Iron Curtain (42 page)

The Cominform’s creation is sometimes described as an ambush, a surprise assertion of Soviet power that sealed the fate of all present. Others have called it a turning point, the moment when the Soviet Union dropped its tolerance of Eastern bloc pluralism. In the revisionist interpretation of Cold War history, the Szklarska Poręba meeting is also sometimes portrayed as a panicked reaction to the aggression of the West, and in particular to the naked imperialism of the Marshall Plan.

Yet a close reading of the reports actually presented by the delegates at the meeting provides a different picture. By their own account, almost every one of the communist parties present at the meeting
already
had a stranglehold on power. Gomułka bragged that “despite the coalition character of the government,” Polish communist party members held all posts “in the Ministry of Security and the Ministry of National Defence, from the highest to the lowest leading organs, and in the security organs the rank-and-file as well.” He also
spoke at length about the communist party’s elimination of the Polish socialists, bragged of the defeat of Mikołajczyk’s PSL, and gleefully described the new, emasculated, pro-regime “peasant party” that had replaced it.
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The Hungarian speaker, József Révai, sounded no less pleased. “As a result of the last elections,” he told the other delegates, “we have become the leading Party, whereas for 25 years we were essentially a small, underground group.” He spoke of the “liquidation of Ferenc Nagy,” and of the breakup of the Smallholders’ Party, in which “American and British imperialism had set their hopes.” The Romanians also spoke of the success of their “bloc of democratic parties,” which had “made possible an intensification of the process of democratic development” and the elimination of opponents. Even the Czech communist leader, Rudolf Slánský, bragged that his party, while not yet in full control (though it would be a few months later), already had created a “regime of people’s democracy” in Czechoslovakia.
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The Cominform did not turn out to be a permanent or even an especially influential institution. It never achieved much in the way of bloc coordination and in 1956 would be dissolved.
Comecon—the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, founded in 1949—would have more longevity and indeed did more lasting damage, since it distorted trade within the Eastern bloc for decades. But the Cominform’s creation did mark the end of an era. In the wake of the Szklarska Poręba meeting, the Eastern European communist parties eliminated even the fiction of opposition.

This meant, in practice, the elimination of all vestiges of social democracy. German social democracy had already been defeated. In 1948, the Polish social democrats were forced to merge with the Polish communist party too. The unified party was christened the Polish United Workers’ Party (Polska Zjednoczona Partia Robotnicza, or PZPR), though it was widely referred to as the communist party, then and later. The Hungarian communists swallowed the Hungarian socialists in 1948 too. The name of their new party—the Hungarian Workers’ Party (Magyar Dolgozók Pártja
,
or MDP)—was chosen in Moscow: the Hungarians had suggested “Hungarian Worker-Peasant Party” but the Russians objected to the inclusion of the word “Peasant.” Naturally, the MDP took over all of the property of the old socialist party, including its newspapers, and expelled any insufficiently enthusiastic members.
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Its members were colloquially called “communists” as well.

These changes had echoes in other institutions. Just before the unification of their two parties, Rákosi, the communist party leader, and Árpád
Szakasits, the Social Democratic leader, arrived at the Hungarian Radio studios for what was supposed to be a live interview. Upon arrival, they closeted themselves in a room for an hour. They emerged, two minutes before the program was due to start, and handed the radio reporter not only a list of the questions he was supposed to ask but also the expected answers. “Don’t screw this up,” the reporter’s boss whispered into his ear, “and you’ll get a 500 forint bonus.”
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The pretense of democratic competition had been dropped. In its wake, the pretense of a free press dissolved as well.

Politics elsewhere in the bloc conformed to a similar pattern. Like the other fraternal parties, the
Czechoslovak communist party now realized that its support was dropping. In 1946 the party had won 38 percent of parliamentary votes. But in 1947 (partly thanks to the unpopular decision not to participate in the Marshall Plan) the party knew its candidates would be lucky to receive 20 percent. Like his fellow “little Stalins,”
Gottwald plotted an undemocratic path to power. He carried out a constitutional coup in February 1948 and then proceeded to eliminate the remaining opposition.
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The same thing had happened in
Bulgaria: following the victory of the left-wing
Bulgarian Fatherland Front coalition, the Bulgarian communists had also dissolved the noncommunist parties in the coalition (Stalin told Dimitrov that “the elections are over and your opposition can go to hell”) and murdered their only real opponent,
Nikola Petkov, who had overcome terror and electoral fraud to win a third of the votes in the Bulgarian elections of 1946.
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In some countries, some of the “bloc parties” or “coalition parties” were allowed to go on functioning as a kind of democratic façade. Poland retained its castrated Peasants’ Party. East Germany tolerated officially sanctioned “Christian democrats” and “free democrats” (FDP), who were nothing of the sort. But even these parties’ leaders understood that their role was distinctly limited, if not entirely fictitious. They published regime-friendly newspapers and magazines, received sinecures and government privileges, and never threatened the hegemony of the communist parties at all. By the end of 1948, politics had not come to an end in the People’s Democracies. But politics had become something that happened not between several parties but within a single party. And so it would remain.

IN CLASSIC MARXIST thought, base determines superstructure. In other words, traditional Marxists believed that the shape of a society’s economy—the division of labor, the means of production, the distribution of capital—determined its politics, culture, art, and religion. No country, according to this way of thinking, can change its political system without changing its economic system first.

That was the theory. In practice, the new communist bosses of Eastern Europe had a chicken-and-egg problem. They believed that the economy would have to be transformed in order to create a communist society. At the same time, they knew they could not transform the economy in the face of popular resistance. In the first months following the war, the communist parties’ priorities were therefore political: the police forces were put in place, civil society was subdued, the mass media were tamed. As a result, there was no economic revolution in Eastern Europe in 1945. Instead there was
an institutional revolution, following which the state took control of the economy in small bites. The new regimes began with the reforms that they guessed would be most easily accepted.

The first and easiest change was land reform. Across the region, huge estates were empty and ownerless. Jewish properties that had been confiscated by the Nazis and German property abandoned after owners died or fled now lay fallow. In the eastern half of Germany, most of the largest landowners had escaped to the west in advance of the arrival of Soviet troops. Since much of this land seemed at the time to belong to no one, there were few objections when the state took it over.

In 1945 the notion of land reform did not strike everyone as a particularly “communist” policy either, and it was not necessarily associated with the Soviet Union. In Hungary, the redistribution of land had been an important goal of many liberal reformers before the war, and was considered something very separate from the forced creation of collective farms. In Poland, both communists and noncommunists expected the slogan “land reform” to be popular, which is why the communists had included it in the referendum, though they hardly uttered the taboo word “collectivization” at all. Far from heralding profound economic change, the first land reforms were a naked bid for support from the poorer peasantry, as they had been in the USSR, where the Bolshevik Revolution’s first slogan had been “Peace, Land, and Bread!” From the moment they arrived, Red Army troops vigorously tried to enforce the same policy, confiscating land from richer owners and redistributing it to poorer peasants.
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But in Eastern Europe, this simple formula did not have the impact that Soviet officers expected or that their communist colleagues hoped.

Although it would eventually affect everybody, land reform in Germany initially focused on the large estates owned by the Junkers, the former
Prussian aristocrats.
Junkerland im Bauerhand
—“the Junker’s land in the farmer’s hands”—was
Wilhelm Pieck’s conveniently rhyming slogan for the project. On September 3, 1945, the Soviet occupying powers issued a decree expropriating the property of anyone in the Prussian province of
Saxony who owned more than 100 acres of land, along with anyone actively associated with the Nazi party. Some 7,000 large estates were affected. The land was then redistributed in small parcels. Two-thirds of it went to half a million landless farm laborers, unemployed town dwellers, and refugees from the East. The rest remained in state hands.
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Some of the recipients of this program were of course pleased and grateful to the Soviet officers who had brought it about. Village halls were decorated with banners and flowers, songs were sung, the communists were praised. But this kind of welcome was rare. More often the process was riddled with inequities and incongruities. Some of the commissions created to assist in the redistribution wound up being dominated by former Nazis. Other commissions used the procedures to settle scores, or even to manipulate the distribution of land to their members’ advantage. In some areas, land reform led to the enlargement of estates rather than their reduction. Some “new farmers” received property but no farm tools, draft animals, or seed. They began to starve very quickly.

Not all of those who lost their land, even from the big Junker estates, fit the stereotype of haughty aristocracy. So many heads of households were dead or in prison camps that the committees often wound up expropriating the land of women and children who were thereby utterly impoverished.
Erich Loest, who worked as a farmhand in Saxony at this time, later described how a Saxon estate was seized from two kindly, elderly aristocratic sisters. Their expulsion won them a good deal of sympathy, especially when they were replaced by a group of
Silesian refugees who had no interest whatsoever in the beautiful house they had just been given. “No choir sang, no brass band played,” Loest wrote, “it occurred to no one to hang garlands. It was completely different from what painters painted later in their commissioned works or scribes inscribed.” The Silesians were homesick and wanted to go back to their own farms.
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Because there were many similarly ambivalent situations, communist party membership in the countryside did not rise as rapidly as expected.
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Land reform was greeted with even greater suspicion in Poland, where “collectivization” carried particularly negative connotations. In the eastern part of the country, many people had family and friends across the border in Soviet Ukraine, whose peasants had experienced first land reform, then collectivization, then famine. So strong was their fear of this scenario that many Polish peasants opposed partial land redistribution—even knowing they might personally benefit—on the grounds that the reform might be a prelude to the collectivization of all land (which in many places it proved to be). Even as a theoretical idea, land reform had never been as popular in Poland as elsewhere. A few attempts at land reform in the 1920s and 1930s had foundered in part because the larger estates were generally well managed, and
many
reformers thought that small farms were less productive.
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Most of the country’s very largest estates had in any case been in eastern Poland, which was now part of the Soviet Union.

Knowing this, the Polish communists proceeded cautiously, and small and medium-size parcels of land were at first exempt. Instead, the 1944 decree on land reform called for the immediate confiscation of the land of “citizens of the Reich who are not of Polish nationality” as well as “Polish citizens claiming German nationality” (Volksdeutsche) and “traitors” (a conveniently vague designation), as well as all farms larger than 100 hectares.
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In total, some 10,000 estates were confiscated, and a further 13,000 estates were reduced in size.
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About 20 percent of all agricultural land was affected.

But even this policy—aimed squarely at the rich, at the Germans, and at collaborators—was not as popular as some had hoped. In May 1945, Gomułka conceded as much at a meeting in Moscow. “In this matter we have not conducted enough agitational work,” he explained delicately. Although land reform should have made peasants feel grateful to the regime, Gomułka noted that they were still wary and still inclined to listen to “reactionary forces.” To combat this problem, the Polish communist party had, he said, decided to come out loudly and clearly against collectivization. “At this stage there isn’t any sense in even thinking about Polish collective farms, we tell the farmers directly that our party is against collective farms, that our party will not oppose the will of the people,” he declared. The
Comintern boss,
Dimitrov, was annoyed by this. What if some farmers wanted to be collectivized, he snapped. Then what? “We haven’t got such a situation,” Gomułka replied.
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