The seven case studies explored in this book prompt a number of general observations about Stalin’s impact on the fate of Europe, about European politics in the postwar period, and about the coming of the Cold War. Of course, each case represents a different set of domestic circumstances in relation to the Soviet Union and the coming Cold War. This diversity makes it difficult to generalize and draw broad conclusions. But there are still commonalities that can be identified.
In every case, political leaders in Europe sought to protect and, in some cases, strengthen their country’s sovereignty, meaning the right of their nations to govern themselves. They had been largely deprived of this right during the war and had been subject either to German occupation, the rule of collaborators, or combinations of both. Many of the political leaders who emerged after the war had been in prison, exile, or hiding before liberation. In the case of the communists, many had been in Moscow. The severe challenges of physical reconstruction and the reconstitution of their societies made their political tasks all the harder. It was not at all a given that they or their political parties could resist either the internal threats of revolution on the left or right or the external threats posed by the power, the prestige, and sometimes the military presence of the Soviet Union. In fact, given the strength of many communist parties immediately after the war and the chaos of the European economies, it was something of a miracle that democratic, pluralist politics could develop at all. One needs to view the postwar period from the perspective of 1944 and 1945 to absorb the sense of insecurity and foreboding that pervaded the political leadership on the continent. Added to this were growing worries in some quarters, and hopes in others, that the Soviet Union and the West might go to war. Yet, amazingly, traditional political systems did revive and the old parties, if sometimes under different names, defended the reconstitution of the rule of law and parliamentary government.
In Denmark (Bornholm), Finland, Austria, and western Germany (West Berlin), the conservative Christian Democrats, and anti-communist Social Democrats, revived parliamentary democracies and led their countries to resist Soviet blandishments. The Christian Democrats faced the uncertain present and future by developing a strong social orientation to their programs. The Social Democrats, especially those who were outside the direct control of the Soviet military and political authorities, successfully resisted efforts by the communists to submerge them in unity parties or to split their parties. Statesmen like Ernst Reuter in Berlin, Juho Kusti Paasikivi in Finland, Karl Renner and Leopold Figl in Austria, and Alcide De Gasperi in Italy were engaged in a political struggle with Soviet and / or communist domination that defined the national character of their countries for decades to come. Even in those countries with ruling communist parties, Poland and Albania, the struggle for sovereignty went on within the communist movement. In Poland, Władysław Gomułka pursued a “Polish road to socialism,” which eventually clashed, like Josip Broz Tito’s Yugoslav communist ambitions, with Stalin’s demands for subordination and conformity. In Albania, Enver Hoxha used the conflict between Tito and the Yugoslavs and Stalin to protect his weak and undeveloped nation’s ability to govern its own affairs from the Yugoslavs, though under his own ruthless and violent dictatorship. Even a Western communist leader, like Palmiro Togliatti, was involved in a complicated balancing act of advancing Italy’s national interests against what he saw as the United States’ imperialist goals and Moscow’s demands for upholding the Cominform line. But Togliatti should also be seen as pursuing Italian sovereignty and building Italian democracy, despite his unquestionable loyalty to Moscow.
Stalin had no firm views in 1944–1945 about how relations with the countries of Europe should develop. As the reader has seen, he looked to the establishment of “new democracies” or “people’s democracies,” which he saw as an attractive intermediate stage between bourgeois democracy and socialism, as the best way to model the new political systems emerging from the war. There would be no dictatorship of the proletariat, no collectivization, and no socialization of property. The Soviets were not interested in red flags flying over city halls or in insurrectionary workers’ demonstrations in the streets. Stalin thought this would also mollify the West; he was rue to antagonize his former wartime Allies and was fearful of a military confrontation of any sort. Moscow dealt with each European country differently, depending on the geostrategic importance of its territories and the strength of its communist parties. Stalin also had a strong sense of “national character” that sometimes influenced his dealings with the European countries: Finns were hardy and stubborn; Germans were brave, unsubtle, “Teutonic”; Poles were subversive and flighty; Albanians were backward and primitive.
From a geostrategic point of view, Poland, Finland, and Germany were crucial to Stalin’s calculations. Finland had a long common border with the Soviet Union and had been its opponent in two recent major wars (the Winter War and the Continuation War); Poland, had been a traditional enemy of the Soviet Union (and pathway for invading German armies), and was the object of Soviet territorial ambitions; and Germany, the strongest European country outside the Soviet Union, had invaded the lands of the Soviet Union during World War I and World War II, and had demonstrated traditional hostility to Russian ambitions on the continent. In each case, Stalin’s policies produced different results. The Finns were not occupied by the Soviet Union and were able to win their domestic sovereignty by diplomatically ceding their ability to make military and foreign policy that might counter Soviet interests. The Poles lost their independence in the Stalinist period, and Gomułka’s attempts to maintain a modicum of Polish sovereignty within the communist movement came to naught within Stalin’s lifetime. The outcome of the Berlin crisis of 1948–1949 indicated that Germany would have two distinct states. The struggle for sovereignty in Germany meant the creation of West German and East German political entities, with the former capital divided between a West Berlin and East Berlin.
In those countries where Stalin had less direct interest—Denmark, Albania, Austria, and Italy—compromises were easier to reach. The occupation of Bornholm lasted less than a year, and the Soviets withdrew with minimal assurances of Danish neutrality and promises for trade and good relations. There was no Sovietization on Bornholm and few lasting effects of the Red Army presence. Stalin left the fate of Albania to the Yugoslavs until the rising tensions between Belgrade and Moscow in the spring of 1948 erupted into a full-scale split. To the end of his life, Stalin seemed both uninterested in Albania and unsure how to deal with its remoteness and backwardness. Despite being very close to an agreement over a state treaty with Austria several times, and most notably in 1949, the Austrian problem was only resolved once the dictator died. Stalin was intrigued with the possibility of Soviet gains in Italy (and France) and displayed periodic flashes of hope that the communist parties there might come to power through electoral victories. But he was consistently opposed to suggestions from militants within those parties that they should strike for power in a workers’ uprising. From the beginning, Stalin had little interest in fomenting revolutions in Europe.
Numerous issues in Europe and Asia were successfully resolved at Yalta, Potsdam, and even afterward. (Historians tend to concentrate on those that were not.) The Soviet Union needed resources to rebuild from the horrendous destruction of its peoples, resources, and industries. As a result, Stalin wanted good relations with the United States and Britain, and he was ready to deal and did. His withdrawal from Bornholm can be seen in this light, as can, for example, his almost incomprehensible unwillingness to help the Greek partisans or support an insurrection in Italy, when in both cases success for communist-backed actions might well have been in the cards.
The coming of the Cold War unquestionably influenced the fate of Europe in the immediate postwar years, but it was not as dominant a factor as many historians suggest. In 1945 and 1946, there was plenty of room for compromise among the great powers. By 1947, with the American president’s pronouncement before Congress of the Truman Doctrine (March 1947), Secretary of State Marshall’s announcement at the Harvard University commencement in June 1947 of his plan to reconstruct the European economies, and the Zhdanov’s “two-camps speech” and critique of the West European communist parties at the first Cominform meeting in September 1947, the chances of compromise between the East and West began to narrow. It took some months for the impact of these and similar policy prescriptions to harden into divisive actions on both sides.
The Americans, it is well worth remembering, had almost nothing to do with the postwar fate of Finland or Bornholm. In both cases, the British were involved, though in neither were they willing to confront the Soviets or interfere with the policies of the Danes or Finns. Given the brutal Soviet takeover of Poland after the war, symbolically marked by the flight of Stanisław Mikołajczyk from the country in October 1947, the United States and Britain had soon abandoned the country as hopelessly inaccessible behind the “Iron Curtain.” The same was true of Albania, though feeble efforts were made in the beginning of the 1950s to overthrow Hoxha. While there were periodic episodes of conflict in Cold War Vienna, the Allied Control Commission functioned remarkably well, and the joint interests of the Four Powers made the evacuation of their respective military contingents a source of constant speculation. Only the Berlin blockade in 1948–1949 carried the seeds of more serious conflict. But here, too, the Four Powers compromised, finding a practical solution for Berlin that lasted in the main until the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961 and then until the collapse of the German Democratic Republic in 1989 and the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.
The years 1948 and 1949 were a crucial watershed in the history of the Cold War and the division of Europe. Many of the salient events discussed at relative length in this book happened during that short period: the defeat of the communists in the Italian elections of April 1948; the beginning of the Berlin blockade in June 1948; the Albanian switch from the Yugoslav to the Soviet alliance during the Soviet-Yugoslav split of the spring and early summer of 1948; the Finnish-Soviet treaty of April 1948; the removal of Władysław Gomułka as secretary-general of the Polish Workers’ Party in September 1948; the lifting of the Berlin blockade in May 1949; and the failure of the Austrian State Treaty negotiations during the summer and fall of 1949. That Denmark joined NATO as an original member in May 1949 in some ways concluded the Bornholm affair, though Soviet withdrawal in April 1946 had ended the occupation.
This book has shown that these events and those that led up to them cannot be understood only in the context of the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States. This was, above all, European history, in the sense that the intentions of European political leaders and the results of European elections were of vital importance in determining the outcome of crises and conflicts within European societies regarding their future. The agency of Europeans mattered and mattered a lot. The political inclinations of postwar leaders and the bitter experience of the Nazi domination of Europe influenced their choices and guided their actions when faced with pressure and enticements from the Soviets and Americans alike. To be sure, Soviet pressure was sometimes overwhelming and deprived some Europeans of complete sovereignty in their choices of political futures. But the struggle was real, and there was little that was inevitable about the division of the continent in the immediate postwar period.
In short, the events of 1948 and 1949 inaugurated the Cold War in the form the world knew it until 1989–1991, when communist states, including the Soviet Union, fell one after another until there were none left in Europe and few in the world as a whole. Before 1948–1949, the fate of the continent could have taken different directions, but that was not to be. Instead, as the war came to an end the rivalry between the Soviet Union and the United States over the European settlement drove the former Allies further and further apart. Despite bleak economic and social circumstances, what seemed like open-ended political possibilities with the collapse of the Third Reich and the liberation of the continent narrowed considerably as the former Allies sought to take advantage of their military positions on the continent. After the formal division of Germany and the formation of NATO in 1949, there was no turning back. The opportunities were minimal for an understanding between the United States and the Soviet Union regarding a German peace treaty, which would have signaled the formal end of World War II.
Events in Asia—the victory of the Chinese Communist revolution and the creation of the People’s Republic in 1949, and the Korean War (from June 1950 until July 1953)—solidified the division of the world into rival camps, the kind that Andrei Zhdanov had stated already existed at the Cominform meeting of September 1947 and Churchill had anticipated in his Fulton, Missouri, speech of March 5, 1946. Even after Stalin’s death in March 1953, during the period of “peaceful coexistence,” the Cold War contained the seeds of a new world war, which might well have involved nuclear weapons, between the ideological and political rivals in the East and West.
No observer can fail to notice the hangovers of the hostility between the United States and the Soviet Union in the post–Cold War period. Old habits die hard in both political entities; some institutional cultures in both Washington and Moscow remain intact and easy reflexes of traditional enmity appeal to political actors and mass audiences alike. But one should make no mistake that the ideological and geostrategic determinants of the Cold War are not the same as those driving Russian-American enmity during the era of Vladimir Putin. Marxism-Leninist theory—and what it meant for the division of Europe and the political hostilities between Europeans, left and right—is all but a dead letter in the spectrum of ideologies today. Instead, the new divisions engendered by the emergence of populist political ideologies are much different in form and content and much more susceptible to change.
Germany is united, economically powerful, and, at least for the time being, a stalwart member of NATO and the European Union. A major aspect of its raison d’être is the peaceful and unified development of the European continent, in comity with the interests of Russia. Italy retains some of the “leftism” of its influential communist past but has become, at least until recently, an active and important part of the European Union and NATO. Albania and the former Yugoslav republics of Slovenia, Croatia, and Montenegro are in NATO, as are Poland and other countries of the former Soviet bloc. Finland and Austria, though both still “neutral” in their own ways, are aligned with NATO, and have joined the European Union. One can undoubtedly read their past vulnerabilities vis-à-vis the Soviet Union and their struggle for sovereignty in their present foreign policies. At least during the 1990s, the discussion about the potential joining of the Russian Federation with the European Union and NATO was serious. One need not exclude that possibility at some point in the future, despite the difficult state of relations between Russia and the West today. But Europe has its woes as well, as the threat of anti-immigrant right-wing parties and the development of anti–European Union sentiment threatens the continent’s stability and prosperity.
The rise of populism and the disruptive public and clandestine Russian policies in Europe require the kind of political leadership and mature social and political engagement of voters that the Europeans experienced in the immediate postwar period. The dominance of fascism and dictatorship in the interwar period and the horrors of World War II made the attraction of parliamentary democracy and peace all the greater. The danger of Soviet transgressions aroused the determination of Europeans to shape their own futures politically. Then, as now, sovereignty was a crucial objective. The Russian Federation will try to limit the Europeans in this connection at its own peril. Despite a generally conciliatory stance toward Moscow, the Europeans have held strong to the regime of sanctions introduced to warn the Russians away from steps, like the annexation of Crimea, meddling in eastern Ukraine, and attacking its former citizens in Britain, that threaten European sovereignty. The downsides of the European Union—excessive bureaucracy, expensive institutions, and sometimes imperious behavior toward member states—can distort the desire for sovereignty into anti-liberal politics. The EU has to find a way to meet its original European calling of peaceful and harmonious cooperation in economics, trade, finance, and labor without impinging on the rights of its member states to determine their own futures.
In many of the countries of Europe, memory politics play an important role in the way the populations think about the immediate postwar period and the present. There are segments of society in former communist eastern Europe that are nostalgic for the idealism and sense of purpose of those early years of rebuilding their countries’ infrastructures and their families’ lives. But much more often, the postwar years are painted in the darkest terms possible, as a time of violence and communist excess, of the crushing of freedom and of the valiant but hopeless struggle for independence. Contemporary Polish memory politics, for example, buries the postwar excesses of anti-Semitism, including the scattered pogroms of the postwar period—or Gomułka’s campaign against the Jews—in a government-supported campaign to revive the reputation of the so-called “Cursed Soldiers,” members of the underground army who switched from resisting the Nazis at war’s end to fighting the communists. In western Europe, too, the postwar era is in part romantically recalled as a time of overcoming economic hardship and rebuilding destroyed cities and shattered lives. For a very long time, discussion of wartime collaboration, fascist crimes, and collusion with the Holocaust was—and still is to some extent—submerged on the continent in the rhetoric of resistance, liberation, and restoration. Memories of the postwar years are frequently shaped by the stories of social conflict in the black-and-white tones of the film noir of the late 1940s and 1950s and of the Italian neorealism school, which explored the lives of the poor and indigent. On the left of the political spectrum and among the Italian intelligentsia as a whole, Togliatti and the PCI are remembered with considerable admiration, while the enormous contributions of De Gasperi to social peace and prosperity in Italy tend to be minimized. Like De Gasperi, the founding fathers of postwar West Germany (Konrad Adenauer and Kurt Schumacher) and Austria (Karl Renner and Leopold Figl,) receive little of the admiration and sense of gratitude that they deserve. Paasikivi is an exception to the rule; the Finns understand in myriad ways the crucial role he (and Mannerheim) played in the development of Finnish sovereignty today. In Denmark, criticism from the right still attends the memory of the Danish government’s handling of the Bornholm crisis and the potential Soviet threat from that period. At the same time, Gustav Rasmussen, Danish foreign minister from November 1945 to October 1950, has been excoriated for setting Denmark on a “neutralist” path.
Forgetting is as much a part of memory politics of the postwar years as remembering. Both the Austrians and the Germans, for example, tend to minimize and historically compartmentalize the period of the Soviet occupation. Both the Germans and the Poles tend to think of the early postwar period as one of Soviet domination, forgetting that there were large numbers of German and Polish communists who contributed to the Stalinization of the East German and Polish states. For many decades, Germans and Austrians did not want to talk publicly about the problem of rape and other depredations by Soviet soldiers at the end of the war and the beginning of the peace. That changed, especially after the fall of the Soviet Union. Still, both the Germans and Austrians tend to follow conciliatory policies toward Moscow in part because of justified guilt regarding the war. The Austrians and Finns, both of whom tottered on the brink of absorption into Moscow’s orbit, remember that their countries’ sovereignty depended on the relative restraint of the Soviets after the war. They, too, do everything they can not to antagonize the Russian Federation today. What might be considered pro-Russian Italian policies derive in good measure from the decades of Italian communist dedication to the Soviet cause in Europe, even if relatively critical and open-minded in the period of Euro-Communism in the 1970s and 1980s. Many younger Albanians accuse the contemporary Albanian government of distorting the legacy of Enver Hoxha and the extreme violence that attended his regime. The strong emphasis on the discourse of Albanian nationalism today overwhelms the history of Yugoslav, Soviet, and eventually Chinese involvement in the country’s development.
Russian historical memory is divided on the legacy of Stalin. But most Russians admire his role as the leader of the country during the Second World War—the Great Patriotic War—and during the early Cold War, which attracts much less attention. Russian historians and journalists will argue about the Soviet role in Europe after the war, with a minority sharply critical of Stalin’s policies and practices that led directly to the communist seizure of power in the countries of eastern Europe. The majority, however, hew a middle path between the traditional and much more benevolent Soviet interpretation of the “liberating mission” of the Soviet troops and the “brotherly aid” of the Soviet Communist Party to its East European comrades, and the more realistic stance of Stalin’s critics. They argue that the communist elites of the European countries themselves determined the fate of the success of the revolution in each, not the Soviets, and even sometimes that American intervention prevented the success of the revolution in western Europe. Violence and purges in eastern Europe, therefore, were the product of local communist excesses but not of Stalin and the Soviet leadership.
In virtually all the countries of Europe, World War II continues to occupy a dominant role in the development of memory politics. This is no doubt even more the case today than in decades past. The memory of the immediate postwar period is also important. Yet Europeans would do well to pay more attention to the struggles of that period as a way to understand the character of their politics and societies. They have a great deal to be proud of in the reconstruction of their countries, the rebuilding of their cities, the prosperity of their economies, the strength of their social welfare systems, and the flourishing of their cultures. The European Union, born as the Coal and Steel Community in 1950, is a product of postwar yearnings for peace, cooperation, and economic development. The spread of the EU to eastern Europe after the collapse of communism was intended to demonstrate that the strivings of the postwar period could be shared throughout Europe. Europeans won their struggle for sovereignty. Now they need to learn how to balance the interests of their own countries with the benefits of acting as a single unit. That is not a simple task, but it is one that they have the talent and determination to resolve.