Stalin as Empire Builder
MASTNY, VOJTECH
Stalin as Empire Builder Between Russia and the West: Hungary and the Illusions of Peacemaking By Stephen D. Kertesz Notre Dame. 299 pp. $20.00. Reviewed by Vojtech Mastny Professor of...
...But their inability to agree about the treatment of the main enemy was a symptom—not the cause—of a deeper discord that had already begun evolving over the question of Soviet power and influence in other countries, particularly in Eastern Europe...
...Reviewed by Vojtech Mastny Professor of International Relations, Boston University...
...The doubts have since been amply justified...
...The sorry tale reveals more about Stalin's lesser-known doubts than about his too familiar brutalities...
...Ultimately, they came down to the incompatibility of the Western concept of international pluralism with the Soviet quest for an absolute security that presupposed subjugation of other nations...
...Quite in contrast with the wishful subtitle of another book on the subject—A.W...
...Hungary's status as a country marginal to Soviet security highlighted the wider implications of the Paris deliberations...
...For the Soviets, the agonizing questions were whether confrontation with the immensely more powerful United States in the heart of Europe or the installation of patently unpopular Communist rulers in the eastern part of it were critical to attaining their objective...
...His book is a happy blend of first-hand testimony and seasoned reflection...
...Such an outcome would seem to require nothing short of the demise of the Soviet Union as we have known it...
...Pondering the long-term outlook, Kertesz reminds us of the unavoidable death of all empires: tout I'empireperira...
...author, "Russia's Road to the Cold War" Forty years after the end of World War II the division of Europe into rival power blocs remains the substitute for a peace settlement...
...This is a study of the formative period of the Cold War, when the inevitable did not yet seem inevitable...
...It is a story about Stalin's hesitating to create a self-enclosed empire organized on the Soviet model, only to proceed with doing so anyway— because of the opportunity at hand, and because of nagging doubts about the viability of that model in an open environment...
...With those that qualified as former enemies—Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and Finland—as well as with Italy, peace treaties were actually concluded following protracted negotiations in Paris in 1946-47...
...In chapters about his native Hungary he describes its ordeal from the Soviet-style "liberation" in 1945 to the imposition of a Communist regime two years down the road...
...The significance was not so much in the results achieved—which merely confirmed that Italy would remain part of the West, and the others would be consigned to the Soviet sphere—as in the deeper issues aired during the frequently acrimonious Paris discussions...
...Stephen Kertesz, now a political scientist in the United States, was on the scene then as secretary of the Hungarian delegation to the peace conference...
...Yet while Stalin's goal was abundantly clear, the incompatibility was not immediately apparent...
...In the crucial territorial dispute over Transylvania, for example, Moscow first favored the Hungarian claim and only afterward took Romania's side...
...It is because of the role of these secondary enemies in shaping the Cold War as a political conflict that the treaties with them assumed a primary significance...
...Kertesz is at his best dissecting the often ingenious ploys the Soviet negotiators used to help dispel Stalin's uncertainties...
...dePorte's Europe Between the Superpowers—the partition of Europe that Moscow forced has not become a source of any "enduring balance...
...The Soviet authorities also assisted initially in introducing a multiparty system of government in Hungary, a move that made the subsequent imposition of Communist rule more difficult...
...Later in 1947, both Washington and Moscow recognized the necessary consequences of the situation and designed new policies to integrate their respective spheres of influence in conformity with their conflicting views of the international scene...
...The victors never managed to conclude a peace treaty with Germany, making their temporary partition of the country permanent by default...
...All the proceedings were public, an unusual departure from diplomatic practice that laid bare before the eyes of the world the sharp differences between Western and Soviet notions of the postwar order...
...The course of the conference makes clear that the partition of Europe and Sovietization of its eastern part flowed inexorably from the geopolitical realities and Stalin's concept of security...
...As an alternative to the obsolescent order that has grown out of the shambles of the peacemaking four decades ago, he hopes for a "neutral East European federation" within a "cooperative state system" from the Atlantic to the Urals...
...Hungarywas not nearly as important to him as Poland, and he improvised...
...But there is no reason why an increasingly anachronistic system should be immune to substantive change, even i fits protagonists have so far successfully managed to prevent this...
...They sought to clarify how far he could safely go in imposing his will in Eastern Europe and still keep his deteriorating relations with the West at an acceptable level...
...The recurrent Soviet failure to insure stability in the eastern part of the Continent instead attests to the pre-cariousness of the quasi-imperial solution in our age of decolonization and national self-determination...
Vol. 68 • May 1985 • No. 7
