Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

by Tony Judt

Stalin had direct or (in the case of

Yugoslavia) indirect control of a huge swathe of eastern and central Europe. His armies had only narrowly been blocked, by the rapid advance of the British under Montgomery, from moving forwar...

As Western generals well knew, there was absolutely nothing to stop the Red Army advancing to the Atlantic if Stalin ordered it. To be sure, the Americans and the British had a clear advantage in strategic bombing capacity, and America had the atomic bomb, as Stalin knew even before Truman told him so at Potsdam in July 1945. There is no doubt that Stalin wanted a Soviet atomic bomb—it is one of the reasons why he insisted on Soviet control of those parts of eastern Germany and, especially, Czechoslovakia where there w...

longstanding Soviet and Russian objectives. The first of these was territorial: Stalin wanted back the land the Bolsheviks had lost, at the 1918 Treaty of Brest-Litovsk and in the course of the war with Poland two years later. This goal had been partly achieved in the secret clauses of his 1939 and 1940 pacts with Hitler. The rest he owed to Hitler’s decision to invade the Soviet Union in June 1941, allowing the Red Army in turn to reoccupy the disputed territories in the course of its advance on Berlin. That way, the Soviet occupation and annexation of Bessarabia (from Romania), the Bukovina (from Romania), sub-Carpathian Ruthenia (from Czechoslovakia), western Ukraine (from Poland), eastern Finland, the three independent Baltic republics and Königsberg/Kaliningrad in East Prussia could all be presented as the spoils of victory, rather than deriving from unsavoury deals with the Fascist enemy.

For the Soviet Union the point of this territorial aggrandizement was twofold. It ended its pariah status. This was a matter of some importance to Stalin, who now became the leader of a huge Eurasian bloc in world affairs, its newfound power symbolized by the Soviet Union’s insistence on a system of vetoes in the new UN Security Council. However, land represented not just prestige but also and above all security. From the Soviet viewpoint a glacis to its west, a broad swathe of land across which Germans especially would have to pass if they wished to attack Russia, was a vital security concern. At Yalta and again at Potsdam Stalin made explicit his insistence that these territories between Russia and Germany, if they were not to be wholly absorbed into the USSR

itself, must be run by friendly regimes ‘free of fascist and re...

Soviet strategists did not fully share the Czarist obsession with Constantinople, the Straits and the south Balkans. But the continuities of policy far outweigh the differences. They are linked, as it were, by the calculations of Sazunov (Russia’s foreign minister on the outbreak of war in 1914), who was already envisaging the future of eastern Europe as a cluster of small, vulnerable, states; nominally independent but effectively clients of Great Russia.

The Bolshevik regime had always been insecure—it was born, after all, of a minority coup in unpropitious circumstances and a highly unsympathetic environment—and Stalin, like all tyrants, needed to invoke threats and enemies, whether domestic or foreign. Moreover Stalin knew better than most that World War Two had been a close run thing: if the Germans had invaded a month earlier in 1941 (as Hitler’s original schedule required) the Soviet Union might very well have folded. Like the USA after Pearl Harbor, but with rather better cause, the Soviet leadership was obsessed to the point of paranoia with ‘surprise attacks’ and challenges to its new-won standing.

Molotov is surely telling the truth when he suggests in his memoirs that the Soviet Union preferred to take advantage of propitious situations but was not going to take risks in order to bring them about: ‘Our ideology stands for offensive operations when possible, and if not, we wait.’

Everyone expected World War Two to end, like its predecessor, with an all-embracing Peace Treaty, and five separate treaties were indeed signed in Paris in 1946. These settled territorial and other business in Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Finland and Italy, though not in Norway, which remained technically in a state of war with Germany until 1951.10 But however much these developments mattered for the peoples concerned (and in the case of Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary they signaled their definitive consignment to Soviet domination), such agreements could be reached because in the end none of the Great Powers were willing to risk confrontation over them. The business of Germany, however, was starkly different. To the Russians especially, Germany mattered very much indeed. Just as the war had been about Germany, so was the peace, and the spectre of German revanchism haunted Soviet calculations every bit as much as it did those of the French. When Stalin, Truman and Churchill met at Potsdam (from July 17th to August 2nd 1945, with Attlee replacing Churchill following Labour’s victory in the British General Election), it proved possible to reach agreement on the expulsion of Germans from Eastern Europe, the administrative sub-division of Germany for occupation purposes and the goals of ‘democratization’, ‘denazification’ and ‘decartelization’. Beyond this level of general common intention, however, the difficulties began.

Thus it was agreed to treat the German economy as a single unit, but the Soviets were also

granted the right to extract and remove goods, services and financial assets from their own zone. They were further accorded 10 percent of reparations from the Western zones in exchange for food and raw materials to be supplied from eastern Germany. But these accords introduced a contradiction, by treating the economic resources of East and West as separate and distinct. Reparations were thus to be a divisive issue from the start (as they had been after the First World War): the Russians (and the French) wanted them, and the Soviet authoritie...

Fortunately for the Western allies, Communist occupation policies in Berlin and the Soviet-occupied territory of eastern Germany were not such as to attract disaffected German sentiments and votes. However unpopular the Americans or British or French might be in the eyes of resentful Germans, the alternative was far worse: if Stalin sincerely wanted Germany to remain united, as he instructed German Communists to demand in the initial post-war years, then Soviet tactics were

grievously ill-chosen. From the outset, the Soviets established in their zone of occupation a de facto Communist-led government without Allied consent and set about rendering superfluous the Potsdam accords by ruthlessly extracting and dismantling whatever fell within their grasp. Not that Stalin had much choice. There was never any prospect of the Communists gaining control of the country or even the Soviet zone except by force. In the Berlin city elections on October 20th 1946, Communist candidates came far behind both the Social Democrats and Christian Democrats. With that, Soviet policy perceptibly hardened. But by this time the Western occupiers were running into difficulties of their own. By July 1946 Britain had been forced to import 112,000 tons of wheat and 50,000 tons of potatoes to feed the local population of its zone (the urban and industrial north-west of Germany), paid for out of an American loan.

The British were extracting at most $29 million in reparations from Germany; but the occupation was costing London $80 million a year, leaving the British taxpayer to foot the bill for the difference even as the British government was forced to impose bread rationing at home (an expedient that had been avoided throughout the war). In the opinion of the British Chancellor of the Exchequer, Hugh Dalton, the British were ‘paying reparations to the Germans.’ The Americans were not under the same economic constraints and their zone had not suffered as much war damage, but the situation appe...

Once the main Nuremberg Trial ended in October 1946 and the terms of the Paris Peace Treaties were finalized the following month, the wartime Allies were bound by little more than their co-responsibility for Germany, the contradictions of which thus came increasingly to the fore. The Americans and British agreed at the end of 1946 to fuse the economies of their two occupation zones into a so-called ‘Bizone’; but even this did not yet signify a firm division of Germany, much less a commitment to integrating the Bizone into the West. On the contrary: three months later, in February 1947, the French and

British ostentatiously signed the Dunkirk Treaty in which they committed themselves to mutual support against any future German aggression. And US Secretary of State Marshall was still optimistic, in early 1947, that whatever arrangements were made to resolve the German economic conundrum need not result in a divided Germany. On this, at least, East and West were still in formal accord.

The real break came in the spring of 1947, at the (March 10th–April 24th) Moscow meeting of the Foreign Ministers of the US, Britain, France and the Soviet Union, convened once again to seek agreement on a Peace Treaty for Germany and Austria. By now the fault lines were clear. The British and Americans were determined to build up the Western German economy, in order that the Germans might support themselves but also to contribute to the revival of the European economy in general. The Soviet representatives wanted a restoration of reparations from the Western zones of Germany and, to this end, a united German administration and economy as initially envisaged (albeit vaguely) at Potsdam. But by now the Western Allies were no longer seeking a single German administration. For this would entail not just the abandonment of the ...

the Americans and British, who had long feared a separate Russo-German Peace and had countenanced delays and compromises in order to forestall it, ceased to take into account an eventuality they could now discount. In August they unilaterally increased output in the Bizone (to a chorus of Soviet and French criticism). The Joint Chiefs of Staff directive JCS 1067 (the ‘Morgenthau plan’) was replaced by JCS 1779 which formally acknowledged the new American goals: economic unification of the western zone of Germany and the encouragement of German self-government. For the Americans especially, Germans were rapidly ceasing to be the enemy.

The Foreign Ministers—Molotov, Bevin, Marshall and Bidault—met one last time, in London, from November 25th through December 16th 1947. It was a curious gathering, since their relations had already in practice broken down. The Western Allies were moving forward with independent plans for West European recovery, while two months earlier Stalin had established the Cominform, instructed the Communist parties of France and Italy to take an intransigent line in their countries’ affairs and clamped down sharply on the Communist-controlled countries in what was now a Soviet bloc.

there was no further agreement on the common administration of Germany or plans for its future and the meeting broke up without scheduling any future gatherings. Instead Britain, France and the US began tripartite discussions on Germany’s future at an

extended conference, once again held in London, beginning on February 23rd, 1948. In that same week the Communist Party in Czechoslovakia staged its successful coup, signaling Stalin’s definitive abandonment of his earlier strategy and his acceptance of the inevitability of confrontation rather than agreement with the West. In the shadow of the Prague coup, France and Britain extended their Dunkirk Treaty into the Brussels Pact of March 17th, binding Britain, France and the Benelux countries in a mutual defense alliance.

There was now nothing to inhibit the Western leaders and the London Conference rapidly agreed to extend the Marshall Plan to western Germany and lay down schemes for an eventual government for a West German state (an arrangement approved by the French delegation in exchange for the—temporary—separation of the Saar from Germany and a proposal for an independent authority t...

of the Potsdam accords and General Vassily Sokolovsky, the Soviet representative on the Allied Control Council (ACC) in Berlin, duly protested (neglecting to acknowledge the Soviet Uni...

On March 10th, Sokolovsky condemned plans for western Germany as the enforced imposition of capitalist interests upon a German population denied the chance to demonstrate its desire for Socialism, and repeated Soviet assertions that Western powers were abusing their presence in Berlin—which he claimed was part of the Soviet Zone—to interfere in eastern German affairs. Ten days later, at an ACC meeting in Berlin on March 20th, Sokolovsky denounced the ‘unilateral actions’ of the Western Allies, ‘taken in Western Germany and which are against the interests of the peaceful countries and peace-loving Germans wh...

for a further meeting. The joint Allied occupation of Germany was over: less than two weeks later, on April 1st, the Soviet military authorities in Berlin began to interfere with surface traffic between western Germany and the Western Allies’ zon...

No one planned this outcome in May 1945, but few were deeply discontented with it. Some German politicians, notably Konrad Adenauer himself, even owed their career to the division of their country: had Germany remained a quadri-zonal or united country, an obscure local politician from the far-western Catholic Rhineland would almost certainly not have made it to the top.

But Adenauer could hardly have espoused the division of Germany as a goal, however much he welcomed it in private. His chief opponent in the first years of the Federal Republic, the Social Democrat Kurt Schumacher, was a Protestant from West Prussia and a tireless advocate of German unity. In contrast to Adenauer he would readily have accepted a neutralized Germany as the price for a single German state, which was what Stalin appeared to be offering. And Schumacher’s position was probably the more popular one in Germany at the time, which was why Adenauer had to tread carefully and ensure that the responsibility for a divided Germany fell squarely on the occupying forces.

By 1948 the United States, like Great Britain, was not unhappy to see the emergence of a divided Germany, with American influence dominant in the larger, western segment. But although there were some, like George Kennan, who had perceptively anticipated this outcome (as early as 1945 he had concluded that the USA had ‘no choice but to lead her section of Germany . . . to a form of independence so prosperous, so secure, so superior, that the east cannot threaten it’), they were in the minority. The Americans, like Stalin, were improvising in these years. It is sometimes suggested that certain key American decisions and declarations, notably the Truman Doctrine of March 1947, precipitated Stalin’s retreat from compromise to rigidity and that in this sense the responsibility for European divisions lay with Washington’s insensitivity or, worse, its calculated intransigence. But this is not so. For the Truman Doctrine, to take this example, had remarkably little impact on Soviet calculations. President Truman’s March 12th 1947 announcement to Congress that ‘It must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities o...

The immediate cause of the division of Germany and Europe lies rather in Stalin’s own errors in these years. In central Europe, where he would have preferred a united Germany, weak and neutral, he squandered his advantage in 1945 and subsequent years by uncompromising rigidity and confrontational tactics. If Stalin’s hope had been to let Germany rot until the fruit of German resentment and hopelessness fell into his lap, then he miscalculated seriously—though there were moments when the Allied authorities in western Germany wondered whether he might yet succeed. In that sense the Cold War in Europe was an unavoidable outcome of the Soviet dictator’s personality and the system over which he ruled.

All the Soviet Union needed to do was accept the Marshall Plan and convince a majority of the Germans of Moscow’s good faith in seeking a neutral, independent Germany. In 1947 this would radically have shifted the European balance of advantage. Whatever Marshall, Bevin or their advisers might have thought of such maneuvers, they would have been helpless to prevent them. That such tactical calculations were beyond Stalin cannot be credited to the West. As Dean Acheson put it on another occasion, ‘We were fortunate in our opponents.’ Looking back, it is somewhat ironic that after fighting a murderous war to reduce the power of an over-mighty Germany at the heart of the European continent, the victors should have proven so unable to agree on post-war arrangements to keep the German colossus down that they ended up

‘Imagine the Austrian Empire fragmented into a multitude of greater and lesser republics. What a nice basis for universal Russian monarchy’. František Palacký (April, 1848) ‘The Yugoslavs want to take Greek Macedonia. They want Albania, too, and even parts of Austria and Hungary. This is unreasonable. I do not like the way they are acting’. Josef Stalin, 1945 ‘All that the Red Army needed in order to reach the North Sea was boots’.

From the Soviet side the war had been fought to defeat Germany and restore Russian power and security on its western frontiers. Whatever was to become of Germany itself, the region separating Germany and Russia could not be left in uncertainty. The territories running in a north-south arc from Finland to Yugoslavia comprised small, vulnerable states whose inter-war governments (with the partial

exception of Czechoslovakia) had been uniformly hostile to the Soviet Union. Poland, Hungary and Romania in particular had been consistently unfriendly to Moscow and suspicious of Soviet intentions towards them. The only acceptable outcome for Stalin was the establishment—in those parts of the region not preemptively absorbed into the USSR itself—of governments that could be relied upon never to pose a threat to Soviet security.

the Soviet Union had almost no leverage in the domestic affairs of its western neighbours beyond the authority of its overwhelming military presence. Communists in much of the region had been banned from public life and legal political activity for most of the previous quarter century. Even where Communist parties were legal, their identification with Russia and the rigid, sectarian tactics imposed from Moscow for most of the period after 1927 had reduced them to a marginal irrelevance in East European politics. The Soviet Union had further contributed to their weakness by imprisoning and purging many of the Polish, Hungarian, Yugoslav and other Communists who had taken refuge in Moscow: in the Polish case the leadership of the inter-war Polish Communist Party was almost completely wiped out.

In Romania, according to the Romanian Communist leader Ana Pauker herself, the Party had less than 1,000 members in a population of nearly 20 million. The situation in Bulgaria was not much better: in September 1944 the Communists numbered about 8,000. Only in the industrial regions of Bohemia and in Yugoslavia, where the Party was identified with the victorious partisan resistance, did Communism have anything resembling a mass base.

Characteristically cautious, and in any case still maintaining working relations with the Western powers, Stalin thus initially pursued a tactic already familiar from the Popular Front years of the thirties and from Communist practice during the Spanish Civil War: favouring the formation of ‘Front’ governments, coalitions of Communists, Socialists and other ‘anti-Fascist’ parties, which would exclude and punish the old regime and its supporters but would be cautious and ‘democratic’, reformist rather than revolutionary. By the end of the war, or very shortly thereafter, every country in eastern Europe had such a coalition government.

Coalitions were the route to power for Communist parties in a region where they were historically weak; they were only ever a means to this end. As Walter Ulbricht, leader of the East German Communists, explained privately to his followers when they expressed bemusement at Party policy in 1945: ‘It’s quite clear—it’s got to look democratic, but we must have everything in our control.’

Communists in eastern Europe were in no hurry to claim the offices of President, Prime Minister or Foreign Minister, often preferring to leave these to their coalition allies in Socialist, Agrarian or Liberal Parties. This reflected the initial post-war disposition of government places—with the Communists in a minority—and reassured Western observers.

The Communists’ stated objective in 1945 and 1946 was to ‘complete’ the unfinished bourgeois revolutions of 1848, to re-distribute property, guarantee equality and affirm democratic rights in a part of Europe where all three had always been in short supply. These were plausible goals, at least on the surface, and they appealed to many in the region and in western Europe who wanted to think well of Stalin and his purposes.

Their appeal to Communists themselves, however, was sharply diminished in a series of local and national elections in eastern Germany, Austria and Hungary. There it became clear very early (in the Hungarian case at the Budapest municipal elections of November 1945) that however successfully they had inserted themselves into positions of local influence, Communists were never going to achieve public power through the ballot box. Despite every advantage of military occupation and economic patronage, Communist candidates were consistently defeated by representatives of the old Liberal, Social Democratic and Agrarian/Smallholder parties.

The result was that Communist parties adopted instead a strategy of covert pressure, followed by open terror and repression. In the course of 1946 and into 1947 electoral opponents were maligned, threatened, beaten up, arrested, tried as ‘Fascists’ or ‘collaborators’ an...

fear and insecurity which Communist spokesmen then blamed on their political critics. Vulnerable or unpopular politicians from non-Communist parties were targeted for public opprobrium, while their colleagues consented to this mistreatment in the hope it would not be applied to them. Thus in Bulgaria, as early as the summer of 1946, seven out of twenty-two members of the ‘Praesidium’ of the Agrarian Union and thirty-five out of the eighty members of its governing Council were in prison. Typical of the charges was one against the Agrarian journali...

Agrarians, Liberals and other mainstream parties proved an easy target, tarred with the brush of Fascism or anti-national sentiment and picked off in stages. The more complicated impediment to Communist ambitions were the local Socialist and Social-Democratic parties who shared the Communists’ own reforming ambitions. It was not easy to charge Social Democrats in central or eastern Europe with ‘Fascism’ or collaboration—they had usually been as much the victim of repression as Communists. And in so far as there was an industrial working-class constituency in overwhelmingly rural eastern Europe, its allegiance was traditionally Socialist, not Communist. Thus since the Socialists could not easily be beaten, the Communists chose instead to join them. Or, rather, to make the Socialists join them. This was a venerable Communist device. Lenin’s initial tactic from 1918 to 1921 had been to split Europe’s Socialist Parties, hive off the radical left element into new-formed Communist movements, and condemn the rump as reactionary and overtaken by history. But when Communist parties found themselves in the minority during the course of th...

The process began in the Soviet Zone of Germany where (at a secret meeting in Moscow in February 1946) the Communists determined upon a merger with their much larger Socialist ‘allies’. This merger was consummated two months later with the birth of the Socialist Unity Party (it was characteristic of these mergers that the term ‘Communist’ was deliberately eschewed by the freshly united party). Quite a few former leaders of the Social Democrats in eastern Germany proved amenable to the merger and were given honorific posts in the new Party and subsequent East German government. Socialists who protested or opposed the new Party were denounced, expelled and at the very least forced out of public life or into exile.

The Social Democrats in eastern Europe were in an impossible position. Western Socialists often encouraged them to merge with the Communists, either in the innocent belief that everyone would benefit, or else in the hope of moderating Communist behaviour. As late as 1947 independent Socialist Parties in eastern Europe (i.e. Socialists who refused to cooperate with their Communist comrades) were barred from joining international Socialist organizations on the grounds that they were an impediment to the alliance of ‘progressive’ forces.

Following the decimation, imprisonment or absorption of their main opponents, Communists did indeed do rather better at elections in 1947 and thereafter, with some help from violent

assaults on their remaining opponents, intimidation at polling stations and blatantly abusive vote counts. There then, typically, followed the formation of governments in which the Communist, or newly-united ‘Worker’ or ‘Unity’ Party was now blatantly dominant: coalition partners, if any, were reduced to nominal and empty roles. In keeping with this transition from united front coalitions to a Communist monopoly of power, Soviet strategy in the course of 1948 and 1949 reverted to a radical policy of state control, collectivization, destruction of the middle-class and purges and punishment of real and imagined opponents.

On June 5th 1947 the US Senate ratified the Paris Peace Treaties with Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Finland and Italy, despite the misgivings of American diplomats in Sofia and Bucharest. The very next day the leading anti-Communist politician in Bulgaria, the Agrarian leader Nikola Petkov (who had refused to follow more accommodating Agrarians into the Communists’ Fatherland Front), was arrested. His trial lasted from August 5th to 15th. On September 15th the Bulgarian Peace Treaty officially came into force and four days later the USA offered to extend diplomatic recognition to the government in Sofia. Within 96 hours Petkov was executed, his sentence having been delayed until the official American announcement. With Petkov judicially murdered, the Bulgarian Communists need fear no further impediments.

In Romania, the Communists’ position was even weaker than Bulgaria, where at least there was a history of philo-Russian sentiment on which the Party could try to draw.1 Although the Soviets guaranteed the return to Romania of northern Translyvania (assigned to Hungary under duress in 1940), Stalin had no intention of returning Bessarabia or the Bukovina, both