Reinventing Politics

by Vladimir Tismaneanu

  All these communist parties held a common conception of internationalism as well as a similar philosophy of party dicipline. It was the duty of individual members slavishly to obey orders coming from the top. This militaristic logic was called democratic centralism. The internal life of the parties was ritualistic, extremely authoritarian, and hierarchical. They functioned in accordance with a skillfully engineered cult of the leaders, and all forms of factionalism or critical attitudes were strictly banned. In those circumstances, a climate of mechanical enthusiasm and apocryphal romanticism thrived. Those who expressed any doubts were marginalized or even exterminated.

  The East European communist parties were led by tightly knit nuclei of militants united in their conviction that their countries had to follow the Soviet model without any reservation or hesitation. As a rule, the Soviet bloc parties were headed by professional revolutionaries, most of whom had been trained in the Comintern schools and whose devotion to the Soviet Union had been thoroughly tested through the years. To carry out the main objectives of Stalinism, those people established a system of terror and persecution that did not spare some of its ardent partisans. In those communist sects there was no room for personal loyalties. The only permitted attachment was to the party, which was considered superior to any of its individual components. The party established its monistic world view as the only acceptable version of truth and pilloried any other conception as objectively reactionary and dangerous. From that intolerance for nonparty truths grew a shared anti-intellectual prejudice. The Soviet-bloc parties suspected all intellectuals, including communist intellectuals, of entertaining a temptation to criticize the status quo and thus of being potential troublemakers. The Stalinists’ suspicion of intellectuals and their belief that the parties embodied the class consciousness of the industrial proletariat led the parties’ elites to try to expand their working class appeal.

  The mind of the Stalinist elites in Eastern Europe was impressively revealed by the Polish journalist Teresa Toranska in a series of interviews conducted in the early 1980s with some of the former leaders of the Polish communist party. Her book title, Oni (Them), captured the universe of myths, fantasies, resentments, and delusions that made possible the self-hypnosis of those who presided over the Stalinization of Poland. The most striking and illuminating of the interviews is with the former Politburo member and Central Committee Secretary Jakub Berman (1901-84), who tried to defend the options and actions of his political generation. According to Herman, Polish communists were right in championing Stalin’s policies in Poland because, he claimed, the Soviets guaranteed his country’s social and national liberation. When Toranska, a Solidarity-linked journalist, maintained that the communists had brought a great disaster upon the Polish nation, Berman replied angrily:

  That’s not true. We brought it liberation …. We didn’t come to this country as its occupiers and we never even imagined ourselves in that role. After all the disasters that had befallen this country, we brought its ultimate liberation, because we finally got rid of those Germans, and that counts for something. I know these things aren’t simple. We wanted to get this country moving, to breathe life into it; all our hopes were tied up with the new model of Poland, which was without historical precedent and was the only chance it had throughout its thousand years of history; we wanted to use that chance 100 percent. And we succeeded. In any case we were bound to succeed, because we were right; not in some irrational, dreamed-up way we’d plucked out of the air, but historically—history was on our side.11

  Thus no empirical (social, cultural, moral) evidence was required to justify the communists’ self-confidence. They knew they had received the mandate of history, and they were pursuing their Salvationist dreams without any concern for the fate of those who may have disliked their utopian blueprints.

  The sense of being entitled to impose happiness on the people, combined with a messianic belief in their parties’ chosen role, made the communist elites impervious to any signals from a disheartened, potentially rebellious society. Far from trying to adjust their schemes to the concrete conditions, the parties were increasingly inclined to change and if need be to suppress society. That explains the fatal chasm between the ruling elites, “them” as the average citizens were calling those zealots, and the mass of the population, or “us.” Berman’s astute and often cynical rationalization of his generation’s commitment to Stalinism could not conceal its mystical underpinnings. After all, the communist elites in Eastern Europe had deliberately broken with their countries’ national traditions in favor of what they perceived as the supranational fraternity of the “liberators of mankind.” The leaders of the Soviet-bloc communist parties were convinced, like Lenin at the moment he founded the Bolshevik party at the beginning of the twentieth century, that the people needed an external force to enlighten and teach them, that without such a vanguard party there was no hope of true emancipation. At the end of his interview with Toranska, Berman issued a passionate plea for the moral superiority of “genuine” communism. According to him, a day will come when mankind will do justice to this chiliastic dream of global revolution, and all the atrocities and crimes of Stalinism will be remembered only as passing incidents:

  [W]ithout placing my faith in the magical power of words, I am nonetheless convinced that the sum of our actions, skillfully and consistently carried out, will finally produce results and create a new Polish consciousness; because all the advantages flowing from our new path will be borne out, must be borne out, and if we’re not destroyed by an atomic war and we don’t disappear into nothingness, there will finally be a breakthrough in mentality which will give it an entirely new content and quality. And then we, the communists, will be able to apply all the democratic principles we would like to apply but can’t apply now, because they would end in our defeat and elimination. It may happen in fifty years or it may happen in a hundred, I don’t want to make prophecies, but I’m sure it will happen one day.12

  In his absolute belief that history was on his and his comrades’ side, Berman was not alone. His was a mindset characteristic of the communist elites in all Soviet satellite countries. The same words could have been uttered by Ana Pauker, the Romanian communist purged in 1952, who died in 1960, still convinced that the Soviet Union was the mainstay of all progressive mankind. Other communist leaders in Eastern Europe likewise could have offered Berman’s profession of faith. Poland’s leader at the moment of the country’s Stalinization was Boleslaw Bierut ( 1892-1956), a former Soviet secret agent who had served as a Comintern instructor in Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, and Austria during the interwar period. Hungary was run by a “foursome” made up by the communist leader Maty as Rakosi ( 1892-1971 ), who had spent fifteen years in Admiral Horthy’s jails for his communist activities, and his close associates Ernő Gerő (the economic czar), Jozsef Revai (the chief ideologue), and Mihaly Farkas (the Minister of Defense). In Bulgaria, the party leader was Vulko Chervenkov (1900-1980), who in the 1930s had served as the deputy director of the Leninist School of the Comintern in Moscow. In East Germany, the party leaders were Wilhelm Pieck (1876-1960) and Walter Ulbricht (18931973), who had left their country after Hitler’s takeover in 1933, had spent the way years in Moscow exile, and had returned to Germany in 1945. In Romania, after the elimination of the Pauker—Luca faction, the communist party was run by Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej (1901-65), a former railroad worker who had spent more than ten years in jails and labor camps. Czechoslovakia’s leader Klement Gottwald (1896-1953) had spent the war years in Soviet exile.13 All these people had known each other in Moscow during the interwar or war years, but the story of their relations belongs to another book.

  Berman, Pauker, Rakosi, and the rest of the East European communist leaders were seasoned militants for whom Stalin’s personality was an example of correct revolutionary conduct. They admired the Soviet leader’s intransigence and his uncompromising struggle against oppositional factions, and they shared his hostility to the West. Educated in
the Stalinist tradition, they believed in the theory of permanent intensification of the class struggle and did their best to create a repressive system where all critical tendencies could be immediately weeded out. Their minds were Manichean: Socialism was right, capitalism was wrong, and there was no middle road between the two. In their intense belief in this simplistic philosophy, they were careful to ensure that the same views would be instilled in the minds of their younger disciples in their countries. A whole propaganda system based on the principle of systematic indoctrination of the party apparatchiks with the myths of the Stalinist doctrine was established in the Soviet-bloc countries. For most of the apparatchiks, knowledge of Marxism was limited to the Comintern Vulgate, which they accepted without reservation as Stalin’s title to infallibility. During their communist underground service, the Soviet-bloc communists had learned to see Stalin’s catechistic formulations as the best formulations of their own thoughts and beliefs. The mental and emotional unity between the prophet and his disciples was unshakable.

  When Stalin died, his East European disciples suffered like orphans: They lost more than their parties’ supporter, they lost their protector, the very embodiment of their highest dreams, the hero they had come to revere, the symbol of their strength. Stalin, the true source of their authority, had passed away. Without him they barely knew how to function in an increasingly centrifugal and ambiguous world.

  NIKITA KHRUSHCHEV AND THE “NEW COURSE”

  Immediately after Stalin’s death, the Soviet leadership began to reassess its relationship to the satellite countries. The ferocious struggle for power in the Kremlin definitely affected the stability of the Soviet-appointed ruling teams in Eastern Europe. As the Soviets moved toward a restoration of their relationship with Yugoslavia, the East European communist leaders found their own authority seriously threatened: After all, they had put all their prestige into the struggle against the Titoist deviation. Some of them had directly initiated purges against fellow communist whose execution had been justified in the name of the struggle against Tito’s spies. Yet the new Soviet leaders could not tolerate the preservation of unreconstructed Stalinist fortresses in Eastern Europe at a time when the Kremlin was trying to revise some of is basic tenets.

  In the summer of 1953 Khrushchev and Malenkov, respectively the Soviet party leader and the Prime Minister, summoned the Hungarian leaders to Moscow and asked them to deploy a new strategy that would ensure better living standards for the population and deflate the terror. Rakosi had to give up his prime-ministership to Imre Nagy, a former Politburo member whose dissenting views on the collectivization of agriculture had resulted in his elimination from the top leadership in the late 1940s. In the GDR, the death of Stalin contributed to the increased nervousness of the Socialist Unity Party (SED) ruling team. In June 1953 they decided to impose a 10 percent rise in work quotas at Berlin’s construction sites (without a corresponding rise in salaries), which led to strikes and a spontaneous mass assault on the communist party headquarters. East German and Soviet troops smashed that first antitotalitarian insurrection in Eastern Europe. Officially dozens, but it is more likely that hundreds, died during the crackdown. In the bitter words of Bertolt Brecht, the renowned poet and playwright:

  After the uprising of the 17th June

  The Secretary of the Writers’ Union

  Had leaflets distributed in the Stalinallee

  Stating that the people

  Had forfeited the confidence of the government

  And could win it back only

  By redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier

  In that case for the government

  To dissolve the people

  And elect another?14

  The East Berlin uprising was the first in a series of spontaneous outbursts of popular rage against the repressive regimes installed with the direct assistance of the Red Army in Eastern Europe. The revolts had a dual nature: They were at once political rebellions against a social order inimical to freedom and destructive of human personality, and they were movements of national emancipation against a foreign power, that is, the Soviet Union. So the thrust of the East European revolts of 1956 included political, social, economic, and national demands. People stood up against a system perceived as fundamentally flawed. The revolts also attacked the ideological camouflage that justified the communist oppression. Marxism-Leninism, as interpreted by Stalin, came under heavy fire in the writings and public statements of intellectuals of leftist persuasion, who felt betrayed by the cynical manipulation of their romantic dreams by the ruling apparatus. Intellectuals who had refused to kowtow to party doctrine, unable to publicize their views, stayed away from what appeared to be a communist family quarrel. To give just one example, Lucian Blaga, one of Romania’s outstanding poets and philosophers, could publish only translations and survived at the periphery of public life as a librarian.

  Meanwhile, in the USSR the new leaders tried to reassure their supporters in the party, military, and government apparatus that the times of irrational terror were over. The Soviet leaders came to the conclusion, especially after the Berlin rebellion, that the old-fashioned methods of colonial exploitation of Eastern Europe had to be replaced. They informed their proconsuls in the East European capitals that new methods of leadership and new forms of authority were needed in the changed circumstances. The Soviets initiated a rapprochement with Tito and asked their East European vassals to do likewise. All those modifications of what had appeared as the sacred, immutable “party line” led to disarray and confusion among the East European communist elites: Matyas Rakosi and his clique in Hungary: Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej in Romania; Boleslaw Bierut in Poland; Antonin Novotny, Gottwald’s successor, in Czechoslovakia; Walter Ulbricht and Wilhelm Pieck in the German Democratic Republic; Vulko Chervenkov in Bulgaria; Enver Hoxha in Albania—all these little Stalins realized that their political survival depended on their ability to contain the traumatic impact of the Soviet thaw in their countries. Clearly for those diehard Stalinists, once Tito’s reputation was restored and the Yugoslav communists ceased to be depicted as the archenemies of progressive mankind, all the charges they had used against their rivals during the show trials would be exposed as frame-ups. So the de-Stalinization initiated by Malenkov and Khrushchev had widespread contagious effects in Eastern Europe. Not surprisingly, the local leaderships, whose legitimacy, as we have mentioned, derived from their boundless solidarity with Stalin’s Soviet Union, did their best to procrastinate. While the procrastinators could not torpedo liberalization altogether, they certainly affected its pace.

  Because Soviet leaders were pushing in that direction, the pressures for liberalization were too forceful to be completely ignored in the Soviet-bloc countries. Furthermore, the economic situation in all those countries was dismal. Well informed by their emissaries in Eastern Europe, the Soviet leaders understood that unless a new course was rapidly adopted, social explosions in the region were inevitable. In Hungary, the avuncular Imre Nagy, less ideological than Rakosi and his associates, was appointed Premier with Soviet blessing in July 1953. He launched a daring program of economic and political reforms. His strategy consisted in reducing the burden imposed on the industrial working class, easing the pressure on the peasants by abandoning coercive methods of collectivization, and instituting a new approach to legality that included a partial amnesty for political prisoners and the abolition of internment camps. That last measure was particularly important in Hungary—perhaps the most repressive of all East European Stalinist regimes. Nagy’s decision to dismantle the Hungarian gulag earned him genuine popularity and made him a serious rival for the increasingly weakened and despised Rakosi.

  Leaders in the other East European countries pursued similar liberalization strategies, but with less commitment and enthusiasm than that shown by Nagy. As the struggle for power intensified in the Kremlin, East European local bosses tried to ingratiate themselves with those Soviet leaders they considered less prone to engage in a swe
eping separation from the Stalinist legacy. Khrushchev’s victory over Malenkov in 1955 permitted Rakosi to reassert his supremacy and to eliminate Nagy from both the premiership and the communist party on a charge of “right-wing opportunism.”

  In May 1955 the Soviets took a new step toward the institutionalization of their hegemony in the region by creating the Warsaw Pact as a military alliance based on ideological affinities. In the words of Zbigniew Brzezinski, the Warsaw Pact was “the single most important formal commitment binding the [East European] states to the USSR, officially limiting their scope of independent action, and legalizing the presence (and hence the political influence) of the Soviet troops stationed on their territory.”15 Initially, the Warsaw Pact included Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Poland, Romania, and the Soviet Union. After the Albanian—Soviet split in 1960, the leadership in Tirana broke with the Warsaw Pact, which the Albanians denounced as an instrument of Soviet imperialism. Albania formally left the alliance in August 1968, when the Soviet Union and its allies invaded Czechoslovakia. While the Warsaw Pact guaranteed Moscow’s political and military control over the potentially rebellious satellites, an earlier alliance, the Council of Mutual Economic Aid (CMEA), founded in 1949, ensured Soviet economic domination in the region.

  The principal instrument used to perpetuate the economic dependence of these countries on the Soviet Union was “specialization in industrial production.” The principles of socialist internationalism were reshaped to fit the new concept of limited economic sovereignty and efforts to create supranational economic bodies entirely subordinated to Soviet interests. Later on, after 1960, the CMEA would be the framework for carrying out the policy of economic integration of the centrally planned East European economies. National plans had to be coordinated, and a unified socialist market was supposed to emerge as a result of these joint economic efforts. After the 1989 upheaval, both the Warsaw Pact and the CMEA became increasingly irrelevant, as member countries embarked on a path toward complete dissolution. Indeed, in February 1991 a meeting of foreign and defense ministers of the Warsaw Pact countries took place in Budapest. It decided to disband the military alliance by March 31, 1991.16