The Power of Freedom. Mart Laar
the West not awoken to the threat, the Soviet domination of Europe could have been even more pervasive. Arousing the West’s fears was not easy; many Westerners still wanted to believe that the Soviets’ intentions were noble and therefore tried to appease them. However, the Soviet’s pressure and demands on Iran and Turkey, and the civil war in Greece demonstrated that the Soviet Union intended to continue its aggressive, pre-war policy. One of the first political leaders to raise his voice against Soviet domination was Winston Churchill. In a speech on 5 March 1946, at a small college in Fulton, Missouri, Churchill declared, ‘from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an Iron Curtain has descended across the continent.’ This metaphor became synonymous with the looming Cold War and the division of Europe. According to Churchill, the people of Eastern Europe now found themselves ‘in the Soviet sphere and [were] all subject, in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence, but to a very high and in some cases increasing measure of control from Moscow.’ Churchill called for ‘timely action’ of the sort that had been lacking ten years earlier against the growing power of Nazi Germany. Churchill’s Fulton speech has been praised largely in hindsight; when it was delivered, it received much criticism, even in the West. On the left, it was called catastrophic, with George Bernard Shaw saying it was ‘nothing short of a declaration of war on Russia.’ On the right, Churchill was accused of building military alliances that were both dangerous and counter-productive. In the East, in an interview which appeared in Pravda on 13 March 1946, Stalin compared Churchill to Hitler and angrily denounced his speech as a ‘call to war’. Although initially Churchill’s was still a voice in the wilderness as far as Western policy towards the USSR was concerned, his next speech immediately had a major impact. Speaking at the University of Zurich on 19 September 1946, Churchill called for the creation of ‘a kind of United States of Europe,’ declaring that the first step in the re-creation of the European family must be a partnership between France and Germany. With these ideas, Churchill heralded a new way of thinking, one that actually led to the creation of modern Europe.116
Indeed, within a year, the West was forced to concede that Churchill’s attitude towards the Soviets had been right. One by one, the illusions evaporated and the Western World began to understand that the Soviet Union was not very different from Nazi Germany. On 12 March 1947, President Truman delivered a speech to a joint session of Congress promising support for ‘free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressure.’ Truman declared that ‘we must keep hope alive’ and asked for the authority to give assistance to Greece and Turkey. Truman and George Marshall also launched the Marshall Plan, which aimed to help the Western democracies and start Western Europe along the road to prosperity.117 The Soviet Union responded by tightening its control over Central and Eastern Europe and provoking direct conflict in Germany. On 24 June 1948, Soviet troops completely sealed off West Berlin, thereby beginning the Berlin Blockade. Eastern power stations ceased to supply electricity to the Western sectors of Berlin, which left them without food, energy, raw materials and machinery for industry and new power stations. America responded by airlifting the necessary supplies to West Berlin, even though nobody believed that it could be done. Astonishingly, the Anglo-Americans pulled it off: with the help of 17,000 volunteers, a new airport was built in the American sector at Tegel, and by Easter 1949, planes fully laden with supplies were landing in West Berlin every 62 seconds. West Berlin would have been unable to resist the blockade without the decisiveness of the West Berliners who volunteered for all manner of tasks and tolerated the shortages and privations of the blockade with amazingly good grace. On 9 September 1948, 250,000 Berliners gathered in front of the Reichstag to support their leaders’ resistance to the blockade. When the demonstrations spilled over into the Soviet sector, the Communist police intervened, shooting several demonstrators. For the West Berliners, this was a clear illustration of the true nature of Communism. The Berlin blockade started as a potential catastrophe and ended as a political and moral triumph for the West. In May 1949, Stalin had to lift the blockade, boosting Western morale to new levels. When Communist North Korea invaded South Korea in June 1950, Truman quickly decided to come to the South’s defence. The Cold War had begun in earnest. It seemed that the West had learned from the mistakes made in the past and understood that only by standing united and by being ready to use massive military force, while remaining beneath the ‘nuclear threshold’, could they resist Communism. In 1949, the North Atlantic Treaty was signed and in 1951, the European Coal and Steel Community was created. Without European integration and NATO, it would have been very hard, if not impossible, to win the Cold War.
The Berlin blockade
Military capability was not, of course, the only decisive factor in the competition between the two systems. In order to win the Cold War, the opposing systems had to demonstrate which of them was more effective and able to offer its people a better quality of life; democracy or Communism. By maintaining and developing democracy, cooperating and opening up to the rest of the world, the countries in the West hoped to open up new possibilities for their citizens and make them more innovative and receptive. This allowed for significantly faster development and higher living standards in the West than was the case under Communism and demonstrated the advantageous effect of freedom in everyday life. Particularly important in this respect was the concept of the ‘social market economy’, developed in Western Germany after the Second World War by West Germany’s first Chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, and his Minister of Economics, Ludwig Erhard. The economic situation in West Germany after the war was dire: industry had been almost entirely destroyed, inflation was very high, money had lost its value and the black market flourished. Initially, planning and regulation were considered the best tools with which to combat the chaos, however, they only made the situation worse. It was only later, when the Christian Democrats launched the concept of the social market economy in the western sectors that the situation there improved. The social market economy first entailed radical monetary reform followed by the liberalisation of the economy, as a result of which power would shift from the government to the people. On 18 June 1948, the D-Mark was introduced in the Western occupation zones at an exchange rate of between 10:1 and 15:1. National savings were lost, but purchasing power was created overnight. Goods appeared in the shops as if by magic. The Social Democrats fought actively against the economic reforms, blaming the government for the drop in living standards. The government remained in power with only a one-vote majority in Parliament. Adenauer and Erhard nevertheless pressed on and, indeed, the economic situation did start to improve leading to the creation of the German ‘economic miracle’ and allowing the government to focus more on social programmes.118
The rise of the West encouraged people in the captive countries of the Eastern bloc to continue their resistance to Communism. In fact, active resistance in the Communist countries was the work of a small minority, yet only a few people actively collaborated with the Communists. A majority tried to pursue a livelihood outside public life. Nevertheless, many people participated in cultural activities outside the system such as membership of a choir, book club, cultural circle or church. In doing so, they detached themselves from the Soviet system, protected their Western values and developed a passive resistance to Communism. For this reason, even the most apolitical activities outside the system were considered by the Soviet authorities to be potential threats and, consequently, they too were massively controlled. Despite official intrusion, such cultural circles became bases for more widespread opposition. One major battle proved to be for the preservation of national history and culture and through this, the continuation of Western ideas and identity. Central and Eastern Europe continued to harbour Western beliefs and values that defied pressures to adopt the socialist ideology. Memories that preserved the truth in the midst of the daily profusion of official lies were decisive for the future of the captive nations. The Communist authorities’ revisions of history were ignored; activism in Central and Eastern Europe was based largely on a commitment to truth and its liberating force in the face of a system founded on lies. To this end, the younger generation was provided with an accurate account of their national legacy and the long tradition of resistance to Russian and Soviet domination. In this regard, symbolic acts of resistance became especially important, including the destruction of Soviet monuments, the placing of flowers and
Shattan 1999, pp. 49-79.
Shattan 1999, pp. 9-49.
Schwarz 1995.