The advance of Russian influence and control to the Stettin-Prague-Trieste line was the greatest result of the Second World War. It was Russian control of Eastern Europe which alarmed the West and precipitated the Cold War. If the Russians had been willing to fight the war without any permanent power gains in this region there would have been no plunge toward a third world war after 1945.

Russian-Communist control of East Europe was the basis of the belief in the West that Russia was out to conquer the world. Vice versa it was the Western opposition to the Soviet organization of Eastern Europe which convinced the Red leaders that the West was as fundamentally hostile as ever. Then the prolonged talk in the West of freeing East Europe from Soviet domination led the Russians to arm and to conduct a world-wide ideological struggle against the West, quite apart from any previous desire they may have had to do so.

This factor was not the only one in Russian thinking, but it is not possible to begin to understand Russian motives and feelings without knowing what they think about Eastern Europe.

No Planned Aggression. What is the first point to note? Surely it is that Russia did not set out cold bloodedly to conquer this region, as the Nazis did. From the national standpoint Russia lost grievously as the result of World War I. All of the gains of Peter the Great were swept away, save only the narrowest and most precariously held window to the West at Leningrad. The port of Riga and others which had helped the old Russia to breathe a little in the Baltic were in hostile hands, serving as rumor factories for an unending stream of Russian atrocity stories. When the notorious Chicago Tribune representative, Donald Day, was expelled from Moscow he stopped in Riga and spent years composing the most fantastic horror stories—published and widely believed in the United States.¹

Yet there was no raging campaign in Russia to recover the lost territories. The German example was not copied. No claim to recovery was raised in any case, except that of Bessarabia, and this claim was tacitly dropped as long as there was hope of stopping Hitler by diplomacy. In Poland the Reds had a perfect basis for setting up an outcry to recover the 8,000,000 Ukrainians and White Russians in East Poland, but they never did so. For this reason they were embarrassed for reasons when it came time to partition Poland with Hitler, since they could not say that the main reason was defense against him.

The Attacks of the Nazi Satellites upon Russia. The Russian occupation of East Europe was due simply and solely to the outcome of a giant war of aggression against the Soviet Union. We know about the huge German onslaught on Russia, but we are not so aware that Finland, Rumania, Hungary and Austria were active and important belligerents against Russia. Some 700,000 Austrians fought in Hitler’s armies, many of them perhaps unwillingly, but the amount of human and material damage they did in Russia was very large. There is no record either that they behaved more humanely in Russia than the other Germans, or that they deserted to the Russians in scores of thousands, as the Czechs did in World War I. If we had remembered the Austrian contribution to Russia’s agony, the Russian economic seizures in Austria would not have seemed so hard hearted, especially since they were firmly based legally on the armistice terms.

The Finns, of course, had their grievance of Russia’s attack on them in 1939, but that did not make their part in the siege of Leningrad any more welcome to the Russians. The Finns also fought on several fronts other than their own and the Russians were very bitter toward them.² Yet when they were finally forced to sue for peace a second time, after years of admonition to do so by Secretary Hull, Russia stiffened the peace terms against them very little. She took Petsamo in the North, as any power in her place would have, but Finland was not occupied. A control commission of 300 Russians went to Helsinki to supervise the execution of the armistice terms. That was all. On December 1, 1945, C. L. Sulzberger could not find the slightest evidence of incorrect behavior by the Russians, or of interference in Finland’s internal affairs.³ David Lawrence wrote that Russia had shown herself “magnanimous and broadgauged in victory.” Those of us who had been portraying Stalin and Russia as “greedy for territory and as eager to trample on the rights and aspirations of small nations” would now have to revise their judgment.⁴

Russian leniency toward Finland was due to several factors. There was the strong sentimental affection of the Americans for Finland. We never declared war on her. But, more important, the Reds respected a people who fought hard for what they believed to be their rights, and then paid their reparations punctually and in full when defeated. If in the end Finland is taken over by Russia it will be due to developments in the Cold War, not to any desire for vengeance.

In the cases of Rumania and Hungary the Russians had little reason to be soft. The Rumanians had their Bessarabian grievance, but that hardly justified their conduct in Russia. They carried the brunt of the war in the southwestern Ukraine. They massacred 200,000 Soviet citizens in Odessa alone and their troops were captured all the way to Stalingrad.⁵ That the Rumanians suffered great losses of men hardly endeared them to Russia. Yet the Russian troops behaved with disciplined restraint when they invaded Rumania. In pursuing the Rumanians from the Volga to Rumania the Russian soldiers had found that the Rumanians carried off everything that could be moved, including the seats of the Odessa State Theater. Frequently the victors passed through their own home towns and learned that the Rumanians had destroyed their homes and murdered their families. Still they obeyed orders and let the Rumanians alone. All during 1944 there was no interference in Rumania’s internal affairs.⁶

The Hungarian invasion of Russia in Hitler’s wake was entirely wanton—one more jackal joining the pack. The Hungarian peasants had no wish to fight the Russians, but they were forcibly conscripted by their native masters and sent off to Russia, where on January 25, 1943, almost the whole of the Second Hungarian Army was annihilated at Voronezh. Ten divisions were lost in the winter slaughter before Stalingrad, but not before the Hungarian rulers had boasted that they had killed a million Russians. At the Potsdam Conference Stalin said that the Hungarians had sent 26 divisions against Russia, the Rumanians 22 divisions and the Finns 24—the latter being essential to the blockade of Leningrad.⁷

If Russia was not overwhelmed, it was not because the lesser fascist states did not do their best to help Hitler do it. Even Italy sent several divisions to Russia, and Franco Spain contributed the large “Blue Division.” Altogether, the scores of divisions supplied by Hitler’s satellites added a grievous weight to his onslaught, even if they were not usually such ferocious fighters as the Germans. They contributed their full share to the immeasurable devastation in Russia.

Russian Conquest Applauded. Eastern Europe was occupied by the Red Army because all of these efforts to destroy Red Russia failed. There is no other reason. When the Russian armies swept into the Balkans, also, we were glad to have it done. Many fears had arisen in the West that the Russians might stop at their own frontiers and leave to the Allies the appalling job of destroying the German armies, and those of their satellites. We were not then gripping our chairs and hoping that the Red armies would not invade the sacred precincts of East Europe. We were cheering them on to do what would be immensely difficult if not impossible for us to do should the Russians stop at their borders and say they had done enough. On March 29, 1944, the leading editorial in the New York Times celebrated Russia’s entry into the Balkans, saying that this event disposed of “the last unjustified suspicions” that the Russians might stop at their own frontiers, or at most conduct a Sitzkrieg there, while the Western Allies finished the war. The Times commented further that it was generally understood in London that at Teheran Roosevelt and Churchill had agreed to drop any plans for a Balkan invasion. Conceding a sphere of influence to Russia in Eastern Europe, the Allies would invade Western Europe.

It was still to be three months before they did so.

Russian Objectives

What motives, aims and purposes actuated the Russians after they had occupied Eastern Europe? What did they seek to accomplish?

1. Security

Their first driving and continuing motive was, and is, security. This is the cardinal, outstanding fact which explains the Cold War more than everything else put together. Unless this dominating consideration is not only understood but felt there can be no understanding of the Cold War.

How can anyone be so certain that security is the ruling Russian aim in East Europe? The real answer to this question is another: “How could anyone who lived through the war doubt it?”

Consider some of the statistics collected by a Russian Extraordinary State Committee. The Nazis and their allies occupied Soviet territory in which 88,000,000 people had lived. They destroyed, completely or partially, 15 large cities, 1710 towns and 70,000 villages. They burned or demolished 6,000,000–buildings and deprived 25,000,000 people of shelter.

They demolished 31,850 industrial enterprises, 65,000 kilometers of railway track and 4100 railway stations; 36,000 postal, telegraph and telephone offices; 56,000 miles of main highway, 90,000 bridges and 10,000 power stations. The Germans ruined 1135 coal mines and 3000 oil wells, carrying off to Germany 14,000 steam boilers, 1400 turbines and 11,300 electric generators.

Any reflection on these figures by American city dwellers will undermine the idea that Russia can have no motive in the world except aggression. Farm people, too, will not be so sure of that when they think of the meaning of 98.000 collective farms and 2890 machine and tractor stations sacked and the following numbers of livestock slaughtered by the Germans or carried away by them; 7,000,000 horses, 17,000,000 cattle, 20,000,000 hogs, 27,000,000 sheep and goats, 110,000,000 poultry. What would the American countryside be like if this kind of scourge had passed over it? And what feelings would be left behind it?

The Germans and their satellites were not any more tender either with Soviet cultural institutions. They looted and destroyed 40,000 hospitals and medical centers, 84,000 schools and colleges, and 43,000 public libraries, with 110.000.000 volumes. Some 44,000 theaters were destroyed, and 427 museums. Even the churches did not escape, more than 2800 being wrecked.⁸

Are these only Soviet statistics, and of course false? The reply is that anyone who followed the newspapers closely during the four interminable years after June 1941, and who has read the books of a few war correspondents, knows that these figures cannot be far wrong. Of course they are in sum total beyond comprehension. No human mind can take them in. Moreover, it is not enough to understand them intellectually. What this limitless damage means to the Russians must be felt.

Naturally this can never be done adequately by the well-fed American sitting in his undamaged home. He could understand fully only if the United States had been ravaged in the same way, from the Atlantic to the Mississippi with some 15,000,000 people killed, twice as many made homeless and 60.000.000 treated to every degrading and brutalizing experience that the fascist mind could invent. Only then could we really know how the Russians feel about their security from future attack through East Europe.

Several months after the end of the war the correspondent of the New York Times visited the totally destroyed city of Minsk and talked with an old brick mason who was doing a little to rebuild his home town. At length he laid down his trowel, looked up and said simply: “You know, when our new five-year plan is completed this kind of thing will never happen again!” Yet at the same time some highly educated Americans were greeting with profound alarm the item in this same plan which called for 60,000,000 tons of steel for Russia in 1960. Of course the Russians meant to conquer the world! Here was the plain evidence, though at that moment the United States was producing 100,000,000 tons of steel annually and could greatly expand that figure if it desired. At that time, too, and for many succeeding years, the Russians could have used twice 60.000.000 tons of steel in their vast domain without putting a pound of it into armaments.

It was this kind of incomprehension which almost led the American people into a limitless disaster. One actually read frequent statements that of course the Russians know that Germany can never harm them again. Surely the Reds must know also that frontiers do not mean anything any more, that we have big airplanes which can fly over any boundary and over any buffer zone. So it does the Russians no good to hold Eastern Europe. Why don’t they come up to date?

If the Russians were only thinking machines they might conceivably accept this reasoning—if they did not observe the Americans acquiring or clinging to military bases many thousands of miles from home, in Japan and the Philippines, in Greece and Turkey, in the Mediterranean and Western Europe, all around the Soviet Union.

Going deeper still, no people can forget the kind of experience the Russians have lived through, not only after 1940, but after 1914. Terrible memories of this kind, twice burned in, cannot die. They are bound to dominate all thinking, mounting even to a security neurosis and giving rise to a fierce, permanent resolve that this kind of thing shall never happen again. There are many people in our own South who still feel strongly about what General Sherman and others did there nearly a hundred years ago. How then can the Russians forget what they have suffered at Germany’s hands through Eastern Europe, during the next century?

A determined if not sympathetic comprehension of Russia’s security complex is the beginning of all wisdom in the period after World War II. Without a keen understanding of the deepest and strongest psychological urge left by that war all else is vain. Otherwise we can never understand how the Russians feel about Germany, about reparations, and about Eastern Europe, i.e. about the main element in the Cold War.

No people in the world who had first suffered as the Soviet peoples have and then won a tremendous military victory would go into Eastern Europe merely for the ride. They would be bound to make sure that the invasion gate was closed, and by the methods which seemed sound to them, not those recommended by others living at a great distance.

This key fact was well understood in the West before the Cold War gripped us. When Russia issued her declaration on the Polish boundary, on January 12, 1944, the New York Times assessed it as “one of self-protection, not one of senseless aggression.” Three days later Anne O’Hare McCormick, the noted foreign expert of the same newspaper, greeted the abolition of the American Communist Party as “pretty convincing proof that Stalin believes this Government is a friendly Government and seeks to do away with every obstacle to good relations with Washington.” A little later, on April 3, 1944, she noted that Russia was changing ideologically. The star she followed was not the Red Star, but that of a Great Power.

On February 3, 1944, James B. Reston reported from London a general tendency among diplomats “to believe that Premier Stalin’s sphere of influence policy is intended as defensive and not offensive.” On July 14, Eric Johnston, President of the United States Chamber of Commerce, returned from a six weeks’ visit to Russia with the impression “that it is Marshal Stalin’s complete desire to rebuild Russia and not to engage further in world conflict if he can avoid it.” Johnston found every evidence of Russian desire to cooperate with us and could see no reason for conflict. It was only later that the idea developed among us that the terribly wounded Soviet peoples, with upwards of twenty million fresh graves among their continent-wide ruins, had suddenly decided to conquer the world.

On September 29, 1944, Reston reported to the New York Times from Washington that “the Soviet Union is not harboring any great expansionist dreams and is not plotting to communize Europe.” This belief was buttressed by a remarkable speech which Stalin made on November 6, 1944, one which can well be studied with care.

In it he reviewed the whole course of the war, analyzing the failure of German and Japanese aggression, with every indication that he thought all such aggressions must fail. He was certain that Germany would try again, and he urged that means to avert any new aggression be worked out now. What means? After the complete disarmament of the enemy there is only one means, “namely, to create a special organization to defend peace and insure security, composed of representatives of the freedom-loving nations, to put at the disposal of the leading organ of such an organization the essential amount of armed force required to avert aggression, and to make it the duty of this organization, in case of necessity, to apply without delay these armed forces to avert or liquidate aggression, and to punish those guilty of aggression.”

Here was a call for a powerful United Nations organization, one with teeth in it, one which could move against any aggressor. It should have “everything at its disposal to defend peace and avert a new war.” There is no hint here of a U.S.S.R. vetoing and laying about her in the UN. Stalin voiced the inveterate insistence of the U.S.S.R. that the peace must be founded on the cooperation of the three great powers. Of course there had been difficulties, including the question of the second front, but all “were solved in the long run in a spirit of complete agreement.” He paid tribute to the unity shown a the Dumbarton Oaks Conference. Stalin could have had no anticipation that Russia would soon feel herself beset in the UN and fearful of it.⁹

His whole address of November 6, 1944, was that of a statesman. He made it clear that aggression could not succeed, because it aroused all the world against an aggressor. It is not credible that an astute statesman who understood this basic principle should at once turn around and start on the same disastrous road himself—before the almost fatal wounds suffered by his nation had begun to heal. Nor is it reasonable that he should stand staunchly for a strong UN, with power to curb aggression, if he thought there was any possibility of Russia turning aggressor and bringing the UN down upon herself.

It must be remembered, too, that this was a Party speech, for home consumption. It was given on the greatest of all Soviet anniversaries, that of the October Revolution. It was printed and heard throughout the Soviet Union and would do great harm to Soviet public opinion if Stalin was planning aggression.

As late as October 16, 1945, a group of American Congressmen returned from Russia reporting that they found the Russian people friendly to America opposed to any more war and eager to raise their standard of living. Even a the end of 1945, on December 21, Walter Lippmann interpreted Russia’s decisive vote for placing UN headquarters in the United States as clear evidence that Russia believed that our fundamental policy would be “not to lead the Western World against Russia” but to mediate the issues which existed between Russia, Western Europe and China.

Anne O’Hare McCormick summed up all the evidence as to Russia’s main goal for the future, including East Europe, when she said in a carefully reasoned article in the New York Times Magazine, on October 28, 1945: “The only fact which overrides all other facts is that the aim of Russia is security Her motive in setting up an outer fortress and insisting that the great power shall be supreme arbiters in making and maintaining peace is to insure security by force.” Since none of the great powers could permit any one of them to become strong enough to dominate the others, the only alternative was partnership and “only a will to war or a philosophy of despair would abandon at the first or the hundredth setback the endeavor to achieve that partnership.”

This is a strikingly statesmanlike utterance. The towering fact of the whole post-war period is recognized. “The only fact which overrides all others is that the aim of Russia is security.” Her policy of peace through a partnership of the great powers was also sound and nothing should deflect us from achieving it. Unfortunately this realistic, life-giving policy, already seriously endangered was soon to be almost fatally undermined by Winston Churchill in his famous speech at Fulton, Missouri, which substituted the policy of alliance against Russia, with strong hints of liberating East Europe.

When Mrs. McCormick spoke, our relations with Russia were already gravely damaged, without basic reason, as other clear heads saw plainly. On November 15, 1944, Red-baiting Representative J. Parnell Thomas (Rep., N.J.) sought to draw out General Dwight D. Eisenhower about our future enemies. Eisenhower replied promptly, while a packed committee room applauded: “Russia has not the slightest thing to gain by a war with the United States. I believe Russia’s policy is friendship with the United States. There is in Russia a desperate and continuing concern for the lot of the common man and they want to be friends with the United States.”¹⁰

Here again is a powerful breath of common sense. The American leader who had kept his eyes on the Russians as perhaps no one other than Franklin D. Roosevelt had, knew that they had no reason or desire to be anything but friends with us. Eisenhower knew also that there is in Russia a desperate and continuing concern for the lot of the common man.

This is an epic fact which has been buried under mountains of assertion and invective by our passionate cold warriors. Indeed scarcely anyone besides Eisenhower could have made that statement later without imminent risk to his future career.

2. Land Reform

The second Soviet objective in East Europe was land reform. The first thing which an invaded, despoiled Russia would do in East Europe, to convert it from an invasion route into a security zone, would be to break the power of the fascist elements which had teamed up with Hitler for the assault on Russia. This would be true even if Russia were not communist. If we had suffered from fascism as Russia has, our blood would boil at the mention of the word.

Breaking the power of the fascist elements in East Europe meant first of all the dispossession of the great landlords. Feudalism had long survived in this region. The German Junkers are the best known example. It was these landed aristocrats who were the very source and center of Prussian militarism for two centuries. They officered the army and the state and kept all lesser Germans goose-stepping in their proper places. They survived even during the German Republic, which was too anemic to break up their estates. Far from that the Junkers lived constantly on the bounty of the state, the famous Osthilfe, squandering their receipts in all the pleasure capitals of Europe until they were bankrupt, then going back to the national treasury to be bailed out again. Hindenburg was one of them originally, and they bound him to themselves in the years of his senility by collecting money and presenting his son with an estate in their midst. A group of these barons actually took over the German Government at the end, turning the country over to Hitler when Premier Schleicher threatened to do something about the Osthilfe scandals.

The great bulk of the Prussian Junkers lived east of the Oder. Their estates were promptly broken up by the Russians in 1945.

In Poland the feudal magnates who ruled the Slavs east of the Curzon line had been the driving force behind the Polish attack on Russia in 1920, which resulted in the incorporation of their estates into Poland. Thereafter it was their power and fear, in large degree, which prevented any settlement of the Polish question until the Red Army provided the settlement. Then county committees of Poles, mainly farmers, divided the estates, trying to give each family twelve acres. In Radzyn County, for example, twenty-eight estates, including two of 4000 acres, were divided. Some 30,000 acres were allotted to the peasants and 10,000 acres of forest land went to the state. Distribution was unimpeded since most of the landlords had either been disposed of by the Germans, or had fled with them when the Red armies came.¹¹

Elsewhere throughout East Europe the process was similar. In Czechoslovakia the estates of the German aristocrats, in whose castles Lord Runciman spent his time while Czechoslovakia was being betrayed, were quickly disposed of by the Czech Government, along with those of the large Czech landlords who had opposed fighting with Russian aid in 1938.

Though the Prussian Junkers were more dangerous in bulk, it was in Hungary that the post-war land reform was most drastic in its national effects. The Austro-Hungarian monarchy had rested one of its main pillars on the feudal magnates. In Hungary forty per cent of the land was held in huge estates, one of 570,000 acres, or 890 square miles. Three hundred and twenty-four others averaged 41,000 acres, or 64 square miles each. Vast acreages were held by the Church. One bishop controlled 266,000 acres.

The degradation and misery of the peasants who existed as semi-serfs on these estates has been pictured unforgettably by G. Poloczy-Horvath in the small book Darkest Hungary, the accuracy of which is attested by one of the ex-magnates, the liberal exile Count Michael Karolyi.¹²

Reform was defeated in Hungary after World War I by the triumph of the reaction to Bela Kun’s abortive communist regime. Thereafter the Hungarian magnates quickly organized under Admiral Horthy the first fascist regime, antedating even Mussolini’s brand. Praetorian guards were gathered from among the impoverished gentry, army officers and chauvinistic middle-class elements which protected the magnates and kept the peasants in their thousand-year-old state of subjection. To the Hungarian landlords, as to the Vichy French, Hitler was the defender of order and property, their savior. In alliance with him they could continue forbidding the peasantry (90 per cent of the people) to form labor unions. It was illegal for the Social Democratic Party to work among them. But the peasants were forced to fight Russia under the Nazi banner.¹³

As soon as the Red armies had conquered half of Hungary the division of the estates began and, as elsewhere, it was rapidly carried through. The distinguished writer Emil Lengyel made a survey of the Hungarian land reform on the spot in September 1946. He found that 3200 land claims committees, consisting of 30,000 peasants, had distributed more than 6,000,000 acres, or a third of the total arable land. About 800,000 families had received land, up to six acres each. Lengyel characterized the dispossessed land barons as the “class which lined up Hungary on the side of the war makers—Hapsburg and Hitler.”¹⁴

Throughout Eastern Europe the estates were broken up, usually without compensation, as a preliminary to the collectivization of the land on the Soviet pattern, a later campaign which very largely failed except in Bulgaria.

3. The Nationalization of Large Industry and Banking

This was the second means used by the new Communist governments to reduce the power of the groups which had attacked the Soviet Union.

Of course they would not have needed this powerful motive, since nationalization is a cardinal communist doctrine. It must be remembered, also, that the war itself made a great deal of nationalization inescapable. Everywhere the Germans went they seized the great properties—steel, coal, manufacturing, banking, any industrial property which had value—either directly or in collusion with native collaborators. Many of the native owners were killed, imprisoned, scattered abroad or otherwise disposed of. Often a perfect maze of new property relationships was created. The tangle was so great everywhere that the pre-war status quo could not be restored in countries like Poland and Czechoslovakia, even if the people had wished to do so. The governments were compelled to take over the Germanized properties and the people approved their remaining in government hands. Small industry was generally left in private hands. In Czechoslovakia factories employing more than 400 men were nationalized. After the Communists seized control in 1948 the figure was reduced to 40.

The Second World War gave an immense impetus to the nationalization of industry and banking all over Europe, including Britain. It is true also that Europe had been increasingly Socialist politically for fifty years, but this was not the main reason for the sweep of nationalization after the war. The real reasons were to be found in the war’s immense destruction of three things: property owners, capital goods and belief in things as they were.

4. Economic Orientation Toward Russia

Since the Industrial Revolution began in England nearly two centuries ago, Eastern Europe had been an economic colony of the West, in the same way that the South and West in the United States used to be dominated by the industrial East. Yugoslavia’s rich copper and other mineral deposits were mainly foreign owned. In one case a French company held its concession but did not develop it for fear of competition with North Africa. In Rumania half of the metallurgical industry and 85 per cent of the oil industry were in foreign hands, chiefly British and American until the Germans took over the properties. After the war these properties were in Russo-Rumanian hands, convincing some American oil men that, as one expressed it, we should make war on Russia to liberate these people.

Traditionally the West not only owned the industrial properties in East Europe, but left the area largely undeveloped, preferring to import great quantities of food and raw materials from East Europe, process them and send a large proportion back at a good profit. Thus the East stayed agricultural and poor, just as for a long time the Southern United States did.

After 1945 East Europe was closed to this particular brand of exploitation. Every state in the region had its program of industrialization, but there was no field for foreign private investment. Trade with the West could still continue on a state-controlled basis, but only to benefit state industries.

This, too, was not the worst of it. The old assumption of East-West trade in Europe was broken. The assumption became East Europe-Soviet Union trade, with the West getting only what it could bargain for. This left Western Europe, which traditionally depended on the East for much of its food, with serious economic problems. All of the basic European Recovery Plan documents insisted that West Europe could recover durably only if a large measure of East-West trade were restored.

It was this dilemma, added to resentment over land reform and nationalization, which convinced many a Western conservative that war was the only solution.

This conclusion came naturally to many highly placed Americans who learned or observed what went on in East Europe after the war. Sympathy with people of their own rank or occupation who were being liquidated economically was bound to be quick and profound, without inquiring into the historical causation of the measures carried out. American and British diplomats were especially open to the appeals of the expropriated groups. They could not believe that the polished, cultivated gentlemen who owned the great houses and entertained so beautifully should lose their status and fortunes to a lot of crude Communists and unwashed peasants. Left to themselves the diplomats of the West were certain to do what they could to save the doomed classes, even if their superiors in the Foreign Offices had not felt the same way. Accordingly, they tried everywhere to put the brakes on the revolution, with the result that the old ruling elements suffered more severely than they would have. This was especially true of the leaders of the old political parties. Western support both encouraged them to resist and doomed their efforts to do so.

5. To Reduce the Power of the Catholic Church

Added to our strong feeling for the ruined conservatives was a still more powerful emotion, stirred by the acts of the new communist states against the power of the Roman Catholic Church. For the Catholic hierarchy this struggle was mortal. It could accommodate itself to fascism successfully since fascism allied itself—for its own purposes—with conservative interests and since the fascist regimes were destroyed in the war, but it was unable to come to terms with communism. There was not only the atheistic basis of Marxism, which labels religion “the opiate of the people” to deal with, but the still more formidable determination of the communist hierarchy not to tolerate any rival. During the war and since, the Soviet Government has shown itself willing to tolerate religious worship, purely as such, and to use the Russian Church as a political instrument, but its opposition to a rival wielding great economic, social and political power was implacable and was fully reciprocated by the Catholic Church.

The Mindszenty Crisis. The struggle between them did not come to a head in Hungary until the winter of 1949. The Government had moved in 1945 to divide all estates above 150 acres in extent, which meant the confiscation of the huge estates of the Church, striking at its great economic power. Then on June 19, 1948, a law was passed ending compulsory religious education and taking from the hands of the Church all schools, except those which taught religion exclusively, and theological seminaries.

The opposition to these measures had been led by Cardinal Archbishop Mindszenty, Prince Primate of Hungary. The spirit in which he fought is indicated by the pastoral letter which he issued four days before the first post-war election, on November 5, 1945. In it he opposed both the land reform and the new marriage law facilitating divorce. He predicted that first the marriage ties would be loosened, then youth would become depraved; next moral libertinism would become the rule and finally, “men forgetting decency and chivalry will break with wild passion upon defenceless women to satisfy their passion.”¹⁵

When the law nationalizing the schools was up for passage Mindszenty threatened the Catholic members of Parliament who voted for it and his opposition to that law led to his trial and conviction, though on other charges, in February 1949. His opposition to the land and school laws had been adamant and he had consistently refused to recognize the existence of the Hungarian Republic.¹⁶

When he was sentenced to life imprisonment there was a natural explosion of wrath from the American Catholic hierarchy, one which many millions of non-Catholics shared, and which advanced American public opinion notably toward the view that the conflict with communism was irreconcilable and could be settled only on the battlefield.

Spellman’s Call to Action. On February 6, 1949, Francis Cardinal Spellman, of New York, demanded the suppression and extermination of communism. Preaching in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, he avowed “that unless the whole American people without further ostrich-like actions and pretenses, unite to stop the Communist floodings of our own land, our sons, for the third and last time, shall be summoned from . . . their own homes and families to bear arms against those who would desecrate and destroy them.”

The general content of this sentence would suggest civil war ahead, yet the phrase “for the third and last time,” indicated clearly a third world war. This result of military action against communism would also be in the nature of things, since a war due to an inundation of our own land by Communist floodings could hardly be ended, with the finality suggested, without sending our atomic bombs and our armies to the source of the “floodings.”

Urging in an impassioned sentence that prudence be put aside, along with “silence, procrastination and compromise,” and assailing “the world’s most fiendish, ghoulish men of slaughter,” Cardinal Spellman asked if we were “always to endure the insults and wounds they inflict upon our American honor and decency as they enslave countries and persecute peoples.”

Calling upon “the American Government, the American public, the leaders in all phases of American life, religious, educational, political, labor, industrial, communications, yes, and entertainment,” to “raise their voices as one and cry out against and work against Satan-inspired Communist crimes,” he cried: “How long—Oh my God—shall we stand by and see Thy peoples who love Thee reviled, persecuted and murdered by atheistic Communists?”

6. Unification of the Slavs

The Second World War was primarily a war for fascist world conquest, but it also became a mighty German-Slav struggle.

From the time of the Teutonic Knights the Germans had been pushing out into Slav lands to the East. They mastered the Baltic states and became a power even in St. Petersburg. They flung out great colonies into Hungary, Rumania and Russia. The map was splotched with them, ending in the biggest enclave of all, the Volga Germans.

World War I was, first and foremost, an effort of the German and Hungarian magnates of the Hapsburg Empire to crush the rising nationalism of the Slav majorities in that Empire. They decided that these Slav nationalistic aspirations must be crushed by force, and Berlin gave them a blank check to do it. Attempting to survive by the sword the Hapsburg Empire perished by it, but Hitler felt himself able really to settle the German-Slav struggle for all time.

He did his best, but failed. After the Germans had killed some 8,000,000 Polish and nearly 20,000,000 Soviet citizens, carrying fire and rapine to the Volga—from which the Volga Germans had been moved far away—the Slavs won the struggle. The Nazis bankrupted and ruined Germany in the effort to exterminate the Untermenschen Slavs and seize their lands, at least as far as the Urals.

Such a gigantic, ferocious and bloody failure must have results. Pan Slavism had been a considerable force in the Tsarist Empire. Russia had fought in 1914 to save a small South Slav state from extinction, though Russia turned out to be the chief loser in World War I. In the late war the tables were completely turned. The Germans gambled everything and lost.

In the long sweep of history the German failure during 1940–5 to conquer the Slavs permanently is a decisive event of enormous proportions. As far as anyone can see, the German-Slav struggle is finished, with the Germans defeated by their own insensate greed. Instead of the Germans inundating all of Europe from the Stettin-Trieste line to the Urals, that vast area is now swept clean of them. They are nearly all back in a smaller Germany, to stay, There can be no real hope of a future German triumph over the Slavs, unless the Germans can serve as the spearhead of an American attack upon Soviet Europe—an event which would consolidate the entire Slav world as nothing else could. The Yugoslavs may insist on their own tempo in moving toward the communist millennium. The democratic Czech Republic may live long in the hearts of the Czech people. The Poles may chafe under tutelage by a power from which it has never been welcome. But let there come another real threat from Germany and all of Slavic East Europe would merge into a desperate wall of opposition, backed by the constantly growing industrial and military supremacy of the Soviet Union in Europe.¹⁷

Can East Europe be Recovered for the West? There was never any real probability that it could be, without a war which would finally finish Western civilization in West Europe, including Britain, whatever the military outcome.

Western Europe had had its day as the ruler of the world, a brilliant day which it frittered away in fratricidal balance of power wars. Its world sway was finally finished by Germany’s lusts for a “place in the sun,” before 1914, and for revenge, “living space” and loot after 1918.

Correspondingly, Eastern Europe had fallen into the Russian orbit for a long period. For better or worse the Soviets had turned the cordon sanitaire back upon the West and it could not be reversed. Nor could the West ever recover the ground lost as a result of its failure to establish and defend world law when it could have been done after 1918 with cheapness and efficiency.

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