It was shortly the turn of the cinema industry. In September 1946 the Central Committee attacked several recent films, including those by the highly regarded directors V. I. Pudovkin and S. M. Eisenstein. The film that brought Eisenstein to grief was his historical epic
Other spheres of thought and culture also underwent ideological purification in the post-war years, from theatre and art to philosophy and economics. Nor was music spared; in February 1948 the party censured such distinguished composers as D. D. Shostakovich, S. S. Prokofiev, and A. I. Khachaturian for ‘formalism’ and insufficient use of folk themes. Even the natural sciences were not immune from persecution. Thus the expulsion of twelve persons from the Academy of Agricultural Sciences in August 1948 confirmed the triumph of the quack agronomist T. D. Lysenko, whose bizarre theory—that characteristics acquired by an organism in one generation could be genetically transmitted to the next—was utterly incompatible with modern biology and genetics. But the regime embraced Lysenko, whose ‘discoveries’ held the promise of limitless human power over nature. Soviet agriculture and biological science were to bear the scars of Lysenkoism for years.
Zhdanov died in the summer of 1948, but the cultural repression persisted. In early 1949 the press exposed an ‘unpatriotic group of drama critics’. And at the Nineteenth Congress of the Party in 1952, G. M. Malenkov was still insisting that the typicality of a novel’s characters bore witness to the correctness of the author’s ideological attitude.
Foreign Policy and the Cold War
Wartime alliances almost never persist once the threat that brought them into existence disappears. It is hardly surprising, therefore that the bonds of the Grand Alliance predictably weakened in the aftermath of the war. The deteriorating relationship between the Soviet Union and its former allies soon gave way to the overt hostility of the Cold War. From Washington, it appeared that Stalin was orchestrating a world-wide campaign of aggression against the West. The year 1946 saw Soviet pressure on Turkey over the Dardanelles, a communist insurrection in Greece, and the establishment of Soviet-backed Azeri and Kurdish regimes in northern Iran. Simultaneously the communization of Eastern Europe proceeded apace, culminating in the dramatic Czechoslovak coup of February 1948. Later that same summer, Stalin blockaded the western zones of occupied Berlin. The following year Mao Tse-tung defeated his nationalist enemies and proclaimed the People’s Republic of China. And in 1950 Kim Il Sung’s forces swarmed across the 38th parallel, touching off the Korean War.
There are, of course, many theories about the origins of the Cold War. Some of the more fanciful blossomed precisely because the dearth of reliable information about the Soviet side made it impossible ultimately to disprove them. Thus while some works argued that Stalin initially sought accommodation with the West and only took the path of confrontation in 1948, others argued the exact reverse—that Stalin was harshest towards the West prior to that date and at his most conciliatory thereafter. Still other studies concluded that Stalin was weaker after the Second World War than before, and accounted for the evolution of Soviet foreign policy largely in terms of domestic politics or the clashing preferences of his subordinates.
With the partial opening of Soviet archives, we now have more evidence than before. The data are, however, far from complete; no definitive interpretation of Soviet foreign relations has yet emerged. The discussion that follows is based on three premises: that Stalin was firmly in charge of international affairs; that he was both an ideologue and a geopolitician; and that two signal post-war objectives were to avoid war while strengthening Soviet control over foreign communist parties.
Stalin was not, in principle, averse to war. In fact, his Marxist
