The East European Revolution

Hugh Seton-watson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9780367291464
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000316117
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This book describes the recent history of Eastern Europe, especially since 1941. It also describes the process by which the East European communists obtained power and analyses the regime they have established, showing the impact of this regime on the social classes and on the citizen.

Part One
Background

Chapter One
The Social Structure

The East European Nations

EASTERN Europe, as it is understood in this book, the area stretching from the Baltic in the north to the Mediterranean in the south, and from the frontiers of Germany, Austria and Italy in the west to those of the Soviet Union in the east, is inhabited by at least twelve nations. Seven of these—Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Slovenes, Croats, Serbs and Bulgarians—are Slavs. The others are the Hungarians, Rumanians, Greeks, Turks and Albanians. To the twelve should perhaps be added two more Slav groups whose claim to separate nationhood is a little uncertain—Macedonians and Montenegrins. Another special group are Slavs of Moslem religion (Serbo-Croat-speaking in Bosnia, Bulgarian-speaking (‘Pomak’) in Thrace), whose outlook, formed by their religion, is so different from that of their Christian neighbours as to constitute something like separate nationality.

The Poles are the most numerous of the East European nations, and have the longest uninterrupted historical tradition. The Polish state took shape after the establishment of Christianity in the tenth century, and remained independent until the end of the eighteenth. Poland had to face constant pressure from her German neighbours—first from the religious order of the Teutonic knights and then from the secular principality of Prussia. In the east she was for long periods at war with the Grand Duchy of Muscovy, which later became the Russian empire. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries Poland was a Great Power, and her neighbours were still weak, but in the seventeenth she was exhausted by Swedish invasions and wars with Russia, and in 1772 began the partitions between Russia, Austria and Prussia which were completed by 1795. From then until 1918 Poland was divided into three portions—Pomerania under Prussia, Galicia under Austria, and the ‘Congress Kingdom’ and historic Lithuania under Russia.

The Czechs had a national state in the Kingdom of Bohemia, which lasted with varying degrees of independence from the tenth century until 1620. Its heroic period was the Hussite wars of the early fifteenth centruy, when the Czech religious reformers defended themselves successfully against ‘Crusaders’ summoned by the Pope from all over Europe. In the sixteenth century Bohemia became a part of the Habsburg empire, and after 1620 was subjected to a process of religious persecution and germanisation. Not until the nineteenth century did a Czech national revival begin, and independence was restored by the collapse of the Habsburg empire in 1918. The Slovaks have some claim to be considered the descendants of the Slavs who established a Moravian kingdom in the Danube basin in the ninth century, but the arrival of the Hungarian conquerors at the end of that century engulfed them. They remained subjects of Hungary, without any national self-government, until 1918. Then, on the grounds of their clośe affinity with the Czechs, and somewhat vague promises of autonomy made by the Pittsburgh agreement,¹ their political leaders agreed to form a common state with them.

The Hungarians entered Central Europe at the end of the ninth century, and conquered the Slav kingdom of Moravia, which then occupied the middle Danube valley. In the year 1000 their king accepted the Catholic form of Christianity, and his successors took their place among the established Christian rulers of medieval Europe. Nothing remained of their Asiatic origin but their language. The kingdom of Hungary was not confined to the area inhabited by people who spoke the Hungarian language, but was extended by conquest to the natural boundaries of the Central European plain—the Carpathians, the river Sava and the foothills of the Alps. Thus for a thousand years Hungary has cut the Slav block in two, separating the Czechs, Poles and Slovaks in the north from the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes in the south. Within its frontiers were large numbers of Rumanians, Croats and Slovaks, who were treated as subject nations. By the treaty of Trianon of 1920, Hungary was reduced to a territory which was supposed to correspond to that inhabited by Hungarians, but which in fact left some three million Hungarians as subjects of neighbour states.

The Rumanians arc the descendants of the Dacians, a people who were conquered by the Romans in the second century a.d., and under Roman rule accepted Latin as their language. After the departure of the Romans, the country was conquered in turn by Slavs, Hungarians, Mongols and Turks. But throughout the centuries of foreign rule, the people kept their separate national character. Their language to-day, in spite of many Slav and other words, remains predominantly Latin in both vocabulary and structure. The chief cultural and religious influences in Rumanian history have been Byzantine, and to-day the majority of Rumanians belong to the Orthodox Church. The only exception to this was the important Uniate fraction among the Rumanians of Transylvania.¹ During the Middle Ages there were periods when the Rumanian principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia were independent, but in the sixteenth century they were conquered by the Turks, who ruled them directly or indirectly for over three hundred years.

The South Slavs settled in the Balkans in the sixth and seventh centuries, at a time when the Byzantine empire was weakened by wars in the East. The Slovenes penetrated far into Austria, but were driven back by Charles the Great and his successors to their present home at the north-east corner of the Adriatic. They never had an independent State of their own, but were ruled by Austria right up to 1918. The Croats founded a state in the ninth century, and had independent relations with Venice and Constantinople. In the twelfth century Croatia was conquered by the Hungarians, and incorporated, with a measure of autonomy, in the kingdom of Hungary. Both the Slovenes and the Croats accepted Christianity from Rome, and until 1918 were linked more closely with Catholic Central Europe than with the Balkans.

The Serbs were converted to Christianity by emissaries from the South, from Constantinople, and have remained since then an Orthodox nation. The main influences in their history have been Byzantine rather than western. They had an independent state for some centuries, and were for a brief period the strongest power in the Balkans. In the fifteenth century they were finally conquered by the Turks. The Bulgarians are also Orthodox, and were still more profoundly influenced by Byzantine culture than the Serbs. The first Bulgarian state was founded in the ninth century by a conquering Mongol tribe called Bulgars, who subsequently accepted the language and customs of the Slav inhabitants whom they found on their arrival, who had themselves occupied the country some centuries earlier. Medieval Bulgaria enjoyed several brief periods of civilisation and military power. It was conquered by the Turks a few years earlier than Serbia.

The Greeks have of course a far longer and more glorious history than any other East European people. They were the dominant nation of the Byzantine empire, whose thousand-year rule was brought to an end by the Turkish conquest of Constantinople in 1453. Under the Turkish regime the Greeks enjoyed more rights than the Balkan Slavs. They controlled the higher offices in the Orthodox Church, and also played a large part in the commerce of the Turkish empire. The Albanians are probably the most direct descendants of the Illyrians of Roman times. Their country was ruled in turn by many different conquerors, until it fell to the Turks in 1467 after a fierce resistance led by the national hero Skanderbeg. After the Turkish conquest the majority of the Albanians became Moslems. Catholic and Orthodox minorities also exist in north and south respectively.

The Turkish empire in Europe fell gradually to pieces during the nineteenth century. The Serbs revolted in 1804, and the Greeks did the same in the twenties. The Rumanians and Bulgarians got their independence in the second half of the century, less by their own efforts than as a result of wars between Russia and Turkey. Macedonia remained in the Ottoman empire till 1912, when it became the object of disputes between Bulgaria, Serbia and Greece. Albania was made an independent state by agreement between the Great Powers in 1913.

In Central Europe, the Hungarians obtained most of the substance of independence by the Compromise of 1867 with Emperor Francis Joseph. Under the ‘Dual System’ which it established, Austria and Hungary had separate governments. Each controlled internal affairs within its own territory, while foreign policy and military affairs were conducted in common for the whole empire. Under this system the Germans and Hungarians were privileged nations, and the Rumanians and Slavs had an inferior status. The collapse in the First World War of the three empires of Germany, Russia and Austria made possible the restoration of Poland. The disintegration of Austria also allowed

Poland and Czechoslovakia

the Czechs to form a new state together with the Slovaks, who had been subject to Hungary. Rumania was able to annex Transylvania, Bukovina and part of the Banat from Austria-Hungary, and Bessarabia from Russia.¹ From the southern territories of Austria-Hungary was formed the new state of Yugoslavia, which also absorbed Montenegro. The creation of Yugoslavia was the result of a movement which had grown strong during the last decades of the Habsburg empire, and which aimed at the creation of a single state of all the South Slav nations, on a basis of equal federal rights for each nation. This conception was opposed by the leading politicians in Belgrade, who wished instead to create a ‘Greater Serbia’, a territorial extension of the pre-war kingdom.

The Ruling Classes

The ruling class of the East European countries on the eve of the Second World War was composed of four elements in varying mixtures—landowners, business men, bureaucrats and intellectuals.

In Poland, in the pre-1918 Kingdom of Hungary, and in Rumania, big landowners were both politically and economically powerful. Up to the end of the First World War they were the chief element in the ruling class. Formal serfdom was abolished in the middle of the nineteenth century, but the dependence of the peasants on the landowners was only slightly reduced, as there was no large-scale redistribution of land. When American cereals began seriously to compete in the European market, in the third quarter of the nineteenth century, many Polish, Hungarian and Rumanian landed estates were ruined. A large part of the ‘gentry’ (owners of a few hundreds of acres) sold their land, and went to the towns, where they entered the civil service or free professions, or became professional army officers. Their land was acquired, partly by the ‘magnates’ (owners of thousands, or tens of thousands, of acres), and partly by the banks.² These changes did not lead to any marked class conflict between the magnates and the gentry, though this might have been expected on purely economic grounds. Both belonged to the same traditional aristocracy, and had a similar history and education. They were intermarried, and treated each other as social equals. The aristocracy considered itself a single class. The children of the gentry who had settled in the towns kept the aristocratic mentality of their fathers. Though their economic position was that of a middle class, their mentality was different from that of either the West European or the Balkan bourgeoisie.

After the First World War, land reforms were carried out in Rumania, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. The landowning class lost the economic basis of their political power. The political basis was at the same time removed by the introduction of universal suffrage. The result of these measures was that the landowners became a small and relatively uninfluential element in the ruling classes of Yugoslavia and Rumania. In Poland, land reform was on a more modest scale, and with the passage of time the pace of redistribution was slowed up. In Hungary only a small part of the land changed hands. Thus in both these countries landowners continued to play an important part in politics. Power was in effect shared between the great landowners and the aristocratic middle class described above. Even in Rumania and Croatia the aristocratic origin of a portion of the middle class had political and cultural effects.

In the Balkans landowners were unimportant even before 1918. In Serbia and Bulgaria the native feudal aristocracy was destroyed by the invading Turks in the fifteenth century. The Turks themselves created no hereditary landowning class. Such land as was in the possession of Turkish pashas or beys at the time of liberation was divided among Serbian or Bulgarian peasants. In Greece large estates had slightly more importance, but a reform carried out by Venizelos on the eve of the First World War went far towards eliminating them. In Albania a class of big landowners formed a pseudo-feudal ruling class in the southern, or Tosk, provinces, while the northerners, or Ghegs, were organised on a tribal basis somewhat similar to the Scottish clans.

An East European business class came into being towards the end of the nineteenth century. The earliest industrial centres were Warsaw, Lodz and Dombrowa-Silesia in Poland, the Czech lands, and Budapest. A Czech business class grew up in Bohemia and Moravia in competition with the German from the end of the

South-East Europe

The names of towns given are those officially used by the governments of the respective countries. The following alternative names are also in common use: Novi Sad: Ujvidék Neusatz; Kishinyov: Chişinău.

nineteenth century. In Poland and Hungary, the first business men tended to be Jews or Germans. Poles began to enter business shortly before the First World War, particularly in the provinces ruled by Prussia. Hungarian Jewish industrialists and bankers to somç extent intermarried with the Hungarian landowning families and had a share in their political power, though they were seldom prominent in public life. It was not until after the First World War that ethnic Hungarians began to go into business in considerable numbers. Both Polish and Hungarian business mén thus found themselves in direct economic conflict with the Jews. This gave a strong stimulus to anti-semitism, which until then had been mainly an intellectual and religious phenomenon, with a certain material basis in the form of rivalry in the free professions. In the thirties the growth of ethnic Polish and Hungarian business classes was rapid and was accompanied by the spread of fascist ideas. The process was encouraged by the governments, and a form of State capitalism came into being, under which it was hard to say whether the politicians controlled or were controlled by the new business men. In Czechoslovakia the Jewish element was too small to produce these effects, and the political traditions of the Czech people were opposed to anti-semitism. The Czech business class grew in numbers and produced its own wealthy capitalists. But the balance of social classes and the democratic outlook of the nation made the Czech bourgeoisie resemble that of Western Europe rather than of neighbouring countries.

Rumanian development resembled that of Poland and Hungary, but at a more primitive level. In 1918 most of Rumanian industry and banking was in Jewish hands, but certain ethnic Rumanian families, mostly of ‘gentry’ origin and connected with the dominant Liberal Party, played an important part. The following twenty years brought a further influx of ethnic Rumanians into business, of whom many were of humbler social origin (for instance, sons of small officials or of wealthy peasants), and from the newly acquired provinces (especially Transylvania and Bukovina). Their competition with Jewish business led to violent anti-semitism. In Rumania, as in Poland and Hungary, the governments of the thirties had a policy of State capitalism, which favoured especially metallurgical, chemical and engineering heavy industry.¹ On the eve of the Second World War the interests of the State and of big business were hardly separable.

The business class of Serbia and Bulgaria was of more recent growth. It was derived from the wealthy peasants, pig-dealers, moneylenders and craftsmen of the villages and small towns. At the end of the last century contacts between these elements and western business interests (Austrian, German, French and British) developed, and something like a capitalist class came into being. After 1918 the comparatively large state Yugoslavia offered new opportunities of enrichment to the Serbian business men, who tried to use political power to impose their will on the older bourgeoisie of Croatia. In Bulgaria, impoverished by defeat, there were fewer prizes to be won. The Albanian bourgeoisie had not advanced beyond the village shopkeeper or usurer stage. Greek capitalism was much older: in a sense it may be said to go back to Byzantine or even classical times. It was based mainly on import and export business, and on shipping. After 1913 a tobacco industry grew rapidly in Macedonia and Thrace, and after the First World War factories sprang up in the Athens-Peiraeus and Salónica areas.

An important element in the ruling classes were the heads of the bureaucracy. The Polish bureaucracy was based on a mixture of Russian, Prussian and Austrian traditions, with the first on the whole predominating. The Czechs had been trained in the Austrian school. Hungarian and Croatian officials owed something to Austrian and something to oriental models, while the bureaucratic traditions of Greece, Rumania, Serbia and Bulgaria were entirely Turkish. Corruption was undoubtedly widespread in East European bureaucracy. At the low levels it was due to bad pay, which made it almost impossible for officials, with families to support, to refuse bribes for minor transgressions of the law. At the top, corruption took the form of embezzlement by ministers or senior officials of ‘discretionary funds’, sale of favourable tariffs to foreign business interests, large bribes from employers to labour inspectors, and similar abuses.

A second unpleasant characteristic of bureaucracy was brutality. Peasants were often robbed and beaten by gendarmes. In the prisons torture was widely used, particularly for political offences. Even when bureaucrats were not guilty of physical violence, they showed an utter contempt for ‘the masses’. Only too frequently the main ambition of the peasant’s son who obtained higher education was to secure a place in some sort of government employment, where he would be able to parade his superiority over the people of his native village. The bureaucracy was enormously inflated to give jobs of this kind, but in the slump of the thirties the strain was too much for it. There were then thousands of ‘unemployed intellectuals’, who formed an important element of instability in Danubian politics.¹

The professional class or ‘intelligentsia’ was not strictly a separate class. Part of it belonged to the ruling class, and part prov...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• Preface to the Second Edition
• Preface to the Third Edition
• Introduction
• Note on Proper Names
• PART I—BACKGROUND
• PART II—WAR
• PART III—SOVIETISATION
• Bibliographical Note
• Index
• Epilogue to the Encore Edition