for one reason or another and incarcerated in
Gulag camps, provided forced labour intended to
help Soviet recovery; but it was an inhuman and
wasteful use of manpower.
Nationalism posed a threat in two ways: ‘bour-
geois’ and ‘nationalist’. Wherever nationalist con-
sciousness manifested itself, especially in com-
munist states such as Yugoslavia, its advocates
were fiercely denounced.
In the communist states the leadership exer-
cised its will through the one (communist) party
that was allowed to function. The party’s control
was usually in the hands of one man, sometimes
a small group, whose wills then became ultimate
law. The party apparatus was essential as a means
of government, providing the link between policy
decisions and their execution. Only one party
could be tolerated. After 1948, the nations which
the Soviet Union dominated had to conform in
leadership and party organisation to the Soviet
model, even down to the details of the ‘person-
ality cult’ and the theatrical plaudits for the
leader. Their alliance with the Soviet Union was
not a question of free choice: loyalty to this
alliance was the price exacted for freedom from
direct Soviet military control.
Between 1940 and 1945 Stalin expanded
Soviet rule over new territories, though he was
well aware of the difficulties such absorption of
hostile ethnic groups could create for the Soviet
empire. Where possible, he reasserted the historic
rights of pre-1917 tsarist Russia. Poland was a
special and most difficult case if only because
there were so many Poles – some 30 million in
1939, but reduced to 24 million in 1945. In re-
establishing the 1941 Soviet frontier, a mixed
population of Belorussians and Ukrainians in the
countryside and Poles in the towns was brought
within the Soviet Union, and this was only
mitigated by population exchanges of Poles,
Ukrainians and White Russians. The frontier
between Poland and the USSR had some histor-
ical justification, since it basically followed the
demarcation proposed at the Paris Peace
Conference by Lord Curzon in 1919. Finland,
too, lost territory but retained more of its inde-
pendence. Stalin shrank from incorporating the
fiercely independent and nationalist Finns.
Instead, he made sure that they understood that
as Russia’s neighbour, and located as they were
far from possible Western help, they would have
to follow a policy friendly to the USSR as the
price of their comparative freedom.
In 1945 Stalin retained, without Allied
approval, the territories of the once independent
Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia,
which it had been agreed in the Stalin–Hitler pact
of August 1939 should fall within the Soviet
sphere. The Red Army occupied them in 1940
and set up puppet assemblies, which promptly
abandoned their countries’ independence and
acceded to the USSR. Also in 1945, but this time
in agreement with the Allies, the northern third
of pre-war East Prussia was ‘administered’ by the
Soviet Union – in practice incorporated into it. In
the Balkans, Stalin wanted Bessarabia (Moldavia).
It had been Russian until 1918. After the First
World War ethnic Romanians of Moldavia had
declared for union with Romania. In 1940, with
the acquiescence of Hitler, Romania was forced
to cede the territory back to Russia. Finally, to
gain a direct link and common frontier with
Hungary, Stalin pressured the Czechs to cede a
part of their territory, Ruthenia, to the USSR. In
this way he accomplished large acquisitions of land
all around the periphery of the Soviet Union from
the Baltic through central Europe to the Balkans
in the south. But, even beyond these annexations,
the Soviet Union desired further influence and
control, to destroy the pre-war block of hostile
states, the cordon sanitaire, with which the West
had tried before 1939 to surround and contain
communist Russia.
During the years from 1945 to 1948 Stalin
brought Eastern and central European politics
and societies under Soviet control. He was
obsessed by the fear that eventually the capitalist
powers would take advantage of their superiority
to attack the Soviet Union, which therefore had
only a few years in which to prepare. In Asia, he
was reticent and pacific. The real danger, he
believed, would develop in Europe. To avoid the
danger of too vehement a Western reaction,
central and Eastern Europe was only gradually
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