The German communists remained cautious in one respect. Like the Hungarian communist party and the Polish communist party, they preferred to go to the polls in coalition with the German social democrats. If they could blur the line between the soft left and the hard left, they told themselves, they would easily win over Germany’s workers. Eventually, all of the social democratic parties in Central Europe would be forced to dissolve themselves into the communist parties. But the first “voluntary” unification of the left—the abolition of social democracy as something separate and distinct from communism—took place in eastern Germany.
It was not an easy process. Social democracy had a long and venerable history in Germany and Eastern Europe, and many social democrats were profoundly anti-Soviet and anticommunist. For their part, German communists had long despised social democrats too.57 In the early twentieth century, Lenin himself conducted a famous quarrel with Karl Kautsky, the founder of German social democracy, who had had the temerity to argue against revolution and in favor of attaining power through elections. In a famous 1918 pamphlet, “The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky,” Lenin dismissed his German colleague as a “windbag” who spoke “twaddle” and mouthed “absurdities” about the nonsense of bourgeois democracy.58 Elsewhere in Eastern Europe social democrats generally had a less radical program than communists. They advocated what we would now call the welfare state, not the dictatorship of the proletariat, and they wanted evolution, not revolution. Above all, however, the communists hated social democrats because they were more popular, before the war and after.
But the experience of political failure and defeat at the hands of the Nazi party had demoralized Germany’s venerable Social Democratic Party. In Weimar Germany, the left had been divided and the right had profited from that division. Now many believed that the left’s failure to unify had brought Hitler to power. Otto Buchwitz, a longtime social democrat, in March 1946 declared his support for the unification of the social democrats and the communists. “Reformism” had failed, he wrote. Now it was time for his party to embrace “revolutionary socialism” in partnership with the communists.
Soviet influence played a role as well. Otto Grotewohl, the leader of the social democrats in the eastern zone of Germany, declared in August 1945 that his party had a right to independence and would not put forward a united list of candidates with the communists. He said the same to Kurt Schumacher, the Social Democratic leader in the western zone, in October. Two months later, in December, he made a speech to a joint social democrat–communist meeting, listing ten reasons why he opposed unification. Above all, he declared, “in our membership, a deep distrust of the communist brother party has materialized.”59
Very rapidly, he changed his tune. In February 1946, he told a British official that he was desperately worried. Personally he was under great pressure—he spoke of “being tickled by Russian bayonets”—and the party was in trouble too, its “organisation in the provinces had been completely undermined,” he explained, and there was no longer any point in resisting the merger with the communists.60 Grotewohl’s view had changed because the communist party’s tactics had changed, as had those of the Soviet military administration, in the autumn of 1945. The failure of communists to win elections in Hungary, the poor showing of the Austrian communist party (which had won only four parliamentary seats in national elections in November, despite high expectations), and the popularity of the Social Democratic Party in the western occupation zones of Germany helped to convince first the East German communists and then their Soviet minders that the time for the unification of the left had arrived. At the beginning of 1946, Red Army commanders were told to enforce the fusion of the two left-wing parties at the local level. Over the next few months, some 20,000 social democrats were “harassed, imprisoned, or even killed” if they objected.61 The Berlin city councillor Ruth Andreas-Friedrich, a dedicated social democrat, wrote a diary entry wondering “who are we to stand up against the pressure of a world power? In the Eastern zone the merging process advances with steadfast relentlessness.”62
Grotewohl, like the social democrat Cyrankiewicz in Poland, might also have realized that if he played along, there was a good chance he would wind up with a top job (as indeed he eventually did: from 1949 until his death in 1964, he was prime minister of the GDR). Whether inspired by fear or opportunism, or both, he agreed to the unification. At a special unification congress on April 21 and 22, 1946, the Socialist Unity Party (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands, or SED) was born. “Not a one-party system, but the consolidation of a united antifascist democratic front,” wrote Neues Deutschland, the communist party newspaper. “Next to this party, which represents millions, there will be, in the long run, no room for any splinter groups.” In her diary, Andreas-Friedrich acidly summarized this statement: “Not a one-party system, but, on the other hand, no room for any other parties.”63
Although Grotewohl caved in under pressure, not all of his party followed. During a tumultuous meeting of the Berlin social democrats, Grotewohl was shouted down with cries of “Lackey!” or “We don’t want a forced unification! We won’t let ourselves be raped” and more:
The protests intensify. They turn more and more angry, more and more passionate. The speaker’s words drown in them as if in a spring tide. “Traitor … fraud … resign … stop …” … Someone begins to sing: “Onward, brothers, to light and freedom …” His lips form the words automatically. And automatically the comrades join in. Everybody’s face is glowing with pride and excitement. “This time we didn’t eat crow. For the first time in thirteen years we have defended our freedom.”64
More than 80 percent of the Berlin social democrats voted against unification with the communist party, a vote that left both parties in an extremely odd position. Although it had ceased to exist in most of eastern Germany, the Social Democratic Party in the city of Berlin remained a major force. Not only that, the Berlin SPD (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands) had become radically anticommunist, maintaining close ties to the equally anticommunist western SPD. Kurt Schumacher opened an “Eastern Office” (Ostbüro) to aid eastern social democrats under Soviet pressure. Ulbricht railed against Schumacher in lengthy speeches, calling him a “reactionary force” who promoted a “policy of division.”65
Against this background, the first postwar German election campaign, launched in September 1946, proved a curious spectacle. From the beginning, the Soviet military administration and its propaganda division, led by Colonel Tyulpanov, planned the campaign with great precision. “All of the SED’s decisions,” Tyulpanov declared, “must be agreed upon by the leadership of the Soviet Military Administration.” Tyulpanov persuaded higher officials to suspend temporarily the reparations program, to increase the supply of raw materials to the zone, and even to increase food rations for children, babies, and pregnant women.66
Though initially skeptical of the political talents of their German allies, the Soviet military administration began to feel more confident of victory by late summer. With unlimited access to paper, the German communists, like the Polish communists, printed hundreds of thousands of posters and more than a million leaflets. Other parties had to fight to get any paper at all. The SED used deliberately anodyne slogans—“Unity, Peace, and Socialism!” or “Unified Germany: Securing our Future!”—and avoided the word “communism,” as well as any references to the USSR. Across the five provinces of the Russian zone, Soviet officials also campaigned openly on the SED’s behalf. In some regions, local commanders reserved the right to promote or veto specific candidates, and to approve or disapprove of electoral rallies.67
Even so, the result was far from reassuring. The SED failed to win majorities at the regional level and would be forced to share power with the “bourgeois” Christian democrats and liberal democrats. In Berlin, where the social democrats campaigned separately from the “unified” SED—and where elections were held simultaneously in both the eastern and western halves of
the city—the results were catastrophic. The social democrats won decisively, with 43 percent of the vote in the Soviet sector and 49 percent overall. The SED managed only 19.8 percent overall, even falling behind the Christian democrats, who won 22.2 percent.68
The party tried to put a positive slant on the results. The headline of Neues Deutschland declared the “Great Election Victory of SED in the Zone.” But behind the scenes the leadership was disappointed and the Russians were furious. In Moscow, the Soviet leadership debated a policy change and considered removing Tyulpanov. In the Red Army’s Karlshorst headquarters, some even expressed doubts that democracy could be “created only through the bayonet” and advocated a more liberal policy.69
Instead of liberalizing, the Soviet military administration cracked down. One of the people who felt that pressure was Ernst Benda. In 1946, Benda was a law student at Humboldt University in East Berlin and the chairman of the students’ association of the Christian Democratic Party (Christlich Demokratische Union, or CDU). Christian democracy seemed to him an obvious choice at the time: “After the experience we had with the Nazi regime it was necessary to become active in politics and to bring your religious personal convictions into politics, to try to form politics according to what you believe in.”70
The party gave Benda a small office at its headquarters on Jägerstraße, close to the university, where he was able to listen to the party leaders’ internal debates. At the time, the CDU was divided between a strongly “pro-Western” and anti-Soviet faction, led by Konrad Adenauer in the West, and another group, led by Jakob Kaiser in the East, whose members believed that it was still possible to find a compromise between East and West and thereby avoid the permanent division of Germany. There was nothing “conservative” about the party in the contemporary sense: “If you looked at the party platform [of the East Berlin CDU] today,” Benda explained in 2008, “it would be to the left of the left.”
Yet even Benda’s left-wing Christian democracy—at the time he advocated the creation of a welfare state and some centralization of the economy, along with private business and enterprise—led him into conflict with the communists at the university. He objected when, on the occasion of a communist party meeting in 1947, the university was draped in red flags, and, in conjunction with other activists, produced leaflets demanding to know where they were meant to be studying, “Humboldt University, or Higher Party School?” The majority of the student council—which split along party lines roughly similar to those in greater Berlin—cooperated with Benda and his CDU friends. “It is not important which party you vote for, it is more important which party you don’t vote for,” Benda told a university election rally at that time. “And everybody understood what I meant by this … You were either for or against the communists. If you were against them, it was not important whether you were a social democrat, a Christian democrat, or anything else.”
As 1947 turned into 1948, these kinds of protests took place with ever greater frequency. They were also met with greater repression. Manfred Klein, the CDU leader who had tried to cooperate with the Free German Youth leaders, had already been arrested by the spring of 1947, and protests at the universities of Rostock, Jena, and Leipzig led to more arrests. Another student leader, Arno Esch, was ultimately sentenced to death by a Soviet military tribunal.71 The crackdown took a little bit longer to get under way in Berlin—the eastern half of the city was still being watched carefully by its western counterpart—but it finally came. Paul Wandel, the rector of Humboldt University and a long-standing communist, expelled three leading student activists. The student council, which was still led by a noncommunist majority, voted to go on strike.
The end, for both Benda and the eastern Christian democrats, came soon afterward:
One day in March 1948 I heard that one of my friends, a CDU student, had been arrested at Friedrichstraße [the underground station which led to West Berlin] … Very clearly I recall that I immediately went over to the CDU headquarters, and called another friend, also a functionary at our student group, who was somewhere in Dahlem, in the American sector. I called him, told him what I had heard, and asked him, “What can we do?” Then, just after I said this, somebody cut in our conversation from the outside … In just four words he told me, “Seien Sie nur vorsichtig: Just do be careful …” I understood immediately: somebody whose job it was to follow telephone conversations had used this opportunity to give me a personal warning.
Benda hung up the phone, left the office, and went immediately to the subway station—not to Friedrichstraße, where his colleague had just been arrested, but to Kochstraße, another border crossing. After a few minutes he had entered into the American zone. He did not return to East Berlin for forty years.72
By the end of 1947, Mikołajczyk had escaped from Poland and was living in Britain. Nagy was in exile, on his way to the United States. Jakob Kaiser had resigned as the leader of the Christian Democratic Party in the Soviet zone of Germany and would soon leave, along with Benda and many other colleagues, for West Berlin. Less than three years had elapsed since the end of the war, but almost all organized, legal opposition to the communist regimes had now been eliminated. Often 1948—the year of the Berlin blockade—is said to mark the beginning of the Cold War as well as the onset of “Stalinism” in Central Europe. But the Stalinization—or Sovietization, or totalitarianization—of Eastern Europe was already far advanced well before 1948 began.
By the autumn of 1947, Stalin had also stopped pretending to the outside world that he would adhere to the language of the Yalta treaty. During the war, he had shut down the Comintern as a gesture of goodwill to the Western Allies. Now he created a new organization—the Communist Information Bureau, or Cominform—in part as a gesture of aggression toward those same Allies.
Although there had been some loose talk of re-creating an international body of “revolutionary” communist parties, the immediate impetus for the creation of the Cominform was the news that President Truman and his secretary of state, General George C. Marshall, were launching a plan to help rebuild Europe’s economies with large investments and big credits. In his 1947 Truman Doctrine speech, Truman had declared that “the seeds of totalitarian regimes are nurtured by misery and want.” The end result of that thought was the Marshall Plan, a generous fund for European recovery. Proposed in June 1947, the Marshall Plan was intended to rebuild European economies and—depending on your point of view—either help fend off the threat of communist revolution or help entrench Western capitalism. Writing at the time, one American advocate declared that “The Plan will create an economic environment in Europe favorable for the growth and development of democratic processes and economic prosperity.” More to the point, the plan can “prevent a breakdown of the political and economic structure of Europe,” and thus lower the chances of communist revolutions in Western Europe, which at the time were believed to be a real threat.73
At first, the Soviet Union was utterly flummoxed by the Marshall Plan. When the program was announced, the Polish government, desperate to join, immediately requested guidance from Moscow. Molotov replied that as yet he had no information on the matter.74 The Yugoslav government’s instinct was to refuse, but it wrote to Moscow for advice as well.75 Meanwhile, the Czechoslovak government—under the impression that it had a choice—voted to accept the offer and to attend a Marshall Aid conference in Paris. Stalin summoned Klement Gottwald, the Czechoslovak communist party boss, and Jan Masaryk, the noncommunist Czech foreign minister, to Moscow. He told them that the Americans were “trying to form a Western bloc and to isolate the Soviet Union” and they were to have no part of it. Bluntly, he ordered them to withdraw from the meeting: “It is necessary for you to cancel your participation in the Paris conference today—that is, June 10, 1947.” They did.76
The Cominform was Stalin’s response to Truman’s challenge. Symbolically, the institution would solidify “his” bloc, enabling its members to better respond to “propaganda” from the West in th
e future. With its creation, the notion of a uniquely “Polish”—or German, or Czech, or Hungarian—path to communism was to be eliminated. All of the world’s important communist parties were to adopt a single line, in Eastern Europe and in the West. Ten communist parties were invited to join, from Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Romania, the USSR, and Yugoslavia; Western parties from France, Italy, and the “Free Territory of Trieste” (at the time a disputed territory, eventually divided between Italy and Yugoslavia) joined as well.
Not all of those present at the organization’s first meeting in September 1947, in the Polish mountain resort of Szklarska Poręba, seemed aware of its purpose. Gomułka, the forum’s Polish host, emphasized the “informal nature of the meeting” in his first speech and spoke naïvely of “the need for exchange of experiences between the Communist Parties.” But there were no exchanges of experience. Instead, the Soviet delegation took over and imposed its agenda. Andrei Zhdanov, Stalin’s culture boss, made a thundering speech in which he spoke of the “new alignment of forces,” the “formation of two camps,” and the “American plan for the enslavement of Europe.” Finally, he provided the group with its draft resolution, which starkly described a Europe divided between “the policy of the USSR” and its allies on the one hand, which was “aimed at undermining imperialism and strengthening democracy,” and “the policy of the USA and Britain, aimed at strengthening imperialism and strangling democracy” on the other.77
The Cominform’s creation is sometimes described as an ambush, a surprise assertion of Soviet power that sealed the fate of all present. Others have called it a turning point, the moment when the Soviet Union dropped its tolerance of Eastern bloc pluralism. In the revisionist interpretation of Cold War history, the Szklarska Poręba meeting is also sometimes portrayed as a panicked reaction to the aggression of the West, and in particular to the naked imperialism of the Marshall Plan.
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