Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956
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The Soviet Union would also oversee municipal and local elections in Germany as elsewhere. Although the USSR actively encouraged the refounding of the Social Democratic Party, the Christian Democratic Party, and the Free Democratic Party in their zone of Germany, they still placed communist party members in key positions in the trade unions, cultural associations, and other new institutions.9 Wherever possible, noncommunists were given public roles while communists took key jobs behind the scenes. Other kinds of political and semipolitical groupings were reconstituted elsewhere, including Zionist and Bundist organizations in Poland and Hungary, some of which initially seemed to have a degree of real independence.
Separately, all of the communist parties in the region maintained their own internal structures, keeping to the Soviet model. They kept Soviet-style hierarchies: Politburo on top, then the larger Central Committee below, then regional and local organizations. These structures would remain parallel to but separate from governmental structures until 1989. Sometimes Politburo members were also government ministers, but sometimes not. Sometimes Central Committee members also had roles in the state apparatus, but sometimes not. It was not always clear, even to people in positions of power, whether the party or the government had the final say in any given question.
If all of that sounds complicated, that is because it was meant to be: politics in Soviet-occupied Europe were designed to be opaque. As the war ended, the communist parties of Eastern Europe were clearly the most influential political grouping in the region, not because of their numbers but because of their Soviet “advisers” in the NKVD and Red Army. At the same time, they were under strict instructions to disguise or deny their Soviet affiliations, to behave as normal democratic parties, to create coalitions, and to find acceptable partners among the noncommunist parties. With the exception of Germany, where the Soviet occupation regime immediately took control, Soviet influence was thus carefully camouflaged.
Throughout 1945 and 1946, the Eastern European coalition provisional governments would therefore try, more or less, to create economic policy in tandem with other politicians. They would try, more or less, to tolerate the churches, some independent newspapers, and some private business, all of which were for a time allowed to develop spontaneously and idiosyncratically. But there was one glaring exception to that tolerance. Everywhere the Red Army went, the Soviet Union always established one new institution whose form and character always followed a Soviet pattern. To put it bluntly, the structure of the new secret police force was never left up to chance, circumstance, or local politicians to determine. And although there were some differences in timing and style, the creation of the new secret police forces followed remarkably similar patterns across Eastern Europe. In their organization, methods, and mentality, all of the Eastern European secret police forces were exact copies of their Soviet progenitor: Poland’s Secret Police (Urzad Bezpiecżeństwa, or SB), Hungary’s State Security Agency (Államvédelmi Osztály, or ÁVO), and East Germany’s Ministry for State Security (Ministerium für Stęaatssicherheit, or later Stasi, the name by which it is now best known).10 So was Czechoslovak State Security (Státní bezpečnost, or StB). The latter was organized, in the words of the Czech communist leader Klement Gottwald, so as “to best make use of the experience of the Soviet Union.” The same could be said of every secret police force in every country in Eastern Europe.11
Like the history of the Eastern European communist parties, the history of Eastern Europe’s “little KGBs” begins well before the end of the war. The Polish secret police began to organize itself in 1939, following the Soviet invasion of eastern Poland. Upon entering the territories of what they now called western Ukraine and western Belarus, the Soviet officers tasked with carrying out the pacification of the region had trouble finding reliable local collaborators. Recognizing the need for more professional and more dependable partners, the NKVD created a special training center near Smolensk in the autumn of 1940. Some 200 Poles, Ukrainians, and Belarusians from the newly occupied territories were invited to attend. These first students completed their course of study in March 1941, after which some of the recruits were sent to do further schooling in the city of Gorky. Among this first generation of graduates were at least three men—Konrad Świetlik, Józef Czaplicki, and Mieczysław Moczar—who remained influential leaders of the Polish security services through the 1950s and 1960s.12
With the outbreak of the Soviet-German war in June 1941, this training program was abruptly halted. But a few months later, after the Soviet Union had recovered somewhat from the shock of the Nazi invasion, training resumed. After the battle of Stalingrad, when the war suddenly looked winnable, recruitment intensified. Candidates were at first chosen from the Polish-speaking “Kościuszko Division” of the Red Army—mostly people who had previously lived in eastern Poland—through what seemed like a mysterious process to those selected. When, on a “freezing afternoon in January of 1944” Józef Lobatiuk was approached by his commanding officer and told to come to his unit’s headquarters to fill out some forms, no explanation was given. A month later, he was told to collect “two weeks’ dry rations” and report for special training in Kuibyshev, a Russian city well behind the front lines. Again, no explanation was given.13
Only upon arriving in Kuibyshev did Lobatiuk discover that he had been sent to an NKVD officers’ training school. He was delighted. Years later, describing his experiences for the Polish Secret Police’s in-house historians, he remembered being treated “like a guest in someone’s home.” After the rough conditions of the front, the school seemed luxurious. The “students” were allowed out on weekends and were not made to do watchman’s duty. They had enough to eat. They were treated with civility. In the dining hall, waiters served food “as if in a restaurant,” even ladling out soup from real tureens.14
Actual lessons did not begin right away. Before any information was imparted, the new recruits were interrogated over several days by a commission of NKVD officers. They were questioned about their biographies, their family backgrounds, and their political views. They were asked to repeat their life stories, more than once. Some did not pass the test and were sent back to their units, though they never learned why. In the end some 200 men remained. These were the Kujbyszewiacy—the Kuibyshev gang, as they eventually became known—the first graduating class of Soviet-taught Polish secret police officers. Immediately, they began preparing for “operational work” under direct NKVD tutelage.
At this point in the war—the spring of 1944—there was as yet no Polish government, other than the exile government in London and the underground “state” that was connected to it, and no open Polish administration on the ground in what was still Nazi-occupied Poland. Nor had any international agreements been reached about the nature of postwar Poland: the Tehran Conference had not come to any final conclusion about the Polish borders and the Yalta Conference, during which Roosevelt and Churchill would cede de facto Soviet control over Poland, was still many months away. But the NKVD was already teaching the Polish officers in Kuibyshev to think in Soviet categories, so that when the time came they would act under Soviet orders.
This first course was very thorough. Some of the subject matter was theoretical—Marxism-Leninism, the history of the Bolshevik party, the history of the Polish “workers’ movement.” Some was practical: techniques of intelligence and counterintelligence, detective work, interrogation. On fine days, they drove out to a shooting range on the Volga. Everything was taught in Russian—only one lecturer spoke Polish—which was a problem, particularly as few of the students had anything beyond a rudimentary education. There were no textbooks, so students met frequently outside class to compare notes. Whenever possible, the Russian-speaking students translated the material for those who had not understood it. Lectures and seminars took up ten hours a day, six hours on Saturdays.
There wasn’t much time to reflect on their new knowledge. This first course came to an abrupt end in July 1944, when the Red Army cros
sed the Bug River, Poland’s new eastern border. The freshly minted security officers were deployed immediately. Most of the 200 men were sent first to the city of Lublin, where the Polish Committee of National Liberation had just been set up and where the provisional government was about to be formed. Conditions were rough—the men slept on floors and used their backpacks as pillows—but they were warmly welcomed. Stanisław Radkiewicz, Poland’s first security minister, gave a dinner in their honor, along with a Soviet adviser. The two men handed out stars for the new officers to sew onto their uniforms.
As the Red Army advanced—first into Rzeszów and Białystok, later into Kraków and Warsaw—the Kuibyshev gang followed, always accompanied by Soviet advisers. In some areas, they first fought as partisans alongside the Red Army. At this point in the war, there were dozens of different partisan groups in eastern Poland and the western USSR, some affiliated with the Polish Home Army resistance, some with the Ukrainian independence movement, some composed of Jews who had escaped the Holocaust, some containing criminal elements.15 But the Kuibyshev gang, whatever their nationality, fought on behalf of the Soviet Union. And upon arrival in a newly liberated province, they always followed a predetermined plan. They set to work organizing regional and local police, identifying enemies, passing information to the NKVD, and recruiting collaborators: “We, the Kuibyshev gang, were supposed to be the backbone of the new force and the teachers of future cadres,” remembered one proudly.16
Not all of them were ultimately successful. Some would be kicked out of the service for theft and incompetence. A few were returned to the Soviet Union, presumably to take up similar work in the republics of Belarus or Ukraine, where many had come from. At least one rebelled and joined the anticommunist opposition. But many of the others would rise high in the security services, and still others would train a new generation of cadres.
Lobatiuk took part, for a time, in the postwar “fight against banditism,” a euphemism that means he joined the organized military action against the remnants of the Polish Home Army, some of whom were still holding out in the forests around Lublin, as well as Ukrainian partisans. In April 1945, he was sent to the city of Łódź, where he was told, again to his surprise, that he would become an instructor in a new Polish security police officers’ school. He and the other Kuibyshev veterans who had been chosen for this task divided up the various subjects between them, according to who remembered which subject the best. Although they had been made to turn in their Kuibyshev notebooks when they left the USSR, they re-created them from memory. Eventually, they put together a textbook based on their recollections of what they had learned from the NKVD. This textbook would remain in use for the next several years, and thus would a whole generation of Polish secret policemen be trained according to Soviet methods.17
Over the next few months and years, the service expanded exponentially. In December 1944 there had been about 2,500 security functionaries. By November 1945 there were already 23,700, and by 1953 there would be 33,200.18 Hardly any of these new members fit what later, in communist Poland, became the stereotype of the typical SB functionary: a diabolically well-trained fanatic, highly educated, probably Jewish. In reality, the immediate postwar SB was overwhelmingly Polish by ethnic origin and almost entirely Catholic. By 1947, 99.5 percent of the SB was composed of Polish Catholics. Jews actually accounted for less than 1 percent of the total, and were outnumbered even by ethnic Belarusians.19 Of the eighteen founding members of the Lublin regional secret police force, only one was Jewish. The rest were Polish, Ukrainian, and Belarusian.20
Far from being diabolically well trained, these new recruits were also overwhelmingly uneducated. In 1945, less than 20 percent had any education beyond primary school. Even in 1953, only half had made it past the equivalent of sixth grade. Throughout this period, the vast majority of the recruits were the children of Polish workers and peasants. Only a tiny number had families classified as “bourgeois,” and hardly any could be described as intellectuals.21 Although the majority had joined the communist party by 1947, very few had any previous political involvement whatsoever.
It was probably not ideology but rather the possibility of rapid social advance that motivated them, as the story of Czesław Kiszczak, one of Poland’s most notorious secret policemen, very well illustrates. Much later, Kiszczak would become the Polish interior minister—he organized the imposition of martial law in 1981—but he was born in 1925 into an impoverished family in a poor part of southern Poland, the son of a factory worker who was unemployed throughout the 1930s. As a teenager in Nazi-occupied Poland, he was picked up and sent first to a labor camp and then, after a series of adventures, to become a slave laborer in Austria. Between 1943 and 1945, by his own account, he lived in a workers’ barracks in Vienna where he was the only Pole among Croats, Serbs, and others, many of whom were communists. He worked on the Austrian train system until April 7, 1945, when the Russians liberated the eastern districts of Vienna. Soon after, again in his own words, “the Red Army took me up, sat me on a tank, and I showed them around Vienna, I knew the streets.” He knew enough Russian and German to serve as a translator. At the age of twenty, with only a primary-school education, he thus became a kind of Red Army mascot, cruising the defeated city of Vienna astride a Soviet tank.22
Eventually Kiszczak returned to Poland clutching a document stating he had been part of the Austrian communist party. He immediately joined the Polish communist party, which in turn sent him to the secret police training school in Łódź. He was, he has said, then taken to Warsaw for further training, where he joined first the new Polish army and then Polish military intelligence, which was initially run entirely by Russians, though later a few Poles were brought in. Although he doesn’t say so, many speculate that he developed a relationship of some kind with Soviet military intelligence as well.
Very soon afterward, in 1946, Kiszczak was sent to London. This was, again, an extraordinary opportunity for a young man who was still only twenty-one. His version of this episode is benign. “We wanted the remnants of the Polish army then in exile to return to Poland, with its arms and its soldiers. It would be a good gesture toward communist Poland … In the beginning there was a lot of joint spirit, the government supported the clergy, the clergy supported the government … Poland seemed friendly for everyone, it gave peasants land, promised higher education, new schools.” Other than that, he says his job in London involved “normal intelligence work,” collecting information on the British army, on Poles in London, and especially on the thousands of Polish soldiers who had fought with the Royal Air Force or other British armed forces during the war.
Much of this biographical information is impossible to corroborate, because Kiszczak apparently combed the archives for any documents relating to himself when he was interior minister, and removed or destroyed them. One or two have been found, however, including a summary of a report he sent home from London in July 1947, which had been tucked away in someone else’s file. In ungrammatical Polish, it describes how the embassy was registering and monitoring Polish members of the British armed forces who expressed a desire to return home. The contempt that Kiszczak had clearly been taught to feel for these men, many of whom had been fighting since 1939, shines through:
Registration takes place in a small room of about 4 meters by 3 meters in which there are five tables and five chairs and two cabinets containing the Consulate’s books. Registration starts up at 10 or 11, and sometimes only at 2:30, as the British make special difficulties for us, and in this case deliberately send soldiers late for registration … The majority of these people would do anything they were told, they would agree to anything as long as someone would guarantee them a good standard of living in Poland. Those who aren’t returning and are staying in England for material reasons would probably render certain services for money, as they are typical products of [prewar] Poland, people without deeper feelings, without ambition and honor …23
In the rest of the report, the now
twenty-two-year-old Kiszczak disparaged the older diplomats in the embassy, the military attaché who seemed insufficiently interested in collecting counterintelligence, the colonel who was trying to demoralize him and others. In another report that survived, he was simply informing on his colleagues in a more straightforward manner. One consulate employee was constantly talking about information he had “from unknown sources” about political violence in Poland, while others were conducting heated policy arguments and threatening one another.
It was a heady job for a young man, but he left soon afterward. In an interview, he claimed that this was because he was lonely and homesick: “I couldn’t eat English sausages.” Or perhaps he had been told, accurately, that there were even better opportunities at home, and he decided to take them. In the chaos and poverty of postwar Poland the secret policemen, however modest their origins, had relative wealth and relative power. And no other state organs could arrest them if they abused it.
From the beginning, anyone with ambitions to become a secret policeman in Eastern Europe knew that the path to influence lay through Soviet connections. But it was not always easy to know which Soviet connections were the correct ones. In Hungary, the organization that eventually became the State Security Department had not one predecessor but two, each one led by a Hungarian with his own set of Soviet friends and mentors.