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FORUM The Cold and East-Central , 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 : The and East-, 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 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-, 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 —East , South Asia, , —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 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 . 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

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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 organized by the Institute for of the ’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 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 , 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 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- was, to a certain extent, autonomous. The dual goal of establishing a security zone that would also facilitate the extraction of economic resources drove ’s rising and control en route to “people’s .” 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

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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 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 ’s wartime , 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 and proved far too trusting of Moscow. Smetana rightly depicts Czechoslovakia’s pursuit of a modus vivendi with Stalin’s as “a test case,” one whose even- tual failure demonstrated that in Central Europe (unlike in ) 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 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 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 accord ... but because of Czechoslovakia’s own choice,” however, would seem to be in need of qualifica- tion. Prewar Czechoslovakia was 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.

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These perspectives are supplemented by Laszl´ o´ Borhi’s examination of the rise of Communist power in and Soviet imperialist exploitation of Hungary’s economic resources, Kramer’s analysis of Stalin’s efforts to bring to heel after 1948, and Rolf Steininger’s examination of ’s division, occupation, and neutralization (his text, however, comes mostly from his 2008 book on the subject), in which the played an im- portant role. When learned of Austria’s desire for reparations from , he informed Austria’s foreign minister: “If Austria demands reparations from us, we shall send an urn containing ’s mortal remains to ” (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 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 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 Organization (NATO) or both remains unclear, but the military and the defense spending targets Stalin set for Eastern Europe affected the region’s for years after Stalin’s death. The scarce information available about the -secret 1951 Moscow reminds us how little we know even today about some of the crucial decisions made in the waning years of Stalin’s rule. The book’s next section deals with the German question. Peter Ruggen- thaler seeks to resolve the continuing debate about the March 1952 Stalin Note on German unification, one of the most debated issues in German—and not only German—historiography. Was Stalin’s proposal for German unification and neutrality a missed opportunity? According to Ruggenthaler, the answer is no. Based on his careful research in German and Russian archives, he rebuts the claims of some scholars that Stalin did not have full command of the reigns of foreign policy and finds that even after Stalin removed as foreign minister in 1949, the latter remained Stalin’s policy manager. Molotov, who consistently acted according to Stalin’s guidelines, was the recipient of key information flows and issued directives to his replacement, Andrei Vyshinskii

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and his deputy, , though “Stalin had the last word.” The newly available archival evidence leads Ruggenthaler to conclude that by this “ maneuver,” initially proposed to the Kremlin by the leader of the German (GDR), , Stalin sought to “conceal [his plans for] the swift integration of the GDR into the ” and to present it instead as merely a response to the West’s integration of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG). A neutral Germany was “definitely” not one of Stalin’s objectives, Ruggenthaler affirms. Hope Harrison’s examination of the origins of the gives credit for the Wall where it is due, namely to Ulbricht. The idea to seal off the in Berlin was Ulbricht’s and the East German regime’s initiative, and it was actually resisted for some time by Moscow. What is also notable, as Harrison shows, is that the myth that the Soviet Union imposed its will and the Wall on lives on in contemporary Germany. Oliver Bange’s chapter demonstrates the central role of Germany in the Cold War’s rise and fall. He argues that German reunification became possible only after Germany’s “self-liberation” (the FRG’s emancipation in the and the GDR’s self- liberation in 1989) and “self-limitation.” Anne Deighton and George-Henri Soutou consider “The German Ques- tion” from the perspectives of official London and Paris, respectively. Their accounts show that in the late 1980’s both London and Paris were taken by surprise by the rapid pace of developments and that where unification of Ger- many was concerned, neither nor Franc¸ois Mitterrand was keen on seeing it proceed. When faced with the inevitability of reunification, they attempted to slow it down. In the end, Mitterrand reluctantly concluded that 1989–1990 was, in Soutou’s words, a “blessing in disguise,” though as he adds, “the disguise was very effective indeed.” As Deighton points out, Britain and , along with the , played a leading role in the division of Germany and Berlin in the postwar years, but by the late neither London nor Paris had the “capacities or interests” to occupy the cen- tral stage along with the major actors—, the United States, and the USSR—when German reunification and the fate of East-Central Europe were being decided. Drawing especially though not exclusively on Hungarian archives, Csaba Bek´ es’s´ account shows how and why the intra- foreign policy coordination evolved from the unruly into the fairly routinized 1970s. A major impetus in the direction of policy coordination came from the East Europeans in the early when in the aftermath of the they realized that being kept in the dark by Moscow about both the developments and the U.S. response afforded them no immunity from the potentially deadly consequences.

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Part III deals with “The Role of East-Central Europe in Ending the Cold War.” Thomas Blanton examines the contributions of and George H. W. Bush to the 1989 . Blanton’s well-researched and trenchantly argued chapter rejects the “triumphalist,” U.S.-centric narrative, which argues that Reagan deserves most of the credit for 1989 and for ending the Cold War. Blanton finds no evidence that the Reagan administration had any strategy for victory or even expectation of Soviet collapse. At the same time, he suggests that Reagan’s interactions with had a “very real impact ... on Soviet thinking, less a matter of than of threat relief,” especially where nuclear security was concerned (p. 290). The strategic review of U.S. policy requested by the next president, Bush, slowed down Washington’s response to the rapid pace of developments in East and Central Europe and delayed his first face-to-face meeting with Gorbachev by nearly a year. As a result, through the end of 1989, “U.S. policy was a bystander at best to the action ...” (p. 298). In hindsight, one might say that this was probably a good thing. In explaining and perceptively analyzing Soviet policies toward Eastern Europe in 1988–1989, Alex sees Moscow’s shift to the role of a “liberal patron of radical reform” as “the single most important contribution to the end of the Cold War in Europe.” To account for the dramatic shift in Soviet goals and priorities, Pravda pays equal attention to material and ideational factors. Of the former, he singles out the opportunity cost of the in Eastern Europe, whereby the Soviet Union provided subsidized energy to the region and received substandard quality goods in exchange. But the rising costs, argues Pravda, would have been bearable were it not for the Soviet redefinition of security, which diminished Eastern Europe’s role as an extension of the Soviet security zone. Finally, Moscow’s “new thinking” about security and foreign policy led Gorbachev to reject the use of force and to repudiate the . Somewhat surprisingly, the region did not merit any priority from Moscow during ’s first three years. No systematic policy reassessment followed until October 1988 when Georgii Shakhnazarov, Gorbachev’s aide for socialist countries, reported that signs were rapidly accumulating that a systemic crisis in Eastern Europe was in the offing. Gorbachev, however, increasingly preoccupied by domestic challenges, stuck to his optimistic beliefs in Communist regeneration and abided by the principle of non-intervention to the end, even when political change in Eastern Europe went beyond what he had envisaged and his perestroika anticipated. Svetlana Savranskaya’s contribution complements Pravda’s (and Kramer’s below) and focuses on the evolving Soviet security conceptions, especially the notion of a “,” which became, in her view, “central

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to Gorbachev’s thinking about the future of the socialist bloc” (pp. 338– 39). Shakhnazarov’s October 1989 memorandum, for example, envisaged the elimination of the Warsaw Pact and NATO in the coming years. But as Savranskaya points out, domestic preoccupation and pressures gradually took priority over the international agenda. A case in point she mentions is the meeting of the Soviet on 9 November 1989. Even as the world was watching people streaming through the , senior officials in the Kremlin were wholly focused on the crisis in . If Moscow had a strategy for Eastern Europe in 1989, Savranskaya concludes, “it was one of transformation on the belated model of the — with a face minus the —along with integration into Europe” (p. 341). Surprisingly, Savranskaya also repeats the old canard that on 9 February 1990 during of State ’s meeting with Gorbachev to explore German unification, Baker offered “guarantees” that “NATO would not expand to the territories of the Warsaw Pact,” guarantees that, she claims, Gorbachev accepted (p. 348). Based on the Baker-Gorbachev meeting, Russian officials, including ’s foreign minister Sergei Lavrov, as well as a few Western analysts, have claimed subsequently that the United Statesviolated a commitment it made in the 1990s not to expand NATO into Central Europe and the Baltics. An internal State Department review of the documents and issues has found no evidence for this claim, and the claim is also rejected by all of the leading U.S. officials involved. Furthermore, independent scholars who have thoroughly investigated the archival record have also rejected the idea that any such pledge was made.1 Although a full accounting of this issue is beyond the purview of this essay, suffice to say that in February 1990, Baker and Gorbachev (and in Moscow the following day) were discussing German reunification and the new Germany’s place within NATO—not the Warsaw Pact countries. So when Baker mentioned to Gorbachev the possibility that NATO would not “spread an inch eastward” he was clearly referring to , not to , Hungary, or Czechoslovakia, all of which were then still members of the Warsaw Pact in good standing. Second, Baker’s conversation with Gorbachev was just that–exploratory talk around several issues that produced no legally binding agreement. Nor did Gorbachev agree to anything at the meeting with Baker. Besides, the issue of reunited Germany’s status in NATO took many months of additional negotiations to resolve and on 12 September 1990 Gorbachev signed accords in Moscow that accepted the reunification of Germany as well as its membership in NATO. Savranskaya’s

1. See, for example, Mark Kramer, “The Myth of a No-NATO-Enlargement Pledge to Russia,” The Washington Quarterly, Vol. 32, No. 2 (April 2009), pp. 39–61.

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account simply adopts the subsequent Russian interpretation of the Baker- Gorbachev conversations and ignores the compelling evidence we have that the “No-NATO-Enlargement Pledge to Russia” is a complete myth. Bernd Schaefer’s chapter, “Pulling the Rug: East-Central Europe and the Implosion of East Germany,” argues that waves of East German fleeing via Hungary and Czechoslovakia, starting in August 1989, was an “indispensable precondition” for the mass inside the GDR in October (p. 361). The starting proposition for Kramer’s analysis of “The Demise of the Soviet Bloc” is that the peaceful character of the transformation “was due as much to the fundamental reorientation of Soviet foreign policy under Mikhail Gorbachev as to the courage and restraint of protesters in Eastern Europe” (p. 370). To these two factors, he adds a third, namely, “the loss of will” among the East European hard liners stemming from their realization that Moscow would not intervene on their behalf. Kramer, similarly to Pravda, sees crucial changes in Soviet conduct vis-a-vis` Eastern Europe occurring only in 1988–1989. In fact, he calls into question Gorbachev’s retrospective claim that he informed his East European counterparts as early as 1985 (at ’s funeral) that Moscow would no longer come to their rescue if they confronted dire threats to Communist rule. Kramer finds no supportive evidence in the recently declassified Soviet-era materials to indicate that such drastic policy change occurred in 1985. On the contrary, he finds Gorbachev saying the opposite, affirming continuity in Soviet policy toward Eastern Europe until fairly late in 1988. Unlike Pravda, Kramer also links the wholesale changes in Soviet policy both at home and abroad to Gorbachev’s consolidation of power at home. During three years at the helm, Gorbachev effected large-scale changes in per- sonnel, demoting hardline opponents of change and promoting like-minded reformers to the apex of the Soviet power hierarchy. These promotions included the appointments of Anatolii Chernyaev, Shakhnazarov, , and , key Gorbachev policy advisers. Thus, consolidation of power and policy change—as well as learning—went hand in hand. A turn- ing point for Gorbachev, according to both Kramer and Pravda, seems to be the Shakhnazarov memorandum from October 1988 prepared for Gorbachev and the Politburo, which defined the situation in Eastern Europe as one in which “social instability and crisis might well engulf the whole socialist world simultaneously. ...The obvious signs of an impending crisis demand radical reforms everywhere in the socialist world” (p. 386). Thus, Gorbachev’s real challenge and preoccupation by then was how to avoid what Kramer dubs the “Khrushchev dilemma”—that is, how to forestall possible crises and instability in Eastern Europe that might require Soviet

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military intervention, which would, in turn, undermine perestroika’s prospects at home. Responding by inaction to instability and violence in the region would be equally costly. Coping with the Khrushchev dilemma led Gorbachev and the CPSU Politburo as well as the Soviet Defense Council to decide in advance in March 1989 not to take military action even if Communist regimes in Eastern Europe collapsed. By artfully forging this high-level consensus against the use of military force Gorbachev, in Kramer’s words, “preemptively defused the Khrushchev dilemma” (p. 388). Kramer concludes his fascinating and exceedingly well documented interpretation by noting that Gorbachev neither foresaw where the changes he launched would lead internally and externally, nor did he welcome the demise of either the Soviet Union or the Warsaw Pact or the reunification of Germany when they came. The “Long Term Perspectives on the Cold War and Its End,” is the fourth and final section of the book. David Holloway’s chapter, “Nuclear and the Cold War in Europe” poses a simple but weighty question: How important were nuclear weapons in Europe during the Cold War? Holloway’s answer brings out several valuable insights. For a few years in the aftermath of II, the primary importance of nuclear weapons was psychological and political rather than military. Once the Iron Curtain was in place, nuclear weapons “strengthened rather than weakened it ..., reinforcing the division of the Continent” (p. 451). Second, the presence of nuclear weapons in Europe made the U.S. commitment to European security easier. Third, nuclear arsenals became indispensable to the and to deterrence. Finally, over time both sides came to appreciate the nuclear paradox. On the one hand, the destructive capacity of nuclear weapons made them unusable for any political end; on the other hand, their presence “served as a crucial restraint” (p. 457). Holloway concludes by noting that the new post-Cold War order in Europe assigns to nuclear weapons “a much smaller role in ,” which is one of the things that make the contemporary security system “far superior” to its predecessor (p. 452). The title of Kramer’s fourth and final contribution poses another crucial question: “Why Did the Cold War Last So Long?” To explore that question, he makes a comparison between 1953 and the late 1980s, noting many simi- larities between the circumstances of those two historical junctures. To do so, he explores the theoretical literature on domestic-external linkages in global , which seeks to integrate theory into the study of history. According to Kramer, the key differences that precluded the Cold War from ending in 1953 include the dominant role of the power considera- tions in the post-Stalin succession struggle, which relegated “new thinking” in 1953 to a low level of preference and importance. A key variable accounting

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for the difference in outcomes, according to Kramer, was “the passage of time.” By this he means that in 1953 the “window of opportunity was much too compressed to allow for fundamental adjustments and learning on either side” (p. 474). Further, the succession struggle in Moscow in 1953 was a much messier and more dangerous affair (it proved fatal for Lavrentii Beria and several of his aides) than the politics of succession in the post-Brezhnev era. Although Kramer does not address the issue directly, he seems to be imply- ing that the internal dynamics of Soviet succession politics limited whatever opportunities the West might have pursued in order to diminish East-West conflict in the early post-Stalin era. By contrast, Gorbachev consolidated his power much more rapidly than Khrushchev, and therefore he and his team were far more open to new ideas and advice offered by outside specialists that would assist the leaders in launching major new initiatives in Soviet foreign policy. Richard Ned Lebow’s account (basically a synopsis of a 2003 volume, co-edited with Richard Herrmann on Ending the Cold War), evaluates the role of material factors, ideas, domestic politics and leadership in ending the Cold War. In so doing, it addresses the debate within political science regarding the relative merits of the realist and constructivist approaches to the study of international relations. Among their principal theoretical findings, as reported by Lebow, is that the end of the Cold War was the result of “a non-linear confluence of multiple chains of causation” (p. 479) and that “its timing and details were all to varying degrees contingent” (p. 494). Lebow ends on an intriguing note, suggesting that “the important puzzle may not be the avoidance of war or the collapse of , or even the fragmentation of the Soviet Union, but the fact that the transformation of the Soviet Union was achieved in a relatively peaceful way” (p. 495). To account for 1989, Silvio Pons makes a compelling case for the his- torical erosion of Communist legitimation, culminating in Gorbachev’s quest to reclaim the ideals of the October . Following the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union was “mainly perceived as an imperialist power and an oppressive bureaucratic system” (p. 518). In seeking to avoid the use of violence to maintain Soviet power in Eastern Europe, Gorbachev unwit- tingly made the process of de-legitimation of Communism worse. Attempting to end the Cold War system to liberate economic resources, Gorbachev failed to grasp that the Cold War system had become a major “source” for the mainte- nance of the Communist systems, rooted in scarcity, suppression of individual choice, and states. Oldˇrich Tuma’s˚ essay, “Conspicuous Connection, 1968 and 1989,” offers thoughtful reflections on the Prague Spring and the Vel- vet Revolution and sketches out several parallels between the two tumultuous

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quests for far-reaching reform and complements Sonaˇ Szomolanyi’s´ analysis of Czechoslovakia’s path to following 1989, focusing especially on Slovak developments. James Hershberg’s contribution reflects on the state of Cold War history before and reminisces about two conferences in 1988 and 1989 that marked the transition toward a new international Cold War history that benefited especially from the opening of both Russian minds and Russian archives. The volume is a compelling, insightful, and nuanced testimony to the vitality of the new international Cold War history. Its appearance is timely in more ways than one. As Russian tanks rumble around (and perhaps in- side) ’s , many observers are asking whether the Cold War has returned. At the simplest level, of course, the answer is no, for we are not witnessing a global struggle of ideologies, an all-out between two , or a do-or-die contest between two economic systems or “civi- lizations.” Nor should Russia, even under , be equated with the old Soviet Union. What is striking, however, is how quickly serious analysts have resurrected the Cold War analogies and how rapidly U.S. public opinion has embraced the notion that we are indeed back to a Cold War with Russia. According to 2015 and 2016 Gallup and Pew Center polls, Russia has quickly risen—or risen again—to number one enemy status, ahead of and North . The ratings for Russia among the U.S. public are by far the worst they have been since the Cold War has ended, with 24 percent having favorable and 72 percent unfavorable views. The feeling appears to be mutual, given that Gallup and Pew Center surveys of since 2014 have found 4 percent of Russians approving and 82 percent disapproving of U.S. leadership. This volume is a reminder of what the last Cold War in Europe was about, its rise and fall, and why we and the Russians should do our level-headed best to avoid going back to it.

Commentary by Anna M. Cienciala

Mark Kramer is a distinguished authority on the Cold War and has long been director of Harvard University’s Cold War Studies program at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies. V´ıt Smetana is a senior research fellow at the Institute for Contemporary History under the Czech Republic’s Academy of Sciences. They have coedited and contributed to this collection of twenty-four essays on the Communist regimes of Soviet-dominated countries from the mid-1940s to the collapse of East European Communism in 1989. Almost all of the contributors draw on Russian and East European documents that

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have been declassified in recent years. The book covers four distinct aspects of this 45-year period: (1) “Central Europe and the Onset of the Iron Cur- tain” (1941–1955); (2) “The German Question and Intra-Bloc Politics in the Post-Stalin Era” (1945–1990); (3) “The Role of East-Central Europe in End- ing the Cold War” (1988–1990); and (4) “Long-Term Perspectives on the Cold War and Its End.” Kramer succinctly defines Eastern Europe as a geographical-political term encompassing the eight countries dominated by the USSR in the post-1945 period (p. 28, n. 1), and uses this term throughout the book except for a few mentions of East-Central Europe (ECE) in chapter 19 (e.g. pp. 464–467). Readers may wonder about the editors’ concept of this region, which is not defined in the book. This is not surprising, however, insofar as definitions of the region tend to be fluid. The great Polish historian Oskar Halecki (1891– 1973), who, because of World War II, spent half of his life in the United States, coined this term for the whole region, but differentiated it by three sub-regions: the central sector, including parts of the Baltic and Pontic () shores, the Danubian Basin with Bohemia, and the .2 Kramer’s and Smetana’s concept seems similar to that of the Canadian geographer Paul Magocsi, whose “Northern Zone” is closest to Kramer’s “Northern Tier” of Eastern Europe: East Germany, Poland, and Czechoslovakia (p. 20), whose control by Moscow was seen as vital by Soviet rulers. Magocsi, however, calls the whole area Central Europe.3 The United Group of Experts on Geographical Names has still another definition, according to which the “Baltic Division” includes the , Poland, and the Russian , and the remaining states are placed in the East-Central and South-East Europe Divisions.4 Most historians of the region today, including me, view East- Central Europe as consisting of Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland. The use of the term in this way is perhaps best exemplified by Piotr S. Wandycz.5 Initial versions of most of the book’s essays were first presented at a special conference with the same title as the book—except for three additional words: “Twenty Years Later”—organized by the Institute for Contemporary History in Prague in November 2009. The objective was to discuss “how

2. Oskar Halecki, Borderlands of Western Civilization: A History of East Central Europe (New York: Ronald Press Company, 1952), p. 7, as well as the map on p. xv. 3. Paul Robert Magocsi, Historical Atlas of Central Europe, rev. and expanded ed. (Seattle: Press, 2002). 4. For the group’s full online database, see http://unstats.un.org/unsd/geoinfo/UNGEGN/. 5. Piotr S. Wandycz, The Price of Freedom: A History of East Central Europe from the to the Present (New York: Routledge, 2001).

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scholarly interpretations of the Cold War in Europe have been changed with the declassification of crucial documents in both East and West, as well as long-term views on the Cold War and its end” (p. xii). The first essay in Part I, “Stalin, Soviet Policy, and the Establishment of a Communist Bloc in Eastern Europe,” written by Mark Kramer, is a brilliant discussion of these topics. Based on his extensive study of the subject, Kramer convincingly demonstrates that “domestic politics and postwar exigencies in the USSR, along with [Iosif] Stalin’s external ambitions, decisively shaped Soviet ties with Eastern Europe” (p. 3). Despite the continuing inaccessibility of some Russian archives—the Presidential Archive and Foreign Intelligence Archives—Kramer uses his remarkable linguistic skills to draw on declassified documentation, along with published studies, to show that Stalin’s repression of resistance in the USSR carried over to Eastern Europe. First, however, he discusses the interwar background of Soviet-East European relations. He includes a good map showing the postwar boundaries of Eastern Europe (p. 5). Unfortunately, however, it does not show the prewar western boundaries of the USSR, which were greatly expanded at the cost of its neighbors in 1945. He notes the long-standing enmity between Poles and Russians, strengthened by the Soviet- Polish War (1919–1920) in which the suffered defeat – an outcome that greatly rankled Stalin. Kramer also notes that the Czechs, Serbs, and were more favorably disposed toward Soviet Russia – which they saw as their protector. Indeed, in 1935 the Czechoslovak government sought and received commitments of French in case of German attack. The Soviet Union also committed to provide assistance to Czechoslovakia, but only if France did so first. In the end, neither country helped Czechoslovakia when it was dismembered by Adolf Hitler. Furthermore, the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 23 August 1939 divided Poland – which itself had rejected German bids for a joint attack on the Soviet Union – as well as the Baltic states between and the USSR. The Soviet Union also received part of northeastern (, now divided into and ). In discussing the establishment of the Soviet bloc, Kramer cogently re- views the many dimensions of Soviet policy, emphasizing Stalin’s desire for a “buffer zone” against Germany and the Soviet leader’s view that a victorious power imposes its own social system on the defeated (from a conversation with Milovan Djilas, p. 12). Moscow’s economic needs after wartime destruction explain the mass removal of industrial equipment from eastern Germany – even after the establishment of a Communist administration there – as well as from western Poland and from Hungary. Here Kramer might have noted the frequent complaints against this procedure made by the Polish Communist leader at the time, Władysław Gomułka, during his visits to Moscow. Kramer

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also cites Stalin’s belief that the bloc would aid the later spread of Communism to . Of course, Soviet domination was made possible by the power of the Red Army in 1945, as well as the silent consent of Franklin Roosevelt and at Yalta, where they obtained Stalin’s agree- ment to “free ,” without knowing—or not wishing to know—the Soviet leader’s interpretation of that concept. (They also gave up their orig- inal demand for international supervision thereof.) The fact that Hungary was not part of the “Northern Tier” coupled with overoptimistic Commu- nist projections may help explain why Stalin allowed genuinely free elections in that country, which led to a resounding Communist defeat. The Soviet (NKVD) assisted Polish Communist forces in battling isolated remnants of the Polish Armia Krajowa (AK, ), which had fought the . Most of the groups fighting the Red Army and the NKVD in 1943–1945 belonged to the Narodowe Siły Zbrojne (NSZ, the rightwing National Armed Forces) because the AK had been ordered not to resist the incoming Soviet forces and was formally dissolved in January 1945. The new Polish Communist forces fought against both the NSZ and the rightwing Ukrains’ka Povstans’ka Armiya (UPA, ) in south- eastern Poland. Shortly after the war’s end, at Stalin’s behest, the Soviet Union and Poland undertook a forced exchange of populations, and the remaining Ukrainian population was forcibly deported to one of the new Polish territo- ries, Western Pomerania.6 Most of the East-Central European countries had fairly liberal policies on the media until February 1948, when the Communists seized power in Czechoslovakia to prevent elections expected to result in a Communist defeat. Meanwhile, the establishment of the Communist Information Bureau (Com- inform) in September 1947 and the expulsion of Yugoslavia from it in 1948 gave Moscow even greater control over the various Communist parties than it already had. Kramer’s masterful analysis provides readers with an excellent overview of the imposition of the Iron Curtain. Of the many other essays in the book, those that drew my special interest deal with the establishment of a United Europe (UE, 1957); U. S. policy toward East-Central Europe (the Northern Tier plus Hungary) in 1989; and the long duration of the Cold War and the causes of its ending. In chapter 11, “The German Question as Seen from Paris,” a prominent French authority on contemporary international history, Georges-Henri Soutou, a professor at the

6. This process has been recounted well in Timothy Snyder, “‘To Resolve the Ukrainian Problem Once and for All’: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ukrainians in Poland, 1943–1947,” Journal of Cold War Studies, Vol. 1, No. 2 (Spring 1999), pp. 86–120.

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Sorbonne University, Paris-IV, does not make use of Russian documents, but he lucidly explains why French leaders, especially President Franc¸ois Mitter- rand (1981–1995), were so vitally interested in establishing a United Europe. This was so because a UE would include a united Germany and thus would shield France from future German attack. Soutou offers an illuminating pre- sentation, but of necessity omits some key topics, such as the role of Jozef´ Hieronim Retinger (1888–1960), the political adviser to the wartime Polish Exile Government in London – and alleged British agent – who cooperated with French politician Robert Schuman to work out the Franco-West German iron ore and coal sharing plan. He was also one of the founders of the European Movement which led to the establishment of the UE. In chapter 13, “Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and the ,” Thomas Blanton, director of the Archive, has written an insightful study of the two U.S. administrations’ reactions to the revolutions of 1989, showing the contrast between the Russian documentary sources and U.S. myths. Blanton convincingly rebuts the triumphalist doctrine of spending the USSR into bankruptcy before and during the period of Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s leadership of the Soviet (1985–1991). Pres- ident Ronald Reagan (1981–1989) had a change of heart; he moved from seeing the USSR as an “evil empire” to seeking reconciliation and achieving it with Mikhail S. Gorbachev. Blanton mentions the impact on Reagan of the made-for-television film set in Lawrence, Kansas—my home since 1965—which depicts the aftermath of a nuclear war (p. 285). He might also have noted the role of , who wanted her husband to leave a legacy of world . Indeed, President Reagan’s meeting with Gor- bachev at in late 1985 began a fruitful relationship that led to nuclear arms reduction agreements. According to Blanton, President George H. W. Bush (1989–1993) was initially focused on projecting the image of U.S. strength and thereby lost the chance for much faster progress in nuclear arms control agreements. Blanton notes that Bush was caught off balance by the “revolutions” of 1989, but supported them while cautioning against radical moves and the use of force. Poland received generous financial aid, but in most cases the United States provided little more than ringing phrases about freedom. Bush tended to be more comfortable with Communist “reform” leaders like Poland’s General (who served as head of the Polish United Workers’ Party from 1981 to 1989, defense minister from 1968 to 1981, prime minister from 1981 to 1985, and from 1985 to 1990) than he was with East European leaders. Bush was still uncertain whether the Soviet Union would refrain from using force (p. 296), indicating little understanding

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of Gorbachev’s policy. But over time Bush did—in contrast to his defense secretary, —come to trust the Soviet leader (p. 297). At the Summit in early December 1989, Bush admitted to Gorbachev, “it is thanks to you that things are proceeding peacefully.” Clearly, of the two leaders, Gorbachev “deserves credit for the peaceful end of the Cold War,” and Blanton laments that “to most , this would be news” (p. 299). Indeed it would! In another superlative chapter, “Why Did the Cold War Last So Long?” Kramer rightly stresses the links between domestic and external pressures in the USSR: (a) in 1953, with the death of Stalin and the consequent struggle for power, on the one hand, and (b) the era of Gorbachev’s domestic reforms and his acceptance of democratic governments in former Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe in 1988–1990, on the other. Kramer points out that Soviet political and foreign policy reform seemed possible after Stalin’s death in March 1953. Lavrentii P.Beria (1899–1953), the longtime head of the Soviet internal security apparatus, had a chance of coming to power. He was strongly in favor of easing the Stalinist regime at home and abroad, strengthening the rights of non-Russian nationalities in the USSR (he was a Mingrelian from ), and even the unification of Germany. Indeed, Stalin himself had sent a note to the Western powers in March 1952 proposing the establishment of a united but neutral Germany, with guarantees for and freedoms. It was rejected by the Western governments, and Peter Ruggenthaler, a senior research fellow at the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Research on the Consequences of War, in Graz, Austria, sees it as a propaganda move in his chapter, “Neutrality for Germany or Stabilization of the Eastern Bloc?” (p. 164). Nonetheless, both Stalin and Beria might have been amenable to a united Germany under certain circumstances. In the struggle for power that ensued after Stalin’s death, Beria lost out to Nikita S. Khrushchev (the leader of the Soviet Communist Party from 1953 to 1964), who joined with Georgii Malenkov in arresting Beria with the help of commanders, including Marshal Georgii K. Zhukov. Khrushchev, Malenkov, and other high-ranking officials plotted to arrest Beria on the charge of seeking to destroy the party. (Perhaps the stationing of two Soviet State Security divisions in Moscow had an impact too?) Kramer elsewhere has recounted the plot in fascinating detail, showing how the intricate conspiracy succeeded.7 Beria was arrested and then executed on fabricated

7. Mark Kramer, “Leadership Succession and in the USSR after Stalin’s Death,” in Paul Hollander, ed. Political Violence: Belief, Behaviour, and Legitimation (New York: , 2008), pp. 69–92, 221–233; Mark Kramer, “The Early Post-Stalin Succession Struggle and Upheavals in East-Central Europe: Internal-External Linkages in Soviet Policy Making (Part 1),”

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charges because the other Soviet leaders feared he wanted to consolidate his own power and move against his fellow members of the Communist Party’s ruling Presidium. The downfall of Beria and its aftermath eliminated the possibility of comprehensive de-Stalinization and left Germany firmly divided. Kramer makes a convincing case that the move against Beria was not ideological. Some of Beria’s liberalization plans were shared by Vyacheslav Molotov (who had returned to his longtime post as foreign minister) and also by Malenkov, who for a few months had seemed likely to be Stalin’s chief successor. They all interpreted the East German uprising of June 1953 as evidence of the need for drastic change in East-Central Europe (pp. 474–475). It is not surprising that Khrushchev had their support to begin the process of liberalizing the whole system when he denounced Stalin in his famous speech at the 20th Soviet Party Congress on 25 February 1956. Kramer rightly concludes: “In 1953 the ‘internal qualities’ of the Soviet Union deepened the bipolar divide in Europe and in the world overall” (p. 474). Unfortunately, Khrushchev felt compelled in the autumn of 1956 to send Soviet troops into Hungary and crush the revolution. Interested readers can read all the known, and especially the unknown, details of that tragic event in Kramer’s forthcoming book on the Polish and Hungarian crises of 1956. In the introduction to chapter 20, “The End of the Cold War as a Non- Linear Confluence,” Richard Ned Lebow, the James O. Freedman Presidential Professor of Government at Dartmouth College, writes “This chapter reports on and elaborates our principal theoretical finding” that “no single explana- tion provides a satisfactory explanation for any turning point”—he lists five turning points—“let alone all of them” (pp. 479–480). Lebow points out that Western “Euro-Communism” inspired Gorbachev and his new thinking, and the economic stagnation in East Germany cried out for at least economic lib- eralization (pp. 489–490). Lebow analyzes various theories on the end of the Cold War presented in the book and concludes, as his chapter title suggests, that it was the result of a non-linear confluence of events. In chapter 21, “Conspicuous Connections, 1968 and 1989,” the Czech scholar Oldˇrich Tuma,˚ director of the Institute of Contemporary History in Prague, draws comparisons between the Prague Spring of 1968 under Alexan- der Dubcekˇ and Gorbachev’s liberalization policies. Indeed, when Gorbachev’s

Journal of Cold War Studies, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Spring 1999), pp. 3–56; Mark Kramer, “The Early Post- Stalin Succession Struggle and Upheavals in East-Central Europe: Internal-External Linkages in Soviet Policy-Making (Part 2),” Journal of Cold War Studies, Vol. 1, No. 2 (Spring 1999), pp. 3–39; and Mark Kramer, “The Early Post-Stalin Succession Struggle and Upheavals in East-Central Europe: Internal- External Linkages in Soviet Policy-Making (Part 3),” Journal of Cold War Studies,Vol.1,No.3(Fall 1999), pp. 3–67.

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spokesman, Gennadii Gerasimov, was asked about the differences between the two during a visit to Czechoslovakia in April 1987, he answered: “Nineteen years.”8 The book as a whole provides invaluable assistance to academics and grad- uate students who want to understand the region in the period of Communism and its collapse in 1989–1991. A list of abbreviations would have been very helpful, and could be added online unless a second edition appears first. A list of figures and maps, along with their titles (e.g. pp. 5, 102), would also be appreciated. It may be cheaper for the publisher to print notes at the end of each chapter, but this creates an added burden for the careful reader. The book itself is so tightly bound that it must be held open, or weighted open, to read. Finally, in the information on contributors to the volume (p. 553) Lebow should be listed as the James O. (not “F.”) Freedman Presidential Professor at Dartmouth.

Commentary by Margaret K. Gnoinska

When I asked my father after many years why he cried when Iosif Stalin died in March 1953, he explained: “Because our teacher told us that our beloved uncle had died. Besides, the kid next to me bawled so much that I could not help but cry as well!” For my father, who was six years old in 1953, the imposition of in Poland must have seemed like a strange fable about an amorphous Uncle Stalin whose ubiquitous portraits, busts, and statues in kindergarten, school, and the streets dotted his childhood memory. For the majority of the adult population, however, the implementation of Soviet-style Communism in Eastern Europe after World War II was a shock that added more sorrow, grief, and anxiety to their daily lives, which had already been shattered by the war. The imposition of Stalinist rule also shut the doors to basic human rights such as the and expression, the and travel, and the ability to own private property. Ordinary citizens experienced war psychosis and endured a sharp decline in their living standards brought about by Stalin’s crash industrialization, forced collectivization, and military buildup during the early years of the Cold War. The ruling elites of Stalinist Eastern Europe engaged in political purges via show trials initially targeting non-Communists and in later phases Communists who strove for a degree of

8. Michael T. Kaufman, “Gorbachev Alludes to Czech Invasion,” The New York Times, 12 April 1987, p. A9.

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autonomy from Moscow. All of these policies were aimed at instilling a general sense of fear in society now living behind the Iron Curtain that divided Europe into capitalist West and Communist East, prohibiting the free flow of people and ideas while keeping the continent under constant nuclear tension exacerbated by the emergence of military —the Organization (NATO) and the Warsaw Pact. Although Stalinism in Eastern Europe faded away in various stages and degrees in most of the region—the exceptions being and Romania—the Communist lasted for more than four decades, engulfing the lives of millions of Europeans, the majority of whom had been historically averse to Soviet-style Communism. The publication of the book came just before the 25th anniversary of the downfall of Communist regimes in Eastern Europe, which paved the way for a remarkably peaceful end to the Cold War and the eventual of the Soviet Union. The anniversary of the 1989 revolutions in Eastern Europe was widely marked all over the region, which long before had been integrated into NATO and the . In Poland, the focus was on the historic day of 4 June 1989 when —the Communist bloc’s first independent and the main opposition to Communist rule in Poland— won an overwhelming victory in the country’s first partly free parliamentary elections in the postwar era, facilitating the end of Communist rule in Eastern Europe. Solidarity’s victory was followed a few months later by widespread unrest in East Germany and the eventual opening of the Berlin Wall—the quintessential symbol of the Cold War—on 9 November 1989 as a result of a series of fortuitous events. To young and future , these events are and will remain mere anniversaries on a historical timeline of European history. For those like me who lived through the events—I was able to vote in my first free elections in June 1989 upon turning eighteen that year while on summer break from the United World College in the United States—the events were a crucial, and indeed a magical, moment in our lives and the lives of our families.9 The upheavals of 1989 were all the more meaningful in Poland in light of what was occurring simultaneously across the globe, where large crowds of demonstrators in Beijing had been peacefully pressuring their own government for individual freedoms. The Chinese protests were crushed by large-scale repressive violence

9. The fact that I was able to study at an international high school in the United States on a full scholarship after a grueling interview process organized by the British Council in Warsaw in 1988 even though my parents were not part of the Communist system is testament to reforms such as glasnost and perestroika launched by Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev that trickled down to Poland and were implemented to some degree, if only grudgingly, by Wojciech Jaruzelski.

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on the same day that Polish citizens went to vote for Solidarity over the Communists. The events of 1989 thus sparked a mix of anxiety and dismay along with excitement about the opportunities for a new tomorrow after decades of intermittent mass protests in Eastern Europe, most notably in East Germany, Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia. The earlier unrest had been crushed by force, but a desire for greater political and economic freedom and dignity had persisted despite the monopoly of the ruling Communist parties. For Western scholars and those from beyond the Iron Curtain, the end of Communism in Eastern Europe and the dissolution of the Soviet Union opened the floodgates of long closed archival vaults, especially in East-Central Europe and the former Soviet Union, offering ample opportunities to reexam- ine the origins, key events, and end of the Cold War. The past 25 years have produced an amazing amount of literature, focusing not just on the superpow- ers, their , and Europe, but also on Asia, Latin America, and Africa, all of which were deeply affected by the Cold War’s dynamics. This outpouring of research has helped to make the study of the Cold War a field both global and international. Institutions such as the Cold War International History Project (CWIHP) of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Schol- ars in Washington, DC and the Parallel History Project on NATO and the Warsaw Pact (which was exceedingly active from 2000 until 2011) have been an instrumental part of not just gathering and translating archival documents from the former Communist bloc, but in creating a truly transnational net- work of scholars that has been highly collaborative and productive in bringing “the other side” into the historiography and analysis of the Cold War, thereby greatly contributing to our understanding of both sides of this long, costly, and tense conflict that affected the entire globe. Imposing, Maintaining, and TearingOpen the Iron Curtain is both a product of and testament to more than two decades of research facilitated by the work of the CWIHP, as well as by the National Security Archive, Harvard’s Cold War Studies program, and other prominent institutions in both North America and Europe. The editors of the above volume, Mark Kramer and V´ıt Smetana, are two prominent Cold War historians, and Kramer has been a frequent contributor to the CWIHP.They acknowledge that many studies of the Cold War focusing on Asia and other parts of the developing world have made valuable contributions to the wider historiography of the Cold War, but they want their book to “return to Europe, which is where the Cold War began in the mid-1940s and where it ended in 1989” (p. xi). Kramer and Smetana have taken upon themselves a highly ambitious, indeed daunting, task of tackling the entire span of the Cold War as related to East-Central Europe in just one volume by soliciting the expertise of numerous distinguished scholars of the

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East-West conflict. Earlier versions of most of the chapters in the volume were originally presented at a conference in Prague in November 2009, “Dropping, Maintaining, and Breaking the Iron Curtain: The Cold War and East-Central Europe Twenty Years Later,” organized by the Institute for Contemporary History of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic. The book is well edited and organized in thematic parts containing twenty- four chapters that vary greatly in length, with often detailed endnotes con- veniently located at the end of each chapter, making them easy to read and follow. The book sets out to reflect on different phases of the Cold War and key issues pertaining to East-Central Europe. The first part, “Central Europe and the Onset of the Iron Curtain,” focuses on the early period of the Cold War and especially the eight years from the end of World War II through the death of Stalin in March 1953, including the imposition of Communism and early troubles within the Soviet bloc such as Stalin’s bitter split with Yu- goslavia. The second part, “The German Question and Intra-Bloc Politics in the Post-Stalin Era,” analyzes the dynamics of Cold War alliances in Europe (NATO and the Warsaw Pact) and, to a lesser extent, the mechanisms of foreign policy coordination within the Soviet bloc. The third part, “The Role of East-Central Europe in Ending the Cold War,” deals with the momentous changes in relations between the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in the late 1980s that contributed to the end of the Cold War, focusing predominantly on Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s policies and efforts to reform Communism and their effects on the demise of the Soviet bloc. The last part, “Long-Term Perspectives on the Cold War and Its End,” offers valuable retrospectives on the Cold War in Europe by focusing on the role of nuclear weapons, the valid- ity and applicability of international relations theories to our understanding of the end of the Cold War, including a comparative analysis of 1953 and 1989, and the processes of de-legitimation of European Communism. The final chapter in Part Four by James G. Hershberg, the founding director of the CWIHP, assesses, in a vivid way, how the major changes in the Soviet bloc in 1989 helped to transform the historiography of the Cold War. The means of organizing the book gives readers the choice of following the whole history chronologically or picking and choosing the Cold War stages or specific topics in which they are most interested. The book includes essays by many leading and high-caliber scholars of the Cold War, who have contributed cutting-edge research to the field over the years. In addition to providing detailed, well-grounded, and deeply researched historical analysis of specific Cold War issues, the editors challenge their readers to think about the long-term perspectives of the Cold War, especially its end. Most of the contributors use secondary sources from as well as literature

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in original languages pertaining to their topics at hand. They base their research on newly declassified Russian, East European, and Wester primary documents as well as materials and archival sources that have been available for some time, including oral history interviews. Although no one dominant theme links all of the chapters, the importance of Germany as a binding key issue that occupied the attention and focus of many countries and East-West relations throughout the Cold War comes out clearly in many chapters of the volume. Several other major themes and threads emerge throughout the volume, mostly pertaining to the dismantling of Communism in Eastern Europe in 1989. This is one of the major strengths and contributions of the volume, especially in Parts Three and Four, and to a lesser extent in some essays of Part Two. First, the authors emphasize that the contemporaneous leaders of the Soviet Union (Mikhail Gorbachev), the United States (George H. W. Bush), and of some West European powers, most notably Margaret Thatcher of Great Britain and Franc¸ois Mitterrand of France, although publicly supportive of changes taking place in Eastern Europe starting in early 1989, were taken by surprise by the speed of the events and thus were wary, particularly of the prospect of German reunification. All these leaders favored stability, the status quo, and a slower pace of change over chaos, conflict, and possibly bloodshed and violence. Second, there seems to be an overall consensus among the volume contrib- utors that Gorbachev did not want the downfall or collapse of Communism altogether and instead was hoping to create a more attractive and popular socialism through new thinking, glasnost, and perestroika. He did not have a master plan, however, on how to go about it. He hoped that his own reformist ideas would be pursued by East European leaders and generally remained aloof when it came to the region’s dynamics and events, as noted by Alex Pravda. Gorbachev was convinced, as emphasized by many authors, that the right course of action was to allow his Warsaw Pact allies to move ahead with their own paths to socialism, which he believed could be reformed. Third, what becomes very clear throughout the volume is that it was not until late 1988 that Gorbachev decided to refrain from any military interference in his East European allies’ internal affairs, thereby doing away with the dreaded “Brezhnev Doctrine.” Although the authors vary in their explanations of the Soviet leader’s reasons for not using force, ranging from economic factors to his vision of the Common European Home (argued by Svetlana Savranskaya), they all stress his deep aversion to using force in Eastern Europe even if that meant that the monopoly of Communist rule had to be sacrificed, as in the case of Poland’s historic June 1989 elections. Gorbachev’s

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remarkable commitment, bordering even on stubbornness, to avoiding the use of military means to suppress the 1989 revolutions was buttressed, as pointed out by some authors in the volume, especially Kramer, by the tragic events in , which convinced Gorbachev that the option of military suppression of peaceful movements was in fact no option at all. Fourth, one cannot help but get the sense throughout the volume that Eastern Europe had become a sort of burdensome and troubled teenager by 1989, but a teenager that had enough trust in his parent to do the right thing in the end and was thus left to his own devices to figure things out on his own. This treatment of the region by Gorbachev was in part fueled by his strong conviction that Communism could be reformed, by his fear of instability, chaos, and bloodshed, and by his aversion to the use of large-scale violence. Finally, even though the contributors to the volume differ in their empha- sis on causal factors—such as Gorbachev’s role as the driving force for change and reform; the impact of the change of Soviet foreign policy on Eastern Europe; economic factors; the delegitimation of the Communist system that had been associated with throughout its existence; the con- tribution of pressures “from below” (i.e., emanating from the East European populations); and, finally, fortuitous and unforeseen circumstances such as the sudden opening of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989—most of them rightly stress that the end of Communism in Eastern Europe, the demise of the Soviet bloc, and the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union were all neither monocausal nor inevitable. Nonetheless, despite all the high-quality analysis based on myriad recent and previously available archival sources, an edited volume on such a scale and of this scope with such an ambitious agenda is bound to have at least a few shortcomings. First of all, the editors never clearly specify what “East- Central Europe” means and what countries it includes. In traditional Cold War scholarship, the region to which the editors and the authors constantly refer has been described as “Eastern Europe,” spanning “from Stettin in the Baltic to in the Adriatic,” to borrow the well-known phrasing from Winston Churchill’s 1946 “Iron Curtain” speech. The region later incorporated the Ger- man Democratic Republic (GDR) once it was officially established in 1949. Therefore, throughout the volume we have references to “Eastern Europe,” “East-Central Europe,” “the Soviet bloc,” “the Communist bloc,” “Eastern bloc,” “Central Europe,” “Eastern and Central Europe,” and so on, all of which purportedly address the same region. Is Austria part of “East-Central Europe”? Given the inclusion of a chapter on Austria, an understudied but im- portant topic in the early stages of the Cold War, the editors do seem to include it. After 1955, however, Austria was no longer part of the Soviet-dominated or

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Soviet-influenced region of Europe. On the contrary, despite remaining mili- tarily neutral, Austria’s gravitation toward the West was politically and econom- ically undeniable. Should Yugoslavia be included in “East-Central Europe”? After all, as thoroughly analyzed by Kramer in one of the chapters, Yugoslavia split as early as 1948 from the Soviet bloc. What about Albania, which gets hardly any mention in the volume? After all, until 1968 the country was for- mally part of the Warsaw Pact, even though its relations were deeply strained with the Soviet Union and the other East European countries, including the GDR, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, and from 1960– 1961 on, after openly gravitated toward ’s version of Communism and took ’s side in the Sino-Soviet split. If the intention of the editors was to show the evolution of the region they are discussing—from “Central Europe” as pointed out in the title of Part One to “East-Central Europe” in the other parts—they should have explained their intention in the introduction. A clearer definition and more consistency throughout the volume would have been welcome, especially because the title of the volume does refer to “East-Central Europe.” Second, the volume is unbalanced in its analysis of the Cold War stages that it sets out to examine, focusing most extensively on the establishment of Communism in East-Central Europe in the 1940s and on the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe in 1989. The latter topic is covered not only in Parts Three and Four, but also somewhat in Part Two. Therefore, some issues and developments tend to be sacrificed in an explanatory process that aims to encompass the entirety of the Cold War. Part One, “Central Europe and the Onset of the Iron Curtain,” does an excellent job of explaining the imposition of Communist rule by highlighting especially the Soviet Union’s (read Stalin’s) motives and interests toward Eastern Europe after World War II, as aptly developed and meticulously documented in Kramer’s chapter. That chapter stresses that although Stalin did not have a clear plan for the region, the steps he took contributed to its Communist transformation and were not always a reaction to the actions taken by the West, such as the introduction of the in 1947. Although some discussion of Poland is provided in Kramer’s chapter, as well as in Michael Hopkins’s account of U.S. policy toward the region after World War II, the volume would have benefited from a separate chapter on the imposition of Communism in Poland. This is because the Polish case was clearly the most complicated and constituted the main bone of contention among the “Big Three” in their discussions in Teheran, Yalta, and . The case of Poland was all the more challenging because of its geopolitical po- sition and the presence of two opposing Polish governments that envisioned

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Poland’s postwar future very differently. The Soviet-dominated Lublin gov- ernment envisaged a Communist Poland closely allied with Moscow, whereas the London government-in-exile sought a capitalist and democratic Poland closely allied with the West. Therefore, a chapter analyzing Poland on par with Smetana’s superb chapter in the volume on Czechoslovakia (“Conces- sions or Conviction? Czechoslovakia’s Road to the Cold War and Soviet Bloc”) would have been a good addition. Such a chapter not only would show the emergence of the Communist regime by taking into account U.S., British, and Soviet policies, interests, and attitudes, but would also give due weight to Poland’s voices in the process. This is exactly what Smetana’s chapter does; it places Czechoslovakia in a larger, highly complex and fluid, international con- text while maintaining the Czechoslovak state’s agency in the decision-making process. To be sure, the motives and scenarios of the Czechoslovak and Hungarian cases (the latter discussed in Borhi’s chapter) were different: Czechoslovakia was betrayed by the West before World War II and then liberated jointly by the Soviet Union and the United States in 1945, whereas Hungary was not “liberated, but conquered” by the Soviet Union, as stressed by Borhi. Nevertheless, the convoluted and vexing case of Poland should have merited a separate chapter to highlight the complexities of post-1945 relations among the great powers, including their limits and constraints, as well as the intricate dynamics of the Polish political constellation. This, in turn, would further help explain the attitudes of the Poles in 1989 toward the changes facilitated by Gorbachev’s new policies and Poland’s role in initiating the process of change in the region. Therefore, although the chapters in Part One do an excellent job of de- tailing the Soviet Union’s motives, interests, plans, challenges, and dilemmas in the formation and consolidation of the Soviet bloc (including the contro- versial issue of the Stalin Note of March 1952, which proposed to neutralize Germany), more voices from the East European countries, not just the cases of Yugoslavia, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia (and even Austria), would have been a welcome addition to the volume. Their inclusion would have provided a fuller picture of that important time for the region and the Cold War as a whole and would help explain the attitudes of these countries in the late 1980s. To be sure, the challenge of including detailed surveys of additional countries (Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, and Albania) in such an enormous compilation and one comprehensive volume would pose daunting logistical problems. This is a problem that almost always afflicts edited volumes that attempt to encompass entire historical periods.

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A further concern is that Part Two, “The German Question and Intra- Bloc Politics in the Post-Stalin Era,” seems once again to focus more on the book’s larger theme of “tearing down the iron curtain” than on the theme of “maintaining it.” The only chapter that really deals with the issue of intra- bloc dynamics and the perseverance of the Communist system in Eastern Europe is that of Csaba Bek´ es,´ who offers much insight and a window into the Soviet bloc’s foreign policy coordination mechanisms, highlighting the role of deputy foreign ministers’ meetings, which dealt with such crucial policy issues as the German question. Regrettably, Bek´ es´ ends his chapter in the mid- 1970s, depriving readers of further analysis that would be important to our understanding of events in the late 1980s. Oliver Bange’s chapter picks up around the late 1960s and the early 1970s, focusing on West Germany’s and its effects on East Germany’s self- emancipation, which in his view contributed to the successful outcome in 1989 and later German reunification. Although the other chapters are highly informative and bring in fresh perspective (especially Hope Harrison’s analysis of the politics of the memory of the Berlin Wall), they deal mainly with the end of the Cold War and beyond, including how West European countries, especially France and Great Britain, faced and responded to the fast-paced changes in Eastern Europe in 1989. Thus, to bolster the section on how the Iron Curtain continued to be maintained, an additional chapter or two should have been included to cover the intra-bloc politics after the end of detente´ and the period of the 1980s prior to the ascent to power of Gorbachev in 1985. This would have given a fuller picture of the interactions within the bloc, especially as pertaining to the deep economic, political, and social crisis in Poland of 1980–1981 and its reverberations not only in Moscow but in other capitals of Eastern Europe and how they affected internal policies of the bloc. Third, in this same vein, a separate chapter (or at least a lengthier dis- cussion within a chapter) should have been devoted to the impact of the Sino-Soviet split on Moscow’s interactions with its Warsaw Pact allies and vice versa. Although the focus of the Kramer-Smetana volume is clearly on Europe, the influence of the Sino-Soviet split should not be ignored or downplayed when discussing Soviet-East European relations. The divorce between Moscow and Beijing, which flared into the open at the end of the 1950s, created havoc within the international workers’ movement and greatly magnified the So- viet bloc’s internal weakness (Albania and Romania are obvious cases) and Moscow’s stepped-up efforts to tighten the screws by favoring coordination on Soviet terms. Moreover, the Sino-Soviet split contributed to Eastern Europe’s reorientation away from Communist Asia, most notably China, toward other

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parts of the world, including especially the , and to a lesser extent Africa, as well as toward economic and cultural relations with Western Europe through institutions such as the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) and with the United States. The Sino-Soviet split also had an effect on the competition between Eastern and Western Europeans for China’s markets during ’s era, in which Eastern Europe was a clear loser starting in the late 1970s. The inclusion of a deeper analysis of the impact of the Sino-Soviet split on intra-bloc dynamics and eventual normalization of relations with China in the late 1980s would also have shed greater light on the connections between the events in 1989 in Eastern Europe and China, most notably the on 4 June 1989 and the tragic Tianan- men Square crackdown that same day. Such connections are mentioned in Kramer’s detailed chapter on the demise of the Soviet bloc in Part Three, but the inclusion of another chapter on the Sino-Soviet split would have provided the needed background. Fourth, although the volume attempts to give agency to East European countries as demonstrated in chapters by Bek´ es,´ Borhi, Harrison, Bernd Schae- fer, Smetana, and Oldˇrich Tuma,˚ overall the emphasis is still on the super- powers’ interests, motivations, and policies and Eastern Europe’s reactions to them. Therefore, the picture of Eastern Europe that emerges from the volume tends to be somewhat more passive. At times the region is treated almost as a homogenous entity, even though it involved a combination of countries that were often at odds with one another. They competed for influence with and the loyalty of Moscow and at times challenged Moscow’s authority and tested its boundaries. Most of the countries harbored historical animosities that at times surfaced during the Cold War. Kramer’s chapters on the imposition and the demise of Communism in Eastern Europe, excellent as they are in their analysis, still tend to focus more on the Soviet side of the story and Eastern Europe’s reactions to either Stalin’s or Gorbachev’s policies. To be sure, the East European countries operated within highly controlled spaces in which their was limited by the Warsaw Pact, the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, the Sino-Soviet split, and the always looming threat of Soviet military intervention throughout the Communist period, even at un- certain times of assurances from Gorbachev in the late 1980s. Even so, giving more agency to East European actors in the otherwise first-rate analysis that considers external factors and influences of the superpowers would have made for a more complete picture of the events and issues described and examined. Overall, however, Imposing, Maintaining, and Tearing Open the Iron Cur- tain is an impressive volume that is a must read for professors and upper-level college and graduate students, as well as for any scholar interested in how the

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Cold War began, lasted, and ended in Europe. To correct its shortcomings, the editors might think about turning it into a three- or even four-part series by expanding each thematic part. Such a series would greatly benefit professors and students alike as an authoritative reference that would maintain focus on the Cold War and Eastern Europe from a truly international perspective and with different levels of analysis. Most importantly, the volume allows for reflection on this turbulent period from various points of view, including the role of leaders, , nuclear weapons, grassroots and civil society movements, ideas, domestic politics, structural processes, economic factors, the nature of the international system, and many others that pushed toward the transformation that took place in 1989–1990. In addition, readers are presented with a variety of approaches and interesting interpretations, including historical analysis, essays challenging various international relations theories, and exploration of counterfactuals, focusing especially on the end of Communist rule in Eastern Europe. The book thus makes for a thought-provoking overview of the events leading to a monumental change in European history in 1989, a shift that occurred with minimal bloodshed (apart from Romania), ending almost half a century of bipolarity in the international system dominated by a costly struggle, including the prospect of a large-scale nuclear war, between two competing versions of modernity—capitalist democracy and Communist . Finally, the reasons for the remarkably peaceful end of the Cold War will surely continue to be a hotly debated topic among scholars of the Cold War, ranging from the school of triumphalism to those who emphasize the grassroots movements in Eastern Europe or the role of Gorbachev. The authors of this volume largely avoid the school of triumphalism and instead tend to focus on the role of grassroots movements, the role of Gorbachev, and many other factors, stressing that the collapse of European Communism was by no means inevitable. Remarkably, nowadays the latest generations of college students in the United States do not associate the end of the Cold War in 1989 with momentous events in Eastern Europe such as the free elections in Poland, the exodus of East Germans via a suddenly between Hungary and Austria, the demonstrations in Czechoslovakia on , and the bloody execution of Nicolae Ceaus¸escu and his wife in Romania. Nor do they associate these crucial events in both European and world history with Gorbachev’s refusal to use military pressure or direct military force. What these students do know, however, is Reagan’s most famous utterance: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” which he pronounced in front of the in Berlin in 1987 and not in 1989. Although all the authors dealing with 1989 highlight the role of Gorbachev in the peaceful end of the

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Cold War, Blanton’s chapter, in particular, shatters the myth of the deep involvement of the United States in the events of 1989 by referring to U.S. policy during this time as “a bystander at best.” Volumes such as this are all the more significant for scholars and students alike as they provide a highly complex picture of the “winds of change” that engulfed Eastern Europe in 1989 and brought the dismantling of Communist rule in the region, which in turn paved the way for the peaceful end of the Cold War and the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union.

Commentary by Douglas Selvage

This volume consists mainly of essays originally presented as papers at a conference organized in Prague in November 2009 by the Czech Institute for Contemporary History. It displays some of the typical problems of conference volumes: varying quality of contributions; emphasis on particular aspects of the larger topic and relative neglect of others; and a relatively long lead interval between the conference and publication—in this case, four years. Nevertheless, the volume contains valuable summary essays on diverse aspects of the Cold War in Europe that more than justify its purchase by libraries – the main customers for the volume, given its price. Particularly useful are Mark Kramer’s essays, whose footnotes provide an overview of the recent historiography on a given topic, along with references to sometimes obscure and otherwise hard-to-find documentary publications. Two such essays by Kramer dominate Part I of the volume on “Central Europe and the Onset of the Iron Curtain”: one on “Stalin, Soviet Policy, and the Establishment of a Communist Bloc in Eastern Europe, 1941–1949” and a second on “Stalin, the Split with Yugoslavia, and Soviet-East European Efforts to Reassert Control, 1948–1953.” Also in Part I, Rolf Steininger’s chapter on “Austria, Germany, and the Cold War” convincingly argues for the importance of the great-power negoti- ations over Austria from 1945 to 1955 for the early history of the Cold War. These negotiations were closely linked to, and generally overshadowed by, debate about Germany’s future—the German question. Steininger’s otherwise useful overview of the Austrian question is marred, however, by occasional questionable assertions or gratuitous swipes. He castigates Britain’s “hysteri- cal fear of communism” after the Communist takeover in Czechoslovakia in February 1948 (p. 132) and makes the unfounded claim that West Germany in effect recognized two German states through its establishment of diplomatic relations with Moscow in 1955 (pp. 143–144). Most bizarrely of all, Steininger

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on p. 144 chides Austria for joining the European Union in 1995! His use of the Soviet-bloc designation for the Federal Republic of Germany—“German Federal Republic” (p. 137)—was most likely a typographical error, but per- haps not. Peter Ruggenthaler’s chapter on the Stalin Note restores a certain equilibrium by arguing—persuasively—that the Stalin Note of 1952 did not represent a missed chance for German unification, as Steininger has previously asserted. V´ıt Smetana provides evidence that the diplomacy of Czechoslovakia’s democratic leaders in exile and in the postwar republic from 1943 to 1948 brought the country into a pro-Soviet alignment before the February 1948 coup. However, if Smetana is implying that the Czechoslovak government could have offered successful resistance to Sovietization by following the ex- ample of Finland (p. 70), he ignores the latter’s more advantageous military, economic, and geopolitical situation vis-a-vis` the Soviet Union. Part II on “The German Question and Intra-Bloc Politics” constitutes practically a book-within-a-book, especially when one considers that the Steininger and Ruggenthaler chapters as well as Bernd Schaefer’s in Part III also fall under this rubric. In Chapter 8, Hope Harrison argues anew her position that Walter Ulbricht played a central role in the Soviet decision to build the Berlin Wall and sketches her promising new research on public memory and remembrance of the Berlin Wall in unified Germany. Oliver Bange makes the case in his chapter that the German question, thanks to the success of West Ger- man Ostpolitik and East-West confidence-building measures in the 1970s and 1980s, served as a catalyst for ending the Cold War—a major contrast to the 1950s and 1960s, when the German question served as the major impediment for overcoming Cold War tensions in Europe. Bernd Schaefer argues in Chap- ter 9 that decisions by Poland and Hungary and later Czechoslovakia in 1989 with regard to opening their borders undermined the East German regime by facilitating the flight of East German refugees to the West. The popular exodus in 1989 and 1990 forced the hands of political leaders and diplomats with regard to German unification, leaving them scrambling to catch up with facts created by the East German masses on the ground. Chapters 9 and 10 on the standpoints of London and Paris with regard to East-Central Europe and the German question, by Anne Deighton and Georges-Henri Soutou, respec- tively, are masterpieces of with rich contextualization and comparative aspects. Deighton explains how the British government played a central role in decision-making with regard to the division of Germany from 1943 to 1949, even as it stood aloof from developments in Czechoslovakia. In contrast, British leaders played at best a minor role in influencing the pace and terms of German reunification in 1989–1990 as a result of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s stubborn opposition to reunification and her

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ensuing refusal to recognize realities. French President Franc¸ois Mitterrand, as portrayed by Soutou, proved more astute than Thatcher and his own advisers in his analyses of the German question in the late 1980s, as he shifted between various historical French approaches to the German question since 1945 in his ongoing diplomacy. Mitterrand’s greatest frustration was that the Soviet Union and specifically Mikhail Gorbachev failed to stop or at least to slow the progress toward German unity, a situation that militated against Mitterrand’s understanding of both the Soviet Union’s long-standing role and the traditions of great-power diplomacy. Somewhat stranded in the German book-within-a-book is Csaba Bek´ es’s´ contribution on foreign-policy coordination within the Soviet bloc from 1953 to 1975. He makes the controversial argument that detente´ began not at the end of the 1960s but with the thaw in Soviet foreign policy in 1953–1956 as embodied in the new policy of “” with the West. “Peaceful coexistence,” however, did not always make for detente,´ as demonstrated by Soviet leader ’s efforts to compel the “imperialists” to adopt “peaceful coexistence” as their own policy by launching the Berlin crises and Cuban missile crisis in 1958–1962. Contrary to Bek´ es’s´ analysis, Moscow’s granting of more room to its allies for maneuver in their diplomacy—mainly in support of Soviet goals—arguably was less important than Soviet leaders’ general neglect of the East European countries’ growing economic ties with and economic dependence on the West. This reflected Moscow’s efforts, beginning in 1953 and ending in 1989, to reduce its own costs of empire in East-Central Europe. As Alex Pravda notes in his chapter on Moscow’s policy toward the region from 1988 to 1989, Gorbachev’s desire to reduce the costs of empire in the form of subsidized raw materials, military deployments, the provision of weapons, and enforcement of the Brezhnev Doctrine contributed to his decision to move away from “the traditional relationship of dependence and domination” with regard to the region. Part III of the book centers on the demise of the Soviet bloc in 1988– 1989. Here we have yet another masterful synthesis by Kramer—in this case, on the evolution of Gorbachev’s policy toward Eastern Europe from 1985 to 1989 and especially the “fundamental reorientation” of Soviet policy toward the region in 1988–1989. According to Kramer, this reorientation, and “the courage and restraint of protesters in Eastern Europe” in 1989, were the main factors leading to the “largely peaceful collapse of East European Communism in 1989.” Svetlana Savranskaya argues in her contribution on Gorbachev’s policy that his vision of a “common European home” to include Eastern and Western Europe, along with the Soviet Union, helps to explain his relative equanimity regarding the changes in 1989 in Germany and

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Eastern Europe. Ultimately, the rapid unification of Germany undermined his plans—supported by Mitterrand—of putting first. Thomas Blanton’s chapter on “Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and the Revolutions of 1989” successfully challenges triumphalist myths in the United States portraying Washington policymakers as having played the central role in the revolutions of 1989 and the collapse of Communism. Part IV of the volume is devoted to “retrospectives on the Cold War in Europe and discussions of salient analytical and theoretical issues.” Of the historical syntheses, David Holloway’s chapter on “Nuclear Weapons and the Cold War in Europe” stands out with its analysis of the issue from the U.S. development of the nuclear bomb in 1945 to the end of the Cold War in 1989. In separate contributions, Mark Kramer (“Why Did the Cold War Last So Long?”) and Richard Ned Lebow (“The End of the Cold War as a Non-Linear Confluence”) underline once again the inability of the structural realist theory of international relations espoused by Kenneth Waltz—at least on its own—to explain the end of the Cold War. The final chapter in the book, by James G. Hershberg on “A Tale of Two Conferences,” provides a first-hand account of the origins of the “New Cold War History” of the 1990s in two conferences held in 1988 and 1989 with U.S. and Soviet historians. Hershberg’s essay will serve as an important reference for future studies on the historiography of the Cold War. Two potential weaknesses in the volume stand out. The first is the lack of a chapter—or, better, chapters—on Poland, especially given the volume’s regional focus on East-Central Europe and its proclaimed focus on “Imposing, Maintaining and Tearing Open the Iron Curtain.” The Big Three’s decisions with regard to the Polish question at the in 1945 and the Soviet Union’s one-sided implementation of those decisions certainly played a key role in “imposing” the Iron Curtain. Developments in Poland also created difficulties for Moscow’s “maintaining” the Iron Curtain. Poland—through its evolving political and ideological deviations,. the ongoing opposition and resistance movements in the country, culminating in Solidarity; and its con- tribution to the economic bankruptcy of the Soviet bloc and Communism in general—played a central role in undermining the strength and unity of the Soviet bloc. In terms of “Tearing Open” the Iron Curtain, Poland’s Solidar- ity movement, the roundtable talks between it and the Polish government in 1989, and the free Polish elections later that year arguably deserved a separate chapter in the book, although the various chapters on 1989 do discuss the role of Poland. Second, some of the contributors to the volume criticize or comment on the work of other historians at various points without providing necessary

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clarification or evidence. For example, Laszl´ o´ Borhi states in his otherwise convincing chapter about “Hungary’s Role in the Soviet Bloc, 1945–1956” that in his view the book published in 1996 by Vladislav Zubok and Constantine Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War – From Stalin to Khrushchev (Harvard University Press), reflects “a subtle attempt to restore the prestige of the Soviet Union, ... which was only out to maximize its defense” (p. 95, n 2). That Zubok and Pleshakov wrote about a “revolutionary-imperial paradigm” seems to undermine this assertion, especially considering that they criticized the paradigm’s “revolutionary” aspects based on Stalinist ideology. Another example arises in Hope Harrison’s chapter. It is true, as she writes, that “German scholars Gerhard Wettig, Matthias Uhl and Manfred Wilke have emphasized Soviet responsibility for the decision to build the Wall” (p. 188). But one should not necessarily lump them together with the alleged “many Germans” from the previous sentence, who find it “uncomfortable to accept the important responsibility of the East German leadership under Walter Ulbricht for pushing for the border closure, the building of the Berlin Wall, and the shoot-to-kill order.” Certainly, Wettig, Uhl, and Wilke do not believe, as Har- rison does, that Ulbricht was “the driving force behind the decision” to build the Wall. They focus instead on the ultimate responsibility of Khrushchev for the decision in 1961—he had to give Ulbricht the green light—and the role of the Soviet Union in creating the structures in East Germany that ulti- mately necessitated the building of the Wall in order to prevent political and . Among other things, the Soviet Union permitted Ulbricht to remain in power for so long, despite occasional misgivings, and permitted him to carry out such policies as the collectivization of agriculture, which accelerated the exodus of East Germans to the West. This does not necessarily mean, however, that these German scholars are “uncomfortable” with criti- cizing Ulbricht and his cronies or ultimately holding them co-responsible for atrocities at the Wall. As Kramer and Smetana note in their introduction, the positions of Harrison and her critics need not be mutually exclusive (p. xviii, n 6). That is, Ulbricht could be the “driving force” pushing for the Wall, even as the ultimate decision rested with Khrushchev in Moscow. This seems, indeed, to have been the case, and thus the Communist leaders in both East Berlin and Moscow were responsible for the ensuing atrocities and tragedies in Berlin. In conclusion, Imposing, Maintaining and Tearing Open the Iron Curtain contains many valuable and thought-provoking essays about the history of the Cold War in Europe. The book will serve as an important reference work on the and the Cold War and thus belongs on the shelves of all university libraries and research institutions.

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Commentary by Molly Pucci

By 1989, the view from Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s desk must have been stressful indeed. Gorbachev had introduced the most radical domestic and foreign policy reforms the Soviet Union and Eastern bloc had ever witnessed, all in the span of roughly a year. He withdrew Soviet troops from , shifted to a policy of non-interventionism in Eastern Europe, and berated the stodgy and conservative East European regimes to embrace domestic reform and political change. His reward for these efforts: the loss of the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe. In 1989, the Soviet bloc tumbled headfirst from one crisis to another: the victory of Solidarity in the Polish elections in June; the opening of the Hungarian border in September; and—finally—the opening of the Berlin Wall in November. Similar to the period following the War, the geopolitical face of Europe was changing radically and no one seemed to have a roadmap. Im- posing, Maintaining, and Tearing Open the Iron Curtain is an expertly written volume on the Cold War in Europe, bringing together 21 scholars from the fields of history and political science to trace key events as they swept across Europe from the end of World War II to the heady months of 1989. The book moves from theoretical debates on geopolitical strategy to the messiness of politics in practice. It balances the long-term decision-making strategies of world leaders with the immediacies of “chance and contingency” (Kramer: on p. 410) in international politics. In doing so, the authors explore some of the most interesting twists and turns of Soviet, East European, and Western decision-making during the Cold War. The book contains 24 chapters divided into four temporal and thematic sections: (1) Central Europe and the onset of the Iron Curtain, (2) the German question and intra-bloc politics in the post-Stalin era, (3) the role of East- Central Europe in ending the Cold War, and (4) long-term perspectives on the Cold War and its end. The broad geographic and temporal expertise of the contributors allows them to compare and draw parallels between major themes and pivotal moments in Cold War history (1945, 1953, 1956, 1968, 1989). Some of the chapters follow specific topics through several decades, such as David Holloway’s discussion of the role of nuclear weapons in foreign policy from 1945 to 1989. Other chapters look at the political perceptions of individual countries over time, such as Oldˇrich Tuma’s˚ exploration of the political situation in Prague in 1968 and 1989. The structure of the book allows the authors to capture how political perceptions and sensibilities changed during the Cold War. To take just one example, the book contains two chapters on Soviet security policy: one explores

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the view from the Kremlin in the post-World War II era, the other explores the analogous view in the 1980s. The juxtaposition of these chapters shows that— from a geopolitical perspective—Soviet leaders saw the world very differently in these two eras. In the first chapter, “Stalin, Soviet Policy, and the Establishment of a Communist Bloc in Eastern Europe, 1941–1949,” Mark Kramer examines the strategic and security concerns of the Soviet leader Iosif Stalin after the Second World War. He argues that because of the immediate experience of war, the Soviet Union’s primary foreign policy aim was to create a protective military buffer zone between its own territory and Germany. The war had also changed the concrete reality of international politics by extending Soviet military, political, and economic influence into large parts of Europe. This chapter is striking when contrasted with Alex Pravda’s article on the Gorbachev era, “Moscow and Eastern Europe, 1988–1989: A Policy of Optimism and Caution.” Pravda looks at how the Soviet Union’s foreign policy and strategic concerns had changed by the 1980s, arguing that Gorbachev’s policy toward Eastern Europe was one of “caution and optimism.” The roots of this caution were the bilateral trade agreements between the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, which began to have more cost than benefit for Moscow (particularly in the sector of subsidized energy). Soviet security needs had also changed substantially since 1945. By the 1980s, the Soviet Union’s “militarized buffer zone” seemed unnecessary, expensive, and outdated. At least in part, Pravda also shows that these policy shifts were a product of changing political sensibilities among Soviet leaders, noting that—in Gorbachev’s view—East European Communist leaders were “dull and even irritating” (p. 311). The strained personal relations between Soviet and Eastern-bloc leaders show that the domestic and international politics of the countries of the Soviet bloc had fallen out of sync by 1988. Although many chroniclers of the Cold War limit their studies to the su- perpowers (the United States and USSR) or the perspective of one country, the varied academic specialties and backgrounds of the contributors in this book allow them to observe events from the vantage point of Moscow, Washington, Berlin, Paris, , Prague, and Vienna. In doing so, they fill in some of the missing pieces connecting international events and national experiences. For example, the section “Central Europe and the Onset of the Iron Curtain” looks at the early years of the Cold War from the perspective of two smaller European countries: Czechoslovakia and Hungary. V´ıt Smetana’s “Czechoslovakia’s Road to the Cold War and the Soviet Bloc,” examines Czechoslovak foreign policy in the immediate postwar era. With respect to Soviet influence, Czechoslovakia was an exceptional case in the Eastern bloc. The Red Army had left Czechoslovak territory by December

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1945—a reality that contrasted with the experience of Germany, Romania, Bulgaria, and Hungary (countries governed by Soviet military administrations until the late 1940s). For Smetana, the Soviet “takeover” of Czechoslovakia was not a military affair; rather, it was the result of an ideological and foreign policy shift toward the Soviet Union in the public and National Front leadership. He argues that pro-Soviet sentiments were understandable after the war, insofar as Czechoslovak leaders saw the Soviet Union as a guarantor of the country’s security. In the long term, it would have been impossible for Czechoslovakia to have been a “bridge between East and West,” a stance that required bal- ancing contradictory demands and ideological pressures from both sides of the Iron Curtain. Out of emotional attachment to the Soviet Union and the need to guarantee the security of their country, Czechoslovak leaders chose to orient their foreign policy toward the Soviet Union. Smetana concludes that “there was one significant exception to the ‘empire by coercion’ created by the USSR in post-war East-Central Europe: Czechoslovakia in fact helped to start building the Soviet Empire—by invitation” (p. 74). Laszl´ o´ Borhi’s “Hungary’s Role in the Soviet Bloc” examines the divergent trajectory of Hungary toward membership in the Eastern bloc. In postwar Hungary, the Soviet military administration was the primary legal authority in the country. The Soviet administration acted as a pseudo-government that unilaterally made important military and economic decisions as late as 1950. Hungarian officials who wanted to travel abroad had to receive permission from the occupation authorities (p. 89). Borhi focuses his analysis on the seldom- explored issue of Soviet economic policy in Hungary, with the USSR holding partial ownership over key branches of the , including aluminum, bauxite, and other natural resources. Soviet occupation authorities not only exported significant wealth from Hungary in the form of reparations, but also used their position in the country to set up lopsided trade agreements that remained in force after the Soviet military administration had been dismantled and the Hungarian government had taken its place. The contrast between Czechoslovakia’s and Hungary’s relationships with the Soviet Union reveals that Soviet influence came in different forms, from trade agreements to foreign policy . Although these two chapters draw an implicit comparison between the Czechoslovak and Hungarian postwar experiences, it would have been useful for Smetana and Borhi to have engaged with each other’s arguments more explicitly. If the roads to socialism differed for the countries of the Eastern bloc in the 1940s, did these paths converge by the 1950s? Did the varied starting points leave behind lasting consequences for the development of socialism in the region? A direct comparison of the cases would also have underscored the contributions of these studies for broader

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issues in the field, such as the role of small countries in Cold War politics and the nature of “Sovietization” in the Eastern bloc. A notable part of the book is the scholars’ ability to speak about the Eastern bloc from their own experiences and personal observations. In several articles, authors describe how they understood Cold War events at the time they were . These on-the-spot observations, like the notes of an anthropologist, underscore the uncertainty and ambiguity of lived events, particularly during the rapidly changing period of the late 1980s. When Svetlana Savranskaya speaks about Mikhail Gorbachev’s policies in the 1980s in her essay “The Fall of the Wall, Eastern Europe, and Gorbachev’s Vision of Europe after the Cold War,” she complements her scholarly account of Gorbachev’s political and social policies with her own impressions from East Germany from 1984 to 1989: “it was completely beyond my imagination that its existence could ever come to an end” (p. 363). She records the “numbing stasis” and “cynical passivity” of East Germans in the late 1980s. Her observations enable the reader to appreciate that what made the street protests of 1989 so remarkable was precisely their unexpectedness. Savranskaya’s personal observations draw our attention to the messiness of international politics in hitting the domestic stage in individual countries and ricocheting in unexpected directions. The book therefore raises important and challenging questions for future researchers. Many chapters suggest that during the Cold War there was a fundamental misalignment between domestic knowledge and responsibility for major political decisions. How much did Soviet leader really understand (or care) about the domestic politics and beliefs of Czechs and before sending troops to crush the Prague Spring in ? Especially with respect to small countries, there are still few in-depth studies of the consequences of what seemed to be a disjuncture between foreign policy and domestic experience. The disconnect between local knowledge and central decision-making power—present to some degree in all political systems—seems the dominant characteristic of this half- century in Europe, manifesting itself also in the post-1945 tendency of large countries to make far-reaching decisions about the borders and fates of small countries that they only superficially understood. These trends suggest that future scholars need to look closely at how these foreign policy decisions translated into practice on the ground in individual countries across Europe. How did people outside the political elite understand these international events and interpret the high-level decisions in the Cold War period? Imposing, Maintaining, and Tearing Open the Iron Curtain is an important and comprehensive guide to international politics and the history of Europe from the end of the Second World War to the demise of the Warsaw Pact. The

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broad expertise, archival research, and well-chosen mix of themes and perspec- tives in the volume draw the reader into interesting debates and questions in the fields of politics, history, and international relations. I recommend it for specialists and non-specialists alike.

Commentary by Erik Kulavig

This thought-provoking collection of essays on the Cold War in Europe has been edited by Mr. Cold War par excellence, Mark Kramer, along with V´ıt Smetana, both of whom have also contributed essays. In the foreword they write that even if the opening of archives in the former Soviet Union and in the countries that were under Soviet hegemony does not put a final end to the politically based controversy between traditionalists and revisionists, it can at least produce a calmer discussion and “empirically grounded, reasonably convincing explanation” (p. 87). The book brings us a long way down that road. This does not mean, however, that the key to the door of the truth about the Cold War has been found. People still disagree on central issues such as which side to blame for the start of the Cold War and which actors to thank for the end of the madness. The core of the controversy can still be found in the old political battle between those who thought that socialism was imposed by force on the people by the elite and those who insisted that socialism had broader social roots and therefore also had a certain amount of legitimacy. The book does not turn the boat over, but it rocks it by bringing new insight based on new material that gives more solid foundation for mainly—but not only—the traditionalist point of view. The book consists of four sections. The first is on the roots and the beginning of the Cold War, the second on intra-bloc politics, the third on the role of East-Central Europe in ending the Cold War, and the fourth, which is the most speculative, on long term perspectives. Kramer has written the comprehensive opening chapter of the first section. He provides ample evidence that Iosif Stalin knew what he was going for from the early stages of World War II, namely Soviet control of Eastern and Central Europe. Kramer shows there is no room for speculation about a “liberal Stalin” who was forced to change his mind because of U.S. . Kramer’s view is reinforced by the second chapter, in which Michael F. Hopkins writes on U.S. policy toward Eastern Europe in1943–1948. He argues there was more continuity than change between the foreign policies of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman. When the United States changed signals it was not because of Truman but because Stalin’s real intentions had been revealed. The

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author of the third chapter, Smetana, claims that Czechoslovakia was the sole East European country that joined the Soviet bloc of its own will—and even did so eagerly. Laszl´ o´ Borhi, in the fourth chapter of the first section, challenges the revisionist point of view that U.S. imperialism is what prevented Hungary from breaking out of the Soviet sphere. He contends that strong archival evidence leaves no doubt that, for Stalin, unchallenged domination of Eastern Europe was always more important than cooperation with the West. (p. 87) In the fifth chapter, Kramer takes us on a frightful journey through new material on Soviet-Yugoslav relations. The declassified documents indicate that the contradictions between the two Stalin and Josip Broz Tito were much sharper than previously thought and that Stalin never abandoned the idea of regaining full control over Yugoslavia. We already knew that Stalin was trying to ruin Yugoslavia by forbidding other Eastern-bloc countries from trading with it, that there were attempts to liquidate Tito, and that saboteurs were sent over the border to destabilize the country. But according to the new material, Stalin at the time of his death in 1953 was preparing an and possibly also a confrontation with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). He was convinced that the United States, having been unable to defeat and China in the ongoing , was too bogged down to confront the Soviet Union. In the next chapter Rolf Steininger looks at the role of Austria, which managed to get free of the Soviet Union’s grip by 1955. Peter Ruggenthaler concludes the first section with a chapter on the “Stalin Note” from 1952. He most convincingly rejects the idea that by not taking Stalin’s proposal seriously the West missed an opportunity to achieve the early reunification of Germany. Ruggenthaler amasses strong evidence that the note was nothing but a sly attempt to avoid or at least postpone the integration of West Germany into NATO. Section two is opened by Hope M. Harrison, who discusses the Berlin Wall. The idea was broached to Soviet leaders as early as 1953 but was rejected as being “politically unacceptable and grossly simplistic” (p. 179). Nikita Khrushchev finally gave in to the constant pressure from the East German leader Walter Ulbricht and was surprised to see how well prepared the German state was to carry out the complicated mission. Oliver Bange examines whether the German question was a hindrance or a catalyst on the path to German reunification. Anne Deighton and Georges- Henri Soutou write on the perception of German reunification in London and Paris. These governments could have played an active role in the process, but when the Wall finally opened, the dominant reaction of Prime Minister

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Margaret Thatcher and President Franc¸ois Mitterrand was not joy but deep concern about the consequences for their own countries’ security. The essays show that West European leaders had never fully believed that Gorbachev would refrain from stepping in, and they therefore were ill prepared for the New Europe. Csaba Bek´ es´ analyzes the functional mechanisms of the Eastern , the Warsaw Pact, which was founded by Khrushchev in May 1955 but did not work efficiently until after the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 when the so-called Brezhnev Doctrine was put into action. Section three on the role of East-Central Europe in ending the Cold War opens with a fascinating chapter on Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and the revolutions of 1989 by Thomas Blanton, who demolishes the “American myth” that the U.S. military buildup and political offensive under Reagan in the early 1980s forced the Soviet Union into a corner from which there was no escape save for surrender (p. 279). Blanton argues that U.S. policy in the late 1970s and early 1980s hindered Soviet reformers (p. 283) and that the Soviet Union in the early 1980s was stagnant and not an “evil empire” on the march. When Reagan learned from his conversations with Mikhail Gorbachev “that the Russians are afraid of us,” he decided to convince them that the United States was not aggressive. This process was expedited by the earlier replacement of the president’s chief adviser on the Soviet Union, , by Jack Matlock. Reagan’s change of direction convinced Gorbachev, who in 1985 told his fellow leaders in Moscow that: “nobody would attack us if we disarmed completely” (p. 289). From this it followed that there was no longer much reason for the USSR to hold on to Eastern Europe. This new thinking produced a window of opportunity that was less a result of pressure than of threat relief and more of interaction than of antagonism (p. 290). Instead of building on the changes immediately to bring a swift end to the Cold War, Bush was worried that Soviet leaders were trying to “steal Europe.” Blanton convincingly argues that the United States and Reagan won the Cold War not by force but by employing understanding and . Alex Pravda continues this section with an answer to the question: How can we explain the remarkable shift in Moscow’s goals and plans for Eastern Europe that materialized at the end of the 1980s? Pravda eschews material and ideational explanations and focuses instead on the policymaking pro- cess. He contends that Moscow had no general plan for how to implement the “,” which meant a shift from force to free will in the relationship between Moscow and the former . Gorbachev was more interested in talking to Western leaders than with his own allies. These

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discussions catalyzed a mutual learning process that enabled Gorbachev to realize that the West was no threat to the USSR. Among the volume’s authors who discuss the end of the Cold War, Svetlana Savranskaya is the one who gives the greatest emphasis to Gorbachev’s leading part in the drama. She documents that he was able to learn from his talks with Western leaders, and she stresses the importance of Gorbachev’s speech in Strasbourg in July 1989 in which he pleaded for European leaders to let the Soviet Union into Europe. She argues that the Soviet leader’s main goal was integration into Europe, which took priority over relations between Moscow and the East European allies. Savranskaya cites Anatolii Chernyaev, who was a close aide to Gorbachev “The total dismantling of socialism has been taking place. Perhaps it is inevitable and good. For this is reunification of mankind on the basis of common sense” (p. 340). According to Savranskaya, the fleeting window of opportunity was closed by the Western politicians who followed Reagan and Thatcher. Gorbachev commented on this after a talk with British Prime Minister John Major in March 1991: “They are talking again about relying on NATO. I don’t think that this corresponds with the common European home, which we started to build (p. 351).” Savranskya concludes on a gloomy note, saying that NATO became a “road to Europe” for Eastern Europe, but that the road remained closed to the Soviet Union and later to Russia. Bernd Schaefer in his chapter “Pulling the Rug” also plays the Gorbachev card. Schaefer argues that Gorbachev became—willingly or unwillingly—the catalyst for a huge popular movement that was then ratified by diplomats and governments. This interpretation was endorsed by Gorbachev in a private conversation that took place in the Danish parliament years after he had left the political scene. He said that in 1989 he was stirred by one of his aides who told him that people were streaming through the Berlin Wall and asked Gorbachev what actions they should take. The answer, as Gorbachev recalled it,was:“Thereisnothingwecando!” Kramer rounds out the section on the role of East-Central Europe with a chapter on the demise of the Soviet bloc. He argues that Gorbachev could have chosen to put the Brezhnev Doctrine into action to crush growing unrest in the East European countries because the Soviet Army was strong. The peaceful disintegration of the bloc was therefore an “unintended consequence”. It was, however, tolerated by Gorbachev, Kramer writes. This does not mean that the opening of the Wall was a coincidence or an inevitable consequence of history. Moscow and Gorbachev may be crucial to understanding why and how, but so are the courageous actions of individuals and groups in Eastern Europe who did not know that Moscow had decided not to intervene. Kramer provides

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fascinating insight into the political machine of Moscow in the 1980s and demonstrates that individuals—top politicians and more humble advisers— do play an important role in history. Kramer draws an interesting parallel is drawn to the Khrushchev years, when the change of signals from Moscow also catalyzed political disintegration in the Soviet bloc. Khrushchev to his own regret saw only one way out: force. Gorbachev solved the “Khrushchev dilemma.” The fourth section on long-term perspectives on the Cold War is opened by David Holloway with a chapter on nuclear weapons in Europe. He con- cludes that the bomb neither started nor prevented the Cold War but did strengthen the division of Europe; and that even though the bomb did not end the Cold War, the reduction of nuclear weapons was a crucial factor in improving East-West relations. On the other hand, nuclear weapons made it possible for the United States to commit itself to the defense of Western Europe at a time when a conventional war with the USSR would have been disastrous because of the strength of Soviet conventional forces. The balance of terror helped to deter the other side from attacking. Today, however, the role of nuclear weapons in international security is much smaller (despite Vladimir Putin’s nuclear bluster), and “the post-Cold War in Europe is far superior to the order that prevailed during the Cold War.” In light of the armed con- flict between Ukraine and Russia since 2014, this argument is perhaps not as convincing as it was when the chapter appeared. In the following chapter, Kramer asks why the Cold War did not end in 1953, when preconditions were similar to those in 1989, and why it happened in 1989. The answer is that it takes time to remove mistrust, and that only Gorbachev was able to realize that the West would not try to exploit his new approach to Eastern Europe. Taking the developments in Europe in 2014 into consideration one may ask how deep Gorbachev’s perception ran in the Soviet elite and in Soviet (especially Russian) society. If it was deeply rooted and had matured over time, what caused the sudden change? In the next chapter Richard Ned Lebow argues that structural realism was woefully unable to account for the sudden end of the Cold War, and he recommends that more emphasis be put on constructivism and other non- realist theories. The following three chapters by Oldˇrich Tuma,˚ Silvio Pons, and Sonaˇ Szomolanyi´ deal with temporal similarities and differences. Tuma˚ focuses on 1968, Pons on the de-legitimation of European Communism after Khrushchev’s “Secret Speech” in February 1956, and Szomolanyi´ writes about the demise of Communism in and its implications. All three chapters demonstrate that 1989 did not develop in a historical vacuum.

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The book concludes with a lively and fascinating chapter about the battle on the front lines of historiography in the waning years of the Cold War. The author is James Hershberg, who took an active part in the battle. He is also one of the founders of the Cold War International History Project, which has played a crucial role for researchers of the Cold War all over the world. The Kramer-Smetana book is a most valuable collection of essays by leading researchers of the Cold War that gives us an idea of the state of the art. The opening of archives has not revolutionized our understanding of the Cold War, but it has brought us important corrections and given us firmer ground for interpretation. The chapters were written, presented, edited, and published before the Russian-Ukraine conflict erupted in 2014 and made journalists and commentators speak about a revival of the Cold War or about a new Cold War. History does not repeat itself, but the present drama gives reason to speculate whether the Cold War was ever truly over. Some of the chapters in the book suggest that it was not and that Western governments are the main culprit because they never trusted Russia enough to let it into Europe. It is also worth considering anew whether ideology was really the core of the Cold War or whether one should put greater emphasis on geopolitical explanations. Perhaps we should start by going beyond 1949 to look for the roots of the Cold War not only in the Bolshevik Revolution but also—and perhaps mainly—in the foreign policy of the Tsars.

Commentary by Constantine Pleshakov

Mark Kramer and V´ıt Smetana have produced a very fine book with a mis- leading title. The volume is broader in scope and richer in meaning than its name suggests. As Kramer and Smetana explain in their introduction, the project started at a 2009 conference in Prague, where earlier versions of most of the chapters were presented (p. xi). Transforming a set of conference papers into a cohesive volume is a daunting task, particularly in a multidisciplinary field, such as Cold War studies. Imposing, Maintaining, and Tearing Open the Iron Curtain consists of 24 essays penned by 21 authors. Perhaps, it was not a good idea to reimagine contributions as chapters and then group chapters into sections. It is hard to see any progression in narrative or argument because, quite predictably, themes, characters, and concepts overlap. The table of content still reads like a conference program, and a tentative one too because of the annoying lack

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of precision in formulating the subjects (e.g., “Long-Term Perspectives on the Cold War and Its End”). That said, this is an intellectually important collection. Smetana, Laszl´ o´ Borhi, Kramer, and Peter Ruggenthaler reexamine the origins of the Soviet bloc. There are insightful essays on 1989 and the lasting consequences of the geopolitical rearrangement the revolutions launched (Georges-Henri Soutou and Anne Deighton on the reunification of Germany, Thomas Blanton on the foreign policy legacy of Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush). Richard Ned Lebow, Kramer, Silvio Pons, and James G. Hershberg offer stimulating interpretations of the Cold War as a system. The arrival of the digital age has not necessarily made publishing good books easier. The volume was four years in the making. Starting at a conference celebrating the twentieth anniversary of the “velvet revolutions,” it reached readers just before the twenty-fifth, when our mood was less celebratory amid a new confrontation in Europe. As Russia and Western governments clashed over Ukraine in early 2014, some analysts proclaimed that the Cold War was back. The modern Russian reconquista started in 2008 with the occupation of and , followed by the sponsorship of “sovereignty” for both. Not forgotten in the West, the intervention was forgiven. Western policymakers viewed the as strategically marginal and not worth a standoff with Moscow. Not until Russia intervened in Ukraine in 2014, first annexing Crimea and then dispatching fighters and weapons to Donbas, did Western attitudes change: Ukraine was an area of paramount significance for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the United States. Like the Cold War, the 2014 crisis started over spheres of influence in Eastern Europe. Hardly a coincidence, this instead suggests the presence of a systemic feature. In his essay on the establishment of the Communist bloc, Kramer elo- quently sums up the geopolitical concerns of the Kremlin in the 1940s, saying that the goal was to turn Eastern Europe into a “protective zone against future invasions from European armies” (p. 14). Another contributor, Michael F. Hopkins, examines Western governments’ attempts in 1944 at making East- ern Europe a sustainable buffer zone between the USSR and Europe’s core by splitting and sharing influence in the region. The best-known initiative was the “” introduced by British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, but as Hopkins stresses, there were other, less blatant initiatives that equally meaningful (p. 45). This pattern continued into the 21st century. The Russian authorities demanded a protective zone between Russia and NATO, and Western leaders

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were generally willing to grant one. The geopolitical borderland between “West” and “East” has never been permanently fixed; its physical boundaries keep shifting, depending on how strong Europe is at any given time. Obviously, the collapse of the Soviet bloc pushed the borderland east. Nowadays, the pre- carious position along Europe’s eastern edge belongs not to Poland, Hungary, and Romania, but to Ukraine, , and Moldova. The “protective zone” the Russian government envisages thus shifts together with intra-European alliances and allegiances. But no matter who occupies the Kremlin and what happens in Europe, the former wants a buffer zone separating it from the latter. Structurally, Ukraine nowadays is for Russia what Poland was for the USSR in 1945. Why is that? Why does Russia demand a cushion between itself and Europe? The demand must originate in an unresolved antagonism, but of what kind? What is the essence of the antipathy that would be shared by Tsarist Russia, the Soviet Union, ’s pluralist democracy, and Vladimir Putin’s “managed democracy”? Perhaps, as Samuel Huntington argued, there is something culturally predetermined here? In that case, the Cold War should be seen as part of a cycle, not as an era. In a masterfully provocative essay “The End of Cold War as a Non-Linear Confluence,” Richard Ned Lebow writes that the only “important puzzle” of the Cold War is the fact that the transformation of the Soviet Union was achieved in a relatively peaceful way: “One need only look at the violent, troubled and unstable Europe and Middle East that emerged at the end of as a result of the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian, Russian, and Ottoman empires” to see that the fragmentation of the USSR could have had “tragic human consequences” (p. 495). Indeed. But now, with a still under way in Ukraine, one has to ask whether the universal pattern of violent imperial breakup has not simply been delayed. If we answer this in the affirmative, there is all the more reason to believe that the Cold War fits into the historical “norm.” In a charming “tale of two conferences” concluding the volume (pp. 533– 550), James G. Hershberg, the founding director of the seminal Cold War International History Project, gives a personal account of the 1989 Moscow Spring. (A disclaimer: he gives me too much credit for “taboo-breaking.”) Twenty-five years down the road, one may look at the anti-Communist rev- olution with a cheerless nostalgia. “Nostalgia” because a quarter century ago we were “sharp relative youngsters,” in Hershberg’s words (p. 535); “cheerless” because the changes we were part of seem in hindsight to have been about actors and agency, not structures or essence.

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Lebow in his essay calls the end of the Cold War a “system change through actor learning,” suggesting that in international relations structural change may be not the cause of behavior but its product (p. 498). A beautiful way of putting it, and perhaps true for 1985–1991. Yet some 25 years later have we not reached the point when “actors” appear to have suddenly unlearned the acquired skills, falling back on their initial training, what Lebow calls “structure”? The revolutions of 1989–1991 resulted in unprecedented configurations in Europe: new political institutions, new commodities, new alliances, new money, new migrations. Evidently, Europe exists in ways not experienced before – but has the essence of the on the continent changed? This takes us back to the “cursed” question of Cold War studies: What was the conflict? A phenomenon? Or a manifestation of structural antagonisms that preceded and followed it?

Commentary by A. Ross Johnson

This book is a welcome addition to the vast literature on the origins, course, and demise of Soviet domination of East-Central Europe during the Cold War. It includes 24 chapters (most initially presented at a conference in Prague in November 2009) by scholars specializing in the region, many of them summarizing archive-based research with full documentation published else- where. No brief review can do justice to all 24 chapters. Taken as a whole, the contributions to this volume demonstrate that even today the origins of the East-West confrontation over Eastern Europe after 1945 are more easily explained than the end of that conflict in 1989. An introduction by the editors provides a helpful precis´ of individual chapters. Part One includes an overview by Mark Kramer of Iosif Stalin’s im- position of Soviet control over Eastern Europe, followed by country chapters on the consolidation of Communist rule in Czechoslovakia (V´ıt Smetana), Hungary (Laszl´ o´ Borhi), and East Germany (Peter Ruggenthaler), as well as a chapter on how Austria remained outside the Soviet bloc (Rolf Steininger). A chapter by Michael Hopkins reviews the limitations on power and presence that made postwar Western policy toward Eastern Europe “essentially rhetor- ical” (p. 51) — a more charitable characterization than Philip Mosely’s earlier critique that “hope, divorced from power, is not a policy.”10 Kramer argues

10. Philip E. Mosely, “Hopes and Failures: American Policy Toward East Central Europe, 1941–1947,” in Stephen Kertesz, ed., The Fate of East Central Europe. Hopes and Failures of American Foreign Policy (South Bend: University of Notre Dame Press. 1956), p. 157.

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persuasively in Chapter 1 that wartime physical and social devastation, East European weakness, Stalin’s record of disposing of domestic rivals, the con- tinued presence of massive Soviet military forces in Eastern Europe, and the USSR’s fear of contamination from the West via Eastern Europe all dictated consolidation of Communist systems in the region, albeit step by step, with “improvisation and opportunism” (Smetana, p. 65) and with due regard for the international situation. A pro-Soviet non-Communist regime such as that in Czechoslovakia prior to 1948 (reviewed by Smetana in Chapter 3) was in- sufficient; hence the February 1948 Communist Party coup. Consolidation of Communist power in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), as Ruggen- thaler argues in Chapter 7, and the secure forward deployment of the Group of Soviet Forces in Germany trumped the possibility of a united German state that would be neutral and disarmed. Even though Communist orthodoxy was necessary, it was insufficient; Leninist systems in Eastern Europe were reliable in Stalin’s eyes only if they were dependent on the USSR. Josip Broz Tito’s regime in Yugoslavia and En- ver Hoxha’s regime in Albania failed to meet the dependency test, inasmuch as they had come to power largely on their own. Tito and his fellow leaders, schooled in the and their own “National Liberation Struggle,” professed to be “Moscow’s most consistent followers.”11 Yet their policies of radical nationalization, collectivization, imposition of Communist Party rule, and international militancy that outpaced East European “people’s democracies” were, for Stalin, not reassuring demonstrations of Communist orthodoxy. Rather, they were disturbing “conceptions different from our own” that led to actions not cleared in advance with Moscow (as Vyacheslav Molo- tov complained to Tito in February 1948) that resulted from an independent power base.12 This alternate source of authority and legitimacy was irreconcil- able with Stalinism and made the Soviet-Yugoslav conflict inevitable, for it was not instrumental but systemic. In Chapter 5, Kramer adds important details from the Soviet and Yugoslav archives that supplement previously available accounts (including my own) of the origins and unfolding of that conflict.13 Part Two focuses on the German question and alliance issues, with chapters on the Soviet decision to divide Berlin (Hope Harrison), on German devel- opments that led to unification (Oliver Bange), on the institutionalization

11. Milovan Djilas, Conversations with Stalin (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1962), p. 11. 12. Vladimir Dedijer, Tito (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1953), p. 317. Molotov’s comment about Tito is cited by Kramer, p. 101. 13. A Ross Johnson, The Transformation of Communist Ideology: The Yugoslav Case,1945–1953 (Cam- bridge, MA: MIT Press, 1972), pp. 46–53, 65–71.

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and development of routinized consultative procedures within the Warsaw Pact (Csaba Bek´ es),´ and on opposition to German unification by Britain and France (Anne Deighton, Georges-Henri Soutou). Harrison, drawing on pio- neering archival research published in the updated 2011 edition of her book on the Berlin Wall, demonstrates in Chapter 8 that Walter Ulbricht’s lobbying and preparations were crucial to Soviet approval in August 1961 of isolat- ing East from by constructing the Antifaschistischer Schutzwall (anti- Protection Barrier), as Ulbricht’s regime termed the Berlin Wall.14 Bange argues in Chapter 9 that the self-limitation of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) from the 1970s and the GDR’s self-liberation in the latter half of 1989 were what made German reunification credible and possible from the standpoint of the external great powers (p. 206). In Chapter 10, Deighton credits Great Britain in 1945 with the power, strategic vision, and diplomatic leverage to play a key role in the division of Germany and Berlin. Forty-five years later, even though Britain was a per- manent member of the Security Council and also belonged to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the European Commu- nities, and the in Berlin and had the of the deployed on FRG territory under NATO’s auspices, the British role in overcoming the division of Europe was “insignificant” (p. 219). Nor was absorption of the GDR into the FRG slowed by Prime Minister Mar- garet Thatcher’s personal policy of opposition to reunification and hostility to Chancellor Helmut Kohl. “Hubris led to nemesis” (p. 220), Deighton writes, citing Colin Munro. The official policy of France, traced by Soutou in Chap- ter 11, endorsed reunification in principle but qualified it with many caveats. President Franc¸ois Mitterrand resisted reunification until the last minute in mid-1990, after the Christian Democratic Union won the elections in East Germany and it became clear that Mikhail Gorbachev would accept a reunited Germany within NATO. Part Three is devoted to the “end game” of 1989, with chapters on the passivity toward developments in Eastern Europe of both George H. W. Bush and Gorbachev during most of that year (Thomas Blanton, Alex Pravda), on the implosion of the GDR (Bernd Schaefer), and on Gorbachev’s vision, actions, and inactions that were crucial to the Soviet from Eastern Europe (Savranskaya, Kramer). In Chapter 13, Blanton debunks the myth that Ronald Reagan’s military spending and aggressive anti-Communism were responsible for the opening of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold

14. Hope M. Harrison, Ulbricht’s Mauer: Wie die SED Moskaus Wiederstand gegen den Mauer brach (Berlin: Propylaen,¨ 2011).

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War (p. 279)—a claim that, as the chapter documents, few insiders to the policy process would make. Blanton is critical of the passivity of the Bush administration in 1989 and its unwillingness to consider anything like a new “Marshall Plan” for Eastern Europe that left the initiative to others. Continuity of foreign policy across administrations is not a strength of the U.S. system, which lacks a permanent civil service on the British model at the level of the National Security Council. Other authors suggest that a more assertive U.S. policy might have increased Gorbachev’s concerns about the direction of change in the region and emboldened opposition to his policies at home. Massive U.S. financial assistance (never a real possibility) might have postponed rather than facilitated necessary economic reform. Key Bush advisers, especially , counseled caution over triumphalism.15 Crucial in retrospect was Bush’s interaction with Kohl and Gorbachev, which defused opposition to German reunification in East and West and enabled the incorporation of the GDR into the FRG as a key NATO member. That would not have happened without the self-liquidation of the GDR, a process traced by Schaefer in Chapter 16. Rejecting Gorbachev’s “new think- ing” and denouncing reformist Hungary and Poland as “slouching into the bourgeois camp,” the hardline leader of East Germany’s Socialist Unity Party (SED), , nonetheless continued to allow young GDR families to travel to Hungary through the summer of 1989.16 This set the stage for the mass repatriation to the FRG of GDR citizens who had taken refuge in FRG embassies in Budapest and Prague. That was in turn, Schaefer suggests, the necessary precondition for the mass demonstrations in and elsewhere in September and October that fundamentally challenged Communist rule. A more self-confident SED regime might have resisted this wave of opposition longer, but no matter how much Honecker proclaimed his confidence and boasted of a souveran¨ GDR, his regime had lost its bearings as a consequence of Gorbachev’s “new thinking.”17

15. Bartholomew Sparrow, The Strategist: Brent Scowcroft and the Call of National Security (New York: Public Affairs, 2015). 16. Honecker’s comment here, cited by Schaefer on p. 360, was made to Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze on 9 June 1989. 17. This was evident to me at a RAND Corporation workshop held in East Berlin in October 1988. East German army officers at the workshop hinted at a national defense doctrine, and East German officials indicated that Honecker’s regime was “trying to assert itself vis-a-vis` Moscow on some matters while remaining deeply insecure over its own legitimacy and stability, and increasing so in an age of perestroika and glasnost.” See Ronald Asmus, The Changing Environment of European Security: U.S. and GDR Perspectives; A Workshop Report (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, January 1989), p. 3.

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Gorbachev was indeed the key actor, and his views and actions are per- ceptively examined by Pravda, Savranskaya, and Kramer. Could we imagine (Pravda asks) someone like Yurii Andropov acquiescing in political pluralism in Hungary or a Solidarity-led government in Poland? Perestroika and glas- nost (no matter how naive in retrospect) were born of Soviet conditions and intended to revitalize the Soviet Union. It was, however, a leap of faith (or an act of hubris) to think they could apply to Eastern Europe, especially in the absence of any serious Soviet analysis of their possible consequences. Despite the extensive archival records and memoirs cited in this volume, we know more about Gorbachev’s actions than about his motivations and still lack a fully satisfactory explanation of his political evolution from 1985 to 1989 and beyond. We know more about the evolving views of Gorbachev’s key advisers (documented in part by Kramer) than of Gorbachev himself. His “new thinking” on a more relaxed Soviet approach to Eastern Europe may have been evident in private as early as 1985, when he replaced Konstantin Chernenko as First Secretary, and was expressed in public starting in 1987 (according to Pravda, p. 312). But in 1985 Gorbachev still espoused ”socialist internation- alism,” and the “Brezhnev Doctrine” was reaffirmed in the Soviet Communist Party’s Program of March 1986 and by Gorbachev himself in Prague in April 1987 and during the 70th anniversary celebrations of the Bolshevik Revolu- tion in November 1987. Not until 1988 did he call the Brezhnev Doctrine into question. His efforts to promote socialist renewal while maintaining sta- bility, restated to Warsaw Pact leaders in July 1988, were divisive, encouraging Polish and Hungarian Communist Parties to abandon core Leninist principles while strengthening the resolve of leaders in Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Romania, and Bulgaria to resist any liberalizing change. Czechoslovak Party General Secretary MiloˇsJakeˇs defensively affirmed that his country’s political system was Communist and “Communist it will always be”—“the last post in the fence.”18 Only in Hungary did Gorbachev help to facilitate leadership change—the replacement of Janos´ Kad´ ar´ by Karoly´ Grosz. Elsewhere the So- viet leader was reluctant to intervene—in Pravda’s view overestimating both the prospects for in-system reform and the risks of encouraging leadership change. Gorbachev welcomed and encouraged the Round Table talks in Poland and Hungary in 1989 under the illusion that they could result in a reformed socialist system – an illusion indicating how poorly he understood the strength of the anti-Communist oppositions and the decay of the ruling parties (in

18. As cited in Arch Puddington, Broadcasting Freedom: The Cold War Triumph of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2000), p. 302.

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Poland, a weakened military ruling in the name of the party). But he was realistic enough to accept the outcome that in fact ensued: the dismantling of the Communist system. This was the litmus test Soviet leaders had been spared in Poland in 1981 by General Wojciech Jaruzelski’s successful crushing of Solidarity. Soviet military intervention, once viewed by all Soviet leaders as necessary to preserve the Communist systems in Eastern Europe (and almost certain to have come about in 1981 had Jaruzelski failed), was rejected in 1989 by Gorbachev as portending instability and conflict that would doom the Gorbachevian regeneration of the Soviet system. Other factors played a role. Gorbachev was constrained by East European economic weakness and indebtedness to the West and reassured by Western restraint, as demonstrated during Bush’s visit to Warsaw in July 1989. Nor could the Soviet leader devote the attention to Eastern Europe that his predecessors did, given mounting problems at home. As Savranskaya points out, in November 1989 Gorbachev was focused not on East Berlin but on Lithuania. Gorbachev’s passivity in Eastern Europe evidently also derived from his notion of a “common European home” that (as he outlined to the in Strasbourg in June 1989) would “put common European values at the forefront and make it possible to replace the balance of forces with a balance of interests” (quoted by Savranskaya, p. 338). Savranskaya views the “common European home” as a real goal and concrete task for the Gorbachev Politburo. Gorbachev’s aide Aleksandr Yakovlev foresaw “a common parliament, common affairs, trade relations, the borders will be open” (p. 339). But if the “common European home” was more than wishful thinking (or, as Valentin Falin feared in April 1990, a “mirage”) and if Gorbachev and his aides undertook any detailed policy planning toward that goal—none is documented by Savranskaya—it was quickly overtaken by the rush of the former Communist countries to join NATO even before the European Union. Perhaps Gorbachev believed he had “started to build” the common European home (as he asserted to John Major in March 1991), but evidence is lacking of architectural blueprints, let alone any actual construction work. Part Four of the volume provides additional perspectives on these issues. Thematic chapters cover the role of nuclear weapons and military forces gen- erally in the Cold War (David Holloway), an interpretation of why the Cold War lasted as long as it did (Kramer), limitations of international relations theories in explaining the end of the Cold War (Richard Ned Lebow), a com- parison of 1968 and 1989 in Czechoslovakia (Oldˇrich Tuma),˚ the gradual de-legitimization of the Communist systems generally (Silvio Pons) and in Slovakia specifically (Sonaˇ Szomolanyi),´ and shifting Cold War historiography (James Hershberg). Holloway traces in Chapter 18 the Soviet buildup of East

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European forces to Stalin’s meeting with East European leaders in January 1951 in the wake of the Truman administration’s announced military buildup in Europe. Over time the East European armed forces came to play important secondary roles under Soviet military command in Soviet planning for offen- sive military operations in Europe. Gorbachev’s announcement in December 1988 of unilateral reductions of Soviet forces as part of a new defensive fundamentally altered that equation. In Chapter 19, Kramer argues the importance of gradual change: the East- West confrontation was too new, and time too compressed, for Stalin’s death and ensuing unrest in Eastern Europe to induce fundamental change in Soviet- East European relations in 1953. Lebow stresses in Chapter 20 the importance of contingency and . He cites Jacques Levesque´ on the “delayed triumph of revisionism” in the USSR (p. 483) and the contra- diction between the attempt to implement in the USSR a program of reform Communism that had been thoroughly discredited in Eastern Europe after So- viet troops intervened in Czechoslovakia in 1968 to end the Prague Spring and thus doomed a reshaping of the “socialist commonwealth.” The irrelevance in 1989 of Communist revisionism was nowhere better demonstrated (as Tuma˚ notes in Chapter 21) than in Alexander Dubcek’sˇ abortive candidacy for the presidency of the Czechoslovak Republic on a totally discredited platform of continuing where 1968 left off. As the contributions to this volume demonstrate, Soviet domination of Eastern Europe in the wake of World War II by a ruthless Soviet leader in power for twenty years is more easily explained than the demise of that hegemony in 1989 under a Soviet leader in power for only four years. Like Dubcekˇ in 1968, Gorbachev twenty years later thought he could reform the Communist system. That he was doomed to fail now seems self-evident. Vladislav Zubok has argued elsewhere that elimination of censorship, wide-ranging cultural liberalization, and political made glasnost and perestroika—a program of reform Communism—irrelevant and doomed Communist control and the multinational Soviet Union itself, as it surely would have done in Czechoslovakia in 1968 had the Soviet Union not intervened.19 Moscow under Gorbachev was nonetheless, as Pravda suggests, the “crucial facilitator” of both inexorable pressures from below and ineptitude from above, and the ensuing liberation of East-Central Europeans from Communist rule and Soviet hegemony was the “unintended consequence of policies meant to create a more

19. Vladislav Zubok, “Soviet Society in the 1960s,” in Gunter¨ Bischof, Stefan Karner, and Peter Ruggenthaler, eds., The Prague Spring and the Warsaw Pact Invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2011), p. 97.

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equal and robust socialist community” (p. 305). Kramer adds (p. 370) that the end of the Cold War in Europe is explained by the sweeping changes in Soviet policy and especially abjuring military intervention in Eastern Europe regardless of the fate of the Communist regimes; by the mass protests of peoples who had lost their fear; and by the weakness and indecision of the Communist elites whot had lost their cohesion and will to rule. As Tuma˚ reminds us, the Communist Party never reshaped the attitudes of the Czechoslovak population (nor did it succeed in blocking alternative information from outside), and over time its Leninist “transmission belts” stopped ensuring party control of low- level social organizations, which took on a life of their own. The caution of a new U.S. administration in 1989 helped reassure Gorbachev that his arms control and other understandings with Reagan held and that the United States had no interest in promoting or exploiting instability in the region. The analyses in this volume thus support ’s much- quoted conclusion (cited by Szomolanyi)´ that “from February to November 1989 the United States and the Soviet Union were largely passive midwives. They made history by what they did not do.” More than a quarter of a century later, Kramer’s judgment is worth reemphasizing: “Never before had political change of such colossal magnitude occurred so quickly with almost no bloodshed” (p. 413). Soviet hegemony over Eastern Europe may have been doomed by the end of the 1980s, but its peaceful demise was by no means assured. As several authors remind us, individual agency and contingency mattered. Counterfactual narratives leading to explosion are easily written. Had Gunter¨ Schabowski not misspoken in November 1989, the Berlin Wall might have stood longer, and popular pressure

within the GDR might have boiled over. Had Lech Wałesa lost control of the Solidarity movement to his radical rivals—some of whom still accuse him of —the Round Table might have failed, followed by mass protests challenging a Polish military incapable of once again imposing martial law. By mid-1989 Gorbachev had crossed the Rubicon. Violent suppression of demonstrations in in April 1989, ordered locally, was an unmistakable warning, leading Gorbachev to conclude that “this sort of tragedy will never be allowed to happen again” (p. 392). Reduction in East-West tension and the arms control agreements reached between Gorbachev and Reagan reduced the level of Soviet concern about East European reforms. In a major speech at Strasburg in July 1989, Gorbachev publicly rejected a doctrine of limited sovereignty for Soviet allies, thus repudiating the Brezhnev Doctrine. He accepted without each of the dramatic cascading steps in the liberation of Eastern Europe, from the reburial of in June 1989 to the formation of the Solidarity government in August to the ouster and killing

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of Romanian leader Nicolae Ceaus¸escu in December. Gorbachev ordered the withdrawal to the USSR and large-scale demobilization of more than 500,000 Soviet military forces stationed in Eastern Europe, the dismantling of the forward Soviet military command-and-control system for war in Europe based in , and soon after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact. By 2004 all former non-Soviet Warsaw Pact countries and the three Baltic republics had joined NATO. The history of Soviet-East European relations (to paraphrase A. J. P. Taylor) had run its course. The volume under review that traces these developments is a welcome compilation of archival–based research by expert scholars on Eastern Europe during the Cold War. No multi-authored work derived from a conference has the coherence of a monograph, and this volume is no exception. It is also intentionally unidimensional, in that its purpose is to convey the work of “scholars ... who have been at the forefront of efforts to reassess the Cold War in Europe, drawing on recently declassified archival materials” and other sources (p. xi). Most of the footnoted references are to declassified or otherwise available documents—ironically, many more are available from the former So- viet bloc than from Western governments. Fuller accounts—including those available in other publications by some contributors to this volume—involve use of the full range of information sources: public statements, journalistic accounts, memoir literature, oral histories, and insightful secondary works. They also involve a critical approach to archival records, understanding that for all their value the most important discussions may remain unrecorded, that memoranda may paper over continuing institutional or bureaucratic differ- ences, that note-takers may record what they think they hear or want to hear, that key records disappear.20 Examples are legion—and could be the subject of another conference and volume. The volume under review also provides rich material for a different reassessment—a consideration of how much newly available archival, memoir, and other sources change earlier scholarly analyses of Soviet-East European relations and developments in Eastern Europe during the Cold War. Exam- ples include Hugh Seaton-Watson’s The East European Revolution,’s The Soviet Bloc: Unity and Conflict; H. Gordon Skilling’s Czechoslo- vakia’s Interrupted Revolution, and many others. How good in retrospect was

20. For example, the Soviet account of Henry Kissinger’s views on Europe’s future expressed to Gorbachev in January 1989, quoted by Savranskaya (p. 340), should be compared with an account by Kissinger. The Soviet account of James Baker’s conversation with Gorbachev on 9 February 1990 (quoted by Savranskaya, p. 348) should be compared with the full State Department account, when available. An example of different Soviet and U.S. accounts of the same conversation is the discussion between Secretary of State Dean Rusk and Soviet Ambassador Anatolii Dobrynin on 22 July 1968, which I cited in my commentary in the Journal of Cold War Studies, Vol. 14, No. 4 (Fall 2012), p. 218.

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“”—not as prediction, but as analysis of past and contempora- neous developments? That too could be the subject of another conference and volume—or several.

Reply to the Commentaries

We are grateful to the eight commentators for their thoughtful observations and positive assessments of the book. Each of us will reply briefly to a few specific points they raise.

Reply by Mark Kramer Let me clarify two points raised by a few of the commentators: how the term “East-Central Europe” is defined in the book, and why there is no chapter specifically about Poland. In my own essays in the book I distinguish between the terms “Eastern Europe” and “East-Central Europe.” The former term, as I note in the book, is partly geographic and partly political, encompassing all the European countries that were under Communist rule from the 1940s through the end of the 1980s other than the Soviet Union (which straddled Europe and Asia). All these countries, except for Yugoslavia and Albania, were formally allied with the Soviet Union until the start of the 1990s. The term “East-Central Europe” is predominantly geographic and en- compasses some countries (Austria, Finland, ) that are not included in “Eastern Europe.” Neither term was perfect for the book, but we decided to go with “East-Central Europe” because we wanted to include a chapter about Austria, which was under four-power occupation from 1945 to 1955 and makes an instructive comparison with Germany, a country that is pivotal to the book. With regard to Poland, we did in fact originally intend to include a chapter specifically about it, parallel to the chapters about Czechoslovakia and Hungary. The organizers of the November 2009 conference in Prague invited two first-rate scholars from Poland to take part and write papers. One of them had to drop out at the last minute for health reasons. The other came and took part in the conference, but he did not turn in a complete paper afterward. If we had known from the outset that we would end up without a chapter about Poland, I would have written one myself (I have published a great deal about Poland in the past), but because we found out so late, we decided it would be best not to hold up publication further. I deliberately included extensive

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discussion of Poland in two of my chapters in the book, and several of the other authors also cover Poland. Admittedly, this is not a substitute for a complete chapter about the country, but I do think someone who reads the full book will understand how crucial Poland was to the onset, duration, and eventual end of the Cold War. Even though the book did not ultimately have a chapter specifically about Poland, I must admit that my greater concern was the lack of any chapters specifically about Balkan countries. My chapter about Soviet-Yugoslav relations in the 1940s and early 1950s is the only essay in the book that looks at the Balkans in any depth. I am surprised that only one of the commentators mentions this gap, and then only in passing. Fortunately, I am currently working on a book (with Alexandre Kostov and Nadia Boyadjieva) about the Balkans and the Cold War. This book will consist of chapters about all the Balkan countries as well as the role of external powers, including the Soviet Union and the other non-Balkan Warsaw Pact countries, the United States and its allies, and the People’s Republic of China. By including two chapters about China’s relations with Balkan countries in the forthcoming book, I hope to make up for the lack of a chapter in the Kramer-Smetana book about China’s ties with East-Central European countries. After doing research in the Chinese archives over the past several years, particularly the Shanghai Municipal Archive and the records released by the Chinese Foreign Ministry, I realize that this topic can now be explored not only on the basis of the rich archival records available in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union but also on the basis of Chinese materials. In that respect among others, the forthcoming book I am involved in writing about the Balkans and the Cold War can be seen as a companion to the Kramer-Smetana book.

Reply by V´ıt Smetana On behalf of the organizers of the conference on which our book is based, I would like to emphasize that we did not intend to cover the entire span of the Cold War as related to East-Central Europe. The major focus was clearly on the end of the Cold War (the conference was organized to mark its 20th anniversary), supplemented by analysis of the roots of the bipolar struggle and pinpointing some of its long-term trends. Geographically, we wished to focus primarily on the countries next to the Iron Curtain—hence the title of both the conference and the book. I am particularly grateful to the reviewers who included stimulating com- ments on my chapter. I agree with Michael Kraus that I could write more

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about the pressure that the Czechoslovak Communists exerted on Edvard Beneˇs in the final stages of the war. However, I did point out the evidence of “conviction” that was behind the pro-Soviet line. At the same time, I am a bit surprised by Kraus’s questioning of Beneˇs’s “legitimacy to make wartime deci- sions about postwar commitments.” Beneˇs and the government-in-exile were recognized by all the great powers as de jure representatives of Czechoslovakia by 1942, and Beneˇs’s reputation in the occupied country was enormous and the decisions he made, whether we like them or not, were later approved by the National Assembly that emerged from Czechoslovakia’s comparatively free elections in 1946. Douglas Selvage disagrees with my implication “that the Czechoslovak government could have offered successful resistance to Sovietization by fol- lowing the example of Finland.” I really did not make the argument so bluntly. Nonetheless, I am comparing Finland’s “prudent policy” motivated by tacti- cal considerations and Czechoslovakia’s adherence to Moscow, driven “by the conviction of the country’s politicians that this was best for its security, as the West was in their view again supporting the forces of German revenge, whether consciously or unconsciously” (pp. 70–71). Admittedly, I remain unconvinced by Selvage’s stressing of Finland’s “more advantageous military, economic, and geopolitical situation vis-a-vis` the Soviet Union.” For one thing, Czechoslovakia’s economy remained predominantly oriented toward the West. From the military point of view, Finland was a defeated country after the war, one governed by the Allied Control Commission headed by the imperious , whereas Soviet forces had withdrawn from the territory of Czechoslovakia by December 1945. Although it is true that Czechoslovakia’s geopolitical situation was very important from the Soviet perspective, Fin- land, for its part, had a long common frontier with the Soviet Union and above all—unlike Czechoslovakia—the common history of Russian occupa- tion lasting more than 100 years. Was it not Iosif Stalin’s major geopolitical goal to renew the former frontiers of Tsarist Russia? This factor would have outweighed the more favorable geopolitical position of Finland had there not been the USSR’s sobering experience with Finland’s staunch resistance in the of 1939–1940. Because Stalin expected serious difficulties if he backed an armed attempt by the Finnish Communists to seize power in their country, and because of the highly negative international reactions to the Communist takeover in Prague in February 1948, the Soviet Union settled for a mere alliance treaty with Finland in 1948. By contrast, whenever Stalin pressured Beneˇs and other Czechoslovak politicians, he had little problem getting them to subordinate Czechoslovakia to Soviet power.

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