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 anti-German left-wing forces. The Front seized power from the pro-German 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.

10. 10. In February 1948, the Communist Party seized power in Czechoslovakia.

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.’

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 Soviet-controlled 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 Four-Power 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 government-in-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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.