The Road to Berlin (72 page)

The new negotiator brought with him plans for an Allied airborne operation in Rumania and tried to turn the terms of the armistice settlement even more generously in Rumania’s favour, angling for an Allied presence by insisting that a successful break with the Axis required Allied (Anglo-American) help, with troops on the ground. Nothing came of this manoeuvre. Inside Rumania, Iuliu Maniu stepped up his contacts with the Communists, and in Moscow the exiled Communists pressed—equally unavailingly—for a speedy Soviet invasion followed by a straight communist ‘takeover’ involving the setting up of a communist government. This, however, did not conform to Stalin’s style in 1944: there was no point in ‘frightening’ his allies for nothing, and what he wanted was control, not immediate and possibly troublesome ‘communization’. To pull the Rumanian Communist Party together, Emil Bodnaras, a former lieutenant of the Rumanian Army who defected to the Soviet Union in 1937, was sent from Russia to Rumania with orders to put the Party on its feet, to forge links with the Rumanian military and to strengthen ties with the opposition. Early in April Bodnaras, Gheorghiu-Dej, Parvalescu and other communist leaders convened a meeting in a prison hospital, decided upon the dismissal of Foris as party leader and elected Gheorghiu-Dej in his place. Bodnaras, Parvalescu and Ranghet received ‘authorization’ to continue talks with the opposition groups committed to pulling Rumania out of the war—a sudden, unexpected resurgence of the Rumanian Communist Party which went ahead without any reference to the exile party group in Moscow and the party bureau headed by Ana Pauker and Vasile Luca.

In Cairo Visoianu met with no success in trying to pull the armistice negotiations his way, and time had practically run out. On 1 June the Soviet government demanded that Iuliu Maniu accept the terms as they stood before the talks went any further; Visoianu could only agree, but having agreed he then demanded that three Allied parachute divisions be dropped into Rumania. Coming at a time when there was heavy pressure for troops owing to landings in France and almost at the instant when Eden informed Gusev of American approval for the Anglo-Soviet plan for Greece and Rumania, the automatic rejection of the Visoianu plan was inevitable. For all practical purposes the Cairo talks closed down and the Soviet Union went about seeking an independent solution of the Rumanian question. The decline of Soviet interest in any further haggling with Iuliu Maniu was accompanied by fresh initiatives in Stockholm, where armistice talks had earlier slumped. Early in June Madame Kollontai presented favourable terms directed at the Antonescus themselves, though this fresh turn to events did nothing to stem Soviet suspicions even as Soviet diplomats worked to tug Rumania deftly out of the war on terms suggesting a direct act of capitulation to the USSR. An atmosphere becoming increasingly charged was not improved by the Soviet accusation aimed at the Prime Minister that a British mission had gone secretly to Rumania in pursuit of ‘purposes unknown to the Soviet government’; the British Ambassador in Moscow presented an official denial to Molotov without visible effect or amelioration. And if the Russians suspected British double-dealing
over Rumania, the British soon had cause to fear foul play over Soviet intervention in the Greek political situation.

The compulsion behind the Soviet attempt to seek its own ‘separate’ armistice agreement with Rumania lay in the overall weakness of Soviet political influence in the country, which in turn necessitated a disproportionate reliance on contacts cultivated through and by the British. Those contacts proved to be within a ‘bourgeois’ and pro-Western opposition, the very popularity of which obliged Antonescu to allow it to continue in existence. Of Rumanian anti-Russian feeling the Russians could be in no doubt; a persistent, historical anti-Russian sentiment within the Rumanian ruling group and the intelligentsia was intensified by the Soviet occupation of Bessarabia and the northern Bukovina in 1940. It was almost inevitable that the Soviet leadership should find in Maniu’s procrastinations signs of a ‘plot’, complete with secret conspiracies and missions, to use Rumania as an instrument in an anti-Soviet power play, and the signal weakness of Soviet influence in the country (reflected in the depressed and divided condition of the Communist Party), increased these fears. The right move for Stalin was not to listen to the hysterical pleas for ‘communization’ advanced by the exiled Communists, but to get his own men into the country and on to the ground.

Soviet interest in achieving a separate diplomatic
coup
through negotiation with Antonescu, the irritation at their enforced dependence on British contacts and obvious scepticism over Iuliu Maniu’s ability to deliver the goods he dangled so enticingly—all contributed to killing the Cairo talks as a means of drawing Rumania out of the war. Iuliu Maniu, the National Peasant Party leader imbued with pro-Western sentiments, placed little faith in underground activity and sabotage campaigns, thus giving slight assurance to those Communists who wished to ‘activate’ popular resistance to the government. The very foundation of his policy rested on one unwavering principle, that the clean sweep he planned and for which he tried to summon Allied—Western—help would not mean committing Rumania to an act of desperate resistance and revolt against Germany. He sought ‘insurance’ against Russian encroachment, the threat of which was real enough. The indecision which finally wrecked his policy fed on the illusion that he could actually talk terms with the Western Allies, a game that the Russians were not prepared to play; instead, they turned to hasty attempts to build up their own influence in the country as and when they could manage it, and tried negotiation not only with the opposition but with the Rumanian government itself.

Stalin’s ‘grand strategy’ did not admit of much generosity towards his communist associates if they stood in the way of the ‘accommodation’ he sought temporarily with his major partners in the alliance. Over Poland he chose to use the Communists as wedges to force ‘accommodation’ on his terms; in Greece they became prime instruments in implementing the bargain with the British at the cost of all their hopes for a ‘takeover’; and over Yugoslavia Stalin showed himself highly suspicious of the uncompromising attitude of the partisan leadership. Milovan Djilas, a member of the first Yugoslav communist mission to Moscow in the spring of
1944, found himself baffled by and deeply uneasy at Stalin’s attitude, which showed all too brutally that ‘he trusted nothing but what he held in his fist, and everyone beyond the control of his police was a potential enemy’. The total deviousness of these methods, compounded of unending suspicion of the British and complete contempt for the ‘peasant’ politicians of these small states, nevertheless worked to bring the whole Anglo-Soviet undertaking to the point of collapse. Late in July the Prime Minister, already smarting under ‘American official reluctance’ at the Anglo-Soviet deal, feared now that ‘Russian bad faith’ must be added to the catalogue of misfortune that had befallen it, an impression nourished by the ‘subterfuge’ so recently practised by the Russians in dispatching a military mission to
ELAS
.

On 25 July a Soviet aircraft cleared for a training flight from the base at Bari suddenly set course for Tito’s headquarters in Yugoslavia; once at partisan headquarters, the aircraft picked up a number of officers from the Soviet mission working with the Yugoslav partisans and flew on to an airfield in Thessaly. The next day Colonel Popov and his colleagues arrived at
ELAS
headquarters, much to the anger and dismay of the British government, on whose behalf Eden delivered a sharp protest to Gusev. Molotov found the matter much too trifling to waste time on, an
hauteur
that hid the details of a complex Soviet operation, crammed with subterfuge and aimed not at the British interests but at the Greek militants themselves. The role of the Soviet mission to
ELAS
proved to be policing the unpalatable decision already made in Moscow, deferring all and any plans for a communist
coup
in Greece. Clearly the gears of Soviet policy began to grind more speedily after Stalin received news of official American acceptance of the Anglo-Soviet division of responsibility over Greece and Rumania. He was never inclined to look a gift horse in the mouth, and here was one with much to recommend it: in return for relinquishing ‘responsibility’ in the maelstrom of Greek politics, he could anticipate virtual freedom of action in Rumania, the same in Bulgaria and a powerful say in Yugoslav affairs, thus enclosing them ‘in his fist’ and being able at the same time to display his commitment to inter-Allied unity, no small consideration at a time when the Polish question was bringing dangerous discord in relations.

Soviet disengagement in Greece went forward brusquely and with blunt efficiency. Not long after the Soviet military mission received its orders to fly to
ELAS
and to cajole rather than incite (General Saraphis denied that the Soviet officers ever offered or supplied any effective assistance), Soviet diplomats in Cairo were reportedly advising members of
EAM
to show themselves more accommodating and to join the Papandhreou government.
EAM–ELAS
was being squeezed from both sides. The presence of the Soviet officers in Greece made itself felt (or so it was deduced by Colonel Woodhouse, commander of the British Military Mission) when the ‘Committee of Liberation’, the
PEEA
, dropped its demands for representation in any new government from seven to five possible members, though the Committee still insisted that Papandhreou was unacceptable as prime minister.
Within a few days the
PEEA
then turned a complete political somersault and agreed to enter the Papandhreou government, on those very terms it had so bitterly assailed and adamantly opposed. What Colonel Woodhouse described as ‘the bellicose wing’ of the Greek Communist Party (the
KKE)
was brought under a tight rein by Moscow: early in September six representatives of the
KKE
, heavily ‘advised’ by Soviet diplomats in Cairo, duly entered the Greek coalition government. The
PEEA
disappeared in a puff of smoke, and at the end of the month communist guerrilla forces (along with other guerrilla bands) placed themselves under formal government command (and thus effectively under British control). Soviet intervention in the affairs of
EAM–ELAS
contributed to postponing rather than provoking a head-on clash with the British, leaving the generals Saraphis and Zervas ironically and uneasily locked in a joint command.

Not long before this clamp was fastened on the
KKE
, the Yugoslav Communists were discovering the self-interested rigour that dominated Soviet policy and Stalin’s outlook, much of it conveyed through Milovan Djilas’s remarkable picture of the Soviet leader at war acquired at first hand during the visit of the Yugoslav mission to Moscow in the late spring of 1944. The British had already burned themselves badly in the fires of the Yugoslav domestic resistance movement, which at an early stage developed into a civil war between Mihailovic’s anti-communist Cetniks and Tito’s partisans with their pronounced communist leanings. Despairing of ever reconciling these two antagonistic groups, and aware that Tito’s guerrillas were making a determined effort to fight the Germans, the Prime Minister in 1943 finally came round to the view that British support must be withdrawn from Draza Milhailovic and full backing given to Tito, even though this must in the long run bring complete communist control of Serbia. The Yugoslav government in exile (now lodged in Cairo to be nearer the fighting men) protested bitterly at the British decision, questioning the ‘irrefutable’ evidence of General Draza Mihailovic’s collaboration with the Germans; the Yugoslav Prime Minister M. Puric insisted that the effect could only be to unleash communism in Yugoslavia and promote peasant resistance to it, at the same time putting the blame on British propaganda for the triumph of Tito’s partisans.

This sombre situation, made more tragic by a terrifyingly brutal German war of extermination waged against the Yugoslav ‘bandits’ and by the atrocities perpetrated in a hideously unbridled civil war, produced political problems of great complexity. Already in October 1943, on hearing of the Foreign Ministers’ meeting in Moscow, Tito nailed his colours to the mast, sending a signal to Moscow for the attention of ‘the Soviet government’ to the effect that ‘the Anti-Fascist Council of Yugoslavia and Supreme Headquarters of the National Liberation Army have empowered me [Tito] to declare [that] we acknowledge neither the Yugoslav Government nor the King abroad …’, followed by the categorical statement that ‘we will not allow them to return to Yugoslavia because that would mean civil war’, adding that ‘the only legal government of the people at the present time is the National Liberation Committee led by the Anti-Fascist
Council’. The Moscow conference, however, scarcely had time to come to grips with the Yugoslav problem. Such talk of it as there was remained desultory, with Eden informing Molotov of the presence of a British mission to Tito’s partisans and Molotov coming out with the intriguing news that the Soviet government might well send a mission to General Draza Mihailovic. Though the Russians passed over this first Yugoslav initiative in silence, ignoring the advertisement to ‘the Soviet government’, the subsequent step—the resolutions of the Anti-Fascist Council of Yugoslavia
(AVNOJ)
passed in the Bosnian town of Jajce in November 1943—did not escape the notice of Stalin who took it as almost a personal affront. On the eve of the Jajce conference Tito decided with his
Politburo
what it was politic to tell Moscow; the Yugoslavs mixed discretion with valour, disclosing that the Anti-Fascist Council proposed to form a national committee to act as a provisional executive but omitting any mention of the intention to declare the royalist government illegal and to ban the King from the country.

The Jajce conference duly set up a Supreme Legislative Council and an Executive Committee for the Liberation of Yugoslavia presided over by Tito himself upon whom the title ‘Marshal of Yugoslavia’ was bestowed; the National Council, which was for all practical purposes a provisional government, stipulated King Peter’s exclusion from Yugoslavia until the Yugoslavs could themselves decide what form of government they wanted. The effect upon Stalin was to make him ‘quite unusually angry’, seeing in the Yugoslav initiative ‘a stab in the back for the Soviet Union and for the Teheran decisions’, in other words a threat to the arrangements he had so painstakingly concluded with the Western powers. But the latter did not take fright at the Jajce resolutions, and nothing ruffled that splendid, if momentary calm in the Big Power relations. The way was open for Stalin to make the necessary adjustment in his position. Late in December ‘Free Yugoslavia’ broadcasting from the Soviet Union demanded recognition for the National Committee and the winding up of the exile government. Early in 1944 a Soviet military mission headed by Lt.-Gen. Korneyev, with Maj.-Gen. Gorshkov second in command, finally appeared at Tito’s headquarters, though the refusal of the Soviet officers to make use of the normal method of entry—a parachute drop—obliged the
RAF
to deliver the Soviet party in two Horsa gliders, the whole operation being covered by a fighter escort. General Korneyev and his colleagues arrived to a rapturous welcome, but all too soon it was apparent that they had brought nothing in the way of badly needed supplies. Since they could promise only the delivery of token loads, the enthusiasm cooled. The Russians for their part were chastened to find that they would not be taking command of the Yugoslav partisans (for all Gorshkov’s disparagement of Tito’s guerrillas compared with the Soviet brand), so that ‘the disenchantment was mutual’.