Victory over Nazi Germany and its allies came
as an immense relief to the Soviet Union. No victorious
power had suffered more. The war had
devastated European Russia, 25 million were
homeless, factories were destroyed, railways disrupted,
mechanised farm machinery virtually nonexistent.
Of the population of 194 million before
the war, 28 million had lost their lives; more than
one in four Russians had been killed or wounded.
Stalin did not expect much help from the capitalist
US once the defeat of the common enemies
was accomplished. Supplies had been shipped
to Russia under the wartime Lend-Lease programme,
but this was severely curtailed after
the victory over Germany and was ended altogether
in August 1945, after Japan’s defeat, for
all countries. But crucial Western food supplies
still reached the Soviet Union in 1946 under
the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation
Administration (UNRRA), mainly financed by
the US. This programme saved devastated regions
from famine.
The Soviet Union tried to obtain immediate
assistance by taking away from the former enemy
countries everything that was movable: rails,
factory machines and all kinds of equipment. It
was an inefficient operation and probably only a
small proportion could be used again when it
reached the Soviet Union. The rest rusted away
in railway sidings. Joint Soviet and Eastern
European companies were formed on terms dictated
by the Russians; special trade agreements
were reached with former allies, generally favouring
the Soviet Union. Another important source
of help came from reparations, exacted not only
from the Soviet zones of Germany and Austria
but, for a short time, with Anglo-American cooperation,
from the Western occupation zones as
agreed at Potsdam. Destruction in the Soviet
Union was on a scale almost unimaginable, and
during the war the Germans had treated the
Russians worse than animals. This helps to explain
the Soviet insistence on huge reparations from the
production of West German industry. But Soviet
demands soon ran counter to Western occupation
policies. The Western Allies realised that it was
they who would in the end have to make good
these losses or continue to support the Germans
in the Western zones with their own subsidies for
years to come. The inter-Allied conflict on the
reparations issue became one of the causes of the
Cold War.
There were desultory negotiations for a US
loan after the war which never came to anything.
In the last resort, Stalin had to rely on the sweat
of the Russian people. There was work for the
millions demobilised from the Red Army. During
the war there had been some ideological relaxation.
Now there was a return to orthodoxy.
Stalin had not mellowed in old age: coercion
resumed and an army of forced labour was herded
into the Gulag Archipelago, the vast network of
labour camps east of Moscow. Hundreds of thousands
labelled as traitors were transported from
the Baltic states, which had been annexed in
1940; many more from all over the Russian
empire were also deported to virtual slavery. The
Communist Party was allowed to re-emerge as
Stalin’s instrument of control over Soviet society.
There was rigid ideological censorship of science
and all forms of culture, even of composers. The
party exploited to the maximum the labour of the
peasants and the workers. Military heroes were
relegated to the status of ordinary citizens.
The last decade of Stalin’s rule was stifling.
Terror returned. Stalin’s Soviet Union was a
country of immense hardship. Nascent internal
nationalism was savagely crushed but could never
be entirely suppressed. Jewish national feelings,
especially after the foundation of Israel, drew
world attention to another aspect of Soviet persecution.
Rights, taken for granted in the West,
did not exist in Stalin’s Russia.
As in the 1930s, Stalin’s economic plans gave
precedence to heavy industry at the expense of
consumer goods, so the standard of living recovered
only to a rudimentary level. Draconian
labour laws deprived workers of all freedom and
exposed them to punishment for lateness or
drunkenness. Heavy burdens were laid particularly
on the peasantry: the collectives were more
tightly regulated and controlled; the productive
private plots of the peasantry were taken away; in
1947 collectivisation was extended to the former
Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. But
agricultural production, unlike industrial activity,
hardly recovered from the wartime lows. Food
was forcibly taken from the peasantry for ridiculously
low prices. There was widespread famine in
the Ukraine in 1946–7. By 1952 the grain and
potato harvests had still not reached the 1940
pre-war level. The failure of ‘socialist’ agriculture
has remained a feature of the Soviet economy.
Stalin’s emphasis on heavy industry was conditioned
by his fear of Western industrial superiority.
He took for granted the implacable hostility of
the capitalist West to the Soviet Union. His grip
over Eastern Europe and the maintenance of a
large peacetime Red Army were to compensate for
Russia’s economic inferiority. Every effort was also
made to catch up in the field of nuclear weapons.
But Stalin clearly wished to avoid a war with the
West. In 1946 he cautiously withdrew demands
made earlier on Turkey, and later pulled the Red
Army out of northern Iran and Manchuria. Yet the
Soviet position in the post-war world would
depend in the first instance on the Red Army.
Globally the Soviet Union stood on its own,
exhausted and deeply wounded by war.
Stalin feared that the Red Army, as it advanced
westwards, would become aware of the much
higher standard of living enjoyed by the ‘fascists’
and capitalists. The success of Soviet propaganda
depended on keeping the Russian peoples from
Western contact. Fraternisation with local populations
was therefore severely limited where it was
allowed to occur at all. Within the Soviet Union,
rigid censorship about the world outside continued
and a distorted picture of Western hostility
and hate was propagated. The party and Stalin’s
leadership were glorified.
Stalin’s post-war revenge was indiscriminate.
The victims of Yalta, those Russians who were
forcibly repatriated by the British and Americans
after the war from the zones of occupation, were
lucky if they ended up in the Gulag Archipelago.
Others were simply shot. But these thousands of
men, women and children were just the tip of the
iceberg. Whole national groups, such as the
Muslim Tatars and Kalmycks, were deported with
great brutality from the Caucasus when it was
reoccupied by Soviet armies in 1943 and 1944.
More than 1 million people were collectively punished
and deported. Stalin’s ferocity exposed his
fanatical determination to wipe out any danger to
‘Russian’ communist power and Soviet unity from
within. The years from 1945 to Stalin’s death in
1953 were as repressive as the terrible 1930s had
been. Stalin ruled by coercion and terror; he was
omnipresent yet totally remote, never meeting the
Russian people face to face. His character was, in
Khrushchev’s words, capricious and despotic,
brutal tendencies that only increased as his faculties
weakened in old age. But he never lacked
henchmen and supporters for his policies; policies
that no one man could have carried through
alone. Coercion and terror formed one essential
element; the other was compliance. To this end,
Stalin’s immediate helpers received material benefits.
A slave army of millions of Russians, arrested
for one reason or another and incarcerated in
Gulag camps, provided forced labour intended to
help Soviet recovery; but it was an inhuman and
wasteful use of manpower.
Nationalism posed a threat in two ways: ‘bourgeois’
and ‘nationalist’. Wherever nationalist consciousness
manifested itself, especially in communist
states such as Yugoslavia, its advocates
were fiercely denounced.
In the communist states the leadership exercised
its will through the one (communist) party
that was allowed to function. The party’s control
was usually in the hands of one man, sometimes
a small group, whose wills then became ultimate
law. The party apparatus was essential as a means
of government, providing the link between policy
decisions and their execution. Only one party
could be tolerated. After 1948, the nations which
the Soviet Union dominated had to conform in
leadership and party organisation to the Soviet
model, even down to the details of the ‘personality
cult’ and the theatrical plaudits for the
leader. Their alliance with the Soviet Union was
not a question of free choice: loyalty to this
alliance was the price exacted for freedom from
direct Soviet military control.
Between 1940 and 1945 Stalin expanded
Soviet rule over new territories, though he was
well aware of the difficulties such absorption of
hostile ethnic groups could create for the Soviet
empire. Where possible, he reasserted the historic
rights of pre-1917 tsarist Russia. Poland was a
special and most difficult case if only because
there were so many Poles – some 30 million in
1939, but reduced to 24 million in 1945. In reestablishing
the 1941 Soviet frontier, a mixed
population of Belorussians and Ukrainians in the
countryside and Poles in the towns was brought
within the Soviet Union, and this was only
mitigated by population exchanges of Poles,
Ukrainians and White Russians. The frontier
between Poland and the USSR had some historical
justification, since it basically followed the
demarcation proposed at the Paris Peace
Conference by Lord Curzon in 1919. Finland,
too, lost territory but retained more of its independence.
Stalin shrank from incorporating the
fiercely independent and nationalist Finns.
Instead, he made sure that they understood that
as Russia’s neighbour, and located as they were
far from possible Western help, they would have
to follow a policy friendly to the USSR as the
price of their comparative freedom.
In 1945 Stalin retained, without Allied
approval, the territories of the once independent
Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia,
which it had been agreed in the Stalin–Hitler pact
of August 1939 should fall within the Soviet
sphere. The Red Army occupied them in 1940
and set up puppet assemblies, which promptly
abandoned their countries’ independence and
acceded to the USSR. Also in 1945, but this time
in agreement with the Allies, the northern third
of pre-war East Prussia was ‘administered’ by the
Soviet Union – in practice incorporated into it. In
the Balkans, Stalin wanted Bessarabia (Moldavia).
It had been Russian until 1918. After the First
World War ethnic Romanians of Moldavia had
declared for union with Romania. In 1940, with
the acquiescence of Hitler, Romania was forced
to cede the territory back to Russia. Finally, to
gain a direct link and common frontier with
Hungary, Stalin pressured the Czechs to cede a
part of their territory, Ruthenia, to the USSR. In
this way he accomplished large acquisitions of land
all around the periphery of the Soviet Union from
the Baltic through central Europe to the Balkans
in the south. But, even beyond these annexations,
the Soviet Union desired further influence and
control, to destroy the pre-war block of hostile
states, the cordon sanitaire, with which the West
had tried before 1939 to surround and contain
communist Russia.
During the years from 1945 to 1948 Stalin
brought Eastern and central European politics
and societies under Soviet control. He was
obsessed by the fear that eventually the capitalist
powers would take advantage of their superiority
to attack the Soviet Union, which therefore had
only a few years in which to prepare. In Asia, he
was reticent and pacific. The real danger, he
believed, would develop in Europe. To avoid the
danger of too vehement a Western reaction,
central and Eastern Europe was only gradually
integrated into the Soviet system. One-party
communist states tied to the Soviet party
remained the goal. To reach it, Stalin had to overcome
the obstacle not only of Western opposition
but more seriously of the intense nationalism of
the ethnic groups living in this region of Europe.
It proved impossible to extinguish the loyalties to
their own countries of Yugoslavs, Hungarians,
Poles and Romanians. Their acceptance of the
communist embrace, despite genuine gratitude
for their liberation, fell far short of seeing in the
Soviet Union a desirable overlord. Polish history
had consisted of the struggle for freedom from
Russia; the powerful Catholic Churches in both
Poland and Hungary identified themselves with
their countries’ national feelings. Added to such
opposition was the resistance to the social and
economic revolution demanded by the communists.
The relationship between the Soviet Union
and its allies in the socialist camp thus moved
uneasily between attempts at rigid party and
Soviet control and relaxation of that control to
the extent of limited independence.
The central and East European states through
which in 1944 and 1945 the Red Army marched
on its way to Vienna and Berlin can be
divided into two groups: the Allied nations, Poland,
Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia and technically
Albania too; and the former enemies, Bulgaria,
Romania and Hungary. The ability of Britain and
the US to intercede effectively for allies was, paradoxically,
smaller than the ability to secure some
say in the future of the enemies. In the case of
allies, the only option was to withhold recognition
of the government installed by the Russians
in 1945 only for recognition to be granted two
years later.
Over the future Czechoslovakia, Allied influence
was especially weak. President Benesˇ had
decided that Czechoslovakia’s post-war future left
no choice but to accept Soviet ‘friendship’, which
meant acquiescing in whatever limits Stalin chose
to place on its independence. Benesˇ was rewarded
by being the only Allied head of state to return
to his own country by way of Moscow. As for
Yugoslavia, the royal government in exile could
not conceivably be re-established without the
support of a large Allied army, for Tito and his
communist partisans had assumed control of the
country, moreover without direct Soviet help.
The position of the enemies, of Hungary,
Romania and Bulgaria, was different, although
each was under Red Army occupation. Their governments
and frontiers could not be regularised
without peace treaties involving the consent of
Britain and the US. The Allies kept up a constant
stream of protest at the undemocratic conduct of
these regimes set up by the Soviet Union and
withheld their recognition and their signature to
the peace treaties until 1947.
In Poland, which he recognised as the most
vulnerable country under Soviet control, Stalin
kept the tightest grip, making few concessions.
Poland remained under the thinly veiled direct
military occupation of the Red Army. The Polish
army, which had accompanied the Red Army, was
largely officered by reliable Soviet officers. In the
new communist-dominated government, the only
politician with a considerable following was
Stanislav Mikolajczyk, a non-communist and
leader of the Peasant Party who had joined the
Lublin government from London and now served
as a deputy prime minister. The communist secretary
of the Polish Workers’ Party, Wladyslaw
Gomulka, was the real power in Poland. The
communists adopted their usual tactics of
attempting to secure the agreement of the Peasant
Party and the non-communist coalition partners
to elections on a ‘single list’; this meant the voters
would be presented not with a choice of parties,
but with one agreed list of candidates, of which
the Peasant Party and others would be allowed
only a minority. Stalin had promised the Western
Allies early free elections. But, because the communists
could not guarantee the results in 1945
despite holding key internal ministries and controlling
the police, the army and much of the
administration, they simply postponed the elections
for two years. During these years there was
open violence and armed struggle.
The Home Army, operating in Poland but loyal
to the London government in exile, was dissolved
in July 1945. Embittered by their experiences,
some desperate units went underground again and
with a few thousand members of the Ukrainian
Independence Army began terrorist attacks on
administrative officials of the Communist Workers’
Party.
In parts of the countryside, fighting escalated
into civil war. Civilian administrators and police
were attacked and killed. Jewish survivors once
more became the murder victims. Not until 1948
could this violence be broken. Until then, the terrorist
attacks served the interests of the communists,
for they made the postponement of elections
plausible.
By fair means and foul the communists did all
they could to undermine support for their political
opponents, who happened also to be their
coalition partners in government. Nevertheless,
the road to socialism was to be Polish and not
Soviet. The economic plans were publicly
declared to be based on the coexistence of a
private, a cooperative and a public state sector. All
the same, there was not much left but the state
sector of industry by 1947. All industrial undertakings
employing more than fifty workers per
shift were nationalised, which effectively brought
91 per cent of industry and banking under state
control. The land question was the most immediately
important. In ‘old’ Poland all the large farms
and estates were broken up and distributed to the
peasantry. In the ‘new lands’, vacated by the
Germans, peasant settlers were encouraged to join
collective farms. This largesse politically neutralised
the peasantry. Few lamented that the prewar
gentry and wealthy industrialists would not
be allowed back their possessions. Intimidation of
political opponents did the rest. Despite the
appalling conditions, huge efforts were made to
rebuild the devastated economy and the towns
and villages of Poland, especially Warsaw.
In the election, finally held in January 1947,
the communists won and almost eliminated their
principal rivals, the Peasant Party, many of whose
candidates had been intimidated or imprisoned.
The Catholic Church remained intact, however,
sustaining its links with the majority of the Polish
people. Gomulka tried to reconcile the Poles to
communist rule, but his efforts were to be
negated by the need to abandon the Polish road
to socialism. During the barren harshness of
Stalin’s last years the Communist Party was disrupted
by purges and Gomulka was disgraced in
January 1949.
Soviet policies in Romania exemplified a different,
gradualist approach determined by internal events
and by the military situation. At first, Stalin may
well have planned a ruthless and simple takeover,
with communist-trained Romanians such as Anna
Pauker setting up an administration in the wake of
the Red Army’s conquest. But the unexpected
happened. In August 1944, King Michael led a
coup that overthrew the fascist government and
then changed sides, from Hitler’s Germany to that
of the Allies. This threw the country open to the
Red Army which, with Romanian troops, chased
the Wehrmacht into Hungary. Romania again lost
Bessarabia to the Soviet Union, but was rewarded
by the return of Transylvania, which in 1940 had
been transferred to Hungary by Hitler. Meanwhile
a Romanian government, including pre-war
Romanian communists, was established, though
these ‘native’ communists were not trusted by
Stalin. At Moscow’s behest, the popular-front-type
governments, which included non-communist parties,
were reshuffled in December 1944 and March
1945 to provide the communists with greater
though still incomplete power.
Soviet army intervention in local administration
eroded popular support for the non-communist
parties. Joint Soviet–Romanian companies were
founded, landed estates were broken up, communists
and fellow travellers were labelled ‘democratic’
and other parties showing any signs of
independence were stigmatised as ‘fascist’. Socalled
‘free elections’ were held in November
1946. There was intimidation, and the results may
well have been doctored, but the communists had
won for themselves a sufficient power base to
make their overwhelming electoral victory acceptable
to the Romanian people. In any case the
people had little choice beyond acceptance since
Western protests would be limited to words.
Britain and the US had already recognised the
communist-controlled government before the
elections. Despite the unsatisfactory elections and
the Anglo-American detestation of communist
regimes, Romania had been written off as
inevitably forming part of the Soviet camp, and a
peace treaty was signed in February 1947 which
recognised this. King Michael was forced into exile
and Romania became a ‘people’s democracy’, the
beginning of four terrible decades.
Although Bulgaria was not at war with the
Soviet Union, Churchill had made it clear to
Stalin in 1944 that it would be allowed to fall
within the Soviet sphere. War having been hastily
declared on Bulgaria, Soviet troops entered and
overran the country in September 1944, without
real Anglo-American opposition. Unlike its
Romanian equivalent, the Bulgarian Communist
Party had had a substantial popular following
before the war and in Georgi Dimitrov a leader
of international reputation following his acquittal
in Nazi Germany for complicity in the Reichstag
Fire. Although he became an influential figure in
Moscow as general secretary of the Comintern
in the 1930s, Dimitrov was not at first allowed
to return to Bulgaria in the wake of the Soviet
invasion. Instead, Bulgarian communists were
installed in 1944 in another popular-front government,
the Fatherland Front, and to begin with
the opposition was not ruthlessly suppressed. But
the respite was only temporary. With the Red
Army stationed in the country and Stalin determined
to consolidate Soviet power, and with no
effective Western counter-measures forthcoming,
the fate of the Social Democratic and Agrarian
Peasant opposition and its party leader Petkov was
sealed. Dimitrov was now allowed to return to
Bulgaria to strengthen the communists.
Despite the muzzling of the press, the elections
held in October 1946 saw a striking success
for the non-communist opposition. For a few
months, 101 deputies elected by over a million
votes were able to act as a parliamentary opposition
to the communist regime. But in August
1947 Petkov was arrested, tried and sentenced to
death on trumped-up charges of working for
‘Anglo-American Imperialism’. He was shot the
following month. Britain and the US had made
public protests before his execution, but Dimitrov
only reinforced the impression of judicial murder
by declaring that Petkov might have been spared
but for the Anglo-American protests. Of course,
the execution could not have taken place without
Stalin’s acquiescence. To Britain and the US
events in Eastern Europe showed the extent to
which Stalin was prepared ruthlessly to ignore his
international obligations. Like their Romanian
counterparts, the Bulgarian communists turned
their country into a particularly brutal and repressive
‘people’s democracy’.
The Hungarians had been ruled from 1919
until 1944 by anti-communist regimes under the
Regent Admiral Horthy. It was his fatal error to
throw in his lot with the German invaders of the
Soviet Union in 1941. When events revealed his
error, he tried to disengage and achieve a peace
with the Soviet Union, but it was too late. It was
the Germans instead who first occupied his
country. In pre-war Hungary army support for
the authoritarian structure had been decisive, and
the need for social reform had gone unsatisfied.
The dominant aspiration of successive Hungarian
governments was the recovery of territory lost
principally to Romania (Transylvania) by the
Peace Treaty of Trianon in 1920. It was this
aspiration that drove Hungary into the arms
of Germany and even to declare war on Russia
in 1941. By then Hungary had already been
rewarded, in 1940, by the transfer of northern
Transylvania from Romania, as well as of portions
of Czechoslovakia. Defeat in 1945 entailed the
loss once more of all these gains as Stalin redistributed
the territories, Britain and the US again
raising no objections.
Stalin’s opportunism is well illustrated by the
first anti-German Hungarian government set up
by the Red Army in the part of Hungary they had
liberated. Soviet military requirements at this time
made it expedient to include many former supporters
of Horthy, as well as communists and
members of other parties. As circumstances
changed, so would the composition of the government.
The leading Hungarian communist was
Mátyás Rákosi, who had lived in Moscow since
1940; he now returned to participate in coalition
governments. He began with patriotic appeals in
1944 promising democracy and peaceful progress,
yet within four years Hungary was transformed
into one of the most ruthless of the Stalinist
‘people’s democracies’. Rákosi’s approach corresponded
to Stalin’s own: cautious opportunism
ruthlessly pursued. Hungarians, not Russians,
would be allowed to transform politics and society
and would guarantee national loyalty to the Soviet
Union. Three parties besides the communists
were allowed to organise and participate in
national politics.
The Catholic Church too played an important
role, acting as a bulwark against atheistic communism.
Stalin proceeded in Hungary with
caution, permitting free elections in November
1945. The communists lost badly. Stalin was not
going to repeat such an error.
Still, Rákosi, with Soviet backing, retained the
key to power through his control of the Interior
Ministry and the secret police. He skilfully
exploited differences between the government
coalition parties, cynically commenting later that
he had sliced them away like salami until only the
communists were left. First the Smallholders’
Party was eliminated, then the Social Democrats.
In the 1947 elections, communist victory was no
longer left to the whim of the voters. Within a
few months, Rákosi and his lieutenants had taken
over the country, and a new ‘constitution’ in
1949 turned Hungary into a Moscow-style
‘people’s democracy’.
There were few indications in 1945 that
Yugoslavia would differ in any significant way
from the other states in Eastern Europe liberated
from the Nazis with the help of the Soviet Union.
If anything, Yugoslavia was more obviously communist,
controlled from the start by Marshal Broz
Tito as undisputed leader organising a one-party
state, ideologically bound to Marxism–Leninism.
The military victory of the partisans who had been
fighting the Germans left little alternative but to
accept Tito’s terms for the post-war reconstruction
of Yugoslavia. Only a military occupation,
Soviet or Allied, could have altered that. Interestingly,
in 1944 Stalin had encouraged the idea
of an Allied landing in Yugoslavia, evidently
already seeing in Tito’s Yugoslav communism a
dangerous national deviation. A closer study of
Yugoslavia shows both similarities with and
important differences from the general pattern
of the communist takeover of the central and
Eastern European states. None of the communist
resistance forces was strong enough to defeat the
Wehrmacht without the victories of the Red
Army. This was no less true of Yugoslavia,
although there the partisans actually liberated the
country from German occupation.
Tito was well aware that the partisan victory
would be dependent upon the victory of the
Soviet Union. He also followed Lenin’s precept
of a tightly disciplined party as indispensable for
maintaining communist power. During the war
the German and Italian occupation had destroyed
the pre-war social and political order. Yugoslav
communists and the royalists fought each other
for predominance at the same time as they
fought the Germans. This triangular struggle was
complex, the two Yugoslav sides accusing each
other of helping the Germans to eliminate the
internal enemy. Initially Tito drew his support
overwhelmingly from Serb peasants attracted by
promises of greater social justice and by appeals
to their patriotism. The Serbs were the largest
national group and Tito succeeded in winning
over far more to his side than the royalist
Chetniks did. But from the first he was also aware
that Yugoslav unity required the support of all the
major national groups – Croats, Macedonians,
Montenegrins and Slovenes. He created people’s
committees in villages, towns and provinces,
promising full national rights to the major nationalities
in a post-war federal Yugoslavia.
Milovan Djilas, Tito’s friend and supporter
until 1954, has described Tito vividly as a man
born a rebel, who combined a distinctive zeal for
communism with a personal zest for power; like
some Eastern potentate Tito, once the hardened
partisan leader, built villas and palaces after the
war for his exclusive pleasure, even though he
could spend little time in any one of them. The
dictatorship of the proletariat became in practice
personal power wielded by an autocratic leader.
Tito created a new party hierarchy, himself at the
pinnacle and the secret police as the instrument
for securing compliance by dealing ruthlessly with
his opponents. In 1946 a constitution on the
Soviet model was established, which guaranteed
the cultural and administrative rights of all the
nationalities in a federal Yugoslav state; this went
some way towards solving the nationality conflicts
of pre-1945 Yugoslavia, at least for a time. Tito’s
second achievement was his resolute defence of
Yugoslavia’s own road to socialism in 1948 in
the face of Stalin’s onslaught, and the assertion
of Yugoslavia’s independence from Moscow’s
control. The monolithic Soviet empire cracked for
all the world to see.
The road to total communist power was different
again in Czechoslovakia. Edvard Benesˇ, the
president of the Czech government in exile in
London, had signed a formal alliance and friendship
treaty with the Soviet Union in December
1943 by which the Russians undertook not to
interfere in Czechoslovakia’s internal affairs. But
Stalin had already established a communist émigré
group in Moscow, led by Klement Gottwald. The
experience of Munich in 1938, when Britain and
France had forced the Czechs to give in to Hitler’s
territorial demands, had convinced Benesˇ that he
should stay on good terms with the Russians,
because Western protection could not be relied
upon. He hoped that by demonstrating the
Czechs’ genuine friendship he would be allowed
to maintain democracy and Western values. He
saw Czechoslovakia’s role as forming a bridge
between East and West. As if to emphasise Czech
reliance on the Soviet Union, Benesˇ returned to
Czechoslovakia via Moscow in the spring of 1945.
Ominously he now had to agree to new terms
which further limited his freedom of action.
The government in exile would be replaced by a
new National Front government for liberated
Czechoslovakia in which only the parties of the left
would participate, and key ministries for the internal
control of the country would be in communist
hands. In return, Benesˇ received Stalin’s empty
promise that the Soviet leader would deal with any
communists who gave him trouble. Benesˇ had also
to agree to a social and economic transformation
(designed to pave the way to communism) and to
the expulsion of the Sudeten Germans. Real
democracy through representative government
was not re-established in 1945, only its appearance.
Czechoslovakia was bound to follow the
Soviet Union in any policy Stalin regarded as
important, even before the communist takeover in
1948; the Czech recantation of participation in the
Marshall Aid Programme in 1947, on Moscow’s
insistence, was a good illustration of this.
The Czech communist leader, Klement
Gottwald, was told by Moscow to content himself
with a gradual path to absolute power. During
the war the communists had organised a resistance
movement against the Germans; after it
they not only held the key ministries and dominated
the trade unions, but established their
national committees in villages, towns and
provinces. Economic transformation began with
the nationalisation of large industries and businesses
even before the provisional parliament met
in October 1945. But later that month the
American forces and the Red Army, who had
jointly liberated the country, agreed to withdraw,
giving hope to the democrats, although the
country was split between the communists and
the democratic parties of the left. Elections were
held in May 1946, but they were not absolutely
free since only the parties comprising the National
Front were allowed to participate. Furthermore,
many Czechs feared that, if the communists failed
to win, the Red Army would return. Given all
their preparatory work and control, it is hardly
surprising that the communists polled 37 per cent
of the votes. But, even with their fellow travellers
among the Social Democratic Party, this did not
give them absolute control. Nonetheless the
democratic opposition, stronger in Slovakia than
Bohemia and Moravia, was weakened by being
split among three parties.
In the new government, formed after the elections,
Klement Gottwald became prime minister;
the two Czechoslovaks best known abroad
retained their former positions, Benesˇ as president
and Jan Masaryk as foreign minister. But soon the
communists inside and outside the government
started to behave high-handedly, and mass arrests
of their opponents were ordered. Clashes in
parliament and between government ministers
became increasingly heated and the supporters
of the democratic parties were considering
whether they would not have to resist violations
of justice if democracy was to survive. But to the
outside world the presence of Benesˇ and Masaryk
appeared to guarantee the preservation of civil
rights; that illusion was shattered early in 1948.
One of the major headaches for the Eastern
European communist leaders was the difficulty of
discovering what Stalin really wanted. At lower
levels, Russian advice and influence were at times
confusing or contradictory. Gottwald, a loyal
communist, believed in 1947, for example, that
Stalin would not object if Czechoslovakia participated
in the Marshall Aid Programme; as we have
seen, he was rapidly obliged to recant. But whenever
Stalin made his views known the communists
made speed to fall into line.
A façade of representative institutions would
placate the West; meanwhile the US was pulling
most of its armed forces out of Europe. Firm
communist bases in Czechoslovakia, Romania,
Hungary, Bulgaria, Poland and the Soviet zone
of Germany were established. Everywhere communists
were strongly entrenched and dominant
in coalition National Front governments. The
political activities of other parties were controlled,
and those labelled ‘fascist’ were banned. The
influence of the landowners was removed by
dividing up their estates, and for the time being
the peasantry benefited from the redistribution of
land: for this, the communists gained the credit.
Large industries were nationalised, and progressively
the smaller ones as well. The economic base
of the dominant wealthy pre-war social groups
was destroyed; in Poland it had already been
destroyed by the Germans. With local committees
established in every community, the communists
entrenched their influence to prepare for ultimate
control as soon as the Kremlin judged the time
right.
In each country there were differences too. The
Catholic Church was powerful enough in Poland
and Hungary to form an opposing force. Social
and economic conditions also differed, Poland
having suffered more grievously during the Second
World War than any other Eastern European state
apart from the Soviet Union. The strength of the
anti-communist opposition varied from country to
country too, as did the tactics adopted by the communist
leaders. In Czechoslovakia, the communists
were sufficiently strong to seek control by
semi-legal means; in Yugoslavia, the communists
took control from the start. But all the countries in
the Soviet orbit had this in common: the dynamics
of the social and political changes introduced after
1944–5 were bound to end in a communist
victory.
Communist domination after 1948 did not
mean the end of political strife. The Moscowtrained
communist leaders turned on the ‘native’
communists in great purges during the closing
years of Stalin’s rule. The revolution began to eat
its own children. Moscow’s was a savage dominance
over a turbulent region.
World History
