Eastern Europe since 1945

Geoffrey Swain, Nigel Swain

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781350307315
• Edition: 5
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Russian History
• Index: History

An established introductory textbook that provides students with an engaging overview of the complex developments in Eastern Europe from the end of the Second World War through to the present. Tracing the origins of the socialist experiment, de-Stalinisation, and the transition from socialism to capitalism, it explores the key events in each nation's recent history. This is an ideal core text for dedicated modules on Eastern European History or Europe since 1945 (including Central Europe and the Balkans) - or a supplementary text for broader modules on Modern European History or European Political History - which may be offered at all levels of an undergraduate history, politics or European studies degree. In addition it is a crucial resource for students who may be studying the recent history of Eastern Europe for the first time as part of a taught postgraduate degree in Modern European history, European politics or European studies. New to this Edition:
- A fully revised new edition of an established text, updated throughout to incorporate the latest research
- Provides coverage of recent events
- Offers increased focus on social and cultural history with greater emphasis on everyday life and experiences in Eastern Europe

© The Author(s) 2018

Geoffrey Swain and Nigel SwainEastern Europe since 1945https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-60513-9_1

Begin Abstract

1. Revolution in Eastern Europe

Geoffrey Swain¹ and Nigel Swain²

(1)

Department of Central and Eastern Europe, University of Glasgow Department of Central and Eastern Europe, Glasgow, United Kingdom

(2)

School of History, University of Liverpool School of History, Liverpool, United Kingdom

Geoffrey Swain (Corresponding author)

Email: [email protected]

Nigel Swain

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

The Communists and Interwar Eastern Europe

Life in interwar Eastern Europe was unpleasant. Czechoslovakia was a democracy, but all the other states of Eastern Europe were governed by authoritarian regimes: Poland was a ‘directed democracy’; Albania, Bulgaria, Romania and Yugoslavia were monarchical dictatorships; and Hungary was a monarchical dictatorship with a Regent rather than a King. As Hugh Seton-Watson, Britain’s leading interwar authority on Eastern Europe, commented, the ‘strong governments’ there were ‘no more than greedy, corrupt and brutal class regimes’.¹

Popular opposition to those regimes, which Seton-Watson averred was widespread, was only patchily channelled into support for the communist parties. In Hungary the experience of the 1919 Soviet Revolution and its brutal suppression had marginalised the illegal communist party. In Poland and Romania support for the communists was severely hampered by the so-called anti-national stance of those parties: after the First World War both countries had acquired territory once part of the Tsarist Russian Empire and the Soviet Union insisted on the return of these territories throughout the interwar period, successfully recovering its Polish claim in September 1939 and its claim on Romania in June 1940; since the Polish and Romanian Communist Parties consistently argued in favour of the Soviet claims, it was easy for their political opponents to describe them as enemies of the existing nation state.

Elsewhere in Eastern Europe the communists fared better. In Czechoslovakia, where they operated legally, they consistently won 10 per cent of the vote, polling well not only in industrial parts of the country but in rural Slovakia and Ruthenia as well. In Yugoslavia and Bulgaria, when the communists were allowed to operate freely, they also did well: in Bulgaria in 1919 they came second in the elections and in 1920 in Yugoslavia they came third; later, as the Labour Party, the communists won the Sofia municipal elections of 1932, while Yugoslav communists won trade union elections in 1938. However, for most of the interwar period the Yugoslav and Bulgarian Communist Parties were forced to operate illegally. In Albania the Communist Party was only formed during the Second World War.

The illegality of the majority of East European Communist Parties during the interwar period left them even more subject to the whims of Moscow than the large legal parties of Western Europe. With each successive change in the political ‘line’ dictated by the Communist International (Comintern) during the 1920s and 1930s, the East European Communist Parties split into smaller and smaller factions, squabbling for control of the pot of gold Moscow made available to its most loyal disciples. In 1938 Moscow interference of this type culminated in the closure of the Polish Communist Party and the suspension of the Yugoslav Communist Party; Stalin feared their reluctance to obey instructions was proof they had been infiltrated by spies.

The first years of Hitler’s New Order in Europe, the period before his invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, put the communists of Eastern Europe under even more pressure. There was practically no chance of communist activity taking place in those parts of Eastern Europe under direct German administration, that is, Poland and the Czech parts of Czechoslovakia. On the other hand, there was some chance of sustaining illegal operations in those East European states allied to Hitler, especially where communist traditions were strong: thus activity in Hungary and Romania was low, but in Bulgaria communist activity was tangible, as it was in Slovakia, a Hitlerite creation Stalin was prepared to recognise by establishing a separate Slovak Communist Party in 1939.

However, the country offering the best prospects for communist activity under Hitler’s New Order was Yugoslavia: it had a tradition of communist activity, and the monarchical dictatorship there was by 1939 in a state of advanced decay, with popular pressure preventing the country’s rulers siding openly with Hitler. With hindsight it is not surprising that it was from Yugoslavia that the communist revival was to come, and from there that communists were to launch a revolutionary insurrection that would spread throughout the Balkans and establish the essentials of a communist revolution in Albania, Bulgaria and Yugoslavia before the arrival of the Red Army on the scene in the autumn of 1944.

Rejuvenated Communism

The rejuvenation of the communist movement in Eastern Europe began on the eve of the Second World War as a consequence of Stalin’s confused intervention in the affairs of the Yugoslav Communist Party. Between 1938 and 1939, when the leadership of the Party was officially suspended, Josip Broz Tito was appointed caretaker leader. Unwilling to await the restoration of funds from Moscow and its endorsement of a new Central Committee, he virtually relaunched the Party on a new financial and organisational footing, loyal to but not dependent on Moscow.² Thus, just as the first cracks were appearing in the authoritarian façade of Yugoslav political life – in November 1939 the King granted limited autonomy to the Croats – the Communist Party began to pose a serious challenge to the government.

Between 1939 and 1941 the Yugoslav Communist Party made steady progress, successfully exploiting the contradictions of a weakening regime, and Tito’s obvious success in running an underground party earned him growing respect in Moscow, reflected in reports from Comintern emissaries who visited Yugoslavia at the end of 1939 and again in the summer of 1940. During the autumn of 1940, two large strikes in the industrial town of Split were enough to prompt the government to close down the communist-controlled trade union organisation, while between 19 and 23 October 1940 Tito brushed aside warnings from Moscow about the impossibility of such a task and organised, under the very noses of the Yugoslav authorities, the Fifth Party Conference attended by over 100 delegates.

At this time the Yugoslav Communist Party became for Moscow the first party among equals. The great legal communist parties of Germany, Spain and France, on which Moscow had relied so heavily in the interwar years, had all disappeared and of all the illegal communist parties the Yugoslav Party seemed to be the most viable, and the Yugoslav government the least pro-German and hence the most benign. Strategically, Yugoslavia was the key to the Balkans, and the Balkans were an area where Stalin believed the Soviet Union had legitimate interests recognised by Hitler in the Nazi–Soviet Pact. Yugoslavia’s neutrality and its willingness to establish diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union in June 1940 both suggested that skilful diplomacy might keep the country outside the Nazi camp. It was hardly surprising, therefore, that the Comintern saw Yugoslavia as a relatively safe haven, and in January 1940 established a radio transmitter in Zagreb from which to maintain contact with the Italian, Swiss, Austrian, Hungarian, Bulgarian, Greek, Slovak and Yugoslav Parties. The transmitter was fully operational by June 1940.³

During this ‘Yugoslav’ period, the Comintern line turned sharply to the Left, from reformism to revolution. Up until the Nazi–Soviet Pact, the premise of Soviet foreign policy, which the communist parties were duty-bound to support, was that the Soviet Union would form some kind of anti-German alliance with Britain and France; in other words the proletarian state, Soviet Russia, would form an alliance with two bourgeois states, Britain and France, against a fascist one, Germany. The Communist International’s support for a popular front between communist parties, socialist parties and bourgeois parties against the fascist threat mirrored this foreign policy stance of the Soviet state.

After the Nazi–Soviet Pact Stalin asserted that Britain and France were not genuine bourgeois democratic states at all but actually imperialist powers, as hostile to the Soviet Union as Nazi Germany. What the Soviet Union faced was not one hostile state, Nazi Germany, with potentially friendly allies to the west, but two hostile imperial blocs: Britain and France, traditional imperial powers with sea-based empires, and Nazi Germany, a modernist, fascist imperial power intent on creating a land-based empire in the east as the Kaiser had once done. Stalin justified his pact with Hitler using the same arguments with which Lenin had justified his 1918 pact with the Kaiser at Brest Litovsk: it was necessary to play the two imperial blocs off against each other and keep Russia out of the war.

The suggestion that the Second World War was simply a replay of the First World War, an imperialist skirmish of no interest to the workers, split the British and French Communist Parties and marginalised them from national life. For Eastern European communists the change in line was far easier to accept, largely as a result of their experiences during the Spanish Civil War. Communists felt the defeat of the Republican government in Spain had been brought about not only by fascist intervention from Hitler and Mussolini, but also by the Anglo-French policy of non-intervention which had evolved from benign sympathy towards the Republic, aimed at localising the conflict, to a blockade of Republican ports, aimed primarily at preventing the delivery of Soviet arms shipments. Communists felt betrayed by Britain and France, and East European communists felt this particularly acutely since one in five of the European volunteers fighting in Spain came from Eastern Europe and at the end of the war, unable to return home, they found themselves interned in camps, not in fascist Germany but in democratic France.⁴

In accordance with the Comintern’s new revolutionary line, its official explanation for the causes of the Spanish defeat, published in February 1940, was highly critical not only of Britain and France but also of the Spanish socialist and liberal parties associated with them. The communists’ mistake had been to trust these other parties, fellow members of the Popular Front government: they had formed a coalition government, a popular front ‘from above’; they should have formed a popular front ‘from below’. A popular front ‘from below’ meant building up a powerful mass movement via such organisations as the trade unions through which communists could counterbalance their weakness at government level. Thus, while communists might only have one seat in government, control over the trade unions could enable them to dictate terms to other ministers and acquire de facto control of the government. Spanish communists, the Comintern concluded, should have ‘broken with the old state apparatus which served reaction and replaced it with a new apparatus which served the working class’. Thus two lessons from the Spanish Civil War stood out: the need to break with the old order, and the need to build a popular front ‘from below’.⁵

This revolutionary analysis was not only shared by those East European communists trapped in internment camps in Southern France, but was also fully endorsed by Tito and the Yugoslav communists, as the decisions of their Fifth Conference made clear. The Conference endorsed the view that the only solution to Yugoslavia’s ills was a ‘people’s government’, and precisely what this meant was spelled out in the Party’s New Year message of 1941: drawing on the lessons of the Spanish Civil War, the Party pointed out that a ‘genuine people’s government’ was only possible if it was formed ‘not between leaders but from below, among the depths of the working masses’. No clearer statement on Tito’s determination not to play second fiddle in any revolutionary crisis to bourgeois politicians is needed. And Tito expected such a crisis to develop soon: in March 1941 a party school heard a report on The Strategy and Tactics of the Armed Uprising which suggested such a rising was imminent. Tito believed that if the Second World War really was a rerun of the First World War, there was no reason why it should not end, as the First World War had done, in a new era of socialist revolutions.⁶

Partisan Insurrection and Communist Resistance to Fascism

In April 1941 German, Italian and Bulgarian troops divided Yugoslavia between them. In June 1941 Germany and her allies invaded the Soviet Union. After some hesitations and false starts over the summer, the Yugoslav communists began their insurrectionary partisan war against the occupying forces in the autumn of 1941 and from then until the arrival of the Red Army in October 1944 succeeded in liberating large areas of Yugoslav territory and resisting five German offensives. From September 1941 onwards, the leading organisation in the Party was not the Central Committee, which was evacuated that month from Belgrade in disarray, but the partisan General Staff, formally established two months earlier; it commanded partisan units soon numerous enough to comprise divisions and brigades, all wearing the communist red star and all assigned political commissars to carry out ideological training. By November 1942 the partisans had been transformed into the People’s Liberation Army controlling a ‘state’ larger than Switzerland.⁷

The nature and extent of the liberated territory changed frequently, but everywhere Tito implemented the ideas he had argued for since 1940. The old order was overthrown and a new popular administration constructed around ‘liberation committees’. Sometimes these would control a single village; sometimes a hierarchy of committees would control a whole town or territory, complete with postal service, health service, and publicly controlled industry. In November 1942 elections were held from these liberation committees to a national parliament, the National Anti-Fascist Liberation Council, which comprised representatives not only from all liberated territories but also underground groups operating in occupied territory.

Communist control over this new political system was total. Although prominent liberal figures were persuaded to join liberation committees, and even allowed to play prominent pu...