by Tony Judt
But Yugoslavia was different all the same: not necessarily kinder to its critics, as Djilas and others found to their cost when dissenting from Titoist orthodoxy,177 but more flexible in handling the needs and wants of the population at large (not least thanks to Western aid). When the Yugoslav essayist Dubravka Ugrešić writes of her nostalgia for the lost Yugoslavia of her youth, what comes to mind are ‘real “winkle-pickers”, plastic macs, the first nylon underwear . . . the first trip to Trieste.’ Such a checklist of cheap consumer goods would have been much less to the fore in Bulgarian or Romanian memory, for example—and the ‘first trip to Trieste’ would have been quite out of the question. Yugoslavs were not prosperous and they were not free; but nor were they imprisoned in a hermetic system. ‘Titoism’ was oppressive rather than repressive. At the time this distinction mattered.
A third route to stability was ‘national Stalinism’, This was the Albanian option—a closed, impoverished society under the absolute rule of a local Party autocrat, paranoid and all-powerful. But it was also, increasingly, the Romanian model too. Nikita Khrushchev, who actively disliked Romania (a sentiment widespread in his generation of Russians), had sought to assign it a uniquely agricultural role in the international Communist distribution of labor. But the Bucharest Party leaders had no intention of being reduced to supplying raw materials and food to more prosperous and advanced Communist economies.
Having played an accommodating role in the imprisonment and suppression of the Hungarian revolt, the Romanians secured the withdrawal of Soviet forces from Romanian territory in 1958 and took an increasingly independent path. Under Dej and (from 1965) Ceauşescu, Romania declined to get involved in Moscow’s quarrels with China and even refused to allow Warsaw Pact maneuvers on its territory. The Romanian leaders made overtures to Tito (whose own relations with the Warsaw Pact were formal rather than friendly), Dej even addressing the Yugoslav National Assembly in 1963; and they underwrote Romania’s neo-Stalinist industrialization with money and machinery obtained from Western Europe. Romania’s dealings with the West steadily increased; while trade with Comecon countries fell—from 70 percent of Romania’s overall foreign trade at the start of the 1960s to 45 percent ten years later.
This much trumpeted ‘Romania-first’ strategy was not unpopular at home—indeed, one of the ways Romania’s Communist Party had compensated in office for its distinctly un-Romanian origins was to wrap itself in the mantle of nationalism. Dej began this, and Ceauşescu merely went further still. But the strategy was even more successful abroad. Whereas Albania, China’s European surrogate, held no attraction for anyone save nostalgic Stalinists and ultra-besotted Maoists, the international image of Communist Romania was curiously positive. Simply by distancing themselves from Moscow, the men in Bucharest gleaned a host of unlikely Western admirers. The Economist, in August 1966, called Ceauşescu ‘the De Gaulle of Eastern Europe.’
As for De Gaulle himself, on a visit to Bucharest in May 1968 he observed that while Ceauşescu’s Communism would not be appropriate for the West, it was probably well suited to Romania: “Chez vous un tel régime est utile, car il fait marcher les gens et fait avancer les choses.” (“For you such a regime is useful, it gets people moving and gets things done.”). De Gaulle was doubtless right that Romanian Communism would not have been appropriate for the West. Communism in Romania was peculiarly vicious and repressive: by distancing themselves from the Soviet Union after 1958 Dej and Ceauşescu were also freeing themselves of any need to echo the de-Stalinization and reforms associated with the Khrushchev era. In contrast to other satellite states Romania allowed no space for any internal opposition—Bucharest intellectuals in the Sixties, cut off from their own society, played no part in domestic debates (there were none) and had to be satisfied with reading the latest nouveaux romans from Paris and participating vicariously in a cosmopolitan French culture for which educated Romanians had always claimed a special affinity.
But far from condemning the Romanian dictators, Western governments gave them every encouragement, After Romania breached the Soviet veto and formally recognized West Germany in January 1967, relations grew warmer still: Richard Nixon became the first US President to visit a Communist state when he went to Bucharest in August 1969. National Communism—‘He may be a Commie but he’s our Commie’—paid off for Ceauşescu: in due course Romania was the first Warsaw Pact state to enter GATT (in 1971), the World Bank and the IMF (1972), to receive European Community trading preferences (1973) and US Most-Favored-Nation status (1975).178
What Western diplomats thought they saw in Bucharest’s anti-Russian autocrats were the germs of a new Tito: stable, biddable and more interested in local power than international disruption. In one sense, at least, they were correct. Tito and Ceauşescu, like Kádár and the neo-Stalinist leadership in the GDR, successfully negotiated the shoals of the Sixties. Each in his own way, they assured their authority and control at home while maintaining at least a modus vivendi with Moscow. The Communist leaders in Warsaw and Prague had no such success.
The peaceful outcome to the Polish uprisings of 1956 had been achieved at a price. While Catholic institutions and writers were permitted in Gomułka’s Poland, opposition within the Party itself was severely constrained. The Polish United Workers’ Party remained deeply conservative, even though it had successfully avoided violent purges in the Stalin years. Nervous at the prospect of a re-run of the disturbances of 1956, the Party leadership treated any criticism of its policies as a direct threat to its political monopoly. The result was deep frustration among ‘revisionist’ intellectuals, not just at the regime in general but at the lost opportunity for a new direction, the unfinished business of the Polish October.
In the summer of 1964, two graduate students at Warsaw University, Jacek Kuroń and Karel Modzelewski, drafted an academic critique of the political and economic system of People’s Poland. Their dissertation was unimpeachably Marxist in tone and content, but that did not stop them being expelled from the Party and the Union of Socialist Youth and being denounced in official circles for spreading anti-Party propaganda. Their response was to publish an Open Letter to the Party, submitted to the Warsaw University Party branch in March 1965. In the Letter the authors depicted a bureaucratic, autocratic regime, deaf to the interests of all but the ruling elite that it served, ruling incompetently over an impoverished working population and censoring all commentary and criticism. Poland’s only hope, Kuroń and Modzelewski concluded, was a genuine revolution, based on workers’ councils, freedom of the press and the abolition of the political police.
The day after presenting their Letter the two men were arrested and charged with advocating the overthrow of the state. On July 19th 1965 they were sentenced to prison terms of three and three and a half years respectively. The authorities were particularly sensitive to the impeccably Marxist terms of their critique, its effective use of social data to point up the regime’s shabby economic performance, and its call for a workers’ revolution to replace the current bureaucratic dictatorship (a neo-Trotskyist touch that did not help the authors’ case179). Above all, perhaps, the Party was determined to head off precisely the combination of intellectual diagnosis and proletarian action for which the Kuroń-Modzelewski letter called.
The Kuroń-Modzelewski Affair sparked a heartfelt response in the university. The secret trial of the two students came as a shock, and there were demands not merely for their release but for their Letter and earlier research paper to be made public. Senior scholars took up their case. Leszek Kołakowski, professor of philosophy at Warsaw University, addressed students of the History Institute the following year, on the 10th anniversary of the Polish Party’s plenary session of October 1956. The Polish October was a missed opportunity, he explained. Ten years later Poland was a land of privilege, inefficiency and censorship. The Communists had lost touch with the nation, and the repression of Kuroń, Modzelewski and the criticisms they espoused was a sign of the Party’s—and the country�
�s—decline.
Kołakowski was duly expelled from the Party as a ‘bourgeois-liberal’, though his colleagues at Warsaw University valiantly asserted his internationally recognized Marxist credentials. Twenty-two prominent Polish Communist writers and intellectuals then wrote to the Central Committee defending ‘Comrade Kołakowski’ as the spokesman of a ‘free and authentic socialist culture and democracy.’ They in turn were expelled from the Party. By the spring of 1967 the clumsy Polish leadership, enraged by criticism from its Left, had succeeded in forging a genuine intellectual opposition; and Warsaw University had become a center of student revolt—in the name of free speech and in defense, among other things, of their persecuted professors.
The issue of free speech at Warsaw University took an additional twist in January 1968. Since late November 1967 the University theatre had been running a production of Forefathers’ Eve, a play by Adam Mickiewicz, Poland’s national poet. Written in 1832 but dangerously contemporary in its portrayal of nineteenth-century rebels struggling against oppression, the play had attracted lively and distinctly engaged audiences. In late January the Communist authorities announced that the play would have to be cancelled. Following the last performance, hundreds of students marched to the Mickiewicz monument in the Polish capital denouncing censorship and demanding ‘free theater’. Two of the students, Henryk Szlajfer and Adam Michnik, described the situation to Le Monde’s Warsaw correspondent, whose report was then carried on Radio Free Europe: Michnik and his colleague were duly expelled from the University.
The response was a wave of student-organized petitions to the Polish Parliament, sympathetic resolutions at the Warsaw branch of the Polish Writers’ Association and speeches by Kołakowski and other prominent professors and writers in defense of the students. One writer publicly denounced the Communists’ treatment of culture as ‘the dictatorship of the dumb’. On March 8th a meeting of students in Warsaw University to protest the expulsion of Michnik and Szlajfer was violently broken up by police. There followed nationwide student demonstrations three days later and a strike at Warsaw University itself. Neo-Stalinist circles within the Party began to speak ominously of the Party’s loss of control, some of them even alerting Moscow to the dangers of Czechoslovak-style ‘revisionism’.
The Gomułka regime struck back decisively. The strike and ensuing protests were crushed with considerable violence—enough to provoke one Politburo member and two senior cabinet ministers to resign in protest. Thirty-four more students and six professors (including Kołakowski) were dismissed from Warsaw University. Then, following the crushing of the Prague Spring in neighboring Czechoslovakia (see below), the authorities arrested the organizers of protests and petitions against the Soviet invasion and brought them to trial. In a long series of trials held between September 1968 and May 1969, students and other intellectuals from Warsaw, Wrocław, Cracow and Łodz were sentenced to terms ranging from six months to three years for ‘participation in secret organizations’, ‘distribution of anti-State publications’ and other crimes. The harshest sentences were handed out to those like Adam Michnik, Jan Litynski and Barbara Toruńczyk who had also been active in the initial student protests.
A disproportionate number of the students and professors arrested, expelled and imprisoned in Poland in the years 1967-69 were of Jewish origin, and this was not a coincidence. Ever since Gomułka’s return to power in 1956, the conservative (neo-Stalinist) wing of the Polish Party had been seeking an occasion to undo even the limited liberalizations he had introduced. Under the direction of Mieczysław Moczar, the Interior Minister, this inner-party opposition had coalesced around the cause of anti-Semitism.
From Stalin’s death until 1967, anti-Semitism—though endemic in eastern Europe and the Soviet Union itself—was kept out of official Communist rhetoric. After the war most of Eastern Europe’s surviving Jews had gone west, or to Israel. Of those who remained, many fled, if they could, in the course of the persecutions of Stalin’s last years. There were still substantial communities of Jews remaining, in Poland and (especially) Hungary; but most of these were not practicing Jews and typically did not think of themselves as Jewish at all. In the case of those born after the war, they often did not even know that they were—their parents had thought it prudent to keep quiet.180
In Poland especially, the still considerable numbers of Jewish Communists—some of them holding political office, others in universities and the professions—were mostly indifferent to their Jewish background, some of them naïve enough to suppose that their indifference was shared by Poles at large. But they offered an irresistible target for anyone seeking a route to power within the Party and demagogic popularity in the country at large.181 All that was lacking was the opportunity, and the Six Day War between Israel and its Arab neighbors duly afforded this in June 1967. Soviet support for the Arab cause legitimized vocal criticism of Israel, Zionism—and Jews.
Thus in a speech on June 19th 1967, condemning those who had backed Israel in the recent conflict, Gomułka brazenly conflated his Jewish critics and the Zionist state: ‘I wish to announce that we shall not prevent Polish citizens of Jewish nationality from returning [sic] to Israel if they wish to do so. Our position is that every Polish citizen should have one country: the People’s Poland . . . Let those who feel that these words are addressed to them, irrespective of their nationality, draw the proper conclusion. We do not want a Fifth Column in our country.’ The reference to Jews as Poland’s Fifth Column was carried on radio and television and heard by millions of Poles. Its message was unambiguous.
Whether Gomułka was expressing his own views; was seeking scapegoats for the policy failures of the past decade; or was merely anticipating Moczar’s efforts to unseat him and had decided to outflank his Stalinist opponents, was never clear. But the consequences of his decision were dramatic. The Polish authorities unleashed a flood of prejudice against Jews: throughout Poland, but especially in the Party and in academic institutions. Party apparatchiks spread suggestions that the economic shortages and other problems were the work of Jewish Communists. Distinctions were openly drawn between ‘good’ Communists, with national Polish interests at heart, and others (Jews) whose true affiliation lay elsewhere.
In 1968, the parents and other relatives of Jewish students arrested or expelled were themselves sacked from official positions and academic posts. Prosecutors paid special attention to the names and origins of students and professors who appeared in court—familiar from the Slánský and other trials of the Fifties but a first for Communist Poland. At the height of the anti-Semitic frenzy, newspapers were defining Jews by criteria derived directly from the Nuremberg Laws—unsurprising, perhaps, in view of the presence of recycled Polish fascists among the Stalinist wing of the ruling Party.
Jews were now invited to leave the country. Many did so, under humiliating conditions and at great personal cost. Of Poland’s remaining 30,000 Jews some 20,000 departed in the course of 1968-69, leaving only a few thousand behind, mostly the elderly and the young—including Michnik and his fellow students, now serving terms in prison. Among the beneficiaries of this upheaval were Moczar and his supporters who took over the Party and government posts vacated by their Jewish occupants. The losers, beyond Poland’s Jews, were the country’s educational institutions (which lost many of their finest scholars and teachers, including Kolakowski—not himself a Jew but married to one); Gomułka, who realized too late what he had unleashed and was himself removed two years later; and Poland itself, its international reputation once again—and for many years to come—inextricably associated with the victimization of its Jewish minority.
The relative ease with which Poland’s rulers were able to isolate and destroy the student protesters derived from their success in separating the intellectuals and their discontents from the rest of the nation—a strategy in which anti-Semitism naturally played a useful role. The students themselves had some responsibility for this, perhaps: at Warsaw University especially it was t
he privileged sons and daughters of Poland’s Communist nomenklatura who took the most prominent roles in the protests and demonstrations, and their concerns were focused on issues of free speech and political rights above all. As their neo-Stalinist enemies were quick to point out, Warsaw’s dissident intelligentsia paid little attention to the bread and butter concerns of the working population. In return, the mass of the Polish people was studiously indifferent to the persecution of Jews and students alike, and Jewish students especially.
Two years later, in 1970, when the government raised food prices by 30 percent and the shipyard workers of Gdansk struck in protest, the compliment was tragically if unintentionally returned: there was no one to take up the cause. But the lesson of these years—that if Poland’s workers and intellectuals wanted to challenge the Party they would need to bridge their mutual indifference and forge a political alliance—would in due course be well-learned and applied with historic effect, above all by Adam Michnik and Jacek Kuroń themselves. In this respect, at least, 1968 in Poland had one positive outcome, albeit deferred. The same could not be said of neighbouring Czechoslovakia.
Czechoslovakia in the early Sixties was a hybrid, caught in an uncomfortable transition from national Stalinism to reform Communism. The show trials and purges of the 1950s had come late to Prague and their impact had been both greater and more enduring than elsewhere. There was no rotation of the old Stalinist elite, no Czech Gomułka or Kádár. The old guard of the regime remained in place. Two investigating Commissions were established to inquire into the Slánský and other trials: the first sat from 1955-57, the second from 1962-63. The purpose behind both commissions was somehow to acknowledge the regime’s recent criminal past without loosening any control of the present.
In the short run this goal was achieved. Victims of the Stalinist trials were released and rehabilitated—in many instances at the behest of the same politicians, judges, prosecutors and interrogators who had condemned them in the first place. The ex-prisoners received back their Party membership card, some money, coupons (e.g. for a car) and in certain cases even their apartments. Their wives and children could once again find work and attend school. But despite this de facto acknowledgement of past injustices, the Party and its Stalin-era leadership remained intact and in office.