The Red Army in Austria. Группа авторов
FRUS, 1952–1954, II/2, pp. 1919–1920; Bischof, Austria in the First Cold War, pp. 137–139.
46. Bischof, Austria in the First Cold War, pp. 137–139.
47. Memorandum of Breakfast Conference with the President, January 20, 1954, folder “Meetings with the President 1954 (2),” box 1, Memoranda Series, John Foster Dulles Papers, Seely G. Mudd Library, Princeton University.
48. Dulles statements on February 12 and 13, 1954, FRUS, 1952–1954, VII/1, pp. 1061–1065 and 1088–1089.
49. Stourzh, Einheit und Freiheit, pp. 301–334; Bischof, Austria in the First Cold War, pp. 138–139; Larres, Churchill’s Cold War, pp. 341–355.
50. See the contribution by Mikhail Prozumenshchikov in this volume.
51. Stourzh, Einheit und Freiheit, pp. 335–400; Bischof, Austria in the First Cold War, pp. 142–147; Rolf Steininger, “1955. The Austrian Treaty and the German Question,” in Diplomacy & Statecraft, Vol. 3 (1992), pp. 211–225; idem, Austria, Germany and the Cold War, pp. 197 and 110–120.
52. Stourzh, Einheit und Freiheit, pp. 400–485; Steininger, Austria, Germany, and the Cold War, pp. 126–129; on the eventual costs of the treaty, see Seidel, Österreichs Wirtschaft, pp. 458–479.
53. Seidel, Österreichs Wirtschaft, pp. 120–125; Bischof, Austria in the First Cold War, pp. 144–146; Allen Dulles in 245th NSC-Session, Box 6, NSC-Series, Ann Whitman Files, Dwight D. Eisenhower Library, Abilene, Kansas.
54. Seidel, Österreichs Wirtschaft, pp. 130–135.
55. Günter Bischof, “The Making of the Austrian Treaty and the Road to Geneva,” in idem, and Saki Dockrill, Cold War Respite: The Geneva Summit of 195? (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 2000), pp. 117–154.
Part II
SOVIET DIPLOMACY TOWARD AUSTRIA
Chapter Two
Soviet Plans for Rebuilding Austria from 1941 to 1945
Aleksei Filitov
The attitude of the Soviet leadership to the post-war status of Austria was already defined and even written out in full at the earliest stage of the Second World War, at the climax of the Battle for Moscow. As a concrete date, November 21, 1941, can be named. It should be made clear, however, that it was not an official declaration but a top-secret telegram which the People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs, Vyacheslav Molotov, sent on this day to the delegated Soviet representative in London, Ivan Maiskii. In all likelihood, Maiskii was somewhat bemused as to the choice of words used by Iosif Stalin in a speech on November 6, 1941, for Stalin expressed the following: “As long as the Hitler people were busy with collecting German lands and the re-unification of the Rhineland, Austria, etc., one could characterise them with a certain justification as nationalists.”1 With reference to a request made by the British communists, the USSR’s political delegate in London sent a telegram on November 14 with a request to People’s Commissar Molotov for an elaboration of Stalin’s statement, which had indeed raised a number of questions.
The occupation of the left bank of the Rhine by Entente troops, in accordance with the Versailles Treaty, drew to a close at the time of the Weimar Republic and the operation carried out in 1936 by Hitler did not constitute a “reunification” but a remilitarization of the Rhineland—two terms which can in no way be equated with one another. Just as difficult to interpret was the attempt by Stalin to equate the Rhineland with Austria, which had at no point in history prior to the Anschluss been part of Germany. From the formulation selected by Stalin, one could thus deduce a renunciation of the early assessment of the Anschluss as a manifestation of the aggressive and predatory policies of National Socialist Germany.
Molotov’s telegram response of November 21, mentioned above, ran as follows:
In relation to your enquiry, I can inform you that the passage in question in Stalin’s speech on Austria was commented on by Comrade Stalin in the following manner: The annexation to Germany of an Austria inhabited by a majority of Germans can be viewed in the framework of German nationalism, but this in no way means that Comrade Stalin is trying to justify this annexation, for Comrade Stalin does not regard German nationalism as a justifiable and acceptable concept. At this point, Stalin wanted to say that even from the point of view of German nationalism, the current policy of expansion on the part of the Nazi leadership [literally: “Hitler people”] is to be regarded as disastrous for Germany and that the NSDAP is a coarse [and] imperialist and not a nationalist party. Stalin wanted thereby to cause confusion in the ranks of the Nazi leadership and drive a wedge between Hitler’s government and the nationalist strata of the German nation. Regarding the attitude of Comrade Stalin toward Austria, the Rhineland etc., Stalin is of the opinion that Austria is to be separated from Germany in the form of an independent state and that Germany itself, including Prussia, must be broken up into a series of more or less autonomous states in order to be able to safeguard a peaceful future existence for the states of Europe.2
How can one assess this dialogue between the People’s Commissar and the Ambassador, in which the “Soviet leader” indirectly participated in the form of a third person or a higher authority? Just saying that a statement made by Stalin was not entirely clear and necessitated an explanation required under the conditions prevailing at that time a considerable measure of fearlessness and moral courage on the part of the person voicing the request—in official form at that—for an explanation. Every statement made by the “Soviet leader” was to be regarded as a truth from the highest authority, and any scepticism as to the wisdom and perfection of the statement, regardless of how it was expressed, could have the most serious consequences. It is correct that Maiskii did not raise the question of his own accord but rather at the request of the British Communist Party, but in this form his telegram could be construed as a manifestation of independent thought, which at that time was not approved of in any form whatsoever.
No less unusual were the reactions of Molotov and Stalin himself, whom the People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs had approached with the request for explanation, as emerges from the text of the telegram from November 24. This was not followed by a brusque rebuke but by an attempt to provide a detailed and to-the-point response to a question that was in no way straightforward. Molotov’s (or rather Molotov’s and Stalin’s) answer testifies to a certain discrepancy between pragmatic and propagandistic components in Soviet policy. Dogmatic teachings and the objectives actually pursued by Soviet policies constituted in the eyes of the Soviet leadership completely different categories, which did not necessitate any conformity or adjustment. It was evidently believed that such a correlation between these two components could ensure a political flexibility and efficiency. The accuracy of such an approach is more than questionable. In the concrete case at hand, one could argue that the reference to German nationalism at the time of the Second World War did not have any noticeable results. If the aim was “confusion,” then this was at most caused among the opponents of National Socialism.
But now for the most decisive factor in the context of the issue being addressed: The aforementioned telegram from Molotov to Maiskii undeniably demonstrates that the separate treatment of the “German” and the “Austrian” questions and the particular emphasis placed on an Austrian identity (as defined at the beginning of the operation of the radio station “Freies Österreich” on November 19, 1941)3 was not merely hollow propagandistic rhetoric designed to weaken the enemy but that the reestablishment of the Austrian state, its independent existence in the post-war world, constituted a declared aim of the Soviet leadership from the earliest phase of the Second World War, despite propagandistic shifts.
This factor