TIME: Almanac 1995

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<text id=93HT0232> <link 93XP0500> <link 93HT0331> <link 93HT0292> <title> 1940s: Eastern Europe </title> <history> TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1940s Highlights </history> <article> <source>Time Magazine</source> <hdr> Eastern Europe </hdr> <body> [The Soviet Union had refused to let any of the Eastern European countries occupied by its troops accept Marshall Plan aid. Meanwhile, the Communists tightened their political grip on the last nations to try to hold onto democracy: Hungary and Czechoslovakia.] (March 22, 1948) Last week, the 98th anniversary of Thomas Masaryk's birth occurred. At his grave in Lany, Gottwald & Co. assembled for a propaganda field day. They said: "If Thomas Masaryk were alive he would approve us." Jan Masaryk was not among them at the grave, but the fact that he was in the Communist Cabinet lent validity to the Communist use of his father's name. Thomas Masaryk had said: "As a rule, in politics men take up a position either to the left or right. The right and the left have their definite opinions; the tactical gold-seeker slips or creeps in between them. He needs the radical oppositions so that he can skip to and fro...The modern era...is the age of permanent revolutions. Reaction itself is a form of revolution...whence the high comedy of golden middle path." Two days after his visit to his father's grave, on a bright sunny afternoon, Jan Masaryk went to see Benes at his peaceful country home. They remained alone for an hour, talking. The lights in Masaryk's third-floor apartment in Czernin Palace burned all night. His body was found at 6:20 by a guard on the stone-flagged court 60 feet below his bathroom window. Most of the indications pointed to suicide. Some skeptics insisted it was another case of Bohemia's famed "forcible defenestration." Whether it was suicide or murder, the fact was that Jan Masaryk had become enmeshed in exactly the kind of trap his father had warned against; he had been destroyed by trying to compromise with forces with which no man could compromise. (January 10, 1949) At a secret session of the Cominform in Sofia last month, Communist leaders spent an entire day discussing Josef Cardinal Mindszenty, 56, Prince Primate of Hungary. The decision to arrest him had already been made; it remained to concoct just the right charges. Eventually all the Communist delegates agreed on a draft bill of particulars against Mindszenty. In Budapest, the cardinal soon learned of what had been decided during the Cominform's busy day. He began to prepare for his arrest. On the night after Christmas, as the police convoy approached the cardinal's residence, he scribbled a hasty postscript on the envelope that held his message. He warned his fellow priests to be skeptical if they heard that he had resigned, or had "confessed." Even if they were shown his authentic signature on a confession, they should consider his signing as the result of "human frailty," i.e., the result of his inability to withstand Communist torture. Then he withdrew to his chambers to pray. There, the police arrested him. Sticking closely to the Sofia decisions, the government announced that Mindszenty was being held incommunicado on suspicion of "treason, attempting to overthrow the democratic regime, espionage and foreign currency abuses." (February 14, 1949) The Communists, who have their own martyrs, well understand the saying "Blood of martyrs, seed of the church." They sought to remove Mindszenty, who stood in their way, but above all they sought to cheat him of his martyr's crown. Thus last week Mindszenty appeared in court, "confessing" and "recanting." How the Communists managed it no one in the West knows. Somehow they broke Joseph Mindszenty, man of burning courage. Somehow they made him say things he had denied with the utmost vehemence, and with full knowledge of the consequences, until his arrest 40 days before. Nobody can prove that Mindszenty was drugged or beaten. All that can be said with certainty is that Mindszenty's whole life probed he was a brake and stubborn man, a man who at every fork in his life proudly took the dangerous, uphill way; to have made such a man "recant" was a sort of miracle of evil. [Cardinal Mindszenty was sentenced to life in prison. Suddenly a crack appeared in the Communist "monolith": Yugoslavia's Josip Broz Tito, who had imposed a Communist dictatorship on his own country, was determined to write his own variations on the Communist economic model for his nation, most notably the retention of private agricultural holdings, and simply defied Stalin and the Cominform to tell him how to run his country.] (July 12, 1948) The surface facts were easy enough to establish. Tito, in the Cominform's book of charges, was guilty of putting Yugoslavia (and himself) ahead of the Soviet Union (and Joseph Stalin). The Cominform did not really expect Tito to recant; they had tried this for weeks without success. Now they were putting it up to his party comrades in Yugoslavia to oust him and to "raise from below a new internationalist leadership." This seemed to worry Tito not at all, nor his efficient security police. He let others do his talking. And while he kept cool--and safe--on an inaccessible island in the Adriatic, the Yugoslav comrades flatly rejected the Cominform charges as "slanders and fabrications," and countercharged conspiracy "to impair the prestige of the (Yugoslav) Communist Party." Fifteen thousand of them sent off a telegram to Comrade Stalin asking him to remove the "false accusations." For the great incandescent fact of the "Affair Tito" was simply this: like Tito, many a non-Russian Red still wanted to think of himself as a Yugoslav, Pole, Czech or Hungarian, and not just a Kremlin stooge. Its peril lay in the fact that guerrilla-wise Tito knew this, and alone among satellite satraps had the necessary independence and power put his knowledge to sue. Moscow could forgive the medals on Tito's chest, the little bust of Bonaparte on his desk. It could not forgive his double-headed weapon of power and a popular cause. [Among the countries outside their immediate sphere of interest where the Soviets most actively fomented Communist activity was Greece. Its wartime Communist resistance had already tried one uprising, which was put down by British troops. But Greece's royalist post-war government was incompetent and unpopular, and with Communist regimes installed in Greece's neighbors, the threat welled up again. This time the British, overstretched and impoverished by the war, admitted they could no longer sustain the commitment, and asked the U.S. to take over the job of protecting Greece's security and democracy.] (March 10, 1947) The British note of Feb. 27, 1947 (a day that may live in history as the beginning of as new and more vigorous U.S. policy) did not find Marshall wholly unprepared. From the first he had regarded his mission to Moscow not merely as a diplomatic negotiation over Germany, but as part of a worldwide struggle in which the U.S. led the forces attempting to contain the aggressive drive of the Soviet Union. In most regions of the world (except the Western Hemisphere, the Far East and Germany), the job of combating the exploitation of confusion had fallen primarily upon Britain. That Britain could not carry this burden had been apparent for months to some Americans and some Britons. The first step in the problem was how to keep Greece from going Communist. In immediate terms, that meant shoring up the stupid and reactionary Greek Government until a better, more democratic substitute could be found. Britain had poured over $250 million into Greece since Liberation. The money had gone to rebuild harbors, pay the Government's expenses and the maintenance of British forces. Ponce Britain could not pay, the U.S. must either do so or the Iron Curtain would be moved down to the Mediterranean. If Greece fell, Turkey was outflanked. For almost eight years, Turkey had kept an army of some 600,000 men on war footing at an average cost of $150 million a year. Only Britain's economic and political assistance had enabled the country to keep up its costly nerve-racking resistance against Communist demands on the Dardanelles. With Britain unable to furnish assistance, Turkey would crack up under the cost of continued mobilization. The Russians could accomplish by mere threat of invasion all that they could hope to achieve by invasion. If Turkey and the Dardanelles went, the whole Middle East might slide into the Russian orbit. The U.S. would probably start by putting up $250,000,000 for Greece, an unspecified but probably smaller sum for Turkey. At some point it would have to help Italy, now on the verge of collapse. The occupation costs for Germany were a part of the same battle; if they were pared too far, misery and confusion in Germany would play into Russia's hands. (March 24, 1947) On March 12, 1947, the President of the United States addressed the Congress, the U.S. people--and the world. Conforming to the peculiar rules of diplomacy, Mr. Truman named no names but left no doubt about the identity of the aggressor. It was Soviet Russia. To some Americans his words sounded almost like a declaration of war. The Investment. As predicted, the aid for Greece and Turkey which the President recommended was an immediate $400,000,000. In addition, he asked Congress to "authorize the detail of American civilian and military personnel" as advisers and supervisors of the fund. In addition: "I recommend that authority also be provided for the instruction and training of selected Greek and Turkish personnel." He did not guarantee that his requests would stop there. On the contrary: "If further funds, or further authority should be needed...I shall not hesitate to bring the situation before the Congress...If we falter in our leadership, we may endanger the welfare of this nation." If Congress acted upon his recommendations, it would mean one of the broadest projections of U.S. Foreign policy in history. Some observers described Harry Truman's new policy as another Lend-Lease. It was far more than that. It was a projection of the advice which George Marshall gave the nation at the end of World War II. He spoke then as Chief of Staff, and in military terms: "The only effective defense a nation can how maintain is the power of attack." Other military leaders paraphrased it: "U.S. policy is now to wage the peace around the world." [Congress passed the bill authorizing aid under the "Truman Doctrine" in June 1947, just in time to help counter a new Communist push. By the end of the following winter, when U.S. Lieut. General James Van Fleet arrived to coordinate U.S. military aid and training efforts, the rash of Red-controlled territory had spread all down Greece's mountainous spine. Greek government forces were not very enthusiastic about going out to meet the new threat. Van Fleet's main job was to convince the Greeks that this was really their fight.] (April 5, 1948) The Guerrillas who were keeping Greece in turmoil, though supported by the Muscovite, were not waiting for Moscow to send Russian troops to do their work. With far less aid than the Greek government had from the U.S., they had not only held out in their crags but had grown in numbers and vigor. In two years they had multiplied tenfold. They had raided and ravaged, living a hard mountain life unsolaced by Athenian cafes. A motley collection of uprooted folk, they had no status quo to preserve, no hopes to lose. Consequently they fought as desperate men. Their mission was akin to that of Communists everywhere: to uproot their countrymen, to spread despair, to kill hope, to smother enterprise, to prevent the sowing of crops, until even the tyranny of Communism would seem by comparison a haven. Their leader, appropriately, was an uprooted soul. Lean, sinewy Markos Vafiades, like many other Greek Communists, was a refugee from turkey. When Communist Leader Zachariades decided to boycott the national elections of 1946 and to build up a Communist revolutionary force, Markos took to the hills. At that time Markos had perhaps 2,500 armed followers in band scattered about Greece. Within a year the number had grown to 8,000. Now he has 25,000. The hard core and leadership are Communist. But the KKE (pronounced coo-coo-ay) seldom admits that it controls the guerrillas, and refers to them as a "democratic force fighting against monarcho-fascists." Markos' stronghold is the range of the Pindus Mountains, extending like a probing finger from Albania and Yugoslavia into the heart of Greece. In those crags Markos Vafiades can claim to rule. And his influence extends to any rocky slope throughout Greece where armed men may hide beyond the easy reach of troops not anxious to stage a manhunt. In the last few weeks help of a more substantial (and, for the Greek army, more ominous) kind has been piling up on Greece's northwestern borders. Over the two main roads leading to villages on the Albanian side of the border, there has been a steady movement of convoys bringing up supplies. Nightly their lights bob and weave among the hills. Nightly mule trains wind across the rough hill tracks into Greece. Villages on the Albanian side of the border, for a depth of 30 miles, have been practically cleared of civilians. In the no man's land between Markos' mountains and army-held towns, the few remaining villagers have learned to retire to their cellars when the shooting starts. When it stops, they come out to see who has won. The spiritual no man's land in the hearts of despairing Greeks is the most significant battlefield. Perhaps half the population is sitting on the fence, ready to join whichever side wins the first big victory. [The civil war continued into 1949, then wound down as the guerrillas and their foreign backers abandoned hopes of a cheap Communist victory. At the same time as the Greek civil war was intensifying, powerful Communist parties and trade unions in Italy and France attempted a show of force. The weak revolving-door French governments that had followed the disgusted resignation of Charles de Gaulle in January 1946 seemed especially vulnerable to threats of labor strife and disorder. But the Truman Doctrine seemed to give non-Communist ministers were thrown out of the French cabinet in May 1947; a vote of confidence upheld the move. Similarly, Italian Premier Alcide de Gasperi resigned, formed a new Cabinet without Communist representatives. The Communists struck back.] (November 24, 1947) A Communist offensive broke out last week in Western Europe. The riots in France and Italy were obviously part of a plan, but the plan probably was not intended to result in immediate Communist seizure of Western European governments. What, then, did Moscow hope to gain? In a word-time. Time in which to wreck the Marshall Plan on the shoals of disorder in Europe, on the rocks of the great U.S. depression which Moscow believes imminent. Moscow is by no means ready for fullfledged international war, but neither does it want peace. In the phrase of a top British diplomat, it wants a "twilight zone" between peace and war. Quite satisfactory twilights have been produced in Greece and China. It is time, in Moscow's eyes, for twilight to roll westward, along the course of the sun. </body> </article> </text>