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The concessions Moscow made were not enough for America. Roosevelt might have understood them, for he was a world statesman who knew history. But with the accession of Harry S. Truman to the presidency, all that was narrow and grasping in American imperialism found its tool in a small-town politician, with the A-bomb monopoly in his hand and with no historic sense. Truman ignored – and probably did not even known – the fact that Romania, Serbia and Bulgaria had been in Russia’s sphere of influence a hundred years; that they owed their very existence as states to Russia’s war with Turkey a century ago. In the time between the two world wars, their rulers, being despotic monarchs, were anti-Soviet, but their peasant peoples never lost their love for Russia. So when the Red Army drove out the German armies, the pro-Nazi officialdom fled and new regimes arose that began to fight on the Russian side. Washington – in the person of Truman – saw only subversion in this.

Washington, which had never accepted the “anti-fascist” nature of the war, fought everywhere the anti-fascist front that emerged in all liberated lands. In Western Europe, American pressure succeeded in splitting this front and driving Communists out of the participation in governments to which their votes entitled them. This American aim did not succeed in the East. All these nations followed a common pattern, based on their own experience in the war. All had big landlords who collaborated with the Nazis and who fled with the German army; this facilitated the long over-due division of land among the peasants. In all those nations, the Germans had a stranglehold on big industry; their flight left industries ownerless as well as ruined. Nationalisation of big industry became not only easy but actually necessary, unless Americans would take concessions, which they wouldn’t. In all these nations, the war had smashed and discredited former political leaders, leaving only one line-up – those who had collaborated with the Nazis and those who had resisted. Hence, governments first arose by coalition of small splinter parties, that included everyone who had fought Germans. American Embassies, however, cultivated disgruntled former leaders and demanded their inclusion in the governments. Sometimes, East European nations yielded, hoping for American favour. To Washington’s view, they never yielded enough.

American loans, which all East Europe hoped for, did not materialise. East Europe had to depend for economic aid on war-exhausted Russia. This led to tensions over good and prices, for of nothing was there nought. It led to a firmer hand from Moscow, doling out the goods. As the cold war policy of Washington deepened, Moscow’s policy in East Europe changed.

The sign of the change was the sudden brutal expulsion of Yugoslavia from the Communist fellowship, for demanding the type of “national independence” that had been gospel for all East Europe only two years earlier. Stalin’s personal antagonism to Tito and Yugoslavia’s vociferous insistence on more industrialisation than Moscow felt able to supply, played a role, but an underlying reason for the change lay not in Yugoslavia but in Harry S. Truman. After continuously needling the Russians, he had announced the “Truman Doctrine,” and that he was sending troops into Greece and Turkey to “contain Communism.” This out-flanking of East Europe by an increasingly hostile America had the natural result. Moscow tightened control of East Europe, sought to weld it into a firm military bloc, and damned Yugoslavia when she objected.

Here is no space to review the long tale of “get tough” policies with which Washington shattered Stalin’s dream – which was also Roosevelt’s – of a long friendship between the USSR and the USA. Truman insulted Molotov on his way to the first United Nations Congress in San Francisco. America made the first U.N. Assembly downgrade the USSR for “aggression” because Soviet troops were slow in leaving Iran, though American, British and French troops stayed on uncensored in many parts of the world. The “Berlin blockade,” which Moscow began as a temporary measure to protect East German’s economy from a flood of new currency printed in the American zone, was turned by Washington into a long demonstration of America’s superfluity in planes and supplies. The “Baruch Plan” for control of the atom, announced by Washington as a “peace” gesture, was seen by every Russian as an attempt to take ownership of Soviet natural resources through a U.N. Authority – controlled by Washington.

Insult seemed added to injury when American commentators more and more grudged Russia “the great territory grabbed in the war.” To Russians, this was their own territory, lost in the first world war, only partially regained in the second. The Russians had lost of ceded 330,000 square miles in the first war, and regained 250,000 in the second, a net loss of 80,000 square miles, which roughly covered the territory ceded to Finland and Poland. Russians had not grudged it when the world war turned both Atlantic and Pacific into “American lakes,” but when these same Americans, who had taken all the oceans and who were building bases on their islands and shores, called Russia greedy for taking back what she formerly owned, this rankled.

Inside the USSR, the Truman doctrine of “containment,” and the constant baiting of Russia by an America for whose friendship Russia had longed, bred an irritated, excessive patriotism, which denounced as “cosmopolitanism” – and almost as treason – any belief that any land but Russia had ever invented anything good. This sick nationalism grew as a defence against the bitter knowledge that they had paid more than all their allies together for the joint victory, and that victory had brought them, not a partnership in building world peace, but a new hostile encirclement by American bases which still had an atom-bomb monopoly, and the taunt of “aggressor” for any expansion other tan their own.