The Red Army in Austria. Группа авторов

Introduction

      Stefan Karner and Barbara Stelzl-Marx

      On Holy Thursday, March 29, 1945, units of the 3rd Ukrainian Front under Marshal Fyodor Tolbukhin crossed the old Austrian border at Klostermarienberg in Burgenland. Thus began the Allied military occupation of Austria. Parallel to this in the course of the advance of the Red Army and later the troops of the Western Allies, the Nazi system collapsed.¹ Austria was liberated externally from Nazi rule. Resistance on the part of Austrians had admittedly grown and was large in places, but it could not yet decisively contribute to the overthrow of Nazi rule.² At least 26,000 Red Army soldiers lost their lives on Austrian territory in the final weeks of the Second World War.³

      Hundreds of thousands of soldiers and officers, their wives and children, as well as the civilian occupation personnel, often came to Austria for years. At the end of the war, about 400,000 Red Army soldiers were in Austria. The majority of them were withdrawn again in 1945/1946. At the end of the occupation in 1955, around 40,000 members of the army together with 7,600 relatives of officers were stationed in Austria. By means of their blanket presence they belonged during the post-war period to everyday life in the Soviet occupation zone. Compared to the quantitatively fewer American, French, and British occupation troops, the Soviet occupation soldiers in eastern Austria thus constituted “strangers” per se. “The Russians,” as they were, and still are, generally called in popular parlance shaped the first post-war decade in Austria particularly strongly. Old propaganda patterns from the nineteenth century and the Nazi era often continued to have an effect here.

The Soviet occupation of eastern Austria from 1945 to 1955 constituted until a few years ago one of the most significant research gaps in Austrian contemporary history.⁴ While the zones of Austria occupied by the Western Allies had already been the subject of numerous academic studies, research into the Soviet occupation lagged drastically behind. The reason for this lay first and foremost in a major, decade-long imbalance in the source situation. As a result of the partial opening of relevant sources in Russian archives, several research projects could dedicate themselves to Austrian-Soviet relations at a bilateral level, questions relating to Soviet influence on Austrian policy as well as plans vis-à-vis Austria or everyday life in the Soviet occupation zone from the Austrian perspective.

      As a result of a three-year, bilateral research project⁵ (with preparatory work lasting several years), in April 2005, a two-volume publication appeared under the title Die Rote Armee in Österreich. Sowjetische Besatzung 1945–1955, in which for the first time the ten-year Soviet occupation of Austria was comprehensively analysed on the basis of documents from many Russian and Austrian archives.⁶ In Russia this concerned in particular repositories of the Central Archives of the Ministry of Defence (TsAMO) in Podol’sk, for the declassification of which a special commission was set up; the Central Archives of the FSB;⁷ the Archives of the Foreign Ministry; the Russian State Archives for Contemporary History (former archives of the Central Committee of the CPSU, RGANI); the Russian State Archives for Social and Political History (“Party Archives” until 1952, now RGASPI); the Russian State Archives for Military History (formerly “Special Archives” of the Ministerial Council of the USSR, now RGVA); and the State Archives of the Russian Federation (GARF). In the framework of the bilateral, joint treatment, almost all of the named archives opened many collections on Austria for the first time. This affected, among others, records of the “Stavka,” the administrations of the 2nd and 3rd Ukrainian Front, which operated in Austria, their political sections, as well as the NKVD units operating behind the front on Austrian soil; the Politburo for the period after 1945, among them the resolutions passed in particular secrecy from the collection “special folder” (“osobaya papka”); and likewise from the collections of Vyacheslav Molotov, the Foreign Policy Commission of the Central Committee and the Soviet Component of the Allied Commission for Austria.

The Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Research on Consequences of War (BIK) continued with this project its long-term research in close cooperation with Russian archives and research institutions. From 1990/1991, Stefan Karner carried out research on Austrian-Soviet relations after 1945 and on the topic of prisoners of war,⁸ before founding the BIK in 1993. Under his leadership, research on POWs in captivity and forced labor in the Soviet Union and in the “Third Reich” were continued.⁹ Research focus was also placed on aspects of the Cold War.¹⁰ In 2008, a research project on the “Prague Spring” was successfully completed. A two-volume publication with almost 3000 pages appeared in international cooperation.¹¹ A 500-page edition appeared in the Harvard Cold War Studies Book Series under the title The Prague Spring and the Warsaw Pact Invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.¹² In 2011, several joint publications on the Vienna Summit of 1961 between John F. Kennedy and Nikita S. Khrushchev were released.¹³ A study on 104 Austrian victims of Stalin who were sentenced to death and shot in Moscow between 1950 and 1953,¹⁴ the postdoctoral thesis¹⁵ of Barbara Stelzl-Marx, which appeared as a book in 2011 under the title Stalins Soldaten in Österreich,¹⁶ and publications on children of occupation are furthermore devoted to the Soviet occupation in Austria and its consequences.¹⁷

      Current research is carried out moreover in the framework of the Austria-Russian Historical Commission (chairpersons: Stefan Karner and Alexander Chubar’ian; secretaries: Barbara Stelzl-Marx and Viktor Ishchenko). The aim of the commission, which was founded in 2008, is the joint treatment of Austrian-Russian/Soviet relations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Thanks is due in this context to the Austrian Federal Ministry for European and International Matters for the financial assistance provided to the projects of the ÖRHK.

      The current volume constitutes a selection of in part revised contributions from the German-language publication Die Rote Armee in Österreich. Sowjetische Besatzung 1945–1955 as well as other research carried out at the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Research on Consequences of War in collaboration with Graz University and the City of Graz. The research was primarily supported by Ludwig Boltzmann Gesellschaft, the Governments of Styria and Lower Austria as well as the Austrian Federal Ministry of Education, Science and Research, Vienna. Professor Günter Bischof, University of New Orleans, a proven expert in the field of Cold War studies, was furthermore recruited for an introductory chapter.

      The aim of the current volume is to provide an account of central aspects of the Soviet occupation in Austria from 1945 to 1955 and to embed them in the context of the early Cold War. Against this backdrop, Günter Bischof provides in his introduction an insight into “The Policies of Presidents Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower toward Austria, 1943–1955.” With his publication Austria in the First Cold War, Bischof presented as early as the 1990s the theory that in 1945 in Austria the Anglo-Soviet Cold War had already set in, from which an Anglo-American-Soviet Cold War developed in 1946. In doing so, he contradicted from the supranational point of view the long-advocated theory that there had never been a cold war in Austria (“KeinKalter Krieg in Kakanien” or “No Cold War in the Dual Monarchy”).¹⁸ Advocates of the latter theory viewed this above all from the perspective of an Allied cooperation in Vienna that always functioned, even in hot phases of the early Cold War (joint patrols, etc.).

Bischof emphasizes Marshall Plan aid as a particularly important element, which Austria—as the only country under Soviet occupation—received from 1948 till 1952. In the per head distribution of the Marshall Plan funds, the Austrians were at the forefront. Austria turned out to be one of the principal recipients of Marshall Funds on a per capita basis. This European Recovery Program served not only as a counterweight to the economic exploitation by the Soviets but also as a political means to contain Communist influence in Austria and to promote the Western orientation