Die Rote Armee in der Steiermark: Sowjetische Besatzung 1945 (review)

When the Cold War ended, German scholars quickly jumped on the numerous East German and Soviet records to write the history of the Soviet occupation zone in postwar Germany. Austrian scholars initially were more lackadaisical in writing the history of the Soviet occupation zone in postwar Austria, but by 2005 they had caught up. In that “memory year”—60 years after the end of World War II and the liberation of Austria and 50 years after the signing of the Austrian State Treaty—a number of remarkable studies appeared that finally shed light on Soviet occupation policies in Austria.

Two principal research teams were at work in the Moscow archives. The team around Stefan Karner and Barbara Stelzl-Marx at the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for the Study of Consequences of War, headquartered in Graz, published a massive two-volume study (a volume of key documents reprinted in Russian and translated into German and a volume of essays) in the spring of 2005 on the Red Army in Austria, Die Rote Armee in Österreich: Sowjetische Besatzung 1945–1955. In the fall of 2005 a team organized by the Austrian Academy of Sciences published a Russian-German volume of documents (Wolfgang Müller, Arnold Suppan, Norman M. Nairmark, and Gennadij Bordjugov, eds., Sowjetische Politik in Österreich: Dokumente aus russischen Archiven). The two groups evidently did not coordinate with each other, and Sowjetische Politik in Österreich reprinted and retranslated key documents that had already appeared in Die Rote Armee in Österreich. The Austrian Academy also organized a huge state treaty anniversary conference and presented the papers to the public in a splendid scholarly volume (Arnold Suppan, Gerald Stourzh, and Wolfgang Müller, eds., The Austrian State Treaty: International Strategy, Legal Relevance, National Identity). Wolfgang Müller, a young Vienna-based Soviet specialist who was the workhorse in the Academy’s project, also published his dissertation at that time, Die sowjetische Besatzung in Österreich 1945–1955 und ihre politische Mission (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2005). Taken together these weighty volumes present a much clearer picture of Soviet political policies during the Austrian occupation. They demonstrate that Moscow never planned to take over Austria. In fact, in the late 1940s the Soviet Union had to restrain the aggressive Austrian Communist Party, which would have liked nothing better than the division of Austria and Communist control of the Soviet occupation zone in eastern Austria. The picture of Soviet economic policies in the exploitation of its zone is less clear and awaits further study.

The volume under review here contains 129 translated documents, mostly from former Soviet archives and a few from Bulgarian repositories, and originates with the Graz research team. The book is dedicated to the short-lived occupation of East Styria by the Soviet Army supplemented by Bulgarian auxiliary forces. The Red Army drove the Germans out of this area in April 1945 after the liberation of Hungary and adjacent eastern Austria, having rolled inexorably westward and southwestward into adjoining areas until the war ended in early May. At the end of the war the Soviet occupation of East Styria was not planned but unfolded when armies filled power vacuums left by Adolf Hitler’s collapsing Third Reich. Once the Red Army was in place, Stalin used it as a bargaining chip. The threat by the Yugoslav leader, Josip Broz Tito, to seize territory in southern Styria and Carinthia also hovered over the great-power politics in this area. The great powers had agreed by the spring of 1945 that Styria would become part of the British zone of occupation, and in late July 1945 Red Army forces moved out of East Styria (including the capital, Graz) and British troops moved into the territory the European Advisory Commission had assigned them (Styria and Carinthia). The final agreement for this zonal realignment came at the Potsdam Conference in late July, after Winston Churchill’s protest and Iosif Stalin’s procrastination (p. 391).

The bulk...