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

by Anne Applebaum

  The German leaders Ulbricht and Pieck were particularly assiduous about tracking down old comrades scattered across the Soviet Union, both in the Gulag and outside it. Among those they discovered was the young Wolfgang Leonhard, who had been deported to Karaganda, in Kazakhstan, at the start of the war, along with many other German residents of Moscow, where he languished in semi-starvation. Out of the blue a letter summoned him to Ufa in July 1942, without explanation. From then on, almost every aspect of his first encounter with the wartime Comintern was shrouded in an air of deep mystery. The entrance to the head office was flanked with large columns, but there was no sign on the door, “nothing to indicate that this was the building which housed the headquarters of the Comintern.” Upon entering, he was immediately offered a meal—it seemed that many of the comrades who arrived there had not eaten in many days—which he wolfed down in silence. He then had a short meeting with the chief of cadres, who told him, still without explanation, that he would be traveling farther: “I will notify you of your destination.”

  During the next few days he encountered many old friends, mostly children of German communists like himself, whom he had met in Moscow schools over the years and at meetings of the Komsomol, the communist party’s youth wing. None of them would speak about their recent past or their future plans, or even use what he knew to be their real names. “Gradually, I learned that different standards prevailed here: It was clear that what one did not talk about covered a much wider field.” After a few days he was again informed abruptly that it was time to leave. Still without any explanation, he was put on a boat, taken up the river, placed in a truck, and then finally told to get out and walk. At last he arrived at some old farm buildings and learned that this, at last, was the Comintern school. In deepest secrecy, he began his training.39

  Over the next few months, Leonhard and his fellow students heard the standard lectures—on Marxism and dialectical and historical materialism—with an added emphasis on the history of the communist parties in their respective countries and the history of the Comintern. They had access to secret reports and papers unavailable to others in the Soviet Union. Because of the high status of their future missions, the students also received Nazi and fascist literature of a kind they had never seen or heard of before. This was to enable them to better understand their enemies, as Leonhard remembered: “Often one of us was required to expound in front of the group various doctrines of Nazi ideology, while others had the task of attacking and refuting the Nazi arguments. The student who had to expound the Nazi arguments was told to set them out as well and clearly and convincingly as he could, and his performance was actually assessed more favorably the better he represented the Nazi point of view.”40

  Although they were allowed to read Nazi literature, they were kept well away from the writings of dissident or anti-Stalinist communists: “Whereas all the other seminars generally reached a respectable level of discussion, the seminar on Trotskyism was confined to furious partisan denunciations.”41

  There were several such wartime schools, not only for communists but also for Polish officers who had been recruited into the “Kościuszko Division,” a Polish-speaking division of the Red Army, as well as for captured German officers who were being “re-educated.” A noteworthy number of the politicians who were later to play promiment roles in the postwar communist states studied at them—or sent their children to do so. Tito’s son Zarko was one of Leonhard’s colleagues, for example, as was Amaya Ibárruri, the daughter of the Spanish communist Dolores Ibárruri, better known as La Pasionaria, one of the celebrated orators of the Spanish Civil War.

  Some of the teachers in the schools had equally illustrious careers in front of them. Jakub Berman, later the security, ideology, and propaganda boss in Poland, taught Polish communists in Ufa from 1942 onward. Then, as later, Berman took great pains to toe the party line. Among other things, he kept in close touch at this time with Zofia Dzerzhinskaia, the Polish wife of the notorious founder of the secret police, Feliks Dzerzhinskii (who was also Polish). She functioned as a kind of godmother to the Polish communists in the Soviet Union, and Berman carefully preserved copies of his letters to her. Although these are stiffly written and not especially informative, they do shed some light on what life must have been like in wartime Ufa. Berman told Dzerzhinskaia that he often went to listen to other lecturers, including Pieck from Germany, Togliatti from Italy, and La Pasionaria from Spain. He carefully followed events in Warsaw (“with great eagerness we are following the news of the heroic battle in the country”). On the occasion of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the USSR, he solemnly informed Dzerzhinskaia that the Soviet Union is “for us the best example of how to organize in the future the same kind of life in our country.”42

  Berman also told Dzerzhinskaia that he was teaching courses on “the History of Poland, the History of the Polish workers’ movement” as well as instructing young Polish communists on contemporary politics. These were not easy subjects, given that Stalin had dissolved the Polish communist party in 1938 and killed many of its leaders. (Later, official party history would explain that the Polish communist party “was created on a base of Marxism-Leninism, but didn’t manage to finish off factionalist tendencies.”)43 The party’s replacement, Gomułka’s Polish Workers’ Party, was still very small, having been founded only in 1942. In another set of letters, to his comrade Leon Kasman, Berman was more open about the “difficulties” these facts presented for anyone trying to teach the history of Polish communism. Obviously it was necessary to tread very delicately when the 1930s were under discussion, since it was impossible to mention Stalin’s role in the dissolution of the party, and even more impossible to mention his antagonism toward Poland.44

  None of this prevented Berman from trying, as best he could, to indoctrinate young Poles and to teach them how to defend the Soviet Union. At one point, he even told Dzerzhinskaia that he had asked his pupils to listen to the broadcasts of the anti-Nazi and anticommunist Polish resistance movement, the Home Army, in order to be able to “counter” their arguments. While German communists like Wolf and Leonhard were being taught to counter Nazi propaganda, Polish communists were thus preparing for the coming ideological struggle against the leaders of the mainstream Polish resistance. In one of his notes to Dzerzhinskaia, Berman wondered whether it might be possible to find “healthy elements”—that is, future collaborators—among the peasant leaders and even the far-right National Democrats. “For this reason,” he explained to Dzerzhinskaia, “it’s absolutely necessary, I believe, to continue the tactics of the united front.” The Polish communist party must not show its true colors too early. First it would have to find allies and collaborators, and only later could it promote Soviet-style reforms.

  He was not alone in making plans along these lines. At about the same time, Soviet leaders were also preparing once again to promote “united fronts,” coalition governments that could rule immediately after liberation, across Eastern Europe. In his long 1944 memo to Molotov, Ivan Maiskii, the Soviet foreign minister, had speculated that the proletarian revolutions might take place in some thirty or forty years’ time. But in the meantime he advocated keeping Poland and Hungary weak, perhaps dividing Germany—“in the long term it will contribute to the weakening of Germany”—and, last but not least, ensuring that local communists worked in tandem with others. “It is in the USSR’s interests,” he concluded, for postwar governments to be “based on the principle of broad democracy, in the spirit of the idea of the national fronts.”45

  The word “democracy” naturally must be taken here with a large grain of salt, for Maiskii also made it clear that these governments, created “in the spirit of the national fronts,” would not be able to tolerate the existence of political parties that were in any way hostile to socialism. In practice, this meant that in some countries (he mentions Germany, Hungary, and Poland) “various methods” of external influence would have to be deployed in order to prevent such parties from gaining p
ower. He did not explain what those methods would be.

  Persecuted in both East and West, European communists of all stripes came to inhabit a culture of conspiracy, secrecy, and exclusivity. In their native countries they worked in cells, knew one another by pseudonyms, and communicated using passwords and dead-letter drops. In the USSR, they kept their thoughts to themselves, refrained from criticizing the party, and searched their lodgings for secret microphones.46 Wherever they were, they observed a “rigid etiquette,” which has been beautifully described by the writer Arthur Koestler in both his novels and his memoirs. Koestler, much of whose fiction and nonfiction describes his relationship with communism, himself was drawn to the German party in the 1930s, not least because of his attraction to secrecy, conspiracy, and intrigue: “Even a superficial contact will make the innocent outsider feel that members of the Party lead a life apart from society, steeped in mystery, danger and constant sacrifice. The thrill of being in touch with this secret world is considerable even for people with an adult and otherwise unromantic mentality. Still stronger is the flattering effect of being found worthy of a certain amount of trust, of being permitted to perform minor services for the harassed men who live in such constant danger.”47

  The lure of an elitist existence, complete with access to privileges and to privileged information, remained an important part of the attraction of communism for decades. At his special Comintern school Wolfgang Leonhard read for the first time the same high-level telegrams circulated among the party bosses and realized how much more they contained than the propaganda fed to the masses: “I remember very well the feelings with which I held one of these secret information bulletins in my hands for the first time. There was a sense of gratitude for the confidence placed in me, and a sense of pride at being one of those officials who were sufficiently mature politically to be trusted with the knowledge of other points of view.”48

  Their experiences of terror—mass arrest and purges, accompanied by rapid tactical changes—had a profound impact on European communists as well. At the Comintern school in Ufa, Leonhard was humiliated by being forced to make a ludicrous public statement of self-criticism. As he reflected on the experience, and on the smug behavior of some of his comrades—notably a German woman named Emmi, later to become Mrs. Markus Wolf—he suddenly wondered: “Is our whole relationship at the school what it ought to be between Party members? There came back into my mind other critical thoughts, which I had had earlier in the period of the purges. Critical conversations came back to me, and I was frightened of myself. If I had already expressed critical thoughts like these, what was the end likely to be? I made up my mind in future to be much more cautious in what I said and to keep it to the minimum necessary.”49

  These kinds of experiences eventually convinced Leonhard to flee East Germany, and ultimately to leave the party altogether. But others, though humiliated in similar ways, did not flee or leave. Nor were they rendered any softer or more compassionate by their traumatic experiences. Far from being humbled by their wartime suffering, whether in Hitler’s camps or in Western jails, the communists who remained in the party often became more devoted to the cause, not less so.

  Many of those who physically survived the purges in the USSR—and intellectually survived the policy changes—emerged from the war with not only an increased sense of tribal loyalty but an increased feeling of dependence on the Soviet Union. And those who had remained faithful party members through the arrests, wild tactical shifts, and confusion of the 1930s often emerged as true fanatics: totally loyal to Stalin, willing to follow the Soviet lead in any direction, they obeyed all orders they were given, if to do so served the cause.50

  Chapter 4

  POLICEMEN

  More or less the following attitude developed among the employees of the Ministry for State Security: We have been particularly checked over. We are particularly good comrades. We are, so to speak, first-class comrades.

  —Wilhelm Zaisser, Minister of State Security, GDR1

  AS THE WAR drew to its bloody end, Stalin at last gave his Eastern European protégés the chance to prove themselves. One by one, as their countries were liberated, he sent the Moscow communists back into their homelands along with the Red Army. All of them were fully conscious of their tiny numbers, and all publicly declared an intention to found or join a coalition government together with other, noncommunist parties. Bolesław Bierut arrived in Warsaw in December 1943, just in time to be named president of the new National Council (Krajowa Rada Narodowa, or KRN). This first attempt to create a popular front failed to attract anybody except Władysław Gomułka’s still-tiny Polish Workers’ Party and a few fringe social democrats who had not joined the mainstream resistance. But a few months later, the National Council helped form a larger group, the Polish Committee of National Liberation (Polski Komitet Wyzwolenia Narodowego, or PKWN), whose name, personally approved by Stalin, deliberately echoed de Gaulle’s French Committee of National Liberation.2 Although it was based in Lublin and now contained a few genuinely noncommunist politicians, there wasn’t much doubt about who was backing the Polish Committee of National Liberation. Its July 22 manifesto sounded very liberal, promising that “all democratic freedoms will be reinstated for all citizens irrespective of race, religion, and nationality; those freedoms to be: freedom of free associations in political and professional fields, freedom of press and information, freedom of conscience.”3 But the document was issued in Moscow, not Poland, and it was broadcast immediately on Soviet radio.

  The creation of a Committee of National Liberation posed an immediate dilemma for the London government in exile, which had represented Poland abroad during the war and still maintained close links to the Home Army and the mainstream Polish resistance. Though they struggled mightily to remain Poland’s international voice, they lost that battle. In due course, the committee transformed itself into the Provisional Government of National Unity (a group that became known as the “Lublin Poles”), which all of the Allies would eventually recognize instead of the London government in exile (the “London Poles”) as Poland’s legitimate rulers. The provisional government ran the country from the beginning of 1945 and was meant to organize the elections that would select the permanent government. Because Stalin was keen to boost its legitimacy, he agreed to allow Edward Osóbka-Morawski, technically a member of the socialist party and not the communist party, to become the provisional government’s first postwar prime minister (Bierut would acquire a formal government title only in 1947). More importantly, he allowed the prime minister in exile, Stanisław Mikołajczyk, to return to the country and join the provisional government as minister of agriculture and deputy prime minister. For a short period, Mikołajczyk’s Polish Peasants’ Party (Polskie Stronnictwo Ludowe, or PSL) would be allowed to function as a true anticommunist opposition. Officially there was no legal Soviet or Allied authority in Poland. In practice, an NKVD general, Ivan Serov, functioned as the senior Soviet adviser to the new government and to the new Polish security forces. It soon became clear that his influence was very broad indeed.4

  Not long after Bierut’s arrival in Poland, events began to move swiftly and a new authority was created in Hungary too. At the beginning of November 1944, Mihály Farkas, Ernő Gerő, and Imre Nagy, three leading “Moscow communists,” were flown in Soviet planes to the liberated eastern city of Szeged. Immediately, they called a mass meeting to celebrate the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, during which Gerő called for “Hungarian Rebirth.”5 Mátyás Rákosi arrived in Debrecen after that city was liberated in January, also on a plane from Moscow. His orders were to set up a Hungarian provisional government there and to prepare for the Red Army’s conquest of Budapest. He did so in conjunction with other Hungarian politicians who were now emerging from hiding or returning from abroad. Together, they negotiated the creation of a provisional national assembly, which selected a provisional national government. As in Poland, the latter was meant to rule Hungary until elections could b
e held.

  Also as in Poland, this first Hungarian provisional government was a coalition. It contained four legal political parties: the communists (Magyar Kommunista Párt, or MKP), the social democrats (Szociáldemokrata Párt, or SZDP), the Peasants’ Party, and the Smallholders’ Party. The last, a prewar party of small businessmen and farmers, rapidly developed into an anticommunist opposition party and rapidly attracted wide support. Nevertheless, it did not dominate the new provisional national assembly or the new provisional government. Despite the fact that the Hungarian communist party had only a few hundred members at the time, the communists were awarded more than a third of the seats in the provisional national assembly as well as several key cabinet posts, in practice including the Interior Ministry. Even Gerő acknowledged the imbalance: “The proportion of communist members was a little oversized. It was partly due to the hastiness, partly due to the overzealousness of local comrades.”6 Under the terms of the Hungarian Armistice Agreement, signed in Moscow in January 1945, the Hungarian government in this interim period was also subject to the oversight of the Allied Control Council, a body that technically included American and British representatives but was in practice run by Marshal Kliment Voroshilov, a senior Red Army commander who regularly failed to consult the other Allies about anything.7

  Finally, on April 27, 1945, the Red Army flew the “Ulbricht Group”—several dozen communists, under Ulbricht’s leadership—to join the First Belorussian Front on the outskirts of Berlin, whence they would enter the city. Wolfang Leonhard went with them. A few days later, the “Ackermann Group,” containing another several dozen communists, prepared to enter Berlin from the south with the First Ukrainian Front. Unlike Poland and Hungary, in eastern Germany there was no temporary or provisional government. Instead, a Soviet Military Administration ran its zone of Germany until the creation of the German Democratic Republic in 1949. But the Soviet administrators slowly created a German bureaucracy to help run the country beneath the Soviet umbrella.8 In June 1947, this bureaucracy, by then a shadow government under control of the Soviet authorities, was blandly christened the German Economic Committee (Deutsche Wirtschaftskommission, or DWK). Many German communists, especially “Moscow communists,” were immediately given senior roles to play in it. Eventually, the Economic Committee became the basis for the East German government when the German Democratic Republic achieved statehood in 1949.