On History: Tariq Ali and Oliver Stone in Conversation

^{Chapter 3} The Soviet Union and Its Satellite States

Oliver Stone: We’ve talked about some of the cataclysmic events after World War II when the West expressed itself aggressively in changing governments. And we mustn’t forget what happened in Greece in 1947. Could you talk about that?

Tariq Ali: Well, the Greek civil war was a very vicious, bloody war involving virtually every single family in Greece. Families were divided, families split up.

Like the Spanish Civil War?

Like the Spanish Civil War. The Greeks still call it “Churchill’s War” because Churchill was so attached to the Greek right and to the Greek royal family that he did not want that country to be changed in any way after the war. The Russians had done the deal at Yalta, deciding that Greece was to be part of the Western sphere of influence. And Stalin was anything if not daft-minded when sticking to his deals. So he told the Greeks you have to behave yourselves. But a group of independent Greeks—they were communists, but more sympathetic to Tito and the Yugoslavs than to Stalin—led by a legendary leader, Aris Velouchiotis, said, we’re going to continue on fighting. So, the war continued. The Russians couldn’t do much about it, but Churchill did. And it was prosecuted with real viciousness and vigor until they defeated the communists.

That war still has echoes today. Recently I was in a part of Greece called Pelion, near Salonika. We were walking through a village, and a Greek friend said there was a big massacre in this village during the civil war, and this is the cemetery for all the communists who died. These events don’t go away, you know. They stay. People remember them. Then something else happens, an eruption totally unrelated to that war, and all these things come up again. A police officer who ordered police to fire on student protesters, his father fought for the right in the civil war. History never goes away, which is why, when I’m speaking especially to younger people, I always say to them that history is present. You may not know it, but almost everything that happens is related to something in the past. You can’t understand the present otherwise.

In Greece didn’t Churchill nakedly hand over British military power to the Americans, saying you finish the job?

Exactly. Though to be technically accurate, the handover was conducted by his Labour Party successor, Clement Attlee, who was under left-wing pressure on this issue from his own party and was relieved to hand over the baby and the filthy bathwater to Truman. The same thing happened in Greece as happened in Saudi Arabia, as happened in other parts of the world where decaying empires handed over their functions to the United States. The United States took over the Greek civil war, and they regard that as a victory. They won that civil war. And many of the officers who carried out the coup d’état in Greece in 1967, imposing a military dictatorship, had fought in the civil war on the side of the West and had been friends ever since.

We’ve been talking about the Western reaction to World War II, and America’s expansion as an empire afterward, displacing the British. Can we talk about the Soviet expansion of that era? Did Soviet aggressiveness provoke a Western response?

The Soviet leadership, Stalin and his successors, were tough on their own populations, but, by and large, they were very careful not to provoke the West. They kept to the deals they had made, both during and after the war. Churchill, Stalin, and Roosevelt had agreed at Yalta that Eastern Europe, with the countries named on a piece of paper, would be a part of the Soviet sphere of influence, and the Russians then took that seriously. Whether this piece of paper should have been signed at all is another question, but it was. Then the Russians said, Eastern Europe is ours, we were attacked by the Germans through Poland, through Czechoslovakia, so we’re going to control these countries now. That’s been agreed to. And then they did something really foolish and shortsighted. The United States made big strategic mistakes, and so did the Russians. To impose the Soviet system on countries like Czechoslovakia, Poland, Romania, and Bulgaria was unnecessary and wrong. In Czechoslovakia, there actually was an election held in 1948, and the Czech Communist Party emerged as a very large political force in its own right, with the Social Democrats only marginally stronger. Now it should have been perfectly possible to maintain Soviet influence within a social democratic and communist coalition in Czechoslovakia. I think the Czech Social Democrats would have agreed to such an arrangement, but this wasn’t the way Stalin operated. Instead, you had to have a one-party state with the central committee, with a politburo, with a general secretary. That model was imposed on Eastern Europe. It was imposed on East Germany, where you also had a strong social-democratic party, which could have continued. Forcible mergers took place. So, sooner or later, people in these countries said, we don’t like this whole style of government, and you had rebellions. The first in East Berlin, the worker’s uprising in East Berlin, soon after Stalin’s death, crushed by Soviet tanks. Then you had the uprising in Hungary in 1956, crushed by Soviet tanks.

The revolt in East Berlin in 1953 was called the worker’s uprising because it was mainly the working class that said we don’t like this system and the way it’s organized. We’d like to be in power, but we’re not in power. And after the East Berlin worker’s uprising was crushed, Bertolt Brecht wrote this wonderful ten-line letter in the form of a poem to the central committee of the East German Communist Party. The poem is called “The Solution.” He said, dear comrades, it seems to me that the problem is the people:

And that question of Brecht’s can be applied to many situations. Both sides of the Cold War imposed governments they liked and deposed governments they didn’t like.

So the East Berlin uprising was crushed. Then the Hungarian uprising of 1956 was crushed. Then came, of course, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968, when Czechs were experimenting with what they called “socialism with a human face.” Big debates opened up on Czech television. For the first time you had a television network and a press that was freer than many outlets in the West. I’ll never forget seeing Czech political prisoners on a special television program confronting the prison guards and the officials who had ordered their arrest. Why did you do it? The effect this had on popular consciousness was staggering. In Czech newspapers, you had endless debates. Does socialism have to be a gray one-party state? Don’t we want socialist democracy, where people can say what they want, say what they feel? And these debates were then beginning to be smuggled in underground publications from Czechoslovakia, samizdat, into the Soviet Union itself. When print workers in the Ukraine published some of the Czech manifestos on socialism and democracy, the Russians panicked. They said, this disease must be stopped. It’s like a cancer, it could kill us unless we deal with it, and they intervened. The Soviet entry into Prague in August 1968 was, I think, the death knell of the Soviet Union itself. Many people gave up hope. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the great Soviet novelist, someone who is regarded as being very right wing, and nationalistic, was asked once, when did you give up hope that the Soviet system could be reformed? And he said on the twenty-first of August, 1968, when Leonid Brezhnev and his central committee decided to invade Czechoslovakia. For me, that was the end. And he was right. And it was the end not only for Solzhenitsyn, but for the whole system. The Soviet bureaucracy didn’t realize it then, because they never think ahead, but what they did meant that the system was bound to implode sooner or later.

Of course, another development that panicked Stalin was the emergence of an independent-minded communist leader who wasn’t prepared to do his bidding in Yugoslavia. Tito made Stalin fearful because his model was quite attractive, not just in the Balkans. The Greek communists were attracted by the Yugoslav model, as were many in Eastern Europe. They said, if Tito can be independent minded, why can’t we? Why do we have to be under the Soviet thumb? And this encouraged the crushing of dissent within the communist parties and the communist movements. In the big show trials that took place in 1948 and 1949 in Hungary, Poland, and Czechoslovakia, the charge was not simply that you were an agent of Western imperialism. You were also labeled an “agent of Titoite revisionism.” They didn’t want to lose control, and that was very shortsighted of them.

We know there was a Russian Empire in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. We know they fought Poland and various countries, but when was the Soviet Empire at its height?

The tsarist empire had been an internal empire. Russia added countries on its borders, much like the United States did in its early days. And these countries were then pretty much assimilated, though not completely assimilated. And it was only in the early 1990s that they began to want to move away. And that, too, largely because that was a direction in which the West wanted to take them. But the Eastern European countries weren’t an empire in the traditional sense, because it was largely a political empire, a socio-political empire, more than an economic one, and that’s what made it very different from the West.

Was the Soviet Union able to extract raw minerals from their satellite countries? Or you’re saying was it a trade policy that was highly favorable to the Soviet Union?

It was a trade policy, which was highly favorable to the Soviet Union in the sense that these countries were forced to buy Soviet goods or the economies were run in such a way that they were very heavily interdependent with the Soviet Union. But often the Soviet Union gave out more than it got back.

Such as in Cuba?

Cuba is a classic example of that. And even in East Germany, though they did dismantle a lot of factories in East Germany immediately after the war, so it took the East Germans a long time to recover, whereas what the United States was doing in West Germany was exactly the opposite, rebuilding the country in order to make it a showcase for the market. And they succeeded in doing that. The Russians didn’t do that.

How do you respond to the argument that, at the end of the day, the countries under the influence of the American empire to a large degree have prospered, such as Japan, and to a certain degree, Latin America, and to a certain degree elites in Africa, and certainly Western Europe—whereas the Soviet empire made Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Poland, which were rich countries at one point, poor?

Well, the argument against that is that Eastern European countries were, with the exception of Czechoslovakia, largely economically underdeveloped. Poland was a very undeveloped, largely peasant country. East Germany, of course, was part of the old Germany, but Allied bombing had destroyed Dresden, which was an East German city. The Soviet Union didn’t have the wherewithal to rebuild these countries. It was mainly interested in rebuilding itself. We have to remember that the Russians suffered more during the Second World War than any other country in Europe. You know, they lost twenty million people. Their industries were destroyed, smashed. The United States lost people, but American cities were never bombed or attacked. What the United States did after the Second World War is unique in imperial history. They rebuilt their old rivals and brought them up to speed economically. No one has ever done that before, and I doubt whether any power will do it again. And the reason they did that is because they perceived that communism was a threat. They couldn’t allow these countries to go under because they would become very susceptible to communism. They had to be built up.

The Russians provided countries with a crude but effective infrastructure, a social structure. Education was free, health was free, housing was heavily subsidized. It was a sort of public utility socialism. You didn’t have freedom, but if you were a citizen in these countries, this is what you got. And you travel to these countries now, as I sometimes do, and the number of people who come up and say to you, we miss that period because that is all gone, is legion. So they did it in their own way. And the United States did it in its own way, creating rich elites in all these countries where the conditions of the poor didn’t necessarily improve.

How about the middle class?

There was a large middle class in some of them. Not all the Latin American countries developed a large middle class, but some of them did, Brazil for instance. In the Soviet satellite states of Eastern Europe, you also saw the development of a middle class, but with constrictions and restrictions.

France certainly was very poor after the war, and it did come back.

But this is the point I’m making: all these countries came back because of the Marshall Plan. The aim of the Marshall Plan was to rebuild Western European capitalism and Japanese capitalism. Why? Because we were now in a battle to the death against the communists, who have a different social system. So we have to show them that our social and political system is much better, which is why, if you compare the media that existed in the 1950s through the 1970s in the United States, and in most of the European countries, there was far more diversity, discussion, debate on the networks, in the press than there is today. Many, many more divergent voices were allowed to write then now that they no longer have to demonstrate this to anyone. You can censor at will, you can marginalize voices you don’t like. At that time they couldn’t do this as much because they were trying to show our big rivals: this is how we’re different than you. And it was effective. Lots of these German friends said we used to watch West German television, and see people like you on it, saying things that we could never say against our government, and that had an impact on us.

Could you talk about the conflicts over the division of East and West Berlin?

The Soviet Union’s decision to impose a blockade on West Berlin in 1948 was meant to show the West that they were not totally cowed. All the pro-Soviet people had been chucked out of governments in most of Western Europe, France in particular. The Cold War had begun. And the Soviet Union thought, why don’t we make a bid for West Berlin and make Berlin the capitol of our Germany. That will show the West that we can’t be taken for granted, they can’t just ride right over us. And they imposed a blockade. Whether they really thought that they would get their way is difficult to know—I’m sure it’s in the archives somewhere—but certainly that blockade was broken. Another reason they wanted the blockade was because it was an anomaly to have Western armies in the middle of a country that had been partitioned. So there was a strategic element there. But certainly they went about it the wrong way, and they didn’t have much support.

My father was an economist. He was actually on Eisenhower’s economic staff at one point, and he worked in Berlin. He told me that the Soviets were trying to steal US currency printing plates. Apparently there was a lot of counterfeiting going on. There was disparate currencies, and the Soviets couldn’t keep their population in check or content with a black market, such as it was.

This is absolutely true. The Soviets couldn’t compete with the West economically. They certainly couldn’t compete with the United States economy, which had emerged from the Second World War much more strengthened. And so they thought, let’s end this anomaly of a Western showcase right on our doorstep.

Are you suggesting you don’t fault the Soviets for building the Berlin Wall, then?

Well, I do fault them for the wall because I think it was foolish to imagine that you can keep people in or change people’s minds by building a wall. It never works like that. We find that time and time again. If people are really determined to do something against the power that either occupies them or controls them, they find a way do it.