Russia: Historic Force

(Editor's Note: Following are excerpts of an article published in TIME magazine on February 2, 1945)

Barring the possible existence on earth of undetected saints and major prophets, about the most important person in the world last week was Joseph Vissarionovitch Djugashvili. He was better known to the world as Joseph Stalin, Marshal and chairman of the Council of People's Commissars of the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics.

In Poland and the Reich, his gigantic armies were (in Winston Churchill's feral phrase) "tearing the guts out of the German Army." In the world at large, his ambiguous political purposes were giving the creeps to practically everybody except professional Communists and those men of good will for whose professional un-realism (when it turns up among Russians) Stalin had always saved his most scathing barbs.

Not since the Red Army burst into the Balkans had there been such a surge of Allied gratitude and respect for Russia as followed its Army's burst into the Reich. There was not only respect for the drive as a military feat -- for mass and power and accomplishment, no Allied campaign of World War II compared with it.

Bisection of Europe

And yet, even as Britons and Americans followed the Red Army's advance on their war maps, they could not escape at least a visual uneasiness. The line of Russia's 800-mile military front practically bisected Europe. How much farther west was it going to move? And what went on behind that line, where the western Allies had no effective power and little real information?

Britain had staked out a formal claim to interest in the affairs of Yugoslavia. She still recognized King Peter. But the Yugoslavs seemed about ready to jettison their King. In Belgrade the Government was dominated by Marshal Tito, a Communist.

From Bulgaria came disquieting reports of complete Russian domination through the Red Army and the Minister of the Interior, Anton Yugoff, veteran Communist. In Rumania there was an almost total news blackout, punctuated by occasional reports, like rifle flashes, of political strife between Communists and the Government.

Hungary and Finland were under Red Army control. Even Czechoslovakia, which had long been Russia's friend, was threatened with the incorporation of its only liberated province, Ruthenia, into the Soviet Ukraine.

Now the question of the future control of Germany was at issue. And since Germany was the strategic and economic key to Europe, so was the future of Europe and the world. Who would control the conquered Reich -- Russia and the western Allies (who so far had barely dented the German frontiers) or the Russians alone (who might soon be in Berlin)?

Already the Sofia radio reported that Moscow's Free Germany Committee was preparing to move into East Prussia on the heels of the Russian troops. There was talk, still unconfirmed, of a Provisional German Government. Reported Sofia radio: its head would be Field Marshal Friedrich von Paulus, captured commander of Germany's Stalingrad armies, who last year joined the Free Germany Committee. Over the Sofia radio he was calling upon the Wehrmacht to end the German ordeal by surrendering to the Russians. Meanwhile ABSIE (American Broadcasting Station in Europe) broadcast that the first Russian governor of occupied Germany "has taken up his functions in the East Prussian town of Gumbinnen" near the Lithuanian frontier.

Did the Russians intend to occupy eastern Germany alone? Anything short of an agreement for the tripartite occupation of Germany would proclaim the Big Three meeting, whatever fancy talk it used to cover up with, a failure.

If the western Allies distrusted the aims of Russia, few could blame Marshal Stalin if he distrusted the aims of the western Allies. Europe was seething with social unrest. As the result of the war, immense political and social dislocations had taken place. Time & again Russia had demonstrated that she had a program, the will and the means to deal with this unrest. But neither Britain nor the U.S. had one.

But until this mutual distrust could be allayed, a specter was haunting Europe -- the specter of World War III.