Soviet Satellites and Divided Germany

The new U.S. containment policies' of 1947 brought a swift reaction from the Soviet Union. Stalin judged these initiatives to be a threat to his sphere of domination in Europe. He responded by drastically strengthening Soviet control over the states in his sphere and by mobilizing other communist parties for political opposition to the West. Late in 1947, Soviet leaders organized a meeting of European communist parties, ostensibly to create a new international organization, the Communist Information Bureau (Comin-. form). Its real purpose was to make clear Moscow's view of East-West relations and to mobilize the communist parties and states within and outside the "socialist camp" for action. Reviving the rhetoric of war, the principal Soviet speaker called for opposition to the Marshall Plan and to the “expansionist and reactionary policy” of the United States. He warned that a new "struggle against the U.S.S.R." had begun. His message was clear: Communists and communist states once again had to rally to the defense of the socialist motherland.

The mobilization of international communist support for the Soviet Union entailed three new developments: (1) increased Soviet control of communist parties and governments; (2) the elimination from power of the remaining non-communists in the eastern European countries' and (3) new efforts by communist guerrilla forces to seize power and establish communist insurgents in their own revolutionary regimes. The most dramatic result of Stalin's Cold War policy in eastern Europe was in Czechoslovakia. In February 1948, the Czech Communist party forced the democratic parties in the coalition government out of power, destroying parliamentary democracy and forming a single-party dictatorship. The call for guerrilla war affected most particularly Greece and China. The Chinese

communist guerrillas, already engaged in fighting the Nationalist government, set out to destroy Chiang's regime. The Greek guerrillas regrouped in the north and proclaimed the formation of a Greek communist government. Stalin privately judged them reckless for fighting a government backed by the United States, "the most powerful nation

in the world." But they continued their struggle. The increased Soviet control over foreign communist parties, proceeding secretly, permitted no room for national independence among communist states. It succeeded everywhere

except in Yugoslavia. In that country, the Yugoslav communist leaders understood national independence to be the fundamental condition of their revolution. In 1946, Tito had protested that his state was not part of anyone’s sphere of influence”, though he did explain later that, of course, he did not have the Soviet Union in mind. The Yugoslav

Communists were revolutionaries in their own country and supporters of communist forces in neighboring states, such as Albania and Greece. They were also nationalists in their unwillingness to accept Soviet domination. When Stalin attempted in early 1948 to replace Tito with a compliant Yugoslav leader, he found that his agents in the Yugoslav leadership were powerless against a united Yugoslav party leadership. Failing in his secret maneuvers, he made the conflict public. In the spring of 1948 ,the Soviet Union withdrew its economic and military advisers, a warning of Moscow's displeasure. . That summer, the Cominform expelled the Yugoslav party from its membership.