Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

by Tony Judt

with Germany extracting for its war effort the maximum possible output from land and people. What happened after 1945 was that the Soviet Union took over, quite literally, where the Germans had left off, attaching eastern Europe to its own economy as a resource to be exploited at will. The Soviet Union extracted reparations from Hungary and Romania, as former allies of Hitler. These reparations, like those taken in kind from the Soviet Zone in Germany, did relatively little to compensate for Russia’s losses but they represented substantial sacrifices for the donor countries: by 1948, Romanian reparations to the USSR represented 15 percent of that country’s national income; in Hungary the figure was 17 percent. From countries that had not fought against him Stalin was no less demanding, but on ‘fraternal’ rather than punitive terms.