Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (35 page)

In 1828, the German poet Heinrich Heine made the already familiar observation that ‘it is rarely possible for the English, in their parliamentary debates, to give utterance to a principle. They discuss only the utility or disutility of a thing, and produce facts, for and against.’ The British rejected Robert Schuman’s invitation in 1950 because of what they took to be the disutility of joining a European economic project, and because of their longstanding discomfort with continental entanglements. But the British decision to stand aside from the ECSC was above all an instinctive, psychological and even emotional one, a product of the utter peculiarity of recent British experience. In Anthony Eden’s summary of the British decision, to a New York audience in January 1952, ‘This is something which we know, in our bones, we cannot do.’

The decision was not final; but, taken when it was, it proved fateful. In the absence of Britain (and, in Britain’s wake, the Scandinavians) power within the ‘little Europe’ of the West fell by default to France. The French duly did what the British might have done in other circumstances and made ‘Europe’ in their own image, eventually casting its institutions and policies in a mould familiar from French precedent. At the time it was the continental Europeans, not the British, who expressed regret at the course of events. Many prominent European leaders deeply wanted Britain to join them. As Paul-Henri Spaak, the Belgian and European statesman, noted in regretful retrospect: ‘This moral leadership—it was yours for the asking. ’ Monnet, too, would later look back and wonder how different things might have been had Britain chosen to take the initiative at a moment when her authority was still unrivalled. Ten years later, it is true, the British would think again. But in post-war Europe ten years was a very long time and by then the die was cast.

VI

Into the Whirlwind

‘Say what you will—the Communists were more intelligent. They had a
grandiose program, a plan for a brand-new world in which everyone
would find his place . . . From the start there were people who realized they
lacked the proper temperament for the idyll and wished to leave the
country. But since by definition an idyll is one world for all, the people
who wished to emigrate were implicitly denying its validity. Instead of
going abroad, they went behind bars’.
Milan Kundera

‘And so it was necessary to teach people not to think and make judgments,
to compel them to see the non-existent, and to argue the opposite of what
was obvious to everyone’.
Boris Pasternak,
Doctor Zhivago

‘I met many people in the camp who managed to combine a shrewd sense
of what was going on in the country at large with a religious cult of Stalin’.
Evgenia Ginsburg,
Journey into the Whirlwind

‘Stalinism means the killing of the inner man. And no matter what the
sophists say, no matter what lies the communist intellectuals tell, that’s
what it all comes down to. The inner man must be killed for the
communist Decalogue to be lodged in the soul’.
Alexander Wat

‘Here they hang a man first and then they try him’.
Molière,
Monsieur de Pourceaugnac

To Western observers in the years after 1945, the Soviet Union presented a daunting prospect. The Red Army marched on foot and hauled its weapons and supplies on carts powered by draught animals; its soldiers were granted no leave and, if they hesitated, no quarter: 157,593 of them had been executed for ‘cowardice’ in 1941 and 1942 alone. But after a halting start, the USSR had out-produced and out-fought the Nazi colossus, ripping the heart from the magnificent German military machine. For its friends and foes alike, the Soviet victory in World War Two bore witness to the Bolsheviks’ achievement. Stalin’s policies were vindicated, his pre-war crimes largely forgotten. Success, as Stalin well understood, is a winning formula.

But Soviet victory was bought at a uniquely high price. Of all the victors in World War Two—indeed of all the participant countries, victors and vanquished alike—the USSR was the only one to suffer permanent economic damage. The measurable losses in people and resources were immense, and would be felt for decades to come. Zdenĕk Mlynář, a Czech Communist studying in Moscow in 1950, recalled the capital as mired in ‘poverty and backwardness . . . a huge village of wooden cottages.’ Away from the cities the situation was far worse. Roads, bridges, railways had been deliberately destroyed across much of Byelorussia, Ukraine and western Russia. The grain harvest in the early fifties was smaller than that of 1929, which in turn had been far less than the last peacetime harvest under the czars. The war had been fought across some of the Soviet Union’s best arable land, and hundreds of thousands of horses, cows, pigs and other animals had been killed. Ukraine, which had never recovered from the deliberate, punitive famine of the thirties, faced another—this time unplanned—in the winter and spring of 1946-47.

But the war years had also seen what would prove an enduring semimilitarization of Soviet life. Centralised direction and a relentless focus upon the production of tanks, guns and planes had turned the wartime USSR into a surprisingly effective war machine, careless of human life and welfare but otherwise well-adapted to fighting a total war. The cohort of Party bureaucrats formed in the war—the Brezhnev generation—equated power and success with large-scale output in the defense industries, and they were to run the country for the next forty years with that model always in mind. Longstanding Leninist metaphors of class struggle and confrontation could now be linked with proud memories of a real war. The Soviet Party-State acquired a new foundation myth: the Great Patriotic War.

Thanks to the Nazis’ treatment of the lands and people they overran, the war of 1941-45 in Russia
was
a great patriotic war. Stalin had encouraged autonomous expressions of Russian national and religious sentiment, allowing the Party and its goals to be temporarily displaced by an aura of common purpose in the titanic battle against the German invaders. And that same emphasis upon the Soviet Union’s roots in Russia’s imperial past served Stalin’s purposes in his post-war foray into central Europe.

What Stalin wanted in Europe above all, as we have seen, was security. But he was also interested in the economic benefits to be had from his victories in the West. The little states of central Europe, from Poland to Bulgaria, had lived under the shadow of German dominion long before World War Two: in the 1930s especially, Nazi Germany was their main trading partner and source of foreign capital. During the war this relationship had been simplified into one of master and slave, with Germany extracting for its war effort the maximum possible output from land and people. What happened after 1945 was that the Soviet Union took over, quite literally, where the Germans had left off, attaching eastern Europe to its own economy as a resource to be exploited at will.

The Soviet Union extracted reparations from Hungary and Romania, as former allies of Hitler. These reparations, like those taken in kind from the Soviet Zone in Germany, did relatively little to compensate for Russia’s losses but they represented substantial sacrifices for the donor countries: by 1948, Romanian reparations to the USSR represented 15 percent of that country’s national income; in Hungary the figure was 17 percent. From countries that had not fought against him Stalin was no less demanding, but on ‘fraternal’ rather than punitive terms.

It is estimated that until the late 1950s the Soviet Union exacted from the GDR, Romania and Hungary considerably more than it spent to control them. In Czechoslovakia it broke even. Bulgaria and especially Poland probably cost Moscow rather more in aid, between 1945 and 1960, than they furnished in trade and other deliveries. Such a pattern of mixed economic benefit in economic relations between metropole and colony is familiar to historians of colonialism and in this respect the relationship between the USSR and the lands to its west was conventionally ‘imperial’ (except that in the Soviet case the imperial center was actually poorer and more backward than its subjugated periphery).

Where Stalin differed from other empire-builders, even the czars, was in his insistence upon reproducing in the territories under his control forms of government and society
identical
to those of the Soviet Union. Just as he had done in eastern Poland between 1939 and 1941, and in the Baltic states in 1940 and again (following their re-conquest from the Nazis) in 1945, Stalin set out to re-mould eastern Europe in the Soviet image; to reproduce Soviet history, institutions and practices in each of the little states now controlled by Communist parties.

Albania, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland and the German Democratic Republic were to become, in the felicitous words of one scholar, ‘geographically contiguous replica states’.
⁴⁵
Each was to have a constitution modeled on the Soviet one (the first of these was adopted in Bulgaria in December 1947, the last in Poland in July 1952). Each was to undergo economic ‘reforms’ and adopt Five Year Plans to bring its institutions and practices into line with those of the Soviet Union. Each was to become a police state on the Soviet template. And each was to be governed by the apparatus of a Communist Party subservient (in fact if not name) to the ruling Communist Party in Moscow.
⁴⁶

Stalin’s motives for reproducing Soviet society in the satellite states were once again very simple. The widespread desire in post-war Eastern Europe for peace, land, food and a new beginning might have eased the Communists’ path to power, but it was no guarantee of local support for Soviet policies. The preference for Communists over Fascists, or for some form of democratic Socialism, could not be counted upon to survive practical experience of Communist rule. Even the appeal of Soviet guarantees against German revanchism might wane in time.

Stalin needed to secure his satellite neighbours’ unswerving allegiance, and he knew only one way to do this. First, the Party had to secure a monopoly of power. In the words of the Hungarian Constitution of August 1949, it was to take and keep a ‘leading role’, extinguishing or absorbing all other political parties. The Party became the only medium of social mobility, the sole source of patronage and the dispenser—through its control of the courts—of justice. Inseparable from the state whose institutions it monopolized, and taking its instructions directly from Moscow, the local Party and its state security apparatus were the most direct lever of Soviet command.

Secondly, the Party-State was to exercise a monopoly over economic decisions. This was not a simple matter. The economies of the east European states varied considerably. Some were modern, urban and industrial, with a sizeable working-class; others (the majority) were rural and impoverished. Some, like Poland and Hungary, had quite sizeable state sectors, dating from pre-war strategies of protection against German economic penetration. In others, like Czechoslovakia, property and business had been mostly in private hands before the war. Some countries and regions had a thriving commercial sector; others resembled parts of the Soviet Union itself. Most of the region had suffered seriously from the effects of the Depression and the autarkic protectionist policies adopted to combat it; but, as we have seen, during the war certain industrial sectors—in Hungary and Slovakia especially—had actually benefited from German investment in war production.

Notwithstanding this variety, the Communist seizures of power were followed in short order by the imposition of economic uniformity across the region. First, in keeping with the Leninist redefinition of ‘socialism’ as a matter of ownership rather than social relations, the state expropriated large-scale firms in service, commerce and industry, where these were not already in public hands. Next, the state took over, taxed or squeezed out of business all firms employing more than fifty people. In Czechoslovakia, by December 1948, there were hardly any private businesses left with more than 20 employees. By that same date 83 percent of Hungarian industry was in state hands, 84 percent of Polish industry, 85 percent of Romanian industry and fully 98 percent of Bulgarian industry.

One of the means at hand for eliminating the property-owning middle class in eastern Europe was currency reform. This was an effective device for destroying the cash savings of peasants and businessmen alike, an updating of older exactions like the forced capital levy. In Romania it was undertaken twice, in August 1947 (when it had the legitimate objective of ending hyperinflation) and in January 1952, when peasants who had built up savings over the previous four years (there was little for them to spend their money on) saw them wiped out.

As in the Soviet Union, so in Soviet-run eastern Europe, the peasantry were doomed. The initial post-war reforms in the countryside had distributed small parcels of land to large numbers of farmers. But however politically popular, these reforms simply exacerbated the longstanding agrarian crisis of the region: too little investment in machinery and fertilizer, too many underemployed laborers and five decades of steadily falling prices for farm produce. Until they were firmly ensconced in power, the Communist parties of eastern Europe actively encouraged inefficient land redistribution. But from 1949 they moved, with increasing urgency and aggression, to destroy the ‘nepmen’ and ‘kulaks’.

In the early stages of rural collectivization, small peasant landowners—few large landholders remained by this time—were penalized by punitive taxation (often exceeding their money income), differential prices and quotas that favored the new collective and state farms, the withholding of ration books, and discrimination against their children, who were denied access to post-primary education. Even under such conditions a surprising number of independent peasants held on, though mostly on economically insignificant ‘microfundia’ of two hectares or less.