A FRAGMENTED WORLD, 1918-45
During the nineteenth century Eastern Europe was simply part of the East. To be sure, the West knew of the existence of Hungarians, Romanians, and Poles, but the widespread attitude was one of benign neglect. Most of the countries discussed in this book emerged as independent nation-states only following the collapse of the great European empires in 1917-18.
Before World War I, the existence of Austro-Hungarian imperial domination kept many of the religious, cultural, and ethnic conflicts that have beset Eastern Europe since 1918 in check. With its unresolved tensions, the world that emerged out of the ashes of the dead empires and the Wilsonian dream of universal democracy seemed ripe for bloody explosions of intolerance and exclusiveness. The nation-states created on the basis of such noble principles as the right to self-determination ensured very little protection for minorities. The new borders were designed to accommodate the victors and their protégés. They often ignored the plight of large minorities, whose calls for cultural autonomy were considered seditious by the ruling ethnic groups. Germans and Hungarians in Czechoslovakia; Ukrainians and Jews in Poland; Hungarians, Jews, and Ukrainians in Romania were among those who experienced the consequences of ethnic harassment and even persecution.
Romania, a country that joined the Entente coalition (formed mainly by Russia, Great Britain, and France) in 1916, was rewarded under the Versailles and Trianon Treaties (1918-20) and expanded its territory by incorporating Transylvania and Northern Bukovina from Austria-Hungary and Bessarabia from Russia. Also as a result of the new international arrangements consecrated by the Versailles Treaty, Yugoslavia appeared as an entirely new political entity, with an Eastern Orthodox Serbian dynasty ruling a country that included not only Catholic Croatia and Slovenia but also predominantly Muslim Bosnia and Herzegovina. As a result of the defeat of Austria-Hungary and the region’s competing ethnic ambitions, Hungary’s territory was shrunk to one-third of what it had been before 1914.4 Hungary, itself a former part of the multinational, Austrian-dominated empire, acquired state independence, but large Hungarian minorities were destined to live in the newly created or substantially expanded successor states.
One of those new entities was Czechoslovakia, which included the former imperial provinces of Bohemia, Moravia, and Slovakia. Of all the countries in the region, although it was not spared major ethnic conflicts, Czechoslovakia seemed the only successful democratic experiment, inasmuch as it included a well-functioning parliamentary system, a strong presidency, and the separation of state powers, inspired by the American Constitution. Founded in 1918, the Czechoslovak Republic showed tolerance for political opposition, including the communists, but failed to satisfy the strong national sentiments of the Slovaks. The Founding Father and first president of Czechoslovakia, Tomas G. Masaryk, was convinced that economic and social development would suffice to erase the differences between Czechs and Slovaks. He accused the Hungarians of having invented the very notion of a Slovak nation.5 On the other hand, with its superior technological infrastructure, Czechoslovakia looked like an economic paradise in comparison with the other East European countries.
Bulgaria and Romania had been monarchies since the nineteenth century, and Yugoslavia emerged as a kingdom after 1918. Hungary was ruled, after a short-lived 1919 communist revolution, by Miklos Horthy, an admiral without a fleet, who played the role of regent for a nonexistent king. Romania, following the adoption of the 1923 Constitution (largely inspired by the Belgian model), had a multiparty system within a constitutional monarchy. Despite the onslaughts of extreme right-wing and left-wing movements, the parliamentary system functioned properly until 1938, when King Carol II proclaimed his royal dictatorship and dissolved the parties and the parliament. The period between 1923 and 1938 can thus be seen as the only genuinely democratic stage in the country’s history. Poland, reborn as a nation in 1917 following the disintegration of the Czarist empire, for most of the interwar period was a republic run by authoritarian leaders who drew their legitimacy from their having resisted Soviet efforts to occupy that country in 1920. Although formally an independent kingdom, Albania was in reality Italy’s economic and diplomatic client.6
In all those countries, attitudes toward the Bolshevik Revolution and the Soviet state were of paramount importance. After centuries of living under the political and cultural domination of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Imperial Germany, Czarist Russia, and the Ottoman Turks, most citizens of Eastern Europe wanted to assert their ethnic identity. Nationalism was on the rise, and Sovietism, with its claim to embody the interests of the workers regardless of nationality, was perceived as a mortal threat to the new nation-states’ very existence. The internationalist mystique propagated by the Communist International (Comintern), founded by Lenin in Moscow in March 1919, was able to inspire no more than tiny communities of zealots. The Soviets tried to export their revolution and did not hesitate to use the Red Army as the bearer of their expansionist dreams. For example, had the Bolsheviks managed to occupy Poland as a result of the Red Army’s “March on Warsaw” in 1920, they would have turned that country into a Soviet Republic and extinguished its cultural and ethnic identity for many decades. Being anti-Bolshevik or anticommunist in Poland or Romania—states whose integrity was questioned by the Kremlin and its supporters—was equated with fighting for national survival. More than fifty-five years after the Red Army’s defeat in Poland, Adam Michnik offered a neat assessment of the importance of the anticommunist triumph during what was often referred to as the “miracle on the Vistula”:
We owe to the 1920 victory over the Bolsheviks twenty years of independent Polish thought which inspired and still inspires generations. Yes, contemporary resistance to Sovietization is to a large extent possible thanks to the cultural reserves created by the interwar Republic. If the Red Army had won the Battle of Warsaw, if a Provisional Revolutionary Committee had started governing Poland, then perhaps I would be living today in Kolyma or Birobidzhan; who knows whether I’d speak Polish, whether a generation of Polish intelligentsia would not have been turned into fodder for polar bears, if Polish culture could have avoided the disaster that befell Russian culture under Stalin’s rule.7
Michnik’s hindsight explains why the policy of creating a cordon sanitaire against Bolshevik expansionism in Eastern Europe was so popular among large social strata, including the downtrodden. The awareness of a Soviet threat led to joint efforts by Polish, Czechoslovak, and Romanian elites to cooperate in their international initiatives. But the persistence of national animosities between successor states prevented the emergence of a coordinated pan-East European foreign policy.
Each of these countries harbored substantial social inequities. The land reforms of the early 1920s fell short of lifting the derelict-like living standards of the peasants. Except for Czechoslovakia, unemployment, primarily the intellectual unemployment created by the existence of an overpopulation of lawyers, teachers, and journalists, was all-pervasive and propitious for the rise of political extremism, including terrorism and physical violence. Social discontent led to explosions of hatred and anger. The new democratic institutions, which included parliaments and an independent judiciary, were too fragile to contain those radical onslaughts. In Romania a fascist movement was formed in the early 1920s and took the name “Legion of Archangel Michael,” later known as the “Iron Guard.” Exploiting social frustrations and ethnic phobias, manipulating religious symbols, and promising the spiritual purification of the country’s corrupt political life, it tried to mobilize Romanians against ethnic minorities, primarily the Jews. Combining romantic anticapitalist motifs with virulent chauvinism, the Iron Guard regarded parliamentary democracy as a non-Romanian, artificial Western institution that had to be replaced by a dictatorship.8
By the 1930s, right-wing authoritarianism was definitely gathering momentum in all these countries, with the exception once again of Czechoslovakia, although even there a pro-Nazi movement was increasingly influential among the German minority
. The failure of the Western powers to offer reliable guarantees against revisionist powers interested in redrawing the borders established by the 1920 Treaty of Trianon only helped demagogic populist movements to recruit more and more adherents. Inspired by the Nazis in Germany and the Fascists in Italy, they despised the parliamentary system and resented liberal democracy. Instead they wanted to establish dictatorships based on the cult of the leader and xenophobic-atavistic values. Such movements developed in Romania (the Iron Guard, led by Corneliu Zelea Codreanu), in Hungary under the name of the “Arrow Crosses,” and Slovakia, where an extremist xenophobic party was founded by the nationalist priest Andrej Hlinka. In addition to being viciously anti-Semitic, those parties were also outspokenly supportive of Hitler’s expansionist plans.
Interestingly, coincident with the mounting political tensions, Eastern Europe witnessed a unique cultural flourishing. Budapest and Bucharest, Prague and Belgrade, Krakow and Zagreb were dynamic cultural centers where young intellectuals feverishly engendered new philosophical and artistic trends. Surrealist groups and publications, for example, were extremely lively in Romania and Czechoslovakia, as were modern philosophical trends like existentialism and phenomenological philosophy. The area (which then considered itself part of Central Europe, lying as it did midway between the Urals and the western shores of the continent) was the homeland for the European avant-garde as well as the birthplace of some of the most innovative cultural currents of the century, including the theater of the absurd, psychoanalysis, structural linguistics, and analytical philosophy. In that part of the world, people valued memory and tried to escape a perpetually cunning History. For them History had been a slaughterhouse, a stage for continuous injustice and defeats. Memory was the faculty that preserved the unfulfilled dreams of freedom and expectations for a community of true citizens. Apocalyptic sarcasm rather than metaphysical commitments was the hallmark of the Central European identity. Unlike the Russians, Germans, or French, the Central Europeans were always aware of the fragility of their political settings. In the words of the Czech novelist Milan Kundera:
Central Europe as a family of small nations has its own vision of the world, a vision based on a deep distrust of history. History, that goddess of Hegel and Marx, that incarnation of reason that judges us and arbitrates our fate—that is the history of conquerors. The peoples of Central Europe are not conquerors. They cannot be separated from European history; they cannot exist outside it; but they represent the wrong side of this history; they are its victims and outsiders. It’s this disabused view of history that is the source of their culture, of their wisdom, of their “nonserious spirit” that mocks grandeur and glory.9
The historical fatality represented by the looming proximity of the Russian and German empires caused Central European intellectuals to look askance at millenary promises of radical ideologies like communism and fascism. However, some intellectuals, like the Hungarian philosopher Georg Lukacs, the Romanian writer Panait Istrati, and the Polish poet Alexander Wat, embraced communism because they felt alienated in their original bourgeois milieu and tried to transcend it by espousing the messianic creed of Leninism. Later, when they realized that they had been duped, many broke with the totalitarian faith and became its most scathing critics. Embittered and pessimistic, disgusted with rampant hypocrisy of a philistine world, and despairing over the chances for democracy to withstand its enemies, many ended up by taking own their lives. The case of the Hungarian-born writer Arthur Koestler, author of the classic anti-Stalinist novel Darkness at Noon, published in England in May 1941, is emblematic of the destiny of Central European intellectuals in this century of radical illusions and devastating disenchantments. Danilo Kis, the Yugoslav novelist, wrote in a memorable essay on Central Europe, several years after Koestler’s suicide in the early 1980s: “The intellectual adventure of Koestler, through his ultimate choice, is unique even in the most broadly defined limits of Europe, It contains the potential biography of every Central European intellectual. In its radical realization.”10 In Central Europe intellectuals played a rucial role in articulating values and defending the cultural memory of nations long deprived of state existence. In Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Romania intellectuals were widely perceived as moral standard-bearers. During the nineteenth century, it was the intelligentsia (a term of Russian origin denoting the morally and socially concerned segment of the intellectual class) that spearheaded the struggle for national liberation; the group continued to enjoy its missionary status even after the formation of the nation-states. Political attitudes espoused by prominent intellectuals had immediate effects on large social strata that identified themselves with those whom they trusted and often followed. More than in other places, Central European intellectuals were seen to be and acted like paragons of social and national causes.
The ferment in intellectual life during the interwar period and the various responses to Utopian temptations are superbly captured by Alexander Wat, the Polish writer, in his conversations with Czeslaw Milosz. According to Wat, the appeal of communism for most intellectuals was associated primarily with its ability to meet the human yearning for solidarity and fraternity:
The warmth of brotherhood. Fraternité … it all starts with fraternité. But it was clear that no other party, no church was providing it. The church was too large, too cold, ritualistic, ornamental …. The communist church had the wisdom, like the early Christian communities (though I greatly dislike analogies with early Christianity; these analogies are nearly always misleading), to base itself on the cell where everyone knew each other and where everyone loved each other. And the warmth, the mutual love found in that little cell surrounded by a hostile world made for a powerful bond.11
Precisely because social tensions were so high and the democratic institutions were too recent to have generated a stable pluralist political culture, totalitarian mass movements were able to gain a foothold in those countries. In March 1919 the Third International (Comintern) was founded. Its bylaws included the obligation of local communist parties willing to become its members to obey Moscow’s directives slavishly. According to the “Conditions of Admission into the Communist International” adopted by the Comintern’s Second Congress in 1920, the decisions of the Moscow headquarters were binding on all the affiliate parties. Opposition to them amounted to treason and led to excommunication.12
World communism had found its Mecca. Following Lenin’s death in 1924, Stalin turned the Comintern into an instrument for the implementation of his expansionist designs. The national branches acted as Trojan horses, disciplined contingents of fanatical supporters of every twist in the Comintern’s strategy. Everywhere in the world, communist groups acted as Moscow’s instrument. In Western Europe they could arouse some support from radicalized industrial workers and gullible intellectuals who ignored the true conditions in Soviet Russia. In Eastern Europe, the very proximity of the Soviet Union and the threat of Soviet aggression made the existence of those parties extremely difficult. For the communist parties in Romania and Poland, the situation was even more dramatic: They endorsed the Soviet territorial claims and could therefore be stigmatized as antinational formations. Formed in the early 1920s, from the very outset those parties championed the Soviet strategy of disrupting the newly created democratic institutions. Indeed, with the exception of Czechoslovakia, communist parties were outlawed in all East European countries. The more marginal these groups were, with their visionary and inflammatory rhetoric, the more sectarian and intransigent their internal life. The first generation of East European communist leaders was made up of people who participated in the Comintern’s activities during Lenin’s last years in power. They had witnessed Stalin’s intrigues during the struggle for Lenin’s mantle. Some of them had been supportive of Stalin’s enemies in the Bolshevik leadership. Others were committed Stalinists with a high sense of discipline; they willingly participated in the Comintern-engineered purges of their own parties. To deter the dissenting elements,
Stalin insisted on the need to “Bolshevize” these parties by eliminating the first generation and replacing it with more docile persons.
During the 1930s the entire elite of the East European communist parties perished in the Great Purge massacres in the Soviet Union. Because Stalin had a particular distaste for Polish communists, whom he accused of the mortal sins of Trotskyism and Luxemburgism, in 1938 he presided over the complete disbandment of the Polish communist party. Wera Kostrzewa, Julian Lenski-Leszczynski, and Alfred Warski, the historical leaders of Polish communism, were all executed. The whole exiled elite of Polish communism was ruthlessly massacred in Soviet prisons. Other parties suffered similar experiences: Milan Gorkic, the general secretary of the Yugoslav communist party, was liquidated in the Soviet Union, as were the founding fathers of Romanian communism, including Alexandru Dobrogeanu-Gherea, Imre Aladar, David Fabian, and many others.13
Enthralled with their internationalist delusions, convinced that by serving the Bolshevik revolution they were serving the cause of the world revolution and the emancipation of the proletariat, these devout communists accepted Stalin’s murderous verdict without a murmur. The replacement of the first nuclei of communist leaders with an even more subservient generation of Moscow-trained apparatchiks led to the complete elimination of any critical trends within those parties.
Despite their unbounded obedience in relations with Moscow, some of the elites found themselves in particularly difficult situations. Moscow always treated the Romanian communist party as a kind of poor relation precisely because it was not able to overcome its marginal status.14 On the one hand, the Kremlin imposed on them a suicidal line that prevented them from becoming mass parties; on the other, it used their marginality constantly to humiliate them. The Bulgarian Communist Party enjoyed more favorable treatment, mainly because of the international stature of its leader, Georgi Dimitrov, who, after his acquittal in the December 1933 Leipzig trial, had become a cult figure for the whole international left. Dimitrov, a political refugee in Germany, was accused by the Nazis of having masterminded the Reichstag fire soon after Hitler’s takeover in January 1933. In a widely publicized trial he managed to denounce the Nazi leaders as the real perpetrators of that political provocation. He was permitted to leave Germany and went to Moscow, where he became the chief executive of the Comintern.15 In Hungary, where a Leninist revolutionary regime headed by Bela Kun had been overthrown with the support of Romania’s army in 1919, the communists barely recovered from their defeat. Kun himself was executed in the Soviet Union as an “enemy of the people,” and his name disappeared for two decades from all communist references to the ill-fated Budapest Commune of 1919.
Reinventing Politics Page 3