would not share their nuclear secrets with the
Russians except on terms that were totally unac-
ceptable, and they maintained a stockpile of
atomic bombs as a threat to the Soviet Union.
American and British secret services were
indeed planning clandestinely to roll back the
Soviet control of Eastern Europe. From 1949
until the early 1950s there was, for instance, a
bizarre scheme to restore King Zog to the throne
of Albania; this, it was hoped, might start a wave
of hostility against pro-Russian governments in
the Balkans. Albanian exiles were actually landed,
but they were quickly rounded up and shot.
Several operations were nevertheless conducted
over a period of some years, but none had any
chance of success. This was not surprising, since
British spies in high places in the Foreign Office
and the Secret Intelligence Services (MI6) were
passing information about these operations to
Moscow. They had been recruited by the KGB as
far back as the 1930s for just such a role. In the
Baltic too in the 1950s, there was guerrilla resis-
tance in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, whose
independence had been snuffed out by the Soviet
Union in 1940. After the war, MI6 organised the
return of Latvian and Lithuanian émigrés to
encourage uprisings. They were betrayed, met by
the KGB and executed or imprisoned. It was in
any event unlikely that any nationalist uprisings,
even if they could have been organised by these
missions, would have provoked any other Soviet
reaction but bloody suppression.
Stalin blundered when he tried to intimidate
the West to give way in Germany during the
Berlin crisis and the blockade in 1948. His overall
German policy, as well as Soviet harshness in
Eastern Europe, was even more calamitously
counter-productive, for it led to the formation of
a firm Western alliance, NATO, and eventually to
the rearmament of West Germany. Any chance of
establishing Soviet–Western relations on a fresh
basis had certainly, if ever possible, been lost by
1948.
From the Kremlin’s point of view, Russia faced
three overriding challenges in the post-war world.
There was the perceived external threat from
Western capitalist hostility to communism; there
was the unwillingness of the majority of the
people of Eastern and central Europe to accept,
unless imposed by Soviet-backed force, the
communist transformation of their society and
economy; and finally there was the danger that a
greater awareness of Western standards of life
would create dissatisfaction among the Russian
people, who had been conditioned into believing
that they were building up a better and more
just society. Stalin, moreover, realised that in
the aftermath of the war the Soviet Union, with
its Western territories devastated, was in an
appallingly weak state and that to provide for
security and reconstruction would demand once
more heavy sacrifices from the Russian people.
In Eastern and central Europe the Soviets
imposed a communist minority on the majority,
and this minority then faced strong popular
opposition to its social and economic policies, as
well as the opposition of the Catholic Church,
which retained the adherence of the majority of
Poles and Hungarians. To this opposition was
added the fierce nationalism of these peoples –
the one characteristic they shared, whether Poles,
Yugoslavs or Albanians. Only the Yugoslavs and
Albanians had escaped direct Soviet control.
Elsewhere the leaders of the satellite communist
regimes soon set up by Stalin, the ‘little Stalins’,
were not only hated but were regarded by their
own people as puppets of their Soviet masters. All
this discontent within the Soviet sphere of power
was a source of instability. It would need little to
transform it into open revolt, even without
Western assistance. The very existence of the West
on the borders of the extended Soviet empire was
a provocation, irrespective of Western policies.
The inherent problems of ruling over the
Soviet Union itself presented the gravest problems
to the isolated communist elite. The war against
the Germans had revealed strong nationalist feel-
ings in the Ukraine and elsewhere and much dis-
affection in the face of Stalinist rule. On the other
hand, the horrors of German occupation and
national fervour had also helped to unite the
peoples of the USSR. Significantly, the war came
to be known not as the great communist struggle
against capitalism in its fascist manifestation, but
as the Great Patriotic War, thus emphasising the
nationalism and patriotism which transcended the