4 Zhdanov and the O rigins

of the Eastern Bloc

The average Soviet man has certain shortcom­

ings, but he also has distinctions that no aver­
age Western European or American possesses.
Andrei Zhdanov, November 6, 1946

In late September 1947, Stalin was on vacation with Molotov. The

Soviet ruler and his foreign policy minister enjoyed the sun, sumptu­
ous food, and delicate wines of Georgia. But late in the evening,
refreshed after a nap, Stalin would read secret cables sent by a special
scrambled radio transmission from the small town of Szklarska
Poremba, in the Southern Sudetenland, which became a territory of
Poland after 1945. The names of the addressee and the senders were
replaced by aliases, similar to those used in the days of the Comintern
for interparty correspondence. The first cable from “ Sergeev and
Borisov” to “ Comrade Filippov” reported that “ tonight, September
22, the conference began its work. Participants of all invited parties
are taking part in [it].” Filippov was Stalin; the senders were the
Politburo members Andrei Zhdanov and Georgi Malenkov. Six days
later the conference ended and they sent the message: “ Tomorrow, the
morning of the 29th, we will fly to Moscow. On all documents of the
conference we will report personally.” 1
N ot until forty-four years later were historians granted access to
the documents of this secret and important conference, but some facts
about it the world learned immediately. What took place in Szklarska
Poremba w as the creation of the Informational Bureau of Communist
Parties, the Cominform. This event formally signaled the beginning of
 Zhdanov and the Origins o f the Eastern Bloc ★ 111

a new and often brutal Soviet policy: the consolidation of the Soviet
sphere of influence in Eastern Europe. This new policy entailed the
transformation of five countries into Soviet satellites under the control
of Communist regimes cloned from the regime in Moscow.
For many East European intellectuals, the report that Zhdanov gave
on the new Soviet foreign policy at the meeting in Poland was a signal
of doom; among the advocates of the Communist millennium it was
received as a new gospel after several years of ideological famine. On
November 1, 1947, Zhdanov received encomiums from Alexandra
M . Kollontai, the Old Bolshevik and retired Soviet am bassador (and
the only woman prominent in the Soviet diplomatic service). “ Your
presentation,” wrote Kollontai in her letter, “ is not only a brilliant,
in-depth analysis of the global situation, particularly of the United
States, but also a document of historic significance . . . Recently many
of us succumbed to pessimism, but your analysis and clear direction
to the subsequent phases of our policy and liberation movement in
the whole world open yet another door into the future. The soul
rejoices and brightens. The instruction of our Party, so colorfully
conveyed in your presentation, firm and clear, is the most impressive
answer to the warmongers.” 2
Kollontai’s praise, sincere or not, did not exaggerate the importance
of Zhdanov’s report. This report, even more than the creation of the
Cominform, clearly marked a watershed in the history o f Soviet for­
eign policy. It signaled Stalin’s failure to abandon the revolutionary-
imperial paradigm and switch to a purer realpolitik mode. Stalin
pursued, among other things, the goal of providing the Soviet satellites
and the whole Communist world with a clear-cut ideological perspec­
tive on global confrontation with the United States. To achieve this
goal he did not need to recreate the Comintern—a too flagrant dem­
onstration of the revolutionary facet of Soviet foreign policy. Every­
thing he needed from that organization had stayed intact after its
dissolution in 1943: the core staff in Moscow, a network of agents
and sympathizers linked up with Soviet intelligence and spread over
Eurasia. The Cominform of 1947 was a sketch of the future Soviet
regional bloc with its affiliations in Western Europe—not a replica of
the dead Communist International.
Andrei Alexandrovich Zhdanov, a Soviet keynote speaker at the
conference in Poland, became the main mouthpiece of the new world­
view that turned the iron curtain into a tragic reality for many millions
112 ★ Inside the Kremlin's Cold W ar

to the east of the Elbe River. Among Stalin’s lieutenants, Zhdanov was
responsible for shaping a Cold War mentality inside the Soviet Union
as well as for Communist followers and sympathizers all over the
world. He was a trumpeter of the Cold War in the Soviet leadership.

Stalin's Most Favored Ideologist

Stalin liked Zhdanov more than anyone else in his inner circle. He
even encouraged his only daughter, Svetlana, to marry Zhdanov’s
son.3 Indeed, the Zhdanov family seemed to embody what Stalin
gradually grew to like and cultivate among his bureaucrats: blind
loyalty, spineless obedience, and meticulous adherence to ideological
dogma.
Andrei Zhdanov was born in 1896 in M ariupol, Ukraine, into a
middle-class Russian family. His family was almost Chekhovian, pas­
sionate patriots of a small, cherry-blossomed town. Zhdanov’s mother
belonged to the nobility and graduated from the M oscow M usical
Conservatory. His father, like Lenin’s, was an inspector of public
schools in the area. Zhdanov’s three sisters, unlike Chekhov’s hero­
ines, plunged into revolutionary activities, motivated by the world war
and the collapse of the Romanov dynasty. Two of them never married
and devoted all their energy to the “ enlightenment of the m asses.”
Their influence on Andrei remained strong even later, when he built
a career in the Party; the two women lived in his house, with his wife
and son, until his death. Zhdanov never received a formal higher
education; as in many Russian families like his, this was compensated
by early random reading and pretensions to be “part of the Russian
intelligentsia.”
Zhdanov did not belong to the cohort of revolutionary heroes. At
the end of the civil war he was only a young deputy of a local soviet
in a town in the Urals. His career progressed quickly after that,
however: from 1922 to 1927 he was a city administrator in the old
Russian cities of Tver and Nizhni Novgorod and a delegate to con­
gresses of the Communist party. He first attracted Stalin’s attention
with his fiery speech against Grigory Zinoviev, the leader of an anti-
Stalin “ Leningrad opposition” (the most threatening anti-Stalinist
group in the Party, joined even by Lenin’s widow, Nadezhda K. Krup­
skaya). In 1927 he became a secretary of the Central Committee. In
1934 Zhdanov replaced Sergei Kirov, after his mysterious assassina­
 Zhdanov and the Origins o f the Eastern Bloc ★ 113

tion, as head of the Leningrad party organization, second only in

importance to that of Moscow. In 1935 he became a candidate, and
in 1939 a full member, of the Politburo. From 1941 to 1944, during
the ferocious German siege of Leningrad, Zhdanov was in the city,
both as a party secretary and as a political counselor of the North­
western (later Leningrad) front. In 1944-1945 he was the Allied
Commissioner in Finland. At the end of 1945, Stalin transferred him
to Moscow, to the Central Committee apparatus. Zhdanov stayed
there until his sudden death after two heart attacks in August 1948.
Some American historians have suggested that Zhdanov’s rise and
disappearance after the Second World War had something to do with
the emergence of the Communist proselytes in the Soviet apparatus
for the first time since the great purges of the 1930s. Stalin allegedly
was under pressure from the new cadres, proud of the Soviet victory
in the war and pushing a more radical, ideological line in domestic
and foreign affairs.4
Ideology had several related functions in the Stalinist state. Its
paramount goal was to promote the “ monolithic unity of the Soviet
people,” that is, to suppress any antagonisms between state and soci­
ety, authority and individual, and also between different groups
within the USSR (interethnic tensions were just one of the potential
powder kegs). Ideology also had a foreign policy function. In the
framework of the revolutionary-imperial paradigm it was one more
dimension of political and physical control. In the Socialist countries,
the Soviet ideology imposed by M oscow and its puppet regimes
strengthened Soviet influence over its territory, be it Poland or Hun­
gary. Outside the Soviet camp, Soviet ideology was recruiting a “ fifth
column” for the purpose of undermining the enemy’s control over
Europe and Asia.
Thus, ideology to an extent had retained its revolutionary glory and
importance. The ideologues did not fare quite so well. Bolshevism
could be interpreted only in the form canonized by Stalin in the
1930s— all innovations were initiated by the pontiff himself, and even
the leading ideologues, from Zhdanov to his successor, Mikhail Sus-
lov, were just librarians responsible for finding the proper quotation
at the right time and for keeping the credo in strict order. N o creativity
or ardor from an ideologue was tolerated. The keepers of the Bolshe­
vik shrine were deprived of any true revolutionary passion and any
real interest in ideology as such.
114 ★ Inside the Kremlin's Cold W ar

By 1947 it had become crystal clear that the Western leaders re­
garded their cooperation with Stalin during the war years as an un­
fortunate episode that was to be followed by considerable detach­
ment. But “ detachment” during the fragile peace of 1945-1947 had
to be transformed into something more definite. Thus many Western
intellectuals and propagandists, ranging from the Trotskyites and the
anti-Communist Socialists to Catholic theologians, contributed to the
ideological, cultural, and doctrinal justification for a Cold War. In the
United States, the philosopher and sociologist Hannah Arendt, the
theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, the Socialist Norm an Thomas, and
many others finished what the diplomat George Kennan had started:
they explained to a public that had been sympathetic to the Soviet
Union as the main fighter against the N azi threat or as an “ interesting
social experiment” that the Stalinist state and Hitler’s regime had one
common denominator—they were totalitarian states. The motto of
the Western Cold Warriors became “ free world versus totalitarian­
ism .”
Stalin clearly felt a need to resuscitate ideology as a prop for his
regime and its foreign policy. An ideological component was required
to give legitimacy both to the M oscow sphere of influence in Eastern
Europe and to Yalta and Potsdam, undermined by the collapse of the
Grand Alliance. Coordination among “ fraternal” parties in the
Cominform guaranteed Soviet domination much better than any sys­
tem of bilateral state treaties, and at the same time dispelled negative
associations with traditional imperialist practices, such as the domi­
nation of Poland by czarist Russia in the nineteenth century. But at
the same time Stalin did not want the Cominform to be in any way
an ideological headquarters of the revolutionary movement. The Yu­
goslav Communists tried to perceive it as such and were unceremoni­
ously expelled from the Cominform in June 1948.
Stalin made sure that the ideology of his Cold War system of
alliances would not dissent or deviate from the Kremlin’s view. Ac­
cording to this view, the world was again, as in 1917, shattered by
world war. The second phase of the terminal crisis of capitalism had
begun. It was characterized by the world’s split into two “ blocs,” one
of imperialism and war, led by the United States, and one of peace,
democracy, and socialism, led by the Kremlin.
The main paradox was that this new ideology was the product not
of the zealous faith of “ party resurrectionists,” as one American
 Zhdanov and the Origins o f the Eastern Bloc ★ 115

historian claimed, but of the meticulous work of gigantic bureaucratic

machinery, manned by Soviet ideologists and propagandists. The dis­
tance between them and true Communist zealots supporting the Soviet
cause over the world was immense. Even a very brief portrait of
Zhdanov is enough to substantiate this point.
Zhdanov belonged to the first generation of Soviet apparatchiks.
Admiration and utter loyalty were his feelings toward Stalin that he
shared with Khrushchev and hundreds of ranking party organizers in
the 1930s. Initially just a young party idealist, Zhdanov was quickly
disciplined by the deadly realities of Stalin’s rule. He was extremely
close to Stalin all the way through the bloody miasma of the great
purges. His signature was next to Stalin’s on a famous cable from
Sochi in 1936 that unleashed the secret police on millions of new
victims. Zhdanov’s primary focus, however, was party propaganda
and agitation. He helped Stalin to edit a new and falsified history of
the Party entitled The Brief Course.
Zhdanov’s papers reveal one important feature that he shared with
many of his colleagues under Stalin: the bureaucratic perfectionism of
a workaholic. His notes betray a man with a huge, almost oppressive,
sense of duty and meticulousness. When Zhdanov was an Allied
commissioner in Finland, he operated with mountains of Finnish
statistics, driven by the duty to extract as much in reparations as
possible from the defeated country. When he supervised Finland’s
politics, he turned into a walking encyclopedia of “ who’s who in
Helsinki.” He left many drafts of every policy: each of them written
in longhand, every succeeding draft changed, reformulated.
People who worked with Zhdanov then and later could not remem­
ber anything remarkable, noteworthy, or anecdotal about the man. In
Stalin’s inner circle, however, he was regarded as “ a man of culture.”
As part of his education, he learned to play the piano and the accor­
dion, and from time to time would entertain the tyrant and his
drunken guests. Zhdanov’s early habit of reading Russian literature
served him well when in 1946, on Stalin’s order, he denounced two
writers, the bearers of the free-spirit tradition of Russian literature,
M ikhail Zoshchenko and Anna Akhmatova. Here as well, Zhdanov
did not do his job perfunctorily; he dug deep into literary criticism,
reading everything he could find on the two selected victims. N o one
else in Stalin’s circle could do this work better.
Did Zhdanov remain as sturdy and one-dimensional as Molotov?
116 ★ Inside the Kremlin's Cold W ar

We know that he did not. He was not physically strong enough. The
siege of Leningrad in 1941-1944, along with the years spent within
Stalin’s court, took its toll: from a vibrant, physically attractive person
Zhdanov turned into an overweight, pasty-faced man, prone to severe
asthmatic attacks.5 Outward diligence, the working habits of a bril­
liant clerk, contrasted with sudden drinking bouts. He was a splin­
tered person, pitiful or tragic. Zhdanov concealed his true disposition
behind a turgid facade.
Stalin valued and liked Zhdanov’s punctuality and perfectionism.
But sometimes it irritated him, and he turned the “ ideologically cor­
rect” Zhdanov into the object of his fits of rage. There are rare traces
of this in the memoirs of Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva. “ Once,
shortly before Andrei Zhdanov’s death,” she writes, “ knowing that
the man suffered from recurrent heart attacks, my father, angered by
Zhdanov’s silence at the table, suddenly turned on him viciously:
‘Look at him, sitting there like little Christ as if nothing was of any
concern to him.’ Zhdanov grew pale, beads of perspiration stood out
on his forehead.” 6
Zhdanov’s biggest feat in the service of Stalin’s doctrine, the report
on the international situation at the creation of the Cominform, he
performed impeccably, with the maximum passion of which he was
capable, although without any personal “theoretical” imprint: the
pivotal ideas of the document had been formulated under Stalin’s
guidance. But again, that was what Stalin valued Zhdanov for.
For most of his career, Zhdanov was in charge of ideology. Ideology
in all its terrifying splendor, a utopian teaching leading to Armaged­
don, could be guarded or regulated only by the supreme pontiff—
Stalin. But ideology as a set of “ correct” and simple cliches based
upon well-developed institutions was Zhdanov’s responsibility. He
had to be both opportunistic, to find propagandist justifications for
the realpolitik, and dogmatic—to preserve the original ideological
credo, in spite of changing political winds and currents.

O n the M argins of G rand Diplom acy

Zhdanov’s Cold War experience began in Finland, where he served as

an Allied commissioner after the war. One year of negotiations with
Finland, from October 1944 to November 1945, helped to shape what
later became known as “ Finlandization,” the transformation of a
 Zhdanov and the Origins o f the Eastern Bloc ★ 117

hostile country into something Stalin could be comfortable with, a

friendly neighbor of the USSR—not a satellite, but not quite inde­
pendent in the security sphere. The Finnish experiment, along with
other scenarios, was very much on Zhdanov’s mind in the months
following the conclusion of his tenure there in November 1945, as he
and other Soviet rulers, along with Stalin, searched for ways to deal
with the countries that fell into the Soviet sphere of influence.
At that time Stalin was prepared to outline most of his general
political goals and let others work out a policy. Probably influenced
by Roman history, he appointed a proconsul to each new Soviet
satellite. (The experience of the Russian empire was also not lost on
him, since under the czars “ the Polish kingdom,” as a special case,
was governed by an especially trustworthy person, a member of the
royal family. Nicholas II had a proconsul in the Far East, Admiral
Alexeev, during the active phase of Russian expansion in the area.)
Stalin appointed other proconsuls besides Zhdanov: Voroshilov in
Hungary, Zhukov and Semyonov in Germany, Vyshinsky in Rum a­
nia.7 In Germany there was a group of proconsuls whom Stalin
entrusted with the micromanagement of domestic situations; they
were to use every means possible, including, of course, the Communist
carpetbaggers trained in the Comintern schools and returned to their
respective homelands.
The power of the proconsuls was curbed once the Stalin-Molotov
foreign policy came into play. In January 1945, Zhdanov was con­
ducting talks on a Soviet-Finnish settlement. His Finnish counterpart
was Field M arshal Carl von Mannerheim, a former officer of the czar’s
court and a father of independent Finland. On January 18, Zhdanov
informed Stalin and M olotov that Mannerheim agreed to sign a
bilateral defense treaty, but “ would defend the interior of the country
himself.” “ He asked if there were standard treaties, and I replied that
the one with Czechoslovakia might be taken as such. I am waiting for
instructions.” 8
The Soviet-Czechoslovak treaty of alliance was a sign that, of all
the countries in the Soviet sphere of influence, Czechoslovakia enjoyed
the most favorable relations with Moscow. The treaty was a product
of successful efforts by Eduard Benes to alleviate M oscow ’s concerns
about the Czechoslovak government-in-exile in London.9 More im­
portant, perhaps, in 1944 Stalin had needed the Czechoslovak model
to encourage other countries, particularly Hitler’s allies, to surrender
118 * Inside the Kremlin's Cold W ar

to the Red Army on its march to the West. This was no longer
necessary, especially not with prostrated Finland.
The Finnish attempt to obtain an early, better deal in comparison
with the general terms of armistice ran contrary to the Stalin-Molotov
grand diplomacy in Europe. It would certainly have been a violation
o f the principle to settle a postwar world in the concert of three great
powers, something that Stalin still highly valued. Zhdanov, who was
on the margins of this grand diplomacy, failed to see this obvious fact.
Therefore, M olotov sent him a terse reply: “ You have gone too far. A
pact with Mannerheim of the sort we have with Czechoslovakia is
[the] music of the future. We have to reestablish diplomatic relations
first. Don’t frighten Mannerheim with radical proposals.” And then:
“ You were too emotional.” 10
Zhdanov swallowed M olotov’s remonstration. “ Finland is on pro­
bation,” he told Mannerheim, “ and it still cannot have relations of a
different kind with the U SSR .” O f course, the whole Soviet-dominated
zone from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea was on probation. But later,
in 1948, the Finns escaped the common fate and did not become
subdued satellites in the Soviet bloc. Zhdanov hardly played any role
in this decision—its real underpinning was revealed by M olotov in his
conversations with Chuev: “ We did the right thing. It would have been
an open w ound.” 11
These words showed that the Kremlin leaders had learned a lesson
from the Finns’ stubborn and courageous resistance to the Soviet
Army during the Winter War of 1939-1940 and come to the correct
conclusion that the “ Sovietization” of Finland would be a bloody,
protracted struggle. There were too many “ open wounds” already
inside the Soviet Union, such as Western Ukraine and the Baltic, where
the nationalist guerillas had fought with regular troops for years.
Still, the activities of High Commissioner Zhdanov give another
clue to the special luck of the Finns. His declassified papers contain
hundreds of pages dealing with Finland’s postwar economic life and
politics. First and foremost, Zhdanov was responsible for the smooth
flow of reparations from Finland to the Soviet Union. In 1945 the
official Kremlin emphasis was still on the political alliance of all
anti-Nazi forces, including the Social-Democratic and Agrarian par­
ties. But, as a security measure, several key ministerial positions in the
Finnish government were given, at M oscow ’s insistence, to the Com ­
munists. Zhdanov had a “ special channel” to them, and advised them
 Zhdanov and the Origins o f the Eastern Bloc ★ 119

how to preserve their power through various tactical alliances with

other parties. In the process he got to know many bourgeois politi­
cians: he preferred to deal with the most conservative among them
(Mauno Pekkala, Urkho Kekkonen) rather than with Social Demo­
crats (who were traditionally regarded as treacherous heretics, and
once labeled “ worse than fascists” by Stalin in the early 1930s).
From the very beginning Stalin, through Zhdanov, kept two options
open: as long as Finland behaved well and fulfilled the reparations
plan, a deal with the traditional, conservative leadership remained a
preferred option. But he kept another option open as well— a possible
Communist junta— in case things should not work out with the ex­
isting leadership. Relations between the two countries continued to
go well, however, and, instead of a Communist coup, the Finns re­
ceived a friendship treaty.12
In December 1945, the Generalissimo returned from his Black Sea
dacha to M oscow and held a meeting of the Politburo, the first after
a five-year interlude. At about the same time he summoned Zhdanov
back from the margins of Soviet diplomacy. Zhdanov returned to his
preeminent role of propagandist-in-chief.
Zhdanov’s administrative “ empire” in the central party apparatus
was greater than in the prewar years. Again he was responsible for
institutionalized ideology. He presided over two departments of the
Central Committee: the Department of Agitation and Propaganda and
the Foreign Policy Department (the latter would change its name and
even its functions in the future, and would eventually become known
as the International Department). Included were Sovinformburo, with
its experienced wartime staff in charge of the dissemination of all
public information; the Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Union (TASS);
some divisions of the Committee on Broadcasting; and a publishing
house dealing with foreign literature. The structures of “ public diplo­
macy,” extremely effective during the war, included the Jewish Anti-
Fascist Committee, the All-Slavic Committee, and the All-Union
Society for Cultural Ties Abroad (VOKS).
The Foreign Policy Department in particular is worth examining in
some detail. After Stalin decreed the dissolution of the Comintern in
1943, its staff continued to work in various Soviet state and party
structures, mainly in military intelligence and propaganda. The central
apparatus had been transferred to the Central Committee, but re­
mained under the command of the former Comintern’s leader, the
120 ★ Inside the Kremlin's Cold W ar

Bulgarian Communist expatriate Georgi Dimitrov. In December 1945,

the “ Ghost Comintern” had become part of his administrative fief-
dom. Dimitrov, who returned to Bulgaria to build a coalition govern­
ment, was replaced by Mikhail Suslov and his deputy, Alexander
Panyushkin, two Russian apparatchiks with no exposure to interna­
tional Communist movements. They both reported to Zhdanov as
their direct boss.
The Foreign Policy Department continued to run several secret
“ institutes” of the disbanded Comintern that maintained old opera­
tive and informational contacts with the world Communist move­
ment. “ Institute-205” dealt with the assessment and analysis of infor­
mation. “ Institute-99” specialized in the recruitment of cadres for
operative Communist work among the POWs. “ Institute-100” dealt
primarily with radio broadcasting and maintained a network of radio
agents scattered around Europe. The Foreign Policy Department and
its old Comintern cadres could hardly constitute a bureaucratic rival
to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs run by Vyacheslav Molotov, but in
the field of information this was a very impressive complex.
The Comintern people had always been a very valuable part of
Soviet political and especially military intelligence networks. The in­
formation from chiefs of Comintern stations and sympathizers around
the world was not just an addition to the regular intelligence collected
by M GB, GRU, and Soviet diplomats; those informers provided a
fresh and different angle—reflecting the faith and illusions of various
social movements primarily belonging to Popular Fronts.
In 1945, when Soviet leaders were busy haggling with the Allies
over peace treaties, this network was almost completely disbanded
and left without instructions. N o coordination of activities existed
among foreign Communist parties. Some of them, including the
American and the British parties, had almost no ties with the Foreign
Policy Department.
In 1946 the role of Zhdanov’s bureaucratic empire was very limited
as far as foreign policy was concerned. It published a top-secret
bulletin of international information, a few copies of which were
prepared by the secret “ institutes” and reserved for those at the top
of the central party apparatus. Zhdanov was personally responsible
for the content and dissemination of this bulletin, but in all other
respects he and his departments and secret “ institutes” were com­
pletely subservient to the needs of foreign policy directed by Stalin
 Zhdanov and the Origins o f the Eastern Bloc ★ 121

and Molotov. This was the pattern in the relationship between the
Comintern and Soviet foreign policy before World War II, and the
events in Iran, which coincided with Zhdanov’s new nomination,
demonstrated that the pattern had not changed.
Since czarist times the northern part of Iran (Persia) had been
regarded by M oscow as part of a legitimate perimeter of security. The
importance of Iranian oil, fisheries, and other resources was on the
minds of the new Soviet rulers, who extracted many concessions from
the weak Iranian government even before World War II. In August
1944 Lavrenty Beria signed and sent to Stalin and M olotov a memo­
randum about the growing importance of Middle East oil and the
possible American-British struggle for it after the war. In 1944-1945
the Kremlin leadership attempted to use the presence of Soviet troops
in Iran (made possible through a wartime agreement with the British
to prevent Germany from penetrating into the Middle East) to secure
these concessions, particularly on oil. But the Truman administration
feared the Soviets might reach out as far as the Persian Gulf, and
regarded a delay in the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Northern
Iran as the first evidence of Stalin’s aggressive intentions after the
war.13
Indeed, larger concerns about the security of the southern under­
belly of the USSR could not have been far from the minds of Stalin
and Molotov. But even so, they seemed to be content with manipu­
lating the Iranian government rather than subverting it. They com­
pletely ignored the Iranian Communist party (the Tudeh), setting up
a separatist puppet party of Iranian Azerbaijan (ADN). As events
showed, Stalin was ready to trade the A D N and the Soviet presence
in Iranian Azerbaijan for oil and other privileges. The Tudeh’s
influence in this region was effectively undermined.14
The old Comintern network had informants in Teheran, very close
to the Tudeh, who tried to use this channel to change M oscow ’s
policies. One agent, for instance, indicated the possibility of striking
a deal with Shah Reza Pahlevi, who seemed then not hostile to the
idea of a behind-the-scenes alliance with the Soviets and the Tudeh
against Prime Minister Quavam. The Tudeh pushed for establishing
a separate revolutionary government in Iranian Azerbaijan, along the
lines of the base of the Communist party of China in Yanan. This
information streamed into the Department of Foreign Policy and
landed on Zhdanov’s desk.
122 ★ Inside the Kremlin's Cold W ar

It was then sent to Molotov, who was very angry at the Tudeh’s
intervening in Soviet foreign policy. In February 1946, on M olotov’s
explicit orders, the officials of the Foreign Policy Department secretly
brought to M oscow a very active leader in the Tudeh, Avanesian
(Ardashir). They explained to him that the Tudeh’s proposals were
“ mistaken and harmful” : the Kremlin would not tolerate any auton­
omy of or initiative from its Communist allies as far as Soviet policies
in the Middle East were concerned.15
Avanesian still hoped to revive the old Comintern network in the
Middle East. On M ay 27, 1946, he sent a report to Zhdanov and
Suslov in which he proposed “ having representatives from the Foreign
Policy Department in each country in order to maintain through them
contacts with Communist parties and groupings.” 16 This idea clearly
interfered with the Stalin-Molotov centralized diplomacy.
Stalin and M olotov rarely shared their strategic deliberations with
Zhdanov. They dismissed the timid attempts of Zhdanov’s subordi­
nate Mikhail Suslov to gain access to more sensitive information on
international affairs, in addition to inadequate and ideologically bi­
ased party sources, and to start the campaign of “ screening” Soviet
diplomatic cadres abroad. Having met with cold disapproval in the
Kremlin, Zhdanov never pursued that line. As a result, the function­
aries of “ party diplomacy” remained, in Suslov’s words, “ virtually
without access to the materials of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.” 17
Still, it is instructive to read Zhdanov’s bulletins of international
information, for they reflect the common wisdom, level of knowledge,
and ideological stereotypes regarding international affairs and leaders
among the rest of the high Soviet elite outside the narrow policy-mak­
ing and intelligence-procuring circles. In the summer of 1946 the
bureau issued a reference book on world leaders with the following
descriptions:

Truman, Harry: Under heavy influence of reactionary imperialist

circles of American monopoly capital striving to achieve U.S. world
domination . . . Started his working life as a small clerk [then was]
the owner of a haberdashery shop . . . [A promoter of] the bloc with
British imperialist circles.

Byrnes, James: Under his guidance a comedy was played out about
the alleged “interference” of the USSR in the domestic affairs of Iran
. . . At the Paris peace conference he is continuing the policy of
 Zhdanov and the Origins o f the Eastern Bloc ★ 123

ensuring the interests of American aggressive circles, directed against

the USSR and other democratic countries.18

These sharply negative characteristics of American policy-makers

contrasted with the more tolerant portraits of some “ realistically
minded” European politicians— among them Jukho Paasikivi of Fin­
land, George Bidault of France, Jan M assaryk and Eduard Benes of
Czechoslovakia. Describing the orientation of Prime Minister Benes
of Czechoslovakia, however, the bulletin’s editors noted that he “ sur­
reptitiously supports and covers reactionaries,” and that he “ advo­
cates a pro-England orientation, although officially he comes out for
the cementing of friendship with the U SSR .” 19 The inimitable party
cliches disseminated by Zhdanov and his staff later grew into the
full-fledged Cold War mentality of the Soviet elites.
Some in the West had long believed that Stalin started the Cold War
as a pretext for domestic repression, to fan the mood of so-called
Soviet patriotism. Documents from Zhdanov’s files, however, show
that the main thrust of the campaign for “ Soviet patriotism” against
pro-Western “ cosmopolites” initially had nothing to do with plans for
confrontation with the West. Rather, in 1945-1946 Stalin was look­
ing for an ideology for domestic consumption that would help him
both to eradicate Western influences spread during the war and to
extract more resources from the impoverished and exhausted USSR
and its people. In other words, it looked as if Stalin and Zhdanov had
carefully read George Kennan’s “ long cable” of February 1946 and
started to eliminate those “ seeds of decay” on whose growth and
proliferation the American diplomat laid a principal hope in his fer­
vent desire to see Stalin’s state crumble and disappear.
Thus Zhdanov, with his jeremiads against wayward composers,
writers, and poets, remained on the margins of grand diplomacy,
managed, as before, by others. On April 18, 1946, he held the first
postwar conference of the Central Party apparatus on propaganda.
He unleashed the Department of Propaganda of the Central Commit­
tee against literary journals. On April 26, Zhdanov repeated the
performance at another session devoted to the situation in cinematog­
raphy.20 Then it was the composers’ turn.
The universalist language of Marxism-Leninism was not a sufficient
booster for domestic mobilization and propaganda. So much of the
campaign, orchestrated by Stalin and Zhdanov, found its food in the
124 ★ Inside the Kremlin's Cold W ar

annals of czarist Russia. The propaganda about the Russians as “ sen­

ior brothers,” the leaders of all Slavs as well as all other, “ smaller”
peoples of the Soviet Union, was nothing but a secularized version of
the czarist myth about “ god-bearing people” (narod bogonosets) and
the official Pan-Slavism of the 1870s. Rooted in xenophobia, which
was instilled by Stalin and his apparatus of terror, this propaganda
was sure to erect a Great Wall between the Soviet people and the West.
The first victims of the new Russian patriotism were Jews. In the
spring of 1946 Stalin ordered the cleansing of state structures, from
intelligence and the security police to propaganda and education, of
Jewish cadres. On June 1, 1946, Suslov, responding to commands
from the top, reported to Zhdanov that “ the staff of authors and
technicians in the Sovinformburo is cluttered with unqualified people
without political clearance.” He suggested bringing new people into
the Sovinformburo and “ Institute-205.” 21 He also advised against
using the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, created during World War II
to marshal support for the USSR among the world’s Jewish popula­
tion, in field propaganda in Poland, Austria, and Rumania, given the
“ considerable demonstrations of anti-Semitism there.” 22 The heads of
both institutions, Solomon Lozovsky and Boris Geminder, were Jews.
About the same time, Zhdanov summoned Boris Ponomarev, a Rus­
sian and party propagandist who organized the wartime broadcasting
beamed on the Resistance movement in the “ Slav” countries. “ We
want to send you to the Sovinformburo. [The head of the Sovin­
formburo, Solomon] Lozovsky turned it into some kind of syna­
gogue,” Zhdanov told him.23
Zhdanov and his people knew that Western societies were demobi­
lized and did not represent a threat. The American economy was
heading for a postwar slump, and Truman was not up to the formi­
dable tasks that faced him.24 When Winston Churchill made his “ iron
curtain” speech in Fulton on March 5 ,1 9 4 6 , Zhdanov’s secret bulletin
presented the speech as a failure. It “ fell short of evoking in the masses
of the American people (except for its reactionary minority) the kind
of response Churchill expected . . . Americans quite sensibly discerned
in the speech . . . an appeal to maintain and restore the might of the
British empire with support from the United States.” The party and
military informers reported negative reactions to Churchill’s speech in
Germany, Poland, and other European countries.25 Stalin evidently
shared this estimate. On M arch 14 and 23, Stalin ridiculed Churchill
 Zhdanov and the Origins o f the Eastern Bloc ★ 125

in interviews, claiming that he was running against the trend of

history. “ It is necessary,” Stalin said, “ for the public and the ruling
circles of the states to organize a broad [program of] counterpropa­
ganda against the propagandists of a new war and for the safeguard­
ing of peace.” 26 This was a clear directive to Zhdanov’s apparatus. At
that time, however, Stalin still felt no need for an overarching ideology
of confrontation—a Soviet analogue to Kennan’s “ containment” or
Churchill’s “ iron curtain” speech. The Kremlin’s foreign policy was
still based on the assumptions of the realpolitik, balancing among
powers, and trying to use British-American contradictions. Zhdanov
and his ideological bulldogs had already been barking loudly— but
Stalin still kept them away from the international arena.

W hy the Cominform?

Two factors prompted the establishment of the Cominform: the So­

viets’ perceptions of a threat from the West to their zone of security
in Europe, and the conviction of Stalin and M olotov that the Soviets
could manage this zone only with iron ideological and party disci­
pline. The events of 1946-1947 that shaped and rocked the Commu­
nist movement in France and Italy, the Balkans, and the Soviet “ secu­
rity zone” of Eastern Europe explain to a large extent the emergence
of the “ Soviet cam p” and the sudden demand for a unifying ideologi­
cal message for this camp—the demand that brought Zhdanov to
prominence.
In the Balkans, the lack of coordination between the activities of
indigenous Communist movements and M oscow ’s foreign policy con­
tributed to misunderstandings and conflicts of interest between the
Kremlin and the Yugoslav leadership, as well as to Stalin’s suspicion
of, and then fury against, Tito.
In 1945-1946 the Yugoslav Communists, bolstered by their victo­
ries over Germany and its satellites in the Balkans, acted in the area
with little or no restraint from Moscow. At first Stalin supported the
ambitions of the Titoists, recognizing their predominant role in the
Balkans. In 1946 he agreed that Yugoslavia should eventually annex
Albania. Free for a moment from his insecurity, he seemed to trust
Tito. Belgrade became the second most important hub of the Com­
munist network after Moscow. When Italian, Greek, and often French
126 ★ Inside the Kremlin's Cold W ar

Communists reported to Stalin and Zhdanov, they had to communi­

cate through Belgrade or use Yugoslav messengers.
N or was Stalin dismayed at first by the conflict between the regional
ambitions of Tito and his comrades-in-arms and Soviet postwar peace
goals. There were mutual goals, to be sure, when M olotov supported
Yugoslav claims on the area of Trieste, the territory disputed between
Yugoslavia and Italy. At that time Stalin and M olotov wanted to
“ punish” Italy, using it as a bargaining chip against the Allies’ inter­
ference in Eastern Europe.
Revolutionary guerillas in Greece, supported by Belgrade, were only
a minor nuisance to Stalin in 1945-1946. As early as the fall of 1944
Stalin observed “ the percentage agreement” with Great Britain, ac­
cording to which London had a right to impose order on the Greek
peninsula. Later he forbade Dimitrov to grant exile to the defeated
Greek guerillas, probably since he did not want to give the British a
reason to argue against Soviet domination in Eastern Europe. The
Soviets seemed to be content with probing the British influence in the
Balkans, most likely knowing that it was coming to an end.27 In any
case, in November 1946 Zhdanov did not mention Greece in his
address on the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution.
There is no indication that Zhdanov’s Foreign Policy Department
and other party propaganda structures had daily contact with Bel­
grade. This is all the more remarkable, given that many Soviet and
Yugoslav Communists had developed strong mutual sympathies. The
siege of Leningrad and the guerilla battles in Serbia evoked common
memories of the hardships and horrors of war. The youngest member
of Stalin’s Politburo and head of the State Planning Committee (Gos-
plan), Nikolai Voznesensky, and his brother were acquaintances of
Milovan Djilas, then Tito’s close lieutenant. Some attempts at collabo­
ration were evident between them on various “ theoretical” and prac­
tical questions of “ Socialist construction.” 28
The Pan-Slavic campaign Zhdanov sponsored in the Russian part
of the Soviet Union also made him look to the Serbs in the Yugoslav
leadership as friends and propagandists of the historic Russo-Serbian
alliance. In a word, Zhdanov was the man who could find a common
language with the Titoists and prevent a conflict between them and
Stalin. But Stalin never even let him try.
Meanwhile, the crisis in the Balkans began to evoke security con­
cerns in Moscow. In Greece the Communists (KKE), rearmed and
 Zhdanov and the Origins o f the Eastern Bloc ★ 127

instigated by the Yugoslavs, resumed the civil war against the British-
backed government. The Titoists bragged about the impending fall of
Greece in the presence of Western diplomats and politicians.29 Perhaps
people in Belgrade and the Greek Communists believed they could
appeal to Stalin’s revolutionary instincts. Nicos Zachariades, a dedi­
cated Stalinist from the KKE, went to M oscow via Belgrade and Sofia
to talk Stalin into supporting this venture.
But by the time Zachariades arrived in Moscow, Harry Truman had
already made a dramatic address on M arch 1 2 ,1 9 4 7 , to both Houses
of the U.S. Congress asking for emergency aid and military involve­
ment in Greece and Turkey to save those countries from imminent
Communist takeover. The Truman administration feared that the
Greek Communists would align Greece with the Soviet Union. Any
suggestion that it was Tito, not Stalin, who operated behind the scenes
would have been taken at the time as a bad joke.30 But it was clear
in M oscow that the Yugoslavs imprudently triggered the U.S. inter­
vention in the Balkans.
Zachariades met Zhdanov on M ay 22, 1947. The Greek Commu­
nist painted an overly optimistic picture of the civil war and was quick
to dismiss the importance of the Truman Doctrine. American involve­
ment would be “ as bankrupt” as the British had been. He complained
then that the Soviets could have been more active in Greece. “ The
[Soviet] embassy is silent.” The All-Union Society for Cultural Ties
Abroad (VOKS), over which Zhdanov had control, “ is of no help.”
Zachariades reminded Zhdanov that Russian and Greek Orthodox
hierarchies had their ties, too. “ One can do something through the
Church,” he begged.31
Zachariades tried hard to persuade Zhdanov that Soviet aid to the
guerillas would tip the scales in the Communists’ favor. Heavy artillery
w as needed to drive the government troops out of the cities. Knowing
well how cautious Stalin was, he promised that the Greeks “ would
do everything themselves” : given Soviet financial aid, they could buy
and ship illegally the required weaponry from Palestine, Egypt, and
France.
Zhdanov’s response was a firm “ n o.” “ There are still big battles
ahead,” he said. Using the language of the combatants for world
revolution in the 1920s, he implied that the Greek Communists were
just a small flute in the Red orchestra of the future, conducted by the
powerful Soviet Union. “ The big reserve has to be spared for big
128 k Inside the Kremlin's Cold W ar

business.” “ N ot everybody realizes,” he continued, “ that one has to

pick a moment to unleash all the forces of the U SSR .” Zhdanov then
said that he understood the impatience of the Greek Communists. He
stressed that they should be “ the fighters for a national idea” against
the corrupt regime, bought by the Americans and the British, thus
playing down the Communist component of the Greek leftists’ offen­
sive and enhancing their role as the bearers of progressive nationalism.
Zhdanov seemed to fear becoming involved with the Greek Com ­
munists, but also with the Yugoslavs. It would be embarrassing and
harmful for the Soviets if it became known that they were aiding the
guerillas. “ Sometimes indifference can be a more considerate thing
than attention,” he said to Zachariades.32
Zachariades decided to appeal directly to Stalin. There are no
records of this meeting, but immediately after it the Soviets asked the
KKE to send a wish-list of armament needs. From Belgrade another
Greek party leader informed the comrades in Athens that there were
reasons to be “ completely satisfied” about the meeting. On June 16
a special courier of “ Institute-100” brought a letter of Zachariades
from Belgrade with a joint request from him and the Yugoslavs to
send much more than had been promised in M oscow: rifles and
machine guns, mountain and air-defense guns, millions of rounds of
ammunition.33
This time Stalin allowed them to force his hand. Was it because he
did not want Tito to look like a good revolutionary supporting the
Greek leftists, while he himself, Stalin, was actually forsaking the
Communist cause? If so, it did not add sympathy to the Stalin-Tito
relationship.34
Stalin’s ideas about Tito’s Yugoslavia, whatever they were, remained
hidden and did not affect Soviet policies until the summer of 1947.
Until then Stalin tolerated the special role of Belgrade and the growing
informal influence of the “ Yugoslav model” on other East European
Communists, especially in Bulgaria and Hungary. Zhdanov and Sus­
lov, however, may have been given some instructions on how to
handle Yugoslavia and its influence, since they systematically discour­
aged all attempts to implement the idea of “ Slavic solidarity” in any
specific form, be it the conference of “ friends of Slavs” or a confed­
eration of the Danube countries.
From July 30 to August 1, 1947, Dimitrov and Tito met in Sofia
and issued a joint declaration about their intent to conclude a bilateral
 Zhdanov and the Origins o f the Eastern Bloc ★ 129

Yugoslav-Bulgarian treaty of friendship, cooperation, and mutual as­

sistance. Neither Stalin nor Zhdanov and M olotov were informed.
This time Stalin reacted sharply. In a ciphered cable flashed to Bel­
grade and Sofia he denounced the meeting as a mistake that might be
used by “ reactionary British-American elements” in order “ to expand
military intervention in Greek and Turkish affairs against Yugoslavia
and Bulgaria.” He made a particular point of the fact that neither
culprit had consulted the Soviet government.35
This Yugoslav-Bulgarian declaration appeared even before the
peace treaty with Bulgaria was implemented on September 15. Stalin
had other plans for the order and hierarchy of relations between the
Soviet Union and the countries of Eastern Europe. Tito inadvertently
intervened in Stalin’s domain just at the time when the dictator, his
xenophobia returning, was seeking to deflect the effects of the M ar­
shall Plan on the Soviet sphere of influence.
It was at this moment that Stalin began to get impatient with the
anarchy and the nationalist deviations in the European Communist
movement. And Zhdanov’s time had come. In M ay 1947 Zhdanov
w as forced to focus attention on an area that had not been his concern
at all—Western Europe. French and Italian Communists, increasingly
isolated in their coalition governments, suddenly decided to go into
opposition—without any prior consultations with Moscow. The reac­
tion in the Kremlin was one of disbelief and consternation. It was
Zhdanov whom Stalin asked to send an urgent letter to Maurice
Torez, General Secretary of the French Communist party.
The Soviet leadership, wrote Zhdanov, cannot understand “ what
has happened in France” and “ what motives guided the Communist
party.” “ M any think that the French Communists coordinated their
actions” with Moscow, he wrote in a draft of the letter. “ You know
this is not true. Your steps were a total surprise to us.” 36 The chief of
the “ Ghost Comintern” admitted his ignorance of the situation. He
was asking for information in addition to what he could cull “ from
the mass m edia.” This remarkable admission highlights how sporadic
communication between M oscow and the West European Commu­
nists was.
From Stalin’s viewpoint, the Western European countries were clos­
ing their ranks, supported by U.S. resources, while the Soviet strategic
rear in Central Europe and the Balkans was in turmoil. Sometime in
August he summoned Zhdanov to his vacation site in Ritsa, near the
130 ★ Inside the Kremlin's Cold W ar

Black Sea, and instructed him to work out, in complete secrecy, the
blueprints of a new organization—the Information Bureau of the
Communist Parties. To the foreign Communists it was announced that
an emergency conference of “ some European parties” would be held
in the fall. After reading the Yugoslav and Soviet records, one histo­
rian came to the conclusion that Stalin and Zhdanov wanted “ to invite
them to a seemingly innocent meeting and then ambush them by
imposing something quite different on them.” 37 The most important
months in the Cold War history of Europe were about to begin. These
would also be the last months of Zhdanov’s life.
Zhdanov’s report to the conference of the European Communist
parties and the emergence of the Cominform in September 1947 have
often been regarded as a clear example of Stalin’s dual approach to
foreign policy. There is little evidence that before the M arshall Plan
Stalin had any master plan for immediate expansion. He had to digest
what he had already gained during the war. But later, when the
Americans were aiming at the whole of Europe, how did Stalin’s
foreign policy change? Did he want first of all to organize Eastern
Europe? Or did he seriously expect to use the Cominform to revive
“ party foreign policy” and to take advantage of the political and
economic chaos in Western Europe to get the Americans out of there?
The newly available Russian sources suggest the emphasis was on
the former: building up the Soviet-led bloc. This was the practical
thrust of the “ Six Points” formulated by Zhdanov in his memoran­
dum to Stalin in early September for the upcoming conference in
Poland. Zhdanov suggested that a report on the international situ­
ation should be “ devoted primarily to ” :
1. an analysis of the postwar situation and the unmasking of the
American plan for the political and economic subjugation of
Europe (the Truman-Marshall plan);
2. the tasks of organizing forces for counteraction to new plans of
imperialist expansion and for the further strengthening of social­
ism and democracy on both a national and an international scale;
3. the increased role of Communist parties in the struggle against
American serfdom;
4. The decisive significance of the USSR as the most powerful force
and a reliable bulwark of the workers of all countries in their
struggle for peace, socialism, and real democracy;
 Zhdanov and the Origins o f the Eastern Bloc * 131

5. a critique of errors committed by some Communist parties

(French, Italian, Czechoslovak, and so on), in part because of a
lack of communication and cooperation;
6. the urgent necessity of coordinating the actions of Communist
parties in the modern international situation.38

Stalin’s decision to boycott the M arshall Plan meant for the Soviet
Union the end of a wait-and-see attitude toward neighboring coun­
tries and, for the “ transitional” regimes in Eastern Europe, a death
sentence. Seemingly, Stalin faced a simple choice—to create a bloc
using either formal diplomatic or “ formal-ideological” instruments:
proclaiming a Warsaw Pact in 1947 or restoring the new Comintern.
He did neither. Instead, he chose another route that fit his needs
remarkably well: he used the common ideology o f Communist parties
to organize Eastern Europe into a “ security buffer” for his state.
Even before Stalin decided to boycott the M arshall Plan, Zhdanov
expressed uncertainty and fear about the impact of U.S. economic aid
on the geopolitical orientation of Finland. On June 30, 1947,
Zhdanov told the Finnish Communists Ville Pessi and Hertta Kuusi-
nen that the Finnish Communist party should intensify a struggle for
national independence against the threat of “ economic enslavement
to America.” American credit to Finland, he said, had to be unmasked
as a result of the “ collusion of the Finnish bourgeoisie with American
imperialist circles.” 39
On July 1, 1947, the day M olotov walked out of the conference in
Paris, Zhdanov taught the Finnish Communists a new line on “ blo-
cist” politics: “ Communists will gain nothing through peaceful coop­
eration within a coalition. On the contrary, they may instead lose what
they’ve got.” “ It is impossible to avoid bloodshed in relations with
one’s partners,” he continued, if they are opposing more radical means
of political mobilization. “ One has to act so that Communists, instead
of awaiting a strike, strike first.” When the Finns dared to say they
lacked hard evidence of U.S.-Finnish “ collusion,” Zhdanov scoffed at
this punctiliousness: “ H ow Truman intimidated you! If you keep
following this rule— that you should use only decent means with the
enemies who use dishonest means—then you will never win . . .
Paasikivi [the prime minister of Finland] must have sold friendship
with the Soviet Union for the first ten billion [dollars] the Americans
had promised him.” 40 Later, in August, Zhdanov warned the Finnish
132 ★ Inside the Kremlin's Cold W ar

Communists that the Americans, if unopposed, might buy Europe

wholesale, and that foreign Communists were blind enough to over­
look this fact.41
Zhdanov had real reasons to be worried. Only under strong Soviet
political pressure did the government of Finland prudently decide
against any participation in the M arshall Plan, to the great satisfaction
of Moscow. But Finland’s defiance of M oscow grew so rapidly that
in 1948 Stalin and M olotov had to accommodate the Finns to make
them accept what Mannerheim had wanted from the very beginning:
“ the Czechoslovak model of the defense treaty with the U SSR.” The
tragic irony was that by that time Czechoslovakia’s independence had
been crushed and the country transformed into a Stalinized Soviet
satellite.42
At the conference in Szklarska Poremba in September 1947,
Zhdanov focused his attacks on “the errors” of the French and Italian
Communists, who proved unable to fight back when faced with the
offensive of the Right, supported by Americans. “ Do you have a plan
for a counteroffensive against the . . . government of [Alcide de]
Gasperi [the Christian Democratic Prime Minister of Italy]?” Zhda­
nov asked Luigi Longo of the Italian Communist party. “ Or do you
intend only to defend your rears and retreat, till they, perhaps, will
ban you altogether? . . . de Gasperi carried out a coup against the
biggest party in the nation, and you leave the field without battle!”
Longo lamely cited the “ objective difficulties” of fighting against gov­
ernment forces, but Zhdanov pressed on: “ Does the Communist party
of Italy believe that general strikes, militant demonstrations of work­
ers, the struggle for the return of Communists to the government—
that this is ‘adventurism’ ?” Zhdanov’s fiery comments were in sharp
contrast to Stalin’s efforts in 1945 to check radical impulses among
French and Italian Communists. In 1947 the revolutionary-imperial
doctrine was back, hope for cooperation with the Western leaders over
the heads of the Western Communists proved to be unrealistic, and
M oscow needed the ideological “ fifth column” in Western capitals—
just as the classical mode of Stalin’s doctrine suggested.
The instructions from M oscow to West European Communists,
relayed by Zhdanov and Malenkov, were “ to destroy the capitalist
economy and work systematically toward unity of live national
forces” against American aid. The focus of party work had to be the
creation of combat units and warehouses of arms and ammunition.
Through August and September, Zhdanov worked hard on a text
 Zhdanov and the Origins o f the Eastern Bloc ★ 133

of his report on the international situation, which he presented to the

conference at Szklarska Poremba on September 25. The most famous
thesis of the report was that the world was now divided into “ two
cam ps”— which was an objective fact by that time, for Stalin and the
West had proved to be unable to maintain the integrity of 1941-1945.
The phrase strongly implied that there would be no neutral parties in
the Cold War. Foreign Communists, who in 1944-1946 were quite
autonomous in charting their national ways toward a “ new democ­
racy,” were suddenly forced to return to the ranks under Stalin’s
command, to oppose the common enemy. Drafts of Zhdanov’s speech
in his personal archives in M oscow tell only part of the story of how
the speech was drafted. In its earlier versions the words “ two cam ps”
were missing. Who added these crucial words? The most probable
explanation is that Stalin introduced this concept—thereby giving a
required rigidity to the future structure of the Soviet sphere of
influence in Eastern Europe.43
All conference participants understood the implications of M os­
cow’s ultimatum. Jacques Duclos, a French Communist leader, re­
turned to Paris to tell his colleagues (some of whom reported it back
to Zhdanov and Stalin through the Yugoslavs) that he “ faced an
alternative—to subdue or to break off.” 44 The steel discipline of
the Communist movement came to be applied to the relationships
among states. Thereby Stalin’s doctrine became a truly interna­
tional phenomenon that soon would become embodied in the Soviet
bloc.
The idea of the Information Bureau of Communist Parties was
another surprise that Stalin and Zhdanov had prepared for East Euro­
pean Communist parties. The conference participants did not even
know that this organization of the Cominform was on the agenda.
The Poles, when they learned about it, were defiant. A Polish partici­
pant at the conference tried to argue that perhaps the whole shift of
tactics w as erroneous and that it would be better to maintain national
People’s Fronts, that is, alliances with Social Democrats and Labour­
ists. Zhdanov snapped back: we in M oscow know better how to apply
Marxism-Leninism.45 On September 25, Zhdanov and Malenkov (to­
gether again, each reluctant to assume full responsibility) telephoned
Molotov, who instructed them that the meeting must by all means
adopt a decision on the establishment of an Informburo. And Stalin
pressed further: the new structure should be fully vested with control
over European, and primarily East European, parties.
134 ★ Inside the Kremlin's Cold W ar

Zhdanov's Last Target

The Titoists, unlike all others, enthusiastically supported the idea of

the conference, and then the Informburo. Tito was at the head of the
mailing list of the Kremlin for all things relating to the conference,
coming before Dimitrov, Georgiu Dej (Rumania), Gottwald (Czecho­
slovakia), and Rakosi (Hungary).46 Tito, Kardel, and Djilas took an
active part in logistical efforts. During the conference Zhdanov
worked hand in hand with the Yugoslav delegation, orchestrating a
vicious “ trial” of the French and Italian Communists. Zhdanov in his
cables to Stalin saved his best compliments for the Yugoslavs.47
Yet beneath this smooth surface was Stalin’s growing displeasure
with Tito. He was already receiving, through Molotov, reports from
Lavrentiev, the Soviet am bassador in Yugoslavia, about the com­
plaints the Yugoslav Communists spread around on the insufficiency
of Soviet support in Trieste and M acedonia. Initially, Stalin wanted
Zhdanov to plan a strike in two directions at the conference in Poland.
In addition to the rightist “ mistakes” of the French, Italian, and
Czechoslovak Communists (who betrayed their desire to take part in
the M arshall Plan), another salvo was reserved for the “ leftist mis­
takes” of the Yugoslav leadership.
In the first drafts of Zhdanov’s report to the conference, the sins of
the Titoists were described as “ the criticism of allegedly inadequate
aid that the Soviet Union provides for friendly states and the presen­
tation of inordinate claims as to the size of this aid . . . the assertions
that the USSR, reputedly for considerations of big politics, out of
unwillingness to spoil relations with great powers, slackens up on its
struggle to satisfy the demands of smaller countries, particularly Yu­
goslavia.” 48 The Yugoslavs put their finger on a sore spot: Stalin’s
cynical disregard of national Communist movements in 1944-1946
and his preference for reaching an imperialistic agreement with the
United States and Britain were a cardinal sin against the universal
Communist cause.
Zhdanov wanted to rebuke the Yugoslavs for their “ underestima­
tion of the great meaning and role of the Soviet Union, which cannot
and should not waste its strength, crucial for bigger battles.” The
conclusion of the passage left no doubt that Stalin inspired it: “The
pretenses to make the Soviet Union support in all cases and under all
 Zhdanov and the Origins o f the Eastern Bloc ★ 135

circumstances any demand [of a smaller state], even to the detriment

of its own positions— those pretenses are unfounded.” 49
Later Stalin decided to drop those charges. The Yugoslavs protected
their flanks by resisting the M arshall Plan from the very beginning. In
a familiar pattern, tested in his fight against opposition from various
corners in the 1920s, the Kremlin tyrant reasoned that it would be
easier to deal with “ deviations” one by one, first using the “ leftist”
Yugoslavs in an effort to discipline the French, Italians, and East
Europeans. But even Tito’s enthusiasm for the Cominform must have
looked suspicious in Stalin’s eyes. N o, he had not created this structure
so that the Titoists could use it for the expansion of their influence
and their “ model.” On the contrary, he was preparing to use the
Cominform against Tito.
From December 1947 Stalin began, step by step, to tighten the
noose around Yugoslavia. On February 1 0 ,1 9 4 8 , Stalin and M olotov
lashed out at the Bulgarian and Yugoslav delegation for “ reckless
independent actions.” Then Stalin revealed that behind his lack of
enthusiasm for the Greek civil war was his growing animosity toward
Tito. He accused the Yugoslavs of being afraid of the Russian advisors
in Albania (read: the Balkans), and expressed his lack of belief in any
success of the Greek Communist party, issuing an instruction to stop
aid to a guerilla movement in Greece— a blow to any imaginary vision
of a Yugoslav-Bulgarian sphere of influence in the Balkans.50
Zhdanov was involved in this final stage of the drama, and there is
no evidence that he or his “ faction” expressed support and sympathy
to the Titoists. In fact, Zhdanov brought to Stalin’s attention more
proof that the Titoists were getting out of hand: their attempts to
remove Soviet advisors from the Balkans in order to reassert their
domination there. Zhdanov began corresponding with Tito and
Kardel about this incident. After Stalin’s meeting with the Yugoslavs,
Zhdanov drafted a letter to them, probably after consulting with
Stalin. He reminded Tito and Kardel that they had approved enthu­
siastically the French and the Italians’ subjection “ to the Bolshevik
critique.” Why did the Yugoslavs not want to surrender now, to
repent? Because “ they began to think they were the salt of the earth”
and considered themselves “ exceptional.” Later Zhdanov would tem­
per the language, but Stalin’s hatred for Tito was unmistakably
there.51
136 ★ Inside the Kremlin's Cold W ar

Stalin, as a great psychologist of the intraparty factional strife of

the 1920s, expected the Yugoslavs to give up rather than decide to
break the ranks of the “ united front of People’s democracies and the
U SSR .” In Tito’s case, this plot backfired.
It has been proposed that the Stalin-Tito split led to the decline of
the “ Zhdanov faction” and perhaps to the sudden death of Zhdanov
on August 30, 1948. In fact, Zhdanov’s health was never strong after
the war and began to fail quickly in 1947. After the creation of the
Cominform he had to go to the Black Sea dacha, where he stayed until
early December, often paying visits to the vacationing Stalin. His
vicious treatment by the irritable and neurotic dictator did not aid his
health. The voice of the man whose fiery speeches made foreign
Communist veterans tremble became faint when near his boss.
Until his death Zhdanov persisted in a remarkably cheerful mood—
his official trademark as propagandist-in-chief. On December 12,
1947, he received an Italian Communist and was feisty: What is the
mood of the masses—ready for combat? Are they rushing forward to
struggle? His assessment of the Cold War dangers also called for
optimism. The West was barking, but could not bite, as “ elements of
blackmail prevail over the real preparation for war.” “ Everybody
understands that we forced them [the imperialists] into defense.” After
the conference in Poland, the “ situation changed in our favor, which
gives us reason to look even more confidently toward our future.” 52
Rumors about Zhdanov’s unexpected death at the age of fifty-four
suggested that it was the work of Beria and Malenkov, his old rivals
inside the Kremlin power circle. But the simple truth was that
Zhdanov, suffering from grave cardiac atherosclerosis, died on August
31 as the result of two heart attacks he had while in a sanatorium far
from Moscow. The Kremlin doctors, who flew to the sanatorium to
help him, made an incorrect diagnosis, which contributed to his pre­
mature death.
If there was an overwhelming reason for Zhdanov’s early death, it
was the enormous stress of being a workaholic and the terrifying
proximity o f his master. Three years after Zhdanov died, Stalin man­
aged to use him as a tool to discipline his lieutenants and terrorize the
country. He blamed his death on a “ conspiracy” of the Kremlin’s
doctors, and unleashed a vicious witch-hunt against the “ Zionists”
and “ agents of foreign intelligence services.” 53
 Zhdanov and Hie Origins o f the Eastern Bloc ★ 137

In a sense, Zhdanov’s death had a symbolic meaning: the era of the

faceless politicians, the valets of the master, was nearing its end.
Other, more ruthless and robust players were to survive a few remain­
ing years of terror and to attempt to construct the post-Stalin world.
Two of the most intriguing figures among them were Lavrenty Beria
and Georgi Malenkov.