The Magic Lantern

In Europe, World War II was both an ideological and a geopolitical contest between the Axis Powers—Hitler’s fascist Third Reich, Italy, Japan, and eventually countries from Eastern Europe—and the Allied Powers, a temporary alliance between the liberal democracies of Britain, France, the UK, and the socialist Soviet Union. After 1945, the Allied alliance became fraught with tension as the Soviet Union held military primacy in Eastern Europe, and its leadership under Stalin was distrustful of capitalist powers and anxious about future security. By 1946, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill spoke of an “iron curtain” dividing Western Europe’s democracies from the Soviet-allied states of Eastern Europe. Within Eastern Europe, new Soviet-aligned governments, often with Communists as one coalition partner among many, began to expand free access to education and promote economic transformation and social leveling, which earned them some domestic support. The division of Germany by the Allied Powers in 1945 became a particularly important point of tension as Stalin was opposed to any attempt to rebuild a strong Germany. All the newly formed states of Eastern Europe rejected Marshall Plan aid from the United States. In 1948, the Soviets briefly attempted to block free entry and exit of goods and individuals through Berlin in what became known as the Berlin Blockade, with the Allies countering with an airlift of food and supplies.

The decades of Cold War that followed were fought ideologically and militarily, but outside Europe, as the prospect of nuclear war between the Soviet Union and the United States made open conflict too risky. The Soviet Union established the Warsaw Pact as a counterweight to the United States and Western European democracies forming the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). By 1947-1948, communist and workers’ parties increasingly consolidated one-party rule, including in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland. Stalin’s death in 1953 sparked a period of liberalization and hopes for economic and social reform, known as de-Stalinization. But these reforms took place without any real rejection of Marxist-Leninist ideology, and the Cold War’s global divisions of the world between socialist states and capitalist ones remained intact.

Reform within socialist systems began in earnest when Stalin’s successor, Nikita Khrushchev, denounced Stalin’s “cult of personality” in the spring of 1956. It was in this atmosphere that Hungarian students protested en masse until Imre Nagy’s government attempted to leave the Warsaw Pact that autumn. This uprising was crushed by Soviet troops, signaling that reform would only be tolerated on a limited basis. The Prague Spring of 1968, sparked by the appointment of reformer Alexander Dubček and his calls for “socialism with a human face” established that all uprisings considered to be anti-Soviet would be put down by force what became known as the Brezhnev Doctrine.

In the 1970s and 1980s, dissident movements grew throughout the region, and within the Soviet Union. These were partly inspired by the signing of the Helsinki Accords, which obligated signatories to commit to safeguarding human rights. 1989 marked a historical turning point, signaling a kind of conclusion to the Cold War, as Mikhail Gorbachev rejected interventionist foreign policy while pursuing domestic reform and open political debate within the Soviet Union itself.