The Balkans Since the Second World War

R. J. Crampton

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317891161
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Storia
• Categoria: Storia mondiale

Since the collapse of Eastern European communism, the Balkans have been more prominent in world affairs than at any time since before the First World War. Crises in the area have led NATO to fire its first ever shots in anger, whilst international forces have been deployed on a scale and in a manner unprecedented in Europe since World War Two.An understanding of why this happened is impossible without some knowledge of the history of the area before the fall of communism, of how the communists came to power and how they used their authority thereafter. Covering the communist states of Albania, Bulgaria, Romania and Yugoslavia, and including Greece, Richard Crampton provides a highly readable introduction to that history, one that will be read by journalists, diplomats and anyone interested in the region and its impact on world politics today.

Part I

COMMUNIST TAKEOVERS AND CIVIL WAR: THE BALKANS 1944–1949

Chapter 1

INTRODUCTION

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If they are to avoid infinite regression all histories must have a starting point. These are never totally satisfactory because no single starting point can be fully explained without some introduction to its own historical background. The starting point for this history is the end of the Second World War yet what happened after the end of that conflict was largely conditioned by the war itself and also the period before it. By the mid-1930s in the Balkans, as in much of Europe and beyond, there was little left of the Versailles system created at the end of the First World War. The League of Nations and collective security were soon to collapse while on the domestic front authoritarianism progressed inexorably, not least because the disastrous economic recession and its social consequences were rapidly increasing the power of central government. By 1939 political power was vested in a centralized executive and political activity confined to what that power deemed acceptable. The battle against the depression and its effects had concentrated an unprecedented amount of economic and social control with the central authorities.

The Second World War intensified these processes. Occupation by or association with Nazi Germany and fascist Italy increased and sanitized the buildup of central power just as it further restricted political and other freedoms. During these years what little remained of the political left was destroyed. When the war ended, in all states except Greece the previously dominant political right was then liquidated. Practically all that remained as an organized political force were those groups which had fought in the anti-fascist resistance or which were imported in the baggage train of the liberating Red Army. The latter consisted almost entirely of communists, the former were heavily under their influence.

The massive destruction brought about by the war itself shattered economies which had only just begun to recover from the depression. What was needed, it was generally believed after the fighting was over, was an energetic, coordinated force to plan and carry out massive programmes of economic and social renewal. Furthermore, few people in 1944–5 believed that capitalism had any future. Its record was one of failure. It had produced the great depression which in turn had fostered aggressive right-wing nationalism and war. The only state, it seemed, which had weathered the economic hurricane was the Soviet Union. No one could envisage the successful consumer capitalism which emerged in the west in the 1950s and 1960s and the economic future seemed to lie with socialism.

So too did the political future. The right had been discredited by its association with aggressive fascism, liberalism by its appeasement of it. The path was open for the left. Within it, the communists, with their strong antifascist credentials bolstered by the sacrifices of the Soviet Union and the Red Army, and with their passionate energy, their ferocious internal discipline and their impregnable determination, were the dominant force. They had another advantage which was much enhanced by the war. The fighting between 1941 and 1945, in the Balkans as elsewhere, had involved a brutality unequalled perhaps since the Thirty Years War of the seventeenth century. The resort to force for political means and the willingness to assume that the ends justified the means had become the norm rather than the exception.

The authoritarianism of the 1930s and the brutality of the Second World War did much to shape the destiny of the Balkans.

Even before the German attack on Poland in September 1939 one Balkan state, Albania, had fallen to the Axis when Italian troops invaded the country on Good Friday 1939. Fighting resumed in the Balkans in October 1940 when Italian troops operating from occupied Albania attacked Greece. They were soon driven back, but in April 1941 the German army entered Yugoslavia and after conquering that country moved into Greece. Yugoslavia ceased to exist; a rump Serbia was set up under total German domination; a supposedly independent Croatian state, which included Bosnia, was established; and the remainder of the former Yugoslavia was partitioned between Italy, Germany and Bulgaria. Greece was occupied by the same three powers, although the Greek state continued to exist in nominal form. In Albania, Greece and Yugoslavia powerful resistance forces emerged during the war though in all these countries there was fierce rivalry and often open warfare between the different resistance groups. The other two Balkan states, Romania and Bulgaria, both sided with the Axis and both received territorial compensation for doing so, Romania east of the Dniestr and Bulgaria in Macedonia and Thrace. The nature of the war in the Balkans was transformed first by the surrender of Italy in September 1943 and then by the rapid advance of the Red Army which entered Romania in April 1944. By the summer of that year it was obvious that Germany was destined for defeat and that it would soon be forced out of the Balkans. The struggle for the succession began long before the Wehrmacht had withdrawn, but the D Day landings in northern France on 6 June dashed the hopes of the anti-communists that western forces might be landed in the Balkans and thereby block the advance of the Red Army into the peninsula.

In the ensuing half decade in all Balkan states, with the exception of Greece, it was the communists who emerged victorious from that struggle. At the same time all communist states, with the exception of Yugoslavia, fell under Soviet domination. Although the speed of the communist takeover varied there were common features in each state, some of them also being found in Greece.

The first was the decisive influence of the great powers and the evolving confrontation between the western allies and the Soviet Union. In Moscow in October 1944 Winston Churchill, desperate to find ground on which he and Stalin could compromise before tackling the critical question of Poland, had put forward his famous, or infamous, percentages agreement. It offered Stalin a majority influence in Romania and Bulgaria and an equal share in Yugoslavia and Hungary; in return he was to acquiesce in western preponderance in Greece. At the Yalta conference in February 1945 Britain, the Soviet Union and the United States agreed that in liberated territories there were to be free and fair elections in which all non-fascist parties could take part. At Potsdam in July and August of the same year Britain and the United States made it clear that they would not recognize any government which, they believed, had not come to office by free and fair elections. After the Potsdam conference the primary forum for the powers' discussions was the periodic foreign ministers' conferences, with those in London in September-October 1945 and in Moscow in December of the same year being of particular significance. In the two former enemy states, Bulgaria and Romania, the victorious powers established Allied Control Commissions to supervise the administration until the signature of a peace treaty.

In all states the communist parties took inspiration and encouragement, if not always material assistance from the Soviet Union, though the Red Army, which had so influential a role in central Europe, was of major significance only in Romania and Bulgaria. The communists' opponents in turn looked westwards for political succour but none, except those in Greece, found it.

The Allied Control Commissions were disbanded after the signature of peace treaties with Romania and Bulgaria in February 1947. By that time the rifts between the Soviets and the west were deepening rapidly, the Truman Doctrine being expounded in the following month to save Greece, it was believed, from communism and Soviet domination. In September 1947 the ruling communist parties, minus that of Albania but plus those of France and Italy, met at Szklarska Poręba in Poland to create The Communist Information Bureau, or Cominform, whose task was to sharpen communist policies in the struggles to achieve power and to create a socialist system. Cominform was also intended to increase Soviet control over the junior parties, a fact which became apparent when the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia parted company in 1948. With the formation of NATO in the following year the divisions which characterized the era of the cold war had been drawn.

If Greece had been threatened by communism then that threat came more from within than from without. The deepening rift between left and right in the country led finally to a civil war which raged from 1947 to 1949 but throughout the period after October 1944 Stalin kept to the percentages agreement.

Stalin's determination not to provoke the west over Greece was a contributory factor in the split between the USSR and Yugoslavia in 1948. That split was to have profound repercussions in the internal politics of all communist states; it was, after the separation of Greece from the rest of the Balkan states, the first example of the process of tessellation which, by the end of the 1960s was to mean that each Balkan state had an individual foreign policy alignment.

Before the Soviet-Yugoslav split, however, the Balkan states other than Greece seemed destined to become communist satrapies of the Soviets. The part played by the indigenous party in a state's evolution towards communist rule depended largely on that state's recent past. In the countries where a strong resistance movement had developed, Albania, Yugoslavia and Greece, the local communist parties were strong while in Bulgaria the communists could cash in on a long history of activity and organization even if their resistance efforts during the war could not be compared with those of communists in occupied countries. In Romania the local communist party had almost no local support or standing.

In the political struggle the communists operated mainly through National or Popular Fronts, loose coalitions of leftist, anti-fascist forces. The struggle was ruthless. In a frenetic and savage assault the fronts eliminated right-wing or even centrist opposition immediately after the war. On the other hand, the destruction of leftist forces, many of them within the coalition, was piecemeal, gradual and studiously crafted. This slicing off of one opponent group after another was, in a phrase later made famous by the Hungarian communist leader, Mátyás Rákosi, ‘salami tactics’. But it was not just political parties and groupings which were attacked.

The communists persecuted and neutralized all individuals and organizations with connections to the west, and they undermined all public institutions and social groups which might serve as a basis for opposition. Of the former the most important was the Catholic Church. All communist parties crossed swords with the Church, though the ferocity of the struggle varied considerably. The conflict with the Church meant disputes over education and the property rights of religious institutions, and also disagreement on the rights of organizations such as the Boy Scouts and Girl Guides. As the communist drive for total authority intensified, suspicion of those with external, non-Soviet connections grew almost to the point of paranoia; minor religious sects and even hapless esperantists, seldom seen as a threat to the established order, were persecuted with demonic fury. Inevitably in such an atmosphere the links to western culture became attenuated. Western films, plays and books were much rarer than their Soviet equivalents, and links between Balkan communist and western scientific and academic institutions withered on their already slender vines. The corollary of breaking ties with the west was to strengthen those with Moscow. Soviet Friendship Societies became powerful social institutions and, more especially after the full assumption of communist political control, the Soviet model was copied in the army, police, education, in the organization of the trade unions and in almost all aspects of social life.

The weakening and eventual destruction of public institutions and social groups which were deemed hostile was a long and complex process in which subtlety as well as brutality played its part. At the top of the social and political system of the pre-war Balkan states had been the monarchs. They posed few problems for the communists. Those of Albania, Greece and Yugoslavia had obligingly absented themselves, and their return was easily prevented; even the Greek monarch had to wait almost two years before his sponsors felt it was safe enough to allow him back. In Bulgaria the reigning monarch was a minor of nine years and could therefore be undermined by attacking the regency rather than the king. Only in Romania did the monarch present a serious obstacle to communist designs.

Closely associated with the monarchy was the army. In the states defeated by the Axis the old armies had been largely discredited and disbanded; when reformed they could be shaped very much after the image of the locally dominant great power. In the two Balkan states which had aligned with the Germans and Italians, Romania and Bulgaria, the military presented a greater problem. It was largely but not entirely overcome by sending the standing army into battle against the Germans in the final stages of the war.

Of great importance in the post-war political configuration of forces were the local police forces. In all states where the communists took power the pre-existing police forces were entirely disbanded and new ones, usually known as people's militias, formed, while in Greece the British enlisted auxiliary police elements in the struggle against the local communists. In addition to people's militias there were people's courts in which swift and retributory justice was meted out to political opponents, real or suspected. The ability of the anti-communist press to comment on such tactics was diminished by a variety of methods such as the control of newsprint, the refusal of communist-dominated print unions to set the type of anti-communist articles, and the outright intimidation of everyone involved in such newspapers from owners and editors to the boys who sold the papers on the street.

Of the communists' social rivals the landed aristocracy was easily neutralized as it had had little influence in Balkan political life; where it had existed its power had been greatly reduced by land redistribution in the inter-war period. Its remaining economic and social powers were dissolved by further land reforms which also affected the Orthodox and Catholic Churches whose lands had frequently supported the Churchs' charitable institutions.

The middle classes were considerably weaker than their western or central European equivalents. In much of the Balkans, as in central and Eastern Europe, the urban bourgeoisie and state employees were frequently of a different ethnic group to the surrounding peasantry and, even if the predominance of Jews and Germans in the Balkan urban communities was not as pronounced as in those of central Europe, the slaughter of the former in the war and the flight of the latter after it inevitably weakened the established bourgeois elements. These elements also suffered from other pressures. Living space was limited because of housing shortages caused by wartime damage, but whatever the reason for these limitations middle-class life was unalterably changed when it became impossible to house treasured collections of books or paintings, or to retain the servants upon whom so much of previous life had depended. A blow at least equally as severe was delivered by swingeing taxation of middle-class wealth. Accumulated wealth, especially in liquid assets, was hard hit by post-war inflation, a phenomenon which also weakened educational and charitable institutions which relied upon investment income; many a private school, hospital or nursing home collapsed for this reason long before the communists had the opportunity to destroy it. If any savings did manage to survive inflation they were defenceless against taxation and even more so against government policies over banking and currency; the introduction of a new currency, often made necessary by inflation, was almost always accompanied by restrictions on savings and the exchange rates for new and old currencies were invariably tilted against those who had sizeable or even moderate bank accounts.

The intelligentsia, despite its generally left-leaning characteristics, was as much a victim of these policies as the commercial or industrial bourgeoisie. For the latter there were additional burdens. The Soviets had, with general allied approval, made it known that they would seize as booty any German property or any property used to further the German war effort. As the Germans had in general conscripted all industry in occupied or allied territories this meant that the Soviets believed they had the right to confiscate virtually all local industry. And where industrial or commercial property did remain in corporate or private hands the freedom to use it was rapidly diminished. Again fiscal policies were important in restricting private enterprise, but so too was state direction of the economy, frequently expressed in the form of state plans, initially usually for one or two years then, later, in the classic Stalinist five-year plan. State direction of the economy was by no means a new phenomenon and it was one which in the face of the massive destruction and dislocation of the war seemed to have a sound economic rationale. It was also, however, grist to the communist mill and eventually made it much easier to extend not only state control but also state ownership.

At the end of the Second World War the Balkan lands were still peasant societies. And in most it was the small independent proprietor who predominated. Here the communists had to tread warily. In most areas the peasant was fiercely independent, devoted to his small plot and suspicious of a political ideology which denigrated his class and vilified his religion. Furthermore, in many states the peasant had behind him the strength of well-established if not always united peasantist political parties which were rigorously opposed to any notions of collectivization on the Soviet pattern. Communist tactics were subtle. Left-wing groups within the peasant parties were cultivated; frequently they were lured into coalition and then suborned from within. Collectivization was seldom mentioned and never featured as a policy goal of the communists; quite the contrary, in some areas early schemes for land redistribution bolstered the small proprietor and in man...