Stalin's ‘rage’ and ‘anger’ can easily be understood. It came to him as a shock that he was beginning to lose control over the revolutionary ferment and even over his own Communist Parties. He had been confident that he could at any time use them as pawns in his great diplomatic game of chess. The pawns were now showing a life of their own and beginning to play their own game. The great chess master, confounded and furious, could not even lay hands on them. For one thing, the Communist Parties concerned were not always within his reach. For another, he had to save his reputation as the friend, inspirer, and leader of world communism — he could not afford the odium of an open betrayal. He had to yield to the will of the pawns and then pretend that it was he who moved them.
This inevitably produced deep cracks in the Grand Alliance. Was it perhaps after all Stalin who was moving the pawns? Roosevelt and Churchill began to wonder; and they prepared and made their own counter-moves. Was it perhaps Stalin after all? we may still ask. Even now, eight or nine years later, it is still impossible to say exactly what happened in each particular case. The ‘accident’ of Tito's break with Moscow has brought to light a few significant episodes in Stalin's struggle to preserve self-containment, which might otherwise have remained hidden in the archives for a long time to come. How many such incidents relating to other East European countries still remain hidden?
What is certain is that as Stalin began reluctantly to identify himself with the rising forces of foreign communism his Western allies also began to identify him with those forces. The Grand Alliance was giving place to the Great Enmity. Stalin then sought reinsurance against the West; and communist regimes in the Russian sphere of influence promised to provide it. And then it was without a doubt he who moved the pawns.[15]
This departure from self-containment was caused, however, not only by the new international tension but also by the latent forces of revolutionary dynamics within the Soviet Union. The Grand Alliance had kept those forces in check; the break-up of the Alliance released them.
The urge to carry revolution abroad ‘on the bayonet points’ is alive in any revolutionary State which has been compelled first to defend itself against a foreign aggressor and then to send its armies to conquer the aggressor's lands and dominions. In Napoleon's France the urge was even stronger than in Stalin's Russia. In both cases armies raised in the climate of revolution came to dominate and administer countries where the ancien regime was still intact. At home, officers and men had been taught to abhor the ruling classes, the institutions, and the customs and habits of the ancien regime. Then they were ordered to meet with obliging smiles the same old ruling classes in the conquered lands, to supervise with impartial detachment the working of their institutions, and to adjust themselves to alien customs and habits. This was an almost impossible demand.
Stalin's generals and colonels had from their earliest years imbibed hatred and contempt of capitalist enterprise; they had been taught to consider bourgeois and Social Democratic Parties as implacable enemies; and had been conditioned to think and act within the framework of a single party system. Is it to be wondered at that as Military Governors of Saxony, Brandenburg, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Rumania they were little inclined to administer these countries in such a way as to allow capitalist business to function as usual and non-Communist Parties, whose leaders did not even conceal their hatred and contempt of the communist conquerors, to carry on their activities without hindrance?
From the beginning, the Soviet Military Governors were caught up in a conflict between their own ingrained beliefs and their new duties. They could not sincerely carry out these duties without betraying their upbringing and outlook, or even without becoming disloyal to their own government, as some of them did. If they were to remain loyal Stalinists, they had to treat the demand of ‘non-interference in domestic affairs’ as mere make-believe. It would have been miraculous if they had managed to adjust their own minds to that demand; but even a totalitarian regime cannot work psychological miracles in its citizens.[16]
Stalin could well promise in all sincerity that he would not strive to impose communism on the occupied countries, but the men deputed to give effect to this promise on the spot could not but act in a way which made his words sound like deliberate falsehoods.
Thus at least three factors combined to undo Stalin's policy of self-containment: genuine revolutionary ferment abroad; the revolutionary urge in Stalin's own armies; and the jockeying for positions among allies rapidly turning into potential enemies.
The expansion of communism was facilitated by the fact that soon after the war the United States, in part relying on its monopoly in atomic weapons and in part responding to popular pacifism, disbanded its armies and left in Europe only a token occupation force. Stalin now knew that he could go ahead with the establishment of communist regimes, without exposing Russia to effective retaliation from the West. Had he had any ground to fear such retaliation, he would hardly have risked the drift away from self-containment.