The New Central Europe

The Potsdam conference of the Big Three was held from July 17 to August 2, 1945. President Truman and Generalissimo Stalin, with their foreign ministers, Byrnes and Molotov, led the American and Russian delegations respectively. Because of the British Labour party's electoral victory (July 25), the places of Churchill and Eden were taken during the second half of the conference by the new Prime Minister, Clement R. Attlee, and his Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin.

One of the major objectives of the Potsdam conference, as stated by Secretary of State Byrnes, was to reach agreement on "plans for carrying out the Yalta Declaration on Liberated Europe, with the hope of ending the constant friction which had prevailed over Russian policy in Eastern Europe since the Crimea Conference." The American delegation (and for that matter the British delegation headed by Attlee) contemplated no "showdown" with Russia such as Churchill had planned. On the contrary, as Byrnes put it, in words true for Britain and Western public opinion at large as well as for America: "The Soviet Union then had in the United States a deposit of good will as great, if not greater, than that of any other country."1 With this good will toward Russia, hardly justifiable by Russian behavior between Yalta and Potsdam, the conference reached a series of agreements. The principal agreement concerned the establishment of a Council of Foreign Ministers. The task of the council was to prepare treaties of peace with the European enemy states, first with Italy, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungaryand Finland, and then with Austria and Germany. Thus the Western Powers, instead of facing the Soviet menace directly, decided upon a new round of gambling with the Russians. It was the West's hope that an early peace settlement in Europe, accompanied by the withdrawal of Soviet occupation forces, would ultimately result in an effective carrying out of the Yalta Declaration on Liberated Europe. Apart from this distant hope, the conference produced nothing that could restrain Soviet aggressiveness. Western complaints against Russian policy in the liberated countries were indignantly rejected by Stalin. He was "against sovietization of any of those countries," Stalin assured Churchill while reminding him once again that Russia was not meddling in Greek affairs. Bierut, the Communist President of Poland, went even further in his promises than Stalin. He told Churchill: "Poland will develop on the principles of Western democracy."2 It was written into the protocol of the conference that Poland would hold "free and unfettered elections as soon as possible on the basis of universal suffrage and the secret ballot." The Big Three agreed also to improve the work of the Allied Control Commissions in Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary But the value of all these agreements, like those of Yalta, depended upon Soviet good faith.

In the case of the reparation agreements reached by the conference, the Western Powers were evidently not aware of the concessions they were granting to the Russians. It was agreed that Russia's reparation claims should be met from, among other things, "German external assets" in eastern Austria, Hungary Romania and Bulgaria. The Western experts did not foresee, however, that since the rights and properties seized by the Nazis in these countries were enormous the Soviets would claim to be the owners of a considerable part of the Danubian economy.

The Russians thereupon, with a display of false generosity, offered these "assets" as their contribution to the establishment of "jointly owned" nationalized companies in the occupied countries, thus effectively laying the economic foundations of the Soviet colonial empire in the Danube Valley.

The case of Poland was as always the main point of East- West disagreement during the Potsdam conference. Confronted with a fait accompli, the Western Powers reluctantly agreed to the German territories east of the Oder- Neisse line remaining under Polish administration, while the final delimitation of the Polish- German frontiers should await the peace settlement. The Soviet annexation of Königsberg and the adjacent area (half of East Prussia) was also approved. Finally the Western Powers gave their consent to the expulsion of the Germans from Czechoslovakia and Poland, including the territories under Polish administration, with the provision that the transfers should be effected "in an orderly and humane manner," as if such acts, however orderly in execution, could ever be humane. The Poles from the provinces lost to Russia in the east were to be resettled to the west and take the place of the expelled Germans. The land of the Germans in Czechoslovakia, on the other hand, was a net gain for the Czechs. The Western Powers also approved the expulsion of the Germans from Hungary However, it was not mentioned at the time of the Potsdam conference that the expulsion of the Germans of Hungarywas tied in with a Czech plan to expel the Hungarians of Czechoslovakia, that is to say, the Germans to be expelled from Hungarywere to make room for the Hungarians marked for expulsion from Czechoslovakia.

In Potsdam both Stalin and the Communist Poles pretended that the number of Germans marked for expulsion from Poland would be insignificant. "The German population had retreated westward with the German armies. Only the Poles remained," said Stalin.3 In fact, over five million Germans were expelled by the Poles, in a rather disorderly manner, after Potsdam. In somewhat more orderly fashion, though replete with atrocities, the Czechs expelled, according to their own statistics, 2.6 million Germans. But they did not succeed in expelling all the Hungarians from Czechoslovakia, because Western objections were raised at the Paris Peace Conference in the summer of 1946. Before then, about 100,000 Hungarians were forced to leave Czechoslovakia, most of them on the basis of a bilateral Hungaro- Slovak population exchange agreement, concluded in February 1946; for the approximately 500,000 Hungarians remaining in Czechoslovakia, the Slovaks made life miserable.

Soviet- occupied Hungaryand Romania, and Tito's Yugoslavia, deported their German minorities according to Communist directives, either to Germany or Russia, although Romania and Yugoslavia were not authorized at all by the Potsdam conference to expel their Germans. However, most of the Saxons of Transylvania escaped expulsion.

The Council of Foreign Ministers, Potsdam's hopeful creation, first met in London in September 1945. The meeting was a complete failure. Western strategy to resolve East- West differences by a speedy conclusion of the peace treaties clashed with Soviet delaying tactics.

The chief obstacle blocking the conference was Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov's insistence that the Western Powers recognize all of the East European governments. He suspected the Western Powers of hostility toward the Soviet Union. Referring to the Romanian government, for instance, he asked: "Should we overthrow it because it is not liked by the United States Government, and set up a government that would be unfriendly to the Soviet Union?" Secretary of State Byrnes in turn suspected that East- West "friendship" would require the West to let the Soviet Union establish "complete suzerainty" over the Eastern European states. But the "deposit of good will" the Soviet Union had in the United States gave Byrnes other ideas too. He was "impressed" by the Soviet statements that Russia "sought security" against Germany. He proposed therefore a twenty- five- year treaty between the four principal powers for the demilitarization of Germany. The American proposal, however, failed to impress Molotov.4 The Western Powers were particularly disgusted with the governments of Romania and Bulgaria, where the Russians so brazenly flouted the Yalta agreements. But in order to demonstrate their friendliness and fairness, both the United States and Britain extended recognition to the governments of Austria and Hungary where the Soviet behavior was less disappointing. In fact, the Hungarian general election on November 4 was the only "free and unfettered" election that took place in the countries under Soviet occupation. It was not, of course, entirely free from Soviet interference; but at least it was a democratic election which could not have been held under Hungarys pre- war reactionary rulers. Czechoslovakia, too, had a free election, but it took place in May 1946 after the Soviet troops had evacuated the country.

It can only be surmised that Western firmness could have stopped Soviet aggressiveness. It is certain, however, that Western softness ruined whatever chances existed for saving Eastern Europe from complete Soviet domination. The West's appeasement policy toward Russia was led by the United States. Critics of the Secretary of State, James F. Byrnes, have often pointed out his inexperience in foreign affairs. Sumner Welles, for instance, spoke of Byrnes's profound ignorance of even the rudimentary facts of international life.5 Whatever his shortcomings, however, it seems that Byrnes's conduct of American foreign policy was in harmony with the public opinion then prevailing in the West, and even in accordance with the fundamental meaning of the Yalta agreements, namely, that friendship between Russia and her western neighbors should be the cornerstone of peace in Europe.

Surely there was no secret about what Russia's interpretation of "friendship" was. Western appeasement of Russia was nevertheless continued on the assumption of Byrnes's slogan that "peace breeds peace," and in the wishful thought that the Yalta principles pledging democracy and freedom to the liberated countries of Europe might with a general peace settlement somehow prevail. Byrnes, after his return from the unsuccessful London meeting of the Council of Foreign Ministers, in a speech delivered on October 31, at the New York Herald Tribune Forum, outlined the American attitude toward Eastern Europe in these words: "Far from opposing, we have sympathized with . . . the effort of the Soviet Union to draw into closer and more friendly association with her Central and Eastern European neighbors. We are fully aware of her special security interests in the arrangements made for the occupation and control of the former enemy states." Echoing Byrnes's ideas, Under- Secretary Dean Acheson, speaking at a rally sponsored by the National Council of American- Soviet Friendship in New York on November 14, said: "We understand and agree with them [the Soviet Union] that to have friendly governments along her borders is essential both for the security of the Soviet Union and for the peace of the world." In this spirit, a further act of appeasement was committed when the Big Three Foreign Ministers (Byrnes, Bevin, Molotov) met again in Moscow in December. In order to end the East- West impasse over recognition of the governments in the Soviet sphere, and thus clear the way for the peace negotiations, the conditions under which the West was ready to recognize Russia's satellites were now greatly reduced. It was agreed that in each of the still contested countries, Romania and Bulgaria, two of that country's opposition representatives should enter the government. In Romania a Soviet- British- American Three- Power Commission was appointed to act as consultant; but in Bulgaria the Soviet authorities alone were entrusted with assisting the political parties to reach agreement.

In Romania, the Three- Power Commission, which consisted of Vyshinsky and the British and American Ambassadors in Moscow, Clark Kerrand Harriman, agreed on the two representatives of the National Peasant and Liberal parties, whereupon recognition was promptly granted to the "new" government. But in Bulgaria, where Vyshinsky alone assisted, the negotiations with the opposition Agrarian and Socialist party representatives ended in failure. Thus Bulgaria remained the only country in Eastern Europe where the government was unable to meet even the greatly reduced conditions required for Western recognition. In spite of that, however, the Bulgarian government was soon recognized; the West pressed no further the controversy over recognition, turning its attention instead to the work of drafting the peace treaties.

The Moscow agreements of the Big Three Foreign Ministers on Roma- nia and Bulgaria made a mockery of the Yalta agreements. They were something like, or even worse than, Churchill's notorious percentage arrangements of 1944. But Churchill himself had long recognized the futility of his dealings with Stalin, and, when the Western governments were reluctant even to mention publicly their difficulties with the Russians, Churchill became the chief critic of the appeasement policy.

In his famous address at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, on March 5, 1946, the British ex- Premier described the"iron curtain" which had been spread across Europe from Stettin to Trieste. To halt the "expansive and proselytizing tendencies" of the Soviet Union, he urged a "fraternal association," leading eventually to common citizenship, between the United States and the British Empire. And, although Churchill did not think that Russia desired war, he warned that Russia admired nothing so much as strength. Union of the democracies and firmness toward Russia: these were indeed the essentials of the policy needed for the West's defense. But Churchill as opposition leader in the House of Commons was no more successful than he had been during the last months of his premiership, in stopping the West's appeasement of Russia.

With American demobilization the West's military strength, which was the asset Russia admired above all, melted away from Europe as Churchill had feared, while the West now focused its policy on the drafting of the first five peace treaties with former enemy states, Italy, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungaryand Finland. The irony of this period of peacemaking was that while the Western Powers were anxious to speed up work on the peace treaties in the hope that termination of the state of war and withdrawal of occupation forces would reduce Russian influence, the Russians were rapidly extending their grip over the whole of Eastern Europe, including former allied as well as former enemy countries. In two of the former enemy states, Bulgaria and Romania, sovietization made great headway behind the facade of the "National Front" coalition governments. In Hungary where alone of the Soviet- occupied countries a promising start had been made toward democracy, with the free elections of 1945, the chief aim of Soviet tactics was to destroy the Smallholders' party which represented the majority of the electorate (57 percent) in the coalition government.

Communist strategy to seize power by infiltration, terror and the splitting up of anti- Communist forces ("polarization" of the enemy, as Communist jargon called it) was not confined to the former enemy states. The pattern was basically the same everywhere: the Communists seized control of the "levers of power," in particular the security police, the army general staff and the publicity machine.6 They wiped out the independent Socialist workers, organizations by "uniting" them with the Communist parties. They crushed peasant resistance to communism by destroying the independent agrarian parties.

In Poland the target of Soviet attacks was Mikolajczyk's agrarian Polish People's party, a suppressed minority in the coalition government, but representative of the majority of the Polish people. Meanwhile, in Yugoslavia no Soviet interference was needed to promote communism: Tito was both determined and sufficiently strong to extirpate the opponents of his Communist dictatorship. The dramatic climax of Tito's unscrupulous drive against his enemies was the execution of Draza Mihailovic his rival in the partisans, war against Germany.

Only in Czechoslovakia did Communists and non- Communists continue to cooperate more or less successfully. There the governmental coalition was built on more solid foundations than elsewhere in Central and Eastern Europe, because Communists and non- Communists were in agreement on basic points of national policy: to make Czechoslovakia into a homogeneous Slav state, and to carry out radical socialistic reforms. This agreement was enhanced by the fact that potential opposition to the government had already been suppressed prior to the formation of the coalition. The Czechoslovak Agrarian party, once the strongest in the country, was suppressed after liberation for its guilt of collaboration with the Germans, although the party as a whole was certainly not guilty. Thus, the political force of the Agrarians, the party of the peasants that is, which everywhere else in Central and Eastern Europe was the chief antagonist of the Communists in the coalition governments, was eliminated from the Czechoslovak political scene.

The cohesion of the Prague coalition was strengthened especially by agreement on the expulsion of the non- Slavs from Czechoslovakia (about one- quarter of the country's post- war population). The expulsion of Germans and Hungarians was a most popular program of exalted nationalism; a great many Czech and Slovak nationalists, who found themselves in agreement with the Communists on this issue, were prone to overlook basic differences separating them from the Communists. Likewise, the Czech nationalists were further encouraged to trust the Communists on the strength of a common position with regard to the Slovak question.

When troubles with the Communists began in Slovakias politics, prior even to similar occurrences in the Czech lands, stronghold of the Communist party, these troubles were explained by the Prague government as being merely the result of reactionary influences among the Slovaks. There were such influences, no doubt. But a great many Czechs were also disposed to accept such sweeping explanations mainly because they were irritated by feuds over the scope of Slovakias autonomy, intertwined as these feuds were with the old dispute as to whether the Czechs and Slovaks were one nation or two. The Communists themselves followed opportunistic tactics concerning this delicate issue. Courting the favors of the Slovaks after liberation in 1945, they stood for greater Slovak autonomy in a revision of Czech- Slovak relations along the lines of a federal union, which was a program popular with masses of Slovaks hostile to the recreation of old, Czech- dominated Czechoslovakia. Following the 1946 elections, however, the Communists changed tactics when their popular rivals in Slovakia the Democratic party, a creation chiefly of former Agrarians opposed to communism, took the lead as champions of Slovak autonomy. The change of tactics consisted of switching Communist support to the Czech nationalists, favoring centralism and less autonomy for the Slovaks in line with Benes's conception of a single Czechoslovak nation. This change of tactics, in turn, may well have strengthened the Czechs' confidence in Communist loyalty. Thus Czech- Slovak rivalry brought grist only to the Communist mill.7 In accordance with their divide- and- conquer tactics, the Communists evidently did not mind if tension developed between Czechs and Slovaks. And tension reached a high point in 1947 with the hanging of Tiso, former president of "independent" Slovakia the capital punishment being favored mainly by the Czech nationalists and by the Communists who were setting the pace in executing war criminals everywhere. Many, but not all, of these sentences will be upheld before the bar of history.

While the Communists were leading the campaign of retribution for crimes committed during the Hitler era, they were themselves perpetrating criminal acts. In spite of official tact toward Soviet Russia, the Western governments could not help but notice violations of the Yalta agreements in the Soviet sphere of influence. Western protests against rigged elections, arbitrary arrests, unfair trials, coercion, intimidation, violence and disregard of international obligations in the Soviet satellites soon became a matter of Western diplomatic routine. The battle of diplomatic notes was on, while the Big Four Foreign Ministers worked on the first five peace treaties.

The peace conference convened in Paris on July 29, 1946. The Big Four made all the decisions, both before and during the conference. The peace terms were dictated, very much as after the First World War, although the vanquished were invited to attend the conference, and allowed to state their case.

The first five peace treaties did not tackle the central problem of Europe, which was Germany. They did not even deal fully with the problem of the smaller nations of Central Europe, inasmuch as Austria was not included in the peace settlement. The chief causes of past enmity between the Danubian countries, the territorial disputes between Hungaryand the former Little Entente, were, however, partly covered by the conference. The Hungarian peace delegation made a modest attempt to achieve territorial revision of the unjust Trianon Treaty, but was lucky to get off with no more punishment than the loss of some more Hungarian territory, the so- called Bratislava bridgehead, which Czechoslovakia coveted.

The transfer to Czechoslovakia of the Bratislava bridgehead, Hungarian-populated as it was, violated the ethnic principle; moreover the incorporation of additional Hungarians into Czechoslovakia lacked logic, since simultaneously the Czechs were pressing for the expulsion of those Hungarians who had already been incorporated into Czechoslovakia after the First World War. The Hungarians fought desperately against expulsion. If the Czechs wanted to expel the Hungarians, so Hungarys peace delegation argued, they should also return the land on which those half a million or so Hungarians (mostly peasants) had lived from time immemorial. But the Czech Foreign Minister, Jan Masaryk, retorted haughtily: "Who won the war, the United Nations, or Hungary"8 The Western Powers went to the rescue of the Hungarians, and the Soviet- supported Czech proposal to expel the Hungarians from Czechoslovakia was finally defeated.

There was a brief flare- up of the old Hungaro- Romanian controversy over the ownership of Transylvania and the future of the close to two million Hungarians under Romanian rule. The armistice of 1944 had pledged Transylvania, "or the greater part thereof," to Romania, and the Hungarians were trying to get at least part of it. But the Russians backed up the Romanians, with the result that the Hungarian claims were ruled out. The Hungarians kept silent about their half a million co- nationals in Yugoslavia, in deference to Tito, who was then thought of as Stalin's formidable Balkan lieutenant. Nor was mention made, of course, of the 100,000 Hungarians living in the former Czechoslovak Ruthenia, who since 1945 had been subjects of Stalin's Russia. Thus the Paris Peace Conference, with Soviet Russia present, confirmed essentially the territorial provisions of the Trianon Treaty which the Western Powers had drawn up after the First World War in Soviet Russia's absence. Then, in the name of international justice, the Communists had denounced the treaty as a work of bourgeois imperialism. Now, in a frenzy of Pan- Slav nationalism, the Russian Stalinists and their Slavic satellites believed the provisions to be too good for the non- Slav Hungarians.

Vanquished Bulgaria was luckier than Hungary She was allowed to retain Southern Dobrudja, a territory which she had obtained from Romania with Hitler's aid. Bulgaria's right to Southern Dobrudja, based on the ethnic principle, was no stronger than Hungarys territorial demands. But Hungarycould only appeal to the sense of justice of the peace conference, while Bulgaria had more realizable assets to call upon. She was a Slavic country, her regime was already firmly under Communist control, and therefore she enjoyed the support of Soviet Russia.

Moreover, the former owner of Southern Dobrudja, Romania, did not question Bulgaria's right to that territory. Romania was satisfied with the whole of Transylvania, which she had regained from Hungary The transfer of Transylvania was to compensate Romania also for the loss of Bessarabia, which, since the First World War, had changed hands four times between Romania and Russia.

Thus, Hungaryalone, among Hitler's former Danubian satellites, bore the consequences of defeat without any mitigation: but then, Hungary unlike the other Nazi satellites, had no chance to escape the opprobrium of her association with Germany. Slovakiaand Croatia could hide their Nazi record behind the victory- facade of resuscitated Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia; Romania and Bulgaria could invoke their participation in the last phase of the war against Hitler; but Hungaryhad been stigmatized as the last fighting ally of Nazi Germany, and was dealt with accordingly.

Among the Danubian victors Yugoslavia, with her annexation of Venezia Giulia, made the most significant territorial gain. The Italo- Yugoslav battle for Trieste, however, ended in a tie. Trieste was proclaimed a "free territory," a very sound status for a city whose port is the natural outlet to the sea for all the landlocked Central European countries, notably Austria, Hungaryand Czechoslovakia. Under the prevailing post- war circumstances, however, Trieste could not fulfill her natural role as a "free territory." And she held her potentially sound status only until 1954, when she was returned to Italy by virtue of an Italo- Yugoslav agreement, with the blessing of the Western Powers.

The peace treaties were signed in Paris on February 10, 1947, but the expectation that they would be instrumental in reducing Soviet influence in Central Europe proved entirely unrealistic. In Hungaryand Romania, even the peace treaties entitled the Russians to keep military units to maintain "lines of communication" to their zone of occupation in Austria. But no treaties, however perfect, could have forced the Russians out of the Danube Valley anyway. The Communists, far from withdrawing, were stepping up their offensive throughout Central and Eastern Europe.

The Western Powers themselves began to realize the futility of their policy of appeasement. In January 1947, General George C. Marshall succeeded Byrnes, and under the new Secretary of State American foreign policy began to change from appeasement to containment. On March 12, 1947, the Truman Doctrine was announced, which pledged aid to Greece and Turkey in particular, and support to free peoples in general "who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressure." Secretary Marshall's Harvard address on June 5 set in motion the European economy recovery program known as the Marshall Plan Theoretically the Marshall Planextended American economic aid to all European nations. Its avowed purpose, however, was "the revival of a working economy in the world so as to permit the emergence of political and social conditions in which free institutions can exist." This was a direct challenge to the Soviet purpose of destroying what the West called "free institutions,"and it was small wonder that the Soviet Union neither participated herself, nor allowed her satellites to participate, in the American aid program.

The East European countries did not benefit from the slowly changing Western policy. On the contrary, as the East- West tension mounted, Soviet Russia rushed through what remained to be done to complete the conquest of Eastern Europe.

True, American aid saved Greece, where revival of civil war in 1946, with support rendered to the Communist guerrillas by the three northern neighbors (Albania, Yugoslavia and Bulgaria) , had created a critical situation. American aid also strengthened Turkey's power of resistance against Soviet Russia. Elsewhere, however, Western aid against Communist aggression was as a rule limited to notes of protest.

In Hungarythe decisive moment, portending the end of the democratic prelude to Communist dictatorship, came in February 1947, when Béla Kovács general secretary of the Smallholders' party, was arrested by the Soviet authorities on charges of reactionary conspiracy. Toward the end of May a Communist coup overthrew the government of the Smallholders, premier, Ferenc Nagy, who was also accused by the Communists of being involved in this alleged conspiracy. But in fact, the Smallholders' party was not involved in any conspiracy, and the accusation against it by the Communists was a blow against democratic elements. For though the party was not altogether immune to reactionary influences, its bulk was made up of peasants who were stalwart supporters of agrarian reform, the backbone of Hungarian democracy in the making. Premier Nagy was vacationing in Switzerland at the time of the coup and he was called to return in order to clear himself of the Communist charges. With the choice of becoming a martyr or an exile, he chose the latter. His successor was an obscure figure of his own party. But the country's real boss was now Mátyás Rákosi one of the outstanding figures of international communism and a self- confessed practitioner of so- called "salami tactics," which consisted of slicing up the Opposition piece by piece until all opposition was destroyed.

Following the Communist coup in Hungary new elections were held in the summer of 1947. In spite of intimidation and fraud, the Communist party gained only 22 percent of the votes (as against 17 percent in 1945), while the ad hoc organized opposition, lucky to have survived the pre- election terror, the Independence party and the Catholic Democratic People's party, received 30 percent. The remaining votes went to the Smallholders and the National Peasants, who, purged of their democratic leaders, became mere tools of the Communists in the "coalition." Soon all the opposition parties, harassed by the Communists, were disbanded, and their leaders fled to the West.

In August- September 1947, the spotlight was turned on the rule of The New Central Europe 182

terror in Bulgaria, when the peasant leader, Nikola Petkov, was tried and executed. Dimitrov, the country's Communist dictator, later declared he could not pardon Petkov because the Western Powers had intervened in his behalf, and this constituted interference with Bulgaria's sovereignty. Implied in Dimitrov's statement was the warning that Western protests would not deter the Communists from their chosen path, quite the contrary.

The next step in Communist strategy was announced on October 5, with the formation of a Communist Information Bureau (Cominform). One of Stalin's right- hand men, Andrei Zhdanov, was secretary general of the new organization; and the members included not only the Communist parties of the Eastern bloc, Soviet Russia, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary Yugoslavia, Romania and Bulgaria, but also those of France and Italy. Thus did the Communist International (Comintern), which had been disbanded during the Second World War, reappear under a new name. The establishment of the Cominform indicated also the vanishing importance of the Slav Committee; the accent in Moscow's policy was shifting from Slav solidarity to Communist solidarity.

In October the aged leader of the Romanian Peasant party, Iuliu Maniu, was put on trial, to be sentenced to life imprisonment. In the same month Mikolajczyk was accused by the Communists of being an "agent of Western imperialists" and he fled from Poland. In December, Michael King of Romania, then a figurehead only, abdicated and left the country. Thus the last of the kingdoms in the Soviet orbit fell. (The British saved, in Greece, one of the five pre- war Balkan kingdoms.) Romania, proclaimed a republic, followed the example of Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Albania, and Hungary which had been a kingdom without a king ever since 1919. But republicanism, the cherished ideal of so many democrats in these former monarchies, did not expand the rule of democracy. Communist control over the satellites of the Soviet sphere of influence was being drawn tighter and tighter. Only one country, Czechoslovakia, seemed to be able to get along with Russia without succumbing to Soviet domination, as had once been hoped for all the countries of Central and Eastern Europe.

There is no evidence to show that the Russians chose Czechoslovakia for tactical reasons to be the last on their timetable of conquest. The fact, however, that Czechoslovakia was conquered last gave Russia all the tactical advantages of a brilliant strategy. Of all the countries in the post- war Soviet sphere of influence, Czechoslovakia, with her reputation for democracy, enjoyed the greatest popularity in the West. The apparent success of the Czech democrats in cooperating with both native and Russian Communists gave, therefore, many Western observers the false impression that the Czechs succeeded where others failed precisely because they were democratic. Conversely, in countries with reactionary and Fascist records, the failure of non- Communists to work in harmony with the Soviet Union was attributed to continued reactionary influence.

The Czech democrats themselves were not quite innocent of spreading false impressions. They made great efforts in the West to keep alive Czechoslovakia's reputation as a "bastion of democracy and peace," though, in cooperation with the Communists, they were guilty of some of the worst crimes ever committed against democracy in Central Europe. With the persecution and expulsion of the non- Slav ethnic minorities, post- war Czechoslovakia obliterated T. G. Masaryk's humanistic traditions. The Czechs did not worry unnecessarily, either, over the tragic destiny of their fellow democrats in neighboring countries; instead, they continued to propagate optimism concerning cooperation with Soviet Russia They seemed to believe that the Czech Communists were not like other Communists, and that the Soviet Union had no reason to behave toward their country as she did toward others, because Czechoslovakia was a sincere friend and ally of the Soviet Union.

Czechoslovakia had a Communist premier in the person of Klement Gottwald, and, in proportion to the country's population, the strongest Communist party in the non- Communist world. In 1946 the Communists won the greatest success ever recorded in free elections: 38 percent of the total poll, 40 percent in the Czech lands, and 30 percent in Slovakia From the summer of 1947 on, however, both the Czecho-Slovak Communists and the Soviet Union began to behave toward Czechoslovakia as they had elsewhere. The crisis started when Czechoslovakia first accepted, then, under Soviet pressure, turned down, the invitation to a preliminary conference in Paris on the Marshall Plan Soon an alleged reactionary conspiracy was discovered in Slovakia The Communists, realizing the decline of their popularity, began to pack the police department in anticipation of the new elections due in the summer of 1948. The crisis reached its climax in February 1948, with the Communists prepared for a showdown, while the non- Communists were confused and paralysed. On February 21, the non- Communist members of the Prague government, with the exception of the Social Democrats resigned in protest against the Communist seizure of the police department. The Communists swung into action, without concealing their determination to seize power by force if necessary. In an atmosphere of imminent civil war, on February 25, President Benes appointed a new Gottwald government which satisfied the Communists. Benes's choice lay between yielding and civil war. He knew that in case of civil war the Russians would not hesitate to interfere if, as seemed probable, Communist success were in jeopardy. On the other hand, from the West Benes could expect hardly more help than diplomatic notes. In fact, after the Prague coup, the Western Powers not only protested individually, but also issued a joint American- British- French declaration, the first of this type, branding the events in Czechoslovakia as placing "in jeopardy the very existence of the principles of liberty." Jan Masaryk remained foreign minister until March 10, when the free world was shocked to learn of his suicide. Rumor reported him murdered by the Communists. Rumors of the same type had been heard when Count Paul Teleki, the wartime premier of Hungary committed suicide; at that time the Nazis were suspected of murder. The fact of Masaryk's suicide, unlike that of Teleki's, has never been proven to everybody's satisfaction. Yet the assassination theory can be discounted. It can safely be assumed that both Masaryk and Teleki ended their own lives, in utter exhaustion and desperation, when they realized the complete failure of their respective policies.9 The failure of the Czech democrats' pro- Soviet policy, which took the life of Jan Masaryk, also felled Edvard Benes, who was the architect of that policy. Broken and sick, President Benes vanished shortly after the February surrender. He resigned the presidency on June 7, and died the following September 3. "His passing symbolized the end of Czecho- slovak democracy," Western comment said.|deg. Actually, the Czech democracy which the West had learned to respect and admire had not been revived since the Second World War. It was a victim of the war.

"We made no mistake," said the Czech democrats after the Prague coup. "In the last resort it was two factors which we could not control which decided the fate of our country: the increasing tension between the U.S.S.R. and the Western Powers, and the dynamism of Soviet imperialism." In substantial agreement with this analysis, some observers thought that Russia acted to bring Czechoslovakia into line with her other satellites under pressure of the gathering crisis between Tito's Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union. Soviet control of Czechoslovakia, it was said, had to be secured before the showdown with Tito.

The Tito affair broke into the open only on June 28, 1948, when it was announced that the Yugoslav Communist party had been expelled from the Cominform; earlier serious clashes between Tito and the Russians had, however, as we know now, coincided with the Czech crisis.'2 Tito had displayed impatience with Stalin's tutelage, and the Soviet dictator was determined to cure his Balkan disciple of his ambitions for independence. The Tito affair may well have influenced the timing of the Czech coup. Or possibly Stalin's expectation, in the winter of 1947-48, that the cold war between East and West might become hot may have impelled him to believe that a showdown with both Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia was urgent. In any event, if the Russians could not stand a Communist independent Yugoslavia in their sphere of influence, they could tolerate even less a non- Communist independent Czechoslovakia, however friendly and cooperative.

The blindness of Czech democrats to the approaching catastrophe, despite the series of Communist seizures of power around them, was caused mainly by their great faith in Slav cooperation. Hubert Ripka, for instance, one of the leading Czech democrats, on November 7, 1947, just before the Communist coup, expressed his faith in Soviet Russias respect for the "independent Slav nations administering their own affairs in their own way, according to their own law and their own national tradition." He paid the customary tributes to the Soviet revolution and the Soviet regime, declaring that the Czechoslovaks were "as equally convinced Russophiles as Sovietophiles."3 After the Communist coup, Ripka stated in apology: "If the democrats of our country had allowed themselves to be drawn into an anti- Soviet policy . . . such a policy would never have been approved by the population.... The people did turn against Russia . . . only after they had seen for themselves that Moscow, in spite of the friendship of which we had given her so many proofs, had decided to put an end to our independence."'4 It is true that the war had fired to unprecedented intensity the traditional pro- Russian sentiment of the Czechs. But their democratic leaders, too, were whipping up these feelings of Slav friendship for Soviet Russia And most painful of all, their aspirations and motivations were not firmly anchored in the ideals of democracy. Of that, Benes's Russian policy was a case in point.

The New Central Europe