Europe: A History (227 page)

…
There are overworked people …
There are Polish apples unavailable for children …
There are girls forced to tell lies…
There are people slandered and spat on,
assaulted on the streets
by common hoodlums undefined by the law …
²⁶

The Warsaw Pact came into being on 14 May 1955. The armies of the People’s Democracies had been growing for seven years; and the point had been reached where the native officer corps had to assume greater responsibility. Thanks to the integrated political structures, the Warsaw Pact was not a genuine alliance of free and equal partners; none of the members’ armies had the capacity for independent action. But there were obvious military advantages in standardized weaponry and joint training; and a strong gesture was made to national pride. A strong signal was sent to NATO against the admission of West Germany.

The critical year proved to be 1956. Khrushchev’s Speech at the XXth Congress inevitably propelled a shock-wave right across Eastern Europe. The fraternal parties had to come to terms with Stalin’s crimes against them. The Polish delegation, for example, which leaked the proceedings to the Western press, learned that the entire leadership of the pre-war Polish communist movement had been murdered on imaginary charges. Bierut died of a heart attack on the spot. By the summer, developments were reaching boiling point. Popular unrest welled up, as the old guard of the ruling parties was rocked by demands of would-be reformers. In Poznań, in June, 53 workers were killed when the Polish army fired on demonstrators carrying banners demanding ‘Bread and Freedom’ and ‘Russians Go Home’. In October, first in Warsaw and then in Budapest, two fraternal parties took the momentous step of changing the composition of their politburos without first clearing their choice in Moscow.

Khrushchev’s management of the East European crisis was facilitated by its
coincidence with the presidential election in the USA and with the Suez Crisis. The Western Powers were distracted by their differences over the Middle East; the USSR was left with a free hand in Warsaw and Budapest.

On Sunday 21 October an apoplectic Khrushchev flew into Warsaw unannounced. He found the city ringed with Polish commandos in full battle gear and ., the Polish leadership steadfast in its support for Władysław Gomułka. (Later rumour held that the Polish army had planned to break through East Germany into NATO lines.) Two days of talks showed thatGomułka’s ‘Polish Road to socialism’ was not inimical to basic Soviet interests, and that open warfare with his largest, and reputedly most courageous, ally was not exactly desirable. So Khrushchev backed down—agreeing thatGomułka’s election as General Secretary should stand, and that Marshal Rokossowski and his advisers should be withdrawn. For a spell,Gomułka basked in the glow of being Poland’s one and only popular communist leader.

In Budapest, events took the fatal turn which might so easily have afflicted Warsaw. Khrushchev was anxious that his generosity to the Yugoslavs, and now to the Poles, should not be construed as a sign of general weakness. The suppression of Hungary posed fewer military problems than action in Poland. And the Hungarian comrades, unlike the Poles, were deeply divided. On the night of 23–4 October, at the exact moment that the Polish crisis was defused, the Hungarian Party’s Stalinist Secretary and security chief, Ernő Gerő, Rákòsi’s successor, called for Soviet military intervention to save him from dismissal. Hungary was battered into submission in less than a month. At first it seemed that an accommodation would be reached. The Soviet Army retreated from the capital; the Soviet Ambassador, Yuri Andropov, abandoned Gerő and approved his replacement by János Kádár—a loyal communist who, like Gomułka, had suffered Stalinist persecution. This seemed to check the progress of Imre Nagy, the leader of the Party’s reformist faction, who had emerged as Prime Minister. The Soviet Army’s final departure was said to be under negotiation. Khrushchev was making a second visit to Tito at Brioni. But then Nagy admitted several non-communists into his government, breaking the communist monopoly. The release of the Primate, Cardinal Mindszenty, sparked enthusiastic demonstrations, followed by ugly attacks on the hated security police. On 2 November popular pressure pushed the Government into appealing for assistance from the United Nations, and announcing Hungary’s withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact. At dawn on the 4th, Soviet armoured divisions poured back into Budapest without warning. For ten days, heroic youths fought the tanks with their bare hands. Blood flowed copiously. Nagy took refuge in the Yugoslav embassy, which he left on a Soviet safe-conduct, only to be promptly arrested. In due course, after incarceration in Romania, he and 2,000 followers were shot. Hundreds of thousands of refugees flooded into Austria. The final toll of casualties reached similar proportions. Hungary was left in the hands of Andropov’s client, Kádár, and a ‘revolutionary government of workers and peasants’.

Hungary’s national rising left an indelible stain on the Soviet record. It showed
the world that communism was impervious to popular demands. It destroyed the lingering sympathies of many leftists, ruined the future for communist parties in the West, and greatly increased the tensions of the Cold War. In the Soviet bloc itself, it offended Mao Zedong, who favoured national variants of communism, and who had tried to intercede on behalf ofGomułka and Nagy. It also provided the impetus for a new general economic strategy, of which the victors of Budapest, Andropov and Kádár, were among the chief proponents. But its lessons were not learned by everyone. Czechoslovakia had to go through a similar ordeal before the rules of the post-Stalinist game were fully understood.

The Sino-Soviet split, when it came in 1960, had direct repercussions in only one European country, Albania. Like the Chinese, the Albanian comrades had important reservations about de-stalinization. What is more, since they had been cut off by Tito’s break with Stalin and did not possess a frontier with the rest of the bloc, they were shielded from Soviet intervention. So they took the ‘Chinese Road’: Tirana shifted its loyalties from Moscow to Peking. It remained fully Stalinist, totally collectivized and atheized, utterly isolated, and at odds with all its neighbours. Nothing was to change until 1990. The only religion in Albania’, declared Enver Hoxha, ‘is being an Albanian.’ [
SHQIPERIA
]

The new Soviet economic strategy of the 1960s was adopted partly in imitation of the EEC and partly in recognition of the shortcomings of existing Stalinist methods. One development was to raise the profile of the CMEA as the coordinator of joint planning. The CMEA allocated specialized tasks to each member country, and put great store on the dissemination of modern science and technology. This satisfied everyone, except Romania. But the main pilot scheme was launched in Hungary. Andropov, now head of the CPSU’s International Department, and Kádár both realized that the reign of terror which followed the Hungarian rising had created an opening for intelligent economic experimentation. Economic reform could proceed without the threat of political turbulence. ‘Goulash communism’ would cure well-fed citizens of their dreams of liberty. The main idea was to introduce limited market mechanisms into a system still controlled by the state, and to encourage enterprise, especially in agriculture, by relaxing controls on compulsory deliveries and land ownership. Results came swiftly: by the mid-1960s Hungary’s prosperity was leading people to forget its political misery. Budapest was a city of thriving restaurants, groaning shelves, and no politics. ‘Kadarization’ seemed to offer an attractive compromise between communism and capitalism, especially to Western economists with no political sense.

Three countries failed to react to the developing trends—each for different reasons.

The German Democratic Republic was the most unnatural of all the People’s Democracies. Its rigid ideological conformism and excessive pro-Sovietism were fostered by the Stasi, a security apparatus of fearful reputation. It was blighted by the continuing division of Berlin, by the presence of nearly 40 divisions of Soviet occupation troops, above all by the steady exodus of its citizens. On 13 August 1961
all the crossings between East and West Berlin were sealed. For the next 28 years the Berlin Wall turned the DDR into a cage, the most visible symbol of communist oppression in Europe. All thoughts of a united Germany were dropped in favour of a theory that East Germany was inhabited by a separate nation with separate traditions. Great efforts were made to force the pace of heavy industrialization, and to win international recognition through massive state sponsorship of Olympic sport. By the time that Ulbricht gave way as General Secretary to Erich Honecker in 1971, a
modus vivendi
was about to be reached with West Germany. Yet the spirit of the 1950s lingered on in the DDR for 30 years. ‘We so love Germany,’ said one French minister with no little irony, ‘we prefer there to be two of them.’

Romania jibbed against all the changes, but never forced an open breach. Nicolae Ceausescu (1918–89), who became General Secretary of the Romanian League of Communists in 1965, pursued a line that was as eccentric as it was disreputable. As
Conducâtor
he created a neo-Stalinist cult of personality and a brand of nepotistic despotism that was well described as ‘socialism in one family’. He invented a constitution announcing Romania’s arrival in the highest ‘socialist’ stage of development, whilst keeping his people in fear and beggary. His dreaded
Securitate
made the KGB of the epoch look like real gentlemen. He gained a minimum of diplomatic leverage by balancing between Moscow and Peking; and he gained a measure of (undeserved) Western admiration by recognizing Israel and by staying on the margins of the CMEA and the Warsaw Pact. He stayed at Buckingham Palace, with his own taster, and, on the advice of the Foreign Office, was knighted by the Queen of England. Romania has been aptly called the North Korea of Eastern Europe—a closed country acutely aware of its inferiority, excessively proud of its dubious record, and instinctively given to acting as mediator between other Mafia gangs.

Bulgaria competed with East Germany for the laurels of grim immobility. Industrialization started late, as did the state’s exploitation of tourism and the wine trade. The Party leader, Todor Zhivkov, held the country on its slavishly pro-Soviet course from 1954 to 1990.

Czechoslovakia resisted de-stalinization until January 1968. The rule of Antonin Novotny, General Secretary since Gottwald’s death in 1953, paid no attention to political relaxation in Poland on one side or to the economic reforms in Hungary on the other. He was finally overturned by a coalition in the Politburo of Slovaks disgruntled with Czech dominance and Czechs eager for systemic reform. The new leader, Alexander Dubček (1927–93), was a mild-mannered Slovak communist, the only General Secretary in the history of the bloc to be endowed with smiling eyes. True to character, he declared for ‘socialism with a human face’.

The Prague Spring burst into bud with intoxicating vigour. Dubček and his team were planning the imposition of reforms from above. But they suspended censorship at an early stage, and the populace was brought into the frenzy of joyful debate. They were the first communist planners to realize that psychological
incentives had to be mobilized if reforms were to really prosper. In their April programme they foresaw a stronger role for the State National Assembly. Nineteen years later, when Mikhail Gorbachev’s spokesman was asked what was the difference between the Prague Spring and Gorbachev’s programme of
pere-stroika
, he answered ‘nineteen years’. The Czechoslovak experiment struggled against the odds for barely seven months. At first, it seemed that an accommodation could be reached. The Soviet comrades expressed concern over alleged excesses, such as the freedom of the media. The Czechoslovak Government affirmed its commitment to socialism, its friendship for the USSR, and its determination to stay in the Warsaw Pact. Yet in July threatening Warsaw Pact manoeuvres were held throughout the country, and a personal meeting between Brezhnev and Dubček and their politburo members was held at the frontier village of Černá-nad-Tisou. After that, the manoeuvres were halted and the troops withdrawn.

At dawn on 21 August 1968, half a million soldiers drawn from all the Warsaw Pact countries except Romania poured back into Czechoslovakia without warning—Poles alongside grey-uniformed East Germans from the north, Hungarians and Bulgarians from the south, Soviet divisions via Poland and Ukraine in the east. The surprise and the saturation were overwhelming; resistance was minimal. Dubček was flown to Russia in chains; the reforms were halted. Czechoslovakia’s frontiers were to be permanently guarded by the Warsaw Pact. In due course Dubéek was replaced by Gustáv Husák, an old-timer who, likeGomułka and Kádár, had kept the faith despite bitter personal memories of Stalinism. When it was all over, Brezhnev spelled out the Soviet position at a summit meeting of bloc leaders in Warsaw in November 1968. The Brezhnev Doctrine stated in the clearest terms that Moscow was obliged by its socialist duty to intervene by force to defend the ‘socialist gains’ of its allies. East Berlin (1953), Budapest (1956), and Prague (1968) were all of a piece. There had been no fundamental progress. The members of the Soviet bloc were not sovereign states.

The invasion of Czechoslovakia was far less brutal than the suppression of the Hungarian Rising. But it unfolded on the world’s television screens; and its impact on world opinion was enormous. It was condemned by several communist Parties. China called it ‘barefaced fascist power politics’, Yugoslavia called it ‘illegal occupation’, Romania ‘a flagrant violation of national sovereignty’. It promised an unending ice age in Europe. Few people who heard it would forget the crackling voice from the last free broadcast from Radio Prague: ‘Please remember Czechoslovakia when we are no longer in the news.’

In the third, Brezhnevian phase (1968–85), the Soviet bloc saw the norms laid down by the Brezhnev Doctrine progressively challenged by a growing tide of intellectual, social, and eventually political protest. All the levers of power were in the hands of the communist authorities; so opposition had to find new, nonviolent channels. The principal exemplar of ‘normalization’ was Czechoslovakia. The principal challenger was Poland.