It is hard to recover any sense of open-endedness and possibility in the early phase of the Cold War: the Red Army had its boots on the ground in Vienna, Budapest, Bucharest, and Berlin, and Stalinist rhetoric rose to a new pitch of “anticosmopolitan” xenophobia. But Naimark, with great perspicacity, insists on a more complex picture. He draws a portrait of a “hyperrealist” Stalin, who had no interest in provoking the Western allies and declined to press the local communist cause in places (notably Greece) where it seemed to have chances of success. The ideological rigidity of the late Stalin era was belied by the flexibility and pragmatism Stalin showed in the international arena. He distinguished between core and peripheral areas of Soviet interest, and even in the core understood that it was preferable to bring about “people's democracy” by something other than naked violence. The Danish island of Bornholm offered the Soviets a potential “Gibraltar of the Baltic,” but their troops withdrew in 1946 after eleven months of occupation, securing handsome financial compensation but no territory. In Poland, the most important country in the Eastern bloc for Soviet geopolitical goals, Stalin was willing to tolerate Władysław Gomułka's indigenous (and anti-Semitic) version of communism up to a point. Gomułka was eventually arrested, but, as a relatively popular non-Jewish Polish communist, he was spared the show trial and execution that was meted out to communist leaders considerably less awkward than he.But Stalin does not deserve too much credit. He may have been more flexible than his doctrine implied, but he retained some ideological blinkers and was capable of serious errors of judgment, notably over the blockade of Berlin in 1948–49. The true heroes of Naimark's story are not the Bolshevik dictator and his plenipotentiaries but the local political elites who held their nerve and set their sights on regaining sovereignty, aiming neither to antagonize the Soviets nor to capitulate to them. The Danes mounted a charm offensive: the Soviet commander on Bornholm was treated to gracious hospitality by the royal couple in Copenhagen. At the other end of Europe, and in a very different political culture, the Albanian communist leader, Enver Hoxha, took advantage of the Soviet-Yugoslav split to achieve an improbable Cold War autonomy for his tiny country. Perhaps the most powerful of Naimark's seven case studies is Finland, exposed due to its long border with the USSR and its strategic importance, and subject to intense pressure from Stalin's henchman Andrei Zhdanov in the late 1940s. The Finns made concessions, providing large and punctual deliveries of agricultural produce and even putting wartime politicians on trial. Once again, though, they secured the main prize of sovereignty.These European elites were also, remarkably, able to revive representative democratic politics. Claims to sovereignty were far more compelling if they could be shown to have a popular mandate, and here European peoples played their part. The continent was hungry, devastated, and traumatized in the period 1945–48, but it was also eager for renewal and agency. Turnout at postwar elections was often astonishingly high. The politicians that people voted for were tough, often charismatic, but also mature, pragmatic, and nonpopulist: they were determined to recover sovereignty but understood that this goal was achievable only by careful maneuvering within the emerging geopolitical order. As Naimark suggests briefly in his conclusion, there are some lessons here for today's European elites.
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Oct 1, 2024
Tim Harris 
Open Access