Iron Curtain Read online

  But the men and women who would become Eastern Europe’s postwar leaders were linked not only by the ideology of the international communist movement but also by its peculiar culture and rigid structures. Whatever their national origins, by the 1940s most European communist parties had copied the Bolsheviks’ strictly hierarchical organization and nomenclature. They were all led by a general secretary and a ruling group called the “political bureau,” or Politburo. The Politburo in turn controlled the Central Committee, a larger group of party apparatchiks, many of whom would eventually specialize in particular issues. The Central Committee oversaw regional committees, which oversaw local party cells. Everyone at the bottom reported to the top, and everyone at the top theoretically knew what was happening at the bottom.

  Those who lived in the USSR were particularly sensitive to the rules of this hierarchy. For those in favor, the rewards were great. Political émigrés—polit-emigrants, in Bolshevik slang—had, in the 1920s and 1930s, been a “privileged caste”:

  We lived in our own world, subjects of a state within a state. We received free hotel accommodations, generous monthly allowances, and free clothing. We spoke at meetings in factory clubs and schools, after which we were banqueted. There were free theater parties and amusements. Those polit-emigrants who were ill as a result of their sufferings in fascist and capitalist prisons were sent to exclusive hospitals and sanatoriums on the Black Sea. And here again, because of their special, privileged status, Russian girls flocked after the polit-emigrant for material considerations.21

  The very highest-ranking foreign communists—top Comintern officials, national communist party leaders—were housed in the well-appointed Hotel Lux, not far from the Kremlin. Their children went to special schools. Both Markus Wolf, later East Germany’s most famous spymaster, and Wolfgang Leonhard, later its most senior defector, attended the same Moscow high school for children of German communists. Those with a somewhat lesser status had jobs at foreign-language newspapers, or at the International Red Aid society, which agitated on behalf of communists in Western prisons. Some worked in plants and factories scattered across the country.

  Yet even at the highest level, and even when they were in favor, these privileged foreigners had been utterly dependent on the goodwill of their Soviet hosts, and on the whims of Stalin in particular. The diary of Dimitrov, the Bulgarian Comintern boss, illustrates this deadly dependency with an almost comic repetitiveness. Over more than a decade, he pedantically recorded his every meeting and every conversation with Stalin, up to and including the time when he called Stalin and the Generalissimo hung up as soon as he recognized Dimitrov’s voice.22

  Like others, Dimitrov knew his privileged status might not last, and for some it didn’t. In the late 1930s, when Stalin turned the focus of his purges on high-ranking members of the Soviet communist party, the “international” communists in Moscow suffered too. At the height of the NKVD’s paranoia, foreigners in the USSR became direct targets. The Polish communist party, which Stalin had never really trusted anyway (he had an NKVD agent specially appointed to manage their affairs in Moscow), was almost completely devastated. At least thirty of the Polish party’s thirty-seven Central Committee members were arrested in Moscow, and most were shot or died in the Gulag. The party itself was dissolved on the grounds that it was “saturated with spies and provocateurs.”23

  Many prominent foreign communists were also arrested in Moscow, among them Leonhard’s mother, and everyone was afraid of being next. In his carefully edited autobiography, even Markus Wolf wrote that his parents were “anguished” by the arrests: “When the doorbell rang unexpectedly one night, my usually calm father leapt to his feet and let out a violent curse. When it emerged that the visitor was only a neighbor intent on borrowing something he regained his savoir-faire, but his hands trembled for a good half an hour.”24 In the hotels and dormitories where foreigners resided, the arrests came in waves—there was “Polish night,” “German night,” “Italian night,” and so on. In their wake, the hallways of the Hotel Lux acquired a “stifling” atmosphere, in the words of the German communist Margarete Buber-Neumann. “Former political friends no longer dared visit each other. No one could enter or leave the Lux without a special pass, and the name and particulars of everyone who did so were carefully noted down. All the telephones in the hotel were controlled by the [secret police] from the central switchboard and we could regularly hear the tell-tale click as the control switched in …”25 Buber-Neumann was herself arrested and sent to the Gulag in 1938, a year after her husband had been arrested and executed.

  If their lives were precarious within the USSR, dedicated communists were not, in the 1930s, necessarily any safer at home. Throughout the prewar period, European communists were often perceived by local authorities as straightforward agents of a foreign power (which, of course, some of them were). Following the Bolshevik invasion of Poland in 1920, the Polish communist party was banned and many Polish communists spent long periods in Polish prisons—a piece of luck though they didn’t know it at the time, as they were then safe from Stalin. The same was true in Hungary, where the interwar authoritarian regime led by Admiral Miklós Horthy persecuted the communist party because of its links with Soviet agents, because of the memory of the failed 1918 communist coup, and because of the disastrous policies of Béla Kun’s brief dictatorship. In the illegal underground, Hungarian communists hid from the law and developed what one veteran called “a severe, tough, hierarchical organization,” one that tolerated very little internal democracy or dissent. Moreover, “this way of organization was idealized and admired.”26

  By contrast, the German communist party was a powerful and legal force in Germany after 1918, and at the height of its influence it could command some 10 percent of the national vote. After Hitler came to power in 1933, the German communists were arrested, expropriated, and persecuted as they were elsewhere. Many spent the war in concentration camps, and many did not survive. Ernst Thälmann, the party’s charismatic leader, was arrested in 1933 and shot in the Buchenwald camp in August 1944. Had he survived he would no doubt have been treated with suspicion by the “Moscow communists” too. In 1941 Stalin told Dimitrov that Thälmann “is being worked on from all sides … his letters show the influence of fascist ideology”—a judgment that did not prevent Thälmann from becoming one of the hero-martyrs of East Germany in the postwar years.27

  Despite these obstacles, the international communist movement flourished in much of Europe in the 1930s, and it was in this period that Eastern European intellectuals began to join the party in larger numbers, largely because there were so few other options. To anyone residing in Eastern Europe, the Western half of the continent did not look attractive. They were horrified by the rise of Hitler and Mussolini and by the inability of their own leaders to confront either of them. They were repulsed by the weakness and small-mindedness of England and France, both of which were economically depressed, and both of which were then led by men who favored the appeasement of fascism. After 1933, the Comintern had also been pushing legal communist parties to enter into “popular fronts,” movements that would unite communists, social democrats, and other leftists against the right-wing movements which were then coming to power across Europe, and these seemed successful. A popular front coalition ruled France from 1936 to 1938, and another popular front contested the 1936 elections in Spain. Both of these coalitions, like their counterparts in Eastern Europe, were supported by the USSR.

  At the same time many had become disillusioned with their own national politics, national traditions, and national literature. The historian Marci Shore has traced the evolution of a number of Polish poets from the artistic avant-garde to the political left—or rather from the observations that “God Is Dead” and “Realism Is Finished” to the belief that Soviet communism would fill the resulting void. In 1929, the poet Julian Tuwim—formerly a member of the patriotic center-left—became deeply disillusioned by the way patriotism was being exploit
ed to the advantage of the ruling elite. He exhorted his compatriots:

  Throw your machine gun onto the pavement.

  The oil is theirs, the blood is yours.

  And from capital to capital

  Cry out …

  “Gentlemen of the nobility, you do not fool us.”

  This wasn’t a Marxist cri de coeur—Tuwim had meant his poem as a statement of pacifism. But it was heading in that direction, and it helps explain why Tuwim would cooperate, to some degree, with the communist regime after the war.28 Wanda Wasilewska, one of the wartime Polish communist leaders, underwent a similar evolution at about that time. Her father had actually been a minister in one of the interwar Polish governments, and as a very young woman she was active in mainstream socialist groups. Only later, after Poland’s shaky democracy collapsed into a small-time dictatorship, did she become truly radical. Disappointed with the failure of centrist, democratic politics, she enthusiastically participated in a teachers’ strike, lost her job, and joined the movement.29

  Shore’s depiction of this milieu focuses on Poland, but the same evolution can be seen in many European countries, both East and West. Disappointment with the failures of capitalism and democracy pushed many Europeans to the far left in the 1930s. Many came to feel that their choices were limited to Hitler on the one hand or Marxism on the other—a polarization that was promoted and encouraged by people on both sides. Communism even acquired a certain avant-garde cachet among nihilist, existentialist, or otherwise alienated intellectuals. The towering intellectual figure of the period, Jean-Paul Sartre, was an enthusiastic fellow traveler. Yet even he could never force himself to dwell too much on the Soviet regime’s brutality. “Like you I find these camps intolerable,” he told Albert Camus, speaking of the Soviet Gulag. “But I find equally intolerable the use made of them every day in the bourgeois press.”30

  Until 1939, it was possible for all kinds of vaguely leftist, committed antifascists to support the Soviet Union without thinking too hard about it. But in that year Soviet foreign policy changed again—dramatically—and made it much more difficult to be an unthinking fellow traveler. In August, Stalin signed his nonaggression pact with Hitler. As noted in the introduction, the secret protocols of that pact divided Eastern Europe between the two dictators. Stalin got the Baltic States and eastern Poland, as well as northern Romania (Bessarabia and Bukovina). Hitler got western Poland and was given leave to exert his influence over Hungary, Romania, and Austria without Soviet objection. Following this pact, Hitler invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, and England and France declared war on Germany. Less than three weeks later, on September 17, 1939, Stalin invaded Poland too. The Wehrmacht and the Red Army met one another on their new border, shook hands, and agreed to exist in peace. Overnight, communist parties around the world were instructed to tone down their criticism of fascism. Hitler was not an ally, exactly, but neither was he to be an enemy. Instead, the comrades were to describe the war as one “between two groups of capitalist countries” who are “waging war for their own imperialist interests.” The popular fronts, which had only “served to ease the position of slaves under a capitalist regime,” were to be abandoned altogether.

  This tactical change was a great blow to communist solidarity. The German communist party was bitterly antifascist, and many of its members could not accept the idea of any accommodation with Hitler at all. The Polish communist party was torn in half between those who rejoiced at the Soviet invasion of eastern Poland—a change that created jobs and opportunities for many of them—and those horrified by the fact that their country had ceased to exist. Across the rest of Europe many communists were deeply confused by the new language they were supposed to adopt in response to these events. The Comintern itself dithered over its statement, drafting and redrafting its new “theses” so often that one Politburo member acidly complained that “By this time, Com[rade] Stalin would have written a whole book!”31 In Moscow, great efforts were made to keep up morale. There is evidence that in February 1941 Ulbricht held a meeting of the German communist party in Moscow at the Hotel Lux, where he cheered them up by predicting, among other things, that the war would end with a wave of Leninist revolutions. The task of the German communists in Moscow, he told them, was to prepare for that possibility.32

  Yet the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were, for twenty-two months, real allies. The USSR sold oil and grain to Germany, and Germany sold weapons to the USSR. The Soviet Union offered the Germans the use of a submarine base in Murmansk. The Hitler-Stalin pact even resulted in a prisoner exchange. In 1940, several hundred German communists were removed from the Gulag camps where they had been imprisoned and taken to the border. Margarete Buber-Neumann was among them. At the border, she wrote, these hardened German communists tried to ingratiate themselves with their old enemies: “The SS and Gestapo men thrust their hands into the air in the Hitler salute and began to sing ‘Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles.’ Hesitantly, our men followed suit, and there were very few who did not raise their arms and join in the singing. Among these latter was the Jew from Hungary.”33 Most of these loyal communists ended up in Nazi jails and camps. Buber-Neumann herself was sent directly from the border to a concentration camp, Ravensbrück, where she spent the rest of the war. She thus became a double victim, condemned to both the Soviet Gulag and a Nazi camp as well. These kinds of stories were quickly forgotten in Western Europe, where “the war” was the war against Germany. But they were remembered all too well in Eastern Europe.

  Paradoxically, Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 gave the international communist movement a new lease on life. With Stalin now a sworn enemy of Hitler, the Eastern European (and Western European) communist parties once again shared a common cause with the Soviet Union. In the USSR, enthusiasm for foreign communists also returned—now they were possible allies, fifth columns inside Nazi-occupied Europe—and Stalin’s tactics changed to suit the new circumstances. Once again, the international communist movement was instructed to unite with social democrats, centrists, and this time even bourgeois capitalists in order to create “national fronts” to defeat Hitler.

  Plans were made to send loyal communists back into their countries of origin, though not all of the earliest efforts met with much success. At the end of 1941, the Red Army helped the first group of “Moscow communists” make their way into Nazi-occupied Poland, where, with radio equipment and contacts provided by the NKVD, they founded a new Polish Workers’ Party (Polska Partia Robotnicza, or PPR) in January 1942.34 Very quickly, they squabbled among themselves and with the rest of the resistance, and probably collaborated with the German secret police during at least one operation against the Home Army, the armed wing of the Polish resistance. One of them then murdered another in a notoriously convoluted incident. Eventually they lost radio contact with Moscow.35 During the period of radio silence they elected a new leader of their own, Władysław Gomułka, who did not win Moscow’s confidence, either then or later. Concerned, the Soviet Union sent in another leader. He was injured parachuting into the country and wound up shooting himself. Gomułka thus remained the de facto wartime leader of the Polish Workers’ Party, at least until Bierut could make it into the country at the end of 1943.

  Now that the Soviet Union urgently needed to train new cadres, the Comintern suddenly became an important institution again. For reasons of security, its headquarters were moved to distant Ufa, the capital of the Central Asian province of Bashkortostan, where a new generation of Comintern agents could be trained without fear of bombing or attack. Far behind the front lines, the USSR began to prepare them for the postwar world. This was not the first time the Comintern had undertaken such a task: a special Politburo committee, which included Stalin, had supervised the organization of the first Comintern training center in 1925, in Moscow. High standards had been set for the first participants. They had to know English, German, or French; were required to have read the most important works of Marx, Engels, and Plekhano
v; and had to pass a test administered by the Comintern as well as a very thorough background check. “This is very important,” noted Comintern officials at the time, “as the whole value of the university will be lost if the proper types are not selected.”36

  From the very beginning, courses were heavy on Marxism—dialectical materialism, political economy, history of the Russian communist party—though they also tried to include “practical” training, sometimes with comic results. One attempt to teach students about life in Soviet factories (“so that they would learn about the dictatorship of the proletariat from the inside”) ended badly when the designated factory, which specialized in metallurgy, could not find jobs for the untrained students, most of whom did not speak Russian. They became, as a result, “figures of fun” and a distraction for the workers.37 Worse, almost every national communist party had its splits and divisions, and there was always someone arguing that local circumstances in their country made it impossible to follow the Soviet line. The internal Comintern records from the 1930s are full of accusations and counteraccusations. Some students had “hidden aspects to their pasts,” or else bourgeois backgrounds that made them “inappropriate people to be leading a workers’ movement.” Disappointingly few appeared to be textbook revolutionaries.38

  By 1941, the Comintern was a more experienced organization, and in the aftermath of the German invasion the recruitment of new students did follow some clear patterns. The foreign party leaders in Moscow immediately began the complex process of tracking down their comrades from the hiding places, refugee camps, and prisons where they had found shelter from the war, as well as from Soviet camps and prisons. Those who had been arrested or had spent years in the Gulag were often rehabilitated immediately, no questions asked, if only they could be found alive.