New documentary collections continue to shed light on Soviet policy in Eastern Europe. Two vital sets of documents on the Soviets' deep involvement in the establishment of Communist regimes are G. P. Murashko et al. (eds.), Vostochnaia Evropa v dokumentakh rossiiskikh arkhivov, 1944-1953 [Eastern Europe in Documents from the Russian Archives, 1944-1953], 2 vols. (Moscow and Novosibirsk: Sibirskii khronograf, 1997); and T. V. Volokitina et al. (eds.), Sovetskiifaktor v vostochnoi Evrope, 1944-1953 [The Soviet Factor in Eastern Europe], 2 vols. (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 1999, 2002). An Italian-sponsored publication contains the transcripts of the first three Cominform meetings and very useful articles on aspects of Cominform history: The Cominform: Minutes of the Three Conferences 1947/1948/1949 (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1994).
Country-specific collections include an updated edition of essential documents on the Soviet Zone of Occupation in Germany, Gennadii Bordiugov et al. (eds.), Sovetskaia voennaia administratsiia v Germanii (SVAG): upravlenie propagandy (informatsii) i S. I. Tiul'panov 1945-1949 [The Soviet Military Administration in Germany (SVAG): The Propaganda (Information) Administration and S. I. Tiul'panov, 1945-1949] (Moscow: AIRO-XX, 2006). For the establishment of Communist hegemony in Poland, see Gennadii Bordiugov et al. (eds.), SSSR-Pol'sha: mekhanizmy podchineniia 1944-1949 gg. [The USSR-Poland: Mechanisms of Subordination 1944-1949] (Moscow: AIRO-XX, 1995). For the Soviet takeover of Romania, see T. A. Pokivailova et al. (eds.), Tri vizita A. Ia. Vyshinskogo v Bukharest 1944-1946 gg. [Three Visits by A. Ia. Vyshinskii to Bucharest 1944-1946] (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 1998).
Two highly influential early monographs are Hugh Seton-Watson, The East European Revolution (New York: F. A. Praeger, 1965), which sets the framework for three generations of writing about the Sovietization of Eastern Europe, and Zbigniew K. Brzezinski, The Soviet Bloc: Unity and Conflict (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964), a foundational political science treatment of the subject. One of the best-documented and most reliable accounts of the origins of the Cold War in Eastern Europe from the pre-1989 period is Vojtech Mastny, Russia's Road to the Cold War (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979). See also Mastny's study of Stalin's policies abroad, The Cold War and Soviet Insecurity: The Stalin Years (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).
Important recent studies of Stalin's foreign policy include Donal O'Sullivan, Stalins “Cordon Sanitaire": die sowjetische Osteuropapolitik und die Reaktionen des Westens 1939-1949 (Paderborn: Schoningh, 2003); T. V. Volokitina et al., Moskva i vostochnaia Evropa: stanovlenie politicheskikh rezhimov sovetskogo tipa, 1949-1953 [Moscow and Eastern Europe: The Emergence of Political Regimes of the Soviet Type, 1949-1953] (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2002), an archive-based study of the Stalinization of Eastern Europe by leading Russian specialists; and Vladislav Zubok and Constantine Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin's Cold War: From Stalin to Khrushchev (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996).
There are also several vital new collections of articles, including A. O. Chubar'ian et al. (eds.), Stalinskoe desiatiletie kholodnoi voiny:fakty i gipotezy [The Stalin Decade of the Cold War: Facts and Hypotheses] (Moscow: Nauka, 1999), including leading Russian specialists on the Stalin period; Stefan Creuzberger and Manfred Gortemaker (eds.), Gleichschaltung unter Stalin? Die Entwicklung der Parteien im ostlichen Europa, 1944-1949 (Paderborn:
Schoningh, 2002), which comprises recent articles on Sovietization by German and East European scholars; N. I. Egorova et al. (eds.), Kholodnaia voina, 1945-1963: fakty, sobytiia [The Cold War, 1953-1963: Facts, Events] (Moscow: OLMA-PRESS, 2003), a reevaluation of the Cold War by Russian archival scholars. See also papers based on new research presented at a Moscow Academy of Sciences conference, collected in Norman Naimark and Leonid Gibianskii (eds.), The Establishment of Communist Regimes in Eastern Europe, 1944-1949 (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1997).
Interesting new interpretations are offered by John Connelly, Captive University: The Sovietization of East German, Czech, and Polish Higher Education, 1945-1956 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), on the ways in which East Europeans were able to preserve their own traditions and institutional cultures during the process of Sovietization; and T. V. Volokitina et al., Narodnaia demokratiia: mif ili real’nost’ [People's Democracy: Myth or Reality] (Moscow: Nauka, 1993), an argument by leading archival scholars of Eastern Europe that "people's democracy" had serious democratic content and intent in the immediate postwar period.
Studies on specific countries include Krystyna Kersten, The Establishment of Communist Rule in Poland, 1943-1948, trans. and annotated by John Micgiel and Michael H. Bernhard (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1991), the English translation of the first archive-based Polish study of the period of Communist takeover; Ivo Banac's pioneering analysis of Yugoslav politics during the Tito-Stalin split, With Stalin against Tito: Cominformist Splits in Yugoslav Communism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988); and Norman M. Naimark, The Russians in Germany: A History of the Soviet Zone of Occupation, 1945-1949 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), an archive-based examination of Soviet policy in Germany and the origins of the German Democratic Republic.
Robert Levy's Ana Pauker: The Rise and Fall of a Jewish Communist (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001) is an important reevaluation of the Romanian Stalinist based on extensive interviews and archives. The premier Czech historian of Communism in that country, Karel Kaplan, studies the origins and course of the 1948 coup in The Short March: The Communist Takeover in Czechoslovakia (New York: St. Martin's, 1987). See also his Report on the Murder of the General Secretary (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1990), which, in addition to an account of the Slansky trial, includes a general history of the East European purges. On Hungary, see Charles Gati's excellent series of extended essays, Hungary and the Soviet Bloc (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1986), and George H. Hodos, Show Trials: Stalinist Purges in Eastern Europe (New York: Praeger, 1987), the best available work on the East European purges by a former victim of Hungarian Stalinists.
Finally, there are several key published memoirs and diaries. The memoirs of the Yugoslav Communist Milovan Djilas remain one of the fundamental sources for understanding Stalin's wartime and postwar thinking, Conversations with Stalin, trans. Michael B. Petrovich (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1962). Likewise, many insights can be gleaned from the splendidly edited notes of the famous Bulgarian Communist Georgii Dimitrov, Stalin's most trusted East European deputy during the war and after, The Diary of Georgi Dimitrov, 1933-1949, ed. Ivo Banac (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003). Essential insights into the Sovietization of East European intellectuals are found in Czeslaw Milosz, The Captive Mind, 3rd ed. (New York: Random House, 1981). Lastly, Teresa Toranska, “Them”: Stalin’s Polish Puppets, trans. Agnieszka Kolakowska (New York:
Harper and Row, 1987), contains striking interviews with Polish Stalinists by an unusually aggressive journalist.
See also sections 5, 7, and 10 in this bibliographical essay.
World History
