U.S. Navy Ship "Crossing the Line"

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. 109-111:

The Moo’s southbound course put her across the equator for the first time some seventy miles west of Baker Island on January 22, an occasion that the ship marked with a line-crossing ceremony. In this centuries-old tradition, sailors who have never crossed the equator before—known as pollywogs—are initiated into the “Ancient Order of the Deep” by their more experienced colleagues, known as shellbacks. Filled with farcical ritual, harmless pranks, and old-fashioned hazing, the festivities were a welcome distraction from daily routines and worries about the upcoming operation. In the days before the ceremony, the crew had received occasional warnings from the ship’s loudspeaker system: “Beware all you pollywogs!” On the nineteenth they received a legal summons from King Neptune himself, warning the Cowpens was approaching his royal domain:

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In advance of King Neptune’s arrival, his shellbacks relieved Captain McConnell in a bloodless coup and took command of the ship. The air group’s senior officers were forced to serve lunch in the enlisted men’s mess, while many of the junior officers were assigned meaningless tasks, such as calling the bridge every five minutes to report on temperature. For his part, newly arrived pilot Ed Haley was stationed on the forecastle with a pair of beer bottles for binoculars and ordered to scan the horizon for the Royal Party.

Streaming seawater and festooned with seaweed, Neptune and his Royal Court—all of whom bore a suspicious resemblance to several of the Moo’s saltiest chief petty officers—planted themselves on the flight deck and bid the lowly pollywogs to do them homage. A group of Royal Bailiffs rounded up the pollywogs and herded them to the flight deck. Some did not go quietly; Art Daly and some cohorts ambushed several shellbacks in advance of being dragooned, engaging in a bare-fisted skirmish with officer and enlisted alike. There was nearly a large brawl on the fantail between the two groups before a passing officer warned them to knock it off. In another instance, some mutinous pollywogs roughed up a couple of Neptune’s royal cops, and shellback reinforcements restored order by spraying down the melee with fire hoses.

George Terrell described how the pollywogs were rounded up and then led single file up to the flight deck by a group of shellbacks that he called the “Judas Battalion.” Once there, “we were beaten to our knees with blivets by our merciless captors, formed into creeping columns,” and, with further whacks with wooden paddles, encouraged to move forward.” With Captain McConnell watching the proceedings from the bridge with a bemused look upon his face, the pollywogs were force-marched to the Royal Court’s red carpet. This was a target sleeve, a fabric tube thirty inches in diameter and thirty feet long, normally towed behind an airplane as target practice for the ship’s gunners. Unfortunately, the pollywogs were not to walk on it, but crawl through it, and the sleeve had been loaded with stinking garbage and slop from the ship’s galley for the occasion. With further encouragement from the paddles, the pollywogs dove headfirst into the sleeve and crawled through thirty feet of muck. “Do you know how fast you can move on your hands and knees?” wrote Terrell. “Would you believe thirty feet in 15 seconds? Records were set and broken in rapid succession.”

Finally, the pollywogs were introduced to King Neptune and his entourage, bedecked in robes, wigs, and gold-painted cardboard crowns. The most colorful member of the court was the Royal Baby, a fat, balding, half-naked chief petty officer in a diaper and covered in axle grease. Each pollywog was forced to his knees in front of the baby, who took a handful of lubricating grease from a drum at his side and rubbed it all over his sweaty abdomen. Then came the order: “Kiss the baby’s belly!” If the pollywog hesitated, a shellback bailiff delivered a whack to his backside. “I closed my mouth and eyes,” recalled Sam Sommers. “I wish I could have held my nose.” Accepting the kiss as tribute, the Royal Baby haughtily waved on the pollywog, with his paddle-wielding bailiffs making sure he cleared out quickly to make room for the next victim.

The final stop was the Royal Barbers and their merciless clippers. Each pollywog ended up with a highly unconventional buzz cut that left his hair in tatters. “They were real artists,” said Marine George Terrell. “A thousand haircuts to be given and no way were any two going to be alike.” Some sailors emerged with a Mohawk or bird’s nest (bald on top, with a fringe around the bottom), but the barbers also sometimes amused themselves by spelling C-O-W-P-E-N-S or V-I-C-T-O-R-Y on successive heads. Sailor Robert Lee attempted to evade the royal clippers with a preemptive head shaving, but soon found out “it doesn’t pay to be smarter than King Neptune. For punishment I had my head and body smeared with a combination of oil and eggs and had to stand on the bow of the ship for one hour in the sun. Did I have fun taking the oil and eggs off my head and body with cold salt water. I learned my lesson.”

Japanese Night Attack Tactics, 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. 88-90:

The [U.S. Navy] task force beat a hasty retreat [from Kwajalein] with the enemy hot on their trail. Everyone expected trouble that evening, and the Japanese did not disappoint. They were expert at night attacks, with a robust playbook of tactics. A little before sunset, one or more snoopers—usually Betty torpedo bombers—would trail the American formation just out of range, radioing the ships’ position to their squadronmates ashore. When darkness fell, the snoopers dropped a string of float lights marking the direction the ships were traveling. When the striking planes arrived, the snoopers flew over the fleet at high altitude, dropping parachute flares to illuminate the ships for torpedo attacks. Getting spotlighted or backlit by brilliant flares produced a profound sense of vulnerability even among the most grizzled sailors. Capt. William Tomlinson, who commanded the Moo’s sister ship Belleau Wood, likened it to one of his recurring bad dreams where he was naked in a bathtub under the bright lights of Times Square—except in this case it was real.

Sure enough, a Japanese snooper shadowed the force in the late afternoon, and as Clark had warned, after dark it guided in the Bettys that the day’s strike had missed. Starting at 7 p.m. and continuing for the next six hours, Cowpens and the fleet were under almost continual attack, with small groups of one to four bombers at a time trying to break through the outer edges of the formation to torpedo the carriers at the center. When the Bettys were not attacking, they were circling or ganging up for a fresh strike, so that bogeys were constantly on US radar screens. The moon was dangerously bright, and sailors aboard the Moo could easily see the formation of ships around them, illuminated further by the fiery, hissing parachute flares that descended from high above.

Tracking the bogeys on radar, Pownall ordered frequent and sometimes radical changes of course to throw off the Japanese and present them the least favorable angle for a torpedo attack. While the maneuvering frustrated most attacks, there were many close calls. One of the Moo’s flight deck firefighters, George McIntyre, described how the water was “lousy with torpedoes.” One passed just astern of Cowpens, while Yorktown had two near misses of her own. Lexington was not as lucky, and took a torpedo to the stern, wrecking her steering gear and killing nine.

Just before 11 p.m., the enemy started to come in with more determination, and Admiral Pownall signaled his ships, ANYONE WITH A GOOD SETUP LET ’EM HAVE IT! Aboard the Moo, those topside watched the fireworks as the task group’s outer cordon of ships lit up the sky with muzzle flashes, orange tracers, and the bright flares of hit and burning Japanese planes. Cowpens and the other CVLs—unlike the larger ships in the fleet—had no radar-guided guns, and so to avoid giving away her position at night she usually did not fire unless the target was brightly illuminated and at close range. The crew, watching the action from the center of the fleet’s battle formation, quipped that what the Moo needed was a big neon arrow on the flight deck with the words: “The big carriers are over there.”

The Japanese planes withdrew just before 1:30 a.m. as the moon set, and soon after the task force’s radar scopes were clear of enemy aircraft.

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.”

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.

Green U.S. Navy Crews, 1942

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. 21-23:

The greenness of Cowpens’ personnel presented a major challenge for Captain McConnell. Teaching any crew to operate and maintain a complex and untried ship is a difficult task, and in Cowpens’ case these problems were compounded by the fact that most aboard were as new to the Navy as the ship itself. Men who had already served at sea were few and far between; most had only the basic skills taught in the Navy’s boot camps and training centers. Only weeks before, they had been civilians from all walks of life—countless Americans from small towns and big cities, factory workers and farmhands, or kids fresh out of high school. This was not unique to Cowpens; each one of the CVLs [light aircraft carriers] departed for the Pacific with more than 70 percent of their complement having no seagoing experience. The old Navy saying was that it took six years to make a sailor, but McConnell had only a matter of months to take this green mob of men and forge them into a combat-ready team.

Youth was one thing that the officers and men of Cowpens had in common. The bulk of the enlisted men were only seventeen or eighteen years old, while most of the ship’s junior officers were only slightly older, with two to four years of college under their belt. There were only a few men aboard who were in their thirties or forties, mostly Captain McConnell and his senior staff. One of the ship’s newly arrived Marines, George Terrell, was seventeen and described his shipmates as “just a bunch of green kids.” In his estimation, 90 percent of the crew was as young as he was. “A man got to be twenty-one [and] he was looked up to as a senior citizen,” Terrell explained. “Even the pilots that flew these hot fighter planes were kids. By the time they got to be twenty-five they were veterans… most of them were between twenty-one and twenty-two.”

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Only a handful of the Moo’s complement of 107 officers had prewar experience or Naval Academy degrees. Instead, most were reservists—fresh out of college or civilian employment, and recent graduates of the Navy’s three-month crash course officer training program, earning them the moniker of “ninety-day wonders.” The number of reservists so significantly outnumbered the career officers that it sometimes seemed to them that they were strangers in their own Navy. More officers were in training in 1943—120,472—than there were total personnel in the Navy in 1938.

One of the few trade school boys assigned to the Moo was Lt. Frank Griffin “Grif” Scarborough. He graduated in the Academy’s class of 1942 and served one cruise aboard Enterprise as an ensign. He was a rarity aboard the Moo, as he was one of the few who had actually fired a weapon in combat. Although Scarborough started the cruise commanding a gun crew, the Cowpens’ senior assistant engineer was suddenly reassigned, leaving a position that needed to be filled. This wasn’t just a matter of a gap in the organizational table. The ship’s senior engineer was a thermodynamics professor from Penn State with no experience operating a ship’s power plant. McConnell and his executive officer, Cmdr. Hugh Nieman, wanted a seasoned officer to help him grow into the role. Given Scarborough had a degree in engineering, and the bulk of his fellow officers were either aviators or ninety-day wonders, Grif recalled, “Suddenly I was the man of the hour—I became senior assistant engineer of the Cowpens by default!”

A Mustang in the Asiatic Fleet

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. 12-13:

Robert P. McConnell was one of many US and Allied officers who narrowly escaped the initial Japanese offensive that followed Pearl Harbor. The handsome, silver-haired McConnell was forty-six years old and a rarity in the prewar Navy—a “mustang,” an officer who started his career as an enlisted man. McConnell studied mining engineering at the University of California at Berkeley before dropping out to join the Navy in 1917. Although the 1918 armistice ended World War I before McConnell saw action in Europe, the practical and conscientious young man secured a commission, starting a Navy career in 1920 as a lieutenant.

McConnell’s unconventional background and lack of a Naval Academy degree nearly hamstrung his career before it began. Amid the draconian personnel cuts that followed the war, the Navy became more parochial, with an officer’s professional pedigree just as important in determining advancement as his performance. Through sheer determination and persistence, McConnell managed to survive and advance in rank in this unforgiving environment. But it wasn’t easy. His daughter Doreen McConnell Johnson recalled how her father had to work harder than the Naval Academy graduates who surrounded him, and he was constantly nettled by reminders that he would always be an outsider in the service’s old boys’ network. Even among the families, Doreen recalled the first question asked in any social engagement was “Oh, what Academy class was your father in?”

McConnell was assigned to the Asiatic Fleet in the Philippines, where he briefly served as the executive officer (second in command) of seaplane tender Langley before assuming command of that ship in early 1942. While every naval officer dreamed of commanding a ship, the Langley was no prize and neither was the Asiatic Fleet. In fact, the assignment was likely the Navy’s way of telling Commander McConnell that his career advancement had come to an end. Despite its grandiose name, the Asiatic Fleet was a ragtag collection of obsolete ships primarily intended to “show the flag” in East Asia rather than do much fighting. It was a place of exile, where the Navy shipped its over-the-hill or incapable officers to wait out their retirement. Similarly, the Langley was exactly the sort of misfit that ended up in the Asiatic Fleet. She’d started life as a humble collier (coal ship), but in 1920 was rebuilt into the Navy’s first aircraft carrier. Langley was more of a test bed for naval aviation than a warship, never really intended to go into harm’s way. She was desperately vulnerable—slow, unmaneuverable, and with little in the way of antiaircraft defenses. Deemed no longer useful as an aircraft carrier, in 1936 she suffered through a conversion to a seaplane tender that cost her almost half her flight deck. Langley lost the ability to launch and land planes in return for the space to winch aboard one of her flock of long-range PBY Catalina seaplanes for maintenance.

Although the Asiatic Fleet had been bracing for the outbreak of hostilities, news of the attack on Pearl Harbor arrived like a bolt out of the blue in the predawn hours of December 8. It caught Commander McConnell and his crew entirely by surprise. Langley received her orders to raise steam and head south as fast as she could, only barely keeping ahead of Japanese air strikes on her home port of Cavite, Manila. They escaped to Australia, where Langley and McConnell had a two-month reprieve patrolling its northern coast before being called back to the war.

Rising Nationalist Communism, 1960s

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 619-621:

Romania asserted itself more boldly in the international sphere. From late 1958, its trade expanded with the West and contracted with the Soviet Union. In the Soviet Bloc’s equivalent to West Europe’s Common Market, the Council of Mutual Economic Assistance (or COMECON), Romania opposed the plans of its allies to make it the agricultural base for their more developed economies. In the eyes of Romania’s leaders, such a scheme would have condemned the country to backwardness; yet it also aggravated long-festering inferiority complexes among them toward other, better established Communist parties, but also toward their own population. The Six-Year Plan that commenced in 1960 provided for sharp increases in Romania’s rate of industrialization, and Marxism-Leninism became a tool for Romanian national development. In 1963 Ceaușescu accompanied Foreign Minister Ion Gheorghe Maurer on a trip to China, North Korea, and the Soviet Union, meeting with Mao, Kim Il Sung, and Khrushchev.

Ceaușescu became the party leader after Gheorghiu-Dej’s death in 1965 and built his popularity on defiance of Moscow. Neither legitimation through Marxian utopianism nor recourse to crude violence was enough to stabilize rule in an intensely anticommunist population, and Ceaușescu evolved into a nationalist extremist, whose personal power increased as did his personal identification with the nation. Romania was surrounded by hostile countries, Ceaușescu claimed, and he was the only force that could protect the people. A younger generation joined him in the Romanian Communist Party leadership, and together they promoted a collective identity based on cults of Romanian historical heroes as well as anti-Russian and anti-Semitic insinuations. They eschewed violent strategies of maintaining power. In the post-Stalinist period, these were not only inappropriate, they were no longer necessary. Earlier mass repression had smashed hostile social groups.

Marxism-Leninism tinged with nationalism thus permitted Romania’s Communists to develop a sense of their political legitimacy for the first time in their history, and also to make appeals to the population and tap “dormant social energies,” among workers and among intellectuals. While firming his grip on power, Ceaușescu permitted the publication of works of previously forbidden authors and fostered collusion with intellectuals that was not entirely new but was greatly intensified. The turn against the Soviet Union was a rupture with previous practice, however, and endeared Ceaușescu to the West. The French leader Charles De Gaulle visited Romania in May 1968, just as workers and students were testing his own regime. He found much to admire in a country that maintained independence against the superpowers and seemed so orderly. “For you such a regime is useful because it gets people moving and gets things done,” he told the Romanian dictator. In 1969, Richard Nixon became the first US president to visit Romania, and nine years later, Ceaușescu touched down in Washington, DC, as neither the first nor last repressive dictator to be accorded full state honors. What seems unusual in retrospect is that Jimmy Carter would celebrate Ceaușescu as a champion of human rights.

Such was the topsy-turvy world of East Central Europe after Stalin, where strategies of national legitimation brought Hungary toward economic reform but took Poland to the center of a very old and toxic nationalism, on a backdrop of slow economic disintegration. Bulgaria as well as Romania retained important facets of Stalinist control under strong party leaders and pervasive security apparatuses, yet one was inseparable in foreign policy from the Soviet Union, while the other treated Moscow almost as a hostile power. East Germany behind the Berlin Wall was modeling itself as Moscow’s most loyal student, but also building pride as the strongest economy in the East Bloc, pride that would evolve into a kind of minor nationalism, “socialist in the colors of the GDR,” black, red, and gold. In 1962 the Soviet Union would force Czechoslovakia to destalinize, and after that, this country also went on its own path, toward something called “socialism with a human face,” which, as it turned out, was initially a detour back to the 1930s, connecting with native traditions of democracy and Masaryk’s idea that truth will prevail.

Khrushchev's Effect on Soviet Satellites

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 595-597:

Kádár’s ethos of making life better had consequences for Party elites as well. Under Rákosi, they had rewarded themselves with vacation houses, special stores, and innumerable perquisites. Kádár cut those back, and now even top leaders relied on the Hungaria-Balaton Tourism and Holiday Company to get rooms in summer houses. Kádár called this policy “strengthening Communist morals.” Functionaries lost the privilege of traveling with 50 percent reduction on state railways and could no longer use state automobiles and telephones for private purposes. Thus, party power was restored but there was no return to the Stalinist status quo ante. More consumer goods became available, and living standards rose by a third from 1957 to 1960. Beginning in the early 1960s, televisions, washing machines, and refrigerators became commonplace, and average wage-earners lived in much greater comfort and security than did their parents or grandparents.

This non-nationalistic, consumption-oriented program also matched Hungary’s specific national predicament. Kádár reckoned that after decades of being called to sacrifice for great causes—the Nazi enterprise of saving Europe and then the Soviet one of propelling humankind into a utopian future—Hungarians were ready for things more tangible. Socialist society was being built, not for the sake of ideology, he assured the population, but “because it ensures a better life for the people, and that the country and the nation will flourish.”

To make this strategy succeed, Hungary’s Communists turned their attention to economic reform more seriously than comrades did elsewhere, over a longer period, with greater consistency and support from the top, despite objections from Moscow, and even during upheavals in other states. Socialist states had grown their economies rapidly in the early 1950s by introducing underused resources to production, especially raw materials and labor, but by the 1960s, those avenues were becoming exhausted. Now industrial growth would depend on increased productivity and technical development. The challenge of slower growth was felt keenly in the Soviet Union, given Nikita Khrushchev’s bold pronouncement of October 1961 that the Soviet Communist Party would attain “over the next 20 years a living standard for the people that will be higher than that of any capitalist country.” “For the first time,” he said, “there will be a full and final end to the situation in which people suffer from shortage of anything.” (See Tables A.5 and A.6 in the Appendix.)

Hungary faced severe disequilibrium. It had mounting debts to countries outside the Soviet Bloc, going from 1,600 million forints in 1959 to 4,100 million in 1963, and its debt-servicing commitments to those countries exceeded the value of its exports to them. More than 80 percent of the growth in debt involved short-term credits that expired within three months and had to be constantly refinanced. The sum of repayment obligations was more than twice as large as the foreign exchange earnings exports could cover.

Pressure for changes was strongest in agriculture, because Hungarians spent most of their money on food and because the quality of diets had dropped sharply under Stalinism. The completion of collectivization by 1961/1962 had only aggravated matters: in the following half-decade, food production barely reached the average of 1958/1959. The time of coercing people to join cooperatives was over. Now the party had to ensure that they worked effectively and conscientiously.

The response was to strike out in a direction where no socialist society had gone. Perhaps stretching the truth, Kádár claimed in 1960 that Khrushchev had said each socialist country had the primary duty of satisfying its own grain requirements, and the Soviet Union would not bail them out in case of shortfalls. Two years later, Kádár told fellow party leaders that other socialist countries had taken paths of coercion that Hungarians should not follow; he was delighted that Hungary had not done “the kind of thing the Bulgarian comrades did,” or for that matter, the East Germans or Czechs. Forced collectivization in East Germany had driven tens of thousands to the West. As his listeners knew, that outflow had led to the construction of the Berlin Wall, probably the greatest public embarrassment for the East Bloc in its history.

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.

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.

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.

Romania Between Nazis and Soviets

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 487-490:

In early July, the Romanian army, assisted by local populations, shot the Jewish inhabitants of villages in southern Bukovina and then extended the killing eastward. In the regional metropolis Czernowitz/Cernăuţi/Chernivtsi, until recently a center of Habsburg Jewish cultural life, German regular soldiers as well as SS troops joined with Romanian forces in rounding up and murdering much of the town’s Jewish population. German units claimed to be shocked by their allies’ brutality, and SS mobile killing units (Einsatzgruppe D) received orders to entice Romanians into “a more planned procedure in this direction.” They objected that the Romanians failed to bury victims, took bribes, or engaged in rape and plunder (for example, taking gold from corpses).

Jews who survived were driven toward the river Dniester, where many were shot into the waters while others were kept in unspeakable conditions in newly established “ghettos” on Bessarabian territory. Next, after occupying and then annexing territory of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic on the other side of the Dniester—called “Transnistria”—the Romanians set up camps there, where unknown numbers of Jews were killed. They permitted no regular food distribution, and some inmates attempted to eat grass. In the infamous camp at Bodganovka, the bakery sold bread for gold, but when the gold ran out, the commandant ordered mass shootings. Romanian forces shot some 40,000 Jews over a precipice into the Bug River, and then took a break for the Christmas holiday. They had seized the regional capital Odessa after stiff resistance in October, yet after a bomb exploded killing Romanian officers, Antonescu ordered reprisals; in one of the cruelest mass murders of the Holocaust, 18,000 Jews lost their lives. By the spring of 1942, this human-made hell had consumed the lives of at least 100,000 Jews.

If the Germans were shocked by the brutality of Romanian policies against Jews, they were also impressed by the apparent peace and prosperity of Ukraine under Romanian rule. After the violence against Jews subsided in the fall of 1941, the city of Odessa recovered quickly. The venal Romanian administration took its cut, but then stood back and watched as individual enterprise flourished, with new hairdressers, cafes, shops, taverns, and movie theaters. Rather than terrorize the local population, Romanian authorities allowed each village in Transnistria to vote on the language it wished to be taught to its children and set up a Ukrainian auxiliary police force.

The Antonescu regime’s eagerness to kill Jews in Bessarabia and Transnistria had left the Germans convinced that it would follow through with the complete destruction of Jewry in the Romanian heartlands. Indeed, Antonescu had wanted to deport the Jews there to Bessarabia, but the Germans stopped him in August 1941, afraid of overburdening SS Einsatzgruppe D. Romanian authorities constricted the rights of Jews in the Regat [the Old Kingdom] as well as Transylvania: seizing their property, forcing them into labor brigades, and expelling them from the professions. The process was called “Romaniazation.” If Romania had behaved like Germany, the next step would have been mass murder, and in fact plans surfaced to transport Romanian Jews to killing camps in occupied Poland. The German railways had even set aside cars and drawn up routes. Yet in the summer of 1942, Romania stopped cooperating.

Explanations vary. Radu Lecca, Romanian commissar for Jewish affairs, a man already wealthy from bribes, supposedly took offence at being snubbed during a visit to Berlin in August 1942. He and his colleagues had become tired of being treated as representatives of a second-class power and being told what to do with “their” Jews. But the moment for a shift also seemed apt. The Romanian government had sent more troops to the eastern front than anyone else, and vividly sensed the coming catastrophe of the Third Reich. Two desperately undersupplied Romanian armies were just taking up positions near Stalingrad in the fall of 1942 when Antonescu requested new weapons from Hitler. This and all other requests were rebuffed.

The leadership also grew hypersensitive to warnings coming from the West about its mistreatments of Jews. President Franklin D. Roosevelt told the World Jewish Congress in New York that “punishment of countries which had persecuted Jews represented one of the aims of the war,” and he promised “fearful retribution” for those who perpetrated “barbaric crimes” against civilian populations in Axis-occupied countries. With the legacies of Versailles and Trianon in mind, Romanian elites knew that punishment meant loss of territory.

That same month, Romanian university professors, writers, and schoolteachers signed a memorandum to the Palace linking deportations of Jews to the postwar territorial settlement: “We must bring ourselves in line with international law and guarantee the right to life and legal protection of every Jew of the territories which we claim.” Ringing through this declaration was the ethnic perspective according to which human life, especially of aliens, was of secondary importance to the nation’s territory. But now the fear of losing territory kindled concern for the fate of aliens, as well as some contrition. Deportations of Jews were in fact a “methodical and persistent act of extermination.” The authors acknowledged that “we have been at the forefront of the states which persecute the Jews.” “I have said it once and will go on saying it,” Romanian Peasant Party leader Iuliu Maniu added in September, “we will pay dearly for the maltreatment of the Jews.”

Rumors of planned deportations to Poland had leaked that summer, panicking Jews in Transylvania, and Maniu and others in the Romanian Peasant Party intervened to put a stop to them. In December, Roosevelt and now Churchill reiterated the threats. “Those responsible for these crimes,” they declared, “shall not escape retribution.” Warning voices also came from the Red Cross, the Turkish Government, the Orthodox Metropolitan of Transylvania, the Papal Nuncio, as well as the Romanian Jewish community (led by Alexandru Safran, the youngest chief rabbi in the world, who had worked closely with members of the royal family as well as the dictator’s wife). Thanks to the insistence of several women active in social welfare, the Romanian Jewish community also mobilized to rescue some 2,000 orphans who had survived the punishing camps in Transnistria.

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.

East Central Europe Under the Nazis

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 463-464:

By 1941, three zones of influence had emerged in Nazi-dominated East Central Europe. The first included areas where Germany destroyed states and left no native administration, itself taking rudimentary control. The second comprised areas where it destroyed states and replaced them with its own political entities, misleadingly called “independent states.” In the third zone, states remained under control of native political elites, but they came under irresistible pressure to become German allies. Only Poland belonged to the first category.

The Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia fit between the first and second zones: it was occupied and destined for absorption into Germany but valued as a place that produced high-quality industrial goods. Its population was thought to be racially valuable (50 percent of the Czechs were considered assimilable; only 10 percent of the Poles) and was permitted its own heavily supervised government, with a Czech cabinet and ministries, and even a tiny armed force. Serbia was similar, a rump, embodying nothing a Serb nationalist could be proud of, with a Serb head of state who had been a Royal Yugoslav general but was under direct Nazi oversight. As we have seen, in contrast to Bohemia, a desperate underground struggle raged, extending from Serbia across Yugoslav territory, pitting German, Italian, and Croat forces against Serb nationalists and Communist internationalists.

The second zone was made up of the “independent” states of Slovakia and Croatia, called into life by Berlin with the expectation they would be loyal, co-fascist regimes; and they matched expectations, to say the least. Their ultranationalist leaders were eager to demonstrate—above all to themselves—their personal achievements for “the nation” by becoming even more racist than the state that had created them. In 1941, a Slovak newspaper boasted that the strictest racial laws in Europe were Slovak; at the same time, the brutality of the Ustasha anti-Serb actions shocked even the SS.

The final zone consisted of states that technically remained sovereign members of the international community, yet whose leaders could see from the fate of Yugoslavia and Poland the consequences of defiance. Still, unlike the puppets Croatia or Slovakia, the Hungarian, Bulgarian, and Romanian states did not owe their existence to Nazi Germany, and everything Germany wanted from them had to be negotiated. The lever for Germany in gaining compliance was territory: though less rapacious than Nazi leaders, East European elites also hungered for Lebensraum. Bulgaria hoped to recover ground lost at Neuilly-sur-Seine and wrench away disputed lands from Greece and Yugoslavia. Hungary wanted back everything it had lost at Trianon. Romania desired the return of lands it had lost in 1940, when parts of northern Transylvania went to Hungary in the second Vienna award (at the insistence of Hitler and Mussolini), and Bessarabia and Bukovina fell to the Soviet Union. These three states knew that Germany as the regional hegemon could make their aspirations become a reality.

Yet from 1941, German diplomats increasingly insisted that the governments of East Central Europe must fulfill a prime wish of their state. They should identify and segregate their Jewish populations, place them under racial laws, and deport them to German-controlled territories in Poland for a fate loosely described as “work in the east.”

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.

Down the Danube: Bulgaria

For two weeks in September-October this year, the Far Outliers took a Viking cruise down the Danube River from Budapest to Bucharest. Here are some impressions from each of the countries we visited. A photo album from the trip (Danube 2024) is on Flickr.

Our first stop in Bulgaria was at Vidin, one of its oldest riverside towns. Our morning excursion was to the old mountain fortress of Belogradchik ('Little Belgrade') and its impressive rock formations, with steep hillsides to climb. In the afternoon we walked along the waterfront, to the old Ottoman post office, a mosque, an orthodox church, and a memorial to the victims of communism. We didn't make it as far as the synagogue because we fell into a long conversation with a talkative schoolboy fluent in English. The captain of our Viking Ullur cruise ship was Bulgarian.

The next morning we stopped at Ruse, famous for its baroque architecture and the Friendship Bridge to Giurgiu, just across the Danube in Romania. But our daylong excursion took us south to Veliko Tarnovo, Bulgaria's old capital, and the nearby Ottoman merchant city of Arbanasi, now a major tourist attraction, where we visited an Ottoman-era merchant's house and an orthodox church hidden in a barn. We ate lunch at the Hotel Izvora (= Spring), built in traditional Bulgarian style, and with a waterwheel-driven rotisserie. On the way back to the bus, we passed two classic Russian cars, a Lada and a Moskvitch.

We passed many large farms on our bus excursions. The wheat and maize had been harvested before our October visit, but fields of young green rapeseed (canola) plants were also visible. After the fall of communism, large collective farms were broken up and given to the families who worked them, but many new owners who lacked the resources to farm their own land have leased it back to large agribusinesses. Bulgaria also has valuable specialty crops, the most famous of which are from the centuries-old Rose Valley. (We first heard of it, under the name Valea Trandafirilor, during our sojourn in Romania in 1983-84.)

After Russia attacked Ukraine's Black Sea grain-storage ports, including Ismail in the Danube Delta, much of Ukraine's huge wheat exports now come by thousands of trucks through Romania, across the Friendship Bridge, and back to the Bulgarian port of Varna on the Black Sea.

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.)

"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.

Romanianizing "Greater Romania"

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 347-349:

Superficially, Transylvania had much in common with Slovakia and Croatia. Here, too, troops and administrators arrived from a neighboring kingdom (in this case, Romania) intent on swallowing new territories and including a population with whom they had never lived in a common state. But ultimately, the union succeeded without major problems.

Romanians in east and west shared the same language and alphabet, and for the most part, the same Orthodox religion, whereas beyond the basic Štokavian form of Serbo-Croatian which they happened to speak, most Croats and Serbs were separated by alphabet, religion, and regional language. Disputes lasted from the beginning to the end of Yugoslavia about whether Croat or Serb variants of the common tongue would be standard, and in our day, the separate states are cultivating what they call separate languages. In “Greater Romania,” however, everyone took for granted that the standard Romanian language extended from Moldavia into Transylvania. And religion united rather than divided: in December 1919, Orthodox bishops from the old kingdom (the Regat) as well as Transylvania formed a common synod and elected the Transylvanian Miron Cristea as their leader. In 1925, he became the first Patriarch of the Romanian Orthodox Church.

Like counterparts elsewhere, the Romanian state-builders claimed that unity was natural; they were returning to the arrangement of 1600, when Michael the Brave acted as ruler of Transylvania, Wallachia, and Moldavia for several months. Their agenda of unity had been part of Romanian political discourse for generations, extending back to the 1840s, when one Transylvanian spoke of the stages in which transformation would be completed: democratic, social, and finally, national. Each stage depended on the others: without a social revolution in which they received land, peasants would remain slaves of a “few individuals.” The new state responded quickly to this need by instituting the most radical land reform in Eastern Europe, aided by the convenient fact of land ownership by alien groups. In Transylvania, Romanian peasants got land that had belonged to Magyars and Germans.

Romanianizing what had been Magyarized space proved the deepest source of common purpose for Romanians from the Regat and Transylvania. State administration as well as schools had to be made Romanian, and then schools had to be employed as vehicles of upward mobility for Transylvania’s Romanian intelligentsia. A condition of becoming literate and professional was no longer becoming Magyar.

Yet a smoldering low-level dissatisfaction set in because the new state was ruled centrally from Bucharest. The December 1918 mass meeting at Alba Iulia had demanded inclusion in Romania but had also asked that Transylvania’s rights be respected in a federal arrangement. Complaints soon multiplied that policy makers in Bucharest were not respecting this agreement, because, like counterparts in Belgrade, Prague, and Warsaw, they regarded the divisions of federalism as inadmissible. Transylvanian Romanians felt in some ways they possessed a distinct and superior political culture, were proud of having drawn leaders from the common people and of supposedly belonging to a more honest and competent “Central European” civilization, whose practices stood in contrast to those of their theatrical and “Mediterranean” compatriots in the Regat. The Transylvanians also objected to the appointment of officials from across the border who had grade-school education at best, complained of acts of humiliation and persecution, and of previously unknown corruption. By the 1930s, the flooding of administrative posts with nonnatives caused locals to speak of “colonization.”

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.

Early Marxists vs. Nationalists

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 270-271):

For Marxists then and later, nationality was a secondary form of identity: nations rose with capitalism and would disappear when capitalism gave way to socialism. And even while they existed, nations had no value as such; nationhood was ephemeral and unsubstantial, not a lasting site of human identity.

Still, Marx and Engels were not non-national; they were culturally German and despised the small peoples who hindered the consolidation of large, “historical” nations like France, Germany, and Italy. Marx ridiculed the idea that the insignificant Czechs, living at the heart of a dynamic Germany, could have a separate state, and Engels wrote that in every corner of Europe, one encountered the “ruins” of peoples, ready to side with reaction against “historical” peoples with their missions to humankind: Scots against English, Bretons against French, Basques against Spaniards, and most recently and tragically, the “barbarian” Czechs and South Slavs against Germans and Hungarians. But Engels had not lost faith. “The next world war,” he wrote in January 1849, “will cause not only reactionary classes and dynasties, but also entire reactionary peoples, to disappear from the face of the earth. And that is also progress.”

As Engels aged, his fury tempered, but he never abandoned the notion that small peoples were “relics.” It was misguided, he wrote in 1866, to think that the “Roumans of Wallachia, who never had a history, nor the energy required to have one, are of equal importance to the Italians who have a history of 2,000 years.” The national movement continued to grow among Czechs, but he still considered them a nuisance, destined to be “absorbed as integral portions into one or the other of those more powerful nations whose greater vitality enabled them to overcome greater obstacles.” Other “remnants of bygone Slavonian peoples” that he mentioned as destined to fade into greater peoples were the Serbs, Croats, Ukrainians, and Slovaks.

The disdain for small peoples extended beyond Marx and Engels to the German socialist elite, to Ferdinand Lassalle, Johann Baptist von Schweitzer, Johann Phillip Becker, Wilhelm Liebknecht, and the left liberal Leopold Sonnemann. Liebknecht, co-founder of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), considered the workers’ movement an “infallible tool to eliminate the nationalities question.” If humans saw their interests in material terms, in their ability to produce wealth and be properly rewarded, who cared what language they spoke? The imperial states were not racist and provided opportunities for Czechs or Poles who rose through education in the state bureaucracies as long as they used the imperial language. If one’s interest was universal culture, why not just use German or Russian? Socialists found no justification in history for the heart of the East European nationalist project: rescuing local vernaculars from the edge of extinction.

Down the Danube: Serbia

For two weeks in September-October this year, the Far Outliers took a Viking cruise down the Danube River from Budapest to Bucharest. Here are some impressions from each of the countries we visited. A photo album from the trip (Danube 2024) is on Flickr.

Our first stop in Serbia was the capital city, Belgrade. It wasn't Budapest, but it was a very pleasant surprise: lively, bustling, and well supplied. We opted for the Viking "included" (at no extra cost) excursion that focused on three attractions: the white limestone-walled Fortress that gave the city its name; the spectacular Church of St. Sava on the pattern of Istanbul's Hagia Sophia (without the minarets); and the Bohemian quarter of the Old Town (with break dancers). The Fortress, now a city park, housed two unusual displays: a dinosaur park and a display of artillery. Our group's guide was the best of our whole trip: a onetime professional singer who was now a professor of art history and a wonderfully wry storyteller. He demonstrated the acoustics in St. Sava by chanting liturgy at a central spot. On the church grounds was a statue of Nikola Tesla, born in what's now Croatia and buried in what's now Serbia.

Our fondest memories of Belgrade were not the architecture, the food, or the shopping, but the music. Later that Friday afternoon, when we climbed up the steep steps to the Old Town on our own, we chanced upon a crowd waiting outside a church for the wedding party to emerge. We stayed around long enough to enjoy the music and take video. In our ship's lounge that evening, we enjoyed a Serbian troupe performing Balkan folkloric music and dance.

When we woke up the next morning, we were at Golubac, site of an old castle on a steep hillside protecting the Danube border. After touring it and slowly climbing to the top, we boarded a bus for a hillside overlooking the Iron Gates, the site of the sunken Turkish fortress island of Ada Kaleh, and Romania across the river. On the sun deck in late afternoon, we listened to the cruise director's narration as we navigated through the narrow gorges and past the huge Decebal statue. We passed through the locks of the hydroelectric dams after dark.