A History of Eastern Europe 1918 to the Present

Modernisation, Ideology and Nationality

Ian D. Armour

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781472508652
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

Why is Eastern Europe still different from Western Europe, more than a quarter-century after the collapse of Communism? A History of Eastern Europe 1918 to the Present shows how the roots of this difference are based in Eastern Europe's tortured 20th century. Eastern Europe emerged in 1918 as the 'lands between', new states whose weakness vis-à-vis Germany and Soviet Russia soon became obvious. The region was the main killing-field of the Second World War, which visited unimaginable horrors on its inhabitants before their 'liberation' by the Soviets in 1945. The imposition of Communist dictatorships on the region, ironically, only deepened Eastern Europe's backwardness. Even in the post-Communist period, its problems continue to make it a fertile breeding-ground for nationalism and political extremism. A History of Eastern Europe 1918 to the Present explores the comparative backwardness of Eastern Europe and how this has driven strategies of modernisation; it looks at the ways in which the region has served as a giant test-tube for political experimentation and, in particular, at the enduring strength of nationalism, which since 1989 has re-emerged more virulent than ever. This book in the essential textbook for any student of 20th-century Eastern Europe.

PART I

The prehistory of twentieth-century Eastern Europe

1

The making of ‘Eastern Europe’

Just as we cannot understand the present without a knowledge of the past, so too every history has its ‘prehistory’. This chapter describes Eastern Europe at the outset of the twentieth century, at a point when profound changes already lay behind the region, but when the cataclysms of the twentieth century were still to come. This involves a brief survey of the physical and human geography, the peoples of Eastern Europe and their environment. It involves a summary of economic and social conditions, and how these shaped domestic political developments. Finally, it involves a tour of the international political landscape, the empires and other states and their relationships with one another. Although much of this terrain is covered in this book’s predecessor, some sort of recapitulation of these aspects seems in order. The chapter concludes with a necessarily brutal analysis of the origins of the First World War, which had their ostensible locus, at least, in Eastern Europe.¹

Physical and human geography

Whatever common characteristics Eastern Europe might possess, they are not to be found in its physical geography. The region ranges from the Arctic taiga of Finland and European Russia, across a vast swathe of boreal forest, the North German Plain and the steppe grasslands of Russia and Hungary, to the mountain ranges of the Carpathians, the Alps and the Balkans, taking in rich river valleys and huge alluvial plains at the mouths of the Vistula, Danube and Dnieper, and narrower mountain gorges throughout the Balkan Peninsula. Eastern Europe includes some of the most fertile land in the world, but it also features rocky, barren landscapes like the Greek archipelago and the limestone karst of the Adriatic littoral. It remains to this day a region rich in natural resources, arable and mineral, one reason among others for the near-continual conflict which has shaped its history.

The human geography is even more complex. The peoples of Eastern Europe are numerous, and divide into at least ten main language groups, living in 1914 under the rule of only eleven sovereign states.² Long before the twentieth century, as a result of migration, conquest and displacement, these peoples had become in many areas inextricably intermixed, to a far greater extent than the peoples of Western Europe. Revolts against Ottoman rule in the Balkans, and the emergence of nation-states there, had begun to undo this intermixture of peoples, by forcing out unwanted ethnic or confessional groups; but this early form of ‘ethnic cleansing’ was far from completed, and the continuing complexity of the population in almost all the states of the region was a source of as yet unresolved tensions. The ‘great departure’ of mass emigration, most of it to the Americas, accelerated after 1880, prompting concerns among rulers about population loss, but did not materially alter the ethnic balance in Eastern Europe itself.³

Map 1 Languages of Eastern Europe.

In addition, populations were divided vertically as well as horizontally. It was not uncommon, even in the twentieth century, for towns to be of a different ethnicity than the people in the surrounding countryside. An example was the largely Polish-speaking city of Vilnius, which in 1918 was anchored in a sea of Belorussian-speaking peasants. Yet towns were themselves multinational: Vilnius hosted German-speakers and Yiddish-speaking Jews, as well as a small but growing number of Lithuanians; it had only just shed its upper crust of Russian administrators, servants of the defunct tsarist regime. Across the region the spread of education meant that long-dominant urban ethnicities were being infiltrated by a trickle of literate peasants, or the literate sons and daughters of peasants.

Until the nineteenth century most of Eastern Europe was profoundly agrarian; in other words the vast majority of the population lived largely on and off the land, with small urban centres and little in the way of industry. The picture changed in the century preceding 1914, but even at the beginning of the twentieth century, due to the uneven spread of industrialisation, much of the huge mineral and non-agricultural richness of the region remained unexploited. On the eve of the First World War there were serious concentrations of industry in metropolitan Austria and Hungary, in Bohemia and Silesia, in Russian Poland and the Baltic provinces of Russia, and in the Donbass region of what is now eastern Ukraine.

Language alone, in Eastern Europe as elsewhere, was no firm guide to ethnic identity, and not just because many East Europeans to this day have, of necessity, a working knowledge of more than one language. Individuals might pass their childhood speaking one language, but receive their education in another, or acquire a second tongue due to migration to a town or elsewhere. Pressure to assimilate into the culture of the dominant ethnicity, in some countries, resulted in sizeable minorities of recent ‘converts’; in interwar Hungary, for instance, nearly 7 per cent of the population were German speakers, quite apart from the large number of Hungarian citizens of German origin. In addition, recent work on transnational history reminds us that regional identities remained important in many parts of Eastern Europe, especially in borderlands like Upper Silesia and Macedonia, which often retained ‘a distinct mixture of cultures and languages’, including what linguists call ‘continuous dialects’ shaped by the everyday use of several languages.⁴

Of the ten main language groups, the Gr eeks were among the longest-established inhabitants of the region. They were also one of the most geographically dispersed groups, with settlements stretching back to antiquity on the shores of Asia Minor and the northern littoral of the Black Sea, in the Caucasus and the Levant as well as the territory of present-day Greece. As late as 1922 the largest Greek urban centre was not Athens, but Smyrna (I˙zmir) on the west coast of Anatolia. Many Anatolian Greeks, the so-called Karamanli Greeks, did not even speak Greek; the only thing that set them apart from their fellow Turkish-speakers was their Orthodox religion.

Hardly less venerable than the Greeks, in terms of the antiquity of their presence, were the Albanians. Crowded into the mountains of the Western Balkans by the arrival of newcomers like the Slavs, the Albanians had spread outwards again following the Ottoman conquest, since the conversion of many Albanians to Islam gave them upward as well as lateral mobility. While a minority of Albanians remained Catholics, the Muslim majority became the general factotums of Ottoman rule, serving as soldiers, administrators and ministers, when they were not feuding among themselves or setting up as semi-independent warlords. From 1913 Albanians even had their own nation-state, although it would be an optimist who claimed to ‘rule’ the new Albania, and large numbers of Albanians continue as minorities in neighbouring states to this day.

Ancient, too, given their alleged descent from the Roman colonists of Dacia, were the Romanians, speakers of a Latin-based tongue heavily influenced by Slavic, Turkish and other languages. At the turn of the twentieth century Romanians were still divided between the newly united kingdom of Romania, the Hungarian half of the Habsburg Monarchy, the Bukovina, an Austrian province at the tail-end of the Carpathians, and the Russian province of Bessarabia. Independent Romania had a native landowning class, whereas the Romanians of Hungarian Transylvania, the Bukovina and Bessarabia were largely peasant.

On the other side of the Balkans, Italians were Eastern Europe’s other Romance language speakers, concentrated in the coastal towns of Croatia, the Istrian Peninsula, and in large numbers in the port of Trieste and its hinterland, and in the South Tyrol, all still Habsburg provinces.

In the north, the two Baltic peoples, Latvians (or Letts) and Lithuanians, were also among the longest-established inhabitants of Eastern Europe, with a presence on the shores of the Baltic Sea dating back to 2000 BC, and speaking Indo-European languages related to one another but distinct from any other language family. In the early twentieth century, both Latvians and Lithuanians were peasant peoples of the Russian Empire, only beginning to develop an educated class and, with it, a sense of national consciousness. Other Baltic peoples, like the pagan Prussians and Curonians, had suffered extinction during the northern crusades of the middle ages, but bequeathed their names to the territories they had inhabited, Prussia and Courland.

The Finno-Ugrian language family, distinctive in Europe in that it is not Indo-European, included two groups related, but separated by centuries of historical development as well as physical distance. On the shores of the eastern Baltic lived Finns and their close linguistic relatives, Estonians, both indigenous to the region since antiquity, both, like the Baltic peoples, long subsumed within the Russian Empire. Finland at least enjoyed a partial autonomy and a set of codified privileges under tsarism, whereas the Estonians, like the Latvians and Lithuanians, were still overwhelmingly peasant. Far to the south, the Magyars, or ethnic Hungarians, had arrived in Eastern Europe much later, settling in the Pannonian Plain in the ninth century; they remained the dominant element in the Kingdom of Hungary, itself a multinational unit within the Habsburg Monarchy.

The Slavonic-speaking peoples, who as migrants into the Roman Empire were relative latecomers to Eastern Europe, constitute by far the most numerous language group. The East Slavs are the Russians, the Belorussians or White Russians, and the Ukrainians. The West Slavs are the Poles, Czechs and Slovaks. The South Slavs are the present-day Bulgarians, Macedonians, Serbs, Montenegrins, Croats, Slovenes and Bosnian Muslims (today rather misleadingly called Bosniaks, and descended from converts to Islam after the Ottoman conquest). Linguistically, however, there are only three main South Slav languages: Bulgarian, Slovene and what used to be called ‘Serbo-Croatian’. Macedonians or, to adopt a more precise terminology, Macedonian Slavs, speak a variant of Bulgarian, rather akin to the differences between Bavarian German and High German. Serbs, Montenegrins, Bosnian Muslims and Croats all speak dialectical variants of Serbo-Croatian, with the principal difference being that Croats and most Bosnian Muslims use a Latin alphabet, whereas Serbs, Montenegrins and a minority of Bosnian Muslims use a Cyrillic alphabet, as do Bulgarian-speakers. Since the break-up of the former Yugoslavia, however, it has become politically impossible to justify the existence of ‘Serbo-Croatian’, and its speakers now habitually refer to their variants as Croatian, Serbian and Bosnian.

Among the Slavonic-speaking peoples mention should also be made of much smaller groups which, by the early twentieth century, were already in danger of dying out. In East Prussia there was a minority of Kashubians, while in Silesia scattered pockets of Sorbs were still to be found.

Germans today are far less numerous in Eastern Europe than they have been historically, and at the start of the twentieth century they were scattered across the region, the result of migration back and forth since the middle ages. Predominant in the new German Empire and the Austrian crownlands of the Habsburg Monarchy, they were elsewhere a sizeable, often preponderant, element in many urban centres for most of the nineteenth century, and were also settled as agriculturalists in substantial pockets, such as the Saxons of Habsburg Transylvania. By 1900 the numbers of Germans in large cities like Prague and Budapest had shrunk in comparison, as the numbers of educated, urban Czech- and Hungarian-speakers increased; but across Eastern Europe ethnic Germans were still a strong presence. In the Baltic provinces of Russia, Germans were not only the majority of town dwellers, but they formed the local landowning aristocracy; the roll-call of imperial Russia’s diplomatic corps in 1914 was full of Baltic German names. The presence of substantial German minorities in so many East European successor states, after the First World War, was a recipe for political instability and worse.

Ethnic Turks arrived in the Balkans from the fifteenth century onward as Ottoman conquerors, and settled as soldiers, administrators, landowners and merchants.⁵ The emergence of the Balkan nation-states in the nineteenth century, however, and the protracted rolling-back of the Ottoman imperium, meant that Muslims of all ethnicities were no longer welcome, and their extermination or expulsion from Balkan Christian societies was the usual concomitant. At the outset of the twentieth century this process was far from complete, although the ferocious Balkan Wars of 1912–13, which virtually eliminated Ottoman rule in the Peninsula, advanced this ‘ethnic cleansing’ considerably. Of the 2.3 million Muslims living in the Ottoman Balkans in 1912, it is estimated that some 632,000 died during the wars; some 414,000 fled or were expelled to Ottoman territory.⁶ Despite the persecution to which they were exposed, however, on the eve of the First World War some ethnic Turks remained in Montenegro, Serbia, Bulgaria and Greece.

One special group of Turkic ethnicity is formed by the Crimean Tatars. They were deported en masse to Siberia in the Stalinist period, but since the break-up of the Soviet Union some 250,000 of them are estimated to have returned to the Crimea, their status currently at risk in the ongoing dispute between Russia and the Ukraine.

Jews were a ubiquitous minority across Eastern Europe, although they were especially numerous in Russian Poland and the other parts of western Russia designated as the ‘Pale of Settlement’, to which in theory Russian Jews were still confined; in Habsburg Galicia; in Moldavia in Romania; and in urban centres generally. Many Jews scraped a precarious living as tradesmen, artisans and moneylenders, and as a result their lot was little better than that of the Christian or Muslim societies which hosted them. In the nineteenth century, however, Jews had been accorded civil liberties, including freedom of movement, in many countries, and with this the numbers of urban, educated and even wealthy Jews expanded exponentially. By the turn of the century Jews were almost 9 per cent of the population of Vienna, and were a million strong in Budapest, which anti-Semites dubbed ‘Judapest’. Jews were disproportionately represented in certain professions, especially medicine, journalism and the law; they played a leading role in the arts; and notoriously, they were unfairly identified with the evils of finance capital. Long discriminated against and in most societies only recently emancipated, Jews no matter how assimilated faced continuing prejudice; as the founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, commented in 1908, ‘if my name were Oberhuber, my innovations would have encountered far less resistance, despite everything.’⁷ In tsarist Russia anti-Semitic prejudice took the form of periodic state-tolerated violence against Jews, or pogroms, a factor which encouraged successive waves of Jewish emigration to Western Europe, the Ottoman Middle East and the Americas. Even in Central Europe the rise of political anti-Semitism prompted the Hungarian German Jewish journalist, Theodor Herzl, to found a Zionist Organisation in 1897 to promote the foundation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. For most East European Jews, however, emigration was not an option; assimilated or otherwise, they remained a part of the societies they lived in, despite their separate identity.

Finally, mention should be made of Eastern Europe’s most downtrodden people, the Roma or Gypsies. Scattered across the region since the middle ages, with large numbers in Romania and Hungary in particular, Roma like the majority of Europeans were of Indo-European origin, but their frequently alien appearance, and the itinerant lifestyle forced on them by the hostility of the host societies, meant that they barely survived by peddling, tinkering, horse-trading, music-making and other lowly occupations. Roma in the first half of the twentieth century, an age of increasingly respectable racial nationalism, faced an uncertain future wherever they were; that future turned lethal during the Second World War, when Roma, like Jews, were targeted for extermination. In the post-war communist period, East European regimes officially dedicated to building social equality nevertheless continued to marginalise their Roma minorities. It is one of the more scandalous aspects of the present-day European Union, to which many East European countries now belong, that the prospects of the Roma are not much brighter in the twenty-first century.

Socio-economic conditions

In socio-economic terms the salient fact about Eastern Europe even at the turn of the twentieth century, setting it apart from much of Western if not Southern Europe, was its largely agrarian nature. The majority of the population was made up of peasants, who still lived on and off the land. Land ownership, by contrast, in the Russian, German and Habsburg empires was largely confined to the nobility, although by the early twentieth century there was also a growing number of peasant proprietors or smallholders. In the independent Balkan states the peasant smallholder class was predominant, since these societies’ noble landowners had for the most part been expropriated and driven out centuries before by the Ottoman conquest, and as the Ottoman imperium was rolled back in the nineteenth cent...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Contents
• Maps
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part I The prehistory of twentieth-century Eastern Europe
• Part II Pig in the middle
• Part III Saddling cows
• Part IV All change?
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright