Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956

by Anne Applebaum

  None of this reflected ill will toward the region, just different priorities. Roosevelt’s main concern at Yalta was the shape of the new United Nations, which he envisaged as a body that would prevent war in the future, and he needed Soviet cooperation to construct this new international system. He also wanted Soviet help in the invasion of Manchuria as well as the use of Russian bases in the Far East. These concerns were simply more important to him than the fate of Poland or Czechoslovakia, and there were other issues at stake as well, from the future of the Italian monarchy to Middle Eastern oil. Although central to Stalin’s postwar plans, Eastern Europe was only of marginal interest to the American president.54

  Churchill, meanwhile, was acutely conscious of British weakness. Once the Red Army was actually in Poland, Hungary, or Czechoslovakia he had no illusions about Britain’s ability to force it to leave. In his memoirs, Churchill remembers telling Roosevelt just before the Yalta summit that “we ought to occupy as much of Austria as possible, as it was ‘undesirable that more of Western Europe than necessary should be occupied by the Russians.’ ” It isn’t clear by what criteria Austria was any more a part of “Western” Europe at that point than Hungary or Czechoslovakia. But Churchill’s fatalism comes through loud and clear: once the Red Army was in place, it wasn’t going to move.55

  Both leaders also knew that, as the war ended, their voters would be anxious for their husbands, brothers, and sons to come home. It would be extremely difficult to “sell” a new conflict with the USSR. Wartime propaganda had portrayed Stalin as jovial “Uncle Joe,” rough-edged friend of the working man, and Churchill and Roosevelt had both praised him in their public statements. In London, sympathizers had held fund-raising concerts for the Soviet Union and erected a statue of Lenin outside one of the Bolshevik leader’s former London garrets.56 In the United States, American businessmen already looked forward to profiting from this new friendship: “Russia will be, if not our biggest, at least our most eager customer when the war ends,” declared the president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.57 To turn around and tell war-weary Britons or Americans that they had to stay in Europe to fight the Soviet Union would have been politically difficult, if not impossible.

  The logistical difficulties were even worse. Churchill, who was never happy about the Russian occupation of Berlin, did, in the spring of 1945, actually order his military planners to investigate the possibility of an Allied attack on Soviet forces in Central Europe, possibly using Polish and even German troops. The result, a plan for “Operation Unthinkable,” was immediately dismissed as impractical. Its authors warned the British prime minister that the Red Army outnumbered British troops three to one, and that the result might be a “long and costly” military campaign, even a “total war.” Churchill himself wrote in the margins of the draft that an attack on the Red Army was “highly improbable”—though some elements of Operation Unthinkable later formed part of the planning for a possible Soviet attack on Britain.58

  There was also an element of naïveté on the Western side, as Miłosz had complained: Roosevelt, particularly toward the end of his life, frequently expressed his faith in Stalin’s good intentions. “Don’t worry,” he told the Polish exile leader Stanisław Mikołajczyk in 1944, “Stalin doesn’t intend to take freedom from Poland. He wouldn’t dare do that because he knows that the United States government stands solidly behind you.”59 A year or so later, American and British negotiators agreed to give the Soviet Union command of the Allied Control Commission in Budapest—the body set up to run Hungary after the war—on the strict condition that the USSR consult with the other Allies before giving any instructions to the Hungarian government. In the event, it never even pretended to do so.60

  Some later contended that communist sympathizers in the American government and “pro-Soviet elements” in Washington had also influenced American postwar policy.61 Even though Alger Hiss, probably the most notorious Soviet agent, was at Yalta as part of the U.S. negotiating team, his influence—if any—would have been unnecessary. The transcripts show clearly that Churchill and Roosevelt had very definite interests, and that pushing the Soviet Union out of Eastern Europe was not one of them.62 Those present were pragmatists. “All that Yalta did was to recognize the facts of life as they existed and were being brought about,” remembered one American general. “To me there was no choice to make.”63

  Perhaps confusingly, this remained the case throughout the Cold War. Even when Western rhetoric became very aggressively anti-Soviet, great care was always taken not to launch a new European conflict. Neither the United States nor Britain wanted a war with the Soviet Union, either then or later. In 1953, after Stalin’s death, when strikes and riots broke out in East Berlin, the Allied authorities in West Berlin remained very restrained, even warning West Germans not to cross the border in support of the strikes.64 At the time of the Hungarian Revolution in 1956, the U.S. secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, an avowed Cold Warrior, also went out of his way to deny any American involvement in the events, and to tell the Soviet Union that “we do not look upon these nations as potential military allies.”65

  In truth, the Eastern Europeans were often more naïve than the Western Allies. In Hungary, pro-British politicians clung to the belief that their country would be liberated by the British. Many were “fuelled by an irrational belief in Hungary’s alleged geopolitical significance,” in the words of the historian László Borhi, and expected a British invasion of the Balkans well into 1944. Because their country had been a bastion of Western Christendom in the struggle against the Ottoman Empire, they thought they would continue to play this role in the twentieth century. “Western powers could not afford Russian domination of [Hungary’s] geographically important area,” declared one Hungarian diplomat with confidence. The Poles, whose political future really had been the subject of heated discussion among the Allied leaders, were equally convinced the British would not abandon the country in whose name they had originally declared war on Germany, and the Americans could not abandon them because the Polish American lobby would prevent it: sooner or later there had to be a Third World War. Later, the East Germans found it hard to believe that the West would agree to the fortification of the German-German border. Surely the West could not afford a divided Germany?

  But the West could afford it and could accept it, just as the West also came to accept a divided Europe. Although no one in the West—not in Washington, London, or Paris—foresaw the extent of the physical, psychological, and political changes that the Red Army would bring to every country it occupied, they exerted very little effort to prevent them from coming about.

  Chapter 2

  VICTORS

  During the last months under the Nazis nearly all of us were pro-Russian. We waited for the light from the East. But it has burned too many. Too much has happened that cannot be understood. The dark streets still resonate every night with the piercing screams of women in distress.

  —Ruth Andreas-Friedrich1

  The Russians … swept the native population clean in a manner that had no parallel since the days of the Asiatic hordes.

  —George Kennan2

  IN BUDAPEST, JOHN LUKACS saw “an ocean of green-gray Russians, all coming in from the east.”3 In an eastern Berlin suburb, Lutz Rackow saw “tanks, tanks, tanks, tanks,” and soldiers walking alongside, among them “amazons with blond braids.”4 This was the Red Army: hungry, angry, exhausted, battle-hardened men and women, some dressed in the same uniforms they’d been wearing at Stalingrad or Kursk two years earlier, all of them carrying memories of terrible violence, all of them now brutalized by what they had seen, heard, and done.

  The final Soviet offensive began in January 1945, when the Red Army crossed the Vistula, the river that runs through the center of Poland. Quickly marching through devastated western Poland and the Baltic States, the “Ivans” had conquered Budapest after a terrible siege by the middle of February, Silesia in March. Their assault on Königsberg in East Prussia ende
d in April. By that time, two vast army groups, the First Belorussian Front and the First Ukrainian Front, were on the outskirts of Berlin, poised for the final assault. Hitler killed himself on April 30. A week later, on May 7, General Alfred Jodl unconditionally surrendered to the Allies in the name of the Wehrmacht High Command.

  Even now, it is not easy to assess what happened in Eastern Europe during those final five months of war because not everybody remembers the events of those bloody months in the same way. In Soviet historiography, the last phase of the war is always portrayed unambiguously as a series of liberations. According to the standard narrative, Warsaw, Budapest, Prague, Vienna, and Berlin were freed from the yoke of Nazi Germany, triumph followed triumph, the fascists were destroyed, the population rejoiced, and freedom was restored.

  Others tell the story differently. For many decades Germans, and especially Berliners, spoke very little about the events of May 1945 and afterward. Nowadays, however, they remember very well the looting, the arbitrary violence, and above all the mass rape that followed the Soviet invasion. Elsewhere in Eastern Europe, the Red Army is also remembered for its attacks on local partisans who had been fighting the Germans but who happened not to be communists, and for the waves of both random and targeted violence that followed. In Poland, Hungary, Germany, Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Bulgaria, the Red Army’s arrival is rarely remembered as a pure liberation. Instead, it is remembered as the brutal beginning of a new occupation.

  Yet for many people, neither of these opposing perspectives offers the complete story either. For the arrival of the Red Army really did herald freedom for millions of people. Soviet soldiers opened the gates of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Majdanek, Stuthoff, Sachsenhausen, and Ravensbrück. They emptied the Gestapo prisons. They made it possible for Jews to leave their hiding places in barns and cellars, and to return, slowly, to something resembling ordinary life. Genia Zonabend, a Jewish internee, walked out of the gates of a small labor camp in eastern Germany and went into the first German houses she could find, asking for food. She was refused—until a Russian passing by heard her story and made sure she received food and, as she remembered, “even warm water to wash.”5

  Nor did Soviet assistance extend only to Jews. The arrival of the Red Army also made it possible for Poles in the western part of Poland to speak Polish after years of being forbidden to do so in public. Nur für Deutsche (“For Germans Only”) signs disappeared from shops, trolley cars, and restaurants in the Polish cities that had been rechristened with German names. In Germany itself, opponents of Hitler rejoiced when the Soviet soldiers arrived, as did millions of Czechs and Hungarians. “I ran out in the courtyard and hugged the first Soviet soldier I saw,” one Hungarian told me, and she was not alone.6 Another one of her countrymen described what the arrival of the Red Army meant to him and his wife:

  We felt that we were liberated. I know that this is a cliché, and these words do not have any real meaning any more, but no matter how hard I think I cannot better describe the feeling we had, than to say that we were liberated. And not only did we feel like this, sitting there in the basement, weeping and holding one another’s hands: everyone there had the same feeling, that the world would finally turn into a different one, and that it really had been worthwhile for us to be born.7

  One Pole told me the same: “We had no mixed feelings about them. They liberated us.”8 Yet even those who rejoiced the loudest didn’t deny that the Red Army left extraordinary devastation in its wake. When describing what happened, many spoke of a “new Mongol invasion,” using language tinged with xenophobia to evoke the unprecedented scale of the violence. George Kennan was reminded of the “Asiatic hordes.”9 Sándor Márai remembered them being “like a completely different human race whose reflexes and responses didn’t make any sense.”10 John Lukacs recalled “dark, round, Mongol faces, with narrow eyes, incurious and hostile.”11

  In part, the Soviet soldiers seemed foreign to Eastern Europeans because they seemed so suspicious of Eastern Europeans, and because they appeared so shocked by the material wealth of Eastern Europe. Since the time of the revolution, Russians had been told of the poverty, unemployment, and misery of capitalism, and about the superiority of their own system. But even upon entering eastern Poland, at that time one of the poorest parts of Europe, they found ordinary peasants who owned several chickens, a couple of cows, and more than one change of clothes. They found small country towns with stone churches, cobbled streets, and people riding bicycles, which were then still unknown in most of Russia. They found farms equipped with solid barns, and crops planted in neat rows. These were scenes of abundance by comparison with the desperate poverty, the muddy roads, and the tiny wooden cottages of rural Russia.

  When they encountered Königsberg churches, Budapest apartments, and Berlin homes filled with antique furniture, “fascist” women living in what they perceived to be unimaginable luxury, the mysteries of flush toilets, and electric gadgets, then they were truly shocked: “Our soldiers have seen the two-storey suburban houses with electricity, gas, bathrooms and beautifully tended gardens. Our people have seen the villas of the rich bourgeoisie in Berlin, the unbelievable luxury of castles, estates and mansions. And thousands of soldiers repeat these angry questions when they look around them in Germany: ‘But why did they come to us? What did they want?”12

  They searched for explanations. One political officer wrote back to Moscow, explaining that “this is a kulak agriculture based on the exploitation of labor. That is why everything looks nice and rich. And when our Red Army soldier, particularly one who is immature in the political sense with a petty bourgeois private ownership view, compares involuntarily a collective farm with a German farm, he praises the German farm. We even have some officers who admire German things …”13 Or perhaps it was all stolen: “It’s obvious from everything we see that Hitler robbed the whole of Europe to please his blood-stained Fritzes,” one soldier wrote home. “Their sheep are the best Russian merinos and their shops are piled with goods from all the shops and factories of Europe. In the near future, these goods will appear in Russian shops as our trophies.”14

  And so they stole back. Liquor and ladies’ lingerie, furniture and crockery, bicycles and linen were taken from Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, the Baltic and the Balkan states as well as Germany. Wristwatches seemed to have almost mythical significance for Russian soldiers, who would walk around wearing half a dozen at once if they could. An iconic photograph of a Russian soldier raising the Soviet flag atop the Berlin Reichstag had to be touched up to remove the wristwatches from the arms of the young hero.15 In Budapest, the obsession with them remained part of local folklore and may have helped shape local perceptions of the Red Army. A few months after the war, a Budapest cinema showed a newsreel about the Yalta Conference. When President Roosevelt raised his arm while speaking to Stalin, several members of the audience shouted: “Mind your watch!”16 The same was true in Poland, where for many years Polish children would “play” Soviet soldiers by shouting: “Davai chasyi”—“Give me your watch.”17 A beloved Polish children’s television series of the late 1960s included a scene of Russian and Polish soldiers during wartime, camping out in deserted German buildings having amassed a vast collection of stolen clocks.18

  For many, these thefts heralded the bitter disillusion that would be experienced by those who had eagerly awaited the arrival of Soviet troops. Márai tells of an elderly man, a “venerable patriarchal figure,” who received his first Soviet visitor with solemnity, and respectfully revealed to him that he was a Jew:

  The Russian soldier broke into a smile, removed the submachine gun from his neck, walked up to the old man, and, according to Russian custom, kissed him gently—from right to left—on the cheeks. He said he was a Jew, too. For a time he silently and heartily squeezed the old man’s hand.

  Then he hung the submachine gun around his neck again and ordered the old gentleman to stand in the corner of the room with his entire family and to turn with rais
ed hands toward the wall … After this, the Russian robbed them slowly, at his leisure.19

  Some Soviet soldiers also found this deeply disturbing. Years later, the writer Vasily Grossman told his daughter that the Red Army had “changed for the worse” when it crossed the Soviet border. One night, Grossman remembered, he slept in a German house, along with several other Russian soldiers, including a “majestic” colonel, with a “good Russian face,” who was so tired he seemed ready to collapse: “All night, we hear noises coming from the room where the tired colonel is staying. He leaves in the morning without saying goodbye. We go to his room: chaos, the colonel has emptied the cupboards like a real looter.”20

  What they didn’t steal, they often destroyed. The street fighting in Berlin and Budapest caused plenty of what we would now call collateral damage, but the Red Army also engaged in wanton destruction, apparently for its own sake. In Gniezno, the cradle of Christianity in Poland, Soviet tanks deliberately destroyed a thousand-year-old cathedral that had no military significance whatsoever. Photographs taken at the time (and then hidden for seventy years) show the tanks standing alone, in the town square, firing at the ancient building without provocation.21 After taking the city of Breslau, Soviet soldiers deliberately set the buildings in the ancient town center alight, burning to the ground the priceless book collection of the university library as well as the city museum and several churches.22