A World at Arms (152 page)

As for Germany itself, as much of it as the Red Army could reach, and more if possible, was to be restructured in accordance with a belief that the National Socialist regime was the product of class forces in that society, rather than a result of the beliefs and deeds of individuals. The expropriation of the old ruling elite and the nationalization of banking and industry would automatically end the power of those who had created and led the instruments of aggression. A popular front under the leadership of the German Communist Party would direct affairs in behalf of the Soviet leadership. Since that party was led by men who had emerged from the endless internal divisions of the Party in the years of the Weimar Republic, and subsequently survived the comprehensive purges in their ranks during the years of exile in the Soviet Union, there was not the slightest chance that any independent thought or idea–perhaps one could say any thought or idea whatever–would ever emerge among them.

The very scarcity of opposition to the murderous Nazi regime appeared to reinforce the need for a tight new control, which the Communist Party would exercise through a combination of whatever elements could be rallied, including any ex-Nazis who had seen the light, and which would temporarily make such concessions to other elements as appeared to be needed–including nationalist appeals where appropriate and a deferring of collectivization of agriculture–until firmly and fully in charge. Eventually the restructuring of the German social order would produce a self–conscious and supportive working class which would lead, under Communist direction, a country modelled on the Soviet Union and in the closest possible alignment with it.

The question of whether such a system could be installed in all or only in a part of Germany was obviously open; one would have to see.
But the chances that it would extend to more than any area directly under Red Army occupation, and that it would be cheerfully accepted even in the part held by the Red Army, came to be undermined by two further policies which the Soviet leadership adopted at the same time. In the first place, as an incentive for the soldiers of the Red Army, now that the pre-war territory of the U.S.S.R. had been freed of German occupation, the internal propaganda was concentrated on the theme of vengeance as a replacement for the earlier theme of defending the homeland. In view of the horrendous atrocities inflicted by the Germans on the civilian population in the occupied territories and on prisoners of war, this concept was easy to propagate and fell on ready ears; but the orgy of individual acts of murder and rape which thereafter accompanied the Red Army’s advance into Germany served to reinforce rather than ameliorate the already vehement anti-Soviet attitude among the German population.

Many Russian soldiers did not participate in the acts which so terrorized and alienated the Germans, and many officers took steps to restrain the fury of their own men, but the overall effect of the Red Army’s advance into Germany would be to make the task of the German Communist Party and its new supporters even more difficult than it was certain to be anyway; they could operate only under the auspices of the Red Army-but their so operating necessarily compromised them in the eyes of the population.

The second policy, about the preparations for which we are not well informed, was one calling for massive reparations to be extracted from the areas overrun by the Red Army and the rest of Germany if at all possible. The vast destruction caused by the Germans in the Soviet Union, both in the fighting and by deliberate measures to wreck as much as possible during the German retreat, left the Soviet government understandably determined to exact whatever goods, machines, and factories it could (as well as the labor of prisoners of war), and equally understandably meant that Moscow preferred for the German rather than the Russian population to pay as large a share as possible of the enormous cost of reconstructing the Soviet economy. In this regard, however, as in that of vengeance, the implications for the German instruments of Soviet policy were likely to be anything but favorable. The new masters who were to be flown in behind the advancing Red Army would inherit a daunting task: how to create a new structure starting from the roof down and covering a population whose earlier anti-Communist and anti-Russian sentiments had been and for years continued to be reinforced by the actions of the very power on whom the new regime
depended for support. And these new masters had, as already mentioned, been carefully screened and culled in prior years by processes which guaranteed that only certified blockheads could survive.

For the territory between the Soviet Union and Germany, Stalin’s government had a set of policies which combined traditional with radical features. In the first place, the territories which had been acquired under the terms of the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939 were in essentially all cases to be kept by Russia. There was a willingness to make some minor modifications in the border with Poland, but the basic assumption always was that the parts of Finland taken in 1940, the three Baltic States, eastern Poland, and the Romanian territories seized in 1940 were to be reincorporated into the Soviet Union. If Stalin had insisted on this in his talks with Eden in December 1941, when the Germans were within striking distance of Moscow, he was certainly not about to allow any changes after a succession of victories. On the contrary, there would be added territorial gains. In the settlement with Finland, he had exchanged a 50-year lease on the base at Porkkala for that at Hangö,
^b
but the Finnish port and nickel mines at Petsamo, returned to Finland after the winter war of 1939–40, were now annexed to the Soviet Union. The latter had also obtained the tentative agreement of her allies to the annexation of the northern half of East Prussia (with the southern half going to Poland) and the commitment to support this arrangement at any future peace conference.
^c

In addition to these territorial changes, Stalin wanted two more but obtained only one of them. Having occupied Bulgaria in September 1944, the Soviet Union was in a very much stronger position to put pressure on Turkey, and began a diplomatic campaign to secure bases on the Straits and the cession of the provinces of Kars and Ardahan to the Georgian and Armenian parts of the U.S.S.R..
¹⁶
This effort would be thwarted by Turkish refusal, backed in the post-war years by Britain and the United States. In October 1944, the month after the occupation of Bulgaria, however, the Red Army entered the easternmost portion of Czechoslovakia, and here the situation was made very different by the Soviet military presence.

This area, the Carpatho-Ukraine or Ruthenia, had been a portion of Czechoslovakia and was so considered by the Czechoslovak government-in-exile although the region had been annexed to Hungary, partially in 1938 and the remainder in 1939. Once the area was liberated by the
Red Army, the local commanders, presumably acting on instructions from Moscow, favored local Communist elements, who called for annexation to the Soviet Union now that the incorporation of the Galician part of eastern Poland provided a common border with the Ukrainian SSR. Stalin insisted on the cession of this area by the Czechoslovak government–which could return to Czechoslovakia only in the wake of the Red Army.

Though we have as yet no explicit evidence on the subject, it appears likely that two factors combined to lead Stalin to his demand. In the first place, his sensitivity to the explosive potential of the nationality problems of the Soviet Union, and especially among its largest nationality after the Great Russians, the Ukrainians, probably made him eager to include
within
the U.S.S.R. the one substantial group of Ukrainians left outside the country after the incorporation of the Ukrainians of pre-war Poland, and who might otherwise provide an
outside
focus for Ukrainian nationalist agitation. Secondly, the annexation of the area provided the Soviet Union with a common border with Hungary, which could in the future be more easily cowed by a Red Army now already across the mountain barrier of the Carpathians which runs through the province. Whatever the reason, Stalin did not allow the Czechoslovak government to administer the area; and the latter agreed to the cession, motivated in large part by the fear that if it did not agree, the Soviet Union would go ahead with the annexation anyway and, in addition, incorporate Slovakia, which only the U.S.S.R. outside the Axis had recognized as independent, as a new SSR into the Soviet Union.
¹⁷

If the annexations represent traditional expansionist policy, the Soviet view of the bulk of the territory between the pre-1939 border of the U.S.S.R. and Germany represented a combination of traditional with revolutionary approaches. Although it has been suggested that Stalin at one point seriously considered the possibility of annexing all of Romania as well as the Baltic States to the U.S.S.R., he appears to have decided fairly early
not
to end the formal independence of Finland, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria; he did not follow the example of Otto von Bismarck, who had arranged in 1866 for the total incorporation of four states into Prussia at the end of the German civil war in addition to annexing three duchies formerly under the Danish crown. In Stalin’s conversations with the United States and Great Britain, most obviously at Teheran, there had always been the assumption that Finland would be independent–just as he assumed that such would
not
be the case with Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. Whatever the boundaries or government, however, Soviet discussions with the Western Allies also assumed the existence of a Poland and separate states in Southeast
Europe, and the percentages agreement between Stalin and Churchill was obviously based on such an assumption.

As for the boundaries with each other and third countries, Poland would receive the southern part of East Prussia, the territory of the Free City of Danzig, and all of Germany east of the Oder and western Neisse rivers, but would return the portion of Czechoslovakia it had seized in 1938 to the latter. In addition, it would be allocated the German port city of Stettin (Sczcecin) and some additional territory
west
of the Oder river to compensate it for not getting the northern half of East Prussia with the city of Königsberg (Kaliningrad), originally promised to Poland but now claimed by the Soviet Union.
¹⁸
There is no evidence to show whether Stalin thought about any westward expansion of Czechoslovakia, but he agreed to that country’s expelling its inhabitants of German background. The British had approved this transfer in early July, 1942; the United States and the Soviet Union in May and June of 1943.
¹⁹
As for the long-disputed border between Hungary and Romania, the Soviet government moved back and forth, using the possibility of its support for the claims to Transylvania of one or the other in the hope of drawing each out of the war on the side of Germany and into the front of the Allies. The success of the coup in Romania in August 1944, followed by active Romanian military participation alongside the Red Army, and the failure of the Hungarians to pull off a similar coup in October of that year, settled the matter: Romania would retain its 1919 border with Hungary. This in turn would make it easier to reconcile Romania to its having to leave with Bulgaria the portion of the Dobruja which had been ceded in 1940.

Vastly more important than the territorial changes, which to all intents and purposes reinstated the settlement of 1919 with only the situation of Poland and the Baltic States altered in major ways, were the sociopolitical transformations on which the Soviet Union insisted. In each country, the old elites were to be dispossessed, if not physically eliminated’ and new regimes in which Communists occupied the key positions of power were to nationalize the means of production and establish entirely new structures not yet fully modelled on the Soviet system but on the road to that goal, via what were for a time called “peoples democracies.” Since Stalin knew that in all these countries the Communist movements were small and the population (with the possible exception of that in Bulgaria) anti-Russian, he could not think of any way to establish a system congenial to the Soviet Union, other than to make sure that popular attitudes could not express themselves through free parliamentary processes. Thus a radical transformation of each country would go along with a formal preservation of each as a separate state,
leaving open as a result at least the remote possibility of other developments in the future.

The country most directly and spectacularly affected by this process was Poland. The movement of the Red Army into the eastern part of pre-war Poland had, to all intents and purposes, settled the boundary issue there in its broader context. The Soviet and Polish governments (either the government-in-exile or that installed by the Russians in Lublin) could discuss modifications of the border as drawn in the German–Soviet agreements of 1939–and this was indeed done.
^d
The occupation of the area by the Red Army and the agreement of Britain and the United States to something approximating the Curzon Line as the basis of the Polish-Soviet border, however, in reality settled the basic issue.
^e
A Poland freed from German control by the Allies could not reassert its pre-1772 and pre-1939 character as a multi–national state by force of arms. The Soviet satellite government referred to by its location for some time as the “Lublin Committee” accepted the new eastern border; the Polish government-in-exile would not do so, although some of its members were willing to make modifications in the pre-war border with the Soviet Union. It has been suggested, and this appears to have been Churchill’s view during the war, that a willingness to accept the new border with Russia would have made possible a very different outcome for Poland on the issues of government and internal institutions; but the fate of the government of Czechoslovakia, which followed an opposite course and accepted territorial change in favor of the Soviet Union, suggests otherwise.