Although Bulgaria was not at war with the
Soviet Union, Churchill had made it clear to
Stalin in 1944 that it would be allowed to fall
within the Soviet sphere. War having been hastily
declared on Bulgaria, Soviet troops entered and
overran the country in September 1944, without
real Anglo-American opposition. Unlike its
Romanian equivalent, the Bulgarian Communist
Party had had a substantial popular following
before the war and in Georgi Dimitrov a leader
of international reputation following his acquittal
in Nazi Germany for complicity in the Reichstag
Fire. Although he became an influential figure in
Moscow as general secretary of the Comintern
in the 1930s, Dimitrov was not at first allowed
to return to Bulgaria in the wake of the Soviet
invasion. Instead, Bulgarian communists were
installed in 1944 in another popular-front gov-
ernment, the Fatherland Front, and to begin with
the opposition was not ruthlessly suppressed. But
the respite was only temporary. With the Red
Army stationed in the country and Stalin deter-
mined to consolidate Soviet power, and with no
effective Western counter-measures forthcoming,
the fate of the Social Democratic and Agrarian
Peasant opposition and its party leader Petkov was
sealed. Dimitrov was now allowed to return to
Bulgaria to strengthen the communists.
Despite the muzzling of the press, the elec-
tions held in October 1946 saw a striking success
for the non-communist opposition. For a few
months, 101 deputies elected by over a million
votes were able to act as a parliamentary opposi-
tion to the communist regime. But in August
1947 Petkov was arrested, tried and sentenced to
death on trumped-up charges of working for
‘Anglo-American Imperialism’. He was shot the
following month. Britain and the US had made
public protests before his execution, but Dimitrov
only reinforced the impression of judicial murder
by declaring that Petkov might have been spared
but for the Anglo-American protests. Of course,
the execution could not have taken place without
Stalin’s acquiescence. To Britain and the US
events in Eastern Europe showed the extent to
which Stalin was prepared ruthlessly to ignore his
international obligations. Like their Romanian
counterparts, the Bulgarian communists turned
their country into a particularly brutal and repres-
sive ‘people’s democracy’.
The Hungarians had been ruled from 1919
until 1944 by anti-communist regimes under the
Regent Admiral Horthy. It was his fatal error to
throw in his lot with the German invaders of the
Soviet Union in 1941. When events revealed his
error, he tried to disengage and achieve a peace
with the Soviet Union, but it was too late. It was
the Germans instead who first occupied his
country. In pre-war Hungary army support for
the authoritarian structure had been decisive, and
the need for social reform had gone unsatisfied.
The dominant aspiration of successive Hungarian
governments was the recovery of territory lost
principally to Romania (Transylvania) by the
Peace Treaty of Trianon in 1920. It was this
aspiration that drove Hungary into the arms
of Germany and even to declare war on Russia
in 1941. By then Hungary had already been
rewarded, in 1940, by the transfer of northern
Transylvania from Romania, as well as of portions
of Czechoslovakia. Defeat in 1945 entailed the
loss once more of all these gains as Stalin redis-
tributed the territories, Britain and the US again
raising no objections.
Stalin’s opportunism is well illustrated by the
first anti-German Hungarian government set up
by the Red Army in the part of Hungary they had
liberated. Soviet military requirements at this time
made it expedient to include many former sup-
porters of Horthy, as well as communists and
members of other parties. As circumstances
changed, so would the composition of the gov-
ernment. The leading Hungarian communist was
Mátyás Rákosi, who had lived in Moscow since
1940; he now returned to participate in coalition
governments. He began with patriotic appeals in
1944 promising democracy and peaceful progress,
yet within four years Hungary was transformed
into one of the most ruthless of the Stalinist
‘people’s democracies’. Rákosi’s approach corres-
ponded to Stalin’s own: cautious opportunism
ruthlessly pursued. Hungarians, not Russians,
would be allowed to transform politics and society
and would guarantee national loyalty to the Soviet
Union. Three parties besides the communists