10

The Communist Takeovers in Europe – Soviet Impositions

Of all European regions, the Balkans was the one in which the Communists had the best chance of coming to power as a result of their own efforts. It was not in Albania and Yugoslavia alone that they might have done so. They had real possibilities also in Greece, but this is where the broader international context has to be considered. Stalin accepted that Greece was outside his sphere of influence and so didn’t lift a finger when Western intervention against the Greek Communists tilted the balance away from them. As early as October 1944, in a piece of traditional Great Power diplomacy, Churchill, on a ten-day visit to Moscow, discussed with Stalin spheres of influence in post-war Europe. Churchill proposed a division of responsibility that would be 90 per cent Soviet for Romania, and 90 per cent British in Greece. These suggestions were accepted by Stalin, and when Churchill proposed a fifty – fifty supervisory share of Yugoslavia and Hungary, Stalin, initially, on Churchill’s account, accepted both. Stalin may, however, have had more confidence about the strength of Tito’s Communists (and at that time no doubts about their loyalty) than the situation in Hungary, and had reason to expect that, whatever Churchill may have hoped, a staunchly pro-Soviet regime would be established in Yugoslavia. Accordingly, that notional division of influence over Yugoslavia was retained even after further discussion involving the British foreign secretary, Anthony Eden, and Stalin’s foreign minister, Vyacheslav Molotov. In those talks, however, the percentage for Hungary was altered to 80–20 in the Soviet favour. The same balance of influence was established for Bulgaria. Churchill, in his memoirs, cites the figures he agreed with Stalin. The Soviet leadership apparently took the exercise seriously enough, given that Molotov haggled further on the percentages even after Stalin had placed a large tick on the paper Churchill passed to him before handing it back. Albania did not figure in these British – Soviet bilateral discussions.¹

Churchill was, on reflection, somewhat embarrassed by his percentage proposals. In a letter addressed to Stalin, which he did not send (on the advice of Averell Harriman, President Roosevelt’s personal envoy to Churchill and the British government from the beginning of 1941 until October 1943, when he became the American ambassador in Moscow), he wrote:

    These percentages which I have put down are no more than a method by which in our thoughts we can see how near we are together, and then decide upon the necessary steps to bring us into full agreement. As I said, they would be considered crude, and even callous, if they were exposed to the scrutiny of the Foreign Offices and diplomats all over the world. Therefore they could not be the basis of any public document, certainly not at the present time.²

What would happen to Poland and to Germany was even more contentious and could not be settled until the Yalta and Potsdam conferences of 1945, involving all the ‘Big Three’, with the opinion of President Roosevelt at Yalta counting for more than that of Churchill. By February 1945, when the Yalta conference was held, Britain was weakened and overstretched by the war, and the economic and military predominance of the United States was increasingly evident. Moreover, Stalin, in particular, hosting this conference on Soviet home ground in the Crimea, had briefed himself much better than had Churchill.³ By the time of the Potsdam conference in the second half of July and early August, Roosevelt had died and the new president, Harry Truman, headed the American delegation. Halfway through the conference Churchill and his foreign secretary, Eden, were replaced by the new British prime minister Clement Attlee and foreign secretary Ernest Bevin, since Labour had defeated the Conservatives by a landslide in the first post-war election. (That election, when it was still a future prospect, had already come up in conversation between Churchill and Stalin in Moscow in October 1944, when ‘Stalin said that he had no doubt about the result: the Conservatives would win’.⁴ After the election had taken place and Churchill was about to return from Potsdam to London to learn the result, Stalin showed his psephological limitations by predicting that the British prime minister would secure a parliamentary majority of eighty.⁵ He was not alone, of course, in overestimating the extent to which people would vote for a war leader rather than on a different set of issues. Churchill himself had been confident of victory.)

At Potsdam it was agreed that Poland would shift to the west. The Soviet Union would retain those parts of Poland which it had seized as a result of the Nazi – Soviet Pact and which roughly corresponded to the ‘Curzon Line’, the border established at the Paris Peace Conference of December 1919 and named after Lord Curzon, the British foreign secretary at that time. Subsequently, as a consequence of the Russo-Polish War, the Polish border moved further eastwards and so remained throughout the Second Polish Republic which existed from 1921 until 1939.⁶ Relations between Poles and Ukrainians during World War Two were extremely tense and there were many civilians killed by both sides. The Poles did not want a substantial Ukrainian minority living within their territory and the Polish Communists as well as Polish nationalists appeared to share that view. During the war the Communists ‘dropped language about the rights of minorities from their programmatic documents’, thus jettisoning the traditions of the Polish left.⁷ However, as Timothy Snyder has observed:

    …by the summer of 1944, Stalin’s preferences mattered more than Polish traditions of any kind. The population exchanges were preceded by, and based on, a Soviet – Polish accord that no Polish nationalist (and few Polish Communists) found acceptable. A secret agreement of 27 July 1944 shifted the Soviet border to the west once again, as in 1939, thereby removing 85 per cent of Ukrainians from Poland, leaving only about 700,000. Most of Poland’s prewar Ukrainian minority thus left Poland without physically moving at all.⁸

To compensate for the post-World War Two loss of the eastern part of its inter-war territory to the Soviet Union, Polish borders were moved significantly westwards. Discussing this issue with President Truman at Potsdam, Stalin said: ‘Of course the proposal…to shift the frontier westward will create difficulties for Germany. I do not object to the claim that it will create difficulties for Germany. Our task is to create more difficulties for Germany…’⁹

The loss to the Soviet Union of territory which had previously been part of Poland was, however, a bitter pill to swallow for those Poles who were not Communists (the vast majority) and, accordingly, not programmed to accept the view that Stalin and Moscow knew best. Churchill in 1944 was torn between his respect for the heroic efforts of the Red Army and desire to be on good terms with Stalin, on the one hand, and his admiration for the bravery of Polish soldiers and airmen who fought with the Allied armies, on the other. In the later stages of the war, however, he gave precedence to Soviet interests over those of any émigré group. In mid-October 1944, he spoke harshly to the Polish government in exile in London, telling them that they had to accept that the Curzon line would be their eastern border and that they must co-operate on a fifty – fifty basis with the Soviet-backed Lublin Poles. When the leader of the government in exile in London, Stanisław Mikołajczyk, attempted to argue with him, Churchill responded: ‘If you want to conquer Russia we shall leave you to do it. I feel as if I were in a lunatic asylum, I don’t know whether the British Government will continue to recognize you.’¹⁰ Exasperated with both Polish governments in waiting but knowing which he disapproved of the more, Churchill wrote to King George VI on 16 October 1944: ‘The day before yesterday was “all Poles day”. Our lot from London are, as Your Majesty knows, a decent but feeble lot of fools but the delegation from Lublin seem to be the greatest villains imaginable.’¹¹

What had been East Prussia was divided between Poland and the Soviet Union, with the German city of Königsberg becoming part of Russia and renamed Kaliningrad in 1946 in honour of Mikhail Kalinin, who had been titular head of the Soviet state (while wielding little power) and had died that year. Poland was granted what had been German territory east of the rivers Oder and the western Neisse. Both there, and in other Slav countries with a German population within their borders, it was agreed at Potsdam that German inhabitants could be expelled to Germany (with its redefined borders).¹² Germany was not yet in 1945 split into two states, but a de facto division developed from the outset. The territory which had been occupied by the Red Army was under the tight control of the Soviet Union, and that within the American and British sphere was profoundly influenced by the occupying powers and took a quite different direction from the Soviet zone. Shortly after the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) became a separate state in 1949, the Soviet satellite of East Germany was granted statehood as the German Democratic Republic.

The spread of Communism throughout east and central Europe in the early post-war years must, then, be seen in the context of the military outcome of the Second World War, of the vast range of territory conquered by the Soviet army, and of Western respect for the Soviet contribution to the Allied victory and for the scale of their losses. Thus the leaders both of the United States and of Britain in the later war years, and at the Potsdam conference, accepted Stalin’s argument that the USSR must be secure from the threat of attack from the West – and from Germany in particular. Diplomacy played a role. Stalin had ‘a computer-like memory’.¹³ He could argue effectively, although it was many years since any Soviet politician had dared contradict him, and he could persuade as well as coerce. Even Churchill – who more than Roosevelt or even Truman (in the earliest months of his presidency) was suspicious of Soviet intentions – allowed himself to be charmed by Stalin and to say in 1944 that if they could dine together once a week, they would solve the vexed problem of Poland. More than once during the Second World War Churchill remarked of Stalin: ‘I like that man.’¹⁴ Roosevelt was still more of an optimist than Churchill about Stalin and on the prospects for continuing good relations with the Soviet Union after the war.

When Truman succeeded Roosevelt as president, he had little experience of foreign policy, and in a letter in May 1945 to his predecessor’s widow, Eleanor, he said that the ‘difficulties with Churchill are very nearly as exasperating as they are with the Russians’.¹⁵ His initial assessment of Stalin was: ‘He is honest – but smart as hell.’¹⁶ The second part of the judgement was sounder than the first. As one of America’s most distinguished observers of the Soviet Union, George Kennan, put it: ‘Stalin’s greatness as a dissimulator was an integral part of his greatness as a statesman.’¹⁷ By the following year, Truman fully shared Churchill’s suspicion of the Soviet Union’s post-war ambitions. At the Potsdam conference, however, Churchill’s electoral defeat had led the American president to reflect on Stalin’s mortality. He confided to his diary at the end of July 1945 his worries that Stalin might disappear from the scene:

    If Stalin should suddenly cash in it would end the original Big Three. First Roosevelt by death, then Churchill by political failure and then Stalin. I am wondering what would happen to Russia and Central Europe if Joe suddenly passed out. If some demagogue on horseback gained control of the efficient Russian military machine he could play havoc with European peace for a while. I also wonder if there is a man with the necessary strength and following to step into Stalin’s place and maintain peace and solidarity at home. It isn’t customary for dictators to train leaders to follow them in power…Uncle Joe’s pretty tough mentally and physically but there is an end to every man and we can’t help but speculate.¹⁸

In a letter which he composed, but did not send, to Dean Acheson in March 1957, Truman noted that at the Potsdam conference ‘a large number of agreements were reached in spite of the setup – only to be broken as soon as the unconscionable Russian Dictator returned to Moscow!’ Truman was irked, though, by the fact that some press comment had made him out to be ‘the little man in stature and intellect’ at Potsdam, when, so far as size was concerned, Stalin was ‘a good six inches shorter than I am and even Churchill was only three inches taller than Joe!’ Of Stalin he regretfully added: ‘And I liked the little son of a bitch.’¹⁹

Poland

Although Churchill himself had talked with Stalin in 1944 in terms of percentages and spheres of influence, he had not envisaged this as paving the way for the establishment of Soviet-type systems throughout Eastern Europe. He did, however – earlier than two successive American presidents – become concerned that this was precisely the path Stalin was pursuing. The plight of Poland particularly exercised Churchill, since, as he reminded Stalin, it was the invasion of Poland which had brought Britain into the war. The Warsaw Rising against the Germans of August 1944 had led to the destruction of the city and the deaths of almost 200,000 Poles, while a large contingent of the Soviet army were camped nearby on the eastern side of the River Vistula. To the extent that the Warsaw Rising had been co-ordinated, it was with the Polish government in exile in London and not with Moscow or the Soviet-created Polish Committee of National Liberation at Lublin. Yet the fact that the Soviet army did not intervene, when it seemed to the Poles in Warsaw that they were in a position to prevent the city’s inhabitants from being slaughtered or dispossessed (for the Germans expelled the survivors, around 800,000 people), added one more source of bitterness to a long history of animosity in Polish – Russian relations.²⁰

Nothing could have been more hollow than the Soviet claim that the Communist government established in post-war Poland reflected the wishes of the Poles. The small inter-war Polish Communist Party had been dissolved by the Comintern in 1938, accused of being infiltrated by Polish secret police and Trotskyists. Many of its leaders and members were in exile in the Soviet Union and most of them were either executed or sent to labour camps. A new party was created, under Soviet tutelage, during the war and given the name initially of the Polish Workers’ Party. Later it became the Polish United Workers’ Party – the PUWP. The two leading Polish Communists in the early post-war period, Bolesław Bierut and Władysław Gomuka, had spent much time in Moscow. Gomułka was of working-class background. He had left school at the age of fourteen, worked as a mechanic, and from an early age was an active trade unionist and socialist. He was expelled from the Polish Socialist Party in 1924 because of the extremity of his views, and two years later he joined the illegal Communist Party. Bierut, who was born in 1892, was thirteen years older than Gomuka and had been a founder member of the Polish Communist Party in 1918. He was the more Russified of the two, having divided his time in the 1920s between the Soviet Union and Poland, while undertaking secret missions for the Comintern.

Both Bierut and Gomuka were students for two years at the Comintern School in Moscow, and each spent a substantial part of the 1930s in Polish prisons. When the Nazis invaded Poland, both men succeeded in escaping to Moscow. Gomuka returned to Poland in 1942 and was active in the Communist resistance movement (which was very much smaller than that of the Polish non-Communists). Bierut took part in the founding of the Polish Committee of National Liberation at Lublin after that city had been taken by the Red Army from the Germans. By January 1945 the Soviet Union had recognized the Lublin committee as the provisional government of Poland, with Bierut as the prime minister and Gomuka as deputy premier. The Polish Communists were comparatively few in number at the beginning of 1945–the party had 30,000 members in January of that year. By the end of the year this had risen to 210,000, and by January 1947 it had reached over 500,000.²¹ Given the identification of the Communist movement with the Soviet Union, and in view of the historically bad relations between Poland and Russia, for Polish Communists to win support within their own society was especially difficult. However, here, as elsewhere, there were people who were ready to join the winning side and to benefit from the enhanced career prospects that would accrue. Hence the rapid rise in party membership between January 1945 and January 1947.

The Soviet-imposed regimes in Eastern Europe were not at the outset regarded as ‘socialist’ by Moscow. The name given to them was ‘people’s democracies’ – a piece of nonsense from a linguistic point of view, since democracy literally means rule by the people. Politically, however, it was intended to distinguish these regimes from what in Marxist-Leninist terms were the ‘bourgeois democracies’ of the West. The terminology also reflected the fact that these did not become fully fledged Communist systems (or, in Soviet terms, ‘socialist’) overnight. They moved, in almost every case, from, first, a partially genuine coalition in which Communists predominated; to, second, a pseudo-coalition in which the Communists had, in reality, a monopoly of real power; and, third, to a Communist system similar to that of the Soviet Union, even if in several east-central European cases the government included one or two members of puppet parties intended to provide the illusion (though virtually no one was deceived) of non-Communist participation.²²

Poland was important to the Soviet Union strategically, and for that reason Stalin, in common with the Polish Communist leaders, was predisposed to take account of its specific features. Thus, the local Communists, with Soviet support, were among the most cautious in Eastern Europe in how they implemented their capture of power. The change in Poland’s borders gave the Communists one notable card they could play – namely, that the guarantor of the territory they had taken from Germany was the Soviet Union. Indeed, the potential threat of a possibly resurgent Germany, and the importance, accordingly, of alliance with the Soviet Union, was a theme of which Poland’s Communist leaders made much over the next several decades. The policies of the Nazis (especially the physical annihilation of Poland’s substantial pre-war Jewish population), the change in the borders, and the expulsion of Germans from what was now Polish territory meant that the country was much more homogeneous than pre-war Poland. That fact was by no means necessarily to the Soviet advantage. Poland had become 98 per cent Polish and, thus, overwhelmingly Catholic. It was also both russophobic and predominantly peasant, the more so since its industrial base had been destroyed in the war.²³

It is a myth that the fate of Poland was determined at the Yalta conference. What defined the limits of Poland’s future for several decades was Soviet military strength, together with the determination of the Communist leadership in Moscow that Poland should be an obedient ally of the Soviet Union. Moreover, far from consigning Poland to Communist statehood, the Yalta agreement had stipulated that there should be ‘free and unfettered elections as soon as possible’. Elections – which turned out to be far from free and unfettered – were not held until the beginning of 1947. Both the Soviet leadership and the Polish Communists had realized that some time was required to achieve the right result. The former leader of the London Poles, Stanisław Mikołajczyk, headed the Peasant Party, which had refused to join a coalition with the Communists. Thousands of its members were arrested, including 142 of its parliamentary candidates.²⁴ A combination of gerrymandering of electoral districts and plain vote-rigging contributed to an electoral outcome whereby the Communist bloc was accorded 80 per cent of the vote.

For some of the Communists’ policies there was, however, quite broad support, including that of the Polish Socialist Party, which had joined the coalition. Thus, the nationalization of industry and banking was broadly accepted, the more especially since these had been in German hands during the war. Similarly, there was support across the political spectrum for land reform, whereby the large estates of a wealthy landowning class were broken up and land was redistributed to Polish peasants. With their increasing control of the mass media and effective propaganda, the Communists were able to ensure that they, rather than the Peasant Party, gained most of the credit for that popular measure. In Poland, unlike what was to happen in the vast majority of Communist states, agriculture was not collectivized. The Catholic Church was not attacked to the extent to which religious institutions were elsewhere in east-central Europe. Bierut, who became president, even took a religious oath, and Gomuka, as Communist party leader, defeated the most extreme pro-Soviet group within the party, people who would have liked Poland to become a constituent republic of the Soviet Union.²⁵

In other words, Poland in the immediate post-war years had characteristics in common with other Communist takeovers, but there were also concessions to the specific features of Poland, partly as a result of Gomuka’s sensitivity to them. What was typical of the time and region was the rapid growth of political censorship and the decision in the autumn of 1947 to arrest a major figure from the political opposition, in this case Mikołajczyk. However, the leader of the Peasant Party learned of this in time and was able, once again, to go into exile. Also typical was the gradual absorption of malleable political figures from other political parties and the exclusion from political life of those who were intransigent. In Poland the Socialist Party was absorbed by the Communists in 1948, and that was the point at which the Polish Workers’ Party was renamed the Polish United Workers’ Party. Less typical of the coming to power of Communists, in addition to the relative tolerance of the Church and the survival of private agriculture, was the fact that Gomuka dared to criticize looters from the Soviet army and publicly recognized the contribution of Western, as well as Soviet, forces to the defeat of Nazi Germany.²⁶

Hungary

Many of the leading Hungarian Communists and founding members of the party, who had sought respite in the Soviet Union, were killed in Stalin’s purges. They included at least sixteen former members of the Central Committee. Among them was Bela Kun, the leader of the 1919 short-lived Hungarian revolution. Shortly after Stalin had telephoned Kun in June 1937 telling him to deny allegations in the Western press that he had been arrested (an instruction which Kun promptly obeyed), he was arrested! His last words to his wife were: ‘Don’t worry. Some misunderstanding. I will be home in half an hour.’²⁷ After interrogation, torture and confession, he was executed on the last day of November 1939. Wartime Hungary was allied with Nazi Germany and the party suffered further severe losses as a result. Hundreds of Communists were arrested during those years, most of them dying in German concentration camps.²⁸

At the time Soviet troops liberated Hungary from Nazi rule in 1944 there were fewer than 3,000 Hungarian Communists left. By the end of the Second World War that number had risen to 150,000, and by March 1947 it was 650,000. Initially, the National Independence Front, formed by the Communists, included leaders of the main non-fascist parties – the Social Democratic Party, the Smallholder Party and the National Peasant Party, in addition to the Hungarian Communist Party. Just as the Polish Socialist Party was merged with the Communists in 1948, so in Hungary the Social Democratic Party was absorbed by the Hungarian Communist Party in the same year.²⁹ In Hungary’s first post-Second World War elections in November 1945, which were honestly conducted, the Smallholder Party had emerged victorious. Further elections took place in 1947, this time fraudulently. The Communists received less than 23 per cent of the vote (and that owed much to the stuffing of ballot boxes) but emerged as the largest single party. Moreover, this understated their growing dominance, for the Communist-led leftist bloc emerged with 45.3 per cent of the votes. A further major breakthrough for the Communist cause came with the establishment of unity with the Social Democratic Party. This brought membership of the Communist Party to well over a million, representing 12 per cent of the population.³⁰ Soviet troops had remained in Hungary and a great deal of pressure was exerted on the Social Democrats to co-operate. In their new guise, the now-ruling Communists were known as the Hungarian Workers’ Party. In an election in May 1949, a still broader umbrella group dominated by the Communists, the unified list of candidates of the Popular Front, was credited with 95.6 per cent of votes cast. The Communists were now able to move quickly to establish their monopoly of power.³¹

Those Hungarian Communists who had been in Moscow in the 1930s and had avoided being purged by Stalin formed the bulk of the leadership of the party in the immediate post-war period. It was headed by Mátyás Rákosi, and his Moscow associates included Ern Ger and Imre Nagy. The leading figures in the ‘native’, as distinct from Muscovite, wing of the party – Communist activists who had stayed in Hungary during the war – were János Kádár and Lászlo Rajk. Rákosi applied his ‘salami tactics’ of slicing off political opponents one by one, pursuing a policy of divide and rule with rival parties, and gradually extending Communist control to all ministries. He secured from the outset the Ministry of the Interior, thus combining control over the police with the power which flowed from the party organization.³² Elements of political pluralism survived in Hungary until 1948, but in that year the comprehensive Stalinization of the system got under way and continued until Stalin’s death in 1953. Rajk was arrested in 1948, along with his ‘Titoist friends’, and following a show trial he was executed. Kádár was arrested in 1950, and although he was tortured, he survived and, following Stalin’s death, was released in 1954, along with Hungarian veterans of the Spanish Civil War and alleged ‘Rajkists’.³³ The one institution which retained some autonomy until late in 1948 was the Catholic Church, but a series of restrictions on its activities brought protests from the head of the Church in Hungary, Cardinal Mindszenty, and he (followed by many other religious activists) was arrested on Christmas Day 1948.³⁴

Romania

During the war, the small Romanian Communist Party was divided geographically between those who were in prison in Romania – among them two future leaders of the country, Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej and Nicolae Ceauescu – and those in exile in the Soviet Union, who included Ana Pauker, the daughter of a rabbi, and a revolutionary since 1918. She spent much of the inter-war period working for the Comintern but the years between 1935 and 1940 in a Romanian prison. In post-war Romania, Pauker was foreign minister from 1947 until 1952, when she was expelled in quick succession from the Politburo, Central Committee, the Foreign Ministry and the Communist Party. Although placed under house arrest, she was less harshly treated than leading Communists who fell out of favour elsewhere in Eastern Europe.

Romania, under its right-wing authoritarian regime, had fought on the side of Nazi Germany in the Second World War. The government of General Ion Antonescu, which had been formed in 1940, made clear to the monarch, King Michael (who had recently succeeded his father, who had abdicated and left the country in haste), that he was to play a merely symbolic role and take no part in the making of state policy.³⁵ In August 1944 King Michael was able to turn the tables on Antonescu. By this time Soviet forces were advancing into Romanian territory; it seemed prudent either to stop fighting altogether or to change sides. Antonescu informed the king that he was going to seek an armistice but that he would first inform the Germans about this. The king, having quickly decided that the Antonescu government was in no position to safeguard the territorial integrity and political independence of Romania, went to an adjoining room and instructed his allies to arrest Antonescu. The new government, formed under a premier appointed by the king, General Sanatescu, had representatives from four political parties, and when Soviet forces entered the Romanian capital, Bucharest, on 31 August 1944, the two countries were, in principle, no longer enemies.³⁶ Hardly surprisingly, however, the Soviet authorities did not set aside all that happened prior to the ‘king’s coup’ and treated Romania as a defeated enemy. Molotov was the implacable Soviet negotiator when an armistice was signed on 12 September. He insisted that the Soviet annexation of the formerly Romanian territory of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina be ratified. Punitive economic demands were imposed on the Romanians, while the military clauses brought the Romanian army back into the war, fighting side by side with the Soviet army against Germany and her allies. The Romanians made a significant contribution to liberating parts of Hungary and Czechoslovakia, took 100,000 prisoners and lost in this part of the war almost 170,000 of their own men.³⁷ Although Gheorghiu-Dej was not a ‘Muscovite’, he succeeded in convincing Stalin that he would be a faithful follower of the Soviet line, and his election as general secretary of the party – and thus the de facto ruler of Romania – took place in 1945. In a later struggle for power with the ‘Muscovites’, which led to the 1952 arrest of Ana Pauker, Gheorghiu-Dej was again to receive Stalin’s blessing.

Bulgaria

Bulgarian Communists had taken part in partisan activities on a modest scale during the Second World War and they were able to gain influence in a Popular Front movement formed in 1943. In September 1944 that movement, called the Fatherland Front, seized power. The Communists were in a minority in the coalition which made up the Fatherland Front, and in the government which was formed in September. However, true to form, they seized the most crucial positions for a party intent on consolidating its hold on power. Through the Ministry of the Interior they controlled the police and through the Ministry of Justice they held sway over the courts. In Bulgaria, as in other states making a transition to Communist rule, a parallel police force known as the People’s Militia was created, and it was entirely Communist-dominated.

The political party which had the strongest support at the end of the war was the Agrarians, but the Communists, successfully applying divide-and-rule tactics, succeeded in splitting both the Agrarian party and the Social Democrats. Georgi Dimitrov returned to Bulgaria to become the leading figure in the Bulgarian Communist Party. While still in Moscow, he was very active behind the scenes and orchestrated many of the moves made by the Bulgarian Communists, having access both to them and to Stalin.³⁸ He returned to Bulgaria to head the government in November 1945. He wished to include the two main leaders of democratic oppositional parties, Nikola Petkov of the Agrarians and Kosta Lulchev of the Social Democrats, in the governing coalition. However, both of them insisted on removing the Ministry of the Interior and Ministry of Justice from Communist control. This the Communist party (known temporarily as the Bulgarian Workers’ Party, reverting to Bulgarian Communist Party in 1948) refused to countenance, and so Petkov and Lulchev stayed in opposition.³⁹ Petkov continued to mount vigorous attacks on the Communists and noted that they were spending far more on the police and prisons than had the right-wing government of Bulgaria during the war. In June 1947 Petkov was arrested and given a travesty of a trial. It ended with his being sentenced to death and hanged. This effectively put an end to democratic opposition to Communist rule in Bulgaria, although Lulchev defied warnings from Dimitrov and voted against the budget in January 1948. In spite of his advanced age, he was arrested later that year and sentenced to fifteen years in prison.⁴⁰ The ‘Dimitrov Constitution’, which had been formulated in the Soviet Union, was adopted in December 1947 and Marxism-Leninism became within the space of a few months the official ideology. The means of production were nationalized, and the Communist Party had by 1948 achieved a monopoly of power, although they kept in existence as a puppet party that section of the Agrarians which had been willing to co-operate with them.⁴¹

East Germany

What became the separate East German state known as the German Democratic Republic (GDR) began as the Soviet zone of Germany. It was the part of the country which had been occupied by Soviet troops and thus fell under Soviet control. This meant that it was administered by German Communists chosen by the Soviet leadership to do their bidding. In West Germany the GDR was known until 1971–when Willy Brandt was the Social Democratic chancellor – as either the ‘Soviet Occupied Zone’ or ‘Central Germany’, with the German provinces to the east of the Oder – Neisse Line, which had been lost to the Soviet bloc (especially Poland), referred to as ‘East Germany’.⁴² There was never any likelihood of that lost ‘East Germany’ being restored to German rule, not least because it had been ‘ethnically cleansed’ of Germans. However, the actually existing East Germany, ruled from 1945 by German Communists in close communication with their Soviet mentors, developed in ways similar to Communist regimes elsewhere in east-central Europe.

Thus they began by constructing a broad base, in which many of those whom they appointed to political offices, such as mayors of important towns, were from the Social Democratic Party or were prominent local professional people of liberal views. However, these citizens, who often accepted their posts in good faith, were invariably shadowed by a reliable Communist (in the office, for example, of deputy mayor) who would ensure that nothing contrary to the longer-term interests of the Communists occurred. All four powers – the Soviet Union, the United States, Britain and France (the last-named a presence in Germany only because Churchill had pressed for this in meetings of the ‘Big Three’)–had their zones of influence in Germany. Stalin was conscious that what happened in the Soviet zone would be the subject of scrutiny and comparison, so he was ready to tolerate some minimal democracy in the initial stage of building new political structures in East Germany. The German Communist Party’s manifesto of June 1945 was modest, advocating neither a socialist economy nor a one-party state. It even included a commitment to ‘complete and unrestricted development of free commerce and private enterprise on the basis of private property’, making it, on the face of things, much less committed to socialism than was the German Social Democratic Party.

When the proclamation of policy was announced from on high by Walter Ulbricht to a conference of German Communists, a majority of whom had belonged to the underground party during the war, one of them asked in what respect the policy differed ‘from the programme of any party you care to name’. Ulbricht’s answer, which was accompanied by a wink, was: ‘You’ll soon see, Comrade! Just wait a bit!’⁴³ The top leadership of the German Communists, most notably Ulbricht and Wilhelm Pieck, were in full accord with Stalin on both tactics and longer-term strategy. On neither side was there an initial desire to commit to separate statehood for the Soviet zone, the preference being to keep their options open. Ideally, they wished for a united Germany – or, at least, a united Berlin – under Communist control. Failing that, they wished to ‘build socialism’, Soviet-style, in East Germany and at the same time to ensure that the part of Germany under Western influence would remain neutral and disarmed. If Germany were to be split into two separate states, Stalin wanted the initiative for this to come from the Western powers, so that they would be blamed by Germans for dividing the nation.⁴⁴

In charge of the gradual transition to a Communist regime was a group of German Communists who had survived both the purges and the war in the Soviet Union. A dominant figure from the outset was Ulbricht, who went on to lead the party until 1971. He was a cold and calculating personality of little imagination but possessed of a remarkable memory. His years in the Soviet Union had left him well fitted to behave in a highly authoritarian manner in Germany, which he combined with obsequiousness in his relations with Stalin. It had become second nature for Ulbricht to think like a Stalinist and to be ready to follow every twist and turn of Soviet policy.

The youngest person on the first planeload of German Communists flown from Moscow to Berlin in 1945 was Wolfgang Leonhard, a graduate of the Comintern School, who was a true-believing Communist at the age of twenty-three, even though his mother had been arrested by the NKVD in 1936 and was to spend the next twelve years in a Soviet labour camp and subsequent exile to a remote Siberian village. Only in 1948 was she allowed to join her son, following representations to Moscow by Wilhelm Pieck, a veteran German Communist who, remarkably, was a leading figure in the party from 1918 until his death in 1960. Leonhard himself has written a vivid account of his years in Russia and of his experiences in early post-war Germany when he precociously entered the ruling circles and became disillusioned with what he saw. The hierarchy of privilege which he had learned to take for granted in the Soviet Union looked different when he saw the reactions of Communists who had known only an underground existence. Along with idealistic German Communists, including some who had been in Nazi concentration camps, he was increasingly revolted by Ulbricht’s style of rule and by the German leadership’s slavish adherence to the Soviet line. The last straw was their endorsement of the excommunication of Tito’s Yugoslavia in 1948. In common with many Communists in central Europe, Leonhard and a number of his colleagues in East Germany had admired the fighting spirit of Tito’s partisans and the fact that they were able to come to power through their own efforts rather than courtesy of the Soviet army.⁴⁵

Some of the German Communists, including one who had spent the war years in the Soviet Union, Anton Ackermann, argued in 1945–46 for a ‘German road to socialism’ which would be distinct from the experience of the Soviet Union. This was tolerated by Ulbricht and by the Soviet leadership for a time, since their policy was initially a gradualist one. Under pressure from Marshal Zhukov, who was head of the Soviet Military Administration in Germany, the Communist Party merged with that part of the Social Democratic Party which was prepared for such a fusion. In April 1946 they became the Socialist Unity Party (SED in its German initials). Notwithstanding that merger, in elections later in 1946 the SED failed to secure a majority in any province of East Germany. In greater Berlin, where the presence of the other four powers permitted those social democrats who had remained independent (the SPD) to compete, the SPD gained 48.7 per cent of the vote as against a mere 19.8 per cent for the SED. Although the Communists had many organizational advantages, they were beaten into third place in the Berlin election by the Christian Democrats, who obtained 22.1 per cent of the vote. After that experience the Communists made sure that in future the electorate would be offered no choice. For Leonhard and those who thought like him within the SED it was clear that the German Communists’ greatest disadvantage was that they were thought of as ‘the Russian party’, and experience of rape, looting, and the dismantling of German factories had made even apolitical German citizens deeply resentful of the Soviet army and Soviet control.⁴⁶

Marshall Aid to the countries of Europe within the Western sphere of influence had, as noted in the previous chapter, been launched in 1947. In West Germany the need to administer such economic aid underlined the necessity of having state political institutions. That necessity was accentuated when in 1948 the Soviet Union and their German Communist allies made an attempt to gain control over the whole of the city of Berlin, taking advantage of the fact that the surrounding territory was in the Soviet zone, by making subsistence impossible in the American, British and French zones. They did this by closing the roads, railways and canals leading into the Western part of the city. The plan did not work because Western aircraft, especially American and British, airlifted supplies to the population of West Berlin, making some 277,000 flights between the imposition of the blockade and its lifting in May 1949.⁴⁷

Marshall Aid and the Berlin blockade between them underlined the de facto existence of two Germanies, and this was formalized in 1949. In the summer of that year the Federal Republic of Germany was formed on the territory of West Germany, and national elections in August led to Konrad Adenauer becoming the first chancellor of this new state. The German Democratic Republic, as East Germany now termed itself, was founded in October 1949, with Wilhelm Pieck becoming its first (and last) president, Otto Grotewohl the prime minister, and Walter Ulbricht pulling most of the strings as the leader of the SED.⁴⁸ Even before this the party had been removing many of the recently recruited social democrats from its ranks. Between the late 1940s and the early 1950s around 5,000 social democrats were imprisoned, another 20,000 were dismissed from their jobs, and 100,000 fled to the West.⁴⁹ The intense pressure on social democrats was part and parcel of the more thorough establishment of Communist political structures and norms, which gathered pace with the establishment of a separate East German state. While the Communist party (under its new name, the SED) held supreme power, it began to develop a security apparatus. In 1949 a Main Directorate for the Defence of the People’s Economy was established which reported to the German Central Administration of the Interior. In February 1950, fear of Western influence led the GDR leadership to take the Stalinization of their state a step further with the creation of a Ministry of State Security, an organization that was to be permitted to grow to an extraordinary extent and become known as the Stasi.⁵⁰

The ‘Iron Curtain’ Dividing Europe

The countries of east-central Europe became more Stalinist and the division of Europe more rigid from 1948 until the death of Stalin. I have more to say in Chapter 12 about that phase of post-war Stalinism both in the Soviet Union and in its now consolidated satellite states. The division of Europe remained in place until 1989, but the terminology which Winston Churchill made ubiquitous with his speech in Fulton, Missouri, on 5 March 1946–‘from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an iron curtain has descended across the Continent…’ – was in later years to obscure the extent to which ideas crossed national boundaries, with the dividing curtain, in many cases, acquiring the permeability of gauze rather than iron.

However, the metaphor of the iron curtain was apt enough in the context of 1946, and it was the timing of Churchill’s use of the term – allied to the fact that he was a world-renowned war leader who was being accompanied on the visit to a small Midwestern college by no less a person than the incumbent President of the United States, Harry Truman – which gave his speech such resonance. The political systems of Eastern Europe were already being constructed along Soviet lines. The mass media and security police in those countries were, with increasing effectiveness, cutting their citizens off from a free flow of information and greatly restricting the populations’ Western contacts. It was not the originality of the term, ‘iron curtain’ – for it was far from original – but its political context which accounts for most of its impact. Just two weeks before Churchill’s speech, George Kennan had sent what was to become celebrated as the ‘long telegram’ from the American Embassy in Moscow to Washington. It gave a penetrating analysis of Soviet strengths, weaknesses, stratagems and subterfuges, together with sensible counsel on how the United States and the West as a whole should respond. While advocating ‘cohesion, firmness and vigor’ in dealing with the Soviet Union, Kennan was at the same time dismissive of ‘hysterical anti-Sovietism’, saying that it was necessary to study Stalin’s Soviet Union ‘with the same courage, detachment, objectivity, and the same determination not to be emotionally provoked or unseated by it, with which a doctor studies unruly and unreasonable individuals’. Warning against ‘prestige-engaging showdowns’, Kennan advocated a policy of containment of Soviet ambitions, observing: ‘Soviet power, unlike that of Hitlerite Germany, is neither schematic nor adventuristic…It does not take unnecessary risks.’ And though it was ‘impervious to logic of reason’ it was ‘highly sensitive to logic of force’.⁵¹

Kennan’s telegram was read by President Truman as well as by senior officials, and the Secretary of the Navy ‘made it required reading for hundreds, if not thousands, of higher officers in the armed services’.⁵² Kennan set out, vividly and without illusions, what he saw as Soviet thinking in the immediate post-war period, taking cognizance not only of official policy but of its informal projection–‘policy implemented through “front” organizations and stooges of all sorts’.⁵³ In his memoirs, Kennan notes that the sensational impact of his ‘elaborate pedagogical effort’ rested on its timing: ‘Six months earlier this message would probably have been received in the Department of State with raised eyebrows and lips pursed in disapproval. Six months later, it would probably have sounded redundant, a sort of preaching to the converted.’⁵⁴ Generalizing further about American politics (though the remark has still broader application) he said: ‘All this goes to show that more important than the observable nature of external reality, when it comes to the determination of Washington’s view of the world, is the subjective state of readiness on the part of Washington officialdom to recognize this or that feature of it.’⁵⁵

Whereas Kennan’s telegram was circulated in the most influential Washington circles, it was not known at the time to the wider world. In contrast, Churchill’s speech, warning of the Soviet Union’s desire to gain the fruits of war (albeit without war) through ‘the indefinite expansion of their power and doctrines’, was widely reported and highly controversial. It was not so long ago that the Soviet Union had been a wartime ally of the United States and Britain, and one of decisive importance. Nevertheless, Truman in private – though not immediately in public – agreed with Churchill, as, essentially, did the dominant figure in British foreign policy at the time, Ernest Bevin, foreign secretary in the Labour government. As Roy Jenkins put it, ‘Bevin’s foreign policy was moving very much in the direction of Fulton, even if a little more slowly.’⁵⁶ It was the iron curtain imagery which stuck in the public mind, although the term was not Churchill’s coinage – or, indeed, that of Goebbels, though he also (as Soviet propagandists did not fail to note) used it during the war.

Even as a metaphor the term had been used quite often. Its literal origins lay in the iron curtain which, for safety reasons, separated the stage from the audience before, and during the intervals of, theatre performances. Later the iron curtains were replaced by asbestos ones. As a metaphor, the term had been used by pacifists, especially by Vernon Lee, as early as 1914, objecting to the ‘iron curtain’ which, as a result of imperial rivalries, divided peoples.⁵⁷ It seems to have first been applied to the division between Bolshevik Russia and the West by Ethel Snowden, the wife of a future Labour chancellor of the exchequer, Philip Snowden, in 1920.⁵⁸ Churchill himself had used the phrase several times in correspondence with President Truman as well as in the House of Commons in 1945. But when in 1946 Churchill (who had the theatre safety curtain in mind) spoke of the iron curtain which had descended in Europe, the impact of the metaphor was much greater. Even Stalin felt obliged to respond and, unusually, used the device of an interview given to Pravda to reply to Churchill’s warnings. For Soviet politicians and historians Churchill’s Fulton speech was seen over the next four decades as the moment at which the Cold War began. Since the term ‘Cold War’ is also a metaphor – it signified greatly increased tension, ideological struggle, economic competition, and armaments build-up, but it was not a war – there can be no definitive answer to the question: when did the Cold War begin? However, the Soviet imposition of Communist regimes on the countries of east-central Europe, with no regard for the wishes of their peoples, was the cause of the division of Europe – and that was the single most important manifestation of what became known as the Cold War.