There was little interference with the USSR’s actions in Soviet-occupied eastern Europe after the Second World War. Truman and Attlee grumbled but they did not act far outside the scope of the agreements at Tehran, Yalta and Potsdam. The tacit deal remained in place that the USSR could get on with its military occupation and political domination while the USA, the United Kingdom and France imposed their control in the West. Stalin had small acquaintance with his vast zone. He had been to Kraków, Berlin and Vienna on his trip before the First World War, but his subsequent interest had been limited to the internal affairs of the Comintern. Yet he was a fast learner when events drove the need for knowledge. Already in the Second World War, as Hitler occupied countries near the USSR, Stalin took account of the situation in consultation with Dimitrov and Litvinov. He also recognised that unless communist parties adopted a more obviously national image they would never succeed in appealing to their electorates. He had planned in 1941 to abolish the Comintern. In 1943 this aim was fulfilled. Behind the scenes, though, the International Department of the Party Central Committee Secretariat commanded the foreign communist parties everywhere. Once given, orders were obeyed.
Stalin’s concern with countries of the region grew as the end of the war approached. In Moscow he received representatives of the communist parties. In January 1945 he discussed economic aid, military dispositions and even the official language, frontiers and foreign policy of the Yugoslav state with Tito’s emissaries. Informed of their desire to form a huge federation with Bulgaria and Albania, he urged caution. Continually he cajoled the Yugoslav leaders, who were more cocksure than others in eastern Europe, to ask his opinion in advance of large-scale action.1
Regular reports and requests came to Moscow after the war, and Stalin went on meeting communist visitors. His ability to issue impromptu decisions was extraordinary. In 1946 he had even set the timing of the following year’s elections in Poland.2 Polish President Bolesław Bierut prefaced his discussion with the following obeisance: ‘We’ve journeyed to you, comrade Stalin, as our great friend in order to report our consideration on the course of events in Poland and check on the correctness of our evaluation of the political situation in the country.’3 His control over eastern Europe was facilitated by the consolidation of communism’s organisational network across the region with the protection of the Soviet armed forces. Years of subordination, enforced by terror, ensured compliance. Communist leaders, with the exception of the Yugoslavs and perhaps the Czechs, also knew how weak their support was in their countries: dependency on the USSR’s military power was crucial for their survival. New police agencies were set up on the Soviet model, and Moscow infiltrated and controlled them. Soviet diplomats, security officials and commanders monitored eastern Europe as if it was the outer empire of the USSR.
Problems awaited the Kremlin across the region. Communists in eastern Europe had suffered persecution before and during the Second World War. Their organisations were frail, their members few. Most of their leaders were popularly regarded as Soviet stooges. Communism was envisaged as a Russian pestilence, and the Comintern’s dissolution had not dispelled this impression. It did not help the cause of national communists that the USSR seized industrial assets as war reparations in Germany, Hungary, Romania and Slovakia. The presence of the Soviet security police and the Red Army – as well as the continuing gross misbehaviour of Soviet troops – exacerbated the situation. A further problem for communist parties was the high proportion of Jewish comrades in their leaderships. Anti-semitism in eastern Europe was not a Nazi confection, and Jews in the communist leaderships bent over backwards to avoid appearing to favour Jewish people: indeed they often instigated repression against Jewish groups.4Yet Stalin had no patience with the difficulties experienced by the foreign communist parties. He had set down a political line; and if problems arose, he expected Molotov or some other subordinate to resolve them.
Stalin and his underlings in the USSR and eastern Europe did not lack self-assurance. History helped them. While installing non-democratic political systems in eastern Europe, they proceeded in accordance with local tradition in most cases. Nearly all countries in the region had possessed authoritarian governments, even dictatorships, between the world wars. Czechoslovakia had been the exception; all the rest, even if they started with a democratic system after the First World War, had succumbed to harsh forms of rule.5It worked to the Kremlin’s advantage that these countries had yet to remove the social and economic obstacles to meritocratic progress. Reactionary army corps and wealthy quasifeudal landlords had held enormous power. Popular educational advance had been fitful. The Christian clergy lacked openness to ‘progressive’ ideas about social change. Poverty was widespread. Foreign capital investment had always been low and the Nazi occupation had brought about a further degradation in conditions. By releasing eastern Europe from the chains of this past, communist administrations could count on a degree of popular consent. Industrial nationalisation and educational expansion were widely welcomed. The possibilities of promotion at work for those who belonged to the lower social orders were eagerly greeted.
Thus there were fewer obstacles to communisation in eastern Europe than would have been the case in western Europe. Stalin was assured of finding support east of the River Elbe even though communist parties had until recently been fragile in the region. The assumption in the Kremlin was that, once the reform process got under way, communisation would develop a momentum of its own.
The communists in Yugoslavia, having won their civil war with little assistance from Moscow, shared power with no other party and encouraged the Albanian communists to behave similarly. The process developed slowly elsewhere. Monarchs were removed in Romania and Bulgaria, and in all the states of the region there was an insistence on the inclusion of communists in government; but in most cases the cabinets were coalitional. Poland was a sore spot. The Provisional Government set up by Stalin grudgingly accepted members from the London-based government-in-exile; but the communists continued to harass all its rivals. Stanisław Mikołajczyk’s Peasant Party was constantly persecuted. Elections were held elsewhere with considerable resort to malpractices which allowed communists to do better. Communists ruled Romania under Petru Groza. In Hungary Stalin faced greater difficulty. The elections of November 1945 had returned a huge anti-communist majority headed by the Smallholders’ Party. Communists, though, held many positions of power and, supported by the Soviet occupying forces, conducted arrests. Czechoslovakia was easier. President Beneš, a liberal, advocated friendly relations with the USSR, and at the 1946 elections the communists emerged as the largest single party with 38 per cent of the vote. Communist leader Klement Gottwald became Prime Minister.
Yet the events of 1947 – the Marshall Plan and the First Conference of the Cominform – changed the whole atmosphere. The Cold War broke out in its most intense form. The east European communist parties discovered how things had been transformed at the First Cominform Conference at Sklarska Poręba in Polish Silesia. Malenkov was sent as Stalin’s chief representative, and gave a tedious introductory speech proclaiming that a million copies of the official biography of Stalin had been printed since the war.6Zhdanov also attended. He and Malenkov functioned as Stalin’s mouth and ears at the Conference. Zhdanov made the decisive comment on behalf of the Kremlin when he stated that ‘two camps’ existed in global politics. One was headed by the USSR, the other by the USA. Supposedly the USSR led the world’s progressive forces. The Americans had no interest in the industrial recovery of Europe; Truman aimed at nothing less than the subjugation of the continent to his country’s capitalist magnates.7 The Marshall Plan was a trick designed to achieve this objective for Wall Street; it was nothing less than a campaign to consolidate the global hegemony of the USA.8
The Conference proceeded with unpleasantness. The Yugoslavs complained that the Italians had not behaved with revolutionary firmness. They accused the Greeks of lacking a commitment to insurgency.9 Obviously they acted in complicity with Moscow; Stalin was insisting on fixing the blame on the Italian and Greek parties even though they had been carrying out his orders. Malenkov and Zhdanov fulfilled his instructions to the letter. In Stalin’s opinion the Marshall Plan ruined the possibility of a durable understanding with the USA, and the Americans, if they hoped to destabilise eastern Europe, would have to accept that the USSR would attempt the same in western Europe. The Cominform was not the Comintern reborn; but it embraced communist parties in countries where the threat to the desires of the Western Allies was acute: membership included not only the countries occupied by the Red Army but also Italy and France.
Stalin made the most of the available opportunities. He had demanded a daily briefing on the proceedings hundreds of miles away in Sklarska Poręba; and by sending Malenkov and Zhdanov, who were comrades but never friends and allies, he would have competing sources of information. He aimed to seize back the international initiative and disturb Washington’s equanimity. A contest between the ‘two camps’ was declared. No word of dissent issued from the mouths of participants; fear of offending the absent Stalin was paramount. Amendments to resolutions arose mainly from changes of mind amid the Soviet leadership, and these changes needed and received Stalin’s sanction. The focus was on Europe. Stalin dealt with the situation without upsetting the status quo elsewhere in the world. This was why he had curtly rejected the request of the Chinese communist leaders to attend. The purpose of the Cominform Conference was to respond to the challenge thrown down by the Marshall Plan. Having proceeded carefully in the first couple of years after the victory over Nazism, Stalin indicated to communists in western and eastern Europe that a more militant programme had to be adopted.
Although he had succeeded in his task with Yugoslav assistance, Yugoslavia troubled him within months of the First Conference. Tito would not limit himself to his country’s affairs. He badgered Stalin for aid to give to the Greek communists in their civil war against the monarchists (who were abundantly supplied and militarily reinforced by the British); he also agitated for the creation of a Balkan federal state which he evidently expected to dominate. He demanded a more rapid transition to communist policies across eastern Europe than Stalin thought desirable. Stalin decided to expel him from the Cominform and to advertise his fate as a warning to those communists in eastern Europe tempted to show similar truculence. Stalin, using Molotov and Zhdanov as his spokesmen, started the anti-Tito campaign in earnest in March 1948. Yugoslav communists were accused of adventurism, regional over-assertiveness and a deviation from Marxist–Leninist principles. Stalin also rebuked Tito for poking his nose into politics in Austria, where the Soviet Army was among the occupying powers.10
The hardened line was expressed in an increase in communist political militancy across the region. Polish elections were held to the accompaniment of intimidation and electoral fraud. Bolesław Bierut became President and the comprehensive communisation of the country proceeded. Władysław Gomułka, the Party General Secretary, was judged too resistant to Stalin’s demands for more rapid installation of Soviet-style economic and social policies and was arrested as a Titoist. The communists absorbed the other socialist parties to form the Polish United Workers’ Party. In Hungary the Smallholders’ Party leaders were arrested and in 1947 fraudulent elections brought the communists to power. The Social-Democrats were eliminated by forcing them to merge with the communists in the Hungarian Working People’s Party. In Czechoslovakia the communists manipulated the police to such an extent that the non-communists resigned from the government. Fresh elections were held and the communists, facing few surviving rivals, won an overwhelming victory. Beneš gave way to Gottwald as President in June 1948. In Bulgaria the Agrarian Union was dissolved and its leader Nikola Petkov executed. For most purposes the communists assumed monopoly of power. Georgi Dimitrov, Prime Minister from 1946, died in 1949 and his brother-in-law Valko Chervenkov took his place. After the Soviet-Yugoslav split the Albanian communist leadership under Enver Hoxha aligned itself with Moscow and executed Titoist ‘deviationists’.
All this took place against the background of Stalin’s onslaught on the Yugoslavs. Tito’s lèse-majesté was discussed at the Second Cominform Conference, which opened in Bucharest on 19 June 1948. The Yugoslavs were not present. Stalin again declined to attend, but Zhdanov and the other delegates followed his agenda to the letter. The project of a Balkan federation was dropped; Yugoslavia was to be held within its frontiers. There was no shortage of communist leaders keen to castigate the Yugoslavs. The French representative Jacques Duclos took revenge for the accusations aimed at him at the First Conference; Palmiro Togliatti from Italy, still smarting from Tito’s demand to annex Trieste to Yugoslavia, chipped in with a charge of espionage.11 Tito had been transformed from communist hero to capitalist agent. The Yugoslav question dominated proceedings and Stalin was kept in daily touch with Zhdanov. The result was a vituperative rejection of Tito and his party. Yugoslav communists were admonished for anti-Soviet, counter-revolutionary, Trotskyist (and Bukharinist!), opportunistic, petit-bourgeois, sectarian, nationalist and counter-revolutionary tendencies. They were castigated at every turn. They were declared to have placed themselves outside the family of fraternal communist parties and therefore outside the Cominform.12
Not a squeak of opposition to Stalin and the Kremlin was audible from the other communist parties. As the Soviet propaganda machine got going, Tito was depicted as a fascist in communist clothing and as Europe’s new Hitler. The entire Yugoslav political leadership were soon called agents of foreign intelligence services.13 The consequences of challenging Moscow were being spelled out. An Eastern Block was formed in all but name. With the exception of Yugoslavia the countries of Europe east of the River Elbe were turned into subject entities and all were thrust into the mould of the Soviet order. Political pluralism, limited though it had been, was terminated. Economic policy too underwent change. The pace of agricultural collectivisation quickened in most countries. Across the region, indeed, communist parties increased investment in projects of heavy industry. Close commercial links were forged with the USSR. The Eastern Block aimed at autarky with economic interests as designated by Stalin being given priority. The Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (Comecon) was formed in January 1949 to control and co-ordinate developments. The whole region, including the Soviet-occupied German Democratic Republic, was locked into a single military, political and economic fortress. The Eastern Block was the outer empire of the USSR.
In return for obedience the subject countries were supplied with oil and other natural resources below world market prices. But in general the other immediate benefits flowed towards the Soviet Union, and Stalin and Molotov did not hide their pleasure. Although they had excoriated Churchill’s Fulton speech on the Iron Curtain, their actions fitted the description given by the former British Prime Minister. Just as the USSR had been put into quarantine before the Second World War, eastern Europe was deliberately cut off from the West in the years after 1945.
Communism was triumphant and its leaders celebrated their victory. A technical point, however, had to be clarified. No one had yet explained how the new communist states were to be fitted into a Marxist–Leninist scheme of historical stages. Stalin had insisted that they should remain formally independent countries (and he discouraged early proposals for them to be simply annexed to the USSR as had been done with Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania). He also wanted to stress that the USSR was the originator of the world communist movement and was at a more advanced point in its progress towards communism than the newcomers. This was the kind of message he was propagating on all fronts in Moscow. Stalin laid down that Soviet, especially Russian, achievements dwarfed those of every nation on earth. In his eyes, his military and political forces were the bringers of a superior form of civilisation to a region blighted by centuries of reactionary rule. Soviet pride, indeed arrogance, was at its zenith. The countries of the Eastern Block were meant to be fraternal states. But they were to be left in no doubt that they were younger and lesser brothers. Big Brother was the USSR.
It was also a tenet of Marxism–Leninism that revolutionary socialism usually – indeed universally, according to Lenin’s The State and Revolution – required a dictatorship of the proletariat to eradicate the vestiges of capitalism. This is what had supposedly happened in Russia with the October Revolution. Such a dictatorship could expect fanatical resistance such as had been mounted by the Whites in the Civil War. For years it had been the contention of Soviet theorists that such a result was normal. In the late 1940s, however, the situation was different. The Red Army had brought revolution to eastern Europe with its tanks and aircraft in 1944–5. The middle classes in those countries had no realistic chance of restoring capitalism, and armed uprising against Soviet armed forces would have been suicidal. The Russian historical template had not been copied.
Stalin therefore opted to designate the new communist states differently. It was the sort of task he liked in his role as the principal ideologist of world communism, and seemingly he scarcely bothered to consult his associates in the matter. He introduced a crafty nomenclature. Instead of referring to these states as proletarian dictatorships, he introduced a new term: ‘people’s democracies’. By this he contrived to suggest that their path to socialism would be smoother than had been possible in Russia. He did not have only the prevention of civil wars in mind. He was also implying that the range of popular consent reached beyond the working class to many large social groups. Peasants and the urban lower-middle class had suffered under many pre-war regimes across the region, and communist-inspired reforms had considerable appeal. Land was redistributed. Free universal education was provided. The social privileges of the upper orders were eliminated and avenues of promotion were cleared for young people who might otherwise have suffered discrimination. A term such as ‘people’s democracy’ served to stress the basic commitment of communist parties to introducing reforms which were long overdue; it was a masterstroke of ideological appeal.
Yet the term involved immense deceit. Imperfect though democracy is everywhere, it usually involves the practical provision of legal and peaceful electoral procedures. Such provision occurred nowhere in eastern Europe. Even in Czechoslovakia there was political violence before the communists achieved power. In those countries where communists continued to allow other parties to serve as junior members of governing coalitions, no fundamental derogation from the desires of the local communist leadership was permitted. There was massive electoral fraud. Although the communists had some popularity, it was always highly restricted. The accurate suspicion remained that such communists had anyway to comply with instructions issuing from the Kremlin.
As the harness of repression was imposed, Stalin strove to increase the degree of dependable compliance. He did this in line with his lurch into an anti-Jewish campaign in the USSR after he fell out with the Israeli government.14 Communist parties were constrained to select a Jew from among their midst, put him on show trial and execute him. In the Cominform countries the sordid legal processes began and no doubt many communist leaders in the region calculated that action against Jews would gain them national popularity. Yet the ultimate verdict was decided in Moscow. László Rajk in Hungary, Rudolf Slánský in Czechoslovakia and Ana Pauker in Romania: all were found guilty without the slightest evidence that they had worked for foreign intelligence agencies. All were shot. Soviet penetration of these states meant that the Soviet embassies, the MVD (which was the successor body to the NKVD) and the Soviet Army directed high politics as they pleased. Only one country remained aloof from the scheme. In Poland the pressure from Moscow was to put Gomułka on trial as a spy and shoot him. But the rest of the Polish communist leadership, having incarcerated him, refused to apply the death sentence. Not everything in eastern Europe followed precisely the path drawn for it by Joseph Stalin.
But what was Stalin up to? Certainly he had it in for Jews from 1949, and his behaviour and discourse became ever cruder.15 But Gomułka was a Pole without Jewish ancestry – and the leaders who put him in prison included Jews such as Bierut and Berman. Probably Stalin was also moving against nationalist tendencies in the communist leaderships of eastern Europe. Gomułka had famously stood out against accelerating the process of communisation in Poland and insisted that Polish national interests should be protected whenever he could. But Rajk in Hungary, Slánský in Czechoslovakia and Pauker in Romania could hardly be accused of indulging nationalism. Probably it is foolish to probe for a particular set of political sins detected by Stalin. If the results of the show trials in Hungary, Romania and Czechoslovakia are taken as a guide, then he surely had intended the political subjugation of eastern Europe.
The choice of victims did not much matter so long as they were leading communists. Until then the priority had been for the communist leadership in each country of the outer empire to persecute those elements of society which opposed communisation. The old elites in politics, the economy, Church and armed forces had been selected for arrest followed by forced labour or execution. The communist parties had had to infiltrate their members into all public institutions. They had to copy the basic architecture of the Soviet state and maintain close bilateral relations with Moscow. Weak in numbers in 1945, they had had to turn themselves quickly into mass parties. Their task had been to indoctrinate, recruit and govern in a situation where they knew that the bulk of their populations hated them. Yet they themselves had always been suspect to the Leader in the Kremlin. Before the end of the Second World War he thought them too doctrinaire and ordered them to try and identify themselves with the interests of their respective nations. Then as the basic communist architecture was established, his emphasis changed and he turned towards getting them to play down the national aspects of policy. Monolithism was to prevail in the Eastern Block. Total obedience would become the guiding principle, and an example had to be made – as Stalin saw things – of a few bright early stars of the Cominform.
The process was scrutinised by Stalin in the MVD reports he received from the capitals of eastern Europe. Tortures previously reserved for non-communists were applied to Rajk, Pauker and Slánský. The beatings were horrific. The victims were promised that their lives would be spared if only they confessed in open court to the charges trumped up against them. Here the expertise of the Lubyanka came into its own. Techniques developed against Kamenev, Zinoviev, Bukharin and Pyatakov were applied in the dungeons and courtrooms of Budapest, Bucharest and Prague. Not all Western journalists had seen through the lies of the Great Terror of the late 1930s. The mistake was not repeated after the Second World War. The media in North America and western Europe denounced the trials. Stalin was rightly accused as the real criminal in the proceedings.
The frightened communist leaders maintained outward compliance, and no one knew whether the show trials might prove a prelude to wider purges. In the meantime the Eastern Block offered fealty to the October Revolution, the USSR and its leader Stalin. Cities were named after him. His works appeared in all the region’s languages. His policies were accorded official reverence. Yet beneath the surface the popular resentment was immense. The religious intolerance of the communist authorities caused revulsion. The refusal to divert sufficient resources to satisfy the needs of consumers annoyed entire societies. Cultural restrictions annoyed the intelligentsia. No communist government offered the realistic prospect of change and all of them were firmly regarded as Soviet puppet ensembles. Countries in western Europe displayed intermittent irritation at the USA’s hegemony; but the anger at the USSR’s rule was wider and deeper in eastern Europe. Without the Soviet military occupation and the penetration by the MVD, no communist regime would have endured more than a few days by the early 1950s. Stalin had acquired the regional buffer zone he craved, but only at the price of turning those countries into a region of constant repressed hostility to his purposes. His political victory in 1945–8 was bound in the end to prove a Pyrrhic one.