Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II (62 page)

Another important governmental post was that of Minister of Justice, who controlled the hiring and firing of judges, as well as the purging of ‘fascist elements’ from the administration. As I have shown, this was the first ministry that came under Communist control in Romania. It was also a key ministry for the Communist takeover in Bulgaria. From the moment the Fatherland Front seized power in Sofia in September 1944, the Communists used the Justice Ministry in conjunction with the police to purge the entire country of any possible opposition. Within three months some 30,000 Bulgarian officials had been dismissed from their jobs — not only policemen and civil servants, but also priests, doctors and teachers. By the end of the war ‘People’s Courts’, sanctioned by the Justice Ministry, had tried 11,122 individuals and sentenced almost a quarter of them (2,618) to death. Of these, 1,046 executions were actually carried out – but estimates of the unofficial execution toll range from 3,000 to 18,000. As a proportion of the population this was one of the most rapid, comprehensive and brutal ‘official’ purges of any state in Europe, despite the fact that Bulgaria had never been fully occupied, and had not been involved in any of the wholesale savagery that had engulfed the other countries of the region. The simple reason for this was that, while the intelligentsia in other countries had already been destroyed by the Gestapo or their local equivalents, in Bulgaria the Communists had to do it all themselves.
¹⁰

Other ministries were targeted in other countries, such as the Ministry of Information in Czechoslovakia and the Ministry of Propaganda in Poland, because these controlled the flow of information to the masses. In Czechoslovakia and Hungary, as in Romania, the Ministry of Agriculture was also a highly prized posting, since the Communists immediately recognized the potential of land reform to gain new members. I have already shown how quickly the Communists gained support in southern Italy by championing land reforms. In eastern Europe they were able to go much further: not only did they change the law, but they directly handed out parcels of land confiscated from large estates or evicted German families. They literally bought the support of millions of peasants.

If the Communists sought power on the national stage, they also did the same on a local level — but always with a view to how that power could be manipulated to further their cause nationally. The single most important task of every European government in the aftermath of the war was to keep the economy afloat. This meant keeping the factories and coal mines running, as well as ensuring that goods could be distributed throughout Europe. The Communists therefore aimed to gain a stranglehold on both industry and transport by infiltrating trade unions and workers’ committees in factories. In this way the Communist parties were able to organize massive strikes whenever the national leadership needed a ‘spontaneous’ show of popular support against their rivals in the government. In Czechoslovakia such demonstrations were deliberately used to make the February 1948 coup seem like a genuine revolution. In all the Eastern Bloc countries, as well as in France, Italy and Finland, workers regularly went on strike in the pursuit of overtly political aims: in a continent that was constantly hovering on the brink of starvation, control of the workforce was an extremely powerful tool.

It was this desire to mobilize large groups of people that led to the next major objective of the Communist Party, which was to recruit as many members as possible, as quickly as possible. In the early days following the war none of the Communist parties was particularly fussy about who joined. They recruited thugs and petty criminals, whom they found useful for filling the ranks of their new security organizations. Likewise they recruited members of the previous regime, who were only too happy to do whatever was necessary to avoid prosecution for war crimes. Bankers, businessmen, policemen, politicians and even clergymen hurried to join the Communist Party as the best insurance policy against charges of collaboration: what the French called ‘devenir rouge pour se faire blanchir’ (to become red in order to whiten oneself).
¹¹
There were also many ‘fellow travellers’ who joined up simply because they saw which way the wind was blowing. However, even factoring in these people fails to explain fully the rapid expansion of Communist numbers throughout central and southern Europe. When the Soviet tanks were approaching the borders of Romania in 1944 there were only some eighty Communist Party members inside Bucharest, and fewer than 1,000 members in the country as a whole. Four years later membership had reached one million – a thousandfold increase.
¹²
In Hungary, membership increased from only around 3,000 to half a million in a single year (1945);
¹³
while in Czechoslovakia the 50,000 Party members of May 1945 increased to 1.4 million within three years.
¹⁴
A large proportion of these new members must have been genuinely enthusiastic supporters.

At the same time as broadening their own power base, the Communists worked hard at weakening the power of their opponents. This was achieved partly by maligning rival politicians in the press, which they controlled both through Soviet censorship and through the ever-increasing Communist presence in the media unions. During the February 1948 crisis in Czechoslovakia, for example, Communist control of the radio stations made sure that Klement Gottwald’s speeches and calls for mass demonstrations received maximum publicity; by contrast, the other parties’ appeals to the country were silenced when union members in the paper mills and print works prevented them even from printing their newspapers.
¹⁵
Similar ‘spontaneous’ censorship by union members occurred in almost every eastern European country.
¹⁶

Aware that it was impossible to discredit all of their opponents at once, the Communist parties of each country started by nibbling round the edges. This was what the Hungarians called ‘salami tactics’ – removing one’s rivals a single slice at a time. Each slice would dispose of a group who could conceivably be accused of collaboration, or indeed any other crime. Some of these people truly were collaborators, but many others were arrested on trumped-up charges, such as the sixteen leaders of Poland’s Home Army (arrested in March 1945), the Bulgarian Social Democrat leader, Krustu Pastuhov (arrested in March 1946), or the leader of the Yugoslav Agrarians, Dragoljub Jovanovi
(October 1947).

Next, the Communists would seek to engineer splits amongst their rivals. They would try to discredit certain factions of other parties, and pressurize their leaders into disowning these factions. Or they would invite rivals to join them in a united ‘front’, causing rifts between those who trusted the Communists and those who did not. This tactic was especially successful with the Communists’ strongest rivals on the left, the Socialists and the Social Democrats. Eventually, having split them time and time again, the Communists would swallow what was left of these parties whole. The Socialists in East Germany, Romania, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria and Poland all came to an end by being officially merged with the Communist parties.

Despite such deft manoeuvres, none of the Communist parties of Europe ever managed to attain enough popularity to win absolute power at the ballot box. Even in Czechoslovakia, where they legitimately won an impressive 38 per cent of the vote in 1946, they were still obliged to govern through compromise with their opponents.
¹⁷
In other countries the lack of faith from the voting public often took the Communists by surprise. The heavy defeat at the Budapest municipal elections in October 1945, for example, was considered nothing less than ‘a catastrophe’, and left their leader Mátyás Rákosi slumped in a chair ‘as pale as a corpse’.
¹⁸
He had made the mistake of believing his own propaganda reports about Communist popularity.

In the face of such widespread scepticism, the Communists inevitably resorted to force – at first by covert means, and later through the use of open terror. Popular opponents from other parties were threatened, intimidated, or arrested on false charges of ‘fascism’. Some died in suspicious circumstances, such as the Czech Foreign Minister, Jan Masaryk, who fell from a window of the Foreign Ministry in March 1948.
¹⁹
Others, such as Bulgaria’s most powerful opposition politician, the leader of the Bulgarian Agrarian National Union Nikola Petkov, were tried by kangaroo courts and executed. Many, like Hungary’s Ferenc Nagy and Romania’s Nicolae R
descu, responded to threats by eventually fleeing to the West. And it was not just the rival leaders who suffered: the full force of state terror was unleashed on anyone who opposed them. In Yugoslavia, for example, the chief of the secret police, Aleksandar Rankovic, later admitted that 47 per cent of arrests carried out in 1945 had been unjustified.
²⁰

During the course of such repression, elections across the region quickly became a sham. ‘Undesirable’ candidates were simply removed from the electoral lists. Alternative parties were listed together with the Communists in a single ‘bloc’ so that voters had no proper choice between parties. The electorate itself was directly threatened by gangs of security policemen at polling stations, and by ensuring that voting was not anonymous. When all else failed, the counting of the votes was simply rigged. As a consequence, the Communists and their allies were finally ‘voted in’ by some frankly improbable margins: 70 per cent in Bulgaria (October 1946), 70 per cent in Romania (November 1946), 80 per cent in Poland (January 1947), 89 per cent in Czechoslovakia (May 1948), and an absurd 96 per cent in Hungary (May 1949).
²¹

As in Romania, it was only once the Communists had gained uncontested control of the government that they finally embarked on their true programme of reform. Until this point their stated policies across most of Europe were always fairly conservative: land reform, vague promises of ‘equality’ for all, and the punishment of those who had acted badly during the war. From 1948 onwards (and even earlier in Yugoslavia) they began to reveal their more radical objectives, such as the nationalization of businesses, and the collectivization of land, which occurred across the rest of Communist Europe in much the same way as it did in Romania. It was also around this time that they started to justify all their previous actions by enacting empty laws against the people and institutions they had already destroyed.

The final piece of the jigsaw was to embark on the terrifying internal purges that would weed out every potential threat from inside the Party structure itself. In this way the last vestiges of diversity were eliminated. Independent-minded Communists such as Wladyslaw Gomulka in Poland and Lucre
iu P
tra
canu in Romania were either ousted from power or imprisoned and executed. In the wake of the Soviet—Yugoslav split, former supporters of Tito were arrested, tried and executed: in this way Albania’s former Interior Minister, Koçi Xoxe, was eliminated, as was the former head of the Bulgarian Communist Party Traicho Kostov. In the late 1940s and early 1950s the whole of eastern Europe descended into a terrifying purge, where everybody and anybody could find themselves under suspicion. In Hungary alone, a country with a population of less than 9.5 million, some 1.3 million faced tribunals between 1948 and 1953. Almost 700,000 — more than 7 per cent of the entire population - received some kind of official punishment.
²²