Cold War - chapter 2

When we left our Big Three, they were all pretty unhappy with each other, following the Potsdam conference. They retired to their respective corners....er, I mean countries, and did their best to regroup following the second world war. America were still feeling quite smug because they had the atomic bomb; Russia were busy building a buffer zone.

Each country in eastern Europe that bordered Russia eventually had a Soviet-sympathising, communist government. Remember how Russia promised they'd allow free elections everywhere? Yeah, well...right now Russia was scuffing its feet along the ground and refusing to meet anybody's eye, because they totally reneged on that promise.

The Russians had several methods for getting their people into the governments of other countries..

In Poland (which never stood a chance really, did it?), once the Soviets had helped the communist government into power, they then helped them to remove members from all the other parties from the government, and then banned all the other parties anyway, just to make doubly sure.

In Romania, they relied on the good old policy of rigging the elections (perhaps George W Bush took his inspiration from here) to make sure they were in power by 1946, and then forced the King to abdicate so there was no threat to their authority.

In Hungary, they employed the tasty-sounding "salami technique", by encouraging splits and divisions between the political parties that made up the coalition government, so that it was severely weakened and couldn't hang on to power for very long. In 1947, the Soviets accused the Hungarian government of offending the Red Army and banned their party.

In Albania, they didn't have to do much at all - the Albanians happily copied the Russian model of government and had red leadership in 1945.

In Bulgaria, the Soviets made friends with the existing party and formed a coalition with them. Awww! Friendly Soviets, how sweet! Except that, once they were nice and cosy, they accused the leader of the other party of plotting a coup, hanged him, and purged all his supporters.

A similar thing happened in East Germany, where the Soviets merged with the ruling Socialist party and then purged all its members.

That just leave Czechoslovakia. This country proved a bit more difficult. They hadn't been a country for very long, having been founded in 1919 by Tomas Masaryk. This probably made them less willing to give in to Soviet demands. Although the communists were strong in the government in 1946, the foreign minister, Jan Masaryk, was keen to maintain the country's independence, and applied for Marshall Aid (more on that later). He was horrified when the communist members of the government rejected the application, and most of the non-communists ministers resigned in 1948, hoping to force an election.

It was the chance the communists had been waiting for. Instead of holding elections, they just filled the empty positions with their own people. Then Jan Masaryk appeared to commit suicide (hmmmm....) and the Czech government were Soviets through and through. Most of the world called this "the Czech coup", but the Russians and their mates called it "Victorious February."