Abstract
Life in inter-war Eastern Europe was unpleasant. Czechoslovakia was a democracy, but all the other states of Eastern Europe were governed by authoritarian regimes: Poland was a ‘directed democracy’; Albania, Bulgaria, Romania and Yugoslavia were monarchical dictatorships; and Hungary was a monarchical dictatorship with a Regent rather than a King. As Hugh Seton-Watson, Britain’s leading inter-war authority on Eastern Europe, commented, the ‘strong governments’ there were ‘no more than greedy, corrupt and brutal class regimes’.1
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Notes
H. Seton-Watson, Eastern Europe between the Wars (New York, 1967), p. 156.
On Tito and the Yugoslav Communist Party, see G. R. Swain ‘Tito: the formation of a disloyal Bolshevik’ in International Review of Social History (1989), where full references to non-English language sources will be found.
For the Comintern radio transmitter, see G. R. Swain, ‘The Comintern and Southern Europe’ in T. Judt (ed.), Resistance and Revolution in Mediterranean Europe (London, 1989) where full references to non-English language sources will be found.
For the impact of the Nazi-Soviet Pact on Eastern Europe, see Swain, ‘The Comintern’. The enthusiastic support for the notion of an imperialist war given by Milovan Djilas, the future dissident Yugoslav communist, is worth noting; see M. Djilas, Memoir of a Revolutionary (New York, 1973) p. 329. For the number of East Europeans fighting in Spain, see International Solidarity with the Spanish Republic, 1936–39 (Moscow, 1975).
For communist control over the liberation committees, see G. R. Swain, ‘The Cominform, Tito’s International?’, Historical Journal (1992) where full references to non-English language sources will be found.
For Tito’s talks with Mihailović, see M. C. Wheeler, Britain and the War for Yugoslavia, 1940–43 (New York, 1980), p. 88.
For the response of French and Italian communists to these instructions, see P. Robrieux, Histoire Intérieure du Parti Communiste (3 vols, Paris, 1981), II pp. 78–81.
and J. Urban, Moscow and the Italian Communist Party (Cornell, 1986) pp. 198–9.
N. Pano, The People’s Republic of Albania (Baltimore, 1968) pp. 41–57.
N. Oren, Bulgarian Communism: the Road to Power, 1934–44 (New York, 1971), p. 201.
Atanasov, Pod znameneto, p. 201. According to Bulgarian police reports, the British had promised as early as February 1944 to support underground and partisan operations to the point of insurrection and the creation of a Fatherland Front Government; see O. Vasilev, V’or’zhenata s’protiva fashizma v B’lgariya (Sofia, 1946), p. 566.
S. G. Tanev, Internatsionalnata missiya na s ‘vetskata armiya v B’lgariya, 1944–7 (Sofia, 1971), p. 43.
J. Tomasevich, ‘Yugoslavia during the Second World War’ and W. D. McClellan, ‘Post-war Political Evolution’ in W. S. Vucinich, Contemporary Yugoslavia (Berkeley, 1969); Wheeler, ‘Pariahs’.
McClellan, ‘Political Evolution’; G. W. Hoffman and F. W. Neal, Yugoslavia – the New Communism (New York, 1962).
Hoffman and Neal, Yugoslavia; P. Auty, ‘The Post-war Period’ in H. C. Darby et al., A Short History of Yugoslavia (Cambridge, 1966).
Swain, ‘The Cominform’; H. Seton-Watson, ‘Albania’ in A. Toynbee and V. V. Toynbee, Survey of International Affairs, 1939–46: the Realignment of Europe (Oxford, 1955).
R. J. Crampton, A Short History of Modern Bulgaria (Cambridge, 1987), p. 145ff.
Crampton, A Short History of Modern Bulgaria, p. 151; H. Seton-Watson, The East European Revolution (London, 1961), p. 213.
B. Petranović, ‘Tito i Staljin, 1944–6’ in Jugoslovenski Istorijski Časopis, Belgrade, 1988;
C. Strbac, Jugoslavia i odnosi izmedju socialističkikh zemalja: sukob KPJ i Informbiroa (Belgrade, 1984), p. 69, p. 259.
Seton-Watson, Revolution, p. 213ff.; J. Tomaszewski, The Socialist Regimes of East Central Europe (London, 1989), pp. 95–100.
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© 1993 Geoffrey Swain and Nigel Swain
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Swain, G., Swain, N. (1993). Revolution in Eastern Europe. In: Eastern Europe since 1945. The Making of the Modern World. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-22656-6_2
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