Cordon Stalinaire
John Jolliffe
The Eagle and the Small Birds: Crisis in the Soviet Empire: from Yalta to Solidarity Michael Charlton (BBC Publications £8.95)
This is a short but vastly informative analysis of the relations between the Soviet Union and its East European colo- nial empire, whose probable western boundary was, incidentally, predicted by Karl Marx (in the New York Daily News, 12 April 1853) as a line between Danzig, or Stettin, and Trieste. It consists of skilfully edited conversations Coral history') with 30 of the best informed surviving partici- pants in East-West relations over the past 40 years together with some of the most Illuminating current commentators such as Kolakowski, Bialer and Pipes.
Naturally, it begins with the Yalta Agreement, which ratified the fait accom- pli of the Russian advance into Eastern Europe. The conference was a game of Poker, wrecked at the start by Roosevelt, who announced first that all American forces would be withdrawn from Europe Within two years of the war ending, and secondly that he himself was going home the following Saturday. (Within six weeks he was dead.) From the beginning, there- fore, Churchill's remark to Stalin, from which this book gets its name, that 'the eagle should permit the small birds to sing, and care not wherefore they sang', never had a chance of having any effect. The first casualty was Poland. Churchill respected the vast and crucial Russian contribution to the defeat of Hitler, and, though he
wanted a free Poland after the war, he did not regard her 1939 eastern frontier as sacred, embracing as it did such a large non-Polish population. Roosevelt, apart from all his other disqualifications, was almost exclusively concerned with securing Stalin's support against Japan, where his chiefs of staff had told him that a million Ainerican troops would be killed unless the Russians came in.
The scene was set for the inevitable disaster in Eastern Europe that followed. The naive idealism of the Left in Hungary and above all in Czechoslovakia still had a year or two to run, though the veteran Czech communist Eduard Goldstiicker, in spite of many excruciating experiences, almost unbelievably retains some of his illusions to this day. His compatriot Benes, by the way, whose conversations with Stalin and Molotov in December 1943 are also quoted here, has a strong claim to be regarded as the most inept of all 20th- century heads of state so far. In 1945, the Czech Communist Party only numbered 40,000, but within a few weeks it had half a million genuine, spontaneous members: among other reasons for this was the fact that three million Sudeten Germans were deported from the country, and those who wanted their land supported the Commun- ists in order to grab it. The Soviet takeover could therefore proceed more gradually and unobtrusively, whereas in Romania and Bulgaria, where there was only a handful of existing communists, a sudden, violent coup was required. The 'free elec- tions' promised at Yalta by Stalin some- times actually took place, but only after various precautions: for example, the Communist secret police decided that the formula 'You were seen with the Gestapo' was enough to justify jail or deportation for anyone likely to vote for another party.
Nevertheless, until he acquired the atomic bomb in 1949, Stalin moved with extreme caution when there was any sign of active resistance by the West, to the extent of actually cancelling the proposed invasion of Yugoslavia when the Amer- icans stood up and fought the Korean War. And confronted with the general Soviet policy of colonial enslavement, and the subsequent absence of any practical suc- cess by Marxist governments anywhere, the Great Apostates gradually and painful- ly awoke from their hypnotic trance. One of the first and greatest was Djilas, Tito's right-hand man, whom he imprisoned in 1955 and who actually spent the next years translating Paradise Lost and digesting the works of St Thomas More. Then came the revolt in Poland and the Hungarian Upris- ing in 1956. General Bela Kiraly, the Commander-in-Chief of the Freedom Fighters, still insists that the revolt was not against the Communist Party but the Sec- ret Police, and claims that if Shakespeare were alive today, he would have written better about Imre Nagy than he did about Hamlet. After Prague, in 1968, the last illusions about the intellectual and moral validity of communism disappeared, and the abiding question, to which none of the experts engaged in this book can hazard a guess, is this: for how long can sheer technology take the place of ideological and economic hopes which have long since been shattered? And for how long can what Djilas calls the 'Industrial Feudalism' of the Soviets go on being enforced by a system which depends, through and through, on institutionalised hypocrisy and lies? The Soviet Union now has a lower standard of living than any of the subject nations in its empire: only in military terms is it still ahead. Perhaps the most interest- ing view expressed here, among many, is that of A. Shevchenko, for some years a political adviser to Gromyko with the rank of ambassador, and plainly the most im- portant Soviet political defector there has ever been. He points out that, if only the industrialised West had a concerted econo- mic policy towards the Soviet Union, it could bring enormous political pressure to bear. But as things are, if the Soviets cannot buy what they want from the Americans, they get it from the Germans, etc., and they continue to survive in power by following Lenin's own injunction to 'use the contradictions between imperialist countries'.
This brief, lucid and enthralling book is the perfect introduction to a deeper study of relations between East and West, past and present. To read it is also to under- stand what Norman Stone said in a recent interview, that compared with Eastern Europe the study of Western Europe today has become about as interesting as the North Thames Gas Board.
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