by Tony Judt
From the Soviet point of view, Polish opposition was an annoyance—remnants of the Polish wartime underground carried on a guerilla war against the Communist regime until at least the end of the 1940s—and seemingly undeserved. Had not the Poles gained 40,000 square miles of rather good agricultural land in exchange for the 69,000 square miles of eastern marshes transferred to the USSR after the war? And was not Moscow the Poles’ (only) guarantee against a Germany whose revival everyone anticipated? Moreover Poland was now free of its pre-war minorities: the Jews had been murdered by the Germans, and the Germans and Ukrainians had been expelled by the Soviets. If Poland was now more ‘Polish’ than at any time in its complicated history, it had Moscow to thank.
But inter-state relations, above all in the Soviet bloc, did not hinge on gratitude or its absence. Poland’s use value to Moscow was above all as a buffer against German or Western aggression. It was desirable that Poland become socialist, but it was imperative that it remain stable and reliable. In return for Polish domestic calm Stalin was willing to tolerate a class of independent farmers, however inefficient and ideologically untidy, and a publicly active Catholic Church, in ways that would have been unimaginable further south or east. Polish universities were also left virtually intact, in contrast to the purges that stripped out the teaching staff of higher educational institutions in neighbouring Czechoslovakia and elsewhere.
The other exception, of course, was Yugoslavia. Until the Stalin-Tito split, Yugoslavia was, as we have seen, the most ‘advanced’ of all the east European states along the path to socialism. Tito’s first Five Year Plan outdid Stalin by aiming at a higher rate of industrial investment than anywhere else in the Soviet bloc. Seven thousand collective farms had been set up before collectivization had even begun in the other satellite states; and post-war Yugoslavia was well on the way to outdoing Moscow itself in the efficiency and ubiquity of its apparatus of repression. The partisans’ wartime security services were expanded into a full-scale police network whose task, in Tito’s words, was ‘to strike terror into the hearts of those who do not like this sort of Yugoslavia.’
Yugoslavia’s per capita income at the time of the break with Stalin was the lowest in Europe save for neighboring Albania; an already impoverished land had been beaten into penury in the course of four years of occupation and civil war. The bitter heritage of Yugoslavia’s war experience was further complicated by its ethnic composition, the last genuinely multi-national state in Europe: according to the 1946 census Yugoslavia’s 15.7 million people comprised 6.5 million Serbs, 3.8 million Croats, 1.4 million Slovenes, 800,000 Muslims (mostly in Bosnia), 800,000 Macedonians, 750,000 Albanians, 496,000 Hungarians, 400,000 Montenegrins, 100,000 Vlachs and an uncertain number of Bulgars, Czechs, Germans, Italians, Romanians, Russians, Greeks, Turks, Jews and Gypsies.
Of these only Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, Montenegrins and Macedonians were accorded separate recognition under the 1946 Constitution, though encouraged to see themselves, like all the others, as ‘Yugoslavs’.49 As Yugoslavs, their prospects seemed grim indeed. Writing from Belgrade to a Greek friend at the end of the 1940s, Lawrence Durrell had this to say of the country: ‘Conditions are rather gloomy here—almost mid-war conditions, overcrowding, poverty. As for Communism—my dear Theodore a short visit here is enough to make one decide that Capitalism is worth fighting for. Black as it may be, with all its bloodstains, it is less gloomy and arid and hopeless than this inert and ghastly police state.’
In the initial months following the split with Stalin, Tito actually became more radical, more ‘Bolshevik’, as if to prove the legitimacy of his claim and the mendacity of his Soviet critics. But the posture could never have been sustained very long. Without external help, and faced with the very real prospect of Soviet invasion, he turned to the West for aid. In September 1949 the US Export-Import Bank loaned Belgrade $20 million. The following month Yugoslavia borrowed $3 million from the International Monetary Fund, and in December of that same year signed a trade agreement with Great Britain and received $8 million in credits.
The Soviet threat forced Tito to increase his defense spending (as a share of Yugoslavia’s meager national income) from 9.4 percent in 1948 to 16.7 percent in 1950; the country’s munitions industries were moved for safety into the mountains of Bosnia (a matter of some consequence in the wars of the 1990s). In 1950 the US Congress, now convinced of Yugoslavia’s possible significance in the global Cold War, offered a further $50 million in aid under the Yugoslav Emergency Relief Act of 1950, and followed this in November 1951 with an accord that allowed Yugoslavia to receive military aid under the terms of the Mutual Security Act. By 1953 the Yugoslav national deficit on current account was fully covered by American aid; over the course of the years 1949-55 Tito’s aid from all Western sources amounted to $1.2 billion, of which just $55 million was repaid. The stand-off over Trieste, which had bedeviled Yugoslavia’s relations with Italy and the West since May 1945, was finally resolved in a Memorandum of Understanding signed by Yugoslavia, Italy, Britain and the US on October 5th 1954.
Western aid allowed the Yugoslav regime to continue favoring heavy industry and defense, as it had been doing before the 1948 split. But while the League of Yugoslav Communists retained all the reins of authoritarian power, the ultra-Bolshevism of the post-war years was abandoned. By the spring of 1951 only the postal service, together with rail, air and river transport, was left under federal (i.e. central government) control. Other services, and all economic enterprises, were in the hands of the separate republics. By 1954, 80 percent of agricultural land was back in private hands, following a March 30th 1953 decree permitting peasants to withdraw themselves and their land from the collective. Of the 7,000 collective farms, just 1,000 remained.
Stalin had emerged from his victory over Hitler far stronger even than before, basking in the reflected glory of ‘his’ Red Army, at home and abroad. The personality cult around the Soviet dictator, already well advanced before the war, now rose to its apogee. Popular Soviet documentaries on World War Two showed Stalin winning the war virtually single-handed, planning strategy and directing battles with not a general in sight. In almost every sphere of life, from dialectics to botany, Stalin was declared the supreme and unchallenged authority. Soviet biologists were instructed to adopt the theories of the charlatan Lysenko, who promised Stalin undreamed-of agricultural improvements if his theories about the inheritability of acquired characteristics were officially adopted and applied to Soviet farming—as they were, to disastrous effect.50 On his 70th birthday in December 1949 Stalin’s image, picked out by searchlights hung from balloons, lit the night sky over the Kremlin. Poets outdid one another in singing the Leader’s praises—a 1951 couplet by the Latvian poet V. Lukss is representative:
Like beautiful red yarn into our hearts we wove,
Stalin, our brother and father, your name.
This obsequious neo-Byzantine anointing of the despot, the attribution to him of near-magical powers, unfolded against a steadily darkening backdrop of tyranny and terror. In the last years of the war, under the cloak of Russian nationalism, Stalin expelled east to Siberia and Central Asia a variety of small nations from western and south-western border regions, the Caucasus in particular: Chechens, Ingush, Karachays, Nalkars, Kalmyks, Crimean Tatars and others, in the wake of the Volga Germans deported in 1941. This brutal treatment of small nations was hardly new—Poles and Balts had been exiled east by the hundreds of thousands between 1939 and 1941, Ukrainians in the 1930s and others before them, back to 1921.
The initial post-war trials of collaborators and traitors across the region echoed nationalist sentiment as well. Peasant party leaders in Poland, Hungary and Bulgaria were arrested, tried and shot between 1945 and 1947 for a mixed bag of real and imaginary crimes, ranging from Fascist sympathies through wartime collaboration to spying for the West; but in every case prosecutors took particular care to impugn their patriotism and credibility as representatives of the Bulgarian/Hungari
an /Polish ‘people’. Socialists who refused the embrace of the Communist Party, like the Bulgarian Krastyn Partakhov (tried in 1946 and sentenced to prison where he died three years later), were also singled out for punishment as enemies of the people.
What is striking about the non-Communist victims of these early public trials is that—with the exception of those who really had thrown in their lot with the Germans and whose activities were thus common knowledge—they conspicuously refused to plead guilty or confess to their alleged ‘anti-national’ crimes. In the palpably rigged Sofia show trial of Agrarian Party leader Nikola Petkov and his ‘co-conspirators’, in August 1947, four out of the five accused proclaimed their innocence in spite of torture and false testimony.51
With the Yugoslav crisis of 1948, Stalin’s attitude shifted. As an alternative to Moscow, Belgrade had a certain appeal to many. Unlike Stalin, Tito posed no imperial threat (except within the local Balkan context); and by liberating his country and leading it to Communism with no help from Moscow, the Yugoslav leader had set an attractive precedent for any Communist in eastern Europe still tempted to ground a local revolution in national sentiment. Stalin was notoriously paranoid about threats to his monopoly of power; but that does not mean that he was altogether mistaken to see in Tito and ‘Tito-ism’ a genuine danger. Henceforward, therefore, nationalism (‘small-state nationalism’, ‘bourgeois nationalism’) ceased to be a local asset and became instead the main enemy. The term ‘nationalist’ was first deployed pejoratively in Communist rhetoric at the June 1948 meeting of the Cominform to condemn the Yugoslav ‘deviation’.
But with all domestic non-Communist opponents now dead, imprisoned or in exile, to what genuine risks was the Soviet monopoly of power exposed? Intellectuals could be bought off or intimidated. The military were firmly under the thumb of the occupying Soviet forces. Mass popular protest posed the only significant threat to Communist regimes, as it would seriously erode the credentials of the ‘worker and peasant’ state. But in their early years the Peoples’ Democracies were by no means always unpopular with the proletarians they claimed to represent. On the contrary: the destruction of the middle classes and the expulsion of ethnic minorities opened prospects of upward mobility for rural peasants, industrial workers and their children.
Opportunities abounded, particularly at the lower rungs of the ladder and in government employ: there were jobs to be had, apartments to be occupied at subsidized rents, places in schools reserved for the children of workers and closed to the children of the ‘bourgeoisie’. Competence mattered less than political reliability, employment was guaranteed, and the burgeoning Communist bureaucracy sought out reliable men and women for everything from block organizer to police interrogator.52 Most of the population of Soviet eastern Europe, especially in the more backward regions, accepted their fate without protest, at least in these years.
The two best-known exceptions to this generalization both occurred in the most urban and advanced corners of the bloc: in industrial Bohemia and in the streets of Soviet-occupied Berlin. The ‘currency reform’ of May 31st 1953 in Czechoslovakia, ostensibly ‘a crushing blow against the former capitalists’, had the effect of cutting industrial wages by 12 percent (because of the price rises that followed). Together with the steadily worsening working conditions in what had once been an advanced industrial economy based on well-remunerated skilled labor, this triggered mass demonstrations by 20,000 workers at the Škoda plant in Plzeň, a major industrial center in western Bohemia, followed by a march on the city hall, on June 1st 1953, by thousands of workers carrying portraits of Beneš and pre-war president Tomáš Masaryk.
The Plzeň demonstrations, confined to one provincial city, fizzled out. But a few days later a far larger protest was sparked off a few dozen miles to the north by substantial(unpaid) increases in the German Democratic Republic’s official work norms. These were imposed by an unpopular regime, already (and not for the last time) far more rigid than its Soviet masters in Moscow, whose advice to the East German Communist leadership to accept reforms and compromises to stem the hemorrhage of skilled workers to the West had been ignored. On June 16th some 400,000 workers went on strike across East Germany, with the biggest demonstrations in Berlin itself.
As with the Plzeň protesters, the German workers were easily put down by the Volkspolizei, but not without cost. Nearly three hundred were killed when Red Army tanks were called in; many thousands more were arrested, of whom 1,400 were given long prison sentences. Two hundred ‘ringleaders’ were shot. The Berlin Uprising was the occasion for Berthold Brecht’s only overt literary dissent from the Communist regime to which he had—somewhat ambivalently—committed himself:
Following the June Seventeenth uprising
the secretary of the Writers’ League
had leaflets distributed on Stalin Allee
where one could read that the people
had forfeited the confidence of the government
and could regain it only through redoubled efforts.
Wouldn’t it be simpler under these circumstances
for the government to dissolve the people
and elect another one?
Angry, disaffected workers on the industrialized western edge of the Soviet empire were a poor advertisement for Communism, but they hardly represented a threat to Soviet power—and it is not coincidental that both the Plzeň and Berlin uprisings took place after Stalin’s death. In Stalin’s time the truly threatening challenge came, as it seemed, from within the Communist apparatus itself. This was the real implication of the Yugoslav schism, and it was in direct response to ‘Titoism’ that Stalin thus reverted to earlier methods, updated and adapted to circumstances. From 1948 through 1954, the Communist world underwent a second generation of arrests, purges and, above all, political ‘show trials’.
The chief precedent for the purges and trials of these years was of course the Soviet Terror of the 1930s. Then, too, the main victims had been Communists themselves, the goal being to purge the Party of ‘traitors’ and other challenges to the policy and person of the General Secretary. In the 1930s the presumptive ringleader was Leon Trotsky—like Tito, a genuine Communist hero un-beholden to Stalin and with views of his own about Communist strategy and practice. The Terror of the thirties had secured and illustrated Stalin’s untrammeled power and authority, and the purges of the post-war years would serve a similar objective in Eastern Europe.
But whereas the Moscow Trials of the 1930s, particularly the 1938 trial of Nikolai Bukharin, had been sui generis, theatrical innovations whose shock value lay in the grisly spectacle of the Revolution consuming not just its children but its very architects, the trials and purges of later decades were shameless copies, deliberately modeled on past Soviet practice, as though the satellite regimes hardly merited even an effort at verisimilitude. And they came, after all, at the end of a long string of judicial purges.
In addition to the post-war trials for treason and the political trials of anti-Communist politicians, the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe had used the courts to punish and close down the churches everywhere except Poland, where open confrontation with the Catholic Church was deemed too risky. In 1949 the leaders of the United Protestant Church in Bulgaria were tried for conspiracy to ‘restore capitalism’. The previous year the Uniate Church in Romania was forcibly merged with the more pliable Romanian Orthodox church by the new Communist regime, in keeping with a long tradition of persecution reaching back to the Russian czars of the eighteenth-century. Selected Catholic priests were tried on two separate occasions in Prague on charges of spying for the Vatican (and the USA), receiving sentences ranging from ten years to life imprisonment; by the early 1950s there were eight thousand monks and nuns in Czechoslovak prisons. Monsignor Grosz, who succeeded the imprisoned Cardinal Mindszenty as head of the Catholic Church in Hungary in January 1949, was found guilty of working to restore the Habsburgs and of plotting with Titoists to arm Hungarian Fascists.
T
he trials of Communists themselves fell into two distinct groups. The first, beginning in 1948 and lasting through 1950, were immediate responses to the Tito-Stalin rift. In Albania, Communist Interior Minister Koçi Xoxe was tried in May-June 1949, found guilty and hanged the following month. Charged with Titoism, Xoxe had the distinction of really having been a supporter of Tito and his plans for the Balkans, at a time when these had Moscow’s backing. In this respect his case was a little unusual, as was the fact that it was handled in secret.
The Albanian trial was followed by the arrest, trial and execution in Bulgaria of Traicho Kostov, one of the founders of the Bulgarian Communist Party. Kostov, crippled by his sufferings at the hands of Bulgaria’s inter-war rulers53, was if anything a known opponent of Tito and critic of the latter’s plans to absorb Bulgaria into a Balkan Federation (Tito disliked Kostov and the sentiment was mutual). But Stalin distrusted him anyway—Kostov had imprudently criticized a Soviet-Bulgarian economic agreement as unfavorable to his country—and he was an ideal candidate for a trial intended to illustrate the crimes of nationalism.
He and his ‘group’ (‘The Treacherous Espionage and Wrecking Group of TraichoKostov’) were charged in December 1949 with collaboration with pre-war Bulgarian Fascists, espionage on behalf of British intelligence and conspiring with Tito. After finally giving in under sustained torture and signing his ‘confession’ of guilt, Kostov refused to speak the pre-agreed text in his courtroom appearance, publicly retracted his statement to his interrogators and was carried out of the courtroom protesting his innocence. Two days later, on December 16th 1949, Kostov was hanged, and his ‘co-conspirators’ sentenced to long imprisonment in accordance with decisions taken by Stalin and his police chief Lavrenti Beria before the trial had begun. Kostov’s case was unusual in that he was the only East European Communist who retracted his confession and protested his innocence at a public trial. This caused some minor international embarrassment for the regime (Kostov’s trial was broadcast on radio and widely reported in the West) and instructions were given that this must never happen again. It did not.