Europe: A History (224 page)

Austria benefited from the Allied fiction that it had been the Nazis’ first victim. Divided, like Germany, into four occupation zones, the Republic succeeded in regaining full sovereignty on the basis of a
Staatsvertrag
or ‘state treaty’ (1955) signed by all four occupying powers. The conditions included strict neutrality, plus the maintenance in perpetuity of Vienna’s vast Soviet war memorial. The restoration of independence was followed by a period of unprecedented prosperity, similar to that in neighbouring Switzerland, and of relative détente. Politics was dominated by the nicely balanced rivalry of the Socialist Party, which held the chancellorship under Bruno Kreisky (1970–83), and the conservative People’s Party. In 1986 an international campaign to discredit the Austrian President, Kurt Waldheim, formerly Secretary-General of UNO, did not harm him; but it served as a reminder of Austria’s past. Austria’s frontiers contained several aberrations. Thanks to a treaty of 1868, the two districts of Jungholz and Mittelberg form part of the Bavarian customs area. The provinces of Vorarlberg and Tyrol enjoyed free trade with the Alto Adige and Trentino in Italy.

Seven European principalities, the last survivors of numerous historic mini-states, were too small to exercise an active role in international relations; but each has been well able to exploit its eccentric position.

San Marino (founded in the fifth century
AD
, territory 62 km
²
, population 23,000) claimed to be Europe’s oldest state. Recognized as independent in 1631, it
hugs the slopes of Monte Titano, near Rimini, and is entirely surrounded by Italian territory. It functioned after the war as a tax haven for rich Italians, ruled by a local government dominated alternately by communists and Christian Democrats.

The Grand Duchy of Liechtenstein (founded 1719, territory 157 km
²
, population 27,000) had ceded its foreign policy to Switzerland. In 1980, at $16,440 it had the highest per capita GNP in Europe. It is the last surviving constituent of the Holy Roman Empire.

The Principality of Monaco (territory 150 ha, population c.30,000) was a self-governing protectorate of France occupying a tiny enclave on the Riviera, east of Nice. Its modern status emerged in 1861; it had previously been a possession of Spain (from 1542), France (from 1641), and Sardinia (from 1815). Its constitution put government into the hands of the Grimaldi family. Its income depended heavily on the casino at Monte Carlo.

Andorra (territory 495 km
²
, population c.43,000), high in the eastern Pyrenees, has preserved its autonomy since 1278, when it was placed under the joint protection of the Bishop of Urgel and the Comte de Foix. In recent times the powers of the latter were exercised by the Prefect of the Ariège on behalf of the President of the French Republic. It lived from tourism, especially skiing, and from duty-free trade.

The Isle of Man (territory 518 km
²
, population 65,000 in 1986) and the Channel Islands (of Jersey, Alderney, Guernsey, and Sark—territory 194 km
²
, population c.134,000 in 1981) were both British dependencies with English connections dating from the Norman Conquest. They were never formally joined to the United Kingdom. Both were wealthy tax havens. The Dame of Sark was still contesting her prerogatives with Westminster in the 1960s. In the 1990s the ‘parliament’ of the Isle of Man was courting a showdown by failing to follow England’s example in legalizing private homosexual acts between consenting adults.

Gibraltar was the only British dependency outside the British Isles to join the EC. In this it followed the French Overseas Departments of Guadeloupe, Martinique, Reunion, and Guiana. All other British and French colonies, like the autonomous Danish regions of [
FAROE
] and Greenland, remained outside the EC.

The Vatican City (territory 44 ha, estimated population 1,000 in 1981) was Europe’s last autocracy. Its ruler, the Pope, exercised the same unlimited governance over this latter-day papal state as over the Roman Catholic Church, of which it was the headquarters. Its nearest counterpart was the ‘theocratic republic’ of [
ATHOS
], which has enjoyed autonomy within Greece since 1926.

These survivals serve as a reminder that variety and tradition play a prominent part in European life. Europe has not been entirely submerged by power politics.

Eastern Europe, 1945–1985

‘Eastern Europe’ in the post-war era had two distinct meanings. It could reasonably be taken to refer to any part of the Continent which lay on the Soviet side of
the Iron Curtain. In this sense, it included the European countries which had been incorporated into the Soviet Union and others which had not. More usually, however, it was used as a synonym for the satellites of the USSR in ‘East Central’ and ‘South-Eastern’ Europe, as distinct from the USSR itself.

In the last analysis, these distinctions carry only limited weight. None of the states organized on Leninist lines, whether as so-called ‘people’s democracies’ or as republics of the Soviet Union, were supposed to enjoy any significant measure of independence. All were designed as facades for the exercise of the dictatorial prerogatives of the Soviet-led communist movement. By any definition, therefore, the post-war history of Eastern Europe can only take the policies of the CPSU as its starting-point, before moving to examine the ever more dyslectic translation of Moscow’s wishes by Moscow’s ever more wayward dependants.

Prior to the terminal decline after 1985, the post-war history of the Soviet Union fell into three periods. The first (1945–53) was taken up by the last years of the Great Stalin. The second (1953–64) was dominated by so-called de-stalinization, during the rise and fall of Nikita Sergeevich Khrushchev. The third (1964–85), later labelled ‘the Age of Stagnation’, was initiated and inspired by Leonid Il’ich Brezhnev. Taken together, those four decades witnessed one of the grand illusions of modern history. The Soviet Union had emerged from the Second World War as the greatest military power in Europe; and it proceeded to turn itself into one of two global superpowers. To all outward appearances it was unimaginably strong, an impregnable fortress armed with the world’s largest arsenal of nuclear weapons. At the same time, its internal processes were decomposing at an unprecedented rate; its body was riddled with the political equivalent of cancer. History is full of giants with feet of clay—the old Russian Empire was a prime example—but here was an armoured dinosaur which was dying on its feet. And no one saw its distress—neither Western sovietologists nor, until much too late, the Soviet leaders themselves. With a number of honourable exceptions, both groups spent most of those 40 years admiring the Soviet Union as a paragon of health and progress.

Stalin’s last years brought no relief to the long night of fear and suffering. Speculation that age and victory would mellow him proved unfounded. The same old gang of Stalin’s pre-war cronies clung to power. The same mixture of terror, propaganda, and collective routine kept the Soviet peoples down. The gulag kept up the same regular motions of mass arrests and slave labour. There is strong evidence to suppose that Stalin, having discovered the so-called ‘Doctors’ Plot’, was preparing yet another great Purge when he died.

In those years the Soviet Empire expanded to its greatest extent. It did so through military conquest and through political surrogates who created political, economic, and social clones of the Soviet model. Shortly after the occupation of Eastern Europe, the major advance came with the victory of the communists in China. Mao Zedong had written that ‘Power grows from the barrel of a gun’; and he triumphed in 1949 without the direct intervention of Moscow. He held somewhat different ideological views from the Soviets, and was well aware that Stalin
had originally backed his arch-enemy, Chiang Kai-shek. But for the time being he was content to be a loyal member of the Soviet camp. For a dozen years, Moscow stood at the head of a movement which controlled the world’s most populous nation as well as the world’s largest state. The so-called ‘Socialist Camp’ contained half of humanity.

Great store was placed on growing Soviet influence with the ex-colonial peoples. In the era of decolonization, Moscow saw itself as the natural patron and beneficiary of all national liberation movements. Its strongest links were forged with Vietnam, the Arab world, and Cuba.

All available resources were thrown into the military aspects of nuclear science. At Mayak in the Urals, and elsewhere, teams of cosseted slave scientists laboured to produce the Soviet ‘bomb’. An atomic device was successfully tested on arctic Novaya Zemlya in 1949, a hydrogen device in 1953. After that, the period of America’s nuclear monopoly had passed. By the time that Stalin died, the Soviet Union had confirmed its status as a superpower.

Stalin died on 5 March 1953 after suffering a stroke at his dacha in Kuntsevo. In his death-throes he was left lying on the floor for 24 hours. No Kremlin doctor who valued his own life was going to save Stalin’s. The Politburo members kept vigil at his bedside in turns:

As soon as Stalin showed signs of consciousness, Beria threw himself on his knees, and started kissing Stalin’s hand. When Stalin lost consciousness again, Beria stood up and spat … spewing hatred.
²⁰

News of Stalin’s death caused tens of millions to weep.

De-stalinization meant exactly what the term implies. It removed those features of the Soviet regime which were directly connected with Stalin himself—the cult of personality, the
edinonachalie
or ‘one-man rule’, and the practice of random mass terror. It initiated an interval known, after Ehrenburg’s novel, as ‘the Thaw’. When Beria was gunned down at the very first Politburo meeting, the collective leadership of his colleague-assassins was able to trim the power of the NKVD—now reorganized as the KGB. But they kept the dictatorial machine intact. They lightened the climate of fear, but introduced no significant measure of democratization or liberalization. The Soviet system retained its totalitarian character. Over three years, the collective leadership gave way to the personal supremacy of Khrushchev.

The ebullient Khrushchev was perhaps the least obnoxious of Stalin’s creatures. He was typical of the proletarian opportunists who had made their way up the Party apparatus in the worst years of the Terror. He had a black record as Stalin’s boss in Ukraine; a late recruit to literacy, he was a cultural philistine of the crudest sort. Yet he had a rough peasant charm—especially when beating the table with his shoe at the United Nations. And he was surrounded by high hopes. Khrushchev’s sensational ‘Secret Speech’ to the XXth Party Congress in March 1956 must be seen in context. It set the precedent where every Soviet leader would ritually denounce his predecessor as a criminal; and its highly selective revelations
of Stalin’s crimes were carefully matched to the needs of the Party. It concealed much more than it revealed, and by minimizing Soviet criminality earned him an exaggerated reputation for honesty. It belongs to the evolving Soviet genre of ‘openness’ that ran from Stalin’s own revelatory speeches to Gorbachev’s feats 30 years later.

Khrushchev’s reign was notable for three signal developments. Misunderstandings over the policy of ‘Different Roads to Socialism’ led to great tensions throughout Eastern Europe, to open conflict in Hungary, and to the fateful split with China. Developments in military science and the launching of Sputnik, the first earth satellite, led to intense rivalry with the USA and to the Cuban missile crisis of 1963. The quantitative achievements of the Soviet economy led Khrushchev to boast that the Soviet Union would overtake the West within 20 years: ‘We will bury you.’ Khrushchev’s adventurism thoroughly scared the comrades; in October 1964 he was removed in a Kremlin coup and sent into live retirement.

Leonid Brezhnev, another Russian from Ukraine, dominated the Soviet bloc for two long decades. He has been blamed as the man who allowed the USSR to revert to ‘neo-Stalinism’, and to ‘stagnate’. In time, he may come to be seen as the leader who understood the system best, who prolonged its life for as long as was possible. He was, above all, a cautious and canny
apparatchik
, who realized the consequences of tampering with a faulty machine. His brief experience of liberalization during the Prague Spring convinced him, quite rightly, of the unreliability of his closest allies and the need for the Brezhnev Doctrine (see below). His brief dalliance with economic reform at home, associated with his chief partner, Alexei Kosygin, convinced him that the risks were greater than the gains. His personal knowledge of Ukraine must have convinced him that the slightest relaxation of the nationality issue could only spell trouble. His pursuit of
détente
with the West, which combined an aggressive military stance with the careful delimitation of spheres, produced a stable arrangement that seemed to guarantee the international position of the USSR in perpetuity.

Brezhnev could not fail to notice how the USSR had been built. But he also understood—as his successors did not—that eliminating the lies and the coercion must inevitably dissolve the fabric of the building. So Brezhnev sat tight. What his detractors were to denounce as ‘stagnation’ could be seen as the peace and stability for which he and his generation had longed. The most one could do was to calibrate the force and the fraud to tolerable proportions. Unlike Stalin, he did not kill people in millions; unlike Khrushchev, he did not go in for ‘hare-brained schemes’; unlike Gorbachev, he did not destroy the system with which he was entrusted.

One of the great ironies of the era became apparent when successive General Secretaries showed signs of a variety of wasting diseases that perfectly symbolized the Soviet condition. By the late 1970s stability was slipping into inertia. Brezhnev’s speech slurred and his movements slowed to the point where jokers claimed that he was a corpse maintained on a life-support machine. His death
turned inertia into paralysis, as ailing successors argued the contrary merits of reform and inaction. Yuri Andropov (1982–3), an exponent of reform, died of cancer before reforms could be started. Konstantin Chernyenko (1983–5), a victim of emphysema, had no intention of starting anything.