The initial period of the foundation of the people’s democracies, 1944-45, was one of the most important in the entire history of postwar Eastern Europe.228 But it is also one of the most difficult to categorize, since the Soviet Union followed flexible policies in establishing its influence. Given their geopolitical importance and the traditionally anti-Soviet and anti-Communist traditions of their political elites, Poland and Romania were fated to be controlled and manipulated by their Soviet occupiers. Here, Soviet involvement was absolutely central to the development of people’s democracies. The same could be said of Hungary, though its geographical position was not as critical to Moscow as that of Poland and Romania and its political opportunities were more open-ended. Eastern Germany (the SBZ, or Soviet Zone of Occupation) was fully controlled by Soviet military and political authorities, but Soviet insistence on the unity of Germany prevented concrete moves toward building a people’s democracy in this period.
Soviet involvement was also important in Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia, but this was coupled with the significant and sometimes equally important influence of purely internal social and political factors. Although to different degrees, the Bulgarian and Czechoslovak Communist Parties cooperated with other resistance forces during the collapse of Nazi rule, which portended decent relations with non-Communists in the postwar period. Still, it was the entry of Soviet troops into both of these countries and Moscow’s support for their native Communist Parties that facilitated their eventual Sovietization. The success of the Communist-led September 9, 1944, coup in Bulgaria and the subsequent domination of the country by the Communist Party would not have occurred without Soviet help and encouragement. During the liberation of Czechoslovakia, the Communists, urged on by Moscow, promoted Edvard Benes and the left-liberal forces he represented as partners in the formation of a new Czechoslovak government.
In Yugoslavia and Albania, the creation of people’s democracies took place predominantly due to internal social and political causes rather than to Soviet influence. The local Yugoslav and Albanian Communist Parties had successfully resisted the Axis occupation of their countries, leading large, popular, and effective left-oriented national liberation movements and, eventually, armies, which freed their respective countries. To be sure, Soviet foreign policy aided their efforts. In Yugoslavia, the Red Army provided important, though not essential, military support. In Albania, Yugoslav advisers and military aid were significant in the outcome.229
The earliest and most blatant case of Soviet involvement in East European politics occurred in Poland, where the so-called Polish National Liberation Committee (PKWN) was secretly formed by Stalin from the ranks of former Polish Communists living in Moscow. According to plan, the PKWN accompanied Red Army troops as they poured into Poland in late July 1944. Then, the Soviets arranged for the PKWN to form a Polish national government in Lublin, which was formally recognized by Moscow. Polish Communists, organized in the Polish Workers’ Party (the PPR), and other Polish leftists, including the socialists in the Polish Socialist Party (PPS), enjoyed the support of only a very small fraction of the Polish population. They were nevertheless called upon by the Soviets to serve as leading personnel in the PKWN, which increasingly asserted its power over those parts of Polish territory liberated from the Nazis by the Red Army. Already at the beginning of 1944, Stalin created a Central Bureau of Polish Communists from the ranks of the leading Polish emigre Communists residing in the USSR. This secret organization became a key instrument in guaranteeing that the Kremlin controlled the political platform of Polish Communism in these years.230 After the liberation of the country from Nazi occupation and the formation of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the PPR in early September 1944, the Soviets made sure that the majority of its members previously belonged to the Central Bureau. This way, Stalin was able to ensure that the "Muscovite" segment of the Central Committee held the upper hand over those "native" PPR members, like Wladyslaw Gomulka, who had participated in the resistance in Poland and tended to follow their own political inclinations.
Soviet military forces and special services protected the new postwar Polish government and administration from opponents in the Polish underground.
Soviet forces eliminated groups attached to the London Polish government-inexile, which had earlier fought against their Nazi occupiers.231 NKVD (secret police) units were extremely active in attacking, killing, and arresting underground activists. On August 23, 1944, Red Army troops were also ordered to take "urgent measures" against Home Army units in areas occupied by the Soviets. These units were to be immediately arrested and disarmed, thus preventing them from making their way to Warsaw to aid the ongoing uprising.232 This signifies, as does other evidence, that Stalin preferred that the uprising, which was organized by the emigre government, be put down by the Nazis, which indeed happened in September-October 1944, rather than achieve success and serve as an impediment to the imposition of Moscow’s authority in Warsaw and in Poland as a whole.
The Kremlin followed similarly forceful tactics in Romania. During the breakthrough of Soviet troops into Romania on August 20, 1944, the royal court and a number of Romanian generals staged a coup, removing General Ion Antonescu’s regime and joining the Allied cause. Even when the country was fully occupied by the Red Army, the king, his military allies, and his administration stayed in power. However, as early as the fall of 1944, the Communist Party, at the head of a Left coalition - the so-called National Democratic Front (FND) - unleashed a Soviet-approved campaign to move the government further to the Left. The FND leaders went so far as to demand that the government transfer power to themselves, even though they could muster very little support from the Romanian population as a whole. The Soviets also applied considerable pressure within the Allied Control Council in Romania, through their chief representative Andrei Vyshinskii, insisting on concessions to the "democratic forces" of the country, which meant the Communist-led FND. Continuing intimidation ofthe government culminated in a Communist-inspired coup in February-March 1945, which was backed by the Kremlin’s ultimatum to the king. King Michael had no choice in these circumstances but to appoint a new government on March 6, one that relied primarily on the FND and its Communist leaders.
During these dramatic events, Soviet military commanders and representatives of the Soviet administration in the Allied Control Council countered attempts by Romanian government troops and police to prevent FND-led demonstrations. In Bucharest, where skirmishes between FND protesters and Romanian government forces signaled the beginning of an acute political crisis, Soviet representatives intervened to support the FND. In collusion with the Romanian Communist Party, the Soviet special services made ready to create an FND government on their own should Vyshinskii fail to bully the king into proclaiming it himself. Additional Red Army units were moved toward Bucharest, including, on Stalin’s orders, two divisions of NKVD troops.233 In the end, there was no need for the direct application of force. Vyshinskii’s relentless pressure on King Michael broke his resistance and the coup was accomplished under the veneer of royal legitimacy.234
The Soviets formed three German Communist "initiative groups" in Moscow to follow Red Army troops into occupied Germany in April and May of 1945: one led by Walter Ulbricht, the second by Anton Ackermann, and the third by Gustav Subbotka. Although some German Communists, most notably Ulbricht, played an important role in building a pro-Soviet political base in eastern Germany, this task fell primarily to the Soviet Military Administration in Germany, and in particular to the head of its Propaganda Section, Colonel Sergei Tiul’panov, and to its political adviser and representative of the Foreign Ministry, Vladimir Semenov. Tiul’panov was responsible for the political development of the SBZ and instituted a series of political initiatives favoring the Communists. But Soviet policy in Germany was characterized by a combination of restraint and control, which reflected the Kremlin’s ambivalence toward the future of Germany. As long as there was the possibility of negotiating an agreement with the West over the future of Germany, Moscow held back efforts by Tiul’panov, Ulbricht, and others to go ahead with the Sovietization of the SBZ.235
In Hungary, the German overlords removed the wartime government of Admiral Miklos Horthy, who had tried to conclude a last-minute truce with the members of the anti-Hitler coalition, and replaced it on October 15, 1944, with the Arrow Cross leader, Ferenc Szalasi. Meanwhile, the Soviets created a provisional government that was to take power in the wake of the Red Army’s advance into Hungary. Stalin was satisfied with placing Hungarian Communist Party members in prominent positions in the new government. The Communists were a minor political force in Hungary and the Soviets sought allies from anti-Nazi and anti-Szalasi Hungarian parties of the Left and center, and even some pro-Horthyite groups which offered to cooperate with the Soviet side.236 Stalin’s policies toward Hungary seemed more pragmatic and flexible than those he promulgated in Poland and Romania.237
There is relatively little evidence that the Soviets directly interfered in the postwar political development of Czechoslovakia. In negotiations between Benes and the Soviets in March 1945, there was general agreement that the Czechoslovak Communists would play an important, if not decisive, role in the new government after the liberation of the country from the Nazis.238 The Soviets neither pressured the new Prague government to engage in violence against its non-Communist opponents nor insisted on specific domestic policies. This did not mean, of course, that the Soviets were without influence. The very fact of the Red Army’s entry into Czechoslovakia changed the situation on the ground. But the withdrawal of Soviet troops in late 1945 gave Benes and his allies unusual latitude within Moscow’s developing "sphere of influence."
World History
