Abstract
In 1945 Red Army units linked up with American forces on the River Elbe in Germany. After a thousand years the Slavs had almost reached the limits of their old migrations once again (see Chapter 10). By the spring of 1948 Communist governments had been imposed on all the territories occupied by Soviet forces at the end of the war, and all political opposition in them had been eliminated. Thereafter the Soviet Union proceeded to mould her satellites in her own image, restructuring their societies, imposing forced industrialization programmes upon them, collectivizing private farmers, and forcing obedience on both their Communist regimes and the population at large by means of Party discipline, secret police operations, illegal ‘administrative’ action, and the purge.
The great migration builds new industry.…
Is fed on great empty words.…
Adam Wazyk, Polish poet.
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References
Stalin to Djilas, June 1945 — M. Djilas, Conversations with Stalin (trans. M Petrovich) (Harmondsworth, 1969) p. 90. In general on the period covered in this chapter see J. Rothschild, Return to Diversity (Oxford, 1989).
The traditional interpretation in the West attributes the onset of the Cold War to Soviet aggression. On the other hand revisionists have claimed that it was Western aggression which forced the Soviet Union to construct an empire in Eastern Europe. Both views are tendentious. A. Schlesinger suggests persuasively that the Cold War arose out of mutual misperceptions, though he attributes too much to ideology. Despite the vast amount of scholarly literature on the subject too much of relevance still lies buried in the archives of both the East and the West. The account which follows attempts to explain the origins and effects of the Cold War only in terms of circumstances and developments in Eastern Europe itself.
They comprised survivors of concentration camps and forced labourers returning home from Germany besides people fleeing from the advancing armies and migrating as a result of frontier changes. The frontiers of Poland were moved westwards; part of Transylvania which had been transferred to Hungary by the second ‘Vienna Award’ (see Chapter 3) was returned to Romania, which, however, had to cede northern Moldavia to the USSR. Czechoslovakia relinquished Subcarpathian Ruthenia to the Soviet Union on 29 June 1945. Yugoslavia gained Trieste, Zadar and Gorizia from Italy.
December 1945 to June 1946. By the time the currency was stabilized in August 1946 the value of the pengo had slumped to a sixth of that.
See the quarterly UNRRA Reports on Poland, 1945 (1946).
J. Szczepanski, Polish Society (New York, 1970) pp. 40–1.
A resident farm labourer working on an annual contract. For a graphic description of their condition early in the century, see G. Cushing’s translation of G. Illyes, People of the Puszta (London, 1971).
Benes’s (anti-Nazi) National Socialists polled 18 per cent; the Catholic People’s Party 16 per cent and the Social Democrats 13 per cent. Under the British electoral system the Communists would probably have gained a comfortable overall parliamentary majority.
R. Wolff, The Balkans in Our Time (Cambridge, Mass., 1956) pp. 293–304. Bulgaria’s traditional sympathy for Russia derived from Russia’s long-standing support for the Orthodox Christians under Ottoman rule and her crucial role in the establishment of Bulgaria’s independence (see Chapter 4). In the only genuine elections before the war the Communists had come second (ironically their support then derived from the cities, whereas in 1990 it derived from the countryside).
The ‘Government of National Unity’ which the British installed in Athens in October 1944, in the wake of the German withdrawal, included only five representatives of the Communist-led Popular Front. Having purged the Greek Brigade serving with the British Army of ‘political unreliables’, the British dissolved the Communist-led resistance force, ELAS, and fired on a crowd protesting against it. By the time elections were held in Greece in 1946 the new Greek National Guard and the police, both of which had been purged of left-wing sympathizers, procured the desired result. It should be noted that Stalin had pressured the Greek Communists into supporting the predominately right-wing ‘Government of National Unity’, and that when ELAS eventually tried to seize power he forbade the Communists to fire on British troops.
See S. Mikolajczyk, The Pattern of Soviet Domination (London, 1948), p. 81.
The phrase in Mikolajczyks’s, op. cit., p. ix.
See V. Mastny, ‘The Benes Thesis: A Design for the Liquidation of National Minorities’, in S. Borsody (ed.), The Hungarians (New Haven, Conn., 1987), pp. 231–43.
See P. Shoup, Communism and the Yugoslav National Question (New York, 1968).
This was subsequently reported by the Hungarian Minister, Gero. The treatment of post-war Greece, see W. McNeill, The Metamorphosis of Greece Since World War II (Oxford, 1978).
By the end of 1945 1 per cent of Poland’s population were members of the Communist Party, though there had been only 30,000 members a year before; 1.25 per cent of Romanians, 1.75 per cent of Hungarians, 2 per cent of East Germans and 5 per cent of Czechs were Party members at that stage, though in Bulgaria only 0.33 per cent were. By 1954 approximately 5 per cent of all Poles, Romanians and Yugoslavs were Party members and 10 per cent of all Czechs and Slovaks.
It should be remembered that the Czechs had supplied essential arms to the Haganah and that the Soviet Union had been the first power to grant de jure recognition to Israel. The historical connections between the Israeli left, which formed the first government of the new state, and the left in Russia, Israel’s large agricultural collective (kibbutz) movement, and the Eastern European origins of most of Israel’s inhabitants at that time gave rise to expectations that the new state would align with Moscow. Why it failed to do so constitutes an interesting but neglected story.
Gomulka had been a popular Minister for the newly-acquired Western Territories. He was expelled from the Party in 1949 and arrested in 1951 but never brought to trial. For his subsequent career see Chapter 1.
For example, there had been a pogrom in Kielce in 1946 in which seventy newly-returned concentration camp survivors were murdered by a mob which had gathered in response to a rumour that Jews had killed a Christian child for ritual purposes. Apologists claimed that the Communists had staged the incident in order to discredit the opposition. Bishop Wyszynski, subsequently Cardinal Primate of Poland, failed to condemn the massacre. Wyszynski once stated that he was not convinced that Beilis, a Jew acquitted by a jury of a charge of ritual murder in pre-revolutionary Russia, had been innocent.
Kriegl was a veteran of the Spanish Civil War. This disposes of the theory that one of the purposes of the purges was to eliminate everyone who might have been connected with Tito, the Comintern’s representative in Paris in the 1930s.
See J. Mindszenty, Memoirs (London, 1974) which, despite its tendentious tone and sarcasm, is a useful source on the Kulturkampf between Church and State in the early years of Communist rule. Mindszenty escaped from prison in 1956 and was long sheltered in the US embassy in Budapest. After the Vatican had reached an agreement with the Hungarian government he was allowed to move to the United States.
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© 1992 Philip Longworth
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Longworth, P. (1992). The Quest for the New Eldorado (1944–53). In: The Making of Eastern Europe. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-22202-5_3
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