Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-q99xh Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T07:07:04.370Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

9 - The Sovietization of Eastern Europe, 1944–1953

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 September 2010

By
Norman Naimark
Edited by
Melvyn P. Leffler  and
Odd Arne Westad
Melvyn P. Leffler
Affiliation:
University of Virginia
Odd Arne Westad
Affiliation:
London School of Economics and Political Science
Get access

Summary

The great Soviet victories at Stalingrad (January 1943) and Kursk (July 1943) reversed the tide of the war against the Nazis and made it likely that Soviet armies would occupy vast stretches of territory in Europe. Allied conferences at Teheran in November 1944 and Yalta in February 1945, and the notorious “percentages agreement” between Iosif Stalin and Winston Churchill in October 1944, confirmed that Eastern Europe, initially at least, would lie within the sphere of influence of the Soviet Union. Communists in the region also assumed that their countries would fall under Soviet sway in one form or another. Milovan Djilas famously recorded Stalin’s assertion during a wartime conversation: “This war is not as in the past: whoever occupies a territory also imposes on it his own social system. Everyone imposes his own system as far as his army can reach. It cannot be otherwise.” Georgi Dimitrov, head of the Soviet Central Committee’s Department of International Information, noted in late January 1945 that Stalin expected a war with the capitalist world within two decades of the Nazi defeat, and therefore it would be necessary to maintain a strong alliance among the Slavic countries of Eastern Europe to counter that aggression.

Yet there is very little evidence that Stalin had firm notions in 1944–45 about developing some sort of Communist bloc in Eastern Europe after the war. Instead, he probably shared many of the suppositions of two of the major policy-planning documents to emerge from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs during World War II, Maxim Litvinov’s “Memorandum” of January 11, 1945, and Ivan Maisky’s “Note” of January 10, 1944. The Litvinov document was prepared in association with the Yalta Conference and explored the possibility of establishing an agreement about three spheres of influence on the continent. Linked to the Soviet Union would be a zone in the east and north, including Finland, Sweden, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, and Turkey.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge History of the Cold War , pp. 175 - 197
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2010

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Albert, Andrzej [Roszkowski], Najnowsza historia Polski, [The Recent History of Poland], vol. II (London: Puls, 1994).Google Scholar
Banac, Ivo, With Stalin against Tito: Cominformist Splits in Yugoslav Communism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), 125.Google Scholar
Biagio, Anna Di, “The Establishment of the Cominform,” in Procacci, G. et al. (eds.), The Cominform: Minutes of the Three Conferences 1947/1948/1949 (Milan: Feltrinelli Foundation, 1994).Google Scholar
Bordiugov, Gennadii, et al. (eds.), SSSR–Pol’sha: mekhanizmy podchineniia 1944–1949 gg. Sbornik dokumentov [The USSR and Poland: The Mechanisms of Subordination, 1944–1949. A Collection of Documents] (Moscow: AERO-XX, 1995), 13–15.Google Scholar
Chubar’ian, A. O., et al. (eds.), Stalin i kholodnaia voina [Stalin and the Cold War], (Moscow: IVI RAN, 1998) –18.Google Scholar
Connelly, John, Captive University: The Sovietization of East German, Czech, and Polish Higher Education, 1945–1956 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2000).Google Scholar
Dimitrov, Georgi, The Diary of Georgi Dimitrov, 1933–1949, ed. Banac, Ivo (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003) –58.Google Scholar
Djilas, Milovan, Conversations with Stalin, trans. Petrovich, Michael B. (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1962).Google Scholar
Field, Hermann and Field, Kate, Trapped in the Cold War: The Ordeal of an American Family (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999).Google Scholar
Gati, Charles, Hungary and the Soviet Bloc (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1986).Google Scholar
Gibianskii, L. Ia., “Forsirovanie sovetskoi blokovoi politiki” [The Imposition of Soviet Bloc Politics], in Egorova, N. I. and Chubar’ian, A. O. (eds.), Kholodnaia voina, 1945–1963 [The Cold War, 1945–1963] (Moscow: OLMA Press, 2003) –41.Google Scholar
Hodos, George H., Show Trials: Stalinist Purges in Eastern Europe (New York: Praeger, 1987).Google Scholar
Isusov, Mito, Stalin i Bulgariia [Stalin and Bulgaria] (Sofia: Izdatelstvo Sv. Kliment Okhridski, 1991) –92.Google Scholar
Janos, Andrew, East Central Europe in the Modern World: The Politics of the Borderlands from Pre- to Postcommunism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000).Google Scholar
Kaplan, Karel, The Short March: The Communist Takeover in Czechoslovakia (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987).Google Scholar
Kynin, G. P. and Laufer, I. (eds.), SSSR i germanskoi vopros 1941–1949 [The USSR and the German Question 1941–1949], vol. I, (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnye otnosheniia, 1996) –96.Google Scholar
Levi, Robert, Ana Pauker: The Rise and Fall of a Jewish Communist (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lockhardt, Bruce, My Europe (London: Putnam, 1952).Google Scholar
Lukes, Igor, “The Rudolf Slansky Affair: New Evidence,” Slavic Review, 58, 1 (Spring 1999) –88.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mark, Eduard, Revolution by Degrees: Stalin’s National-Front Strategy for Europe, 1941–1947, CWIHP Working Paper No. 3 (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center, 2001).Google Scholar
Mastny, Vojtech, The Cold War and Soviet Insecurity: The Stalin Years (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996).Google Scholar
Micgiel, John, “‘Bandits and Reactionaries’: The Suppression of the Opposition in Poland, 1944–1946,” in Naimark, Norman and Gibianskii, Leonid (eds.), The Establishment of Communist Regimes in Eastern Europe, 1944–1949 (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1997).Google Scholar
Naimark, Norman M., The Russians in Germany: A History of the Soviet Zone of Occupation, 1945–1949 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995).Google Scholar
Naimark, Norman M., Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001) –11.Google Scholar
Naimark, Norman M., “Post-Soviet Russian Historiography on the Emergence of the Soviet Bloc,” Kritika, 5, 2 (Summer 2004) –80.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Naimark, Norman M., “Stalin and Europe in the Postwar Period, 1945–1953: Issues and Problems,” Journal of Modern European History, 1, 2 (2004).Google Scholar
Noskova, A. F. (ed.), Iz Varshavy. Moskva. Tovarishchu Beriia …: dokumenty NKVD SSSR o pol’skom podpol’e 1944–1945 gg. [From Warsaw. Moscow. Comrade Beriia…: Documents of the USSR NKVD about the Polish Underground] (Moscow and Novosibirsk: Sibirskii khronograf, 2001) –46.Google Scholar
O’Sullivan, Donal, Stalins “Cordon Sanitaire”: die sowjetische Osteuropapolitik und die Reaktionen des Westens 1939–1949 (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2003).Google Scholar
Pokivailova, T. A., 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).Google Scholar
Roberts, Geoffrey states that he supports the general view of Volokitina and her coauthors in his recent Stalin’s Wars: From World War to Cold War, 1939–1953 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006).Google Scholar
Sanders, Irwin, Balkan Village (Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press, 1949).Google Scholar
Tismaneanu, Vladimir, Reinventing Politics: Eastern Europe from Stalin to Havel (New York: Free Press, 1992).Google Scholar
Tomaszewski, Jerzy, The Socialist Regimes of East Central Europe: Their Establishment and Consolidation, trans. Krauze, Jolanta (London: Routledge, 1989).Google Scholar
Volokitina, T. V., et al. (eds.), Sovetskii faktor v vostochnoi evrope, 1944–1953 [The Soviet Factor in Eastern Europe 1944–1953], 2 vols. (Moscow: Rosspen, 1999), vol. I.Google Scholar
Volokitina, T. V., et al. (eds.), Vostochnaia Evropa v dokumentakh rossiskikh arkhivov 1944–1953 gg. [Eastern Europe in Documents from the Russian Archives 1944–1953], 2 vols. (Moscow and Novosibirsk: Sibirskii khronograf, 1997), vol. I, 86–87, 94–98 –04, 111–13.Google Scholar
Volokitina, T. V., et al., Narodnaia demokratiia: mif ili realnost’? [People’s Democracy: Myth or Reality?] (Moscow: Nauka, 1993).Google Scholar
Volokitina, T. V., et al., Moskva i vostochnaia Evropa: stanovlenie politicheskikh rezhimov sovetskogo tipa, 1949–1953. Ocherki istorii [Moscow and Eastern Europe: The Creation of Political Regimes of the Soviet Type, 1949–1953. Historical Essays] (Moscow: Rosspen, 2003).Google Scholar
Zubok, Vladislav and Pleshakov, Constantine, Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War: From Stalin to Khrushchev (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996).Google Scholar
Zubok’s, AFailed Empire: The Soviet Union in the Cold War from Stalin to Gorbachev (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2007).Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×