Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century (44 page)

At the same time, the ambiguity of communist policy towards nationalism further confused matters, and disorientated opponents. By expelling the ethnic Germans, communist regimes claimed to be turning countries like Poland into nation-states at last. By forcibly resettling members of one ethnic group in another part of the country—Ukrainians in western Poland, Banat Serbs and Macedonians in eastern Romania, Bosnian peasants in the Yugoslav Vojvodina—the regime weakened old local and regional ties and asserted the authority of the centralized state. The contrast is striking with the Soviet policy pursued in the Baltic states, where it was precisely the dominant national group which was targeted for deportation. But then the Baltic states faced a far worse fate than the rest of eastern Europe: they were to be absorbed within the Soviet Union itself, and subjected to a conscious policy of Russification.

Building up a ruling Party was one thing; controlling the administration was another, for that required an obedient state machine. In western Europe, occupation gave British and American policy-makers enormous influence over the internal affairs of both former enemies like Italy and Germany, and of former allies like Belgium and Greece. Soviet advisers intervened as much if not more, and took steps to consolidate their influence over the bureaucratic apparatus of the various east European states. Both West and East, most civil servants had wartime pasts to live down, and willingly conformed to the wishes of their new masters. In many cases, too, political control of the civil service was nothing new, and the communists simply inherited wartime and pre-war instruments of domination.

The independence of the judiciary, where this still existed after years of authoritarianism and wartime occupation, was almost immediately undermined by decrees making judges subordinate to the
Ministry of Justice. It was not necessary after this sort of measure to force pre-war appointees to resign: in Poland, for instance, some 60 per cent of judges as late as 1950 had begun their careers on the bench before the war. It was a similar story in the military, where pre-war generals took their orders from the new Higher Political Administration, which ensured a pro-Soviet line.
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Culture, education and the media, formerly censored by domestic right-wing regimes or by the Germans, now came under Moscow’s influence: some conservative papers were closed (on the grounds that they had served the “Fascists”); others were controlled through a licensing system and the distribution of paper and newsprint. Censorship gradually extended from “anti-Soviet” material to more sweeping definitions of what was harmful to the state: by 1949 some 8,000 previously published works were banned in Romania, and similar lists grew elsewhere. By 1949 at the very latest, formal censorship systems had been established which effectively placed all literary and journalistic output under Party control. It took longer to bring the universities into line, and the rhythm and rate of success varied enormously, from East Germany, on the one hand, where the old order was swept away almost at once, to Poland, where it remained tolerated by an uncertain Party for years.
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Most important of all, there were the security forces. Military intelligence was subordinated to GRU, the Soviet military intelligence agency. Virtually from the moment of liberation, the KGB made control of internal security a priority. Prompted by the Russian security services, Party apparatchiks both infiltrated the regular police forces and outflanked them by creating new special security units—like the Bulgarian People’s Militia—under Party control. In Czechoslovakia—the last country to fall under communist control—the reorganization of the police became
the
critical political question, prompting a struggle between the communist-controlled Interior and the non-communist Justice Ministry.

The police—like civil servants generally—were in a weak position to resist communist pressure. Many of them had worked through the war for the Germans and were vulnerable to being purged; they found it awkward to act against politicians backed by the forces of liberation. They also had to watch for their jobs as politically reliable youngsters
were being drafted en masse. Sándor Kopacsi, a future police chief of Budapest, recollected that “all underground fighters of the Mokan group [a Leftist wartime partisan outfit] were rearmed and became part of the law-enforcement apparatus of the new Republic of Hungary that was just being born. That’s how I became a cop.” Yet such inexperienced novices could hardly be relied upon from the start. In the police, as elsewhere, high percentages of officers remained in post from the old force, and simply bowed their head to the new realities, trading their professional expertise for job security.
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TOWARDS STALINISM

The turning point in what Mastny calls the Pax Sovietica came in 1947: in the face of increasingly decisive Western anti-communism, the foundation of the Cominform that September revealed a shift in Soviet policy from gradualism to embattled militancy, from an acceptance of divergent national paths to socialism to an insistence upon bloc uniformity. Stalin used the Yugoslavs to attack other communist parties for their “fetish of coalitionism.” Humiliated just the previous month in national elections, Hungarian cadres were criticized for admitting that their government was a “mixture made up of elements of the people’s democracy and bourgeois democracy.” A year earlier Gomulka in Poland and Gottwald in Czechoslovakia had stressed the need for each country to find its own path to socialism. Henceforth, this line was abandoned. In economic planning, politics, architecture—across the board came an increased subservience to Moscow.

In 1948 it was the Yugoslavs’ turn to be the whipping boy: the Tito-Stalin split, unforeseen and undesired by Tito, essentially came about because the Yugoslavs would not accept the kind of Soviet domination of their internal affairs which was becoming routine throughout the region. Meeting Soviet officers in Romania, Milovan Djilas was shocked by “this attitude of a ‘superior race’ and the conceit of a great power.” Djilas and his colleagues, proud of their wartime record, resented the obligation to publish Soviet books on demand, or to subordinate their own economic development to the needs of the Soviet Union; in foreign policy, Tito’s intervention in the Greek civil war and his evident ambitions in the Balkans angered Stalin, just as the
Yugoslav attempt to take Trieste had done two years earlier. The breach opened up rapidly, and became the means for Stalin to impose his authority even more powerfully upon the rest of the bloc. For the next five years, until his death, the region experienced a wave of show trials, police terror and forced industrialization—in a word, Stalinism.
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“We study and take as an example the Soviet system,” Tito had stressed to Stalin, “but we are developing socialism in our country in somewhat different forms.” After Yugoslavia was expelled from the Cominform, cadres in other countries hastened to distance themselves from accusations of “national communism.” The gap which had opened up in the Soviet bloc was attributed to “despicable traitors and imperialist hirelings,” “traitors to proletarian internationalism,” “gangs of spies, provocateurs and murderers,” and “dogs tied to American leashes, gnawing imperialist bones, and barking for American capital.” The need to reconfirm the infallibility of Soviet authority led not merely to purges and mass expulsions, which cut deep into the Party and state apparatus but also—notably in Hungary and Czechoslovakia—to a series of show trials.
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The need to demonstrate loyalty to Moscow by unmasking “enemy agents” spread the terror like a virus into the heart of the Party. In August 1948 Romanian minister Lucretiu Patrascanu was arrested; another “nationalist deviationist,” Wladyslaw Gomulka, was removed as secretary-general of the Polish party the following month. Senior figures in the Albanian and Bulgarian leadership were arrested and tried. The Hungarian Interior Minister, László Rajk, was transferred to Foreign Affairs in August 1948, and arrested the following May.

Reflecting the paranoid atmosphere in the Kremlin in Stalin’s last years as well as real fears over the extent of Soviet control in eastern Europe, the show trials turned into a visible demonstration of Party loyalty which extended even to the victims themselves. According to bugged tapes of a private dialogue between Interior Minister Kádár and Rajk, the chief defendant in the first Hungarian trial, Kádár told Rajk: “We
know
you’re not guilty; we’ll admire you even more for this sacrifice. Not even your life—we won’t kill you; just moral sacrifice and then we’ll spirit you away.” Rajk initially resisted this line, but worn out at the trial, complied. He was then executed.
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When the Hungarians started the Rajk trial they warned the Czechs that some Czech names would come up. Why hadn’t they arrested them? Accusations of “Titoism” led to an acceleration in the Czech investigations. Moscow sent security advisers to Prague to uncover the “Czechoslovak Rajk” and his links with Western imperialism. Hastening to prove his own loyalty, former Secretary-General Rudolf Slánsky warned: “Nor will our Party escape having the enemy place his people among us and recruiting his agents among our members … We must be all the more vigilant, so that we can unmask the enemies in our own ranks, for they are the most dangerous enemies.” In 1950 Slánsky himself was among those senior Party figures arrested on the grounds that they were “Trotskyist-Zionist-Titoistbourgeois-nationalist traitors, spies and saboteurs, enemies of the Czech nation, of its People’s Democratic order and of Socialism.”

Cold War spy fever was an epidemic which afflicted the East even more than the West. In Czechoslovakia alone, there were monster trials of former Socialists, Catholics and Social Democrats—“the leaders of a terrorist conspiracy”—as well as the notorious “Trial of Vatican Agents” which took place in early 1950. Among the victims were wartime opponents of the Party, soldiers, intellectuals and religious leaders. But they also included suspect Party members like the “Spaniards” (activists who had fought in the Spanish civil war and were often thought to be dangerously independent), ethnic minorities deported to work camps, and, of course, “class enemies.”

The victims of these few years numbered tens if not hundreds of thousands. More communists were killed in Hungary as a result of the purges than Horthy had managed in twenty-five years. The secret police rose to power (as their backers were doing under Beria’s leadership in the Soviet Union), but were themselves riven by suspicion, informers and feuds. Nevertheless, they managed to superintend the elaboration of a sprawling network of work camps: at least seventy in Bulgaria, holding perhaps 100,000 inmates (mostly in the infamous “Little Siberia”). Those arrested numbered some 200,000 in Hungary, 136,000 in Czechoslovakia, 180,000 in Romania, an incredible 80,000 in Albania. Only Poland, nearing the end of its own civil war, escaped repression on this scale.
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The Stalinist terror cannot, in the final analysis, be separated from
the ultimate justification for the Party’s existence—its role in the transformation of society. Despite the large numbers killed, the majority of those arrested were sent to labour camps. As in the Soviet Union earlier, work became both punishment and means of redemption, both a right and a duty, through which enemies of the “working classes” could rejoin society in the great task of Socialist Construction. In other words, the Stalinist terror of 1948–53 was bound up not only with Soviet efforts to stamp out heresy or independence within the Party but also with the grand project of state-driven industrialization. Terror accompanied the Party’s march towards modernity.
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The model for eastern Europe’s development was to be the forced industrialization of the Soviet Union in the 1930s through five-year plans. Although the region was more advanced economically than the Soviet Union had been, the effort to create a modern industrial sector still presupposed a profound social upheaval. The communists aimed to transform society completely through an industrial revolution, and the only way to finance growth domestically on the scale required was by squeezing both the agricultural sector and consumption: but this was impossible without coercion by the state. Hence, as one émigré put it: “The essence of the situation in the countries of eastern Europe is the communist police state and the industrial revolution.”

Eastern Europe’s basic economic problem had been evident for over a century. As western Europe industrialized, the region fell further and further behind. For the newly independent states created after 1918, the challenge had been how to respond. Peasant parties had traditionally argued that the answer lay not in imitation of the West but rather in support for the independent smallholder and agricultural development. This message carried tremendous emotional appeal but cooler heads realized that it offered no lasting solution to overpopulation and low agricultural productivity.

The chief alternative in the inter-war period was that urged by east European urban elites: gradual industrialization financed by capital inflows from the West. For roughly a decade this policy had actually been tried, and produced rapid but patchy industrial growth. The trouble was that it handed over investment decisions and ultimately ownership of key industries to foreign capitalists without ensuring growth high enough to solve the problem of rural underemployment.
Economic nationalists hated the results and felt vindicated when the world slump terminated the experiment. After the failures of interwar liberalism and the peasantist movement, the socialist strategy of forced industrialization organized by the state and financed out of domestic savings looked increasingly appealing.

The world depression of the 1930s had already popularized the idea of state-led industrial growth. In the wake of the catastrophic failure of market capitalism,
étatisme
became fashionable: in eastern Europe technocratic planners and army officers (in Poland and Bulgaria) agreed that the state should expand not merely into labour relations and social services but into planning and directing investment. The crisis of 1929–32 had led to new public-sector control of banking, allowing the state greater control over monetary policy and industrial investment. The state’s economic reach extended further after 1939 as the Germans expropriated key businesses and introduced wartime controls on production and pricing. Often—in economics as in politics—the Germans’ successors simply took over the new tools of control.