INTRODUCTION

We forget, perhaps, how much of the world is not controlled by the Great Powers and how many people have a will of their own.

—A. J. P. TAYLOR

The European continent was utterly devastated by World War II. Everywhere were destroyed cities and sad throngs of hungry faces. Whatever differences there might have been between eastern and western Europe in the interwar period—mostly deriving from economic underdevelopment over significant stretches of eastern Europe—were leveled by the horrendous costs of the war in human lives and materiel. The continent as a whole was beset by hunger, apathy, unemployment, and, especially during the winter of 1946–1947, fierce cold—the worst in three centuries. Food and coal were in desperately short supply. Food production sank to two-thirds of the prewar level in part because of the shortage of fertilizer, livestock, and labor. Kerosene was found in some localities for light and cooking. Wood, charcoal, and peat—when available—served as the main sources of heat. Europeans were destitute, malnourished, and weakened by the low caloric intake. This in turn prompted the frequent appearance of pneumonia, diphtheria, tuberculosis, and typhus. Given the widespread shortages of drugs—in particular penicillin, sulpha drugs, and antibiotics—disease, epidemics, and high rates of death from illness were inevitable. Not surprisingly, the elderly and very young were the most susceptible.

Tens of millions of people were on the move in 1944–1945: demobilized soldiers, returning POWs and forced laborers, expellees, settlers, deserters, and drifters in search of booty, work, and something to eat. Up to forty million people were displaced during the war.¹ After having survived the wartime years of highly restrictive and punitive labor laws (including the threat of mobilization), factory workers in Łódź, Milan, Paris, and elsewhere went on strike for higher wages, better working conditions, and, frequently, increased workers’ control. Frightful anti-Semitism was rampant in many European societies, despite—indeed one could argue because of—what the Nazis had done to the Jews. Instead of stamping out anti-Semitism, knowledge of what happened to the Jews seemed only to exacerbate it. Few locals wanted the Jews back in their communities, east or west, and those Jews who returned to their homes and workplaces tended to face the hostility bred, in many cases, by guilt and indifference.² Avaricious and sometimes simply needy neighbors had seized Jewish homes and shops during the war. Few were ready to return them afterward.³

Europeans in all parts of the continent resented ethnic minorities. During the war and after, the ruling nationalities carried out generally popular policies of ethnic cleansing. The Nazi leaders were the primary perpetrators of the violent deportations of peoples, but they also forcibly resettled Germans from the east to return to the Reich (Heim ins Reich) to take over the farms and properties of deported minorities. Once the war was lost, Germans themselves were driven from their former homes in eastern and central Europe in the millions, as the combination of changing borders and attacks by nationalist vigilante and militia groups exposed German communities to extreme danger.⁴ Hungarians, Ukrainians, Italians, Poles, and others faced the same fate in territories where they once held sway and were now no longer welcome. The victorious Soviets joined the act, both by approving the deportation of minority peoples and by cleansing their own territory of Poles and Germans.

Many targeted peoples tried to adopt new national identities to avoid expulsions, whether Italians in Dalmatia, Ukrainians in Poland, or Hungarians in Slovakia. German Silesians and Mazurians claimed that they were Poles. In the newly constituted Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Poland, judicial processes decided who was a “native” and who was not.⁵ The nationalist principle reigned supreme. Keeping in mind the elimination of the vast majority of European Jews, Poland was never so Polish as after the war, Ukraine never so Ukrainian, Germany never so German, Denmark never so Danish, and Italy never so Italian.⁶

Yet everywhere, too, people sought solace in the latest dances and music, jazz and swing, and did what they could to come up with fashionable outfits to wear among the ruins, using the black markets that sprang up all over Europe to obtain occasional luxuries to distract themselves from poverty and want.⁷ Sexual mores were upended as women were sometimes forced to seek sustenance through semi-prostitution with occupation soldiers. Roving groups of weary trekkers, men and women, found some comfort in sex and coupling. In the displaced persons (DP) camps set up by the Allies for Jews in Germany after liberation, many of whom had fled postwar hostility and persecution in Poland, there were a striking number of marriages and births, as refugee Jews, just like other Europeans, sought to put the past behind them and embark on a new life.⁸

The psychological state of Europeans was complex and difficult. One Polish historian describes what he calls “the great fear” (wielka trwoga) experienced by the vast majority of Poles, a deep unease about what would become of them given the horrors they had endured, the extreme want that surrounded them, the political uncertainty of incipient communist rule, and the incessant rumors of a new world war.⁹ In German-language memoirs, one encounters repeatedly the words for anxiety (Verzweiflung and Angst), which characterized the mood of the Germans. There was also hope, but it tended to be overwhelmed by fear and anxiety.¹⁰ At the end of the war and beginning of the peace, suicide rates jumped to record numbers. Especially Germans and Austrians were terrified of the onslaught of Soviet troops and the impending occupation. But even after the war was over the challenges of staying alive and safe were too much for many Europeans.

Women were in a particularly psychologically challenging position at the end of the war. Their husbands, brothers, sons, and fathers were often absent, killed in the war, languishing in POW camps, or simply missing. Not only were they the primary “workhorses” of reconstruction, but for every surviving male there were 1.6 women of marriageable age.¹¹ The insecurity of not knowing whether their loved ones were alive or dead, or where they were interned—and not being able to communicate with them if they were in POW camps or on labor details in the USSR—was extremely trying. This became a major political issue in Soviet-occupied Germany and Austria, as well as in Italy and Hungary. Men who returned from camps were often physically or emotionally broken, and turned out to pose a greater burden for the household economy than when they were absent. Divorce rates skyrocketed.¹²

Women and girls had their own traumas to bear, starting with humiliating accusations of and social punishment for “horizontal collaboration” in Norway, France, Poland, Italy, and elsewhere. There was also the ever-present threat and reality of rape and sexual violence by Allied soldiers, which continued even after the end of the war in all the occupation zones of Germany and Austria (though far worse in the Soviet zones), in France and Italy, and in east central Europe, especially in Hungary.¹³ Informal prostitution was known wherever Allied soldiers were billeted. The spread of syphilis and gonorrhea became a major issue for Allied commanders and for local health officials, especially given the shortages (or complete absence in the east) of penicillin. If infected, Soviet soldiers were forced to endure excruciating applications of mercury.

The occupations imposed burdens beyond those of threats to and violence against women. The Allies confiscated housing for their troops and villas for their officers, while many locals had to find shelter in barns and garages. They requisitioned food and coal, which were in desperately short supply. The Soviets took reparations from Germany and Austria, and removed supposedly German assets from eastern Europe, as well. The political officers of the victorious armies, east and west, often behaved with arrogant superiority toward the indigenous populations, which in turn aroused considerable resentment and anger. With some bitterness, Europeans noted that they would be glad to be “liberated from the liberators.” In all of the war-ravaged countries of Europe, planning for reconstruction was at the heart of government and policy planning. East and west, the desires of the extreme left and extreme right quickly made themselves known at the end of the war but faded quickly in comparison to the need for governments to take the lead in clearing rubble, rebuilding cities, and getting basic infrastructure—water, sewage, transportation—back in place.¹⁴ The centralization of economic life during the war in many parts of the continent contributed to the “etatization” of Europe’s economies in the postwar period.¹⁵

Postwar Europe was no place for utopian fantasies. The political catastrophes that engulfed the countries of Europe during the war—the murderous attacks on the left, the collaboration of the right, and the demonstrable fecklessness of the liberals—had intensified rather than gutted the desire for the reconstitution of political parties after the peace, albeit in the new framework of anti-fascism and democratic institutions. The lust for revenge and retribution after the war certainly took its toll in victims and political uncertainty. The demand for justice quickly gave way in most of Europe to scapegoating and then to selective memory as Belgians, French, Dutch, Poles, Czechs, and others eagerly pursued the return to normalcy and regularity in their lives.¹⁶

The “shadow of the past” would never quite elude postwar European culture and politics, haunting those years (and even up to today) in unpredictable ways.¹⁷ The tasks at hand of feeding, housing, and heating the dwellings of a desperate population quickly took precedence throughout Europe. Besides, so many people were implicated in one fashion or another in the crimes of the wartime regimes that few were interested in a thorough cleansing of the administrations or political parties that had survived as forces of order in postwar society.¹⁸ Continuities between the wartime and postwar periods were as notable as the elements of starting afresh at the so-called zero hour, Stunde Null.

The Soviet Union had won the war on the ground in Europe. Its troops were present in many parts of the continent, from the Danish island of Bornholm to the Bulgarian littoral of the Black Sea. The Red Army had liberated the capitals of central Europe—Warsaw, Prague, Berlin, Vienna, and Budapest—sometimes at enormous cost to their soldiers and with disastrous results for the local populations. The Soviet people themselves suffered desperately from the consequences of the war. The sheer grief and mourning of losing twenty-seven million soldiers and civilians—more than sixty-five times the American losses during the war—weighed heavily on the society.¹⁹ The fierce fighting on and German occupation of the western part of the Soviet Union created untold misery for the peoples of the region. As a result of the destruction, tens of millions lived in utter poverty, many finding shelter in hovels, earthen dugouts, and bombed-out apartment blocks. Yet the Soviet state was intact, its army—some six and a half million strong—was an intimidating presence on the continent. Thus was Stalin poised to lead the Allied efforts to construct a postwar settlement in Europe.

At Cecilienhof, the German royal residence in Potsdam, Stalin gave every appearance of being in control during the Allied conference of July 17 to August 2, 1945. Franklin Roosevelt had fallen ill earlier that spring and died on April 12. He was replaced by Harry S. Truman, who had little experience in foreign affairs and only reluctantly attended the Potsdam summit at all. That Winston Churchill lost the British election of July 25, 1945, and was replaced at Potsdam by the Labor leader Clement Attlee only raised Stalin’s status in Europe and the world as the senior leader of the victorious wartime coalition. Truman was reportedly buoyed by the information that he received in Potsdam of the successful testing on July 16, 1945, of the atomic bomb in Alamogordo, New Mexico. But Stalin himself seemed little intimidated by this news, which Truman whispered in his ear at a conference reception.²⁰ Stalin already knew about the nuclear weapons project through his intelligence. Much more important for the Soviet dictator was the actual explosion of the bomb on August 6 at Hiroshima, which prompted him to order his secret police chief, Lavrentii Beria, to launch an all-out Soviet project to build a bomb.²¹

There is very little evidence that Stalin had a preconceived plan for creating a bloc of countries in Europe with a common Soviet-style system. Given his proclivity to see the world through ideological lenses, his long-term goals included the communization of Europe (and the world). But in the short term, he was most concerned that Germany not be rearmed or rendered capable of carrying out another invasion of the Soviet Union through Poland, and that the countries of east central Europe not serve as willing helpmates in such a war. Stalin frequently noted after 1945 that war with Germany was likely in fifteen or twenty years. He also was worried about the West’s possession of the atomic bomb and its potential use against the Soviet Union militarily, in a direct conflict between Moscow and the West, but also politically, as a way to deprive him of his territorial gains in Europe.²² Stalin’s growing interest after the war in spreading Soviet influence into east central Europe may well have been related to the idea that increased Soviet “space” would compensate him for the postwar asymmetry in nuclear weaponry with the West.²³ (The first Soviet bomb was successfully tested only in August 1949.)

1.  Postwar Europe

The immediate postwar years, the chronological period of greatest concern in this work, were characterized by the emergence of legitimate conflicts between the security interests of the Soviet Union on one side and the United States and Great Britain on the other. These conflicts were palpable already before the end of World War II and grew more salient as the fighting came to an end and joint efforts to construct a peaceful postwar world failed to satisfy the victors. But diplomacy still was able to resolve some testy questions and provide long-term solutions. A few of the cases I present necessarily reach beyond the 1948–1949 outer limit, when conflicts of great power interest were frequently overwhelmed by ideological hostility. But most of the discussion in this book is centered on the early years of the peace, when, I would suggest, there was greater fluidity and openness to postwar settlement in Europe than is often assumed both in the historiography and in public memory.²⁴

As a way to understand the development of the uneasy peace and, within several years, the division of the continent that followed, I have conceived this study along three primary vectors, the first of which is Stalin and his policies toward Europe. From the time of the Russian Civil War (1917–1922) and the Polish-Soviet War (1919–1921) up through the tense period of the Nazi-Soviet Pact (1939–1941) and especially war with the Third Reich (1941–1945), Stalin had garnered considerable experience in dealing with the outside world. This he brought to bear in his flexible and probing approach to the problems in Europe during the postwar years. The second vector of this study involves the challenges, goals, and accomplishments of the European nations themselves and their politics after World War II. I am as interested in the political development and reconstruction of postwar Europe as its governments confronted the power, prestige, and influence of Stalin and the Soviet Union as I am in the shifting contours of Moscow’s policies and actions. The third and final vector at play here is the coming of the Cold War, in particular the growing Soviet-American rivalry and the mutual hostility that exacerbated it. This hostility inevitably influenced events in the nations of Europe, but an important goal of this study is to foreground European considerations and keep Cold War politics, as important as they later become, in appropriate perspective. Most of the events in the book take place at the intersection of these three vectors—Stalin’s policies, European politics, and the coming of the Cold War—where they influence one another and to some extent merge, making it difficult to talk about one without the others.

Stalin

There is something to John Gaddis’s statement that “as long as Stalin was running the Soviet Union a cold war was unavoidable.”²⁵ In any analysis of the dictator’s policies, foreign or domestic, one has to factor in his pathological predisposition to create enemies internally and externally, to focus on the ideologically determined hostility between capitalism and socialism, and to see the Soviet Union involved in a worldwide class war. To deprive Stalin of his ideological lenses and Bolshevik mentality would be to miss important dimensions of his motivations. When, at the end of World War II, the Soviet Union absorbed new territories and fighting erupted in a series of civil wars on the USSR’s new western borders and in its freshly incorporated lands, Stalin sense of insecurity only seemed to increase.²⁶

Stalin’s views are important to Europe because he sat at the very epicenter of Soviet foreign policy making after the war. There is no question that the input of Foreign Minister Viacheslav Molotov was important and that a variety of party officials, higher officials in the foreign ministry, and even military officers—“bold subordinates” as one historian characterized them—played important roles here and there in decision making.²⁷ But Stalin not only oversaw the entire process, stepping in when he thought it was time for him to take a decisive role; he was also a micromanager, watching his deputies like a hawk as they handled a myriad of issues over which he had supreme control. He was hardworking, focused, and capable of absorbing vast amounts of information regarding international developments. Despite his frequent absences from the Kremlin in Sochi to revive his flagging health in the postwar years, Stalin remained in command and, as was noted in the propaganda of the time, “always at his post” (Stalin vsegda na postu), using the telephone, telegraph, and visits from senior officials to maintain his reins of power. One is quickly convinced in reading his editorial remarks on proposed newspaper articles, analyses of foreign policy, annotations in the margins of books, or his rewriting of party statements that Stalin was smart and knowledgeable, with a penchant for lively and direct prose.²⁸ He was determined to remain in charge in particular of foreign affairs, despite a full agenda of domestic problems, and his underlings knew that.

Although he was trying to minimize his responsibility for the crimes of the Stalin era, Nikita Khrushchev was essentially correct about the role of the Soviet leadership when he wrote in his memoirs, “The rest of us were just errand boys.”²⁹ Molotov said something very similar when he noted that the decisive figure in the making of Soviet foreign policy was Stalin and not some diplomat.³⁰

Stalin sometimes even abused Molotov as a way to make sure that he did not exceed his mandate as foreign minister. In one notable incident in early December 1945, Stalin pointedly criticized Molotov in a letter to the other three of his chief deputies, Georgi Malenkov, Lavrentii Beria, and Anastas Mikoyan. (Molotov was the fourth in the ruling “four,” the chetverka). Molotov had made such serious errors in judgment as foreign minister, wrote Stalin to the three, that “I can no longer consider such a comrade my first deputy.” Stalin added that he was not at all sure that Molotov had a “clear conscience.” When read Stalin’s recriminations by the deputies in person, Molotov broke down in tears. He then wrote a pathetic letter of self-criticism to Stalin (December 7) that was more a demonstration of total subservience than an explanation for his misdeeds. He expressed deep sorrow at the expression of Stalin’s unhappiness with him and his work and promised that he would “earn back the trust of Stalin and the party.”³¹

Stalin never mentioned this incident again, and Molotov was allowed to continue as foreign minister until 1949, and as an important, if distrusted, member of the ruling party elite until 1952, when he was dropped from the presidium elected at the Nineteenth Party Congress. There is still a lot we do not know about the way Stalin made and implemented decisions: relatively few documents emanated from Stalin himself and from those around him at the time, and a significant portion of the Stalin papers remains classified.³² But we can be sure that Stalin himself was responsible for the conception and implementation of Soviet policies abroad.

Stalin no doubt read and shared many of the suppositions of two of the major policy-planning documents to emerge from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs during World War II, Ivan Maiskii’s “Note” of January 10, 1944, and Maxim Litvinov’s “Memorandum” of January 11, 1945. According to the Maiskii note, continental Europe would be inevitably transformed into a series of socialist states. Barring armed conflict, which could speed the process, this would take somewhere between thirty and fifty years. Meanwhile, Soviet cooperation with the United States and Great Britain was critical for setting up democratic regimes and functioning economies in formerly fascist and fascist-occupied countries.³³

The Litvinov document was prepared in association with the upcoming Yalta Conference and explored the possibility of establishing an agreement between the Allies about three spheres of influence on the continent: one zone in the east and north, including Finland, Sweden, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, and Turkey, that would be linked to the Soviet Union. A second zone would be dominated by Great Britain and include Holland, Belgium, France, Spain, Portugal, and Greece. Most interesting was the so-called “neutral sphere,” which included Germany, as well as Denmark and Norway, Austria, and Italy. In this zone, the great powers would share responsibility for the security of the area, cooperating on issues of reparations and trade.³⁴

There is no indication in these documents or even in the immediate postwar period that Stalin intended to get into a worldwide shoving match with the United States, nor did he anticipate that one would emerge from the circumstances of the settlement following World War II. Great Britain was always identified as the Soviet Union’s primary rival, its policies seen as deeply contradictory with those of the United States. Stalin had no firm plan for postwar Europe, nor even what we would call today a road map for the development of a socialist continent. He was too tactically inclined for that. It is likely that he looked at the future of countries as diverse as Great Britain, Spain, Norway, Czechoslovakia and Greece with the idea that they would develop into different constellations of people’s democratic governments, ruled by coalitions of the left and center, including communist parties, that would gradually stabilize their respective societies and rebuild their economies, based primarily on the model of state-controlled industries. Eventually, these countries might move by stages to more socialist-oriented governments, but not precipitously and not in the near future. As we know from the examples of Greece and Yugoslavia, as well as from Stalin’s treatment of leftist revolutionaries all over the continent, he was not interested in fomenting socialist revolutions in Europe; nor was he anxious to alienate the Americans and British by assisting in the elimination of noncommunist parties of the left and center.³⁵

Arguments among historians about whether Stalin was motivated primarily by Leninist internationalism or by foreign policy realism do not make a lot of sense in the context of postwar Europe. Stalin was by all accounts the ultimate realist. In fact, one might best think of him as a hyperrealist, which constituted, as he himself understood it, the essential meaning of Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist teaching when it came to foreign affairs, which he firmly believed advanced the thinking of Lenin to a new level. During the war, he noted to the Croatian communist leader Andrija Hebrang, “Lenin did not think you could conclude an alliance with one wing of the bourgeoisie against the other. We have done that: we are not led by emotions but by rational analysis calculation.”³⁶ This kind of super pragmatism in foreign affairs was embedded, to be sure, in Stalin’s own sharp awareness of the geopolitical interests of the Soviet Union and his sensitivities to the vulnerability of the Soviet Union—and before that Imperial Russia—to invasion from external powers.³⁷

This does not mean that Stalin did not sometimes make mistakes in his foreign policy calculations. In the course of this book, the reader will see that he made quite a few such errors of judgment. But he made every effort to weigh carefully ends against means and assess without wearing any blinders the “correlation of forces,” a factor in foreign policy making that constantly informed his decisions. After the Second World War, he was convinced—absolutely correctly—that he could not fight a war against Great Britain and the United States. Thus he would push, demand, and bully, short of provoking warlike reactions on the part of his former Allies. He would try to defuse conflict situations, like the Greek Civil War or the Azerbaijan dispute in Iran, which had the potential of breaking out into a wider conflict. His policies in China and Korea were especially cautious and moderate. Not even President Truman’s refusal on August 18, 1945, to allow the Soviets to land in Hokkaido according to their plans—and thus participate in the occupation of Japan—deflected Stalin from his course of accommodation with the United States in Asia and Europe.³⁸

Above all Stalin sought security for the Soviet Union, while looking to expand Soviet influence in Europe. Defending the interests of the Soviet Union was, in essence, what it meant to be a good communist anywhere in Europe—or the world. Excessive ideological enthusiasm, frequently known derogatorily in party circles as “sectarianism,” was for naïfs. Unwavering obedience and thoroughgoing understanding of Moscow’s priorities were the crucial markers of a good communist. Among the best Stalinists, foreign and domestic, was an unspoken code of rigid hierarchy that needed no articulation or discussion. In a conversation of November 19, 1944, the head of the French Communist Party, Maurice Thorez, profusely thanked Stalin for his advice and counsel. Stalin replied that there was no need for thanks. These matters, he said, are perfectly understood between communists.³⁹

Stalin’s goals on the continent were geostrategic in the narrowest sense of the term; he was desirous of exerting influence in all of Europe but above all in the bordering lands of eastern Europe. At the same time, he showed remarkable lack of interest in the colonies both of his wartime enemies and of his postwar rivals and was relatively indifferent to China, despite the successes of the Chinese Communist Party. Instead, he expressed regrets that Soviet soldiers had not marched into Paris as the Russians did in the Napoleonic Wars. “We [in Moscow] toyed with idea of reaching Paris,” he told Thorez. The ever-obsequious French communist leader opined “The French people would have enthusiastically received the Red Army.”⁴⁰

But if by the fall of 1947 the vision of Soviet troops marching into Paris was a vain fantasy, Stalin’s insistence on extending the Soviet Union’s borders to the west, as he had by dint of the Nazi-Soviet Pact of August 23, 1939 (specifically the secret protocols that accompanied it), and the Red Army invasion of Poland on September 17, 1939, was not. At the minimum, he sought a sphere of influence in eastern Europe and direct influence on the future development of Germany and Austria. He was determined not to allow foreign powers to gain a foothold in postwar Poland, with its borders shifted westward, in Finland (now without Karelia), and in Romania (without Bessarabia). Beyond these consistent and overlapping military and political interests, coinciding with tsarist foreign policy aims, was enormous variation and flexibility in Stalin’s short and medium-term goals, whether the objects were Czechoslovakia and Hungary, Germany and Austria, or France and Italy. One of Stalin’s overriding priorities was that Europe not be divided into strict eastern and western zones of influence. Certainly at the outset, Stalin did not want an Iron Curtain. One sees that in his policies toward Germany and Austria, which demanded that the unity of these countries be preserved, even when the Western Allies had decided that division was the most advantageous way for them to deal with the “German Question,” if not that of Austria.⁴¹ He was also anxious to receive reparations in the form of coal from the Ruhr and exert influence in France and Italy.

At the same time, Stalin wanted to see the creation of a Europe of discrete national units that he could control through bilateral relations. One observes this in his negative reaction to the formation of the West European Union or Brussels Treaty Organization of March 17, 1947, which was the anti-German security agreement between France, Great Britain and the Low Countries.⁴² There was some hope in Moscow that the organization would demonstrate anti-American sentiments, but more important was the potential to oppose Soviet interests. He showed the same hostility toward attempts at a Balkan Union, proposed at different times by Marshal Tito in Yugoslavia and Georgi Dimitrov in Bulgaria. Stalin was deeply interested in Europe, but just not in one that was joined in units larger than individual countries and as such could offer resistance to his blandishments and bullying.

Stalin and the party ideologues who followed his lead designated the immediate postwar period in Europe as one of the development of “new,” “popular,” or “people’s” democracies. His idea, derived primarily from Comintern thinking during the Popular Front period of the mid-1930s, was for Europe’s communist parties to ally with socialist and other anti-fascist parties, including those of the “center,” to complete the bourgeois revolution and begin the long process—sometimes articulated as twenty-five to thirty years—of a gradual transition to socialism. The idea had also been employed in 1940–1941 as a way to soften Stalin’s policies in the Baltic countries as they were gradually incorporated into the Soviet Union during the period of the Nazi-Soviet Pact.

Repeatedly Stalin reminded his interlocutors that in Europe, in contrast to Russia, there was no need for “the dictatorship of the proletariat,” no need for a violent revolution, and no need for bloodshed. The revolutionary dictatorship was particular to Russia because of the revolutionaries’ need to overthrow tsarism and autocracy and seize control of the country during a world war and civil war. Even the British parliamentary system had the potential to evolve slowly and surely to socialism, in Stalin’s view.⁴³ The two major countries in Europe that historically embarked on the path toward socialism, he told the leaders of the British Labour Party in a meeting of July 8, 1946, were the Soviet Union and Great Britain. The former was forced to endure a violent and at times bloody revolution; the latter could achieve socialism by peaceful means.⁴⁴

European communist leaders at the end of the war and the beginning of the peace were granted the opportunity—indeed given the mandate—from Moscow to represent the sovereign interests of their respective peoples. They were to carry out the “anti-fascist democratic revolution” and begin the process of increasing their power and influence in society. They were to lead the fight for expropriating large landowners and industrialists but not collectivizing agriculture or imposing a dictatorship of the party in place of a parliamentary system.⁴⁵ Private property was to be respected, and national front programs, which were to appear “impeccably democratic,” were to be implemented.⁴⁶ Of course, this was not always observed in practice, but Stalin’s views, at least until the first meeting of the Cominform (Information Bureau of the Communist and Workers’ Parties) in September 1947, and even after, provided a powerful impetus for the development of mass communist parties in Europe based on thoroughgoing patriotic impulses.

Even in a country like Poland that seemed destined to fall under Soviet control, Stalin indicated to Polish interlocutors that they would be free to choose their allies, among them, of course, the Soviet Union, and develop in the direction of a “new democracy.” He told Stanisław Mikołajczyk in Moscow (August 2, 1944) that “between Poland and the Soviet Union there should be trust and friendship” but that “Poland should also have ties with England, France, and the United States.” “Poland will be a big and strong country,” Stalin announced during a June 1945 discussion about the formation of the Polish Provisional Government of National Unity. “For such a Poland it is not sufficient to have ties with only one country.… Poland is in need of ties with Western states, with Great Britain, France, and friendly relations with America.… Poland should conclude new alliances.”⁴⁷

Free to form alliances where it wished, Poland would, however, follow the template of a “people’s democracy.” There was no need for the dictatorship of the proletariat, Stalin explained to Jakub Berman and Eduard Osóbka-Morawski in May 1946. Poland’s government would be a “new type of democracy,” which could go about the business of nationalizing industry and mustering the resources of the country for the benefit of the working people better than could the more retrograde forms of government presently ruling France and Britain. “Therefore,” Stalin concluded, “there is no need for you to copy Western democracy. Let them copy you.”⁴⁸

Just how genuine Stalin’s commitment was to these ideas is an important historical question—that is, whether the propaganda about the new democracies was not simply a ruse created to deceive the Western powers and European voters and politicians.⁴⁹ One historian calls Stalin’s statements about “new democracy” nothing but a “regular performance [spektakl’].”⁵⁰

The evidence cuts both ways, depending both on the time and place Stalin indicated what he would like done and the chronology of his growing disgruntlement with the West. In some cases, he seemed determined to seize power one way or another, using the “new democracy” as a smoke screen. He upbraided the East German communists for being excessively “Teutonic” about achieving their socialist goals; instead they needed to learn to “mask” their aims.⁵¹ Walter Ulbricht, the East German communist leader, took Stalin’s message to heart when he told a group of party activists that their policies and actions “should look democratic but we must keep everything in our hands.”⁵² But there were other times, especially when Stalin was dealing with the Italian or Austrian communists, or even the Polish comrades in the immediate postwar period, that the “boss” indicated a genuine commitment to the idea of “new democracy.”

Eventually, of course, the new democracies in eastern Europe, under increasing Soviet control, evolved into Stalinist entities, though maintaining the democratic facade of multiparty elections, “democratic blocs,” and parliaments. But right after the war, many East European noncommunist leaders, especially in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, continued to believe that they were competing for electoral support in genuine, if new, democracies. Since most of them were not fools—in fact, just the contrary, most were capable and perspicacious politicians—either Stalin used extremely clever deception to draw them into his devious postwar political game or he was, at least for the time being, sincere enough in his convictions about this new and innovative transitional stage to socialism to convince them of his integrity.⁵³

The latter explanation is the more likely, at least until the fallout over the Truman Doctrine in March 1947 and the Marshall Plan in June of that year convinced the already suspicious Soviet dictator that he could not trust the Americans. Those noncommunist politicians who remained behind in eastern Europe frequently ended up behind bars, put on trial, and executed by judicial order. The lucky ones narrowly managed to escape to the West with the help of American or British embassy officials.⁵⁴

The Cold War

The history of the origins of the Cold War weaves its way in and out of any consideration of the development of immediate postwar Europe. But the history of Europe in this period should begin, at least, with the proposition that the antagonistic Soviet-American rivalry about the European settlement was not necessarily always the dominant, and certainly not the only, factor of interest in determining the ultimate fate of the continent. Even if there were signs of the coming of the Cold War, the Iron Curtain did not descend across Europe when Winston Churchill spoke of it in his famous Fulton, Missouri, speech of May 5, 1946. As Churchill’s most recent biographer writes, Churchill was looking into the future rather than describing the present in his Iron Curtain speech, where “he delivered a warning just as grave, and just as prescient as any made about the Nazis in the appeasement period.”⁵⁵ People, goods, ideas, and even military personnel continued to move in both directions across this “border” until well into the late 1940s and early 1950s.⁵⁶ Stalin’s famous election speech of February 9, 1946, spoke of the progressive character of “the anti-fascist war,” “a war of liberation, one of the tasks of which was to restore democratic liberties.” In this war, Stalin emphasized, the alliance of the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union played the decisive role in defeating the Nazis.⁵⁷

We know that Stalin was ready to deal with the Allies constructively on a number of issues, ranging from the settlements in Germany and Austria to the internationalization of Ruhr coal and the Danube.⁵⁸ We will never really know for certain whether a consistent and forceful policy of engagement on the part of the United States and Great Britain, one that would have brought unrestricted aid and loans for Soviet rebuilding, not to mention access to the reparations promised at Yalta, would have made any difference in avoiding the kinds of clashes that ended up dividing Europe. There is also the question whether the counterfactual of Western willingness to accede to Soviet postwar demands for a demilitarized and neutral Germany (though, of course with Soviet troops on its eastern borders in Poland, in effect, therefore, under indirect Soviet influence) would have produced a more palatable result for all Europeans.⁵⁹

Given Stalin’s predilections it is unlikely that a settlement between the Soviet Union and the United States could have been reached that would have satisfied both sides. But that is a conclusion that one can only reach in retrospect, when we know that it never came about. At the time, an alternative history was not impossible. To state the problem a little differently, one cannot write the history of Soviet involvement in Europe without including the growing Soviet rivalry with the Americans and the unexpected and utterly novel involvement of Washington in postwar European affairs. Still it would be a distortion to blanket postwar European developments and Stalin’s initiatives on the continent with the well-honed dark images and paradigms of traditional Cold War history.

The international context of European history in the years 1944–1949 has an extraordinarily rich historiography, given its integral role in the origins of the Cold War.⁶⁰ Cold War historiography grew by leaps and bounds in the Gorbachev period and after the fall of communist governments in eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. With newly available documents from the Soviet archives, in particular, a series of landmark books and articles were published that increased our understanding of Stalin’s motivations, U.S. interactions with Soviet initiatives, and the escalation of conflict between Washington and Moscow.⁶¹ Likewise seeing publication were a number of important studies of specific European countries and their participation in the dynamics of the growing rivalry between the Soviet Union and the United States.⁶² But few of these studies look at Europe as a whole, and most tend to keep their periscopes leveled on Washington and Moscow, much as analogous studies of Russian and American objectives in Europe do today.⁶³ The realities and sometimes the pretensions of Great Powers are reflected in the works of their historians, whether approving or sometimes critical in their points of view.

The Cominform meeting of late September 1947 in Szklarska Poręba in Poland represented both a serious retreat from the ideas of new democracy and separate roads to socialism and a strong signal of Soviet dissatisfaction with the political development of Europe. This was the moment when Andrei Zhdanov, representing Stalin at the meeting, gave his famous “two camps” speech, which portrayed the world divided between socialist and capitalist powers in ways that intensified the rhetorical hostility of the Soviets to the West—a shift from the more accommodating tone of Stalin’s election speech of more than a year-and-a-half earlier.⁶⁴

Stalin was upset by the removal of the French and Italian parties from their governments in the late spring of 1947, and during the summer he sought to impose his views regarding the rejection of the Marshall Plan on the European communist parties. The Czechoslovak leaders were summoned in early July 1947 to Moscow, where Stalin insisted that the Prague government rescind its decision to participate in the Marshall Plan. Czechoslovak statesman Jan Masaryk noted, “I went to Moscow as a Foreign Minister of an independent sovereign state. I returned as a lackey of a foreign country.”⁶⁵ On March 10, 1948, Masaryk died when he either jumped (or was thrown) from a window after the Czechoslovak communist coup d’état of February 1948.

The real division of Europe began in the aftermath of the Cominform meeting, as Stalin and his allies in the East European parties began to impose uniformity and hierarchical discipline on their members. In western Europe, Stalin demanded the same allegiance from party members but continued to encourage their participation in their respective parliamentary institutions. The “two camps” paradigm sketched out by Zhdanov now also meant that the communist-dominated societies in the East and their respective parties would develop along different lines than those in the West. The Czechoslovak coup of February 1948 and the Berlin blockade from June 1948 to May 1949 completed the process whereby Soviet geostrategic and political interests in claiming a sphere of influence and domination in eastern Europe trumped earlier ideas of developing an all-European zone of interest.

The communist takeover in Czechoslovakia delineated a particularly important moment in postwar European history and had profound effects on political developments in Italy, Finland, and Austria, among other parliamentary governments that feared a communist seizure of power. Despite their widespread influence, the leaders of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia had grown increasingly frustrated by their inability to control the parliamentary democracy led by President Eduard Beneš. The communist authorities in Prague purged the state’s police force, provoking the resignation from the government on February 21, 1948, of twelve noncommunist ministers who counted on the president to dissolve the government and call for new elections. Instead, the communists, allied with the Social Democrats, were able to outmaneuver the noncommunists and appointed new ministers from their own ranks. With major demonstrations in Prague of pro-communist workers’ groups and the purges of democrats from government institutions around the country by communist-led action committees, Beneš felt he had no choice but to accede to the forces on the street. The new communist-dominated government was sworn in on February 25, formally ending the last genuine parliamentary democracy in east central Europe. Beneš resigned in June.⁶⁶

European Politics

The history of politics in interwar Europe and even more so during World War II was depressing and grim. Therefore, it is surprising in many ways that a talented and remarkably adept generation of European politicians emerged from the war to skillfully lead countries out of the war into the uncertain early tribulations of the peace. They were a motley mix of the old—sometimes very old, and experienced—who had spent the war in hiding, confinement, exile, internment, or isolation of one form or another, and of the young and ambitious, who had managed to avoid military service, fought in the underground, and found ways to emerge unscathed from the chaos of Nazi defeat and Allied victory. These younger politicians were ready to throw all of their energies into rebuilding political lives in their respective countries. Some had been in government prisons or concentration camps. Others had to struggle with Allied occupation authorities to gain reentry into their countries from exile abroad.

Against the backdrop of the war, the new leaders of Europe shared a commitment to the sovereignty and independence of their countries as well as to the rebuilding of their nations’ economies and societies. For some, sovereignty meant a struggle against Soviet dominance. For others, it meant resisting American and British influence. There were also cases where political leaders saw their countries’ futures inextricably linked to the policies of the dominant powers. But even in the communist world this was rare. Most European politicians were deeply worried about the reconstitution of German power on the continent. But all, even the vast majority of the communists who had entered politics during the anti-German partisan movement or in the campaign for the “new democracies” after the war, were committed to ensuring their country’s ability to make its own decisions about the future, despite the constraints foisted upon them by foreign occupation forces.

Not only were there numbers of supremely competent and inspirational political leaders dedicated to the reconstitution of “democratic” governments across Europe, however variably the term was sometimes defined, but Europeans themselves seemed remarkably willing to participate in genuine political competition after six years or more of authoritarianism, Nazism, fascism, and wartime occupation regimes. The elections held after the war were characterized by extraordinarily high levels of participation, genuine political engagement, and the mobilization of interest groups. The elections’ results mattered, though they were sometimes manipulated or influenced by non-democratic forces, especially in the East. Elections had important effects not just on democratic politics in Europe but on the ways Stalin and the Soviets viewed their policies on the continent and subsequently behaved in areas under their influence and control. Soviet officials carefully analyzed election results and came up with political and propaganda initiatives as a result.

Case Studies

This book was conceived and is organized according to a series of seven case studies of individual European countries and the issues they faced during the crucial postwar period of political reconstitution, including how those nations dealt with shifting Soviet objectives. Each chapter comprises a separate case study. Some are better known than others, and some cover longer periods than others. They are, in the order in which they appear: the Soviet occupation of the Danish island of Bornholm, 1945; Albania and the Yugoslavs, 1944–1948; Zhdanov and Finland, 1944–1948; the Italian elections of 1948; Hoxha and the Yugoslavs, 1944–1948; the Berlin blockade, 1948–1949; the struggle between Gomułka and Stalin, 1944–1949; and the Austrian settlement, 1945–1949. Different aspects of the relationship between the Soviet Union, a Europe in flux, and the emerging Cold War are examined in each case study.

The purpose of using cases studies confined in time and space and thematically is in part to be able to dig deeper into the stories of the individual countries and crises in order to give the reader a better understanding of the political processes at work in the postwar world. Given the documentary evidence I have been able to use in each, the case study method also allows me to tell each of these stories in a way that might make a contribution to the historiography of each as well as to that of postwar Europe as a whole. These particular cases were chosen because I thought they would provide a diverse set of interesting, enlightening, and even provocative examples. Some are from what could be considered western Europe (Italy and Bornholm); some from central Europe (Germany and Austria); and one each from Soviet-dominated eastern Europe (Poland), from the Balkans (Albania), and from northern Scandinavia (Finland.) The Soviets occupied at least for a time parts of several of the locales under study—Poland, Germany, Bornholm, Finland, and Austria—but not others such as Italy and Albania. In some of the areas (Italy, Austria, and Finland), Stalin weighed the possibility of supporting a communist takeover but decided against it. In eastern Germany and Poland, Soviet troops were part of the landscape of the country until the collapse of communism. Each chapter here explores the goals of Stalin and the Soviet Union while demonstrating the agency of the Europeans, communists and noncommunists alike, as they struggled for sovereignty on a continent increasingly dominated by the Cold War.

Although the chapters of this book tell discrete stories of political struggle, the narratives are embedded in a common context that emerges at the end of the war and the onset of the recasting of Europe: the tragedy of poverty and social chaos; the weakness of political institutions; Soviet influence on the continent; and increasing American attention to European issues. The announcements of the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan in March and June 1947—and especially their actual implementation over the months and years to follow—served as important stimuli to events on the ground in almost all of the case studies. The first Cominform meeting (September 1947) and particularly the second (June 1948), when the Yugoslavs were expelled, influenced political movements throughout the continent but especially in eastern Europe. Developments in Albania and in Poland were particularly impacted by Stalin’s shocking treatment of the Yugoslav comrades, which few European communist leaders approved of. The Czechoslovak coup d’état in February 1948 had profound reverberations in Italy, which held crucial elections in April of that year in the shadow of a potential coup by the Italian communists. After the assassination attempt on Palmiro Togliatti in June of 1948, the threat of a communist takeover again seemed possible.

The Czechoslovak coup was very much on the mind of Mayor Ernst Reuter and General Lucius Clay when both, in their own way, sought to overcome the dire effects of the nearly year-long blockade of Berlin (June 1948–May 1949). The Western powers and the Austrian government were caught off guard by the Berlin blockade and worried themselves about how they could survive a similar set of Soviet actions regarding Vienna. When negotiating the friendship treaty with the Soviets in early 1948, the Finnish government similarly did so against the background of a potential communist takeover.

Examined together, these seven case studies point to the diversity and complexity of Stalin’s aims on the continent. They demonstrate that postwar Europe was in a state of flux: Allied armies evacuated occupied territories; alliances were redefined; local politics mattered. Elections were crucial and political leadership meant a lot. These case studies point to the openness of outcomes and alternative trajectories, recognizing that the Soviet Union increasingly—and brutally—shut down possibilities of genuinely democratic politics in eastern Europe while seeking to increase its leverage over communist parties and the broader societies they sought to influence in the West. The general historiographical portrait of a continent divided from the end of the war, with the predetermined outcome of the Cold War, is much more blurred and uncertain when looked at from the perspective of the immediate postwar history of Europe.