Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century (38 page)

Cynicism towards authority and a concomitant willingness to get by were especially evident, for obvious reasons, in the ravaged lands of eastern Europe. A Polish writer summed up the mood: “The Bolsheviks are in the country, the Communists are in power, Warsaw is burned to the ground, the legitimate London government is abandoned. Nothing worse can happen to us, we lost the war and should look after ourselves.” In 1972, another observer of the Polish scene remarked upon the “demoralization left in the wake of the brutal occupation of World War II”; among the results were “present-day cynicism” and “a heightened yearning for material goods and gadgets, rather than for more idealistic values.”
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Even in countries less devastated than Poland, the war’s end was welcomed by many people as a chance to leave behind the madness of a world torn apart by political struggle. In Germany, Franz Neumann summarized the popular mood as “the deliberate rejection of politics and parties, ironic and sarcastic attitudes towards Nazism, denazification, democracy and anti-fascism and concentration on finishing one’s education as speedily as possible, and on a position, money and consumer goods.” The greatest believers turned into disillusioned cynics. “He who loves unduly a god, forces others to love him, ready to exterminate them if they refuse,” wrote Romanian émigré Emile Cioran in his manifesto of pessimistic indifference,
Précis de decomposition
, in exile in France in 1949;—the same Cioran who had worshipped Hitler and Codreanu in the 1930s with messianic fervour for their “cult of the irrational.”
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After 1945, then, politics turned into something to be endured, while intimacy and domesticity became more important than ever as
stabilizing factors in people’s lives. Elio Vittorini’s classic novel of reconstruction in post-war Italy—
Le donne di Messina
, first published in 1949—describes a world in which ideology has lost its magical powers of persuasion, and the search for privacy beckons. The need for human warmth extends to Uncle Agrippa, whose entire life is spent on trains passing up and down the country looking for his daughter, and to the anti-hero, Ventura, once a Fascist fanatic and an ideologue, now rooted to the land and his lover, desperately keeping his past at bay.

It was the family, above all, which became a refuge from wartime and post-war anxieties. “As in an experiment,” noted the anthropologist Vera Erlich, “the tendency to preserve family life became evident among the survivors of German concentration camps.” Erlich noted the speed with which these people sought not casual affairs but marriage. “With marriage they changed completely. Only then did they begin to return to life.” Affection and intimacy were thus essential in reviving the self-described “ghosts” after their return from captivity. Erlich observed: “When a child was born to them, many found some mental equilibrium. Their passionate desire for married life had appeared spontaneously, as had their wish to have children. To the babies they showed extreme tenderness, and even tended to pamper and spoil them.” The more troubling psychological consequences of this sort of relationship between camp survivors and their children often only emerged ten or twenty years later.
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This new attachment to the family did not appear only among survivors of the camps. It was very widespread, and contributed in no small part to the remarkable and almost entirely unforeseen baby boom of the post-war period. As a result of the new upward trend, which had begun in many countries even during the war, the gloomy prognoses of population decline, so commonplace in the West before 1939 and still encountered into the 1950s, turned out to be unfounded.

The results of wartime and post-war dislocation and upheaval were therefore paradoxical. On the one hand, in many countries the new political authorities were confronted with a
tabula rasa
upon which to imprint their own social vision. To this end they could count upon the support of a radicalized population that had moved to the Left during
the war and demanded reform and reconstruction. On the other hand, there is little doubt that the overwhelming feeling was one of exhaustion. “We are tired out by History,” wrote an eminent Greek novelist, “tired and uneasy.” In Sarajevo in 1946, the writer Ivo Andrić observed the exhausted faces and white hair of prematurely aged passers-by. Weary of conflict, suspicious of ideology and politics, people wished to remake and sometimes retreat to a secure private world of family stability and adequate living standards.
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The result was a popular mood which was both radical and conservative at the same time. People looked forward to building a new world, but they did not wish this process to be disruptive. Hence an underlying propensity, once the anger and excitement of the first moments of liberation had worn off, to opt for social calm. In eastern Europe, the extraordinary turmoil of the years from 1939 to 1948 was an important factor, therefore, in helping understand popular adaptation to the imposition of communist rule. But in western Europe, too, one sees how the social and psychological consequences of the war years laid the foundations for a social consensus based upon commitment to welfare, mass consumption and the recovery of the family.

THE POLITICS OF OCCUPATION, 1943–5

In May 1943 Anthony Eden advised the British war cabinet that the only alternative to total Russian domination of eastern Europe at the end of the war was to create an “inter-Allied Armistice Commission,” with a rotating presidency. Through this the Big Three would determine policy jointly towards the territories which fell under their control. The Russians welcomed Eden’s idea. So when, a few months later, they learned that they were being shut out of Allied negotiations for an Italian surrender, they protested forcefully. In Stalin’s words:

To date it has been like this: the USA and Britain reach agreement between themselves while the USSR is informed of the agreements between the two powers as a third party looking passively on. I must say that this situation cannot be tolerated any longer.
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Churchill, however, signed the Italian armistice terms before replying. Allied actions spoke louder than words: by the autumn of 1943, before the Red Army had pushed the Wehrmacht back into Europe, it had been made clear that there were limits to the extent of Big Three cooperation. As Italy was the first ex-combatant to drop out of the war, a precedent had been set.
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How conscious were the Allies of the implications of the Italian armistice for cooperation with the Russians? The Americans, in so far as they devoted much thought to post-war Europe, shied away from anything that smacked of power politics and preferred to envisage European problems being solved amicably through the new post-war United Nations Organization which they hoped to create. On the other hand, they expected to demobilize rapidly when the war ended, a prospect which necessarily undermined the persuasiveness of their arguments.

The likelihood of being left alone without American support concentrated minds in Whitehall: idealism was a luxury the overstretched British could ill afford. De Gaulle offered a potential prop for London in post-war Europe. But even if an Anglo-French understanding materialized, the fact of overwhelming Russian power remained. Hence, the British Foreign Office attached much importance to ascertaining Russian wishes, and was prepared, if necessary, to acquiesce in Soviet domination of eastern Europe. “It is better that Russia should dominate Eastern Europe than that Germany should dominate Western Europe,” was the superbly ruthless calculation of Sir William Strang in May 1943.
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As for the Soviet Union, this was far from planning the swift takeover of Europe which Cold War warriors came to fear. Rather, its post-war planners envisaged a “breathing spell” of decades in which time the borders of 1941 would be confirmed and wartime devastation made good, Germany would be nullified as a threat, and the USSR would become “a centre of gravity for all truly democratic medium-sized and small countries, particularly in Europe.” European stability would be assured preferably by continuing the wartime Grand Alliance, and if not by at least exploiting the rivalries that were believed likely to emerge between the USA and the UK.
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There was thus much common ground between the Big Three and, while the war was on, the understanding between them remained intact. When Stalin broke off relations with the Polish government in exile, the weak Allied response can only have encouraged him to assume that he had their support for his efforts to ensure a pro-Soviet regime in Poland after the war. Was there not then, at the highest levels, a tacit quid pro quo here regarding Poland and Italy? At the Teheran conference at the end of 1943, the Allies agreed to shifting Poland’s borders westwards, a move which astute observers realized must inevitably turn Poland into a client state of the Soviet Union since it meant taking territory from Germany. By 1944, Strang’s precept seemed to be underlying Western policy towards Poland, at least.

Once the British and Americans decided not to invade the Balkans from the Mediterranean, it became clear that nothing could stop the Red Army’s march into eastern Europe. During the Romanian armistice negotiations in September 1944, the British and American ambassadors to Moscow watched silently as Molotov agreed terms with the Romanian delegation which gave the Soviet High Command sweeping political powers in the occupied country. The following month Anglo-Soviet talks in Moscow allowed Churchill and Stalin openly to discuss spheres of influence. The two men’s so-called Percentages Agreement, followed by some surreal bargaining between Eden and Molotov, clarified the balance of power in the region: Stalin’s demand for a free hand in Romania was balanced by British control in post-war Greece. Soviet predominance was also conceded in Hungary and Bulgaria.
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We should not, however, make the mistake of assuming that the Great Power carve-up of the continent was necessarily intended at this stage to be comprehensive. There could be little doubt by the end of 1944 about Soviet intentions in Poland, Romania and Bulgaria, just as it was obvious that Stalin was conceding Italy to the Allies and allowing Churchill a free hand in Greece, where British fighter planes were strafing suburbs of Athens in order to defeat a communist-led uprising. Yet in Hungary, Stalin’s tactics were very different and intended to form a reassuring contrast with Soviet policy towards Poland. In both France and Italy, the Communist Parties—which had
accumulated considerable military power as a result of their leading role in the resistance—were under strict instructions to pursue a legalist policy. In Italy, the result was that the PCI agreed to support the largely discredited monarchy ahead of most other parties. By December, Communist Party secretary Togliatti was one of two vice-presidents in the government and more insistent than ever—in view of the rift which had opened up in Greece between the Left and the British—upon abstaining from revolutionary temptation.

The Yalta Declaration on Liberated Europe—with its promise of a dawning era of liberty and democracy—must be evaluated in the light of this emerging Great Power understanding. Just prior to Yalta Roosevelt had indicated that: “The Russians had the power in Eastern Europe, that it was obviously impossible to break with them and that, therefore, the only practicable course was to use what influence we had to ameliorate the situation.”
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Yalta’s lofty commitment to free elections across the continent could hardly be squared with the realpolitik of the Percentages Agreement of three months earlier, when Stalin and Churchill secretly carved up eastern Europe into spheres of influence. None of the Big Three could have believed that Yalta would have much effect upon Soviet attitudes towards Poland, Romania and Bulgaria, countries which Stalin regarded as keys to Russian security. Strikingly, both the Polish communists and their opponents interpreted Yalta as a victory for Stalin. By the spring of 1945, the Red Army was rounding up and deporting thousands of Home Army guerrillas, forcing others into the forests to take up arms. At the same time, the Polish Workers’ Party launched an immense and highly successful recruitment drive to build up a mass base. Thus in Poland, as in Romania and Bulgaria, the twin bases of Soviet domination—massive repression of the opposition combined with membership drives into local Communist Parties—were in evidence even before the German surrender.

Yet in 1945 we are still some way from the polarization of three years later. In Poland itself communist tactics shocked Western public opinion and provoked forceful if largely ineffectual protests from Churchill and Roosevelt. Moreover, the spheres of influence tacitly confirmed at Yalta left much of Europe untouched. Austria, Finland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Albania and eastern Germany
formed what Geir Lundestad has called Moscow’s “middle sphere.” In this area Stalin could not count upon Western toleration, nor indeed was he convinced that countries like Yugoslavia or Hungary were ready for revolution. So keen were the Russians to play the parliamentary game according to the rules in 1945 in the areas outside their own sphere of influence that in at least two cases—Austria and Finland—Communist Parties entered elections, did poorly and were effectively marginalized from politics.

The future of Germany remained the key issue. It would be quite inaccurate to assume that partition was a foregone conclusion as early as 1945. On the contrary, the Big Three were all genuinely committed to preserving the unity of the country. Thus when the war finally ended and Europeans began to tackle the problems of social and political reconstruction, they found themselves in a situation of growing tension but not deadlock between the Powers. Nor, in 1945, was polarization common in domestic affairs. Across Europe coalition governments were the norm, pledged to embark upon the sweeping socio-economic reforms required for a renovation of parliamentary democracy. For later generations, the years 1945–6 came to represent a moment of promise, before the Iron Curtain dropped.