Dark Continent, page 33
Most important of all, there were the security forces. Military intelligence was subordinated to GRU, the Soviet military intelligence agency. Virtually from the moment of liberation, the KGB made control of internal security a priority. Prompted by the Russian security services, Party apparatchiks both infiltrated the regular police forces and outflanked them by creating new special security units—like the Bulgarian People’s Militia—under Party control. In Czechoslovakia—the last country to fall under communist control—the reorganization of the police became the critical political question, prompting a struggle between the communist-controlled Interior and the non-communist Justice Ministry.
The police—like civil servants generally—were in a weak position to resist communist pressure. Many of them had worked through the war for the Germans and were vulnerable to being purged; they found it awkward to act against politicians backed by the forces of liberation. They also had to watch for their jobs as politically reliable youngsters were being drafted en masse. Sándor Kopacsi, a future police chief of Budapest, recollected that “all underground fighters of the Mokan group [a Leftist wartime partisan outfit] were rearmed and became part of the law-enforcement apparatus of the new Republic of Hungary that was just being born. That’s how I became a cop.” Yet such inexperienced novices could hardly be relied upon from the start. In the police, as elsewhere, high percentages of officers remained in post from the old force, and simply bowed their head to the new realities, trading their professional expertise for job security.22
TOWARDS STALINISM
The turning point in what Mastny calls the Pax Sovietica came in 1947: in the face of increasingly decisive Western anti-communism, the foundation of the Cominform that September revealed a shift in Soviet policy from gradualism to embattled militancy, from an acceptance of divergent national paths to socialism to an insistence upon bloc uniformity. Stalin used the Yugoslavs to attack other communist parties for their “fetish of coalitionism.” Humiliated just the previous month in national elections, Hungarian cadres were criticized for admitting that their government was a “mixture made up of elements of the people’s democracy and bourgeois democracy.” A year earlier Gomulka in Poland and Gottwald in Czechoslovakia had stressed the need for each country to find its own path to socialism. Henceforth, this line was abandoned. In economic planning, politics, architecture—across the board came an increased subservience to Moscow.
In 1948 it was the Yugoslavs’ turn to be the whipping boy: the Tito-Stalin split, unforeseen and undesired by Tito, essentially came about because the Yugoslavs would not accept the kind of Soviet domination of their internal affairs which was becoming routine throughout the region. Meeting Soviet officers in Romania, Milovan Djilas was shocked by “this attitude of a ‘superior race’ and the conceit of a great power.” Djilas and his colleagues, proud of their wartime record, resented the obligation to publish Soviet books on demand, or to subordinate their own economic development to the needs of the Soviet Union; in foreign policy, Tito’s intervention in the Greek civil war and his evident ambitions in the Balkans angered Stalin, just as the Yugoslav attempt to take Trieste had done two years earlier. The breach opened up rapidly, and became the means for Stalin to impose his authority even more powerfully upon the rest of the bloc. For the next five years, until his death, the region experienced a wave of show trials, police terror and forced industrialization—in a word, Stalinism.23
“We study and take as an example the Soviet system,” Tito had stressed to Stalin, “but we are developing socialism in our country in somewhat different forms.” After Yugoslavia was expelled from the Cominform, cadres in other countries hastened to distance themselves from accusations of “national communism.” The gap which had opened up in the Soviet bloc was attributed to “despicable traitors and imperialist hirelings,” “traitors to proletarian internationalism,” “gangs of spies, provocateurs and murderers,” and “dogs tied to American leashes, gnawing imperialist bones, and barking for American capital.” The need to reconfirm the infallibility of Soviet authority led not merely to purges and mass expulsions, which cut deep into the Party and state apparatus but also—notably in Hungary and Czechoslovakia—to a series of show trials.24
The need to demonstrate loyalty to Moscow by unmasking “enemy agents” spread the terror like a virus into the heart of the Party. In August 1948 Romanian minister Lucretiu Patrascanu was arrested; another “nationalist deviationist,” Wladyslaw Gomulka, was removed as secretary-general of the Polish party the following month. Senior figures in the Albanian and Bulgarian leadership were arrested and tried. The Hungarian Interior Minister, László Rajk, was transferred to Foreign Affairs in August 1948, and arrested the following May.
Reflecting the paranoid atmosphere in the Kremlin in Stalin’s last years as well as real fears over the extent of Soviet control in eastern Europe, the show trials turned into a visible demonstration of Party loyalty which extended even to the victims themselves. According to bugged tapes of a private dialogue between Interior Minister Kádár and Rajk, the chief defendant in the first Hungarian trial, Kádár told Rajk: “We know you’re not guilty; we’ll admire you even more for this sacrifice. Not even your life—we won’t kill you; just moral sacrifice and then we’ll spirit you away.” Rajk initially resisted this line, but worn out at the trial, complied. He was then executed.25
When the Hungarians started the Rajk trial they warned the Czechs that some Czech names would come up. Why hadn’t they arrested them? Accusations of “Titoism” led to an acceleration in the Czech investigations. Moscow sent security advisers to Prague to uncover the “Czechoslovak Rajk” and his links with Western imperialism. Hastening to prove his own loyalty, former Secretary-General Rudolf Slánsky warned: “Nor will our Party escape having the enemy place his people among us and recruiting his agents among our members … We must be all the more vigilant, so that we can unmask the enemies in our own ranks, for they are the most dangerous enemies.” In 1950 Slánsky himself was among those senior Party figures arrested on the grounds that they were “Trotskyist-Zionist-Titoistbourgeois-nationalist traitors, spies and saboteurs, enemies of the Czech nation, of its People’s Democratic order and of Socialism.”
Cold War spy fever was an epidemic which afflicted the East even more than the West. In Czechoslovakia alone, there were monster trials of former Socialists, Catholics and Social Democrats—“the leaders of a terrorist conspiracy”—as well as the notorious “Trial of Vatican Agents” which took place in early 1950. Among the victims were wartime opponents of the Party, soldiers, intellectuals and religious leaders. But they also included suspect Party members like the “Spaniards” (activists who had fought in the Spanish civil war and were often thought to be dangerously independent), ethnic minorities deported to work camps, and, of course, “class enemies.”
The victims of these few years numbered tens if not hundreds of thousands. More communists were killed in Hungary as a result of the purges than Horthy had managed in twenty-five years. The secret police rose to power (as their backers were doing under Beria’s leadership in the Soviet Union), but were themselves riven by suspicion, informers and feuds. Nevertheless, they managed to superintend the elaboration of a sprawling network of work camps: at least seventy in Bulgaria, holding perhaps 100,000 inmates (mostly in the infamous “Little Siberia”). Those arrested numbered some 200,000 in Hungary, 136,000 in Czechoslovakia, 180,000 in Romania, an incredible 80,000 in Albania. Only Poland, nearing the end of its own civil war, escaped repression on this scale.26
The Stalinist terror cannot, in the final analysis, be separated from the ultimate justification for the Party’s existence—its role in the transformation of society. Despite the large numbers killed, the majority of those arrested were sent to labour camps. As in the Soviet Union earlier, work became both punishment and means of redemption, both a right and a duty, through which enemies of the “working classes” could rejoin society in the great task of Socialist Construction. In other words, the Stalinist terror of 1948–53 was bound up not only with Soviet efforts to stamp out heresy or independence within the Party but also with the grand project of state-driven industrialization. Terror accompanied the Party’s march towards modernity.27
The model for eastern Europe’s development was to be the forced industrialization of the Soviet Union in the 1930s through five-year plans. Although the region was more advanced economically than the Soviet Union had been, the effort to create a modern industrial sector still presupposed a profound social upheaval. The communists aimed to transform society completely through an industrial revolution, and the only way to finance growth domestically on the scale required was by squeezing both the agricultural sector and consumption: but this was impossible without coercion by the state. Hence, as one émigré put it: “The essence of the situation in the countries of eastern Europe is the communist police state and the industrial revolution.”
Eastern Europe’s basic economic problem had been evident for over a century. As western Europe industrialized, the region fell further and further behind. For the newly independent states created after 1918, the challenge had been how to respond. Peasant parties had traditionally argued that the answer lay not in imitation of the West but rather in support for the independent smallholder and agricultural development. This message carried tremendous emotional appeal but cooler heads realized that it offered no lasting solution to overpopulation and low agricultural productivity.
The chief alternative in the inter-war period was that urged by east European urban elites: gradual industrialization financed by capital inflows from the West. For roughly a decade this policy had actually been tried, and produced rapid but patchy industrial growth. The trouble was that it handed over investment decisions and ultimately ownership of key industries to foreign capitalists without ensuring growth high enough to solve the problem of rural underemployment. Economic nationalists hated the results and felt vindicated when the world slump terminated the experiment. After the failures of interwar liberalism and the peasantist movement, the socialist strategy of forced industrialization organized by the state and financed out of domestic savings looked increasingly appealing.
The world depression of the 1930s had already popularized the idea of state-led industrial growth. In the wake of the catastrophic failure of market capitalism, étatisme became fashionable: in eastern Europe technocratic planners and army officers (in Poland and Bulgaria) agreed that the state should expand not merely into labour relations and social services but into planning and directing investment. The crisis of 1929–32 had led to new public-sector control of banking, allowing the state greater control over monetary policy and industrial investment. The state’s economic reach extended further after 1939 as the Germans expropriated key businesses and introduced wartime controls on production and pricing. Often—in economics as in politics—the Germans’ successors simply took over the new tools of control.
After liberation, the new vogue for planning and the repudiation of liberalism spread right across the continent. Enlarging the welfare state, greater intervention in the economy, control of heavy industry and banking all formed part of the accepted wisdom of the day. The key issue in the years 1944–7 was not whether or not to plan, but whether to follow the social democratic or the communist variant of planning.
In Poland and Czechoslovakia, there were powerful pre-war traditions of state planning, and in 1945–6, socialist planners seemed to be winning the ear of local communists in arguing for a mixed economy, private trade and non-collectivized farms. But after the formation of the Cominform and Stalin’s refusal to allow East European countries to participate in the Marshall Plan, Stalinist orthodoxy took over. Communists criticized the “so-called primacy of consumption.” Poland’s Central Board of Planning, which had called for a midcourse between the “heroic road” of forced savings and “middle-class” demands for an immediate gratification of consumer desire, was wound up. It was replaced in early 1949 by the Party-controlled State Commission of Economic Planning for whom “the struggle for the planned economy is a class struggle waged on the political, economic and ideological fronts.”28
Between 1948 and 1951 every country behind the Iron Curtain introduced a Five- or Six-Year Plan. These were very different from the shorter reconstruction plans which had been introduced after liberation. By this point pre-war levels of output had been regained in most countries, while nationalization had delivered industry into the hands of the state. These new Plans set out highly ambitious targets for heavy industry and power generation. Far less attention was paid to consumer goods, and Party experts—ignoring the signs of social exhaustion—warned that in this “heroic” phase of development, living standards would remain depressed as resources were ploughed back into investment. Czech premier Zápotocký attacked “any fond illusions that a rise in the standard of living may be regarded as a necessary corollary, or even ought to precede the successful implementation of the Plan. The exact opposite is the truth: in order to make it possible that our material and cultural level might be raised, it will first be necessary to fulfil the Plan … so that we might henceforth live better, more contentedly and more joyfully!” Eastern Europe, observed the UN, was aiming at “an industrial revolution far more radical than anything seriously attempted in western European countries.”29
A vigorous propaganda drive hyped the results. The J. W. Stalin steelworks in East Germany, the Klement Gottwald steelworks in Ostrava, the V. I. Lenin iron and steelworks in Bulgaria were the cathedrals of the new era—their monumental entranceways, their very creation, a testimony to the power of man and science to conquer nature. Petru Dumitriu’s painting The Light of Lenin in the Mountains of Romania celebrated the building of the hydroelectric plant at Bicaz. The “light of Stalin shines on Albanian soil,” was Hoxha’s slogan in 1952.
But it was certainly not all propaganda. Growth rates in certain sectors, starting from a low base, were spectacular. Industrial production and employment both grew at least as quickly as in western Europe—perhaps faster—in the 1950s and early 1960s, despite the fact that there was no east European Marshall Plan; indeed the Soviet Union was actually extracting resources from the region, not putting them in. “A revolutionary transformation of the industrial structure has been carried out,” noted the Economic Commission for Europe from Geneva. “East European governments have on the whole planned successfully.” Very high investment ratios—twice as high as in western Europe—delivered fast rates of growth in favoured sectors such as mining and iron and steel production.30
Yet this pattern of development was storing up innumerable problems for the future. The use of a labour-intensive Soviet model was not illogical in an area where capital was scarce and labour relatively abundant; but it did lead east European countries to favour industries reliant on outmoded technologies. While in the world economy the number of miners was falling during the 1950s, in Hungary, for example, it doubled. Large numbers of workers were being funnelled into problem areas of industry, making for economic and political turmoil in the future once the region became more exposed to international competition.
Perhaps politically most serious of all was the problem of agriculture. After nearly two decades in which farmers had enjoyed an advantage over urban dwellers, the late 1940s ushered in a period in which the city took its revenge. In the Baltic states, where collectivization was introduced several years ahead of the rest of eastern Europe, hundreds of thousands of “kulaks” were deported, just as they had been in the Ukraine in the 1930s: a staggering 3 per cent of the total population went in a mere ten days in March 1949. Because communism had little support among the peasantry, the Party elsewhere had initially denied any interest in collectivization and tried to win favour through land reform. Now this policy was thrown into reverse throughout the region. Stalinism placed the burdens of development on to the agrarian sector by introducing collectivization drives, raising taxes, and cutting back loans and credits for farmers. Like a sort of internal colony, the countryside was to provide both food and labour for the growing cities. But state control of the land turned out to be a disaster, just as it had earlier in the Soviet Union. While industrial output soared, agricultural production barely attained pre-war levels. Indeed, as late as the early 1960s, per capita output remained depressed and “meatless days” testified to the depletion of livestock herds.31
As the authorities tried to secure the harvest by force, farmers resisted with every means—arson, deliveries of damaged grain, sabotaging machinery—at their disposal. In Romanian Transylvania, peasants burned the new cooperative farms; after one incident in July 1949, security forces only restored order by shooting twelve peasants on the spot and making mass arrests. Party efforts to terrorize the peasantry into submission led to widespread unrest and the inevitable accusations of “sabotage” by “well-off peasants.” These “bitter enemies of the new order” were “capable of any crime to ruin Socialist construction.” The typical “kulak” “fails to deliver his quotas, sabotages agricultural production and even resorts to murder.” In fact, the resistance was on an enormous scale, as was even indirectly admitted occasionally by the official press. “How can one talk about the proper ideological attitude of such members as Mikula from Mosina in Człuchów?” demanded the Green Banner, the official journal of the Polish United Peasant Party in November 1951. “He has said that he will not sell grain or potatoes to the State, and that if the surplus is taken from him by force, he will hang himself and let the Western radio know about it.”32
