Читать книгу The Power of Freedom - Mart Laar - Страница 6

One of the tragedies of the modern world is that after the First World War, European democracies were in poor shape to meet the challenges presented by two totalitarian systems: Communism and Nazism. Although these two systems differed in some ways, their ideologies were similar and, crucially, they had a common enemy – Western democracies.12 Both Nazism and Communism lacked any semblance of ethics and morality, as was evident in the unscrupulous tactics employed in their attempts to destroy democratic governments in the West. Unfortunately, the European states were absorbed with their own affairs after the First World War, thus providing dictators with the time and space to expand their influence. This laid the groundwork for the policy of appeasement that began in the 1920s and accelerated with each new concession to the dictators. The 1938 Munich agreement was the culmination of this policy. To achieve ‘peace for our time’, the democratic state of Czechoslovakia was urged to disarm and cede a part of its territory, the Sudetenland, to Nazi Germany. At this time, the European democracies could have stood their ground against Hitler’s territorial demands and negotiated iron-clad agreements for Czechoslovakia’s security. Instead, they bowed to the Nazis’ claims on a free country. Furthermore, the Czechoslovakian President, Eduard Beneš, had no right to compromise his country’s territorial integrity, yet he did so. One year later, Czechoslovakia had ceased to exist.13

Line dividing Central and Eastern Europe with the signatures of Stalin and Ribbentrop on 28 September 1939

Even though at this time the Soviet dictator, Josef Stalin, appeared to be Hitler’s main opponent, the Munich Treaty convinced him that the West could not stand strong against aggressive behaviour. If Stalin and Hitler joined forces, the West would be powerless to stop them. Throughout the spring and summer of 1939, Stalin carefully signalled that he was ready to entertain a German proposal for more extensive cooperation.14 Stalin was convinced that a Communist revolution in Europe would not succeed as long as there was peace. To ignite worldwide revolution Stalin needed a war and Hitler was just the man to start such a war. It is not surprising, then, that Stalin named Hitler ‘the icebreaker’ of the world revolution. To mask his intentions, Stalin negotiated with British and French delegations thereby decreasing their interest in fashioning a peace agreement with Hitler. Because Stalin wanted Europe to be enveloped in war, he used all of his guile and influence to undermine peace initiatives. In the end, Hitler cast aside his suspicions and agreed to Stalin’s proposals. After secret negotiations, the Foreign Minister of Nazi Germany, Joachim von Ribbentrop, was invited to visit Moscow on 23 August 1939, at which time he signed a non-aggression pact with Vyacheslav Molotov, Stalin’s Foreign Minister.15 The treaty was supplemented by a secret protocol containing an agreement between Hitler and Stalin to carve up Eastern Europe into spheres of influence. Finland, Estonia and Latvia (and later Lithuania) were incorporated into the Soviet sphere, Poland was divided between Hitler and Stalin and the Soviet interest in Bessarabia was recognised.

The so-called ‘pact of non-aggression’, or the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, was a perfect blueprint for aggression that constituted a license for Hitler and Stalin’s war against much of Europe. Each of the signatories was now free to assault its neighbours without hindrance from the other. In his speech to the Politburo on 19 August 1939, Stalin admitted that without a non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union, Hitler would be reluctant to begin a war in Europe. According to Stalin, a war in Europe was in the Soviets’ interests, especially since at its conclusion, both sides would be exhausted and the Soviet Union could intervene at the opportune moment to pursue its own territorial ambitions. This was the best route to world revolution. In retrospect, it is clear from the outset of his dealings with Hitler that Stalin intended to outmanoeuvre his new partner, preparing the way for a complete Communist takeover of Europe.16

Polish victims of the Katyn Forest Massacre in 1940

On 1 September 1939, Hitler invaded Poland and the Second World War began. The German army advanced rapidly and destroyed the main forces of the Polish army. On 17 September, Red Army troops poured across the Polish border and completed the conquest. Poland capitulated on 4 October 1939 and was divided between the two aggressors. Looking at footage from the common ‘victory’ parade arranged in Lvov, we see the satisfied faces of Soviet and Nazi officers – their common historical enemy, Poland, had been wiped from the map. The occupation of Poland by both the Nazis and the Soviets provided the rest of the world with stark evidence of the terror that totalitarian powers were capable of inflicting. Between 1939 and 1941, the Gestapo and the Russian secret police (NKVD) cooperated with each other, actively exchanging information and arresting suspects wanted by their partner in crime. The Nazis commenced the Holocaust that killed millions of Jews. Other Poles were murdered in order to suppress the remainder of the population controlled by the Nazis. The brutality of the Soviets matched that of the Nazis. In 1939, the Soviet Union took control of over 52.1 % of the territory of Poland, with over 13.7 million people. Initially, the Soviet occupation gained support among some members of the non-Polish population, but their enthusiasm quickly faded as it became clear that Soviet repression was aimed at all national groups equally. There were four major waves of deportations from the conquered territories between 1939 and 1941. Older Polish sources estimate that altogether as many as 2 million people were lost due to deportations, conscription and arrests. According to Soviet documents, the number of people deported is lower – 320,000 – to which 43,000 interned POWs can be added. The Soviets arrested and imprisoned 107,140 Poles between 1939 and 1941, including former officials, officers and natural ‘enemies of the people’, such as the clergy, executing about 65,000 Poles during two years of occupation.17 During the early stages of the war the Soviets killed thousands of Polish prisoners of war. In 1940, the NKVD systematically executed 21,768 former Polish officers, political leaders, government officials and intellectuals who had been imprisoned during the 1939 war. Some 4,254 of them were discovered in 1943 in mass graves in Katyn Forest.18 The Soviets’ intention was to kill as many members of Poland’s intelligentsia as possible in order to weaken any future Polish state. The fact that most of the imprisoned officers were from all these professional groups is a consequence of the fact that they were reservists. Even today, Russia’s leaders do not want to acknowledge this crime, attacking the Polish director Andrzej Wajda’s film about the Katyn massacre and claiming it to be ‘anti-Russian’ propaganda. Wajda’s father was also killed in Katyn and throughout the entire Soviet period, he was unable to talk publicly about what had really happened to him.19

In late September 1939, the Soviet Union began exercising the liberties it had been granted by Hitler in the Baltics. First, it issued an ultimatum to Estonia to sign a treaty allowing the deployment of Soviet military troops on Estonian soil. Although most of the population wanted to reject the Soviet demands, Estonian political leaders decided in favour of a peaceful solution. After signing the treaty, the Red Army marched into Estonia in October 1939, occupying the bases allotted to it and promising not to violate Estonia’s independence. In the following months, the Soviet Union signed similar pacts with Lithuania and Latvia. Finland, however, rebuffed Soviet demands and heroically defended its decision in the Winter War of 1939–1940. Despite heavy territorial and human losses, Finland succeeded in retaining its most cherished treasure – its national independence. Finland thereby avoided the fate of the Baltic States and kept its place in the Western world. In June 1940, the Baltic countries were completely occupied. They were cut off from the rest of the world by the Soviet forces and pressed to surrender. On 14 June, a Finnish passenger plane, the ‘Kaleva’ was shot down over Estonian territorial waters by Soviet aircraft, killing everyone on board.20 Under Soviet orchestration and the protection of Soviet tanks, legal governments were replaced by Soviet puppet governments. After Soviet-style ‘elections’ in which all candidates except the Communists were removed from the ballot, the Baltic countries ‘voluntarily’ joined the Soviet Union.21

Train of Latvian deportees being sent to Siberia

During the first year of occupation, the Baltic countries were forcibly Sovietised. A massive terror campaign was launched with arrests in the Baltic countries starting just before the countries officially ‘joined’ the Soviet Union. During the first year of Soviet occupation, about 8,000 people were arrested in Estonia. In Latvia and Lithuania too, the prisons filled up with prisoners. Many of those arrested were interrogated in the cruellest way and then killed – often without a court ruling. The names are known of 2,199 Estonians murdered by the Soviets between 1940 and 1941. Eighty-two minors, including three infants, were among them. The most extensive act of genocide was the deportation of whole families to Siberia in the course of the “June deportations” that started on 14 June 1941.22 According to the ‘final report’ prepared by Merkulov, the People’s Commissar of the USSR State Security Office, a total of 9,146 people were deported from Estonia, 3,173 of whom were arrested, 15,500 Latvian citizens were sent to Siberia and a further 17,730 people were deported from Lithuania.23 The majority of them never saw their homeland again. Among the children deported to Siberia in those terrible days was Lennart Meri, the son of the Estonian diplomat Georg-Peeter Meri. In 1992, he became the first democratically elected President of free Estonia. Many other children were not so lucky. Several reminiscences and documents testify to the difficult fate of the deportees, the most shocking of which is the diary of ten-year-old Rein Vare covering the years 1941–1944. It speaks about deportation, the journey to Siberia and his experiences there. With the gravity of an adult, Rein Vare draws tombstones for his playmates in his diary. A large part of the diary is dedicated to his beloved father, Rein Vare, a schoolteacher from Sausti who by that time had already died of hunger in Isaroskino prison camp, yet he lived on in his son’s diary. The family’s history took a happier turn in 1946 when Rein and his sister were given permission to return to their relatives in Estonia. At that time, their mother’s yearning for her children overruled her common sense – she fled from Siberia and tried to follow them but, unfortunately, only got as far as Leningrad. Her attempt was followed by arrest and three years in a labour camp. In 1951, Rein Vare, who meanwhile had finished school in Estonia, was arrested again. He was kept in Patarei prison for a few months and then sent back to Siberia. This finally broke him. Although the family managed to return to Estonia by the end of 1958, its members were no longer the people they had been. Rein Vare was utterly embittered and the sunny side of life had disappeared for him. His inability to hold down a job gave way to excessive drinking and, eventually, death in George Orwell’s year of 1984, in Viljandi, where his body was only recovered several days after he had died. His diary, however, was preserved until the day came when the document, which can be compared to Anne Frank’s, was published in Estonia.24

The people in the countries occupied by the Nazis or the Soviets continued their fight for freedom during the first years of the Second World War. They created governments in exile that sustained diplomatic activity and organised resistance movements in their occupied homelands. The Western countries did not recognise the occupation of the Baltic states and allowed their diplomatic representatives to continue their work in Western capitals.25 All this appeared to be consistent with the tenets of the Atlantic Charter approved by Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill at Placentia Bay in August 1941. The Charter affirmed ‘the right to restore self-government to nations who have forcibly been deprived thereof.’ Four months later, the Prince of Wales (the flagship used by Churchill during the summit) was sunk by Japanese dive bombers off the coast of Singapore. The principles of the Atlantic Charter were scuttled only a short while after.26

During the first years of the Second World War, Hitler and Stalin cooperated closely.27 Deliveries and military assistance from the Soviet Union helped Hitler to conquer Western Europe. Stalin even rallied the Communist parties of Western countries against their own governments, in this way supporting Hitler’s aggression. Cooperation between the two dictators went so far that the Gestapo and the NKVD began to exchange detainees. Stalin delivered German Communists who had escaped to the Soviet Union in the 1930s to Hitler. In 1940, tensions nevertheless began to develop between Hitler and Stalin. Stalin became jealous of Hitler’s success in Europe, while Hitler was displeased about Stalin’s plans to start a new war with Finland at the end of 1940 and his plans to swallow Romania and take control of Turkey.28 As a result, both sides started to make secret preparations for war. Hitler prepared his ‘Barbarossa’ plan, while Stalin began preparations for his plan ‘Groza’ (Thunder) to launch a surprise attack against Hitler with the aim of conquering and subsequently Sovietising all of Western Europe. Overwhelming numbers of Soviet troops, tanks and planes were concentrated on the Western borders of the Soviet Union.29 However, Hitler was faster and attacked at dawn on 22 June 1941. The war between Russia and Germany had started. The German attack took Stalin by surprise: the Soviet forces were surrounded and destroyed, taking Hitler to the gates of Moscow.30 The German attack opened the way for Great Britain and later the United States to join the Soviet Union and restore a modified version of the the First World War ‘Entente’. Churchill explained Great Britain’s decision to support Stalin thus: ‘If Hitler invaded hell, [he (Churchill)] would make at least a favourable reference to the devil in the House of Commons.’ Massive Western help allowed Stalin to restore the strength of the Red Army faster than Hitler had anticipated.

Early in the war, Stalin was clearly eager for an arrangement based on the 1941 borders. He would probably have been willing to trade recognition of these for acceptance by the Eastern European governments in exile with the caveat that the Baltic States remain under Soviet dominance. Unfortunately, the United States had other ideas. Roosevelt preferred to concentrate on the war effort rather than stand against Soviet expansionism. This gave Stalin the opportunity to delay political discussions and seize as much booty as he could. He was not asked to make any concessions while German army was still in the field. Although Churchill understood what was taking place, Great Britain alone was not strong enough to oppose Stalin’s creation of a Soviet sphere of influence in Central and Eastern Europe. Consequently, Stalin took what he wanted. Using Western support to great effect and disregarding enormous losses, Stalin built the Red Army up into the fighting machine that by 1942–1943 crushed the German army and then pushed it back to the West.31

Vae victis! Red Army in conquered Germany, 1945

At the Yalta Summit in February 1945, the Western allies accepted Russia’s conquests prior to 1941 and put their stamp of approval on the new ones. For the countries that were thus absorbed into the Soviet bloc, this sentence was to last 45 years. Stalin’s concession to his allies was a Joint Declaration on Liberated Europe that promised free elections and the establishment of democratic governments in Central and Eastern Europe. As the weeks passed after Yalta, it became increasingly evident that Stalin did not intend to honour the terms of the agreement. Governments in the countries conquered by the Red Army were appointed by the Soviet authorities.32 In February 1945, when King Michael of Romania refused to remove the national government from office and replace it with pro-Communist forces, Stalin’s representative Vyshinsky arrived in person in Bucharest, hinting bluntly to the King that refusal might mean the end of Romania. The Communists got what they wanted.

Map 4

Divided Europe

The realities of this new order were soon clearer to the captive nations of Central and Eastern Europe than they were to the Western world. For the nations now under the control of the Red Army, the Soviet advance constituted a change from one totalitarian ruler to another. In Central and Eastern Europe, the Red Army was received with mixed feelings at best. In countries that were taken by the Soviet Union as a result of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the first year of Soviet rule with its brutal terror was such a shock to the people that the traditional hatred of Germans was forgotten and the German army was welcomed as a liberator in West Ukraine and the Baltics in 1941. National armed units were formed to fight the Red Army and national governments declared. These were, nevertheless, crushed by the Germans and people quickly found that there was no difference between the Nazis and the Communists: both kill people, burn books and are against the independence of smaller nations. So the national resistance movement started, now targeted against both the Nazis and Communism. In 1944, when the Red Army was advancing to the West, tens of thousands of men in the Baltics were mobilised by the German Army, including Waffen-SS units, to stop the Red Army’s advance into their territories. Under the decisions of the Nuremberg Tribunal, these soldiers were not treated as war criminals and after the end of the war they had the opportunity of staying in the West. So although the Soviets liberated people from the hated Nazis, they also brought subjugation to Stalinism. Looting, rape, violence and terror took place on a horrific scale in the wake of Communist domination. Such acts seriously undermined the authority of the Soviet Union and Communism, giving even local Communists cause for complaint. A report written by Hungarian Communists in Köbanya and presented to the Soviets in 1945 states that when the Red Army arrived, the soldiers committed a series of sexual crimes in an outbreak of ‘mindless, savage hatred run riot. Mothers were raped by drunken soldiers in front of their children and husbands. Girls as young as 12 were dragged from their fathers and raped by 10-15 soldiers in succession and often infected with venereal disease.’33 The Soviet leadership, however, did not react to these reports. Stalin is reported to have said to the complaining Yugoslav Communist, Milovan Djilas ‘Can’t he understand if a soldier who has crossed thousands of kilometres through blood and fire and death has fun with a woman or takes some trifle?’34

Various Central and Eastern European states attempted to free themselves from the Nazis and restore their own independent governments. Since the beginning of 1944, Estonian soldiers had fought alongside the German army to halt the Red Army at the borders of Estonia. When the Germans decided to withdraw their troops from Estonia in September 1944, an independent Government of Estonia was established by the Estonian national resistance movement in Tallinn. The new government declared its neutrality in the German-Russian conflict and turned to the Western powers for help. Estonia never received a reply. They pushed the Germans out, but within three days, Soviet tanks arrived and after hopeless fighting, defeated all efforts to win the country’s freedom. Very few members of the government were fortunate enough to escape the country. Once more, the Soviet occupation swallowed up Estonia and the other Baltic countries.35

A similar attempt to win freedom was made in Poland where the prospects for success were even better. A legal Polish government-in-exile and an underground Home Army hoped to crush the Nazis and restore an independent Polish government and administration in Warsaw before the Soviet takeover. As Soviet military units re-entered the suburbs of the capital on 1 August 1944, the Home Army started an uprising against the Nazis. Assailed from all sides, the Germans began to withdraw. Victory seemed within the grasp of the Home Army, but Stalin refused any assistance. Instead, the Red Army halted and watched passively from across the river Wisla while the uprising was crushed. Moscow radio, which had urged the Varsovians to revolt, now denounced them as a ‘gang of criminals’. Churchill tried to persuade Stalin to help the uprising, but his pleas fell on deaf ears. Moreover, the Soviets were not even ready to support the Western allies who were willing to help the uprising. On 18 August, for example, the Soviets declared that they ‘object[ed] to British or American aircraft, after dropping arms in the region of Warsaw, landing on Soviet territory, since the Soviet Government [did] not wish to associate itself either directly or indirectly with the adventure in Warsaw.’ Warsaw resisted for 63 days, appealing for help that never came. Then it was over. The surviving inhabitants were evacuated by the Germans and Warsaw was ‘razed without a trace.’ The Home Army was destroyed with the result that no one was left to challenge the Communists; the Nazis had done the Soviets’ work for them. Poland’s pre-war Republic was not restored; the surviving leaders of the uprising were hunted down by the KGB, arrested and then killed.36

In 1945, the Red Army moved west, seizing new territories. Stalin soon acquired his Western allies’ acquiescence to his retention of the territories and countries awarded to him under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact: the Baltic States; the Eastern part of Poland; Karelia; the region won from Finland and Bessarabia. But his goal was to rule as much of Europe as possible so Stalin pressed the Red Army onwards to the West as quickly as possible, paying no attention to the enormous losses incurred. In April 1945, Churchill advised Eisenhower to take Berlin, Prague and Vienna ahead of the advancing Soviet armies. The Americans refused, still entertaining unrealistic hopes about the possibility of post-war cooperation with Stalin. Concomitantly, Stalin was effectively implementing what he had privately told the Yugoslavian Communist leader, Milovan Djilas, ‘this war is not as in the past, whoever occupies a territory also imposes on it his own social system. Everyone imposes his own system as far as his army can reach.’ 37 The Soviet age was arriving in Central and Eastern Europe.