Postwar

37

When Tito closed the Greek land border with Yugoslavia in July 1949, following his break with Stalin, the Greek Communist resistance collapsed almost immediately.

38

The PCI actually increased its vote somewhat at the 1948 elections, but only at the expense of the Socialists, who lost heavily. The victorious Christian Democrats outscored the combined Left by over four million votes.

39

It was no coincidence that Soviet advisers were withdrawn from Yugoslavia on March 18th 1948, just forty- eight hours before General Sokolovski walked out of the Allied Control Council meeting in Germany.

40

Had he wished to do so, there was little practical impediment. In the spring of 1948 the Soviet Union had three hundred divisions within reach of Berlin. The US had only 60,000 soldiers in all of Europe, fewer than 7,000 of them in Berlin.

41

The Basic Law was deliberately provisional—‘to give a new order to political life for a transitional period’: i.e. until the country was reunited.

42

The French Finance Minister Henri Queuille complained to the US Ambassador to France of Britain’s ‘complete lack of loyalty.’

43

A point of view nicely captured in lines anonymously penned during the negotiations on Britain’s postwar loan:

‘In Washington Lord Halifax

Once whispered to Lord Keynes:

“It’s true they have the moneybags

But we have all the brains.”’

44

Germans understandably did not remember the war in this light and would be mystified in decades to come when subjected to English football supporters’ chants and British tabloid newspaper headlines referring to ‘Huns’, ‘Krauts’ and the like.

45

Professor Kenneth Jowett of UC Berkeley.

46

The institutions of the German Democratic Republic were somewhat distinct, reflecting its interim standing in Soviet eyes. But the spirit of its laws and practices was impeccably orthodox.

47

The Baltic states, fully incorporated into the Soviet Union itself, were even worse off than the rest of eastern Europe. In 1949 kolkhozes in northern Estonia were required to begin grain deliveries even before the harvest had begun, in order to keep in line with Latvia, four hundred kilometers to the south. By 1953 rural conditions in hitherto prosperous Estonia had deteriorated to the point where cows blown over by the wind were too weak to get back on their feet unaided.

48

The initial Comecon participants were Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Romania and the USSR, joined shortly thereafter by Albania and the GDR. In later years Yugoslavia, Mongolia, China, North Korea and North Vietnam also became members. In 1963 Comecon countries’ share of international trade was 12 percent; by 1979 it was 9 percent and falling.

49

Under the 1946 Constitution the constituent republics—Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia, Macedonia and Montenegro—were free to secede from the Federation, a right of which they were deprived seven years later.