Iron Curtain Read online

  Other elements of capitalism and even liberalism did remain in place for a time. Private farming, private business, and private trade persisted throughout 1945 and 1946, and sometimes longer. Some independent newspapers and journals kept publishing and some churches remained open. In some places, noncommunist political parties were also allowed to function, along with selected noncommunist politicians. But this is not because the Soviet communists and their Eastern European allies were liberal-minded democrats. This is because they thought that these things were less important, in the short term, than the secret police, the radio, ethnic cleansing, and the domination of youth groups and other civic organizations. It was not a coincidence that ambitious young communists invariably went to work in one of these areas. Upon joining the party in 1945, the communist writer Wiktor Woroszylski was offered three choices: the communist youth movement, the secret police, or the propaganda department, which dealt with mass media.27

  Free elections held in some countries in 1945 and 1946 were not a sign of communist tolerance either. The Soviet and Eastern European communist parties allowed these elections to happen because they thought that with control over the secret police and the radio, and with heavy influence over young people, they would win. Communists everywhere believed in the power of their own propaganda, and in the first years after the war’s end they had some good reasons for that belief. People did join the party after the war, whether out of despair, disorientation, pragmatism, cynicism, or ideology, not only in Eastern Europe but in France, Italy, and Britain. In Yugoslavia, Tito’s communist party was genuinely popular, thanks to its role in the resistance. In Czechoslovakia—occupied by Hitler in 1938, thanks to the appeasement of the West—real hopes were at first placed in the Soviet Union, which the Czechoslovaks hoped would be a more sympathetic power. Even in Poland and Germany, countries where suspicion of Soviet motives was strong, the psychological impact of the war also shaped many people’s perceptions. Capitalism and liberal democracy had failed catastrophically in the 1930s. Many believed it was now time to try something different.

  Hard though it sometimes is for us to understand, communists also believed their own doctrine. Just because communist ideology now seems wrongheaded in retrospect, that doesn’t mean it didn’t inspire fervent belief at the time. The majority of communist leaders in Eastern Europe—and many of their followers—really did think that sooner or later the working-class majority would acquire class consciousness, understand its historical destiny, and vote for a communist regime.

  They were wrong. Despite intimidation, despite propaganda, and despite even the real attraction communism held for some people devastated by the war, communist parties lost early elections in Germany, Austria, and Hungary by large margins. In Poland, the communists tested the ground with a referendum, and when that went badly its leaders abandoned free elections altogether. In Czechoslovakia, the communist party did well in an initial set of elections, in 1946, winning a third of the vote. But when it became clear that it would do much worse in subsequent elections in 1948, party leaders staged a coup. The harsher policies imposed upon the Eastern bloc in 1947 and 1948 were therefore not merely, and certainly not only, a reaction to the Cold War. They were also a reaction to failure. The Soviet Union and its local allies had failed to win power peacefully. They had failed to achieve absolute or even adequate control. Despite their influence over the radio and the secret police, they were not popular or universally admired. The number of their followers was shrinking rapidly, even in countries like Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria, where they had initially had some genuine support.28

  As a result, the local communists, advised by their Soviet allies, resorted to the harsher tactics that had been used previously—and successfully—in the USSR. The second part of this book describes those techniques: a new wave of arrests; the expansion of labor camps; much tighter control over the media, intellectuals, and the arts. Certain patterns were followed almost everywhere: first the elimination of “right-wing” or anticommunist parties, then the destruction of the noncommunist left, then the elimination of opposition within the communist party itself. In some countries, communist authorities even conducted show trials very much along Soviet lines. Eventually the region’s communist parties would attempt to eliminate all remaining independent organizations; to recruit followers into state-run mass organizations instead; to establish much harsher controls over education; to subvert the Catholic and Protestant churches. They created new, all-encompassing forms of educational propaganda, sponsored public parades and lectures, hung banners and posters, organized petition-signing campaigns and sporting events.

  But they would fail again. Following Stalin’s death in 1953, a series of minor and major rebellions broke out across the region. In 1953, East Berliners staged a protest that ended with Soviet tanks. Two major uprisings followed in 1956, in Poland and in Hungary. In the wake of those uprisings the Eastern European communists would moderate their tactics once again. They would continue to fail—and continue to change tactics—until they finally gave up power altogether in 1989.

  Between 1945 and 1953, the Soviet Union radically transformed an entire region, from the Baltic to the Adriatic, from the heart of the European continent to its southern and eastern peripheries. But in this book, I will focus on Central Europe. Though referring to Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Bulgaria as well as Yugoslavia, I will focus in particular on Hungary, Poland, and Eastern Germany. I have chosen these three countries not because they were similar but because they were so very different.

  Above all, they had different experiences of war. Germany had, of course, been the main aggressor and then the biggest loser. Poland had fought hard against German occupation and was one of the Allies, although it did not share in the fruits of victory. Hungary had played a role somewhere in between, experimenting with authoritarianism, collaborating with Germany, trying to switch sides and then finding it was too late. These three countries also had very different historical experiences. Germany had been the dominant economic and political power in Central Europe for decades. Poland, although a continental empire through the seventeenth century, had been partitioned by three other empires in the eighteenth century and lost its sovereignty in 1795, regaining it only in 1918. Hungary’s power and influence had meanwhile peaked in the early part of the twentieth century. After the First World War, Hungary lost two-thirds of its territory, an experience so traumatic that it has echoes in Hungarian politics even today.

  None of the three had been democratic, strictly speaking, in the period immediately preceding the war. But they all had experience of political liberalism, constitutional government, and elections. All had stock markets, foreign investment, limited companies, and laws protecting property rights. All had civic institutions—churches, youth organizations, trade associations—dating back hundreds of years, as well as long traditions of press, printing, and publication. Poland’s first newspaper had appeared in 1661. Germans had produced an enormous array of competing media before Hitler’s rise to power in 1933. All had elaborate economic and cultural ties to Western Europe, far stronger in the 1930s than their ties to Russia. Nothing in their history or their culture automatically destined them to become totalitarian dictatorships. Western Germany, although culturally identical to Eastern Germany, became a liberal democracy as did Austria, which had long been part of the Hapsburg Empire alongside Czechoslovakia and Hungary.

  History sometimes looks inevitable in retrospect, and in the decades following the imposition of communism some sought post hoc rationales for the Eastern European communist regimes. The eastern half of the continent was said to be poorer than the western half (except, of course, that Germany wasn’t); the nations of the region were said to be less developed (except that by comparison to Greece, Spain, and Portugal, Hungary and Poland weren’t) or less industrialized (except that the Czech lands were among the most industrialized in Europe). But from the perspective of 1945, no one looking forward foresaw that Hungary, wit
h its long ties to the German-speaking lands in the West; Poland, with its fierce anti-Bolshevik tradition; or eastern Germany, with its Nazi past, would remain under Soviet political control for nearly half a century.

  When they did fall under Soviet political control, few outside the region understood what happened and why. Even now, many continue to see Eastern Europe solely through the prism of the Cold War. With some exceptions, Western books about postwar Eastern Europe have most often focused on East-West conflict; on Germany’s division (“the German Question”); and on the creation of NATO and the Warsaw Pact.29 Hannah Arendt herself dismissed the region’s postwar history as uninteresting: “It was as though the Russian rulers repeated in great haste all the stages of the October Revolution up to the emergence of totalitarian dictatorship; the story, therefore, while unspeakably terrible, is without much interest of its own and varies very little.”30

  But Arendt was wrong: “the Russian rulers” did not follow the convoluted stages of the October Revolution in Eastern Europe. They applied only those techniques that they knew had a chance of success, and they undermined only those institutions that they believed absolutely necessary to destroy. This is why their story is so full of interest: it tells us more about the totalitarian mind-set, Soviet priorities, and Soviet thinking than would any study of Soviet history on its own. More importantly, a study of the region tells us more about the ways in which human beings react to the imposition of totalitarianism than would a study of any one country on its own.

  In more recent years, a wide range of scholars have begun to acknowledge this. In the two decades since the collapse of communism and the opening of archives across Central Europe, Germany, and Russia, an enormous amount of academic work has been devoted to the region. Particularly well covered, in the Anglophone world, are the physical and human consequences of the Second World War—notably in the work of Jan Gross, Timothy Snyder, and Bradley Abrams—as well as the history of ethnic cleansing in the region.31 The international politics of the region are even better understood. Whole institutes now devote themselves to the study of the origins of the Cold War and the U.S.–Soviet conflict.32 I have mostly relied on secondary sources when discussing these subjects.

  The same is true of the political history of Eastern Europe, which has been very well told using archival sources in regional languages. I have not tried to replicate the work of excellent historians such as Andrzej Paczkowski and Krystyna Kersten, whose writings on the Polish communist leadership and secret police remain unsurpassed; Norman Naimark, whose book on the Soviet occupation of East Germany is the definitive work in English; Peter Kenez and László Borhi, who have written superb accounts of the political machinations in Hungary; Bradley Abrams, Mary Heimann, and Karel Kaplan, who have described the period in Czechoslovakia.33 Certain more defined topics have also been the focus of excellent articles and full-length books. Among the best, again in English, I would include John Connelly on the Stalinization of Eastern European universities; Catherine Epstein and Marci Shore on communists and left-wing intellectuals; Mária Schmidt on the show trials; Martin Mevius on national symbolism in Hungary; Mark Kramer on de-Stalinization and the events of 1956.34

  General histories of the region as a whole are much rarer, if only because of the logistical difficulties. It’s not easy to find a historian who reads three or four of the regional languages, let alone nine or ten. Anthologies are often the answer and there are at least two very good recent ones: Stalinism Revisited: The Establishment of Communist Regimes in East-Central Europe and the Dynamic of the Soviet Bloc, edited by Vladimir Tismaneau, and The Establishment of Communist Regimes in Eastern Europe, 1944–1949, edited by Norman Naimark and Leonid Gibianskii. Though both volumes contain excellent essays, anthologies don’t necessarily look for patterns or make comparisons. Since I wanted to do exactly that, I had the assistance of two superb researchers and translators, both writers in their own right, while working on this book, Regine Wosnitza in Berlin and Attila Mong in Budapest. I relied on my own knowledge of Polish and Russian.

  Although much has been written about this period, there are still many, many untold stories. While preparing to write this book, I worked in former secret police archives—PN in Warsaw, ÁBTL in Hungary, BStU (the Stasi archive) in Berlin—as well as the archives of government ministries, German art academies, the Hungarian film institute, East German and Polish radio, just to name a few. I also made use of several new, or relatively new, collections of Soviet documents on the period. These include the two volumes of Vostochnaya Evropa v dokumentakh rossiskikh arkhivov, 1944–1953 (Eastern Europe in Documents from the Russian Archives, 1944–1953), the two volumes of Sovetskii faktor v vostochnoi evrope, 1944–1953 (The Soviet Factor in Eastern Europe, 1944–1953), and a three-volume series on Soviet occupation policy in Eastern Germany, all published in Moscow with Russian editors, as well as a seven-volume series published by the Russian state archive on the same topic.35 A joint commission of Polish and Ukrainian historians have now put together an imposing series of documents on their mutual history. In addition, the Polish Military Archive in Warsaw has a large collection of documents copied from Russian archives in the early 1990s. The Central European University Press has also published two excellent document collections on the uprisings in Germany in 1953 and in Hungary in 1956. A wide range of documents has been published in Polish, Hungarian, and German as well.

  In addition to consulting archives, I conducted a series of interviews in Poland, Hungary, and Germany in order to learn from people who actually lived through this period, and to hear them describe the events and the emotions of that time using their own language. I am very conscious that this may have been the last possible moment for such a project, and in the course of writing this book several people whom I had interviewed in the early stages passed away. I remain extremely grateful to them and to their families for allowing me to ask them extensive questions at that stage in their lives.

  The goals of this research were varied. In the documents of the period, I sought evidence of the deliberate destruction of civil society and small business. I investigated the phenomena of social realism and communist education. I gathered as much information as possible on the founding and early development of the region’s secret police. Through both reading and conversations, I sought to understand how ordinary people learned to cope with the new regimes; how they collaborated, willingly or reluctantly; how and why they joined the party and other state institutions; how they resisted, actively or passively; how they came to make terrible choices that most of us in the West, nowadays, never have to face. Above all, I sought to gain an understanding of real totalitarianism—not totalitarianism in theory but totalitarianism in practice—and how it shaped the lives of millions of Europeans in the twentieth century.

  PART ONE

  FALSE DAWN

  Chapter 1

  ZERO HOUR

  The mad orgy of ruins, entangled wires, twisted corpses, dead horses, overturned parts of blown-up bridges, bloody hoofs which had been torn off horses, broken guns, scattered ammunition, chamber pots, rusted washbasins, pieces of straw and entrails of horses floating in muddy pools mixed with blood, cameras, wrecked cars and tank parts: They all bear witness to the awful suffering of a city …

  —Tamás Lossonczy, Budapest, 19451

  How can one find words to convey truthfully and accurately the picture of a great capital destroyed almost beyond recognition; of a once almighty nation that ceased to exist; of a conquering people who were so brutally arrogant and so blindingly sure of their mission as a master race … whom you now see poking about their ruins, broken, dazed, shivering, hungry human beings without will or purpose or direction.

  —William Shirer, Berlin, 19452

  It seemed to me that I was walking on corpses, that at any moment I would step into a pool of blood.

  —Janina Godycka-Cwirko, Warsaw, 19453

  EXPLOSIONS ECHOED THROUGHOUT the night, and artillery fire could be h
eard throughout the day. Across Eastern Europe, the noise of falling bombs, rattling machine guns, rolling tanks, churning engines, and burning buildings heralded the approach of the Red Army. As the front line drew closer, the ground shook, the walls shivered, the children screamed. And then it stopped.

  The end of the war, wherever and whenever it came, brought with it an abrupt and eerie silence. “The night was far too quiet,” wrote one anonymous chronicler of the war’s end in Berlin.4 On the morning of April 27, 1945, she went out of her front door and saw no one: “Not a civilian in sight. The Russians have the streets entirely to themselves. But under every building people are whispering, quaking. Who could ever imagine such a world, hidden here, so frightened, right in the middle of the big city?”

  On the morning of February 12, 1945, the day the siege of the city came to an end, a Hungarian civil servant heard the same silence on the streets of Budapest. “I got to the Castle District, not a soul anywhere. I walked along Werbőczy Street. Nothing but bodies and ruins, supply carts, and drays … I got to Szentháromság Square and decided to look in at the Council in case I found somebody there. Deserted. Everything turned upside down and not a soul …”5

  Even Warsaw, a city already destroyed by the time the war ended—the Nazi occupiers had razed it to the ground following the uprising in the autumn—grew silent when the German army finally retreated on January 16, 1945. Władysław Szpilman, one of a tiny handful of people hiding in the ruins of the city, heard the change. “Silence fell,” he wrote in his memoir, The Pianist, “a silence such as even Warsaw, a dead city for the last three months, had not known before. I could not even hear the steps of the guards outside the building. I couldn’t understand it.” The following morning, the silence was broken by a “loud and resonant noise, the last sound I expected”: the Red Army had arrived, and loudspeakers were broadcasting, in Polish, the news of the liberation of the city.6