Meta: The difficulty in shifting the iron curtain by military action in WWII-

raharris1973

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Of the portions of Europe that became communist post-WWII, the countries most accessible to western military power during the war were Albania, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia. The former three countries were near allied theaters of operations in the Mediterranean, and Prague could have been put within military reach after D-Day. However, these were the very same countries that had the strongest native communist parties and pro-Soviet popular and elite sentiments. Even of liberated by the western allies, their local communist parties would have been powerful, much more so than say the Italian or French communist parties, and they, along with other non-communist elite elements, would have resisted participation in anti-Soviet alliances.

To elaborate, by 1943 communists were the dominant resistance group in Yugoslavia, and even more dominant, relative to other groups, in Albania. A pre-Cold War example of Bulgarian pro-Sovietism was its refusal to declare war on the USSR. Just prior to the German invasion, royalist Yugoslavia was expanding ties with the USSR, to give another example of non-communist pro-Sovietism. Benes, remembering Munich bitterly, made up his mind by mid-1942 that Czechoslovakia should place its principal reliance for security
on the USSR after the war. He had been fairly pro-Soviet before the war also, although also allied with France.
Those countries with more anti-Soviet or anti-communist native sentiment, weak communist parties and with the greatest corresponding interest in western alliances were the Baltics, Poland, Romania and Hungary. However, they were all relatively geographically inaccessible to western allied forces during the war, being the most distant from Atlantic and Mediterranean invasion routes.
 
Are you sure about native communist strength in Czechoslovakia? It was a pretty stable republic before the war, and from what I remember of my visit to Prague, the communists got a lot from Soviet troops on the ground...
 
However, these were the very same countries that had the strongest native communist parties and pro-Soviet popular and elite sentiments. Even of liberated by the western allies, their local communist parties would have been powerful, much more so than say the Italian or French communist parties, and they, along with other non-communist elite elements, would have resisted participation in anti-Soviet alliances.

Hmm? I am not sure how you can call the French Communist Party noninfluential, or the Italians, who were prominent in Italy and gained significant votes after WW2.

While Bulgaria was pro-Russian generally, the Bulgarian Communist party was basically nonexistent prior to WW2.
 
Hmm? I am not sure how you can call the French Communist Party noninfluential, or the Italians, who were prominent in Italy and gained significant votes after WW2.

While Bulgaria was pro-Russian generally, the Bulgarian Communist party was basically nonexistent prior to WW2.
Wrong, it was actually one of the strongest in Eastern Europe.
 
Are you sure about native communist strength in Czechoslovakia? It was a pretty stable republic before the war, and from what I remember of my visit to Prague, the communists got a lot from Soviet troops on the ground...

One of the many reasons the communists won such a big share of the vote before the coup (even bigger than before the war, not that CZS being a stable democracy meant it couldn't have any communist party and indeed the party did consistently win a fair share of the vote) was that they were identified with the Soviets who had liberated the country, but it wasn't the Soviets who carried out the coup. Obviously the existence of the Red Army close at hand allowed it to happen, but it was carried out from within Czechoslovakia.
 
Wrong, it was actually one of the strongest in Eastern Europe.

I'm not so sure. It gets purged and pushed underground in 1924, and then spends a long time jerking around and operating through the Bulgarian Workers Party.It managed to get 166,000 votes in 1931, but when the government banned all political parties, the BWP's efforts to promote a general strike were a bust and the party melted away.

This doesn't strike me as a powerful and vigorous opposition.
 

raharris1973

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On the contrary -

Hmm? I am not sure how you can call the French Communist Party noninfluential, or the Italians, who were prominent in Italy and gained significant votes after WW2.

On the contrary Faeelin, my intention was not to say those parties were weak, but fairly strong (indeed stronger than the Romanian or Polish communist parties), but that the Czech party was yet again even *stronger* than the French and Italian communist parties, which I think is a supportable statement.

Here are some past threads where the Czechs jumping into Soviet arms has been discussed. David Tenner and Pavel Vozelinek see Benes as assigning his country to the Soviet sphere well before the end of the war, while Krystof Zietara and Michelle Armellini have a hunch that western liberation of Prague would have altered the pro-Soviet dynamic in Czechoslovakia.

http://groups.google.com/group/soc....5a2acad883c?lnk=gst&q=prague#c3bb05a2acad883c

http://groups.google.com/group/soc....WII+-+Goes+communist+anyway?#1751873b78d94256



While Bulgaria was pro-Russian generally, the Bulgarian Communist party was basically nonexistent prior to WW2.

Being pro-Russian is enough for the purposes of my argument. Pro-Russianism and/or pro-communism is enough to make any of these countries a doubtful member of a westen bloc.

Also, regardless of the Bulgarian CP's stature in the 1930s, during the war itself its underground organization got much stronger.

To move on to the western Balkans, Yugoslavia and Albania were quite militarily accessible to the western allies, but the western allies would have had a hard time converting that access into political gains for an emerging cold war.

Churchill's ideas for an attack on Istria and then an advance through the Ljubljana Gap to Vienna and Budapest were absolutely fantastical (and some have even gotten so carried away with the fantasy thinking it could have yielded Prague or Bucharrest to the western allies.) Not only would they have faced huge terrain/logistical bottlenecks (well-outlined by Carlo D'Este I believe in "Options of Command"), the political environment would have been none too favorable. The British would have had to make a deal with either Tito or the Ustasha, and Tito did not want British ground troops. Gerhard Weinberg alleges, according to his sources that Tito was so opposed his response would have been to withdraw into the hills to *avoid* inconveniencing German counterattacks on a western allied bridgehead.

Even if that last allegation is a bit extreme, it is difficult to see Tito being at all helpful to British troops attempting to make land grabs preempting the Soviets in Central Europe, which was the whole point of Churchill's proposed Adriatic gambit, at leastas he wrote about it post-war.

After 1949, Tito used western support to withstand pressure from Stalin, but it is dangerous to read this back in to the war years. Tito was very much in favor of maximizing communist and Yugoslav expansion, and favored intimate alliance with the USSR, regardless of the fact that he had gotten most of his material support from the British. It took Stalin's arrogance and threats to Tito's position and personal survival to create "Titoism".


Western allied overtures to alternative factions in Yugoslavia, like the Ustasha or Chetniks, while providing willing collaborators against communism, would have been even more morally compromising (at least in the Ustasha case) and would have bogged down the western allies in feuds with partisans, hardly conducive to using Yugoslavia as a territorial springboard, and in the Cold War environment, would have pushed Tito and Stalin right in to each other's arms further. If there was an ugly side to the alliances the west made in Greece to prevent to prevent communist takeover there, multiply it by 10 in the case of Yugoslavia.

Now possibly a western initiative in the more southern Adriatic could have changed the local balance of forces enough to result in a non-communist, western-aligned Albania. Geopolitically, whoop-de-do. It does have the bonus of easing internal conditions in Albania enormously, and in weakening the position of the Greek communist rebels by denying them border sanctuary, but it could have made it harder for Tito to later break Yugoslavia away from Stalin, because more of the party might have regarded the Soviet tie as essential to defend Yugoslavia from feared Anglo-American-Italian backed Albanian irredentism for Kosovo.
 
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