Iron Curtain Read online

  In fact, many of the “orthodox” theorists of totalitarianism had made a number of the same points. Few had claimed that totalitarianism worked. On the contrary, “because totalitarian rule strives for the impossible and wants to place at its disposal the personality of man and destiny, it can be realized only in a fragmentary manner,” wrote Friedrich. “This is precisely why the consequences of the totalitarian claim to power are so dangerous and oppressive, because they are so hazy, so incalculable, and so difficult to demonstrate … This contortion follows from the unfulfillable aspiration to power: it characterizes life under such a regime and makes it exceedingly difficult for all outsiders to grasp.”11

  Political theorists in more recent years have taken this revisionist argument further. Some have argued that the term “totalitarian” is truly useful only in theory, as a negative template against which liberal democrats can define themselves.12 Others find the word altogether meaningless, explaining that it has become a term that means nothing more than “the theoretical antithesis of Western society,” or else simply “people we don’t like.” A more sinister interpretation holds that the word “totalitarianism” is self-serving: we use it only in order to enhance the legitimacy of Western democracy.13

  In popular speech, the word “totalitarian” isn’t so much self-serving as overused. Democratically elected politicians are described as totalitarian (e.g., “Rick Santorum’s Totalitarian Instincts”), as are governments or even companies (one can read of “The United States’ march towards totalitarianism” or learn that Apple has a “totalitarian approach to its app store”).14 Libertarians, from Ayn Rand onward, have used the word to describe progressive liberals. Progressive liberals (and indeed conservatives) have used the word to describe Ayn Rand.15 The word is nowadays applied to so many people and institutions that it can sometimes seem meaningless.

  Yet although the very idea of “total control” may now seem ludicrous, ridiculous, exaggerated, or silly, and although the word itself may have lost its capacity to shock, it is important to remember that “totalitarianism” is more than an ill-defined insult. Historically, there were regimes that aspired to total control. If we are to understand them—if we are to understand the history of the twentieth century—we need to understand how totalitarianism worked, both in theory and in practice. Nor is the notion of total control completely old-fashioned. The North Korean regime, set up along Stalin’s lines, has changed little in seventy years. Though new technology now seems to make the notion of total control harder to aim for, let alone achieve, we can’t be certain that mobile phones, the Internet, and satellite photographs won’t eventually become tools of control in the hands of regimes that also aspire to be “all-embracing.”16 “Totalitarianism” remains a useful and necessary empirical description. It is long overdue for a revival.

  One regime in particular understood the methods and techniques of totalitarian control so well that it successfully exported them: following the end of the Second World War and the Red Army’s march to Berlin, the leadership of the Soviet Union did try very hard to impose a totalitarian system of government on the very different European countries they then occupied, just as they had already tried to impose a totalitarian system on the many different regions of the USSR itself. Their efforts were in lethal earnest. Stalin, his military officers and his secret policemen—known from 1934 to 1946 as the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (Narodnyi Komisssariat Vnutrenikh Del, or NKVD) and only later as the KGB—and his local allies were not trying to make a point about Ayn Rand or progressive liberals when they created the totalitarian states of Eastern Europe. To paraphrase Mussolini, they wanted very much to create societies where everything was within the state, nothing was outside the state, and nothing was against the state—and they wanted to do it quickly.

  True, the eight European countries that the Red Army occupied in 1945, in whole or in part, had vastly different cultures, political traditions, and economic structures. The new territories included formerly democratic Czechoslovakia and formerly fascist Germany, as well as monarchies, autocracies, and semifeudal states. The inhabitants of the region were Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant, Jewish, and Muslim. They spoke Slavic languages, Romance languages, Finno-Ugric languages, and German. They included Russophiles and Russophobes; industrialized Bohemia and rural Albania; cosmopolitan Berlin and tiny wooden villages in the Carpathian mountains. Among them were former subjects of the Austro-Hungarian, Prussian, and Ottoman empires, as well as the Russian Empire.

  Nevertheless, Americans and Western Europeans in this period came to see the nations of communist-dominated but non-Soviet Europe—Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, eastern Germany, Romania, Bulgaria, Albania, and Yugoslavia—as a “bloc,” which eventually became known as “Eastern Europe.” This is a political and historical term, not a geographic one. It does not include “eastern” countries such as Greece, which was never a communist country. Neither does it include the Baltic States or Moldova, which although historically and culturally similar to Eastern Europe were in this period actually incorporated into the Soviet Union. There are similarities between the experiences of the Baltic States and those of Poland in particular, but there were also important differences: Sovietization, for the Balts, meant the loss even of nominal sovereignty.

  In the years following Stalin’s death—since 1989 in particular—the eight nations of Eastern Europe took very different paths, and it has become routine to observe that they never really had much in common in the first place. This is absolutely true: before 1945, they had never previously been unified in any way, and they have startlingly little in common now, aside from a common historical memory of communism. Yet for a time, between 1945 and 1989, the eight nations of Eastern Europe did share a great deal. For the sake of simplicity, familiarity, and historical accuracy I will therefore use the term “Eastern Europe” to describe them throughout this book.17

  Very briefly, between 1945 and 1953, it did seem as if the USSR would succeed in turning the widely varying nations of Eastern Europe into an ideologically and politically homogenous region. From Hitler’s enemies and Hitler’s allies they did, during this period, create a clutch of apparently identical polities.18 By the early 1950s, all the gray, war-damaged capitals of the “ancient states” of the region, to use Churchill’s phrase, were patrolled by the same kinds of unsmiling policemen, designed by the same socialist realist architects, and draped with the same kinds of propaganda posters. The cult of Stalin, whose very name was venerated in the USSR as a “symbol of the coming victory of communism,” was observed across the region, along with very similar cults of local party leaders.19 Millions of people took part in state-orchestrated parades and celebrations of communist power. At the time, the phrase “Iron Curtain” seemed much more than a metaphor: walls, fences, and barbed wire literally separated Eastern Europe from the West. By 1961, the year in which the Berlin Wall was built, it seemed as if these barriers could last forever.

  The speed with which this transformation took place was, in retrospect, nothing short of astonishing. In the Soviet Union itself, the evolution of a totalitarian state had taken two decades, and it had proceeded in fits and starts. The Bolsheviks did not begin with a blueprint. In the wake of the Russian Revolution, they pursued a zigzag course, sometimes harsher and sometimes more liberal, as one policy after another failed to deliver promised economic gains. The collectivist “war communism” and “red terror” policies of the Russian Civil War era were followed by Lenin’s more liberal New Economic Policy, which permitted some private business and trade. The New Economic Policy was in turn abolished in 1928 and replaced by a Five-Year Plan and a new set of policies that eventually became known as Stalinism: a push for faster industrialization, forced collectivization, centralized planning; draconian restrictions on speech, literature, the media, and the arts; and the expansion of the Gulag, the system of mass forced labor camps. The terms “Stalinism” and “totalitarianism” are often used interchangea
bly, and rightly so.

  But by the late 1930s Stalinism was in crisis too. Standards of living were not improving as fast as the party had promised. Poorly planned investments were beginning to backfire. Mass starvation in Ukraine and southern Russia in the early 1930s, while of some political utility to the regime, had created fear rather than admiration. In 1937, the Soviet secret police launched a public campaign of arrests, imprisonments, and executions, initially directed at the saboteurs, spies, and “wreckers” who were allegedly blocking society’s progress and eventually spreading to include the highest circles of the Soviet communist party. The Great Terror was neither the first wave of arrests in the Soviet Union nor the largest—earlier bouts of terror had been largely aimed at peasants and ethnic minorities, especially those living near the Soviet border. But it was the first to be directed at the highest party leadership, and it caused profound disquiet at home and among communists abroad. In due course, the Great Terror might have led to real disillusion. But Stalinism—and Stalin—was fortuitously rescued by the Second World War. Despite the chaos and mistakes, despite mass deaths and vast destruction, victory bolstered the legitimacy of the system and its leader, “proving” their worth. In the wake of the victory, the near-religious cult of Stalin reached new heights. Propaganda described the Soviet leader as “the incarnation of their own heroism, their own patriotism, their own devotion to their socialist Motherland.”20

  At the same time, the war gave Stalin an unprecedented opportunity to impose his particular vision of communist society on his neighbors. The first opportunity came at the very beginning, in 1939, after the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and agreed to divide Poland, Romania, Finland, and the Baltic States into Soviet and German spheres of influence. On September 1, Hitler invaded Poland from the west. On September 17, Stalin invaded Poland from the east. Within a few months, Soviet troops had occupied the Baltic States, parts of Romania, and eastern Finland as well. Although Nazi-occupied Europe was eventually liberated, Stalin never gave back the territories he occupied in this first phase of the war. Eastern Poland, eastern Finland, the Baltic nations, Bukovina, and Bessarabia, now called Moldova, were incorporated into the Soviet Union. The eastern Polish territories remain part of Ukraine and Belarus today.

  In their zone of occupation, Red Army officers and NKVD officers immediately began to impose their own system. From 1939 onward, they used local collaborators, members of the international communist movement, mass violence, and mass deportations to the concentration camps of the Gulag to “Sovietize” the local population. Stalin learned valuable lessons from this experience and gained valuable allies: the Soviet invasion of eastern Poland and the Baltic States in 1939 produced a cadre of NKVD officers ready and willing to repeat it. Immediately, even before the Nazi invasion of the USSR in 1941, Soviet authorities began to prepare the ground for a similar transformation of Eastern Europe.

  This last point is controversial, for in the standard historiography, the region’s postwar history is usually divided into phases.21 First there was genuine democracy, in 1944–45; then bogus democracy, as Hugh Seton-Watson once wrote; and then, in 1947–48, an abrupt policy shift and a full-fledged takeover: political terror was stepped up, the media muzzled, elections manipulated. All pretense of national autonomy was abandoned.

  Some historians and political scientists have since blamed this change in political atmosphere on the onset of the Cold War, with which it coincided. Sometimes, this onset of Stalinism in Eastern Europe is even blamed on Western Cold Warriors, whose aggressive rhetoric allegedly “forced” the Soviet leader to tighten his grip on the region. In 1959, this general “revisionist” argument was given its classic form by William Appleman Williams, who argued that the Cold War had been caused not by communist expansion but by the American drive for open international markets. More recently, a prominent German scholar has argued that the division of Germany was caused not by the Soviet pursuit of totalitarian policies in Eastern Germany after 1945 but by the Western powers’ failure to take advantage of Stalin’s peaceful overtures.22

  Any close examination of what was happening on the ground across the region between 1944 and 1947 reveals the deep flaws of these arguments—and, thanks to the availability of Soviet as well as Eastern European archives, a close examination is now possible.23 New sources have helped historians understand that this early “liberal” period was, in reality, not quite so liberal as it sometimes appeared in retrospect. True, not every element of the Soviet political system was imported into the region as soon as the Red Army crossed the borders, and indeed there is no evidence that Stalin expected to create a communist “bloc” very quickly. In 1944, his foreign minister, Ivan Maiskii, wrote a note predicting that the nations of Europe would eventually all become communist states, but only after three or perhaps four decades. (He also foresaw that in the Europe of the future there should be only one land power, the USSR, and one sea power, Great Britain.) In the meantime, Maiskii thought the Soviet Union should not try to foment “proletarian revolutions” in Eastern Europe and should try to maintain good relations with the Western democracies.24

  This long-term view was certainly in accordance with Marxist-Leninist ideology as Stalin understood it. Capitalists, he believed, would not be able to cooperate with one another forever. Sooner or later their greedy imperialism would lead them into conflict, and the Soviet Union would benefit. “The contradictions between England and America are still to be felt,” he told colleagues a few months after the war’s end. “The social conflicts in America are increasingly unfolding. The Labourites in England have promised the English workers so much concerning socialism that it will be hard for them to step back. They will soon have conflicts not only with their bourgeoisie, but also with the American imperialists.”25

  If the USSR was not in a rush, neither were the Eastern European communist leaders, few of whom expected to take power immediately. In the 1930s, many had participated in “national front” coalitions along with centrist and socialist parties—or had watched as national front coalitions were successful in a number of countries, most notably Spain and France. The historian Tony Judt has even described Spain as “a dry run for the seizure of power in Eastern Europe after 1945.”26 These original national front coalitions had been created to oppose Hitler. In the war’s aftermath, many prepared to re-create them in order to oppose Western capitalism. Stalin took a long-term view: the protelarian revolution would take place in due course, but before that could happen, the region first had to have a bourgeois revolution. According to the schematic Soviet interpretation of history, the necessary bourgeois revolution had not yet taken place.

  Yet as the first part of this book will explain, the Soviet Union did import certain key elements of the Soviet system into every nation occupied by the Red Army, from the very beginning. First and foremost, the Soviet NKVD, in collaboration with local communist parties, immediately created a secret police force in its own image, often using people whom they had already trained in Moscow. Everywhere the Red Army went—even in Czechoslovakia, from which Soviet troops eventually withdrew—these newly minted secret policemen immediately began to use selective violence, carefully targeting their political enemies according to previously composed lists and criteria. In some cases, they targeted enemy ethnic groups as well. They also took control of the region’s interior ministries, and in some cases the defense ministries as well, and participated in the immediate confiscation and redistribution of land.

  Secondly, in every occupied nation, Soviet authorities placed trusted local communists in charge of the era’s most powerful form of mass media: the radio. Although it was possible, in most of Eastern Europe, to publish noncommunist newspapers or magazines in the initial months after the war, and although noncommunists were allowed to run other state monopolies, the national radio stations, which could reach everyone from illiterate peasants to sophisticated intellectuals, were kept under firm communist party cont
rol. In the long term, the authorities hoped that the radio, along with other propaganda and changes to the educational system, would help bring mass numbers of people into the communist camp.

  Thirdly, everywhere the Red Army went, Soviet and local communists harassed, persecuted, and eventually banned many of the independent organizations of what we would now call civil society: the Polish Women’s League, the German “anti-fascist” groupings, church groups, and schools. In particular, they were fixated, from the very first days of the occupation, on youth groups: young social democrats, young Catholic or Protestant organizations, Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts. Even before they banned independent political parties for adults, and even before they outlawed church organizations and independent trade unions, they put young people’s organizations under the strictest possible observation and restraint.

  Finally, wherever it was possible, Soviet authorities, again in conjunction with local communist parties, carried out policies of mass ethnic cleansing, displacing millions of Germans, Poles, Ukrainians, Hungarians, and others from towns and villages where they had lived for centuries. Trucks and trains moved people and a few scant possessions into refugee camps and new homes hundreds of miles away from where they had been born. Disoriented and displaced, the refugees were easier to manipulate and control than they might have been otherwise. To some degree, the United States and Britain were complicit in this policy—ethnic cleansing of the Germans would be written into the Potsdam Treaty—but few in the West understood at the time how extensive and violent Soviet ethnic cleansing would turn out to be.