THE END OF SOVIET EXPANSION IN EASTERN EUROPE (1945-1993) AND
EASTERN BLOC WAS THE GROUP OF SOCIALIST STATES IN CENTRAL AND EASTERN
EUROPE.
Joseph
Stalin and Kliment Voroshilov, was a prominent Soviet military officer
and politician during the Stalin era. He was one of the original five
Marshals of the Soviet Union (the highest military rank of the Soviet
Union), along with Chief of the General Staff of the Red Army Alexander
Yegorov (military), and three senior commanders, Vasily Blyukher, Semyon
Budyonny, and Mikhail Tukhachevsky.Map
showing sectors of occupation of Berlin.Allied-occupied Germany,British
(green), French (blue), American (orange) and Soviet (red) occupation
zones. Saar Protectorate (light blue) in the west under the control of
France.Berlin
is the quadripartite area shown within the red Soviet zone. Bremen
consists of the two orange American exclaves in the British sector.Upon
the defeat of Nazi Germany in World War II, the victorious Allies
asserted their joint authority and sovereignty over 'Germany as a
whole', defined as all territories of the former German Reich which lay
west of the Oder–Neisse line, having declared the extinction of Nazi
Germany at the death of Adolf Hitler.
Soviet Union Takes Over Eastern Europe After World War II
After
World War II, the Soviet Union extended its control into Eastern
Europe. It took over the governments in Albania, Bulgaria,
Czechoslovakia, Hungary, East Germany, Poland, Romania and Yugoslavia.
Only Greece and occupied Austria remained free. The Baltic
countries Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania were made into republics. Even
Finland was partly controlled by the Soviets. The Communist Party was
also strong in Italy and France.Cause for cold war,Soviet expansion in
Eastern Europe was massive cause of the cold war. Over twenty million
Russians died during the Second World War, so Stalin said he wanted to
create a buffer zoneof friendly states around Russia to make sure that
Russia could never be invaded again.Stalin was planning to take the
whole of Eastern Europe. During the war, communists from the occupied
countries of Eastern Europe escaped to Moscow and set up Communist
governments in exile there, and as the Red Army drove the Germans back,
it occupied large areas of Eastern Europe and, once the war was over the
USSR never left the countries it had taken in the war, this occupation
created Stalin desired buffer zone.This large and fast expansion of the
USSR and its allies scared the USA and tension grew due to the fear of
further expansion west toward America by the USSR. It caused conflict
between the two superpowers because of the vast ideological differences.
One of the main beliefs of communism is that capitalism is inherently
bad and posed a threat to the working class. The communists view all
capitalist nations as possible enemies. According to them, capitalism
will eventually destroy itself and it is their duty to help it along.
They refused cooperation between themselves and capitalist nations
ideologically.The USSR’s expansion is in my opinion a very important, if
not the most important cause of the cold war. It scared the USA and
empowered the USSR, it caused the USA to seriously think about the
threat of communism from the east and its own defences against
communism, it caused immense secrecy between the two countries, America
didn’t know where Russia was planning on going and Russia didn’t know if
America was going to stop them.Soviet
expansion in Eastern Europe,twenty million Russians died during the
second world war, so Stalin said he wanted a buffer zone of friendly
states around Russia to make sure that Russia could never be invaded
again.Stalin was planning the takeover
of Eastern Europe. During the war, Communists from the occupied
countries of Eastern Europe escaped to Moscow and set up Communist
governments in exile there. As the Red Army drove the Nazis back, it
occupied large areas of Eastern Europe and Churchill in the so-called
percentages agreement - agreed that Eastern Europe could be a Soviet
"sphere of influence".The
Eastern Bloc was the group of socialist states of Central and Eastern
Europe, generally the Soviet Union and the countries of the Warsaw
Pact.The terms Communist Bloc and Soviet Bloc were also used to denote
groupings of states aligned with the Soviet Union, although these terms
might include states outside.In the countries that the Red Army
"liberated", communist-dominated governments took power. The Communists
made sure that they controlled the army, set up a secret police force,
and began to arrest their opponents. Non-Communists were gradually
beaten, murdered, executed and terrified out of power. By 1949, all the
governments of Eastern Europe, except Yugoslavia, were hard line
Stalinist regimes.The
Communists made sure that they controlled the army, set up a secret
police force, and began to arrest their opponents. Non-Communists were
gradually beaten, murdered, executed and terrified out of power. By
1949, all the governments of Eastern Europe, except Yugoslavia, were
hard line Stalinist regimes.In
1946, in a speech at Fulton in the USA, Churchill declared that an Iron
Curtain had come down across Europe, and that Soviet power was growing
and had to be stopped. Stalin called Churchill's speech a "declaration
of war". In 1947, Stalin set up Comintern which is an alliance of
Communist countries designed to make sure they obeyed Soviet rule.Another
massive cause for the start of the cold war was the Marshall plan.The
United States became alarmed with the growing of communism in Europe and
set up the Marshall Plan in order to control the spread of communism.
The Marshall Plan was an economic support program funded by the United
States. They gave money to the war torn democratic countries in order to
rebuild their economy. They did not give money to the Soviet Union and
any of its allies. The Unites States’ motivation for doing this was to
provide themselves with trading partners in the east and to economically
exclude the Soviet Union.The Second World War, the Marshal met in
captivity methods of warfare during the Civil War, throwing German tanks
on infantry and cavalry. This is what Marshal Zhukov wrote about
Voroshilov: "He remained so dilettante in military matters until the end
and never knew them deeply and seriously, but he held a high position,
was popular, had a claim to consider himself completely military .In a
critical time for the Soviet Union, when the Germans took Leningrad into
a tight ring, Voroshilov stayed on as commander of the Leningrad front
for less than a month. Stalin recalled Voroshilov and sent Zhukov to
save the situation. Stalin understood that there was a mortal danger not
only for the country, but also for him personally. Friendship of
friendship, Voroshilov held high posts throughout the war, even Soviet
people perceived this mediocre person as a symbol .In 1953-1960
Voroshilov held the post of head of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet
of the Soviet Union. Then he supported the anti-party group of Molotov,
Malenkov, Kaganovich and Shepilov who joined them, who wanted to drop
Nikita Khrushchev and make him Minister of Agriculture. Voroshilov's
position is clear. Khrushchev encroached on the "holy" figure of Stalin,
his close friend. Over time, Khrushchev said that Voroshilov in a
conversation with him complained of "I feel like a beaten dog."
Commenting on this, Khrushchev remarked: "And then I felt myself on the
horse .From oblivion Voroshilov pulled Leonid Brezhnev. In 1972, the
destroyed Voroshilov Museum was rebuilt, which was in the house where he
was born .Little is known about Voroshilov's personal life. His wife
was Jewish - Golda Gorbman. The couple did not have their own children,
they brought up their adoptive son. Let us recall another episode of the
pre-war life of Kliment Voroshilov. Somehow he had to dance at a
reception with a high-ranking foreign person.
Poland,
17th September, 1939, Members of the Russian army on horseback near the
Polish on the march with their guns over their shoulders as they cross
the Polish frontier during the Soviet invasion at the start of World War
Two.The
Soviet invasion of Poland was a military operation by the Soviet Union
without a formal declaration of war. On 17 September 1939, the Soviet
Union invaded Poland from the east, sixteen days after Germany invaded
Poland from the west. Subsequent military operations lasted for the
following 20 days and ended on 6 October 1939 with the two-way division
and annexation of the entire territory of the Second Polish Republic by
Germany and the Soviet Union.
One
of the most easily overlooked, yet momentous short wars of the 20th
century was the swift-moving clash between the post-World War I Polish
Republic and Russia’s brand-new Bolshevik regime of Vladimir Ilyich
Lenin. Reaching a climax during the summer of 1920, the Russo-Polish War
is often regarded as the final episode of the Russian Civil War. In
fact, it was much more at once a reflection of the age-old enmity
between two Slavic neighbors and a Marxist crusade bent on varying the
torch of revolution into the heart of Europe. The campaign featured a
remarkable cast of characters on both sides and mixed ferocious cavalry
charges with early blitzkrieg tactics in quest of exceptional
objectives.The roots of the war ran deep. For a century and a quarter,
the once-formidable Polish nation was a political nonentity, having been
dismembered by Prussia, Austria and Russia in the infamous partitions
of 1772, 1793 and 1795. Three national insurrections had failed to
dislodge the occupying powers; severe Germanization and Russification
efforts, aimed at the destruction of the Polish language and culture,
were imposed upon the population during the 19th century. Although such
campaigns had little effect, by the turn of the century only the most
optimistic Polish patriots could still dream of independence.Yet World
War I provided exactly the right set of circumstances for the Poles. On
November 6, 1916, Austria-Hungary and Germany, in a desperate bid to
ensure the loyalty of their Polish populations, jointly agreed to the
formation of a semi-autonomous ‘Kingdom of Poland.’ In Paris, France,
Polish spokesmen beat the ears of Allied statesmen on behalf of an
independent Poland, but none of the Western powers cared to antagonize
their imperial Russian ally, which was opposed to such a move. In 1917,
however, Russia had dropped into a violent vortex of chaos and
revolution. Partly in consequence to that development, the Fourteen
Points for peace drafted by United States President Woodrow Wilson
included the creation of an independent Poland and its recognition as
‘an allied belligerent nation’ as of June 3, 1918. On October 7, 1918,
with the Central Powers clearly on the brink of defeat, the Regency
Council in Warsaw declared Polish independence. After the guns of war
fell silent on November 11, the three torn pieces of the Polish nation
were triumphantly reunited.The representatives of France, Great Britain,
Italy and the united States met in the mirrored halls of Versailles in
1919 to dismember the German and Austro-Hungarian empires and set the
world right. Russia, the erstwhile ally that in November 1917 had
established the world’s first Communist government, was shunned by the
Western Allies; Lenin’s decision to make a separate peace with Germany
at Brest-Litovsk in the spring of 1918 would not be forgiven just then.
Moscow’s absence form the Versailles conference later proved to be a
costly blunder. While the Allies were able to produce a tentative
settlement for Poland’s western frontiers, they had no means of
establishing any agree-upon border between the new Polish state and the
Russian colossus.The resurgent Poles, meanwhile, quickly established a
Western-style parliamentary government and chose a 51-year-old romantic,
a conspiratorial and avidly Russophobic military hero named Jozef
Klemens Pilsudski as chief of state. Pilsudski, a longtime member of the
Polish Socialist Party’s right wing, had always placed the achievement
of Polish independence ahead of the social reforms advocated by some of
his more ideological colleagues. As a young man he had felt the
brutality of tsarist justice, spending five years in Siberian exile for
revolutionary activity. During World War I, he organized and commanded a
Polish legion under Austrian auspices on the Eastern Front, convinced
that Russia was the chief enemy of his country’s independence. He soon
became disillusioned with vague Austrian promises in favor of Polish
independence, however, and refused to take an oath of allegiance to the
Central Powers. Arrested and imprisoned in Magdeburg for two years, he
was released on November 10, 1918, and returned home to be acclaimed as a
national hero.Pilsudski possessed an iron will and a quick mind. He
clearly regarded the new Polish army as his special province, and
himself as the guarantor of independence. The republic’s forces, still
motley and ill-equipped, would soon be put to the test as the commander
in chief turned his attention eastward.The re-establishment of Poland’s
pre-partition 1772 frontiers, which included substantial parts of the
Ukraine and Belorussia (‘White Russia,’ now Belarus), was a matter of
top priority for Pilsudski. To accomplish that goal, the veteran
revolutionary resurrected the old Polish idea of federalism, first
championed in the Middle Ages by the kings of the Jagiellonian dynasty.
Put simply, the plan called for an East European federation consisting
of the independent republics of the Ukraine, Belorussia and Lithuania,
bound together with Poland. The latter nation would, according to the
Pilsudski scheme, play the leading role.This incredibly ambitious
designed was destined to disintegrate almost immediately. The
Lithuanians, former partners in the old Polish kingdom, were intensely
nationalistic, after their own long submergence in the Russian empire,
and they zealously sought to protect their own newly proclaimed
independence in the wake of the tsar’s fall. They wanted no part of
Pilsudski’s federalist notions. The Ukrainians, while keenly desiring
independence, were naturally suspicious of the Polish leader’s motives,
realizing how much of the Ukraine was intended for incorporation within
the Polish state. The Belorussians, for centuries caught in the
crossroads of Roman Catholic Poland and Orthodox Russia, had no
outstanding national consciousness yet and were frankly interested in
neither in independence nor in Pilsudski’s proposals of union. The
Polish argument that none of those three nations could stand next to
Russia alone fell on deaf ears. To all three of the potential federal
members, it appeared that they might be exchanging the former Russian
yoke for a Polish one.The Western Allies, too, were decidedly against
Pilsudski’s plans. Both Britain and France accused the Polish chief of
state of imperialism at Russia’s expense, and they urged Poland to limit
its eastern frontiers to the farthest extent of clear-cut Polish
ethnicity. As for Russian Bolshevism, London and Paris saw that not as a
threat, but a temporary disease, soon to be destroyed by the
anti-Communist White forces, which the Allies supported in the
ten-raging Russian Civil War.The new Bolshevik government, besieged by a
multitude of armies commanded by a politically diverse collection of
generals ranging from tsarist aristocrats to disillusioned socialists to
provincial warlords, had its hands full at the time. The White forces
of Generals Anton Denikin, Nikolai Yudenich and Piotr Wrangel, and
Admiral Aleksandr Kolchak, supported by Western and Japanese armies and
funds, had to be stopped. The Reds had little time in 1918 to worry
about Polish schemes to expand on Russia’s western periphery.Lenin’s
dynamic associate Leon Trotsky organized the Red Army to meet the White
threat. By using powerful idealism awakened in the revolution, and
invovling fears that the landowning aristocrats might return to power,
Trotsky built a formidable force of workers, peasants and ex-soldiers of
the old imperial army, complete with a tough cavalry corps, to protect
the Bolshevik regime. Throughout 1918and 1919, the Reds turned the
tables on their foes, one by one.At that moment of chaos and civil war
in Russia, the Poles struck. In February 1919, Pilsudski sent his troops
northeast, occupying as much territory as possible for the purpose of
presenting a fait accompli to the Allied Supreme Council. That body
would then be forced to recognize Poland’s expanded eastern
boundaries.The Polish forces encountered little resistance and advanced
rapidly, soon capturing Wilno (Vilius), a historically Polish city, from
the Lithuanians, who had proclaimed it the capital of their new
republic. By the autumn of 1919, the Polish red-and-white banner was
flying over large sections of Belorussia and the western Galician part
of the Ukraine was well.Pilsudski ordered a halt at that point, his
intelligence service having informed him that the Whites under General
Denikin were pressuring Moscow from the south and could possibly capture
the seat of the Bolshevik regime. The Poles surmised that a White
government bent on the reconstruction of the old empire would prove more
recalcitrant than the hard-pressed Bolsheviks. Denikin was willing to
allow Poland to exist up to the borders of Privislanski Kaj, a former
Russian province carved from Poland, in exchange for Polish
participation in an anti-Communist crusade, but since those terms would
deprive Poland of half the territory Pilsudski wanted, the Polish
commander in chief rejected that and other White offers. Although
Pilsudski secretly negotiated with the Reds for an acceptable eastern
frontier, he was by no means convinced of Lenin’s sincerity.In December,
the British foreign minister, Lord George Nathaniel Curzon, proposed a
frontier that roughly corresponded to the ethnic limits of Poland but
failed to include the two predominantly Polish cities of Lwow and Wilno.
Ironically, the ‘Curzon Line,’ as it was later dubbed, was to become
the eastern border of post-World War II Poland. The border proposed by
the British, although never meant to be a final frontier, was rejected
by the Poles, for they had already pushed beyond it.When it became
evident to Pilsudski that the Bolsheviks had turned the tide in the
civil war and the Whites appeared doomed, Polish-Soviet negotiations
were broken off and the Poles prepared for another thrust into
Belorussia and the Ukraine. Such an action, the Poles knew, would be
tantamount to a full-blown anti-Soviet war.
Accordingly
at the end of September Horthy sent a secret mission to Stalin to seek
an Armistice. Stalin was not unreceptive but called for a return to
Hungary's 1938 borders and for her to declare war on Germany. Informed
by the SS Intelligence of what was in the offing Hitler again intervened. ForOperation Panzerfaust ,he
called upon the man whose career had already seen him free Mussolini
and try to kill Tito - Otto Skorzeny. In October Skorzeny kidnapped
Horthy's surviving son the same day he announced the armistice. The
armistice was repudiated and Skorzeny would drive 4 King Tigers into
Buda castle to capture Horthy. He would later be forced to abdicate in
exchange for a promise that his sons life would be spared.
How did the Soviets treat Germans after WWII?
Following
World War I, the victors created nearly a dozen new nations in Eastern
Europe. These nations were supposed to become democracies, but they
would need time to do this. In the 1930s, time ran out. Ethnic
differences, political corruption, and finally
the Great Depression undermined the infant democracies.During World War
II, Eastern Europe was caught between Nazi Germany and the Soviet
Union. Several Eastern European countries Hungary, Romania, and
Bulgariaaligned themselves with the Nazis. Nazi troops overran most of
the rest of Eastern Europe in the first years of the war. (Troops of
Fascist Italy took over Albania.) Some Eastern Europeans joined
resistance groups to fight the Nazis. The strongest forces emerged in
Yugoslavia and Albania, led by communists. By the war's end in 1945, the
Soviet Union's Red Army occupied all of Eastern Europe (except
Yugoslavia and Albania).Shortly before Germany surrendered, U.S.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston
Churchill, and Soviet communist dictator Joseph Stalin met at Yalta, a
resort in the Soviet Union. The Allied leaders discussed terms for the
German surrender and the future of Eastern Europe.ll
Eastern European countries established a social security system. It
included government health insurance, welfare services, and pensions. In
most countries, men could retire as early as 60; the retirement age for
women was generally a few years earlier.The
rate of violent crime was low. The streets were safe. But crimes of
corruption, such as bribery, flourished. People paid off officials and
even shop clerks to get ahead in line or get an item in short supply.
Theft was a problem for items that were in short supply. For example,
car owners routinely removed their windshield wipers when they parked
their cars. Otherwise, the wipers might be stolen and replacement parts
were hard to find.Eastern
Bloc media and propaganda was controlled directly by each country's
Communist party, which controlled the state media, censorship and
propaganda organs. State and party ownership of print, television and
radio media served as an important manner in which to control
information and society in light of Eastern Bloc leaderships viewing
even marginal groups of opposition intellectuals as a potential threat
to the bases underlying Communist power therein.Circumvention of
dissemination controls occurred to some degree through samizdat and
limited reception of western radio and television broadcasts. In
addition, some regimes heavily restricted the flow of information from
their countries to outside of the Eastern Bloc by heavily regulating the
travel of foreigners and segregating approved travellers from the
domestic population.It
depended on rank much of the time. The Russians were intimidated by
rank. Most General officers were treated fairly, with the exception of
Gen Wiedling who was the defender of Berlin and FM von Saucken, who was a
true Prussian aristocrat, was crippled for life in Lubyanka prison. The
Russians hated aristocracy. SS General Wilhelm Mohnke, who was the
leader of Hitler’s bodyguard, spent ten years in solitary confinement.
FM von Paulus, the leader of the 6th Army in Stalingrad was a broken and
embittered man who converted to Communism. Gen von Seydlitz, the German
hero of Demyansk, also converted to Communism and turned on the Germans
in the last year of the war, using his acumen to assist the Soviets in
defeating the Germans and training Russian and Free German men to wear
German uniforms and confuse the Germans with false orders.Stalin
declared that German prisoners would be held as slave labor until the
Soviet Union was repaired by their efforts. German prisoner were often
made to parade by the thousands through Red Square. After the parade
there would be hundreds of dead prisoners littering the streets, dead
from exposure, hunger, exhaustion or beatings.Average soldiers were
treated poorly. There are some excellent accounts of life under the
Soviet PoW system in Hans von Luck’s book “Panzer Commander” where he
was captured outside Halbe. Soviet guards pulled his gold teeth out
while he was force-marched to the PoW camp. There is a much better and
longer description of life under the Soviet PoW system in Lt Bidermann’s
excellent book “In Deadly Combat”. He was with the 132nd Infantry
Division captured in the Kourland Peninsula after the German
surrender.SS soldiers were singled out for particular punishment. SS
soldiers had their blood group tattooed under their left arm and this is
how they were identified by the Soviets. When capture appeared
imminent, SS soldiers would cut the flesh out with a knife or put a
pistol under their arm and fire or have someone burn or shoot it off.
Few SS soldiers returned to Germany.Of the 90,000 German soldiers
captured at the surrender of Stalingrad, 50 percent would be dead within
a month. Only about 5000 Stalingrad soldiers ever returned home from
Soviet PoW camps. Many German units disappeared completely after
surrender. After the key battle of velikiye luki
11,000 Germans surrendered. The officers were hung in the main square.
Five soldiers made it back to Germany after the war. Not a single
soldier of the rear guard of the German 6th Army Nebelwerfer Unit that
held up the Russians for a day, allowing the 6th Army to surrender to
the Americans, ever returned to Germany. Very few of the Germans army
that surrendered after the Battle of Budapest ever made it home.It’s
important to note that under the Germans, as much as 50 percent of all
Soviet prisoners died; under the Soviets about 40 percent of all German
prisoners died, so who was worse? On the surface it seems the Germans
were worse but because of the punishment to be suffered by repatriated
Soviet prisoners due to Stalin Order 270, many Soviet prisoners
committed suicide when told they would be repatriated after the war. An
American account tells of an American officer telling a group of Soviet
prisoners that they are to be repatriated to Soviet control, then
watching in horror as they committed suicide in front of him. In
the summer of 1944 the Soviet Union launched Operation Bagration, a
large-scale, complex offensive against the Nazi invaders in Belarus,
Poland and the Baltic republics. This vital Soviet offensive was
launched just after Allied troops had landed in Normandy, and it is
symptomatic of the lack of public knowledge about the war in the East
that whilst almost everyone has heard of D-Day, few people other than
specialist historians know much about Operation Bagration.Operation
Bagration (named after a Georgian prince in the war against Napoleon
130 years earlier) was not just one of the largest military offensives
of the war, it was one of the most sophisticated. On 19 June 1944, Red
Army partisan units, operating behind German lines, attacked transport
and other Wehrmacht supply lines; two days later the Soviets launched
massive air attacks; and then on the 23rd (one day after the third
anniversary of the German invasion) the Red Army moved forward under
cover of darkness.Soviet advance caught the Germans by surprise.
Once again, the Soviet technique of ‘maskirovka’ (deception) had worked.
The Soviets pushed forward in powerful spearheads leaving enemy units
isolated behind them a tactic that was made all the more effective
because of a tactically disastrous decision Hitler had made. The German
leader had ordered the soldiers of Army Group Center to stand firm and
inflexible in the face of any Soviet advance.Hitler’s directive of 8
March 1944 had announced that ‘feste Plaetze’ (fortified places) should
be the core of the German defense. The idea was that the Soviets would
advance past these fortifications, which would, Hitler said, “fulfill
the function of fortresses in former historical times”. The commander of
the German Ninth Army, General Jordan could scarcely believe the nature
of the order he had been given. “Ninth Army stands on the eve of
another great battle”, he wrote, “unpredictable in extent and duration
the Army believes that, even under the present conditions, it would be
possible to stop the enemy offensive, but not under the present
directives which require an absolutely rigid defense”.“Hitler’s orders
to hold firm were totally disastrous”, confirms military historian
Antony Beevor. “He refused to allow his generals any flexibility or
leeway which was totally contrary to all the precepts and the teaching
of the German general staff but because Hitler so distrusted his
generals he wanted to control everything and that was basically the
undoing of the German army”.In contrast, due to the efforts of Konrad
Adenauer, German prisoners started coming home by 1954 and were received
as heroes. When the trains arrived, the German prisoners were greeted
with thronging, cheering crowds, brass bands, food, wreaths and so on.
They called the war and time afterwards “The Lost Years”.Like
Germany, Hungary had lost much at the end of the First World War. The
Treaty of Trianon stripped her of around two thirds of her territory and
population. Further, her status had declined if anything more than
that. She had had much more power as half of the dual Austro-Hungarian
monarchy than her population strictly merited and had been a
multi-ethnic state with a millennia of history in which Magyars were a
slim majority. She was now reduced to a small rump, having lost her
frontier regions and substantial Magyar populations to new creations
such as Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia, rivals such as Romania and hemmed
in by the Little Entente of those countries, backed by France.As
in Germany the political situation in the immediate post-War period was
chaotic, but after a short-lived Communist regime and a Romanian
invasion a stable regime was eventually formed under Admiral Miklós
Horthy - the last commander of the Austro-Hungarian navy. This was
formally a monarchy, but neither the Little Entente nor the victorious
allies would permit a Hapsburg Restoration. Accordingly Horthy took the
title of Regent and Hungary became a Monarchy without a Monarch, ruled
by an Admiral without a Navy - or even a coastline.It
was more or less inevitable that Hungary would end up aligned with the
discontented states such as Germany and Italy that wished to revise the
post-war settlements. As such she would gain a slice of Czechoslovakia
in the aftermath of the Munich settlement (First Vienna Award) and even
fight a brief border war with Slovakia. Nevertheless she had no quarrel
with Poland and had enjoyed previous good relations. So she not only
remained neutral when war broke out but refused Germany permission to
cross Hungarian territory to engage Poland - thus allowing Polish units
to escape into Hungary and Romania.What
she really wanted however was Transylvania, which currently belonged to
the Romanians. They however were in a perilous position after the
collapse of their French ally in June 1940 and had already ceded
territory to Stalin and to Bulgaria. The Second Vienna award would give
Hungary less than what she had first asked for, but still a substantial
area with a significant Romanian population.Tragic Fate: Parade of 57,000 German prisoners of war in the streets of Moscow
march to Moscow after defeat at Belarus during “Operation
Bagration”.Troops of German 4th Army after being captured at Minsk in
Belarus being marched through the streets of Moscow Russia 17 July 1944.In
the summer of 1944 the Soviet Union launched Operation Bagration, a
large-scale, complex offensive against the Nazi invaders in Belarus,
Poland and the Baltic republics. This vital Soviet offensive was
launched just after Allied troops had landed in Normandy, and it is
symptomatic of the lack of public knowledge about the war in the East
that whilst almost everyone has heard of D-Day.
Victorious
Red Army soldiers in Berlin, on May 2, 1945 in Berlin shows a Soviet
soldier raising the Red Flag over the Reichstag, after the Allied forces
entered the city, ending World War II. The photo would become both the
defining image of the Red Army's victory over Nazi Germany.
Soviet
expansion in Eastern Europe was massive cause of the cold war. Stalin
said he wanted to create a buffer zone of friendly states around Russia
to make sure that Russia could never be invaded again.The
Red Army was recruited exclusively from among workers and peasants and
immediately faced the problem of creating a competent and reliable
officers’ corps. Trotsky met this problem by mobilizing former officers
of the imperial army such
officers served in the Red Army and with but few exceptions remained
loyal to the Soviet regime. Political advisers called commissars were
attached to all army units to watch over the reliability of officers and
to carry out political propaganda among the troops. As the Russian
Civil War continued, the short-term officers’ training schools began to
turn out young officers who were regarded as more reliable politically.On
May 5, 1955, the American, French, and British forces formally ended
their military occupation of West Germany, which became an independent
country. Four days later, West Germany was made a member of NATO. For
U.S. politicians, this was an important step in the defense of Western
Europe. Despite the reluctance of some European nations, such as France,
to see a rearmed Germany, even as an ally, the United States believed
that remilitarizing West Germany was absolutely vital in order to
maintain a good defensive system and stop any Soviet expansion. The
Soviet response was immediate. On May 14, 1955, the Soviet Union
established the Warsaw Pact, a military alliance between Russia and its
Eastern European satellites, including East Germany. Germany began to
arm themselves again with better equipment.The
Eastern Bloc refered to a group of communist states in Central and
Eastern Europe, generally understood to be the countries of the Warsaw
Pact.During the immediate postwar period, the Soviet Union first
rebuilt and
then expanded its economy, with control always exerted exclusively from
Moscow. The Soviet Union consolidated its hold on Eastern Europe,
supplied aid to the eventually victorious communists in China, and
sought to expand its influence elsewhere in the world. This active
foreign policy helped bring about the Cold War, which turned the Soviet
Union's wartime allies, Britain and the United States, into foes. Within
the Soviet Union, repressive measures continued in force; Stalin
apparently was about to launch a new purge when he died in 1953.In 1946
Andrey Zhdanov, a close associate of Stalin, helped launch an
ideological campaign designed to demonstrate the superiority of
socialism over capitalism in all fields. This campaign, colloquially
known as the Zhdanovshchina ("era of Zhdanov"), attacked writers,
composers, economists, historians, and scientists whose work allegedly
manifested Western influence. Although Zhdanov died in 1948, the
cultural purge continued for several years afterward, stifling Soviet
intellectual development.Russia rebuilt quickly after World War II and
rose to be one of the
world's two superpowers through its moves in Eastern Europe, postwar
modernization of industry and the seizure of German factories and
engineers as booty. The postwar Five-Year plans focused on the arms
industry and heavy industry at the expense of consumer goods and
agriculture.
Describing Stalingrad in 1949, John Steinbeck wrote, "Our windows looked
out on acres of rubble, broken brick and concrete and pulverized
plaster and in the wreckage the strange dark weeds that always seem to
grow in destroyed places. During the time we were in Stalingrad we grew
more and more fascinated with this expanse of ruin, for it was deserted.
Underneath the rubble were cellars and holes, and in these holes people
lived. Stalingrad was a large city, and it had apartment houses and
many flats, and now there was none except for new ones on the outskirts,
and its population his to live some place. It lives in the cellars of
the buildings where the buildings once stood.Under
the communist systems of Eastern Europe, the "collective interest" of
the people, as determined by the communist party, overcame any claims to
individual rights. Thus, the government harshly suppressed freedom of
speech, press, and assembly. The government
licensed newspapers, other media, and even churches in order to control
them. The practice of religion was discouraged.The communist regimes
established civil and criminal court systems. In most cases, the trial
courts consisted of one professional judge and two citizen "assessors,"
not specifically trained in the law. Public prosecutors acted as
defenders of the state, public defenders, and prosecutors of crimes.
They, like the judges and assessors, were accountable only to the
government officials who appointed them. The officials, of course,
belonged to the communist party.A fair trial might take place if the
communist party had no interest in it. But otherwise the system was
stacked against those accused of crimes. Defendants could be charged
with political or economic crimes. The crime of "economic sabotage"
included such offenses as failing to achieve a factory production quota.
The courts vigorously prosecuted anyone dissenting against
communist-party rule. As in the Soviet Union, Eastern European countries
weeded out those suspected of disloyalty. This happened in "show
trials," where the government forced defendants to confess their
supposed crimes.All the Eastern European countries established extensive
secret police organizations. Soviet "advisors" occupied key command
positions in each of them. Moreover, secret police agents from the
Soviet Union worked throughout Eastern Europe and could arrest anyone.All
the Marshall plan did was anger the USSR, it made them hate America and
all her allies. It increased tension massively by showing the two
countries that either could be attacked at any time, and it also showed
that the USA would stop at nothing to stop the spread of communism. The
USSR criticised the USA and said that all they wanted to do was control
and enslave Eastern Europe by putting them in to the USA’s debt.Compared
to the expansion of Russia, the Marshall plan is a large factor
resulting in the cold war, the Marshall plan is still vastly important
as a cause of the cold war, but without the expansion of Russia it would
not be necessary, but it was important enough to scare and enrage
Stalin. It resulted in Stalin forming COMECON the USSR’s answer to
Marshall Aid; it was a plan to give finical aid to all communist states
that felt the threat of capitalism. This plan in turn angered America
thus starting a cold war.In conclusion that the huge expansion of
Russia was the main and most important cause of the cold war it had a
massive impact, it scared the west and forced the Americans to tackle
the threat of communism head on. The Marshall plan was simply the little
nudge that sent Russia and America in to the cold war. The expansion
was the main factor; it forced the capitalist west to evaluate their
defences against the threat of communism. The expansion built up a time
bomb of tension and conflict. The Russian expansion, in my view, started
the cold war and was the main cause for tension and conflict; it
destroyed the shaky relationship between the USSR and America and made
Russia the biggest superpower in the world. And that is why I believe
that the Russian expansion is the main cause of the cold war.
The Brandenburg Gate dividing East and West Berlin.Two
days after sealing off free passage between East and West Berlin with
barbed wire, East German authorities begin building a wall the Berlin
Wall to permanently close off access to the West. For the next 28 years,
the heavily fortified Berlin Wall stood as the most tangible symbol of
the Cold War–a literal “iron curtain” dividing Europe.The
end of World War II in 1945 saw Germany divided into four Allied
occupation zones. Berlin, the German capital, was likewise divided into
occupation sectors, even though it was located deep within the Soviet
zone. The future of Germany and Berlin was a major sticking point in
postwar treaty talks, and tensions grew when the United States, Britain,
and France moved in 1948 to unite their occupation zones into a single
autonomous entity–the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany). In
response, the USSR launched a land blockade of West Berlin in an effort
to force the West to abandon the city. However, a massive airlift by
Britain and the United States kept West Berlin supplied with food and
fuel, and in May 1949 the Soviets ended the defeated blockade.
The
Grand Alliance could not agree on a permanent united German state, and
so the temporary zones of occupation had been created. Stalin was
concerned that the Western powers would force the creation of a single
capitalist Germany, by joining their zones together and overpowering the
East. As a result, the first major crisis of the Cold War was over the
future of Germany. Conflicting policies The USA, Britain and France knew
that Germany would have to be supported economically if communism was
to be resisted. The allies wanted a strong, democratic Germany acting as
a buffer against the communist states of Eastern Europe. In contrast,
Stalin wanted to: weaken Germany as a punishment for the war; help
rebuild the USSR by stealing German industrial technology; make
communism seem more attractive to the Germans. These conflicting
policies soon led to a crisis in international relations.
THE BERLIN CRISIS ( 1948–1961)
Ever
since the Yalta Conference, it had been clear that Berlin was going to
be a flashpoint in the Cold War, and this came to a head in 1948.After
the end of World War II in Europe, what remained of pre-war Germany
west of the Oder-Neisse line was divided into four occupation zones,
each one controlled by one of the four occupying Allied powers: the
United States, the United Kingdom, France and the Soviet Union. The
capital of Berlin, as the seat of the Allied Control Council, was
similarly subdivided into four sectors despite the city's location,
which was fully within the Soviet zone.Within
two years, political divisions increased between the Soviets and the
other occupying powers. These included the Soviets' refusal to agree to
reconstruction plans making post-war Germany self-sufficient and to a
detailed accounting of the industrial plants, goods and infrastructure
already removed by the Soviets. Britain, France, the United States and
the Benelux countries later met to combine the non-Soviet zones of the
country into one zone for reconstruction and to approve the extension of
the Marshall Plan.Once
the wall went up in 1961 life for East Berlin began to improve under
the communist system. People had excellent healthcare facilities and
free public transport. They enjoyed full employment, food and rents.
Factory outputs also increased in the 1960s. Many East Germans believed
that communism was fairer than capitalist West German. They were proud
of their achievements.However,
they lacked some key freedoms including freedom of speech, the ability
to vote and they were not allowed to leave East Berlin and travel to the
West. This chapter outlines the advantages and disadvantages of the
communist system in East Berlin.The standoff at Checkpoint
Charlie: Soviet tanks facing American tanks, 1961.In October 1961,
border disputes led to a standoff and for 16 hours the world was at the
brink of war while Soviet and American tanks faced each other just 300
feet (100 meters) apart. On August 1961 Washington and its British and
French allies had failed to prevent the Soviets building the Berlin
Wall. On October 27, after several days of escalating U.S. rebuffs to
East German attempts to get American officials to show identification
documents before entering East Berlin (thus indirectly acknowledging
East German sovereignty, rather than Soviet occupation authority) ten
U.S. M-48 tanks took up position at Checkpoint Charlie.There they stood,
some 50 meters from the border, noisily racing their engines and
sending plumes of black smoke into the night air. Alarmed by the
apparent threat, Moscow, with the approval of the Soviet leader, Nikita
Khrushchev, sent an equal number of Russian T55 tanks rumbling to face
down the Americans. They too ground to a halt some 50 meters from the
East/West Berlin. This was the culmination of several days escalation of
actions on both sides and the face-off of the Soviet and American
tanks, with guns uncovered, the first (and only) such direct
confrontation of U.S. and Soviet troops.General Clay of the American
troops was reminded by Washington that Berlin was not so “vital” an
interest to be worth risking a conflict with Moscow. President Kennedy
approved the opening of a back channel with the Kremlin in order to
defuse what had blown up. As a result, the Soviets pulled back one of
their T55s from the eastern side of the border at Friedrichstrasse and
minutes later an American M48 also left the scene. Soon the rest of the
Soviet tanks withdrew, followed shortly by reciprocal withdrawal of the
U.S. tanks.Khrushchev
had been equally uninterested in risking a battle over Berlin. In
return for Kennedy’s assurance that the west had no designs on East
Berlin, the Soviet leader tacitly recognized that allied officials and
military personnel would have unimpeded access to the East German
capital.The Berlin crisis arose from what one may term “objective
factors” – the fact that West Berlin was an anomalous Western enclave
well to the east of the Iron Curtain, precipitating a clash of concrete
interests of the Soviet Union and the West. The confrontations of armed
tanks facing off at Checkpoint Charlie is, however, an excellent
illustration of how “subjective factors” such as differing perceptions
and beliefs of the two sides also contributed to tension – and could
even have precipitated war.By the end of World War II, the Soviet armed forces had swelled to
about 11.4 million officers and soldiers, and the military had suffered
about 7 million deaths. At that point, this force was recognized as the
most powerful military in the world. In 1946 the Red Army was
redesignated as the Soviet army, and by 1950 demobilization had reduced
the total active armed forces to about 3 million troops. From the late
1940s to the late 1960s, the Soviet armed forces focused on adapting to
the changed nature of warfare in the era of nuclear arms and on
achieving parity with the United States in strategic nuclear weapons.
Conventional military power showed its continued importance, however,
when the Soviet Union used its troops to invade Hungary in 1956 and
Czechoslovakia in 1968 to keep those countries within the Soviet
alliance system.The end of World War II saw the Soviet Union emerge as one of the
world's two great military powers. Its battle-tested forces occupied
most of Eastern Europe. The Soviet Union had won island holdings from
Japan and further concessions from Finland (which had joined Germany in
invading the Soviet Union in 1941) in addition to the territories seized
as a consequence of the Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Pact. But these
achievements came at a high cost. An estimated 20 million Soviet
soldiers and civilians perished in the war, the heaviest loss of life of
any of the combatant countries. The war also inflicted severe material
losses throughout the vast territory that had been included in the war
zone. The suffering and losses resulting from the war made a lasting
impression on the Soviet people and leaders that influenced their
behavior in the postwar era.The
USSR officially ceased to exist on 31 December 1991. The collapse of
the Soviet.Union in December 1991 changed the world’s geopolitical
balance. When the Soviet Union fell, it ended the tenure of a superpower
with the resources of more than a dozen countries. The fall left its
largest component, Russia, unable to wield anything like the global
clout that the Soviet Union had for decades. The concluding drama of the
Cold War the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern
Europe and the end of the four-decade-old East-West conflict unfolded
in three acts between 1989 and 1991.The
Bolshevik Revolution triumphed on 07 November 1917 (October 25 old
calendar), when the Bolsheviks dispersed the Provisional Government from
the Winter Palace in Petrograd. On 03 March 1918, Soviet government
officials signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, relinquishing Poland, the
Baltic lands, Finland, and Ukraine to German control and giving up a
portion of the Caucasus region to Turkey. And the monarchical cause was
effectively killed when Communists shot the imperial family in July
1918.Anti-Soviet
popular uprisings began in Budapest and spread throughout Hungary in
the autumn of 1956. On November 2, Hungarian Premier Imre Nagy, who had
already promised the Hungarians free elections, denounced the Warsaw
Pact and asked for United Nations support. On November 4, Soviet forces
moved into Hungary and suppressed the revolt. Soviet, Polish, East
German, Bulgarian, and Hungarian troops invaded Czechoslovakia on 20
August 1968, and deposed the reformist government of Alexander Dubcek,
who had begun a program of economic and political liberalization (the
"Prague spring")Mikhail
S. Gorbachev entered office in March 1985 determined to scrap old
assumptions about Soviet foreign policy. He had drawn lessons from the
return of Cold War tensions in the early 1980s and they scared him. The
"old thinking" believed that the USSR would emerge victorious in the
Cold War if it continued building up its arsenal and fostering
"progressive" regimes in the Third World in places like Angola,
Ethiopia, and especially Afghanistan. Gorbachev's "new thinking" sought
to reorganize and revitalize the Soviet system; but to do so required a
favorable international situation to relieve the material burden of arms
competition with the West.On
09 November 1989, the East German Government opened the Berlin Wall.
East Germany, the center of contention throughout the Cold War, was
united with West Germany and integrated into NATO. As one historian
noted, in Poland communism took ten years, in Hungary ten months, in
East Germany ten weeks, and in Czechoslovakia ten days to disappear. In
Romania the bloody exception to the rule of peaceful transition the end
came with the execution of Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife on Christmas
Day. The collapse of the Warsaw Pact a year later plus the 1990 Treaty
on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe [that substantially reduced
Soviet superiority in conventional forces in Europe] resulted in a
stronger Western alliance.The
third and final act closed with the 1991 dissolution of the USSR. By
1989 Gorbachev's domestic reforms had run into serious trouble, and the
economy went into a tailspin. The centrifugal forces in the "outer
empire" stimulated and accelerated those in the "inner empire", as the
Soviet republics sought sovereignty and then independence. As the center
disintegrated and Gorbachev opened up the political process with
glasnost (openness), the old communist "barons" in the republics saw the
handwriting on the wall and became nationalists; they "first of all
attacked the USSR government and subsequently destroyed the USSR." Asked
when he decided to secede from the USSR, Ukrainian party boss Leonid
Kravchuk replied: "1989" [he did so in mid-1990]. Each of the USSR's
republics, as they declared independence or sovereignty, also adopted
statements by the republic leaderships on service in the armed forces,
including the creation of their own military forces.The Soviet Union also began exerting its influence in Asia. Outer
Mongolia became the first Communist regime outside of the Soviet Union
in 1945 when it taken over by a Soviet puppet government. China became
Communist in 1949.
A Soviet red army victory at Vienna,in spite of a tenacious defense,
the Soviet Red Army overwhelmed the Germans in the Austrian capital of
Vienna.The
might of the Red Army prevailed in the battle for Vienna in the spring
of 1945. Soviet soldiers and their supporting self-propelled assault
guns maneuver through the suburbs of the Austrian capital city in April.
In
mid-March 1945, the Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Red Army launched a major
offensive with the aim of clearing Axis forces out of Hungary and
forcing them back to the very borders of Hitler’s Greater German Reich.
It was successful, and at 1925 hours on the 29th a “Führer Decision”
finally arrived at the headquarters of Army Group South authorizing a
phased withdrawal to what was called the Reichsschutzstellung the Reich
Guard Position.This
position followed the approximate line of Austria’s eastern border.
Four days later, on April 2, Waffen SS General Sepp Dietrich, the
commander of the Sixth Panzer Army, was presented to the people of
Vienna as their “defender,” and over the next two days a number of his
battered formations, notably the 2nd SS Panzer Division Das Reich,
pulled back in chaotic conditions toward what had inevitably been
designated Fortress Vienna. The withdrawal was complicated by roads
jammed with miscellaneous German and Hungarian troops and hordes of
civilians all desperately trying to reach what they thought might be a
place of safety.Soviets Pushing Toward the Danube,by
April 4, Das Reich, with a Kampfgruppe (battlegroup) from the 3rd SS
Totenkopf Division on its left flank in the area of the Vienna airport,
had been forced back to a line running roughly between the villages of
Mödling and Achau. There it was tasked with preventing a Soviet advance
along the main roads leading into Vienna from Wiener Neustadt and
Sopron. But it was now clear that the Soviets were also beginning to
push northwest toward the Danube River valley in the area of Tulln with
the intention of outflanking and isolating the Austrian capital. Das
Reich’s commander, SS Colonel Rudolf Lehmann, had little option other
than to prepare to withdraw his Kampfgruppen into the city itself.That
same day, General Rudolf von Bünau was appointed commandant of the city
of Vienna, and 24 hours later Lehmann received an order said to have
come from the Führer himself, which ended: “From now on there is to be
no more retreating.” By this time, however, his men, despite intense
fighting, had been forced back some two and a half miles across flat,
open ground to a low ridge running from Vösendorf to Leopoldsdorf. There
they occupied temporary positions on a reverse slope.Some extraordinary
events had occurred during the withdrawal toward and into Vienna. Some
2,800 men intended for the 12th SS Panzer Division Hitlerjugend but
unable to reach that division had been quickly absorbed into Das Reich,
and a reinforcement unit made up of convalescents, leave personnel, and
replacement troops was quite literally taken off trains passing through
Vienna and found itself in action under Lehmann’s command in the
Piesting River sector.In the same way, individual replacements arriving
on April 3 had been quickly integrated, but according to SS Lt. Col.
Otto Weidinger, the commander of the Division’s 4th SS Panzergrenadier
Regiment Der Führer, it was no longer possible even to take down the
names of these men. Losses were being recorded in numbers rather than
names. He also recorded that just before the final withdrawal into the
city most of Das Reich’s artillery was intact, but that the
panzergrenadier regiments amounted to only “five average battalions” and
the division had only 60 percent of its authorized motor transport.At
2000 hours on April 5, Lehmann gave orders for a further withdrawal to
the high ground behind the Liesing River, running from Mauer through
Altmannsdorf to the area of Inzersdorf. This new position was within the
city limits of Vienna itself, and soon after occupying it the men, and
particularly the officers of the division, began to run into new
problems.At 0730 hours on April 6, the Soviets launched a major assault
on the German positions. It has been said that this attack was due to
coincide with an attempt by the Austrian resistance movement to hand
over the city to the Soviets. In any event, the attempt failed. The
leaders of the movement had clearly not calculated on the presence of
the men of the Waffen SS.During the 6th, Das Reich’s 2nd SS
Reconnaissance Battalion, under the command of Major Ernst Krag, pulled
back through the division’s lines to the area around the Floridsdorf
Bridge across the Danube. This vital bridge, which was to become the
focus of the fighting in the last hours of the battle for Vienna, was
already under observation from Soviet troops on the Kahlenberg feature
in the northwestern part of the city.By the evening of the 6th, Das
Reich, which was no longer fighting as a division but in small-unit
groups, had been forced back to a line just south of the Schönbrunn
Palace and extending west to the Hietzing sector of the city. Some of
its tanks and certainly the 10th SS Heavy Battery had taken up positions
in the palace grounds. Another battery, the 12th, was in position on
Prater Island between the Danube and the Danube canal. One of the 10th
Battery officers later described how they were shooting directly over
the gloriette toward the south and how one gun was positioned in the
middle of the three main entrances to the palace grounds, firing toward
the palace bridge to the north. He claimed the palace suffered only
slight damage to the east side of the gloriette.As
darkness fell on the 6th and the Russians began to threaten Prater
Island from the southeast, General von Bünau, who although still city
commandant had been placed under the command of SS Lt. Gen. Willi
Bittrich’s II SS Panzer Corps that included Das Reich, the 3rd
Totenkopf, and the 6th Panzer Divisions, gave orders for the bridges
across the Danube in the eastern part of Vienna to be blown. The same
night saw the enemy trying to infiltrate toward the West Station, but
the deployment of a battalion of Hitlerjugend (youngsters, but not part
of the Waffen SS or the 12th SS Panzer Division Hitlerjugend) put a
temporary end to this threat. Nevertheless, by midnight parts of
Weidinger’s Der Führer Regiment had been pushed back into the streets
just to the north of the Schönbrunn Palace.
President Ronald Reagan "Tear Down This Wall" Speech at Berlin Wall.
US president Ronald Reagan at Brandenburg Gate - "tear down this wall".This
speech by President Ronald Reagan to the people of Wes Berlin contains
one of the most memorable lines spoken during his presidency.
President
Reagan and Mikhail S. Gorbachev signed the first treaty
reducing the size of their nations' nuclear arsenals. The
President and the Soviet leader, beginning three days of talks aimed
at even broader reductions, pledged to build on the accord by striving
toward what Mr. Gorbachev called ''the more important goal.October 11,
1986: Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev Meet in Reykjavik, Iceland, to
Negotiate Disarmament.
When
the Berlin Wall fell on November 9, 1989, its destruction was nearly as
instantaneous as its creation. For 28 years, the Berlin Wall had been a
symbol of the Cold War and the Iron Curtain between Soviet-led
Communism and the democracies of the West.This
same division into West and East occurred in Berlin. Since the city of
Berlin had been situated entirely within the Soviet Zone of Occupation,
West Berlin became an island of democracy within Communist East Germany.