Iron Curtain

by Anne Applebaum

  Inevitably, there began to be border “incidents”—Soviet soldiers shooting into the American zone and vice versa—as well as arguments over where, exactly, the new East–West German border was supposed to be. Nineteenth-century stone markers, which could be stealthily moved at night, became a focus of contention, and a number of towns in the Soviet zone applied to be transferred to the American zone.44 The Red Army began to establish what would later become a no-man’s-land, an area along the border where no one was allowed to live. Later, whole villages in these border areas would be evacuated. A series of Allied negotiations were held to discuss travel problems, and various commissions were set up to find the answers. Rules were created to govern the issuance of passes and permits.

  All the while, Germans kept moving from East to West. Between October 1945 and June 1946 some 1.6 million people crossed into the American and British zones from the Soviet zone. By June 1946, the Red Army, not the American army, was demanding a ban on interzonal travel, and American soldiers, not Red Army soldiers, were helping Germans sneak across (by dressing up German women in American uniforms, among other things, a trick that was apparently not hard to see through).45

  From 1949, the West German authorities also stopped treating people arriving from the East as illegal immigrants. Instead, they came to be regarded as political refugees and victims of communist oppression. They received places in refugee camps and help in finding housing and work. In accordance with these changes, the Soviet authorities also began to enforce stricter controls, sending Red Army troops to patrol their border and build ditches, fences, and barriers.

  Berlin remained the exception. Although the city lay inside the Soviet zone, it was not easy to set up an enforceable “border” within it (though the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961 would eventually prove that it was possible). More importantly, the USSR did not at first want the city’s division to become official. The Soviet authorities preferred Berlin to remain unified, albeit anchored securely in the East. This anomaly quickly created another odd dynamic, as East Germans began flocking to East Berlin in order to cross the border into West Berlin, and to make their way from there to West Germany by train or air. The mystery and intrigue of Berlin, so attractive to spy novelists and filmmakers, date from this era, when Berlin was the gateway to freedom.

  The Berlin blockade of 1948–49 (described in Chapter 11) was designed to end this flow of people, as well as to persuade the Western Allies to abandon the western part of the city. Though the blockade failed in that latter task, the reinforcement of the border within the city did make it more difficult for Berliners to cross. Border police, ostensibly looking for black marketeers, monitored all forms of transportation, checking passports and visas, sometimes arresting would-be refugees.

  The real clampdown came in 1952, after the East German government created a special commission to deal with the problem of those “fleeing the Republic.” Naturally, their solutions included propaganda—denunciations of the Western spies who enticed Easterners across the border with false promises of riches—as well as promises of better employment and housing for anyone who came back. The secret police began to collect information about people who had left, the better to understand their motives. Eventually, all remaining crossings along the East–West German border were closed to ordinary traffic, including as many in Berlin as feasible. It was at this point that the East German police and the Red Army began to monitor and block the roads into East Berlin from East Germany as well.

  Yet still people fled. Despite all of the border controls, the guns, and the tanks, despite the risk of arrest or capture, nearly 200,000 people—197,788 to be precise—left East Germany for the West in 1950. In 1952, after the border had been newly fortified, the number dropped only slightly, to 182,393. Even then it began to pick up again, and would hover around 200,000 annually until the construction of the Berlin Wall halted the traffic. In total, 3.5 million people, out of a population of 18 million, are thought to have left East Germany between 1945 and 1961.46

  Of these 3.5 million, some might have become the regime’s opponents if they had stayed. Ernst Benda, the young Christian Democratic activist who slipped over the border after receiving an odd phone message, went on to become a legal scholar, an early supporter of the Free University of West Berlin, and eventually president of the West German Supreme Court. Gisela Gneist, imprisoned in Sachsenhausen for founding a democratic youth group at the age of fifteen, crossed the border after her release. Decades later she helped create the memorial to Soviet prisoners at that camp. Gerhard Finn, arrested as a teenage “Werewolf,” crossed the border and threw himself into the anticommunist movement in West Berlin. Among the émigrés were artists, writers, and musicians of all kinds who, if they had stayed, might well have developed into cultural dissidents.

  Not all of the refugees were political. One factory in Köpenick, required to explain its employees’ departures, told the authorities that people left because their relatives were in West Germany, because the factory had not granted them a leave of absence to study, because they had debts, and because they thought they could make more money in the West. This was probably an accurate reflection of many émigrés’ motives, which were undoubtedly mixed. The last point in particular was surely influential. By the early 1950s, West Germany’s economy had left East Germany’s economy far behind, as everyone could see.

  But not all of those who remained were unhappy, and it is a mistake to imagine that only a sullen, apolitical rump population remained behind after this exodus—or that, as the German scholar Arnulf Baring once wrote, “anyone who showed initiative or was energetic and determined, had either left in time or was thrown out later on.” At least until the wall was built in 1961, those who stayed behind had extra leverage: if not given housing, better wages, or a top job, they could always threaten to leave. Those in certain critical professions—doctors, for example—were showered with privileges designed to persuade them to stay, and some of them reckoned they were better off for it. When, after Stalin’s death, her husband told her that changes in regime policy might mean that many who had fled to the West might be coming back to East Germany, Herta Kuhrig, then aged twenty-three, thought: “Oh my God, if they return, we might have to leave our flat.”47

  Knowing its citizens had a choice, the East German government refrained from cutting wages, and probably kept the police regime lighter than it would have been. Fear of a mass exodus might even help explain why there were no show trials in East Germany.48 Not all of those who stayed were admirers of the communist system, but they had assessed the situation, worked out how much compromise would be required and how much passive opposition would be possible. They made what they thought was the best choice for themselves and their families, and then waited to see what would happen next.

  Chapter 18

  REVOLUTIONS

  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?1

  —Bertolt Brech, “The Solution”1

  ON MARCH 6, 1953, Eastern Europeans, like the rest of the world, awoke to hear stunning news: Stalin was dead.2

  Across the region, radios played funereal music. Shops closed their doors. Citizens were urged to hang flags from their homes, and millions voluntarily wore black clothes and black ribbons. Newspapers appeared with black borders around the edges, black sashes were placed on Stalin’s photograph in offices, and schoolchildren took turns standing as honor guards before his portrait. Delegations from factories and ministries trooped through the offices of Soviet commandants in East Germany, where they signed condolence books in mournf
ul silence. In the town of Heiligenstadt, Catholic churches rang their bells and priests said an “Our Father” in Stalin’s name.3 Enormous crowds of mourners filled Wenceslas Square in Prague, and tens of thousands gathered around the Stalin statue in Budapest. A moment of silence was observed on Alexanderplatz in East Berlin.4

  In Moscow, Stalin’s acolytes and imitators gathered for his funeral. Bolesław Bierut and Konstantin Rokossovskii, Mátyás Rákosi and Klement Gottwald, Walter Ulbricht and Otto Grotewohl, all of them were there. So were Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej from Romania, Enver Hoxha from Albania, and Vulko Chervenkov from Bulgaria. Mao Tse-tung and Chou En-lai came from China, Palmiro Togliatti came from Italy, and Maurice Thorez from France.5 Georgy Malenkov, Lavrentii Beria, and Vyacheslav Molotov gave funeral orations, although they did not, one observer noted, “exhibit a trace of sorrow.”6 Emotions must have run high, however. Gottwald suffered a heart attack after the funeral and died soon after.

  Change followed swiftly. By the time of his death, Stalin’s colleagues had grimly concluded that things were not going well in the Soviet empire. For many months they had been receiving regular, accurate, and extremely worrying reports from Eastern Europe. The Soviet ambassador to Prague had written of “near-total chaos” in Czech industry in December 1952, for example, along with steep price increases and a dramatic drop in living standards. Following the deaths of Stalin and Gottwald, strikes across Czechoslovakia picked up pace again. In May, thousands of Czechoslovak workers marched three kilometers from the Škoda factory to the city hall in Plzeń, where they occupied the building, burned Soviet flags, and threw busts of Lenin, Stalin, and Gottwald out of the window—a symbolic protest against the defenestration of Jan Masaryk, the former foreign minister, an anticommunist who had been thrown out of the window of Prague castle in 1948.7 Strikes also began to spread among tobacco workers in Bulgaria, until then one of the most obedient countries in the bloc. The Soviet Politburo found this particularly disturbing: if hitherto loyal Bulgarian workers were restless, then the rest of the region must be even more unstable.8

  The news from East Germany was not good either. Despite ever increasing border security, despite police controls and barbed wire, traffic over the internal German border was accelerating. More than 160,000 people had moved from East to West Germany in 1952, and a further 120,000 had left in the first four months of 1953.9 One report warned of “growing unrest among the [East German] population stemming from the hard-line policies of the GDR leadership.”10 Beria himself penned a very accurate, perfectly clear-eyed analysis:

  The increasing number of flights to the West can be explained … by the unwillingness of individual groups of peasants to join the agricultural production cooperatives that are being organized, by the fear among small and medium entrepreneurs about the abolition of private property and the confiscation of their possessions, by the desire of some young people to evade service in the GDR armed forces, and by the severe difficulties that the GDR is experiencing with the supply of food products and consumer goods.11

  Even with the evidence in front of them, the Soviet leaders did not publicly question their own ideology. The ideas of Marxism were still correct—but, they concluded, the people in charge had failed: they had been too harsh, too arbitrary, too hasty, too incompetent. In particular, the East German party bosses had failed. On June 2, the Soviet Politburo summoned Ulbricht, Grotewohl, and Fred Oelssner, the ideology chief, to Moscow to tell them so. For three days, the Politburo lectured their German comrades. They told them to abandon celebrations of Ulbricht’s birthday, to liberalize their economic program, and to postpone, indefinitely, the planned announcement of East Germany’s imminent transition to “full socialism.” This “incorrect political line” was to be replaced by a “New Course.” The Germans naturally obeyed. On June 11, Neues Deutschland published a statement from the party leadership on its front page, apologizing for the “grave mistakes” of previous years, calling for an end to collectivization and even for the rehabilitation of victims of political trials.

  Soviet–Hungarian talks followed a week later. This time, the Politburo attacked Rákosi, along with Ernő Gerő, Józef Révai, and Mihály Farkas. Beria—who had himself personally conducted brutal interrogations in the Soviet Union—led the charge: Rákosi, he said, had initiated an insupportable “wave of repression” against the population, even giving personal directions as to who should be arrested and beaten. Beria’s colleagues also accused the Hungarian leader of “economic adventurism.” Well aware of “discontent among the Hungarian population,” shortages, and economic hardship they ordered Rákosi to step down as prime minister, although they allowed him to remain general secretary of the Hungarian communist party.12

  They replaced him with Imre Nagy, the little-known agricultural minister. Nagy was also a “Moscow communist” who had lived in the Soviet Union before the war—where, as the historian Charles Gati argues, he had probably worked as a secret police informer and maintained informal links to some of the Soviet leadership. But he had long favored a more gradual transition to communism and, more importantly, was not Jewish, which the Soviet Politburo seemed to think was an enormous advantage.13 He set to work designing a New Course for Hungary, and within a few weeks he was ready to announce it. In July he made his first speech to parliament, stunning his party and his country. Nagy called for an end to rapid industrialization, an end to collectivization, and a more relaxed approach to culture and the media. “In the future,” the Central Committee would soon declare, “the primary goal of our economic policy will be to raise constantly and considerably the standard of living of the people.” Nagy remained a Marxist and described all of his policies using Marxist language—his long, dull, and almost unreadable written defense of the New Course quotes Stalin and Lenin with alarming frequency—but in the context of the time he seemed fresh and very different.14

  The Soviet Politburo had never intended East Germany and Hungary to make these changes on their own: the liberalization was meant to be instituted across the bloc in order to stem the tide of protest and discontent. Some of them may even have imagined that eventually similar changes would take place in the USSR, where, for a few short years—a period known in the USSR as “the Thaw”—it would also seem as if truly radical change were possible. Certainly in all of their conversations with their Eastern European partners in 1953, the Soviet leaders made it clear that their criticism was intended “not just for a single country but for all the people’s democracies.”15 Talks with the Albanian leader Enver Hoxha followed those with Ulbricht and Rákosi. More conversations, plotting more New Courses, were planned for late July. The Politburo also intended to invite the Poles, the Czechs, and the Bulgarians to Moscow, where they would also be told to change direction and make themselves popular—or risk catastrophe.

  But catastrophe came anyway, though in a form nobody had expected.

  The weather broke bright and clear in Berlin on June 17, 1953. Nevertheless, many Berliners stepped into the sunshine with trepidation, not sure what the morning would bring. The previous day, East Berlin had witnessed its first major mass strikes since the war. Emboldened by the announcement of the New Course, cheered on by Stalin’s death, frustrated by the fact that the new policies didn’t seem to include lower work quotas, Berlin’s workers had taken to the streets to protest. Lutz Rackow, an East German journalist, had walked down Stalinallee on June 16 alongside several thousand construction workers. They carried banners—“Berliners, join us! We don’t want to be slaves to our work!” Few had dared. But as soon as he got to Stalinallee on June 17, Rackow immediately saw that things were going to be different: “This time people were joining. Not only that, workers were coming into the city from as far as Henningsdorf to join, even though public transportation had been halted and the walk took three hours.”16

  Erich Loest, the novelist who had tried to teach workers to write theater reviews, was on his way into the city that morning from Leipzig and he saw strikers too.
But he also saw Soviet tanks and trucks moving north from bases near Schonefeld and Ahlsdorf. They were heading for the center of Berlin at about the same speed as his train. On another train from Leipzig—or perhaps even the same one—the writer Elfriede Brüning saw the same tanks. She was sitting with a colleague, who read aloud a newspaper headline: “Tumult in Bonn,” it declared. Her friend laughed, and made a daring joke: “How is it that the government has heard only about the tumult in Bonn and not the uprising in Berlin!”17

  On the Western side of the city, Egon Bahr, then the chief political editor in West Berlin for RIAS (Radio in the American Sector), was anxiously waiting to hear what was happening. A couple of days earlier, a delegation from East Berlin had come to his office to ask him to publicize their planned strike. He had agreed to broadcast the strikers’ demands—they wanted lower work quotas, lower food prices, and free elections, among other things—and he had continued to do so until the radio’s American controller, Gordon Ewing, burst into his office and told him to stop: “Do you want to start World War Three?” Ewing told Bahr that American responsibility and American security guarantees ended at the border, and he’d better be clear about that in his broadcasts. As Bahr remembers, “This was the only order I ever got from the U.S. government at RIAS.”18