The future that the Soviets had in mind for those whom they liberated from Hitler was a future constructed by Moscow designers. East Central Europe in its Lcninist-Stalinist version was perceived as a Russian product. By 1945 these nations had considerable experience in nation-building and state-building, however imperfect their record may have been. Most of the inhabitants felt that their way of life and their 350 Russia, Ukraine, and the Breakup of the Soviet Union
Ideas of a better life were preferable to the Soviet model. Even indigenous communists thought the Soviet model to be inapplicable to the conditions of Poland, Czechoslovakia, or Hungary. They were proud of their own revolutionary tradition and experience. Central and Eastern European socialism before 1917 had produced brilliant thinkers in the fields of sociology, economics, history, law, and nationalities studies.** Eastern Europe had a rich tradition of labor organization and socialist politics, and it continued into the period between the two world wars. Why should the East Europeans have been impressed by Stalin’s interpretation of Marxism or the praaice of socialism that they saw in 1945? For them, the notion that Stalinist Russia was the image of their—and the world’s—future appeared preposterous.
As for the future of nations and states, the East Europeans were for understandable reasons especially reluctant to accept the Soviet Marxist position on the subject. The idea of “withering away” or the “merger” of nations did not have many supporters, even among the communists. The tradition of Austro-Marxism was especially original in this area, as was the contribution of the main strands of Polish socialism, whether that was tied to the more nationalistically minded Polish Socialist Party (PPS) or to the “internationalist” Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and of Lithuania (SDKPiL), which maintained closer ties with the Russian revolutionary movement. The Bolsheviks embraced the most literal interpretation of The Communist Manifesto on the future of nations and languages, even when in practice, as in the 1920s, they were tolerant of linguistic and ethnic diversity. The Soviets were promoting “the building of socialism” in Eastern Europe as it was understood in Moscow but they had no special understanding of the conditions prevailing in East Central Europe, and their ideology offered little guidance.
Whether Moscow wanted it or even knew it, as the paramount power in the region it inherited the mantle of the Habsburgs. The Soviet Union and its communist friends in the Balkans became involved in issues that were a legacy of the Ottoman-Habsburg struggle. This historical link was noted by the British historian A. J.P. Taylor, a disciple of Namier. In a book dedicated to Namier, Taylor spoke about post-1945 Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia as legatees of the Habsburgs:
Only a Communist Slovakia would preserve the unity of Czechoslovakia; the price would be the ruin of Czechoslovak democracy. Faced with unwelcome alternatives, the Czechs used once more the method
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Of delay which they learnt from the Habsburgs; and hoped that industry and education might in time create in Slovakia a humanistic middle class, which would make Masaryk's Idea a reality.*'
While Taylor’s expectations about the future of Czechoslovakia were not high, and his fears were vindicated in the post-1989 years, he expected Yugoslavia to do much better. He thought that the joint struggle of Serbs and Croats in “the great partisan war’’ against the Germans “made Yugoslavia, as the Franco-German war of 1870 made Germany.” For several reasons, it seemed to Taylor that Tito just might do a better job than the Habsburgs had been able to do:
“Democratic, federal Yugoslavia” translated into practice the great might-have-been of Habsburg history. Marshal Tito was the last of the Habsburgs: ruling over eight different nations, he offered them "cultural autonomy” and reined in their nationalist hostility.... There was no longer a “people of state” [i. c., an officially-designated ruling nation]; the new rulers were men of any nationality who accepted the Communist idea. More fortunate than the Habsburgs, Marshal Tito found an “idea.” Only time will show whether social revolution and economic betterment can appease national conflicts and whether Marxism can do better than Counter-Reformation dynasticism in supplying central Europe with a common loyalty.**
“Time” did show: Taylor’s question was answered forty years later.
According to Namier, in World War II the South Slavs completed their 1848 agenda when the last of the lands they claimed were removed from Italian rule. Likewise, the Ruthenes completed their 1848 agenda when their historic relation to Poland ended. But from the current perspective one might raise a question that Namier did not ask: Might this “Western” extension of a Belgrade-dominated Yugoslavia on the one hand and a Moscow-dominated Soviet Union on the other have weakened Belgrade’s (i. e., Serbia’s) position versus the Slovenes and Croats in Yugoslavia just as it undermined Russia’s traditional relationship with Ukraine? Tito’s and Stalin’s triumphs of 1945 may have contributed, then, to the process of disintegration that we saw in the 1980s. In both cases the inclusion into the older geographical and political struaure of once-Habsburg possessions changed the traditional ethnocultural balance in the older states.
In addition to becoming after 1917 the heir or legatee of the empire of the Romanovs, the Soviet Union became in 1945 a legatee of another
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Prcnational dynastic state. At this time, imperial Austria’s Eastern Galicia, which had been under Polish rule from 1919 until 1939, northern Bukovina, which had been under Romanian rule from 1918 until 1940, and Czechoslovakia’s Ruthenia, which had been a part of Habsburg Hungary until 1918, were brought into the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. Thus, the Soviet Union also became a successor state of the Habsburgs.
One somehow feels that the dominant position of the Russian clement in the Soviet Union, and with it the unity of the state, would have been much more secure without the annexation of Western Ukraine and the reannexation of the Baltic states. In the end, it appears that not only the Yugoslav and the Czech communists but also their Soviet comrades shared the Habsburgs’ fate. Gorbachev, not Tito, would prove to be “the last of the Habsburgs.’’
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