Category Archives: democracy

by | 18 December 2024 · 2:15 am

U.S. Navy in Wartime Honolulu

From The Mighty Moo: The USS Cowpens and Her Epic World War II Journey from Jinx Ship to the Navy’s First Carrier into Tokyo Bay, by Nathan Canestaro (Grand Central, 2024), Kindle pp. 56-57:

Hawaii had occupied a special place in the American popular consciousness since the 1930s. Even during the darkest days of the Depression, as much as half of the US population saw a movie every week, and “Hawaii Hollywood-style” was a staple of the films of the era. A string of blockbusters romanticized it as a tropical paradise with a hula girl under every palm tree. The islands’ exclusiveness also added to their popular mystique. In the prewar era, a Hawaiian vacation was well out of reach of the vast bulk of American society, affordable only for the very affluent.

Once servicemen arrived in Honolulu, it was difficult to reconcile the popular image of the place with reality. Rather than an idyllic paradise, Honolulu was just another crowded Navy town, “full of sunlight and sailors and bad liquor.” Pearl Harbor was a major shipyard, supply center, and way station for the Pacific Fleet, and from 1941 to 1945 more than a million servicemen and defense workers passed through it on their way to or from the war. Sam Sommers commented that with the huge volume of men, equipment, and supplies pouring into Hawaii, “the island could have fought a pretty good war by itself.”

Few servicemen said much good about it, however, dubbing it “the rock.” Some of this was just a case of unrealistic expectations, although there were also plenty of legitimate gripes. These included overcrowding by fellow servicemen, high prices, a male-to-female ratio that most men swore was at least several hundred to one, and the seedy industries that sprung up to separate the sailors from their $50-a-month salary. The complaint that there were just too many servicemen was the most common. The men waited in line for everything—restaurant, movie theater, bar, or brothel. The crowds would reach their peak in December 1944, when 137,200 soldiers, sailors, and Marines were ashore, more than half of Honolulu’s 1940 population. The islands had a tradition of hospitality, but many residents felt they had avoided a Japanese invasion only to suffer through a Navy one.

Cowpens had six days at anchor in Pearl Harbor before putting out to sea for exercises, and during that time McConnell released the crew for liberty in rotating shifts. While the officers enjoyed time in the O clubs or playing golf and tennis, some of the sailors went sightseeing, or swam or sunbathed on Waikiki Beach, seeing for the first time that the iconic beach was marred with double lines of barbed wire and patrolled by sentries. Other popular destinations were the USO clubs, the largest being the Army-Navy YMCA in downtown Honolulu. At these clubs, A-list celebrities such as Bob Hope and Jack Benny put on lavish musical variety shows, which interspersed big band music with stand-up or dance routines. The Navy had its recreation center, the Breakers Club, on Waikiki Beach—Artie Shaw and his Navy band made it famous, and up to 4,400 men visited every day.

The Army’s Maluhia Club, at the other end of Waikiki, had the best dance floor on the island. Many soldiers and sailors went there in hopes of meeting women, but the odds were skewed against them. Paraphrasing Winston Churchill, the men joked that “never have so many pursued so few, with so much, and obtained so little.” The Maluhia was staffed by a cadre of volunteer USO girls, many of them the daughters of socially prominent Hawaiian families, each accompanied by a watchful chaperone. Perhaps 250 or so were there on any given night to dance with 3,500 or so men. There was no cutting in until the whistle blew, which it did every 2.5 minutes. The female volunteers danced for three or four hours at a stretch just to make sure each of the lonely servicemen got their turn. One such group of patriotic women volunteers called themselves the “Flying Squadron,” and in twelve months from 1942 to 1943 they attended 127 dances with more than sixty thousand men.

The most popular destination for the enlisted men in Honolulu was Hotel Street, the city’s vice district—where they went to get “stewed, screwed, and tattooed.” While the men had arrived looking for the Hawaii they had seen in the movies, on Hotel Street they found the Hawaii later depicted in From Here to Eternity. James Jones’s iconic 1951 novel detailed the intersection between the island’s servicemen and its seedy side, what one scholar of the period called “a small world of rough men and prostitutes, of drinking, gambling, sex, violence, and despair.”

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Filed under democracy, economics, Hawai'i, labor, migration, military, Pacific, U.S., war

by | 17 December 2024 · 12:14 pm

U.S. Navy Segregation, 1943

From The Mighty Moo: The USS Cowpens and Her Epic World War II Journey from Jinx Ship to the Navy’s First Carrier into Tokyo Bay, by Nathan Canestaro (Grand Central, 2024), Kindle pp. 27-29:

At the bottom of the ship’s social hierarchy was the ship’s contingent of African American mess attendants, known after 1943 as steward’s mates. The Navy—and the Cowpens—was a microcosm of 1940s America, demonstrating its injustices as well as its virtues. One such injustice was the Navy’s policy on racial integration. Since 1932, African Americans had only been able to serve as enlisted men on Navy combat vessels, and only as steward’s mates, where they were effectively domestic servants. They did a variety of menial tasks, including cooking, waiting on officers’ tables at meals, and doing their cleaning and laundry.

It had not always been this way. The Navy was integrated throughout much of the nineteenth century, and during the Civil War as much as 20 percent of its sailors were Black. But in 1919, [Woodrow Wilson’s] Navy Secretary Josephus Daniels closed the door to any recruitment of African Americans. FDR had served under Daniels as assistant secretary of the Navy, and as president he sought to strike a middle ground between the demands of White segregationists and civil rights activists. Under his watch, the Navy allowed African Americans in only noncombat roles such as messmen, shore workers, dockhands, and in construction battalions, and like the other armed services it remained racially segregated.

It was not until 1944, when James Forrestal became secretary of the Navy, that the service began shifting toward integration. But in the meantime, the Navy came down hard on any resistance to segregation. In the so-called Philadelphia Mutiny of 1940, fifteen African American messmen aboard the cruiser Philadelphia wrote to one of the leading Black newspapers—then a powerful voice in the fight for racial equality—warning other African Americans not to join the Navy, for they were little more than “sea-going bell hops, chambermaids, and dishwashers.” All fifteen were dismissed from the service, which denied them any veterans’ benefits.

Cowpens had a contingent of twenty-eight steward’s mates aboard under the supervision of a White officer, but unfortunately no account of their experience survives. The account of one messman on Independence gives us some idea of what their life aboard the Moo might have been like, however. Willie Thomas was an eighteen-year old from Cincinnati, Ohio, who volunteered for the Navy because he saw little opportunity to contribute to the war at home. Willie’s primary responsibility was taking care of the pilots’ ready rooms and officers’ quarters, making sure coffee and donuts were available after every mission. But like many steward’s mates across the Navy, he also volunteered for additional tasks that pushed the boundaries of the racial restrictions that prohibited him from combat duty. When the ship was under attack, he carried clips of 40mm ammunition from the ship’s magazines to its antiaircraft guns so they could maintain a steady rate of fire. Despite working in a system that was biased against him, Willie was upbeat about the relationship of the steward’s mates with the majority-White crew, saying that “we were all on this big ship together.”

While Willie was charitable about the state of race relations aboard, George Terrell thought there was some room for improvement. He wrote in his journal about how shocked he was to encounter overt segregation and racism for the first time. “I was young and impressionable and terribly innocent about these things,” he recalled years after the war. “Many of the older career officers on the ship were natives of the Deep South… they really believed that these black boys were inferior human beings.” Terrell gradually learned that the prejudice was not universal, saying how it was “not shared by all the officers, not even by all the southern officers. And it was certainly less prevalent among the lower ranks.” For example, the enlisted Marines’ berthing compartment was right next to the steward’s mates, and the two groups got to know each other and often socialized. Getting to know each other, Terrell concluded, taught him how “screwed up” segregation really was.

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by | 11 December 2024 · 2:15 pm

Yugoslav Heresies in the 1950s

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 563-565:

In 1953, the question of what socialism would be after Stalin was not purely theoretical because Yugoslavia’s Communists had been experimenting with new models since Stalin’s break with them in 1948. The rupture was not about ideology (that is, about how to build socialism or to structure the party): it was about obedience to Stalin personally. Tito and his comrades had enraged the Soviet leader by failing to seek permission, for example, for their policies toward the other Balkan states. For the time being, references to Tito were anathema in the Soviet Bloc; as recently as December 1952, top Czech Communist leaders had gone to the gallows for association with Titoist heresies. But now Stalin’s successors sought peace with Yugoslavia, leading to full restoration of relations by the summer of 1955. When the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev denounced Stalin the following winter in a secret speech, many Hungarian and Polish Communists, as well as workers, thought the Yugoslav way might become their way.

The best-known component of this Yugoslav path to socialism was worker self-management, enshrined in law in 1951. It grew out of a struggle of leading Yugoslav Communists for orientation after their expulsion from the Cominform. Tito had been so tightly bound to the Soviet party that he later recalled the first days of estrangement as a “nightmare.” Yet Yugoslav Communists had no doubt that they were in the right; their victory in the Partisan struggle, with little Soviet help, showed that history was on their side. The question was where the Soviets had gone wrong.

Yugoslav Communists located the causes of the Soviet deviation in the Communist Party itself and its untrammeled power. Tito’s lieutenants Milovan Djilas and Edvard Kardelj reasoned that power in the Soviet Union lay not with workers and peasants but with bureaucrats. For example, managers and not workers controlled Soviet factories. Like capitalists, they determined what men and women on the factory floor produced, and like capitalists, they had the privileges of higher salaries. In effect, exploitation of the working class continued. This was a vital recognition and critique for a political order that claimed to embody emancipation of all human beings. Soviet reality was not socialism but “state capitalism.”

Somehow Soviet leaders had failed to heed Marx’s warnings about “usurpers” who might derail the revolution. Indeed, the very idea of a strong state, as the Soviet one undoubtedly was, had seemed anathema to Marx.

…

Djilas and Kardelj, along with the Slovene Boris Kidrič, reread these lines from Marx’s and Engels’s Communist Manifesto, and during a chat in a limousine outside their villas in 1949, decided that this vision of workers’ power held a solution to Yugoslavia’s predicament of being a socialist state cut off from the socialist motherland. They suggested it to Tito, and he quickly recognized the promise, exclaiming: “Factories belonging to the workers, something that has never been achieved!”

…

The party elite now took central planning out of its straight jacket and introduced some flexibility, for instance, giving firms tax breaks for better production. Though Yugoslavia was far from being a market economy, it became possible for managers to seek marketplace advantages and make higher profits. At the same time, firms were not required to act according to market rules, and bank credits became available to cushion them against budget shortfalls (that is, noncompetitive performance). After 1953, partly aided by Western credits, the Yugoslav economy—and living standards—improved markedly. One sign of this was growth in personal consumption, which went up by 45.8 percent between 1957 and 1961.

A transformation took place from a “distributive model” of the early postwar years, whose aim had been to remedy deprivation, to one in which the needs and preferences of consumers guided the production of the country’s enterprises. From the late 1950s, Yugoslavia thus embarked on the path to a “consumer society,” and the Yugoslav economic reforms of 1965 would be the most ambitious market-oriented changes seen anywhere in the Communist world before 1989.

Yet for all the heady experimentation in the economic realm, the Yugoslav way soon gave evidence of its limitations, and oddly, that involved its founding thinker, Milovan Djilas. Marx had been radical in his belief that the state must die under socialism, and so was Djilas. From October 1953 to January 1954, Djilas published articles in the party daily Borba attacking the power of the Yugoslav Communist bureaucracy. His views had evolved…. The more the party succeeded in building socialism, the less it was needed. Yet in reality, the party-state in Yugoslavia was becoming ever more entrenched.

In one of the last articles he was able to publish in socialist Yugoslavia, Djilas doubted whether that country was still in the throes of a “class struggle.” The bourgeoisie had been destroyed. What then was the need for a Communist organization of any kind, no matter what it called itself? Already alarmed, Tito moved to silence his former lieutenant, proclaiming that, yes, there would be a withering of the League, but the process would be protracted, because there were still many class enemies afoot. Djilas himself was evidence of this fact.

Djilas was now removed from the Central Committee and denied permission to publish. But he continued to give interviews with Western journalists, and in 1956, he published a book arguing that the party had become a new class. For the crime of “conducting propaganda hostile to Yugoslavia,” Djilas was sent to prison.

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by | 8 December 2024 · 1:58 pm

Communist Takeover in Prague, 1948

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 535-538:

At the Cominform’s founding, [the Soviet leaders] urged the radical Yugoslav faction to publically humiliate French and Italian Communists for sharing government with imperialist forces, and Czechoslovak Communists understood they were implicated as well. At that time, they were sharing a coalition with Catholics, Czech National Socialists, and Social Democrats, and were gearing for parliamentary elections in 1948. On returning to Prague, Party General Secretary Rudolf Slánský informed his Politburo that the time had come for a decisive act to place the country on a direct path to socialism. That implied a rupture with existing policy: the previous year, party leader Gottwald had still been speaking of a “Czechoslovak road to socialism,” without a dictatorship of the proletariat or violence on the Soviet model.

In February 1948, Czech and Slovak Communists used their huge cadre base and control of the military and police to stage a rapid seizure of power. Though backed by overwhelming force, the coup was bloodless. They took advantage of an embarrassing mistake by the National Socialist and Catholic politicians, who were tiring of the sundry illegalities of their Communist coalition partners. In November 1947, Communist authorities in Prague had staged a purge of the police force. Believing the population would support them, the Catholic and National Socialist ministers resigned in protest on February 21, thinking that the president would now dissolve the government and immediately call for elections. But they miscalculated: the Communists and their Social Democratic allies still had a majority of seats in the government, and simply replaced the ministers who had resigned with politicians of their own choosing. Then they summoned party cells across the country to form “action committees” that would purge every institution in public life.

The leaders got more than they bargained for. Within a few days, mostly young and impatient Communists had ousted directors and managers from newspapers, state administration, sporting clubs, political parties, schools, and cultural institutions such as theaters. Then they began firing people the next level down. The purge was so thorough that party chief Gottwald had to restrain students, who believed that they had advanced into a new stage of history. Charles University was expecting guests from across Europe to celebrate its six-hundredth anniversary, and the young radicals had just unseated the rector, causing several Western universities to withdraw their participation and spoiling the event’s propaganda value. Gottwald got on the phone to the student leader in charge and asked whether he and his comrades were thinking with their heads or “their behinds.” He did not object to the purges that students were carrying out in their own ranks. Opposition leaders were simply arrested, but the rest of the student body was required to appear before “verification commissions,” which expelled more than one-fifth of them. These “class enemies” were usually sent to do heavy labor, often in mines, and thus were erased from Czechoslovak cultural, economic, and political life.

A final stage now occurred in salami tactics. Having sliced off independent peasant, nationalist, and Catholic politicians, the Communists devoured their Social democratic partners whole. This was a regional trend. In the summer and fall of 1948, these more moderate Marxist parties were compelled to form “unity” parties with the Communists. The result in Hungary was the Hungarian Workers Party and in Poland the Polish United Workers Party. In East Germany, the Soviets had forced the merger of Communists and Social Democrats in April 1946, producing the Socialist Unity Party of Germany. In all these cases, the joint cadre base of the new party was much larger than when the Communists stood alone; the challenge was now to subject Social Democrats to Leninist discipline. Czechoslovakia’s Communists dispensed with the pretense of a new name, however, and after absorbing the smaller Social Democratic party, they remained the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia.

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Filed under Czechia, democracy, economics, education, Hungary, labor, migration, nationalism, philosophy, Poland, Slovakia, USSR, Yugoslavia

by | 7 December 2024 · 3:01 pm

Contempt for Old Elites, 1945

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 510-512:

Contempt for old elites derived not only from blunders of international politics, however. Beyond failing to protect their countries from the onslaught of well-armed and rapacious neighbors, the prewar leaders had neglected grievous social problems, instead monopolizing and reproducing privilege for themselves. They had made limited investments in modern industries and introduced few educational reforms, and therefore the overwhelming majorities of the populations were cut off from hopes of social advancement. Now leading intellectuals sought to expiate their guilt for the rampant injustices of the interwar regimes by siding with people’s democracy, understanding that those governing them were of lower class background and had to learn to behave “culturally” through educational advancement that only the intelligentsia could provide.

Few leaders of the interwar years remained to face the consequences. In 1945, Admiral Miklós Horthy was a prisoner in Nuremberg, and after release went into exile in Switzerland and Portugal. Polish foreign minister Józef Beck escaped to Romania, only to die there. Peasant Party leader Stanislaw Mikołajczyk returned to Poland, but the rest of the London government did not. Yugoslav King Peter had fled at war’s outbreak, never to return. Boris III of Bulgaria died in 1943 and his nine-year-old son, Simeon, went into exile in 1946. In February 1945, as the result of a decision of a Communist-controlled “people’s court,” virtually the entire surviving government of Bulgaria was executed, including three regents, twenty-two ministers, and sixty-seven parliamentarians. The popular King Michael of Romania was forced to abdicate at gunpoint in December 1947 and left for exile in Switzerland the following month.

The devastations of war had also weakened the governing classes, especially in Poland. There Nazi and Soviet occupiers had acted as co-conspirators in genocide by deporting and killing Poland’s national elite, most egregiously at the forests near Katyn in early 1940, when the NKVD shot more than 22,000 reserve officers, who in civilian life were leading figures in politics, culture, and the economy. When Soviet authorities sent four transports of more than one million Polish citizens from eastern Poland to central Asia and Siberia in 1940/1941, they targeted persons with higher education and means; and from the moment German armed units crossed Poland’s borders, SS units followed with lists of Polish intellectuals to kill. The physical and human destruction overlapped most dramatically in Warsaw, which had served as the political but also as the cultural and economic locus of power. Of the city’s 1.2 million inhabitants, historians estimate that 800,000 lost their lives during the war. The municipality was still more than 80 percent ruins as late as 1948. Those elites who survived staggered from the blows received and were unable to mount serious resistance to people’s democracy.

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by | 4 December 2024 · 4:47 pm

Bulgaria Between Nazis and Soviets

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 484-485:

What had made the deportations from Thrace and Macedonia take place without resistance was that the Jews there were not Bulgarian citizens. Yet the conditions of their sojourn on Bulgarian territory on the way to Poland became known and shocked the public conscience. They had had been denied food, water, and sanitation and been subject to wanton violence. Now no one doubted the meaning of further deportations: they would be the first steps to total destruction. Subranie [National Assembly] Vice President Dimitar Peshev, supported by forty deputies, censured the government and a “hint from the highest quarters” followed (presumably from Boris), ordering the stop of all deportations planned from Old Bulgaria.

Yet the Germans continued to apply pressure. Foreign Minister Ribbentrop complained personally to King Boris during his visit to Berlin in April 1943 about his government’s failure to honor an agreement from January to deport 6,000 Jews. Boris explained that he needed them for road building. German observers on the ground reported other methods of deception: rather than prepare Sofia’s Jews for the promised deportations to Poland, Bulgarian authorities were planning to settle them in the countryside. Even the fanatic Beckerle felt there was no hope in prodding the Bulgarians to further action. They had been living so long with other peoples, like the Armenians, Greeks, and Gypsies, he wrote to the Foreign Office, that Bulgarians did not see the Jews as a special enemy. Indeed, within Bulgarian society, the plans to remove Jews from Sofia was seen as a threat and an outrage, and were preceded by street demonstrations and interventions of Jews with Christian acquaintances, including members of the Orthodox Synod, as well as the Dunovist Christian sect. The Dunovists, who incorporated worship of the rising sun in their Christian beliefs, were strong at the royal court and included Princess Eudoxia, Boris’s advisors, and perhaps Boris himself. One rabbi, Daniel Tsion, a mystic and student of comparative theology, managed to deliver a note to the king with what he claimed was a warning from God against persecuting Jews.

Despite this unusual engagement of Bulgarian politicians and church leaders in saving their Jewish neighbors, the resistance had its limits. King Boris still thought Jews were a serious problem that had to be dealt with. In April 1943, he told members of the Orthodox Synod that Jews and their “profiteering spirit,” were in large measure responsible for the present “global cataclysm.” Like politicians throughout the region, he was primarily interested in strengthening his nation-state, and that is why he had subjected Jews and other non-ethnic Bulgarians to a demeaning status, depriving them of civil rights. King Boris may well have approved deportations of Jews to the death camps had Germany prevailed against the Soviet Union. And if Jews had not lost their lives in virtually every other European state, Bulgaria would be remembered as a hell for Jews.

Yet Boris and other influential Bulgarians could not ignore the fact that Germany was losing the war, and they feared allied retribution. When US bombers attacked the oil fields at Ploieşti in Romania, Boris rejected German requests for assistance in turning them back. He also refused to alienate the Soviets and never permitted anti-Soviet propaganda in the Bulgarian press that was routine everywhere else. The only thing that might have changed the Bulgarian position, German diplomats wrote, would be “new activation of the German war effort,” that is, evidence that Germany could win. Yet as Soviet forces pushed ever closer to Berlin, anti-German forces in Bulgaria showed greater courage, carrying out attacks on right-wing leaders, like General Hristo Lukov in February 1943. The assassinations lasted into the spring, showing that the war was “coming home” to the streets of Sofia. In August, the king died of heart failure, shortly after a meeting with Hitler in East Prussia, his third of the year. Perhaps he had been poisoned, but more likely he was worn out from the stress of navigating among a plethora of competing demands.

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by | 20 November 2024 · 5:43 pm

Antifascists in 1930s Bulgaria

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 428-430:

Fascists in Bulgaria faced a distilled concentration of all the problems that handicapped counterparts in Yugoslavia or Poland: a native strongman, a native national movement that valued democracy, and an agricultural societal structure. In Bulgaria, fascism lacked the disorientated and enraged middle- and working-class constituencies that allowed it to flourish farther west. Still, like everywhere else, a native version did emerge, and it did so from the top of the political elite. After Stamboliiski’s murder in 1923, the economics professor Aleksandar Tsankov became prime minister and vigorously suppressed the Bulgarian left. He fell from power in 1926 because his rule involved brutalities that shocked European opinion, causing London bankers to threaten the withholding of loans. After that, a moderate government took office under the centrist Andrey Lyapchev (1866–1933), and the country again managed to secure international financing.

Tsankov did not fade from the scene entirely, however, and became increasingly attracted to fascist politics. In May 1934 he called for a rally ahead of Nazi leader Hermann Goering’s visit to Sofia. Some 50,000 supporters were expected. Yet three days before Goering’s visit, the Bulgarian military (“Military League”) stepped in and seized power from a weak assemblage of mainstream parties. The army officers were supported by the civilian association Zveno (“The Link”), which held that Bulgaria must be modernized from above by the enlightened few because parliaments were a thing of the past. Under Zveno’s rule, Bulgaria conformed to regional patterns: increasing dependence on the German economy, nationalist chauvinism—reflected, for example, in the changing of Turkish to Bulgarian place names—and central rule. Zveno believed the state bureaucracy had to be streamlined and rationalized, and it reduced the ranks of the civil service by one-third.

Zveno is yet another case of the terminological confusion of that period surrounding the word fascism. Although Zveno was not a paramilitary, radical nationalist, or a mass mobilization regime, the US newsweekly Time called it “fascist.” In fact Zveno was moderate in foreign policy and sought better relations with Belgrade rather than a violent seizure of disputed territory. As in Marshall Piłsudski’s Sanacja, prominent leaders were military men (Damyan Velchev, Pencho Zlatev, Kimon Georgiev), and like Sanacja, they vowed to undo the corruption of public life. Yet unlike Polish counterparts, they did not establish a government party (like BBWR) or mass movement (like OZON), although they did abolish the political parties. The National Parliament (subranie) and local governments continued, but candidates had to run as individuals. Still, most successful candidates for office had belonged to the old parties and were recognized as such. Subranie elections in early 1938 netted the opposition one-third of the votes despite the sort of harassment and manipulation seen in Poland, Romania, Hungary, and Yugoslavia.

In early 1935, King Boris III, concerned about republican sentiment in the government, disbanded the Military League and appointed a civilian prime minister loyal to himself (he maintained the ban on parties). From that moment until his death in 1943, the king controlled Bulgarian politics, appointing prime ministers as he saw fit, yet acting as a benign dictator, maintaining peace with totalitarian Germany and Russia while trying to associate Bulgaria with democratic France. As far as possible, he suppressed the terrorist IMRO. Calling himself a “democratic monarch,” Boris stayed in touch with Bulgarians by touring the country in his own locomotive, occasionally stopping to visit with villagers, to whom he dispensed trinkets and other small gifts. Several right-wing associations emerged in the late 1930s that admired Nazism, but Boris kept them in check.

Yet he also adopted certain popular fascist appearances. Given his impressive record as field commander in World War I, Boris wore a uniform with some justification, and his regime formed corporatist organizations like a state-run “patriotic” union, through which, one Communist asserted, the “fascists buried the class struggle.” Again we see the period’s flexible understanding of “fascist.” For Communists, the authoritarian antisocialist regimes were fascist by definition. In 1936 Zveno created a “Bulgarian Workers’ Union” that attempted to usurp the workers’ cause in order to strengthen the state (again very reminiscent of Italy). May Day parades continued, but red flags were replaced by Bulgarian tricolors that were blessed by priests. As we will see in Chapter 17, Boris supported the rescue of Bulgaria’s Jews when they were threatened by Germany.

Like Hungarian and Romanian authoritarians, Boris suppressed fascism yet expended much less energy for similar results. His country, even more rural and with rampant illiteracy, featured few large towns in which people might be mobilized for fascist causes. In addition, Bulgarian politics offered other options to absorb radical energies. There was Stamboliiski’s mass agrarian movement in the 1920s as well as a potent military ultra-right, and there was IMRO, the Macedonian separatist movement, which featured a strong Bulgarian irredentist faction. All of this meant that Tsankov’s followers had little chance in the urban spaces where fascism thrives. And much more successfully than Horthy or Carol, Boris III, a popular and uniformed war hero, appeared to embody the national cause. It was easy for his police to identify and arrest the relatively few fascists, especially at the universities, which served as hothouses for radical ideologies.

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by | 10 November 2024 · 6:33 am

Interwar Croats vs. Yugoslavia

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 377-379:

The elections of 1919 produced stunning majorities in Croatia for the Croat Peasant Party, led by the mercurial, charismatic, popular, and erratic but principled Stjepan Radić, who decided to boycott the meetings that drafted the new state’s constitution. He told other Croat politicians before they rushed off to join the Serb Kingdom in 1918 that they were acting like “drunken geese in fog,” having learned nothing from the fall of Emperor Wilhelm in Germany a few weeks earlier. Like the fallen emperor, they were in a hurry to impose power on the people, rather than fostering self-governance by involving the people. No one had asked Croats if they wanted to belong to the new state, and that was an irrational, imprudent, and as time would show, self-defeating act.

Radić then led Croats in boycotting Yugoslav political institutions, and was arrested frequently, once for seeking support for Croat independence in Moscow (an act considered seditious). The other major political forces in Yugoslavia—Serbs from the old kingdom (Radicals), Serbs from Habsburg lands (Democrats), Muslims from Bosnia, and Slovene Catholics—thus ruled the new state without the Croats. Things seemed to change for the better in 1925, when Radić suddenly agreed to take a post as education minister and King Alexander made his first visit to Zagreb. Yet because of incompatibilities of the leaders, this relative harmony only lasted for just over a year.

The differences between Serbs and Croats in political vision proved unbridgable. Croat leaders insisted that Croatia must be guaranteed local autonomy in recognition of centuries of Croatian state’s rights that had been respected even under Hungarian rule. Yet Serbs had no tradition of federal rule. Having borne the costs of liberating Yugoslav territory from the Austrians—while Croats were fighting for Austria—Serbs claimed a moral right to rule the new state from the center. The determination to rule was reflected in a stranglehold Serbs established on institutions of state that lasted until 1941. Yet Serbs also argued compellingly that Yugoslavia had not been a Serb idea in the first place, and their political elite had acceded to unity in response to the urgent wishes of Croat politicians, first at Corfu in 1917, then in Belgrade with the delegation that appeared the following December. Without Serb backing, much of Croatia would have been divided between Hungary and Italy.

Nikola Pašić, the respected leader of the Serb Radical Party, died in 1927, and the parliamentary deputies in Belgrade sank into a routine of lobbing insults across the lines of ethnicity. In June 1928, Radić called Montenegrin deputies “apes,” and the next day, the Serb Radical Puniša Račić shot Radić on the floor of parliament along with two other Croat deputies. The two deputies died immediately, but Radić held on for several weeks, finally succumbing to complications from an operation in early August. The king reputedly offered to separate Croatia from Yugoslavia, but Radić refused, perhaps anticipating the difficulties of separating Croats from Serbs in the old military frontier (krajina) in Croatia and fearing Italian domination of the rump state that would be left.

In the end, Radić also acknowledged the basic need for a state that could secure the peaceful coexistence of the peoples on Yugoslav territory. Yet in contrast to Serb elites in Belgrade, his hope, and the hope of his deputy and successor Vladko Maček, was a federal Yugoslavia, perhaps even a Serb-Croat sharing of rule akin to the 1867 agreement between Austria and Hungary. One sign of hope was that since 1926, his Croatian Peasant Party worked in coalition with the Independent Democrats, a mostly Serb party from former Habsburg areas led by Svetozar Pribićević, also a target of the assassination in June 1928.

But with Radić’s death, the king felt a compulsion to act, and in January 1929, he declared a royal dictatorship, hoping simply to keep the state together. Parliament had proved a “hindrance to any fruitful work in the state” and to permit it to continue its work would expose Yugoslavia to the predations of its neighbors.49 In a modernizing frenzy meant to force Yugoslavia to become a state, Alexander made historic borders irrelevant and divided the country into nine banovine, or districts, named after rivers and with little relation to any district that had ever existed. Bosnia and Croatia simply disappeared from the map. In the army he abolished all insignias and standards that were attached to historic Serbia, thus alienating many Serbs. The country was now officially Yugoslavia and no longer the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes.

Perhaps the king’s scheme was not so outlandish. After all, the very idea of a united South Slav state went against all prior history, and to some extent all interwar Eastern European politics involved creation of new units in disregard of old ones. And he was not a nationalist: far from a tool of the Serb bureaucracy, Alexander acted to reduce Serb predominance. (As we will see, like the region’s other intemperate centralizer, Joseph II, he failed in almost everything he attempted.)

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by | 9 November 2024 · 9:36 am

“Imperialist” Founding of Czechoslovakia

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 346-347:

Basic agreements were made about Czechoslovakia during the war years, far away from the would-be country’s territory or population, by Czechs and Slovaks in exile, but also by Western statesmen. In 1915 representatives of Czechs and Slovaks in Cleveland agreed to form a common state, and in May 1918, Czechs, Slovaks, and Ruthenians gathered in Pittsburgh and agreed on the formation of the state of Czecho-Slovakia. The agreement said that Slovakia would have its own administration, parliament, and courts, and some Slovaks believed that implied autonomy. In October 1918, Tomáš G. Masaryk proclaimed Czechoslovakia’s existence from Independence Hall in Philadelphia, and neither he nor his followers doubted that the state would be governed from Prague, just as France was governed from Paris.

Czech statesmen and their Slovak supporters were resolute on this point because they feared that anything short of unanimity might cost them support in Western capitals. They also worried about the dangerous examples that would be set by any talk of autonomy or regionalism. If Prague accorded the Slovaks self-rule, then demands for the same would pour in from Germans, Magyars, and Ruthenians. Slovakia itself was highly heterogeneous, with Magyars dominating cities and the southern edge, and three large German “islands” in the west, center, and northeast. Some Slovak politicians hoped there might be a chance at a later date to negotiate the details of local rule, but in the meantime, they had to act to counter demands from Hungary. A new ideology of Czechoslovakism (of one people in two tribes) papered over doubts, and the constitution of 1920 referred to “a Czechoslovak” language. In practice, that meant that Czech administrators in Slovakia felt free to use Czech, which Slovaks understood almost perfectly. Yet by doing so they began grating on local sensitivities, creating a sense of differences that had never before existed, because the two peoples did not know each other.

Yet there was also a practical side to this “Czech imperialism.” Because the Hungarian administration had stifled the development of Slovak elites for generations—in 1910, of 6,185 state officials at all levels in Slovakia, only 154 were Slovaks—educated and skilled Czechs were needed to build schools, create jobs, form the networks of cultural institutions, and simply run the state. For example, in the capital city of Bratislava (called Pozsony in Hungarian, Pressburg in German), as late as 1925 there were 420 Czechs to 281 Slovaks in the police directorate. But the Czechs also exported condescension. Slovaks were a small population, foreign minister Beneš said, “insufficient to create a national culture on their own.” Tomáš G. Masaryk, though his father was Slovak, insisted that

there is no Slovak nation. That is the invention of Magyar propaganda. The Czechs and Slovaks are brothers.… Only cultural level separates them—the Czechs are more developed than the Slovaks, for the Magyars held them in systematic unawareness. We are founding Slovak schools.

Uncomfortable facts were swept under the rug. Masaryk had attended the Pittsburgh agreement promising Slovaks some kind of autonomy, yet he failed to regard it as binding. And when the constitution was drafted, representatives of the German, Polish, Magyar, and Ruthene communities—one-third of the new state’s population—had no part in it. The Slovak delegates in the assembly were not elected but chosen by Vávro Šrobár, the Slovak chairman of the Czechoslovak National Council, a physician active in Slovak politics who happened to know Masaryk. Šrobár and the Slovak delegates came from the Protestant minority, which was more enthusiastic about union with the Czechs than was the Slovak Catholic majority. They assented to a centralized state because the largely illiterate Slovak population was not “mature” enough for local autonomy and also because the threat of a return of Magyar power seemed to necessitate close cooperation with the Czechs.

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by | 5 November 2024 · 5:35 am

Evolution of Polish Nationalism

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 287-289:

In much of East Central Europe, landowners or bosses were of a foreign nationality, and nationalists exploited a sense of economic oppression to spread national consciousness to the masses. For example, in the Czech lands, owners of factories or manors tended to be German, and the Czech movement accordingly defined Czech identity as anti-German. In Bosnia, the landowner was Muslim; in Slovenia, German; and in much of Croatia, Hungarian. In 1800, Prague and Brno, but also Budapest, Bratislava, Ljubljana, and Zagreb, were German-speaking cities. The German was an enemy against whom the self was clearly defined and who was then displaced from culture, business, politics, and all traces of the new standard version of the national language.

In central Poland, the landowners as well as peasants were Polish-speaking. The cities and towns, however, had mixed populations, mostly Polish, but there were also many Jews, who spoke their own language and pursued walks of life that were distinct: trade, commerce, money-lending, and small crafts. Jews often bought cattle and grain, made credit available to peasants, or ran the local inn. Nationalists thus had an opportunity: they could use anti-Semitism to convince village folk that Jews were foreign, and that as ethnic Poles, the villagers belonged to the same nation as Polish townspeople and gentry. They told poor villagers that their problem was not lack of land, education, or farming implements but the “alien” Jewish presence in nearby towns. As restrictions on Jewish ownership eased from the 1870s, Jewish families began competing with small farmers to buy up the land of impoverished gentry, and by 1912, they controlled 20 percent of the agricultural land in Galicia. Arguments that presented these inroads as unfair Jewish advantages in the economy convinced peasants that they shared a common identity with Polish landlords.

Gradually the national idea caught on among peasants, even those who had been alienated from all talk of nation and felt that the court in Vienna was their protector. Beginning in the latter decades of the century, peasants participated more actively in local self-government and took a stronger role in national life, and that also meant heightened circulation among them of nationalist arguments. Catholic priests contributed a debased and opportunistic reading of their faith to serve the cause. One wrote that a Pole who was not an anti-Semite “has no right to call himself a good Catholic or a good Pole, and cannot be a good patriot.” The Polish national movement created “Christian” institutions to strengthen “Polish” ownership in the economy (the equivalent of the Bohemian nationaler Besitzstand was polski stan posiadania), and soon there were Christian shops, Christian lending institutions, and Christian pubs, all of which had the function of linking Poles across classes in village and city and promoting upward social mobility for co-ethnics.

But even so, the inculcation of Polish nationalist narratives in the village was not easy. Before World War I, many peasants still uttered curses when the name Poland was mentioned because they associated Poland with the “lords.” And when they embraced national consciousness, peasants and their political movements claimed to do so in a way all their own, saying that national culture was unspoiled in the villages, in contrast to the towns, where the gentry had absorbed foreign ideas about states and laws. In the early twentieth century, leading Polish intellectuals bought those arguments and developed their own cult for the genuine Polishness of villagers, even seeking peasant brides.

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