In the postwar conferences of Foreign Ministers, the Soviet Union concentrated on procedural matters such as priority of agenda items and blocked Western proposals while Moscow-trained Communists, backed by the Soviet Army, usurped power in Rumania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Albania, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and East Germany. In 1947 at Moscow the Soviet Union refused to disclose basic information about its zone of occupation in Germany, leading to suspicions, later proved correct, that vast areas were being stripped of every transportable item for shipment to the U.S.S.R. These facts help explain the unwillingness of the Soviet authorities to cooperate in establishing a balanced economy for Germany as agreed upon at Potsdam. This was a most serious setback to recovery in Europe and to development of a self-supporting German economy, even at a minimum level.
The fate of the Eastern European states, which were forced to become satellites because of the presence or proximity of Soviet military forces, demonstrates the difference between pledges of the Soviet Union at Yalta and its subsequent actions.
The United States could not avoid interpreting these Soviet deeds as indicative of the real policies of the U.S.S.R. in spite of Soviet promises and pronouncements. Soviet disregard for solemn agreements and principles shattered the good will felt for the U.S.S.R. among the American people and convinced every Western government of the need for defense against the threat of further Soviet expansionism.
The “cold war” was declared and the Communist postwar line set by Stalin in his Moscow speech of February 9, 1946. In this speech Stalin made it clear to the world that the wartime alliance with the Western powers had been dictated by expediency and was not to be interpreted as an indication that cooperation between the Soviet Union and its former allies was lasting or would continue.
He reminded his listeners that Communist doctrine considered that war was inevitable until capitalist countries had been taken over by Communist parties, and he outlined the economic plans by which the Soviet Union should lay the basis on which it could fight the “inevitable” future war.
He boasted of the might of the Soviet state and of its wartime achievements and informed the world that the Soviet Union would not rest content with the victory in World War II. His demand for recognition that “the Soviet social order is a form of organization, a society superior to any non-Soviet social order” was not lost on non-Soviet peoples. They clearly discerned the renewal of the Communist call for maximum efforts by Communist partisans to achieve domination over all the peoples of the world.
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