The end of the Second World War left Great Britain as no longer being a great power while it was practically bankrupt at the end of the war, and then increasingly less powerful during the process of decolonization that followed. The Soviet Union suffered heavier losses than any other country in the war, as they had been engaged in most of the fighting for the Allied cause. The industrial centres in the western regions had been destroyed and agriculture laid waste. However, the Soviet Union’s two greatest potential rivals, Germany and Japan, had been devastated and it became the greatest military land power in Europe. The Soviet Union had emerged as a world power second only to the United States in the course of defeating National Socialist Germany. The Soviet Union became to be considered a serious menace to western European security as it consolidated its political control over the territories it occupied in eastern Europe, as well as in the Soviet occupation zones in Germany and Austria that were administered by the four occupation powers in a separate Allied Control Council represented by four separate occupation powers, with the Soviet zones constituting forty percent of postwar Germany and Austria, and the remaining territories divided evenly between Great Britain, the U.S., and France. The eastern European countries and the Soviet occupation zone would create a defensive buffer of Soviet allies against the west, which combined its own alliance of states in reaction to suspicions about postwar Soviet foreign policy.
The Allies in World War II had held together primarily by the common enmity against the fascist powers, and the ideological differences between the western allies and the Soviet Union became increasingly evident following their earlier wartime cooperation. Periodic conferences in Tehran in November 1943, Yalta in February 1945, and Potsdam in July-August 1945 between the three heads of government settled some disputes during and soon after the Second World War in Europe. The last wartime meeting of the Allied leaders took place at Potsdam from 17 July to 2 August 1945, where President Harry S. Truman, Soviet premier Josef Stalin, and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and then succeeded by Clement Atlee, to discuss urgent European problems resulting from the Allied victory where various tentative rather than conclusive agreements were reached. Postwar disputes led to friction that gradually escalated into a non-conventional war of conflicting ideologies of establishing capitalist or communist national economies and forms of government in the postwar European order. The world became divided between the United States and the Soviet Union as superpowers leading conflicting blocs of nations competing for influence throughout the world, with European states constituting a front line between east and west, as well as supporting opposing sides in several proxy wars worldwide, in what became known as the Cold War.
The common task that had kept the allies between east and west intact over the past years had been accomplished with the end of the Second World War in Europe, and another top-level conference was needed to put some order into the chaos that Hitler had left behind. One of the primary purposes of the Potsdam Conference was to determine agreements on the postwar treatment of Germany, including discussions on, denazification, demilitarisation, disarmament, decentralisation and democratisation. The administration of relatively ambiguous protocols reached at this conference were left to the four power administration of Germany under the auspices of a four power Allied Control Council and four separate occupation zone administrations as well as four occupation sectors Berlin to provide joint governance until German political administrations could be restored, with administrative responsibility assumed by the Soviet Union occupying forty percent of the remaining German territory in the east, and twenty percent each for the U.K., the U.S., and France, with the same terms applying to the joint administration of Berlin. Interpretation and execution of these protocols took place according to the interpretations of the separate occupation powers.
The shifting of Germany’s eastern boundaries was set at the Oder and Western Neisse Rivers, while East Prussia was divided between the Soviet Union in the north and Poland in the south, which removed approximately twenty-five percent of Germany 1937 territories. German populations in the territories from the former German territories in the east, as well as those remaining in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary would be expelled and forcibly resettled within the new postwar German boundaries. Provisional agreements were made for extracting reparations in kind, while maintaining occupied Germany as a single economic unit as a provisional administrative arrangement that was to be established in actual practice during the postwar military occupation. The London Conference in August 1945 established an extraordinary International Military Tribunal that was granted the jurisdiction to adjudicate top ranking National Socialists for unprecedented war crimes, crimes against humanity, crimes against peace, planning and initiating wars of aggression, genocide, extermination and deportation, violations of the laws of war, and conspiracy to commit any of the first three offences. Proceedings began in Berlin on 18 October, with judges and prosecutors from Britain, the U.S., the Soviet Union and France who brought charges against the first twenty-four defendants and six criminal organisations, including Hitler’s cabinet, the NSDAP leadership, the SS and SD, the SA and the Gestapo, and the general staff and high command of the German military. Subsequent proceedings were held in Nuremberg.
Regardless of the earlier cordiality between the western allies and the Soviet Union, postwar circumstances had given way to a formal coldness bordering on hostility. This was mainly due to certain Russian actions that indicated that the Soviet Union intended to follow a policy of its own in eastern Europe, where relatively few native and émigré communists were to be introduced during the advances of the Red Army, in countries where Sovietization would be neither spontaneous nor popular. After Roosevelt’s death, President Truman asked Roosevelt’s adviser, Harry Hopkins in late May to deal with some of these difficulties in direct talks with Stalin. Most of the discussion between Stalin and Hopkins dealt with Poland again showed the incompatibility between Russia’s desire for a pro-Russian Communist regime to establish Soviet control and America’s hope for a freely elected Polish government. There were two separate Polish governments, with the one in exile in London very little influence on the ground in Poland, while Stalin sponsored the establishment of a Polish Committee for National Liberation in 1944, commonly known at the Lublin Committee composed of Polish communists, as an alternative to the Polish government-in-exile in London, which began to be established in Soviet occupied areas of control in Poland prior to and following the Yalta Conference. Political control in the local restored Polish government was established by Polish communists who had come from Moscow for this purpose. Taking this action under Soviet control set the pattern that would be repeated throughout the countries and regions under Soviet control, where communist representatives occupied key ministerial positions, including the ministry of the interior that held jurisdiction over the police, while the military occupation authorities and the NKVD to eliminate any local political opposition, as well as suppress any rhetoric that was critical of the Soviet Union or communist political ideology, while local communists appointed with Soviet approval formed coalitions with competing political parties, and gradually suppressing political opposition until the communists established a monopoly of political power.
The communist Lublin Committee dominated the provisional government that was set up in January 1945, with all non-leftists blocked from this national administration, which was made responsible to the State National Council that functioned under the auspices of the Soviet occupation authorities. Leading members of any political opposition were removed by the NKVD. The national economy began being nationalized in 1946 as part of institutionalizing a national command economy under a national assembly. The communists’ consolidation of power continued in the January 1947 national elections that was characterised by murders and arrests of political party members opposing the Democratic Bloc led by the Soviet supported Democratic Workers’ Party, and falsification of the election results, which ensured the complete political domination of Poland by communist representatives in the elected national assembly who claimed eighty percent of the popular vote. The People’s Party that had constituted the major political opposition party was soon dissolved in the face of persecution, and the leftist representatives were merged into the Democratic Bloc into the United Workers’ Party, led by the Communist party that established its control over the country.
The advance of the Soviet armies during the Second World War likewise led to regaining Soviet control of the Baltic states, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, which would lose their postwar sovereignty, following having been subjected to this control as a result of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and their occupation by Soviet troops by 17 June 1940. Existing parliaments were forcibly dismissed and new elections with predetermined results were held to establish the control of “People’s Governments” led by Communist representatives who composed minorities in each of these states, while any opposition was suppressed. The “People’s Parliaments” ratified the declarations of these states as new Soviet Socialist Republics on 21 July 1940, and were annexed into the Soviet Union between 2 and 6 August 1940. Their re-incorporation into the Soviet Union following the advance of the Soviet armies was met with little international opposition, partly due to these states not having governments-in-exile to represent their national interests. They did not come under discussion during postwar settlement planning, and Soviet control was thus brutally re-imposed when they were re-occupied with the elimination of any sources of opposition in the local populations, including remaining partisan resistance.
Whereas the Soviet Union imposed its political influence from above in the countries that came under their military occupation, the U.S. became committed to the economic reconstruction of Europe. The American Secretary of State General Marshall launched a plan for economic assistance to European countries in June 1947 that matched their own funds, in addition to assisting the economic recovery of Germany and Austria. Without the revival of German production there could be no resurrection of Europe’s economy, and this overall European recovery and contributing large amounts of money would also assuage French fears against being threatened by renewed German economic power. This offer of American economic aid would bring European nations together to plan their economic recovery jointly, and also achieve a non-military and unaggressive form of containment of the USSR, and address the threat of communist influences among European populations through sending a total of nearly 13 billion US dollars in financial aid for postwar reconstruction by encouraging economic integration and restoring free markets. This was essentially to serve the underlying political purpose of the so-called Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan, which was elucidated by George F. Kennan in Foreign Affairs in 1947, who argued that communism preached a perpetual struggle against the non-communist world, which was to be countered with the force of determined resistance through the reconstruction of western Europe, and committing the U.S. to its continued defence against expanding Soviet influence. Apart from its humanitarian element, this was a comprehensive development plan that was intended to ensure Europe’s postwar economic stability and strategic security, which was motivated by the interests to preclude the errors of imposing a Carthaginian peace after the First World War that had embittered German society by causing economic hardship. Although the use of America’s economic strength was probably not unexpected in Moscow, it appears that the Russians believed at first that Marshall’s offer was one designed essentially to locate and guarantee markets for American products through properly functioning international trade. The Russians ultimately concluded, however, that something else was involved, namely, an ambitious strategy designed to bring as many states as possible into a binding relationship with Washington, and to lure these countries away from the Russian orbit. The USSR therefore declined to take part in this program, and it would not allow its satellites to accept this international aid assistance.
Similar sovietisation processes of other eastern European states took place in similar circumstances. The Baltic states, Rumania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Albania would likewise become Soviet satellite states as Communist parties were empowered by dominating postwar political life in these countries under the auspices of Soviet occupation authorities, and took power by means of fraudulent elections and taking control of key national governmental ministries, such as the ministries of the interior that controlled the police, disseminating propaganda, and coercing opposition political parties into dissolution or merger with the leading Communist party authorities. The Russians thus manipulated the internal affairs of the eastern European countries under their occupation by consolidating its control in these countries.
It was soon determined that the Soviet Union would consolidate its power in the occupied countries of eastern Europe in preparation for further expansion through waging war. Churchill envisaged this possibility as early as April 1945 due to suspicions about Stalin’s postwar plans for establishing Soviet control over eastern Europe, and ordered the Joints Chiefs of Staff Committee to begin preparing planning for a potential war against the Soviet Union. The purpose of this “Operation Unthinkable,” delivered to the chiefs of staff committee on 24 May, was planning to launch a pre-emptive surprise attack on Soviet forces on 1 July 1945 to curb Soviet influence. A two-pronged assault was planned for an advance through Germany and Poland toward Danzig and Breslau through applying the joint forces of Britain and the U.S., as well as German and Polish troops, while envisaging that forty-seven divisions could be mustered for a surprise eastward offensive toward Dresden, confronting one hundred and forty Soviet and allied divisions, with western allied naval superiority and superior air power. Marshal Zhukov received advanced knowledge about this plan through espionage resources in the U.K., and was prepared to meet this threat by shifting forces from Poland into eastern Germany to confront shifting western allied forces in defensive positions that were beginning to be deployed for this purpose. However, this Third World War scenario would have to take an orderly Soviet retreat toward defensible positions in the face of an advance, as well as its industrial capacity east of the Urals into account, as well as Soviet counteroffensives, particularly toward the Middle East, that made this plan impracticable.
The Potsdam Conference opened on 16 July 1945 to formulate the postwar settlements took place in view of earlier developments that would influence subsequent events that demonstrated a rift between the wartime allies. The fact that the first successful explosion of an atomic bomb in the proving grounds at Los Alamos, New Mexico, coincided with the beginning of the conference considerably reinforced the position of the United States delegation, because it made Russian participation in the Pacific war no longer essential. With Truman in place of Roosevelt, and Clement Attlee taking over from Churchill after the latter’s defeat in Britain’s parliamentary elections on July 23, Stalin remained as the only member of the original Big Three. The major item on the agenda concerned the future of Germany, and the agreements reached had a profound influence upon postwar developments in that country. The Potsdam Declaration on Germany stated that the victors intended to provide the Germans with “the opportunity to prepare for the eventual reconstruction of their life on a democratic and peaceful basis.”
The four zones of occupation in Germany and Austria, and the establishment of an Allied Control Council, already approved at the Yalta Conference, were once again recognised, and the aims of Allied occupation policy were specified as: (1) disarmament and demilitarization; (2) denazification and the trial of war criminals; (3) democratization of Germany’s political, educational, and judicial systems; (4) decentralisation of her political structure and emphasis on local self-government; and (5) deindustrialisation of war and heavy industries and placement of primary emphasis on agriculture and peaceful domestic industries. Most of these aims had already been agreed on in principle at Yalta and were here merely restated. There were two other subjects that had already been cause for dispute at Yalta and that continued to cause further tension at Potsdam. These were Germany’s eastern frontier and the payment of reparations as compensation for war damages. Without notifying her allies, Russia had, three months earlier, entrusted Poland with the administration of German territory east of the Oder and Neisse rivers, and had herself taken over the northern part of East Prussia. Faced with this fait accompli, the Western powers had no choice in recognizing “in principle . . . the ultimate transfer to the Soviet Union of the city of Königsberg and the area adjacent to it.” The West persuaded the Russians to agree, however, that the final delimitation of the German-Polish frontier should wait until a definite peace settlement was reached. However, this did not keep Poland from subsequently expelling most of the Germans from the region east of the Oder-Neisse line and from claiming that the term “delimitation” merely applied to details of the frontier. Poland thus acquired almost one-fifth of’ Germany’s pre-1938 territory.
A final decision on the total amount of German reparations was not reached at the Potsdam Conference, although Russia continued to insist on its share of ten billion dollars. This amount had been set only tentatively at Yalta. It was to be collected through removal of industrial equipment from the Russian zones of occupation and from German external assets. In addition, the Russians were to get 25 per cent of the industrial equipment in the western occupation zones that was not needed for Germany’s own postwar economy. Only 10 per cent of this 25 per cent from western zone equipment was to be for reparations, however. The other 15 per cent was to be paid for by the Soviet Union in food and raw materials. The powers also agreed that Germany should retain “enough resources to enable the German people to subsist without external assistance,” that “the amount and character of the industrial equipment unnecessary for the German peace economy and therefore available for reparations shall be made by the Control Council under policies fixed by the Allied Commission on Reparations,” and that during the period of occupation, Germany should be treated “as a single economic unit.” Here was sufficient material for subsequent friction among the victorious powers, and Germany soon became the major issue in the growing tension between East and West. In addition to these provisions for Germany agreed on at Potsdam, the conference achieved very little. Russia denied Western charges that she was violating the Yalta agreements on Eastern Europe and unsuccessfully tried to gain the trusteeship over one of Italy’s former colonies (Libya) and a voice in the control of the Turkish Straits. The only additional agreement was on the establishment of a Big Four Council of Foreign Ministers to draft the peace treaties for Germany’s satellites and Finland.
Four days after the Potsdam Conference adjourned, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. The Soviet Union declared war on Japan two days later and invaded Manchuria. After a second bomb had been dropped on 10 August 1945, Japan offered to surrender, and on August 14 (V-J Day), the war in the east Asia was over. The formal terms of surrender were signed on board the U.S.S. “Missouri” in Tokyo Bay on 2 September. Since the United States had carried the major burden of the war against Japan, she felt justified in claiming sole control over the defeated country, an arrangement that greatly facilitated the post-war administration of Japan. There were set up an Allied Council with headquarters at Tokyo, consisting of the Big Three powers and China, and a Far Eastern Commission located at Washington, composed of eleven powers primarily concerned with eastern Asian affairs. The functions of these bodies were purely advisory. Supreme authority over Japanese affairs was vested in a Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers, a post filled for almost six years by General Douglas MacArthur.
The fact that Soviet Union had entered the war against Japan, although it did so at the last moment and did not materially affect its outcome, now entitled it to the rights and territories she had been promised at Yalta. In accordance with another Yalta provision, Russia, on 14 August 1945, concluded a treaty of friendship and alliance with the Nationalist Government of China, in which the latter agreed to the Yalta concessions as far as they affected China’s interests. To complete the eastern Asian settlement, Russia and the United States jointly occupied the Korean peninsula, pending the formation of a democratic Korean government. Another outcome of the end of the war against Japan following the use of atomic bombs was spurring Stalin to order the development of the Soviet Union’s own development of atomic bomb, which accelerated rapidly thereafter, culminating in the Russians secretly conducting their own atomic explosion test in August 1949.
The process of the United States and the Soviet Union moving from being allies to enemies started at this time. The United States wanted self-determination for the nations of Europe, while the Soviet Union wanted a buffer zone between the Soviet Union and Western Europe, and thereby establish its hegemony in eastern Europe. With the Red Army occupying most of eastern and central Europe and bent on subjecting the entire area to its will, the Soviet Union gradually replaced Nazi Germany in the eyes of the western powers as the major menace to world peace and security. The Soviets sealed off their sphere of influence, clamped down on the countries they had occupied by establishing Stalinist dictatorships in what become in their satellite states, maintained a vast military establishment and were intransigent and abusive towards their erstwhile Allies. As a result, tensions grew between the two new world superpowers of the US and the USSR, which became known as the Cold War. These tensions initially took place while there were postwar problems of reconstruction and achieving satisfactory settlements with the defeated states.
A positive outcome of the Second World War was a worldwide attempt at international cooperation, just as the League of Nations had intended to do. As in 1918, war also provoked attempts to establish worldwide political and economic stability in the aftermath of total war, which resulted in the establishment of the United Nations in an attempt to maintain lasting peace in the future through providing an international forum for discussion relating to various international relations matters. Its charter was composed in a general conference from April to June 1945 in San Francisco, and headquarters were established in New York with a similar organisation to the League of Nations. There was a general assembly of the member nations meeting annually as a consultative body, which began functioning on 24 October 1945. A security council was to function continuously with eleven members, with each of the five permanent members, the US, the USSR, France, Britain and China, having the right to veto any decision, while six others were to be elected by the general assembly. These two bodies were supplemented by specialist organisations.
In spite of this attempt at international cooperation, lines of division between the western democracies and the USSR became increasingly apparent. These were due to changed circumstances in Europe that made it vulnerable to ideological divisions, as well as the ideological and security ambitions of the USSR that arose from the war, and the assumption of a more interventionist role by the US in European affairs. Both the Soviet Union and the United States wanted security after 1945, but each defined it in a different way. The Soviet Union was still a regional power after 1945 and security for it meant “friendly” states on its border. The United States was a global economic power, and security for it meant a world open to the free exchange of trade and people. The immediate postwar period shed light on the causes for division between the wartime allies as a result of their conflicting war aims. Following the reduction of Germany, the British war aim, was to establish a reasonable European and international balance of order. Stalin’s main aim was establishing Soviet control over most of Eastern Europe. While the survival of the United States was never seriously threatened during the Second World War, American interests composed vast and unrealistic drafts pertaining to the future function of the United Nations, and the confusion of the historical landscape during this time later revealed how the Soviet Union benefited from postwar conditions, while Europe was left to recover in the face of shifting conditions in which clear reconstruction goals were lacking.
Two factors made Europe especially vulnerable to ideological extremism. One was economic dislocation. Europe was economically shattered by the war and suffered from a large adverse balance of trade while seeking to re-equip for production. There was also a pronounced imbalance of power after 1945. France was considerably weakened by the occupation and war, and the costs of war had weakened Britain so that it no longer the equal of US and the USSR, and Germany had temporarily ceased to exist. France and Italy also had considerable electoral support for the communists, and therefore appeared to be vulnerable democracies. In addition, the USSR had a twofold ambition. The first priority was strengthening national security through establishing a barrier of satellite states and annexing new territories on its western frontiers, and preventing German economic recovery at the same time. Secondly, staging support for international revolution. The USSR could pursue both objectives simultaneously through the military occupation of eastern Europe and the ability to manipulate internal communist organisations.
During the same time, Soviet intelligence services continued deciphering western plans for the future in an ongoing new form of warfare not involving overt military force. News of a spy case broke in February 1946 with the announcement from Ottawa of the arrest of twenty-two individuals led by Julius and Ethel Rosenberg charged with stealing secret information on the atomic weaponry research for the Russians. This spy ring case alarmed some Americans since it seemed to indicate a connection between Russian espionage activities and the world communist movement, whereas the U.S. that had operated its Office of Strategic Services handling covert operations during the Second World War lacked an intelligence gathering service of its own between 1945 and 1947, until the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officially began operating on 18 September 1947 as a specialised organisation to gather intelligence and conduct clandestine operations with plausible deniability.
The CIA enlisted Major-General Reinhardt Gehlen, who had served as the military intelligence chief for the German army in eastern Europe, to build an espionage network based in western Germany, drawing on fervently anti-communist former German personnel who had served for the National Socialist regime as a pragmatic matter of expediency as the east-west chasm became increasingly apparent, and thus composed the CIA’s forefront department for intelligence affairs relating to the Soviet Union and eastern Europe in what became known as the “Gehlen Organisation,” which would subsequently serve the same purpose for NATO, and then compose the West German intelligence service. Gehlen had also been involved in establishing stay behind partisan formations during the retreat from the eastern front during the Second World War to harass the rear areas of the advancing Soviet forces, which continued operating in eastern Europe until 1952, primarily in Poland, Ukraine and the Baltic states. The Gehlen Organisation supplied weapons to these units who communicated with German liaison officers, and thus continuing covert warfare during the postwar years.
While international relations between the Soviet Union and democratic western states became increasingly tense during the postwar period, the first election in Soviet Russia held in eight years took place in February 1946. The campaign speeches by the CPSU’s candidates were permeated by expressed fears of the outside world. Candidate Molotov called on the Russian people to be watchful for “intrigues against international security,” while Stalin declared that World War II was “the inevitable result of development of world economic and political forces on a basis of monopolistic capitalism.” He made clear his view that the recent victory of Russian arms confirmed the need for party control, planned industrialization, and collectivization. He went on to tell his people that Soviet Russia would develop its own atomic capability and surpass the West, adding that there could be no long-term accommodation between the communist and capitalist world. He apparently did not realize how this apparent return to prewar orthodoxy could be misinterpreted by nervous Western leaders as a statement of the inevitability of war between the Russian state and the capitalist countries, and not just among the capitalists themselves. Stalin’s “re-election” speech and that of former British Prime Minister Churchill the following month set the tenor for the subsequent policy reappraisals. While Stalin spoke of the ultimate triumph of communism over capitalism, Churchill warned of an impending extinction of freedom in areas dominated by Soviet Russia in a speech in Fulton, Missouri on 5 March 1946. While Churchill conceded that the Russians did not desire war, he charged that they wanted the postwar benefits thereof, and went on to call for a “fraternal association of the English-speaking peoples” operating under the principles of the U.N., but not inside that organization, and with the support of atomic weaponry, to reorder the world while an “iron curtain” had descended in Europe between east and west.
Rumania had been governed by a wartime dictatorship, which the monarchy removed from power in August 1944 and turned against the Axis powers, just prior to its occupation by the advancing Soviet armies. The Soviet occupation authorities pressured King Michael in March 1945 to form a new leftist government, the Ploughman Front with Communists occupying key ministerial posts, regardless of violating the Yalta Conference agreements on imposing national governments through external influences, rather than establishing postwar governments on the basis of universal suffrage. Soviet occupation authorities forced King Michael I of Rumania on 6 March 1945 to relinquish any active role in the political affairs of the state, while remaining in place as the nominal head of state. Anti-communist demonstrations in November 1945 were forcibly suppressed. The first free elections took place on 19 November 1946, in which the communists falsified the genuine results in the presence of the Red Army in the country and the use of political intimidation, with allegations of ballot falsifications and persecution of opposition supporters. Rumanian communists claimed ninety percent of the popular vote, which inevitably led to Rumania becoming a Soviet puppet state where the newly-elected regime gradually taking over the police, and placing the main opposition on a show trial in October 1947. Non-communist political representatives were forced into exile or arrested thereafter, leaving the hollowed out coalition government in the hands of communists and their auxiliaries, and the king was forced to abdicate. Any remaining leftist elements were fused into a merger with the Rumanian Communist Workers’ Party, and a Rumanian People’s Republic was proclaimed on 30 December 1947, which was followed by the promulgation of a new constitution in 1948 based on the model of the 1936 constitution of the USSR.
Bulgaria had likewise been under the control of a military dictatorship during the Second World War, which was opposed by the anti-fascist Fatherland Front led by Communist elements through waging guerilla warfare, which successfully overthrew the government by 2 September 1944, and then deployed People’s Militias that persecuted members of the former regime, as well as non-Communists. Prince Regent Kyril, the member of the Regency Council, twenty-two former ministers, and many members of the former regime were all executed by June 1945. Parliamentary elections were held in November, in which the Communist-led Fatherland Front won an eighty-eight percent majority, while dismissing claims of electoral fraud. A 98.6 percent of the vote in a plebiscite held on 6 September 1946 ratified the abolition of the Bulgarian monarchy, in favour of establishing a republic, for which parliamentary elections were held in November to adopt a new constitution. The Communists further consolidated their control, regardless of widely recognised electoral fraud, which was followed by repression and elimination of non-Communists while the Soviets occupied the country. All remaining opposition was ended on 23 September 1947 with the execution of Nikola Petkov, regardless of protests in western countries, leading the opposition by striving to maintain a parliamentary democracy against the Communist party leader Georgi Dimitrov who had returned from exile in the Soviet Union after the end of the war, and declared Bulgaria to be a People’s Republic. A new constitution based on the 1936 constitution of the USSR was promulgated following the suppression of any opposition.
Czechoslovakia was initially re-established as a parliamentary democracy following its postwar liberation by Soviet armies in 1945 under the auspices of the government-in-exile, led by Edvard Beneš that returned from London at the head of a six party leftist party coalition while the country was under Soviet occupation. Beneš was prepared to make necessary concessions to the local Communists to preclude Soviet intervention in domestic political life to preserve national independence, and therefore became the de facto president of the new postwar republic, while key government posts were held by Communist party member representatives, including the ministry of the interior. The Communists acquired thirty-six percent of the votes in the 1946 popular election, which was the highest amount in European history, in reaction to conservative elements. Sovietisation of Czechoslovakia was accelerated in 1947 following the Soviet Union precluding its national government from accepting Marshall Plan reconstruction aid in 1947, with propaganda pressure applied against non-Communists. The foreign minister Jan Masaryk as the only non-Communist in this government was murdered a few weeks later in May 1947, and any remaining opposition members resigned from the government, which was followed by waves of persecutions, arrests and exiles of anyone opposing this new government. The Interior Minister Vaclav Nosek further consolidated the division between Communists and their opponents in early 1948 by removing the remaining non-Communist police officers, to which twelve non-Communist government ministers offered to submit their resignations in protest, while mass protests that included the police and armed militias took place in Prague in support of the Soviet supported communists, and applied pressure onto all non-communist members of the government to resign, and were replaced by communists. This led to the creation of a Communist-led coalition government on 25 February 1948. A new constitution was promulgated to establish a People’s Democracy, and the subsequent elections in May only listed the National Front on the ballot. Beneš resigned soon thereafter, and his Communist deputy Klement Gottwald took over the new government.
Hungary likewise came under Soviet control in April 1945, without a pro-western government-in-exile, having been an Axis ally, which ushered in the sovietisation process relatively rapidly upon the return of the country’s Communist leaders Matyas Rakosi from exile in the Soviet Union during the war years, whereas another Communist leader, Lazslo Rajk, returned to prominence after having led Communist resistance from within Hungary. The Communists suffered a devastating defeat in the November 1945, in which they only acquired seventeen percent of the vote. Nevertheless, the Soviet Marshal Kliment Voroshilov, the head of the Allied Control Commission that oversaw the occupation forces in Hungary, counteracted these results by forcing the creation of a governing coalition, with Rakosy as the Deputy Prime Minister, and Rajk becoming the Minister of the Interior, and used this office to direct the police to persecute non-Communists. As a result of the Communists only receiving twenty-four percent of the vote in 1947, the Social Democratic party that had received fifteen percent of the vote was forcibly merged with the Communist party to achieve a complete takeover of the government, which was followed by all non-communists being expelled from this newly-merged party. All opposition parties were declared illegal in 1949, and all of the remaining parties were forcibly merged into a People’s Front led by the communists. A new Soviet-style constitution was promulgated in August, which extinguished any semblance of parliamentary democracy.
Unlike other eastern European states, both Yugoslavia and Albania were largely liberated from Nazi occupation by local partisan forces, rather than direct and decisive intervention by Soviet armies. Owing to not having been established in power as a result of direct Soviet intervention, with the Red Army having had only dealt the final blow that eliminated the presence of German troops, Yugoslavia would remain an independent Communist state, the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, founded by Josip Broz Tito who had primarily led the partisan warfare during the Second World War. Tito established a provisional national government in the territories he controlled in 1944 as the German occupation was breaking down, with the sanction of Ivan Subavic’s government-in-exile in the Treaty of Vis on 16 June that formalized a merger between Tito’s partisans who constituted the largest partisan force in occupied Europe, when Soviet and Bulgarian forces invaded Yugoslavia on 8 October 1944. A provisional government was formed in November, led by Tito, and Subasic as the foreign minister. After Tito launched a major partisan offensive that reached Sarajevo, which brought the collapse of the Croatian puppet state in April 1945 and a retreat of Axis forces from Yugoslavia, parliamentary elections were organised to be held in November. The Communist-dominated National Front won these elections with an overwhelming majority, with ninety percent of vote and all of the parliamentary seats, although opposition forces were barred from taking part in this process, which included closing opposition newspapers and “enemies of the state” from voting, in addition to being subjected to harassment. A one-party state amalgamating separate states was established on 29 November 1945, and Yugoslavia remained exercising an independent foreign and domestic policies, rather than becoming a Soviet satellite state. This became officially sanctioned with the expulsion of Yugoslavia from the Cominfom in 1948.
Partisan forces in Albania expelled Axis forces by November 1944, which led to establishing a provisional Communist led government led by Enver Hoxha. This postwar administration led a campaign of persecution against anyone who opposed the regime, which consolidation its power following elections in December 1945, in which the Communists established complete control. Albania pursued an independent foreign policy with economic integration with Yugoslavia, until the latter’s expulsion from the Cominform. Further economic support was then provided by the Soviet Union, albeit without a Soviet military presence.
Austria was also administered the four occupation powers as in Germany who governed jointly in a separate Allied Control Council for Austria. A postwar Austrian national government was established in Vienna under President Karl Renner was recognised by the occupation powers on 20 October 1945, which acquired formal legitimacy in the first postwar elections on 25 November. The conservative Austrian People’s Party formed a majority with forty-nine percent of the vote, the Socialists acquired forty-four percent, whereas the Communists acquired five percent. The Soviets would maintain their control over their occupation zone where reparations in kind, especially extracted oil reserves and industrial capacity, while the national political administration was restored under a national coalition government. Economic stability was restored in the western occupation zones with Marshall Plan along with humanitarian assistance. Austria as a whole would remain under four power Allied occupation while the Soviet foreign policy held the Soviet occupation zone as a bargaining chip in dealings with the western powers, while economic life in the Soviet zone was in decline. Austria would eventually regain its full sovereignty on 15 May 1955 on the condition of future permanent military non-alignment with foreign powers, with a formal declaration of neutrality signed for this purpose on 26 October 1955.
During a time when the world would become progressive divided between competing spheres of interests, progress on preparing for a German settlement was at a virtual standstill. The position taken by the American representatives at the Potsdam Conference in the summer of 1945, and the one substantially agreed to by the Russians during the course of those deliberations, called for the reunification of Germany on terms which, while ensuring its freedom and independence, would provide maximum assurance that a united German state would never again stage aggression against any of its neighbours. Moreover, the conference protocol explicitly provided that, as long as the occupation lasted, Germany would be treated as a single economic unit. It would not be very long, however, before this view was abandoned by both sides, the four occupation zones of Germany in the process of becoming sealed off from one another, with initial increased economic cooperation between the British and the Americans, while centralisation was opposed by both the French and the Russians.
The chief opposition to treating Germany as an economic unit came initially from the French, not the Russians. At Yalta, the Big Three had agreed to give France an occupation zone and a seat on the Allied Control Council. This placed the French government in a position to veto implementation of whatever parts of the Potsdam protocol it did not like. The French during the summer and fall of 1945 proceeded to adopt in their zone of occupation obstructionist policies toward the efforts of the Big Three to reach a final solution of the German question. In particular, in order to enforce their demands for some sort of indemnity or territorial concession from Germany, the French proceeded to veto in the Allied Control Council almost every action that might have led to the treatment of Germany as a political or economic whole and thus lead to the reestablishment of a German state. These tactics, among other things, contributed to the subsequent deterioration of the four-power coalition, emboldening the Russians to alter their original policy of merely insisting on carrying out the Potsdam contract to one of seeking to extract every advantage they could within their own zone.
Europe was thus divided into two distinct spheres of influence, and Germany was being split into two states. There was thus a rationale for a new, tougher line to be taken against the Soviet Union by the US. In his famous “long telegram” from his post in Moscow in February 1946, George F. Kennan, Deputy Chief of Mission of the United States to the USSR, provided what appeared to be a compelling diagnosis of the intensifying conflict between the two countries, and proposed a policy of containment of the expansion of the Soviet Union’s political influence abroad, rather than adopting a conciliatory position, which was later published in Foreign Affairs in February 1947. Written ostensibly as an analysis of that country’s recent campaign rhetoric, the document sought to put Russian policies and attitudes in historical perspective. Russia was absolutely dedicated to the proposition that there could be no fundamental agreement with America, and that if Russian security was to be protected, Washington’s power and influence would have to be severely weakened. He warned that Russia was now continuing a centuries-old policy of expansion – one that sought to move Russia’s borders further to the west, pointing to a power vacuum that Russia was trying to fill, a situation that would be detrimental to the west because the world balance of power would surely shift away from the U.S. and western Europe.
He also argued against the assumption, carried over by most Americans from the war, that conciliatory gestures and agreements on specific conflict areas could assuage the Kremlin and preserve the peace: “Suspicion is an integral part of the Soviet system, and will not yield entirely to any form of rational persuasion or assurance.” Kennan advocated no specific policies in the long telegram, but stressed the need to educate the American people as to the dangers we now faced. This document received wide circulation at the highest levels of government, and provided seemingly compelling evidence for those in the administration who were advocating taking an aggressive stance with the Russians. Events in Iran in March 1946, seemed to confirm the worst-case scenario, emboldening the hard liners to demand action. After a joint American-British-Russian occupation of Iran during the war in order to forestall German activity in the region, the Big Three had agreed to withdraw six months after the end of the conflict. Most of the American and British forces had been pulled out by early 1946, but the Russians stalled while demanding oil concessions on a par with those obtained by the British. This was followed by a Russian-sponsored revolt of the Azerbaijanian population of northern Iran, with the apparent intention of establishing a Russian sphere of influence in that portion of the country. Although the Soviet Union announced it had entered an agreement with the Iranian government to leave by the end of May, after this issue had been brought before the U.N. and the U.S. protested against Soviet actions, tensions remained after the central Iranian government was restored.
Another crisis occurred in August 1946 when the Russians requested a revision of the Montreux Convention to allow for joint Turkish-Russian defense of the Dardanelles. American officials viewed this action as the culmination of a long effort by Moscow to establish naval bases in Turkey and thus be in a position to intimidate that country. The Turks were strongly urged to resist and units of the American fleet were dispatched to the eastern Mediterranean to provide support. The Russians dropped their demands in the face of these actions, and a major confrontation was averted. The importance of this action showed that containment had already effectively begun and that Washington was ready to risk war, if this was necessary to block further Russian expansion. Puppet regimes were established in the states where the Soviet army was in control, and democratic opposition was eliminated. The Soviets imposed Communist governments in Poland, Bulgaria and Romania without free elections being held. Free elections were held in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, but their democratic governments were later ousted to bring the communists into power through the so-called “salami technique,” which was to cut away non-communist political elements and gradually assume control of the various institutions of power. This effect of the Soviet Union seizing control was especially felt after Yugoslavia, which had mostly liberated itself through partisan forces under Marshal Tito, would be subjected to the Soviet Union’s control while causing the Sovietisation of eastern Europe, and consequently the division of Europe as a whole that became an accomplished fact by 1948, when an order of subjugated socialist satellite states under Soviet control were established.
The positions of the western allies and the Soviet Union also consolidated over the issue of postwar Germany. While the British and the Americans sought to reunify postwar Germany among the four occupation zones in the interest of economic recovery, they faced continual opposition for a permanent settlement from the Soviet Union. The result was the progressive breakdown of four power cooperation over the control of Germany, while the evolution of the American attitude toward the German question during the coming months reflected the changing orientation. The immediate issue was reparations, agreed on in principle at Yalta and Potsdam but never in specific amounts. The Soviet view prevailed that as much as possible should be removed from their occupation zone, with the result that the Americans and British, who were de facto underwriting most of the German economy, found themselves subsidizing reparations to Soviet Russia. Convinced that Germany was now the key to confronting the Russians, London and Washington took steps by mid-1946 to halt the drain of reparations from the western zones and prepare for the creation of a viable German economy, from which Alsace and Lorraine and the territories east of the Oder and Neisse rivers were severed, which weakened its economic potential while also having had an economy and communications. Washington, alarmed by the French obstructionist attitude toward Germany and Stalin’s stonewalling tactics, became convinced that the Russians were using the delay in implementing the Potsdam Agreement to solidify their position in eastern Germany. French opposition to German economic unity also threatened not only to make the division of that country permanent, but to place upon Washington the burden of supporting the food deficient Western zones. As a result, a series of diplomatic initiatives were launched in the spring of 1946 designed to find out Russian intentions in Germany.
The most important of these overtures was a proposal on April 29 by Secretary Byrnes to the Council of Foreign Ministers calling for a four-power treaty guaranteeing the disarmament of Germany for the next twenty-five years. Four days after Byrnes made his proposal, the American military commander in Germany, General Lucius Clay, announced the suspension of further reparations shipments from the American zone until the four occupying powers agreed to treat Germany as an economic unit. This, said Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson, would “put Soviet protestations of loyalty to Potsdam to [the] final test and fix blame for [the] breach of Potsdam on [the] Soviets in case they fail to meet this test.” Both the Russians and the French rejected it within two months.
It became quite apparent during the course of that year that President Truman and his key advisors were moving toward the view that if the Russians refused to cooperate on the German question, a united Germany could and should be created and incorporated into an anti-communist Western bloc of states. Secretary of State Byrnes’s Stuttgart speech in September marked the initial public indication of an American change of attitude–a posture that led America by early 1947 to an abandonment of the basic concept of reconciliation inherent in the Potsdam Agreement. Secretary Byrnes set the tone for much of the subsequent American approach to Soviet Russia and Europe when he said at Stuttgart that “[T]he time has come when the zonal boundaries should be regarded as defining only the areas to be occupied for security purposes by the armed forces of the occupying powers and not as self-contained economic or political units.” If Germany could not be treated as a single economic unit, he implied that the Western states should merge their own zones, further declaring that steps should be taken to form a provisional German government. On 2 December, the American and British governments signed an agreement to fuse the economies of their zones of occupation in Germany into a so-called bizone as a provisional administrative arrangement.
It was at this time that Truman directed his special counsel, Clark Clifford, to compile a comprehensive report on America’s relations with Russia. The resulting document, prepared after consultations with high-level military personnel and intelligence people, echoed Kennan’s analysis by stressing the influence of ideology on Moscow’s foreign policy. “The key to an understanding of current Soviet foreign policy,” the report stated, “is the realization that Soviet leaders adhere to the Marxian theory of ultimate destruction of capitalist states by communist states.” Concessions to the Russians would only have the effect “of raising Soviet hopes and increasing Soviet demands…Soviet leaders appear to be conducting their nation on a course of aggrandizement designed to lead to eventual world domination by the USSR.” Arguing that “they strive to postpone the inevitable conflict in order to strengthen and prepare the Soviet Union for its clash with the western democracies.” Clifford, in effect, anticipated most, if not all, of the vigorous anti-Russian steps that the Truman administration would take over the next three years: the Truman Doctrine to aid nations threatened by communism, the Marshall Plan to restore economic stability in Europe that was embodied in the Economic Cooperation Act of 1948, the revival of Germany as a western partner, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, and the pursuit of national security based on America’s superiority in nuclear weapons – all as part of a new approach called containment when the division of Europe under the leadership of the Soviet Union and the United States became an accomplished fact.
Relations between Soviet Russia and the West had been deteriorating by the beginning of 1947, and the relationship between them was such that they could no longer regard one another as allies as a result of the new substantial and increasing tension that was barely mitigated by continuing negotiation. Each side had begun to regard the other in two different roles: as partners in the continuing negotiations over the future of Germany and Austria, and as intensifying adversaries in most every other subject area. It had taken almost two years after the end of the war to resolve the issues surrounding the peace treaties with Germany’s allies Italy, Hungary, Rumania, and Bulgaria. Those negotiations had been frequently acrimonious and ended with each side having clear reason to suspect the motives of the other. From Moscow’s perspective, Western unwillingness to accept predominant Russian hegemony in the countries of Eastern Europe provoked suspicion about why the Western powers seem so intent on depriving Soviet Russia of the security benefits it had earned by bearing the most of share of the struggle against Germany. From Washington’s perspective, Moscow’s heavy-handed tactics to assert its predominance in the region aroused fears that Russia’s ambitions were something more than simply a desire to have “friendly” relations with their neighbours. Yet, there had been no decisive break in relations by the spring of 1947. The reason for this was quite straightforward: reaching a postwar settlement with Germany had yet to be resolved while it remained under four power occupation. The Council of Foreign Ministers meetings in Paris and New York in November and December 1946 got nowhere. Ironically, the event that actually triggered America’s psychological mobilization was one that Stalin did not initiate. Fighting broke out once again in Greece between the royalist government, restored to power by British influence, and a communist-dominated anti-government insurrection during the summer of 1946. The Greek communists were aided and abetted by Josip Broz Tito in Yugoslavia who, flush with his victory over the fascists, now sought to develop a Balkan federation dominated by Belgrade. Britain, unable to provide the kind of necessary assistance to support the government as a result of its severely weakened postwar economic position, pleaded with American authorities to provide military aid.
The pivotal event in this regard occurred on 21 February 1947, when the British embassy in Washington delivered to the State Department a pair of notes concerning the role of Great Britain in Greece and Turkey. These notes essentially indicated that Britain would have to cut off military and economic aid to Greece in its ongoing struggle with the guerrilla forces, while at the same time terminate economic assistance to Turkey by March 31. Reports from the region indicated that the Greek government could last only a few weeks without continuing British support. It was argued that if Greece fell to communist control, it was only a matter of time before Turkey and Iran would feel the full brunt of Russian intimidation and would perhaps collapse. Control of the eastern Mediterranean, it was felt, was at stake as well as the long-term prospects for the stability of Italy and France. As those two countries had large, popular Communist parties, the question was now whether they could survive if the Russians made significant inroads in southern Europe. Hence, a decision was made to provide assistance to the British through providing economic assistance. The result was the so-called Truman Doctrine – the name given to the program of economic and military assistance extended in 1947 (and later) to Turkey and Greece – which served the role of lending the first concrete substance to the concept of getting tough with the Russians. President Truman thus responded to the postwar tension between the United States and the Soviet Union with the Truman Doctrine of 12 March 1947, stating that the United States would use its power to provide financial aid to Greece and Turkey any country that was threatened by communist expansion. The Truman Doctrine thus officially expressed the tension between the Soviets and the Americans, and also provided the justification for considerable injections of American money into European economic recovery to counteract the development of social and economic unrest.
The failure of the Paris and New York Foreign Ministers sessions led to the next scheduled session in Moscow in March-April 1947, which would prove to be decisive for subsequent developments. The Moscow Conference opened on 10 March 1947 with negotiations on the major problems confronting the US and the USSR. Unfortunately, each side came to that meeting with a different emphasis. For the western powers, the solution of the German question had become a matter of great economic significance. As Germany was felt to be the main engine of western Europe’s economy. As long as Germany remained divided, the economies of the other states of western Europe would suffer. Increasingly violent strikes came to mark Europe’s labor relations as their economies began to hemorrhage. Only increased economic aid from Washington or the reintegration of German resources into the European economy, it was felt, offered the possibility of stemming the bleeding. For Soviet Russia, the German question also had economic importance, but one framed more in terms of reparations. Moscow wanted these reparations partly in the form of payments from current German production in order to better facilitate their own reconstruction. Politically, in order to prevent a resurgence of German power, the Russians desired demilitarization, neutralisation, and the creation of a political system in which the German communists would play an important role.
Group investigation
1. Groups of 4 prepare a subject to present for the final exam presentation
2. Choose any subject relating to modern European history, and explain its causes and consequences
Follow these points:
1. Identify the topic
2. Gather sources, data and references
3. Develop an outline
4. Plan the presentation contents
5. Revise the contents.
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