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The Cold War and East-Central Europe, 1945–1989

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The Cold War and East-Central Europe, 1945–1989 FORUM The Cold War and East-Central Europe, 1945–1989 ✣ Commentaries by Michael Kraus, Anna M. Cienciala, Margaret K. Gnoinska, Douglas Selvage, Molly Pucci, Erik Kulavig, Constantine Pleshakov, and A. Ross Johnson Reply by Mark Kramer and V´ıt Smetana Mark Kramer and V´ıt Smetana, eds. Imposing, Maintaining, and Tearing Open the Iron Curtain: The Cold War and East-Central Europe, 1945–1989. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2014. 563 pp. $133.00 hardcover, $54.99 softcover, $54.99 e-book. EDITOR’S NOTE: In late 2013 the publisher Lexington Books, a division of Rowman & Littlefield, put out the book Imposing, Maintaining, and Tearing Open the Iron Curtain: The Cold War and East-Central Europe, 1945–1989, edited by Mark Kramer and V´ıt Smetana. The book consists of twenty-four essays by leading scholars who survey the Cold War in East-Central Europe from beginning to end. East-Central Europe was where the Cold War began in the mid-1940s, and it was also where the Cold War ended in 1989–1990. Hence, even though research on the Cold War and its effects in other parts of the world—East Asia, South Asia, Latin America, Africa—has been extremely interesting and valuable, a better understanding of events in Europe is essential to understand why the Cold War began, why it lasted so long, and how it came to an end. A good deal of high-quality scholarship on the Cold War in East-Central Europe has existed for many years, and the literature on this topic has bur- geoned in the post-Cold War period. Even so, what makes Imposing, Main- taining, and Tearing Open distinctive is not only the many years of detailed knowledge the contributors bring to bear but also their ability to draw exten- sively on newly declassified archival sources from the former Soviet bloc and from Western countries as well as recently published memoirs and interviews. The authors also make us of existing scholarship and contemporaneous pub- lished sources, but their access to a wide range of declassified archival materials allows them to trace events more closely, comprehensively, and accurately. Journal of Cold War Studies Vol. 19, No. 2, Spring 2017, pp. 158–214, doi:10.1162/JCWS_c_00723 C 2017 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 158 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JCWS_c_00723 by guest on 27 September 2021 Forum To assess the book’s contributions to the literature, we asked eight experts on the topic to provide commentaries, including about the questions that remain to be answered. Although the commentators do not always see eye-to- eye, their essays collectively shed light on the state of the art in scholarship on the Cold War in East-Central Europe. Commentary by Michael Kraus This nearly 600-page volume is based on twenty-four revised essays, most of which were originally presented at a November 2009 conference in Prague organized by the Institute for Contemporary History of the Czech Republic’s Academy of Sciences. Twenty-one scholars from nine countries have con- tributed, though four chapters come from Mark Kramer, also the volume’s co-editor. Let me simply state at the outset that scholars interested in both the broad contours and patterns of the Cold War in Europe as well as specialists and graduate students examining particular crises involving East and Central Europe from 1945 through 1989 will find this volume indispensable. In the context of this review, one cannot do full justice to the richness of the many subjects covered here and the merits of every essay. Several key themes emerge and inform the organization of the book into four parts. Part One, “Central Europe and the Onset of the Iron Curtain,” focuses especially on the years from 1945 to Iosif Stalin’s death in 1953. Kramer’s “Stalin, Soviet Policy, and the Establishment of a Communist Bloc in Eastern Europe, 1941–1949,” is an excellent overview of the establishment of Soviet power in the region. As he puts it : “Although Stalin did not set out with a master plan for the Communization of East-Central Europe, the steps he took from an early stage pushed events unmistakably in that direction” (p. 7). Kramer analyzes the postwar developments in the region in the context of rising repression and xenophobia inside the USSR, as well as the crackdown on armed insurgencies in the newly annexed Soviet territories in the region. According to Kramer, Stalin’s policies toward the region should be seen as a function of “an internal-external dynamic,” which though not insulated from the larger East-West competition was, to a certain extent, autonomous. The dual goal of establishing a security zone that would also facilitate the extraction of economic resources drove Moscow’s rising hegemony and control en route to “people’s democracies.” Kramer’s thoroughly documented thesis is a testament to what we have learned from the recently declassified materials—even though, as he points out, several crucial archives in Moscow remain closed to researchers: the 159 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JCWS_c_00723 by guest on 27 September 2021 Forum Presidential Archive, the Foreign Intelligence Archive, the Central Archive of the Federal Security Service, and the Main Archive of the Ministry of Defense. To this one might add—based on personal experience—that some archival materials that had been accessible to researchers in the 1990s were at least temporarily put off-limits again or subject to a prolonged “review” (though fortunately by 2015 most of the materials had been reopened). Kramer’s chap- ter is complemented by Michael Hopkins’s fairly mainstream interpretation (based largely on secondary sources) of the hardening of U.S. policy toward Moscow and Eastern Europe in 1943–1948. V´ıt Smetana’s well researched analysis shows how Czechoslovakia’s wartime diplomacy, as conducted by president Edvard Beneˇs’s government in London, reflected a good deal of self-subordination to Soviet interests. The contrasts between the exiled Czechoslovak and Polish governments, rep- resenting two neighbors in Central Europe, could not be greater: Whereas the Poles in London seemed justifiably suspicious of Soviet motives and ob- jectives throughout the war, the London Czechoslovak government-in-exile led by Beneˇs remained prisoners of the Munich agreement and proved far too trusting of Moscow. Smetana rightly depicts Czechoslovakia’s pursuit of a modus vivendi with Stalin’s Soviet Union as “a test case,” one whose even- tual failure demonstrated that in Central Europe (unlike in Finland) Stalin would not settle for regimes that would accommodate Soviet interests in their external affairs while remaining internally free. Although Moscow paid lip service to non-intervention in Prague’s internal affairs, Soviet intelligence ser- vices had already (during the war) covertly recruited agents and informants in Czechoslovak security and military units who gave Stalin a lever of power and subterranean influence in postwar developments. Although Smetana’s often harsh criticism of Beneˇs and Foreign Minis- ter Jan Masaryk seems on the whole well-founded, he does not fully analyze one crucial element in the equation, namely the role of the Moscow-based Czechoslovak Communist power elite, emboldened to demand greater and greater concessions from Beneˇs as the Red Army moved deeper into Central Europe. Smetana argues, rightly, that by the end of the war, Czechoslovakia had become “a solid part” of Stalin’s sphere of influence. His conclusion that this occurred through no “dirty Great Power accord ... but because of Czechoslovakia’s own choice,” however, would seem to be in need of qualifica- tion. Prewar Czechoslovakia was occupied and dismantled during the war and therefore was in no position to make any “choice,“ much less its “own.” The “choice” to which Smetana is referring belonged to the government-in-exile of Edvard Beneˇs, whose legitimacy to make wartime decisions about postwar commitments was as questionable as it was colored by the Munich catastrophe. 160 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JCWS_c_00723 by guest on 27 September 2021 Forum These perspectives are supplemented by Laszl´ o´ Borhi’s examination of the rise of Communist power in Hungary and Soviet imperialist exploitation of Hungary’s economic resources, Kramer’s analysis of Stalin’s efforts to bring Yugoslavia to heel after 1948, and Rolf Steininger’s examination of Austria’s division, occupation, and neutralization (his text, however, comes mostly from his 2008 book on the subject), in which the German question played an im- portant role. When Konrad Adenauer learned of Austria’s desire for reparations from Germany, he informed Austria’s foreign minister: “If Austria demands reparations from us, we shall send an urn containing Adolf Hitler’s mortal remains to Vienna” (p. 142). Borhi’s chapter provides revealing data on Soviet extraction of Hungarian resources and leads him to conclude that the overall estimate (for which he provides no source) of “$22 billion of Soviet compen- sation from occupied territories” probably significantly understates the actual total. In addition to evidence of Stalin’s unceasing efforts to have Josip Broz Tito assassinated, Kramer’s account brings to light fascinating details regarding the secret East-bloc meeting in Moscow on 9–12 January 1951. Although the full stenographic record of this top level meeting remains unavailable, Kramer, working like a detective, reconstructs the available evidence, which depicts Stalin as demanding a huge expansion of the East European armies at a breakneck pace to attain a total of at least 3 million troops, of which 1.2 million were to be “combat–ready.” Whether the crash military buildup was aimed at preparations for a war against Yugoslavia or the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) or both remains unclear, but the military and the defense spending targets Stalin set for Eastern Europe affected the region’s economies for years after Stalin’s death.
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