10 PIOTR H. KOSICKI
hand, the Baltic states lost their sovereignty entirely, subsumed
as they were into the USSR as new Soviet “republics” pursuant to
the terms set out in the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939.23
How the war had been fought was a crucial factor in deter-
mining what kinds of Communist regimes would emerge in dif-
ferent parts of Central and Eastern Europe. As Mark Kramer has
noted, “The establishment of Soviet dominance in the region
at the end of World War II was due as much to East European
weakness as to Soviet strength.”24 Yet there are two outliers from
Kramer’s observation, both in the Balkans. In neither Yugosla-
via nor Albania was there was a lasting Red Army presence; So-
viet troops were in Yugoslavia only briefly in September 1944,
en route to Hungary. The success of Tito’s and Hoxha’s wartime
Communist insurgencies against both the Axis occupiers and—
in Tito’s case—the fascist Ustaše puppet state in Croatia legiti-
mized their postwar rise to power in Yugoslavia and Albania,
respectively.25 In Yugoslavia, Catholics made up over 30 percent
of the population, but Communists effectively traded on the
Church’s wartime ties to the Ustaše government.26 The widely
accepted legitimacy of the postwar Tito-led Communist govern-
ment of Yugoslavia constrained the USSR’s ability to influence
Tito’s strategy of governance.
- See, for example, Andres Kasekamp, A History of the Baltic States (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 124–46. - Kramer, “Stalin, Soviet Policy, and the Consolidation of a Communist Bloc,”
- On Yugoslavia: Enver Redžić, “The Partisan Movement,” in Bosnia and Her-
zegovina in the Second World War, trans. Robert Donia (New York: Frank Cass, 2005),
197–246; Jozo Tomasevich, War and Revolution in Yugoslavia, 1941–1945: Occupation
and Collaboration (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001). On Albania: Miranda
Vickers, The Albanians: A Modern History (London: I. B. Tauris, 1995), 141–84. - Kurt Hutten, Iron Curtain Christians: The Church in Communist Countries
Today, trans. Walter G. Tillmanns (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1967), 356. On the grim
postwar fate of the Catholic Church in Albania, see Peter C. Kent, The Lonely Cold
War of Pope Pius XII: The Roman Catholic Church and the Division of Europe, 1943–1950
(Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002), 101–4.