The plans of all the imperialist powers had backfired. Churchill had completely miscalculated, but so had Stalin, Hitler and Roosevelt. Hitler believed Soviet resistance could easily be broken. General Halder, chief of the German General Staff, expected the USSR to be defeated within four weeks. Von Ribbentrop, German foreign minister, thought eight weeks, and the US War Department between four and 12 weeks. The British military gave Russia six weeks at most. Yet the war – despite the Stalin regime and the terrible sacrifices – demonstrated beyond question the viability of the new property relations established by the October Revolution.

The victory of the USSR shattered the perspectives of the Allies, who had originally hoped that Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Russia would slug it out until mutually exhausted. They would then march in and clean up. In the words of Harry Truman: “If we see that Germany is winning the war, we ought to help Russia, and if Russia is winning, we ought to help Germany, and in that way let them kill as many as possible.” (Quoted in D. Horowitz, The Free World Colossus, p. 61.)

On May Day 1945 the Red flag was flying over the Reichstag in Berlin. A few days later, the German High Command surrendered. But already the imperialists were manoeuvring against the Soviet Union. The dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the Americans at a moment when Japan was clearly defeated and already suing for peace, served no military role and was a clear warning to the USSR from its ‘allies’.

Stalin had attempted to come to an accommodation with the imperialist powers between 1944 and 1945 at the Big Three Conferences at Tehran, Moscow, Yalta and Potsdam. Churchill noted down his conversation with Stalin in October 1944:

The moment was apt for business, so I said, “Let us settle about our affairs in the Balkans. Your armies are in Romania and Bulgaria. We have interests, missions, and agents there. Don’t let us get at cross-purposes in small ways. So far as Britain and Russia are concerned, how would it do for you to have 90 per cent predominance in Romania, for us to have 90 per cent of the say in Greece, and go 50-50 about Yugoslavia?” While this was being translated, I wrote out on a half sheet of paper:

Romania: Russia 90 per cent – The others 10 per cent

Greece: Great Britain (in accord with USA) 90 per cent – Russia 10 per cent

Yugoslavia: 50-50 per cent

Hungary: 50-50 per cent

Bulgaria: Russia 75 per cent – The others 25 per cent

I pushed this across to Stalin, who had by then heard the translation. There was a slight pause. Then he took his blue pencil and made a large tick upon it, and passed it back to us. It was all settled in no more time than it takes to set down… After this there was a long silence. The pencilled paper lay in the centre of the table. At length I said, “might it not be thought rather cynical if it seemed we had disposed of these issues, so fateful to millions of people, in such an off-hand manner? Let us burn the paper.” “No, you keep it” said Stalin. (W. Churchill, Triumph and Tragedy, pp. 227-8.)

Thus, certain countries would fall under the spheres of influence of either Stalinism or the imperialists. Stalin washed his hands of the revolution in Greece. He told the Yugoslav partisan leader Milovan Djilas: “The uprising in Greece will have to fold up … [it] must be stopped, and as quickly as possible.” (M. Djilas, Conversations with Stalin, p. 140-1.) And according to Churchill, “Stalin adhered strictly and faithfully to our agreement of October and in all the long weeks of fighting the Communists in the streets of Athens not one word of reproach came from Pravda or Izvestia”. He wanted Mao to make a modus vivendi with Chiang Kai-shek. In Yugoslavia Stalin favoured the restoration of the monarchy under King Peter.

As predicted by Trotsky, the war ended in a revolutionary upheaval, with the workers in the advanced countries moving in the direction of socialist revolution and the tremendous awakening of the colonial masses. But this mighty movement of millions was headed off, on the European continent by the Stalinists, and in Britain by the Labour government. In many parts of occupied Europe, the Communist Parties had gained mass support as a result of the courageous role of the Communist Party workers in the resistance to the Nazis after 1941.

The masses looked to the Communist Parties for a revolutionary way out after the bloody lessons of the war. But Stalin had other ideas. On instructions from Moscow, the Communist Party leaders entered bourgeois coalition governments in France, Italy, Belgium and Finland as a means of blocking the revolutionary movement of the workers. This failure of the working class of the advanced capitalist countries to take power was the political premise for the subsequent recovery and post-war upswing. It also shaped and predetermined the fate of the revolutions that occurred in the colonial countries.