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

by Anne Applebaum

  The third major blow to Stalin’s prestige came from within the bloc. Josip Broz Tito, the “little Stalin” of Yugoslavia, was the only Eastern European communist leader who did not suffer from the knowledge that he was deeply unpopular. Although he had plenty of enemies, and although he disposed of them quite brutally, the Yugoslav communist party also had its own sources of legitimacy. Having led the anti-Nazi resistance, and having created his own loyal army and secret police, Tito—uniquely in the region—had no need of Soviet military support in order to stay in power. Nor did he want much Soviet interference. Although tensions had been brewing for some time, the break became official in June 1948, when the rest of the bloc agreed to expel Yugoslavia from the Cominform.

  If the success of the Berlin airlift had compounded Soviet paranoia about lurking Western conspiracies and Anglo-American spy rings, Tito’s departure from the bloc fueled Soviet fears of internal dissent. For if Tito could escape Stalin’s influence, then why not others? If the Yugoslavs could design their own economic policies, then why shouldn’t the Poles or the Czechs? Eventually “Titoism,” or “right deviationism,” became a very serious political crime: in the Eastern European context, a “Titoist” was someone who wanted his national communist party to maintain some independence from the Soviet communist party. Like “Trotskyism” the term could eventually be applied to anyone who objected (or appeared to object, or was accused of objecting) to the mainstream political line. Titoists also became the new scapegoats. If Eastern Europe was not as prosperous as the West, then surely Titoists were to blame. If shops were empty, Titoists were at fault. If Central European factories were not producing at the expected level, Titoists had sabotaged them.

  Within the boundaries of the Eastern bloc, the year 1948 was an important turning point in domestic politics too: it was the year in which the Soviet Union’s Eastern European allies abandoned attempts to win legitimacy through an electoral process and stopped tolerating any forms of genuine opposition. The full power of the police state was now turned against the regime’s perceived enemies in the church, in the already defeated political opposition, and even within the communist party itself.

  Violence, arrests, and interrogations were deployed against regime opponents, but they were not the only tactic. From 1948, the communist parties also began a very long-term effort to corrupt the institutions of civil society from within, especially religious institutions. The intention was not to destroy churches but to transform them into “mass organizations,” vehicles for the distribution of state propaganda just like the communist youth movements, the communist women’s movements, or the communist trade unions.17 In this new era, the communist parties now felt it was no longer sufficient to scare opponents. They had to be exposed in public as traitors or thieves, put through humiliating show trials, subjected to extensive attacks in the media, and placed in new, harsher prisons and specially designed camps.

  The renewed attack on the enemies of communism was the most visible and dramatic element of High Stalinism. But the creation of a vast system of education and propaganda, designed to prevent more enemies from emerging in the future, was just as important to the Eastern European communists. In theory, they hoped to create not only a new kind of society but a new kind of person, a citizen who was not capable even of imagining alternatives to communism orthodoxy. During a turbulent discussion about falling listenership at East German radio, a high-ranking communist argued that “it is necessary in every detail, in every program, in every department to discuss the line of the party and to use it in daily work.”18 This was precisely what was done across society: from 1948 onward, the theories of Marxism-Leninism would be explained, expounded, and discussed in kindergartens, schools, and universities; on the radio and in the newspapers; through elaborate mass campaigns, parades, and public events. Every public holiday became an occasion for teaching, and every organization, from the Konsum food cooperative in Germany to the Chopin Society in Poland, became a vehicle for the distribution of communist propaganda. The public in communist countries took part in campaigns for “peace,” they collected money in aid of communist North Korea, they marched in parades to celebrate communist holidays.19 From the outside—and to some on the inside as well—High Stalinism looked like a political system whose attempt to achieve total control might well succeed.

  From the earliest days of Soviet occupation, the church had been subject to harassment, and worse. Religious leaders, as prominent and influential members of civil society, had been among the first victims of the Red Army’s initial wave of violence. Polish Catholic priests were sent to Soviet camps in large numbers. The German postwar camps contained both Catholic and Protestant clergy, with a particularly large number of Catholic youth leaders. Soviet occupation authorities had gone out of their way to ban religious youth camps and retreats. In Hungary, the wave of violence against youth groups had begun with the arrest of Father Kiss, the priest accused of organizing the murder of Red Army soldiers in 1946, and had continued with the banning of the Catholic youth group Kalot, slander campaigns against Calvinist and Lutheran clergy, and many other forms of legal and personal harassment. As early as May 1945, a Lutheran bishop, Zoltán Túróczy, was put on trial before one of the People’s Courts and sentenced to prison, presumably to scare others.20

  Communist leaders instinctively hated and feared church leaders, and not merely because of their own doctrinal atheism. Religious leaders were a source of alternative moral and spiritual authority. They had independent financial resources and powerful contacts in Western Europe. Catholic priests in particular were feared, both because of their close links to the Vatican and because of the perceived power of international Catholic charities and societies. In many countries, notably Poland and Germany, church leaders had also been associated with the antifascist or anti-Hitler opposition during the war, which gave them additional status and legitimacy after the war’s end. The church’s organizing power, even aside from its ideological power, was formidable. It owned buildings where dissatisfied people could meet, as well as institutions where they could be employed. Every Sunday, priests and preachers had a guaranteed audience. Church publications had a guaranteed readership. That made the church an essential component and supporter of civic, charitable, and educational organizations of all kinds.

  Yet in the early years, both the new regimes and their Soviet allies had demonstrated a substantial measure of caution in dealing with the churches. In 1945 the Red Army did not, as a rule, shut down, sack, or destroy churches as the Bolsheviks had during the Russian Revolution and Civil War, nor did it carry out mass shootings of priests.21 Much of the time, Red Army soldiers in Germany went out of their way to facilitate the reopening of religious institutions—churches, schools, even theological colleges. They allowed the new radio stations to transmit sermons and sanctioned the printing of Bibles and other religious literature. This was deliberate. They wanted to distinguish the new occupiers from their Nazi predecessors, as one Soviet official in Germany wrote in a later analysis: “By giving churches full freedom in their activities, the Soviet occupation authorities demonstrated their tolerance of religion” and eliminated “an important part of the arsenal of anti-Soviet propaganda.”22 Their sheer ignorance of religion did lend an arbitrary quality to some of their behavior. In 1949, for example, the local Soviet commander became suspicious of the young people preparing for a Lutheran confirmation service in the town of Nordhausen and demanded to know why “such additional propaganda is necessary.” What, he blustered, was the purpose of a special confirmation service: “Is it to agitate against Marxism and Russia?”23

  Deference to the church was even greater in Poland, where communist leaders, anxious to be perceived as “Polish” and not “Soviet” (or, indeed, Jewish), initially made obeisance to Polish national symbols of all kinds, the church hierarchy included. Senior communists marched alongside senior clergy in the annual Corpus Christi processions, and communist leaders attended mass on multiple occ
asions. Behind the scenes, the Polish party leadership described this policy as one of “bypassing” the church: they would reform other institutions first, tempt young people away from the church, and hope that older churchgoers would eventually die out.

  As in Germany, the new government very much wanted some formal Catholic institutions to reopen in Poland as proof that “normalcy” had returned and that the Red Army’s presence did not constitute a new occupation. The most prominent Catholic institution in the country, the Catholic University of Lublin, opened its doors in August 1944, a decision that infuriated the London government in exile, as it implied a tacit recognition of the status quo. Soon afterward, the Archdiocese of Kraków received official permission to publish Tygodnik Powszechny (Universal Weekly), the intellectual Catholic weekly that quickly became one of the most important in the country. The writer and communist intellectual Jerzy Borejsza also organized meetings of communist and Catholic intellectuals in Kraków in the hope of orchestrating a cease-fire between the church and the party.24

  In Hungary, the party also tried to appear accommodating, though the word “appear” must be stressed. In November 1945, Mátyás Rákosi told a Central Committee meeting dedicated to church matters that “We have to work carefully, we have to see how and in which form we attack.”25 “Working carefully,” at least in the early days, meant that Hungarian communists never assaulted the church openly and that communist brigades helped restore bomb-damaged churches, for which they were publicly praised.26 Yet at the same time, church leaders were portrayed in the official media as corrupt “reactionaries” seeking to restore the Horthy regime.

  Attacks on the churches were also carried out under the guise of other programs. During land reform, the Hungarian state deliberately deprived the Roman Catholic Church of more than three-quarters of its land and the Protestant churches of nearly half.27 In public, the authorities described this confiscation of church property as a legitimate by-product of economic reform rather than an open attack on religion. No compensation was paid. Priests and other church functionaries assumed the dubious status of state employees as religious organizations became completely dependent on state subsidies for the first time.

  But by the end of 1947, most of the region’s communist parties, knowing they remained unpopular, prepared to abandon any remaining nuances. Young people were taking too long to become enthusiastic communists, and religious people were not dying out fast enough. In September, József Révai, at the time responsible for ideology, had already begun to speak of “terminating the clerical reaction.”28 In October, the regional Polish secret police bosses gathered in Warsaw to hear Julia Brystiger, head of Department V, the secret police department responsible for the clergy, declare that “the battle against the enemy activity of the clerics is without a doubt one of the most difficult tasks in front of us.” Brystiger, one of a handful of deeply loathed secret policewomen, laid out several new methods of attack, ranging from a “systematic” investigation and penetration of the church in the provinces to the recruitment of clergy as informers and the use of “youth activists” to monitor the religiosity of teachers and educators.29 In due course, these tactics became standard practice across the bloc.

  In East Germany, both the secret police and the ordinary police force, the Volkspolizei (People’s Police), wasted little time in refocusing attention on “enemies” in the religious youth groups. By December 1949, the Volkspolizei’s general inspector had already identified what remained of the Junge Gemeinde, the Protestant youth movement, as a hostile organization whose central goal was the destruction of the Free German Youth (Freie Deutsche Jugend, or FDJ). In an exchange with the FDJ leadership, the inspector declared that “If criminals meet under the cover of a religious cult, we will of course decisively lash out against them with all legal means.”30 Rapidly, the language grew even harsher. Walter Ulbricht called the Junge Gemeinde an “agents’ center” that is “in touch with the so-called youth groups” in West Berlin. In East Berlin, administrators received a special directive to “thwart and destroy the work being carried out by reactionary groups within the church and the Junge Gemeinde, on behalf of foreign imperialists, to damage socialist construction, to sabotage the struggle for peace, and to prevent Germany unity.”31

  Before 1949, harassment had been focused on a handful of influential Christian youth leaders. But now antichurch propaganda became more blatant. The regime banned the Kreuz auf der Weltkugel—a cross atop a circle, symbolizing the globe—the Junge Gemeinde’s symbol. FDJ gangs appeared at church meetings and heckled those inside. (One FDJ report describes with satisfaction a “steeplechase of motorcycles” that had been organized around one Christian group meeting.32) The FDJ also organized meetings in high schools designed to “protest against fascist terror in West Germany” and to “uncover and dismiss hostile elements” from the premises, which meant Catholic and Protestant students. School “tribunals” interrogated children suspected of having religious leanings. These were huge, public occasions and often very dramatic. One such spectacle took place in a school theater in Wittenberg: students who refused to join the FDJ or insisted upon going to church were named, condemned, and expelled one by one, before the whole school. Many left the stage weeping.33

  In 1954, the state would even introduce the Jugendweihe, a secular alternative to Protestant confirmation services, a ceremony that was supposed to impart to young people “useful knowledge in basic questions of the scientific world-view and socialist morality … raising them in the spirit of socialist patriotism and proletarian internationalism, and helping them to prepare themselves for active participation in the construction of developed socialist society and the creation of the basic preconditions for the gradual transition to communism.” Pastors protested, but although only about a sixth of young people participated at first, by the 1960s more than 90 percent would take part in this ceremony.34

  Many children were expelled from school for refusing to publicly renounce religion—estimates vary from 300 to 3,000—and far more were expelled from universities. Some made their way to West Germany or West Berlin, where the West German Interior Ministry arranged tuition and accommodation for those forced to flee school, a policy that naturally increased the paranoia in the eastern half of the country.35 Others from religious famlies simply never tried to attend a university at all. Having refused to join the FDJ in school, Ulrich Fest, the Wittenberg shopkeeper, knew he and his friends weren’t ever going to qualify for higher education: “We were a very small group that somehow mutually thought, ‘No, we’re not doing that.’ ”36

  Events followed a similar pattern in Hungary: first dark talk of espionage, then harassment, bans, and arrests. Rákosi kicked off 1948 by agreeing with Révai “by the end of this year we have to terminate the clerical reaction.”37 Hundreds of church schools were nationalized within months, sometimes in the face of bitter objections. In an infamous incident in the village of Pócspetri, locals gathered to protest at the loss of their school and the police attacked them with clubs. A gun went off, killing one of the policemen. Afterward, a local notary and a priest were arrested, and the notary was subsequently sentenced to death and executed. Suspicions (for which there is now some documentary support) that the entire incident had been provoked and organized by the political police have hung over the case ever since. At the time, the incident was used in the propaganda war against church schools. In June, more than 6,500 of them were forced to relinquish their religious identity and become state schools.38

  The closure of monasteries followed soon afterward. Nuns in the city of Győr were given six hours to pack up and leave. In southern Hungary, 800 monks and some 700 nuns were removed from monasteries in the middle of the night, told they could take 25 kilos of books and clothing, placed into transport trucks, and removed by force. Across the country, some 800 nuns were told they could no longer work in hospitals—a decree that forced many of these hospitals to cut services. Some nuns were subsequently sent back t
o their families or to work in factories, others were eventually deported to the Soviet Union.39 Sándor Keresztes, a former Catholic politician who was himself under constant police surveillance—he had eight children, which was itself considered suspicious—quietly hired a group of nuns and set them to work repairing nylon stockings, in order to enable them to stay together and not starve.40

  In Poland, the party’s change of tactics in 1948 coincided with the death of the Catholic primate August Hlond. With his passing, the widespread conviction among clergy that the regime would soon fail, and that the Western powers would have to force the USSR out of Eastern Europe, began to fade.41 The church was further demoralized by the arrests of priests, by edicts forbidding the teaching of catechism in any schools, and by the shuttering of seminaries. Catholic hospitals and nursing homes were also closed, along with any remaining charitable organizations. At the beginning of 1950, a new taboo was breached when the regime launched an attack on Caritas, the most important Catholic charity. Caritas operated 4,500 orphanages, looked after 166,700 orphans, maintained 241 soup kitchens, and distributed aid from abroad, mostly from the United States, which had helped reconstruct churches, schools, and convents. In the months after the war’s end, Caritas had been one of the few sources of medicine in Poland. But its power, prestige, and independence meant that the party’s attack was especially harsh. In January 1950, the Polish press agency announced that Caritas had fallen under the control of “aristocrats” and Nazi sympathizers, and that most of its leaders were under investigation for misappropriation of funds. Caritas was immediately placed under state administration and its leadership was removed. In effect, the charity was nationalized. Stunned, the Polish episcopate jointly denied all of the charges against Caritas and denounced the attack: