Oddbean

I know a woman who is from East Germany but then she came to the US as like... a babysitter or something? Freshly 18. Then she married the guy who is 20 years older than her. They're still married today and she seems jazzed about the whole thing but when she was telling me the story I was thinking "this sounds highly suspicious."

One of my oldest and dearest friends' mother was East German. She had some kind of job that took her to West Germany where she met and eventually married a Canadian soldier serving there. This meant she did not get to see any of her family until after the wall fell and was not able to often get news of them.

I had thought the US and Russia split up Germany because after Hitler failed at taking over the world everyone was like "this sounds like a good opportunity!" And then assumed they built a wall because of the whole communism thing. Then assumed the reason people wanted the wall down was because however the Russian side was running things made it so nobody had food.

Berlin was divided into spheres of influence, with the USSR taking East Berlin. Neither FDR or Churchill intended it to be permanent, but Stalin did. From what I’ve read, he wanted to establish spheres of influence after the war, and wanted the others to agree to it, to the point on insisting to the detriment of war planning. That’s how we ended up with the Iron Curtain; those were countries Stalin wanted the USSR to have control over. Germany was just one of the countries; it was divided because of Nazism, and it was the 2nd time they kicked off a world war. But, the Red Army let the Polish resistance army die before they helped out, and crushed a Czech demand for democracy in the 1960s. (And before anyone points out Chile, I know we’ve done some of that too, but millions died to Stalin before the war even began.)

Here’s a handy-dandy map that shows the location of Berlin in East Germany. The borders were heavily guarded and border guards on the East side had orders to shoot anyone who tries to leave. Lots of harrowing stories of people escaping this way or that. That’s how we ended up with the Iron Curtain; those were countries Stalin wanted the USSR to have control over. That’s essentially it. And the results of that divide are still visible in Europe. Some anomalies to this were Austria and Finland. Austria somehow got insanely lucky and managed to negotiate a neutrality for itself, whereas Finland had put up enough of a fight to make it clear to Stalin that any attempt to take over the country by force would end up in a miserable, drawn-out quagmire of a resistance war. Plus Stalin clearly perceived some advantage to having an officially neutral buffer zone there. That of course didn’t stop the Soviets from doing everything they could to bully Finland for decades to come. Never got real control over the country, though. A different anomaly was Tito’s Yugoslavia. While both were communist and one arguably as bad as the other, Tito wasn’t willing to play Stalin’s lapdog, and had the means to back that up. There’s a well-known anecdote about the two, that after capturing yet another assassin sent by Stalin, Tito sent him the following message: “Stop sending people to kill me. We’ve already captured five of them, one of them with a bomb and another with a rifle… If you don’t stop sending killers, I’ll send one to Moscow, and I won’t have to send another.” Quite possibly apocryphal, but makes a good story. And also illustrates Stalin’s determination to rule over all of eastern Europe. At least. And a lot of the present day realities in Europe, especially the eastern side, can be traced back to that particular determination and its manifestations in policy. https://media.spinster.xyz/19b8b5ab3f99d2a27c8a77b493a7d174e4f4cac3fb8765419f1bebfcffb02925.jpg

Tito was a horror in his own right, but I’m culturally predisposed to appreciate anyone who could muster credible threats of murder against Stalin. Not that I would want him next door to me either.

As I remember the west “liked” him, or could at least deal with him. There were major European and American brands available in the shops long before Pepsi made a deal to sell in Moscow under Nixon / Brezhnev. No, I would not want him in my neighborhood, especially when you consider how it all fell apart, and what happened in Serbia, Bosnia, etc since he died. A lot of resentment kept repressed by the prototypical iron fist.