Читать книгу The Red Army in Austria - Группа авторов - Страница 8

On Holy Thursday, March 29, 1945, units of the 3rd Ukrainian Front under Marshal Fyodor Tolbukhin crossed the old Austrian border at Klostermarienberg in Burgenland. Thus began the Allied military occupation of Austria. Parallel to this in the course of the advance of the Red Army and later the troops of the Western Allies, the Nazi system collapsed.¹ Austria was liberated externally from Nazi rule. Resistance on the part of Austrians had admittedly grown and was large in places, but it could not yet decisively contribute to the overthrow of Nazi rule.² At least 26,000 Red Army soldiers lost their lives on Austrian territory in the final weeks of the Second World War.³

Hundreds of thousands of soldiers and officers, their wives and children, as well as the civilian occupation personnel, often came to Austria for years. At the end of the war, about 400,000 Red Army soldiers were in Austria. The majority of them were withdrawn again in 1945/1946. At the end of the occupation in 1955, around 40,000 members of the army together with 7,600 relatives of officers were stationed in Austria. By means of their blanket presence they belonged during the post-war period to everyday life in the Soviet occupation zone. Compared to the quantitatively fewer American, French, and British occupation troops, the Soviet occupation soldiers in eastern Austria thus constituted “strangers” per se. “The Russians,” as they were, and still are, generally called in popular parlance shaped the first post-war decade in Austria particularly strongly. Old propaganda patterns from the nineteenth century and the Nazi era often continued to have an effect here.

The Soviet occupation of eastern Austria from 1945 to 1955 constituted until a few years ago one of the most significant research gaps in Austrian contemporary history.⁴ While the zones of Austria occupied by the Western Allies had already been the subject of numerous academic studies, research into the Soviet occupation lagged drastically behind. The reason for this lay first and foremost in a major, decade-long imbalance in the source situation. As a result of the partial opening of relevant sources in Russian archives, several research projects could dedicate themselves to Austrian-Soviet relations at a bilateral level, questions relating to Soviet influence on Austrian policy as well as plans vis-à-vis Austria or everyday life in the Soviet occupation zone from the Austrian perspective.

As a result of a three-year, bilateral research project⁵ (with preparatory work lasting several years), in April 2005, a two-volume publication appeared under the title Die Rote Armee in Österreich. Sowjetische Besatzung 1945–1955, in which for the first time the ten-year Soviet occupation of Austria was comprehensively analysed on the basis of documents from many Russian and Austrian archives.⁶ In Russia this concerned in particular repositories of the Central Archives of the Ministry of Defence (TsAMO) in Podol’sk, for the declassification of which a special commission was set up; the Central Archives of the FSB;⁷ the Archives of the Foreign Ministry; the Russian State Archives for Contemporary History (former archives of the Central Committee of the CPSU, RGANI); the Russian State Archives for Social and Political History (“Party Archives” until 1952, now RGASPI); the Russian State Archives for Military History (formerly “Special Archives” of the Ministerial Council of the USSR, now RGVA); and the State Archives of the Russian Federation (GARF). In the framework of the bilateral, joint treatment, almost all of the named archives opened many collections on Austria for the first time. This affected, among others, records of the “Stavka,” the administrations of the 2nd and 3rd Ukrainian Front, which operated in Austria, their political sections, as well as the NKVD units operating behind the front on Austrian soil; the Politburo for the period after 1945, among them the resolutions passed in particular secrecy from the collection “special folder” (“osobaya papka”); and likewise from the collections of Vyacheslav Molotov, the Foreign Policy Commission of the Central Committee and the Soviet Component of the Allied Commission for Austria.

The Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Research on Consequences of War (BIK) continued with this project its long-term research in close cooperation with Russian archives and research institutions. From 1990/1991, Stefan Karner carried out research on Austrian-Soviet relations after 1945 and on the topic of prisoners of war,⁸ before founding the BIK in 1993. Under his leadership, research on POWs in captivity and forced labor in the Soviet Union and in the “Third Reich” were continued.⁹ Research focus was also placed on aspects of the Cold War.¹⁰ In 2008, a research project on the “Prague Spring” was successfully completed. A two-volume publication with almost 3000 pages appeared in international cooperation.¹¹ A 500-page edition appeared in the Harvard Cold War Studies Book Series under the title The Prague Spring and the Warsaw Pact Invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.¹² In 2011, several joint publications on the Vienna Summit of 1961 between John F. Kennedy and Nikita S. Khrushchev were released.¹³ A study on 104 Austrian victims of Stalin who were sentenced to death and shot in Moscow between 1950 and 1953,¹⁴ the postdoctoral thesis¹⁵ of Barbara Stelzl-Marx, which appeared as a book in 2011 under the title Stalins Soldaten in Österreich,¹⁶ and publications on children of occupation are furthermore devoted to the Soviet occupation in Austria and its consequences.¹⁷

Current research is carried out moreover in the framework of the Austria-Russian Historical Commission (chairpersons: Stefan Karner and Alexander Chubar’ian; secretaries: Barbara Stelzl-Marx and Viktor Ishchenko). The aim of the commission, which was founded in 2008, is the joint treatment of Austrian-Russian/Soviet relations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Thanks is due in this context to the Austrian Federal Ministry for European and International Matters for the financial assistance provided to the projects of the ÖRHK.

The current volume constitutes a selection of in part revised contributions from the German-language publication Die Rote Armee in Österreich. Sowjetische Besatzung 1945–1955 as well as other research carried out at the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Research on Consequences of War in collaboration with Graz University and the City of Graz. The research was primarily supported by Ludwig Boltzmann Gesellschaft, the Governments of Styria and Lower Austria as well as the Austrian Federal Ministry of Education, Science and Research, Vienna. Professor Günter Bischof, University of New Orleans, a proven expert in the field of Cold War studies, was furthermore recruited for an introductory chapter.

The aim of the current volume is to provide an account of central aspects of the Soviet occupation in Austria from 1945 to 1955 and to embed them in the context of the early Cold War. Against this backdrop, Günter Bischof provides in his introduction an insight into “The Policies of Presidents Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower toward Austria, 1943–1955.” With his publication Austria in the First Cold War, Bischof presented as early as the 1990s the theory that in 1945 in Austria the Anglo-Soviet Cold War had already set in, from which an Anglo-American-Soviet Cold War developed in 1946. In doing so, he contradicted from the supranational point of view the long-advocated theory that there had never been a cold war in Austria (“KeinKalter Krieg in Kakanien” or “No Cold War in the Dual Monarchy”).¹⁸ Advocates of the latter theory viewed this above all from the perspective of an Allied cooperation in Vienna that always functioned, even in hot phases of the early Cold War (joint patrols, etc.).

Bischof emphasizes Marshall Plan aid as a particularly important element, which Austria—as the only country under Soviet occupation—received from 1948 till 1952. In the per head distribution of the Marshall Plan funds, the Austrians were at the forefront. Austria turned out to be one of the principal recipients of Marshall Funds on a per capita basis. This European Recovery Program served not only as a counterweight to the economic exploitation by the Soviets but also as a political means to contain Communist influence in Austria and to promote the Western orientation of the country and Austrian society.

In the context of European policy, it was for a long time not clear to Washington that a commitment to Austria would be so extensive. Initial disinterest in Austria during the Second World War gradually gave way to the increasingly identified strategic importance of Austria in Central Europe for the entire “old continent.” In the early Cold War Austria was a gateway between East and West and in this way a direct setting for disputes between the systems. Following the founding of NATO in 1949, the Alpine region took on a varied importance in the strategic defense plans of the alliance. After initial neglect of Austria in the defense concepts, this changed above all as a result of French pressure. For Paris it was first and foremost a question of being able to commence with military defense as far as possible from French territory in the event of an attack from the east, in order to prevent a repeat of the trauma of the Second World War. In the years after 1948, NATO’s defense line moved year for year further forward—initially from the Pyrenees and the Atlantic coast to the Rhine and then the East German border. Following the so-called putsch attempt in October 1950 in Austria, the strategic importance of the Austrian Alpine region for the defense of NATO territory also became clear for the American military in Austria and the Pentagon planning. Bischof traces the significance of Austria in these strategic considerations and in American policy and thus embeds Austrian post-war history in the East-West confrontations of the early Cold War.

In the second part of the book, the contributions from Aleksei Filitov, Stefan Karner, and Peter Ruggenthaler provide an overview of Soviet planning on Austria during the Second World War and 1945. The main aim here was the reestablishment of Austria as an independent but “smaller and weaker” state in its pre-war borders, which was designed above all to bring about a weakening of Germany. The Soviet Union refused to be a party to plans to unite states in a confederation (with Vienna as a potential capital city), as propagated above all by Winston Churchill, in order not to create any significant power factor in the Balkans or Central Europe, who, like centuries before, could become a direct rival of Moscow. With the reestablishment of Austria as an independent (small) state, the Soviet leadership pursued above all the aim of a sustained weakening of Germany. The establishment of the provisional state government under Karl Renner on April 27, 1945, confronted the Western Allies with a fait accompli, as Stalin had acted in this matter independently and against the agreements reached in the European Advisory Commission. They suspected—correctly—an attempt to set up a people’s front government, like previously in the central and eastern European states, and believed that Renner ran the risk of degenerating into a Soviet puppet.

In his essay, Peter Ruggenthaler reconstructs Stalin’s Austria policy from the “Anschluss” in 1938 to his death in 1953. On the basis of documents mostly made available for the first time in the framework of the project on the “Red Army in Austria,” a clear picture emerges. From the beginning, the Soviet occupation of eastern Austria was for Moscow of strategic importance for its policy on Eastern Europe, guaranteeing as it did the maintenance of troops in Romania and Hungary. For this reason, the Austrian State Treaty was not signed in 1949, in spite of supposed preparations for a troop withdrawal. Stalin allowed negotiations to be broken off. The human factor also played a role here. The Soviet dictator was not prepared to render Tito a service. A withdrawal of Soviet troops from the vicinity of Tito’s Yugoslavia could have been celebrated by the Western powers as a great victory. In light of Soviet files, the benefit of the Soviet occupation is clearly shown, the maintenance of which was importance to the Kremlin as long as it remained advantageous. Thus, Stalin’s death should not necessarily be regarded as a break in Soviet policy on Austria.

Michail Prozumenshchikov addresses the closing phase of Soviet Austrian policy up to the signing of the Austrian State Treaty on May 15, 1955, in Vienna’s Belvedere; the withdrawal of occupation troops until October 25, 1955, and the neutrality decided on by the Austrian national council the following day. He emphasizes the economic importance of the Soviet occupation, which failed to yield any gains after 1953, however, and traces the discussion within the Soviet leadership, according to which Khrushchev was strongly supported by Foreign Trade Minister Mikoyan against Foreign Minister Molotov, who had long blocked a solution to the Austrian question.

In the third part of the book, several central aspects of the ten-year period of Soviet occupation in Austria are illuminated. Walter M. Iber first of all addresses Soviet economic policy toward Austria, which was governed by the pursuit of “booty” and by exploitation. This policy was initially characterized following the war by dismantling operations, from autumn 1945 by the establishment of exterritorial Soviet economic bodies (the Administration for Soviet Property in Austria, USIA, and the Soviet Mineral Oil Administration, SMV), which administered the “German property” confiscated by the occupying power in accordance with the Potsdam Agreements. Of particular importance was the SMV, as it administered in Lower Austria the third largest oil field in Europe (after the USSR and Romania). As a result of the Moscow Memorandum of April 1955 and the completion of the State Treaty on May 15, 1955, the Soviet economic administrations were ultimately transferred—for extensive release payments—to the Republic of Austria.

Harald Knoll and Barbara Stelzl-Marx examine in their contribution the fate of the around 2,400 Austrian civilians who were arrested by Soviet organs in eastern Austria. More than half of them were subsequently sentenced by military tribunals to generally long prison terms and taken to the USSR; more than 150 were executed. They were accused of illegal weapons possessions, war crimes, crimes against the Soviet occupying power, membership of “Werewolf” units at the end of the war, and especially espionage. Against the backdrop of the Cold War, the fourfold-occupied Austria, and above all Vienna, developed into a hub of espionage activity; here East clashed with West. A large proportion of those civilians convicted were rehabilitated by the Main Military Public Prosecutor of the Russian Federation in the 1990s, among them the vast majority of those Austrian victims of Stalin who were shot.

Barbara Stelzl-Marx addresses a topic that remains to this day taboo: after the Second World War, so-called “children of occupation” were born all over Austria and Germany as a result of voluntary sexual encounters between local women and foreign occupation troops, but also as a consequence of rape. They were often regarded as “children of the enemy” and—together with their mothers—frequently discriminated against. In accordance with Stalin’s policy, weddings between Soviet soldiers and Austrian women were practically impossible. Most soldiers or officers were even sent back to the USSR when their liaisons with local women became known. For several decades hardly any contact was feasible. Thus, the majority of “Ivan’s children” in Austria grew up as a fatherless generation. Many of them have been in search of their biological fathers for several decades, regardless of the difficulty of obtaining any reliable information. This is linked with the desire to explore one’s own identity and look for one’s personal roots.