Russia and Her Neighbors in Europe

by VERA MICHELES DEAN

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THE military defeat and territorial losses of Germany in World War II have opened a new phase in the struggle that has raged for over a hundred years concerning the disposal of those nations in Eastern Europe and the Balkans which at one time or another formed part of four great empires whose interests conflicted in that area — the Ottoman, Russian, German, and Austro-Hungarian empires. Of the thirteen nations involved, all of which had achieved independence by 1919 — Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Rumania, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Albania, and Greece, — all but the last two have found themselves objects of direct interest on the part of Russia, the only one of the four empires that survived a series of disastrous wars more or less intact.

Throughout their history, the Russians, settling over a gradually widening territory, have pushed their way toward both west and east, stopping only when they were checked by genuine resistance. For the Western powers to try to check Russia in Eastern Europe and the Balkans by force would not only mean risking another war, but would be fundamentally unconstructive, since it is obvious that major adjustments of one kind or another are essential to stabilize that politically volcanic region.

Russia’s concern with these borderlands from the Baltic to the Black Sea is due to a wide range of considerations. With a population of nearly 200 million, Russia comes closer than any other country except the United States to achieving economic self-sufficiency. It has within its boundaries most of the foodstuffs needed for a balanced diet and most of the raw materials needed for modern industry and warfare — with the notable exception of rubber, tin, and perhaps uranium, and what are known as “colonial” wares, such as coffee and certain spices. It would be difficult to prove that Russia needs additional territory in order to obtain control of essential natural resources —although some concern has been expressed by Russian spokesmen about the dwindling of the country’s resources of oil, and Moscow has shown a lively interest in obtaining oil from Rumania and Hungary as well as coal from Poland. It should also be borne in mind that Russia’s coal mines and oil refineries were damaged during the war as the result first of its own “scorched earth” policy, and later of Germany’s depredations.

More important than territories, populations, or natural resources, from Russia’s point of view, are the strategic considerations affecting its security in this area, one of the great battlegrounds of history. The only easy way of attacking “ the Heartland,” of which Russia is a predominant part, is through the western borderlands, which offer few points of natural defense. These borderlands have to a peculiar extent served both to isolate Russia from the Western world (and this long before the concept of the “cordon sanitaire” was propounded at the Paris Peace Conference by a French official), and as a traditional highway for invasion of Russia from the West. The peoples of these lands, more imbued than the Russians with Western culture and hence more susceptible to Western influences, thus seemed doubly hostile to the Russians, who, feeling cut off from the rest of the world, took a sort of perverse pride in their isolation and, at the same time, suspected others of trying to isolate them.

Throughout its history Russia, a landlocked continent, has sought outlets to the open seas. Again and again since the days of Peter the Great, Russia has endeavored to obtain footholds on the Gulf of Finland (which it had when it ruled Finland, and has acquired once more by its peace treaty of 1940 and its armistice of 1944 with that country); on the Baltic Sea (which it obtained at the Potsdam Conference, when a section of East Prussia, including Königsberg, was assigned to Russia); on the Black Sea (where it has been reported to have asked for bases on the territory of Bulgaria, also pressing Turkey for bases close to the Straits of the Dardanelles); and on the Mediterranean (where it is demanding a trusteeship under the UNO over the Italian colony of Tripolitania).

Russia, moreover, like France, is not yet satisfied that Germany has been rendered harmless; or that the United Nations Organization, which she has supported from its inception at the Moscow Conference of 1943, will prove sufficiently powerful to check renewed aggression by the Germans. These views have led Russia to insist on strict adherence to the idea of Big Three unanimity in the UNO on the ground that the Great Powers, which bore the brunt of World War II, must stand together in time of peace and have the authority to fulfill the responsibilities for maintaining world security with which they are charged by the San Francisco Charter. At the same time, to make assurance doubly sure, Russia has worked to establish binding relations with its neighbors in Eastern Europe and the Balkans, and has encouraged their leaders to reorient their policy toward coöperation with the U.S.S.R.

In its efforts to foster the creation, along its western border, of “friendly” governments, the Kremlin has used every weapon in the armory of a modern world power. Appeals on ideological grounds, economic inducements, military pressure, political suasion, have all been tried, in varying mixtures thought best adapted to local conditions and national temperaments. Most recently the influence of the restored Orthodox Church has been brought into play to counteract that of the Vatican, especially in Eastern Poland and Ruthenia; and Pan-Slavism, revived during the war as a powerful antidote to Pan-Germanism, has been invoked to rally the Slavs of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Bulgaria to the support of Russia.

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To understand the extent to which these various factors have affected Russia’s policy toward its neighbors in Eastern Europe and the Balkans, it is essential to trace the roots of its policy not only through the thin topsoil of today’s events, but through layer after layer of past history. Space does not permit an extended analysis of action and counteraction between Russia and the eleven nations with which it has been concerned both under the Tsars and under the Soviets. But a brief review of its relations with Poland, Hungary, Rumania, Yugoslavia, and Bulgaria, and of those points which have aroused particularly heated controversy in the United States, may serve to place Russia’s role in the affairs of that area in somewhat more comprehensible perspective.

Relations between Russia and Poland have been dominated for centuries by a struggle for the borderlands of White Russia and the Ukraine. (Ukraine literally means “on the border.”) Both countries claimed these areas at various times — Poland on historic grounds, Russia on grounds of ethnography and strategic security. The Polish state, formed in the middle of the tenth century, opposed from the outset attempts at either Germanization or Russification. In the fourteenth century, during one of Poland’s most brilliant periods, King Casimir the Great abandoned Polish claims to western territories formerly under Polish suzerainty, which were subsequently Germanized, and recognized Czech domination over Silesia and that of the Teutonic Knights over East Prussia, but sought to extend his rule eastward at the expense of Russia. Following protracted wars with Russia during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Poland underwent three partitions — in 1772, 1793, and 1795 — during which it was divided between Austria, Prussia, and Russia. Through these partitions Russia obtained for the most part lands which were ethnically non-Polish.

It was only after the Napoleonic wars, at the Congress of Vienna in 1815, that Russia received part of the Grand Duchy of Warsaw (formed by Napoleon), which Tsar Alexander I organized as the “Kingdom of Poland,” granting it a constitution that was unusually liberal for that period. After the Polish uprising of 1830, precipitated by Russian violation of this constitution, the agreement was abrogated and a policy of vigorous Russification which deeply embittered the Poles was immediately undertaken.

Following the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, the Russian segment of Poland was reunited with the Polish state, which had been restored at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. Poland’s leader in the early post-war years, Marshal Pilsudski, sought to expand the country’s boundaries as far eastward as possible, with the support of extreme Polish nationalists. In 1919, when Russia had been plunged into chaos by civil war, Polish forces overran Eastern Galicia; Vilna, just awarded by the Allies to newly independent Lithuania, was seized by the Poles; and in April, 1920, Pilsudski attacked Russia, with the avowed aim of including Lithuania, White Russia, and the Ukraine in a new Polish-Lithuanian Empire. The Russians succeeded in driving the Poles out of the Ukraine, but under the Treaty of Riga, concluded in 1921, Poland retained extensive Ukrainian and White Russian territories. Pilsudski’s anti-Russian and anti-revolutionary policy — regarded by many Poles as patriotic — was viewed by the Soviet Union as a serious threat to its security.

Meanwhile agrarian reforms, which, in Poland as elsewhere in Eastern Europe and the Balkans, were pressed by peasant leaders after the war, brought opposition from large landowners and the army. These groups rallied in support of Pilsudski, who in 1923 had retired from public office. In 1926 Pilsudski defied the constitution of 1921, overthrew the government composed of moderate liberal and peasant representatives, and set up a military dictatorship.

After years of struggle against the Polish parliamentary parties, and of opposition to Ukrainian demands for independence, Pilsudski, on January 26, 1934, introduced an authoritarian constitution. On the same day Polish Foreign Minister Beck — who was regarded by Moscow as an archenemy of the Soviet Union — signed with Germany a pact of nonaggression which even in the opinion of historians critical of the U.S.S.R. marked one of Hitler’s first major steps toward domination of Europe. In the autumn of that year Poland declared that it would no longer accept control by the League of Nations over the fulfillment of its obligations to minorities within its borders, as defined in minorities treaties it had accepted in 1919, thus freeing its hands for measures of repression against Ukrainians, Jews, and other minority groups.

When Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, — following conclusion of the Soviet-German non-aggression pact on August 23, — the Soviet Union lost no time in reinforcing its position with respect to the Reich. On September 17 Soviet forces invaded Eastern Poland, on the ground that the Polish state had become “a fertile field for any accidental and unexpected contingency that may create a menace to the Soviet Union,” and that the Soviet government could not remain indifferent “to the fate of its blood brothers, the Ukrainians and White Russians, who . . . have been abandoned entirely to their fate.”

On September 28 Ribbentrop and Molotov concluded a treaty of amity and an agreement tracing the “final” German-Soviet frontier in Poland. This delimitation placed under German rule Polish territory in which the Poles are in a majority, and gave the Soviet Union land in which the Poles are the largest minority in a population of nearly 13 million, estimated to include over 5 million Poles, over 4 million Ukrainians, and over a million White Russians. Polish White Russia was then incorporated into the White Russian S.S.R., while Polish Ukraine was incorporated into the Ukrainian S.S.R. These two republics became charter members of the United Nations Organization.

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POLISH Premier Sikorski, who after the German invasion of Russia in June, 1941, adopted a policy of letting bygones be bygones, reached an agreement with Moscow on July 30, 1941, by which the U.S.S.R. recognized “ the Soviet-German treaties of 1939 as to territorial changes in Poland as having lost their validity.” The Soviet government, however, gave no indication that the incorporation of Polish White Russia into the White Russian S.S.R. and of Polish Ukraine into the Ukrainian S.S.R., would be invalidated. On the contrary, it consistently gave the impression that there could be no discussion about the disposal of Eastern Poland, and that its acceptance of the terms of the Atlantic Charter after the German invasion of 1941 in no way affected any measures it had taken before that date.

General Sikorski’s policy of reconciliation with the Soviet Union was subjected to pressure from two sides: from nationalist Poles in London, who opposed Russia’s control of Eastern Poland, and in turn, advanced claims to East Prussia; and from Moscow, which showed an increasing disposition to doubt the intentions of the London Poles, and instead encouraged the formation on Russian soil of a Union of Polish Patriots, which eventually became the nucleus of the Lublin regime. The death of General Sikorski in an airplane crash at Gibraltar in July, 1943, dealt a serious blow to Russo-Polish relations.

On January 10, 1944, however, the Soviet government announced over the Moscow radio that it did not consider “unchangeable” the 1939 frontier fixed under the Ribbentrop-Molotov agreement, and offered Poland a new frontier corresponding to the Curzon Line of 1919, as well as an alliance of mutual assistance against Germany modeled on the RussoCzech pact concluded a month previously. The Soviet announcement also suggested that Poland “must be reborn, not by the occupation of Ukrainian and White Russian territories, but by the return of territories seized from Poland by the Germans” — a reference to East Prussia and Silesia.

Russia’s offer was unacceptable to Polish extremists, especially because it was accompanied by criticism of the Polish government in London and praise for the Union of Polish Patriots. Premier Mikolajczyk, a leader of the Peasant Party, who had succeeded General Sikorski, faced a cruel dilemma: if he acquiesced in Russia’s seizure of Eastern Poland, he feared repudiation of his government by many Poles; if he rejected Russia’s territorial claims, he had to face the possibility that the Russians would set up a rival government on Polish soil, which they had reached in their steam-roller pursuit of the retreating Germans.

In spite of repeated efforts, Mikolajczyk found it impossible either to reconcile the London Poles with Moscow, or to break with the London Poles in order to join the Polish Committee of Liberation, successor to the Union of Polish Patriots, as he had been invited to do. The Polish Committee, established in July, 1944, at Chelm, the first large town on Polish territory west of the Curzon Line to be liberated by Russia, issued a manifesto in which it urged collaboration with Russia and accepted the transfer to Russia of Eastern Poland. It also demanded the transfer to Poland of Pomerania, Silesia, and East Prussia, all part of Germany in 1939, with a population of ten million Germans and fewer than 300,000 Poles. In other respects, the Polish Committee, like Premier Mikolajczyk, favored termination of the dictatorial system established by Marshal Pilsudski in 1934, and a series of industrial and agrarian reforms.

The Polish Committee of Liberation, which with the advance of the Russian Army moved first to Lublin, then to Warsaw, was recognized by the Soviet government as the provisional government of Poland. The United States and Britain declined to accord recognition to the Lublin regime, but meanwhile grew noticeably cooler toward the Polish government in London, from which Mikolajczyk had resigned. At the Crimea Conference in February, 1945, the Big Three reached a compromise on Poland.

They agreed to establish a commission, consisting of Foreign Commissar Molotov and the British and American Ambassadors in Moscow, which was to consult Polish leaders concerning the formation of a new Provisional Government of National Unity, which some of the London Poles were to be invited to join.

Following months of arduous and fruitless negotiations, Mikolajczyk and some of his London associates decided in June to return to Poland and join the Lublin regime, which in July was recognized by the United States and Britain. At the Potsdam Conference the Poles, on Russia’s insistence, were invited to present their views regarding the future of Germany; and the Potsdam Declaration assigned East Prussia and a section of Silesia to Poland “pending the final determination of Poland’s western frontier.”

While the Potsdam conferees agreed that the expulsion of Germans from the areas assigned to Poland and Russia, as well as from Hungary and Czechoslovakia, should be delayed to permit the Allies to consider this problem, the Poles and Russians proceeded to expel all German inhabitants from areas under their control. These new displaced persons, who had to leave suddenly with few or no possessions, and struggled to reach havens in the British and American zones of Germany, have created a tragic and baffling problem for Allied administrators. The Poles, however, have justified their action on the ground that the presence of a large German minority within what they consider their borders would prove a constant threat of irredentism, similar to the presence of three and a half million Sudeten Germans in pre-1939 Czechoslovakia.

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THE life skein of Rumania, Yugoslavia, and Bulgaria has been closely interwoven with that of Russia since the beginning of the nineteenth century, when Tsar Nicholas I, intervening in the Balkans to aid the liberation of Greece, involved Russia in the war of 1828-1829 with Turkey. In 1853, following a dispute over the rights of Orthodox Greeks in the Holy Land, Turkey declared war on Russia, and Britain and France invaded the Crimea and laid siege to Sevastopol. According to the Treaty of Paris of 1856, which brought the Crimean War to an end, Russia lost the right, to maintain a fleet in the Black Sea and had to abandon the right of exclusive protection over Orthodox peoples in Turkey. The Straits of the Bosporus and the Dardanelles, moreover, were closed to military vessels of all nations.

Twenty years later, when Slavs revolted against Turkish tax collectors in Bosnia, Herzegovina, and Bulgaria, Russia intervened once more in the Balkans on behalf of its Slav brethren. Tsar Alexander II declared war on Turkey in 1877, and Russia was joined by Rumania. By the preliminary peace terms signed in 1878, Turkey agreed to form a new principality, Bulgaria, and to recognize the independence of Serbia, Montenegro, and Rumania, and Russia reacquired the mouth of the Danube, which it had been forced to surrender in 1856.

Britain and Austria, however, opposed Russia’s advance into the Balkan and Black Sea area, and Russia accepted the mediation of Bismarck, the “honest broker,” rather than face another war. The Congress of Berlin of 1878 turned into a rout for Russia. By the Treaty of Berlin the new principality of Bulgaria was greatly reduced in size and remained a vassal of Turkey; while Austria “temporarily” occupied Bosnia and Herzegovina.

A rough delimitation of the Ottoman Empire’s former possessions in the Balkans was thus arrived at by Russia and Austria — Russia exercising predominant influence among the eastern Balkan Slavs, especially Bulgaria, and Austria among the western Slavs, especially in Serbia and Herzegovina. In 1908, however, when Austria annexed Bosnia and Herzegovina, the latent antagonism between Serbia and Austria, and Russia and Austria, was fanned into bitter resentment, and Russia sought to emancipate the Slavs from the rule of the Austro-Hungarian Empire as it had once sought to liberate them from the Turks.

In 1912 Serbia, Bulgaria, and Greece joined forces to defeat Turkey, which lost almost all its possessions in Europe inhabited by Slavs. The victors, however, fell out among themselves. Serbia and Greece, later joined by Rumania, fought against Bulgaria, which then turned for aid to Germany and Austria-Hungary, while its opponents turned to Russia, then allied with France. When the Archduke Ferdinand, heir to the Austrian throne, was assassinated on June 28, 1914, in a Bosnian town, Sarajevo, Russia promptly came to the aid of Serbia, and Germany to the aid of Austria. The stage was thus set for World War I.

Out of that war Serbia (which joined with Croatia and Montenegro to form Yugoslavia, literally “South Slavia”), Rumania (enlarged by the acquisition of Transylvania from Hungary), and Greece (enlarged by the acquisition of Western Thrace from Bulgaria) emerged on the side of the victors, of those who wanted to maintain the status quo; Hungary and Bulgaria on the side of the vanquished, of those who strove to overthrow the peace treaties. The governments of all these countries — the dictator-king Alexander of Yugoslavia; the aristocratic regime of Hungary headed on the eve of World War II by Admiral Horthy; King Carol of Rumania; King Boris of Bulgaria; Premier Metaxas of Greece — shared fear of the political, economic, and social system developed in the U.S.S.R., and were alarmed by the influence it might have on unstable conditions within their borders. All of them were openly anti-Communist (and in the case of Hungary and Rumania also antiRussian), and more or less openly pro-Fascist, although not necessarily pro-German. The Hungarians, especially, recalled with alarm the Communist coup staged in Budapest by Bela Kun in 1918.

The Soviet government, however, had no territorial grudges against any of these countries, with the exception of Rumania, which, it will be recalled, had seized Bessarabia at the end of World War I. Bessarabia, a backward but rich agricultural area, had formed part of the Russian Empire since 1812, when Russia acquired it from Turkey. On June 26, 1940, a few days after the signing of the Franco-German armistice at Compiegne, which freed a part of the German Army for operations in Eastern Europe and the Balkans, the Soviet government presented an ultimatum to Rumania demanding the immediate return of Bessarabia and the cession of Northern Bukovina. This ultimatum the Rumanian government, already confronted with territorial demands on the part of Hungary and Bulgaria, accepted on June 28, and on July 1 the Red Army occupied Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina, which Moscow claimed on historic and ethnographic grounds.

Pending the conclusion of peace treaties with Hungary, Rumania, and Bulgaria, Russia has maintained about 500,000 men on the territory of each of the three Axis satellites. On the ground that it had to safeguard communications across Poland to its zone in Germany, Russia has also kept troops on Polish soil; but according to the most recent reports it has withdrawn its soldiers from Yugoslavia, except for a small number of technical military experts.

The fact that Russian occupation forces live off the land, encroaching on the already depleted food resources of the occupied countries, and requisition goods on terms that force the local governments to resort to unrestrained inflation, has caused growing resentment among the native populations. This resentment has been reflected in a strong trend toward social democracy, away from the extremism of both Fascism and Communism. In Hungary, for example, the Small Landholders’ Party, representing primarily peasant interests, won nearly 60 per cent of the votes in the national elections of November 4; and in Austria, where Russia shares in the quadrapartite Allied control of the country, the moderate People’s Party and the Social Democrats decisively defeated the Communists even in industrial centers in the national elections of November 25.

It is true that every newly formed government in Europe has Communists among its members, and that the Communists have, in each case, sought to obtain key ministries, notably Interior, Foreign Affairs, and Justice. The significant point, however, is that the moderate parties are now in the ascendant and realize that the best chance to check Communist demands is to undertake long-overdue reforms, whose absence had greatly facilitated Communist propaganda before and during the war.

There are two notable exceptions. In Bulgaria the November 18 elections gave an 80 per cent vote for the Fatherland Front composed of Communists, Agrarians, and Socialists, while in Yugoslavia the November 11 elections brought overwhelming victory for Marshal Tito. It is not possible to assess accurately the trend of public opinion in Poland and Rumania, where free elections have not yet been held.

While little unbiased information is available about political conditions in Poland, the impression is growing that the Polish government, as might have been expected, is becoming increasingly more pro-Polish in its views, and that the influence of former Premier Mikolajczyk is in the ascendant. Many of the Poles living abroad find it impossible to reconcile themselves to the new regime; but others are ready to return to Poland and work for the nation’s welfare, provided they can receive trustworthy assurances of personal safety.

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AT THE Yalta Conference, it will be recalled, the Big Three pledged themselves to assist the people in any liberated state or former Axis satellite in Europe where, in their judgment, conditions require outside aid, “to form interim governmental authorities broadly representative of all democratic elements in the population and pledged to the earliest possible establishment through free elections of governments responsive to the will of the people,” and to facilitate where necessary the holding of such elections.

The principal obstacle to realization of these aims has been the difficulty of finding a formula defining the term “democratic” which would be acceptable to both the Western powders and Russia. The United States and Britain agreed to recognize the Polish government on July 5, after it had been enlarged, as provided at Yalta, by the inclusion of several Polish leaders from London, notably former Premier Mikolajczyk. They also extended recognition in November to the government formed in Hungary by Zoltan Tildy, leader of the Small Landholders’ Party, who has since become President of the Hungarian Republic.

On December 22 the Western powers recognized the government of Marshal Tito in Yugoslavia, but on this occasion the United States criticized the methods used in the elections, and declared that recognition should not be interpreted as approval of the policies of the Yugoslav government. Hitherto, however, the Western powers have been reluctant to extend recognition to the regime of Premier Groza in Rumania, and have indicated that, in their opinion, the elections in Bulgaria were not representative of the popular will because opposition parties had not been given an opportunity to present their program to the voters on equal terms with the Fatherland Front.

From the point of view of the United States and Britain, democracy means unrestricted participation by all parties, except avowed Fascists, in universal and secret balloting for various party candidates. From the point of view of Russia, democracy means acceptance by all groups of the population of economic and social concepts and practices which the Russians regard as essential for the creation in these countries of governments that, would be friendly to the U.S.S.R. Discussion of these divergent interpretations of democracy has been complicated by the existence in Greece, which alone of the Balkan countries lies outside Russia’s sphere of influence, of political controversies similar to those in Rumania and Bulgaria.

In an attempt to ascertain conditions in Rumania and Bulgaria, about which the Big Three disagreed at the London Council of Foreign Ministers, the United States in October sent Mark Ethridge, publisher of the Louisville Courier-Journal, to observe the situation on the spot. His report formed the subject of discussion between Secretary of State Byrnes and Foreign Commissar Molotov at the Big Three Conference in Moscow last December.

At this conference the United States, Britain, and Russia decided to arrange for certain changes in the governments of Rumania and Bulgaria, already recognized by Russia. Recognition by the two Western powers clears the way for the conclusion of peace treaties with them. The Rumanian government of Premier Groza was to be enlarged by the inclusion of one member each of the National Peasant Party and the Liberal Party. This reorganized government was then to declare that “free and unfettered elections” would be held as soon as possible on the basis of universal and secret ballot. It was also to give assurances concerning the grant of freedom of the press, speech, religion, and association. The performance of these tasks was to be supervised by an Allied commission.

The situation in Bulgaria was more complicated because, as Secretary of State Byrnes frankly said in his radio address of December 30, the Soviet government regards the Bulgarian elections of November 18 as free, and “we do not.” The compromise reached in this case was that the Soviet government took “upon itself the mission of giving friendly advice to the Bulgarian government with regard to the desirability” of including in the cabinet of the Fatherland Front (then in process of being formed) two additional representatives of “other democratic groups.”

The decisions reached with respect to Rumania and Bulgaria, although falling short of what the United States and Britain would have liked to see done, marked an important step forward, for two reasons. The Soviet government, for the first time since the Yalta Conference, agreed to cooperate with the Western powers toward making these two governments more representative; and the Western powers apparently convinced Moscow that they recognized Russia’s special interest in the peaceful character of its neighbors.

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No MATTER what pledges are made about democracy, or what institutions are established to meet the political standards of the Western powers, democracy in the Western sense cannot be expected to flourish in Eastern Europe and the Balkans unless economic and social conditions are fundamentally improved. It is significant that the only country in the area which has succeeded in developing a strong democratic system is Czechoslovakia, which has also established efficient modern industries, has modernized agriculture, and has created a vast network of social services.

What must never be forgotten in discussing the situation of Russia’s neighbors in Europe is that most of them are today at an economic and social level strikingly similar to that of Russia in 1917. Of the five countries considered in this article, Poland alone had made notable progress toward industrialization. Rumania, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, and to a lesser extent Hungary, are primarily agricultural countries, which in the past have exported food and certain raw materials, with which they paid for the consumers’ goods and machinery they were as yet unable to produce within their own borders. An excellent little book published in England last year, Economic Development in Southeastern Europe (London, Political and Economic Planning), succinctly shows that the standard of living in most of the countries of this region was dangerously low, as indicated by an inadequate level of nutrition and the resulting high incidence of deficiency diseases, such as pellagra, anemia, scurvy, and rickets, as well as a high rate of infant mortality. To raise their standard of living these countries need to increase materially their production of food.

The breaking up of large estates which, except for some areas of Hungary, had been carried out on an extensive scale during the inter-war years does not of itself offer solution of the agricultural output problem, as the Russians discovered after they had parceled big estates in 1917 — and the Poles are discovering now as they divide up Junker estates in East Prussia. What is needed is more efficient utilization of land through scientific crop rotation, use of fertilizers and of modern agricultural machinery, land reclamation and drainage, agronomic research, animal breeding, and improved methods of marketing agricultural products.

The Soviet government effected such reforms between 1933 — when peasant resistance to collectivization was ruthlessly suppressed — and the invasion of Russia by Germany in 1941 — when 99 per cent of the land was cultivated either as collective or as state farms. It is true that in Eastern Europe and the Balkans, where private ownership of land had been far more widespread than in Russia before the Bolshevik revolution, collectivization similar to that undertaken by the Soviet government may prove impracticable; and it is significant that the governments of these countries, even when directly inspired from Moscow, have been cautious about proposing collectivization, and have emphasized their respect for private property.

The industrial problems of these countries call for measures in which the experience of Russia may also prove helpful. Owing to the low standard of living throughout this area, the demand for consumption goods was limited to primitive needs for cheap textiles, paper, soap, sugar, salt, and matches. Poland is the only one of the five countries here considered which has large resources of coal, now increased by the assignment to it of Germany’s Silesian coal mines, and can therefore look to the development of largescale industry. Rumania and Hungary, however, have oil; and Yugoslavia has brown coal, copper, lead, and chromite. The area has considerable resources of water power which have not been sufficiently utilized, and could support a wide variety of consumers’ goods industries.

The creation of these industries, however, is hampered by an acute shortage of skilled labor and supervisory personnel (who for a time might have to be recruited abroad), and by shortage of capital. Conceivably these countries could develop their resources with little or no capital from abroad by forcing their exports, but this could be done only by decreasing their standard of living still further — as Russia discovered during the hard years of its successive FiveYear Plans. And it must be remembered that Russia had large resources of gold to pay for the services of foreign technicians and for imported machinery, and could draw on a huge reservoir of manpower not available to its small neighbors.

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To EMERGE from their backward condition and develop democratic institutions, the border countries need to obtain foreign capital. In the past, however, foreign capital has tended to go into extractive industries (American and British capital has been invested in the oil wells of Rumania, French capital in the copper mines of Yugoslavia), or else has been offered only on condition that the borrower purchase armaments in the lending country (this was particularly true of France’s loans during the inter-war years to its allies cast of Germany). What is needed most urgently is capital for the development of industries that could produce consumers’ goods, raise living standards, and incidentally liberate these countries from their economic dependence on Germany.

To develop the productive capacities of Eastern Europe and the Balkans, the United States and Britain would be well advised to propose to the U.S.S.R. a long-term program of joint economic aid for the countries of this area. A precedent for such a program may be found in the plan presented by President Truman to China in his declaration of December 15. A similar offer to Russia for joint assistance by the Big Three in the reconstruction of Eastern Europe and the Balkans, on condition that existing regimes he broadened to include “other political elements,” would help to convince the Soviet government that the United States and Britain are genuinely concerned with the future security and economic welfare of the small nations in that area, and are not urging democracy for Rumania or Bulgaria merely to checkmate Moscow’s influence.

To such a joint economic program each of the Big Three would have a valuable contribution to make.

The United States could provide a line of credit in this country for the purchase here of machinery for new industries, as well as technicians. Britain could offer exports of tools and technical advice, as well as a market for the food and raw material exports of Eastern Europe and the Balkans. Russia could share with these countries its own experience in effecting the painful transition from backward agrarian economy to modern industry and agriculture.

Whenever we are inclined to be critical of Russia’s methods in Eastern Europe and the Balkans, we must remember that we and the British, in the heyday of our power in that area, showed little or no interest in the welfare of the native peoples, and were concerned primarily with the short-term advantages to be gained from investments in oil or other raw materials. The day for foreign investments that disregard the interests of local inhabitants has passed. From now on, the first test of investments must be: will they, in the long run, benefit the borrowing countries and, by benefiting them, also increase the well-being, and hence the security, of the rest of the world?

In spite of the disillusionment that Russia’s neighbors have experienced on coming into direct — and somewhat too intimate — contact with its armies of occupation, they have distinctly something to gain from closer relations with the U.S.S.R., which has far outdistanced them on the road to industrialization. Not only do they stand to learn a great deal from Russia’s solutions of its industrial and agricultural problems, which are similar to their own, but they are bound to be impressed with the success of the Soviet government in assuring wide cultural autonomy to the 160 national groups of the U.S.S.R. welded together in a strong political and economic union.

For centuries the nations buffeted bet ween the four great empires that once dominated this area have vainly sought to discover some way in which they could preserve their precious heritage of culture and at the same time attain a measure of political and economic security. The League of Nations proved a vain hope because of the refusal of the Great Powers to safeguard the interests of the small. The United Nations Organization now has an opportunity to succeed where the League failed. But if again the small nations should find themselves at the mercy of the ambitions and conflicts of the great, the possibility must not be excluded that the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics will make a strong bid for the inclusion, within its elastic framework, of some of its small neighbors, especially those countries which are inhabited by Slavs.

If the Western powers want to have a voice in the future destiny of Russia’s neighbors, they must revise their own previous approach to these peoples, whom too often in the past they treated with contempt for their backwardness, and match Russia’s bid with socially desirable measures for rehabilitation of the area, in coöperation with, and not in hostility against, Russia.