We asked Marshal Konev, who was the commander of the Warsaw Pact troops, ‘How much time would it take if we instructed you to restore order in Hungary and to crush the counter-revolutionary forces?’ He thought for a moment and replied, ‘Three days, no longer.’ ‘Then start getting ready. You’ll hear from us when it’s time to begin.’ So it was decided.
Memoirs of Nikita Khrushchev, 1971
While Western Europe was taking shape as a political entity under the aegis of the United States, the Soviet Union was consolidating its hold over the bloc of countries in its ‘sphere of influence’ on the other side of the Iron Curtain. The once independent Baltic countries – Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania – had been part of the Soviet Union since 1940. The other countries under Moscow’s aegis were Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, the German Democratic Republic, Hungary, Poland and Romania. Yugoslavia, however, continued to develop along the separate path it had followed since Marshal Tito’s breach with Moscow in 1948.
A major caesura occurred in Eastern Europe – like ‘Western Europe’ a political construct rather than a precise geographical description – with the death of Joseph Stalin in March 1953. The end of the great tyrant ushered in a period commonly dubbed ‘the thaw’, a metaphor derived from the title of a novel published by Ilya Ehrenburg in 1954. The ‘thaw’ indicated de-Stalinization – a marked break with the system under Stalin. But the metaphor has its limitations. The Stalinist system had itself not been ‘frozen’, as a ‘thaw’ implies, but had been modified in several phases over time. Indeed, some change during the ‘thaw’ flowed from pressures that had built up in Stalin’s last years or tapped into earlier ideas. Ehrenburg himself interpreted ‘thaw’ to imply impermanence, instability and mere uncertainty about what the weather would bring. A thaw could bring not just spring but new frosts as the ground froze over once again. But in its literal meaning a ‘thaw’ does eventually change the weather entirely. It reduces previous ice and snow to a formless slush that ultimately becomes water and drains away. Yet change under Nikita Khrushchev, though real and substantial, was within the Soviet system and did not dissolve it into a completely different form, let alone water it down to near disappearance. On the contrary: after Khrushchev’s removal from office in October 1964 the system was stabilized and reinforced under his own successor, Leonid Brezhnev, lasting (even if stagnating) in much the same form and substance until the transformation of 1985–90. Finally, a thaw is a natural occurrence, not involving human agency. There was, however, little that was ‘natural’ about change in the Soviet Union after Stalin.
Perhaps a different metaphor, of a ‘clamp’ or ‘vice’, is therefore preferable to ‘thaw’. A clamp can be loosened or tightened. But the object to which the clamp is applied remains the same. What happened under Khrushchev amounted to a loosening of the extremely tight clamp that Stalin had imposed on the Soviet Union. But the system remained in its essence intact. Moreover, there was a significant difference between Stalinism in the Soviet Union itself and in the nation states of Eastern Europe.
The possibilities of systemic change in the Soviet Union, given the firm establishment of communist rule over more than three decades since the 1917 Revolution and in a vast country lacking alternative forms and recent traditions of political organization, were as good as non-existent. In most of Eastern Europe, by contrast, only under Moscow’s tutelage since the aftermath of the victory of the Red Army in 1944–5, Stalinism was an external and recent imposition. Here, the potential for fundamental change was real. Only the Soviet clamp of power prevented it. In each of the countries in the Soviet ‘sphere of influence’ there had been pre-war experience of pluralistic political systems, even if this had often amounted to no more than a façade of democracy. In some cases (most prominently East Germany and Czechoslovakia) there were longstanding democratic traditions, suppressed but still latently present. Most obvious of all, each of the satellites had a continuous sense of identity as an autonomous nation state. This was specially pronounced in Poland and Hungary.
It was, therefore, unsurprising that an initial loosening of the clamp after Stalin’s death led, in some of the Soviet Eastern European satellites, to serious unrest that carried the potential to upturn, not just amend, the communist system itself in those countries. Nor was it surprising that the response of the Soviet Union was both nervous and heavy-handed, ultimately turning to the use of force as the clamp was sharply retightened.
The last years of Stalin were a miserable time for most Soviet citizens. The glories of the Red Army’s victory over Nazism reverberated through the country. The human cost – over 25 million Soviet citizens had been killed – was barely imaginable. Whatever the embellishments of propaganda, there was great and genuine patriotic pride among the survivors at the feats of extraordinary courage and fortitude that the Soviet Union had shown in order to defeat and destroy the cruel invaders. But patriotic pride did not fill stomachs or provide decent homes. And patriotic pride was no guarantee against the insecurities of living in an intrusive police state without legal protection.
It is hard to exaggerate the extent of the physical destruction that the war had left behind in the western parts of the Soviet Union. Entire regions were desolate. The ravages of the fighting, or wilful destruction by the retreating Wehrmacht, had destroyed 1,710 towns and no fewer than 70,000 villages. Around 25 million people were homeless. Grain production had fallen by two-thirds, industrial production for civilian needs by well over a third. It took an extraordinary feat of reconstruction to recover from such devastation.
Recovery was indeed impressive. It was nevertheless accompanied by the rigidity, harshness and cruelty that had been an intrinsic part of the pre-war and wartime economy. Doubtless there were still many idealists and much readiness on the part of ordinary citizens, as in Western Europe, to work hard and endure hardships to help recovery and bring about improvements in their material circumstances. But what was demanded of them could only be achieved through heavy coercion. Wartime labour restrictions, with draconian penalties for lateness or any perceived misdemeanour, remained in place. The command economy retained its panoply of controls. Labour was mobilized where the state saw fit to deploy it. The results, in purely economic terms, were mixed. The human cost was, however, enormous, on top of the death and suffering during the war that had left scarcely a Soviet family untouched.
Production of iron, steel, coal, oil, electricity and cement was higher by 1950 than it had been before the war, and three times as many tractors were now being produced than ten years earlier (even if caveats have to be attached to all Soviet production statistics, leaving aside the age-old tactic of managers setting targets low in order to be able to show that they had been surpassed). But real wages only began to reach their 1928 level in 1952. Production of consumer goods and supplies of housing lagged far behind the improvements in heavy industry. The standard of living remained excruciatingly low. Housing was squalid and accommodation, often in communal apartments, grossly overcrowded. Much of the population continued to live in dire poverty. The priority accorded to capital goods (many still for armaments), whose output had increased by 83 per cent between 1945 and 1950, was retained. In 1952 a 45 per cent increase in output for the armed forces, compared with 1950, was included in the budget. As in the 1930s the countryside, quite especially, bore the brunt of the industrial recovery. Agricultural production was lower in the early 1950s than it had been before the war – productivity per acre even lower than before the First World War. Instances of cannibalism were reported from Ukraine, suffering in 1946 as it had grievously done in 1932–3 and once again from famine, despite the richness of its soil. This partly arose from natural causes, as drought badly affected the harvest. But far worse damage was done by the state removing food reserves from the peasants even though this condemned them to starvation.
Disaffection and unrest were kept under control by massive repression, which was ramped up again in the post-war years. The Gulag once more expanded as hundreds of thousands of new prisoners poured into the camps at the start of years of slave labour to help rebuild the ravaged country or to sustain armaments production (soon to include the making of nuclear weapons). Their numbers, reduced during the war, once more swelled to around five million prisoners. Disproportionate numbers came from deportees from the western borders of the Soviet Union or the former Baltic countries, the loyalties of whose populations were still regarded with high suspicion. Well over a million Red Army soldiers who had been captured by the Wehrmacht and spent years in horrendous conditions in Germany came back to their homeland to find themselves regarded as traitors and incarcerated anew in the Gulag.
Whatever minor relaxations in restrictions on expression and limits on interference by the party that had existed during the war were subsequently eliminated. The arts were throttled of anything that did not comply with the strict ideological guidelines laid down by the Communist Party’s cultural head, Andrei Zhdanov. Science, too, was forced into line. The slightest sign of deviance invited the extreme disapproval of the regime, if not worse. The satirical tale of a monkey that had escaped from a zoo, observed Soviet life for a day, and preferred to return to captivity brought accusations against the author, Mikhail Zoshchenko, of ‘rotten ideological nihilism’ designed to poison attitudes towards the state.
The repression that was so close to the surface of Soviet life in Stalin’s last years needed a huge apparatus of those ready to carry it out. Stalin ensured that the party, the army and the security police were well provided with privileges and power. Although much of the population had to scrape by with the bare minimum, the ruling elite still had their dachas, their holidays in the Crimea, special shops, good medical care and educational advantages for their children. And this kind of political bribery trickled down in some degree to lesser functionaries, bureaucrats in the service of the party or the state, members of the army and agents of the security service. The system of sticks and carrots – fear of retribution for any perceived failure, and material benefits, advancement, status and power over others – worked not just at the top but also as motivation to the millions of minions and ‘little Stalins’ who made the system work at the bottom.
Stalin’s well-honed technique of ‘divide and rule’ among his paladins, deeply suspicious of each other and competing for the dictator’s favour, continued down to his death. No one was secure in this system. But those in the ruling elite, most exposed to Stalin’s whims, knew that they especially, for all their power, had only precarious tenure of their positions. A word spoken out of turn or some well-meaning action that caused the dictator’s displeasure could have incalculable consequences. There was no repeat, it is true, of the great purges of the 1930s. But selective purges of party cadres were carried out in Leningrad in 1949 and in part of Georgia in 1951. Stalin’s decision to summon the Nineteenth Party Congress in October 1952, after a gap of thirteen years, was viewed by his subordinates as an ominous sign that he intended to purge the top leadership once again. Khrushchev thought another major purge was avoided only by Stalin’s death.
Indeed, the dictator’s paranoia was again running riot. ‘I trust no one, not even myself,’ Khrushchev claimed to recall him saying in 1951. A year later Stalin was absurdly suspecting Vyacheslav Molotov and Anastas Mikoyan, two of his most long-standing and loyal lieutenants, of being agents of foreign powers. Then, in January 1953, a group of Kremlin doctors, most of them with Jewish-sounding names, were suddenly arrested, accused of planning to wipe out the Soviet leadership. Stalin’s own antisemitism was ingrained and obvious to his acolytes. And despite public condemnation of antisemitism, prejudice against Jews was widespread in Soviet society. Tens of thousands of Jews between 1948 and 1953 faced dismissal from their jobs and other forms of discrimination. Had Stalin lived, the ‘doctors’ plot’, which triggered numerous arrests of Jews, would have spelled grave new danger for Soviet Jews. But the purge never took place. Immediately following Stalin’s death the doctors were released and the ‘plot’ was acknowledged to be a fabrication.
On 1 March 1953 Stalin, in poor health for quite some time (though the fact was a close secret), collapsed after a stroke. No one rushed to provide medical care – not that it would probably have made any difference. Lavrenti Beria, the head of state security, seemed particularly keen that Stalin should not recover. Fear of the stricken dictator even as he lay dying combined with mutual suspicion and power ambitions to paralyse into inactivity his inner circle (reduced to Georgi Malenkov, Nikita Khrushchev, Nikolai Bulganin and Beria, with Molotov and Mikoyan largely sidelined). Stalin clung to life for four days before dying on 5 March, leaving his acolytes to fight over the spoils of power.
In the inevitable power struggle that immediately followed, Malenkov appeared to be the winner. He had used his various high positions, particularly his running of the party’s secretariat, to become first among equals in the inner circle – in effect Stalin’s heir apparent. His main ally – an alliance of convenience, no more – was Beria. No sooner was Stalin dead than Malenkov, proposed by Beria, was appointed by the inner circle both as Chairman of the Council of Ministers and as Secretary of the Party’s Central Committee. Malenkov then proposed Beria as his first deputy. Beria was in addition given extended control over state security. The others in the leadership group felt obliged at first to accept this arrangement. But deep suspicions remained. One danger was the accretion of power in state and party in the hands of Malenkov. This was, in fact, quickly alleviated when Malenkov, already on 14 March, was forced to step down as Secretary of the Central Committee (in effect, head of the party). This opened the door to the most crucial position in the Soviet Union for Khrushchev, increasingly the coming man.
Bigger than the threat from Malenkov, as the inner group recognized, was that posed by Beria, whose ambitions had been barely disguised. They all feared Beria – and with good cause. He presided over an immense security and surveillance network and had a long history of ruthlessly dispatching any individuals who, on whatever trumped-up charge, could be portrayed as internal enemies. Nevertheless, the security chief had made his own powerful enemies, also among significant figures within the army – not least the former war hero, Marshal Zhukov. When the blow fell, Beria was on his own.
Khrushchev had lost little time in persuading the other leading figures in the Party Presidium (which in 1952 had replaced the Politburo) to join him in a plot to topple Beria. On 26 June 1953, a mere three months after Stalin’s death, an unsuspecting Beria, attending a meeting of the Presidium, was denounced by his former comrades, arrested by Zhukov and a number of other generals, briefly held in military custody, then in December convicted in a secret trial on the ludicrous charge of being a British spy – the security chief hoisted on his own petard – and immediately shot. In March 1954 his security empire was split into two separate organizations, one to deal with ordinary criminality, the other with security matters.
Over the following months Khrushchev used his position as First Secretary of the party to consolidate his own power. He made numerous new appointments at regional and district level, creating an important base of support among those who were indebted to him. And his bold policy of opening up ‘virgin lands’ in Kazakhstan and Siberia to cultivation was trumpeted as a great success (though in reality contributing little to the bounty from the plentiful harvests of 1954 and 1955). Malenkov’s star was by now on the wane, all the more so when Khrushchev set up a commission to investigate the crimes of the 1930s and 1940s, including Malenkov’s role in the Leningrad purge of 1948–9. In February 1955 Malenkov lost his position as head of the Council of Ministers – effectively Prime Minister. His replacement, Bulganin, was, as soon became evident, the weaker component of the duopoly now running the Soviet Union.
The dramatic moment when Stalin’s clamp was loosened came at the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union on 25 February 1956. Khrushchev had suggested a fortnight earlier that a speech should be devoted to ‘the Cult of the Individual and its Consequences’. Molotov, the arch-Stalinist, was opposed. So were Stalin’s old stalwarts, Lazar Kaganovich and Kliment Voroshilov. But Khrushchev got his way. Those in the Presidium who supported him had all been involved, like Khrushchev himself, in implementing the horrific repression under Stalin. They were aware that the commission already at work would expose at least some of what had taken place. Anticipating that the many who would return from long periods in prisons and camps would ask questions, they had a vested interest in deflecting all blame to the dictator himself. So they backed what was a risky venture.
Khrushchev’s four-hour speech to a closed session of the Congress was a bombshell. A key strategy was to separate Lenin’s legacy from Stalin’s abuses of power. Lenin was placed upon a pedestal to emphasize the gulf between him and his successor. Early in the speech Khrushchev cited Lenin’s 1922 warning about Stalin – that he was not fit to be given the powerful position of the party’s General Secretary. This was part of a sustained attempt to show that Stalin had completely abandoned Lenin’s precepts and ‘trampled on the Leninist principle of collective Party leadership’ in building up his own absolute power, personality cult and reign of terror. Khrushchev’s blistering attack on Stalin’s crimes from the 1930s onwards (drawing a blanket over anything earlier) blamed him personally and solely – if aided by his willing minions, the heads of the security services (Nikolai Yezhov and Beria), acting under his express orders – for the terroristic repression and mass executions of loyal party members as ‘enemies of the people’ on completely falsified charges. ‘Everything,’ Khrushchev declared, ‘was dependent upon the wilfulness of one man.’
By implication, subordinate party leaders were exonerated; they were, he added (with reference to the Leningrad purge), ignorant ‘of the circumstances in these matters, and could not therefore intervene’. Not only did Stalin destroy the party cadres through his terroristic purges. His personalized power threatened the very existence of the country. Stalin, Khrushchev stated, was personally responsible for the calamitous mistakes made in 1941, when he had ignored warnings of imminent German invasion. Khrushchev continued his demolition of Stalin’s reputation down to the abuses – including the supposed ‘doctors’ plot’ – of the years immediately preceding his death. He ended his lengthy peroration with condemnation of ‘the cult of the individual as alien to Marxism-Leninism’ and urged his comrades ‘to restore completely the Leninist principles of Soviet socialist democracy’ and ‘to fight wilfulness of individuals abusing their power’.
The denunciation of Stalin served, therefore, to underline both the ideological purity and the organizational principles of the Soviet system, as built by Lenin. In other words, the tyrant was gone and a line drawn under his crimes. But the system, now given new strength, would continue. When Khrushchev finished, ‘the silence in the hall was profound’, one delegate present later recalled. ‘Whether from the unexpectedness of what had just occurred or from nervousness and fear’, people, heads bowed, avoided looking each other in the eye as they came out.
The speech, leaked and swiftly published abroad, was a sensation. In Poland and Hungary its revelations contributed significantly to the mounting unrest that by the autumn would pose an outright challenge to Soviet rule. In the Soviet Union itself the press published no more than a brief summary of the speech. But the party’s Central Committee itself ensured, probably directed by Khrushchev, that before long in the Soviet Union, too, copies of the speech were printed, circulated, and read out to party members.
Only three years earlier Stalin’s death had produced a mass outpouring of grief, even near hysteria, among Soviet citizens. ‘Everyone was in tears,’ one woman recalled. ‘We did not know what was going to happen next. We had never known anything different.’ How genuine the grief was is impossible to ascertain. It was wise not to voice publicly the private reaction of a woman in Kazakhstan who simply said: ‘Stalin’s dead. And a good thing, too.’ Even so, the personality cult of the great leader, cultivated over so many years, had not been without effect. Millions had come close to worshipping Stalin. Now they were asked utterly to disavow their recent idol. Unsurprisingly, therefore, many were shocked when they learnt the content of the speech; there was also great confusion.
Reactions were mixed. Portraits and busts of Stalin were destroyed, removed or defaced in places across the Soviet Union. There were demands to remove his body from its place of honour alongside Lenin’s embalmed remains in the Kremlin mausoleum (though this was not, in fact, done until 1961). But many never forgave Khrushchev for toppling their idol from his pedestal. They defended Stalin, resisted attempts to remove his portraits, and praised his purges of those who had oppressed them. Nowhere was the Stalin cult upheld more fervently than in his native Georgia, where four days of protest at Khrushchev’s denunciation of the former dictator marked the third anniversary of his death. Some 50,000 people gathered to pay homage to him on 5 March at his birthplace in Gori. A crowd of over 60,000 people attended a demonstration on 7 March to place flowers on Stalin’s monument in Tblisi. During the following days, hundreds of others commandeered vehicles to carry portraits of ‘the Great Stalin’ around the city, shouting ‘Down with Khrushchev’ and ‘Long Live Stalin’. Troops were sent in to quell the mounting disturbance. The events left twenty dead, sixty wounded and many others imprisoned.
Across the Soviet Union there was certainly far more open criticism than had been risked only a short time earlier. People, including those returning from the Gulag, felt emboldened to break their silence and to speak out. Party members queried the suggestion that other members of the Presidium had been ignorant of what Stalin was doing. They asked why it had taken so long to speak of Stalin’s crimes. ‘And where was Khrushchev himself?’, asked one Stalin admirer, a retired colonel in the Red Army. ‘Why did he keep quiet back then, but begin to pour all this muck on Stalin now he’s dead?’ Some asked why Khruschchev had made no mention of the many victims who had not been party members and questioned whether the system itself was not to blame? Such searching criticism was, however, exceptional. Critics more usually attacked abuses of Leninist ideals, not the Soviet system itself. Nearly forty years after the Revolution, it was as good as impossible to contemplate any alternative to a system that, whatever its faults, had proved victorious in the war. Most people were in any case still wary of voicing their opinions too loudly. Even so, the Central Committee was worried enough to send out a circular in June 1956 demanding tough action to curb the criticism.
It was like trying to nail down the lid of Pandora’s box. Khrushchev’s speech had awakened hopes and enthusiasm for reform, especially among students and other youth groups. There was a marked increase in political dissent in 1956 and 1957, most notably in and around universities in several parts of the Soviet Union. Thousands of anti-Soviet leaflets were distributed. Some, put through the letter boxes of houses in working-class districts of Moscow, called for reforms ‘in the spirit of the Twentieth Congress’, for the formation of genuine ‘workers’ soviets’, for factory strikes, and for trials of those implicated in Stalin’s crimes. The sending of anonymous anti-Soviet letters, possession of subversive literature and, most usual, individual verbal remarks attacking the regime, were the common forms of dissent detailed in a judicial review of almost 2,000 sentences for anti-Soviet activity in 1957. The World Youth Festival, a two-week-long carnival held in July that year in Moscow and briefly opening up the Soviet Union to an influx of over 30,000 people from 130 countries, contributed to the greater readiness of some young Soviet citizens to question their own political system – though, almost certainly, in order to improve it, not to embrace Western democracy.
Turning the spotlight back to the crimes and gross injustice of the Stalin era, as Khrushchev’s speech had done, had a further unsettling effect as four million prisoners returned from prison camps and colonies under a series of decrees and amnesties between 1953 and 1958. Few met with a warm welcome. Most were marginalized and treated with suspicion. It was difficult to believe, many citizens felt, that there had been no grounds for their imprisonment. They were seen as a dangerous part of society, and often blamed for rising rates of crime. Those not directly affected by the mass arrests under Stalin had been indifferent towards the victims. They were unlikely now to show them much concern. For the victims themselves, though, there was a new readiness to speak of their ordeal, to confront their trauma. One woman, returning from exile to Leningrad in 1956, started after Khrushchev’s speech to speak of her experiences for the first time, her daughter recalled. ‘And the more we talked, the more our ideas changed – we became more sceptical.’ But for victims and their families the new freedom was strictly qualified. They feared that repression could come back as quickly as it had receded. Most people remained cautious – and rightly so, for it was plain that the regime was prepared to tolerate criticism of Stalin’s ‘cult of personality’ but not of the Soviet system itself.
It would be as well not to exaggerate the scale of the unrest within Soviet society. It was a minority taste. But it was sufficient to worry Soviet leaders of the old guard, and to heighten their criticism of Khrushchev. They disliked his domineering and impulsive style of leadership, though they had been used to far worse from Stalin. They had been antagonized by his outspoken attack on the leader they had served and often still revered, not least as the great Soviet wartime hero. At the very least they thought Khrushchev had made a grave error in opening up the past, of which they themselves were a part, to public scrutiny. Nor did they like his deviation from Stalin’s foreign policy through re-establishing relations with the outcast, Tito, and through a professed readiness to seek ‘peaceful coexistence’ with the West. The strikes in Poland and the Hungarian uprising in autumn 1956 that had threatened to undermine Soviet rule were a further serious indicator to them that Khrushchev was completely mishandling Stalin’s legacy.
The old-stagers Molotov, Malenkov and Kaganovich, all Stalinist stalwarts, plotted to overthrow him, proposing at a meeting of the Presidium on 18 June 1957 to abolish the post of First Secretary of the Communist Party, the base of his power. Khrushchev managed, however, to appeal to the decision of the Central Committee, placing his fate in the hands of its members. Most of these were his own placemen, who had benefited from advancement to positions of authority in the provinces. Rushed into a special meeting on 21 June, they backed Khrushchev. The plotters were defeated and dismissed from the Presidium. There was at least no reversion to the practices of Stalin’s day. The disgraced leaders were not given a show trial, then executed. Instead they were dispatched to far-flung parts of the Soviet Union where they could cause no further mischief. Molotov was sent as ambassador to Mongolia. Malenkov became director of a power station in Kazakhstan. Kaganovich was made director of a cement works in Sverdlovsk in the Urals. Bulganin, too, had been implicated in the plot, and was dismissed as Chairman of the Council of Ministers. Khrushchev himself took over the post in 1958, following Stalin’s example of 1941 by uniting it with his position as First Secretary of the Communist Party. The experiment with collective leadership was over. From now on, for the next six or so years, Khrushchev, heading both party and state, was the unchallenged leader of the Soviet Union.
The balance sheet of his period in office is chequered. During his time as Soviet leader gross national income rose by 58 per cent, industrial output by 84 per cent and consumer goods by 60 per cent. Despite the continued weighting towards capital goods, heavy industry and the military (including the development of nuclear weapons), the standard of living for most Soviet citizens improved as high rates of economic growth were sustained (if still poor by comparison with Western Europe). An indication was the increase in meat consumption by 55 per cent, and the fact that growing numbers (though still a tiny proportion of Soviet citizenry) could now afford a fridge, television and washing machine. Attempts were made to lessen some of the most dire poverty in the countryside. Higher prices were paid to collective farmers to procure their produce and they were allowed to make greater gains from private plots. Investment in agriculture was greatly increased. There was no longer the harsh punishment for minor misdemeanours at work that had prevailed under Stalin. Social security benefits were widened. A big housing programme went some way towards ameliorating the disastrous shortage of decent accommodation. Blocks of flats shot up in the big cities. Heating costs were minimal. Education and medical care were free. Substantial steps were taken to improve education, trebling the number of university students. And legal reforms removed the worst of the arbitrariness that had previously existed, even if the law remained ultimately subordinate to political imperatives. These were certainly notable improvements. But Khrushchev won few plaudits from Soviet citizens. Living conditions remained poor. The authoritarianism and arbitrariness of the system were somewhat reduced, but not removed.
Khrushchev also made huge mistakes. Some of the most costly were in his drive to improve agricultural productivity. His much-trumpeted ‘virgin lands’ policy was an initial success. Hundreds of thousands of young Soviet citizens were mobilized by the party’s youth movement, the Komsomol, to travel to Kazakhstan or Siberia to help with the harvests. Thousands of tractors ploughed huge new tracts of previously barren countryside which, by 1956, were producing three times as much as they had done in 1953. But the cost of maximizing production at the fastest possible pace was soon paid in soil erosion that seriously damaged millions of hectares of land, while the dreadful living conditions in the countryside caused many early idealists to return home. Despite the razzmatazz of the ‘virgin lands’ campaign, it had proved a failure. Agricultural production across the Soviet Union actually fell between 1958 and 1963.
Khrushchev made an equally damaging error when he returned from a visit to the United States in 1959 with enormous enthusiasm for turning hay meadows over to maize production in conditions quite unsuited for growing the crop. The experiment, carried out in the teeth of advice from leading agricultural experts, was a dire failure, as was the accompanying campaign to overtake the USA in dairy products. By 1962 food prices had to be raised (leading to riots in some cities), there were queues for bread even in Ukraine, long seen as the Soviet granary, the black market was thriving in major cities like Moscow and Leningrad, and hard-currency reserves had to be used to import grain from abroad. The price increases, shortages and other economic difficulties of 1961–2 had soured the popular mood. There were disturbances in some cities. In Novocherkassk, near Rostov in southern Russia, the army was called in to suppress serious riots in early June 1962 by striking workers, incensed at price increases and cuts in wages. Soldiers even turned a machine gun on unarmed workers, killing twenty-six and injuring a further eighty-seven.
It was little wonder that Khrushchev’s enemies in the party were again sharpening their knives. The failures in planning, damaging economic problems and the expressions of popular resentment stood in glaring contrast to the boundless optimism and extraordinary promises – remarkable hostages to fortune – that Khrushchev had made only a year earlier, when presenting a revised party programme which he had personally devised to the Twenty-Second Party Congress on 18 October 1961. Khrushchev gave two speeches – gigantic even by Soviet standards – that lasted ten hours in total. He told the assembled 5,000 delegates that within ten years the whole population would be ‘materially provided for’, that the housing shortage would disappear by then, and that consumer goods would soon be plentiful, ensuring everyone ‘a diet of high quality’. The crass gap between image and reality that was so blatantly revealed within less than a year could only undermine Khrushchev’s authority, as well as his popularity.
The triumphalism of the Party Congress had a counterpoint: the final showdown with the cult of Stalin. Khrushchev’s speech five years earlier, in 1956, had been to a closed meeting of party members. Although its contents swiftly became known there had been neither at that time, nor subsequently, an official, public denunciation of Stalin. On this occasion, however, it was open season on the former dictator; and now, also, on his former henchmen Molotov, Malenkov and Kaganovich, who had led the ‘anti-party’ plot of 1957 against Khrushchev – figures described in the official newspaper Pravda as ‘swamp creatures grown used to slime and dirt’. Towards the end of the Congress an elderly woman who had joined the Bolsheviks in 1902 made her way to the podium and recounted her dream the previous night in which Lenin had appeared to her, saying: ‘I do not like lying next to Stalin, who brought so much misfortune to our party.’ This prompted a resolution, unanimously approved, to deem ‘unsuitable the continued retention in the mausoleum of the sarcophagus with J. V. Stalin’s coffin’. That same night Stalin’s body was removed and thrown into a pit at the back of the Kremlin. Lorry-loads of concrete were reportedly poured into the pit and a granite slab was placed on top. It was as if the Soviet bosses were taking no chances – making absolutely sure that they were rid of the great monster once and for all.
Khrushchev had destroyed the cult of Stalin. But he had not replaced it with anything approaching the same level of commitment to his own personal rule. His own standing was soon on the wane as the extent of policy failure and popular discontent with his rule became apparent. Another poor harvest in 1963 aggravated the position. Khrushchev’s agricultural policies had been costly mistakes. His reorganization of the apparatus of party and state had not led to marked improvement. There were worries that ‘de-Stalinization’ was going too far. Reductions in military spending and numbers of officers did not go down well in the leadership of the Soviet army. And Khrushchev’s behaviour on the international stage – banging his shoe on the table to interrupt a speech that he did not like in the United Nations in 1960, and his mishandling of the Cuba Crisis in 1962 – were felt to have brought disrepute to the Soviet Union. He had succeeded in alienating important sectors of all the main power blocs – the party, the military, economic ministries and the security police.
In October 1964 Khrushchev was asked to return from holiday by the Black Sea to attend a meeting of the Party Presidium, ostensibly about agricultural matters. He was until the last minute blithely unaware that the meeting had been called to depose him. His successor was, in fact, nominated and ready to take over. It had already been agreed that Leonid Brezhnev, a one-time Khrushchev protégé, would become the next First Secretary of the Communist Party. He first had to preside over the meeting that would end Khrushchev’s career. The meeting boldly attacked Khrushchev’s failings of leadership, accusing him of trying to create his own personality cult, pointless administrative meddling, and disreputable conduct of foreign affairs. (An editorial in the party organ Pravda soon afterwards castigated ‘harebrained scheming, half-baked conclusions and hasty decisions and actions divorced from reality, bragging and bluster, attraction to rule by fiat’.) The basis of support that had saved him in 1957 had meanwhile drained away. No one spoke in his favour. Khrushchev meekly accepted his fate: ‘What can I say? I’ve got what I deserved,’ he told his comrades. But there was no Stalinesque retribution. He departed, officially on grounds of ill-health, for comfortable retirement in obscurity, his name seldom to be heard again until his death in September 1971.
With Khrushchev’s deposition dynamic dictatorship in the Soviet Union was over – replaced by dull dictatorship, now with a collective leadership. Already in October 1964 it had been decided that no single person could simultaneously be head of party and state. And Brezhnev made no attempt to gather all the reins of power into his own hands. So Aleksei Kosygin, if possible even less dynamic than Brezhnev, was made head of the Council of Ministers (Prime Minister), while Nikolai Podgorny, vying for dullness with the pair of them, was appointed chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet (head of state). In this collective leadership Brezhnev’s position of first among equals metamorphosed only gradually over more than a decade into outright supremacy.
After decades of Stalin’s autocratic rule followed by Khrushchev’s upheavals, Brezhnev brought stabilization. His lacklustre personality contrasted sharply with Khrushchev’s erratic ebullience. It was a complete antidote to anything resembling ‘charismatic’ rule. The system settled down to conservative repressive authoritarianism. The time for grand (but risky) experiments was over. The new head of the party reverted to being ‘General Secretary’, the title used from Stalin’s time until Khrushchev had altered it to ‘First Secretary’. The Politburo (which in 1952 had been restyled the Presidium) also regained its old name. Within the party the old insecurities disappeared. The new steadiness rested on armies of apparatchiks who were by and large left to enjoy their positions of power and comfortable corruption as long as they kept in line. Bureaucrats no longer needed to fear for their tenure, or even their lives. Draconian labour discipline was somewhat relaxed. Availability of consumer goods improved slightly, though there were still shortages of even basic commodities. People became used to queuing for foodstuffs. But the window to change that Khrushchev had opened a sliver was now firmly closed again.
The new regime under its collective leadership did not try to imitate the terroristic repression of bygone times. It made clear, however, that the communist system, whatever the changes in leadership, remained in all essentials intact and unchallengeable. The state security apparatus, now called the KGB (Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti), was still in place, a crucial vehicle of regime control. Intellectuals who had thought that there was room in the system for a type of ‘loyal opposition’ – challenging abuses though not wishing to destroy a reformed communism – were disabused of their reformist hopes. The tentative steps taken under Khrushchev towards greater freedom and objectivity in the Soviet historical writing were halted or even reversed. Alexander Solzhenitsyn had gained international renown with the publication, personally approved by Khrushchev, in November 1962 of his book One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, sensationally revealing the horror of the Gulag, but three years later he was not allowed to publish his novels, The First Circle and Cancer Ward, about life under Stalin. (He would later be expelled from the Soviet Union, his citizenship revoked.) The physicist Andrei Sakharov was prevented from expressing any criticism in public, then deprived of his privileges. He would subsequently be forced into internal exile. The satirists Andrei Sinyavski and Yuli Daniel were sent to the Gulag for spreading ‘anti-Soviet propaganda’. The number of political prisoners or those who had vainly demanded freedom of religious expression grew to around 10,000 over the next few years. Surveillance, resting on huge networks of informers, was omnipresent.
It was nothing like a reversion to the days of Stalin. Arbitrary arrest, imprisonment and execution had gone. Keeping quiet brought relative security. But overt criticism or political deviation invited reprisals. Repression was immanent to the system. The clamp could be loosened somewhat, as it had been under Khrushchev. But it could not be removed.
One communist country stood out from those Eastern European states that belonged to the Soviet bloc. Yugoslavia, after Marshal Tito’s rancorous split with Stalin in 1948, trod a separate path to that of the Soviet satellites where fears of contamination through the exquisitely labelled ‘Titoist deviation’ led to arrests, show trials and dire punishment for any – usually political opponents – accused of espousing it. Stalin had at first done all he could to put an end to Tito. Relentless vitriolic attacks in Soviet propaganda were accompanied by assassination attempts. Tito was, however, not one to be daunted by threats. A note found in Stalin’s desk after his death read: ‘If you don’t stop sending killers, I’ll send one to Moscow, and I won’t have to send a second.’ Khrushchev went some way towards mending fences with Tito in 1955. By then he was compelled to accept that Yugoslavia would remain a black sheep within the communist flock, continuing to reject subservience to the Soviet Union.
Stalin saw Tito’s main crime in the refusal to bow to his supremacy. Ideologically, Tito would pursue a ‘heretical form of socialism’ that was diametrically opposed to the central tenets of Soviet rule. In Yugoslavian communism power was decentralized, not run by a highly bureaucratized party-state. Industrial production was steered through the ‘self-management’ of over 6,000 elected workers’ councils, not by draconian managerial rule imposing the diktats of central planning. And Yugoslavia pursued ‘non-alignment’ – effectively neutrality in the Cold War through avoidance of formal commitment to either of the superpowers – rather than bow to Soviet imperatives in foreign policy.
The limited democratic form of communism in Yugoslavia, developed from the base upwards rather than from the top downwards, naturally raised vital questions about the role of the party. In the Soviet system the theory was clear: the party was the vanguard of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ and as such controlled and directed the state. In Yugoslavia it was less clear. Tito set his face, however, against those who wanted to dilute the party’s role to the point of near insignificance. Party organizations, Tito stipulated in 1954, would not interfere in the technical management of factories under the workers’ councils. ‘They must see,’ he said, however, ‘what general policies are pursued in the enterprises,’ and ‘they give the tone to the work of the workers’ councils.’ The vagueness of the demarcation lines did not disguise the ultimate control of the party.
The system functioned. Industrial production rose annually by over 13 per cent between 1953 and 1960, allowing an increase in income of nearly 6 per cent and, after the early years, a greater shift towards spending on consumption than in the Soviet bloc. The impressive economic growth, much of it flowing from investment channelled through the state-controlled banking system, was helped, though not caused, by financial aid from abroad – $553.8 million between 1950 and 1953 – as the United States, in particular, viewed Yugoslavia as a wedge to split communism still further. By the 1960s the beginnings of mass foreign tourism in Europe started to swell Yugoslavia’s coffers still further and the extended liberalization of the system made it in Western eyes the most appealing form of communism. Already in the early 1960s, however, economic growth was slowing, and by the middle of the decade unemployment, inflation and a trade deficit were starting to rise – a harbinger of greater problems in the 1970s.
Popular support for Yugoslavian communism in the 1950s probably exceeded that for any of the Soviet satellites. Apart from a higher level of commitment that emanated from somewhat more democratic forms of government, two unique factors conditioned the relative success of Yugoslavian communism. One, certainly in the early years, was the unifying impact of the threat from Stalin. Fear of invasion fostered cohesion, producing ‘negative integration’ among the different peoples of Yugoslavia. More positively, a sense of identity was built around the figure of Josip Broz Tito himself. The creation of a Tito cult portrayed the leader as the personification of the new socialist Yugoslavia and the embodiment of the partisan heroism that had created the country. Tito’s popular standing and prestige meant that he stood supreme over any internal factionalism within the party. The fact that he had a Croatian father and Slovenian mother helped him, too, to transcend the ethnic divides that had earlier poisoned the country. Liberal disbursement of the usual positions of power, career advancement, privileges, material benefits and the fruits of corruption ensured that party activists and the security police remained loyal. Above all, Tito saw to it that the army – well funded, offering good pay, career opportunities and state housing – always stood behind him. Yugoslavian communism was fortunate that Tito – head of party, state and armed forces – lived so long, dying only in 1980. His personal qualities, political skill and ‘charismatic’ style of leadership were indispensable to the success and stability of the system. Without him, the divisions that would tear the country apart not long after his death might well have manifested themselves much earlier.
However appealing Tito’s rule came to seem as a contrast to the Soviet bloc, it nevertheless had a dark side. Communists loyal to Moscow were heavily persecuted after 1948, around 16,000 of them interned in brutal ‘re-education’ camps. Up to 3,000 of them died there, many of the effects of torture. Although purges within the party never remotely reached Stalinist dimensions, opponents were expelled and – most prominently Tito’s arch-critic Milovan Djilas – imprisoned for lengthy terms, as were intellectuals and any others who overstepped the mark in their denigration of the regime. And, as within the Soviet bloc, when collectivization of agriculture – which underpinned the drive to industrialization – was vehemently resisted by the peasantry, prompting an outright rebellion (including former partisans and party members) in one region in 1950, the regime resorted to force. Hundreds of peasants were arrested, the leaders of the revolt sentenced to death. The regime learned the lesson. In 1953 the drive to collectivization was halted and land taken into unproductive cooperatives was given back to the peasants.
The greater flexibility and national roots of communism in Tito’s Yugoslavia could cope far better than the Soviet satellites with adjustments to setbacks, and allowed moves to further liberalization of the economy as well as cultural activities in the 1960s. Cinemas showed some films from the West, including Hollywood productions (whose import was subsidised by the United States). Young people could enjoy the music of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and Jimi Hendrix. Yugoslavia went further than any other Eastern European country in creating space for personal freedom. Yet the limits on behaviour were obvious. There could be no challenge, not even fundamental written or verbal criticism, to the system. Ultimately, like the Soviet system, coercion – overt or implicit – lay behind it.
The countries of the Soviet bloc were yoked together more tightly than were the liberal democracies of Western Europe. Nevertheless, they did not form a monolith. National traditions and cultures continued to shape their varied development beneath the blanket uniformity of Marxist-Leninist ideology. Their adjustment to the overlordship of the Soviet Union was also conditioned by the ways in which communist rule had been established and consolidated. They did not, therefore, react in uniform fashion to the changed climate following Stalin’s death.
In the Balkan countries of Romania, Bulgaria and Albania there was, in fact, scarcely any loosening of the clamp at all. In Czechoslovakia, too, it remained tightly fastened. In the German Democratic Republic in 1953, then in Poland and, above all, Hungary in 1956, however, it was an altogether different story. There the scale of mass protest shook Soviet leaders, who responded with force to suppress the grave threat to their authority. What accounts for these differences within the Soviet bloc?
Of fundamental importance was whether the communist leadership in each country retained undisputed control of the apparatus of power and could direct policy without internal challenge or ‘correction’ from Moscow. The power of the regime’s leadership itself rested heavily upon the support of the security services, whose loyalty was ‘bought’ by the extension of material benefits within the system. Extreme levels of repression then served to deter oppositional activity. Where repression was less extreme, and where the perception existed that the regime’s leadership could be changed or policy substantially altered, the likelihood of significant expressions of political nonconformity was greatly enhanced. This was itself more probable where there was a well-established social and political infrastructure (such as through trade unions) that provided the capacity, even under a repressive regime, to organize forms of resistance. Where a particularly strong sense of nationality existed (which could tap long-standing aversions to Russia, only superficially varnished over by ideological ‘fraternity’ with the Soviet Union), as it did in Poland and Hungary, there was the potential for opposition to spread and gain extensive support. Organizational capacity was lower in the economically less advanced Balkan countries where traditional social and political infrastructures resting on large rural populations and a relatively small industrial working class persisted.
One of the most fanatical and ruthless communist leaders was the Romanian dictator, Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej. He had outmanoeuvred his rivals for power, Lucreţiu Pătrăşcanu, Vasile Luca and Ana Pauker, and by the time of Stalin’s death was in complete control as state premier and head of the party. He presided over a huge and utterly brutal security apparatus that ran a camp system reminiscent of the worst times of the Gulag in the Soviet Union under Stalin. Tens of thousands of Romanians from all sectors of society, but especially from the peasantry during the drive for collectivization of agriculture (which had begun in 1949–50), were incarcerated, many of them subjected to torture. Further tens of thousands became slave labourers on a massive construction project, the building of the Danube–Black Sea Canal. The slavery was pointless as well as grossly inhumane; reductions in Soviet economic support led to the suspension of work in 1953, leaving the canal unfinished. Work began again only two decades later.
Unchallenged in power and in control of a formidable police state, Dej was in a good position to resist the moves to reform introduced in the Soviet Union by Khrushchev. As a nod towards collective leadership he resigned as party leader in 1954 but took the post back again the following year, appointing his acolyte Chivu Stoica as Prime Minister. And he found scapegoats for earlier failings, denouncing his former rivals, Pătrăşcanu, Luca and Pauker as ‘Stalinists’ – a classic case of the pot calling the kettle black. Control of the party and the security forces provided the basis of Dej’s power. Internal unrest was contained. Peasant resistance, which had begun in the late 1940s in protest at collectivization, was, despite ruthless repression, far from fully extinguished, but the largely sporadic guerrilla activity in the hills and forests lacked the capacity to threaten the regime’s existence. And when, in autumn 1956, encouraged by events in Poland and Hungary, student protest burst out in the universities, it was violently put down by the secret police, the notorious Securitate, among the largest and most brutal repressive organizations in Eastern Europe. Dej’s strong support for the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian uprising in October gave him a bargaining counter with Khrushchev. Soviet economic impositions in Romania were pared back. And Dej’s hold on power was left intact. Far from loosening the clamp of Stalinism, in Romania it was tightened.
By the later 1950s Romania not only had a largely unreconstructed Stalinist regime, but was in some ways developing a form of national communism, at odds with Soviet economic imperatives for the ‘socialist division of labour’ in its satellite states. In particular, the Romanian leadership’s economic priority – to force the industrialization of the country – did not accord with Soviet expectations. These, pursued through the Comecon organization (set up in 1949 to coordinate the economies of Soviet bloc countries), were aimed at keeping Romania permanently as an agrarian state and mere supplier of agricultural products and raw materials. At stake especially, however, was the wider question of Soviet intervention in the internal affairs of other states. The Romanian leadership had to tread carefully, though it was helped by the Soviet Union’s anxiety to avoid a showdown such as had taken place in Hungary. So the more semi-detached relationship of Romania with the USSR continued. The pursuit of quasi-independence within the Communist bloc was still in its early stages when Dej died in 1965, and was followed by his equally brutal successor Nicolae Ceauşescu.
In Bulgaria, too, the Stalinist clamp remained tightly applied. Unlike Romania, where long-ingrained anti-Russian feelings in the population had merely been glossed over by the imposition of communist rule (and, in fact, where the Soviet annexation of Bessarabia and northern Bukovina in 1940 still rankled), Bulgaria had a long tradition of pro-Russian and pan-Slavic sentiment and after the war became the most slavishly loyal of all the Eastern European satellites of the Soviet Union. The Bulgarian leader, Vâlko Chervenkov, was another Stalinist clone, by 1950 both Prime Minister and the party’s General Secretary. Unlike Dej in Romania, however, he lost much of his power following Stalin’s death. This was not before he had done much to ruin the agricultural base of the country by destroying peasant smallholdings and forcing through inefficient collective farms that saw productivity fall sharply. Chervenkov followed Soviet demands in the immediate post-Stalin era in relaxing some of the most stringent controls and by improving housing and production of consumer goods. Bulgaria remained, however, an intensely poor and backward country with miserable living standards and a high economic dependency on the Soviet Union.
Chervenkov also complied with Soviet insistence on the separation of party and state positions of leadership, stepping down as party Secretary in 1954 in favour of Todor Zhivkov – born into a peasant family in 1911, and now, after working his way up the party’s echelons, Europe’s youngest communist leader. Two years later, following Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin’s cult of personality, Chervenkov was additionally forced to resign as Prime Minister. As was the case in Romania, however, Bulgaria did not publish Khrushchev’s damaging speech. There was a very brief interlude of limited tolerance of literary expression before the clamp was put firmly in place again. Offending journalists were expelled and constraints imposed on publishing. The Soviet suppression of the Hungarian uprising was greatly welcomed as an opportunity to reimpose strict state controls. Stalinism had never gone away and was now again reinforced.
Factional infighting continued for some years at the top of the party, resulting in Chervenkov’s removal from the Politiburo in 1961 after Khrushchev’s second major attack on Stalinism at the 1961 party Congress. Zhikov was by this time Bulgaria’s undisputed leader, now Prime Minister as well as party Secretary. His supporters were placed in all the key positions at the top of the party. Bulgaria, economically dependent upon the Soviet Union, remained a subservient Stalinist satellite – practically another Soviet republic. As Zhikov stated after Khrushchev had visited the country in 1962, Bulgaria’s watch was set to Moscow time.
The poorest country in the Soviet bloc was the smallest, Albania. It had been under monarchical dictatorship for most of the interwar period and had then been occupied during the war by first Italy, then Germany. Unlike Romania and Bulgaria, Yugoslavian partisans and not the Red Army had been responsible for the establishment of a communist regime there. But when Tito broke with Stalin in 1948 the communist leadership, which had become increasingly antagonistic towards Yugoslavian economic exploitation, abruptly switched allegiance to the Soviet Union, gaining extensive economic assistance in return. Enver Hoxha, head of party and state since 1946 and a fervent admirer of Stalin, crushed all internal opposition in ruthless purges and, backed by a tight, nepotistic ruling circle, gained absolute dominance over Albania that would last until his death in 1985.
The greater the threats – real and perceived – from neighbouring Yugoslavia, the more Hoxha could pose as a national leader defending his country, one that he ruled with a rod of iron. Draconian repression, including the execution of thousands of real or supposed adversaries, was a hallmark of his regime. A quarter of party members had been expelled or arrested in the purge that followed the break with Yugoslavia. The collectivization of agriculture from the mid-1950s, highly unpopular as elsewhere among the peasantry, was accompanied by further heavy repression. Fully fledged Stalinism remained in place. Following the death of the revered Stalin, however, problems with the Soviet Union had started to mount. Hoxha had no truck with the post-Stalin reforms, and was appalled by Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin in 1956. He fully approved of the suppression of the Hungarian uprising, whose roots he saw in the revisionism of Tito. But he was alienated by Khrushchev’s rapprochement with the arch-enemy, Tito, as well as by Soviet insistence on Albania’s perceived future as a supplier of agricultural produce, ignoring its industrialization programme.
The alienation led to Hoxha transferring his allegiance once more. When China split with the Soviet Union in 1960–61, Hoxha switched to backing Mao Zedong’s China, which offered the economic support that had been lacking from Moscow and a leadership model more amenable to his own personality cult. Albania increasingly went its own way, largely isolated from the rest of Europe, east and west, and declining still further into an economic backwater that could provide only a miserable standard of living for the Albanian people. This did not, however, undermine Hoxha’s entrenched position as leader, which was upheld by further repression and control of all the levers of power. Unlike the other communist countries of Eastern Europe, Albania remained staunchly Stalinist. The clamp here had never been loosened at all.
On the face of it, Czechoslovakia had more in common with the countries – East Germany, Poland and Hungary – where serious disturbances challenged Soviet domination than with the quiescent Balkan regimes. Traditions of national independence, especially in the Czech lands, had long roots. A democratic pluralist political culture had been well established before Hitler destroyed it. A modernized industrial economy, though less developed in Slovakia, had produced a strong working class and a social infrastructure that bore little resemblance to the clientelism of the heavily agrarian Balkan states. There was a large intelligentsia and sizeable student population. Why, then, did the Soviet Union encounter no significant trouble from Czechoslovakia in the years after Stalin’s death?
As elsewhere, the Soviet assault on the Hungarian rebels in 1956 had a strong deterrent effect in Czechoslovakia. But why had the Soviet Union faced no significant problem before then from the Czechs and Slovaks? In fact, there had been a serious wave of strikes in Czechoslovakia in May 1953, triggered by the announcement of a swingeing currency devaluation to be introduced the next month (widely dubbed ‘the Great Swindle’) and following months of sharply rising prices and falling living standards. Strikers from the Škoda factory in Plzeň had even thrown busts of Lenin, Stalin and Klement Gottwald (the Czech communist leader, who had died within days of Stalin’s death) out of the window of the town hall, which they had occupied. But the disturbances were savagely put down by the police and never developed into the outright challenge to the regime similar to that which was shortly to explode in the German Democratic Republic.
The level of repression is itself a major part of the reason why unrest in Czechoslovakia was contained relatively easily. Repression does not, however, offer a complete explanation. Another strand lies in the appeal of communism within Czechoslovakia. Unlike some parts of the Soviet bloc, communism was not an alien ideology, imposed by an external force. It enjoyed, in fact, a broad base of home-grown popular support. The Communist Party had won more seats than any other party as far back as 1925. Its support had swelled in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, bringing it nearly two-fifths of the votes in free elections in 1946. Early steps following the coup of 1948 to nationalize big business and to eliminate the ownership of large landed estates were widely popular. The party offered many a route to advancement. And it could manipulate opinion. It was not only able to eliminate political rivals, but also to extend its own control and influence through the takeover of, for example, youth and sporting organizations, and through a monopoly of propaganda and orchestration of the mass media. Even so, repression was never far away – the unmistakable backcloth to the communist penetration of society.
The five years of communist rule had, in fact, been characterized by brutal repression under a leadership that repeatedly showed utter ruthlessness in purging real or imagined opponents and in consolidating a firm hold on power that passed seamlessly on the death of Klement Gottwald to Antonín Novotný, his successor as First Secretary of the party. Show trials of former political adversaries on trumped-up charges of treason and anti-state activity had begun in 1949, inevitably ending in death sentences or long terms of imprisonment. Stalin’s suspicions of Czech and Slovak leaders’ connections with foreign intelligence and their links with the Titoist anathema in Yugoslavia, together with his increasingly paranoid antisemitism, lay behind the purges.
These culminated in the arrest, show trial, forced false confession (reminiscent of the Stalinist purges of the 1930s) and execution as traitors and ‘enemies of the people’, in 1952, of the former General Secretary of the Czechoslovakian Communist Party, Rudolf Slánský, and eleven other communist leaders. Ominously, they were described as being ‘of Jewish origin’. A sharp resurgence of antisemitism, prompted by the racist slurs of the party leadership, accompanied the purges in Czechoslovakia. Heda Margolius Kovály, herself Jewish, a former prisoner in Auschwitz, and married to a Jew, later recalled, ‘When the arrests first started, it was generally assumed that the accused were guilty of something.’ This was before her husband, Rudolf, was arrested, tried and executed as part of the imaginary Slánský conspiracy.
The spectacular show trials were only the tip of the iceberg of repression in Czechoslovakia. Thousands of citizens were denounced and imprisoned, or worse, for alleged offences against the state. As elsewhere in Eastern Europe, however, the execution of the feared Lavrenti Beria in December 1953 sent a signal that a new wind was blowing in the Soviet Union. Czechoslovakia, too, had to adjust to the changed climate. The years between the death of Stalin and Khrushchev’s assault on his memory in February 1956 brought the release of many prisoners in Czechoslovakia, though like released prisoners in the Soviet Union and elsewhere these faced an uncertain and often hostile welcome on their return from incarceration. There was a limited relaxation of controls on censorship, permitting some muted criticism of aspects of Soviet rule. And the atmosphere that brought the purges, fomented by the earlier antagonism between the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, disappeared. But the repression had done its work. It had certainly not been without a basis of popular support. And the party leaders, bound together by their backing for the purges, made only minimal concessions to change.
Two years after his death, a colossal statue of Stalin, flanked by peasants, workers and intellectuals, was unveiled in 1955 in Prague. Standing high above the Vltava River the statue, 12 metres wide, 22 metres long, 15 metres high, could be seen all over the city. Ordinary citizens remarked – though not openly – that it looked like a queue for scarce meat. But it was a prominent sign of continuity at precisely the moment when Stalin’s legacy was being called into question.
Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin in 1956 posed difficulties for the Czech leadership. Their own purges and show trials had, after all, been carried out in accordance with Soviet imperatives. Novotný and the other Czech leaders found themselves obliged to pay lip service to the new course under Khrushchev while heading off major reforms. There was some cautious criticism of Stalinism in the lower ranks of the party. More strident demands for reform came from students in Prague and Bratislava, then at other universities and colleges across the country. Among the demands was the call for an investigation into the trials of Slánský and others together with punishment for those who carried out ‘illegal procedures during interrogations’.
The student protest peaked in May 1956, then simmered, but did not escalate any further before events in Poland, then Hungary, posed a plain deterrent to action against the regime. Cultural dissent was vehemently attacked, and powerful voices in the Czech intelligentsia even backed the constraints on criticism. There was no liberalization as the party sustained its hold, introducing a new Five-Year Plan in 1956 that rested on the usual lines of maximizing production in heavy industry and the extended collectivization of agriculture.
The party leaders closed ranks. The changed climate in the autumn also gave them the opportunity to quash what would have been a damaging report on the purges and to reimpose their own stringent control. Novotný’s position was strengthened in November 1957 when, on the death of Antonín Zápotocký (who had been responsible for handing Slánský over to the tender mercies of the security services), he became President of the Republic (head of state) as well as First Secretary of the party. A new constitution in 1960 substantially reduced Slovakian autonomy, and the control of the party’s ‘Fraternal Cooperation’ with the USSR was expressly underlined. With that the threat to the party’s power that had materialized in 1953, then again in 1956, had passed. Terroristic repression of the vintage of the early 1950s was no longer necessary, though the underlying intimidation continued. For the mass of the population the prospect of significant change seemed remote. So most Czech and Slovak citizens conformed. It was often without enthusiasm, sometimes resentfully. But more was not needed to sustain political stability. For now the regime remained firmly in place.
The German Democratic Republic (GDR, or East Germany as it was usually called in the West) came to be regarded as Moscow’s most important ally. But in 1953 it was the first country east of the Iron Curtain in which an uprising had to be put down by Soviet armed force. Why, uniquely in the eastern bloc, did trouble flare up so strikingly in 1953? Why, in contrast, did the GDR remain quiet three years later when first Poland and then Hungary rebelled against Soviet domination? And how did the GDR change so categorically from being a trouble spot to the most dependable acolyte in the Soviet bloc?
East Germany in the early 1950s had an obvious Achilles heel. It was the only Soviet satellite that was an entirely new state, one created out of military occupation and the break-up of a former nation state. Only a narrow border separated it from the ideologically hostile political system and booming economy of West Germany. And that border was porous. Even after 1952, when it was sealed across its entire length, the special status of Berlin, under the control of four great powers, left a crucial opening. There it remained possible, if with difficulty, to cross to the West, and to a different (to many, more attractive) lifestyle. That very fact put the East German leadership under some pressure, since the growing exodus – over 360,000 in 1952 and early 1953 – could not be stemmed. The exodus itself reflected low living standards, a consequence of an economy directed, along Stalinist lines, towards the growth of heavy industry at the cost of production for consumer needs.
The East German regime also had to contend with another weakness. In Moscow’s eyes East Germany was dispensable as the price for attaining a bigger goal – a reunified but neutral and demilitarized Germany. That goal had not been abandoned by the early 1950s. Stalin had tried to tempt the West into accepting it in 1952, but he met with a prompt rebuff. After his death the idea was resuscitated. Were it to succeed the East German leadership would see its power base vanish. But when, following Stalin’s death, Soviet leaders – effectively the short-lived collective of Malenkov, Molotov and Beria – responded positively to Winston Churchill’s suggestion of a Four-Power Conference to discuss a German peace treaty, involving free elections and the neutralization of a reunified country, a split opened up among East German leaders. The main faction, under the Stalinist diehard Walter Ulbricht, General Secretary of the Socialist Unity Party (SED, formed in 1946 from the forced merger of the Communist and Social Democratic parties, but wholly under communist domination), was utterly opposed. Another faction in the East German leadership, however, headed by Rudolf Herrnstadt (editor of the main SED newspaper, Neues Deutschland) and Wilhelm Zaisser (Minister of State Security), favoured economic reforms aimed at improving the living standards of the population (and reduced dependence on the Soviet model). They appeared at first to have backing in Moscow. Soviet leaders contemplated deposing Ulbricht. His leadership stood on shaky ground.
The factional disputes and divisions in leadership, in some respects mirroring the uncertainties in Moscow in the immediate aftermath of Stalin’s death, were exposed even in the controlled press of the GDR and played a vital part in fostering the unrest that led to the uprising in June 1953. On 9 June the Politburo, bowing to the pressure to follow the Soviet Union’s ‘new course’ (after Ulbricht and other top leaders had been summoned to Moscow and firmly told what was necessary), agreed to introduce limited economic reforms to improve living standards. The decision, made public two days later, prompted wild rumours about the reasons for the change. Some speculated that there had been a putsch against the party leadership, that Ulbricht had been arrested or shot, that the SED was on the point of breaking apart, and that the borders would be opened. Remarkably, the abrupt reversal of previous policy (hugely unsettling to those party workers who had faithfully upheld the need for unpopular measures) was accompanied by the damaging admission that mistakes had been made. Even more remarkably, while peasants, white-collar workers and the self-employed stood to gain in modest fashion, industrial workers – the very bedrock of the Marxist-Leninist ideology – faced a decline in their living standards. On 28 May the regime had already decreed a 10 per cent increase in production levels (‘work norms’), which it saw as necessary to counter the country’s severe economic problems. Workers would, therefore, have to work more for the same pay – in effect, a wage reduction. Amazingly, the communiqué of 9 June had made no mention at all of the raised work norms.
The divisions in the leadership soon became evident. On 14 June the increase in work norms was directly criticized in an article in Neues Deutschland. But two days later the diametrically opposite stance was presented in the official trade union newspaper, Tribüne, which supported the increases. It was unheard of for the leadership to air their fundamental disagreements in public. It served only to advertise weakness and confusion. It was later admitted that the Tribüne article triggered the conversion of the simmering discontent into open protest, first voiced by building workers in East Berlin.
In spontaneous meetings the workers demanded the cancellation of the increased productivity norms. The protests escalated and on 16 June a 10,000-strong angry crowd gathered outside the House of Ministers, the central government building. Once more the leadership sent mixed signals, suggesting with one voice that the raised work norms would be rescinded, but with another merely that they would be reconsidered. The crowd started to become more radical. Some demanded the resignation of the government. The demonstrations reflected the significant unrest that had been building for some days amid the speculation about the leadership and expectations that change was on the way. They were outbursts of spontaneous protest, without planning, orchestrated leadership or organization. But when one worker grabbed a loudspeaker and announced a general strike for the following day, there was immediate and widespread support. On 17 June the strikes spread to 373 towns and cities across East Germany. Half a million workers in 186 factories took part. Nor was the protest any longer confined to strikes. Other sectors of society joined in – over a million people in more than 700 places during the following five days. Around 250 party offices and other public buildings were attacked. Some 1,400 political prisoners were freed from jails (though most were soon rearrested). What had started as a protest about work norms had turned into a mass uprising against the regime.
SED leaders were in shock. The protests had quickly gained unexpected momentum. And there were concerns that the police might sympathize with the striking workers. The Soviet military commander in Berlin had on 16 June turned down a request for aid. A day later, however, presumably seeing that the protest was starting to run out of control and not trusting the GDR police to restore order, the Soviet authorities changed their mind. Warning shots were fired at midday. At 12.30 p.m. Soviet tanks started to rumble through the streets of East Berlin. Shortly afterwards the Soviet military administration imposed a state of emergency on the city, soon extending it to much of the GDR and retaining it until 11 July. At first the Soviet tanks advanced slowly, aiming to quieten the demonstrators through the show of intimidation. Tank crews even waved at the crowds, which in turn avoided any provocation, reserving their anger for the East German regime. But the uneasy stand-off could not last. It soon led to shots being fired. Demonstrators scattered, running for their lives. Some of those who remained threw stones at the tanks, shouting abuse at the Soviet occupiers.
By the evening of 17 June the show of Soviet might had done its work. There had been violent clashes of demonstrators with police and Soviet forces in a number of East German towns and cities – notably, outside Berlin, in Leipzig, Halle, Magdeburg and Bitterfeld – but the futility of combating Soviet military power was swiftly obvious to most protesters. One witness to events in Magdeburg, a schoolboy at the time, recalled that as the first Soviet tanks fired at the demonstrators, ‘it was plain to everyone that the feeling of freedom had been a brief one’. Although signs of lingering unrest persisted for some weeks, the uprising was over.
What the disparate groups of protesters had wanted, apart from the remedying of immediate economic grievances, was not altogether clear. It is far from certain that the majority favoured Western capitalist liberal democracy, or had any specific alternative political model in mind. Many still believed in socialism. They had simply hoped – and in utopian fashion continued to hope – for a better way to a genuine socialist society. The demands – including cries of ‘down with the SED’, ‘government resign’, ‘free elections’, ‘reunification’, ‘withdrawal of occupation forces from Germany’ – nevertheless radically challenged the very existence of the GDR. Lacking the possibility of a clear oppositional stance, let alone a political programme, protest was bound to remain inchoate – an elemental outburst of anger and deep discontent rather than a preconceived and articulate expression of demands for a fundamental change of the system. The uprising nonetheless shook the SED regime at its roots.
Dozens of demonstrators – estimates vary between sixty and eighty – were killed in the clashes, along with ten to fifteen party functionaries and members of the security forces. The reprisals for the rebellion were ruthless. Over 6,000 people involved in the uprising were arrested by the end of June, another 7,000 later, and sentenced to lengthy periods of imprisonment. Several of those viewed as ringleaders were executed without any formal judicial procedure. Those in the party who had been seen to rock the boat were vigorously purged. Over the following months tens of thousands of functionaries and ordinary party members were denounced as ‘provocateurs’ and dismissed from their positions. And to ensure that the regime could never again lose control, the police and State Security Service (Stasi) were greatly strengthened, assisted by an elaborate network of informers constructed to spy on ordinary citizens.
The feeling of euphoria at challenging the regime had gripped the demonstrators only for a few hours. But the memory of Soviet tanks on East German streets firing on protesters, and the brutal way in which the uprising was suppressed, was long-lasting. Rebellion had brought bloodshed and repression. The hopes that some had placed in intervention by the Western powers had been illusory. (The GDR leadership had absurdly blamed ‘American and West German sabotage organizations and fascists’ for the uprising. In fact, the danger of sparking an international conflagration meant that the West refrained from any inkling of intervention.) The main and obvious lesson that contemporaries drew was that protest against overwhelming military power was pointless; the SED regime could not be overthrown as long as it had the backing of the Soviet Union. There was no willingness to repeat the failed experiment of 1953. That basic feeling sufficed to keep East Germany quiet when Poland and Hungary erupted in 1956.
Repression was only one side of the response to the uprising. It was accompanied by concessions. Within days the Central Committee of the SED retracted the unpopular increase in wage norms that had been the immediate cause of the trouble. Other modest but tangible improvements to living standards followed. Industrial production targets under the Five-Year Plan (to run over the years 1951 to 1955) were adjusted to reduce spending on heavy industry in favour of somewhat higher spending on consumer goods, while educational reforms stretching from primary school to university also sought to widen social advancement for children from working-class backgrounds. A new generation, socialized in the values of the regime from the cradle onwards, influenced too by incessant anti-Western propaganda, gradually formed the basis of more solid future political support than had existed in 1953.
Most people complied with the demands of the regime. But compliance is not consensus. Conformity was not just encouraged, but enforced. There was enormous resentment at the constraints of the system, the coerced uniformity, living standards inferior to those in West Germany, the presence of the security police, and the pervasive threat of denunciation. Informing, spying, denunciation ran through the society and provided an essential basis of social control for the regime. Those who did not conform encountered at the very least significant disadvantages – for example in housing, jobs, education – that affected living standards for themselves and their families. Some faced greater deterrents to nonconformist action. For the minority who still made their dissatisfaction openly felt, the big stick was never far away. The basic lack of freedom, except within the narrow parameters of the system, meant that, ultimately, it rested on the mechanisms of control and repression. Short of removing the system itself, this could not be altered.
Perversely, the uprising of June 1953 saved Walter Ulbricht. His leadership had been wobbling before the mass protest. Beria’s arrest soon after the uprising had signalled that the die had been cast in Moscow against those who favoured a change of course in the GDR. Moscow’s need to shore up the regime left Ulbricht in a far stronger position as the internal purges removed opponents and the SED tightened its control over state government. The removal of Ulbricht would have been seen as weakness, inviting further demands. The Soviet leadership had no wish to add to their troubles by trying to remove a loyalist hardliner in Berlin. The instability in the eastern bloc following Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin in 1956, then, especially the uprising in Hungary in the autumn of that year, saved Ulbricht anew. It showed again what could happen if the clamp were loosened. Ulbricht was therefore able to silence his critics and bolster his own position of power once more.
He was helped, too, by Moscow’s effective abandonment, as West Germany remilitarized then gained national sovereignty, of the quest for a unified, neutralized Germany and acceptance that the GDR was here to stay. A sign of this was Soviet relinquishment of further reparations from the GDR, which had inflicted great damage on its economy. Another was the extension of Soviet credit and restrictions on the cost of supporting Soviet troops in the GDR. Internationally, too, the GDR was more closely bound to the Soviet Union. Its fate, as the events of June 1953 had shown, depended entirely on Soviet backing. In May 1955 it became a member of the newly created Warsaw Pact, and remained over the following decades the Soviet Union’s most staunch and loyal supporter in foreign affairs.
The building of the Berlin Wall starting in August 1961 was the culmination of the shift in the Soviet approach to the GDR and of the internal changes in the country that had followed the shock of the 1953 uprising. For the Soviet Union and for the East German regime, it brought lasting stabilization. For the people of East Germany it meant accepting what they could not change.
After the dramatic events in the GDR the Soviet Union faced no further great turbulence in its satellite countries of Eastern Europe until the aftermath of Khrushchev’s sensational speech in February 1956. The intervening years had been unsettled across the eastern bloc as communist leaders had tried to adjust in different ways to the ‘new course’ in the Soviet Union. But Khrushchev, once his own pre-eminence as leader had been established, made attempts to weld the eastern bloc countries closer together. The formation of the Warsaw Pact in May 1955 – an immediate response to the remilitarization of West Germany – was an important step. So was the reconciliation with Tito in 1956 that restored relations between the Soviet and Yugoslav communist parties. This came at a time, however, when, in the months after Khrushchev’s speech, the Soviet Union faced an unprecedented challenge to its authority in Eastern Europe, one that even put the uprising in the GDR in the summer of 1953 in the shade.
The problems that arose in Poland and Hungary were separate but – certainly in Soviet eyes – interrelated. The unrest in Poland spilled over in the autumn of 1956 into the far greater threat from the mounting insurgency in Hungary. There were significant differences between the two countries, though also some common threads to the unrest. In both countries challenges to the party leadership made the respective regimes vulnerable, offering the chance for the disaffected to press for change – as had happened in the GDR. In both countries long-standing anti-Russian (and anti-Soviet) feelings, together with a notably strong sense of national identity, persisted beneath the blanket of communist rule. In both countries intellectuals and sizeable student populations felt choked by the constraints on free expression. And in both countries the priorities given to spending on heavy industry and capital products at the expense of consumer goods had led to significant discontent, notably among the working class. The pressures for reform, finally, in each country had been sharpened by the awareness of the post-Stalin atmosphere of change in the Soviet Union, especially after Khrushchev’s speech in February 1956.
Poland had effectively been handed over to communist control through the triumph of the Red Army over Hitler’s forces in 1944–5. Over the next decade the country became thoroughly ‘Stalinized’, creating an enormous bureaucratic machinery of control and massive state security system. By 1954 the Ministry of Public Security had a card index on ‘criminal and suspicious elements’ covering almost a third of the adult population – much of the information having been supplied through the denunciations of 85,000 informers scattered through all levels of society. The celebrated Polish writer Maria Dąbrowska lamented in her diary her country’s ‘great chalice of bitterness’, its ‘missed chance of socialism’.
Stalin had remarked, however, that ‘introducing communism to Poland was like putting a saddle on a cow’. Under the Stalinist puppet leader, the President and General Secretary of the Party, Bolesław Bierut, and the Vice-Premier and Minister of Defence Marshal Konstanty Rokossowski (who was there to ensure Soviet control), the Poles were never happy to dance to Moscow’s tune. After Stalin’s death the reluctance became more evident. Some attempt was made to adjust to new times. Moves to collectivize farming were slowed down on party orders. Censorship was relaxed. And in late 1954 the former communist leader, Władisław Gomułka, the chief rival to Bierut and long under house arrest following his advocacy of a more independent Polish route to communism, was released. In 1955 the Warsaw Youth Festival, attended by an estimated 30,000 young people drawn from 114 countries, then gave Poles a glimpse of a more open, less regimented outside world. After Bierut’s death – he had died suddenly in Moscow after attending Khrushchev’s speech, it seems from a heart attack or stroke presumably brought on by the shock at the denunciation of Stalin – his successor, Edward Ochab, continued the limited de-Stalinization, freeing and amnestying around 9,000 political prisoners in April. He spoke, too, the same month of possibilities of a ‘new democratization of our political and economic life’, though few specifics emerged to satisfy raised expectations.
There was little to be seen of reform and democracy when in June the complaints of factory workers in Poznań, incensed by a peremptory demand for a 25 per cent increase in productivity without a commensurate rise in wages (shades of East Germany three years earlier), fell on deaf ears. It sparked a strike by tens of thousands of workers in and around Poznań by the end of the month, and, as in East Germany, initial economic demands soon became political. Calls for ‘bread and freedom’ turned into ‘Russians Go Home’. Prisoners were freed by workers from the local jail, weapons were seized from the guards, and the headquarters of party and police were attacked. The regime brought in 10,000 troops and 400 tanks from the Polish army to quell the trouble as unrest threatened to spread to other cities. The troops opened fire on the strikers leaving seventy-three dead and hundreds injured. They suppressed the rising within two days, though they could not eradicate the disaffection that lay behind it. Blame was largely directed at the Minister of Defence, Rokossowski (of Polish origin though a Soviet citizen), and a number of other Soviet citizens in the army leadership who had given the orders to fire on the striking workers. The result was increased pressure to end Soviet involvement in the army (specifically, the withdrawal of Rokossowski). There were also demands for a democratization of communist rule (including, for example, workers’ self-management and a revival of parliament and local councils) in Poland and for the return of Gomułka, viewed as the face of the necessary reform.
There was powerful internal opposition to such a step from a conservative faction with influence in the Polish military and security services, which was anxious to prevent any weakening of ties with the Soviet Union and encouraged a tough stance from Moscow. Soviet worries that Gomułka would take Poland down a more independent route, enhanced by his demand for the release from office of Rokossowski, prompted a heavyweight delegation of Soviet leaders, including Khrushchev himself, and military top brass to Warsaw on 19 October. Tense deliberations headed by Khrushchev and Gomułka followed. The Soviet side pressed for a strengthening of the ties between the two countries. Gomułka repeated the demand for the removal of Rokossowski and fifty soviet military ‘advisers’ to the Polish army. While the negotiations proceeded, Gomułka was told that Soviet tank and military units were advancing on Warsaw. Polish combat units were ordered to take up defensive positions to protect the city. Armed conflict between Poland and the Soviet Union seemed close. Khrushchev blinked first, bowing to Gomułka’s request to halt troop movements, and the immediate danger passed. On 21 October Gomułka was duly restored as First Party Secretary. Back in Moscow, Khrushchev was nonetheless heard to remark ominously that ‘there’s only one way out – by putting an end to what is in Poland’.
Within a few days he had backed away from immediate military intervention, saying it would be easy to find a reason for armed conflict, ‘but finding a way to put an end to such a conflict later on would be very hard’. Soviet leaders believed that the Poles would put up strong armed resistance to intervention and would mobilize worker militias in the cause. There was agreement that the Soviet Union should ‘refrain from military intervention’ and ‘display patience’ for the time being. Khrushchev instead sought a political solution, reluctantly agreeing to the removal of Rokossowski, withdrawn as Minister of Defence on 29 October. Another indicator that Moscow was looking to calm the situation in Poland was the freeing on 28 October of Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński, the head of the Polish Catholic Church, from the detention in which he had been placed in 1953.
The massive displays of public support for Gomułka in huge rallies – over 100,000 in several major cities, half a million in Warsaw – probably encouraged Khrushchev to back down from all-out confrontation. Gomułka for his part assured Khrushchev that Poland would remain a loyal member of the Warsaw Pact and publicly condemned those who had expressed opposition to this. He exhorted citizens to return to work and to end the demonstrations. What undoubtedly most concentrated Soviet minds, however, and pushed Khrushchev to seek a rapprochement rather than order military intervention, was the deteriorating situation in Hungary, which by 26 October 1956 had already boiled up into a crisis far more dangerous than Poland’s. And to deal with that, the Soviets wanted to ensure calm in Poland – indeed to have the support of the Polish leadership.
The tense conflict in Poland played a part in the immediate background to unleashing what soon became a full-scale revolution. Hungary had long been an uneasy component of the Soviet bloc. The country was kept under control by heavy repression, in which widespread disaffection with the Stalinist leadership was never far from the surface. Mátyás Rákosi had returned from wartime exile in Moscow to stamp his authority in Stalinist fashion on the path to dominance of the Hungarian Communist Party, destroying the far more popular Smallholders’ Party in a prolonged, bitter struggle and cementing his complete control. Rákosi then demonstrated his credentials as Hungary’s ‘little Stalin’ when in 1949, in toadying acquiescence with Moscow’s line, he acceded to the show trial and execution (for supporting the ‘Titoist deviation’ and allegedly involvement with Western intelligence services) of László Rajk, the former Minister of the Interior. But with the introduction of the Soviet ‘new course’ after the death of Stalin, Rákosi’s days were numbered.
With the economy in crisis, peasants resisting collectivization, workers striking on account of falling wages, and bulging jails, Rákosi and other party leaders were summoned to Moscow in June 1953 and told in no uncertain terms to put their house in order. Rákosi’s ‘high-handed and domineering style’, Soviet leaders told him, had led to ‘mistakes and crimes’ and had taken Hungary ‘to the brink of catastrophe’. Despite such an indictment, he was left in office as party leader though forced to surrender his position as head of government to Imre Nagy, the people’s favourite and hope of disillusioned communists, who had been expelled from the Politburo in 1949 for opposing the speed of collectivization.
A crucial division in the communist leadership thereby opened up. This played no small role in boosting the growing unrest in the country, exposing Moscow’s lack of confidence in Rákosi and indicating an alternative, more attractive form of leadership. Nagy lost no time in advocating economic changes to improve the supply of consumer goods. More radically, he proposed reinvigorating communism by democratization at the grass roots. He envisaged a mass base of support, organized in a new popular front, the Patriotic People’s Party, which would blend national sentiment with democratic socialism. The Communist Party would play a leading role in Nagy’s scheme, but would not simply rule from above. This was naturally anathema to Rákosi and the party hardliners. By early 1955 Rákosi’s machinations against Nagy had proved successful. Nagy was condemned for ideological ‘deviation’, expelled from the party’s Politburo and by the end of the year, from the party itself.
The situation in Hungary, therefore, was already brittle even before Khrushchev’s speech in February 1956 created a new, hugely disturbed climate. Intellectuals and students, stirred by the prospect of a more democratic route to communism that Nagy had opened up and angry at repression and censorship, engaged in intense political debate about Hungary’s future. Workers, incensed at their treatment in a supposedly ‘workers’ state’, felt exploited by ‘a bloodsucking government’. Groups of workers even met young intellectuals and joined in debates that were attended by growing numbers of people. Many of the debates were organized by the Petőfi Circle (named after a revolutionary fighter for Hungarian independence in 1848). It was from the Petőfi Circle, which had attracted as many as 6,000 people to an evening meeting in Budapest in June 1956, that the call came for Rákosi to be ousted and replaced by Nagy. Moscow responded. Rákosi duly resigned – officially on health grounds – in July. His replacement was, however, not Nagy but the hapless Ernő Gerő, cut from much the same ideological cloth as Rákosi himself.
Serious trouble was not long in coming. The start of the ‘Budapest autumn’ was 6 October 1956 when attacks on the regime were voiced by tens of thousands of demonstrators gathered for the solemn reburial (with Gerő’s reluctant permission) of the rehabilitated László Rajk – the former security chief, now an unlikely symbol of the desired liberalization. By 23 October, inspired by events in Poland, student-led demonstrations in Budapest and other cities posed radical demands. These included the reinstatement of Nagy as Prime Minister (he had been readmitted to the party ten days earlier), the withdrawal of Soviet troops, punishment of those responsible for the terroristic repression, and free elections to end monopoly communist rule. A huge statue of Stalin in a Budapest park was hauled down and dragged by a lorry through the streets of the city. A placard was attached to the statue, admonishing the Soviets to go home. ‘Don’t forget to take me with you’ was added. Members of the security forces inflamed the growing rebellion when they fired on unarmed demonstrators that evening. Gerő himself responded in a radio broadcast, condemning the chauvinism and nationalism of demonstrators that had been whipped up by hostile propaganda. The government was by this point close to panic.
Gerő had already a few hours earlier asked the Soviet Embassy for urgent military assistance, but Soviet officials in Budapest were unwilling to give their permission without authorization from Moscow. That evening the Soviet Party Presidium gave its permission. By the next day thousands of Soviet troops had already entered Budapest. By that afternoon at least twenty-five protesters lay dead and more than 200 had been wounded.
The show of military might had not proved effective, however, in quelling the unrest. A state of emergency was proclaimed. Party offices were attacked, Soviet symbols destroyed, and Budapest paralysed by a mass strike. Approaching tanks, manoeuvring only with difficulty through the barricades erected in Budapest’s streets, found themselves the easy target of ‘Molotov cocktails’, hand grenades and even two anti-tank guns removed from army arsenals. An offer by Nagy (who had supported the request for Soviet military intervention and was reinstated as Prime Minister on 24 October) of an amnesty to rebels if they laid down their arms was whistling in the wind. The replacement of Gerő as head of the party by János Kádár, himself in earlier years a victim of Rákosi, also failed to calm the situation. The violent unrest continued on 25 October as demonstrators were shot by the police and party functionaries, and agents of the police in turn were killed by protesters. Workers’ councils and revolutionary committees, without central organization, took over power in the localities. The party seemed to have become as good as superfluous.
Calm – after a fashion – only returned on 28 October when Nagy (who the previous day had appointed a cabinet of reformers) announced that he accepted the main demands of what he called the ‘national democratic movement’. He spoke of Soviet troop withdrawal, dissolution of the political police, a general amnesty and reform of agriculture. The next day, 29 October, Soviet troops indeed began withdrawing from Budapest. The revolution had triumphed – or so it seemed.
In Moscow an uncertain Soviet leadership, dismayed by Nagy’s stance, nonetheless decided on 30 October to pull back the troops from Budapest and avoid confrontation through large-scale military intervention. Reports from their emissaries in Budapest, Mikail Suslov and Anastas Mikoyan, however, were increasingly pessimistic. They described further violent attacks on party functionaries in Budapest and feared that the Hungarian army sided with the insurgents. In their view the situation could not be politically resolved in any way compatible with Soviet interests. ‘Peacefully liquidating this hotbed is impossible,’ they concluded. Calls from the Hungarian leadership on 30 October for a ‘neutral Hungary’, and Nagy’s own approval, expressed that day to Mikoyan and Suslov, of the withdrawal of all Soviet troops and the country’s departure from the Warsaw Pact, confirmed the gravity of the situation. Khrushchev pondered overnight whether the decision against renewed military intervention had been the correct one. In favour of intervention, beyond the worsening situation in Budapest, was the worry that any sign of weakness by the Soviet Union would be exploited by the imperialist Western powers (which on 29 October, amid the Suez crisis, had launched their attack on Moscow’s Middle Eastern ally Egypt). A far more serious consideration was that Soviet weakness would encourage the spread of unrest – already being reported in neighbouring Romania and Czechoslovakia – to other parts of Eastern Europe. The risk of contagion was a grave one, as Soviet leaders were well aware. It was the critical factor. Accordingly, led by Khrushchev, Soviet leaders reversed their earlier stance and on 31 October unanimously agreed to deploy full-scale military force in Hungary to ‘rebuff the counter-revolution’.
That day further units of Soviet troops entered Hungary. On 1 November Nagy announced that Hungary was leaving the Warsaw Pact and proclaimed the country’s neutrality. In the evening a Soviet military plane flew Kádár to Moscow. When he returned to Budapest a few days later it was at the head of a new ‘Provisional Revolutionary Workers’ and Peasants’ Government’ installed by the Soviets to crush the ‘fascist reaction’ and defend socialism. Nagy took refuge on 4 November in the Yugoslavian Embassy. Meanwhile, Khrushchev, along with Malenkov and Molotov, had lost no time in ascertaining that other communist states, including China and Yugoslavia, supported the intervention. It was a good moment to act. The Western powers were conveniently mired in the Suez crisis – though, whatever their sympathies for the Hungarian rebels, it was clear that they had no intention of risking a possible world war through intervening in the Soviet sphere of influence. Suez was, from the Soviet point of view, no more than a fortunate distraction. It had no determining role in the decision to crush the Hungarian uprising. It did, however, encourage the readiness to act while the Western powers were, as Khrushchev put it, ‘in a real mess in Egypt’.
The end now came quickly. Soviet troops began their assault on Budapest in the early morning of 4 November 1956. The Soviet forces were this time better prepared for the intervention than they had been in October. ‘The streets are swarming with Soviet tanks and arms,’ a French journalist in the city registered. ‘Guards have been posted at street-crossings. Shots are fired from all sides.’ The Hungarian army took no part; the troops were confined to barracks and disarmed by Soviet forces. The fighting in Budapest and other cities was fierce for the next three days, but it was largely over by 8 November. Over the three days the casualties (dead and wounded) numbered around 22,000 Hungarians and nearly 2,300 Soviet soldiers – an indication of the scale of the revolution. The reprisals were swiftly under way. Over 100,000 people were arrested, 35,000 tried for ‘counter-revolutionary acts’, almost 26,000 given prison sentences and 600 executed. An estimated 200,000 Hungarians fled into lasting exile abroad. Nagy himself was lured out of the Yugoslavian Embassy by false promises of safety, taken captive by Soviet security forces, initially deported to Romania, then later put on trial and in June 1958 hanged.
There was a diplomatic price to pay. The prestige of the Soviet Union in non-aligned countries suffered, at least in the short term. And the scales fell from the eyes of many Western European communists, who until then had looked to the Soviet Union as their lodestar but now deserted communist parties in droves. None of this weighed heavily in the balance for Soviet leaders when preventing the eastern bloc of communist states from disintegrating was at stake. The cohesion of the Soviet bloc had been maintained – if only through the force of arms. That was the crucial factor. The demolition of the Hungarian uprising was the vital moment which showed potential dissidents that any attempt to overthrow Soviet power was futile. Any such action would be ruthlessly crushed.
There was recognition in Moscow that the policies which for years had held back living standards in the eastern bloc would have to change to prevent any recurrence of trouble. The crass imbalance between capital and consumer spending was as a result at least partially redressed. Living standards modestly increased across the Soviet bloc in the following years. The trajectory of the two countries at the centre of the storm in 1956, Poland and Hungary, was, however, not identical.
Władisław Gomułka turned out to be a sore disappointment for those who had dreamt that the ‘Polish October’ would usher in a more liberal socialism. At first the signs were promising. The circumstances of his compromise arrangement with Khrushchev gave him some leeway, which he initially exploited as far as he could without rocking the boat. His government was less rigid and less repressive than its predecessor and at first enjoyed much greater popularity. The security police were cut back in size and reduced in power – though not by any means to the point of insignificance. Polish intellectuals and students experienced a more liberal atmosphere. The brakes were applied to collectivization of agriculture and farmers were given somewhat greater freedom to grow produce on their own plots of land. Elsewhere, too, limited private enterprise was tolerated. Wages rose, as did living standards generally. And the Polish regime sensibly adopted a more relaxed stance towards the Catholic Church.
Gomułka was, however, no democrat. He was anxious to cement his own power as party First Secretary. And he was wary of the dangers of freedom of expression. In any case the need to keep on good terms with Moscow meant that there were strict limits to liberalization. Controls over freedom of expression in the arts and literature were tightened again by 1957. State criticism of the Catholic Church started again soon afterwards, though without undermining the Church’s standing with much of the population or its increasing emergence as an oppositional sub-culture. And by the early 1960s, as the drive to agricultural self-sufficiency failed and living standards still lagged while party bosses enjoyed conspicuous luxury, disillusionment with Gomułka and his regime grew. There was no reversion to the Stalinism of the post-war decade. Solid and lasting improvements had been made. But coercion still underpinned the regime. Any who transgressed the narrow borders of permissible criticism felt it. For example, the thirty-four writers who signed a letter in 1964 demanding a more liberalized cultural policy and a relaxation of censorship found themselves banned from publishing or from leaving the country. And as usual legions of functionaries, the police, the security services and the army were kept loyal through a variety of sweeteners. The hold of the system was very strong. People in the main fitted into its demands and adjusted their lives accordingly. As elsewhere it amounted to tolerance of what could not be altered.
In Hungary the scale of the uprising, the brutal repression that followed, and Moscow’s determination to maintain tight control, left Kádár’s puppet government with little possibility of meaningful change at first. The need to improve living standards nonetheless worked eventually to Kádár’s advantage. Decentralization of administrative controls in both industry and agriculture stimulated higher levels of production. Economic growth also benefited from the export of bauxite and uranium. The system stabilized. Standards of living rose and the improvements diluted the social disaffection that only a few years earlier had threatened to undermine communist rule. By the early 1960s Kádár was able to bring about a limited form of liberalization. Political prisoners were released and a wide-ranging amnesty was issued. The stringent restrictions on cultural activities and freedom of expression were somewhat relaxed, it became possible to listen to Western radio, intellectuals could cultivate limited contacts with the West, and overt police repression was reined in. ‘Goulash communism’ – a term depicting greater attention to consumer products than in the rest of the Soviet bloc – allowed even a limited market economy (though economic problems soon started to mount). But the security apparatus remained in place, under the party’s control. Possibly a near doubling of annual suicide rates between 1955 and 1970 implied less than total contentment in János Kádár’s Hungary. Hungary was even so on its way, in Western eyes, to becoming the least unattractive face of the Soviet bloc.
So Poland and Hungary went somewhat different ways. In the first case the clamp was loosened then gradually retightened, in the second sharply tightened then somewhat loosened. But in neither case could it be released fully. What bound both countries and the rest of the bloc together was that – to paraphrase what Friedrich Engels had decades earlier said of the economy – ‘in the last instance’ Soviet power determined matters. There was, it is true, no return to the fully fledged Stalinism that had been the norm before 1953, though some neo-Stalinist characteristics persisted everywhere.
Communism throughout Eastern Europe had in fact lost its earlier revolutionary raison d’être. Whatever the cynical propaganda about building a society infinitely superior to that of imperialist Western capitalism, the Soviet Union and its satellites had turned into merely conservative authoritarian states whose actual aims soared no higher than maintaining the system but were devoid of revolutionary dynamism or utopian ambitions. Beyond the apparatchiks who profited from the system and, doubtless, a leaven of enthusiasts and true believers, most ordinary people got on with their lives, indifferent or simply resigned to seemingly unalterable political conditions. Given a choice, most would almost certainly have opted for something other than the ‘real existing socialism’ that ultimately was kept in place by Soviet force. The reality was that they did not have that choice. Communist rule could have its harshest edges blunted and be amended somewhat in line with national demands in the varied satellite states. Fundamental change to the system was, however, out of the question.
There would be one further massive challenge to Soviet domination, in Czechoslovakia in 1968. That apart, after 1956 Soviet power in Eastern Europe was to remain intact and scarcely dented for over thirty years.