witnesses will contribute to making the Holocaust a historical event: perhaps
one of the best-documented historical events in history, but a historical
event nonetheless. This will not in the least diminish the relevance or the
gravity of the admonition "Nevěr forget!" If there are two lessons the Holocaust
taught, they are remembrance and vigilance. People do disagree,
nonetheless, on which form of remembrance is most appropriate and which
form of vigilance is necessary or legitimate, and they most likely will continue
to disagree long into the future.
* 11 *
Spheres of Influence II
East and West, or "Yalta Europe"
"Yalta Europe" has two relatively distinct sets of meaning. Among many East
Central European intellectuals and dissidents, it is a pejorative reference to
a summit meeting of the "Big Three"—Winston Churchill, Franklin Delano
Roosevelt, and Joseph Stalin—held at Yalta, a resort in the Crimea on the
Black Sea, on February 4 to 11, 1945. During one week of negotiations, as
this version of the story goes, the two most important leaders of the Western
democratic world abandoned more than 100 million people to an expanded
Soviet version of the east, or the "Soviet empire." Ever since then, the
word 'Yalta" has evoked feelings of contempt for the sheer stupidity of the
West in its dealings with Stalin as well as sentiments ranging from moral indignation
to betrayal.
In a more dispassionate vein, "Yalta Europe" refers to the complicated
process of multilateral negotiations among the Allies during and after World
War II, on the one hand, and the gradual division of Europe into two ideologically
opposed military and economic blocs, on the other. In this respect,
Yalta Europe began at the first major summit of the Big Three in Teheran
in 1943, was more or less complete with the division of Germany in 1949,
and assumed its finál shape in May 1955 when the finishing touches were
put on the East and West blocs. The Federal Republic of Germany joined
the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO); the Warsaw Pact was established;
and the signatuře of the Austrian State Treaty ended the Allied
occupation of Austria, which then declared its permanent neutrality after
occupational troops evacuated the country in October.
The defeat of Nazi Germany led to the division of Europe, and any number
of events can be ušed to mark the turning point of the war. From the
223
I C E N T R A L E U R O P E
íerican point of view, the landing of the western Allies in Normandy in
íe 1944 signaled the beginning of the end of the war in Europe. The en:lement
and destruction of the German Sixth Army at the Battle of Stalxad
during the winter of 1942/1943 is generally recognized as the psyjlogical
turning point of the war. From a military point of view, Operation
adelle, the failure of the German offensive on the centrál section of the
tern front in the latě spring and summer of 1943 appears decisive, beise
the Germans exhausted their offensive capacity in a gigantic battle
t involved more than 2,000 tanks and 2 million men. Even this dáte is rel'ely
latě, however, because by the end of 1941, members of the German
h command recognized that the war against the Soviet Union on the easti
front could not be won.
The objective of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941,
i to "annihilate" the Soviet Union with a blitzkrieg of unprecedented dinsions.
Despite massive territorial gains, the German offensive stalled at
gates of Moscow and Leningrad. Some military historians maintain that
lin pursued a simple "space for time" stratégy. Territory lost was time
ned, which allowed the Soviet Union to marshal its forces for defense and
n for counteroffensives. But others maintain that Stalin was responsible
enormous losses on the eastern front, which almost led to the defeat of
Soviet Union, because he did not withdraw Soviet troops fast enough or
maturely ordered them to hold positions. In any event, the sheer size of
Soviet Union led to an overextension of the German army. Winter is usucalled
one of Russia's most important allies, and the German troops unibtedly
were ill equipped for it. Rain in the fall and the spring were equalying
for the Germans, as the instruments of blitzkrieg, tanks and other
vy motorized vehicles, literally bogged down in the soft ground and on
>rly maintained Russian roads.
In latě 1941, the Soviet East and the British and American West forged
illiance. The German invasion of the Soviet Union eventually provided
at Britain with a needed ally, and vice versa, and the Japanese attack on
rl Harbor on December 7, 1941, brought the United States into the AnSoviet
alliance. The Soviet Union switched allies in 1941 without changsome
of the policy objectives articulated in the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939,
i as the consolidation of control over the Baltic states and eastern Poland.
\lthough the United States' vast reservoirs of human and materiál rerces
played an indisputably important role in winning the war in Europe
ultimately expedited its outcome, the most important European theater
lilitary conflict was the eastern front, where Nazi Germany lost its war.
: German losses of men and matériel on the eastern front between 1941
the Normandy invasion in June 1944 were enormous. An estimated 13
ion Soviet citizens in the armed forces died during World War II, in ad:>n
to 7 million civilians. Soviet combat dead outnumbered those of the
ted States in the Atlantic theater of war approximately 75 to 1 or, inling
civilians, around 115 to l.1
Given the enormity of Soviet losses, it is
to understand why western allies and a western European front were so
ortant to Stalin. The fact that his Anglo-American allies promised to
EAST AND WEST, OR "YALTA E U R O P E " 225
open a western European front in 1942 but did not deliver on a grand scale
until 1944 made him both impatient and suspicious.
The evolution of Allied policy in Europe was a long and complicated
process of bi- and multilateral negotiations on many levels. The common objective
of defeating Nazi Germany was the basis of the "anti-Hitler coalition,"
and the unconditional surrender of Nazi Germany became one of the cornerstones
of Allied policy in early 1943. Churchill, Stalin, and Roosevelt also
recognized that the defeat of Nazi Germany would necessarily mean reorganizing
Europe so as to prevent the possibility of German aggression in the
future.
Allied plans also were complicated by the fact that the alliance's common
denominator of anti-Nazism was not great enough to overcome the principál
ideological differences between the Anglo-American democratic West and
the Soviet East. However, ideological antagonisms were played down because
they could weaken the alliance and the war effort, and there were fears among
the Western democracies that the Soviet Union might negotiate a separate
peace with Nazi Germany, and vice versa. Therefore, the priority of maintaining
East-West collaboration demanded that concessions be made on issues
that the Western powers considered secondary. Negotiations among the
Allies also were guided by the realistic assumption that regional "spheres of
influence" would exist in Europe after the defeat of Nazi Germany.
As a matter of principle, the Western democracies agreed not to recognize
territorial acquisitions made by force; this was one of the principles of
the Atlantic Charter formulated by Churchill and Roosevelt in August 1941.
But as a matter of fact, they did. The Western Allies disapproved of the territorial
gains the Soviet Union had made under the auspices of the initial
"spheres of influence" agreement between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany,
Hitleťs and Stalin's nonaggression pact of 1939. Stalin had every intention
of reestablishing Soviet control over the Baltic republics and territories
that the Soviet Union had annexed in Finland, eastern Poland, and
Romania between 1939 and 1941, areas that had been lost for the time being
because of the invasion of the Soviet Union by Nazi Germany and its allies,
and he made this clear to his Western allies early on in the alliance. Stalin
also was intent on expanding the Soviet sphere of influence beyond these
frontiers to ensure Soviet national security in the future.
If Yalta is thus understood as the democratic Wesťs subordination of political
principle to the imperiál interests of the Soviet Union in East Central
Europe (or, in a less moralistic vein, the compromises necessary to maintain
East-West cooperation), then the evolution of Allied policy toward Poland
provides the best example of how the idea of Yalta Europe developed before
the Yalta conference.
The Polish Problém, 1939-1945
A brief survey of the diplomatic situation in Central Europe during World
War II is necessary to appreciate the exceptional role Poland played in inter-Allied
negotiations. Austria had been incorporated into the Third Reich
) C E N T R A L E U R O P E
March 1938; Finland, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria were allies of Nazi
rmany; and Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia had established govíments
in exile in London. The status of the states that collaborated with
zi Germany obviously was different from the status of those that had govíments
in exile. The former had to be defeated along with Nazi Germany,
1 the latter had to be liberated from Nazi Germany.2
The importance of
: Yugoslav government in exile in London decreased as the significance
rito and his Communist partisan movement increased in Yugoslavia and
joslavia assumed an increasingly "eastern," or Communist, course during
war.
Eduard Beneš, the president of the Czechoslovak Republic, who had reled
after the Munich agreement in 1938, initially was an embarrassing
itical exile for the Western democracies, because he reminded them that
y had left Czechoslovakia in the lurch with their "policy of appeasement."
ieš's experience with Western democracies eroded his confidence in the
st and led to his recognition that it also would be necessary for Czechoakia
to reach some kind of accommodation with the Soviet Union. He
refore developed a close working relationship with Stalin, and, as many
:chs in times of duress had doně in the past, saw Russia as a patron of the
iller Slavic nations.
Poland, the only country of this trio that depended completely on the
port of the Western democracies, was in the least advantageous position
11. Its national interests conflicted directly with those of the Soviet Union,
this bilateral confrontation threatened the harmony of the Britisherican-Soviet
alliance.
Britain and France had entered the war in 1939 to maintain the Euron
status quo, which required, among other things, fighting for the
itablishment of Polish independence. The Soviet Union's participation
tie invasion and occupation of Poland in 1939 made it an enemy of the
sh government in exile, but the German invasion of the Soviet Union in
1 made the Soviet Union an ally of the United Kingdom, Polanďs most
ortant ally and advocate. The United Kingdom, in turn, pressured
ind to develop an accommodating relationship with the Soviet Union,
for obvious reasons Polish-Soviet relations were characterized by mususpicion
instead of reciprocal trust. The Soviet Union had invaded and
ipied that part of Poland it wanted to keep, and it justified this acquisiby
pointing out that the region was inhabited predominantly by Belaians
and Ukrainians.
rhe renegotiation of the Polish-Soviet frontier is a long, complicated,
sad story. At the end of 1941, Churchill had branded the Soviet acquins
in East Central Europe as a "shameless aggression," but in 1942 he
cated to the Soviets that he was willing to make concessions on this isRoosevelt
secretly followed suit at the Teheran conference at the end
343, but he wanted to avoid making any public statements on the borssue
until after the U.S. presidential elections in the fall of 1944, for fear
•sing the Polish American vote. Plans for compensating Poland for the
tory it was to lose in the east with German territory in the west were disEAST
AND WEST, OR "YALTA EUROPF." 227
cussed and agreed on in principle at a summit meeting in Teheran in 1943.
Churchill demonstrated the idea by putting three matches on the conference
table. The ones on the left and the right represented the German-Polish
and Polish-Soviet frontiers in 1939, and the one in the middle, the border
the Soviets demanded. Then he took the match on the right and moved
it to the far left to show how Poland would be compensated for its losses in
the east by gains at the expense of Germany in the west. At Teheran,
Churchill and Roosevelt also gave the Soviet Union a more or less free hand
to administer the territories it was "liberating" on the eastern front.
The Allies also had bigger issues on their agenda in Teheran, such as the
articulation of a grand stratégy for the war, which included opening up new
fronts in western and southern Europe and a Soviet commitment to enter
the war against Japan; the establishment of policies for the treatment of Nazi
Germany's allies; and the discussion of the framework for a permanent international
peacekeeping organization. Churchill was a great proponent of
a Western Allied invasion on the Balkán Peninsula, which would pierce the
soft underbelly of Hilter's Europe and háve the concomitant benefit of
bringing Western troops into the heart of the continent, but this proposal
was tabled by the Americans and eventually dismissed in favor of the Allied
invasion in Normandy.
The fact that Stalin had broken off diplomatic relations with the Polish
government in exile in mid-1943 also damaged Polanďs prospects. The immediate
cause of this rupture in relations was the Polish reaction to the German
discovery of a mass grave of more than 4,000 Polish officers in the Katyn
Forest (near Smolensk in Belarus) in March 1943. In the process of invading
and occupying eastern Poland in 1939, the Soviet Union had taken into
custody 15,000 Polish officers, professional soldiers, and reservists. These
Polish officers, representatives of a national elitě, then disappeared without
a trace until the Germans discovered the mass grave in Katyn. The Germans
accused the Soviets of having massacred them, but the Soviets reversed the
allegation. However, given the evidence and an international investigation,
it became clear to the Poles that the Soviets had murdered the Polish prisoners
in Katyn, which also indicated that the 11,000 others most likéry met
similar fates elsewhere. Polish indignation and concern played directly into
ťhe hands of Nazi propaganda. The Soviet Union then accused the Polish
government in exile of "pro-Hitler" agitation and broke off diplomatic re­
lations.
Soviet authorities adamantly denied responsibility for the Katyn massacre
until 1989 when they finally admitted that it was one of the many atrocities
committed by the NKVD, the Soviet secret police. The Hitler-Stalin
nonaggression pact, the Soviet denial of its secret protocol, and the Soviets'
refusal to reveal what had happened to the Polish officers who had been taken
into Soviet custody in 1939 strained Polish-Soviet relations not only
throughout World War II but also during the entire postwar period of Communist
"fraternal cooperation" between the two countries. Katyn, which became
a symbol for the crimes the Soviet Union committed against the Polish
nation, was subsequently one of the most gaping "blanks" or distortions
228 C E N T R A L E U R O P E
in the official Soviet and Polish Communist histories. Although the 4,000 officers
murdered at Katyn were but a fraction of Polanďs total losses of 6 million
during World War II, they assumed a prominent pláce in the Polish historical
memory.
The Katyn massacre also is a good example of the type of policy the Soviet
Union pursued toward non-Communist political and military organizations
throughout east Central Europe. The liberation of countries from Nazi
Germany went hand in hand with the persecution of anti-Nazi resisters who
also were anti-Communists. They were accused of being "bourgeois," "nationalist,"
or "reactionary." Poland provides once again a prime example for
the manner in which this policy was executed.
There was a considerable military underground organization in Poland,
the H o m e Army, which worked dosely with the Polish government in exile
in London. In order to establish a political presence in Poland when it was
liberated by the Soviet Union, H o m e Army commanders were instructed to
stage local uprisings immediately before the arrival of the Soviet units. They
also were advised to offer their assistance to the Red Army while simultaneously
declaring their allegiance to the Polish government in exile, a practice
that led in some cases to their immediate arrest or execution.3
The situation of the H o m e Army in Poland was complicated by the fact
that once the Red Army reached ethnic Polish territory, Polish Communists
from the Soviet Union established the "Committee for National Liberation"
in the Lublin, the first major city liberated in "ethnic Poland," and the socalled
Lublin Committee declared that it was the provisional legal authority
for all of liberated Poland. As a result, Poland had two rival governments:
one officially recognized by the Western Allies in London and another recognized
only by, but fully supported by, the Soviet Union in Poland. The
Lublin Committee was the first Communist puppet government in East Central
Europe, and its establishment also demonstrated how the Soviet Union
intended to deal with anti-Communist governments in the region in the future:
They were to be discredited if possible and undermined if not.
The way in which the Soviet Red Army failed to aid an uprising of the
Polish Home Army in Warsaw in August and September 1944 is yet another
example of the means that the Soviets were prepared to use to eliminate
anti-Communist, national opposition. In the summer of 1944, the Red Army
advanced rapidly toward Warsaw. The Polish government in London called
for an uprising by Polish Home Army in Warsaw, with the intention of establishing
a territorial base of operations for the Polish government. The
government also assumed that the Red Army would come to the aid of the
Polish forces and "co-liberate" the Polish capital. But then the Red Army
halted on the outskirts of Warsaw, and the stalling of the Soviet advance gave
the Nazis ample opportunity to put down ruthlessly the Warsaw uprising.
The elitě of the Polish Home Army and 200,000 civilians died in Warsaw during
sixty-three days of fighting.
In military terms, the Warsaw uprising was directed against Nazi Germany.
Politically, however, it was explicitly anti-Soviet, and the Soviets let the
German forces do their military and political dirty work for them. The Nazis
EAST AND WEST, OR "YALTA EUROPE" 229
eliminated the Polish nationalists, democrats, and anti-Communists of the
H o m e Army, and they destroyed most of Warsaw in the process. (After the
Warsaw uprising, Hitler ordered that the remains of Warsaw be razed. When
it finally was "liberated" by the Red Army, the city was a depopulated pile of
rubble.) Soviet histories maintained that the Red Army had overextended
itself and was in no position to advance, although Poles nevěr accepted this
version of the story. Before 1989, Poles ušed to illustrate Polanďs geopolitical
predicament and their bitter feelings about Germans and Russians with
a caustic joke. Question: "If Poland were to be invaded again by Germany
and the Soviet Union, in which direction should one shoot first?" Answer:
"To the west: first business, then pleasure."
Yalta: Bungling or Betrayal?
The Yalta conference was prefaced by an Anglo-Soviet understanding in regard
to southeastern Europe. In October 1944, Churchill and Stalin met in
Moscow to discuss British and Soviet interests in the region, and Churchill
relayed only partial results of these meetings to Roosevelt. At that time,
Churchill and Stalin came up with a "percentage agreement" that was basically
a Soviet recognition of British interests in the Mediterranean (Greece,
in particular) and the British acknowledgment of a Soviet sphere of influence
in Romania and Bulgaria. Influence in Yugoslavia and Hungary was to
be shared equally.4
This entire agreement was made rather nonchalantly at
the dinner table. Churchilljotted down the following East-West percentages
on a half sheet of páper: Romania 90:10; Bulgaria 75:25; Hungary and
Yugoslavia, 50:50; Greece 10:90. He passed it to Stalin, who looked at it and
put a large check on it with a blue pencil and then passed it back to
Churchill. (There was a bit of additional dickering on the next day between
the Soviet and British foreign ministers, V. M. Molotov and Anthony Eden,
and the percentages for Bulgaria and Hungary were revised to 80:20 and
75:25. However, the modalities of measurement nevěr were discussed.)
Stalin also emphasized that he wanted Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary
to be "anti-Nazi, pro- Russian" states, and Churchill inconclusively
broached one of his favorite ideas with Stalin: the reestablishment of a federation
of states along the Danube, with Vienna as its capital. Churchill
thought in the terms of the classic European balance of power in this respect,
and he was concerned about the expansion of Soviet influence in Central
Europe. A Danube confederation could fill the vacuum that the destruction
of Austria-Hungary had created in 1918, and various schemes for
a multinational cooperation in the region were popular among British planners.
Representatives of the Polish and Czechoslovak governments in exile
also discussed confederative plans during the war as a means of cooperatively
offsetting Russian and German influence. But none of these confederative
schemes materialized, and the Soviets viewed them with suspicion because
they merely represented Western attempts to erect a new cordon
sanitaire.
By the time the Big Three met in Yalta at the beginning of 1945, the end
230 C E N T R A L E U R O P E
The Big Three met at Yalta in early 1945 to negotiate a new postwar order: British
prime minister Winston Churchill, ailing U.S. president Franklin Delano Roosevelt,
and Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. (U.S. Army Signál Corps, National Archives, Washington,
D.C.)
of the war in Europe was in sight. The Red Army had occupied almost all of
Poland and had overrun Romania, Hungary, and Bulgaria. (Romania and
Bulgaria switched their allegiances and became belated members of the
anti-Hitler coalition.) The Soviets had taken Budapest after three months of
siege, and the Western Allies had reached German soil. The big issues on
the Yalta agenda were the defeat and treatment of Nazi Germany, the future
status of Poland, a hastening of the end of the war with Japan, and the development
of a world security organization.
It is important to recall that British-American-Soviet cooperation
reached a peak at the beginning of 1945, and there were hopes that the spirit
of cooperation established during the war would carry over into the postwar
period. However, critics háve accused Roosevelt of trusting Stalin and of
having misconceptions about Soviet Communism. Roosevelt did not háve as
good an understanding of Communism and Central European affairs as
Churchill did, who was becoming increasingly concerned about the Soviet
Union's growing influence. Churchill viewed Soviet policy in East Central
Europe as a European problém with globál implications for the Western
democracies, whereas Roosevelt subordinated East Central European or reEAST
AND WEST, OR "YALTA E U R O P E "
23]
gional issues to globál considerations. He banked on the idea of the United
Nations and believed that Stalin and the Soviet Union were prepared to assume
the role of one of the guarantors of the free world. Therefore, concessions
to the Soviet Union in East Central Europe were a means of ensuring
peace on a globál scale. But this situation was complicated by the fact
that Roosevelt was in some respects more concerned about the gains of the
British Empire during the the war than those of the Soviet Union and thus
was more suspicious of Churchill than of Stalin.
At Yalta, the Allies discussed principles for the treatment of Germany,
such as unconditional surrender, dismemberment, denazification, demilitarization,
and reparations for the Soviet Union, and they agreed on including
France in the occupation and administration of Germany and
Berlin, which were to be divided up into four different zones. (This model
of quadripartite administration also was applied to Austria and Vienna.)
However, there was no agreement on what to do with Germany after the war,
no common pian or joint vision.
An important shift in the Western perception of Poland antedated the
decisions regarding the borders and the future of Poland that were made at
Yalta. Both Churchill and Roosevelt had come to accept the idea that Poland
had to be considered in the context of the Soviet Union 's national security
interests. From this perspective, the purpose of Poland would be to help protéct
the Soviet Union from future aggression. At Yalta, the Allies agreed to
revise the eastern frontier of Poland, and they discussed new northern and
western frontiers that would involve the incorporation of substantial German
territories into Poland—most of East Prussia in the north and areas
reaching as far west as the Oder and Western Neisse Rivers (the so-called
Oder-Neisse Line). These acquisitions, in turn, would necessitate the expulsion
of millions of Germans. Although the Oder-Neisse frontier was not
sanctioned until the last great summit meeting that the Allies held, in Potsdam
in midsummer 1945, the dye was east in Yalta. The so-called eastern
territories—East Prussia, Pomerania, and Silesia—were placed under the
administration of Poland, which referred to them as "recovered territories,"
and then were unilaterally annexed after 1947. (The Soviet Union
also occupied and then annexed a portion of northern East Prussia around
Kónigsberg.)
At Potsdam, the Allies also formally endorsed the policy of transferring
not only Germans from the German territories administered by Poland but
also ethnic German minorities, or Volksdeutsche, from Czechoslovakia and
Hungary, "in a humane and orderly manner." Finally, the Allies agreed on
a "reorganization" of the Communist-dominated Lublin government in
Poland, which already had been recognized by Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia,
to include some representatives of the Polish government in exile,
and "the holding of free and unfettered elections as soon as possible." Long
before Yalta, the Western Allies had abandoned Polanďs 1939 frontiers;
then at Yalta, they effectively abandoned the Polish government in exile. (Although
it had lost its diplomatic status, the Polish government in exile maintained
an office in London until 1989.)
232 C E N T R A L E U R O P E
It is important to distinguish here between the two different planeš of
Soviet and Anglo-American, or East-West, relations. Democracy and Communism
were incompatible on moral, political, and ideological levels, and
in this respect, the Cold War started before the hot war. Nonetheless, military
cooperation was indispensable, and the overriding importance of an
East-West anti-Nazi alliance made Western anti-Communism a secondary issue.
At Yalta, Poland was not important enough for the Western Allies to risk
a rupture with the Soviet Union, and after World War II, Western anti-Communism
was subordinated in many respects to the objective of maintaining
peace in Europe. If one is prepared to downplay or ignore the necessity of
cooperating for the pragmatic purposes of winning the war against Nazi Germany
before 1945 or keeping the peace in Europe between East and West
thereafter, it is easy to use moral criteria to criticize the hypocrisy or duplicity
of the Western democracies' policies, and many East Central Europeans
háve perceived "Yalta" or "the West" in exactly these terms.
After defeating Nazi Germany with the Soviet Union, the West was neither
willing nor prepared to fight a new war with the Soviet Union in order
to liberate East Central Europe. The Cold War was implicit in the dynamics
of the British-American-Soviet alliance. The overriding objective of defeating
Nazi Germany held the alliance together, and once it had been
achieved, conflicting ideological and national interests were free to emerge.
Poland was the first victim of World War II in 1939: the Hitler-Stalin pact
and Nazi and Soviet aggression. It also was in the ill-fated position of being
the first victim of peace in 1945: the collaboration of Western democracies
with the Soviet Union that led to the defeat of Nazi Germany.
Although Europe was not divided at Yalta, the process of dividing it began
there. Allied policy for the treatment of postwar Germany was fragmentary.
The decisions made regarding Poland were both unfortunate and
far reaching, but Czechoslovakia and Hungary were barely discussed.
Among the concluding documents of the Yalta conference was an Allied
"Declaration on Liberated Europe" affirming the "right of all peoples to
choose the form of governments under which they will live," "the restoration
of sovereign rights and self-government," and "free elections." The
Western allies did not envision the Soviet sphere of influence as a closed
bloc, and they hoped that the Soviet Union would respect the rules of democratic
fair play in East Central Europe after the war. It did not.
The Making ofEastern Europe, 1945-1948
Churchill popularized the term "Iron Curtain" shortly after the war. This
vivid metaphor tends to divert attention away from the fact that the Iron Curtain
did not fall into pláce at one theatrical moment. Although the presence
of the Red Army from the Baltic to the Balkans gave the Soviet Union massive
political leverage in the region, the Communists did not také power all
at once. Instead, the establishment of Communist regimes in the region was
a successive process that started in 1945 but was not completed until 1948.
The amounts of political sympathy and antipathy for the revolutionary proEAST
AND WEST, OR "YALTA E U R O P E " 2 3 3
gram the Soviet Union propagated in the countries it liberated varied from
statě to statě, as did the tactics the Communists employed to gain power.
The political revolutions in East Central Europe went hand-in-hand with
massive ethnic and demographic dislocations. Poland is the best example of
the type of chaos that World War II produced in the form of armed hostilities,
deportation, genocidě, settlement and resettlement campaigns, liberation,
repatriation, and population exchanges. After 1939, the Soviets deported
Poles from eastern Poland. The Nazis expelled Poles from the parts
of Poland that had been annexed by the Third Reich into the General Gouvernement,
and they "exported" Poles to Germany as forced laborers. Ethnic
Germans from throughout East Central Europe were brought in to "resettle"
those parts of Poland that Nazi Germany had incorporated. The
Holocaust virtually annihilated the Polish Jews. After the war, Poles were
repatriated from the Soviet Union and Germany, and the Germans were expelled
from those parts of Germany administered by Poland, which in turn
had to be "resettled" by Poles.
The expulsion of the Germans from East Central Europe took a number
of forms. Many Germans—as well as the members of many other national
and ethnic groups that had collaborated with Nazi Germany or merely
feared the Red Army—fled to avoid ending up behind the Soviet front. (In
the process of honoring repatriation agreements, the Western Allies returned
more than 2 million people to the Soviet Union after the war: collaborators,
who as anti-Communists and nationalists had fought with the
Nazis against the Soviets; prisoners of war; and laborers the Nazis had conscripted
by force from occupied territories. Upon their return to the Soviet
Union, these people were frequently accused of treason (either reál or imagined)
prosecuted, and severely punished.) On the one hand, Nazi antiSoviet
propaganda was apocalyptic and atrocious, and it encouraged evacuation
or flight. On the other hand, plundering, looting, murder, and the
mass rape of German women were characteristic of the conduct of the victorious
Red Army. Vengeance and greed played no small role in the initial
treatment of German minorities throughout East Central Europe. The first
expulsions of Germans and the appropriation of their property were spontaneous
and arbitrary, but these measures evolved into national policies
which the Allies sanctioned after the war.
Between 1944 and 1950, more than 11 million Germans fled or were expelled
from their homes, and the number who perished in the process is unknown.
Estimates range from hundreds of thousands to 2 million. Theft,
rape, murder, and death caused by hunger, exposure, and exhaustion were
part of the "humane and orderly" transfer of the Germans. They left homes
they had inhabited for hundreds of years, and they often fled on foot in large
"caravans."
The great majority of those Germans who were expelled, more than 7
million, came from the territories administered by Poland east of the
Oder-Neisse Line and Poland and the Soviet Union in east Prussia. Well before
the end of the war, Beneš received Stalin's consent to expel Czechoslovakia^
German minority of more than 3 million, the Sudetendeutsche. They
234 C E N T R A L E U R O P E
were collectively branded as traitors and banished after the war. Almost 90
percent of the 500,000 "ethnic Germans," or Volksdeutsche, from Yugoslavia
emigrated during the war, fled, or were killed or deported after the war. The
estimated 240,000 Germans who were evacuated, deported, or expelled
from Hungary reduced the country's German minority by half. Tens of
thousands of the "Transylvania Saxons" also fled their 600-year-old homes
in Romania.5
Some people explain the treatment of the Germans in terms of biblical
justice: an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth. The fact that the East Central
European victims of Nazi German aggression committed crimes against
Germans has been consistently and conveniently ignored. After World War
II no one was prepared to let the Germans be the victims of anything, and
German-Polish and German-Czech relations were burdened for decades
by the fact that millions of Germans in the Federal Republic of Germany
who had been expelled from Poland or Czechoslovakia wanted the Poles
and the Czechs as well as the Communists to admit to the violence and injustice
of these expulsions. An admission of this nature was not nationally
feasible for Poles or Czechs, nor was it ideologically possible for Communists.
It took a revolution to address this issue. After 1989, for example,
Václav Havel raised the question of Czech guilt for the expulsion of the Sudetendeutsche,
much to the consternation of many Czechs.
If a German andjewish as well as a German-Jewish presence was one of
the distinctive characteristics of Central European culture, and multicultural
symbiosis was the source of its dynamism, this culture ceased to exist
during and after World War II. If Central European culture was inspired or
made by Jews, it either emigrated with them before the Holocaust or died
with them during it. The flight or expulsion of the Germans also dramatically
diminished their presence in the region.
East Central Europe, historically part of a German "linguistic and cultural
space," was de-Germanized, although the Germans' absence is seldom
lamented. The combined results of Nazi and Allied policies—genocidě for
the Jews and population transfers for the Germans—were an "ethnic cleansing"
of states that historically had been multi-ethnic, culturally diverse, and
religiously heterodox.6
For the fírst time in its history, Poland was almost exclusively
ethnic Polish and Roman Catholic. The population of Bohemia
and Moravia became almost exclusively Czech. In comparison, Hungary still
had a considerable number of Jews and Germans, but it became much more
homogeneous than it had been in the past.
If the relative absence of Jews and Germans dramatically changed the
complexion of Central European culture, then the massive presence of the
Russians in the region represented an unprecedented political reorientation.
The eastern half of Central Europe, which had historically been oriented
toward the West—Catholic Róme, the Paris of the Enlightenment and
the French Revolution, or London and Washington, D.C. as the capitals of
the democratic world—fell under the long shadow of Moscow. "The Second
World War, or rather its outcome," Piotr Wandycz remarked, "reversed the
course of history of East Central Europe. Traditionally a borderland or a
EUROPE DIVIDED, 1945-1949
DENMARK
North Sea
Black Sea
Mediterrenean Sea TURKEY
The Iron Curtain in 1945
\//\ Territories occupied and annexed by the Soviet Union, 1939-1941 and 1945-1947
:
I The "eastern territories" of Germany incorporated into Poland
B i l and the Soviet Union, 1945-1947
| Soviet zones of occupation in Germany and Austria
1945
Year Communists came into power
236 C E N T R A L E U R O P E
semi-periphery of the West, the region became a westward extension of the
Soviet East."7
Generalizations about how the Communists came to power in East Central
Europe are difficult to make. Yugoslavia was an exception because it was
liberated by Tito's National Liberation Army, not the Red Army, and it installed
a Communist government without Soviet assistance, or interference,
in 1945. The Communists' rise to power in other countries in the region followed
more or less the samé pattern. During the war, Communist parties in
these states were divided into "domestic" and "Muscovite" wings. The "domestics"
worked in the underground at home, whereas the "Muscovites"
were in Soviet exile. (The geographical segregation of the party factions also
had ideological implications.) The Muscovites returned home in the wake
of the Red Army to assume leading party and governmental positions, which
inevitably lead to dissatisfaction among those Communists who had doně
the dangerous work at home.
After the first postwar elections in the region, which were relatively free
in Czechoslovakia and Hungary but much less so elsewhere, the Communist
parties participated in coalition governments with sociál dernocratic, "bourgeois
dernocratic," and agrarian parties. The Communists regularly controlled
the Ministry of the Interior, an office that allowed them to misuse
the police for political purposes and to manipulate the electoral process.
Communists also promoted the idea of the "unity" of the left: an ideological
and tactical alliance between Communists, on the one hand, and socialists
and sociál democrats, on the other. This was just a tactical ploy, however.
The destruction of independent socialist parties and the creation of
"socialist unity" or "socialist workers'" parties exclusively under Communist
control was one of the Communists' first objectives. The Communists also
promoted policies, such as the nationalization of major industries and land
reform, that were not only popular with broad sections of the population
but also, to a certain extent, necessary. Nationalization was a means of reconstruction,
and many East Central European states had a tremendous
amount of land on their hands that had to be redistributed, for example,
the former German territories in Poland, the properties of the Sudetendeutsche
in Czechoslovakia, and the assets confiscated from "fascists" and
Volksdeutsche in Hungary.
The Communists' methods of eliminating their opponents varied. Generally
Communists exploited the results of an election, which they manipulated,
or a governmental crisis, which they instigated, to undermine their
opponents. Their rise to power in Bulgaria, Romania, and Poland in 1946
was straightforward, heavy-handed, and ruthless. Politicians from the opposition
fled or were arrested on trumped up charges of "treason," tried,
and executed, and their political parties were banned.
Hungarian Communists ušed the more sophisticated approach of "šalami
tactics." They took the whole sausage, but only one thin slice at a time,
with a carefully orchestrated combination of defamation, blackmail, coercion,
and police terror. In 1947, they eliminated their most formidable political
opponent, the agrarian national Smallholders Party which held a maEAST
AND WEST, OR "YALTA E U R O P E " 237
jority of seats in the Hungarian parliament and had received an absolute majority
(53 percent) of the votes in the 1945 elections, by discovering a "conspiracy"
which ended in a gigantic show trial of 220 politicians. By 1948, the
Communists had Consolidated their control of Hungary. (Nevertheless, it
would be technically inaccurate to label the East Central European Communist
states as one-party regimes. In order to create the impression of political
pluralism, a few agrarian and "liberal" parties were left nominally intact
but strictly subordinated to the Communist Party as "bloc parties.")
In Czechoslovakia, the Communists enjoyed a considerable amount of
authentic popular support, and they emerged from the first postwar elections
with 38 percent of the vote. The Communists' rise to absolute power
in February and March 1948 was an ambiguous event, and historians háve
had trouble deciding whether it was more of a coup by the Communists or
more of a capitulation by the democrats. In any event, the Communists terrorized
the non-Communist parties and called their supporters into the
streets, and the Czechoslovak coalition government buckled under pressure.
Eduard Beneš, who had presided over the demise of Czechoslovak
democracy in 1938, had the misfortune of experiencing its renewed fall in
1948 and died shortly thereafter. His death also was symbolic, as it severed
the link between the first and the second Czechoslovak republics. The dernocratic
West was shocked by the Communist takeover in Czechoslovakia, an
event that reflected Stalin's stratégy for the region. He wanted the Communist
parties of the region to consolidate their power, even if this meant rupturing
relations with the West.
The Communist seizure of power in the individual countries of East Central
Europe was comparable in a number of respects. Whether the similarities
are enough to assume that they had a master pian that they all followed or, on
ťbe contrary, whether they acted on a more pragmatic and ad hor basis, is difficult
to determine. However, the presence of the Red Army and the allegiance
of the national Communist parties to Moscow made clear the region's
future political orientation. By the end of 1947, the (Moscow) party line also
was clear. Communists were not to cooperate with "bourgeois democrats."
Furthermore, the experience of fascist rule had radicalized many people
and made them more receptive to socialist ideas, and after the war the
shining Soviet vision of a new sociál order based on peace, justice, equality,
and prosperity appealed to many members of the younger generation and
to intellectuals, in particular. Traditional political elites had been largely
eliminated by the Nazis in Poland and Czechoslovakia or discredited to a significant
extent by collaboration in Hungary, and the Communists defamed
national traditions and prewar institutions as "feudal, bourgeois, clerical,
and fascist. "8
The new Communist intelligentsia responsible for the propagation and
administration of the forthcoming revolution came predominantly out of
the working class and had moved up through the party rank and filé or consisted
of assimilated bourgeois Jewish intellectuals with upper-class backgrounds.
(In East Central Europe, both Stalinization in the immediate postwar
period and de-Stalinization after 1956 had peculiar national and
238 C E N T R A L E U R O P E
anti-Semitic twists. In Czechoslovakia, many of the leading party officials accused
of conspiracy and executed in 1952 were Jewish. But these roles were
reversed in Poland and Hungary, where many of the most ruthless Stalinists
were Jewish. Therefore, de-Stalinization in 1956 was explicitly anti-Semitic
as was indigenous anti-Communism thereafter.)
The Communist parties Consolidated their power in two phases. Between
1945 and 1948, they purged the non-Communist or national opposition,
and then they embarked on resolute programs of Stalinization, destroying
democratic institutions and suspending civil rights, oppressing
churches, nationalizing commerce and industries, collectivizing agriculture,
and purging their own ranks. Yugoslavia was the only Communist country
in East Central Europe not sucked into the Soviet bloc. Tito wanted to rule
with his own iron fist, had his own ideas about the development of communism
in Yugoslavia, and refused to fall into line with the other Communist
parties and states in the region. The fact that the Red Army had not liberated
Yugoslavia and the Wesťs explicit approval of Tito's nonalignment also
gave him considerable latitude. Differences between Tito and Stalin led to
a dramatic split in 1948, and this ideological falling-out raised reál and imagined
tensions between "nationalists" and "Stalinists" in East Central Europe.
After Tito refused to subordinate himself to Moscow, "Titoism" became a
crime synonymous with "Troskyism," "bourgeois nationalism," "revisionism,"
and the betrayal of "the international proletariate," all various designations
for not doing things the way Moscow wanted. Throughout East Central
Europe, many alleged Communist "aberrationists" were charged with
these transgressions, prosecuted at show trials, and imprisoned or executed.
The fundamental issue at stake was whether there was "one road to socialism"
designed and dictated by Moscow or many individual "national
paths" leading to the samé goal. As long as Stalin lived, "national aberrations"
were not tolerated. But after his death in 1953, there was a struggle
between Stalinists and reform Communists in many East Central European
countries that was fueled by the offícial beginning of de-Stalinization in the
Soviet Union in 1956. The pattern of conflict between Stalinists (or Moscow
hard-liners) and East Central European reform Communists (who frequently
appealed to national sentiments and hence were called "national
Communists") was established early on and proved to be enduring. Each attempt
to change the systém—Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968,
Poland in 1980/1981, and in the Soviet Union itself in 1991— provoked a
neo-Stalinist backlash.
Dividing Germany, 1949
Despite the big summit meetings in Teheran and Yalta, regular diplomatic
consultation on a number of subordinate levels, and the establishment of
Allied joint planning commissions during the war, the Allies nevěr managed
to agree before the end of the war on how they were going to deal with Germany.
Allied planners discussed the idea of dividing Germany into smaller
EAST AND WEST, OR "YALTA E U R O P E " 239
states as one means of diminishing a future German threat. But they nevěr
a
greed to divide Germany into the two German states that were established
in 1949: the Federal Republic of Germany in the west and the German Democratic
Republic in the east. The Germans also initially had nothing to say
in the whole affair. After Nazi Germany capitulated on May 8, 1945, the Allies
disbanded the Nazi government under the leadership of Admirál Karl
Dónitz and eventually arrested its members. The absence oí ajointly articulated
Allied policy toward Germany before the end of the war and the absence
of a German government after the end of the war created a situation
that ultimately facilitated the division of the country four years later.
The last great World War II summit meeting was held in Potsdam, outside
Berlin, during July and August 1945. The composition of the BigThree
had changed considerably. Churchill had won the war for Britain but lost
the postwar elections; Clement Attlee was now the British prime minister.
Roosevelt died shortly after the Yalta conference and his vice president, Harry
Truman, assumed his pláce. Germany was the centrál issue at this meeting.
The Allies decided on the Oder-Neisse Line as a provisional German-Polish
frontier and endorsed the expulsion of Germans east of it as
well as from Czechoslovakia and Hungary. They outlawed the Nazi Party and
all its suborganizations, introduced denazification programs, and decided
to prosecute leading Nazis at Nuremberg for war crimes and crimes against
humanity. They also finally agreed on the modalities for the occupation of
Germany and Berlin, which were divided into four zones but were to be
jointly administrated as a whole.
In theory, a quadripartite body, the Allied Control Council, was to agree
unanimously on Allied policy for all of Germany which, in turn, was to be
uniformly applied in the four zones by the respective occupational powers.
This top-down administration was to be complemented by a bottom-up reorganization
of Germany, which involved the reestablishment of political
parties, on the one hand, and the rejuvenation of political institutions on a
local and provincial levels within the four zones, on the other. The political
parties and the provinces (Lánder) were to be the building blocks of a new
German statě. A high degree of consensus and cooperation among the Allies
would háve been necessary for the quadripartite administration of Germany
to function as envisioned, but the ability of the Allies to agree on fundamental
policy issues disintegrated rapidly after the war. The individual
occupational powers were also effectively in a position to act as they saw fit
in their respective zones.
The dissension among the Allies on how to administer Germany was a
manifestation of deeper differences between the Soviet East and the democratic
West. Whether the Allied inability to agree on Germany directly contributed
to a greater estrangement between East and West or, conversely,
whether ideological confrontation caused a political gridlock in Germany
has been a hotly debated issue among historians of different political dispositions.
This is an important issue because it raises the question of who
was ultimately responsible for the division of Germany—Communists and
240 C E N T R A L E U R O P E
Russians in the East or anti-Communists and Americans in the West—or if
the division of Germany could háve been avoided in the course of dividing
of Europe.
In any event, the four Allies failed to establish a centrál administration
for Germany. They argued about whether economic unification should precede
political unification, or vice versa, and whether or not national elections
should be held. It would be unfair to blame all the Allies' problems on
the Soviets. The French, initially more anti-German than anti-Soviet, acted
obstructively, too. In 1947, the American and the British occupational
regimes created a "bizone" to coordinate their economic policies, and the
French eventuallyjoined this configuration. Meanwhile, the Soviets pursued
their own policies in their zone. In 1948, the failure of Allied cooperation
in Germany and the success of the Communists in East Central Europe motivated
the Western Allies to abandon the idea of German unity for the time
being at least, and they drew up plans for the economic and political integration
of western Germany into the European and transatlantic west. The
Western Allies proposed that the German political parties in the western
zones of occupation work out a provisional constitution, and they introduced
a reformed West German currency, the deutsche Mark. The Soviets responded
by withdrawing from the Allied Control Council, introducing an
East German Mark, and blockading Berlin. However, their attempt to drive
the Western Allies out of West Berlin by starving the inhabitants in the western
half of the city was frustrated by a spectacular airlift.
In September 1948, representatives from the Lánder in the western zones
convened in Bonn to draft a provisional constitution, and the adoption and
ratification of the Bonner Grundgesetz, or Bonn Basic Law, led to the establishment
of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) in May 1949. The Western
perception of West Germany and the Western German perception of
the Allied occupation changed dramatically. The Western powers lost an old
enemy and gained a new ally. From the West German perspective, the victors
stopped occupying Western Germany and began defending its independence.
While democracy was being established in West Germany, fullscale
Stalinization commenced in East Germany, and it followed the
established Communist patterns of coercion and collectivization. East German
Communists also drafted and adopted their own version of a constitution,
and the German Democratic Republic (GDR), a statě of "farmers and
workers," was proclaimed in October 1949.
The unwavering allegiance of West Germany to the West and East Germany
to the East was extraordinary, and some observers ironically described
the Germans' loyalty to their respective states and ideological blocs in terms
of the German national psyche: a propensity for order, disciplině, and perfectionism
under prevailing political circumstances, whatever they may be.
After the war, the Germans in the west decided to be the best democrats,
and the Germans in the east were resolved to be the best Communists. But,
this kind of observation obscures the fact that the political culture that
evolved in the FRG represented a break with undesirable German national
traditions of authoritarianism, whereas the one that developed in the GDR
EAST AND WEST, OR "YALTA E U R O P E " 241
did not. The GDR was one of the most successful Communist states in the
eastern bloc, not because it was Communist, but because it was "German"
in the negative sense of the word. Piety, Prussian organizational logic,
Nazism, and Stalinism were compatible in many respects. Thus, the transition
from one form of totalitarianism to another—from "brown fascism" to
"red fascism"—involved a change of ideologies more than a departure from
previous political structures or attitudes.
The Bonn Basic Law and the relationship between the two German states
were unusual in many respects. Although the Bonn Basic Law had the legal
status of a constitution in the Federal Republic of Germany, it was a provisional
document designed to bridge the gap until a definitivě constitution
for all Germany could be drafted. The FRG assumed the moral and Financial
responsibilities that came with being the successor statě of the Third
Reich, whereas the GDR as a "socialist and anti-fascist statě" completely dissociated
itself from Nazi Germany.
Although the Federal Republic of Germany developed a pragmatic
modus vivendi with the "second German statě" and began to cultivate diplomatic
relations with the GDR on several levels in the early 1970s, it nevěr formally
recognized the GDR. On the contrary, the FRG considered itself the
only legitimate representative of the German people, and it granted FRG citizenship
to any German resident of the GDR who was in a position to request
it. In this respect, the Germans who were defacto citizens of the GDR
were de jure citizens of the FRG, or potential West Germans. All they had to
do is get to the West.9
Finally, the FRG not only claimed to be the sole legitimate representative
of all Germans; as the only successor statě of Nazi Germany, it also maintained
that any peace settlement with Germany had to be based on a territorial
status quo ante bellům: the German frontiers of 1937. The legal
reasoning behind this argument is complicated, but it essentially meant that
the FRG—as a partial, provisional, and democratic German statě—could
not definitively accept those changes in the prewar frontiers of Germany
that the Allies had made unilaterally after the war, because the preconditions
for recognizing those changes—German unification and the conclusion
of a peace treaty—had not been fulfilled. In other words, the war was
over, but from a legal point of view, peace had not been concluded.
As a result, the FRG did not formally recognize the postwar annexation
of the "eastern regions" of prewar German territory by Poland and the Soviet
Union. Although the leading politicians of the Federal Republic of Germany
recognized that the "eastern regions" were irrevocably lost for Germany
and were wise enough nevěr to turn this formal issue into an actual
claim, the fact that the Federal Republic of Germany was bound by a cogent
legal argument to question the legitimacy of the postwar frontiers on formal
grounds burdened the relations between the FRG and Poland. West German
claims were a constant source of anxiety for Poles. They also gave Communist
propagandists an opportunity to accuse the Federal Republic of Germany
of wanting to revise the European order that World War II had established,
just as Hitler did after World War I. (The German-Polish border
242 C E N T R A L E U R O P E
issue was finally settled in a bilateral treaty after the unification of Germany
in 1990.)
The division of Europe into East and West was at an advanced stage before
the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic
were established in 1949. Between 1945 and 1948, the Communists
had consolidated their control in Yugoslavia, Albania, Bulgaria, Romania,
Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia. The Iron Curtain on the "German-German"
frontier and, after 1961, the Berlin Wall were the most
poignant symbols for the partition of Europe. Germany was notjust a microcosm
of the East-West split; it was the key to overcoming the division of
Europe. As long as Germany was divided, Europe would stav divided.
There were two completely different best-case scenarios for German unification:
"neutrality" on Soviet terms or democracy on Western terms. In
1952, the Soviets transmitted a diplomatic notě to the Western Allies in
which they proposed resuming quadripartite negotiations on the "German
question." The so-called Stalin notě envisioned the establishment of a PanGerman
government in which "progressive" political forces would be (over)
represented, the negotiation of a peace treaty, and the unification of Germany
based on the condition that Germany would not participate in any military
coalitions or alliances in the future. German neutrality or the neutralization
of Germany was the price to be paid for unification. The West
German government and the Western Allies viewed this Soviet offer with suspicion
and eventually rejected it.
Some historians háve argued that this was merely a tactical ploy by the
Soviet Union to slow down the process of Western European economic and
military integration and that it was aimed at preventing the "drift" of the Federal
Republic of Germany into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Others,
however, view the Wesťs failure to respond to this Soviet initiative as a
tragically missed opportunity, and they blame Western politicians of being
shortsighted and intransigent. The interpretation of Stalin's 1952 offer is
still a source of controversy. In any event, the best Germany that the Soviet
Union could imagine was a neutral one: either not associated with the West
or disassociated from the West in military and economic terms.1 0
This vision
also was similar in many respects to the kind of Germany that many representatives
of the West German left in the 1980s wished to see: a neutral, demilitarized,
and nuclear-free statě.
The Soviet proposal for German unification was based on a big compromise,
and one of the reasons that the West rejected it was that it wanted
reunification on its own democratic terms. These terms were unrealistic,
however, because they presupposed the democratic transformation of East
Germany as well as the Soviet willingness to let East Germany go. In principle,
West German politicians nevěr questioned the importance of German
reunification. It was and remained a long-term policy goal and constitutional
obligation of the Federal Republic of Germany. However, the prospects
of reunification were so dismal that very few people believed it to be
a foreseeable event.
The longer the division of Germany lasted, the more acceptable it beEAST
AND WEST, OR "YALTA E U R O P E " 243
came on both sides of the Iron Curtain. For example, in the 1950s and 1960s,
between 35 and 45 percent of the West Germans surveyed considered reunification
to be the most important question in the Federal Republic; after
the mid-1970s, however, it was nevěr more than 1 percent.11
The word
"reunification" effectively disappeared from the operative vocabulary of
West German politicians and was replaced by other terms reflecting the
Western German policy options in German-German relations: Ostpolitik,
rapprochement, détente, cooperation, normalization. Furthermore, the
idea of the unification of Germany or, after 1949, reunification, was a generational
issue. That is, it meant much more to the older generations of Germans
than to the younger ones who had grown up in two German states and
had been taught not only that the division of Germany was the price that
the Germans had to pay for the Third Reich but also that it was indispensable
to the maintenance of peace in Europe.
Starting the Cold War
As long as the Cold War lasted, there was an ongoing debatě among historians
and political scientists in the West about who started it and whether it
could háve been avoided or shortened, and since 1989 they háve argued
about who won or lost it and why. Neither the time nor the pláce in which
the Cold War began is a source of controversy. It started as a European affair
that acquired increasingly clear contours between 1946 and 1949 and
assumed globál dimensions thereafter. However, historians must establish a
hierarchy of causes for the Cold War, and the importance of individual variables
such as ideology (or political principle), economics, or national interest
can be weighted and combined in various ways. Different interpretations
reflect different understandings of the roles played by the Soviet Union and
the United States (as well as varying assumptions about the nature of Marxism-Leninism
or capitalist democracy).
Theories of the origins of the Cold War can be divided into different
schools. The traditional interpretation of the Cold War is the product of an
older generation of scholars, many of whom had firsthand experience with
Nazism or Stalinism, whereas revisionist interpretations háve been proposed
by younger generations. "Idealists" and "realists" argue about the motives
behind the conflict: The former emphasize the importance of political principle,
and the latter underscore the role of economics and national interest.
Liberals and conservatives in the United States or representatives of the political
left and right in Western Europe also regularly disagree about the
Cold War. In conservative terms, the issue at stake is whether or not one was
"hard" or "soft" on Communism. Generálky speaking, idealists and conservatives
support a traditional, pro-American interpretation of the Cold War,
whereas realists and representatives of the political left advance various
forms of revisionism critical of the United States' role in the initiation and
continuation of the conflict.
The initial interpretation of the Cold War took Soviet ideology at face
value. It was based on the assumption that the Soviet Union was an expan-
244 C E N T R A L E U R O P E
sive and aggressive totalitarian statě ruled by a ruthless and unscrupulous
dictator and actively pursuing the objective of world domination. The establishment
of Communist regimes in Eastern Europe and the Iron Curtain
was indicative of Soviet aspirations, and the Western democratic world
closed ranks to protéct itself and combat the spread of Communism. These
issues were not open to interpretation. They were generally recognized as
matters of fact.
Revisionists later questioned this version of the story and attempted to
invert the logic of the beginning of the Cold War. They maintained, for example,
that Soviet policy was more reactive than aggressive, and they contended
that the belligerent nature of Western anti-Communism threatened
the Soviet Union to such a great extent that it was forced into a defensive
posture that entailed clamping down in Eastern Europe. These two schools
of thought háve enjoyed varying degrees of popularity among different generations
of Western Sovietologists and historians.
The older generation of analysts from the 1940s and 1950s, frequently
émigrés from East Central Europe or the Soviet LT
nion, advanced a relatively
straightforward theory of totalitarianism developed during World War II to
describe both Nazism and Communism. This novel form of government
tried to subordinate all forms of sociál, economic, and political organization
in a single hierarchy that in turn was dominated by one party and one individual
or dictator. Totalitarian ideology envisioned the radical transformation
of humankind and society and sanctioned domestic terror and foreign
aggression as legitimate means for achieving these ends. Furthermore, totalitarian
rule was comprehensive; it penetrated all realms of society. From
this perspective, the Cold War was the logical, moral, political, and military
continuation of World War II. Hitler had been defeated. Stalin had not.
The younger generation of revisionists who began their careers in the
latě 1960s criticized this traditional interpretation of the Cold War for being
too ideological, uncritical, and methodologically unsophisticated. Instead,
they assumed that the Soviet Union was not as bad as the proponents
of the totalitarian theory claimed, made a variety of distinctions between
Nazism and Communism, and pointed out that Soviet reality was much more
complex than the gross simplifications of totalitarian theory. They also believed
that the Soviet systém was capable of modernization and reform.
Theories about the Cold War fell into corresponding "right-wing" and
"left-wing" categories. On one side, the proponents of the traditional theory
criticized as totalitarian the tenets of Marxism, socialism, and communism.
On the other, many revisionists showed a certain sympathy for Marxist
or socialist ideals, and in some cases, they felt that the Soviet Union was
basically a good idea that had been poorly executed and had massively gone
astray, especially under Stalin. From this perspective, the Soviet Union appeared
to be inherently capable of developing into a freer and more prosperous
systém, especially after Staluťs death in 1953.
Different dates can be ušed to mark the beginning of the American engagement
in the Cold War, each illustrating different political, economic,
and strategie dimensions of the conflict. On March 5, 1946, Winston
EAST AND WEST, OR "YALTA E U R O P E " 245
Churchill gave a speech in Fulton, Missouri, in which he popularized the
metaphor of the Iron Curtain. Just over one year later, President Harry Truman
told the U.S. Congress that the world was faced with a struggle between
two fundamentally incompatible ways of life. One, which the Americans understood
as the American way, was based on the "will of the majority" and
was "distinguished by free institutions, representative government, [and]
free elections," and the other, which relied on "terror and oppression," was
"based upon the will of the minority forcibly imposed upon the majority."
The immediate occasion for this speech was Truman's request that the
United States provide economic and military aid to Greece and Turkey in
order to help their respective governments combat Communist insurgents.
However, he also stated that the United States was determined in principle
to assist those people elsewhere whose freedom was threatened by "armed
minorities or by outside pressure."12
The Truman Doctrine was born.
For Harry Truman and most other Americans and Europeans at this
time, the Cold War was a straightforward question of political principle (or
political ideology). The choice to be made was between freedom, liberty, and
demoeracy or their absence, although subsequent interpretations made this
seem less clear and almost hopelessly complicated.13
The Cold War worldview
distinguished between good and evil, or "us" and "them," in a manner
that was perhaps naivě, simplistic, and self-righteous. It also was responsible
for a number of dubious U.S. domestic and foreign policies, vigilantes like
the "Commie" hunter Senátor Joseph McCarthy at home, and an assortment
of politically reprehensible allies and client states in the developing world
whose only redeeming value was their anti-Communism. Whether the merit
of the ideals to which the United States was committed can be ušed as an
excuse for the excesses of the Cold War or, conversely, whether the excesses
were indicative of the shortcomings of the ideals themselves is a point that
proponents and eritics of U.S. policy during the Cold War will continue to
debatě. Nevertheless, if the Cold War was about ideas, the fundamental
choice was clear.
George F. Kennan, one of the most influential personalities in the American
foreign policy establishment after the war, was responsible for the classic
formulation of the stratégy that the United States was to pursue in its confrontation
with the Soviet Union. In an article, "The Sources of Soviet
Conduct," which he published under the pseudonym "X" in the July 1947
issue of Foreign Affairs, he outlined the "innate antagonism between capitalism
and Socialism" and asserted that "the main element of any United States
policy toward the Soviet Union must be that of a long-term, patient but firm
and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies."14
The Cold War
was, in this respect, a confrontation between fundamentally different sociál,
economic, and political systems, each championed by states that emerged
from World War II with an unprecedented amount of power: the United
States and the Soviet Union.
A "realist" school of international relations would prefer to invert the relationship
of political principle to national interest in both the American
and Russian cases. The realists maintain that the divergent U.S. and Soviet
246 C E N T R A L E U R O P E
ideologies merely veiled the reál source of conflict: clashes of national interest
on a globál scale between two hegemonical powers. This interpretation
downplays the importance of ideas because they are just an ideological
subterfuge for national economic interests. However, it would be unwise to
overlook the fact that Soviet confidence in Soviet ideology—and, one might
add, American faith in the American way-of-life—had reached their zeniths
after World War II.
It is important not to lose sight of the psychological factors that were at
work on both sides. The Cold War was a world historical conflict for the
Americans and the Soviets, and each side felt threatened by the other.
Whether the mutual perception of these threats ever really matched their
actual dimensions or the intentions of the adversaries is a related problém.
One may argue that the American fear of Communism at the beginning of
the Cold War was commensurate with the Soviet faith in Communism. Certainly
one of the peculiarities of the ensuing conflict was that American antiCommunists
steadfastly continued to believe in the threat of Communism
long after the Communists had ceased believing in Communisnťs promise
and potential. The manner in which the Cold War ended—the Soviet Union
collapsed—seems to indicate that the Soviet Union's political posture
changed dramatically somewhere along the way. Nonetheless, ideas and ideologies
were important at the beginning of the Cold War, and they helped
heighten or, as some critics maintain, exaggerate the conflict. This is a problém
that I shall discuss later.
Once the United States had announced its intention to contain Communism,
it had to articulate economic and military policies to do so, and
they were the Marshall Pian and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. In
a commencement speech at Harvard University on June 5, 1947, General
George Marshall, the U.S. Secretary of State, announced plans for the
largest foreign aid program in history, a pian that would bear his name. Historians
háve argued about how altruistic or imperialist the Marshall Pian,
was as well as to what extent the United States needed the "European Recovery
Program" as much as the Europeans did. In his speech, Marshall emphasized
the idealism underlying the proposal: "Our policy is directed not
against any country or doctrine but against hunger, poverty, desperation,
and chaos." He also made it clear that "governments, political parties, or
groups which seek to perpetuate human misery in order to profit therefrom
politically or otherwise will encounter the opposition of the United States."
But, he did not technically exclude any one from the start: "The program
should be a joint one, agreed to by a number of, if not all, European na-
tions."
15
Although Poland and Czechoslovakia were sincerely interested in participating
in this program, the Soviet Union dismissed as "imperialistic" the
idea of the Marshall Pian for itself and its "allies" in East Central Europe. But
the Western European states participated enthusiastically, and the initial $13
billion of aid helped lay the foundations for their postwar recovery and pros­
perity.
The political logic of the United States for providing economic aid to EuEAST
AND WEST, OR "YALTA EUROPF." 247
ropě was relatively simple: If widespread economic hardship had provided
a fertile breeding ground for left- and right-wing radicalism and totalitarianism
in Europe—the hardships of World War I had directly contributed to
the success of the Bolsheviks in Russia and Germanys economic duress
helped precipitate the Nazis' rise to power in Germany in 1933—then economic
recovery, stability, and prosperity would deprive ideological radicalism
of its materiál basis. They also would enhance the chances of democracy.
America, therefore, invested in its allies.
The United States also had concrete economic interests in European reconstruction.
World War II had brought the country out of the Depression
and had created the most powerful economy in the world. Government analysts
recognized that the U.S. economy had to find markets for its productive
potential after the war, or otherwise it would experience a dramatic
downturn, the consequences of which would be magnified even further by
planned cutbacks in federal expenditures related to the war effort. Thus the
idea of giving Western European countries grants, credits, and subsidies earmarked
for the purchase of U.S. goods and services was born, and it provided
a way out of an impending economic dilemma. In helping Europe,
the United States helped itself. Aid created the basis for trade and secured
new export markets in a postwar globál economy in which the United States
enjoyed a dominant position.
Furthermore, the fact that government expenditures in the United
States did not recede after the war to the extent many people had anticipated
they would greatly benefited the American economy. Although government
expenditures dropped sharply from 1945 to 1948, they still were
more than twice what they had been in 1940, and between 1948 and the end
of the 1950s, they nearly doubled again. The main reason for this remarkable
increase in government spending was defense. From an ideological or
strategie perspective, the obvious purpose of unprecedented peacetime expenditures
on defense was to contain Communism by defending the United
States, its allies, and American interests throughout the world.
From a fiscal perspective, the billions and billions of dollars spent on defense
during the Cold War also helped stimulate economic growth and
maintain domestic prosperity in the United States. In other words, defending
the American way of life also financed the American way of life for millions
of Americans, not to mention the European way of life for millions of
West Europeans, too. It allowed Western European governments to invest
less in defense—and more on infrastructure, health, housing, education,
and sociál welfare—than they would háve been able to if they had spent
more on their own defense.
The establishment of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)
in 1949 put one of the finishing touches on the institutionalization of the
Cold War in its initial phase. When World War II ended, American military
planners wanted to "get the boys home." The idea of maintaining a considerable
and permanent military presence in Europe and the Pacific did not
correspond to the United States' isolationist traditions, but the Cold War as
a European and a globál conflict essentially changed the United States' for-
248 C E N T R A L E U R OP E
eign policy demeanor. As a result of World War II, Western European states
had also learned a number of lessons about collective security, and their immediate
concern after the war was the German potential for aggression in
the future. But the actuality of the Soviet threat in Europe quickly displaced
hypothetical considerations about a German one. Western European
democracies shared the United States' perception of the Soviet Union as a
threat, and they wanted to maintain a U.S. presence in order to deter it.
From the American perspective, Europe was the most important immediate
theater of "containment," and the defense of the United States did not
start on the Atlantic coast but on the Elbe River. The purpose of NATO was
relatively straightforward. The idea of a transatlantic pact for collective security
was to keep the United States in, Germanydown, and the Soviet Union
out. The Warsaw Pact also had similar objectives in Eastern Europe, with one
important exception. Its purpose was to keep the Soviet Union in, Germany
down, and—as the outcome of the Hungarian revolution in 1956 and the
end of the Prague Spring in 1968 demonstrated—East Central Europe
down, too.
Critics of U.S. foreign policy during the Cold War maintain that the antiCommunist
rhetoric of containment obscured the United States' reál objectives:
the "hegemonie project"16
of containing not only its enemies but
also its friends and allies. Idealists contend that political principle—"defending
the Free World"—was the most important motive of U.S. policy,
whereas "realists" and revisionists identify and document less noble and selfserving
incentives called "the American national interest."
There is no point denying that American hegemony in Europe (and elsewhere)
developed in the course of the Cold War. However, the hegemony
of the "American empire" was qualitatively different from the control the
Soviets exercised in their own. The distinction between hegemony "by invitation"
and by imposition is an important one.1 7
"Ami go home!" belonged
to the political vocabulary of many WT
estern Europeans, and the frequency
of this exhortation inereased in proportion to the development of freedom,
prosperity, and security in Western Europe. The reason the United States
did not comply with this demand was that it represented a minority opinion
in functioning democracies that ultimately identified their national security
interests with a continuing U.S. presence.
The consequences of dissidence in East Central Europe were different.
Nevertheless, Soviet propaganda always emphasized how "friendly" and "fraternal"
the Soviet Union's relationships were with its allies. Before 1989, East
Central Europeans ušed to ask one another rhetorically whether the Soviets
were their friends or their brothers. The answer to this question was telling:
"They are our brothers. You can piek your friends."
* 12 *
The Failure of Eastern Europe
1956-1989
When the Cold War started, the concepts of East and West were more than
sufficient for deseribing the political reality of a divided Europe, a division
that appeared to be permanent. The Soviet version of Communism and the
Soviet Communist version of Eastern Europe seemed to be here to stay. The
idea that the Soviet Union would let its empire go was simply unrealistic, according
to the experts of that now defunct disciplině called Sovietology. The
assumption that any attempt to change the political status quo in Eastern
Europe would endanger peace not only in Europe but also on a globál scale
became one of the centrál premises of East-West relations: peaceful coexistence
after the mid-1950s and détente in the 1970s. Then East-West relations
deteriorated to such an extent in the early 1980s that H. W. Brands referred
to this period as the "Cold War II."
1
Détente ended with the Soviet
invasion of Afghánistán in 1979 which demonstrated to the West that the Soviet
Union was still intent on aggressively expanding its empire. Ronald Reagan,
elected to his first term as U.S. president in 1980, shocked friend and
foe alike by referring to the Soviet Union as an "evil empire." The Cold War,
East and West, was here to stay.
Of course, not everyone in the Soviet East abandoned the idea of Central
Europe. Many members of the older generation—socialized before
World War I or during the interwar period—continued to believe in the conservative
(traditional, national, and Christian) or "bourgeois" (liberal and
enlightened) values that were part and parcel of that Central European tradition
defining the region as the easternmost part of Western European civilization.
However, the Communist control of public life, the press, and education
made Central Europe a "private" and a subversive idea, and it was
250 C E N T R A L E U R O P E
exactly this class of "reactionaries" that the Communists wanted to destroy.
They attempted to replace traditional intelligentsia with a new class of Eastern
European Communist intellectuals systematically recruited from the
rural or working classes. These agents of Stalin's agenda for the region were
the vanguard of building socialism in Eastern Europe, and they were, in the
Communist sense of the word, Eastern Europeans. The next generation of
Eastern European intellectuals had a more critical relationship with
Moscow. This was partially a result of the de-Stalinization in the mid-1950s
that brought the reform Communists into power. They did not believe in a
the slavish imitation of the Soviet model for building socialism and were interested
in pursuing a variety of different "national paths" to Communism,
but they were Eastern Europeans, too, because they still embraced a Communist
program.
One sinali group of people continued to propagate the idea of Central
Europe: the first wave of Central European émigrés from Soviet Eastern Europe
to the West, those who left during the initial period of Stalinization in
the latě 1940s or early 1950s. (Subsequent waves of émigrés followed: Hungarians
in 1956, Czechs and Slovaks in 1968, and Poles in 1981.) They suffered
a fate common to all exiles: Věry few people in the West seemed to pay
attention to them or to show even a remote understanding of the issues that
concerned them.
Being disappointed in the West was one of the complaints of Central European
émigrés in the West as well as Central European intellectuals in the
East. Western ignorance, or a combination of negligence and amnesia, was
the main problém. Most people in the West did not even know that the countries
that formed the western provinces of the new Soviet empire represented
the eastern frontier of Western civilization, nor did they fully understand
the true nature of Communism or the implications of Russian Soviet
totalitarianism. The "attitude of the average person in the people's democracies"
in the East toward the West, as Czestaw Mitosz observed in the early
1950s in The Captive Mind, his analysis of the relationship of intellectuals to
Communism, was "despair mixed with a residue of hope." He described the
Eastern intellectuafs attitude toward the West as "somewhat like disappointed
love" that "often leaves a sediment of sarcasm."
2
Civěn these circumstances, it should be apparent why very few people
spoke about Central Europe in the decades following World War II. With
the exception of a handful of émigrés and experts, no one in the West
seemed to know much about the idea or the region, and many Western specialists,
who were trained during the Cold War to analýze Communism,
methodologically subsumed most of the region under the umbrella concept
of the Soviet East. The Soviet Union and Eastern Europe (or "the bloc")
were one region, not two (Central or East Central and Eastern Europe). In
Eastern Europe itself, the Communists applied the samé logic of ideological
unity, although they ušed different concepts to justify it such as "the perpetual
friendship of the Soviet Union," "fraternal cooperation," and the "socialist
division of labor."
Under such conditions, it seemed unrealistic to talk about Europe in any
MILITARY AND EGONOMIC BLOCS, 1955-1989
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1956 Anti-Communist revolutions in the East bloc
252 C E N T R A L E U R O P E
other terms than East and West. But in the early 1980s an increasing number
of intellectuals and dissidents in Eastern Europe, a handful of émigrés,
academics, journalists, and even a few politicians in the West started to use
the concept of Central Europe, or East Central Europe, with greater frequency.
There was no reál consensus on where this region was, and there
were regional and ideological variations on the idea of Central Europe
which had one common denominator: Central Europe was a means of
searching for alternatives to the Iron Curtain, the Cold War, and the partition
of Europe. The political implications of the idea of Central Europe were
so enormous that realists tended to dismiss the concept altogether.
It is easy to retrospectively ascertain that the reemergence of the idea of
Central Europe paralleled the finál crisis of Communism in Eastern Europe
during the 1980s. If the bankruptcy of Communism in Eastern Europe was
one of the prerequisites for the reemergence of the idea of Central Europe,
or some of the most important versions of it, we should look at how Communism
failed in Eastern Europe in order to understand the renaissance of
Central Europe as an idea and a region.
Revolutions and Reforms:
1956, 1968, and 1980-1981
In light of the failure of Communism, it might seem unnecessary to ask
whether Communism was a good idea that was merely poorly executed or a
bad idea to start with. The distinction between methods and principles is an
important one. As long as Communists believed in method—-the possibility
of reforming or perfecting the Communist systém—it was viable. But once
they recognized that the principles on which the systém was based had to be
changed—such as the Communist Party's monopoly on political power or
the state's monopoly on the economy—it was not.
The history of Communism in the twentieth century analogously can be
written from two different perspectives. It may be viewed sympathetically as
a series of missed opportunities or analyzed critically in terms of its inherent
defects: the systemic flaws or moral and political misconceptions that
burdened it from the very start and that became clearer with time. In the
first čase, Stalin may be accused of ruining or perverting the fundamentally
good ideas of Lenin and Marx; in the second čase, Lenin and ultimately
Marx are responsible for the basically bad ideas that Stalin executed all too
well. Regardless of the perspective one prefers, Stalin is the centrál figuře in
the story. He was the architect of building socialism in the Soviet Union before
World War II and responsible for exporting it to Eastern Europe there-
after.
De-Stalinization in 1956 was the watershed in the history of European
Communism. After Stalin's death in 1953, there was a "thaw," a period of liberalization.
Nikita Khrushchev eventually emerged victorious in the struggle
for power in the Soviet Union, and one of his main concerns was improving
the performance of the systém he had inherited from Stalin. He
understood that innovation, dynamism, and growth would be difficult in an
T H E FAILURE OF EASTERN EUROPE 2.™
"administrative-command systém" based on excessive centralization, coercion,
and fear, and he recognized that the habits and interests of the party
bureaucrats were one of the primary obstacles he confronted. Khrushchev
also realized that he could not remedy the organizational deficiencies of the
Stalinistic systém without criticizing the ideology behind it. Therefore, he
had to dismantle Stalin's reputation in order to reorganize the systém bearing
his name.
At the Twentieth Party Congress in early 1956, Khrushchev gave a "secret
speech" condemning Stalin. In a tirade lasting for hours, he denounced
Stalin's "personality cult," the party purges of the 1930s, the secret police,
the extensive network of concentration camps or gulags? and Stalin's blundering
as a military commander during World War II. He accused Stalin of
negligence, incompetence, and deceit which cost millions of Soviet citizens
their lives. Stalin and his regime were criminal.
Khrushchev had to mobilize those members of the Communist Party
who were interested in reform, against the Stalinist hard-liners who were
not, and his stratégy for de-Stalinization was to undermine the legitimacy
and credibility of the old guard by making them accomplices to Stalin's
crimes. Although Khrushchev's program of de-Stalinization was inspired by
the domestic problems of the Soviet Union, it also had profound consequences
abroad. In the West, many Communists and intellectuals sympathetic
to the Soviet Union were completely disillusioned. In Eastern Europe,
the Stalinists in power had not been forewarned by Khrushchev about his
plans. They were shocked to hear this type of talk coming from Moscow because
it undermined their positions, too.
Using the criterion of reform or innovation, the post-World War II history
of Communism in the Soviet Union can be divided into four generál
periods, each of which had far-reaching implications for the status of Communism
in Eastern Europe: Stalinism, or the totalitarian period, which lasted
until Stalin's death in 1953; de-Stalinization in 1956 followed by a phase
of liberalization and experimentation under Nikita Khrushchev until 1964;
a period of posttotalitarian retrenchment, consolidation, and stagnation under
Leonid Brezhnevfrom 1964 until his death in 1982 (including the governments
of Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko, each of whom died
shortly after coming to power); and the Gorbachev era from 1985 until 1991.
De-Stalinization illustrated the extent to which a change in Communist
doctrine in the Soviet Union affected the Communist regimes in Eastern
Europe. On the one hand, the Soviet Communists' willingness or unwillingness
to experiment with reform at home determined the Eastern European
Communists' latitude to experiment with (or against) the systém in
their own countries. On the other hand, innovation in the Soviet Union inevitably
created problems for those Communist regimes in Eastern Europe
that were more conservative than the one in Moscow itself. De-Stalinization
in the Soviet Union created a crisis for the reigning Stalinists of Eastern Europe
in the mid-1950s (especially Poland and Hungary), just as Gorbachev's
initiatives of perestroika (restructuring) and glasnost (openness) created
problems for the representatives of the old Brezhnev era in Eastern Europe
254 C E N T R A L E U R O P E
in the second half of the 1980s (especially the German Democratic Republic,
Czechoslovakia, and Bulgaria).
Furthermore, de-Stalinization sparked a debatě among those Eastern
European intellectuals who had embraced the socialist vision. These socalled
revisionists were philosophers who, as Marxists, criticized Stalin and
argued in the name of Marx for a return to more genuine socialist values
and ideals. They assumed that there had to be not only philosophical but
also political alternatives to the Russian Soviet version of Communism: perhaps
even a "third way" between the type of capitalist democracy that had
developed in the West and the socialism that had arisen in the East during
the Cold War.
The question whether there was only one true path or many paths to socialism
had been at the heart of the split between Stalin and Tito in 1948.
The fact that Khrushchev sought a reconciliation with Tito in 1955 was an
indication that attitudes were changing in Moscow, and after 1956
Khrushchev had to de-Stalinize Soviet foreign policy as well. Khrushchev was
prepared, within limits, to allow Communist regimes in Eastern Europe a
certain amount of latitude to experiment with "national paths." De-Stalinization
helped to intensify the conflicts in Eastern Europe between the
Moscow-oriented Stalinists, who were in power, and the reform-oriented,
"national Communists," many of whom had previously been accused of
"Titoism." It also provided an opportunity for the peoples of Eastern Europe
to express their discontent with the Stalinist systém.
Infighting among the different wings of the Communist Party and the
potential for popular protest created explosive situations in Poland and
Hungary in 1956, with events getting out of hand in Poland first. In June,
some 50,000 workers in Poznaň, an industrial center west of Warsaw, rioted
against increases in prices and work quotas. The protest spread across the
country, and as it began gaining momentům and support, it took on an increasingly
anti-Communist tone. The Stalinists in power ušed Stalinist methods
to squelch it, by calling on the Polish army, which led to more than fifty
deaths and hundreds of wounded. Confronted with the prospect of continued
unrest and pressure from the nationalistic wing of the Communist Party,
the Polish Stalinists desperately sought a way to prevent the situation from
deteriorating further.
This desperation pavěd the way for the political comeback of Wladyslaw
Gomulka, a former first secretary of the Polish Communist party who himself
had been a victim of the Stalinists. (He was a national Communist who
had been accused of "Titoism" in 1948 and was removed from power.) Gomulka
was rehabilitated and reinstated in his old position in October 1956,
and he managed to defuse the explosive situation. As a nationalist and a victim
of the Stalinists, he had the sympathy of the population at large, and he
announced a program of Polish de-Stalinization that enhanced his popularity.
The Soviet Union followed events in Poland with great apprehension,
and there was a strong likelihood of a Soviet intervention. (Khrushchev was
prepared to tolerate anti-Stalinist reform but not anti-Communist revoluT
H E FAILURE OF EASTERN EUROPE 255
tion.) But Gomulka managed to convince Khrushchev that Polanďs commitment
to Communism and the Soviet Union was still intact.
The political setting in Hungary in 1956 was similar to that in Poland.
There had been infighting between the Stalinists and the national reform
Communists in the party and considerable popular discontent with the Stalinist
systém, based on its poor economic performance. The dynamics of the
protest and reform evolved differently, however. In Hungary, Communist intellectuals,
not workers, spearheaded the antiregime protest. They were devastated
by tales of terror that accompanied de-Stalinization and wanted to
see Mátyás Rákosi, Hungary's premiér Stalinist, ousted from office. Many intellectuals
sympathized with Imre Nagy, a more liberal and popular Communist
leader who had been appointed prime minister in 1953 and tried to
de-Stalinize Hungary before the official advent of de-Stalinization in the Soviet
Union. However, Rákosi and his cohorts maneuvered Nagy out of office
in 1955 and then expelled him from the Communist Party. In an attempt to
pacify the situation, the Soviets helped orchestrate a change of leadership
in July and replaced Rákosi with one of his associates, Ernó Gero. Replacing
one Stalinist with another did very little to calm the situation. Antiregime
protesters, mainly students, began making bolder and bolder demands, and
they were encouraged by how events had transpired in Poland in October.
At a large demonstration in Budapest on October 23, 1956, the protesters
demanded political liberalization, the dissolution of the secret police,
and the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Hungary. It still is not clear how
the shooting started, but gunfire sparked a revolution that began on the
streets of Budapest and swept through the nation like wildfire. Workers and
farmers swelled the ranks of the protesters, who armed themselves and
clashed with the police, the Hungarian army, and Soviet units.
The days that followed were full of confusion, attempts at reconciliation,
misunderstandings, and violence. Gero stepped down, and Nagy stepped in
to form a new government that included several non-Communists. He also
negotiated with the Soviet Union about withdrawing Soviet troops from
Hungary, and they actually began leaving Budapest. Within a week of October
23, Nagy proclaimed the restoration of a multiparty systém, announced
Hungary's withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact, and declared the
country's neutrality. (Nagy obviously had in mind the 1955 precedent of
Austrian neutrality: neither East nor West but in the middle.) He appealed
to the United Nations, and many Hungarians expected help from the West,
particularly the United States. The tough talk of American anti-Communists
had created the impression that the United States would help anti-Communists
in Eastern Europe once they started helping themselves. But this was
not to be the čase.
The massive intervention of the Soviet army on November 4 crushed the
Hungarian revolution which, in Communist parlance, was subsequently
called the "Counterrevolution." Jánoš Kádár, a Communist who had been
imprisoned under the old Stalinist regime and, like Nagy, made a political
comeback during the first days of the revolution by becoming the first sec-
256 C E N T R A L E U R O P E
retary of the Communist Party, conspired with the Soviets to form a new government.
The proclamation of the new Kádár government coincided with
an attack by Soviet tanks on Budapest. Nagy and a number of his compatriots
sought refuge in the Yugoslav embassy in Budapest. Fighting continued
around the country for about another week, but the revolutionaries were
hopelessly outnumbered and outgunned. More than 10,000 people died in
the uprising, and almost 200,000 fled to Austria, where they received asylům.
Although Nagy and his associates were guaranteed safe-conduct by Kádár
and the Yugoslav ambassador, they were kidnapped by the Soviets as soon as
they left the Yugoslav embassy, taken to Romania, and then eventually returned
to Hungary. They were tried and executed on June 16, 1958, and
buried in unmarked graves.
Nagy had envisioned for Hungary some "third way," a combination of
neutrality and socialism. But in the eyes of the Communists he had committed
two "crimes": By reintroducing a multiparty systém, he had abandoned
one of the centrál precepts of Marxism-Leninism, and by withdrawing
from the Warsaw Pact, he had directly threatened the Soviet Union's
national security interests. The political monopoly or "leading role" of the
Communist Party and the unity of the Soviet bloc were not to be questioned.
(In 1989, Hungary's reform Communist regime rehabilitated Nagy by giving
him a statě funeral on the thirty-first anniversary of his execution on
June 16. At the time, observers interpreted the reburial of Nagy as a funeral
ceremony for Hungarian Communism.)
Hungarians like to compare their revolution of 1956 with the revolution
of 1848. (Incidentally, after 1989, the dates on which these revolutions began—March
15, 1848 and October 23, 1956—became Hungarian national
holidays.) In both cases, they fought against imperiál powers for national
freedom and lost because of Russian intervention. But they won the compromises
that followed the defeats, by regaining a considerable amount of
national autonomy.
After 1848, Hungary eventually negotiated the Compromiseof 1867 with
Austria. Although Kádár initially clamped down on the "counterrevolutionary
elements" after 1956, under his leadership Hungary eventually became
the most liberal Communist regime in the Eastern bloc. It was characterized
by a willingness to experiment with economic decentralization or market elements,
modest prosperity, and a relatively good human rights record. One
generál assumption is that the Hungarians showed the Soviets their teeth,
and as a result, the Soviets were prepared to give them an exceptional
amount of leeway. This is only half of the story, however. The West, always
interested in encouraging independence from Moscow, was more than glad
to support experimentation and rewarded Hungary for its initiative with
generous financial support and favorable trade conditions.
Czechoslovakia and the German Democratic Republic weathered relatively
well the initial phase of de-Stalinization without de-Stalinizing, but this
just postponed the issue. In Czechoslovakia, Antonín Novotný exercised a
Stalinist monopoly on power from 1948 until 1968 as first secretary of the
Communist Party and president of Czechoslovakia. The belated de-StalinT
H E FAILURE OF EASTERN EUROPE 257
ization of Czechoslovakia was not inspired by popular protest or intellectuals,
however. It originated within the Communist Party itself, which was concerned
about the country's sluggish economic performance and generál political
malaise. At the beginning of 1968, a younger generation of
reform-minded Communists maneuvered Novotný and the other conservative
representatives of the old guard out of power, and under the leadership
of a new party secretary, the dynamic and liberal Slovák Alexander Dubček,
they began a series of sweeping reforms known as the "Prague Spring."
The Czechoslovak reformers avoided going as far as Imre Nagy had doně
in Hungary in 1956. There is no indication that they intended to abandon
the doctrine of the Communist Party's monopoly on power or withdraw
from the Warsaw Pact. They still regarded the Communist Party as an agent
and instrument of reform but believed that it would be possible to develop
a freer and more prosperous form of "Communism with a human face," and
they recognized that political liberalization was the prerequisite for economic
reform. The Prague Spring changed the relationship of the citizens
to the Communist party-state by granting them more political freedom,
which won them over to participate in reforming the systém. Censorship
and restrictions on travel outside of the country were lifted, and genuine
criticism and individual initiative suddenly were not only permitted but even
encouraged by the Communist Party itself. A new economic stratégy was instituted,
based on the introduction of market elements and competition into
a socialist economy that still was based on the Communist idea of the collective
(or statě) ownership of the means of production—that is, the absence
of private property in the capitalistic sense.
The Czech and Slovák response to these innovations was enthusiastic,
even euphoric, and "Back to Europe" became a popular slogan. By avoiding
coercion and actually sacrificing control, Dubček gained genuine popular
support which ultimately enhanced his power and the legitimacy of his
regime. But conservative Communists inside and outside of Czechoslovakia
did not understand how it was possible to gain control by losing it, and they
viewed the Czechoslovak experiment and the people's enthusiasm for it with
increasing suspicion and apprehension. If the people liked it so much,
something had to be wrong.
There has been a lot of speculation about what could háve happened if
an invasion of Warsaw Pact troops had not ended the Prague Spring on August
20, 1968. Dubček and his compatriots either went too far, or Communists
less inclined to reform assumed that they would. Unlike Hungary in
1956, there was neither revolution nor armed resistance and bloodshed. But
like Hungary in 1956, the reform Communists in power condemned the intervention,
and conservative Communists negotiated behind their backs directly
with the Soviets to install a new regime with the help of Soviet tanks.
The West was shocked, but the overriding priority of détente contributed in
its own way to the occupation of Czechoslovakia.
Dubček, effectively deprived of power after the invasion, was gradually
eased out of office and replaced in 1969 by Gustav Husák, a conservative
Communist and former victim of Czechoslovak Stalinism. Husák then pro-
2 5 8 C E N T R A L E U R O P E
ceeded to purge the Communist Party of its reformers—one-third of its
membership—and to introduce a program of "normalization" that placed
greater emphasis on the production of consumer goods coupled with the
systematic persecution of dissent and a debilitating maintenance of the status
quo. Leonid Brezhnev justified the Warsaw Pacťs occupation of Czechoslovakia
in terms of defending the achievements of socialism; the Brezhnev
Doctrine of "limited sovereignty" made it clear that the Soviet Union would
not tolerate too much experimentation in the Warsaw Pact because it threatened
the Soviet Union's vital ideological and strategie interests.
The year 1968 was a turning point in East Central Europe in a number
of respeets. It marked the "culmination of the conflict between eritical intellectuals
and political power"4
that had started with de-Stalinization in
1956. Many intellectuals who as party members, "revisionists," or Marxists
had previously believed that the systém could be reformed now recognized
that it could not. A new generation of dissidents was born that abandoned
Marxism as an intellectual program and "Communism with a human face"
as a political one. In its pláce they adopted a political vocabulary with a striking
affinity to that ušed in the West at the beginning of the Cold War. They
were concerned about issues of principle, the moral dimension of politics,
human rights, truth, and justice. But they also dismissed as cosmetic the
changes made in the systém since de-Stalinization and started analyzing it
in terms of the continuity between what Stalin had created and Brezhnev
and his comrades were maintaining. They began to talk about a "posttotalitarian
systém" or a "Stalinist-Brezhnevite systém."
After the Prague Spring, a number of developments in the West added
to the Western inability to understand the East Central European experience
with Communism. The student revolutions of 1968 accompanied the
rise of the "New Left," a renaissance of interest in Marxism and neo-Marxism,
and protests against the United States' involvement in the Vietnam War.
Many academics and intellectuals in the West considered the right-wing
rhetoric of American Cold War anti-Communism to be an ideological subterfuge
for "American imperialism," and this form of anti-anti-Communism
was explicitly anti-American. The American empire was frequently seen as a
greater threat than the Soviet empire. Some form of Marxism-Leninism appeared
to be the only antidote for "American imperialism" in the developing
world, and in some circles there was open admiration for the leaders of
"struggles for national liberation," such as North Vietnam's Ho Chi Minh or
Cuba's Che Guevara.
At the samé dme, the concept of totalitarianism went out of fashion
among the younger generation of Western Sovietologists—the members of
the older generation were veterans of World War II and the Cold War—because
it was too ideological and methodologically unsophisticated for the
theoretical and empirical purposes of sociál scientists. The Soviet Union's
systém obviously was different from Western systems. Nonetheless, the Soviet
systém was a systém, and so its behavior could be explained using systém
theory, and its performance could be measured using quantitative analysis.
After all, it had a constitutional and an institutional framework, decisionT
H E FAILURE OF EASTERN EUROPE 259
making processes, sociál classes, interest groups, "lobbies" that bargained
for resources, patterns of distribution, and the like, and it was pursuing a
program of economic and sociál modernization.
Furthermore, the interplay between the spirit of leftist protest in the west
and the methodological innovation in the sociál sciences inspired by neoMarxist
approaches inereased the sympathy for socialism among a new generation
of academics and intellectuals. In many cases, they sympathized with
the ideals of socialism and preferred them to the materialistic and moneygrubbing
values of consumer capitalism. Based on their data, the Soviet systém
seemed to be doing well, and most Western sociál scientists were convinced
that it could be reformed in the long run.
This was one of the premises for the "convergence theory" of capitalism
and communism that was popular in the West in the 1970s. Sociál demoeratic
and labor parties were in power in many W7
estern European states.
These left-of-center governments adopted policies based on statě intervention,
tax inereases, additional public spending, and comprehensive as well
as redistributive sociál welfare schemes, and they shared the conviction that
shifting the public-private mix in the economy in favor of statě expenditure,
ownership, and control was the most desirable path of development. At the
time, the generál structural trend in Western Europe appeared to be away
from capitalism and toward a sociál welfare systém: "Less free market" and
"more statě" were the ideas behind "capitalism with a human face."
Although the idea of "Communism with a human face" had failed dramatically
in 1968, there also were attempts to reform the Communist
economies of Eastern Europe: strategies for economic change that left intact
the Communist monopoly on political power. For example, in 1968 Hungary
introduced a "New Economic Mechanism" that decentralized the planning
process, gave individual enterprises more autonomy, introduced competition
among economic agents, and placed greater emphasis on the production
of consumer goods. Anewschool of socialist reform economists devised
different "pian and market" schemes to improve the systém 's economic performance.
Along with the relatively good human rights record of the Kádár
regime, this appeared to be a promising development.
Poland launched an ambitious program of economic modernization, or
"second-wave industrialization." It purchased Western technology with
Western credit with the intention of producing more and better commodities.
Some of them were to be sold in the West to generate the hard currency
to pay the debt incurred, and the remainder would flow into the domestic
or East bloe market. But grafting Western technology onto an inefficiently
organized Eastern European economy failed and left Poland with a massive
foreign debt. (Hungary also borrowed heavily, with fundamentally the samé
results.) Elsewhere there were other experiments along the lineš of "consumer
socialism." Incremental economic liberalization appeared to be the
trend in Eastern Europe.
The proponents of the convergence theory thought that the structural experimentation
of the Eastern European Communist states indicated that they
were gradually moving in the samé direction as the Western European so-
2 6 0 C E N T R A L E U R O P E
cial welfare states, although from a completely inverted point of departure.
If more statě and less market was the Western European pattern of development,
then less statě (centralization) and more market (elements) appeared
to be the Eastern European pattern. Furthermore, if both these
trends continued, the structural convergence of these divergent systems at
some ideál midpoint in the future could be extrapolated. Both systems
would ultimately evolve into Swedish-style sociál welfare states, and Eastern
European Communists eventually would become Western European-style
Sociál Democrats. The entire region would become ideologically equidistant
from the Soviet Union and the United States, and Central Europe would
become a neutral zone. The nonconfrontational environment of détente,
the aversion of many Western sociál scientists to Cold War terminology, and
the European vision of a symmetrical withdrawal of the superpowers from
Central Europe made this scenario popular at the time.
The intellectual worlds of East Central European and Western intellectuals
drifted apart during the latě 1960s and 1970s. The great majority of
East Central European intellectuals abandoned Marxism, adopted the concept
of totalitarianism to describe Communism, and rejected the idea of being
able to reform the Communist systém. At the samé time, many Western
academics and intellectuals abandoned totalitarian terminology and adopted
ideas colored by Marxism or neo-Marxism. They displayed more and
more sympathy for socialism and were convinced that the Communist systém
could be reformed. It was truly a strange situation. After 1968, leftist intellectuals
in the West started using a political vocabulary similar to the one
that East Central European intellectuals had defínitively abandoned in 1968,
and East Central European intellectuals adopted a political vocabulary that
had a great affinity to the classic Cold War terminology that Western antiCommunists
started using in 1948. In both cases the problém was finding a
way change the status quo. East Central Europeans looked wistfully to the
West, and a fair share of Western intellectuals looked hopefully to the East.
When the independent trade union movement of Solidarity emerged in
Poland in 1980, the prospects for a change in East-West relations were not
very promising. The strikes that began in the Gdaňsk shipyard in the summer
of 1980 were precipitated by increases in food prices, and they were similar
in this respect to the previous waves of protest that had erupted after
price hikes in Poland in 1970 and 1976, both of which had been bloodily repressed.
However, the movement for independent trade unions that
emerged from this discontent went far beyond the traditional union con-
cerns.
The Polish workers' movement was flanked by the Catholic Church, on
one side, and a relatively large group of peasant-farmers who owned and
tilled their own land, on the other. Both these features of Polish society indicate
to what extent Stalinization had failed in Poland. The Communists
had failed to break the influence of the church, which was especially strong
in rural areas, and they nevěr managed to collectivize agriculture. Given the
demographics of Polish industrialization and urbanization, the average Polish
workers' roots were those of a Catholic peasant-farmer, which was not the
T H E FAILURE OF EASTERN EUROPE 261
stuff out of which good Communists (and, in some cases, good workers)
were made.
5
Two important "alliances" preceded the rise of Solidarity. First, after
the Polish strikes in 1976, dissident intellectuals started showing concern for
the interests of the working class, and a series of initiatives helped bridge the
traditional gap between the intellectual dissent of relatively isolated individuals
and the workers' protest with its mass potential. Second, Polish intellectuals,
many of whom were anticlerical (either as representatives of traditional,
enlightened European liberalism or as former Marxists), reconciled
themselves to working with the Catholic Church on practical issues, instead
of against it on fundamental issues. In other words, "Catholic and nonCatholic
intellectuals found more and more common ground in the defence
of common values, common sense and basic rights."6
The idea of selfdefense—defending
the people against the violence and transgressions of
the statě—became one of the unifying principles of action. Last, although
we should not overestimate how religious the Poles were—Communism did
succeed to a great extent in creating a modern, secular society—the church
was a strong and popular organizatíon in Poland, and it always had provided
the Polish nation with a haven during times of occupation and duress.
This triangular coalition of workers, intellectuals, and priests supplied
the potential for mass protest with intellectual direction and moral authority.
Although the poor performance of the Polish economy and the ineptitude
of the Communists who managed it were the immediate sources of
popular discontent, there were a number of Polish national traditions that
aggravated it: anti-Russian sentiments, revolutionary romanticism, patriotism,
and Roman Catholicism. AU these elements seemed to coalesce when
Cardinal Karol Wojtyla, the archbishop of Kraków, was elected Pope John
Paul II in 1978. The election of the first non-Italian pope in centuries was
not only a spectacular confirmation of Polanďs Western or "Roman" orientation;
it also created a feeling of national pride and acted as a catalyst in
what can only be described as a spirituál or moral revolution.
The dynamics of the "Solidarity revolution" are complicated. The Poles
had learned from the Hungarian revolution of 1956 and the Prague Spring
of 1968. They therefore dismissed the idea of violently overthrowing Communism
because they considered violence an inappropriate means of
change, and they no longer believed in the Polish Communist Party's ability
to reform Communism. (Nor did the Polish Communists. Their main interest
was maintaining privilege and power.) What started out as a strike in
Gdaňsk in the summer of 1980 ended up less than eighteen months later as
an independent organizatíon of 10 million members (almost one-third of
the Polish population), and Solidarity's demands on the government grew
as the movement did. The idea of self-defense made way for the concept of
self-management, which implied self-government. If Poland really was a
"workers' statě," as the Communists always had maintained, then the workers
started demanding reál rights from the Communist Party in their own
statě.
Solidarity completely undermined the legitimacy of the Polish Commu-
262 C E N T R A L E U R O P E
nist party-state, but it did not try to seize political power. Instead, its stratégy
was based on the insight that the party-state could not be reformed but
that society could. The idea of a society that renewed and reorganized itself—a
"civil society" independent of the statě and whose interaction with
the statě was based on the rule of law and the observation of fundamental
human rights—was one of the movemenťs guiding principles, and Solidarity
was internationally recognized in the West from the far left to the far right
because virtually everybody could find something in its program with which
they could identify.
Solidarity pursued a stratégy of "self-limiting revolution," based on nonviolence
and constraint, to wring concessions from the Communist partystate
and managers of the state-run economy, and it progressively increased
the scope of its autonomous activities. Pragmatists and fundamentalists in
the movement argued about how far Solidarity could or should push its demands.
As a precautionary measure, Solidarity explicitly stated that it had
no intention of pulling Poland out of the Warsaw Pact. But it was perfectly
clear to the Soviets and conservative Communist regimes elsewhere that a
peaceful, democratic, national, anti-Communist revolution was in progress,
and they were afraid that it might be contagious.
The Solidarity movement exacerbated the economic crisis in Poland and
created a political one. A vacuum developed in which the Polish Communist
Party had effectively lost control, but Solidarity—for tactical reasons and
as a matter of principle—was not prepared to assume it. The Solidarity experiment
thus ended on December 13, 1981, when (Communist) General
Wojciech Jaruzelski proclaimed a national emergency and martial law and
assumed the positions of Communist party secretary and prime minister. Because
there were no emergency powers provisions in the Polish constitution,
which would háve given him extraordinary powers, Jaruzelski had to impose
martial law. (Jaruzelski's declaration of martial law prevented a Soviet intervention,
the consequences of which, most Poles agree, would háve been
catastrophic, and as much as Poles despised him in 1981, since then he has
been rehabilitated largely for this preemptive measure.)
Since Poland obviously was not at war with a foreign statě, it was clear to
the members of the Solidarity movement that the government had declared
war on civil society. The Jaruzelski government rounded up thousands of activists
and put them in internment camps and banned Solidarity and its various
suborganizations. Unlike the situation in Hungary in 1956 or Czechoslovakia
in 1968, however, the Jaruzelski regime did not isolate and disperse
protest effectively or break the will to resist. It merely outlawed the former
and contained the latter. Solidarity then went underground as a resistance
movement and continued its struggle against a government that most Poles
regarded as illegitimate and perceived as foreign. The international protest
was loud but ineffectual, and Poles were disappointed in those Western European
heads of statě, such as the West German chancellor, Helmut
Schmidt, who criticized Solidarity for its recklessness and considered the
Jaruzelski regime's restoration of order to be "necessary."
The initial demoralization and disillusionment were great after the decTHE
FAILURE OF EASTERN EUROPE 263
laration of martial law in Poland in December 1981, and everyone was prepared
for a long political winter. The repertoire of East Central European
options seemed to be exhausted: Violent revolution had failed in Hungary;
"Communism with a human face" had failed in Czechoslovakia; and Solidarity^
peaceful, negotiated transformation of the Communist systém, "selflimiting
revolution," had failed, too.
In 1982, the Hungarian dissident Gyórgy Konrád made the following ob­
servation:
The three medieval kingdoms of East Central Europe—Polish, Czech, and
Hungarian—seem to háve been the work of peoples who had great powers
of survival. In one way or another, they paid dearly for their independence.
Even though the centuries-old experiment in independence has
still not reached a successful conclusion, this continuing tenacity is proof
that the struggle for self-determination will go on until self-determination
has been achieved.
Konráďs prognosis for the chances of change in the Communist world at
that time was pessimistic and long term: "Three attempts háve failed; the seventh
will succeed."' The Communist systém may not háve been robust, but
it was intact. In a variation on the old phrase of "Communism with a human
face," the Polish dissident Adam Michnik called it "Stalinism with its teeth
knocked out." Under these discouraging circumstances, people started talking
about Central Europe.
The Idea of Central Europe
The career of the concept of Central Europe since 1945 has been truly unusual.
After World War II, for at least three decades, people stopped using
the term in the present tense. No one ever wanted Germans to talk about
Mittekuropa again. "Central Europe" was thus a nebulous concept when it
began to come back into circulation in the early 1980s, reflecting different
perceptions of the East-West problém on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Although
an auspicious denouement of the East-West conflict was one of the
premises of the idea of Central Europe, even those people who ušed the term
could not agree on the causes or the nature of this conflict or on the most
appropriate means of ending it. The regional dynamics of the East-West
conflict and the divergent attitudes toward the reform potential of the Communist
systém also influenced the evolution of different Central Europe
ideas. Three versions of "Central Europe" emerged: in the Federal Republic
of Germany in the West, in and around the frontiers of neutral Austria,
and behind the Iron Curtain in Eastern Europe.
In West Germany, Central Europe was a concept adopted by the left,
ranging from the ecological-pacifíst, "basis democracy" Green movement
to the Sociál Democrats. They all were interested in reviving the process and
practice of détente and believed in the centrál premise of Sociál Democratic
Ostpolitik, that "change through rapprochement" or peaceful cooperation
with the Communist systém was the best means of transforming it. They
2 5 4 C E N T R A L E U R O P E
also were opponents of the arms race and, in some cases, of the membership
of the Federal Republic in NATO. Troop reductions and disarmament,
the creation of a nuclear-free zone in Central Europe, neutralism or neutrality
for the Federal Republic of Germany, and a symmetrical withdrawal
of the superpowers from not only Germany but also the entire region were
some of the key elements of this vision for Central Europe.8
After these preconditions
were satisfied, German reunification could be seriously addressed.
Assumptions about the potential benefits of actively reintroducing
détente, convergence theory, the democratic potential of reform Communism,
and, in some cases, the possibility of a "third way" between (Soviet)
Communism and (American) capitalism all were operative here.
This version of Central Europe was the most sensitive to the international
and strategie dimensions of the East-West conflict. The quality of the relations
between the Soviet Union and the United States and their allies in Eastern
and Western Europe determined the generál international framework
for discussing the idea of Central Europe, based on the premise that a fundamental
change in the relationship between the superpowers—and hence
their conduct and presence in Central Europe—was necessary in order to
change the status quo. It was difficult to envision under what circumstances
either the United States or the Soviet Union might withdraw from the region,
but it was clear that both of them had to go. There naturally was much
disagreement on which of the superpowers represented the greater threat
and hence was the bigger obstacle. For example, for the West German peace
movement, it was the United States and NATO.
The German-German frontier was the toughest line of European confrontation
in the East-West conflict. In terms of troops and conventional
and nuclear weapons, East and West Germany were the most highly militarized
region in world history. Parity and deterrence—a "balance of terror"—
were strategie doctrines in both East and West, but it was difficult for representatives
of both military establishments to agree in quantitative and
qualitative terms on who had what. The complicated tactical and strategie
relationships between conventional and nuclear forces, combined with
mutual suspicion and the assumption that the other side nevěr admitted to
having a eritical advantage that was upsetting the balance of power, made
troop and arms reduction talks between the superpowers relatively futile
exercises.
9
Furthermore, Western security experts tended to agree that unilateral
Western reduction was undesirable or even dangerous, because it either
would upset the balance of power or could be interpreted as a sign of weakness
and thus encourage the Soviet Union as the benefiting power to také
advantage of its position of superiority. During the renewed arms race of the
1980s, unilateral reduction and withdrawal were basically what the West German
left demanded (and was lavishly praised as "progressive" by Soviet propaganda).
The idea of getting the Americans out of West Germany, getting
West Germany out of NATO, and declaring German neutralism or neutrality
had a strong affinity to what Stalin wanted to achieve with his famous offer
in 1952. The leftist West German scenario for Central Europe was based
T H E FAILURE OF EASTERN EUROPE
265
on the assumption that if the United States were to go, then the Soviet Union
would leave. Then after the Soviets left, not only Central Europe would
come into its own, but reform communism or reál socialism would flourish,
too. This, however, was a worst-case scenario for the conservatives: a "Finlandization"
of West Germany.
Finns háve always been troubled by the use of the term "Finlandization."
After World War II, the Finnish government concluded a treaty of mutual
cooperation and assistance with the Soviet Union that took into account certain
Soviet security interests. For example, Finland was obliged to cooperate
with the Soviet Union in čase of another war with Germany. Otherwise, Finland
pursued a judicious policy of neutrality after 1945, which ensured its
independence.
In reference to Western European affairs, "Finlandization" was a negative
term that reflected conservative fears that the Western European left
might succeed in neutralizing Western Europe. However, in the Eastern European
context, after the mid-1980s until 1989, "Finlandization" or "self-Finlandization"
was a best-case scenario for countries like Poland and Hungary.
Dissidents and reformers speculated that the Soviet Union might let countries
out of the Eastern bloe if they, like Finland after World War II, were prepared
to make some concessions to the Soviet Union's national security interests
and to refrain from joining Western military or economic alliances.
If the West German debatě about Central Europe reflected the immediacy
of the East-West conflict, then a second, different version of Central Europe
evolved in and around Austria. The Iron Curtain may háve been impenetrable
between East and West Germany, but the contours of the
East-West conflict softened along the frontiers of neutral, nonaligned Austria.
It was not a member of either of Europe's military and economic
blocs—NATO and the European Community or the Warsaw Pact and
COMECON—and in this respect it was neither East nor West. In terms of its
economic and political systems, Austria was a Western European statě, but
it jutted like a peninsula into Eastern Europe.
Austria's neighbors in Eastern Europe envied its neutrality, which in
1955 had allowed it to get out of the East-West conflict. As a small and neutral
statě, it threatened virtually no one, and some political scientists speculated
that Austrian neutrality could serve as a model for other small states
in the region. No one really was sure how an ineremental neutralization of
the blocs, one statě at a time, could be achieved, but it seemed to be a good
idea.
The practice of mediating between the two rival blocs, cultivatíng cordial
relationships with its immediate neighbors despite ideological differences,
and promoting regional cooperation across national frontiers were
essential to Austria's foreign policy. Austria's practice of neutrality also benefited
from the admittedly nostalgie but nonetheless positive associations
that the memories of "old" imperiál Habsburg Austria evoked throughout
the region. Despite the Iron Curtain, the peoples of various states shared a
history, despite their differences. In this part of the world, Mitteleuropa had
nothing to do with Germany. Rather, it was Habsburg territory, and Vienna
266 C E N T R A I , E U R O P E
was the indisputable capital of this cultural empire and the historical hub of
a cosmopolitan network of cities: Trieste in Italy, Ljubljana in Slovenia, Zagreb
in Croatia, Cluj in Transylvanian Romania, Chernovtsy and L'viv in
Ukraine, Kraków in Poland, Prague and Bratislava in Czechoslovakia, and
Budapest in Hungary.
The border between neutral and nonaligned Austria and nonaligned
but Communist Yugoslavia was the least problematic seam between the
Communist East and the democratic West in Europe. In the latě 1970s the
Austrian provinces of Upper Austria, Carinthia, and Styria; the Italian
provinces of Friaul, Trentino-South Tyrol, and Venice; and the Yugoslav republics
of Slovenia and Croatia established a regional "working group" to
discuss shared Alpine-Adriatic problems and concerns and to arrange
transnational planning in the region despite the differences in political Systems.
There were many topics on the agenda, ranging from traffic and ecological
issues to tourism, economic cooperation, and cultural exchange.
This initiative was a modest attempt to emphasize the region's common
interests, not the national or ideological frontiers that separated them, and
it was not only a unique experiment in transnational cooperation but also a
great popular success. The idea of a common Central European pastjustified
the logic of cooperation. The idea of being Central European also fed
on the northern Italian provinces' discontent with Roman politics and the
fact that Italy's wealthier and economically more advanced north was tired
of financing the country's underdeveloped south. Likewise, the northern republics
of Yugoslavia were more highly developed than the southern ones.
Slovenes and Croats resented footing the bili for Balkán backwardness and
Communist inefficiency just as much as northern Italians did for southern
Mediterranean underdevelopment and Mafia corruption. In both cases, the
concept of "Central Europe" was full of separatist potential. In Yugoslavia,
too, it reminded Slovené and Croatian nationalists and anti-Communists
that they had previously lived outside a statě dominated by Orthodox Serbs
(before 1918) or Serbian Communists (before 1945). In this context, Central
Europe was a Roman Catholic, Western European, and Habsburg idea.
A completely different version of Central Europe evolved between Vienna
and Budapest. Austrian-Hungarian relations developed so auspiciously
during the 1970s that they became a model of East-West cooperation.
Austria's investments in Hungary, joint ventures, and the judicious
foreign policy of the Austrian federal chancellor, Bruno Kreisky, led to cooperation
reminiscent of the good old days, and in the mid-1980s, the countries
lifted their bilateral visa requirements. Hundreds of thousands of Hungarians
went to Austria for a taste of the West, and just as many Austrians
went to Hungary to shop in the East.
Austrian neutrality combined with its good-neighbor policies helped create
a nonconfrontational environment that promoted liberalization in its
historical hinterland behind the Iron Curtain. Extrapolated to European
politics, the Austrian-Hungarian model of neutrality and sociál democracy
in the West plus economic and political liberalization in the East seemed to
háve some promise for the future.
T H E FAILURE OF EASTERN EUROPE 267
Austrian Sociál Democrats shied away from using the term "Central Europe,"
but more conservative Austrian Christian Democrats, above all the
Austrian politician Erhard Busek, did not, because they were more comfortable
with Roman Catholicism and the cultural traditions of the Habsburg
Empire as unifying elements of the region. In the mid-1980s, Busek
brought new impetus into the Central European debatě by combining the
idea of common cultural traditions with demands for more human rights
and cooperation in the region. He considered Central Europe to be a "projed"
in which Austria could play an important role, and in the early 1980s
he was one of the few Western European politicians who actively sought and
cultivated contacts with East European intellectuals and dissidents, in
Poland and Hungary in particular.
The last and ultimately most important version of the idea of Central Europe
was the product of Eastern European intellectuals: dissidents at home
and émigrés abroad. It was anti-Soviet and anti-Russian, on the one hand,
and "remarkable for its omission of Germany and 'the German question,'"10
on the other. The idea of a confederation of states situated between the Soviet
or Russian East and the German West and stretching from the Baltic Sea
in the north to the Adriatic Sea in the south played a considerable role in
many of these intellectuals' versions or visions of Central Europe. The historical
precedents for Central Europe were nostalgically transfígured multinational
empires—the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the north and
the Habsburg Empire in the south—whose parameters could be defined not
only historically but also in traditional religious and enlightened philosophical
terms. Central Europe was Roman Catholic and "westward-looking,
cosmopolitan, secular-humanist, and rationalist."11
Proponents of this idea of Central Europe shared many of the sentiments
of the Western European peace movements. Although they—like most intellectuals
on both sides of the Iron Curtain—were critical of the American
presence in Europe and the consequences of American "cultural imperialism"
and consumerism, Eastern European dissidents and intellectuals recognized
the Soviet Union and Communism as greater threats. Consequently
they had a rather reticent relationship with the Western European peace
movements, because many of the advocates of peace and disarmament in
the West failed to understand how dangerous the Soviet Union and Communism
really were or to understand that the absence of human rights and
democracy in the East bloc were peace issues as well.12
This version of the
Central European idea identified a fundamental change in the Eastern European
political systém as the prerequisite for reál peace in Europe, an insight
that made it anti-Communist.
The Czech novelist and essayist Milan Kundera provided a classic definition
of Central Europe in an article published in November 1983 in Paris
(later translated into English and German). He described the "three fundamental
situations" that developed in Europe after World War II as "that of
Western Europe, that of Eastern Europe, and, most complicated, that of the
part of Europe situated geographically in the center, culturally in the West,
and politically in the East." He also was specific about where Central Europe
268 C E N T R A L E U R O P E
was. It consisted of "an uncertain zone of small nations between Russia and
Germany," historically coextensive with the Habsburg Empire and Poland.
The "tragédy of Central Europe," with the exception of "little Austria,"
was that it had been "kidnapped" by the Soviet Union after World War II.
The Western European inability to distinguish between Central and Eastern
Europe also was indicative of a larger and more profound crisis. Kundera accused
the West of not even noticing that part of the European West had disappeared
into the Soviet East and of accepting the logic of a divided Europe.
His diagnosis of the fact that "Europe no longer perceives its unity as a cultural
unity" was that "Europe itself is in the process of losing its own cultural
identity."13
Kundera did not offer a concrete political program, but he did háve a
political claim shared by many other representatives of the Central European
idea: The division of Central Europe into an East and a West after
World War II was illegitimate. Advocates of the idea of Central Europe may
not háve agreed on where Central Europe was or which strategies should be
pursued or could be ušed to turn the idea of Central Europe into reality, but
they shared "the experience of small nations subjected to large empires" and
the "unique experience of living under Soviet-type Communist systems since
Yalta."14
The histories of these small nations and their encounters with Communism
provided them with different perspectives, too, but the Eastern European
proponents of the idea of Central Europe shared several attitudes
and convictions.
If politics meant violently wresting power from the Communists or attempting
to influence the existing statě or governmental policy, most dissident
intellectuals were "antipolitical." One of the problems of the totalitarian
or posttotalitarian systems in the Eastern bloc was the omnipresence of
politics—the statě, the party, the police. Therefore, the idea was not to také
the power from "them" but, rather, to destroy the systém by redefining the
relationship of the statě to society. The idea of a "civil society" that was independent
of the institutions of the centrally administered and bureaucratic
party statě and whose relationship to it was regulated by certain principles
and game rules was shared by many proponents of the idea of Central Europe.
They believed in the tenets of political liberalism but not necessarily
economic liberalism,15
and this made human rights and the rule of law into
core Central European issues. It was society's task to control the statě, not
vice versa.
Many dissidents and intellectuals resorted to fundamental philosophical
issues and moral discourse. It really did not make much difference whether
their critiques of Communism were based on the terminology of modern
existentialism, traditional Catholic moral theology, or common sense. For
example, Václav HaveFs famous samizdat essay "Living in the Truth" was inspired
by the work of the Czech philosopher and fellow dissident Jan Patočka,
one of the cofounders of Charta '77 who, in turn, had been influenced
by German phenomenology and existentialism.
Pope John Paul II stood firmly in the tradition of Roman Catholic moral
theology and sociál doctrine. Many advocates of the idea of Central Europe
T H E FAILURE OF EASTERN EUROPE 269
did not hesitate to talk about the differences between good and evil, truth
and lies, or human dignity and moral depravity. Many dissidents believed
that certain ideas were worth suffering for, and the absence of basic rights
and freedoms gave them an appreciation for those things often taken for
granted in functioning democracies in the West, like habeus corpus and due
process or the freedoms of speech, the press, and assembly. Individual existential
rectitude and the ethics of solidarity coalesced into one conviction:
"our" truth versus "their" lies.
Generalizations about the dimensions and the consequences of dissidence
in the region are dangerous. Both ideas and popular protest were important
in the revolutions of 1989, but we should not assume that the majority
of people were inspired by the dissidents' ideas for a long time before
1989 or that the Communist regimes in the region had uniformly become
soft. For example, the Czechoslovak dissidents in Charta '77, were relatively
isolated from the population at large and were systematically persecuted,
regularly imprisoned, or forced to do menial labor. Therefore, they had a
different experience with protest than did their Polish counterparts in Solidarity,
who were not ostracízed from society to the samé extent and could
rely on sociál support systems typical of a "civil society."
Furthermore, at a time when Czechoslovak and Polish dissidents were
going in and out of jail in the early and mid-1980s, some Hungarian dissidents
started to enjoy the fruits of the Kádár regime's liberality and began
traveling between Eastern Europe and the West. Some Yugoslav intellectuals
enjoyed similar freedoms, but there was virtually no organized dissident
in East Germany. Although the regime spectacularly expelled a few prominent
protesters, West Germany paid ransom for all the others. Between 1963
and 1989, the Federal Republic of Germany "bought free" around 34,000
political prisoners from the German Democratic Republic. After the latě
1970s, the going rate or ransom for a political prisoner was DM 95,847 per
head, around $40,000.
16
Under these circumstances, it was odd that after
1989 some West Germans had the audacity to criticize East Germany for the
absence of dissidents.
The Gorbachev Factor
Virtually no one anticipated the revolutions of 1989 in the early 1980s, not
to mention the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. It will také political scientists,
economists, and historians a generation to sort out why the revolutions
of 1989 happened when they did, how they were related to the ultimate
collapse of Communism in the Soviet Union in 1991, and what role
the Cold War played in both these dramas. Retrospectively, it is truly amazing
to what extent experts on Communism and the Soviet Union failed to
see what was coming.17
Billions of dollars were spent on studing Communism,
and some of the Wesťs best minds were engaged in this enterprise.
The precision instruments of Western Sovietology did not háve much predictive
power, nor for that matter, did the crystal balls of East Central European
dissidents and intellectuals. The winners of the revolutions of 1989 (in
270 C E N T R A L E U R O P E
East Central Europe) and the Cold War (in the West) were just as surprised
at their victories as the Communist losers were at their defeats in 1989 (in
East Central Europe) and in the Soviet Union in 1991.
There are different schools of thought regarding the most important
causes of the events of 1989 as well as their relationship to the dynamics of
the Cold War as a superpower conflict. Changes in Central Europe were determined
by the complex interaction of different fields of forces operating
on international, regional, and national levels. The development of a qualitatively
new relationship between the superpowers after Mikhail Gorbachev's
rise to power in the mid-1980s, the Soviet Union's dramatic change
of policy in its own sphere of influence thereafter, and the dynamics of
protest throughout East Central Europe each played indisputably important
roles. These issues will be addressed in terms of the possible answers to three
questions: Did the West (or the United States or Ronald Reagan) win the
Cold War? Did Gorbachev's attempts to reform Communism end it in a manner
that created new perspectives for Central Europe, or did East Central
Europeans liberate themselves?
Which stratégy contributed most to the demise of Communism? Idealists
and realists, people "hard" and "soft" on Communism, and advocates of
deterrence and détente all want credit for making the greatest contribution
to ending the Cold War. All of them certainly contributed to its demise.
There was no unified Western stratégy but, rather, a number of different
policies that shifted from one governmental administration to the next,
from "hard" to "soft," and from country to country. This in itself kept a fundamentally
rigid Communist systém off balance and contributed to its
demise.18
For the saké of argument, one can identify two extréme positions:
the get-tough policies of the Reagan administration in the early 1980s versus
the détente policies or the German Sociál Democratic version of Ostpolitikunú\
the early 1980s.
Proponents of the arms race and rearmament maintain that the West,
particularly the United States, recognized that they could be ušed to change
the Communist systém. This stratégy was based on the fact that the American
economy was more efficient than the Soviet economy. Therefore, increases
in defense expenditures ultimately cost the Soviet Union much more
than they did the United States. The arms race drew a disproportionate
amount of resources in the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc away from
other economic sectors, which prevented investments in other spheres such
as modernization, infrastructure, or consumer goods.
In other words, the United States' stratégy for the arms race was to exploit
the inherent deficiencies of Soviet-style planned economies and to
drive them to the brink of economic disaster. For many years, American policymakers
assumed that the Soviet Union spent about twice as much of its
gross domestic product on defense as the United States did: 12 percent to
the United States' 6 percent. (In the 1970s and 1980s, the figures on Soviet
defense spending were revised upward to 16 or even 20 percent.) Making
the Soviets compete in a race not exclusively based on arms but, rather, on
T H E FAILURE OF EASTERN EUROPE
271
the overall allocation of economic resources drove the Soviet economy into
a structural crisis that forced them to reform.
One of the simplest versions of this story is that Ronald Reagan won the
Cold War. The Strategie Defense Initiative (SDI) was not the straw but the
two-by-four that broke the proverbial camďs back. The Soviets reacted to
American policy by putting Mikhail Gorbachev into power. Therefore the
billions of dollars spent on defense paid off in the long run and demonstrated
the systemic superiority of market economies over planned economies
in terms of efficient resource allocation. The systém that could produce
both guns and butter—both strategie and consumer goods—won over the
one that had to make a structural choice between guns or butter. Cruise missiles
and Coca Cola could not be beat.
The various representatives of the German Sociál Democratic Ostpolitik,
the protagonists of détente, and the left in generál háve a difficult time making
a čase for their contributions to ending the Cold War. Many believed that
the Communist systém somehow could be reformed. The stratégy of this
kind of détente was to cooperate with those in power in Moscow, East Berlin,
Warsaw, and elsewhere in a manner that would contribute to the systenťs
liberalization and thus improve the conditions of those who had the misfortune
of living under it. The objective was to work with the powers that be
in order to make Communism more tolerable for all the parties involved,
not to win the Cold War.
According to this view, dissidents actually obstructed the process of systemic
transformation via rapprochement. Therefore they did not really fit
into the stratégy of détente but were, on the contrary, sometimes a wrench
in the works because their demands were unrealistic. From the European
détente or Sociál Democratic perspective of Ostpolitik, tougher anti-Communists
always ušed Eastern European dissidence as leverage on the Communists
in order to prevent further reform. Since 1989, the representatives
of the tough-on-Communism Stance conversely háve aceused the proponents
of détente of directly helping maintain the Communist systém by
working with it. For example, the DM 3.5 billion that West Germany paid to
East Germany for humanitarian purposes between 1963 and 1989—for the
release of political prisoners and the reunification of separated families—
certainly did not contribute to the demise of the Communist systém and was
but a fraction of the monies, credits, and goods that East Germany received
from West Germany over the years.
Proponents of détente háve developed their own version of the story
based on the samé deficiencies of the Communist systém, and they attempt
to explain how détente, not deterrence, led to its demise. Détente always attempted
to promote more openness within the Communist systém itself.
The Helsinki Finál Act of 1975 and the beginning of the Conference on Security
and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) process, especially with its emphasis
on human rights, multilateral diplomacy, and confidence-building
measures, was a turning point in East-West relations.19
Because the Communist systém collapsed after 3. new phase of East-West
272 C E N T R A L E U R O P E
détente in the mid-1980s, one may argue that détente, not deterrence, was
the key to the end of the Communist systém. According to this view, the externalpressure
of vitriolic Western antí-Communism helped sustain a systém
that was terminally ill. Furthermore, it contributed to keeping in power conservative,
anti-reform-minded Communists who helped maintain the systém.
The denouement of East-West tensions after Gorbachev's rise to power
in the mid-1980s, which created an atmosphere in which the Soviet Union
felt it could address domestic reform, therefore is comparable to removing
the buttresses from a dilapidated building which, in this čase, collapsed once
it was no longer being held up by external means. The centrál premise of
this theory is that Soviet Communism would háve failed sooner had Western,
and in particular American, anti-Communism not exerted the external pressures
necessary to hold it together.
The fact that both the proponents of détente and deterrence háve cogent
arguments for being responsible for the end of the Cold War is a good
indication that both these approaches may overestimate the consequences
of Western European and American policies on the development of Soviet
foreign and domestic policies. Anyone naivě enough to maintain that Western
policies "brought Gorbachev into power" does not understand how the
Soviet systém worked.
Conjectural arguments are admittedly of questionable value; however,
had Chernenko or Andropov lived longer or had a younger generation
"Brezhnevist" primarily interested in maintaining the status quo assumed
the leadership of the Soviet Union instead of Gorbachev, the revolutions of
1989 (and 1991) most likely would not háve happened when they did and
how they did. It is reasonable to assume that a more conservative and ideologically
orthodox Soviet leader could háve maintained the Soviet systém
much longer—at great cost, of course—but he could háve maintained it
nonetheless. It was obvious to all observers that the Soviet empire was
overextended, but the assumption that the Soviet Union would follow the
path of all other great empires by crumbling soon was not widespread.
20
This raises another problematic issue: the role of "great men in history."
Gorbachev undoubtedly deserves to be placed in this category, although he
failed to accomplish what he wanted to-that is, reform the Communist systém—but
he failed grandly. He can be compared with other centrál figures
in the history of the Communist systém who also attempted to reform it and
failed: Imre Nagy, Alexander Dubček, and Nikita Khrushchev.
In the comparison with Nagy and Dubček, the question to ask is how a
systém so thoroughly based on stability, conformity, control, loyalty, and ultimately
a certain lack of ingenuity could háve let some one like Gorbachev—daring,
prepared to experiment, and innovative—get so far? Did
all the Communist Party's filtering mechanisms fail? Was Gorbachev an accident,
a fluke, or, until his rise to power, a brilliant impostor? Comparisons
with Khrushchev are less speculative. Gorbachev embodied the necessity of
systemic change; he personified historical powers atwork. Like Khrushchev,
he had to dislodge entrenched interest groups in the systém in order to
change the systém, and this required criticizing the representatives and
T H E FAILURE OF EASTERN EUROPE
273
benefactors of his predecessor, Brezhnev. Glasnost and perestroika—"deBrezhnevization"—was
a from of de-Stalinization or even a continuation of
the process that Khrushchev had begun and Brezhnev had interrupted.
Some sympathetic observers even felt that Gorbachev was bringing back the
Russian Revolution to a point where the historical record might be rectified
by a new start. In theoretical terms, he returned to the mid-1920s, the period
after Lenin but before Stalin. A gigantic "New Economic Pian"2 1
might
háve belatedly set the Soviet experiment aright.
Gorbachev was an unusual Soviet leader in a number of respects. Given
the geriatric status of the leadership of the Brezhnev era, he was a young
man and not a veterán of World War II. This undoubtedly was an important
element of his psychological makeup and colored his perceptions of Germany
in particular and the West in generál. Although he sincerely believed
in the principles of the socialist systém, he was not an ideologue, and as a realist
he knew that propaganda regarding the alleged "superiority" of Soviet
systém bordered on nonsense. In order to gain the political leverage he
needed to reform the Soviet systém, he also violated one of the fundamental
rules of Communist government. Instead of beating the people over the
head with the Communist Party, he began beating the party over the head
with the people. He recognized that his reforms could be successful only if
the people helped initiate and carry them. All the well-worn metaphors ušed
to descríbe the consequences of these measures are accurate. Gorbachev let
the genie out of the bottle or opened Pandora's box.
Gorbachev also recognized either that the Soviet Union had lost the
arms race or that the cost of competing was too high. In any event, he needed
to end it in order to divert the tremendous economic resources the Soviet
Union spent on defense from military to civilian economic sectors; otherwise
he would not háve the resources he needed to implement his
ambitious program of restructuring the Soviet economy. It is important to
emphasize here that Gorbachev made a political decision based on the economics
of the Cold War. Adherents of the resource allocation theory of the
arms race are correct in pointing out that it cost the Soviet Union much
more than it cost the United States, a fact that brought out all the deficiencies
inherent in the Soviet economy to the detriment of the systém as a
whole. But the economics of the Cold War did not "force" Gorbachev, as
some proponents of the arms race assume, to make this decision.
In order to pursue his project of sweeping domestic reform in the Soviet
Union, Gorbachev had to change Soviet policy toward the West, and the
denouement of East-West tensions created a new environment in superpower
relations that undoubtedly enhanced the prospects of change in East
Central Europe in the latě 1980s. Gorbachev not only stopped seeing the
Western systém of military and economic alliances as an active threat. He
also began perceiving Western Europe as a potential partner. He rethought
the relationship of the Soviet Union with its own empire, and he concluded
that East Central Europe was not as important to the Soviet Union 's national
security as it once had been.
He was prepared to let the states of the Soviet bloc go their own way,
Epilogue
Postrevolutionary Paradoxes
Central Europe Since 1989
During the last six months of 1989 the Communist regimes in the Eastern
Bloc came down one by one: in July in Poland, in Hungary in September, in
East Germany in November, and in Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Bulgaria
in December. One thing all of these revolutions obviously had in common
was that they displaced the old Communist order, and the coincidence of
1989 with the bicentennial celebration of the French Revolution in 1789
was an appropriate historical accident. Francois Furet, one of the premiér
French historians of the French Revolution, drew parallels between 1989
and "the ideas of 1789 or the American Revolution: human rights, the sovereignty
of peoples, free elections, markets" and compared the Communist
regimes with the ancien régime of late-eighteenth-century France: hated, immobile,
and incompetent.
Furet also took this opportunity to criticize the European Left, which traditionally
interpreted the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 as a legitimate
expression of French revoludonary ideals. The revolutions of 1989 represented
the belated victory of "old ideas"—the moderate, late-eighteenthcentury
principles liberal-democratic revolutions—over the radically modem
ones of early-twentieth-century "Bolshevik-Jacobinism":
We are witnesses to revolutions, which are simultaneously counter-revolutions:
uprisings by the people in the name of the establishment or reestablishment
of liberal democracy; we are seeing the end of the revolutionary
idea that has determined the horizons of the Left, far beyond strictly Marxist-Leninist
circles, for two hundred years.
According to Furet, in 1989 the future of Communism and socialist planned
economies ironically became democracv anH ranitalíst m^i-lr/** í^^n^™;*...