Russia

But sufficient troops remained to keep order. The surviving German population received the occupiers with fear and sullenness, and many Hungarians and Romanians were hardly joyful. The newly liberated Czechs, Slovaks and Yugoslavs, by contrast — even most Poles — had greeted them with relief. Although the Ukrainian (Ruthenian) tail of Czechoslovakia was immediately annexed along with eastern Poland, these countries were compensated with territories at Germany’s expense, and at the request of President Benes over 3 million Germans and nearly half a million Hungarians were expelled from the Czech Sudetenland and Slovakia with the assistance of Soviet troops. All this added to the chaos on what remained of eastern Europe’s roads.

Yet, as UNESCO reported in 1945, some form of Soviet occupation was inevitable for the immediate future since eastern Europe was almost entirely dependent on the Soviet army for the transportation of food, medical supplies and other necessities, and in many areas for the restoration of basic services too. ⁷ Furthermore, Britain and the United States had agreed that the new governments should be friendly to the Soviet Union and purged of Nazi influences. These factors called for Soviet troops to remain in these countries for some time. There was an air of inevitability about the Soviet takeover of eastern Europe.

The region was for the most part poorer than western Europe, and boasted little industry Its nobility belonged to another age, its clergy were largely reactionary, but the mass of peasantry and the small, alienated middle class, including those few Jews who had survived the Nazi period and other social outsiders, including intellectuals, were ready for a revolution of some kind. Soviet forces removed regimes most of which had become unpopular and there were hopes that the new order would bring a better kind of life. The situation had been foreseen even before the war. As early as 1935 a Hungarian economist and former centrist minister who had migrated to New York published an article which turned out to be prophetic. Analysing the effects of the Great Depression on Hungary and the Balkan countries, he concluded that the experience had trapped them in a hopeless economic situation which encouraged militant nationalism. The consequence, he forecast, would be war or revolution. In fact it had led to both. He had also forecast likely trends in the aftermath of the cataclysm:

After a bloody chaos mass misery may find its solution. This will come, however, not through a peaceful reform of the agricultural production on the basis of independent peasant holdings and cooperation but … in the form of the bread factories of Russia with dictatorial methods [i.e. collectivization]. This might also lead to a new political union but … [it] would not be … [a] federation of the free … countries [but] Slav unity under Russian dictatorship. ⁸

In short, he was suggesting that the Soviet way and Russian rule would seem the only practical way by which poor countries could avoid mass poverty and political instability. Whatever the perceptions of a shrewd political economist, the experience of fascism and the extreme clericalism of the Catholic Church in eastern Europe had given Communism broad appeal, especially to younger people. The older generation was not so attracted — except, ironically, in the most developed of all the eastern-European countries, Czechoslovakia, and there a Communist-dominated left-wing government was freely voted into office.

For two or three years after the war the priority in eastern Europe was to clear the debris and re-establish a working economy. Fascists and those who had collaborated with the Nazis were harshly dealt with, as they were, at first, in the West, though there were no general restrictions on individual freedom. But as soon as it became possible to look towards the longer term, the Soviet model seemed promising not so much for ideological reasons but because it seemed to be the most effective way of quickly rebuilding something better on the ruins of a discredited system.

The taproot of the Cold War, however, went back to the mistrust between the Powers which had increased from 1944. When Truman informed Stalin at Potsdam that the United States possessed an atomic bomb, which it was soon to drop on Japan, Stalin thanked him. But his intelligence service had already informed him of the fact some time before. America’s reticence did not inspire trust and the United States’ subsequent refusal to entertain requests for credits further undermined the close wartime relationship. Yet the Cold War could have been avoided even after Churchill’s ‘Iron Curtain’ speech of March 1946.