Russia (43 page)

A
LTHOUGH THEIR CAUSE
was already doomed, Hitler’s armies fought on with fierce desperation for almost two years more. By the time they were overwhelmed and Hitler himself had committed suicide in the ruins of Berlin, Stalin’s armies controlled the larger part of Europe. The Soviet Union now regained all the territories it had claimed under the Nazi-Soviet Pact (though Britain and the United States would not recognize its rule in the former Baltic states as legitimate). It also acquired the ancient German city of Konigsberg, renaming it Kaliningrad. Albeit tacitly, the Western Powers also recognized the Soviet Union’s right to a sphere of influence in eastern Europe beyond its own frontiers, and with the advent of the ‘Cold War’ two years later — though not before — the construction of a new kind of Russian empire consisting of nominally independent dominions got under way.

In the Far East, the Soviet Union’s belated participation in the war with Japan enabled it to add southern Sakhalin and the Kurile Islands to its possessions. China turned Communist, and for a moment even France and Italy seemed likely to do so. Marxist internationalism proved to be a far more potent lure than pan-Slavism had ever been. Furthermore, since the Soviet regime offered both a model for overcoming backwardness and help for peoples oppressed by other imperial powers, many more countries, including Egypt, Afghanistan and Cuba, were to become Soviet clients. For a time only the Western monopoly of nuclear weapons seemed to prevent a stampede to enter Stalin’s corral, and, thanks to its espionage service, the Soviet Union soon broke that monopoly. Just as the Soviet leaders came to poach Western technology and suborn useful citizens, they learned to exploit discontent in capitalist countries and cut a dash in the Third World.

Soviet prestige and world influence now exceeded those of any former Russian empire, and they continued to grow. In 1961, to general astonishment, the Soviet Union sent the first astronaut to orbit planet Earth, and when the ebullient new Party Secretary, Nikita Khrushchev, boasted that
it would be able to match the United States in terms of economic output in a decade or even less, his claim did not seem entirely ridiculous. Within the short span of twenty years Soviet Russia had moved from the position of an embattled pariah to become a great power with a strong claim to world pre-eminence.

Once the German offensive at Kursk in the summer of 1943 had been broken, Soviet military operations read like a triumphant progress. But the successes were not won easily. Attention focused first on a stretch of the front along river Dnieper near Kiev, where Russian longboats had once gathered for the voyage to Constantinople. The first Russian imperial capital was defended by battered, but still formidable, divisions under the command of the able Field Marshal von Manstein, and by the great and treacherous river itself. The man in charge of the Soviet forces in the sector of intended breakthough to Kiev was General Vatutin. The carefully planned operation was heralded by a terrible barrage of more than 2,000 guns, mortars and rocket-launchers concentrated on to a front only 4 miles wide. A few days later guns in Moscow firing blank charges roared out a salute to greet the news that Kiev had been cleared of enemy troops. Czech troops under a Colonel Svoboda had taken part in the operation. They had been told that in fighting for Kiev they would be fighting for Prague. Events were to justify the claim.
¹

From this point on the story of the war can be reduced to a series of pincer movements which snapped shut to trap enemy armies; and a list of battles to cross great European rivers - the Bug, the Vistula and the Danube, the Oder and the Elbe. Prague was one of the very last cities to be taken: the Germans held it even after the fall of Berlin. But the war was fought on many levels. Aside from the military operations, there were diplomatic wars between the Allies over grand strategy and struggles between political leaders and military commanders. Moreover the war helped to shape the peace which followed. The victory over Nazi Germany was comprehensive and, as the Allies recognized, due largely to Soviet sacrifice. The shape of the new Europe was determined partly by the position of forces on the ground when the fighting stopped, and partly by agreements made between the Allies while the war was still in progress.

Peace arrangements, like military operations, were the subject of careful planning. The partition of post-war Germany, for example, had been proposed at an early stage by the Americans, though on the basis of a north-south rather than an east-west division, and the Soviet government
was engaged in strategic preparation for the peace many months before the war ended. At Tehran in 1943 it was agreed that Poland’s frontiers should be moved westward, leaving the Soviet Union in possession of Polish territory it had occupied in 1939 (the predominately Orthodox areas) but compensating the Poles in the west at Germany’s expense. In November 1944 Maxim Litvinov, who had been Soviet Foreign Minister before the war and was now engaged in foreign-policy planning, sent his successor, Viacheslav Molotov, a position paper based on the premiss that the United States might revert to isolationism or even fall out with Britain (and they did indeed disagree over important questions such as the future of the British Empire). In such an event, he argued, Anglo-Soviet co-operation would bring advantages. With this end in view, Litvinov suggested that the British be accommodated over Iran (Persia), Afghanistan and Sinkiang in return for control of the Straits and hence free access from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean (which had been offered to Russia during the First World War).

Such an agreement [he added] can only be brought about on the basis of an amiable delineation
of
spheres of interest in Europe … The Soviet Union can consider Finland, Sweden, Poland, Hungary, Romania, the Slavic countries of the Balkan peninsula, and also Turkey as [constituting] its maximum sphere of interests. Holland, Belgium, France, Spain, Portugal and Greece [on the other hand] can certainly be included in the English sphere.
²

When Churchill met Stalin in Moscow in 1944 they agreed a division of the Balkans into spheres of influence, subsequently known as the ‘percentages agreement’. According to this, Romania and Bulgaria would be in the Soviet sphere, Greece in the British, while Soviet and British influence in Hungary and Yugoslavia would be split fifty-fifty. It was also agreed that the three Allied Powers, plus France, would occupy Germany at least until it was de-Nazified. It seemed unlikely that the Western Powers would yield the Straits, however, so in June 1945 Moscow proposed joint Soviet—Turkish responsibility for their control, and pressed the Turkish government to allow Soviet troops to be stationed on the Bosphorus and at the Dardanelles. It even proposed that part of Trabzon and Karasund be transferred to Soviet control — but Turkey stood firm. So did Iran when it was pressed to cede some territory on the frontier with Azerbaydzhan.
³
At Potsdam in July—August 1945 the Allies called on Japan to surrender unconditionally, and agreed that the Soviet Union should receive southern Sakhalin and the Kurile Islands, and reparations from all those countries that had fought against it. It also made provision for continuing co-operation between the Allies after the war. Not everything had turned out as expected, however.

Stalin had undertaken to declare war against Japan within three months of Germany’s defeat, but when the time came the United States no longer needed Soviet participation and did not want it - but Stalin insisted on joining in for fear that the Americans would otherwise dictate peace terms and so threaten Soviet interests in the Far East. Britain and the United States refused to recognize Soviet retention of the Baltic countries, yet did not dispute it. It transpired that, while most Romanians and Hungarians would have preferred their countries to have been included in the West’s sphere of influence, most Greeks — and for a time most Frenchmen and Italians too — were sympathetic to Communism and would have preferred inclusion in the Soviet sphere.

Contrary to popular belief, Stalin stuck to the letter of his agreements with the Western Powers. Rather than being ideologically motivated, he believed that ‘whoever occupies at territory also imposes his own social system
on
it.’
⁴
Not only did he sacrifice the Communists in Greece and allow those of France and Italy to be thwarted, he conceded rather more in Hungary than he need have done. In brief, he was a cautious empire-builder of the old Russian type — a realist, intent on achieving concrete objectives. To this end he used the Communist Party as an Established Church, as a means of controlling his own followers, like Russian grand princes of a former age; and he adapted Communist ideology quite freely to direct the faithful at home and around the world in the directions he desired. Until the Soviet Union acquired its own atomic bomb in August 1949, however, his posture to the West remained defensive. Both Russia and its Western allies were subject to similar pressures, economic and popular, to demobilize quickly and most of the victorious Soviet troops who had first occupied central Europe were soon ordered home.

High though the German casualty rate had been, Soviet casualties were higher.
⁵
Certainly the Soviet command had been less careful with lives, and when the war ended it was just as careless in demobilizing soldiers. In the summer of 1945 an Italian Jew recently released from a concentration camp in Germany observed squads of recently demobilized soldiers on their way home, singing songs. They

had been demobbed in the crudest, simplest fashion; their commanders had said to them: ‘You have finished fighting the war, now go home’; and home they went, on foot. Now anyone with any idea of the size, the distance along parallels within the Soviet Union, will realize what sort of a repatriation this was. There were squads on foot, some even barefoot, carrying their boots over their shoulders so as not to wear them out. Others had found the most incredible means of transport, clambering up onto lorries, onto Berlin buses
towed along like trains. We saw one motor unit towing two or three Berlin city buses still with the Berlin signs as they travelled east, homeward with still another thousand, two thousand, three thousand kilometres to go, perhaps into the heart of Siberia; and they sang [the popular song]
‘Kalinka Kala’
as they passed by in front
of
us, this and other songs, waving to us all, survivors and the rest.
⁶

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.