INTERVIEWEES
GERMANY
Karl-Heinz Arnold, Egon Bahr, Ernst Benda, Hans-Walter Bendzko, Klaus Blümner, Elfriede Brüning, Stefan Doernberg, Axel Drieschner, Klaus Eichner, Ulrich Fest, Gerhard Finn, Karl Gass, Gisela Gneist, Bernhard Heisig, Herta Kuhrig, Jürgen Laue, Wolfgang Lehmann, Irina Liebmann, Erich Loest, Andreas Ludwig, Manfred Meier, Hans Modrow, Peter Pachnicke, Alfons Pawlitzki, Gustav Pohl, Klaus Polkehn, Lutz Rackow, Günter Reisch, Werner Rösler, Günter Schabowski, Ulrich Schneider, Gotthold Schramm, Willi Sitte, André Steiner, Hans-Jochen Tschiche, Günter Tschirschwitz
HUNGARY
János Boór, László Dalos, Ferenc Gergely, Ágnes Heller, György Hidas, Ferenc Hollai, Elek Horváth, Elekné Horváth (née Júlia Kollár), Tibor Iványi, Sándor Keresztes, Sándor M. Kiss, András Kovács, Sándor Ladányi, Tamás Lossonczy, Judit Mészáros, József Nevezi, Ferenc Pataki, Csaba Skultéty, Ferenc Szabó, Pál Szemere, Zsófia Tevan, Áron Tóbiás, Iván Vitányi
POLAND
Barbara Barańska, Michał Bauer, Szymon Bojko, Halina Bortnowska, Stefan Bratkowski, Wiesław Chrzanowski, Krystyna Czart-Kosacz, Jacek Fedorowicz, Andrzej Garlicki, Stefan Grzeszkiewicz, Józef Hen, Alexander Jackowski, Ksawery Jasieński, Stanisław Juchnowicz, Ludwik Jerzy Kern, Czesław Kiszczak, Tadeusz Konwicki, Janina Miziołek, Karol Modzelewski, Jerzy Morawski, Eugeniusz Mroczkowski, Piotr Paszkowski, Krzysztof Pomian, Józef Puciłowski, Antoni Rajkiewicz, Ludwik Rokicki, Marta Stebnicka, Janina Stobniak, Maria Straszewska, Janina Suska-Janakowska, Julia Tazbirowa, Józef Tejchma, Jerzy Turnau, Leopold Unger, Andrzej Wajda, Andrzej Zalewski
NOTES
LIST OF ARCHIVES
1956 Institute
Archives of the 1956 Institute, Budapest
AAN
Archiwum Akt Nowych: Central Archive of Modern Records, Warsaw
ÁBTL
Állambiztonsági Szolgálatok Történeti Levéltára: Historical Archives of Hungarian State Security (secret police archives), Budapest
AdK ABK
Akademie der Künste Archiv Bildende Kunst: Academy of Arts Visual Arts Archive, Berlin
AUL
Archiv unterdrückter Literatur in der DDR: Archive of Suppressed Literature in the GDR, Berlin
BStU MfSZ
Der Bundesbeauftragte für die Stasi-Unterlagen: The Federal Commission for the State Security Archives of the GDR (Stasi archives), Berlin
CAW
Centralne Archiwum Wojskowe: Central Military Archive, Warsaw
DRA
Deutsche Rundfunkarchiv: German Broadcasting Archive, Potsdam
GARF
Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii: State Archive of the Russian Federation, Moscow
GEOK
Gedenkbibliothek zu Ehren der Opfer des Kommunismus: Memorial Library of the Victims of Communism, Berlin
HIA
Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford, California
IPN
Instytut Pami˛eci Narodowej: Institute of National Remembrance (secret police archives), Warsaw
IWM
Imperial War Museum Archives, London
Karta
Archives of the Karta Center Foundation, Warsaw
MNFA
Magyar Nemzeti Filmarchívum: Hungarian National Film Archive, Budapest
MOL
Magyar Országos Levéltár: National Archives of Hungary, Budapest
NA
National Archives, Kew, Richmond, United Kingdom
NAC
Narodowe Archiwum Cyfrowe: National Digital Archives, Warsaw
OSA
Open Society Archive, Budapest
PIL
Archive of the Institute of Political History, Budapest
RGANI
Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Noveishei Istorii: Russian State Archive of Contemporary History, Moscow
SAPMO-BA
Stiftung Archiv der Parteien und Massenorganisationen der DDR im Bundesarchiv: Foundation for the Archives of the GDR’s Parties and Mass Organizations in the Bundesarchiv, Berlin
SNL
Széchenyi National Library, Budapest
TsAMO RF
Tsentral’nyi Arkhiv Ministerstva Oborony Rossiiskoi Federatsii: Central Archive of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation, Podolsk
TVP
Telewizja Polska: Polish Radio Archives, Warsaw
INTRODUCTION
1. Interview with Janina Suska-Janakowska, Łódź, October 16, 2007.
2. Both quotes from Barbara Nowak, “Serving Women and the State: The League of Women in Communist Poland,” dissertation, Ohio State University, 2004.
3. The word was coined by Giovanni Amendola, an opponent of Mussolini, in 1923. But it was adopted enthusiastically by Mussolini himself in 1925, and used frequently by his main theoretician, Giovanni Gentile. For an overview, see Abbott Gleason, Totalitarianism: The Inner History of the Cold War (Oxford, 1995), pp. 13–18.
4. Benito Mussolini and Giovanni Gentile, Fascism: Doctrine and Institutions (Rome, 1935).
5. For a summary of this entire debate, see Gleason, Totalitarianism, as well as Michael Geyer and Sheila Fitzpatrick’s introduction to Beyond Totalitarianism: Stalinism and Nazism Compared (Cambridge, 2009).
6. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (Cleveland and New York, 1958).
7. Carl J. Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski, Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy (Cambridge, 1956).
8. Available at http://www.trumanlibrary.org/whistlestop/study_collections/doctrine/large/index.php.
9. Gregory Bush, Campaign Speeches of American Presidential Candidates, 1948–1984 (New York, 1985), p. 42.
10. See Geyer and Fitzpatrick, Beyond Totalitarianism.
11. Quoted in Richard Pipes, Communism: A History (New York, 2001), pp. 105–7.
12. See Michael Halberstam, Totalitarianism and the Modern Conception of Politics (New Haven, 2000).
13. Slavoj Žižek, Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? Five Interventions in the (Mis)Use of a Notion (New York, 2001). Žižek argues that the description of Stalinism as “totalitarian” is nothing more than an attempt to ensure that the “liberal democratic hegemony” endures.
14. Available at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/james-peron/rick-santorum-gay-rights_b_1195555.html; http://video.foxbusiness.com/v/1328239165001/the-uss-march-toward-totalitarianism; http://articles.latimes.com/2011/dec/25/business/la-fi-hiltzik-20111225.
15. Available at http://fare.tunes.org/liberty/library/toptt.html.
16. See William J. Dobson, The Dictator’s Learning Curve (New York, 2012), for a description of the evolution of contemporary dictatorships.
17. This is Mark Kramer’s brilliant and precise definition: “The term ‘Eastern Europe’ … is partly geographic and partly political, encompassing eight European countries that were under Communist rule from the 1940s through the end of the 1980s … The term does not include the Soviet Union itself, even though the western Soviet republics (Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Belarus, Ukraine, Moldova, and Russia west of the Urals) constituted the easternmost part of Europe. The term does include some countries in what is more properly called ‘Central Europe,’ such as Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, and what in 1949 became known as the German Democratic Republic (or East Germany). The other Communist states in Europe—Albania, Bulgaria, Romania, and Yugoslavia—are also encompassed by the term ‘Eastern Europe.’ Countries that were never under Communist rule, such as Greece and Finland, are not regarded as part of ‘Eastern Europe,’ even though they might be construed as such from a purely geographic standpoint.” Mark Kramer, “Stalin, Soviet Policy, and the Consolidation of a Communist Bloc in Eastern Europe, 1944–1953,” p. 1, paper delivered at the Freeman Spogli International Institute, April 30, 2010.
18. This is also Joseph Rothschild’s point in Return to Diversity: A Political History of East Central Europe Since World War II (New York and Oxford, 2000), especially pp. 75–78.
19. Pravda, D
ecember 21, 1949.
20. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks) Is the Leading and Guiding Force of Soviet Society (Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, 1951), p. 46.
21. See Hugh Seton-Watson, The New Imperialism: A Background Book (London, 1961), p. 81.
22. The classic version of this thesis was formulated by William Appleman Williams in The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (New York, 1959). A more recent, more sophisticated version is found, for example, in Wilfried Loth, Stalin’s Unwanted Child: The Soviet Union, the German Question and the Founding of the GDR, trans. Robert F. Hogg (London, 1998).
23. John Lewis Gaddis, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (Oxford, 1997); Kramer, “Stalin, Soviet Policy, and the Consolidation of a Communist Bloc in Eastern Europe.”
24. T. V. Volokitina et al., eds., Sovietskii Faktor v Vostochnoi Evrope, 1944–1953, vol. 1, pp. 23–48; also Norman Naimark, “The Sovietization of Eastern Europe, 1944–1953,” in The Cambridge History of the Cold War (Cambridge, 2010).
25. Ivo Banac, ed., The Diary of Georgi Dmitrov, 1933–1949 (New Haven and London, 2003), p. 14.
26. Tony Judt and Timothy Snyder, Thinking the Twentieth Century (London, 2012), p. 190.
27. Tomasz Goban-Klas, The Orchestration of the Media: The Politics of Mass Communications in Communist Poland and the Aftermath (Boulder, 1994), p. 54.
28. The communist party of Yugoslavia remained more popular than the others for many years, but this was at least partly because it eventually broke away from Soviet influence.
29. One exception, and the standard work for many years, was Zbigniew Brzezinski’s The Soviet Bloc: Unity and Conflict (New York, 1967).
30. Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, pp. 480–81.
31. See Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (New York, 2011); Jan Gross, “War as Revolution,” in Norman Naimark and Leonid Gibianskii, eds., The Establishment of Communist Regimes in Eastern Europe, 1944–1949 (Boulder, 1997); Bradley Abrams, “The Second World War and the East European Revolution,” East European Politics and Societies, 16, 3, pp. 623–25.
32. See the work of the Harvard Project on Cold War Studies, as well as the Wilson Center’s Cold War International History Project. Good recent surveys that use new archives include John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War: A New History (New York, 2005); Vojtech Mastny, The Cold War and Soviet Insecurity: The Stalin Years (Oxford, 1996); Melvyn P. Leffler, For the Soul of Mankind: The United States, the Soviet Union, and the Cold War (New York, 2007). See also Melvyn P. Leffler and Odd Arne Westad, “Bibliographical Essay,” in Cambridge History of the Cold War, vol. 1: Origins (Cambridge, 2010).
33. Andrzej Paczkowski and Krystyna Kersten have written multiple works on the period. In English see Andrzej Paczkowski, The Spring Will Be Ours: Poland and the Poles from Occupation to Freedom (New York, 2003), and Krystyna Kersten, The Establishment of Communist Rule in Poland, 1943–1948 (Berkeley, 1991). See also Norman Naimark, The Russians in Germany: A History of the Soviet Zone of Occupation, 1945–1949 (Cambridge, Mass., 1995); Peter Kenez, Hungary from the Nazis to the Soviets: The Establishment of the Communist Regime in Hungary, 1944–1948 (New York, 2006); László Borhi, Hungary in the Cold War, 1945–1956: Between the United States and the Soviet Union (New York, 2004); Karel Kaplan, The Short March: The Communist Takeover in Czechoslovakia, 1945–48 (New York, 1987). Bradley Adams, The Struggle for the Soul of the Czech Nation: Czech Culture and the Rise of Communism (New York, 2005); Mary Heimann, Czechoslovakia: The State That Failed (New Haven, 2009).
34. John Connelly, Captive University: The Sovietization of East German, Czech, and Polish Higher Education, 1945–1956 (Chapel Hill, 1999). Catherine Epstein, The Last Revolutionaries: German Communists and Their Century (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 2003). Marci Shore, Caviar and Ashes: A Warsaw Generation’s Life and Death in Marxism, 1918–1968 (New Haven, 2006). Maria Schmidt, Battle of Wits, trans. Ann Major (Budapest, 2007). Martin Mevius, Agents of Moscow: The Hungarian Communist Party and the Origins of Socialist Patriotism 1941–1953 (Oxford, 2005). Mark Kramer, “The Early Post-Stalin Succession Struggle and Upheavals in East-Central Europe: Internal–External Linkages in Soviet Policy Making,” parts 1–3, Journal of Cold War Studies 1, 1 (Winter 1999), 3–55; 1, 2 (Spring 1999), 3–38; and 1, 3 (Fall 1999), 3–66.
35. T. V. Volokitina et al., eds., Vostochnaia Evropa v dokumentakh rossiskikh arkhivov, 1944–1953 (Moscow and Novosibirsk, 1997), and T. V. Volokitina et al., eds., Sovetskii Faktor v Vostochnoi Evrope, 1944–1953 (Moscow, 1999).
1. ZERO HOUR
1. Támas Lossonczy, The Vision Is Always Changing (Budapest, 2004), p. 82.
2. William Shirer, End of a Berlin Diary (New York, 1947), p. 131.
3. Marcin Zaremba, Wielka Trwoga: Polska 1944–1947, Ludowa reakeja na kryzys (Warsaw, 2012), p. 71 (page numbers come from the prepublication manuscript).
4. Anonymous, A Woman in Berlin, trans. Philip Boehm (London, 2006), pp. 64–66.
5. Krisztián Ungváry, The Siege of Budapest: 100 Days in World War II (New York, 2005), pp. 324–25.
6. Władysław Szpilman, The Pianist (London, 1999), p. 183.
7. Bradley Abrams, “The Second World War and the East European Revolution,” East European Politics and Societies, 16, 3, pp. 623–25.
8. Heda Margolius Kovály, Under a Cruel Star (Cambridge, Mass., 1986), p. 39.
9. Anonymous, Woman in Berlin, p. 297.
10. Zaremba, Wielka Trwoga, p. 71.
11. Ibid., pp. 6–7.
12. Stefan Kisielewski, “Ci z Warszawy,” Przekroj 6, 5, 1945.
13. Sándor Márai, Portraits of a Marriage, trans. George Szirtes (New York, 2011), p. 272.
14. Arthur Marwick, War and Social Change in the Twentieth Century (London, 1974), pp. 98–145.
15. Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (New York, 2010), p. 19.
16. Ibid., pp. viii–ix.
17. Wolfgang Schivelbusch, In a Cold Crater: Cultural and Intellectual Life in Berlin, 1945–1948 (Berkeley, 1998), pp. 8–9.
18. Andrew Roberts, Masters and Commanders (London, 2008), pp. 561 and 569.
19. Abrams, “The Second World War and the East European Revolution,” p. 631; also Iván T. Berend and Tamás Csató, Evolution of the Hungarian Economy, 1848–1998, vol. I (Boulder, 2001), p. 253.
20. The most recent calculations of German war dead include 5,318,000 military deaths (Rudiger Overmans, Deutsche militärische Verluste im Zweiten Weltkrieg [Munich, 2004], p. 260); the rest are civilians who died of starvation or illness, during deportation and expulsion, or during bombing raids.
21. Janusz Wrobel, “Bilans Okupacji Niemieckiej w Łodzi 1939–45,” in Rok 1945 w Łodzi, pp. 13–30.
22. A few years ago, my husband received a letter from a German, born in the Baltic region, whose family had been given what is now our Polish country house to inhabit during the war. Enclosed was a photograph of his smiling German parents, dressed in jodphurs as if about to go riding, sitting on the front steps of our house, which is situated in what is now central Poland. He remembered the property being very run-down, and noted that his father had worked hard to put it back into working order. He hoped his family was remembered positively by people living in the area. In truth, they are not remembered at all.
23. Jan Gross, “War as Revolution,” in Norman Naimark and Leonid Gibianskii, eds., The Establishment of Communist Regimes in Eastern Europe, 1944–1949 (Boulder, 1997), p. 23.
24. Krystyna Kersten, The Establishment of Communist Rule in Poland, 1943–1948 (Berkeley, 1991), p. 165.
25. M. C. Kaser and E. A. Radice, The Economic History of Eastern Europe, 1919–1945, vol. II: Interwar Policy, the War and Reconstruction (Oxford, 1986), pp. 466–72.
26. Iván Pető and Sándor Szakács, A hazai gazdaság négy évtizedének története, 1945–1985, vol. I. Az újjáépítés és a tervutasításos irányítás időszaka. 1945–1968 (Budapest, 1985), pp. 17–2
5.
27. Berend and Csató, Evolution of the Hungarian Economy, pp. 254–55.
28. Kaser and Radice, Economic History of Eastern Europe, vol. II, pp. 504–6.
29. Janusz Kalinski and Zbigniew Landau, Gospodarka Polski w XX wieku, pp. 159–89.
30. Abrams, “The Second World War and the East European Revolution,” p. 634.
31. Kaser and Radice, Economic History of Eastern Europe, vol. II, pp. 338–39.
32. Ibid., pp. 299–308.
33. Jan Gross, “The Social Consequences of War: Preliminaries to the Study of the Imposition of Communist Regimes in East Central Europe,” Eastern European Politics and Societies, 3, 2 (Spring 1989), pp. 198–214; Abrams, “The Second World War and the East European Revolution,” pp. 623–64; Kalinski and Landau, Gospodarka Polski w XX wieku, pp. 159–89.
34. Abrams, “The Second World War and the East European Revolution,” p. 639.
35. Czesław Miłosz, The Captive Mind, trans. Jane Zielonko (London, 2001), pp. 26–29.
36. Márai, Portraits of a Marriage, p. 272.
37. Zaremba, Wielka Trwoga, pp. 221–52.
38. Ibid.
39. Interview with Csaba Skultéty, Budapest, March 12, 2009.
40. Zaremba, Wielka Trwoga, p. 87.
41. Ibid., p. 273.
42. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York and Cleveland, 1958), pp. 322–23.
43. Karta, Lucjan Grabowski, II/1412.
44. Interview with Tadeusz Konwicki, Warsaw, September 17, 2009.
45. Hanna Świda-Ziemba, Urwany Lot: Pokolenie inteligenckiej młodzie˙zy powojennej w świetle listów i pami˛etników z lat 1945–1948 (Kraków, 2003), pp. 30–50.
Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956 Page 64