Iron Curtain (8 page)

None of this reflected ill will toward the region, just different priorities. Roosevelt’s main concern at Yalta was the shape of the new United Nations, which he envisaged as a body that would prevent war in the future, and he needed Soviet cooperation to construct this new international system. He also wanted Soviet help in the invasion of
Manchuria as well as the use of Russian bases in the
Far East. These concerns were simply more important to him than the fate of Poland or Czechoslovakia, and there were other issues at stake as well, from the future of the Italian monarchy to Middle Eastern oil. Although central to
Stalin’s postwar plans, Eastern Europe was only of marginal interest to the American president.
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Churchill, meanwhile, was acutely conscious of British weakness. Once the Red Army was actually in Poland, Hungary, or Czechoslovakia he had no illusions about Britain’s ability to force it to leave. In his memoirs, Churchill remembers telling Roosevelt just before the Yalta summit that “we ought to occupy as much of Austria as possible, as it was ‘undesirable that more of Western Europe than necessary should be occupied by the Russians.’ ” It isn’t clear by what criteria Austria was any more a part of “Western” Europe at that point than Hungary or Czechoslovakia. But Churchill’s fatalism comes through loud and clear: once the Red Army was in place, it wasn’t going to move.
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Both leaders also knew that, as the war ended, their voters would be anxious for their husbands, brothers, and sons to come home. It would be extremely difficult to “sell” a new conflict with the USSR. Wartime propaganda had portrayed Stalin as jovial “Uncle Joe,” rough-edged friend of the working man, and Churchill and Roosevelt had both praised him in their public statements. In
London, sympathizers had held fund-raising concerts for the
Soviet Union and erected a statue of Lenin outside one of the Bolshevik leader’s former London garrets.
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In the United States, American businessmen already looked forward to profiting from this new friendship: “Russia will be, if not our biggest, at least our most eager customer when the war ends,” declared the president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
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To turn around and tell war-weary Britons or Americans that they had to stay in Europe to fight the Soviet Union would have been politically difficult, if not impossible.

The logistical difficulties were even worse. Churchill, who was never happy about the Russian occupation of Berlin, did, in the spring of 1945, actually
order his military planners to investigate the possibility of an Allied attack on
Soviet forces in Central Europe, possibly using Polish and even German troops. The result, a plan for “
Operation Unthinkable,” was immediately dismissed as impractical. Its authors warned the British prime minister that the Red Army outnumbered British troops three to one, and that the result might be a “long and costly” military campaign, even a “total war.” Churchill himself wrote in the margins of the draft that an attack on the Red Army was “highly improbable”—though some elements of Operation Unthinkable later formed part of the planning for a possible Soviet attack on Britain.
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There was also an element of naïveté on the Western side, as Miłosz had complained: Roosevelt, particularly toward the end of his life, frequently expressed his faith in Stalin’s good intentions. “Don’t worry,” he told the Polish exile leader
Stanisław Mikołajczyk in 1944, “Stalin doesn’t intend to take freedom from Poland. He wouldn’t dare do that because he knows that the United States government stands solidly behind you.”
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A year or so later, American and British negotiators agreed to give the Soviet Union command of the
Allied Control Commission in Budapest—the body set up to run Hungary after the war—on the strict condition that the USSR consult with the other Allies before giving any instructions to the Hungarian government. In the event, it never even pretended to do so.
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Some later contended that communist sympathizers in the American government and “pro-Soviet elements” in
Washington had also influenced American postwar policy.
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Even though
Alger Hiss, probably the most notorious Soviet agent, was at Yalta as part of the U.S. negotiating team, his influence—if any—would have been unnecessary. The transcripts show clearly that Churchill and Roosevelt had very definite interests, and that pushing the Soviet Union out of Eastern Europe was not one of them.
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Those present were pragmatists. “All that Yalta did was to recognize the facts of life as they existed and were being brought about,” remembered one American general. “To me there was no choice to make.”
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Perhaps confusingly, this remained the case throughout the Cold War. Even when Western rhetoric became very aggressively
anti-Soviet, great care was always taken not to launch a new European conflict. Neither the United States nor Britain wanted a war with the Soviet Union, either then or later. In 1953, after Stalin’s death, when strikes and riots broke out in
East Berlin, the Allied authorities in
West Berlin remained very restrained, even warning West Germans not to cross the border in support of the strikes.
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At the
time of the Hungarian Revolution in 1956, the U.S. secretary of state,
John Foster Dulles, an avowed Cold Warrior, also went out of his way to deny any American involvement in the events, and to tell the Soviet Union that “we do not look upon these nations as potential military allies.”
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In truth, the Eastern Europeans were often more naïve than the Western Allies. In Hungary, pro-British politicians clung to the belief that their country would be liberated by the British. Many were “fuelled by an irrational belief in Hungary’s alleged geopolitical significance,” in the words of the historian László
Borhi, and expected a British invasion of the Balkans well into 1944. Because their country had been a bastion of Western Christendom in the struggle against the
Ottoman Empire, they thought they would continue to play this role in the twentieth century. “Western powers could not afford Russian domination of [Hungary’s] geographically important area,” declared one Hungarian diplomat with confidence. The Poles, whose political future really had been the subject of heated discussion among the Allied leaders, were equally convinced the British would not abandon the country in whose name they had originally declared war on Germany, and the Americans could not abandon them because the Polish American lobby would prevent it: sooner or later there had to be a Third World War. Later, the East Germans found it hard to believe that the West would agree to the fortification of the German-German border. Surely the West could not afford a divided Germany?

But the West could afford it and could accept it, just as the West also came to accept a divided Europe. Although no one in the West—not in Washington, London, or Paris—foresaw the extent of the physical, psychological, and political changes that the Red Army would bring to every country it occupied, they exerted very little effort to prevent them from coming about.

IN BUDAPEST,
JOHN LUKACS saw “an ocean of green-gray Russians, all coming in from the east.”
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In an eastern Berlin suburb,
Lutz Rackow saw “tanks, tanks, tanks, tanks,” and soldiers walking alongside, among them “amazons with blond braids.”
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This was the
Red Army: hungry, angry, exhausted, battle-hardened men and women, some dressed in the same uniforms they’d been wearing at Stalingrad or Kursk two years earlier, all of them carrying memories of terrible violence, all of them now brutalized by what they had seen, heard, and done.

The final Soviet offensive began in January 1945, when the Red Army
crossed the Vistula, the river that runs through the center of Poland. Quickly marching through devastated western Poland and the Baltic States, the “Ivans” had conquered Budapest after a terrible siege by the middle of February,
Silesia in March. Their assault on Königsberg in East
Prussia ended in April. By that time, two vast army groups, the
First Belorussian Front and the
First Ukrainian Front, were on the outskirts of Berlin, poised for the final assault. Hitler killed himself on April 30. A week later, on May 7, General
Alfred Jodl unconditionally surrendered to the Allies in the name of the Wehrmacht High Command.

Even now, it is not easy to assess what happened in Eastern Europe during those final five months of war because not everybody remembers the events of those bloody months in the same way. In
Soviet historiography, the last phase of the war is always portrayed unambiguously as a series of liberations. According to the standard narrative, Warsaw, Budapest,
Prague,
Vienna, and Berlin were freed from the yoke of Nazi Germany, triumph followed triumph, the fascists were destroyed, the population rejoiced, and freedom was restored.

Others tell the story differently. For many decades Germans, and especially Berliners, spoke very little about the events of May 1945 and afterward. Nowadays, however, they remember very well the looting, the arbitrary
violence, and above all the mass rape that followed the Soviet invasion. Elsewhere in Eastern Europe, the Red Army is also remembered for its attacks on local partisans who had been fighting the Germans but who happened not to be communists, and for the waves of both random and targeted violence that followed. In Poland, Hungary, Germany, Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Bulgaria, the Red Army’s arrival is rarely remembered as a pure liberation. Instead, it is remembered as the brutal beginning of a new
occupation.

Yet for many people, neither of these opposing perspectives offers the complete story either. For the arrival of the Red Army really did herald freedom for millions of people. Soviet soldiers opened the gates of
Auschwitz-Birkenau,
Majdanek,
Stuthoff,
Sachsenhausen, and Ravensbrück. They emptied the
Gestapo prisons. They made it possible for Jews to leave their hiding places in barns and cellars, and to return, slowly, to something resembling ordinary life.
Genia Zonabend, a Jewish internee, walked out of the gates of a small
labor camp in eastern Germany and went into the first German houses she could find, asking for food. She was refused—until a Russian passing by heard her story and made sure she received food and, as she remembered, “even warm water to wash.”
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Nor did Soviet assistance extend only to Jews. The arrival of the Red Army also made it possible for Poles in the western part of Poland to speak Polish after years of being forbidden to do so in public.
Nur für Deutsche
(“For Germans Only”) signs disappeared from shops, trolley cars, and restaurants in the Polish cities that had been rechristened with German names. In Germany itself, opponents of Hitler rejoiced when the Soviet soldiers arrived, as did millions of Czechs and Hungarians. “I ran out in the courtyard and hugged the first Soviet soldier I saw,” one Hungarian told me, and she was not alone.
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Another one of her countrymen described what the arrival of the Red Army meant to him and his wife:

One Pole told me the same: “We had no mixed feelings about them. They liberated us.”
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Yet even those who rejoiced the loudest didn’t deny that the Red Army left extraordinary devastation in its wake. When describing what happened, many spoke of a “new Mongol invasion,” using language tinged with xenophobia to evoke the unprecedented scale of the violence.
George Kennan was reminded of the “Asiatic hordes.”
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Sándor Márai remembered them being “like a completely different human race whose reflexes and responses didn’t make any sense.”
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John Lukacs recalled “dark, round, Mongol faces, with narrow eyes, incurious and hostile.”
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In part, the Soviet soldiers seemed foreign to Eastern Europeans because they seemed so suspicious of Eastern Europeans, and because they appeared so shocked by the material wealth of Eastern Europe. Since the time of the revolution,
Russians had been told of the poverty, unemployment, and misery of capitalism, and about the superiority of their own system. But even upon entering eastern Poland, at that time one of the poorest parts of Europe, they found ordinary peasants who owned several chickens, a couple of cows, and more than one change of clothes. They found small country towns with stone churches, cobbled streets, and people riding bicycles, which were then still
unknown in most of Russia. They found farms equipped with solid barns, and crops planted in neat rows. These were scenes of abundance by comparison with the desperate poverty, the muddy roads, and the tiny wooden cottages of rural Russia.

When they encountered Königsberg churches, Budapest apartments, and Berlin homes filled with antique furniture, “fascist” women living in what they perceived to be unimaginable luxury, the mysteries of flush toilets, and electric gadgets, then they were truly shocked: “Our soldiers have seen the two-storey suburban houses with electricity, gas, bathrooms and beautifully tended gardens. Our people have seen the villas of the rich bourgeoisie in Berlin, the unbelievable luxury of castles, estates and mansions. And thousands of soldiers repeat these angry questions when they look around them in Germany: ‘But why did they come to us? What did they want?”
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