7

Eastern Spheres

From the 1940s to the 1960s one alternative world covered the globe from the Arctic through the center of Europe to the Adriatic, and from there through the Caucasus and central Asia to Korea and the city of Vladivostok on the Pacific Ocean. That city’s name, meaning “the conqueror of the east,” now symbolized Communist victory in a very large part of Eurasia. But the Communist world did not stop there. From Vladivostok it moved south, through China, the most populous country on earth, to end off the shores of Vietnam, in the South China Sea. What is remarkable about this world is how it was connected. It was not just a security alliance, such as NATO was for the north Atlantic states. It was an integrationist political and economic project, built on a common understanding of how the world worked and how it ought to be changed. It based itself on the teachings of Marx and Lenin, and on the practices that had developed in the Soviet Union under Stalin. It was fiercely protective of its unity and committed to supporting the Soviet Union in the Cold War. It was, or so it seemed, a full-fledged alternative to capitalism and a rebuke to those who believed the United States was the great victor of the Second World War.

Everywhere, the imposition of Communist rule was based on military power. In eastern Europe and North Korea the Soviet Red Army helped put Communist regimes in place. In China, Yugoslavia, and Albania, local Communist armies took power on their own.¹ But in all cases their leaders identified the Communist military takeover with a socialist revolution. They left behind Marx’s concepts of capitalism under bourgeois rule gradually developing the foundations of socialism. Like Stalin, they believed that Communist regimes could create socialism in their own countries, especially since the Soviet Union had blazed a path for such development. But the realization of socialism under Communist rule would have to happen in stages, so as to conform to the Marxist elements of Stalinism. The regimes were therefore forced to claim that they at first represented a “national” revolution, which would then later go on to develop socialism, because that was the best for the nation. With a dishonesty remarkably similar to private companies claiming that they are acting for the public good, Communists claimed to be acting for all the nation, even though their programs were blatantly intent on empowering some social classes and marginalizing others.

Among the biggest difficulties for Communists in power everywhere was their claim to stand for the international. The future, they said, belonged to the proletarians and the peasants—to classes, not to nation-states. The problem was that for many ordinary people in the 1940s and ’50s, a strong nation-state was what they wished for most. The war had shown what would happen to those groups who did not have the protection of their own state. The massive bloodletting in eastern Europe, the mass murders of Jews and Roma, and the moving of borders had made it possible for Poles, Hungarians, or Romanians to claim their countries to be nation-states. The Communists, even when professing to carry out a “national” revolution, also had to stand for internationalism, especially since Moscow made that the test case for the loyalty of each Communist regime. From the very beginning, therefore, the Communists had a troubled relationship with concepts of nation and nationhood, or even state independence.

The Communist parties were minorities everywhere. The Hungarian Communist party, for instance, had only around three thousand members when the war ended.² They therefore had to depend on surveillance and the use of force to stay in power. The techniques they used were copied from those developed by the Bolsheviks after the Russian Revolution or, in some cases, from the Nazis or the authoritarian regimes of the interwar years. Although workplace dismissals, expropriations, secret arrests, labor camps, and terror against real or imagined opponents were used everywhere, there were big differences in the number of people who died. In China, as we have seen, more than two million were killed in the first two years of Communist rule. In Hungary the number was about five hundred, and in Czechoslovakia less than two hundred. The difference is probably explained both by the character of the regime and by the situation the leaders were in. In China there had been a long civil war, turning into an international war in Korea, while in Czechoslovakia violence in the taking of power had been relatively slight. But the Chinese Communists also believed in a swift transformation of their country, and liked to use the phrase that one cannot make an omelet without breaking eggs.³ As seen from Prague, the realization of Communism was a slower concoction.

In all of the Communist states, there was of course much change over time. Even though the Communist parties were in power, they still had to build a state and get some form of cooperation from the population. While Stalin was alive, it was hard to get on with these essential tasks, because the aging dictator took them through a series of increasingly capricious campaigns, purges, and changes in policy. After Stalin’s death in 1953, the eastern European regimes turned toward stability and economic growth. This deliberate lessening of tension by the Communists made protest more possible, as in East Germany in 1953 or Poland and Hungary in 1956. But it also made it easier for the population to collaborate with the regimes. For most people, after all, the Communist regimes were simply the new authorities, and socialism increasingly the new normality. Over time a degree of mutuality between rulers and ruled developed. Those in power at the lower levels could fashion official policy to suit them. Workers used solidarity with their workmates to carve out space free from direct Communist interference. But more and more people also participated in the regime’s organizations, events, or festivals. By the early 1960s some form of uneasy truce had arrived between rulers and ruled, in the Soviet Union itself as well as in eastern Europe (but not in China, where Stalinist-style campaigns were intensified rather than abated).

IN SPITE OF all the geographical and economic differences among new Communist states, the Communists set off in similar directions everywhere. At the beginning there was much that could be based on common models, often lifted directly from Soviet practices. Most of the Communist countries were heavily agricultural, so their leaders wanted to maximize state income from the land. They therefore decreed collectivization so the state could keep the profit from agricultural production and control the farmers politically. They also believed that the Soviet model had shown collective farming to be more effective, more industrial, and therefore more modern than individual farms. But collectivization was often resented by farmers, who believed they would do better in working their own land themselves. Much as in their relationship with the nation, the Communists were caught in a developmental quandary with regard to agriculture. They argued that collective farming was the future, just at the very moment when many farmers, from eastern Europe to China, had begun to sell their produce for cash, and therefore saw opportunities in linking up to the capitalist market.

The methods by which Stalin and his henchmen had pushed through Soviet collectivization in the 1930s had been one of the worst crimes of his regime. No other Communist state acted with the same degree of ruthlessness, possibly because even the Soviets had become alert to the costs. All over eastern Europe collectivization progressed slowly, and in Poland the process was a complete failure; the Communist government there simply gave up on account of massive resistance by farmers—Polish collective farms never covered more than 10 percent of the country’s arable land. Elsewhere collectivization continued apace, with a mix of incentives and pressure. For some farmers, especially in the less developed countries, incentives such as access to technology were important. The new policies also appealed to some of the collective values of rural society. But nowhere did farmers give up their right to own their own land without some form of resistance. Even in China, where the main phase of collectivization was completed in record time in 1955 and where it had been preceded by massive terror against the bigger landowners, many peasants did demur. Given a choice, they would have preferred to own the land they cultivated.

The central tenet of Communist economic change was industrialization. The pattern again was taken from the Soviet Union. Only by industrializing fast could a country become socialist and modern. The policy had an obvious appeal: in countries on the European periphery, where there was a profound sense of having fallen behind, and in countries outside of Europe, such as China, Korea, and Vietnam, rapid industrialization seemed indeed to be the way forward. Everyone was bewitched by the extraordinary role of Soviet industrial production in destroying Nazi Germany. The emphasis was always on heavy industry: steel, machinery, shipyards, and on the mining and drilling that served such industries. Big enterprises had the priority, and almost all investment went to capital projects. Consumer goods were lacking, and for those that were available, shortages and queuing were the rules from the very beginning of Communist governments.

The ideal was that all economic activity should be run by the state, and that the measure of the economy was production volume, not competition or exchange. Planning and centralization therefore played a big part in all Communist economies. As we have seen, elements of planning were not uncommon for the postwar era even among non-Communists. But the difference was the totality of the plan: in the Communist world it covered everything, from household consumption to steel production. By the early 1960s, 100 percent of the national income in the USSR and Bulgaria was produced by state and collective enterprises, and most other Communist countries had similar figures.⁴ Private ownership was abolished through expropriations.

A fully planned economy was based on the government deciding the priorities for production. Government ministries then issued production quotas, which factories strove to fulfill. The allocation of raw materials, energy, and workers was decided centrally, based on calculations of how much was needed to achieve the quotas on time. Transport, repairs, or new machinery were requested by the individual factory and decided on, according to political priority, by state institutions allocated such tasks. Investment and output were imagined to be in perfect balance, and resources therefore utilized to the utmost. Distribution replaced the market as a mechanism of dividing the output. No factories ever closed, and no workers were laid off. There was therefore full employment at all times. The country was a socialist economic machine, the purpose of which was to maximize production.

Reality, of course, diverged rather substantially from this economic ideal, as did capitalist practices from free market thinking in nonsocialist countries. Although much was achieved in terms of increasing production during the first decades of full economic planning, mainly in industry (socialist agriculture always lagged behind), growth slowed later. Some of this is undoubtedly explained by the first phase of growth being pushed forward simply by unrealized potential from earlier decades. The resource advantages of centralization in an underdeveloped economy played a part in initial successes, as did the enthusiasm of workers to rebuild and see their factories and countries succeed. But there were also inefficiencies built into the planned economy, which became more glaring as economies matured. There was a lack of efficient allocation, innovation, and product differentiation. There was also a lack of incentives for workers, and a lack of economizing or preservation of resources, natural or industrial.

With industrialization came urbanization, and the transformation of peasants into workers on an unprecedented scale. Bulgaria, for example, was predominantly rural in 1945. Less than a quarter of the population lived in cities. By 1965 that figure was doubled, and more than half the population worked in industry. This process was replicated—although usually at a slower rate—all over the Communist states. As all processes of rapid social change, it had its push and pull factors. For many, the opportunity to live in a city and to learn new skills was attractive. But some were driven out of their villages by the effects of collectivization or by Communist party pressure to join the ranks of industrial workers. Aspiring to be a worker was a badge of honor in all Communist-ruled states.

The Communist regimes constructed new centers of production, which were supposed to be ideal sites for factories and for workers. In these new towns—Nowa Huta in Poland, Dimitrovgrad in Bulgaria, or Sztálinváros (Stalin City) in Hungary—socialist planning efforts were taken to the extreme. Big plants were built in the cities, with modern apartments for workers in high-rise buildings close by. Schools and kindergartens were run in cooperation between city authorities and the factories where people worked, as were clinics, sports grounds, and concert halls; evening classes were offered for workers who wanted to further their education. All was free of charge or available for a nominal fee. No wonder people such as Mateusz Birkut, the impoverished hero of Polish director Andrzej Wajda’s magnificent film Man of Marble, flocked to the new socialist towns in great numbers. Though many of their hopes were to be dashed, for the emergent working class in eastern Europe or in China, such initiatives symbolized a future that they found attractive.

For most workers the transition to socialism held out considerably fewer rewards. Though everyone appreciated job security and a steady income—especially those who had experienced the 1930s—living conditions were still poor and the shortages of consumer goods and sometimes even food clashed with socialist ideals of plenty. Even worse was the lack of working-class autonomy. All over eastern Europe workers had tasted influence and power of their own in the immediate postwar years. In some areas factory councils had taken over the running of plants or negotiated deals with the owners. By the late 1940s Communist trade unions came in and took over workers’ organizations, and officials appointed by the authorities were the new bosses. They set production quotas after instructions from above, and workers had little influence on their daily existence. Workers protested everywhere, with some condemning the Communists as Nazis in disguise. Gradually, in the post-Stalin era the authorities tried to buy off workers’ protests through accepting lower levels of productivity and increasing subsidies on food and rent.

One of the biggest changes throughout the Communist world was in the position of women. All over eastern Europe and eastern Asia the position of women had been governed by patriarchal traditions that gave them little say over resources, work, or family affairs. In areas that had had a taste of capitalism, new opportunities for women were mixed with increased social and economic exploitation. The Communist parties set out to change this sorry state of affairs, and at first many women were able to benefit from the new policies. Access to education, work, and child care improved dramatically in many places. So did women’s control of their own lives. The right to divorce and availability of birth control made for big changes in gender relations. But women were still kept out of political leadership positions, and as the regimes wanted to increase their populations, many women found themselves increasingly caught between work and duties to their families. The dual burden on women turned out to be as troublesome in societies that called themselves socialist as they were in the capitalist countries, and the on-going conflict between progressive ideas and traditional norms at least as intense.

Part of the reason why Communist regimes cherished women’s return to the domestic sphere after first having enabled them to make other choices was the gradual militarization of society. The Cold War played a significant role in this. As was the case in the capitalist countries, the Communists needed new soldiers for their armies, and falling birth rates did not serve that purpose. But the Communists’ fondness for the military was not only connected to defense. Many Communists admired military organization as a supreme form of modernity. For them, or at least for those who had never served in the military themselves, military organization equaled efficiency and the maximum use of resources. It was the principles of the assembly line and of planning put into practice on a grand scale. Enormous new military parade grounds came to define Communist states. To many Communists, in Stalin’s Russia and Mao’s China especially, society ought to be organized as a machine that worked in a military manner, with commands being executed, positions conquered, and enemies destroyed. Such societies had no use for those with their own agendas or for doubters or dissenters.

The idea about the tight organization of society and the state often led to the idolization of the supreme leader, the symbol of the collective efforts. Such adoration was hard-wired into the Communist system, although it took different forms under different circumstances. In the worst cases leaders used it to establish a personal dictatorship, as in the cases of Stalin or Mao Zedong, or the “little Stalins” who emerged all over eastern Europe during the vozhd’s rule. North Korea under Kim Il-sung was another crude example. The Soviet national anthem claimed, “We were raised by Stalin to be true to the people, To labor and heroic deeds he inspired us!” But even when the cult of the leader was less intense, the hierarchical and authoritarian remained. Rituals and festivals, and even shrines, were set up to honor the leader. Though atheist in principle, it is hard not to suspect a certain craving for the sacred in Communist attachment to their high priests and the political theory they represented.

For those who could not believe, or were excluded from the fold, Communism was grim and repressive. Surveillance was the order of the day. The regimes had spies who helped them control the population. To begin with, at least, a wrong word could get you into big trouble. As often happens, for instance in the United States during the McCarthy era, some people made use of reporting on others to settle private scores. But the Communist parties went further than sheer control. Whole social or ethnic groups were suspected of enemy activity and excluded from society. Class enemies, of course, included the former aristocracy or those who owned property, shops, or factories, but also teachers, writers, or people with foreign or minority background. In Stalin’s last years, Jews were singled out for persecution. The point was to force everyone to conform to Communist ideals, though as time went by, a mere passive conformity gradually became enough. In the Soviet Union, campaigns against enemies peaked as the Cold War hardened in the late 1940s, even if mass executions ended. The population in forced labor camps, under the GULag system, reached its highest number, about two and a half million people, in the early 1950s.

Even though resistance was hard, people obviously did resist. Under the rule of the great dictators Stalin or Mao, or even Kim Il-sung, in most people’s minds conformism won over resistance time and again because the price paid for opposition was so great. But after Stalin’s death in 1953, people began to oppose the authorities in greater numbers, especially in the Soviets’ newly won empire in eastern Europe. Most of this was everyday workers’ resistance: shirking work, pilfering from the factory, boycotting Communist marches or festivals, reading forbidden literature, or cursing the government when sitting around the kitchen table at home. Some went further, organizing underground meetings or distributing leaflets. Troubling for the authorities, most often it was not the hated bourgeoisie that committed such infractions. It was the sons and daughters of the working class, the very group the Communists pretended to represent. Sometimes the government cracked down, and the perpetrators of such small liberties ended up in prison or labor camps. Overall, however, the governments in eastern Europe managed to hold the fort through warning people off, or by playing up fears of Soviet intervention or German revanchism.

But in East Germany in 1953 resistance boiled over into open rebellion. It began in June when workers in Berlin demanded better working conditions and better pay. When the Communist government prevaricated, forty thousand protesters assembled in East Berlin and marched on the party headquarters. A general strike was proclaimed. On 17 June the Communists panicked and called in armed police, supported by Soviet troops. At least one hundred people died in the fighting, and several thousand were arrested. The number of skilled workers departing for West Berlin, already high, increased sharply. In Moscow, the new post-Stalin leaders understood that their German problem had not gone away.

Behind the workers’ protest in East Germany lay years of dissatisfaction with Communist rule. First, there was the Red Army terror in 1945–46, and the removal of industrial machinery as reparations to the Soviet Union. Then, the 1948 Berlin Blockade increased the sense of isolation in the Soviet occupation zone. When the Soviets and the German Communists agreed to set up a new German state within the Red Army zone of occupation in October 1949, they did so based on the de facto division of the country that the currency reforms had created. Although most Germans in the east longed for a united Germany free of foreign occupation, the disasters they had been through also made them realists. They wanted to make the most of the situation in the new Communist German Democratic Republic, which was supposed to be a socialist workers’ state. Among some workers there were hopes for increased autonomy and better livelihood. Famous German writers such as Bertolt Brecht and Stefan Heym returned to settle in East Germany. Heym, who had fought in the US Army during the war, wrote a letter to President Eisenhower, in which he renounced his US citizenship, condemned the war in Korea, and returned the Bronze Star he had been awarded for bravery. For Brecht and Heym, the German Democratic Republic was the good Germany.

But the German Communists, as Communists in governments elsewhere, wanted to accentuate production over workers’ participation. They were not keen on the involvement of intellectuals, except as mouthpieces for the regime. The East German leader Otto Grotewohl, in his speech at the founding of the GDR, told his audience that reconstruction was the main business of the new regime: “The German cities, towns and villages which have been destroyed, the ruined houses and factories will not rise up again if the German people simply twiddle their thumbs. All true Germans must therefore work together to overcome the consequences of the war as quickly as possible, and to reconstruct a free, democratic and peace-loving Germany.”⁵

The unrest in Berlin and other East German cities in 1953 came as a result of the regime’s impatience. By again increasing the output quotas for industry, the Communists reminded the workers that the party would construct socialism through their hard work. During the first part of the demonstrations, the workers’ demands were therefore mainly economic: “Away with inflated norms!” “Increase wages now!” “Reduce food prices!” But soon the slogans changed to the political: “For free elections!” “Release all political prisoners!” “Freedom of speech!” After the rebellion had been crushed, the East German Communists blamed foreign agitators for the unrest, claiming that the rebellion had been a “fascist coup attempt”: “Through their agents and other people bought by them…, the aggressive forces of German and American monopoly capital succeeded in influencing parts of the population in the capital Berlin and some other places in the Republic to strike and demonstrate,” said the Communist Central Committee.⁶ They wanted the population to rededicate itself to hard work. Bertolt Brecht wrote scathingly, in a poem he did not dare publish at the time, about how the Communist leaders claimed that the people had failed the government and had to work hard to regain its trust. Would it not then be simpler, the old satirist wrote of his own regime, if “the government dissolved the people / and chose another?”⁷

The dilemma between satisfying workers’ pent up demands and defending the socialist state was precisely the challenge of the new Soviet leadership after Stalin. The group that had come to power—Georgii Malenkov as premier, Lavrentii Beriia as head of the secret police, Nikita Khrushchev as party first secretary, Viacheslav Molotov as foreign minister, Nikolai Bulganin as defense minister—feared the collapse of Communist rule as much as they feared and distrusted each other. Through his brutality and the respect he commanded, Stalin had been the guarantor of Communist rule and the final adjudicator of all things political. With him gone, his Kremlin successors all agreed that tension had to be reduced and compromises found if the Soviet state and its alliances were not to be seriously threatened. The first signal of new policies was the sudden release of the Jewish doctors arrested by Stalin, who were accused of trying to murder him and other Soviet leaders. Beriia, as the former head of the secret police, may have tried to cover his own tracks by announcing that this and other cases were violations of “socialist legality.” Unnerved by Beriia’s vigorous involvement in policy-making, the other leaders conspired against him, and he was arrested in July 1953 and executed by the end of the year. According to several witnesses, General Pavel Batitskii, the commander of the Moscow Air Defense Region, shot the most feared man in Russia through the head at close range when he would not willingly walk to the execution ground.⁸

The killing of Beriia, who had been the symbol of Stalinist repression, did little to enable the surviving leaders to find new policies. Even the freeing of some of Stalin’s prisoners was controversial. Hearing of the doctors’ release, a female railway worker wrote a complaint, oozing anti-Semitism and allegiance to the great leader: “We lost our great friend and father, our beloved Iosif Vissarionovich [Stalin], and the tears on our face will still not dry, the trepidation in people’s hearts over our future had not calmed, when the stunning news spread, and the terrible thought pierced people’s brains—enemies of the people are free. They once more have the right to commit their dark acts, to wreck mankind’s peaceful work, and to receive praise and rewards from their American-English bosses.”⁹

Even so, the new leadership, among whom Nikita Khrushchev slowly emerged as the head, went ahead with gradually setting free many of those imprisoned in the GULag. While labor camps would continue to exist right up to the end of the Soviet Union, Khrushchev removed them as a key part of the country’s economy, which under Stalin had been completely dependent on prison labor. Hundreds of thousands of prisoners—political protesters, petty thieves, foreign soldiers, those who belonged to the “wrong” nationality, and those many who had no idea why they had been arrested—started to emerge from the camps, and struggled to get home or find a new place in society. These are the people the Russian Nobel laureate Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn immortalized in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and the process Ilya Ehrenburg called “The Thaw.” But Khrushchev himself later admitted that the new leaders “were scared—really scared. We were afraid that the thaw might unleash a flood, which we wouldn’t be able to control and which would drown us.”¹⁰

Nikita Khrushchev was born close to the Russian-Ukraine border in 1894, and moved from his village to the industrial city of Donetsk when he was fourteen. With less than four years of formal schooling, he was lucky to get a job as a metal fitter’s apprentice. He joined the local Soviet when it was set up in 1917, and fought with the Red Army in the civil war, in which his first wife died. After the civil war he combined political posts in the Ukraine with evening studies of technical subjects. He was an active participant in carrying out Stalin’s purges in the 1930s and during World War II served in political roles on the front against Germany, ending as party leader and premier of Ukraine. Here he carried out the Communist revenge against those who had worked with the Germans or sought independence. In Stalin’s final years he was the party boss of Moscow and ever closer to the dictator himself. Underestimated and sometimes mocked by his rivals for power because of his lack of schooling and his boorish manners, Khrushchev outmaneuvered them all and became the top leader—now called First Secretary—of the Communist Party in 1953 and head of the government five years later.

In his first years in power Khrushchev had to work closely with his colleagues to formulate policy. Among their biggest challenges were eastern Europe and China. Khrushchev was intent on strengthening the alliance with the Chinese. To his advisers he often commented that Stalin had been crazy not to immediately embrace the Chinese revolution. “We will live like brothers with the Chinese,” he was fond of saying, and his first major foreign trip was to Beijing, where he massively increased Soviet economic support for China.¹¹ Eastern Europe seemed more difficult. The new Soviet leaders understood that some of Stalin’s policies had created the resistance that had boiled to the surface after his death, not just in East Germany but elsewhere as well. But they were also afraid that the East German rebellion could be repeated elsewhere if they were not careful. By late 1953 they had therefore developed what they called a “new course,” which was intent on reform without weakening the Communists’ monopoly on power.

The main parts of the reform program were reducing the number of people who were arrested or otherwise excluded from society, amnesty for most political prisoners, cuts in heavy industry and defense industry output, and improvements in the production of food and consumer products. Not all of these measures were welcomed by the eastern European party leaders, whom Khrushchev often ridiculed as “little Stalins.” Only one of them the Soviets managed to curtail straight away: the old Stalinist Mátyás Rákosi in Hungary. He was already during the Beriia interregnum forced to share power with Imre Nagy, who had previously been criticized as a “nationalist deviationist.” And even in Hungary the changes were temporary. By 1955 Rákosi had maneuvered himself back into power.¹² But Khrushchev still pushed hard for political changes. He met with the eastern European leaders and warned them that they faced a catastrophe if they did not reform. But most eastern European Communists resisted, concerned that reform would be interpreted by their populations merely as weakness. They often and correctly explained to a furious Khrushchev that they had simply implemented orders coming from Moscow before.

In spite of the lack of wholehearted support for his new course from the eastern European leaders, or perhaps because of it, Khrushchev and the other Soviet leaders decided to expand the integration processes in the eastern bloc. The new bosses in the Kremlin had been watching the rise of western European and NATO integration closely, and they wanted the same advantages for their alliances. The result was the setting up of the Warsaw Pact in 1955 as a countercheck to NATO, and a stepping up of economic coordination through the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance. Many eastern European leaders initially thought these were just new ways of dictating and controlling them by Moscow. But they soon realized that Khrushchev had more of a genuine mutual integration in mind. Although he insisted on the paramountcy of the Soviet Union as the oldest and biggest Communist state, the new Soviet leader understood that effective military and economic cooperation would have to involve a bit of give and take.¹³ By the late 1950s eastern bloc summit meetings no longer just involved the others being ordered around by the Soviets. Real discussions started to appear, with a sense of common purpose as well as disagreements.¹⁴

The biggest surprise of Khrushchev’s early years in power was his 1954 decision to normalize relations with Yugoslavia. Stalin’s pet object of hatred in his final years was the Yugoslav leader Tito, whom Soviet propaganda referred to as “the stinking head of a fascist clique” and “a prostitute for Anglo-American imperialism.”¹⁵ All eastern European leaders whom Stalin had purged were routinely called Titoists, in addition to other epithets. At least twice the Boss had seriously considered invading Yugoslavia. But other priorities had intervened, and Tito had, reluctantly and in desperation, sought support from the United States and western Europe, which had kept his regime afloat. The Yugoslav leader therefore hesitated to respond to Moscow’s overtures, until Khrushchev himself showed up in Belgrade in May 1955 to apologize in person for Soviet actions. “We studied assiduously the materials on which had been based the serious accusations and offenses directed at that time against the leaders of Yugoslavia,” he told Tito. “The facts show that these materials were fabricated by the enemies of the people[;] detestable agents of imperialism who by deceptive methods pushed their way into the ranks of our party.”¹⁶ Khrushchev blamed Beriia. Tito welcomed the visit, but would have none of it. Stalin himself was to blame, he said.¹⁷

Khrushchev was slowly coming around to the same position himself, and not only with regard to Yugoslavia. In February 1955 he had Malenkov, his nearest rival for party power, demoted from the premiership. In July, after returning from Belgrade, he attacked Molotov for adhering too closely to Stalin’s line. “I will frankly say,” Khrushchev told the Central Committee, “that I believed Molotov’s word on everything, [and] like many of us, thought that he was a great and experienced diplomat. Sometimes you’d look and then reason and think: Damn it, maybe I am missing something!”¹⁸ Molotov was replaced as foreign minister the following year. But in spite of all this infighting, none of the defeated leaders were executed, arrested, or even thrown out of the central committee. Khrushchev had something bigger in sight: a break with the Stalinist past and a reinvigoration of Lenin’s party, thereby shortening the road to Communism.

His opportunity came at the Communist Party’s Twentieth Congress in February 1956. It was the first such Congress since Stalin’s death, and Stalin had never bothered much with them—there had been no Congress between 1939 and 1952. Khrushchev had prepared a speech that would stun the Soviet and foreign Communists assembled there. The speech was held at the end of the Congress, to a closed session of delegates and high-ranking party members who had been released from Stalin’s prisons. It was therefore dubbed “the secret speech,” but there was little doubt that Khrushchev expected it to eventually be made public. He got up to speak just after midnight. “Quite a lot has been said about the cult of the individual and about its harmful consequences,” he began. “The negative characteristics of Stalin… transformed themselves during the last years into a grave abuse of power… which caused untold harm to our party.… Stalin acted not through persuasion, explanation, and patient cooperation with people, but by imposing his concepts and demanding absolute submission to his opinion. Whoever opposed this… was doomed to removal from the leading collective and to subsequent moral and physical annihilation.”

While the audience gasped in astonishment and trepidation, Khrushchev continued his indictment. While Stalin had begun as a servant of the party, he had become a despot, the first secretary said, who engaged in “the most cruel repression, violating all norms of revolutionary legality.” He spoke of Stalin’s intolerance, his brutality, and his coldheartedness, and pointed out that the majority of all delegates at the Seventeenth Communist Party Congress, in 1934, had later been arrested as counterrevolutionaries. Khrushchev listed some of those who had been unjustly arrested or executed by name. And it had all been for nothing, Khrushchev argued. Stalin had left the country woefully unprepared for World War II. The victory in 1945 had been the people’s, the party’s, and the Red Army’s, not Stalin’s.

But Khrushchev’s worst indictment was reserved for Stalin’s postwar behavior. Then, the new leader said, “Stalin became even more capricious, irritable, and brutal; in particular his suspicion grew. His persecution mania reached unbelievable dimensions. Many workers were becoming enemies before his very eyes.… Everything was decided by him alone without any consideration for anyone or anything.” The break with Yugoslavia was Stalin’s fault, as were the postwar purges. “You see to what Stalin’s mania for greatness led. He had completely lost consciousness of reality; he demonstrated his suspicion and haughtiness not only in relation to individuals in the USSR, but in relation to whole parties and nations.”¹⁹

In the audience, some fainted, though the majority cheered wildly. The Polish party leader Bolesław Bierut had a heart attack and died when he read the text. Communists everywhere were profoundly shocked when they heard about the speech. Their whole lives they had been defending Stalin and the USSR against what they considered slander. Now their key leader told them, and the whole world, that Stalin’s accusers had been right. Some, in western Europe where they had the freedom to do so, left the Communist parties. Others rejoiced in the supposed return to Leninism. Mao Zedong told the Soviet ambassador that Stalin had always approached the Chinese with “distrust and suspicion.” Stalin had “continued to believe more in the power of the Guomindang than of the Communist Party,” said Mao, adding that he himself had been treated like a “Chinese Tito.”²⁰ For Mao, as for other Communists, some hard questions had to be asked, however, even if they initially felt relieved by the criticism of Stalin. Where had the other Soviet leaders, including Khrushchev himself, been while Stalin had “violated all norms”? And could not the criticism of Stalin be carried too far, so that the principles of Communist rule—not to mention their own positions—could be undermined?

In the summer of 1956 the worst fears of the Communist leaders were confirmed. As so often, it began in Poland. On 28 June around one hundred thousand workers gathered in the city center of Poznan to demand lower work quotas, lower food prices, and the freedom to organize independently of the Communist Party. They were met with brute force by the Polish army, commanded by the defense minister, Konstantin Rokossovsky, who up to 1949 had been a general in the Soviet Red Army. Up to one hundred striking workers were killed, and nearly one thousand arrested. But the crackdown did little to stem unrest elsewhere in the country. Most worrying from Moscow’s perspective, a number of Polish Communists joined in the calls for reform and to replace the party’s leadership. Matters came to a head at an 8 October Central Committee meeting, at which the Communist reformer Władysław Gomułka, recently released from prison, was elected the head of the Polish Communist Party. Faced with incidents all over the country in which ordinary people demanded free elections, religious freedom, and the withdrawal of Soviet troops, Gomułka promised an end to repression and a more open society, including talks with the church. He also wanted to remove Soviet advisers from Poland and increase food subsidies for workers.

Khrushchev was alarmed. On 19 October he led a top-level delegation from the Soviet party leadership to Warsaw to discuss matters face to face with Gomułka and the new Polish leadership. The Soviets attacked the Poles for allowing news stories critical of the Soviet Union to be published. Gomulłka retorted that the same was happening in the Soviet Union itself after the Twentieth Congress. “What frightens them?” Gomułka wrote in his own abbreviated summary of Khrushchev’s reply. “It’s not [about] insults, as much as the threat of us [Polish Communists] losing power. The slogan of the youth: away with Rakossovsky [sic], is a blow against the army. How are we [the Soviets] to reconcile [Soviet-Polish] friendship with the demand to recall officers, Soviet officers. They can’t be thrown out all of the sudden. Do Soviet officers imperil [Polish] sovereignty? If you [the Poles] consider the Warsaw Pact unnecessary—tell us. Anti-Soviet propaganda does not meet any resistance.”²¹ But Gomułka would not give in, and both sides realized that an open break would imperil the position of both. With the situation tense, and with Polish youth chanting anti-Soviet slogans in the streets, cheering Gomułka on, the Red Army units in Poland were put on full combat readiness.

By late October 1956, though, the Soviet leaders found that events in Poland were much overshadowed by graver circumstances in Hungary. There, the Stalinist leader Mátyás Rákosi, who had seen his power circumscribed on Beriia’s orders in 1953, had defeated the reformists and regained his former authority. After Khrushchev’s February speech, the majority in the Communist Party, supported by Moscow, toppled Rákosi and replaced him with Ernő Gerő, a party leader no less Stalinist but more to the Soviets’ liking. Independent student clubs had sprung up all over the country to discuss Hungary’s future. But little had happened on the streets until news came through from Poland that Khrushchev had agreed to a compromise with Gomułka, in which Soviet advisers would be removed and more open debate allowed. On 23 October the Hungarian Writers’ Union, joined by some of the student clubs, placed flowers on the monument to a Polish-Hungarian revolutionary hero from 1848. They recited a patriotic poem:

On your feet, Magyar, the homeland calls!

The time is here, now or never!

Shall we be slaves or free?

This is the question, choose your answer!-

By the God of the Hungarians

We vow,

We vow, that we will be slaves

No longer!²²

As the crowd grew, someone cut the Communist symbols from a Hungarian flag, and a throng of about twenty thousand people marched behind the new banner toward the parliament building. By nightfall they were ten times as many, chanting slogans against Soviet occupation and for political freedom. When Gerő took to the radio to condemn the rally, the demonstrators responded by toppling a large statue of Stalin in downtown Budapest. Another group of protesters attacked the radio headquarters. State security officers opened fire on the crowds. The Hungarian revolution had begun.

With the situation out of control in Budapest and many other Hungarian cities, the Soviet leadership met with eastern European Communist leaders in the Kremlin. After Gerő had appealed for Red Army intervention, Soviet troops had already begun to cross the border in the early morning of 24 October. In Moscow the leaders discussed the situation, trying to find ways of avoiding an armed conflict. “In the case of Poland,” Khrushchev said, “it is necessary to avoid nervousness and haste. It is necessary to help the Polish comrades straighten out the party line and do everything to reinforce the union among Poland, the USSR, and the other people’s democracies.” But in the Hungarian case the situation was extremely serious. Khrushchev still expected that it could be contained without bloodshed. He said that Communists everywhere needed to “think about the problems in greater depth. We must realize that we are not living as we were during the [Comintern], when only one party was in power. If we wanted to operate by command today, we would inevitably create chaos.… Ideological work itself will be of no avail if we do not ensure that living standards rise.… In our country they also listen to the BBC and Radio Free Europe. But when they have full stomachs, the listening is not so bad.”²³

With Soviet support, the Hungarian Communist Party made Imre Nagy the new prime minister. He was an unconventional but effective Communist leader who had been purged by the party several times in the past. But the situation in Budapest and elsewhere only worsened. A general strike had been declared. Workers’ councils and revolutionary committees took power from local authorities and took over arms depots and police stations. With orders only to protect major public institutions, the Red Army was mostly bystanders. Nagy believed that compromises needed to be made with the protesters, hoping that they would join with him in seeking peaceful reform. With this in mind, he extracted several concessions from the Soviets: Red Army troops would be withdrawn, there would be an amnesty for all revolutionaries and a legalization of their organizations, and the hated state security bureau would be dissolved.

But the concessions came too late. The people in Budapest and other cities had begun to organize their own authorities and armed groups. The youth, especially, were celebrating their newfound freedom. Some Hungarian army units began to cross over to the rebel side. After Soviet troops opened fire on protesters in front of the parliament building, killing at least one hundred, the mood turned increasingly ugly. There were pitched battles between Red Army soldiers and Hungarian rebels all over Budapest, and the civilians fighting to protect their barricades refused to give in. Nagy was playing for time. He begged the Soviets to withdraw their troops immediately, saying that he and the Hungarian Communists would be able to restore order on their own. Khrushchev wanted to reduce the violence and avoid a full-scale invasion. On 30 October the new Soviet foreign minister, Dmitri Shepilov, who had replaced the dogmatic Molotov in the summer of 1956, declared that “with the agreement of the government of Hungary, we are ready to withdraw troops. We will have to keep up struggle with national-Communism for a long time.”²⁴

While the Hungarian and Soviet governments were negotiating, people were taking power into their own hands all over Hungary. Revolutionary committees began to administer basic services, and organized the fighting. The old political parties were reestablished. Some Communist party headquarters were attacked and set on fire, and the remaining offices of the security services were raided. A number of security officers were executed on the spot. Around the headquarters of the security service in Budapest the fighting was particularly fierce. When Red Cross personnel tried to evacuate the wounded, they, too, came under fire from inside the building. Then, a reporter wrote, the “youngsters took over”: “They were magnificent; fifteen, sixteen, seventeen year old kids. They ran in there with no protection at all. A kid ran in, half bent over. He put a man on his back and dragged him to shelter. Now, many were at it. Young boys in twos, flat on the ground, some pulling stretchers, getting to the wounded and dragging them back. Nothing could stop them.”²⁵

When the main building of the hated security services was finally occupied, the revolutionaries showed no mercy: “Six young officers came out, one very good-looking. Their shoulder boards were torn off. They wore no hats. They had a quick argument. ‘We’re not so bad as you think we are. Give us a chance,’ they were saying.… Suddenly one began to fold[;] they were going down the way you’d cut corn. Very gracefully. They folded up smoothly, in slow motion. And when they were on the ground the rebels were still loading lead into them.”²⁶

Reports of the attacks on Communists made the Soviet leaders change their mind. It became clear to them that Nagy would not be able to stabilize the situation, and that both the Communist regime in Hungary and the integrity of the Soviet bloc were waning quickly. The day after they had decided to withdraw their troops, the Soviets turned around and ordered a massive military intervention to crush the rebellion. Khrushchev’s rethinking was also fueled by the advice of other eastern European Communists and the Chinese in favor of an invasion, and by the NATO powers being distracted by the Suez Crisis, which was unfolding at the same time. Overall the concrete response of the Americans and the western Europeans had been limited. For Eisenhower the prospect of intervening in the Soviet bloc was a nonstarter, even though some foreign radio stations, such as Radio Free Europe, were encouraging the Hungarian revolutionaries.

The Soviet invasion forced Nagy to make the toughest decision of his life. In the end, and in spite of a checkered career that included a time as a Soviet secret police informer, he sided with the revolutionaries. His government unilaterally withdrew Hungary from the Warsaw Pact and declared the country’s neutrality.²⁷ Nagy also appealed for UN intervention. It was, of course, to no avail. Nagy’s last broadcast was in the early morning of 4 November: “Today at daybreak Soviet forces attacked our capital with the obvious intention of overthrowing the lawful democratic Hungarian government. Our troops are in combat. The government is at its post. I notify the people of our country and the entire world of this fact.”²⁸ Soon afterward the radio station issued its final appeals for help. Then it went off air. When it reappeared in the evening it was in the hands of a new Hungarian government, led by János Kádár, installed by the Soviets.

The aftermath of the crushing of the Hungarian revolution was deeply depressing for Europeans. It showed that the division of the continent into power blocs was there to stay. The United States and its allies had no plans for “liberating” the eastern Europeans, in spite of occasional rhetoric about the “roll-back of Communism.” And Khrushchev’s attempts at liberalization inside and outside the Soviet Union were landed a heavy blow by his own hands. Two hundred thousand Hungarians fled west, twenty thousand were arrested, and 230 executed, including Prime Minister Nagy and several of his close associates. In western Europe, as a direct result of Hungary, the Communist parties lost strength, some of them irrevocably. And in the east most opponents of the regimes concluded that they could not win through open rebellions against Moscow. Unless international circumstances changed, the road to reform would have to be gradual.

But the eastern European Communist regimes also drew lessons from Hungary. Repression would have to be balanced against real improvements in people’s living conditions. Subsidies for food, housing, and health care had to be stepped up. Any increase in work quotas had to be avoided, even if it meant borrowing money abroad to offset low productivity. In Poland Gomułka engaged in much nationalist rhetoric against a German revanchist threat—centering, of course, on West Germany and not on the “friendly” East Germany next door. But he also opened up Polish society so that most people felt freer than before. In Hungary the new leader, Kádár, initially reviled as a quisling by most Hungarians, with Soviet consent moved away from the Stalinist terror of the past. Kádár gradually made his country the most “liberal” eastern European state, with larger plots of private land, less state interference, and freer travel than anywhere else. But neither Gomułka nor Kádár wanted to remove the Communist dictatorship or the close alliance with the Soviet Union. They may have been cabbage or goulash Communists, as they were often derided to be. But they remained Communists all the same.

Nikita Khrushchev survived the Polish and Hungarian events politically, although by a hairsbreadth. In 1957 he stared down a coup attempt in the Central Committee, in which most of the old Stalin coterie conspired against him. It became their, not his, political end. Molotov was packed off as ambassador to Mongolia. Malenkov and Stalin’s old-time associate Lazar Kaganovich were made factory directors in Kazakhstan and in the Urals, respectively. In 1961 they were all expelled from the Communist Party. Khrushchev, in the most symbolic act of his career, had Stalin’s body removed from the mausoleum on Red Square, where it had been laying next to Lenin, and hastily reburied along the Kremlin wall. The Soviet leader continued to believe that he could create a new and reformed Communism, harking back to the Leninist ideals of the past. But Poland and Hungary had told him that it would have to be without political reforms that could endanger the whole Communist edifice.

Instead Khrushchev turned to the expansion of Soviet plans for agriculture, science, and technology. In spite of its gigantic size, the Soviet Union had always had problems with its food supply, mainly because its collective farms lacked productivity. It was also held back by its biologists, who, mainly for ideological reasons, clung to the teachings of Trofim Lysenko, a Soviet geneticist who believed in the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Khrushchev was convinced that bigger and better collective farms would solve the problem. He proposed to develop “virgin lands” in northern Kazakhstan and western Siberia to produce more wheat. Beginning in 1954, almost two million people from the western Soviet Union migrated to the new giant farms in the east. Some were sent there by the government. Others were attracted by promises of better wages and living conditions. Yet others were caught up in the ideological fervor of developing new lands for Communism and for their country. The tasks they faced were overwhelming. Within a territory half again as large as California or Sweden, they had to build successful farms from scratch. Leonid Brezhnev, a young Communist technocrat from the Ukraine who later became general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, described the challenges he and others faced: “Selection of sites for the centers of the new state farms; the reception and accommodation of hundreds of thousands of volunteers in country that was still totally unprepared for human habitation; the urgent building of tens and later hundreds of state farm settlements; the selection of many thousands of specialists; the building of close-knit, harmonious collectives out of a heterogeneous mass of people; and the actual plowing of the virgin soil and the first spring sowing. And this had to be done not gradually but all at once, simultaneously.”²⁹

The virgin lands campaigns delivered good results at first, but ultimately failed. The kinds of wheat selected were not suited for the arid and cold conditions in the new regions. Irrigation plants did not deliver enough water and infrastructure was slow to develop. Nutrient depletion withered away the soil. Some areas saw wind erosion create massive dust bowls. The environmental outcome was grim, with lakes drained, soil eroded, and mono-cropping inviting weed and pest infestations. By the 1970s some of the new collective farms looked like ghost towns, and breadlines returned to the Soviet cities. What remained of the virgin lands campaign and similar Soviet campaigns in central Asia, Siberia, the Caucasus, and in Soviet eastern Europe was a mixture of peoples and cultures, which added to the deportations Stalin had carried out in creating truly multicultural sites throughout the Soviet Union. In Kazakhstan there were more Russians than Kazakhs in 1970; in Turkmenia and in Estonia, only about two-thirds of the population were Turkmen or Estonians. The rest came from population groups all over the Soviet Union, though the main part of the migrants tended to be Russian.

But it was not only agriculture that was supposed to benefit from virgin lands. One of Khrushchev’s grander schemes was the building of a new city for science and technology in Siberia, Akademgorodok. “We hoped very much that by coming to virgin lands we could start everything from scratch, according to international scientific standards, instead of waiting for God-only-knows how long in Moscow’s old established institutions,” said a young physicist who arrived in Akademgorodok in 1961. “We wanted to catch up with the West.”³⁰ And catch up they did, at least in some fields, as Soviet nuclear science had already demonstrated. By the late 1950s Soviet electromagnetics, hydrodynamics, and quantum electronics were as developed as in any other country, and in some fields, such as space exploration, the Soviets were pushing ahead. In 1957 they launched the first satellite, Sputnik, which orbited the earth in 96 minutes, doing 1,500 orbits in all. The feat elated Soviet leaders and frightened Americans and western Europeans, who believed that the Communists could weaponize their satellites and thereby win the Cold War. They tended to forget that a large portion of the Soviet population could only watch the satellite streaking through the sky from their place in the breadline or from their derelict collective farms.