund to Zhukov, 16 July 1945, ibid., Ulbricht Nachlass, 182/1180; Ulbricht, Grundlinien fur einen Etat der Parteizeitungen, 9 June 1945, ibid., 182/851; to Ulbricht from?, Richtlinien der Arbeit der KPD in den westlichen Zonen, 8 January 1946, ibid., 182/ 860. The salutation: report of Ortsgruppe der KPD Tegel-Sud, 26 June 1945, ibid., 182/859. The KPD had also publicly subscribed to the interwar popular front. See Gregory Sandford, From Hitler to Ulbricht (Princeton 1983), 4-6, 14. One mass of reports, among many, from July 1945, regarding Red Army pillaging all over the SBZ: Hoernle to Pieck, n.d., IfGA, ZPA, Pieck Nachlass, 36/631.
In fact, Stalin had a poor implement in the Red Army for dealing with anything but wartime slaughter. It was not just toward the defeated Germans, against whom the Soviets had a legitimate grudge (whatever one may think of the response), that they behaved brutishly. Red Army troops forced British soldiers released from German prison camps to work in factories, robbed them of whatever they still possessed, and even violated the British women prisoners they had helped free. See Foreign Office to Washington, 31 May 1945, PRO, F0371, 47882, N5846.
25. A.I. Mikoian in Pravda, 19 May 1945, and Berliner Zeitung, 22 May 1945.
Ulbricht carried over the same line into the new KPD platform (Leonhard, op.cit., 349). But ten years later he left out by way of elision Mikoians unusual testimony: in his Zur Geschichte der neuesten Zeit, I, erster Halbband (Berlin 1955), 66. Pieck notes, Sitzungen des Zentralsekretariats des ZK, 2 August 1945, IfGA, ZPA, Pieck Nachlass, 36/631; report of Bruno Leuschner, 21 September 1945, ibid., Ulbricht Nachlass, 182/1183.
26. Ulbricht, untitled notes of early May 1945, ibid., 182/853. Ulbricht notes, Besprechung ... mit je 1 Genossen aus jedem Verwaltungsbezirk . . ., 20 May 1945, ibid., 182/851; Ulbricht (unsigned, but confirmed as Ulbrichts by comparison with his signed telegram essentially having the same content in the same file) to Pieck, 23 May 1945, ibid., Pieck Nachlass, 36/629; Pieck notes of 4 June 1945, ibid.; Pieck notes, Protokoll Nr. 12 der Sitzung des Sekretariats, 2 August 1945, ibid., 36/631. See the important background for Stalins sudden decision (a clear surprise to Ulbricht and Pieck) to permit the establishment of two worker parties, in Leonhard, op. cit., 345-7; 358-9. Stalin personally told Pieck on 4 June of the decision (no word of any other consultant on this, but one might imagine Dimitrovs opinion had been heard) put in writing on 26 May, to permit two worker parties in Germany. See Pieck notes, 4 June 1945, IfGA, ZPA, Pieck Nachlass, 36/629. The SPD group in Berlin was originally for a united workers party. But Ulbricht at first designedly held them at bay presumably to gain control over his own party: Pieck notes, Einwande, 20 January 1946, ibid., 36/631.
The idea of an Einheitsfront was an old one, apparently emerging in Dimitrovs office in the 1930s. See ibid., Dahlem Erinnerungen, EA 1078, 88.
27. It is hard to see how the Soviets could have exercised any closer control over SBZ development unless they wholly ran it themselves. Ulbricht cleared virtually everything with their chieftains in Berlin, for the KPD leaders had been told before they left Moscow that the Red Army was to run everything. See, especially, ibid., Ulbricht to Pieck, 26 May 1945, Pieck Nachlass, 36/629; Besprechung der Leitung, 17 February 1945, and Besprechung bei Dimitrov, 25 April 1945, both ibid., 36/500; and ibid., Ulbricht Nachlass, 182/1180-1183, passim. Ulbricht also kept careful spies eyes on the other party leaders. On the spying apparatus: see ibid., 182/1183, passim, and ibid., Pieck Nachlass, 36/631, passim.
28. Pieck notes, 4 June 1945, ibid., 36/629. Some recent German discussion of this key document in Rolf Badstubner, Beratungen" bei J. W. Stalin. Neue Dokumente, Utopie kreativ, no. 7/1991, 99-116; and Giinter Benser, Quellenveroffentlichung ja, doch so prazis wie moglich, ibid., no. 11/1991, 101-7. I am indebted to Professor Heinrich Bodensieck (Dortmund) for helping me keep up to date on these issues.
29. Background: ibid., Pieck notes, Besprechung mit Dimitrov, 13 January 1944 (Einheitliche Arbeiterpartei: was ist vorteilhafter, als KPD oder anderer Name, ob Partei auf breiter nationaler and sozialer Basis [wie] Freies Deutschland [that is, Das National-Komite Freies Deutschland, an anti-nazi, ostensibly political rainbow group, founded by Pieck and Ulbricht in Moscow. It included even the blue aspect of the spectrum, and even some black tones, but not brown except for those who had rejected their nazi past.]). On Ulbrichts visit to Moscow in June: ibid., Dahlem Erinnerungen, Dahlem Nachlass, EA 1078, 53-4, 95.
30. Stalin, in a candid moment in 1944, cautioning United States Ambassador Harriman about taking notes and writing down memoranda, saying, I am a cautious old man. Library of Congress, Harriman Papers, Churchill-Stalin Conference Record, October 13-21, 1944, no. 8. Stalin was also angry at Polish communist
Wladyslaw Gomulka, who apparently took too many notes in his presence (Conquest, op. cit., 288).
31. Piecks Moscow whereabouts in these days in IfGA, ZPA, Pieck Nachlass, 36/ 25; Raack, Stalins Plans . . . , passim; Raack, Stalin Fixes the Oder-Neisse Line, passim - the latter in particular reveals a clear case of Stalins determination to go ahead with risky plans whatever the consequences.
32. Pieck to Dimitrov, 26 February 1945, HGA, ZPA, Pieck Nachlass, 36/544. Stalin had already taken large sections of eastern Germany and had transferred parts of them to himself and to his Polish allies, much to the chagrin of his Western allies, who considered them parts of Germany to be dealt with at the time of making the peace treaty. See Teheran, Jalta, Potsdam, the discussions at Potsdam, passim.
33. Pieck notes, 4 June 1945, HGA, ZPA, Pieck Nachlass, 36/629. The elastic policy: Pieck notes, Mitteilung Semenov, 26 August 1945, ibid., 36/734, and passim. Stalin as philosopher: Tucker, op. cit., 148-50, 481-4, 539-41, 551. A specific, and not at all untypical, example of Stalins mental peregrinations: in earnest negotiation with the Latvian foreign minister in 1939, he suddenly changed the subject to philosophical speculation, then changed again to the subject of the sexual needs of Soviet sailors - right in the middle of his political harangue: United States National Archives, transcript no. 2 of the Meeting of Foreign Minister Munters, etc., with Stalin and Molotov, Moscow, 2 October 1939, T1244, reel 5.
Five days after the meeting with Stalin referred to in the text, Pieck was dashing off a document (the title is indicative) Nachste zentrale Aufgaben der Parteifiihrung, 9 June 1945, HGA, ZPA, Pieck Nachlass, 36/630. One of the central tasks was, as proper, the founding of a theoretical journal. Djilas quote in Milovan Djilas, Conversations with the Kremlin (London 1962), 134.
34. Leonhard, op. cit., 344-5, has Pieck personally in Berlin bringing Stalins word on 7 June. But Pieck did not leave Moscow until 1 July according to his daughter, who flew west with him. See E. Winter to F. Dahlem, 11 August 1972, IfGA, ZPA, Dahlem Nachlass, 72/168. See also Badstiibner, Beratungen, 101; Djilas, 139.
35. Some Soviet scholars who have recently had access to Soviet archival materials for the period have themselves begun to describe the internal failures of a government directed by one man surrounded only by sychophants and yes-men. See, on Stalins inability to resist intervening and directing wherever his fancy took him, Georgii A. Kumanev, Istoriia sovetskogo obshchestva. Korotkii ocherk (1917-1945 gg.), Istoriia SSSR, no. 2/1991, 13-14; on Stalins inability to brook opposition: Iu.1a. Kirshin and N.M. Ramanichev, Na kanune 22 iiunia 1941 g., Novaia i noveishaia Itoriia, no. 3/1991, 16-19. An estimation of Stalins irresistible will by another of the insiders: Jakub Berman in Oni, 47.
Stalins determination to get to Paris: quoted by W. Averill Harriman, in G.R. Urban, Stalinism. Its Impact on Russia and the World (London 1982), 55.