Iron Curtain Read online

  Of the three, Walter Ulbricht was probably the most unpromising as a young man. The son of a poor tailor, Ulbricht left school early and became a cabinetmaker. He joined the Young Workers’ Educational Association, a socialist club of the sort that discouraged drinking and card-playing while encouraging earnest discussion and Sunday outings in the countryside. The club members would tie red handkerchiefs to their walking sticks and sing Marxist songs as they hiked along trails. That early experience seems to have left the future communist party general secretary with an almost fanatically puritan sexual morality and a deep respect for long, heavy books.3

  Like the rest of his generation, Ulbricht was drafted into the German army in 1915. But he deserted in 1918—he loathed the military—and was profoundly impressed by the brief workers’ revolution he witnessed in Leipzig that year. At about the same time he discovered Marxism. As one of his biographers writes, “here was a seemingly simple, convincing formula that enabled him to categorize and explain everything he learned, heard and saw. Here was ‘truth’—the truth the ruling classes were bent on suppressing and keeping from people.”4

  Ulbricht was to stick to that very simple, very clear faith for the rest of his life. When the Moscow show trials began in the late 1930s, he fervently supported Stalin’s persecution of the “Trotskyite spies of Nazi fascism.” He was never bothered by the fact that so many of his German comrades wound up in the Gulag, and perhaps this was not an accident. Ulbricht benefited directly from the arrest of dozens of leading communists—men better educated and more experienced—since their disappearance facilitated his own rise to power. In 1938, following a particularly vicious series of arrests, he became the German communist party’s representative to the Comintern and moved to Moscow.

  Even after the signing of the Hitler-Stalin pact in 1939 he stuck to his support for Stalin. This moment provoked a great crisis among German communists, most of whom were passionate and genuine anti-Nazis. Ulbricht was one of the few who did not waver. Even after Stalin sent several hundred German communists back to Hitler’s concentration camps at Hitler’s request, Ulbricht continued to agitate against “primitive” antifascism, meaning antifascism that did not allow for nuances such as pacts with the fascists. Perhaps it was then that he won the Soviet dictator’s trust.

  Certainly it was not his charisma that brought him to power. A Nazi officer who encountered him in a Soviet camp recalled that although “there are Communists who can handle themselves fairly well in the company of officers … the Party apparatchiks like Ulbricht, with their wooden ‘dialectical’ monologues, are simply unbearable.”5 Elfriede Brüning met Ulbricht before the war at the party meetings her parents organized in the back room of their shop. “He was always in a hurry, never exchanged a personal word with us,” she wrote in her memoirs. “ ‘You really get cold just looking at him,’ said my mother.”6 Ulbricht could not make small talk, and in later years was given to reciting monologues on topics such as “the happiness of youth” (perhaps marginally more entertaining than his famously long speeches, which were devoted to subjects like “The Tasks of the Political Departments of the Machine and Tractor Stations” and “The Tasks of Trade Union Members in the Democratic Construction of the Economy,” subsequently published in large volumes).7 But because it was tacitly understood that Ulbricht was the USSR’s man in Germany, his authority went unchallenged until Stalin’s death.

  Over the years, Ulbricht would repay the Soviet leadership’s faith in him. During the early period of the Soviet occupation of Germany, Ulbricht would not tolerate any discussion of Red Army rape and looting. According to one of his colleagues, “Ulbricht’s workload amazed even his enemies. We kept asking ourselves, How can Ulbricht keep it up?—twelve or fourteen, sometimes sixteen hours a day …” Slowly, however, they began to realize that this “was not so impressive,” since “apparently he received general directives from the Soviets; his skill lay in applying these instructions to specific areas.”8 Toward the end of his life, his personal style even came to mimic Stalin’s, and his birthday parties were celebrated with pomp, circumstance, and poems dedicated to his glory. If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then Ulbricht was a great flatterer indeed.

  By comparison to Ulbricht, Bolesław Bierut was a far shadier character—so shady that even his birthplace is disputed. He probably came from eastern Poland, a region that was part of the Russian Empire until 1917, and it seems he went to a Russian-language school. Like Stalin’s parents, Bierut’s parents hoped he would be a priest. But after he participated in the strikes that broke out across the Russian Empire in 1905 he was expelled from school and had to work. Some sources think he might have joined the Freemasons, but others disagree. All do agree that he joined the party very early on, and that he attended the Comintern’s International Lenin School in Moscow in the 1920s. He did not have a high position in the Polish communist party before the war, and was hardly known in his own country at all. Instead, like Ulbricht, he became a trusted agent of the Comintern, and traveled on the Soviet communist party’s behalf through Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Bulgaria. At one point he even became a leading member of the Bulgarian communist party. His job in Sofia, as everywhere else, was presumably to make sure that local communist leaders toed the Stalinist line. That he was a paid agent of Soviet influence is beyond doubt.9

  But the real mystery of Bierut surrounds his activities during the Second World War. It is known that he was in Warsaw in 1939, that he fled to the USSR after the German invasion, and that he lived in Kiev until May 1941. This was an unusual place for a Polish communist to be in that period: most of them had made their way to the newly Sovietized regions of western Ukraine and western Belarus, where they were given important political or cultural offices, or else to other parts of the USSR. After 1941, things become murkier still. A confidential biography of Bierut put together by the international department of the Soviet communist party in 1944 states that from the moment Hitler invaded the USSR, “information on Bierut is lacking.”10 A Polish communist who met him in wartime Warsaw also remembered that “I knew nothing of his past. He simply appeared.”11

  Bierut was probably in Białystok when Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union began in June 1941, and he probably traveled from there to Minsk. But there the trail runs cold. He had a girlfriend and child in Minsk, having left his first wife and children behind long ago, as so many revolutionaries were wont to do. He also went to work for the Nazi city administration, where he was probably, though not necessarily, a Soviet agent. Rumors to the effect that Bierut had collaborated with the Gestapo, and even that he spent part of the war in Berlin, have long been in circulation.12 So have stories that Bierut was simply a straightforward employee of the Soviet NKVD, the secret police, from the beginning to the end of his career.13

  Both might be true: Bierut may have simply switched sides a few times. Stalin is known to have favored promoting people who had some deep character flaw or secret, supposedly because he liked to have an extra means of controlling his subordinates. Since Stalin had little faith in Polish communists in general, he might well have preferred a possible collaborator like Bierut to a true believer like Ulbricht. Anyone can lose their faith in communism, but blackmail is forever.

  Whatever the reason, Bierut did have unusually good contacts with the Soviet leadership, as well as lines of communication not necessarily open or apparent to others. He also remained, from the Soviet point of view, reliably subservient. The British statesman Anthony Eden witnessed an encounter between Bierut and Stalin and described the Polish communist as “servile.” Władysław Gomułka—Bierut’s most important party rival, and thus not an entirely dependable witness—claims to have seen Stalin shouting at Bierut, “What kind of fucking communists are you,” or words to that effect, in October 1944, when Bierut apparently ventured to suggest that an all-out attack on the Polish anti-Nazi underground might not be good policy. Some Polish communists even wanted to operate in tandem with the nonc
ommunist Polish partisans, but Stalin did not like that idea at all—and thus neither did Bierut, who complied with Stalin’s demands for the liquidation of the wartime underground, as well as his demands for an internal party purge in 1949, for the liquidation of the Polish officer corps, and for the imposition of socialist realism on Polish artists and architects. In the end, there is no record of Bierut ever defying Stalin on any issue at all.

  Mátyás Rákosi, the third “little Stalin,” started out rather differently from his counterparts. Ulbricht was a worker, Bierut was (probably) a peasant, but Rákosi was the son of a small-time Jewish merchant. He was also relatively well educated. Born in a Hungarian-speaking county of what is now Serbia, he was the fourth child in a family of twelve children, according to his autobiography. His father went bankrupt when he was six years old, and the family moved frequently after that. Mocked for his poverty by his schoolmates, the young Rákosi was attracted to the radical left from childhood onward. During his teenage years his school headmaster banned him from making political speeches. He also prided himself on his “awful manners.” He used deliberately rude forms of speech in order to offend people, especially if he thought they came from the upper classes.14

  Following a brief period of military service and a couple of years as a political prisoner in Russia, in 1918 Rákosi helped found the Hungarian communist party. In 1919 he was one of the leaders of the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic. Somehow, within the three-month life of that regime, he managed to be commander in chief of the Red Guard, Commissar for Production, and Deputy Commissar for Commerce. After the Hungarian Soviet Republic collapsed he made his way, via an Austrian prison, to Moscow, where in 1921 he had a brief meeting with Lenin. This event would, in time, be transformed into the myth of Rákosi as a “friend and collaborator” of Lenin.15

  Like Bierut and Ulbricht, Rákosi worked closely with the Comintern throughout the 1920s, and traveled through Europe on behalf of that organization and of the Soviet secret police. In 1924—revealing a sense of humor he rarely exhibited elsewhere—he returned to Budapest disguised as a merchant from Venice. There he helped reorganize the communist party, banned since its disastrous period in power in 1919. Following his arrest in 1925, he became the focus of a celebrated and much-publicized trial. Despite an international campaign to release him, Rákosi then spent the next fifteen years in prison, where he learned Russian and taught Marxism to the other prisoners.

  He was finally allowed to travel to the Soviet Union in 1940 when, following the Hitler-Stalin pact, the Hungarian authoritarian regime allowed a number of imprisoned communists to travel to the USSR. Upon arrival, he received a hero’s welcome and even stood beside Stalin during that year’s celebration of the Great October Revolution. He quickly became one of the leaders of “Kossuth Radio,” which was already broadcasting Soviet propaganda into Hungary, and resumed his close relations with Comintern leaders.16 Thoroughly at home in the USSR, he even managed to marry a Soviet prosecutor, a Yakut woman whose first husband had been a Red Army officer.17

  Rákosi’s career as Hungary’s “little Stalin” followed that of his fellow dictators in another respect. Rákosi reckoned early on that the only way to get ahead and to stay on top was to slavishly follow the edicts of Stalin. Throughout the postwar period, the Hungarian communist party made no important decisions without Soviet approval, as Rákosi readily admitted. In his memoirs he wrote frankly, for example, that Stalin asked him to stay out of the negotiations that formed the first postwar government in 1945, on the grounds that Rákosi was too closely associated with the 1919 government—in other words he was “too” communist—and also because he was Jewish, a fact that might be used against him by his political opponents. Rákosi did not object on either count.18

  Without question, these three men were very different in character and personal style. Rákosi, garrulous and talkative, had been a well-known if not exactly beloved public figure inside his country for many years. Bierut was absolutely unknown to most Poles, including most Polish communists. Ulbricht was a familiar but not particularly popular face inside the German communist party, and wasn’t much known outside it.

  Yet as their biographies reveal, these three men did share certain things. All of them had worked closely with the Comintern. All of them had survived the war either by fleeing to Moscow or by obtaining Moscow’s help. In the shorthand that later became popular, all of them were “Moscow communists”—that is, Soviet-trained communists, as opposed to communists who had made their careers in their own countries, or communists who had spent the war in Western Europe or North America. From the Soviet point of view the latter two groups were less reliable: they might well have acquired suspicious views or dubious contacts in their years spent outside the USSR.

  “Moscow communists” would play a key role in the formation of the first postwar governments all across Europe. Klement Gottwald, the Czechoslovak “little Stalin,” had been a Comintern leader, as had Josip Tito, the Yugoslav partisan leader who became the Yugoslav dictator. Georgi Dimitrov, Bulgaria’s “little Stalin,” was actually the Comintern’s boss for nearly a decade. Both Maurice Thorez, the leader of the French communist party during and after the war, and Palmiro Togliatti, who played that same role in Italy, were “Moscow communists” too. Both men were intimately involved in Comintern affairs and, had the chance ever presented itself, they would have been Stalin’s designated puppets in Western Europe. There were one or two exceptions—Romania’s postwar communist party was run by Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, a “local communist”—but he still went out of his way to demonstrate his fealty to Stalin whenever possible.

  Although their names and faces would appear most prominently on the placards and posters of the time, most of the little Stalins were also surrounded by other Moscow communists who reinforced their views, and who may also have watched over them on Moscow’s behalf. Bierut’s two most important sidekicks, Jakub Berman and Hilary Minc—the former in charge of ideology and propaganda, the latter in control of the economy—would eventually line up with him against “Warsaw” or “Home” communists such as Gomułka. In Hungary, Rákosi also headed a troika of Moscow communists. The other two members were József Révai and Ernő Gerő, again in charge of ideology and economics, respectively. Mihály Farkas, minister of defense between 1948 and 1953, was another important sidekick. All of them would eventually turn against the “Budapest” communists too.

  In Germany, Ulbricht’s most important colleague, Wilhelm Pieck, had a long Comintern history, having been secretary-general of the organization from 1938 to 1943. From the very earliest days of Soviet occupation, all of the German communists who returned to Berlin early, on planes flown directly from Moscow or in the company of Red Army troops, always had higher status than those German communists who found refuge in France (where many were harassed by French authorities), Morocco (they lurk in the background of the film Casablanca), Sweden (where Brecht lived for a time), Mexico (then very friendly to communists), and the United States. The Soviet leadership even considered them more trustworthy than the German communists who had stayed in Germany to the fight the Nazis. Even those Germans who had suffered as political prisoners in Hitler’s concentration camps never enjoyed the confidence of the Soviet occupation authorities. It was as if their very presence in Nazi Germany had tarnished them in Soviet eyes.

  Across Eastern Europe, the Moscow communists were united not only by a common ideology but by a common commitment to the Comintern’s long-term goal of worldwide revolution, followed by an international dictatorship of the proletariat. Though Stalin’s declaration of “Socialism in One Country” had brought to an end the open warfare between the Soviet Union and the nations of Western Europe, it did not prevent him and his secret services from plotting violent change, albeit using spies and subterfuge instead of the Red Army. In fact, the 1930s—W. H. Auden’s “low dishonest decade”—were a period of extraordinarily creative skulduggery for Soviet foreign policy. In the Uni
ted Kingdom, Soviet agents recruited Guy Burgess, Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, Anthony Blunt, and (probably) John Cairncross, the infamous “Cambridge Five.” In the United States they recruited Alger Hiss, Harry Dexter White, and Whittaker Chambers.

  In at least one respect, these Anglo-American agents had something in common with the Moscow communists of Eastern Europe: all of them were willing and eager to work closely with the NKVD. So too, at the time, were most European communists. In this, they were not exceptional. Though their links to the Soviet secret police are now felt, in retrospect, to have tarnished American and European communist parties, it did not bother the leaders of those parties at the time. Generally speaking, those in the West who believed in the desirability of world revolution also thought that this revolution would be led by the Soviet communist party and thus facilitated by the Soviet secret police. Even the American communist party took money from the USSR, sometimes channeled through the Comintern.19 Many left-wing intellectuals at the time knowingly met NKVD agents on a regular basis, as a matter of course.20 There was no stigma, as there would be in later years, in taking “Moscow Gold,” or in doing a few favors for the local undercover agents of the NKVD or, as it was later known, the KGB. To the truly dedicated, the goals of the USSR, of the Comintern, of the USSR’s spies, and of their own national communist parties would have seemed utterly interchangeable.