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Said Stalin: "Over 7,500,000 deaths for no purpose at all. Then you must acknowledge that our losses are small, because your war ended in chaos, while we are engaged in a work which will benefit the whole of humanity."
The most stubborn fact of Lenin's life was that he had achieved the world's greatest political revolution. The most stubborn fact of Stalin's was that he achieved the world's greatest economic revolution. It was a long way—the span of a crucial epoch of world history—from the Tsar's jails, police files and fingerprints to revolutionary triumph and apotheosis.
Some critics charged that Stalin had ceased, paradoxically, to be a revolutionist, at the moment when the Communist revolution was most successful. If it suited his present purposes, Stalin might have reminded his critics that he was the author of Russia's two official volumes of orthodox dogma: The History of the Communist Party and Leninism. Leninism is a best-seller (3,000,000 copies were sold a week after publication).
As proof of his undeviating orthodoxy, Stalin might point to the definition of democracy in Leninism: ". . . The dictatorship of the proletariat is the domination of the proletariat over the bourgeoisie, untrammeled by law, based on violence, and enjoying the sympathy and support of the toiling . . . masses. . . . Democracy under the capitalist system is . . . the democracy of an exploiting minority. . . . Democracy under proletarian dictatorship is . . . a democracy of the exploited majority."
The Stubborn Factor. This was the Stubborn Factor with whom Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill would one day soon sit down to review the stubborn facts that were bedeviling the Big Three.
There was the stubborn fact of Russia's entrenched power through half of continental Europe from Finland to Greece. Did Russia mean to exclude her allies completely from this sphere?
There was the stubborn fact of Yugoslavia. If reports were true, when a small British liberating force landed in Dalmatia last November, Marshal Tito disarmed them and threatened them with internment. Then London ordered them to withdraw. Now people close to Tito were talking about a Yugoslav Federation which would include Albania, parts of Greece and Bulgaria.
There was the stubborn fact of Greece. In the fighting between the British troops and ELAS, the Greek Communist Party had been the most aggressive section of the EAM. But no Communist Party undertakes an important action without Moscow's advice. The Soviet Government had remained scrupulously aloof from the fighting in Greece but Moscow could not escape the suspicion of having had some hand in the revolt.
There was the stubborn fact of Poland. Having recognized the Polish Government at Warsaw, it was unlikely that Russia would accept any major changes in it at the insistence of Britain and the U.S. Poland was a test problem of the Big Three meeting.
So was Germany. 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.