Eastern Europe 1945-1969

From Stalinism to Stagnation

Ben Fowkes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317881742
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

Here is an essential short guide to the history of Eastern Europe under the early decades of communist rule. The study explores the communists attempt to transpose a uniform economic and social system across the region copied from the Soviet model. Dr Fowkes shows how this did not always succeed and he reveals the local variations which became more pronounced after the death of Stalin. The book includes detailed analysis of the dramatic events in Poland and Hungary and in the assessment section there is a useful summary of the strengths and weaknesses of the communist model in its heyday. It is an illuminating study, full of maps and photographs as well as over 30 documents (most previously unavailable in English) which brings this complex subject alive. and helps us to understand the special conditions the people of the region have faced in catching up with the West both in terms of material prosperity and more recently in the establishment of democratic political systems.

Part One

Introduction

Chapter One

General Background

The general framework for the history of post-1945 Eastern Europe was set by three major elements: the international context, the local situation (in other words the historical inheritance of the region) and, finally, because the communists came to power everywhere and were also marked by their past, the evolution of the communist movement. We shall deal with these three points in that order.

The International Context

The logic of the Soviet victory in the Second World War was generally accepted by the Western allies. There was no wish to challenge Stalin on Eastern Europe in 1945, even though Western statesmen were often extremely critical of his actions. There is some evidence that the British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, was ready to meet Stalin more than half way on the issue of Soviet influence there. In October 1944 he went to Moscow and made an agreement which essentially preserved Greece for the West (dividing influence there 90 to 10 per cent) in return for assigning a paramount position to the Soviet Union in Romania (90/10) and Bulgaria (75/25) and dividing Hungary and Yugoslavia equally. Two days later, after some hard bargaining between the British and Soviet Foreign Ministers, Anthony Eden and Viacheslav Molotov, Western influence in Hungary was brought down from 50 per cent to 20 per cent, and in Bulgaria from 25 per cent to 10 per cent [52 pp. 378–82].

The essence of the Churchill-Stalin ‘spheres of influence’ agreement of October 1944 was preserved in practice, though it was never confirmed by the United States. In theory, the Americans rejected the whole concept of a division of spheres of influence. Even so, American reactions to Stalin’s moves between 1944 and 1947 were limited to complaints, followed by grudging acceptance, for without a willingness to use military force it was impossible to alter the situation. Stalin was ready to provide face-saving concessions, which were, however, more apparent than real. Thus the response to US Secretary of State James F. Byrnes’s complaints at the December 1945 Moscow Conference about the composition of the Romanian and Bulgarian governments was that Stalin and Molotov accepted American proposals to change their composition [45; 46]. All this meant was that two powerless members of non-communist parties (Haţieganu and Romniceanu) were added to the Romanian government, and it was immediately recognized by the West; things took a little longer in Bulgaria because the opposition refused to join the government, but the end result was still the same: the West recognized communist-dominated governments [105; 175]. On 10 February 1947 the United States and Britain joined the Soviet Union in signing peace treaties in Paris with Hungary, Bulgaria and Romania, thereby giving up the one card they still had in their hands.

It must be stressed that the Western governments had very little alternative. They were in no position to challenge Soviet control on the ground. They felt they could achieve something on behalf of the non-communists by insisting that they be allowed to participate in coalition governments; in this respect, however, they were pushing at an open door, since this was exactly in line with Stalin’s policies. The Yugoslav communists, however, did not favour coalitions. The British Prime Minister Winston Churchill insisted that their leader, Tito, should enter a coalition with Dr. Šubašić, the head of the exiled royal Yugoslav government (October 1944); but no attempt was made to specify how many ministers each side would be entitled to. Churchill was well aware that in making this agreement he was abandoning King Peter of Yugoslavia, and that the country would probably come under communist rule. Fitzroy Maclean, Chief of the Allied Military Mission to the Yugoslav communist partisans during the war, reported the following somewhat cynical discussion with Churchill on the subject:

I emphasized that ... Tito and the other leaders of the Partisan Movement were openly and avowedly Communists and that the system which they would establish would inevitably be on Soviet lines. ... The Prime Minister’s reply resolved my doubts. ‘Do you intend to make Yugoslavia your home after the war?’ ‘No, Sir’ I replied. ‘Neither do I’, he said. ‘And, that being so, the less you and I worry about the form of government they set up, the better.’ [59 pp. 254–5]

Later on, we shall examine how this extremely favourable international context was exploited by the communist parties of Eastern Europe in their bid for power after 1945.

The Burden of History

We shall now look briefly at the main features of the domestic situation in Eastern Europe on the eve of the Second World War. Economically speaking, the main distinguishing feature of the region, in the historical context, was its undeveloped character, at least in comparison with Western Europe. This contrast between East and West had arisen long before the twentieth century. It was not even a creation of the industrial revolution. Eastern Europe began to be differentiated from the West during the later Middle Ages, as a result of the continuing stagnation of its agriculture, and the late development and long persistence of serfdom in the East [66 pp. 42–3]. These points do not apply to East Germany or the westernmost part of Czechoslovakia, the mixed Czech-German province of Bohemia, which underwent agricultural and industrial revolutions at the same time as Western Europe [66 pp. 70, 76]. Unsurprisingly, these two areas were not regarded as part of Eastern Europe until they came under communist control after 1945.

There was also a division within Eastern Europe between the north western and south eastern zones of the region. As Paul Shoup has put it, ‘as one moved east (and south) indices of births and child mortality rose; the percentage of the population employed in agriculture increased; and the degree of overpopulation in the countryside grew greater’ [50 p. 343]. The south eastern zone is commonly referred to as the Balkans, although most people in the area are unhappy with the connotations of this word. Only the Bulgarians, writes Maria Todorova, are prepared to consider ‘a Balkan name and a Balkan identity’, and even they are ‘ambiguous’ about it [95 p. 57]. We shall therefore stick to the term ‘South Eastern Europe’. This covers present-day Romania, Bulgaria, Albania and Greece and parts of former Yugoslavia. South Eastern Europe fell even further behind the West than the rest of Eastern Europe after the Middle Ages. This was probably a result of the Ottoman conquest of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, which destroyed the position of the native aristocracy. The economies of this region were based on small-scale peasant farming rather than the big land-ownership which prevailed further north. The subsequent predominance of small peasant farms did not assist economic growth. For the next three centuries there was a complete absence of population growth, which in pre-modern times, though not now, can be seen as a measure of economic development [66 p. 184].

The relatively undeveloped character of Eastern Europe was not substantially affected by the first signs of an economic take-off there, which appeared in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the interwar years Eastern Europe continued to suffer from generally lower levels of what is normally described as ‘infrastructure’: housing availability, communications, transport, health care and education. A systematic comparison of the statistics for these indicators by Éva Ehrlich and her Budapest colleagues has made it clear that all the countries of Eastern Europe were placed in 1937 behind all Western European countries, with minor exceptions. Czechoslovakia, in eighteenth overall position, was closest to Western European levels; Romania, twenty-sixth, was furthest away. Greece, which also counted as part of Eastern Europe at that stage, was placed twenty-second [79 p. 326].

The situation is brought into still sharper focus by some of the detailed comparative figures. In the area of communications, Eastern Europe had 8.3 telephones per 1,000 people in 1937, Western Europe 70.6. In housing, as late as 1950, Eastern Europe had 1.9 persons per room, Western Europe 1.1. In health care there was also a pronounced gap. Infant mortality in 1937 was 143.5 per 1,000 live births in Eastern Europe, 61.6 per 1,000 in the West. Even after surviving the first year of life, Eastern Europeans still had a shorter life expectancy than people in the West. The gap was 5.3 years in 1929; by 1950 it had narrowed but was still 3.7 years. The continuing inadequacy of medical provision in 1950 is shown by contrasts in the availability of professional medical care: there were 0.52 doctors per 1,000 people in Eastern Europe and 0.93 in Western Europe [79 p. 352]. In levels of education and culture the difference between Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland and their Western counterparts was not great, but there was a contrast between South Eastern Europe (34 per cent illiteracy in 1937 and 10 radios per 1,000 people) and the countries further north (9.5 per cent illiteracy and 41 radios per 1,000 people) [79 p. 258]. Little progress had been made in closing this gap by 1948. Only in Yugoslavia and Hungary was there an increase in the proportion of children attending school (up from 46 per cent of the age group to 58 per cent in Yugoslavia, and 64 per cent to 83 per cent in Hungary). In Romania there was a decline (from 60 per cent to 42 per cent). In Bulgaria the proportion stayed at 54 per cent. Czechoslovakia also experienced a decline, from 96 per cent to 90 per cent [79 pp. 96, 101].

So history had given Eastern Europe a bad start economically and socially. But there was worse: the region did not, until 1918, have the chance to develop the homogeneous nations that had emerged in the West over time. Repeated waves of settlement and conquest created a patchwork of national groups, and a set of rival claims to the same territory. National differences were compounded (and sometimes actually created) by religious adherence. Thus a Hungarian would be Protestant or Catholic; while a Romanian would be Orthodox or Uniate. A Turk would be Muslim. A Croat would be Catholic, a Serb Orthodox. These differences reached back far into the past. We do not need to consider here the many disputes, as many as there are nations, over the early medieval history of the region. The motives of the parties to these disputes are usually transparent. The aim is always to assert ‘prior rights of ownership’ of a particular piece of land; it is assumed that to prove prior settlement is to prove prior rights.

What is much more important is rather to give some account of the status quo before the population movements of the Second World War transformed it. There were twelve major national groups in the region: Greeks, Bulgarians, Romanians, Albanians, Hungarians, Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Slovenes, Croats, Serbs and Montenegrins. By the end of the nineteenth century the first three had their own states; by the end of the First World War the next three had followed suit. The situation of the other nations in the list was more complex. The closely related Czechs and Slovaks were combined together after 1918 in the state of ‘Czechoslovakia’; the Slovenes, Croats, Serbs and Montenegrins together made up ‘Yugoslavia’, a state which was based on the alleged ‘unity of the South Slavs’. But the Slovenes were divided by language from the Croats and Serbs; the Croats were divided from the Serbs by religion, script and a long history of separate development. Moreover, some people argued that two further nations should be added to the Yugoslav list: the Macedonians and the Bosnian Muslims. The Macedonians were divided from the Bulgarians by rather subtle linguistic and cultural differences (many Bulgarians claimed them for themselves); the Bosnian Muslims were divided from the surrounding Croats and Serbs by religion and communal tradition, though not by language. The Yugoslav communists subsequently recognized the separate existence of both these nations [193 pp. 114, 216].

None of the eight states which constituted Eastern Europe after 1945 was entirely homogeneous. They all had their national minorities. There were compact minorities of Hungarians living on lands taken from historic Hungary after 1918 and added to Yugoslavia, Romania and Czechoslovakia; there were Turks in Bulgaria; there were Ukrainians and Lithuanians in Poland; there were Sorbs in East Germany; and there were large minorities of other nations spread over the whole area. In descending order of importance, these minorities were Germans, Jews, Roma (Gypsies), Vlachs, Greeks and Armenians [31; 41]. By 1946 the picture had been somewhat simplified by the Nazi extermination of most of the Eastern European Jews during the Second World War, and the expulsion of almost all Germans from the region after it. This reduced the two most important minorities to fragmentary remnants. But the others remained, and the national mosaic hardly seemed to have lost its complexity [41 pp. 261–7; 31 pp. 209–10].

The features we have outlined above are an essential background, without which it is impossible to explain the peculiarities of the Eastern European situation. Politically, Eastern Europe was marked (outside Czechoslovakia) by a lack of democratic traditions and a tendency towards authoritarianism. Socially, the domination of landowning and bureaucratic elites was hardly challenged. Culturally, the values and attitudes held by the population continued to be deeply traditional, though they were beginning to be covered by a thin veneer of Western-influenced intellectual life.

All this was hardly changed at all by the brief interwar period of independence. Most of the post-1918 rulers of Eastern Europe were less interested in radical change than in maintaining their own personal power and guaranteeing their nation’s survival. Their attitudes were profoundly undemocratic, since they belonged to a bureaucratic political class which used the newly introduced system of parliamentary democracy as a barrier against change rather than an instrument of reform. The Eastern European countries, which started off as democracies, gradually fell into the hands of authoritarian or semi-authoritarian rulers under the impact of eco...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction to the Series
• Note on Referencing System
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Maps
• Part One: Introduction
• Part Two: Analysis
• Part Three: Assessment
• Part Four: Documents
• Chronology
• Glossary
• Who’s Who
• Bibliography
• Index