Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century (43 page)

Thus in defeated Germany, Stalin and his henchmen were furious with the old-time sectarian communist cadres who went around shouting “Heil Moskau!,” hanging red flags or painting the hammer and sickle on requisitioned cars. From Moscow’s point of view, blood-thirsty
declarations of imminent revolution, preaching dictatorship of the proletariat, tearing down statues of Luther and erecting monuments to Lenin—all implied a complete misreading of the situation. It showed that pre-war communists had learned nothing, and would only disturb the administration of the country. As early as 10 June, and with bewildering speed, the Soviet Military Administration issued an order permitting the creation of other parties and trade unions; the German Communist Party’s own manifesto explicitly ruled out the idea of “forcing the Soviet system on Germany” and called for the establishment of a parliamentary democracy.
¹¹

All this indicated that from Stalin’s perspective in 1945, other parties would be tolerated and parliamentary elections would be held. The model for eastern Europe was to be the Popular Front of the mid-1930s not the Leninist revolutionary elite of 1917. Fascism’s triumph between the wars, according to Moscow’s theorists, had showed the necessity for unifying progressive forces under the banner of a broad anti-fascist coalition, winning over the masses by a gradualist programme of land reform (not collectivization), expropriation of the elites and state-led economic controls. But even the theory itself was not so important as it would later become. The situation was, in fact, highly fluid. It is a striking reflection of the improvised character of east European politics at this time, and of the pragmatic character of Soviet attitudes, that not until early 1947 did there appear any official interpretations of the meaning in Marxist theory of People’s Democracy, and only in December 1948 was it identified unambiguously with the dictatorship of the proletariat. The fact was that until this point Soviet policy was focused upon the question of creating a friendly Germany and there was no overall strategy for eastern Europe.
¹²

Time was required, meanwhile, to build up what were in effect new parties, since communism had been effectively crushed throughout most of the region in the preceding three decades. Just as in Russia earlier, so now in eastern Europe, it was necessary to make the transition from the small conspiratorial organization which had struggled in opposition to a party capable of wielding power. Only in Czechoslovakia had the party remained legal and popular. Membership of the Polish Communist Party, renamed a more palatable Polish Workers’
Party, grew from 20,000 in July 1944 to 300,000 in under a year; in Hungary it grew from 2,000 in late 1944 to 864,000 by the end of 1947; the Romanian party grew similarly. When we examine the ballooning party membership figures for the early post-war years, it would be easy to write off most of those who joined as opportunists or time-servers. It was not difficult to recognize the new realities, and many “realists” adjusted their expectations, swallowed hard and compromised with the new masters and their Soviet backers. Others were simply too worn out by the years of war to struggle further. But there was also genuine enthusiasm underlying the rise of the party after 1945.

In part, this was enthusiasm for the Soviet Union and respect for its achievements. The enormous prestige which had accrued to the Red Army in defeating the Third Reich was not immediately dispelled by its soldiers’ ill-disciplined behaviour. Moreover, the defeat of the Third Reich did not allay traditional fears of German power: on the contrary, the experience of half a century, and especially the previous six years, persuaded many that Russian protection was more than ever a necessary insurance against future German expansion.

At home, memories of the war generated a widespread suspicion of collaborators and underlined the ambiguous status and doubtful performance of most pre-war political parties. Zdeněk Mlynar, for instance, who was later to play a leading part in the Czech Spring, recollected the vehemence with which, as a teenage recruit into the party in 1946, he had criticized the “pusillanimous prudence of our parents’ generation that had made collaboration with the enemy so excusable.” Growing up through the war had given the young a “Manichean view of the world” and a “primitive radicalism.” “We were children of the war who, having not actually fought against anyone, brought our wartime mentality with us into those first post-war years, when the opportunity to fight for something presented itself at last.”
¹³

But this struggle was not merely, in Mlynar’s words, “a holy struggle against the infidel.” Sweeping away the past was necessary in order to construct a better future. The general radicalization which occupation had stimulated across Europe manifested itself after liberation in a widespread desire for socio-economic change. The Hungarian elections of 1945—the first in the country’s history under universal suffrage—demonstrated
that this desire extended far beyond communist voters. Many looked eastwards for inspiration. “In 1945,” writes Mlynar, “deification of the Soviet Union and Stalin did not necessarily exclude one from the general excitement felt … concerning the prospects of establishing freedom and justice as the cornerstones of the new state. On the contrary, it was part of that excitement … The Soviet Union was, in that sense, a land of hope for all who desired a radical departure from the past after the war and who also, of course, knew nothing of the real conditions in the Soviet Union.”
¹⁴

Even among non-communists, who were much less inclined to idolize Stalin, Party policy in the first two or three years after liberation encouraged their hopes by its relative flexibility and gradualism. “Though the nation did not want to accept the alien system of rule imposed by Stalin,” Jacek Kurczewski has argued in the case of Poland, “civil war in the first post-1945 years was rejected by the majority in favour of reconstruction of homes for the people and of the country as the home for all.” In central and eastern Europe, communist energy and dedication in the work of reconstruction could win people over. A striking illustration is provided by the anti-communist Hungarian refugees who gave credit for the reconstruction drive to “the communists, who handled economic reconstruction with enthusiasm and even a touch of genius.” Gerö “the Bridge-Builder” was the leading Party official who as Minister of Transport was hailed for the swift rebuilding of the Danube bridges.
¹⁵

The basic point is that social justice and economic efficiency were for many higher priorities than a return to—or creation of—party or “bourgeois” democracy. Communism, which had swept away the remnants of feudalism and held out the promise of Soviet industrialization to contrast with the capitalist stagnation of the inter-war years, offered a way forward, especially through the palatable compromise of People’s Democracy. If no less a figure than Czech President Beneš could publicly reject a “purely political conception of democracy in a liberalistic sense” in favour of a system “in the social and economic sense also,” is it surprising that many less sophisticated thinkers should be ready for effective rather than necessarily representative government? This was the legacy of the inter-war crisis of liberal democracy in eastern Europe.
¹⁶

But the sharing of power in the People’s Democracies through coalitions and bloc-building was more easily reconciled with Soviet security concerns in some countries than in others. In Romania and Poland—countries where both communism and Russia were historically unpopular, and whose anti-Russianism, incidentally, was heartily reciprocated in Moscow—the strains became apparent early on. Foreign Minister Vyshinsky had to come to Bucharest in February 1945 to order King Michael to appoint the prime minister the Russians wanted. Moscow’s man, Petru Groza, was not a communist, though his secretary-general, Emil Bodnaras, was not merely a communist but an NKVD officer. It is significant that there was no Western response to the King’s appeals for help, perhaps because Churchill was not behaving very differently in Greece at about the same time. When Michael ordered Groza to resign, the prime minister simply ignored him and then went to Moscow to meet Stalin. “We talked,” Groza recollected, “as a small pupil to an old teacher.”

The Poles put up greater resistance than anyone else to Russian domination; unfortunately for them, Poland was the most important country in eastern Europe to the Russians, especially while the fate of Germany remained undecided, and Polish public opinion of little consequence to Moscow. As the West acknowledged this fact, Stalin could use a greater degree of force there than elsewhere. Yet even there the politics of the initial phase of communist rule also aimed to garner support. The pro-Soviet “Provisional Government” was a coalition, led by a socialist prime minister, and the West put pressure on genuinely independent political figures to cooperate with the Russians. Added pressure came in the form of show trials of anti-Soviet public figures in the summer of 1945.

And as in Romania, so in Poland, the Soviet Union gained enormous leverage over domestic politicians by its ability to readjust international borders at the peace table. Regaining Transylvania from Hungary was the carrot for the Romanians; taking over the vast and prosperous formerly German “New Territories” along the Oder-Neisse line the incentive for the Poles. The result in both cases was that nationalists had every incentive to placate Moscow as the guarantor of their new lands.

Although the rhythms differed across eastern Europe, the subsequent
pattern looked similar in retrospect: government by coalition, in which the Communist Party played an influential and dominant part; then, marginalization and outright repression of those parties and splinter groups which remained outside the coalition. Finally elections, which gave the Government Front 89 per cent in Poland, 98 per cent in Romania (up in 1948 from 91 per cent in 1946!) and 79 per cent in Bulgaria. By 1947–8, this process had succeeded in crushing the agrarian and socialist parties which were the most serious threat in a democratic setting to communist hegemony; some of their leaders had been executed or forced to flee, while others had led splinter groups into government.

Was this a Machiavellian strategy carefully planned in advance? Some contemporary observers had no doubts. Hugh Seton-Watson discerned a pattern of three stages: genuine coalition; bogus coalition; the “monolithic” regime. Yet in a curious way, this series of stages mirrored the emerging Soviet view which also saw the region moving by stages to communism. Both perhaps were trying to see a logic and a tidiness to events which did not exist. The actual course of events suggested—at least before 1947—a far more hesitant and uncertain Soviet Union than Seton-Watson implied. The 1945 elections in Hungary, for example, resulted in a humiliating defeat for the communists and a 57 per cent triumph for the Smallholders. Some coalitions (Poland, Yugoslavia in early 1945)
were
mere showpieces from the start, disguising communist control; others were genuine coalitions for several years (Hungary, Czechoslovakia); Romania and Bulgaria fell somewhere between the two. Nor should one forget the vital case of Finland in this context: Finno-Soviet diplomacy resulted in an agreement which satisfied Soviet concerns while preserving Finnish autonomy of action.
¹⁷

It is also important to remember that an impatience with pre-war party politics and a desire to solve the immediate problems of the post-war era in a spirit of national unity made coalition government popular right across the continent: democracy—it was widely felt—must be made to work the second time around, by sinking party differences if necessary, especially on the Left. As this spirit frayed under the pressure of the Cold War, coalitions West and East fell apart. Thus the emergence and disappearance of coalition governments was
not solely an east European development, nor only explicable as a Soviet conspiracy.
¹⁸

The communists also profited from several factors in addition to Soviet backing. One was the weakness and lack of cohesion of many of their rival parties: although some could only be crushed through police terror, others—like the Hungarian Smallholders—were friable and splintered easily, especially in the absence of Western support. Marxist Social Democrats were often as drawn to the Soviet example as repelled by it. And anyway, outside Czechoslovakia and East Germany social democracy had weak roots in the region. The historical memory of the Left’s fatal split in the 1920s added weight to the communists’ demands for unity.

More fundamentally still, the rival parties’ commitment to the principles of democracy had to be understood in the light of their own pre-war political traditions and experience. For many this included both the lack of a legacy of successful parliamentarism, and a familiarity with the idea of large governing coalitions operating—as in inter-war Hungary and Romania, for instance—in an authoritarian context. Outside Czechoslovakia, the memory of inter-war parliamentary government conjured up ambiguous associations. Pre-war “bourgeois democracy” found few supporters; sociologically and ideologically its old constituencies had shrunk, fled or been killed. In Poland, the war—thanks to both Germans and Russians—had more or less wiped out the liberal intelligentsia; in Romania it was largely tainted with collaboration.

Liberal, Catholic and peasant politicians were uncertain about whether to move to total opposition or some kind of compromise with the new order. Advocates of intransigence placed their hopes in the outbreak of a Third World War, and this led many to wait indefinitely for salvation from the West. In the Balkans, noted Elisabeth Barker, “There were many in the Opposition who had little interest in the peasants or in constructive programmes. The one question which obsessed them, and which they often put only to foreigners, was: ‘When do you think the war against Russia will start?’ … They let the expectation of war become the assumption on which most of their thinking was based. So they tended just to wait passively with a strange mixture of hopelessness and hopefulness, for the outbreak of
the war.” They were understandably misled by the warlike tone of Cold War rhetoric on both sides. “The final stage of preparation for war is under way,” insisted a Lithuanian partisan bulletin at the time of the Truman Doctrine. The Korean War gave a further boost to the surviving believers. Only Western passivity over Hungary in 1956 killed off their dreams for good.
¹⁹