It hardly needs to be stressed that Stalin was being disingenuous. He had not the slightest intention of releasing his political grip on foreign communist parties. While allowing them the appearance of autonomy, he aimed to keep them on a short lead. Comintern Secretary-General Georgi Dimitrov would simply be transferred to the International Department of the Central Committee Secretariat of the All-Union Communist Party. His duties would be kept secret and essentially unchanged. Dimitrov had always been expected to advise and obey Stalin in relation to the world communist movement, and the same situation persisted after the Comintern’s dissolution. This gives a clue to Stalin’s reasons for the astonishing decision. There was speculation at the time and subsequently that he was trying to reassure the Western Allies about his intentions. But it can hardly have been the main motive. The period when Stalin most needed to call upon their trust had already passed. The USSR had been at its weakest before Stalingrad and Kursk, when the Wehrmacht had hopes of winning the war. Yet Stalin had done nothing for two years. He had bided his time until victory for the Red Army started to appear likely.
The timing is unlikely to have been accidental. Stalin and his advisers were making plans for Europe after the war. Ivan Maiski and Maxim Litvinov, removed as ambassadors to London and Washington, gave their ideas. Dimitrov added his. Molotov was constantly available. All were thinking hard about what could be done to maximise the security and power of communism to the west. Clandestine communist groupings had been scratching out an existence in the early years of the Soviet–Nazi military conflict. While the USSR was on the defensive, anything that could be done by the foreign parties of the Comintern to sabotage Hitler’s New Order in Europe was welcomed. But in mid-1943 these limits on ambition had to be lifted. Stalin wanted to build up support for communist parties in eastern and east-central Europe. The parties themselves were frail — and he had not helped the situation by exterminating as many Polish comrades as possible in 1938. The Red Army was poised to recover the western borderlands of the USSR, as its territory had stood before the Nazi–Soviet diplomatic agreement of August 1939. Indeed, it was about to overrun most countries to the east of Germany and Stalin knew that their communists were regarded as agents of Moscow. It was vital for them and him to pretend that they were not Moscow’s stooges. The Comintern’s dissolution was a basic precondition.
This meant that communist parties should find ways to identify themselves not only as internationalists but also as defenders of the national agenda. Stalin ensured that this was understood among the foreign communist leaders resident in Moscow as well as among those who had maintained contact from their own countries. Heroes, symbols, poems and songs of a nationalist resonance had to be grasped by communism; and in this way, he assumed, the local appeal of communist parties would be enhanced. This had been undertaken for Russians in the USSR; it needed to be repeated in countries which the Red Army was about to conquer. Communism was neither just an international movement nor just a Russian one; it was seeking, at Stalin’s behest, to acquire a diversity of national colours.16
This was a concession masking militant aims. Other shifts of policy in the second half of 1943 were less covertly introduced. Among them was the reassertion of Marxism–Leninism. Russian national feeling was far from being rejected. Heroes of old Russia — the ones acceptable to the regime — were retained: Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, Suvorov, Lomonosov, Pushkin and Tolstoi. But the limits had to be respected. And as the war was drawing to a close, the Kremlin began to emphasise Soviet motifs. Patriotism was put forward as a greater value than internationalism, and the ‘fraternal friendship’ of the Soviet peoples was affirmed. Cosmopolitan became a dirty word. Any sign of admiration for the societies and cultures of the West was severely punished. The Soviet armed forces’ dependence on jeeps, explosives and other military equipment supplied to the USSR by the USA under the terms of Lend– Lease was the object of Stalin’s suspicion. The influx of high-quality foreign products could undermine official Soviet boasts. In 1942 the crime ‘praise of American technology’ was added to the USSR’s legal code and people could be thrown into the Gulag camps simply for expressing appreciation of a jeep.17 Stalin was aiming at the reinsulation of the Soviet mind from foreign influences at the very time when hopes were growing for the convergence of the Red Army with its Western Allies in Germany for the defeat of Nazi power.
