Eastern Europe in the Postwar World

256 Pages·1991·24.646 MB·English

by  Thomas W. Simons Jr. (auth.)

EASTERN
EUROPE
IN THE
POSTWAR
WORLD
Thomas W. Simons, Jr.
PALGRAV E MACMILLAN
To the memory of my father and to my students
in History 125 at Brown.
ISBN 978-1-349-12760-3 ISBN 978-1-349-12758-0 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-12758-0
©Thomas W. Simons, Jr. 1991
Reprint of the original edition 1991
All rights reserved.
For infonnation write:
Scholarly & Reference Division
St. Martin's Press, Inc.,l75 Fifth Avenue
New York, N.Y. 10010
First published in the United States of America in 1991
ISBN: 978-0-312-06169-2
978-0-312-06168-5 (pbk.)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Simons, Thomas W.
Eastern Europe in the postwar world I Thomas W. Simons, Jr.
p. em.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-312-06169-2 (hardback) ISBN 978-0-312-06168-5 (pbk.)
I. Europe, Eastern-History-1945- I. Title.
DJK50.S58 1991
947-dc20 91-7796
Contents
Acknowledgements . . ............. v
Preface ..... . . . • • . . . . • . . . • . . . Vll
1. The Roots . . . . . . . . . . . 1
2. Independence and Destruction, 1918-1941 .......... 17
3. The War and the Victors, 1939-1948: Trial by Fire ..... 38
4. High Stalinism: Trial by Ice . 57
5. De-Stalinization, 1953-1956 . 84
6. The Iron Ring, 1956-1968 . . 104
Interlude: The Personality of the Old Regime . . . . . . . . . . 129
7. Goulash Communism, 1968-1980 . 141
8. The Return to Politics, 1980-1987. 167
9. The Road to 1989 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 193
Envoi: 1990 and Beyond in Historical Perspective 218
Maps 240
Index 244
Also by Thomas W. Simons, Jr.
THE END OF THE COLD WAR?
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The Department of State made this book possible by assigning me as
Diplomat-in-Residence at Brown for 1989-1990, although the views ex
pressed in it do not necessarily reflect those of the Department. My debt
to the Department and the Foreign Service of the United States is also
both deeper and less direct. It extends back over the years and is entwined
with my personal history. For I grew up in a Foreign Service family, and
my father and mother were both educators before they became diplomats.
Hence, whatever skills I have as a teacher and diplomat clearly owe a great
deal to both of them, and I am grateful to them for it, as well as for lifelong
support and affection.
But my father was also a trained historian, and if history has been my
way of understanding and dealing with a difficult and changing world as
I changed with it, it has been because it was his way too, and because I
admired him. I would like him to have read and enjoyed this book of
history, but he died too soon for that-it was one of the few things he left
unaccomplished - in July 1990, at 87, just as I was being confirmed by
the Senate as Ambassador to Poland and finishing the basic manuscript.
So I dedicate it to his memory with a full heart.
We are a close Foreign Service family, so my daughter Suzanne and my
son Benjamin know that this book would never have seen the light of day
without the vigorous and at times despairing protective efforts of their
mother, and my dearest friend, Peggy. Not only was she almost a co
teacher in the course, or at least an expert advisor on what younger people
can stand and absorb, but against her deepest inclinations and best
judgment she took on nearly the whole burden of our move from
vi Eastem Europe in the Postwar World
Providence to Warsaw so that I could turn the course into this book. So
she is much more than a co-author.
Both of us are affectionately grateful to our friends and colleagues in
the Brown community - Mark and Betty Garrison of the Center for
Foreign Policy Development, Howard (and Jan) Swearer of the Institute
for International Studies, and especially Tom (and Sarah) Gleason of the
Department of History, where this book is concerned - who took us in
and offered us the splendid environment of scholarship and fellowship in
which it grew.
Most of all, I would like to thank my students in History 125, to whom
it is also dedicated. I expected a dozen, and there were more than eighty.
They came in all shapes and sizes and with a range of backgrounds and
interests and degrees of courage. Since we were together, some have stayed
at Brown, others have scattered to the four corners of America and the
world, including a number to Eastern Europe. While we were together,
however, they taught me to teach, and helped me to learn again. Their
intelligence, their enthusiasm, their willingness to work hard, their
capacity for intellectual excitement gave me a sense of what it means to
live in a community of scholars that I never had in my own student days,
and that will be precious to me for the rest of my life.
I am thinking in particular of Tim Snyder, then a junior and now a
senior at Brown, editor of its international affairs journal, but in the
summer between co-editor of this book. He shares all the virtues described
above in spades, but adds others peculiarly his own: exceptional quickness
of mind, a gift for grasping and extending the essence of a thought and an
argument, a writing style that is at once exceptionally spare and exception
ally rich, and modesty. This books owes him some of its good passages,
and a great deal of its clarity and coherence. He has a bright future; I am
grateful for our recent past together.
Finally, I would like to thank my editor at St. Martin's, Simon Winder,
for a degree of tolerance and skill the more remarkable for having now
been repeated through the production of two books.
PREFACE
This book is based on a course of the same title which I gave as an
Adjunct Professor of History at Brown University in Providence, Rhode
Island, during the second semester of the academic year 1989-1990. It is
very much a history book, a record, and an attempt at explanation of
events in Eastern Europe in the half-century that ended in 1989. History
did not stop there, but the caesura of that year was so great that this history
basically does.
I was trained as a historian, and while I have found the historical
perspective marginally useful in a career as a working diplomat which is
now more than a quarter century long, it has been absolutely essential to
me personally, as a way to help me understand the world I was living and
working in, and my place in it. The center of that world, since I left school
and joined the U.S. Foreign Service in 1963, has been Eastern Europe and
its neighbors to the east and west, the Soviet Union and the Western
Europe which has emerged in the postwar period and is still going strong
today. My service as a diplomat took me and my family to Geneva, to
Warsaw, to Moscow, to Bucharest, and to London, with long spells in
between working on East-West relations at the Department of State in
Washington, D.C. The last spell, from 1981 to 1989, was particularly
intense, for it included a tour of record length as Director for Soviet Union
Affairs, until 1985, and then a tour as the Deputy Assistant State for
European and Canadian Affairs responsible for the conduct of relations
with the Soviet Union, the countries of Eastern Europe and Yugoslavia,
during the last three years, when the area was moving toward and then
into the revolutions of 1989. During those years I was not only current on
viii Eastern Europe in the Postwar World
information concerning the developments underway in the area and U.S.
policy towards it, but I was there often, dozens of times, and had the
chance, sometimes, to contribute to shaping the policy and the develop
ments themselves.
Throughout the whole period I took what opportunities I had to do
historical research, publish historical articles and in general to reflect
historically on a part of the world I love and was learning more about, as
well as on the United States' relationship to it and the U.S. role in it. And
the Service gave me two wonderful opportunities to punctuate the quarter
century with whole years of study and reflection, first as a Council on
Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow at the Hoover Institution
in Stanford, in 1971-1972, and then as a Member of the Senior Seminar in
Foreign Policy, in 1985-1986. But it was only when I was named Diplomat
in-Residence at Brown in the fall of 1989 and offered the chance to teach
a real live credit course in the history of postwar Eastern Europe in the
spring of 1990 that I was challenged to function once again as a full-time
working historian.
I found the challenge daunting. This was partly because I had no idea
of what kind of a teacher I would be. When I had last taught history, in
the early 1960s, I was a distracted graduate student one reading ahead of
my undergraduate charges: It had not been a job I wanted, nor a job I
could do well, nor a job I did well. Since then I had learned a lot about the
subject matter I was to teach, and I had done a great deal of public
speaking, in the 1980s. But I had been speaking as an official on public
policy issues, and that is essentially functional speech. At its best it
resembles teaching history, but it bears no necessary relationship to it. And
since one necessary element of teaching history is to consider and confront
what others have said and written about a given field, there was a lot to
read, a half decade's work on most topics, a decade's for some, a
generation's for a few. The challenge was therefore multiple. At its core,
however, was the challenge to leave functional speech behind me enough
to fashion a coherent story of what happened over a turbulent and complex
period in a way that did justice both to my own experiences and to the best
scholarship available, and to make that story accessible to American
undergraduates of the turn of the 1990s. It seemed overwhelming.
Preface ix
Whether or not it was overwhelming the reader will judge on the basis
of this book. The beginnings were certainly difficult. The best that could
be said for the first few lectures, over-full and over-complex, was that they
aroused the fighting spirit and the hatred of injustice which characterizes
American undergraduates at their best, to the point where they overcame
their natural diffidence and began to tell me what I was doing wrong. For
my part, I hated to give up the richness and the complexity. In the end, a
balance was struck. It was a balance between the accuracy, the richness
and complexity I insisted on giving them, and the limits to what intelligent
and enthusiastic people who are taking three or four other courses need
and can stand. If it is successful, it is a balance which is exemplary for the
way democracy should work. As the weeks and months passed, I felt it was
getting more successful and that, with proper editing, it was successful
enough to offer to public judgment in book form.
I would also like to think that the story will be useful and accessible to
the reading public beyond the university. Eastern Europe, the part of the
continent outside the Soviet Union that was divided from the rest in the
early postwar years, was important during the cold war. To use a phrase
characteristic of Communist thinking and prose practice, "as is well
known" the cold war started there; the area's peculiar life and status helped
keep it going; and the nations and peoples of the area helped bring it to an
end, to the extent it has ended. But Eastern Europe will continue to be
important, and I think even more important, in the new era that is now
taking shape. To the extent that the cold war is over, it is a large part of
the Europe which must be brought back together in ways that support
security and stability for the international community as a whole. But that
process will be long and difficult, marked by both new opportunity and
new danger, partly because Eastern Europe is different, in ways that need
to be understood. To the extent that the cold war is not over, Eastern
Europe's distinctiveness will be part of the reason. It is not what is was
before World War II, and it is not so different that it cannot be understood.
Its nations and peoples are simply emerging from a complex history of
their own. But that history needs to be explained if we are to understand
not just what is desirable, but also what is possible for all of us in the future.
This book is an attempt to provide that explanation.