Sergiu Verona. Military Occupation and Diplomacy: Soviet Troops in Romania, 1944-1958. Forward by J. F. Brown. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1992. xii, 212 pp. $34.95.

http://users.ju.edu/jclarke/wizzl.html

Given recent events, it seems appropriate to try to come to an understanding of Soviet Russia's intertwined military and political relations with its neighbors, that is to say, the establishment during World War II and the collapse half-a-century later of the Soviet satellite system in Eastern Europe.

Sergiu Verona begins his study with a long discussion of Moscow's imposition of its military occupation on Romania after 1944. He comes to the hardly surprising conclusion that the legal basis for Soviet forces there, that is, to protect the USSR's communications with its forces in Austria, was but a ruse masking Communist imperialism. Could Joseph Stalin's empire survive his death? Apparently not.

According to Verona, Nikita Khrushchev made his decision to withdraw troops from Romania in several stages. Following the USSR's military withdrawal from Austria and wishing to prove the sincerity of his approaches to Yugoslavia, between June and August 1955 Khrushchev conceived the idea of a new opening to the West, a unilateral troop withdrawal from Eastern Europe. Designed to elicit a comparable Western move, this limited departure would not undermine Moscow's military advantages in the area, where socialism was by now safely ensconced in any case.

Spurred by a suggestion from Romania, Khrushchev then came to see that country as an attractive candidate for the troop withdrawals. Not only had Romania's strategic importance declined with the collapse of Stalin's expansionist plans, Romania also had a long common border with the USSR and was securely enveloped by socialist countries on its other borders. And given Bucharest's support in 1956 during the Soviet invasion of Hungary, Khrushchev saw Romania as a credible ally, run by pliant leaders controlling a subdued population. Finally, the move would reassure the Yugoslavs about Soviet Russia's good will and the promise of the permissibility of "Different Roads to Socialism." After Khrushchev had assumed full control in the Kremlin in 1957, he discussed the issue in the Politburo and with senior military commanders. The decision made, the Soviets withdrew their troops from Romania in August 1958, to underwhelming fanfare.

Verona quite properly sees Khrushchev's withdrawal of his armed forces from Romania as the beginning of Soviet Russia's reexamination of the rationale for its troop deployments in Eastern Europe. Eventually Khrushchev's move provided the inspiration for Gorbachev's withdrawal from Eastern Europe, and the parallels between the two dictators' domestic and international imperatives and policies raise Verona's subject to a level of high importance.

Yet, Verona insists that the effect of the Soviet withdrawal from Romania on contemporaries was quite unspectacular. Romanians were no more impressed than were the Americans, who recognized that troop strengths in Eastern Europe as a whole had not changed and that Romania remained vulnerable to Soviet forces stationed beyond its borders. Certainly Washington was unwilling to reduce its commitment to NATO ground forces as Khrushchev apparently had hoped. He was, however, more successful in reassuring the Yugoslavs.

Contemporary opinion aside, Verona would seem to be correct in calling the withdrawal "the pivotal act" (p. 153) in the development of an independent and ultimately obstreperous Romanian foreign policy vis-à-vis the USSR.

This monograph, to be honest, is less about Soviet-Romanian relations than it is about a patriotic Romanian's view of contemporary British and American interpretations of those relations. This reflects what is now available in the archives, and clearly Verona has poured over them, for he relates--and quotes--the sources in excruciating detail. More synthesis would have helped his readers focus upon the central problem, an important one, posed by Verona--the symbiosis between military and diplomatic policy in the relations between the USSR and Romania. Those who do not demand such exhaustive detail may conveniently consult Verona's work-in-progress article, "Historical Note: Explaining the 1958 Soviet Troops Withdrawal from Romania" in the second issue of 1990's SAIS Review.

J. Calvitt Clarke III
Jacksonville University

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