Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (175 page)
The initial Comecon participants were Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Romania and the USSR, joined shortly thereafter by Albania and the GDR. In later years Yugoslavia, Mongolia, China, North Korea and North Vietnam also became members. In 1963 Comecon countries’ share of international trade was 12 percent; by 1979 it was 9 percent and falling.
Under the 1946 Constitution the constituent republics—Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia, Macedonia and Montenegro—were free to secede from the Federation, a right of which they were deprived seven years later.
It is significant that Stalin left his nuclear physicists alone and never presumed to second guess
their
calculations. Stalin may well have been mad, but he was not stupid.
They were executed nonetheless. Three weeks after his death, the regime published Petkov’s posthumous ‘confession’. But this was so obviously faked that it rapidly became an embarrassment, even in Communist Bulgaria. The authorities ceased to speak of it and the Bulgarian secret police chief who had injudiciously arranged for its publication was duly shot.
As late as 1966, four-fifths of Polish state employees had only a primary school education. The country was run by a strikingly under-educated administrative caste.
In 1924 the 27-year-old Kostov was arrested and tortured by the Bulgarian police. Afraid that he might betray the (underground) Communists he leaped from a fourth-floor window at police headquarters in Sofia and broke both his legs.
The
Bund
was a Jewish labor movement whose roots lay in pre-war czarist Russia and whose interwar activities were confined to Poland.
See Heda Margolius Kovaly,
Under a Cruel Star
(1986). In the eighteen months following the end of World War Two more Jews were killed in Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia than in the ten years preceding the war.
Stalin’s Secret Pogrom: The Postwar Inquisition of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee
(Yale University Press, 2002), edited by Joshua Rubenstein and Vladimir Naumov, page 52. Following a familiar pattern, Komarov himself would later be imprisoned and executed—pleading to the last his anti-Semitic credentials.
The survivors were all released in later years, though they and their fellow victims would not be fully rehabilitated and exonerated until 1968.
The script was
very
precise. When André Marty was unofficially ‘tried’ by the Central Committee of the French Communist Party in December 1952, his ‘prosecutor’, Léon Mauvais, accused him of speaking of ‘the Trotskyist International’ rather than ‘Trotskyist scum’ or ‘group of Trotskyist police spies’, which were the Communists’ ‘natural and habitual’ terms for use when referring to Trotskyists. This linguistic slippage alone placed Marty under grave suspicion.
Catherine Merridale,
Night of Stone: Death and Memory in 20th-Century Russia
(2000), page 249.
Translation by Professor Marci Shore of Indiana University, slightly amended by TJ. I am also indebted to Professor Shore for the quotation from Ludek Pachman.
Zdeněk Mlynář,
Night Frost in Prague
(London, 1980), page 2.
Brecht, characteristically, hedged his bets by retaining an Austrian passport.
The best-known of course was Arthur Koestler—but then he might as readily be described as Hungarian, or Austrian, or French or Jewish.
The PSI in these years was unique among West European Socialist parties in its proximity and subordination to the Communists—a pattern much more familiar in
Eastern
Europe.
In De Sica’s
Sciuscià
(made in 1946 and set in that same year) the director of a boys’ prison not only gives the Fascist salute—a habit he cannot break—but alludes with undisguised nostalgia to the low crime figures back in Mussolini’s time.
Despite his own misgivings about Soviet cultural policy, Paul Eluard refused to criticize Zdanovism in front of the working-class comrades of his local Party cell. As he explained to Claude Roy, ‘Poor things, it would just discourage them. One must not upset those taking part in the struggle; they wouldn’t understand. ’
François Fejtö, living in Paris, noted some years later that whereas the Italian Communists gave a warm, if guarded, welcome to his history of Eastern Europe, the PCF condemned it as the work of just another renegade.
Thus Emmanuel Mounier, in
Esprit
, February 1946: ‘Anti-Communism . . . is the necessary and sufficient crystallizing force for a return of Fascism.’
Likewise, the cult of Mao in the West reached its zenith at the height of the Cultural Revolution, just when and
just because
Mao was persecuting writers, artists and teachers.
In these years ‘progressivism’, as Raymond Aron mordantly observed, consisted in ‘presenting Communist arguments as though they emanated spontaneously from independent speculation.’
These sentiments are unintentionally caricatured in this report from a child’s first class with a Communist primary teacher, in Prague, April 1948: ‘Children, you all know that in America people live in holes dug in the ground and are slaves for a few capitalists, who take all the profit. But in Russia everyone is happy, and we in Prague are very happy too, owing to the government of Klement Gottwald. Now children, repeat loudly with me: “We are very contented and approve the Gottwald government”.’
‘We were intolerant of idiocy in the domains we knew well ’, wrote the French poet Claude Roy, who joined the PCF during the war after an earlier romance with the far Right Action Française, ‘but forgiving of crimes in matters of which we knew little.’
Luc Sante,
The Factory of Facts
(1998), p.27.
She was not alone in her Victorian allusions. The British Prime Minister at the time, Winston Churchill, used to remind audiences that he had ridden in the last cavalry charge of the British Army—at Omdurman in the Sudan—in September 1898
In high-school history textbooks the message of Franco’s ascent to power was unambiguous: ‘The future of Spain united, after three centuries, to the destiny of the past! . . . The ancient procession has not ceased . . . Along its path advance the dead and the living, bursting with Christianity, in which a world disoriented and in catastrophic convulsions centers and anchors itself . . . This is the grand task that God has saved for the Spain of today . . . An exceptional destiny . . . Through the Empire, to God!’ Feliciano Cereceda,
Historia del imperio espanol y de la hispanidad
(Madrid, 1943), pp. 273-74, quoted in Carolyn Boyd,
Historia Patria: Politics, History and National Identity in Spain, 1875-1975
(Princeton, 1997), p. 252.
Bing.
Wartime humour in Britain had typically concentrated on material shortcomings, mild sexual innuendo and an undercurrent of resentment at over-privileged American GIs. Sometimes on all three at once: ‘Have you heard about the new Utility underpants? One Yank and they’re off!’
But note that France had more publications devoted to cinema than the other two combined.
Trevor Grundy,
Memoir of a Fascist Childhood
(1998), page 19.
Rationing in Eastern Europe was not abolished until 1953 in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland and Bulgaria; 1954 in Romania, 1957 in Albania and 1958 in East Germany. But since the Communist economy induced shortage systemically, comparisons with Western Europe are inappropriate.
J. H. Plumb,
The Growth of Political Stability in Early Eighteenth-Century England 1675-1725
(London, 1967), p. xvii.
In March 1951, under US pressure, the Dutch, overcoming considerable domestic neutralist sentiment, had reluctantly agreed to double their defense budget and ready five divisions for deployment by 1954.
Based, according to Eden, on an idea dreamed up in his morning bath.
4
The only explicit restriction placed on German rearmament was an absolute prohibition of any German nuclear arms program, then or ever.
Austrian neutrality was not in the original text; it was inserted by the Austrian parliament during the debate over the State Treaty.
The Americans were not the only ones panicked by displays of Soviet hardware. In 1960 the British Conservative Prime Minister Harold Macmillan privately concluded that ‘They [the USSR] are no longer frightened of aggression. They have at least as powerful nuclear forces as the West. They have interior lines [of communication]. They have a buoyant economy and will soon outmatch capitalist society in the race for material wealth.’
It was left unclear what say, if any, the British would have in their use. At the time (1952) a joint Churchill-Truman communiqué rather obscurely declared that ‘the use of these bases in an emergency would be a matter for joint decision . . . in the light of circumstances prevailing at the time.’
8
American pressure on the British and French to withdraw from Suez in November 1956 (see Chapter Nine) had led to fears among the NATO countries that when it came to a war the US might retreat to its hemisphere, abandoning the exposed Europeans. Hence the perceived need in Washington to ‘stand firm’, first on Berlin and later on Cuba, in order to reassure America’s vulnerable allies.
Kennedy’s remark was not only confidential at the time, it was even kept out of the documents from the summit meeting when they were first published thirty years later.
As they were to discover in 1990, their fears were not unfounded.
Anatoly Dobrynin,
In Confidence
(Times Books, 1995), p. 46. Khrushchev’s aversion to war was genuine. As he wrote to Kennedy on October 26th, at the height of the Cuba crisis: ‘If indeed war should break out, then it would not be in our power to stop it, for such is the logic of war. I have participated in two wars and I know that war ends when it has rolled through cities and villages, everywhere sowing death and destruction.’
As late as 1971, 95 percent of Italy’s senior civil servants had begun their careers before the overthrow of Fascism.
Though in the light of Italy’s earlier history it is not entirely fair to lay the blame for the country’s institutional corruption on American foreign policy. See Eric J. Hobsbawm,
The Age of Extremes. A History of the World, 1914-1991
(New York, 1994), pp. 238-39.
In the elections of 1945 the Austrian Communists received just 174,000 votes—5 percent—and elected four deputies to the parliament. Thereafter they played no role in Austrian politics.
On the eve of the 1938
Anschluss
there were 189,000 Jews in Vienna. When the city was liberated in 1945 there were fewer than 1,000 remaining.
In Belgium the long-established
Catholic
Party changed its name to
Christian
to emphasize its cross-denominational appeal and its more modern, reforming aspirations. In the Netherlands, where intra-Christian distinctions actually mattered, the Catholic Party kept its old title.
To which Resnais responded, ‘Naturally I hadn’t realized that the National Socialist regime would be represented at Cannes. But now, of course, I do.’
‘No-one can take this shame from us.’
With unintentionally revealing hyperbole he described the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty as a ‘Morgenthau Plan squared’.
Many of modern Germany’s senior public figures (including the Federal Chancellor and Foreign Minister at the time of writing—2005) were children of this time, raised in single-parent families by a working mother.
The Portuguese dictator Dr Antonio de Oliveira Salazar was asked in 1968 (seven years into the Angolan revolt that began in February 1961) when he envisaged independence for Portugal’s African colonies, Angola and Mozambique: ‘It is a problem for centuries’, he replied. ‘Within five hundred years. And in the meantime they will have to go on participating in the process of development.’ (See Tom Gallagher,
Portugal. A Twentieth-Century Interpretation
, 1983, page 200.) But then Salazar’s principled denial of the modern world was legendary: for most of the 1950s he succeeded in keeping Coca-Cola out of his country, something even the French could not manage.
There was occasional substance to the French claim: Félix Eboué, the governor-general of French Equatorial Africa in 1945, was a high French colonial functionary—and he was black.
According to some sources, De Gaulle discouraged open talk of colonial self-government lest European settlers, notably in Algeria, seize the occasion to secede from France and establish a segregationist state, on the South African model. This was not an unreasonable anxiety, as subsequent events would show.
For friend and foe alike, Ho Chi Minh’s incarnation as an international Communist icon was confirmed on January 14th 1950, when Mao and Stalin were the first to recognize his newly declared Democratic Republic of Vietnam.
These events are memorably depicted in Gilles Pontecorvo’s 1965 film
La Battaglia di Algeri
(
The Battle of Algiers
).
