Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century by Mark Mazower

Author:Mark Mazower
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Tags: Europe, History, General
ISBN: 9780679757047
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 1998-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

In eastern Europe, too, there were extensive purges after the war, but they served a very different purpose and followed a different course to those in the West. They were not based upon the judicial investigation of individual misdeeds but upon a more sweeping attribution of collective guilt derived from social position or ethnic attribution. This reflected the key difference behind the two social projects, West and East. The philosophy underlying the purges in western Europe separated the punishment of guilty individuals from questions of socio-economic reform, and regarded the latter as matters for democratic debate. In eastern Europe, on the other hand, purges against “Fascists” and “war criminals” became a central part of the construction of society on something approaching the Soviet model.

“Anti-Fascist” campaigns targeted entire social categories for dismissal, deportation, expropriation or worse. In Hungary, for instance, Moscow insisted upon the need to purge “Fascist elements” during the negotiations which preceded the formation of a provisional government in December 1944. It quickly emerged that this was meant to encompass not merely the pro-German Arrow Cross extremists who had seized power in October, but also the “full liquidation of feudal structures” and measures against “reactionaries” in the state and society.43 During 1945 over 3,000 local committees were set up to imprison and try suspected collaborators. They also formed special police units drawn from workers and farm labourers. At the same time, “People’s Courts” were set up to try high-profile political cases: public executions of war criminals drew large crowds. Though at first these trials focused upon the Arrow Cross, over time the definition of “enemy of the people” broadened. By April 1945, communist papers were criticizing the courts for their moderation, asserting that “the Democracy is behaving too humanely towards these fascist beasts.” Interestingly, there is evidence to suggest that the judicial process ran into the same difficulties in Hungary as it did in western Europe, and produced the same low rate of guilty verdicts.44

In Yugoslavia, Tito ordered the massacre of thousands of members of Serbian, Croatian and Slovenian collaborationist formations who were handed over by the British in April-May 1945. He saw this, according to Milovan Djilas, as a “pragmatic solution,” since he feared the courts could not cope with so many individual investigations. Overall estimates of the numbers of quislings and collaborators killed in post-war Yugoslavia are highly controversial, but as many as 60,000 may have lost their lives in this way. In Greece, the December 1944 fighting saw the communists conduct mass shootings of “people’s enemies,” often identifying them solely on the basis of their status as “bourgeois.” Meanwhile, on the Greek Right, nationalist guerrillas killed hundreds of Chams (Albanian-speaking Muslims) and drove the remaining 15,000 into Albania on the grounds that they had aided the Axis.45

Russian-backed regimes in eastern Europe developed this kind of ethnic cleansing more systematically. Anti-communist underground armies, stay-behind teams and sabotage units, in many cases equipped by the Germans in 1944–5, constituted a thorn in the side of these new regimes and prompted them to respond with both repression and expropriation.

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