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

by Anne Applebaum

  The political impact of the arrests and convictions of leading communists between 1949 and 1953 is not easy to measure. By that time, show trials were a familiar spectacle in Eastern Europe. Home Army soldiers in Poland had been subjected to them; priests and pastors had been subjected to them; Cardinal Mindszenty himself had publicly confessed to plotting the launch of the Third World War. But the sight of the nation’s heroic leaders confessing in public to absurd crimes left ordinary citizens feeling both afraid and confused.64 If the accusations weren’t true, then that meant the party had reached new levels of paranoia. But if they were true, then the country really had been penetrated by enemies and spies. Even among members of the secret police the confessions simultaneously produced a strange mixture of fear and disbelief. Szász’s interrogator laughingly called the truncheon he used to beat prisoners the “people’s educator,” and yet at the same time his cynicism was “interwoven with some sort of bigoted and sentimental blind faith.”65

  In the long run, the trials planted doubts about the reliability and even the sanity of the communist leadership, though these were not necessarily expressed at the time. One historian tells the story of two Hungarian sisters, both loyal communists, who separately grew disenchanted with the regime during the trials. Despite living in the same apartment, each remained convinced that the other was still a believer, and both continued to repeat Stalinist slogans, even to each other, just as they did outside the house.66 Like the accused, the public was also expected to act as if they believed the truth of what was being said, even if they had private doubts.

  In the short run, the arrests of leading communists did contribute to the public paranoia that reached new levels in 1949, remained high until Stalin’s death in March 1953, and had a real impact on the public, the leadership, and the secret police. Because the accused were alleged to be foreign spies, their arrests were accompanied by a wave of especially vicious anti-American and anti-Western propaganda. In 1952, the propaganda department of the Polish communist party’s Central Committee handed out a pamphlet to party agitators containing sample speeches. One of them, using language typical for the time, proclaimed that the “American imperialists are rebuilding the neo-Nazi Wehrmacht and preparing it to invade Poland” while the Soviet Union was “helping to develop Polish technology, culture, and art.”67 At about the same time, East German activists were also presented with pamphlets instructing them on the proper way to explain West German politics to their East German listeners:

  Just who are these “German” politicians? They are monopoly capitalists whose property was seized in the German Democratic Republic, along with their cronies in West Germany. They are the Junkers who lost their land and moved to West Germany. They believe that they can regain their estates through a new war. They are the war criminals and militarists who dream of new deeds of “heroism” and the lackeys of the Anglo-Americans, like Adenauer, Blücher, Kaiser, Schumacher, etc.68

  Both the Polish and the German propagandists also received instructions on the conduct of the “battle against the beetle,” national campaigns to rid the Polish and German potato crops of a deluge of Colorado potato beetles that invaded Central Europe that summer—a scourge that both Trybuna Ludu and Neues Deutschland blamed squarely on the Americans: U.S. pilots, they declared, had thrown thousands of the parasites down from airplanes over East Germany, which had made their way east. Polish schoolchildren were urged to form brigades to find, catch, and kill them, and factory workers spent their weekends in the fields searching for them.69 The East Germans, who christened the bugs Amikäfer, meaning Ami (American) beetles, invited sympathetic foreign journalists from China, Poland, Czechoslovakia, France, and Italy to witness the damage done by Amikäfer. Afterward, the journalists and their German colleagues signed a joint protest note: “Colorado beetles are smaller than atomic bombs, but they are also a weapon of U.S. imperialism against the peace-loving working population. We journalists who serve peace hereby condemn this new criminal method of the American warmongers.”70

  Though that kind of language sounds ludicrous in retrospect, it had real and tragic consequences at the time. In Hungary, food shortages were widely and angrily blamed not on beetles but on kulaks, wealthy peasants who were allegedly hiding their produce in order to undermine the regime. “Enemies of the state try to prevent us from making bread for the whole nation” declared a 1950 newsreel. In that same year, an elaborate case was launched against a peasant who made a small campfire in a field to cook his lunch, knocked over the pot, and lost control of the flames. Although nobody was injured and the harvest was not harmed, the man’s field burned. A local prosecutor investigated, and was at first inclined to dismiss the case as an accident.

  The prosecutor changed his mind after he was visited in the middle of the night by secret policemen who told him that this case involved a kulak, criminal arson, and a crime against the state. On the following morning, officials from the Justice Ministry also called to tell him that he had three days to finish the trial, which was being observed very closely by the highest officials. Amid a burst of national publicity the man was quickly convicted. He received a death sentence that was enacted immediately. As his daughter remembered, “When we were entering the courtroom, we could see the gallows under preparation for the afternoon.”71 The authorities had clearly been looking for just such a case, as Rákosi’s personal correspondence from that period reveals. From 1948 onward he had been complaining about overlenient sentences for peasants convicted of crimes such as food hoarding or illegal animal slaughter. “We must take class origins into consideration in these verdicts,” he declared in a note to Ernő Gerő.72

  In this period, the early training of the Eastern European secret police forces also finally began to bear fruit: they had been taught that all independent organizations were suspect by definition, that all foreign contacts most likely involved espionage—and now the evidence at the highest levels proved that those warnings had been correct. Following each arrest of a leading communist, the victim’s relatives, colleagues, employers, and employees fell under suspicion too, and many were arrested. After the arrest of Pál Justus, a social democrat who was implicated in the Rajk trial, the secret police then came, one by one, for Justus’s wife, his secretary, his friends, and then the acquaintances of his friends, of whom György Faludy was one. “They’ll get you too comrade Faludy,” his driver told him without emotion, and a few days later they did.73 Almost everybody felt they could be accused, and almost everybody took measures to prove their innocence. At the offices of the newspaper where Faludy worked, the entire staff had gathered to hear Rajk’s sentence read aloud over the radio:

  These burnings of heretics were regarded as festive and joyful occasions, as in a certain sense they really were: they came as climaxes to long weeks of uncertainty, and put an end to campaigns of arrest so that everyone could feel safe for at least a few weeks until a new wave of arrests began. But if the heretic on the stake was widely known as a faithful believer, the audience—namely the whole country—felt [implicated] in the same suspicion and thus it was advisable to be pres-ent at such collective radio-listenings and at the party meeting after them unless one wanted to be accused of complicity.74

  Even those who were not arrested became pariahs. Jo Langer was away from Prague on holiday when she learned of her husband’s arrest. Her companions immediately showed “shock, curiosity, sympathy, helpfulness, tearful embraces, yes. Not many words. Above all, no comments. We were six of us in the hotel room when the call came, all good friends. But at such a moment and in those times, who dared to trust five other people? Or, for that matter, the walls.” In subsequent months and years, Langer lost her job, her apartment, and most of her friends. She and her young daughter barely survived. Only a few courageous people would speak to the wife of an enemy of the state.75

  By the early 1950s, in other words, the stage was set for the region’s secret policemen to finish the task they had begun in 1945: the eliminati
on of any social or civic institutions still remaining, along with anyone who might still sympathize with them. Among those finally destroyed were the Hungarian Freemasons.

  The Freemasons had deep roots in Eastern Europe, where they had long been linked to projects of modernization and, originally, the Enlightenment. The first Hungarian lodge was opened in 1749—Freemasonry was imported into the country simultaneously from both Poland and France—and Freemasons were an important force in the Hungarian Revolution of 1848. Treated with skepticism in the interwar period and banned by the Nazis, the Freemasons had lain low until 1945, when a group of them founded the first postwar lodge. The seventy-six new members were, in the words of a current member, “ordinary bourgeoisie”—doctors, lawyers, university professors, civil servants. With the blessing of the provisional city mayor, himself a Freemason, they got back their old building, a splendid structure in central Budapest.76 By definition they were an international organization, and they received some aid from abroad. They began organizing concerts, lectures, and charitable events.

  By the end of 1950, the organization no longer existed. It had been banned, and the secret police had ransacked their building and confiscated their books and paintings.77 Major investigations into the activities of all the leading Freemasons were already under way. Of these, the most important and most comprehensive was the investigation of Géza Supka, grand master of the main Budapest lodge. Supka, aged sixty-seven in 1950, had by that time enjoyed a long and admirable career. A trained archaeologist, he had been the director of the National Museum, a member of parliament, and a founder of a leading literary periodical as well as, after the war, of a short-lived centrist newspaper. He had not collaborated with the fascists, he had not compromised himself during the war. He devoted much of his life to charitable and patriotic causes.

  Nevertheless, in the view of the security services, Supka represented a dangerous threat to Hungarian national security. In his thick and detailed police file, a summary of his life, written in 1950, describes him as a “representative of Anglo-Saxon interests in Hungary” and as a traitor plotting to overthrow the regime: “According to our agents’ reports, Supka had received a note in August 1949 from Count Géza Teleki in the United States, advising him to keep regular contact with political personalities on whom they can both count after the regime change. Supka establishes widespread contacts for this purpose …”78

  During the previous year, the Hungarian secret police had detained and interrogated many of Supka’s friends and acquaintances. Many had cooperated, as his police file demonstrates. A journalist who had worked for his newspaper was threatened—or tortured—into declaring that Supka was a “man of the Americans,” that he had been recruiting “sympathizers for his movement” since 1944, that he frequently read foreign newspapers, and that after the war he had often visited the American embassy “to speak to his boss.” The journalist claimed to have visited the U.S. embassy in Supka’s company, where he had observed that Supka had suspiciously good relations with everyone there. Worse, “I have knowledge of his participation in cocktail parties with the Anglo-Saxons.” At about the same time, the secret police began opening Supka’s mail, copying letters, and placing them back in envelopes. Among the copied “evidence” against him were notices from Paris about the renewal of his magazine subscriptions.

  Nevertheless, the most harrowing element of the file is a series of frequent, almost daily reports filed by someone very close to Supka. Although not named in the police file, this informer must have been a close friend or personal secretary, for his knowledge of Supka’s movements, conversations, and intimate thoughts is very precise. Supka confided many times in the informer, who then gave full reports to the authorities. The resulting report unintentionally provides a glimpse into the life of a man who knows he is in danger, who knows he is being watched, but who still has a naïve faith in the goodwill of people who are close to him, including the informer.

  As the atmosphere in Budapest grew more stultifying, Supka at first thought of emigration. “Political changes will not come soon,” he told the informer on December 20, 1949, and he wondered if he should leave the country, as some of his friends were doing, including the vice president of the national bank. He wasn’t certain, however, and he was afraid to apply for a passport, as that would draw the authorities’ attention. The informer sent this information back to Supka’s case officer, who in turn ordered him to go back “to find out the exact content of the conversation between him and this bank vice president, and at the same time to observe Supka and report as soon as he sees any preparation for immigration.”

  The informer complied. He also continued to report Supka’s views on a wide range of topics. In January, Supka told him he was disappointed with American diplomacy in China, which was too indecisive: he had expected the Americans to be more firmly anticommunist. However, he was cheered by the appointment of General Bradley to replace Eisenhower because Bradley was a Freemason—as, he said, were Truman and MacArthur. (Supka’s case officer here made a note: “All these reports support our assumption that Supka kept in close contact with agents of imperialist powers.”)

  Supka also told the informer that Hungary had two strong links to the West: the church and the Freemasons. The latter, he felt confident, could evade secret police observation. A few days later, however, the file notes that “when our agent left at a quarter to midnight, an unknown young person showed up at Supka’s apartment from the British embassy, bringing a bulletin and newspapers …” The case officer leapt upon this detail as proof of his thesis: “Supka is the most prominent representative of the imperialist powers in Hungary. On the basis of his statement, we conclude that the focus of their activity is the Freemason movement … the person coming from the U.K. embassy proves that Supka has direct and regular links with Western powers.”

  Beginning in the spring of 1950, the informer began reporting on Supka’s thoughts and movements almost every day. Supka told the informer that he was prepared to be detained at any time, and that he’d already made contact with well-connected friends who he hoped would help him if and when this happened. He told him that he knew his name had been dropped from invitation lists, as people were becoming wary of him, and that he knew he was under observation. But now he had decided not to emigrate, due to his old age and ill-health, and he asked the informer for help in evading what he thought was inevitable arrest. He was trying to get an academic posting in the distant countryside, and perhaps the informer could help him find a suitable place.

  In July, Supka and the informer discussed the Korean situation and the fact that several Freemasons had been arrested. In September, they discussed the church–state agreement and the possibility of an American war in Europe. In June 1951, Supka told the informer that police had visited his house, and confessed he was once again frightened of being deported. Among other things they also discussed the defection of Gyula Schöpflin, the former radio director, to Great Britain; the Rajk trial, about which Supka had many doubts; and Supka’s health, which was not good. Still, Supka had many visitors. His cleaning lady gave all of their names to the informer, who passed them on to the case officer.

  After that, Supka plunged into depression, fearing his arrest. He obtained some medical documents from a doctor, which he hoped would help him avoid detention or deportation. He tried to make contact with some people he knew in the communist party leadership. He reached out to a couple of Freemasons who seemed to have made their peace with the regime—one of them wore a brand-new suit and had a new car—and he discussed rumors that people like himself were being sent to work on collective farms in the Soviet Union. In August 1952, he told the informer that he now left his apartment only rarely. Supka didn’t want to see the world of the present, the informer declared in his report to the secret police, it had become so completely different from what he had imagined:

  He added that he often asked himself whether it had been worth it to fight against so many things, now that h
e knew it would end this way. He is almost 70 years old and is unable to adapt to present-day conditions. This makes everything he believed in irrelevant. He still believes in freedom, and although he doesn’t know well the condition of the United States, he knows that in England civic freedom is still alive. He thinks he won’t see the day when the Third World War that he thought would be inevitable would come, but he is convinced that a world built on freedom, not the fake freedom of the fake October Revolution, would come someday. His greatest sorrow is that the Freemason lodge was banned and he considers this a major attack on civic freedom … All his life he had been anti-religious and anticlerical, but even so he could not agree with the persecution of church and of priests … his sympathy was for the persecuted.

  Though a collective celebration was impossible, friends did come to visit the former grand master in small groups on Supka’s seventieth birthday. After that he was often ill, according to the informer’s reports, though he still liked to discuss politics. Géza Supka finally died in May 1956, five months before the Hungarian Revolution. Some 400 people came to his funeral. As the informer reported, “there were several wreaths and several people put acacia leaves on them, symbol of the Freemasons …”

  Chapter 13

  HOMO SOVIETICUS

  We watched the procession, the masses carrying red flags, the girls in white dresses. Grigorev was with us, the Soviet adviser to the Allied Control Commission … When the whole square was full of people, he turned to me and asked: “Say, these 200,000 proletarians gathered here—six months ago they were just as enthusiastic for the Arrow Cross fascists, weren’t they?