Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

by Tony Judt

To outside observers, Communism was a single political entity, shaped and run from the Moscow ‘Centre’. But from Stalin’s perspective matters were more complicated. From the late Twenties through to the outbreak of war, Moscow had indeed succeeded in imposing its control over the world Communist movement, except in China. But the war had changed everything. In its resistance against the Germans the Soviet Union had been forced to invoke patriotism, liberty, democracy and many other ‘bourgeois’ goals. Communism had lost its revolutionary edge and become, deliberately, part of a broad anti-Fascist coalition. This had been the tactic of the pre-war Popular Fronts too, of course, but in the Thirties Moscow had been able to keep tight control of its foreign parties—through financial aid, personal intervention and terror. In wartime that control had been lost—symbolized by the shutting down of the Comintern in 1943. And it was not fully recovered in the immediate post-war years: the Yugoslav Party was the only one in Europe that actually came to power without Soviet intervention, but in Italy and France the Communist parties, while professing continued loyalty to Moscow, functioned on a day to day basis without advice or instruction from abroad. The Party leaders there were not privy to Stalin’s intentions. Like the Czechs, but with even less guidance from the USSR, they pursued what they described as the French or Italian ‘road to Socialism’, working within governing coalitions...