According to Kennan, ‘[O]ur national leaders in Washington had no idea at all, and would probably have been incapable of imagining, what a Soviet occupation, supported by the Russian secret police of Beria’s time, meant for the people who were subjected to it.’
25
In February 1945, when asked who would do most to help France recover, 25 percent of those polled said the USSR, 24 percent the USA.
26
Marshall was probably not much reassured to learn from Bidault that this public emphasis upon the German threat was strictly for domestic consumption.
27
Under the terms of a secret Czech-Soviet agreement of March 1945, the USSR had the right to mine and extract uranium from the Jachymov deposits in Western Bohemia.
28
In Poland, of course, it was anything but reassuring—just because it was so familiar.
29
In 1990 Edvard Shevardnadze, the Soviet Foreign Secretary, reportedly observed that despite a forty-year- long Cold War with the United States, when his grandchildren played war games, Germany was still the enemy.
30
Italy lost all of its colonies, paid $360 million in reparations to the USSR, Yugoslavia, Greece, Albania and Ethiopia, and ceded the Istrian peninsula to Yugoslavia. The disposition of the border city of Trieste remained in dispute for eight more years.
31
This proved an easy accommodation. In the words of one American GI, pleasantly surprised at his reception in Germany following the rather frosty French response to their liberators, ‘Hell, these people are cleaner and a damned sight friendlier than the French. They’re our kind of people.’ Quoted in Earl Ziemke,
32
In September 1947 Andrej Zdanov, speaking as always for his master, would inform delegates at the founding Congress of the Cominform that the Truman Doctrine was directed at least as much against Britain as against the USSR, ‘because it signifies Britain’s expulsion from its sphere of influence in the Mediterranean and the Near East’.
33
The Bulgarians had actually oscillated quite markedly over the years from enthusiastic pro-Germanism to ultra-Slavophilism. Neither served them well. As a local commentator remarked at the time, Bulgaria always chooses the wrong card… and
34
This was not the first time armed Russians had personally supervised crucial Polish elections: during the local parliamentary elections of 1772 at which Poles were asked to chose representatives who would confirm the partition of their country, foreign troops stood menacingly by to ensure the desired outcome.
35
The Agrarian Party in the Czech lands and its partner, the People’s Party in Slovakia, were banned after the war for connivance with Nazi policies.
36
Western public opinion was also influenced by Masaryk’s death on March 10th 1948—he was reported to have ‘fallen’ from his window into the courtyard of the Foreign Ministry. The exact circumstances of his death have never been elucidated.
