Eastern... Europe Transformed
The East European Revolution. By Hugh Seton-Watson. (Methuen.
223. 6d.)
MR. S ETON-WATSON Is to be congratulated on this admirably com- petent and useful piece of work. There has so far been no coherent account by a professional historian of the transforma- tion of Eastern Europe since the first World War ; in this case the professional historian enjoys the singular advantage of having grown up in the circle created by his father, to which many out- standing East Europeans belonged. It is, of course, with the last decade, and most particularly with the last ,five years, that Mr. Seton-Watson is most concerned, but he rightly presumes that they cannot be faithfully portrayed without a detailed historical intro- duction involving a brief recapitulation of his own earlier book. Thus Part I (background) and Part II (war) form slightly less than half the book, and Part III (Sovietisation) slightly more. Part III includes a chapter on "The Greek Exception," and ends with a discussion of international problems and of East and West.
First Mr. Seton-Watson gives us a straight account of the political and social evolutionY af the eight or so countries of his area. When Germany collapsed, and her New Order with her, the U.S.S.R. stepped into the consequent void and proceeded to build up political and economic machinery decked out with the slogans of the Popular Front until the Marshall offer in 1947. The new American plan was treated as a declaration of economic war, and Stalin replied with the creation of the Cominform ; by breaking with Tito in the following year he launched what he regarded as a counter-attack, this time with the tactics of no compromise That this volte-face should have occurred Mr. Seton-Watson regards as inevitable, and he gives little consideration to the possibility of another reversal of policy which Communist doctrine might not forbid. Indeed, he castigates the Western world for having neglected Communist literature, which makes no secret of its long-term objective of destroying the remnants of capitalist society It was difficult enough to push one's way through Hitler and Alfred Rosenberg, but at least they made onet laugh until one realised that they must be taken very seriously. But one cannot laugh over Lenin, and although his tremendous personality penetrates the Marxist jargon to which he condemned himself, his writings are too much for most of us. As for the rigmarole which fills the East European Press today, it supplies an indispensable source of contemporary history, not because it reveals what the East Europeans think but because, in its peculiar dialect, it announces the policy of Moscow ' - it is none the less dull for that. Mr. Seton-Watson deserves our whole-hearted gratitude for the amount of " Marxist-Leninist " material through which he must have waded in order to have written the book under review.
The East European Revolution is a mine of information. In it one finds not merely a straightforward account of all the major events, but also an array of such little-known facts as that "For the first time in the history of Transylvania its capital Cluj (Kolozsvdr) has two universities, one Rumanian and one Hungarian." The general reader may find greater interest in Mr Seton-Watson's more general statements. He points out that there are only three important gaps in the barrier between the Communist world and the Mediterranean: these are Trieste, the Straits and Macedonia, and "all three are controlled directly Itir indirectly by the West." To the question of why Eastern Europe has never attained stable government since the decline of the Ottoman and the Habsburg empires he finally replies that this is due to "the distortion— economic, cultural and political—arising from the impact of the West on the East, the conflict between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries which exist side by side in Eastern Europe. This pheno- menon is by no means confined to Eastern Europe. It is found in different fohns in Asia, the Middle East and South America and is beginning to appear in Africa." It is this phenomenon which has given Marxism its breadth of appeal, and which has, at the same time, resuscitated the imperialism of Russia. Mr. Seton-Watson follows Mr. Deutscher in emphasising the role of the Georgian, Stalin, in the linking of these processes, the co-ordination of the conflicts of the age. Mr. Seton-Watson has a downright way with him. His new book, while showing some marks of haste, is none the less scholarly, and it is written with a determined 'integrity which will be evident to readers who may not agree with his every conclusion: it is likely to count as the standard work on the subject for a long time to
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