The European Recovery Program, commonly known as Marshall Plan, is usually remembered for the economic support provided by the United States for the rehabilitation of European countries ravaged by the Second World War. But the US was motivated by more than just economics and today a far more important role is accredited to the Marshall Plan. By way of example, Andreas Enderlin points to two influential works dealing with the Marshall Plan and its implications for the Cold War. The publications were published in 1995 and 2005, the ten-year gap alone promising two differential points of view on the motives that lay behind the Marshall Plan.
United Europe
Published in 1995, Klaus Schwabe examines traditional view of the Marshall Plan in his work Der Marshall-Plan und Europa. In a speech given in 1947, the then US Secretary of State, George Marshall (pictured), declared that the ‘official goal’ of the Marshall Plan was the unification of Europe. The program met with great approval in the United States. One noteworthy supporter of the idea of a unified Europe was a future Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, but who soon realized, along with others, that the Soviet Union would render a united Europe impossible. So instead the US concentrated on forming a united Western Europe, motivated, to use Schwabe’s words, by a ‘rational utilization of Europe’s economic potential’ and an ‘alternative for Europeans against communist propaganda’.
Last week on 22 November saw the death of Lana Peters in Wisconsin. To those who came into contact with her, she was simply a lonesome frail 85-year-old with a rather strange accent. But she was, in fact, once known by the name of Svetlana Stalin and she was the daughter of Joseph Stalin.
Peters’ arrival in the US in 1967 gave the West a huge propaganda coup – the defection of Stalin’s own daughter was the ultimate proof of how terrible life was behind the Iron Curtain. She had even been prepared to leave behind her two adult children, aged 22 and 17, in the Soviet Union.
‘I have come here to seek self-expression’
In her first US press conference, in 1967, she acknowledged the father’s monstrous rule but insisted that the blame for the murder of millions of Soviet citizens could not be laid purely on one man – it was the regime and its ideology. ‘I have come here to seek the self-expression that has been denied me for so long in Russia,’ she said. Shortly afterwards, she wrote Twenty Letters To A Friend, which went on to become a bestseller. A follow-up autobiography, Only One Year, sold equally well. With time she became more critical of her past – she publicly burnt her Soviet passport and accused her father of being ‘a moral and spiritual monster’.
Fifty years ago today, 31 October 1961, a small but symbolic event took place in Moscow. The embalmed body of former Soviet dictator, Joseph Stalin, was re-interred behind the Kremlin Wall. It was a symptomatic relegation for the man once known as the Great Leader who, for the eight years since his death, had lain on public display alongside Vladimir Lenin, founder of the Soviet state. The man who ordered that Stalin be reburied under several layers of concrete, was his successor and former protégé, Nikita Khrushchev.
But no amount of concrete can keep down the ghost of Joseph Stalin.
There is no excuse for repression
Fifty years on, few speak of Khrushchev. But Stalin’s shadow still looms large over Russian society. A poll run in April this year, by the VTsIOM (All-Russia Centre for the Study of Public Opinion), found much support for Stalin, the man who ‘received the country with a wooden plough, and left it with a nuclear missile shield’.
In 2009, a new plaque was unveiled at a Moscow metro station that included a line from the former Soviet national anthem: ‘Stalin brought us up to be loyal to people, inspired us to labour and feats’. Imagine today seeing a quote from Hitler in the Berlin underground?
It gets worse – in July this year, a new statue of Stalin was unveiled in the Russian town of Penza, 390 miles southeast of Moscow. Sixty years ago, Khrushchev went to great pains to have two Stalin statues removed from the same town.
If the ‘History Will Absolve Me Trial’ was the stage for Fidel Castro’s oratory skills, the prison letters are valuable historic documents that shed light on the revolutionary and thinker, who paved the way for revolution from a cell in the prison on the Isles of Pines.
On October 16, 1953, Fidel was sentenced to 15 years in prison for orchestrating the Moncada Barracks attack. (Pictured is Castro on his arrest in July 1953 following the attack). Not one resigned to defeat, Fidel sought the opportunity to further his cause and coordinate strategy for the next phase of the revolution.
In a meticulous manner which was also seething with passion for a cause, he sought to portray the injustices of the Batista regime (Fulgencio Batista, President of Cuba 1940 to 1944, and 1952 to 1959), the illegitimacy of the presidency, compassion for the fallen revolutionaries at Moncada, and political propaganda aimed at enhancing his philosophy. His gift for erudition left Batista’s torture tactics on the sidelines. If anything, the trial had served to forward Fidel’s name to the people, the majority of whom sought or yearned for the end of the tyrannical regime.
A friend of mine has just returned to England after an adventurous trip around south-eastern Europe, taking in the sites of Montenegro, Croatia and Albania. She was very complimentary about the first two but rather damning about the latter. My colleague is Canadian and also fairly young, having been born in the seventies, so she asked me who was this guy the Albanians kept talking about, a guy called Norman Wisdom.
A household name
Aha, I said, Sir Norman, 95 years-old and a classic British comedy icon. OK, Wisdom’s slapstick humour looks a bit dated now and not really suited to our sophisticated tastes but he remains a household name in Britain – well, to anyone over 40. And, it seems, a household name in Albania.
During the long, forty-four year rule of Stalinist dictator, Enver Hoxha, Wisdom’s films were amongst the few bits of Western culture or entertainment that were allowed in this small, cut-off, forgotten country called Albania, or, to use its correct title of the time, the People’s Socialist Republic of Albania. Films like Trouble In Store, A Stitch In Time and The Early Bird, made in the fifties and early sixties, had Wisdom playing the hapless character, Norman Pitkin, fighting against the big men in suits smoking on cigars. Hoxha saw Pitkin as the ultimate proletarian, waging a one-man war against the capitalist world of corporations and big money. This, the dictator dictated, was appropriate Communist viewing for Albania’s comedy-starved masses and, as a result, our very own Norman became a huge hit in Albania.
The world’s longest serving leader has survived through more than most – infuriating his opponents for almost half a century, and probably beyond. Despite hundreds of assassination attempts, the US embargo, sabotage, the assassination of Che Guevara and ongoing slander, Fidel Castro remains committed as ever to the revolution.
Born on August 13, 1926, to Lina Ruz and Angel Castro, Fidel was exposed to poverty and its ramifications from an early age. His family was wealthy – Angel was a landowner and had many peasants working for him. Fidel grew up, in a way more privileged than other children, at the same time disregarding his family’s social status and befriending children from peasant families as well.
Fidel went to school in Biran, already displaying brilliance and an excellent memory. At the suggestion of the schoolmistress, Fidel was sent to her home in Santiago de Cuba with the promise of furthering his education. However, this promise never materialised – indeed Fidel states that they never had any lessons. He managed to escape and return home, together with his brother Ramon.
June 26, 1948, saw the start of the Berlin Airlift, a direct consequence of the Berlin Blockade. But what were these two events that were so pivotal in the early post-war years of the Cold War?
Misery and want
“The seeds of totalitarian regimes,” said US President, Harry S. Truman, a year earlier in March 1947, “are nurtured by misery and want.” In other words, communism appealed to those suffering from hardship. Remove the hardship; you remove the appeal of communism.
Known as the Truman Doctrine, the President believed that communism had to be contained, and that America could not, as it did after the First World War, turn its back on Europe – isolationism was no longer an option. Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, which brought America into the war, was proof that physical distance was no longer a guarantee of safety. In the post-war era a stable Europe and the future of the ‘free world’ was a necessity.
The Marshall Plan
To alleviate the hardship, and to deprive communism its foothold, the US introduced the Marshall Plan, named after its originator, George C. Marshall, a huge package of economic aid offered to all nations of Europe. Sixteen nations of Western Europe accepted the offer, which by 1951 had amounted to $13 billion. Although offered also to Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union itself, Stalin was never going to allow American / capitalist interference with the Soviet economy, and nor would he permit his satellites.
The Marshall Plan, therefore, had the effect of reaffirming Churchill’s concept of the Iron Curtain (a phrase he coined during a speech in Missouri in March 1946) by forcing countries to decide whether their loyalties lay to the west or east.
The Marshall Plan also contributed to the unravelling of the fragile co-existence of East and West Berlin. Berlin, one hundred miles within the Soviet hemisphere, was split into four zones, one for each of the Allied powers, with the British, American and French zones in West Berlin and the Soviet zone in the east. A line of communication through East Germany linked the western zones of Berlin to West Germany.
Berlin: You cannot abandon this city and this people
In June 1948 America and Britain announced proposals for establishing a new currency, the Deutschmark, into West Berlin. This immediately caused economic chaos in the Soviet sector as people clambered to exchange their old money for the new.
The Soviets responded on June 24 by cutting off all road, rail and canal links between West Germany and West Berlin. The Berlin Blockade had begun. “People of this world,” said the Mayor of West Berlin, “look upon this city and see that you should not and cannot abandon this city and this people.”
If Stalin’s aim was to force the western powers out of Berlin, it backfired. The communication channels of land and water may have been closed off but not by air. And so began the Berlin Airlift.
During the eleven months (318 days) of the Berlin Airlift American and British planes supplied West Berlin with 1.5 million tons of supplies, a plane landing every three minutes, day and night. Three years earlier, the Allies had been dropping bombs over Berlin, now, the West Berliners joked, they were dropping potatoes.
The West may have exaggerated the plight of the West Berliners for propaganda purposes but it worked and on May 12, 1949, Stalin, knowing he couldn’t risk shooting down the planes and realising the PR disaster he’d caused, lifted the blockade.
East and West Germany
Within two weeks the political division of Germany became official with, on May 23, 1949, the formal proclamation in Bonn of the ‘Federal Republic of Germany’ ( West Germany). The formation of NATO (the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation), had been agreed a month earlier.
On October 7, 1949, in response, came the proclamation of East Germany with its somewhat misleading title, the ‘German Democratic Republic’.
It was now formal – Europe was divided into two, East and West, and was to remain so for another forty years.
June 1953, Stalin had died three months before, and a new post-Stalinist era beckoned for those trapped behind the Iron Curtain. “Socialism with a human face”. But if the workers of East Germany thought that Stalin’s death meant change, they were soon disabused as the East German premier, Walter Ulbricht, strove to increase industrial output.
Walter Ulbricht’s plan
East Germany’s economy was stagnating and Ulbricht (pictured), a Stalinist to the core, proposed a range of measures to pump-up the economy – increase taxes, increase prices and increase production by 10% – but with no corresponding increase in wages. If the new quotas were not met, the workers were told, wages would be cut. The Kremlin viewed these proposals with concern, advising Ulbricht to tone down the measures and slow down the intense pace of industrialisation that the East German leader insisted was necessary.
For the workers of the German Democratic Republic this was a lose-lose scenario.
Citizens of post-war Eastern Europe they did as their governments ordered, any protest was silent, whispered in dark corners. But this, these measures, was too much, Ulbricht had gone too far.
Strike
On June 16, 1953, East Berlin construction workers downed tools. The following morning, June 17, the strike had spread with over 40,000 demonstrators marching through the capital. Their demands at first focussed on the economic – a return to the old work quotas. But then as the strike spread to other cities – Leipzig, Dresden and throughout East Germany, their voices gained strength and their hearts courage. They demanded increasingly more – free elections, a new government, democracy.
This was no longer a strike but an uprising.
Soviet intervention
Ulbricht turned to the Kremlin. Laventry Beria, Stalin’s former Chief of Secret Police and the man poised to take over now that that Stalin was dead, sent in the tanks. The crews, 20,000 troops based in East Germany, were told by Beria not to “spare bullets”. This was a revolution and it needed crushing. (Six months later Beria was dead - executed by his Kremlin colleagues).
The tanks moved in and in East Berlin, along the Unter den Linden, and alongside the East German police, they opened fire. People, demonstrators, civilians fell. How many were killed no one knows for sure. The figures vary considerably between sources based in the West and those of the East. But at least 40 were killed and 400 wounded. Within just 24 hours of starting the uprising was finished.
And then started the reprisals – thousands arrested, tortured and interned. During the Cold War the human face of socialism only went so far and today, 57 years on, Germany still remembers the uprising of 1953.
50 years ago today, April 12, 1961, Yuri Gagarin became the first human being to venture into space.
Less than four years before, on October 5, 1957, the Soviets had launched the first satellite, or Sputnik, into space, followed a month later, on November 3, the fortieth anniversary of the Russian Revolution, with a second, this time with a cosmonaut of sorts on board – Laika, a dog. Animal lovers throughout the world protested but Laika proved the first of many canines launched into space by the Soviets.
‘Flopnik’
The Americans were shocked by how far the Soviets had raced ahead, and more so when their own launch, on December 6, 1957, resulted in a humiliating failure when their rocket exploded on take-off. ‘Flopnik,’ teased the press. America felt it was fast becoming a ‘second-rate power’ in the Cold War behind the Soviet Union. In response, the US formed NASA and did finally succeed in launching its own rocket in January 1958.
But the ultimate humiliation came on April 12, 1961, when the Soviet cosmonaut, Yuri Gagarin (pictured), became the first person in space in a round-the-world flight lasting 108 minutes. Originally, the flight was intended to take place on the 13th, but Soviet premier, Nikita Khrushchev, feeling superstitious, brought it forward a day.
Gagarin was the successful candidate from a list of 20 possible names. The fact that he came from humble origins certainly helped. Also, on a more practical level, his height, or lack of it, (5 ft, 2 inches / 1.57 metres) was considered a benefit within the claustophobic confines of the capsule.
The Motherland Hears
Although Gagarin was later to claim, “I was never nervous during the space flight – there were no grounds for it”, not all the canine cosmonauts returned alive, and it was certainly a very high-risk project.
Gagarin’s fully-automated rocket was launched from Kazakhstan soon after nine on the morning of April 12th. Although fully controlled from the ground, Gagarin had been given a sealed envelope containing the necessary codes in order to take control of his rocket – should the need have arisen. But for most of the 108 minutes, all was under control and Gagarin was able to report back, “The Earth is blue… how wonderful. It is amazing” and whistle a tune by Shostakovich, “The Motherland Hears, The Motherland Knows”.
Towards the end of the flight, however, the temperature within the capsule soared and Gagarin almost lost consciousness. But on time, Gagarin was able to eject and parachute down came to Earth, landing safely in the Volga River. Khrushchev repeatedly asked, “Is he alive? Is he alive?” When told that his cosmonaut had landed safely, the celebrations began.
With dashing good looks and a radiant smile, 27-year-old Gagarin returned to Earth a hero. Khrushchev was delighted. He had long pumped money into the Soviet space programme, as had the Americans in theirs. Supremacy in space, so the superpowers believed, equated to control of the Earth.
Khrushchev and Gagarin toured around Moscow in an open-top car. Gagarin became feted wherever he went (see the brief video clip below) and was made Hero of the Soviet Union.
Gagarin – the National Treasure
Afterwards, Gagarin was prohibited from going into space again – he had become too much of a national treasure. So he began training as a fighter pilot.
It was during a training flight, on March 27, 1968, that Gagarin’s MiG-15 plane crashed and 34-year-old Gagarin, together with his co-pilot, died. He was buried within the Kremlin walls.
Inquests were held and conspiracies abounded but no one could be sure of the exact circumstances that caused Gagarin’s death. But aviation specialists from Russia have recently, after almost a decade of investigations, concluded that an open air vent within Gagarin’s plane caused him to panic and crash.
Ultimately, it was a sad and premature end to a glorious life for the hero with the beguiling smile.
Forty years ago today, on April 10, the simple game of table tennis marked the beginning of a thaw in the diplomatic freeze that had existed between the US and China for over 20 years.
In April 1971 the US ping-pong team was in Nagoya, Japan, for the 31st World Table Tennis Championships, and following a team practice 19-year-old Californian student, Glenn Cowan, missed the team bus. Zhuang Zedong, three times world champion, on seeing Cowan’s plight, offered the American a seat on the Chinese team bus.
“The ping heard round the world.”
Although talking to a foreigner was deemed a crime in China, the two men, talking through an interpreter found a rapport. Zedong gave the American a silk gown by way of a present, and invited the American team to play a friendly championship in China. This seemingly innocuous invitation has to be seen in the context of the time – no American had stepped on Chinese soil since Chairman Mao had come to power 22 years earlier in 1949. Time magazine called it “The ping heard round the world.”
Published in 1995, Klaus Schwabe examines traditional view of the Marshall Plan in his work Der Marshall-Plan und Europa. In a speech given in 1947, the then US Secretary of State, George Marshall (pictured), declared that the ‘official goal’ of the Marshall Plan was the unification of Europe. The program met with great approval in the United States. One noteworthy supporter of the idea of a unified Europe was a future Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, but who soon realized, along with others, that the Soviet Union would render a united Europe impossible. So instead the US concentrated on forming a united Western Europe, motivated, to use Schwabe’s words, by a ‘rational utilization of Europe’s economic potential’ and an ‘alternative for Europeans against communist propaganda’.
