Gleichschaltung unter Stalin? Die Entwicklung der Parteien in östlichen Europa, 1944–1949 (review)

This is a very useful and interesting compendium of essays on the Soviet takeover of Eastern Europe after the Second World War. The authors are a mix of German and East European specialists who are well-versed in the historiography of the period and in the newly available documents. Central to many of the contributions are the recently published Georgi Dimitrov diaries and the multivolume document collections edited by Jochen Laufer and G. P. Kynin on the German question from 1944 to 1949 and by T. V. Volokotina and her associates on Soviet policy in Eastern Europe from 1944 to 1953. The use of these and other newly available materials ensures that the quality of the contributions is generally very high. At a time when American scholars are feeling the pinch of the financial costs of scholarly publication, they may be a bit envious of the two German editors, who were able to put out an elaborately footnoted and carefully edited compendium of this size (468 pages), including an excellent bibliography and an index.

The book leads off with two fine conceptual pieces, one by the senior German scholar Gerhard Wettig and the other by a junior colleague, Donal O’Sullivan. Wettig focuses on the German question in the postwar period but keeps the rest of Eastern Europe clearly in view. O’Sullivan looks at Soviet plans for Eastern Europe as a whole, including the German question. Both authors make clear that no single “master plan,” cooked up in Moscow, existed for the region. The issue of “Sovietization” was essentially not a predetermined one; it was instead the product of the lopsided competition between, on the one hand, pressure from the Soviet Union and its Communist helpmates in Eastern Europe (including Germany) to control political developments in the region and, on the other hand, the resistance of non-Communist forces in the region itself, with intermittent backing from the West. Both essays usefully review the plans devised by Maksim Litvinov and Ivan Maiskii for postwar European development, emphasizing once again the important connections made by Soviet policy planners between the German question and the fate of Eastern Europe as a whole.

The central theme of the book is Gleichschaltung, a concept of political leveling and the elimination of opposition that comes out of the study of Nazism. However, the editors and authors do little by way of comparing Eastern Europe with the Nazi case. Instead, they emphasize that the Soviet Union’s policy of promoting a National Front in each of the “People’s Democracies” (in German they pedantically refer to them as the “so-called” People’s Democracies) was no more than an effort to grind down political opposition and promote the fortunes of the Communists. This is clear from the book’s contributions on Poland (Harald Moldenhauer), Romania (Ulrich Burger), Bulgaria (Marietta Stankova), Yugoslavia (Jerca Vodušek Starič), Albania (Peter Danylow), the Soviet Occupation Zone of Germany, SBZ (Monika Kaiser), Czechoslovakia (Jiří Kocian), and Hungary (János M. Rainer). When one examines the strategies and tactics of the Communist seizure of power in each of these countries, the conclusion is clear: every case has a different and “special” quality; yet every case ends up with pretty much the same results—a Communist-led “new democracy” and an indigenous form of the “dictatorship of the proletariat.” Stefan Creuzberger and Manfred Görtemaker correctly conclude: “The conversion of this strategy [of the National Front] into practice took place in a genuinely heterogeneous fashion” (p. 423). If, however, the strategy was as obvious and transparent as the editors indicate, why did so many “bourgeois” politicians and Social Democrats participate in it? Why did the West play along for so long?

The most innovative aspect of the volume is its inclusion of excellent essays about Finland (Ruth Buttner) and Austria (Oliver Rathkolb). The cases of Finland and Austria are important in understanding the historically contingent origins of the...