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

by Anne Applebaum

  But those were not the only choices open to the faithful under the new regime. Very quickly, other kinds of opportunities opened up as well.

  From the first days of Soviet occupation, the new secret police services sought to recruit priests and religious people secretly into their ranks, just as they sought to recruit members of many other professions. But in the case of the clergy, secret collaboration was not enough; they also wanted the clergy to function openly in the service of the regime, as an arm of the communist party. This was an explicitly Soviet idea.69 According to Józef Światło, a senior Polish secret police officer who defected in 1953, General Serov himself had proposed “not the liquidation of the church but slowly making it into a tool of Soviet politics.” The idea was to “penetrate it on the inside, divide it into squabbling factions as much as possible—as happened in Russia before 1929—and weaken its authority on the outside.”70 This had been the fate of the Orthodox Church in Russia, which by the 1930s was in effect a state institution.

  Stalin himself laid out this policy very clearly in October 1949, at a Cominform meeting in Karlsbad, when he ordered the bloc’s communist parties to adopt harsher tactics, starting in Czechoslovakia:

  It is necessary that we isolate the Catholic hierarchy and drive a wedge between the Vatican and the believers. Depending on our success in Czechoslovakia, we will build up Catholic activities in Poland, Hungary, and the other countries. We must also make full use of the question of the finances of the lower-level priests. Our measures will divide lower-level priests from the hierarchy. Governments should order priests to take the citizen’s oath, communist parties should force priests to spread the ideas of Marx, Engels, and Lenin through religious classes and sermons, and whenever they have direct contacts with their believers. We have to fight a systematic war against the hierarchy; churches should be under our full control by December 1949.71

  In Hungary, the authorities followed precisely these tactics, and they did so in concert with the mass “peace campaign” launched nationwide in 1948. This peace movement, as noted, did not resemble its spontaneous, grassroots counterparts that eventually developed in some Western European countries; it was organized from above by the government, and carried out with the aid of communist party activists who organized peace parades, peace races, and peace conferences, and who collected money for peace bonds. Journalists were commissioned to write about the peace campaign, and designers were set the task of creating posters and brochures promoting peace.

  In Hungary, as elsewhere, activists also launched a major peace petition drive. Petitions were passed around schools, offices, and factories, where party members vied with one another to see who could get the most signatures. In the spring of 1950, this campaign reached an almost hysterical intensity. By the beginning of May, 24,583 “peace activists” had collected 6,806,130 signatures on a petition calling for world peace, an enormous percentage in a country which at the time had some 9 million inhabitants.72

  Priests were asked to sign the petitions too, and some did. Others evaded or dodged the campaign altogether, arguing that they didn’t know whether their vows permitted them to sign a political petition. Finally, Archbishop Grősz, who after Mindszenty’s arrest had replaced him as the Hungarian primate, resolved the issue. In public, he declared that the Catholic Church had always promoted peace. However, only the Vatican was entitled to decide whether any Catholic clergyman could join an international organization or sign any treaties. As a result, he would not sign this peace petition, or any other petition, and no other Hungarian priest should do so either.73

  That statement gave the communist party and its sympathizers the ammunition they needed. Party journalists immediately attacked the church for warmongering. György Lukács, the Hungarian philosopher who sometimes collaborated with the communist party and sometimes did not, attacked the archbishop’s “hypocritical” decision. The communist party leadership was delighted: the secretariat decided that the peace movement should now be “used to make lower-level priests oppose their superiors.”74 Pressure on low-ranking clergy would intensify—and rewards would be offered to those who defied Archbishop Grősz and agreed to join the “peace movement.”

  Quickly, the potential collaborators were identified and József Révai orchestrated the “peace rally,” which would become the founding meeting of the organization of “peace priests.” Everything about the meeting was planned in advance, including its concluding declarations, which would eventually be signed by 279 priests and monks, about 2 percent of the clergy in the country. Even the mood of the participants was determined in advance. At one Central Committee meeting, János Kádár—later to become Hungary’s post-1956 dictator—declared that “the atmosphere of the meeting should neither be too convivial, nor too reserved”:

  An atmosphere of war should be created. They have to emphasize Mindszenty’s policy mistakes, criticize the episcopacy’s policies toward authorities … priests should report on threats they received because of their democratic convictions and because of their planned participation in this meeting … Speeches should contain remarks against bishops, speakers should demand the episcopacy change its opinion toward democracy and peace, speakers should not be too radical, so as not to endanger the feeling of unity at the meeting.75

  A similar level of planning went into the organization of the Polish “progressive” priests, as the Polish communist party called them. (Colloquially—and ironically—this group of clerics was widely known as the “patriotic priests.”) These Polish clergymen were not attached to the peace movement, as in Hungary, but rather to the “official” organization of war veterans, the Union of Fighters for Freedom and Democracy (Związek Bojowników o Wolność i Demokrację, or ZBoWiD), which had been created by the communist party because the authentic veterans’ groups, linked by informal relationships and close emotional bonds to the Home Army, were too dangerous for the regime to tolerate.

  Priests who joined immediately received privileges such as access to doctors and sanatoriums, as well as building materials for church construction. Following the dissolution of Caritas in January 1950, the possible rewards for collaboration grew even larger. Priests who cooperated with the state could take control of Caritas assets, offices, and projects. By that point the Polish secret police had begun to encourage the creation of “official” Catholic publications and organizations as well. An “official” Catholic newspaper, Dziś i Jutro (Today and Tomorrow), was already in existence, as was Pax, an “official” Catholic pseudo-political party, of which more later. In the wake of these changes, the progressive priests orchestrated a membership drive and planned a national conference, which was indeed attended by some 350 priests in 1952.76

  But the church fought back. In Hungary, the bishops’ council dismissed peace priests from their posts. In Kraków, Cardinal Sapieha demanded a personal meeting with the local progressive priests and ordered them to resign from the movement. In both countries, pro-regime priests were also, at times, harassed by members of the public. In one Hungarian village, the faithful “stopped confessing and taking holy communion with the peace priest” and interrupted his sermons with shouts.77

  As a result of such hostility, the movements never did become mass organizations for the distribution of pro-communist literature and the support of the regime. They did grow, but not as much as the regime had hoped: at the movement’s zenith, there were some 1,000 progressive Polish priests, plus another 1,000 sympathizers. The Hungarian group never published an official count of its members: at one point the leadership claimed more than 3,000, though Radio Free Europe, the American-backed broadcasters based in Munich, later put the number of true activists at 150. Both groups published newspapers—The Chaplain’s Voice in Poland and Cross in Hungary—and held periodic meetings.

  The motives of those who stayed out of these movements are easy to understand: both their hierarchy and their system of values argued against it. Much harder to understand are the motives of those who
joined. The historian József Gyula Orbán reckons that a small proportion, about a tenth, collaborated out of an honest desire to cooperate with the new ruling powers. Some were themselves Marxists or left-wing socialists who had some faith in the party’s economic program. Others hoped that by working with the communists they could improve the lives of their parishioners. The Polish church historian Father Tadeusz Isakowicz-Zaleski also speculates that some of the progressive priests, especially survivors of German concentration camps, were psychologically weakened by their wartime experiences and therefore easily manipulated by the communists.78

  Others were clearly blackmailed or beaten into submission. The eventual leader of the Hungarian group, Bishop Miklós Beresztóczy, had been arrested in 1948 and tortured brutally. Another priest joined after he had been accused of arson (a haystack in his parish had burned) and he hoped to avoid prison. Światło, the secret police defector, claimed the Polish security services were disappointed by the movement: “The patriotic priests are creatures of the [security services], in many cases broken physically and morally by Soviet or Nazi camps.”79 A few of those who attended the official gatherings were no more than secret police agents dressed in cassocks. Observers in Hungary at the first meeting of peace priests noted mysterious “Franciscans” whom no one had ever seen before and no one met later.

  Still others joined in expectation of promotions and privileges, and indeed the secret police actively sought out priests who were disgruntled, thwarted in their ambitions, or in conflict with their superiors. Father Henryk Weryński, a Polish priest who had once been a firm supporter of the prewar regime, fell very much into that category. Before the war, Weryński had worked for the Catholic press agency and had strong political and literary ambitions. He had even tried to run for parliament, but with no success. After the war he switched sides—and from then on his career progressed at a rapid pace.

  Very early on, Weryński agreed to become a working agent of the secret police. They paid him a monthly stipend of 5,000 zlotys and ensured that his pro-government articles would be printed in all of the Catholic newspapers, which had hitherto rejected them. In return, he helped them to identify other potentially “progressive” priests. He informed on all of his Kraków colleagues, both clerical and lay people; reported regularly to the authorities; and expressed his gratitude in public. At a meeting of the local progressive priests’ committee in Krynica in 1951, he declared that the prewar government, “though beloved by many priests, never took such good care of them” as the communists.80 According to Światło, Weryński had even supplied police agents with information he obtained from hearing confessions. Światło claimed that he personally gave Weryński a coupon to purchase a cassock.81

  Fear, the stifling politics of Stalinism, and doubts about the future must have affected many priests as well. Cardinal Mindszenty’s arrest and disjointed “confession” terrified Catholic priests all across the Soviet bloc. The nationalization of Caritas and other religious charities in Poland, the liquidation of the monasteries in Hungary, and the destruction of church schools everywhere may have seemed, to many, like the beginning of the end of the traditional church. So gloomy was the Polish cardinal Sapieha in this period that he issued a statement declaring that if he were arrested, no one should believe in the authenticity of any statements or “confessions” he made afterward.82 In this atmosphere, the decision to collaborate might not have seemed so morally dubious as it did later on.

  Similarly mixed motives also explain not only public clerical collaboration but secret clerical collaboration. Sándor Ladanyi, a historian of the Hungarian Lutheran church and the son of a Lutheran pastor, notes that although many priests who became informers had been tortured, and although many others were careerists like Weryński—priests, theology students, teachers who felt thwarted in their careers or wanted to study abroad—there were many more ambiguous reasons for collaboration as well. Priests and pastors were under constant pressure to speak to the secret police—more pressure than others—and some cooperated voluntarily, hoping to deflect the authorities’ interest while at the same time striving to assist them as little as possible. Some agreed to be informers, but said nothing. A number of Hungarian informer files end with the statement that a given priest’s name should be removed because “the information he provides is no good.” Still others were blackmailed, openly or more subtly. Protestant clergymen in particular were thought to be susceptible to blackmail because they had families. Their children’s education could be at stake, or their wife’s medication (Catholic priests, who did not have wives and children, were thought to be harder to “turn” and were often therefore treated more harshly).83

  Certainly the peace priests and the patriotic priests were not in the end of much real value to the regime. Behind the scenes, Hungarian authorities criticized the peace priests for making “insufficient progress in the fight against clerical reaction.” In Poland, the movement was never truly embraced by either the party or the public: eventually the very phrase “patriotic priest” evolved into a term of abuse. As they became alienated from the mainstream of the church, and easier to ignore, they also became less useful to the regime as mouthpieces for propaganda. Nevertheless, their presence seems to have had a dispiriting, even debilitating effect on the rest of the clergy, and they occupied a good deal of church leaders’ time and energy. Cardinal Wyszyński met with the progressive priests frequently, including several times in the months preceding his arrest in 1953. For a short period, the prospect of a wholesale “conversion” of Catholic priests to the communist cause must have seemed perfectly plausible.

  Above all, the existence of a vocal and pro-communist clergy contributed to the moral confusion of the period. Was the church supporting or opposing communism? Was the new Caritas charity in Poland authentic or ersatz? Were the peace priests really in favor of peace, and if so—shouldn’t everyone support them? Collaborationist priests also encouraged the collaboration of others: If “holy” men could accept gifts and favors from the regime in exchange for cooperation, why shouldn’t anyone else?

  Chapter 12

  INTERNAL ENEMIES

  The Party promises only one thing: after the victory, one day when it can do no more harm, the material of the secret archives will be published. Then the world will learn what was in the background of this Punch and Judy show …

  —Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon, 19411

  A person that’s beaten will give the kind of confession that the interrogating agents want, will admit that he is an English or an American spy or whatever we want. But it will never be possible to know the truth this way.

  —Lavrentii Beria, speaking at a secret Politburo meeting after Stalin’s death in 1953, from archival documents published after 19912

  “REACTIONARY CLERICS” WERE obvious targets in the paranoid atmosphere of High Stalinism. But there were many other potential enemies. Following a series of strikes and economic disasters, the Polish secret police decided that it needed “a thorough study of the workforce on the shop floor and at all levels of the administration … intelligence concerning the precise political influences to be found among the workforce, in the past and at present.” They rummaged through their files and identified twenty-five categories of “enemies.” These included anyone who had been in the Home Army, anyone who had been at all active in the prewar social democratic movement or any other political party, and anyone who had served in the Polish armed forces abroad. Many who had been released from prison in 1947 or had accepted amnesty after the war immediately fell under new suspicion too. Eventually, this list grew to forty-three categories. By 1954, according to Andrzej Paczkowski, the “register of criminal and suspicious elements” contained 6 million names, or one in three adults. In 1948 there were 26,400 political prisoners, by mid-1950 there were 35,200, and by 1954 there were 84,200 political prisoners in the country, incarcerated all over Poland.3

  Similar processes unfolded across the bloc. In Hungary, the secre
t police kept its focus on “potential” enemies. In East Germany the Stasi sought to identify real and imagined Western spies. In Czechoslovakia police sought out anyone who had opposed the communist coup d’état of 1948, or anyone who might be presumed to oppose it. The Romanians launched a special operation in May 1950, targeting any remaining government ministers from the period 1919–45, including some very elderly men, as well as Greek Catholic and Roman Catholic priests.4

  In this second wave of investigations and arrests, peasants and rural landowners were frequently victims too. In the autumn of 1952, the secret police arrested tens of thousands of Polish peasants who had failed to comply with requirements for compulsory delivery of grain.5 Between 1948 and 1953, some 400,000 Hungarian peasants were arrested for failing to deliver their production quotas, and an extraordinary 850,000 were fined.6 In 1949, nearly 3,000 rural Romanian landowners were evicted from their properties within the space of a few minutes to make way for collectivization.7

  But mass, Soviet-style arrests created a Soviet-style problem: Where should all of these unreliable enemies be kept? In Poland, authorities simply allowed prisons to become overcrowded and let conditions deteriorate. Wacław Beynar, a former Home Army partisan, was arrested in 1948 and found himself in an airless cell in the Rakowiecka prison in Warsaw. So humid was the cell that prisoners, among them many veterans of the Warsaw Uprising, removed their shirts and waved them in the air in order to create the illusion of a breeze. There was no toilet in the cell, and prisoners were taken out to use one only twice a day, a system that quickly became a form of torture for those who got diarrhea from the prison food. During interrogations, Beynar was beaten “primitively,” hit in the face, kicked in the side, and given a death sentence, which he heard “with neutrality: I just couldn’t believe it, that I’m a criminal.”