by Tony Judt
There was now nothing to inhibit the Western leaders and the London Conference rapidly agreed to extend the Marshall Plan to western Germany and lay down schemes for an eventual government for a West German state (an arrangement approvedby the French delegation in exchange for the—temporary—separation of the Saar from Germany and a proposal for an independent authority to oversee the industry of the Ruhr). These plans constituted an explicit departure from the spirit of the Potsdam accords and General Vassily Sokolovsky, the Soviet representative on the Allied Control Council (ACC) in Berlin, duly protested (neglecting to acknowledge the Soviet Union’s own frequent breaches of those same accords).
On March 10th, Sokolovsky condemned plans for western Germany as the enforced imposition of capitalist interests upon a German population denied the chance to demonstrate its desire for Socialism, and repeated Soviet assertions that Western powers were abusing their presence in Berlin—which he claimed was part of the Soviet Zone—to interfere in eastern German affairs. Ten days later, at an ACC meeting in Berlin on March 20th, Sokolovsky denounced the ‘unilateral actions’ of the Western Allies, ‘taken in Western Germany and which are against the interests of the peaceful countries and peace-loving Germans who seek the peaceful unity and democratization of their country’. He then swept out of the room, followed by the rest of the Soviet delegation. No date was set for a further meeting. The joint Allied occupation of Germany was over: less than two weeks later, on April 1st, the Soviet military authorities in Berlin began to interfere with surface traffic between western Germany and the Western Allies’ zones of occupation in Berlin. The real Cold War in Europe had begun.
It should be clear from this narrative that there is little to be gained from asking ‘who started the Cold War?’ To the extent that the Cold War was about Germany, the final outcome—a divided country—was probably preferred by all parties to a Germany united against them. No one planned this outcome in May 1945, but few were deeply discontented with it. Some German politicians, notably Konrad Adenauer himself, even owed their career to the division of their country: had Germany remained a quadri-zonal or united country, an obscure local politician from the far-western Catholic Rhineland would almost certainly not have made it to the top.
But Adenauer could hardly have espoused the division of Germany as a goal, however much he welcomed it in private. His chief opponent in the first years of the Federal Republic, the Social Democrat Kurt Schumacher, was a Protestant from West Prussia and a tireless advocate of German unity. In contrast to Adenauer he would readily have accepted a neutralized Germany as the price for a single German state, which was what Stalin appeared to be offering. And Schumacher’s position was probably the more popular one in Germany at the time, which was why Adenauer had to tread carefully and ensure that the responsibility for a divided Germany fell squarely on the occupying forces.
By 1948 the United States, like Great Britain, was not unhappy to see the emergence of a divided Germany, with American influence dominant in the larger, western segment. But although there were some, like George Kennan, who had perceptively anticipated this outcome (as early as 1945 he had concluded that the USA had ‘no choice but to lead her section of Germany . . . to a form of independence so prosperous, so secure, so superior, that the east cannot threaten it’), they were in the minority. The Americans, like Stalin, were improvising in these years. It is sometimes suggested that certain key American decisions and declarations, notably the Truman Doctrine of March 1947, precipitated Stalin’s retreat from compromise to rigidity and that in this sense the responsibility for European divisions lay with Washington’s insensitivity or, worse, its calculated intransigence. But this is not so.
For the Truman Doctrine, to take this example, had remarkably little impact on Soviet calculations. President Truman’s March 12th 1947 announcement to Congress that ‘It must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or outside pressure’ was a direct response to London’s inability to continue with aid to Greece and Turkey following the British economic crisis of February 1947. America would have to take over Britain’s role. Truman thus sought Congressional approval for a $400 million increase in his budget for overseas aid: to secure the funding he presented the request in the context of a crisis of Communist insurgency.
Congress took him seriously, but Moscow did not. Stalin was not much interested in Turkey and Greece—the chief beneficiaries of the aid package—and he understood perfectly well that his own sphere of interest was unlikely to be affected by Truman’s grandstanding. On the contrary, he continued to suppose that there were very good prospects for a split within the Western camp of which the American assumption of erstwhile British responsibilities in the Eastern Mediterranean was a sign and precursor. Whatever led Stalin to adjust his calculations in Eastern Europe, it was decidedly not the rhetoric of American domestic politics.32
The immediate cause of the division of Germany and Europe lies rather in Stalin’s own errors in these years. In central Europe, where he would have preferred a united Germany, weak and neutral, he squandered his advantage in 1945 and subsequent years by uncompromising rigidity and confrontational tactics. If Stalin’s hope had been to let Germany rot until the fruit of German resentment and hopelessness fell into his lap, then he miscalculated seriously—though there were moments when the Allied authorities in western Germany wondered whether he might yet succeed. In that sense the Cold War in Europe was an unavoidable outcome of the Soviet dictator’s personality and the system over which he ruled.
But the fact remains that Germany was at his feet, as his opponents well knew—‘The trouble is that we are playing with fire which we have nothing with which to put out’, as Marshall put it to the National Security Council on February 13th 1948. All the Soviet Union needed to do was accept the Marshall Plan and convince a majority of the Germans of Moscow’s good faith in seeking a neutral, independent Germany. In 1947 this would radically have shifted the European balance of advantage. Whatever Marshall, Bevin or their advisers might have thought of such maneuvers, they would have been helpless to prevent them. That such tactical calculations were beyond Stalin cannot be credited to the West. As Dean Acheson put it on another occasion, ‘We were fortunate in our opponents.’
Looking back, it is somewhat ironic that after fighting a murderous war to reduce the power of an over-mighty Germany at the heart of the European continent, the victors should have proven so unable to agree on post-war arrangements to keep the German colossus down that they ended up dividing it between them in order to benefit separately from its restored strength. It had become clear—first to the British, then to the Americans, belatedly to the French and finally to the Soviets—that the only way to keep Germany from being the problem was to change the terms of the debate and declare it the solution. This was uncomfortable, but it worked. In the words of Noel Annan, a British intelligence officer in occupied Germany, ‘It was odious to find oneself in alliance with people who had been willing to go along with Hitler to keep Communism at bay. But the best hope for the West was to encourage the Germans themselves to create a Western democratic state.
V
The Coming of the Cold War
‘Imagine the Austrian Empire fragmented into a multitude of greater and
lesser republics. What a nice basis for universal Russian monarchy’.
František Palacký (April, 1848)
‘The Yugoslavs want to take Greek Macedonia. They want Albania, too,
and even parts of Austria and Hungary. This is unreasonable. I do not like
the way they are acting’.
Josef Stalin, 1945
‘All that the Red Army needed in order to reach the North Sea was boots’.
Dennis Healey
‘The idea of a European order is not an artificial creation of Germany
but a necessity’.
Paul-Henri Spaak (April, 1942)
‘This is s
omething which we know, in our bones, we cannot do’.
Anthony Eden (January, 1952)
‘This war is not as in the past; whoever occupies a territory also imposes upon it his own social system. Everyone imposes his own system as far as his army can reach. It cannot be otherwise.’ Josef Stalin’s famous aphorism—reported by Milovan Djilas in his Conversations with Stalin—was not quite as original as it appeared. World War Two was by no means the first European war in which military outcomes determined social systems: the religious wars of the sixteenth century ended in 1555 at the Peace of Augsburg, where the principle of cuius regio eius religio authorised rulers to establish in their own territory the religion of their choice; and in the initial stages of the Napoleonic conquests in early nineteenth-century Europe, military success translated very quickly into social and institutional revolution on the French model.
Nevertheless, Stalin’s point was clear—and put to Djilas well in advance of the Communist take-over of eastern Europe. From the Soviet side the war had been fought to defeat Germany and restore Russian power and security on its western frontiers. Whatever was to become of Germany itself, the region separating Germany and Russia could not be left in uncertainty. The territories running in a north-south arc from Finland to Yugoslavia comprised small, vulnerable states whose inter-war governments (with the partial exception of Czechoslovakia) had been uniformly hostile to the Soviet Union. Poland, Hungary and Romania in particular had been consistently unfriendly to Moscow and suspicious of Soviet intentions towards them. The only acceptable outcome for Stalin was the establishment—in those parts of the region not preemptively absorbed into the USSR itself—of governments that could be relied upon never to pose a threat to Soviet security.
But the only way to guarantee such an outcome was to align the political system of the states of eastern Europe with that of the Soviet Union and this, from the start, was what Stalin wanted and intended. On the one hand it might seem that this goal was straightforward enough: the old elites in countries like Romania or Hungary had been discredited and it would not be difficult to remove them and begin afresh. In many places the Soviet occupiers were at first welcomed as liberators and harbingers of change and reform.
On the other hand, however, the Soviet Union had almost no leverage in the domestic affairs of its western neighbours beyond the authority of its overwhelming military presence. Communists in much of the region had been banned from public life and legal political activity for most of the previous quarter century. Even where Communist parties were legal, their identification with Russia and the rigid, sectarian tactics imposed from Moscow for most of the period after 1927 had reduced them to a marginal irrelevance in East European politics. The Soviet Union had further contributed to their weakness by imprisoning and purging many of the Polish, Hungarian, Yugoslav and other Communists who had taken refuge in Moscow: in the Polish case the leadership of the inter-war Polish Communist Party was almost completely wiped out.
Thus when Mátyás Rákosi, the leader of the Hungarian Communist Party, was returned from Moscow to Budapest in February 1945, he could count on the support of perhaps 4,000 Communists in Hungary. In Romania, according to the Romanian Communist leader Ana Pauker herself, the Party had less than 1,000 members in a population of nearly 20 million. The situation in Bulgaria was not much better: in September 1944 the Communists numbered about 8,000. Only in the industrial regions of Bohemia and in Yugoslavia, where the Party was identified with the victorious partisan resistance, did Communism have anything resembling a mass base.
Characteristically cautious, and in any case still maintaining working relations with the Western powers, Stalin thus initially pursued a tactic already familiar from the Popular Front years of the thirties and from Communist practice during the Spanish Civil War: favouring the formation of ‘Front’ governments, coalitions of Communists, Socialists and other ‘anti-Fascist’ parties, which would exclude and punish the old regime and its supporters but would be cautious and ‘democratic’, reformist rather than revolutionary. By the end of the war, or very shortly thereafter, every country in eastern Europe had such a coalition government.
In view of continuing scholarly disagreement over responsibility for the division of Europe, it is perhaps worth emphasizing that neither Stalin nor his local representatives were in any doubt as to their long-term goal. Coalitions were the route to power for Communist parties in a region where they were historically weak; they were only ever a means to this end. As Walter Ulbricht, leader of the East German Communists, explained privately to his followers when they expressed bemusement at Party policy in 1945: ‘It’s quite clear—it’s got to look democratic, but we must have everything in our control.’
Control, in fact, mattered much more than policies. It was not by chance that in every coalition government—‘Fatherland Front’, ‘Unity Government’ or ‘bloc of anti-Fascist parties’—in eastern Europe, Communists sought control of certain key ministries: the Ministry of the Interior, which gave the Party authority over the police and security forces as well as the power to grant or withhold licenses to print newspapers; the Ministry of Justice, with control over purges, tribunals and judges; the Ministry of Agriculture, which administered land reforms and redistribution and was thus in a position to confer favours and buy the loyalty of millions of peasants. Communists also put themselves in key positions on ‘denazification’ committees, district commissions and in the trade unions.
Conversely, Communists in eastern Europe were in no hurry to claim the offices of President, Prime Minister or Foreign Minister, often preferring to leave these to their coalition allies in Socialist, Agrarian or Liberal Parties. This reflected the initial post-war disposition of government places—with the Communists in a minority—and reassured Western observers. The local population was not fooled and took its own precautions—Romanian Communist Party membership rose to 800,000 by the end of 1945—but in many respects Communist strategy really was reassuringly moderate. Far from collectivizing land, the Party was urging its distribution among the landless. Beyond the confiscation of ‘Fascist’ property, the Party was not pressing for nationalization or state ownership—certainly no more and usually rather less than some of its coalition partners. And there was very little talk of ‘Socialism’ as a goal.
The Communists’ stated objective in 1945 and 1946 was to ‘complete’ the unfinished bourgeois revolutions of 1848, to re-distribute property, guarantee equality and affirm democratic rights in a part of Europe where all three had always been in short supply. These were plausible goals, at least on the surface, and they appealed to many in the region and in western Europe who wanted to think well of Stalin and his purposes. Their appeal to Communists themselves, however, was sharply diminished in a series of local and national elections in eastern Germany, Austria and Hungary. There it became clear very early (in the Hungarian case at the Budapest municipal elections of November 1945) that however successfully they had inserted themselves into positions of local influence, Communists were never going to achieve public power through the ballot box. Despite every advantage of military occupation and economic patronage, Communist candidates were consistently defeated by representatives of the old Liberal, Social Democratic and Agrarian/Smallholder parties.
The result was that Communist parties adopted instead a strategy of covert pressure, followed by open terror and repression. In the course of 1946 and into 1947 electoral opponents were maligned, threatened, beaten up, arrested, tried as ‘Fascists’ or ‘collaborators’ and imprisoned or even shot. ‘Popular’ militias helped create a climate of fear and insecurity which Communist spokesmen then blamed on their political critics. Vulnerable or unpopular politicians from non-Communist parties were targeted for public opprobrium, while their colleagues consented to this mistreatment in the hope it would not be applied to them. Thus in Bulgaria, as early as the summer of 1946, seven out of twenty-two members of the ‘Praesidium’ of the Agrarian Union and thirty-five out of the ei
ghty members of its governing Council were in prison. Typical of the charges was one against the Agrarian journalist Kunev, accusing him of having, in an article, ‘in a truly criminal manner called the Bulgarian government political and economic dreamers’.
Agrarians, Liberals and other mainstream parties proved an easy target, tarred with the brush of Fascism or anti-national sentiment and picked off in stages. The more complicated impediment to Communist ambitions were the local Socialist and Social-Democratic parties who shared the Communists’ own reforming ambitions. It was not easy to charge Social Democrats in central or eastern Europe with ‘Fascism’ or collaboration—they had usually been as much the victim of repression as Communists. And in so far as there was an industrial working-class constituency in overwhelmingly rural eastern Europe, its allegiance was traditionally Socialist, not Communist. Thus since the Socialists could not easily be beaten, the Communists chose instead to join them.
Or, rather, to make the Socialists join them. This was a venerable Communist device. Lenin’s initial tactic from 1918 to 1921 had been to split Europe’s Socialist Parties, hive off the radical left element into new-formed Communist movements, and condemn the rump as reactionary and overtaken by history. But when Communist parties found themselves in the minority during the course of the next two decades, Moscow’s approach altered and the Communists instead held out to the (mostly larger) Socialist Parties the prospect of Left ‘unity’—but under Communist auspices. In the circumstances of post-liberation eastern Europe this seemed to many socialists a sensible proposition.
Even in western Europe some left-leaning members of the French and Italian Socialist Parties were seduced by Communist invitations to merge into a single political force. In eastern Europe the pressure proved, literally, irresistible. The process began in the Soviet Zone of Germany where (at a secret meeting in Moscow in February 1946) the Communists determined upon a merger with their much larger Socialist ‘allies’. This merger was consummated two months later with the birth of the Socialist Unity Party (it was characteristic of these mergers that the term ‘Communist’ was deliberately eschewed by the freshly united party). Quite a few former leaders of the Social Democrats in eastern Germany proved amenable to the merger and were given honorific posts in the new Party and subsequent East German government. Socialists who protested or opposed the new Party were denounced, expelled and at the very least forced out of public life or into exile.