In Stalin’s view, at this particularly dangerous time, when the imperialists had decided to intensify their aggressive actions against the budding “people’s democracies” and the threat of a new world war was looming large, no country or leader could be allowed to engage in national communist experiments. Nationalism, defined as the opposite of loyalty to the Soviet Union and its leader, was diagnosed as a betrayal of the sacred principles of Marxism-Leninism. From that moment on, those identified as nationalists could be charged with the most fantastic sins, including collaboration in the past with the Gestapo or, in the present, with Western intelligence agencies. That was the background of Stalin’s clash with Yugoslavia. Monolithism was the religion of Stalinism, and all centrifugal trends had to be ruthlessly extirpated. Indeed, the purpose in creating the Cominform had been to coordinate all policies of the newly established regimes in accordance with the radicalization of Soviet international behavior and to prevent such clashes.
After all, the sole principle of legitimation for the ruling communist parties in the Soviet bloc was their unreserved attachment to the Soviet Union, their readiness to carry out unflinchingly all of Stalin’s directives. He had invested the communist parties in Eastern Europe with power, and it was thanks to him that they had gained the ruling positions in their countries. Therefore, within the various countries of the Soviet bloc, party leaders could be allowed to enjoy the adoration of their subordinates, but their cults were only echoes of the true faith: unswerving love for Stalin. In the words of Wladislaw Gomulka, the Polish communist leader, the cult of the local leaders “could be called only a reflected brilliance, a borrowed light. It shone as the moon does.”30
The logic of Stalinism excluded doubt and questioning, numbed critical reasoning and intelligence, and instituted Soviet-style Marxism as a system of universal truth inimical to any form of doubt. Stalin’s alleged omniscience purported to settle all troubling issues and confusing situations. The logic was by definition exclusive and hortatory, a celebration of the pivotal role of cadres in a militaristic, rigidly hierarchical order. The leader was the only guarantor of ideological purity, and full submission to his orders was the only socially accepted conduct. Civic autonomy was thus destroyed, and a slavishly obedient form of political activism was the general norm. To achieve ideological uniformity and regimentation, Stalinism invented and perfected the mechanism of the permanent purge.
The purge mechanism, the basic technique of Stalinist demonology, was the modern equivalent of the medieval witch-hunt. It was eagerly adopted by Stalin’s East European apprentices and adapted for their own purposes. Echoing Stalin’s fervid cult, East European leaders engineered similar campaigns of praise and idolatry in their own countries. The party was identified with the supreme leader, whose chief merit consisted in having correctly applied the Stalinist line. The solutions to all disturbing questions could be found in Stalin’s writings, and those who failed to discover the answers were branded “enemies of the people.” Members of the traditional political elites, members of the clergy, and representatives of the nationalist intelligentsia who had refused to collaborate with the new regimes were sentenced to long prison terms following dramatic show trials or cursory in camera trials. That was the first stage of the purge in Eastern Europe. After 1949 the purges fed upon the communist elites themselves, and in that second purge many faithful Stalinists experienced firsthand the effects of the unstoppable terrorist machine they had helped set in motion.
According to the Polish-born philosopher Leszek Kolakowski, the purges had an integrative function, contributing to the destruction of the last vestiges of subjective autonomy and creating a social climate where no one would even dream of criticism: “The object of a totalitarian system is to destroy all forms of communal life that are not imposed by the state and closely controlled by it, so that individuals are isolated from one another and become mere instruments in the hands of the state. The citizen belongs to the state and must have no other loyalty, not even to the state ideology.”31 Only Stalin was privileged to interpret and reinterpret the ideological dogmas to suit opportunistic shifts in the official party line. Ideology was simultaneously vague and rigid, a mixture of prescriptions and interdictions, which the individual had to follow blindly.
As in the USSR in the late 1930s, in the Soviet bloc the ideology underlying this terrorist pedagogy was only partly irrational. While the victims recruited among politicians of the prewar political parties were innocent of the charges uttered against them, many of them embodied a political tradition, which the Stalinists were desperately trying to suppress. As for the communist victims, they belonged to a category described by Stalinist legal theory as “objective enemies.” They were people who once in their lives may have expressed reservations about the sagacity of Soviet policies or, even worse, may have criticized Stalin personally. Links with Tito, of course, were used as arguments to demonstrate the political unreliability of certain East European leaders (for instance Laszlo Rajik in Hungary, who had fought in the Spanish Civil War and had maintained friendly relations with members of Tito’s entourage). The purpose of the continuous cleansing was to eliminate any search for domestic initiatives and to ensure the complete Soviet domination of the East European satellites.
Domesticism, according to Zbigniew Brzezinski, was an exaggerated, even if frequently unconscious, “preoccupation with local, domestic communist objectives, at the expense of broader, international Soviet goals.”32 It was not an elaborated philosophy of opposition to Soviet hegemony, but a conviction on the part of some East European leaders, like Wladyslaw Gomulka in Poland, Lucretiu Patrascanu in Romania, and Traicho Kostov in Bulgaria, that national interests were not necessarily incompatible with the Soviet agenda and that such purposes could therefore be pursued with impunity. The fact that the “domestic” East European leaders were mistaken became clear in later years. Most of them would either perish or be jailed on the most absurd charges.
The rise of domesticism was an international phenomenon, and Stalin realized that if the trend was not nipped in the bud it could undermine the whole system of domination and control he had been working to create in Eastern Europe. Titoism had to be exposed as a villainous attempt to restore capitalism and to break Yugoslavia away from the “fraternal family of socialist nations.” It became the Cominform’s main task—if not its only task—to suppress such domestic ambitions. Domesticism had to be halted once for all and unity drastically imposed. Moscow’s absolute preeminence had to be recognized as sacrosanct and Stalin’s views as infallible.
The fulfillment of the Stalinist design for Eastern Europe included the pursuit of a singular strategy that could eventually transform the various national political cultures into carbon copies of the “advanced” Soviet experience. Local communist parties, engaged in frantic attempts to imitate the Stalinist model, transplanting and sometimes enhancing the most repulsive characteristics of the Soviet totalitarian system, enthusiastically formulated strategic goals.
Economic Goals: Industrialization
Regarding the economy, the Stalinization of Eastern Europe meant the adoption of the command economy model. State planning commissions were formed in all the East European socialist countries. Their purpose was to designate the principal tasks of the state-owned economy. The state-planned economy was founded on the nationalization of the principal means of production.
Stalinist economic doctrine provided for a special role assigned to heavy industry, particularly the machine-building industry. In accordance with the Soviet dogma of economic autarky and self-reliance, each nation’s economy was reoriented toward forced industrialization. For predominantly agricultural countries like Romania and Bulgaria, industrialization amounted to a violation of the natural economic course and the destruction of a potentially prosperous source of economic growth. All East European countries engaged in an industrial buildup that completely neglected the necessary equilibrium among various economic branches. Fascination with
the Soviet industrialization precedent led to the launching of Pharaonic projects, including the building of canals and steel mills in disregard of any economic rationale. Those projects were ideologically motivated, and no questioning of their effectiveness was permitted. Whenever they failed to produce the expected results, the blame was placed on alleged saboteurs who were trying to create obstacles in the way of the triumphant march toward the classless society.
Because the communists were convinced that both nature and society could and should be continuously transformed, they combined economic, social, and educational engineering in a repressive formula reminiscent of Oriental despotism. The classic Leninist formula—“socialism is Soviet power plus electrification”—was oversimplified and eventually reduced to the second term of the equation. During that initial stage of unchained Stalinism, socialism came to mean simply electrification plus terror. In the name of proletarian internationalism, the Soviet Union imposed unfair trade agreements on the satellite countries and forced them to establish joint enterprises with Soviet partners that definitely did not favor the East European countries. The Soviets used Romanian oil, Czechoslovak uranium, and Polish coal under purely colonial agreements. Economically as well as politically, the USSR became the metropolis, and the East European states its colonies.
Economic Goals: Agriculture
Since Soviet socialism could not exist in a society based on heterogeneous property relations, the private ownership of land had to be abolished and replaced with collective farms. The ideological underpinning of the decision to collectivize agriculture was the Marxist-Leninist belief that the peasantry by definition constituted a reactionary class and that only in large collective units could it be reeducated as selfless members of the socialist community. Total warfare against the peasantry was essential to the Stalinist effort to achieve a cohesive and entirely controllable economic body. In turn, the collective farms themselves were controllable through their dependency on the government for technological supplies, delivered through state-managed machine and tractor stations.
Political Goals: Destruction of the Civil Society
Socially, the Stalinization of Eastern Europe meant the destruction of the human bonds generally described as the civil society. A universal sense of fear was instilled in individuals, who were treated as simple cogs in the wheels of the totalitarian state machine. The legal system was redesigned to deprive the individual of any sense of protection or potential support. Revolutionary justice satisfied the communist party’s thirst for social revenge against the former ruling groups and against all who might raise any doubts regarding the validity of the political and economic goals of the rulers. The whole legal system was turned upside down. New judges were appointed, and the whole judicial procedure became a mockery. The true repository of power was the communist party’s political apparatus, including the organizational, the ideological, and the security police branches. The army also was purged, and new officers were recruited among workers who zealously obeyed the orders of the party leaders.
Political Goals: Regimenting Intellectual Life and Culture
In the field of intellectual life, the communists tried, with partial success, to neutralize and anesthetize all critical currents. The party smashed all forms of dissent inside and outside itself. Campaigns were undertaken to eliminate “objectivistic and cosmopolitan trends.” Marxism-Leninism, as codified by Stalin, was enshrined as the only accepted ideology. It played a mobilizing role, indoctrinating the people and conditioning them to submit easily to the communist party’s behests.
The ideology claimed to be exhaustive and comprehensive, a set of universal values to explain all natural, social, economic, and cultural phenomena. The Stalinist ideological project consisted in the creation of a new human type, actually an extremely flexible individual, totally controllable by the party. Soviet dissident writers aptly referred to this “new man” as Sovieticus. The phrase Homo Sovieticus captures the anthropological ambition of Stalinism to carry out more than a simple social transformation. With remarkable prescience, three years after the October Revolution, in 1920, the Russian writer Yevgeny Zamyatin wrote about this suppression of human autonomy in a collectivistic Leviathan:
[T]ake a pair of scales: on one side there is a gram, on the other—a ton; on one side “I,” on the other “We,” the One State. Is it not clear that to suppose that the “I” can have some sorts of “rights” in relation to the State is exactly like assuming that the gram can counterbalance the ton? Hence the rights go to the ton and the duties to the gram; and the natural path from nothingness to greatness is to forget that you are a gram and to feel instead that you are a millionth part of a ton.33
The social regimentation had to be total. No sphere of life, however private or intimate, could escape its impact. In all satellite countries ideological bureaucracies, the so-called Agitprop departments, were created to conduct brainwashing campaigns similar to those already tested in the Soviet Union. Hollow propaganda slogans permeated all publications. The guidance of literature was entrusted to fanatical commissars whose sole objective was to eradicate all forms of independent thought. “Socialist realism” was proclaimed the road to cultural and political perfection, and mass production of this Utopian kitsch made audiences increasingly disgusted with officially sponsored creativity.
Literature, art, and philosophy lost all credibility because of their annexation by the political sphere. They became a safe haven for mendacity, hypocrisy, and moral turpitude. In all fairness, only a few intellectuals were really committed to this debased aesthetic creed. More often than not, others tended to collaborate with the regime out of fear or opportunism. Ethical suicide and chameleon behavior became pandemic among the communist intelligentsia. The most illuminating source for those who wish to understand the fascination of the East European intelligentsia with Marxism-Leninism, or the “New Faith,” remains Czeslaw Milosz’s classic The Captive Mind. Published in 1951, when the Cold War had reached its peak, Milosz’s book analyzed the illusions and delusions of his colleagues who had espoused communism after the arrival of Soviet troops in Poland.
According to Milosz, the role of ideology was to neutralize the faculty of doubt and to instill in the individual boundless love and gratitude toward the party. With its claim to omniscience, ideology offered ready-made answers to any unsettling issue and promoted the individual’s belief that there was no salvation outside the party:
There is a species of insect which injects its venom into a caterpillar; thus inoculated, the caterpillar lives on though it is paralyzed. The poisonous insect then lays its eggs in it, and the body of the caterpillar serves as a living larder for the young brood. Likewise (although Marx and Engels never foresaw this use for their doctrine), the anaesthetic of dialectical materialism was injected into the mind of an individual in the people’s democracies. When the individual’s brain was duly paralyzed, the eggs of Stalinism were laid in it. “As soon as you are a Marxist,” the party says to the patient, “you must be a Stalinist, for there is no Marxism outside of Stalinism.”34
In the words of another great Polish poet, Zbigniew Herbert, the foundations of Stalinism rested upon fear, pride, a perverse joy in humiliation, and base material interests. Certain members of the intellectual elite accepted and sometimes even enjoyed this pact with the Stalinist establishment:
The Great Linguist, Stalin, once said that one does not need to buy a nation. One simple has to have engineers of human souls. The government needed legitimacy which was provided by the intellectuals, the so-called “creative” intelligentsia, and especially the writers …. There was a visible gap, then, between the elite and the sentiments of the nation. These people believed that the nation is a foolish crowd to be led by the enlightened few. Such are the beginnings of every fascist system: a self-appointed elite imposes upon the rest its own vision of the radiant future.35
Overview
What happened in each of the East European countries? How was it
possible to extirpate and sterilize traditional nuclei of critical thought? How was it possible that the apparatus, headed by tiny elites, managed to smash all opposition and impose its autocratic rule? Who were the victims of those developments, and how were they selected?
In order to understand the success of the Stalinist experiment in Eastern Europe, remember the prevailing role of direct Soviet intervention and intimidation. Keep in mind as well that the local Stalinist formations were pursuing the Stalinist model of systematic destruction of the noncommunist institutions, the disintegration of the civil society, and the monopolistic occupation of the public space through statecontrolled rituals and institutions (Communist Youth Leagues, partycontrolled trade unions, peace councils, and other subservient mass organizations). The overall goal was to build a passive and fearful consensus based on unlimited commitment to the political program of the ruling elite. The true content of the political regime is described as the “cult of personality” system. Where one person symbolizes collective, infallible wisdom, where difference as such is considered subversive, where there is absolutely no room for opposition attitudes, and where the social body is threatened with extinction, the very notion of a civic culture is doomed.
The personalization of political power, its concentration in the hands of a communist demigod, led to his forcible religious adoration and the masochistic humiliation of subordinates. The leavening agent for this moral and political enslavement was the Stalinist definition of internationalism as unbounded love for the USSR. In the words of an editorial published by Czechoslovak communist daily Rude Pravo on May 25, 1952: “The road into the morass of treason indeed begins on the inclined plane of reservations and doubts regarding the correctness of the policy of the Soviet Union.”36
Terror was theoretically justified as the sine qua non for the system’s survival. Stalinist doctrine maintained that the more advanced the socialist construction, the harsher the opposition of the defeated social groups. Therefore, the more critical becomes the need to respond in an uncompromising way to plots fomented by the “enemies of the people.” Terror was sanctified and glorified as the antidote needed to conserve the socialist gains.
Reinventing Politics Page 6