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

by Anne Applebaum

  Splitting one’s personality into home and school, friends and work, private and public was one way to cope with the requirement to collaborate. Others tried what Iván Vitányi called “a brainwashing made by myself.” This wasn’t quite the same as Oskar Nerlinger’s determined effort to transform himself from an abstract painter into a socialist realist, but something more like self-silencing. After the war, Vitányi had been an enthusiastic activist at one of the People’s Colleges in Budapest, and an avid student of peasant music and folk dancing. But after objecting to the removal of the Nékosz leadership in 1948, he was expelled from his college and given an internal party trial. He was not, in the end, expelled from the party. But the Rajk affair had begun and a sense of menace had crept into the media. Although he was himself a member of the regime, having taken a job at the Ministry of Culture, Vitányi decided, in his own words, “I shall not think and I shall not deal with the country. I don’t know anything, I don’t want to know. I want to do my work.”

  From having been a talkative and even argumentative young man, he became silent. And although he agreed years later that one could debate about whether this “self-brainwashing” was a good tactic or not, “I survived.” He behaved as he knew he should in public. He kept his thoughts to himself. He was not arrested. This, at the time, counted as a major professional success.34

  Instead of remaining silent, others deliberately chose to forget parts of their biography or to ignore, quite consciously, uncomfortable facts. Those were the tactics deployed by Elfriede Brüning, the East German journalist and novelist who had belonged to the communist party before the war—she had even met Walter Ulbricht as a child—and had been jailed by the Nazis. By the end of the war she was living quietly in the country home of her husband’s parents, where she joyfully anticipated the arrival of the Russians and celebrated when they finally came.35

  After the war’s end, Brüning threw herself enthusiastically into the work of the cultural life of communist East Berlin. She joined the Kulturbund and went to work for its weekly publication, Sonntag, hoping to become a journalist. In one of her first articles, she described riding into Berlin on a truck full of onions and carrots. Arriving in the city, the truck was besieged by beggars and women holding up children: “One carrot for my child, one carrot!” She handed the article in to her editor, who dismissed it: “Give that to Tagesspiegel,” the West Berlin newspaper, he told her. She looked at him blankly: Did he really want her to give it to Tagesspiegel? In the East, he explained scornfully, “we are to radiate optimism.” Her article was too negative: it must show the present as it ought to be, not as it was.

  Brüning never considered giving her article to Tagesspiegel and never considered working for a Western newspaper either. All of Brüning’s friends were staying in the East, and she herself belonged, culturally and intellectually, to the communist movement. And so she convinced herself that “optimism” was important, and that in any case what mattered were communism’s ultimate goals, not the mistakes made along the way. She disliked many things about the new system: “the personality cult of Stalin … the ridiculous banners everywhere … slogans like ‘Every artificially inseminated pig is a blow to the face of Imperialist warmongers.’ ”36 She objected to the ration cards that divided the population into classes and the system of double canteens at workplaces, “one with stew for the workers and one [with better food] for the engineers and heads of departments.” But she persevered: “We were steeped in the wish to help the construction, and to convince people who had believed in Hitler not long ago that we wanted the right thing now.”

  In her autobiography, Brüning makes clear that at some level she continued to believe she had done the right thing. She frequently contrasts the achievements of the East with those of the West: “Didn’t we send workers’ children to university? Hadn’t we liberated women from their immaturity, given them access to all professions, and guaranteed them the same rights as men, including the same wage for the same work—a demand that has not been fulfilled in the Western state until today? We were, that was our belief, the better state … we were proud of our alleged independence and thought ourselves to be on the right track.”37

  Brüning learned to rationalize her choices, to put things into a larger context, and to take the long view. But she never convinced herself that black was white, or that there was nothing wrong with the system she had chosen. In 1968, following the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, she briefly considered emigrating but did not. In time, she grew friendly with Susanne Leonhard, Wolfgang’s mother, who had spent many years in the Soviet Gulag but eventually returned to East Berlin. Inspired by Leonhard’s life story, Brüning began to interview others who had spent time in the Gulag. After 1989 she published the collected interviews in a book, Lästige Zeugen (Annoying Witnesses). The words of her preface could be about herself: “For too long they were forced to remain silent, to conceal … Therefore, it is high time we let these men and women have their say, they who fell victim to the Stalin era and must finally be granted full justice …”38

  In a 2006 interview, I spoke with Brüning for several hours about her life. We talked about her career, the early days of the Kulturbund, and her life in East Berlin after the war. Among other things, she told me she had known nothing at the time about mass rapes and theft carried out by the Red Army in 1945, and nothing about the mass arrests that followed. I didn’t press. But a few days later, she called back. Yes, she had known about some of these things, she said, and she would like to talk about them. We met for a second time.

  It was true, Brüning explained, that she had celebrated the liberation. But her pleasure had quickly faded. In the spring of 1945, Soviet soldiers occupied her in-laws’ home and began stealing books and other things to sell on the black market. Her husband approached their commander and asked them to stop. In revenge, one of the soldiers planted a pistol in his suitcase. It was “discovered,” and Brüning’s husband was arrested as a saboteur. Pleading her long membership in the communist party, she managed to obtain his release. But as a result of this incident, her husband turned on communism (and on her) and emigrated to the West. She never remarried.

  It was also true, as Brüning had said in our first conversation, that out in the countryside there were no mass rapes. But after the war, she had visited Berlin to find her parents. Not only had she heard a good deal about rape in the city and met many victims, she spent several days hiding from Soviet soldiers who were looking for women in her parents’ neighborhood.

  A few months after that, Brüning spent some time in the seaside town of Ahrenshoop, where the Kulturbund wanted to set up a writers’ colony. But in order to have a writers’ colony, the Kulturbund had to get hold of somewhere for the writers to stay. To solve that problem, charges were trumped up against the owners of some of the more attractive seaside villas. Those who were not arrested fled to the West. The cultural bureaucrats moved in.

  We did hear about these things, Brüning told me, “but you must understand, I had welcomed the arrival of the Red Army and we wanted to build socialism—well, even today I sometimes reproach myself—we did not inquire closely enough …” Her voice trailed off—and that was all. She had just wanted me to know that she knew.

  The splitting of one’s personality into public and private, home and school, friends and work was not the only solution for those who wanted to live successful lives in a communist regime. Instead of hiding their mixed feelings, a small and unusual group of people displayed them openly. Instead of feeling conflicted, they tried to play dual roles, staying within the system and maintaining some independence at the same time. This kind of ambiguous role could be played, for example, within the official “opposition” parties, the phony political parties that had been created to replace the real ones after their leaders had fled or been arrested, parties that were loyal to the regime in every way that mattered. East Germans who remained active within the rump Christian Democratic Party were allowed to be pub
licly religious, although they were expected to adhere to the principles of Marxism-Leninism at the same time. Poles who remained within the rump Polish Peasants’ Party were allowed to be advocates on behalf of farmers, as long as their advocacy didn’t come into conflict with official policy.

  No one in Eastern Europe ever played this particular game with greater skill than Bolesław Piasecki, a politician whose extraordinary career took him from the radical right to the radical left within a decade. Assessments of his life range widely. As early as 1956, Leopold Tyrmand denounced him as a man for whom “all morality in politics is a harmful myth.”39 More recently, one of his biographers called him a “tragic figure.”40 Judgments of Piasecki fall almost everywhere else in between. To some, his is a classic collaborationist story. To others, his life is a tale of survival.

  Piasecki’s career began in the turbulent 1930s, when as a very young man he made his name as an activist of a faction of the far-right Polish National Radical Party. Known by the name of their publication, Falanga—a clear allusion to Spanish fascism—the Falangists believed that they were living through a time of moral and economic crisis. Like the communist parties of that same era, they also believed that Polish society was deeply corrupt, and that the weaknesses of democracy and the “nonsense” of democratic liberalism were to blame. But even though they were anti-Semites, and though they admired authoritarian regimes in general and Italian fascism in particular, the Falangists were Polish nationalists, and thus, with one or two exceptions, they did not collaborate with Hitler.41

  Piasecki himself was imprisoned by the Gestapo in 1939. Upon his release, he joined the resistance and eventually the Home Army. In the summer of 1944, just as the Warsaw Uprising broke out, he and his partisan unit were captured by the Red Army in the forests to the east of the city. By November, he was imprisoned in the Soviet occupation force’s headquarters, probably in the notorious cellars of Lublin castle. What happened next is a matter of no little controversy.

  Most of the sources agree that Piasecki held nothing back. He gave the Soviet officers leading his interrogation an accurate account of his career in the resistance. He also gave away the names, and possibly locations, of many of his Home Army colleagues, though by that time much of that information was already known. He hinted heavily at his own importance. He told his Soviet interrogators that he had been in charge of the “clandestine operations” of the Home Army, and had already been named leader of a new, secret section of the underground. This was an exaggeration. But the tactic paid off.

  Piasecki’s guards halted his interrogation. They removed him from ordinary military supervision and took him directly to Ivan Serov, the Soviet general who had organized the “cleansing” and pacification of eastern Poland in 1939, and who had been brought back to carry out the same task in the rest of Poland in 1944. Serov had already organized the arrests of General Wilk and General Okulicki, and was trying to find out as much as he could about the Home Army. To Piasecki’s immense surprise, Serov was not much interested in Piasecki’s Falangist past: like most Soviet officials, he considered anyone who was not a communist to be “far right” by definition, and distinctions between social democrats and radical right-wingers did not concern him. He was far more interested in Piasecki’s wartime underground activity, in his alleged “clandestine” connections, in his political views, and in his declared contempt for the London government in exile.42

  By his own account, Piasecki was pleased to discover that he had much in common with the Soviet general. He admired men of power, he was delighted to talk philosophy, and he had some positive things to say about the new regime. He told Serov that he approved of the communist-dominated provisional government and admired the land reform. He enthusiastically endorsed the expulsion of the Germans and the acquisition of the Western territories. He lauded the “idea of a bloodless social revolution and the transfer of power to workers and peasants.” But he also told Serov that the new communist government was going to have difficulties attracting the loyalty of Poles, with their deep anti-Russian prejudices and their paranoia about occupation. Which, of course, was true.

  He offered to help. “I am deeply convinced,” he told Serov in a memo, “that through my influence I can mobilize the reluctant strata of society for active cooperation.” He promised, in other words, to persuade the patriotic, nationalist elements of the underground to support the new regime. Pia-secki’s memo was eventually forwarded to Colonel Roman Romkowski, the secret policeman in charge of counterintelligence, as well as to Władysław Gomułka, then the communist party boss.43

  In the decades afterward, this enigmatic conversation—an exchange between a famously cruel NKVD general and a famously charismatic Polish nationalist—attained an almost legendary status in Warsaw. No one knew at the time exactly what had transpired, but everyone had a theory. In 1952, Czesław Miłosz wrote a fictional version of the encounter in Zdobycie Władzy (The Seizure of Power), a novel he published after emigrating to the West. Of course, Miłosz’s account is imaginary. But as one of Piasecki’s biographers points out, Miłosz was in Warsaw in 1945, he would have heard accounts of this famous meeting, and he had himself been tempted into cooperation with the new regime. His account thus has a ring of authenticity, particularly when Kamienski, the Piasecki figure, warns the Soviet general that “you are hated here” and tells him to expect resistance:

  “Ah,” said the general, leaning his chin on his hands—“you are counting on internal opposition … But conspiracy, in our system, is impossible. You know that. Encouraging more murders will just increase the numbers of victims. We are starting to build trains and factories. We have got back the Western territories, which of course were always Slavic, almost to Berlin—and if I’m not mistaken, that was your prewar program. Those territories can only be held with our help. And so?”

  Eventually, the general in the novel comes to the point: Kamienski/Pia-secki would be set free, even allowed to publish a newspaper, on the condition that he “recognize the status quo, and help us reduce the number of victims.” Kamienski/Piasecki deliberates, and then agrees. The general, satisfied, leans back and states that he is not surprised:

  “You have already understood that anyone who wants to change the world can’t continue to pay lip service to phony parliamentarianism, and you know that the liberal games of merchants were a short-lived bit of excess in human history.”44

  Whether or not he used those exact words, archival evidence makes clear that Serov really was impressed by Piasecki and apparently hoped to jumpstart his political career by naming him mayor of Warsaw. (When reminded of Piasecki years later, Serov is said to have asked, “And so—did he become mayor of Warsaw?”)45 But Serov left soon afterward for Berlin, along with most of the rest of the Red Army leadership. He never returned to Poland.

  That left Piasecki in an odd position. He had clearly obtained a blessing of some kind from the Soviet Union. But Polish communists, who understood the significance of his Falangist past quite well, were more suspicious of him and his motives and did not at first promote his political career; nor did they make him mayor of Warsaw. Still, in November 1945 they allowed him to publish the first edition of communist Poland’s first “official” Catholic newspaper, Dziś i Jutro (Today and Tomorrow).

  From the start, the paper offered harsh criticisms of the then-legal Polish Peasants’ Party and of its leader, Stanisław Mikołajczyk, and it urged Poles to support the communists in their “Three Times Yes” referendum. After that referendum had failed to provide a ringing endorsement for the new regime, Piasecki wrote to Gomułka. The current system, he argued, “should be enriched by the political representation of Catholics.”46 He also published an interview with Bierut, in which the communist leader declared grandly that “Polish Catholics have no more and no fewer rights than other citizens”—a comment that implied they might even have a right to their own party. Eventually, this came to pass and in 1952 Piasecki founded Pax, a loyal, legal, pro-communis
t Catholic “opposition” party, the only one that would ever be allowed to exist in communist Poland or indeed anywhere else in communist Europe.

  Both Pax and Piasecki existed in a strange, undefined, and ambiguous political space. On the one hand, Piasecki expressed his loyalty to the regime enthusiastically and often. “Our main goal,” he wrote at one point, “is the reconstruction of a Catholic doctrine with respect to the ongoing conflict between Marxism and capitalism.” At the same time, Piasecki was one of the few people in public life who never quite cut himself off from the traditions of the wartime underground and was never forced to denounce his Home Army comrades. Those in his circle, many of whom had had extensive Home Army careers, never had to renounce their pasts either, and they were never arrested.

  All of this was extremely unusual in public life at the time, and it created, in the words of Janusz Zabłocki, one of his former colleagues, “an enclave of freedom” around Piasecki, as well as an aura of mystery. Nobody quite knew why the leader of Pax was exempt from the rules—at one point he even managed to expel a police informer from his inner circle—but everyone saw that he was. Most assumed that “there must have been an agreement at the highest political levels” which allowed Piasecki such leeway—presumably an agreement with Soviet officials—and many hoped that his position would grow even stronger. Zabłocki joined the staff of Dziś i Jutro under the influence of this belief. So did Tadeusz Mazowiecki, the Catholic intellectual who would become Poland’s first noncommunist prime minister in 1989. Both men reckoned that Pax would sooner or later play an important role in governing the country.47 Piasecki himself hoped the same.