Authors: Gerhard L. Weinberg
Tags: #History, #Military, #World War II, #World, #20th Century
With the possibility of Soviet archives finally opening up, it may be easier to determine the reasoning which led Stalin to allow the Finns to retain their domestic institutions as long as they could be depended upon to pursue no foreign policy hostile to the U.S.S.R.. It would appear that a combination of concern for the maintenance of the alliance with the Western Powers and a recognition of the fierce determination of the Finns to maintain their freedom led him to decide that a neutral and at least outwardly friendly Finland was preferable to a restive province whose retention was also costly for Soviet relations with the West.
No country, except for the defeated, was changed more drastically as a result of the war than Poland. The armies of Germany and the Soviet Union had moved across it several times, leaving enormous destruction in their wake. In addition, the Germans had systematically destroyed the city of Warsaw and had done what they could to wreck the nation’s economy. The human losses included the overwhelming majority of the country’s Jewish population, and hundreds of thousands of civilians
killed during the fighting and as a prelude to the systematic extermination of the Poles scheduled for the period after a German victory. Additional millions had been deported by both the Germans and the Soviets. Furthermore, with the country’s boundaries practically completely different after 1945 from what they had been in 1939, there were additional population shifts, difficult at first even if leading to a more nationally uniform population on a somewhat richer territory when it was all over. As if these massive changes were not enough, the end of the war saw the imposition of a Soviet-style dictatorship on the state.
Poland had been anything but a democracy before the German invasion of 1939, but the system imposed in 1945 and the immediately following years had essentially no roots in the country at all. Consolidated by a combination of internal warfare against the remnants of the underground army, the Armia Krajowa, with Stalinist terror, the new structure involved a complete reordering of Polish society on a model practically no segment of the population favored. When the free elections promised at Yalta were finally held more than forty years later, the whole edifice–or what by then was left of it–was swept away, leaving the Polish people to pick up where they had left off in 1939, changed in many ways by the war, but with the additional burdens left behind by decades of brutality and mismanagement.
The three Baltic States of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania had lost their independence during and as a result of the war but, unlike the smaller countries of Western Europe, did not regain it at the end. The insistence of the United States on a refusal to recognize their annexation to the U.S.S.R. still stood, and in reluctant deference to Roosevelt’s preference the British maintained a similar position formally, but the reality of life in the three states was very different. They were reabsorbed as Soviet Socialist Republics into the U.S.S.R., with a persistent, if by no means entirely successful, effort being made to model them completely on the system installed in the other SSRs. As a part of the earlier territorial reorganization arranged by Hitler and Stalin, Lithuania received the long-disputed area of Vilna from Poland, and in subsequent decades this city and its surrounding territory would, for the first time, become solidly Lithuanian in population. On the other hand, deliberate settlement of Great Russians in the Baltic States would create new nationality problems. In 1990 these three countries finally resumed their real, as opposed to nominal, independence, picking up where they had left off half a century earlier. The fact that Lithuania now separated the northern portion of former German East Prussia, since 1945 included in the Soviet Federated Socialist Republic, from the rest of Russia’s territory would mean that an additional complication was certain to face
Lithuania as it dealt with a Russian state emerging from the collapsing U.S.S.R.
That country, by far the largest in Europe and in the world, was transformed by the experience of the war. Its casualties had been by far the highest of all belligerents, and the physical damage to its cities, industries, and transportation system was immense. In addition to the damage in the areas directly affected by hostilities, enormous dislocations in the economy, the running down of industrial plant and the imposition of tremendous hardships on the population had had a major impact on the huge portions of the state never reached by the invader. The country had received substantial assistance from its allies, and this had been especially important in sustaining the civilian population, but the standard of living at the end of the war was grim indeed. Reconstruction would be an immense charge on the economy, and the foreign policy of the Stalin government insured that there would be no outside aid beyond the initial relief support of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration. It is not surprising that under these circumstances the Soviet government did what it could to extract economic benefits from its domination of Eastern Europe and its control of a zone of occupation in Germany, but it would be a long, hard pull all the same.
The new boundary agreement worked out with, or perhaps one should say imposed on, the puppet Communist regime of post-war Poland expanded Soviet territory at the expense of pre-war Poland. The eastern portion of that country was annexed as was the northern part of former East Prussia and the easternmost part of Czechoslovakia. In the north, parts of Finland additional to those annexed under the peace treaty of March 1940 were included in the Soviet Union, the most important of these being the Petsamo area, a shift which deprived Finland of an outlet to the Arctic Ocean while giving the nickel mines–and a border with Norway–to the U.S.S.R. Romania, on the other hand, was not required to cede territory additional to that which the Soviet Union had seized in the summer of 1940, perhaps because the Romanians had changed sides in August 1944.
But these territorial accretions, and the domination over the countries of East and Southeast Europe, were not the most significant parts of the new status of the Soviet Union. Instead, it was a double effect of the war on the internal and international situation of the country. Inside the U.S.S.R., the war, called the Great Patriotic War, was the major consolidating experience. Decades later the whole structure of the system would fall apart, but in the period immediately after the war, the ordeal the country had gone through and the victory it had attained gave a sense of pride and cohesion which had not been there since 1917 and
took a long time to erode. That pride, engendered by a major role in the defeat of Germany, a role magnified by Soviet propaganda to the practical exclusion of all others, surrounded the regime with an appearance of legitimacy it had not had before and never regained.
In international affairs, the result of the war was that the very country which the Germans had expected to obliterate from the face of the earth–with most of its citizens–instead became and was recognized as one of the dominating powers of the globe, its territory expanded, its influence enhanced, its status unchallenged. Instead of being crushed, the Soviet Union had played a major role in crushing Germany, had advanced into Central and Southeast Europe, and was a founding member of the new United Nations Organization with that status symbol of a great power: a permanent seat on the Security Council. Instead of derision, the Soviet Union inspired respect and even fear. No greater reversal from 1917 or 1939 could be imagined. The day would come when some might question whether getting so many millions of one’s citizens killed was truly a sign of genius; but for the time being, Stalin, the only 1939 leader of a major country other than Chiang Kai-shek remaining in power in 1945, looked like the biggest winner from the war.
Czechoslovakia had not been as badly damaged during the war as most other portions of Eastern and Southeast Europe, though there had been substantial fighting in the Slovak portion. Because Czechoslovakia had been taken over by the Germans without war and its Czech population’s transfer or annihilation postponed by the Germans until after their victory, the western portion of the country had suffered the usual economic exactions, and the Jewish population had, for the most part, been killed as in other areas under German control; but the basic economic structure of the country had not been affected. The easternmost part of the pre-Munich country was annexed by the Soviet Union, and the puppet state of Slovakia had vanished, leaving its leaders to be tried and in many cases executed after the end of the war. The territory turned over to Germany under the Munich agreement was returned to Czechoslovakia, but the German inhabitants were now expelled in a process which deprived all of their property and many of their lives. For a short time it looked as if the country might provide that bridge between East and West that many of its leaders hoped it could be, but early in 1948 this prospect was crushed in a Communist coup. Forty years of darkness lay ahead.
Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria were all under the control of the Red Army at the end of the war. Though having by no means suffered equal damages and casualties during hostilities, each would encounter
the same immediate fate: a process of total social and political reorientation as all three became Soviet satellites. Hungary lost all the territories she had acquired as a partner of Germany; in addition, a small piece of land (the Bratislava bridgehead) was turned over to Czechoslovakia. Romania regained what had been lost in 1940 to Hungary but not what the country had been obliged to cede to the Soviet Union and to Bulgaria. The last named was the only state defeated in the war which actually increased its territory, being allowed to retain the southern Dobruja obtained from Romania in 1940 (and which Bulgaria had lost after World War I). All also had to pay some reparations, but these were to be paid in goods.
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Yugoslavia had suffered a civil war as well as occupation and a long struggle with the various occupiers. Terribly ravaged and exploited, the country hardly made up for the enormous suffering by acquiring substantial territory from Italy. The liberation of the country was, however, largely the result of its own resistance forces so that the Soviet Union could not control Yugoslavia as it did its northern and eastern neighbors. Tito imposed a Communist dictatorship on the country but soon broke with Moscow. The Communist insurgents came to control Albania when the nationalist insurgents waited too long to resist the Axis occupiers. Fearful of domination and possibly even absorption by Yugoslavia, they turned toward the Soviet Union for defense against a Yugoslavia which in one of its provinces contained a majority of people who were really Albanians, rather than Serbs (who controlled it). For decades, that new dictatorship was to attempt a remolding of Albania even as it insisted on an independent status in international affairs.
Greece had been spared the devastation of fighting in 1944 when the German troops pulled out, but the years of occupation had drained the country. Greece received the Dodecanese Islands in the Aegean from Italy, certainly a welcome addition, but peace with Italy did not bring peace at home. The civil war which had taken place inside the country already under Axis occupation would continue in various forms thereafter; the Greek agony was to last for years.
The African continent was affected dramatically by the war even though only relatively small portions of it had seen much fighting. The end of Italy’s colonial empire pointed the way to new developments. Ethiopia regained its independence and received the former Italian colony of Eritrea, an acquisition that was to prove a very mixed blessing indeed. Italian Somaliland, soon expanded by British Somaliland, became an independent country, as did Libya.
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These changes point toward a most significant effect of the war. The imperial ties which had bound most of Africa to European states had begun to be loosened as
a result of World War I; World War II practically broke them. The defeat of France in 1940 had destroyed that country’s prestige and nothing de Gaulle did in what was then French Equatorial Africa or subsequently in Algiers could erase the reality of prior French defeat. Since neither the Americans nor the British who had played the key role in freeing French Northwest Africa from Axis influence had any interest in taking over those areas for themselves, the key issue involved the restoration of French rule. In the short term this was possible, but in the long run it proved quite impossible. The immediate post-war revolt in Madagascar was crushed, but the war which began soon after in Algeria destroyed the French Fourth Republic without restoring French domination. New forms of association with France might be found; the French colonial empire in Africa was gone.
The impetus to decolonization was different for British than for French Africa, but the impetus was there all the same. The Egyptians chafed under the continued presence of British troops: with the Axis defeated, against whom were they to defend the Suez Canal? The parliamentary majority of Whites who ruled the Union of South Africa voted in 1948 for those who had opposed entrance into the war; they preferred to wage an internal war of sorts against the Black and Colored majority of the population. In any case, they would not look to London for guidance. The various British-controlled areas on the continent between Cairo and the Cape of Good Hope all moved toward independence in the immediate post-war years, the Gold Coast, renamed Ghana, being the first to attain that status fully in 1957. Substantial European settlements in Kenya and Southern Rhodesia complicated but could not halt the process which was, in any case, enormously facilitated by a changed perception of the imperial idea in the erstwhile colonial power itself.
Decolonization in Asia was both retarded and speeded up by the war. In Syria and Lebanon, the promise of independence made by both the British and the Free French at the beginning of the fighting there in June 1941 precluded any possible return to French rule. Whatever de Gaulle might imagine, there was no road back to the mandate system in the face of powerful nationalist movements, especially in Syria. In Iraq, the alignment of the al-Gaylani government with the Axis had provoked a temporary reassertion of direct British influence; but with the end of the war, that country would resume its troubled path to independence. The situation of Iran was in some ways similar even if different in detail. The British and Soviet occupation of 1941 had lost its rationale in 1945 very much the way Britain’s role in Iraq now had no justification, and the British indeed withdrew. The Soviet Union at first was disinclined to honor its promise to do likewise, and it took
massive outside pressure, primarily from the United States, to induce a withdrawal of the Soviet military from the northern part of the country. The opening of archives in Moscow may bring new light on this issue. In any case, the war years eventually left Iran with a massively improved internal transportation system as a result of the development of the supply route across the country for allied aid to Russia; it also left a new relationship with the United States that was to prove troublesome.