Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

by Tony Judt

The presence of Soviet prosecutors and Soviet judges was interpreted by many commentators from Germany and Eastern Europe as evidence of hypocrisy. The behaviour of the Red Army, and Soviet practice in the lands it had ‘liberated’, were no secret—indeed, they were perhaps better known and publicized then than in later years. And the purges and massacres of the 1930s were still fresh in many people’s memory. To have the Soviets sitting in judgment on the Nazis—sometimes for crimes they had themselves committed—devalued the Nuremberg and other trials and made them seem exclusively an exercise in anti-German vengeance. In the words of George Kennan: ‘The only implication this procedure could convey was, after all, that such crimes were justifiable and forgivable when committed by the leaders of one government, under one set of circumstances, but unjustifiable and unforgivable, and to be punished by death, when committed by another government under another set of circumstances.’

It is easy, in retrospect, to see that hopes for a democratic Eastern Europe after 1945 were always forlorn. Central and Eastern Europe had few indigenous democratic or liberal traditions. The inter-war regimes in this part of Europe had been corrupt, authoritarian and in some cases murderous. The old ruling castes were frequently venal. The real governing class in inter-war Eastern Europe was the bureaucracy, recruited from the same social groups who would furnish the administrative cadre of the Communist states.

‘Here they hang a man first and then they try him’. Molière, Monsieur de Pourceaugnac

Poets outdid one another in singing the Leader’s praises—a 1951 couplet by the Latvian poet V. Lukss is representative: Like beautiful red yarn into our hearts we wove, Stalin, our brother and father, your name.

As Milovan Djilas observed, recalling his own experience as Tito’s close adjunct: ‘Totalitarianism at the outset is enthusiasm and conviction; only later does it become organizations, authority, careerism.’

As George Orwell observed in 1947, ‘the English are not sufficiently interested in intellectual matters to be intolerant about them.’

‘It is never a struggle between good and evil, but between the preferable and the detestable.’

‘Anticommunism’, he wrote in Algiers in March 1944, ‘is the beginning of dictatorship.’

‘I have decided to reject everything that, directly or indirectly, makes people die or justifies others in making them die.’

Between the spring of 1949 and August 1961 somewhere between 2.8 and 3 million East Germans went through Berlin to the West, around 16 percent of the country’s population.

‘It’s pretty dreary living in the American age—unless of course you’re American’. Jimmy Porter, in Look Back in Anger (1956)

In 1950, three out of four working adults in Yugoslavia and Romania were peasants.

In 1969 there followed the Divorce Act, which did not so much precipitate a dramatic transformation in the institution of marriage as reveal its extent: whereas in the last year before World War Two there had been just one divorce for every fifty-eight marriages in England and Wales, forty years later the ratio would approach one in three. The

It is one of the ironies of the 1960s that the ruthlessly ‘renewed’ and rebuilt cityscapes of the age were deeply resented above all by the young people who lived there. Their houses, streets, cafés, factories, offices, schools and universities might be modern and relentlessly ‘new’. But except for the most privileged among them, the result was an environment experienced as ugly, soulless, stifling, inhuman, and—in a term that was acquiring currency—‘alienating’. It

‘The death of a worker weighs heavily like a mountain, while that of a bourgeois weighs as lightly as a feather’. Mao Zedong

‘Punk might have been invented for the cultural theorists—and the partial truth is that it was’. Robert Hewison

Currencies fell. And as they fell, so the cost of imports rose: between 1971 and 1973, the world price of non-fuel commodities increased by 70 percent, of food by 100 percent.

In 1947 the UK boasted 958 coal mines; forty-five years later just fifty of them remained. The mining workforce was to fall from 718,000 to 43,000: most of those jobs were lost in the course of the decade 1975–85.

Many of those who lost jobs in inefficient (and previously state-subsidized) industries like steel, coal-mining, textiles and shipbuilding would never find work again, becoming lifelong dependents of the state in all but name. If their former employers went on in some cases (steel, notably) to become profitable private companies it was less through the miracle of private ownership than because Margaret Thatcher’s governments had relieved them of high fixed labour costs, ‘socializing’ the expense of superfluous workers in the form of state-subsidized unemployment.

It is one of the paradoxes of the Socialist project that the absence of property tends to generate more corruption, not less.

The Socialist social contract was tartly summed up in the popular joke: ‘you pretend to work, we pretend to pay you’.

‘The most dangerous time for a bad government is when it starts to reform itself’. Alexis De Tocqueville

In 1985 US defense spending rose by 6 percent, an unprecedented peacetime increase.8

By the autumn of 1990 Gorbachev would have the support of just 21 percent of the public.

A short list of the epithets officially-approved by Ceauşescu for use in accounts of his achievements would include: The Architect; The Creed-shaper; The Wise Helmsman; The Tallest Mast; The Nimbus of Victory; The Visionary; The Titan; The Son of the Sun; A Danube of Thought; and The Genius of the Carpathians.

The opposite of Communism was not ‘capitalism’ but ‘Europe’.

As this last example suggests, Gorbachev was letting Communism fall in eastern Europe in order to save it in Russia itself—just as Stalin had built the satellite regimes not for their own sake but as a security for his western frontier. Tactically Gorbachev miscalculated badly—within two years the lessons of Eastern Europe would be used against the region’s liberator on his home territory. But strategically his achievement was immense and unprecedented. No other territorial empire in recorded history ever abandoned its dominions so rapidly, with such good grace and so little bloodshed. Gorbachev cannot take direct credit for what happened in 1989—he did not plan it and only hazily grasped its long-term import. But he was the permissive and precipitating cause. It was Mr Gorbachev’s revolution.

At midnight on December 31st 1991 the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics ceased to exist.

‘The worst thing about Communism is what comes after’. Adam Michnik

‘Truth is always concrete.’ G. W. Hegel

Srebrenica was the worst mass murder in Europe since World War Two: a war crime on the scale of Oradour, Lidice or Katyn, carried out in full view of international observers.

The new ‘capitalists’ in these countries did not actually make anything; they merely laundered public assets for private benefit.

If capitalism without legal restraints descends readily into theft, then—in the absence of agreed and understood boundaries to public rhetoric and political competition—democracy, it was feared, risks slipping into competitive demagogy.

But as one Hungarian who had worked for some years in California explained to an interviewer: ‘America is the place to come when you are young and single. But if it is time to grow up, you should return to Europe’.