by Tony Judt
In the rest of the Soviet bloc these Communist-Socialist ‘unions’, similarly structured, came a little later, in the course of 1948: in Romania in February 1948; in Hungary and Czechoslovakia in June; in Bulgaria in August; and in Poland in December. By then the Socialist parties had been split and split again over the issue of fusion, so that long before they disappeared they had ceased to be an effective political force in their country. And, as in Germany, former Social-Democrats who threw in their lot with the Communists were duly rewarded with empty titles: the first Head of State in Communist Hungary—appointed on July 30th 1948—was Árpád Szakasits, a former Socialist.
The Social Democrats in eastern Europe were in an impossible position. Western Socialists often encouraged them to merge with the Communists, either in the innocent belief that everyone would benefit, or else in the hope of moderating Communist behaviour. As late as 1947 independent Socialist Parties in eastern Europe (i.e. Socialists who refused to cooperate with their Communist comrades) were barred from joining international Socialist organizations on the grounds that they were an impediment to the alliance of ‘progressive’ forces. Meanwhile, at home, they were subject to humiliation and violence. Even when they accepted the Communist embrace their situation hardly improved—at the February 1948 ‘fusion’ Congress of the two parties in Romania, the Communist leader Ana Pauker accused her erstwhile Socialist colleagues of systematic sabotage, servility to reactionary governments and anti-Soviet ‘calumnies’.
Following the decimation, imprisonment or absorption of their main opponents, Communists did indeed do rather better at elections in 1947 and thereafter, with some help from violent assaults on their remaining opponents, intimidation at polling stations and blatantly abusive vote counts. There then, typically, followed the formation of governments in which the Communist, or newly-united ‘Worker’ or ‘Unity’ Party was now blatantly dominant: coalition partners, if any, were reduced to nominal and empty roles. In keeping with this transition from united front coalitions to a Communist monopoly of power, Soviet strategy in the course of 1948 and 1949 reverted to a radical policy of state control, collectivization, destruction of the middle-class and purges and punishment of real and imagined opponents.
This account of the initial Soviet take-over in eastern Europe describes a process common to all the countries of the region. Stalin’s calculations were typically indifferent to national variety. Where Communists could reasonably hope to secure power by legal or ostensibly legal means this appears to have been Stalin’s preference, at least through the autumn of 1947. But the point was power, not legality, which is why Communists’ tactics became more confrontational and less embarrassed by judicial or political constraints, even at the cost of alienating foreign sympathy, once it was clear that electoral success would elude them.
Nonetheless, there were significant local variations. In Bulgaria and Romania the Soviet hand was heaviest—in part because both countries had been at war with the USSR, in part because of local Communist weakness, but mostly just because they were so obviously consigned by geography to the Soviet sphere from the outset. In Bulgaria the Communist leader (and former Comintern Secretary) Georgy Dimitrov declared bluntly as early as October 1946 that anyone who voted for the antiCommunist opposition would be regarded as a traitor. Even so, the Communists’ opponents won 101 out of 465 parliamentary seats in the ensuing general election. But the opposition was fore-doomed—the only thing preventing the occupying Red Army and its local allies from openly destroying all dissent right away was the need to work with the Western Allies on a Peace Treaty for Bulgaria and to secure Anglo-American recognition of a Communist-led government as Bulgaria’s legitimate authority.
Once the peace treaties were signed, the Communists had nothing to gain by waiting and the chronology of events is thus revealing. On June 5th 1947 the US Senate ratified the Paris Peace Treaties with Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Finland and Italy, despite the misgivings of American diplomats in Sofia and Bucharest. The very next day the leading anti-Communist politician in Bulgaria, the Agrarian leader Nikola Petkov (who had refused to follow more accommodating Agrarians into the Communists’ Fatherland Front), was arrested. His trial lasted from August 5th to 15th. On September 15th the Bulgarian Peace Treaty officially came into force and four days later the USA offered to extend diplomatic recognition to the government in Sofia. Within 96 hours Petkov was executed, his sentence having been delayed until the official American announcement. With Petkov judicially murdered, the Bulgarian Communists need fear no further impediments. As the Soviet general Biryuzov observed in retrospect, discussing Red Army support for the Bulgarian Communists against the ‘bourgeois’ parties: ‘We did not have the right to withhold assistance to the efforts of the Bulgarian people to crush this reptile.’
In Romania, the Communists’ position was even weaker than Bulgaria, where at least there was a history of philo-Russian sentiment on which the Party could try to draw.33 Although the Soviets guaranteed the return to Romania of northern Translyvania (assigned to Hungary under duress in 1940), Stalin had no intention of returning Bessarabia or the Bukovina, both incorporated into the USSR, nor the Southern Dobrudja region of south-east Romania now attached to Bulgaria: as a consequence, the Romanian Communists were forced to justify a significant territorial loss, much as, during the inter-war years, they had been hobbled by the Soviet claim on Bessarabia, then Romanian territory.
Worse, the Romanian Communist leaders were frequently not even Romanian, at least by traditional Romanian criteria. Ana Pauker was Jewish, Emil Bodnaras was Ukrainian, Vasile Luca was of Transylvanian German background. Others were Hungarian or Bulgarian. Perceived as an alien presence, the Romanian Communists were utterly dependent on the Soviet forces. Their domestic survival rested not upon winning the popular vote—never remotely considered as a practical objective—but upon the speed and efficiency with which they could occupy the state and divide and destroy their opponents in the ‘historic’ parties of the Liberal center, a task at which they proved decidedly adept—as early as March 1948 the government list won 405 out of 414 seats in national elections. In Romania as in Bulgaria (or Albania, where Enver Hodxa mobilized the southern Tosk communities against tribal resistance from the northern Ghegs), subversion and violence were not one option among others—they were the only road to power.
The Poles, too, were fore-doomed to the Soviet sphere after World War Two. This was because of their location, on the route from Berlin to Moscow; their history, as longstanding impediments to Russian imperial ambitions in the west; and because in Poland, too, the prospects of a Soviet-friendly government emerging spontaneously by popular choice were minimal. The difference between Poland and the Balkan states, however, was that Poland had been a victim of Hitler, not his ally; hundreds of thousands of Polish soldiers had fought with the Allied armies on Eastern and Western fronts; and the Poles nursed expectations about their postwar prospects.
As it transpired, those prospects were not so very bad. The Polish Communists in the so-called ‘Lublin Committee’—set up in July 1944 by the Soviet authorities so that they would have a ready-made government to put in office when they reached Warsaw—could hardly claim a mass base, but they had a degree of local support, especially among the young, and they could point to some real benefits of Soviet ‘friendship’: an effective guarantee against German territorial revanchism (a genuine consideration at the time) and a policy of national exchanges whereby Poland was ‘cleansed’ of its remaining Ukrainian minority and ethnic Poles from the east were resettled within the new national frontiers. These considerations allowed Polish Communists, for all their marginality (many of them, too, were of Jewish origin), to claim a place in Polish national and even nationalist political traditions.
Nevertheless, Poland’s Communists too would always have been an insignificant minority in electoral terms. The Polish Peasant Party of Stanislaw Mikołajczyk counted some 600,000 members in December 1945, ten times the number of
activists in the Communists’ Polish Workers’ Party (the Polish United Workers’ Party after its absorption of the Socialists in December 1948). But Mikołajczyk, prime minister of the wartime government-in-exile, was fatally handicapped by his party’s characteristically Polish insistence on being both anti-Nazi and anti-Soviet.
Stalin was more or less indifferent to the success of ‘Socialism’ in Poland, as later events would reveal. But he was far from indifferent to the general tenor of Polish policy, especially Polish foreign policy. Indeed, together with the outcome of the German standoff, it was more important to him than anything else, at least in Europe. Accordingly the Peasant Party was steadily edged aside, its supporters threatened, its leaders attacked, its credibility impugned. In the blatantly rigged Polish parliamentary elections of January 1947, the Communist-led ‘Democratic bloc’ obtained 80 percent of the votes, the Peasant Party just 10 percent.34 Nine months later, in fear of his life, Mikołajczyk fled the country. Remnants of the wartime Home Army continued to fight a guerilla war with the Communist authorities for a few more years, but theirs, too, was a hopeless cause.
In Poland, the Soviet Union had so obvious an interest in the political complexion of the country that the Poles’ wartime illusions—before and after Yalta—can seem quixotic. In Hungary, however, notions of a ‘Hungarian road to Socialism’ were not altogether fanciful. Hungary’s chief post-war interest for Moscow was as a safe conduit for Red Army troops, should these need to move west into Austria (or—later—south into Yugoslavia). Had there been widespread public support for the local Communists their Soviet advisers might have been willing to play out the ‘democratic’ tactic longer than they did.
But in Hungary, too, the Communists proved consistently unpopular, even in Budapest. Despite being targeted as reactionary and even Fascist, the Smallholders Party (Hungary’s equivalent of Agrarian parties elsewhere) secured an absolute majority in the national elections of November 1945. With the backing of the Socialists (whose leader Anna Kéthly refused to believe that the Communists would stoop to election-rigging), the Communists succeeded in expelling some of the Smallholder deputies from parliament and charged them in February 1947 with conspiracy and, in the case of their leader Béla Kovács, espionage against the Red Army (Kovács was sent to Siberia, whence he returned in 1956). In new elections in August 1947, shamelessly falsified by the Communist Interior Minister László Rajk, the Communists still managed to secure only 22 percent of the vote, although the Smallholders were duly reduced to a 15 percent share. In these circumstances Hungary’s road to Socialism converged rapidly with that of its eastern neighbours. By the next elections, in May 1949, the ‘People’s Front’ was credited with 95.6 percent of the vote.
It is easy, in retrospect, to see that hopes for a democratic Eastern Europe after 1945 were always forlorn. Central and Eastern Europe had few indigenous democratic or liberal traditions. The inter-war regimes in this part of Europe had been corrupt, authoritarian and in some cases murderous. The old ruling castes were frequently venal. The real governing class in inter-war Eastern Europe was the bureaucracy, recruited from the same social groups who would furnish the administrative cadre of the Communist states. For all the rhetoric of ‘Socialism’, the transition from authoritarian backwardness to Communist ‘popular democracy’ was a short move and an easy one. It is not so very surprising that history took the turn it did.
Moreover the alternative of a return to the politicians and policies of pre-1939 Romania or Poland or Hungary significantly weakened the anti-Communist case, at least until the full force of Soviet terror was felt after 1949. After all, as the French Communist leader Jacques Duclos slyly asked in the Communist daily l’Humanité on July 1st 1948, was not the Soviet Union these countries’ best guarantee not just against a return to the bad old days but of their very national independence? That was indeed the way it seemed to many at the time. As Churchill observed: ‘One day the Germans would want their territory back and the Poles would not be able to stop them.’ The Soviet Union was now the self-appointed protector of the new borders of Romania and Poland, not to speak of the redistributed land of expelled Germans and others all across the region.
This was a reminder, as though it were needed, of the omnipresence of the Red Army. The 37th Army of the 3rd Ukrainian Front was detached from the forces occupying Romania in September 1944 and stationed in Bulgaria, where it remained until the Peace Treaties were signed in 1947. Soviet forces remained in Hungary until the mid-Fifties (and again after 1956), in Romania until 1958. The German Democratic Republic was under Soviet military occupation throughout its forty-year life and Soviet troops transited regularly across Poland. The Soviet Union was not about to leave this part of Europe, whose future was thus intimately bound up with the fate of its giant neighbour, as events were to show.
The apparent exception was of course Czechoslovakia. Many Czechs welcomed the Russians as liberators. Thanks to Munich they had few illusions about the Western powers and Edvard Beneš’s London-based government-in-exile was the only one that made unambivalent overtures to Moscow well before 1945. As Beneš himself expressed his position to Molotov in December 1943, ‘in regard to issues of major importance, [we] . . . would always speak and act in a fashion agreeable to the representatives of the Soviet government.’ Beneš may not have been as alert as his mentor, the late President Tomáš Masaryk, to the risks of a Russian or Soviet embrace, but he was not a fool either. Prague was going to be friendly with Moscow for the same reason it had sought close links to Paris before 1938: because Czechoslovakia was a small, vulnerable country in central Europe and needed a protector.
Thus despite being in many ways the most western of ‘eastern’ European countries—with a historically pluralist political culture, a significant urban and industrial sector, a flourishing capitalist economy before the war and a Western-oriented social-democratic policy after it—Czechoslovakia was also the Soviet Union’s closest ally in the region after 1945, in spite of losing its easternmost district of sub-Carpathian Ruthenia to Soviet territorial ‘adjustments’. That is why Beneš, alone of the east- and south-east European wartime prime-ministers-in-exile, was able to bring his government home—where, in April 1945, he reconfigured it with seven Communists and eleven ministers from the other four parties.
The Czech Communists under their leader Klement Gottwald genuinely believed that their chances of coming to power through the ballot box were good. They had made a respectable showing at the last pre-war Czechoslovak elections, obtaining 849,000 votes (10 percent of the total) in 1935. They were not dependent on the Red Army, which withdrew from Czechoslovakia in November 1945 (though in Prague as elsewhere the Soviet Union maintained a significant intelligence and secret police presence through its diplomatic establishment). In the genuinely free, albeit psychologically fraught Czechoslovak elections of May 1946, the Communist Party won 40.2 percent of the vote in the Czech districts of Bohemia and Moravia, 31 percent in largely rural and Catholic Slovakia. Only the Slovak Democrat Party did better, and its appeal was by definition confined to the Slovak third of the population. 35
The Czech Communists anticipated continuing success, which is why they initially welcomed the prospect of Marshall Aid and undertook recruitment drives to bolster their prospects at future polls—party membership of some 50,000 in May 1945 rose to 1,220,000 in April 1946 and reached 1,310,000 in January 1948 (in a national population of just 12 million). The Communists were certainly not beyond using patronage and pressure to secure support. And, as elsewhere, they had taken the precaution of obtaining the vital ministries and placing their men in crucial positions within the police and elsewhere. But in anticipation of the elections of 1948 the homegrown Communists of Czechoslovakia were preparing to come to full power by a ‘Czech road’ that still looked quite different from those to the east.
Whether the Soviet leadership believed Gottwald’s assurances that the Czechoslovak Communist Party would triumph unaided is unclear. But
at least until the autumn of 1947 Stalin left Czechoslovakia alone. The Czechs had expelled the Sudeten Germans (which exposed them to German hostility and thus made their country even more dependent on Soviet protection) and the emphasis in Beneš’s post-war governments on economic planning, state ownership and hard work reminded at least one French journalist in May 1947 of the rhetoric and mood of early Soviet stakhanovism. Prague billboards carried portraits of Stalin alongside those of President Benes himself, long before the Communists had even established a government of their own, much less secured a monopoly of power. We have seen that Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk and his colleagues did not hesitate, in the summer of 1947, to decline Marshall Aid at Moscow’s behest. Stalin, in short, had nothing to complain of in Czechoslovak behaviour.
Nevertheless, in February 1948 the Communists engineered a political coup in Prague, taking advantage of the imprudent resignation of non-Communist ministers (over an important but obscure issue of Communist infiltration of the police) to seize control of the country. The Prague coup was of enormous significance, precisely because it came in a more or less democratic country that had seemed so friendly to Moscow. It galvanized the Western allies, who inferred from it that Communism was on the march westwards.36 It probably saved the Finns: thanks to the problems that the Czech coup caused him in Germany and elsewhere, Stalin was forced in April 1948 to compromise with Helsinki and sign a Friendship Treaty (having initially tried to impose on Finland an eastern-European solution by splitting the Social Democrats, forcing them to merge with the Communists in a ‘Finnish People’s Defense League’—and thus bringing the latter to power).