The decision was not final; but, taken when it was, it proved fateful. In the absence of Britain (and, in Britain’s wake, the Scandinavians) power within the ‘little Europe’ of the West fell by default to France. The French duly did what the British might have done in other circumstances and made ‘Europe’ in their own image, eventually casting its institutions and policies in a mould familiar from French precedent. At the time it was the continental Europeans, not the British, who expressed regret at the course of events. Many prominent European leaders deeply wanted Britain to join them. As Paul-Henri Spaak, the Belgian and European statesman, noted in regretful retrospect: ‘This moral leadership—it was yours for the asking.’ Monnet, too, would later look back and wonder how different things might have been had Britain chosen to take the initiative at a moment when her authority was still unrivalled. Ten years later, it is true, the British would think again. But in post-war Europe ten years was a very long time and by then the die was cast.
VI. Into the Whirlwind
‘Say what you will—the Communists were more intelligent. They had a grandiose program, a plan for a brand-new world in which everyone would find his place… From the start there were people who realized they lacked the proper temperament for the idyll and wished to leave the country. But since by definition an idyll is one world for all, the people who wished to emigrate were implicitly denying its validity. Instead of going abroad, they went behind bars’.
‘And so it was necessary to teach people not to think and make judgments, to compel them to see the non-existent, and to argue the opposite of what was obvious to everyone’.
‘I met many people in the camp who managed to combine a shrewd sense of what was going on in the country at large with a religious cult of Stalin’.
‘Stalinism means the killing of the inner man. And no matter what the sophists say, no matter what lies the communist intellectuals tell, that’s what it all comes down to. The inner man must be killed for the communist Decalogue to be lodged in the soul’.
‘Here they hang a man first and then they try him’.
To Western observers in the years after 1945, the Soviet Union presented a daunting prospect. The Red Army marched on foot and hauled its weapons and supplies on carts powered by draught animals; its soldiers were granted no leave and, if they hesitated, no quarter: 157,593 of them had been executed for ‘cowardice’ in 1941 and 1942 alone. But after a halting start, the USSR had out-produced and out-fought the Nazi colossus, ripping the heart from the magnificent German military machine. For its friends and foes alike, the Soviet victory in World War Two bore witness to the Bolsheviks’ achievement. Stalin’s policies were vindicated, his pre-war crimes largely forgotten. Success, as Stalin well understood, is a winning formula.
But Soviet victory was bought at a uniquely high price. Of all the victors in World War Two—indeed of all the participant countries, victors and vanquished alike—the USSR was the only one to suffer permanent economic damage. The measurable losses in people and resources were immense, and would be felt for decades to come. Zdenek Mlynar, a Czech Communist studying in Moscow in 1950, recalled the capital as mired in ‘poverty and backwardness… a huge village of wooden cottages.’ Away from the cities the situation was far worse. Roads, bridges, railways had been deliberately destroyed across much of Byelorussia, Ukraine and western Russia. The grain harvest in the early fifties was smaller than that of 1929, which in turn had been far less than the last peacetime harvest under the czars. The war had been fought across some of the Soviet Union’s best arable land, and hundreds of thousands of horses, cows, pigs and other animals had been killed. Ukraine, which had never recovered from the deliberate, punitive famine of the thirties, faced another—this time unplanned—in the winter and spring of 1946-47.
But the war years had also seen what would prove an enduring semimilitarization of Soviet life. Centralised direction and a relentless focus upon the production of tanks, guns and planes had turned the wartime USSR into a surprisingly effective war machine, careless of human life and welfare but otherwise well-adapted to fighting a total war. The cohort of Party bureaucrats formed in the war—the Brezhnev generation—equated power and success with large-scale output in the defense industries, and they were to run the country for the next forty years with that model always in mind. Longstanding Leninist metaphors of class struggle and confrontation could now be linked with proud memories of a real war. The Soviet Party-State acquired a new foundation myth: the Great Patriotic War.
Thanks to the Nazis’ treatment of the lands and people they overran, the war of 1941-45 in Russia
What Stalin wanted in Europe above all, as we have seen, was security. But he was also interested in the economic benefits to be had from his victories in the West. The little states of central Europe, from Poland to Bulgaria, had lived under the shadow of German dominion long before World War Two: in the 1930s especially, Nazi Germany was their main trading partner and source of foreign capital. During the war this relationship had been simplified into one of master and slave, with Germany extracting for its war effort the maximum possible output from land and people. What happened after 1945 was that the Soviet Union took over, quite literally, where the Germans had left off, attaching eastern Europe to its own economy as a resource to be exploited at will.
The Soviet Union extracted reparations from Hungary and Romania, as former allies of Hitler. These reparations, like those taken in kind from the Soviet Zone in Germany, did relatively little to compensate for Russia’s losses but they represented substantial sacrifices for the donor countries: by 1948, Romanian reparations to the USSR represented 15 percent of that country’s national income; in Hungary the figure was 17 percent. From countries that had not fought against him Stalin was no less demanding, but on ‘fraternal’ rather than punitive terms.
It is estimated that until the late 1950s the Soviet Union exacted from the GDR, Romania and Hungary considerably more than it spent to control them. In Czechoslovakia it broke even. Bulgaria and especially Poland probably cost Moscow rather more in aid, between 1945 and 1960, than they furnished in trade and other deliveries. Such a pattern of mixed economic benefit in economic relations between metropole and colony is familiar to historians of colonialism and in this respect the relationship between the USSR and the lands to its west was conventionally ‘imperial’ (except that in the Soviet case the imperial center was actually poorer and more backward than its subjugated periphery).
Where Stalin differed from other empire-builders, even the czars, was in his insistence upon reproducing in the territories under his control forms of government and society
