Some scholars criticize the concepts of Sovietization or Stalinization because they overly simplify the complex processes of give-and-take between the Soviet Union and its East European subordinates.268 They prefer the idea of "self-Sovietization" or "self-Stalinization," terms that capture the fact that the East Europeans adapted and used Soviet models themselves without direct instructions or coercion. John Connelly is right to note that both processes were at work. The Soviets, given their exaggerated security concerns, "kept channels of information to Eastern Europe narrow, and left communists there no choice but to discover and implement the Soviet system themselves."269 Thus there was plenty of room for East European leaders to set their own priorities and initiate their own policies, but only within the contours dictated by Stalin and the Soviets.
A related question that suffuses the historiography, both traditionally and more recently, has to do with Stalin’s original objectives in Eastern Europe. Was he, from the very beginning, interested in the development of Soviet-style regimes throughout the region, or did other factors, such as the interests of East European Communists themselves or threats from the West in the increasingly menacing atmosphere of the Cold War, prompt Stalin to clamp down on his East European allies? Most examples of recent Russian historiography tend to take the latter view.270 But many historians in the West and a few in Russia think that Stalin developed his programs for anti-Fascist fronts and people’s democratic governments as so much eyewash for the British and Americans and as a sop to the electoral sensitivities of the East Europeans.271 The next stage, a fully Stalinist Eastern Europe, was the inevitable result of his political planning, with or without the Cold War.
The arguments by Soviet foreign-policy specialists Vojtech Mastny and Vladislav Zubok tend to support this latter view, though they attribute Stalin’s policies in Eastern Europe to his pragmatic understanding of the spread of Communism within the traditional framework of spheres of influence. As acceded to by the Allies during the war, Stalin sought to nail down a belt of dependent countries on the Soviet European borders, while essentially turning over Western Europe and Greece to the British and Americans. Mastny emphasizes Stalin’s fears and exaggerated needs for security as the motivating factors in constructing what came to be known as the "Soviet bloc."272 Zubok places the primary weight on what he and Constantine
Pleshakov call the “revolutionary-imperial paradigm,” which conforms to traditional Russian proclivities to control Eastern Europe.273
The argument about Stalin’s intentions and motivations will not be easily resolved. There can be little question that the Soviets imposed their will on Eastern Europe in a gradual and carefully calibrated fashion. But the evidence is not conclusive that Stalin planned this process, rather than reacted to a variety of domestic and international stimuli along the way. As Vladimir Pechatnov has shown in his contribution to this volume,274 Stalin was constantly adjusting and resetting his plans and priorities, as prompted by shifts in American foreign policy and the international situation. From the perspective of more than a half-century later, the Sovietization of Eastern Europe can easily seem to have been designed from the very beginning of the Soviet occupation and even earlier. Appearances can be deceptive, especially when scholarly hindsight is at work, a consistent story needs to be told, and archival evidence can be mustered for opposing arguments.
In the immediate postwar period, both Communists and non-Communists in Eastern Europe assumed that the struggle for political mastery of their countries was open-ended and could lead to a variety of results. They thought that their policies - sometimes more and sometimes less “radical” than those generally proffered by the Kremlin - fulfilled the needs of their parties and of Stalin. It is unlikely that they missed something that we can clearly see today. That they were wrong about their ability to determine the ultimate fate of their countries was less a product of their political blindness to Stalin’s real intentions than of their inability to predict a future in which the growing intensity of the Cold War increasingly dominated Moscow’s view of the world.
World History
