Transcript File - Ossett History

Bulgaria
1. Bulgaria was of strategic importance to the USSR. Controlling
Bulgaria would give the Soviets a naval base on the Mediterranean.
2. The occupation of Romania in August 1944 allowed them to then
invade Bulgaria a month later in September. By the 28th October they
had established an ACC (Allied Control Commission).
3. Local Communists, including several thousand partisan troops,
had already established the Patriotic Front, an alliance of antiGerman left-wing forces. The Front seized power from the proGerman government and established a government in Sofia shortly
before the Red Army arrived.
Inevitably, this success strengthened local Communists, who
attempted a Communist revolution in the country. The former ruling
class was eliminated. Over 10,000 people were executed. Trade
unions and police were dominated by Communists and large farms
were taken over by peasants.
4. However, Stalin did not share the zest for revolution that the
Bulgarian Communists had. He wanted to ensure the Soviets
controlled Bulgaria, but didn’t damage relations with the West at the
same time, particularly as the war was still being fought and the issue
over Poland was becoming more apparent.
5. Since the USSR’s position was guaranteed through the key role of
the Soviet chairman of the ACC, and the strong position of the local
Communist Party, Stalin could afford to hold back from full revolution
in Bulgaria.
In the autumn of 1944, Stalin persuaded the Bulgarian Communists
to pursue a more moderate policy. He wanted them to tolerate a
certain degree of political opposition and to work within the Patriotic
Front coalition. This was difficult to achieve as local Communists,
sometimes backed by Soviet officials on the ACC, were determined
to gain complete power regardless of Stalin’s instructions.
6. In December 1945, Stalin forced the Communist-dominated
Bulgarian government to include two members of the opposition, but
when these began to demand changes in policy, Stalin advised the
Communists to adopt a series of well-planned measures to smother
the opposition.
7. Despite allowing 2 opposition members into the Bulgarian
government, Stalin remained anxious to mask the Communist Party’s
dictatorship, particularly as the USSR was in the midst of negotiating
the post-war settlements with the USA and Britain.
8. In September 1946, Stalin urged the Bulgarian Communists to set
up a ‘Labour Party’ which would have been a ‘broader base and a
better mask for the present period’.
9. In October 1946, elections took place for a national assembly. The
opposition parties managed to win over a third of the total votes, but
Western hopes that this would form the basis of a strong
parliamentary opposition were soon dashed.
10. The Truman Doctrine led to US intervention in Greece, where the
USSR was attempting to establish a Communist regime. Bulgaria
(which borders Greece) therefore became the frontline state in the
defence of Communism. As a result, Stalin allowed the Communists
to liquidate the opposition and push forward with radical Communist
policies e.g. collectivising agriculture.
Czechoslovakia
1. Unlike in other Eastern European states, Stalin did not have
immediate plans for Communists to seize power in Czechoslovakia.
2. Of all the Eastern European states, Czechoslovakia had the
closest relations with the USSR. The Czechoslovaks felt betrayed by
Britain and France who had failed to prevent the Nazis invading the
whole if Czechoslovakia in 1938.
3. In 1943, the Czechoslovak government-in-exile in London under
Edvard Benes, the former president, negotiated an alliance with the
USSR, although this still did not stop Stalin from annexing Ruthenia,
in eastern Czechoslovakia, in the autumn of 1944.
4. As the Soviet army occupied more and more of Czechoslovakia in
the winter of 1944-5, the balance of power tilted steadily away from
the democratic parties represented by the government-in-exile in
London to the Czechoslovak Communist Party led by Klement
Gottwald, who was a refugee in Moscow.
5. Nevertheless, Stalin forced Gottwald to accept Benes as president
and work within a coalition government. In turn, Benes was ready to
co-operate with the Communist Party, enabling Stalin to achieve a
harmony that had been impossible to reach in Poland.
6. When the Provisional Government was formed in 1945, the
Communist Party was able to demand eight seats in the cabinet
including the influential Ministries of the Interior and information,
although Gottwald skilfully camouflaged the Communist Party’s
powerful position by not demanding the position of prime minister.
7. The post-war revolution of Czechoslovakia was relatively
straightforward due to the collaboration of Benes and the
Communists. Soviet troops withdrew in December 1945, and in May
1946 free and democratic elections were carried out. The
Communists won 38% of the vote.
8. Without the intensifying Cold War, Czechoslovakia might perhaps
have remained a bridge between East and West, as Benes had
hoped, but the Marshall Plan and the subsequent creation of the
Cominform effectively created a climate where this was impossible.
The Czech cabinet voted unanimously in July to attend the Paris
conference on the plan, but the Soviet government insisted that the
Americans, under cover of offering a loan, were trying to form a
Western bloc and isolate the Soviet Union.
9. Czech proposals for compromise were ruthlessly dismissed. Jan
Masaryk, the foreign minister, later told the British ambassador: ‘I
went to Moscow as the foreign minister of an independent sovereign
state; I returned as a lackey of the Soviet government.’
10. 10. In February 1948, the Communist Party seized power in
Czechoslovakia.
Germany
1. 1. At the end of the war, Stalin had sought to gain reparations
from Germany and its allies, believing that Russia had borne the
brunt of Germany’s aggression. Approximately 27 million Russians
had been killed in the war.
2. To protect the USSR against any further German attack, Stalin was
determined to hang on to the land annexed from Poland in 1939 and,
as compensation, to give Poland some German territory.
3. At Potsdam, there were basic agreements made over Germany.
The country would be demilitarised, denazified, and war criminals
would be punished. An ACC (Allied Control Counci) was established,
and it was agreed, in principle, that Germany would pay some kind of
reparations.
4. The ACC in Germany involved splitting the country into 4 ‘zones’,
at the insistence of the Soviets (to avoid the Western powers
dominating the whole country). This decision effectively stopped the
ACC from exercising any real power in Germany as a whole.
In terms of reparations, it was agreed that each country would take
their own reparations from their own zones, with the USA and Britain
giving around 25% of their reparations to the Soviets to both keep
them sweet and in exchange for food and raw materials.
5. Stalin’s aim was for Germany to eventually become a Communist
state. In order to try and make this happening, he ordered the
German Communist Party (the KPD) to merge with a popular left
wing party, the Social Democratic Party (SDP). Stalin was able to
ensure this merger took place after interrogating, imprisoning or
murdering over 20,000 SDP members. The new party was named the
Socialist Unity Party (SED).
6. The violence that had taken place in the Soviet zone of Germany
scared many in the western zones, and it thereby prevented
Communism from gaining popularity there.
7. In May 1946, the USA suggested that the four zones of Germany
should merge their economies to help them recover and become self
supporting. The USSR were fearful of this, as they believed the US
was trying to turn the whole of Germany into a capitalist state. In
response, the USSR transformed 213 key German firms into Sovietcontrolled companies – the production of which would go straight to
the Soviet Union!
8. In January 1947, the USA and British zones merged
(economically) to become ‘Bizonia’, probably in the hope that Bizonia
would become prosperous and, over time, absorb the French and
soviet zones to become a unified German economy. In order to
convince the USSR that they were not trying to create an embryonic
state, the offices for Bizonia’s food, finance and transport were all
deliberately located in different cities.
9. The Moscow Conference of Foreign Ministers in March/April 1947 was
a turning point. The Soviets made a determined effort to destroy Bizonia
by demanding that a new central German administration under FourPower Control should be immediately set up. There was strong
opposition from the British foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin, who feared
this would slow up the economic recovery of the British zone. In London,
Bevin’s officials had skilfully come up with a revised Potsdam Agreement,
which Bevin knew the Soviets could not accept. The USSR would have to
return some of the reparations that it had seized in its zone to help
balance the budgets in the Western zones, and it would receive no coal
or steel deliveries until the whole of Germany could pay for its food and
raw material imports. Bevin successfully managed to manoeuvre the
USSR into a corner when he persuaded the Americans to agree that
political unity could only come after economic unity. As this would mean a
delay in reparation deliveries, the Soviets had little option but to reject the
proposal, which is exactly what Britain and the US hoped they would do.
10. By April 1947, Germany remained divided economically –
Bizonia, the French zone and Soviet zone
Hungary
1. When Soviet troops crossed the Hungarian frontier in September
1944, the head of state, Admiral Miklos Horthy, appealed to the
Soviets for a ceasefire, but Germany took Horthy’s son prisoner and
encouraged the Hungarian ultra-nationalists, the Arrow Cross Party,
to seize power in western Hungary. It was not until early December
1944 that Red Army units reached the outskirts of Budapest,
Hungary’s capital.
2. In the Soviet-occupied section of the country, the Hungarian
Communist Party was initially too weak to play a dominant role in
politics, and it therefore had little option but to co-operate with the
Socialist Party, the Smallholders Party and several other middle-class
parties.
In December 1945, when elections took place for the National
Assembly, the Communist Party, despite the presence of the Red
Army, gained only 17% of votes cast, but they were given three key
posts in the provisional national government.
3. Throughout 1945, Stalin’s immediate aim was to remove anything
from Hungary that could be claimed as war reparations by the USSR,
since Hungary had been a German ally.
4. By 1947, Hungary had been left relatively untouched by the
Soviets. The elections of 1945 had been free and democratic, even
though the Soviets could have easily influenced them. In 1947,
Hungary still had a free press, a democratic parliament, open borders
and private business.
5. Despite this, the Soviets dominated the Hungarian ACC (Allied
Control Commission), which was the real governing force in Hungary,
and Stalin was able to insist on the Communist Party participating in
the coalition government and controlling the vital Ministry of the
Interior.
6. In the spring of 1947 the most powerful opposition to the
Communists was shattered when the leader of the Smallholders’
party, Bela Kovacs, was arrested by soviet troops for conspiring
against the occupation. Yet even this did not lead to an overwhelming
Communist success in the August elections, when the left-wing bloc
only won 45% of the vote.
7. As late as autumn 1947, it still seemed possible that Hungary
might retain some independence, but it was increasingly being drawn
into the Soviet bloc.
8. On 8 December 1947, a treaty of friendship and co-operation was
signed with Yugoslavia and, a month later, a mutual aid treaty with
the USSR.
9. In March 1948, as a result of Soviet pressure, the Hungarian
Communist and socialist parties merged.
10. In February 1949, the Communist-dominated Hungarian People’s
Independence Front was formed, and in the elections of may 1949
only candidates from the Independence Front were allowed to stand.
Poland
1. Poland was partitioned (divided up) between the USSR and Nazi
Germany in 1939. This had been agreed between Hitler and Stalin in the
Nazi-Soviet Pact.
2. Once the Red Army crossed Poland’s eastern frontier in early January 1944,
the Soviet Union annexed the territory it had claimed in September 1939. By July,
Soviet troops had moved into Western Poland. As they advanced, they
systematically destroyed the nationalist Polish resistance group known as the
Polish Home Army. Stalin fatally undermined the authority of the Polish
government-in-exile in London by establishing the Lublin Committee. This
committee was tasked with administering Soviet-occupied Poland, and eventually
to form the core of a future pro-Soviet government in Poland.
3. The USSR’s policy was revealed when the Polish Home Army rose in revolt
against the Germans in Warsaw in August 1944 in a desperate attempt to seize
control of parts of Poland before the Red Army could overrun the whole country.
By capturing Warsaw, the Home Army calculated that it would be able to set up a
non-Communist government in the capital, which would be recognised by the
Western Allies as the legal government of Poland. It was hoped that this would
then stop Stalin from creating a Communist Poland. Not surprisingly, Stalin
viewed the uprising with intense suspicion. Although Soviet moved to within 20
kilometres of Warsaw, the Polish insurgents were left to fight the Germans alone
and were defeated by 2 October. The German defeat of the Warsaw Uprising
effectively destroyed the leadership of the Home Army, and thereby made it
easier for Stalin to enforce his policy in Poland. As Soviet troops moved further
west in the remaining months of 1944, the NKVD (Soviet secret police), assisted
by Polish Communists, shot or imprisoned thousands of participants in the Home
Army in an attempt to eliminate the anti-Soviet Polish opposition.
4. To protect the USSR against any future German attack, Stalin was determined
to hang on to the land annexed from Poland in 1939 and, as compensation, to
give Poland the German territories that lay beyond the River Oder.
One of Stalin’s main aims was to establish friendly relations with other European
states. In Poland’s case, Stalin believed this could only be achieved if they had a
Communist government themselves.
5. In January 1945 the USSR formally recognised the Communist-dominated
Committee for National Liberation (the Lublin Committee) as the provisional
government of Poland. Britain and the USA, although they still supported
Poland’s government-in-exile in London, played down the significance of this in
order to maintain healthy relations with the USSR.
6. At the Yalta Conference:
- Poland’s new borders were agreed – the USSR gained land in eastern Poland,
whilst Poland gained land to the west from Germany.
- Britain and the USA recognised the provisional government of Poland (The
Lublin Committee) but negotiated the inclusion of democratic politicians
- Elections were agreed, to be held “as soon as possible”
7. The agreements at Yalta had been incredibly ambiguous, and as a
result, Stalin was able to manipulate them to his advantage.
Firstly, the exact amount of land that Poland received from Germany was
not fixed, and the words ‘democracy’ and ‘election’ meant very different
things to the participants.
8. In June 1945, Stalin set up the Provisional Government of National Unity,
which was joined by Stanislaw Mikolajczyk, the former leader of the governmentin-exile in London. Stalin could not risk genuinely free elections since the
Communist Party was actually quite unpopular in Poland, and would therefore
inevitably suffer defeat. Mikolajczyk therefore resigned in protest from the
provisional cabinet in August 1945, and in October 1946 he refused to allow his
party, the Polish Peasants’ Party, to join the Communist-dominated electoral
bloc, which would all support a Communist dominated government. He hoped
that this boycott would trigger a political crisis that would force Britain and the
USA to intervene.
9. Truman’s policy of containment was not applied to Poland. He accepted that
Poland was within the USSR’s sphere of interest and that the USA would not
intervene. When Mikolajcyk suggested that Britain and the USA should send
officials to monitor the election in January 1947, both declined in the knowledge
that there was little they could do to influence events in Poland. The results were
a foregone conclusion. The bloc, which used terror and falsified electoral results,
gained 394 seats, while the Peasants’ Party gained 28.
10. Although Wladyslaw Gomulka, the leader of the Polish Communist Party, was
dependent on Soviet assistance, he believed passionately that Poland had a
unique history and could not just follow unquestionably the Soviet example. After
the creation of Cominform, he became even more fearful that the USSR would
force the Eastern European Communist parties to do exactly what they said –
and Poland would have no independence. Only under considerable pressure did
he reluctantly accept it, and a year later Stalin had him removed from the
leadership.
Romania
1. Romania was of strategic importance to the USSR. Controlling Romania would
give the Soviets access to Yugoslavia and south-eastern Europe.
Note: During World War Two, Romania had been an ally of Nazi Germany.
2. The Soviet Union had occupied the Romanian territories of Bessarabia and
northern Bukovina in 1940 and the USSR was keen to re-annex these territories.
They launched an offensive against Romania on 20 August 1944.
3. In a desperate attempt to take control of Romania before the Red Army
occupied the whole country, the Romanian king deposed the pro-German
government on 23 August. The king hoped that Romania would be allowed to
negotiate a ceasefire with the Western allies and then form a new government in
which Communists would only be a minority.
This idea was an illusion based on the false assumption that Britain and the USA
would begin a second front in the Balkans which would give these two allies more
say in Romania’s affairs. The king had no alternative but to negotiate an armistice
on 12 September, with the Soviets who now occupied the country.
4. Britain and the USA accepted that Romania was in the Soviet sphere of
influence, and gave no help to the Romanian government, which was anxious to
obtain a guarantee that Soviet troops would be withdrawn as soon as the war
with Germany was over. An ACC was created and dominated by Soviet officials.
A coalition government composed of Communists, socialists, National Liberals
and the left-wing National Peasants’ Party, the so-called Ploughmen’s Liberals,
was formed.
5. The National Democratic Front was paralysed by disagreements between the
National Liberals and the three other parties. Supported by Soviet officials on the
ACC, Communists and their allies formed the National Democratic Front and
incited the peasants to seize farms from landowners and the workers to set up
Communist-dominated production committees in the factories.
6. In March 1945, Stalin intervened in Romania to set up a Soviet-friendly
government. With the help of the Red Army, Romanian Communists orchestrated
a coup which led to the creation of the pro-Soviet Communist-dominated National
Democratic Front government.
7. After Potsdam, where it was decided that peace treaties could only be
signed when governments recognised by the wartime allies had been
established, Romania’s King Michael called on Britain and the USA not to
recognise the new government as it had been imposed by the USSR in
December 1945. As the Council of Foreign Ministers was about to begin
negotiations on the Romanian peace treaty, Stalin decided to call on
Petru Groza, the prime minister, to appoint two more non-Communists to
the government. In reality, however, this made little difference. Groza was
able to strengthen the National Democratic Front in March 1946 when the
Romanian Socialist Party merged with the Communist Party. As in the
Soviet zone of Germany, this effectively ensured Communist domination
of the party.
8. In May 1946, the National Democratic Front was further extended to
include the National Popular Party, the National Peasant Party, as well as
representative from the Communist-organised trade unions, youth and
women’s organisations.
9. In November 1946, the Communist-dominated Front went to the polls.
As in Poland, abuses did occur during the election: opposition
newspapers were closed down and leading members of the opposition
were murdered. It was therefore unsurprising that the Front won more
than 80% of the vote. However, even without this interference, it is very
likely the Front would have won the election due to its popularity.
It opposed the supporters of the former government (which had allied with
Nazi Germany) and the new government had carried out popular social
reforms such as the redistribution of land from great landowners to the
peasantry.
10. In February 1947, with the signature of the Paris Peace Treaties, the
ACC was dissolved. Under Soviet pressure, Romania refused Marshall
Aid and joined the Cominform. In December 1947, King Michael was
forced to abdicate and, in April 1948, a Communist people’s republic was
declared.