Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

by Tony Judt

subversion and violence were not one option among others—they were the only road to power.

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.

This was a reminder, as though it were needed, of the omnipresence of the Red Army.

The Prague coup was of enormous significance, precisely because it came in a more or less democratic country that had seemed so friendly to Moscow. It galvanized the Western allies, who inferred from it that Communism was on the march westwards.

Thanks to Prague, a significant part of the non-Communist Left in France, Italy and elsewhere would now firmly situate itself in the Western camp, a development that consigned Communist parties in countries beyond Soviet reach to isolation and growing impotence.

This shift was driven in general terms by Stalin’s anxiety at his inability to shape European and German affairs as he wished; but also and above all by his growing irritation with Yugoslavia.

But Yugoslav devotion to Bolshevism was, from Stalin’s point of view, always a little too enthusiastic. Stalin, as we have already seen, was interested less in revolution than in power. It was for Moscow to determine the strategy of Communist parties, for Moscow to decide when a moderate approach was called for and when a radical line should be adopted. As the origin and fountainhead of world revolution, the Soviet Union was not a model for revolution but the model. Under the appropriate circumstances lesser Communist parties might follow suit, but they were ill advised to trump the Soviet hand. And this was Tito’s besetting weakness in Stalin’s eyes. In his ambition to plant the Communist standard in south-east Europe, the former partisan general was running ahead of Soviet calculations.

What began as a basis for mutual co-operation among local Communists soon came, in Stalin’s suspicious eyes, to appear more like a bid for regional hegemony by one of them.

Tito’s provocative encouragement to the Greek insurgents thus annoyed Stalin—who rightly reasoned that without Yugoslav assistance the Greek imbroglio would long since have resolved itself peacefully5—and alienated him still further from his Balkan acolyte.

Tito’s combination of Yugoslav irridentism and partisan revolutionary fervour was thus a growing embarrassment to Stalin.

In wartime that control had been lost—symbolized by the shutting down of the Comintern in 1943.

The policy of cooperation, pursued in Prague, Paris and Rome and hitherto tacitly approved by Stalin, was swiftly being replaced by a retreat to the strategy of confrontation represented by Zdanov’s promulgation of the theory of two irreconcilable ‘camps’.

the real goal of both the meeting and the Cominform (which only ever met three times and was disbanded in 1956) was to re-establish Soviet dominion within the international movement

Peaceful co-existence, of the kind they had been pursuing in domestic politics, was at an end. An ‘anti-imperialist democratic camp’ (in Zdanov’s words) was forming and a new line was to be followed. Henceforth Moscow expected Communists to pay closer attention and subordinate local considerations to Soviet interests.

Following Szklarska Pore¸ba, Communists everywhere switched to confrontational tactics: strikes, demonstrations, campaigns against the Marshall Plan and—in eastern Europe—acceleration of the take-over of power.

In Zdanov’s ‘two camps’ theory, Communists in the Western camp were now consigned to a secondary, spoiler role.

Instead, however, the Tito-Stalin rift was publicly initiated by Stalin’s condemnation of the Balkan Federation idea in February 1948 and the Soviet cancellation of trade negotiations, followed by the recall from Belgrade of Soviet military and civilian advisers the following month.

In fact, Yugoslavia represented the international equivalent of a ‘left opposition’ to Stalin’s monopoly of power and a conflict was inevitable: Stalin needed to break Tito in order to make very clear to Tito’s fellow Communists that Moscow would brook no dissent.

It is significant that the attacks on Tito and his followers coincided with the full flowering of the Stalinist personality cult and the purges and show trials of the coming years. For there is little doubt that Stalin truly did see in Tito a threat and a challenge, and feared his corrosive effect on the fealty and obedience of other Communist regimes and parties. The Cominform’s insistence, in its journals and publications, on the ‘aggravation of the class struggle in the transition from capitalism to socialism’ and on the ‘leading role’ of the Party risked reminding people that these had been precisely the policies of the Yugoslav Party since 1945. Hence the accompanying emphasis on loyalty to the Soviet Union and Stalin, the rejection of all ‘national’ or ‘particular’ roads to Socialism and the demand for a ‘redoubling of vigilance’. The second Stalinist ice age was beginning.

If Stalin went to such trouble to assert and re-assert his authority in eastern Europe, it was in large measure because he was losing the initiative in Germany.7 On June 1st 1948 the Western Allies, meeting in London, announced plans to establish a separate West German state.

Like most of Stalin’s diplomatic adventures the Berlin blockade was an improvisation, not part of any calculated aggressive design (though the West could hardly be blamed for not knowing this at the time). Stalin was not about to go to war for Berlin.

For Stalin, once he appreciated that he could neither compete with the Allies for the allegiance of the Germans nor force them to abandon their plans, a separate East German Communist state was the least bad outcome.

the Berlin crisis committed the United States for the first time to a significant military presence in Europe for the indefinite future.

This western European Union was officially inaugurated with the Brussels Pact, but as Bevin explained to Marshall in a message of March 11th, such an arrangement would be incomplete unless extended to the concept of North Atlantic security as a whole—a

If the United States was committing itself to an entangling European alliance for the first time, it was because many people in Washington saw NATO much as they saw the Marshall Plan: as a device to help Europeans feel better about themselves and manage their own affairs—in this case, their own defense.

NATO thus had a double attraction for Paris especially: it would place the line of defense against Soviet forces further east than hitherto—as Charles Bohlen had observed, some months before the Treaty was signed, ‘the one faint element of confidence which [the French] cling to is the fact that American troops, however strong in number, stand between them and the Red Army.’ And perhaps more important, it would serve as a reinsurance policy against German revanchism. Indeed it was only because of the promise of NATO protection that the French government, with the outcome of World War One still firmly in mind, conceded its approval for a West German state.

the purpose of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was ‘to keep the Russians out, the Americans in and the Germans down.’

The originality of the Treaty lay not so much in what it could achieve but in what it represented: like the Marshall Plan—and the Brussels Treaty from which it sprang—NATO illustrated the most significant change that had come over Europe (and the US) as a result of the war—a willingness to share information and cooperate in defense, security, trade, currency regulations and much else. An integrated Allied command in peacetime, after all, was an unheard of departure from practice.

The Americans and West Europeans immediately drew the (erroneous) conclusion that Korea was a diversion or prelude, and that Germany would be next—an

From a psychological boost to European confidence, NATO thus became a major military commitment, drawing on the seemingly limitless resources of the US economy and committing the Americans and their allies to an unprecedented peacetime build up of men and matériel.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation was now, unambiguously, an alliance. Its primary task was what military planners called the ‘forward defense’ of Europe: i.e. confrontation with the Red Army in the middle of Germany.

there was something perverse about spending billions of dollars to defend the West Germans from Russian attack without asking them to make a contribution of their own. And if Germany was to become, as some anticipated, a sort of buffer zone and future battlefield, then the risk of alienating German sympathies and encouraging neutralist sentiments could not be ignored.

More than a coal and steel cartel, but far, far less than a blueprint for European integration, Schuman’s proposal represented a practical solution to the problem that had vexed France since 1945.

For the first time the Federal Republic of Germany was entering an international organization on equal terms with other independent states—and would now be bound to the Western alliance,

their common Christian Democratic concern for social cohesion and collective responsibility disposed all of them to feel comfortable with the notion of a trans-national ‘High Authority’ exercising executive power for the common good.

it provided the psychological space for Europe to move forward with a renewed self-confidence.

It was a political vehicle in economic disguise, a device for overcoming Franco-German hostility.

the British saw the ECSC as the thin edge of a continental wedge in British affairs, whose implications were the more dangerous for being unclear.

The Americans were frustrated by the UK’s reluctance to merge its fate with Europe and irritated by Britain’s insistence upon preserving its imperial standing.

This sense of quiet pride at the country’s capacity to suffer, endure and win through had marked Britain off from the continent.

This accounts for Britain’s recurrent post-war currency crises, as the country struggled to pay off huge dollar-denominated debts from a drastically reduced income.

But the British decision to stand aside from the ECSC was above all an instinctive, psychological and even emotional one, a product of the utter peculiarity of recent British experience.

What Stalin wanted in Europe above all, as we have seen, was security. But he was also interested in the economic benefits to be had from his victories in the West.

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.

Where Stalin differed from other empire-builders, even the czars, was in his insistence upon reproducing in the territories under his control forms of government and society identical to those of the Soviet Union.

Stalin needed to secure his satellite neighbours’ unswerving allegiance, and he knew only one way to do this. First, the Party had to secure a monopoly of power.

Secondly, the Party-State was to exercise a monopoly over economic decisions.

antipathy towards the peasant, and successful implementation of rural collectivization, were one of the chief tests of Stalinist orthodoxy.

In western Europe, too, investment in productivity and growth was given priority over the provision of consumer goods and services, though the Marshall Plan softened the pain of this strategy.

The Soviet model of the thirties, improvised to address uniquely Soviet circumstances of vast distance, abundant raw materials and endless, cheap, unskilled labor, made no sense at all for tiny countries like Hungary or Czechoslovakia, lacking raw materials but with a skilled industrial labor force and long-established international markets for high-value-added products.