Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

by Tony Judt

Thus most of the Eastern European intellectuals’ enthusiasm for Communism—even in Czechoslovakia, where it was strongest—had evaporated by Stalin’s death, though it would linger on for some years in the form of projects for ‘revision’, or for ‘reform Communism’. The division within Communist states was no longer between Communism and its opponents. The important distinction was once again between those in authority—the Party-State, with its police, its bureaucracy and its house intelligentsia—and everyone else. In this sense the Cold War fault-line fell not so much between East and West as within Eastern and Western Europe alike. In Eastern Europe, as we have seen, the Communist Party and its apparatus were in a state of undeclared war with the rest of society, and closer acquaintance with Communism had drawn up new battle-lines: between those for whom Communism brought practical social advantage in one form or another, and those for whom it meant discrimination, disappointment and repression. In Western Europe the same fault-line found many intellectuals on both sides; but enthusiasm for Communism in theory was characteristically present in inverse proportion to direct experience of it in practice.