3

Europe’s Asymmetries

For anyone who had known Europe in 1914, or even in 1939, the devastation wrought by five years of total war would have been overwhelming. Hitler’s vainglorious attempt at conquering the continent had wrought destruction on a scale unprecedented in Europe’s long history of war and peace. From the Greek islands to the high north of Scandinavia, cities had been firebombed, fields and orchards burned, and people killed and buried in mass graves. Forty million had died. At least as many were refugees or emerging from German concentration camps. The Nazi genocide of six million Jews was the single greatest crime of the war, in a horrible category all its own. The Holocaust also led to widespread dislocation and chaos in regions where significant Jewish populations had been removed. Starvation was widespread: in the Soviet Union, Hungary, Poland, and parts of Germany, more than half the population were slowly dying from hunger as the war ended.

Even if most of Europe was hungry, tired, and terrorized in 1945, the situation was worst in the east. Along an enormous belt of land between the Norwegian Arctic and the southern Balkans, the war between Germany and the Soviet Union had left cities completely devastated and people dead or dying. More than 1,700 towns were almost totally destroyed in the USSR. Cities like Budapest, Minsk, or Kiev were more than 80 percent uninhabitable. In his letters home, a young American relief worker tried to give words to the destruction he witnessed in Warsaw: “Wherever you walk here it is hunks of buildings standing up without roofs or much sides, and people living in them. Except the Ghetto, where it is just a great plain of bricks, with twisted beds and bath tubs and sofas, pictures in frames, trunks, millions of things sticking out among the bricks. I can’t understand how it could have been done.… It’s something that’s so vicious I can’t believe it.”¹ The world most Europeans had lived in prior to 1914 had ceased to exist. In its place had come death and destruction, and a lack of faith in old ideas.

The Cold War between capitalism and Communism, and between the United States and the Soviet Union, fit the European disaster to a T. Not only had the military outcome of the war left the Americans and the Soviets in command of the continent, but Europeans, hungry for a miracle, or just plain hungry, looked to Washington or Moscow for answers. For now, in a moment unique in Europe’s modern history, most of the continent was reduced to a supine waiting on events outside its control. Europeans wanted a lasting peace. They wanted rapid reconstruction. They wanted a future that was fair, efficient, and economically successful. In other words, they wanted to get as far away from the disasters of the 1930s and ’40s as possible, and Communism or American capitalism were each offering a way out.

And a way out was needed immediately. Europe in 1945 had come to a standstill. Although the physical infrastructure could be rebuilt, there was a deeply felt sense that things were not moving forward, that the situation after the war ended was going from bad to worse. The continent was facing a humanitarian crisis on a scale that Europe had not seen since the seventeenth century. Within the prewar German borders alone there were around seventeen million displaced people: concentration camp survivors, slave laborers, German refugees from the east, or people who had fled because their homes had been destroyed. They were all hungry and all trying to get to somewhere they could not go. All forms of order had broken down, and it was every man, woman, and child for themselves. A Polish girl trying to get home was struck by the scale of it: “Germany in 1945 was one huge ants’ nest. Everyone was moving. This was how the eastern territories of Germany looked like. There were Germans escaping from the Russians. There were all these prisoners of war. There were some of us [Poles]—not that many, but still.… It was really incredible, teeming with people and movement.”²

Even in rich countries that had not experienced hunger for at least three centuries the situation seemed hopeless. In the Netherlands the population in the main cities got fewer than eight hundred calories of food per person per day; the prewar average had been close to three thousand. The Dutch hunger winter of 1944–45 killed at least twenty-two thousand people and its effects were felt long afterward.³ Getting starving people to contribute to production was next to impossible, and relief—in the Netherlands as elsewhere—could only come from the outside. But in spite of massive attempts by the new UN Relief and Recovery Administration (UNRRA), large parts of Europe still did not have enough to eat by 1947.

The disasters that had befallen Europe put the prestige of the new masters of the continent—the Americans and the Soviets, or the Superpowers as Europeans had started calling them—into sharp relief. Their military power was unquestioned, but unlike Britain—which also had considerable military power in Europe in 1945, but seemed old and exhausted—they could also provide new models of development for the future. Much of the hope for change rode on such inspiration from the outside. Even though the Americans could contribute much more in terms of material supplies, Soviet prestige and Stalin’s personal standing were built on the Red Army’s central role in defeating Nazi Germany. Whoever could beat the German war machine and conquer Berlin must be a very advanced country, many Europeans believed.

World War II brought total collapse to National Socialism and Fascism. Right-wing Fascist-style authoritarian governments in the Spain of Generalissimo Francisco Franco and the Portugal of António de Oliveira Salazar survived only because they had been neutral during the war. For collectivism and anticapitalism, Communism was the only game in town. Not only had the Soviets played a key role in defeating Germany, but Communist parties elsewhere had often been at the forefront of the resistance against occupation and Nazi rule. In war, four years is a very long time. Many people had forgiven or forgotten Stalin’s pact with Hitler, and the erstwhile Communist slogans against “the imperialist robber war” had been drowned out by the post-1941 heroism of the Red Army and local Communist partisans.

In western Europe it was the hope for change that fueled allegiance to the Communist cause. Almost no European wanted to go back to systems that had created two world wars and a profound economic crisis. The hope was for better, and the Communists—with their blend of anti-Fascism, social justice, and reflected glory from the Soviet war effort—carried high the banners of hope. They were by far the biggest party organization in France (with 900,000 members) and in Italy (1.8 million). In the first postwar western European elections, the Communists made inroads everywhere. In Norway they got 12 percent of the vote, in Belgium 13 percent, in Italy 19 percent, in Finland 23.5 percent, and in France almost 29 percent. Their leaders insisted on representation in government, which they got in most of the national-unity cabinets formed after the war was over. They wanted to have a decisive influence on politics in the future, paving the way for a social revolution coming out of the demands of the working class. But the Communist leaders did not believe in immediate revolutionary upheavals in postwar western Europe. Reflecting the advice they were getting from Moscow, they did not want to mount an outright challenge to the existing governments when US and British troops were still in control and could crush such rebellion out of hand.

But even the most powerful Communist leaders in western Europe—Maurice Thorez in France, Palmiro Togliatti in Italy—could not hold back waves of social upheaval that deprivation and degradation spread across the continent. In Italy, workers took control of factories and peasants occupied land. Both there and in France there was political violence against established elites, against people who had collaborated with the Nazis or the Fascists and against those who had not, but happened to own a factory or had a noble title. Some were dragged out of their houses and beaten to death. The elites were seen as responsible for everything that had gone wrong in their countries.

Communist government ministers had their hands full campaigning for social stability and a return to work. France’s revival, Thorez said in a speech in October 1945, “depends on our own efforts, the union of all republicans strengthened by the union of the working class.”⁴ Rebuilding came first, the Communist leader argued, and through rebuilding would come political hegemony for the Left. But some local Communists saw things differently. The government “and the rest, to hell with them. I only have one boss, and that’s Stalin,” yelled a Communist partisan in southern France as he and his men arrested and beat up local noblemen.⁵

But Stalin, as well as Thorez and Togliatti, at first believed that revolutionary action in western Europe could destroy the Communist parties as well as sound the death knell for the faltering Soviet alliance with the United States and Britain. Stalin expected conflict with the capitalist states and, eventually, Communist revolutions in Europe. But after the end of the war the Soviet Union itself was in ruins. Stalin could not risk a confrontation with his allies while the Soviet Union was weak. Better then, Stalin thought, to express hope of future cooperation while the American and British imperialists fought over the spoils of war on their side. The biggest threat to the Soviet Union, Stalin felt, was if the imperialist countries made a common front against it. The initial postwar Soviet policy on western Europe was designed to avoid such a coming together of its enemies.

In Greece, an ongoing civil war served as a warning to the Soviets and European Communists of what could happen if they acted too soon. When the Axis Powers occupied Greece in 1941, the country’s Left formed a National Liberation Front. The front gradually came under the control of the Greek Communist Party, and its armed wing, the Greek People’s Liberation Army (ELAS), fought both the Germans and other Greek parties. As the Germans withdrew in late 1944, the British arranged for a coalition government and gradual integration of ELAS into the Greek army. But when the Communist units refused to fully disband, the coalition broke down. After the police opened fire on a Left-wing rally in Athens in December 1944, killing twenty-eight civilians, ELAS fought back. The British responded by aerial bombardments of Communist strongholds in Athens. Outgunned in the capital and advised by the Soviets to seek a compromise, the Greek Communist leaders agreed to dissolve ELAS in the spring of 1945. Fighting continued in some areas, mostly provoked by Right-wing attempts at driving peasants off the land they had occupied during the war or punishing ELAS soldiers who had fought against them. Six thousand Greek National Liberation Front activists fled across the northern border to Communist-held Yugoslavia.

The Greek disaster led Stalin to demand that other Communists, from China to Italy, not act prematurely. While the Soviets believed that World War II would create revolutions, just as Lenin had taught about the first world war, they expected them mainly in those parts of Europe where the Red Army could help protect them, meaning in the east. Stalin’s view was that other Communist parties had neither the experience nor the theoretical understanding to take and keep power on their own. Only when they were guided by the Soviet Union and protected by the Red Army would they stand a chance of permanently defeating their enemies. The Soviet leader remembered well the “Soviet republics” that had sprung up all over Europe, from Finland to Hungary and Bavaria, after 1918. They had, the Soviet leader was fond of explaining, quickly been snuffed out by a better-armed and better-organized Right-wing, supported by the imperialist countries. What made the 1940s different, Stalin believed, was the existence of the Soviet Union as a political and military great power.

The Soviet strategic position in Europe in 1945 was truly remarkable, if one compares it with Russia in 1918 or at any point since the end of the Napoleonic wars. In little more than a year, since the spring of 1944, the Red Army had broken all resistance on the way from deep inside the Russian plains to a line that ran roughly from Lübeck and the Danish island of Bornholm through the middle of Germany and Austria to the Adriatic. The Soviet Union was now in central Europe. The breakdown of Hitler’s Third Reich had happened so suddenly that there was little resistance to Soviet control in areas behind Red Army lines. In some countries, such as Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia, the Soviets were generally welcomed as liberators. In others, including Hungary, Poland, and the Baltic states, they were seen as conquerors. It all depended on the locals’ historic experience with Russia and the Soviet Union. It also, of course, depended on the degree to which local authorities and populations had collaborated with the Germans. But with Hitler’s Reich gone, the Soviets had total military preponderance in eastern Europe. Even those who had reason to hate and distrust them thought twice about challenging them in 1945.

Stalin had yet to make up his mind, though, about what to do with the vast regions of Europe now under his control. Although his political judgment told him that none of the countries were ripe for revolution in the Soviet sense, he hoped that the presence of the Red Army and Soviet civilian advisers would strengthen the Left and enable the Communists to gain significant influence. The Soviet example might steer these countries toward socialism, the Kremlin leaders thought. But in the meantime eastern Europe was important as a buffer zone against any possible American and British imperialist attack on the USSR. Stalin was convinced that Soviet influence had to remain there, although he wanted to keep it in place in ways that did not cause a break with the Americans and the British. The Soviet Union had to rebuild. And until that rebuilding was in place, Stalin hoped to avoid aggression from his World War II allies.

Soviet planning for postwar eastern Europe left much to be desired. The Kremlin had been so preoccupied with fighting the war that there was little time for thinking through postwar scenarios. Much like the United States and Britain—but not nearly at the same level of detail—the Soviets had produced some contingency plans for how to avoid mass starvation and mass flight in eastern Europe as their forces advanced. But even more so than in the west, the course of war defeated the best laid plans. By mid-1945 the Red Army was in control of far more territory in Europe than almost anyone in Moscow had expected. Red Army commanders sought out local authorities who could establish a modicum of order and help with the supply situation, including for their own troops. In some regions, where warfare had been less intense or where the local population welcomed the Soviets as Slavic liberators from German tyranny, these tactics worked reasonably well. But the Red Army’s atrocities in war zones, or in non-Slavic countries that had opposed the USSR (Hungary, Romania, and of course Germany) made it difficult even for those who wanted to collaborate with the new masters to work with them there.

The killings, rapes, and robberies that soldiers in the Red Army carried out against the civilian population did much to impede Soviet ability to govern in eastern Europe. In Germany, Soviet soldiers raped hundreds of thousands of women, possibly as many as two million in total. These horrendous experiences were compounded by destruction, theft, and wanton killings of unarmed civilians. By mid-1945 there were very few families in the Soviet occupation zone of Germany who had not experienced Red Army brutality, as had many people in most zones that the Soviets moved into. A young German girl from East Prussia was among a group of refugees who were attacked:

Terrible hours followed, particularly for the women. From time to time, soldiers came in, also officers, and fetched girls and young women. No shrieking, no begging, nothing helped. With revolvers in their hands, they gripped the women round their wrists and dragged them away. A father who wanted to protect his daughter was brought into the yard and shot. The girl was all the more the prey of these wild creatures. Towards morning, she came back, terror in her child-like eyes. She had become years older during the night.⁶

Soviet leaders tried to excuse their soldiers’ behavior by pointing to the systematic cruelty of the Germans and their allies inside the USSR during the war. Some Soviet propagandists and officers egged the soldiers on in their savagery. For them it was a question of revenge. But even for Stalin, who easily turned against his subordinates when they engaged in behavior he considered counterproductive to his aims, Soviet war crimes were a nonissue. He told a group of Yugoslav Communists who complained about Red Army conduct, “One has to understand the soul of the soldier who traveled three thousand kilometers of battle from Stalingrad to Budapest. The soldier thinks that he is a hero, everything is permitted, he is allowed to do anything, he is alive today and might be killed tomorrow, [and] he will be forgiven. The soldiers are tired, they are worn out in the prolonged and difficult war. It is wrong to take the point of view of a ‘decent intellectual.’”⁷ The Americans, British, and French also committed war crimes at the end of the war in Europe. But they paled in comparison with Soviet actions, which affected millions of families and left a legacy of hatred for future generations.

Eastern European Communists therefore started their postwar agitation under difficult circumstances. Communism had never been strong in the region, except perhaps in Czechoslovakia, where the prewar party had gathered some 10 percent of the votes in free elections.⁸ Elsewhere the support for the Communist parties had been minuscule, and the dictatorships in eastern Europe had been Right-wing, nationalist, anti-Communist, and authoritarian. Even though they discounted the effects of their own army’s behavior, Soviet leaders saw the weakness of eastern European Communism rather clearly. They believed that the social and economic conditions for advanced socialism were not in place, at least not yet. In some countries it would be hard to achieve even with Soviet support and guidance. The first Soviet reports to come back from eastern Europe in 1945 reported quite negatively on local political conditions, especially—as could be expected—in Poland and Hungary. Stalin himself dismissed the potential for home-grown revolution with a down-home metaphor: “Communism would fit Poland as a saddle on a cow,” he told Harry Hopkins, Roosevelt’s envoy, in 1944.⁹

What, then, was the form of government in eastern Europe that the Soviets were looking for? Having no experience with pluralism at home and regarding “bourgeois democracy” as a sham, they naturally sought authoritarian regimes that excluded the Soviets’ wartime and prewar enemies, that obeyed Stalin’s instructions, and included the local Communist parties. Given that there had been little love for Stalin in the region in the past and that the Communists were weak, this meant a very narrow base to rule from. Already by the fall of 1945 the Soviets found that they did not have the instruments in place to secure future influence in eastern Europe after the withdrawal of the Red Army.

Bulgaria is an example of what this meant in practice. After the collapse of the old pro-German regime, the hastily assembled Fatherland Front coalition government increasingly came under the control of the Bulgarian Communists. Though few in numbers, they used their special relations with the Red Army to take command of the ministry of the interior and the police. Thousands of the Communists’ Right-wing political opponents were tried by People’s Courts set up by the new government or organized by Communist activists locally. Many were sent to prison camps or executed. But though the Communist Party grew in influence and in support, most Bulgarians still favored the Peasants’ Party, a Left-wing agrarian reform group that had joined in the Fatherland Front. In a country where more than 80 percent of the population were peasants it could hardly have been otherwise.

The Bulgarian Communists therefore faced a dilemma. The Soviets told them that the right form of government for Bulgaria, at its stage of development, was a “democratic” coalition government, meaning a government of the Left that could rule efficiently and was beholden to Moscow. Georgi Dimitrov, former head of the Comintern who had moved home to take control of the Bulgarian Communist Party, was told that it was fine for the Communists to expand their influence but not to break away from “unity” with the Peasants’ Party and other “progressive” forces. But at the same time peasant leaders were becoming increasingly critical of the Communists and their plans, which included the rapid industrialization of Bulgaria. In May 1945, the Communists engineered a split within the Peasants’ Party, with a small pro-Communist faction breaking away. The majority, headed by the formidable Nikola Petkov, resigned from the government and ran on a separate ticket in the October 1945 elections. After much voter intimidation and outright fraud, the Communist-dominated Fatherland Front won. From then on Dimitrov was in charge. He made the country a People’s Republic, meaning a republic under Communist control; forced the Social Democrats to merge with the Communists; and detained the main leaders of the non-Communist opposition. Meanwhile, Petkov was arrested, sentenced to death, and hanged in 1947.

The concept “People’s Republic” was a Soviet invention from 1924, created for use in Outer Mongolia, a territory in eastern Asia under Red Army control that Moscow could not integrate as a full Soviet republic without serious problems with the Chinese who had ruled there for centuries. But the People’s Republic concept fit the situation in eastern Europe, too. Stalin did not want to integrate the eastern European countries into the Soviet Union; doing so would be an unnecessary provocation for the Americans and western Europeans. It would also mean large numbers of sullen, resistant peoples inside Soviet territory. People’s Republics became halfway houses: they could become fully Communist, but not entirely Soviet. Even by the beginning of 1947 Stalin had not made up his mind about a model for the composition of future eastern European governments. He preferred coalition governments, headed by powerful Communist parties. Marxist-Leninist political theory told him that the “revolutions” in eastern Europe were “national-democratic” revolutions, not socialist ones. Full Communist rule would happen when circumstances permitted, that is, when the Communist parties had won full hegemony over the working class.

Romania posed a particular challenge for Soviet policies. It, too, had been a German ally, imitating the Nazis by murdering hundreds of thousands of Jews and Roma. It switched sides only in August 1944, when the war was going very badly for Hitler. The Communist Party there was weak and faction-ridden and did not have a key leader such as Dimitrov in Bulgaria. Worse, in Stalin’s view the Romanian party was dominated by “non-Romanians”—basically, Jews and Hungarians—who would not be recognized as “national” leaders. By the end of the war the Red Army had full military control, with a million Soviet soldiers stationed in Romania. But where to turn for effective local leadership? The Soviets decided to install a coalition government, as in Bulgaria, with the Communist Party in control of the ministry of justice and therefore the police. The young Romanian king, Michael, protested. Michael was regarded as a national hero after dismissing the pro-German leadership, but the Soviet emissary Andrei Vyshinskii gave him no choice. “You have two hours and five minutes to make it known to the public that [the government] has been dismissed,” the Soviet deputy foreign minister barked at the king. “By eight o’clock you must inform the public of [the] successor.”¹⁰ In November 1945 the Communist-led coalition won an election through widespread intimidation and fraud. Two years later it forced the king to abdicate. The government announced that a new People’s Republic of Romania was up and running.

Bulgaria and Romania may have been tricky for the Soviets to control, but they paled in comparison with the real test, which was Poland. The Soviets were generally hated in this largest of the European countries that had now come under their military control. Imperial Russia had lorded it over parts of Polish territory since the eighteenth century. The Soviet Communists had fought and lost a war against Poland in the early 1920s. Stalin and Hitler had invaded the country and divided it between them in 1939. Then, after having congratulated the Germans on their conquest of Warsaw, Foreign Minister Molotov explained to his partners that the USSR “intended to take the occasion of the further advance of German troops to declare that Poland was falling apart and that it was necessary for the Soviet Union, in consequence, to come to the aid of the Ukrainians and the White Russians.”¹¹ In the course of this “aid,” the Soviets had introduced a reign of terror in the part of Poland they had occupied up to 1941, when their German partners betrayed them. Then, in 1944, the Red Army had stood silently by as the Germans slaughtered the desperate Polish resistance in Warsaw. Quite a record on which to create a friendly neighborhood ally.

And still Stalin believed his regime could build a new Poland, with the Polish Communist Party (PPR), however weak, playing a significant role. One element involved a curious mixed army. After Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, the Red Army began recruiting Polish soldiers to fight the Nazis. Most of these men came straight from Soviet prison camps, where they had been since 1939. Not surprisingly, Stalin soon realized that keeping such an army on Soviet soil was a bad idea. He quietly let the British send most of these Poles to fight in the Mediterranean under command of the Polish government-in-exile. But some remained, forming the Polish Army in the USSR, fighting under Red Army command. They were a combination of Communists, Leftists, eastern Poles, and those who simply wanted to fight the Germans closer to home than on faraway battlegrounds in North Africa or Italy.

In January 1945, before the Yalta Conference, the Soviets had established a provisional government of the Republic of Poland, ignoring the government-in-exile, with which it (understandably) had bad relations. At Yalta, the powers had agreed to a merger of the two governments and free elections in Poland as soon as possible. It was an attempt at a compromise that made nobody happy, but it was based on military facts on the ground: the Red Army was in full control of Poland. President Roosevelt’s chief of staff, William Leahy, pointed out to the president privately that Stalin’s promise was “so elastic that the Russians can stretch it all the way from Yalta to Washington without ever technically breaking it.”¹² The new “coalition” government in Warsaw was a marvel of Communist dissimulation: technically it had a non-Communist majority, including some ministers who had returned from London, but in reality it was controlled by Polish Communists under Soviet tutelage.

The big question for the Polish Communists after the war was how to increase their public appeal. History counted against them. The brutal behavior of Red Army soldiers did not help. Even the man the Soviets handpicked as the head of the Polish Communist Party, Władysław Gomułka, noted that “the mistakes that the Soviet organs have committed with regard to the Poles (deportations) have influenced the public opinion… ; given these attitudes, there is a danger that we might be accused of being Soviet agents and subjected to isolation.”¹³ But the Communists also had clear advantages. They had the Red Army and the Polish Army in the USSR to support them in case of trouble. They had international recognition for their government. Their own party may have been in bad shape, but so were all other political parties. They had the advantage that the main treaty with the Soviet Union was signed before the coalition government came into office, and before the crucial decision to incorporate former German territory into Poland and cede Polish lands in the east to the Soviets had been made by the Great Powers at Yalta. The Polish Communists and their allies could therefore claim that they were making the best of a difficult situation: they claimed to stand not just for a rapid modern transformation of a war-torn country, but also for stability and independence.

The Polish Communists had some takers for their message, improbable as it may sound. As everywhere else in eastern Europe, people were tired of fighting and starving. They might not like the new government, but it represented authority and stability. At the end of 1945, Stalin told the Polish Communists they were not taking enough credit for their achievements. “It is ridiculous that you are afraid of accusations that you are against independence.… You are the ones who built independence. If there were no PPR, there would be no independence. You created the army, built the state structures, the financial system, the economy, the state.… Instead of telling them all that, you are saying only that you support independence. The PPR turned the USSR into an ally of Poland. The arguments are right there at your feet and you don’t know how to make use of them.”¹⁴But not only Stalin thought that the Polish Communists were in a much improved situation. Many Poles who disliked the Soviets and the local Communists accommodated themselves to the regime. The Polish-Lithuanian writer Czesław Miłosz, then thirty-five, who later wrote one of the most scathing—and accurate—analyses of the accommodation of intellectuals in eastern Europe—agreed to serve in the new government’s foreign ministry. “I was delighted,” Miłosz wrote, “to see the semi-feudal structure of Poland finally smashed, the universities opened to young workers and peasants, agrarian reform undertaken and the country finally set on the road to industrialization.”¹⁵

Meanwhile the Communists’ attempts at securing their control of the Polish state and Polish society continued. In mid-1946 they managed, by hook and by crook, to get a majority in a referendum supporting land reform and nationalization of basic industries. During that year the Communists gradually, with Soviet assistance, outmaneuvered their Left-wing coalition partners and marginalized them. A few brave politicians—such as Stanisław Mikołajczyk, the leader of the centrist Polish People’s Party—attempted to hold them back, and the Polish Catholic Church complained about the country being ruled by atheistic Communists. But no one in Poland had a strategy to prevent Communist domination. Neither did Britain nor the United States. Both the new British foreign secretary Ernest Bevin and US secretary of state James F. Byrnes kept reminding the Soviets of their obligations to arrange free elections in Poland. But neither man believed that Stalin would have known how to organize a free election even if he had wanted to. And Stalin did not want the Poles to vote freely because he knew that in spite of the Communist advances there was no chance they and their allies could win. When Stalin finally agreed to elections in January 1947—ironically first and foremost in a belated attempt at placating the other Great Powers—the Soviets and the Polish Communists made sure that not a vote was counted that should not be. With deception and coercion and the exclusion of opposition candidates on trumped-up charges, the Communist-led Democratic Bloc claimed to have won more than 80 percent of the vote. Opposition leaders ended up in prison or in exile. But the Soviets were still not secure. One of their officials in Poland, in charge of culture, reported to Moscow that he was continuously working to “suggest to the Poles the thought that only in friendship with the USSR will they achieve peace and economic prosperity, that any other path spells trouble for them;… to promote the economic and military power of the USSR; [and] to dispel slanderous statements about the backwardness of Soviet culture and technology.” But he could report little progress.¹⁶

Czechoslovakia and Hungary were the most developed of the countries the Red Army occupied after 1944. Before 1918, Hungary had been a key part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which dominated central Europe. During World War II, its authoritarian Right-wing government had allied itself with Nazi Germany, with disastrous consequences as the war ended. The Soviets shot their way through eastern Hungary to the capital, Budapest, which was then subjected to a devastating siege. When the Hungarian government tried to arrange a cease-fire, local Fascists rebelled and fought on alongside the Germans until the German surrender in May 1945. Even more than its neighbors, the Hungarians had got the short end of the stick: not only had the country been devastated by war, but its elites had not managed to change sides in time. As a result, Hungary was occupied not only by the Red Army, but by the Romanians, with whom the country had a number of overlapping territorial claims.

Stalin’s view of Hungary was colored by the sad fate of the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic in 1919 and by what he saw as the strength of the political Right. He instructed the Hungarian Communist leaders who returned from Moscow in order to reestablish their party in Budapest to be careful. Do “not be sparing with words, [but] do not scare anyone,” the Boss admonished. “Once you gain strength you may move on.”¹⁷ The land reform policies of the coalition government that took over running the country after the German capitulation did prove popular, and the Communists thought they could take much of the credit. They bragged about their influence to Stalin. The Soviet leader, however distrustful he was of the Hungarian party’s predominantly Jewish leadership, allowed elections to go ahead in Hungary in the fall of 1945, on the assumption that the Communists would do well. It is also likely that Stalin intended his generosity toward the Hungarians to reduce tension with his allies while he made up his mind about the country’s future.

The Hungarian election of 1945 became a disaster for the Communists. By all ordinary measurements they did well by getting 16 percent of the vote in a country where they had not existed a few months previously. But with the Soviets expecting them to do much better and—worst of all—the Right-wing Smallholders’ Party getting more than 50 percent, Stalin feared he might lose control of a country that was on the edge of his new sphere of influence. He instructed his old comrade Marshal Kliment Voroshilov, the Soviet representative in Hungary, to insist that “the Communists receive the Interior Ministry; recommend that two posts of deputy prime minister be created additionally and that these be awarded to the Communists and the Social Democrats; pay attention mainly to ensuring that those entering the new Hungarian government from the Smallholders’ Party and the Social Democrats should be people also acceptable personally to the Soviet government.”¹⁸

By issuing this ultimatum, the Soviets secured considerable Communist influence in the new government. In spite of its majority of votes, the Smallholders’ Party was still hostage to Communist policies because of Soviet manipulation and because they believed that confronting the Communists would risk Moscow’s goodwill concerning Hungary’s territorial aspirations. Hungary’s economic situation was precarious, and with Moscow blocking Budapest from applying for American loans, outside assistance could only come from the USSR. By mid-1947 Hungary’s Communists, led by the inveterate Stalinist Mátyás Rákosi, felt that they had decimated their coalition partners enough through arrests, deportations, and intimidation for another election to take place. In August 1947 the Communist Party and its Left-wing allies won 60 percent of the vote after much rigging. With increased confrontation with his former allies looming, Stalin gave his blessing to the new regime, even though he remained unsure of whether the Hungarian Communists could manage the situation.

Between 1944 and 1947 Soviet policies in eastern Europe gave rise to much conflict with the United States and Britain. But American and British policies—in part in response to Moscow’s behavior in the east—also helped convince Stalin that only through Communist regimes could Soviet control of eastern Europe be made secure. With Soviet military control already in place, it is likely that a Sovietization of eastern Europe would have happened at some point whatever the policies of others had been. There were a number of very weak states along the Soviet European borders, mostly remnants of the Austro-Hungarian Empire that had collapsed back in 1918. After the German breakdown in 1945, Soviet control seemed probable. But there is no doubt that the advent of a Cold War between the Soviets and the United States made complete Communist takeovers everywhere in eastern Europe more critical and urgent for Moscow. By 1947, Stalin may still have believed that his neighbors were not ready for socialism. But he had concluded that only Communist rule could deliver the kind of security the Soviet Union wanted.

After the Potsdam Conference, Britain and the United States repeatedly protested the Soviets’ behavior in the countries they occupied at the end of the war. The regular meetings of the allied foreign ministers became increasingly confrontational, even though the Truman administration realized that it did not have the power to change Soviet policies in areas that the Red Army controlled. The president wanted postwar demobilization to go ahead, bringing US troops back from Europe. But the United States and Britain, working increasingly closely with each other, clashed verbally with the Soviets over reparations from Germany and Italy, over the content of the peace agreements with Romania, Bulgaria, and Hungary, and over the question of the Italian city of Trieste, which had been occupied by the Yugoslav Communists at the end of the war. The short-tempered British foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin, was furious with his Soviet colleague, Molotov, at a Paris meeting in the summer of 1946. It appeared to him, Bevin said, that “the procedure of this conference was not to decide anything.” The Russian coolly retorted that “Bevin should not underestimate his services in helping to produce that result.”¹⁹ In Washington, President Truman wrote that he was “tired of babying the Soviets.”²⁰

By the spring of 1947 many Europeans and most US policy-makers had become fixated on a seemingly relentless pattern of Soviet expansionism in eastern Europe. Never mind that this was not how matters may have seemed from Moscow or from within the eastern European countries themselves. In all of these places developments seemed more contingent, more diverse, and generally more chaotic. Still, in the west, many who had lived through the 1930s noted similarities with Nazi expansionism. And there was the scale of it: Soviet control seemed to be imposing itself over half of Europe. In spite of Stalin only acting in countries that had come under Red Army control, there was no clear limit to “eastern Europe” in the minds of many Europeans or Americans. Were Finland and Norway fundamentally different from Czechoslovakia? Were Greece and Turkey different from Bulgaria and Yugoslavia? From the far vantage point of today it may indeed seem so, and Soviet aims therefore seem more limited. But such demarcation lines were hard to see for those who had grown up with a more diverse Europe, where division lines between east and west did not readily exist.

From the start of his tenure, President Truman believed that the Soviets were expansionist in nature, but also that they would not take the risk of a complete break with the United States and Britain. But over the next two years, Truman started to doubt his original judgment. He was furious over Soviet behavior in eastern Europe, where he felt that Stalin had reneged on promises given to FDR about establishing democracies there. He also believed the Soviets were increasingly engaging in confrontational conduct not only in Europe but in Asia, too. Many leaders whom Truman respected were fueling his suspicions. In a March 1946 speech at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, where he was introduced by Truman himself, former British prime minister Winston Churchill spoke again about immediate danger. Its motifs, especially the idea of an “iron curtain descending across the continent,” he had rehearsed in his letter to Truman a year before. But this was public. The old lion roared:

From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia, all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and, in many cases, increasing measure of control from Moscow.… In front of the iron curtain which lies across Europe are other causes for anxiety.… The future of Italy hangs in the balance.… In a great number of countries, far from the Russian frontiers and throughout the world, Communist fifth columns are established and work in complete unity and absolute obedience to the directions they receive from the Communist centre. Last time I saw it all coming and cried aloud to my own fellow-countrymen and to the world, but no one paid any attention.… We surely must not let that happen again.²¹

Churchill’s warning was echoed by a young and talented US diplomat, George F. Kennan, who had served in Moscow during the war. Kennan’s Long Telegram, as it became known, sent from Moscow on 22 February 1946 to the State Department, became an influential, widely distributed document in the Administration. In it Kennan described Moscow’s policy as inherently aggressive and expansionist because of its Marxist-Leninist ideology. While the Russian people preferred peace, they were held hostage by a party that exploited traditional Russian insecurities against the more advanced parts of Europe. The past had told Russians that only through destroying an enemy could security be achieved. And the current Soviet aim was to weaken foreign powers, through splits and subversion, until Moscow’s predominance was complete:

We have here a political force committed fanatically to the belief that with the US there can be no permanent modus vivendi, that it is desirable and necessary that the internal harmony of our society be disrupted, our traditional way of life be destroyed, the international authority of our state be broken, if Soviet power is to be secure. This political force has complete power of disposition over energies of one of world’s greatest peoples and resources of world’s richest national territory, and is borne along by deep and powerful currents of Russian nationalism. In addition, it has an elaborate and far flung apparatus for exertion of its influence in other countries, an apparatus of amazing flexibility and versatility, managed by people whose experience and skill in underground methods are presumably without parallel in history.²²

But Kennan, as did his superiors in Washington, believed that war could be avoided. Stalin was not taking unnecessary risks. And the USSR was still much weaker than the United States and had significant internal problems. Containing the Soviet threat, however, meant that the Truman Administration had to become more forward in its foreign policy:

We must formulate and put forward for other nations a much more positive and constructive picture of the sort of world we would like to see than we have put forward in the past. It is not enough to urge people to develop political processes similar to our own. Many foreign peoples, in Europe at least, are tired and frightened by experiences of the past, and are less interested in abstract freedom than in security. They are seeking guidance rather than responsibilities. We should be better able than Russians to give them this. And unless we do, Russians certainly will.²³

George Kennan’s message was more a summing up of where many US policy-makers were already heading than an innovative policy prescription. It was also in parts contradictory: the Soviets were inherently aggressive but also able to compromise. But for officials hungry for ways of explaining an increasingly complicated world, it resonated. In spite of some compromises being reached at the Paris foreign ministers’ meeting, other worries, such as a new flare-up of the Greek civil war and new Soviet demands on Turkey, darkened the picture in late 1946. Truman was increasingly concerned that the Soviets were planning to take control of the Black Sea Straits and help the Communists win in Greece. Such a breakthrough would put the Soviet Union in control of the eastern Mediterranean. It would also be a serious blow to Britain, the traditionally predominant power there, at a time when the British domestic economic situation seemed to be going from bad to worse. In a calculated attempt at getting the United States to back up London’s interests in deeds as well as words, the British Labour government formally appealed to Truman for assistance.

The US president now faced some tough choices. Though the economy had avoided the postwar slump that many had predicted, Truman’s Democrats had fared badly in the November 1946 midterm elections, with the Republicans taking control of both Houses of Congress for the first time since 1932. In the campaign, his opponents had castigated Truman for being too preoccupied with helping foreign countries and for being too soft on Stalin and the Communists. With public opinion moving in different directions at the same time, Truman felt that the situation called for bold leadership. Although the president knew little about foreign affairs and understood even less, his temperament as well as his political instincts provided a way forward. Truman had been looking for means by which to confront the Soviets. In Greece and Turkey he found one. In March 1947 he addressed a joint session of Congress, in which he asked for up to $400 million ($4.3 billion today) in immediate US economic and military assistance to the two countries. “The very existence of the Greek state is today threatened by the terrorist activities of several thousand armed men, led by Communists, who defy the government’s authority,” Truman said.

We shall not realize our objectives… unless we are willing to help free peoples to maintain their free institutions and their national integrity against aggressive movements that seek to impose upon them totalitarian regimes. This is no more than a frank recognition that totalitarian regimes imposed upon free peoples, by direct or indirect aggression, undermine the foundations of international peace and hence the security of the United States.… I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.²⁴

Truman’s new secretary of state, General George C. Marshall, whom the president called the most admired man in America, put the situation even more starkly in a closed meeting with Congressional leaders. “We have arrived at a situation which has not been paralleled since ancient history,” Marshall and his deputy, the suave, self-confident Dean Acheson, told them, according to a summary of the meeting. “A situation in which the world is dominated by two great powers. Not since Athens and Sparta, not since Rome and Carthage have we had such polarization of power. It is thus not a question of pulling British chestnuts out of the fire. It is a question of the security of the United States. It is a question of whether two-thirds of the area of the world… is to be controlled by Communists.”²⁵ The Administration was following the Republican internationalist senator Arthur Vandenberg’s advice to Truman: it was only through “scaring the hell out of the American people” that the White House could get what it wanted. And Truman’s address—known later as the Truman Doctrine—frightened Congress enough to grant the president’s wishes.

While the Soviets were busy subduing eastern Europe and the Americans debated their future role abroad, western Europe’s economic situation continued to deteriorate. Very different from expectations in Washington or London, the supply situation in most of France and the Low Countries, not to mention in Germany and Italy, had not improved as the military and political situation stabilized. Instead, the winter of 1946–47 was among the worst Europeans had ever experienced, with dwindling food stocks, unstable currencies, and diminishing industrial outputs. In a note to his boss Secretary Marshall, the undersecretary of state for economic affairs, William Clayton, laid out the stark realities in May 1947:

It is now obvious that we grossly underestimated the destruction to the European economy by the war. We understood the physical destruction, but we failed to take fully into account the effects of economic dislocation on production… Europe is steadily deteriorating.… Millions of people in the cities are slowly starving.… Without further prompt and substantial aid from the United States, economic, social and political disintegration will overwhelm Europe. Aside from the awful implications which this would have for the future peace and security of the world, the immediate effects on our domestic economy would be disastrous: markets for our surplus production gone, unemployment, depression.²⁶

To remedy the situation, and to rescue both the western European and the US economies, Truman decided on a gamble. He would ask Congress for an unprecedented grant for European reconstruction. Presented in June 1947 by Secretary of State George Marshall, and henceforth known as the Marshall Plan, the scheme would provide over $12 billion ($132 billion in 2016 dollars) over four years to European countries that signed up to receive it. The conditions seemed unrestrictive: the recipient countries would need to cooperate with each other, open up their economies for outside reporting, and accept American envoys who would help decide where the aid should be allocated. Washington knew that American control (and benefit) would mostly be secured through the Europeans buying US goods for what they received. The main western European countries jumped at the opportunity. The same month France and Britain invited other countries to assemble in Paris to discuss a European response to the American offer. The USSR and the eastern European countries were invited, too. Given the tense situation that existed, Truman expected the Soviets to turn the offer down. But he was willing to take the risk, since not to do so would have made the Marshall Plan a too obvious instrument for waging a Cold War against Moscow.

Stalin hesitated. On the one hand the Soviets and east Europeans needed funds for reconstruction, even more than what the west Europeans did. On the other hand he sensed a trap. Stalin first sent Foreign Minister Molotov to Paris with a large delegation, only to order them to walk out after a few days. Accepting the plan, Molotov declared in Paris, would lead to American hegemony in Europe and a divided continent. When the Czechoslovaks still seemed eager to explore the US offer, Stalin lambasted their pro-Soviet prime minister Klement Gottwald, leaving him shaking: “He reproached me bitterly for having accepted the invitation to participate in the Paris Conference. He does not understand how we could have done it. He says we acted as if we were ready to turn our back on the Soviet Union.”²⁷ Moscow made its views clear to all eastern European governments: American assistance would be regarded as an anti-Soviet act.

One of Stalin’s main anxieties around the Marshall Plan was the future of Germany. After the war ended, the country and its capital, Berlin, had been divided into four zones of occupation, with the Soviets taking control of the eastern part. Stalin believed that a neutral, or in the best case, socialist, Germany was the key to Soviet influence in Europe. In spite of what he often told his foreign interlocutors, he was not primarily concerned with German revanchism; he knew that Germany was removed as a serious military force in Europe for a long time to come. But he was concerned that the western powers—above all the United States—might turn the German territory they controlled into an arsenal for a future confrontation with the Soviet Union. The others ruled the richer part of Germany. And if they integrated it into the Marshall Plan, they would control it permanently. Stalin wanted to avoid such an eventuality, even if it meant depriving his own people and all those of eastern Europe of much-needed aid.

The controversy over the Marshall Plan reminded Stalin about the need to bring Czechoslovakia fully to heel. Even if he had not done so, the Czechoslovak Communists would have been there to remind him. By far the most powerful Communist party in east-central Europe, it had received 38 percent of the vote in a free election in 1946, making it the biggest party in the Czech lands, including in the capital, Prague. Much of the extraordinary support for Communism in Czechoslovakia was an effect of the failure of Britain and France to support the country against the German occupation of 1938–45. The feeling, which went much beyond the Communists, was that the western powers could not be trusted and that the Soviet Union was a necessary and often admired partner. Ever since 1945, the party leaders had pushed for a Czechoslovak revolution—the seizing of total power by the party and its affiliates—but until the autumn of 1947 Stalin refused to give his go-ahead, preferring a coalition government. With a more hard-line policy coming from the Soviets, the Czechoslovak Communists concluded that they had the all clear, and in February 1948 they struck, using the threat of civil war and Soviet intervention to force the aging president, Edvard Beneš, to appoint a government fully controlled by the Communist Party. The police and security services, already in Communist hands, began rounding up “enemies of the people.”

The Czechoslovak coup was a shock to many in western Europe, far beyond the anti-Communist Right. Czechoslovakia’s inclusion in a Soviet sphere had in no way been seen as a given by other Europeans. There was also—especially in Britain and France—a sense of the need to stand up for the Czechoslovak people, who had been so appallingly betrayed in 1938. Most important was the feeling within the non-Communist western European Left—socialists and social-democrats—that Soviet expansionism and Communist militancy now were a direct threat to them and not only to the old elites. In Norway, for instance, where the ruling Labor Party was traditionally one of the most Left-leaning Social Democratic parties in Europe, Prime Minister Einar Gerhardsen spoke out against the Soviets and the local Communists: “The events in Czechoslovakia have not only aroused sorrow and anger among most Norwegians, but also fear and alarm. Norway’s problem is, as far as I can see, primarily a domestic problem. What could threaten the freedom and democracy of the Norwegian people is the danger that the Norwegian Communist Party represents at any given time. The most important task in the struggle for Norway’s independence, for democracy and the rule of law, is to reduce the influence of the Communist Party and the Communists as much as possible.”²⁸

The Norwegian Communists, few in number and already politically isolated, had no chance to counter the might of a well-organized and unsparing Social Democratic movement. It was a pattern that repeated itself all over Scandinavia, in the Low Countries, and in Austria after the Czechoslovak coup.

Part of the weakness of many western European Communist parties stemmed from new instructions from Stalin. It had become clear to him that the main postwar conflict would not be between the remaining capitalist powers, but between the capitalist world, headed by the United States, and the Soviet Union. Now, in this new state of things, an old weapon would be retooled. In September 1947, the Communist International, the Comintern, which had been dissolved during the war as a gesture of goodwill—with the war on, it did not make much sense to seek to foment revolution among your allies—was resurrected as the Cominform (Communist Information Bureau). At its inaugural meeting at Szklarska Poręba on the Polish-Czechoslovak border, Stalin’s deputy for issues of ideology, Andrei Zhdanov, made clear the Boss’s current thinking with a decisive clarity:

The crusade against Communism proclaimed by America’s ruling circle with the backing of the capitalist monopolies, leads as a logical consequence to the attacks on the fundamental rights and interests of the American working people… to adventures abroad in poisoning the minds of the politically backward and unenlightened American masses with a virus of chauvinism and militarism, and in stultifying the average American with the help of all the diverse means of anti-Soviet and anti-Communist propaganda—the cinema, the radio, the church and the press.… The strategic plans of the United States envisage the creation in peacetime of numerous bases and vantage grounds situated at great distances from the American continent against the USSR and the countries of the new democracy. America has built, or is building, air and naval bases in Alaska, Japan, Italy, South Korea, China, Egypt, Iran, Turkey, Greece, Austria and Western Germany.… Economic expansion is an important supplement to the realization of America’s strategical plan. American imperialism is endeavoring… to take advantage of the post-war difficulties of the European countries, in particular the shortage of raw materials, fuel and food in the Allied countries that suffered most from the war, to dictate to them extortionate terms for any assistance rendered.²⁹

Stalin suspected that the western European Communist parties were being seduced by the Americans and the local elites. The leaders of the French Communist Party “have fallen prey to the fear that France would collapse without American credits,” he told his inner circle at a drunken party at his dacha in August 1947. At the Szklarska Poręba meetings the next month, the verbal attacks continued. The Soviets entrusted the Yugoslavs with launching a stinging attack on their comrades in western Europe: “After the war, certain communists thought that a peaceful, parliamentary period of appeasement of the class struggle was ahead—there was a deviation towards opportunism and parliamentarism, in the French party, the Italian party, as in other parties.”³⁰

By the beginning of 1948 a Cold War system of states was being established in Europe. A lot was still unclear, but the main characteristics were known. Communist parties would be in political control of the countries occupied by the Soviet Union at the end of World War II. The United States would remain involved in European affairs. Britain’s role was permanently reduced. Most of the western European Left would side with their governments against the Communists and the Soviets. Although neither the Soviets nor the Americans wanted war in Europe, military tension was likely to grow. The American government was increasingly thinking of European and world politics in terms of containment of the Soviet Union and Communism. Soviet leaders—essentially Stalin himself—were choosing security and ideological rectitude over any potential for limited cooperation with the United States and Britain. And while Europe was changing politically in dramatic ways, the reconstruction of its economies and social structure was taking longer than anyone had expected.