DICTATING COMMUNISM
Hungarian Uprising, 1956. Source: Magnum Photos.
On the morning of March 10, 1948, Czech foreign minister Jan Masaryk was found dead in the courtyard of Czernin Palace in Prague. His corpse lay fourteen meters below the bathroom window of his official residence, in which a Bible was opened to a passage in Galatians referring to the comfort of the Holy Spirit. According to acquaintances, he had been quite depressed after the Communist takeover two weeks before, which had marginalized him and the aging president Edvard Beneš. The police declared the death a suicide, but the public suspected that he had been murdered by Soviet agents—a theory later supported by forensic evidence. The exact circumstances of this new defenestration, which recalled the outbreak of the Thirty Years’ War, remained one of the mysteries of the Cold War. But whether suicide or murder, Masaryk’s death clearly signaled the end of the Communist Party’s cooperation with bourgeois partners and the transition to open dictatorship under Klement Gottwald. The death “came as a great shock to the whole Western World,” as it indicated “a policy which was to destroy the last vestiges of freedom” in Eastern Europe.1
Military victory provided the Soviet Union with the opportunity of dictating communism to its conquered territories and satellites. The success in defeating German aggression reaffirmed the correctness of communist ideology, proving its superiority to National Socialism and cementing Bolshevik dictatorship for another half century. The advance of the Red Army into the heart of Central Europe not only demonstrated the rise in Soviet power but also created an armed occupation that could be turned into political domination. Watching impotently from the outside, western governments were reduced to issuing paper protests, since they lacked the means to influence developments on the ground. In the East, however, many people from the Baltic to the Black Sea were grateful to be liberated at last from Nazi servitude and annihilation, while intellectuals admired the speed and extent of Soviet modernization. In short, at the end of the war Stalin could finally begin to implement what his rival Trotsky had earlier demanded—he could export revolution beyond the borders of the Soviet Union.2
Central European émigrés and western critics attacked the establishment of Soviet hegemony over Eastern Europe by coining the concept of “totalitarianism.” Philosopher Hannah Arendt was struck by the antidemocratic similarities of the dictatorial methods employed by both the Nazis and the Soviets. Political scientist Carl Friedrich listed a series of characteristic traits shared by both systems such as a dominant ideology, a mass party led by a dictator, the use of terror, a monopoly of force and propaganda, as well as the control of a planned economy. Disappointed by the suppression of freedom in communist countries, British writer George Orwell dramatized mechanisms of repression in his dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. In practical politics, President Eisenhower in 1959 created the National Captive Nations Committee, an advocacy group that agitated for the eventual liberation of East European countries from Soviet domination.3 Since the charge of totalitarianism justified switching enemies from National Socialism to communism, the word itself became a powerful weapon in the ideological battles of the Cold War.
Liberal intellectuals and communist sympathizers countered that the concept of totalitarianism obliterated the differences between types of authoritarian regimes and simplified the complexity of their dynamics. Stressing the Enlightenment roots of the socialist utopia, leftist commentators pointed to the consistent antifascism of the communists in order to highlight their ideological hostility to National Socialism. Scholars sympathetic to the Soviet project stressed instead the weakness of the tsarist state, the popular participation in the revolution, and the relative normalcy of most lives among ordinary people in the USSR. Intent on maintaining a critical stance toward the West, social reformers cited the improvements in living conditions, welfare provisions, health care, and educational opportunities under communism that created greater social equality than under capitalism. Comparing the actual functioning of the Soviet and fascist dictatorships, they emphasized the differences in their ideology, longevity, and murderousness. Against the repressive picture, they suggested a more nuanced image of the Soviet Union that also acknowledged some of the progressive features of its “welfare dictatorship.”4
The notion of “Sovietization” offers a way out of the interpretative dilemma because it shifts the focus of debate to the transformation of Eastern Europe according to the model of Soviet modernity. While the concept originated as a Cold War accusation, its analytical use provides an eastern counterpart to the way in which “Americanization” has been employed for describing changes in the West. Sovietization draws attention to the hegemonic influence that the Soviet Union exerted on its satellite states, extending from the political rhetoric and form of leadership to the structure of the economy, the pattern of social interactions, and the cultural style. Moreover, it emphasizes the mixture of compulsion (such as the dictates of the Cominform, the orders of the military, or the demands of Russian and local joint economic companies) and of voluntary imitation of customs (such as wearing Russian fur hats, drinking vodka, or eating dishes like solyanka soup). Sovietization therefore addresses the various ways in which the communist project of modernization sought to transform Eastern and Central Europe in the postwar period.5
COMMUNISM REAFFIRMED
The Soviets’ hard-won victory in the “Great Patriotic War” over the German invaders seemed to prove the ideological superiority of communism over Nazism and capitalism. Stalin’s wartime appeals to socialist internationalism and Russian nationalism merged both sentiments indissolubly into a new Soviet identity. The expansion of the Soviet Union into the Baltic states, a slice of Finland, eastern Poland, half of East Prussia, and Bessarabia offered tangible proof, since it restored the geographic reach of the tsarist empire and extended Russian influence into the center of Europe. In massive monuments, ranging from the Mamayev Kurgan memorial in Stalingrad to Berlin-Treptow, the Soviet Union celebrated the courage of its soldiers and its military victory. On May 9 of each year, ritualized parades recalled the triumph with bemedaled war heroes reviewing goose-stepping troops and endless rows of tanks and missiles.6 With these commemorations the Communist leadership crafted a self-approving narrative of victory over fascism that, in the sad words of the dissident Efim Etkind, cemented its dictatorship for another half century.
The challenge of the postwar rebuilding in the East was, nonetheless, even more difficult than in the West, because the war of annihilation had left greater destruction behind. Much of the land between the Volga and the Elbe rivers had been twice fought over, and the successive scorched-earth policies of the Russian defenders and the retreating Wehrmacht had devastated fields as well as factories. Moreover, in Russia, Poland, and East Germany the blood toll was proportionally higher, decimating an entire generation of men, which pushed much of the burden of recovery onto the shoulders of women. Since Stalin rejected the U.S. offer of help in order to avoid its influence, the Soviet Union had to reconstruct the economy without outside assistance, scraping together from within its borders the resources needed to restore the burnt cities and razed factories. With the fields fallow, farm animals dead, and machinery wrecked, famine swept the Soviet Union in the postwar years, and people lived in earthen dugouts while houses were being rebuilt. Though externally Moscow acted as a mighty conqueror, internally many Russians struggled for bare survival.7
Because of these problems, the Soviets firmly insisted on receiving reparations, partly from new production, but partly also from the dismantling of German factories. The original list comprised about 1,600 plants in order to reduce Germany’s industrial output to about three-fifths of the prewar level. The Russian share of $10 billion worth of materials was supposed to come partly from their own occupation zone and partly also from the Ruhr Basin, but the West stopped its deliveries once it started to rebuild. Nonetheless, the Russians did remove about 760 factories from East Germany, especially anything of potential military value such as machine production, even stripping the second track from many railroad lines. This ruthless exploitation of the defeated enemy reduced the Soviet zone’s industrial capacity to two-thirds of the prewar level, taking away the livelihood of the very proletariat that the Communist Party was trying to court ideologically. While some of the material helped rebuild Russian production facilities, much of the equipment was left to rust at railroad sidings because no one knew how to use it.8
Military victory also made Soviet rule rather Byzantine, because it enhanced Stalin’s reputation, increased his power, and fed his paranoia. In countless paintings, statues, poems, and songs a burgeoning cult of personality portrayed him as the wise leader, the vozhd, who had saved the fatherland from aggression, disregarding his mistakes and murders along the way. Getting older and more inflexible, Stalin distrusted his close associates ever more strongly, making Old Bolsheviks like Vyacheslav Molotov fawn over him lest they lose his favor and thereby their lives. His chief lieutenant Andrei Zhdanov, who had successfully defended Leningrad during the long siege, was especially hostile to cultural innovation, forbidding the experimental works of poets like Anna Akhmatova. During his last years Stalin also invented a “doctors’ plot,” accusing mostly Jewish physicians of a conspiracy to kill Soviet officials and triggering an anti-Semitic, anticosmopolitan campaign that declared all international ties suspect.9 The triumph over Hitler therefore reinforced the negative sides of Stalinism, making Soviet communism even more dictatorial.
The joy of liberation was short-lived, since this fear of foreign contamination rendered Soviet authorities increasingly intolerant. Instead of being reunited with their loved ones, hundreds of thousands of returning prisoners were shipped off to the gulag because they might have seen a better life in Central Europe and were potentially subversive. In the universities the pseudoscientific teachings of the biologist Trofim Lysenko held sway, claiming that genes could be environmentally altered to improve yields of grain. In the cultural realm, the works of writers such as the deeply patriotic Boris Pasternak were banned, while Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was sent to a labor camp for criticizing Stalin. In architecture, a blend of neotraditional styles celebrated Soviet power through the construction of gingerbread-style skyscrapers in Moscow, Warsaw, and East Berlin. Because victory had not brought the hoped-for freedom, Pasternak formulated the widespread disappointment of intellectuals: “If, in a bad dream, we had seen all of the horrors in store for us after the war, we should have been sorry not to see Stalin go down together with Hitler.”10
The elation of victory and Stalin’s security mania contributed to the militarizing of Russia in spite of its incessant peace propaganda. The military was the most prestigious institution in the Soviet Union, tying up three to five million men and devouring enormous economic resources. Initially serving for three years, conscripts were harshly trained and stationed all over Eastern Europe from Poland to East Germany, from Czechoslovakia to Hungary. Conceiving of the next conflict as a repetition of the war against the Wehrmacht, the Russian force was primarily a land army with tanks and artillery, although the air force developed MiG jet fighters and the navy expanded its fleet of submarines. Helped by captured German scientists and by effective espionage, the Soviet military strove to develop rockets and acquire first the A- and then the H-bomb in order to catch up to the technically more advanced U.S. arsenal.11 In the belief that power rested on military might, the Soviet Union built up the largest army in the world, supported by a huge military-industrial complex, thereby impairing the improvement of living standards.
The establishment of Russian hegemony over Eastern Europe therefore proceeded by force in an almost mirror-reversed repetition of Nazi practices. First, a series of direct annexations from Finland to Romania cemented the gains of the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact, enlarging Soviet territory considerably. With ruthless ethnic cleansing the victors expelled local inhabitants and moved Russian nationals in, while at the same time imposing one-party communist dictatorships. Second, the brutal occupation of areas like East Germany, whose fate was to be decided in a peace treaty, created a military administration that secured Russian dominance. This presence also started the process of Sovietization through denazification according to social class, eliminating large landowners and industrialists, and support of local communists in their project to seize political power and transform the occupied nations’ social and economic structure. Third, even in nominally independent satellite states like Poland, the Soviet Union acted as a repressive hegemon through the stationing of troops, the activities of the secret service, and so-called advice to fraternal parties that had to do Moscow’s bidding.12
Disappointing hopes in communist modernity, Eastern Europe’s liberation from Nazi repression merely brought Soviet domination, exchanging one dictatorship for another. In part, the personal paranoia of the aging dictator Stalin was to blame because he no longer respected any restraints on his power. In part, the structure of the Bolshevik system was at fault, since its one-party rule eliminated all competitors and limited policy discussions to a small party elite that was always afraid of being accused of deviations. Moreover, the victory over Hitler greatly strengthened the influence of the Soviet military, a hierarchical institution that was used to employing force in order to get what it wanted. At the same time the expansion of Russian rule over Eastern and Central Europe also reinforced the authority of an imperial bureaucratic apparatus inherited from tsarist precedents. This postwar incarnation of Soviet communism was therefore a far cry from the utopian visions of liberty, equality, and fraternity stemming from the Enlightenment. Because of its many defects, the reality of the Soviet version ultimately discredited the ideals of socialism.13
PEOPLE’S DEMOCRACIES
During its march toward Berlin, the Red Army was greeted with much rejoicing, since its arrival heralded the end of the Nazi nightmare. Most East Europeans were grateful that Russian troops “brought ultimate liberation,” because they “finally got rid of those Germans.” Conservative patriots were especially delighted with the defeat of the Wehrmacht since they hoped now to be able to regain a measure of independence. At the same time local socialists praised their good fortune of coming under Soviet rule, because that “helped in implementing a number of changes” toward establishing socialism, which would have been impossible without Red Army support. Aware that the majority of the population preferred the return of democracy, Polish Marxists like Jakub Berman were glad that the Russian presence allowed them to dispense with the nicety of free elections, “because we’d lose.” Shielded from German revanchism by Soviet tanks and relying on Russian support against their own citizens, East European communists now embarked on creating their kind of “people’s democracy.”14
For the Germans and their allies, defeat turned into a traumatic experience, deeply etched into collective memory, which inhibited support for communism. Thoughtful Russian officers like Lev Kopelev worried that the fierceness of the Red Army’s vengeance resembled the brutality of Nazi atrocities. Inspired by antifascist propaganda and encouraged by liberal doses of vodka, the victorious troops often killed indiscriminately and burned buildings, paying back with interest what had been done to their own families. Women were especially victimized by gang rapes, amounting according to some estimates to over two million cases in Germany alone. Moreover, units coming from the poorer regions of the Soviet Union engaged in much plunder, taking wristwatches with cries of “Uri, Uri,” bicycles, or anything else of value and vandalizing the rest. Encouraged by the Red Army command, this train of destruction created a visceral hatred that protestations of “people’s friendship” could never completely erase. As a result “liberation” gained a double meaning, inspiring not just support of socialism but also vigorous anticommunism.15
The East-Central Europeans therefore reacted ambivalently to the arrival of Soviet communism, withholding their final judgment until its actual performance became clear. About one-third, largely composed of workers and intellectuals, welcomed the chance to reform their societies by abolishing class distinctions and creating planned economies. Disappointed in the West and hoping for help from their Slavic brethren, the Czechs were particularly eager to embrace the Soviet model. Another third, consisting of farmers, craftsmen, and traders, were impressed by the thoroughness of the Red Army victory and therefore willing to give communism a chance to prove itself as more peaceful and stable than the failed democracies. Only the final third, including mostly nationalist businessmen, professionals, and the clergy were either skeptical or openly opposed. Since they had experienced not just Nazi but also Bolshevik atrocities, sizable segments of the Polish elite were, for instance, unwilling to collaborate with the Soviets, with some parts of the Home Army waging a guerrilla campaign against Russian dominance.16
As a result of western pressure, politics in the satellite states initially followed the mixed approach of a “people’s democracy,” which retained parliamentary forms but gradually tipped toward one-party communist rule. In order to outmaneuver the moderate parties, the Soviets sponsored the creation of “national fronts” that included bourgeois representatives and peasant deputies but allowed communists to wield power indirectly by controlling strategic positions in the police and the military. In order to prevent electoral defeats like the one in Hungary in November 1945, the small communist parties also merged with the larger social democratic parties in one united party, thereby overcoming the historic split between socialists and communists within the labor movement. These pseudocoalitions were held together by an understandable hatred of Nazism, widespread fear of German revenge, and sincere commitment to postwar rebuilding. With surprising candor, the East German dictator Walter Ulbricht formulated the general rationale of this transitional course: “It should look democratic, but we must control everything.”17
The Soviet zone of occupation in Germany was a special case, since it only gradually became clear that it would develop into a second German state. In the beginning Stalin wavered between using his conquest as a bargaining chip for neutralizing a demilitarized but united Germany or as an attractive showcase in order to spread socialism to the rest of the country. In selecting the latter path, the Soviet zone had to overcome more severe obstacles than its neighbors: it was part of a defeated and divided nation, which had lost its eastern territories, was forced to accept millions of refugees, and had to pay enormous reparations. The returning exiles who rallied around Ulbricht and the internal survivors around Erich Honecker nevertheless set out to create a “better Germany” than in the capitalist West. But their failure to win a sufficient majority in the local and state elections of 1946 made them erode the parliamentary system by creating a “national bloc” in which the distribution of seats was determined beforehand. In typical fashion, the German Democratic Republic reinterpreted the concept of democracy to mean government for the people by the Socialist Unity Party (SED).18
Already during the rebuilding from war damage, the East German communists began to lay the foundations for the future construction of socialism. Often Marxist zealots, counting on Red Army support, would push radical measures on a reluctant populace under the cover of denazification. In contrast to the western practice of punishing individual guilt, in the East the removal of Nazi perpetrators or collaborators sought to eliminate their underlying class basis, echoing Georgi Dimitrov’s 1935 definition of fascism as “the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic and most imperialist elements of finance capital.” Concretely, that approach meant expropriating the Junkers (i.e., large landowners) as a group and redistributing their holdings to landless laborers. At the same time it also required taking factories away from capitalists and nationalizing industries so as to put the means of production under workers’ control. These measures culminated in the introduction of economic planning on the Soviet model, which gradually replaced market competition with production targets decided in government plans.19
Many intellectuals on both sides of the Iron Curtain waxed enthusiastic about this new beginning that promised to realize the socialist dream. From their U.S. exile writers such as Bertolt Brecht and Stefan Heym returned to East Germany, while Holocaust survivors like Tadeusz Borowski and Marcel Reich-Ranicki volunteered to help revolutionize Poland. Three aspects proved particularly seductive: Since communists had offered the most resolute resistance against fascism, their ascendancy promised to prevent any relapses into racism. At the same time, the noble experiment of creating an egalitarian society entrusted intellectuals with a special mission of guiding the transformation. Finally, the opening of access to education aspired to create a truly popular culture that would bridge the gap between the elite and the masses. However, some clairvoyant observers like the Polish writer Czesław Miłosz quickly realized the deceptive nature of socialist modernization: “What is happening in Russia and the countries dependent upon her bespeaks of a new kind of insanity.”20
In the first postwar years the Soviets slowly tightened their grip on their sphere of influence, since they were increasingly willing to disregard western objections. Red Army liberation morphed successively into military occupation, material rebuilding, and social transformation. In the satellite states, a broad coalition of socialists, opportunists, and nationalists supported the establishment of communist dominance because it promised a better life in the future. Even bourgeois democrats such as Victor Klemperer, who had barely survived the Third Reich, were convinced to join the SED so as to support the fresh start. The Soviet use of force and the communist regime’s disregard for human rights were rationalized away as necessary means of overcoming the resistance of unregenerate traditionalists. A personal conversion, provided it looked sincere enough, as in the case of the youthful Christa Wolf, sufficed to erase the Nazi blemish and let one participate in the heroic project of building a new society. Only a few critics like Arthur Koestler realized that the communist “god that failed” was bringing a new form of bondage.21
SOVIETIZING THE BLOC
Russian dominance over Eastern Europe led to the partly compulsory imposition and partly voluntary adoption of Soviet modernity, effectively ending national roads to socialism. Stalin himself admitted: “In this war nothing is as it was before. Whoever has occupied a territory installs his system where his army has advanced.” The visible presence of the Red Army and the invisible activities of the NKVD established unquestionable control, supplemented by Cominform dictates to fraternal parties and orders by political advisers in the Russian embassies. At the same time many East Europeans also began to imitate Soviet styles of food, dress, behavior, and outlook, redirecting their social and cultural gaze away from London or Paris to Moscow. For instance, most transnational contacts took place between delegations, cementing their friendship in sumptuous banquets with endless toasts of vodka. This counterpart to Americanization transformed both the substance and the appearance of eastern politics as well as daily life in a strange mixture of communist modernization and Stalinist repression.22
The first step in imposing the Soviet model was the open establishment of a “dictatorship of the proletariat” after the coup of the Czechoslovak communists in February 1948. Since the Cold War made concessions to the West irrelevant, the united communist and social democratic parties like the Polish ZPR, the German SED, and the Hungarian Working Peoples’ Party now formally seized power in their respective countries. Their general secretaries Klement Gottwald, Boleslaw Bierut, Walter Ulbricht, and Matyas Rakosi thereby became sole dictators, controlling the government apparatus through their parties. To compensate for their lack of charisma, they muzzled all opposition, reduced other parties to ciphers, and hollowed out parliamentary forms. At the same time, they violated constitutionally guaranteed civil rights by imposing censorship, forbidding debate, and outlawing public assemblies. The remaining discussion within the newly enlarged communist parties was limited through the prohibition of factionalism and the strict execution of dictates from Moscow.23 By the early 1950s East European politics was reduced to the conformity of mature Stalinism.
The second move was the systematic suppression of civil society so as to leave communist associations in sole control of the field. In the German Democratic Republic (GDR), for instance, the trade unions were unified in a single organization, the Free German Trade Union (FDGB), which metamorphosed from a representation of labor interests into a transmission belt of orders to the proletariat, moderated only by the dispensing of small favors such as bonus pay or vacation reservations. Similarly the variety of youth groups, ranging from scouts to sailing clubs, was reduced to a single-party youth association, the Free German Youth (FDJ), which combined ideological indoctrination with the provision of leisure activities. Numerous other organizations like the party-dominated Democratic Women’s League of Germany (DFD) sought to appeal to a specific clientele, while making sure that its demands would not contradict communist policy.24 This coordination of social activities and indoctrination created endless conflicts with the Protestant and Catholic churches, who insisted on more autonomy. As a result, citizens were forced to channel their activities solely through party organizations.
The introduction of a planned economy that was supposed to assure workers’ control and repeat the Russian miracle of industrialization was yet another aspect of Sovietization. In order to create larger, machine-assisted farming units, agriculture was collectivized everywhere except in Poland, where small holdings survived. The transposition of the industrial model to the countryside did facilitate the mass production of grain and meat, but at the expense of personal initiative. Similarly the nationalization of industry and trade created a large state-owned sector of companies but failed to liberate workers, putting them under the new control of union, party, and government bureaucrats. The introduction of Five Year Plans in Eastern Europe sought to create a heavy industrial base in coal mining and steel production, essential for postwar rebuilding, but it neglected the manufacture of consumer goods. Moreover, the elimination of market competition, ignoring of costs in pricing, and lack of incentives left allocation decisions to the planners, who often failed to anticipate the desires of the public.25
The Soviet model came to dominate even in the less tangible realm of culture, thereby stifling intellectual debate and artistic creativity. Studying the great Russian writers or musicians was certainly justified, but the support of ideological stultification by poets like Johannes R. Becher and philosophers like György Lukacs was reprehensible. The dogma of Marxism-Leninism not only pervaded all schools but also severely constricted freedom of research and teaching in the universities and academies.26 Moreover, the petit bourgeois style of socialist realism rejected modernist experimentation, and the injunction to “pick up the pen, comrade” in order to create a working-class literature largely produced literary drivel. The warping of thought and the twisting of language due to the ubiquitous insistence on citing the classics of Marxist-Leninism as the sole font of wisdom was similarly insidious. Associations like the Writers’ League and the Culture League kept creative intellectuals in line by offering privileges such as access to publication or travel. This process of reorientation culminated in the cultivation of cultural ties by Soviet friendship societies.27
Sovietization was not just imposed from above but also supported by a vocal minority from below. The surviving communists liberated from the Nazi concentration camps, emerging from the anti-Nazi underground, or returning from exile in the Soviet Union and the West were the most determined advocates of social revolution. They could count on many members of the labor movement who hoped finally to realize their egalitarian aims with the help of the big brother in Moscow. Of course, those new farmers who had received land from the dissolved estates of the nobility also had a considerable stake in the socialist regime. Moreover, quite a few intellectuals embraced Marxism-Leninism as an ideology, since they could interpret the communist classics for the masses. While some opportunists also sought to advance their careers by emulating the victorious Soviet example, the bulk of the East European population withdrew from politics in order to get their personal life in order.28 As a result, the remaining anticommunist opponents in the churches, older parties, and nationalist circles found ever less support.
The outward expression of bloc solidarity was the economic cooperation of the Comecon and the military alliance of the Warsaw Pact. Communist party leaders from various countries customarily met for bilateral talks and multilateral consultations during congresses of the Bolshevik Party in Moscow. But in response to the creation of the western Organization of European Economic Cooperation in 1949, Stalin decided to go further, founding a Council for Mutual Economic Assistance with his satellite states that shared the same planned economy in order to intensify mutual trade. When West Germany entered NATO, Moscow also formalized its military cooperation with seven other East European countries, ranging from Albania to Romania. The mutual defense treaty was named the Warsaw Pact after the site of signing, which took place in the Polish capital.29 Creating a formidable image of united strength, these organizations were nevertheless dominated by the Soviet Union as the biggest member and therefore served to institutionalize Russian hegemony, even if some tensions over goals and methods continued with mavericks like Yugoslavia.
During the postwar decade, a combination of compulsion and imitation transformed Eastern and Central Europe according to the Soviet model of modernity. Marxism-Leninism, as interpreted by the Soviet Union, provided the ideological bond and the legitimation for Moscow’s dominance. Because the eastern currencies were not freely convertible on the world market, trade with the West withered, and was redirected toward bilateral exchanges with the Soviet Union and barter with other Comecon countries. Moreover, the Warsaw Pact justified the continued stationing of Soviet army troops in most satellite states and provided an integrated defense doctrine, practiced in annual maneuvers that tested the military coordination between the members. The propaganda glue holding the Soviet Bloc together was fear of a revanchist West Germany, which lurid posters depicted as dominated by ex-Nazi NATO generals and financed by evil U.S. capitalists. Just when Moscow’s ascendancy seemed secure, the Chinese began to challenge its orthodoxy with a new version of agrarian communism, better suited to Korea and Vietnam.30
DE-STALINIZATION
After Stalin’s death in 1953, the temperamental Nikita Khrushchev finally won the successor struggle by promising to soften repression without losing control. The early favorite, secret police chief Lavrenti Beria, was shot by the army on treason charges, while the second competitor, Prime Minister Georgy Malenkov, was gradually pushed aside since he was blamed for mismanaging the economy. Trained as a metalworker, the fifty-nine-year-old Khrushchev, who had risen as a political commissar in the Ukraine where he fought against nationalists, proved to be more adroit in getting the party to appoint him as first secretary. Though he had participated in the purges, he cultivated a populist down-to-earth image and understood the need to distance himself from Stalin’s excesses in order to preserve communist power by making it less repressive. This contradictory policy demanded an extraordinary balancing act between, on the one hand, admitting some of his predecessor’s crimes so as to respond to resentment of the gulag and, on the other, setting clear limits to public criticism in order to maintain Communist Party control.31
During Stalin’s last years, popular discontent had been building in the Soviet Bloc without finding an appropriate outlet. In the Soviet Union the slow economic recovery from wartime devastation and the high costs of the Cold War arms race frustrated citizens, while the arbitrariness of the purges left a trail of fear, substantiated by tales of suffering from returning camp inmates. Moreover, the censorship of culture turned many intellectuals against the system, even if they supported socialism in principle. Among the citizenry of defeated Nazi allies like Hungary there was much nationalist anger over Russian domination, since Sovietization appeared as the imposition of an alien model. At the same time the open establishment of dictatorship and the construction of socialism, with its collectivization and industrialization, victimized numerous opponents in Poland and Czechoslovakia, many of whom fled to the West. Moreover, the persecution of the churches created martyrs like Cardinal Jozsef Mindszenty and alienated faithful Christians from the communist regime. Only western media like Radio Free Europe in Munich and RIAS in Berlin were able to voice such discontent.32
Surprisingly enough, the first explosion occurred on June 17, 1953, in East Berlin when workers dared to revolt against the SED dictatorship. The attempt of an “accelerated transition” to socialism encountered special problems in the GDR such as food shortages, repression of dissent, and persecution of the Protestant church. When the government raised work quotas, thereby lowering pay, construction workers went out on strike and began marching down the Stalinallee, a wide boulevard, calling for the pay cuts to be taken back. During their demonstration the crowd grew to twenty-five thousand, and demands escalated to political reforms like “free elections” and “German unification.” Broadcast by western media, the unrest quickly spread to about five hundred East German cities and towns, with angry citizens beating up party functionaries and freeing prisoners. Fearing for its rule, the GDR Politburo appealed to the Soviets, who authorized the use of Red Army tanks to put the uprising down. About seventy-five people were killed and another sixteen hundred imprisoned as punishment for the “counterrevolutionary coup attempt.” Thereafter the SED remained traumatized, since the revolt showed the illegitimacy of its rule.33
During the Twentieth Party Congress on February 25, 1956, Khrushchev finally decided to risk denouncing the excesses of Stalin’s rule so as to rehabilitate the communist project. For four hours he harangued the stunned delegates with an impassioned speech, accusing his predecessor of “intolerance … brutality, and … abuse of power.” He began his litany of Stalin’s “repression and physical annihilation” with the purge of Old Bolsheviks and continued with Stalin’s deportation of entire nationalities, only to conclude with details on the exaggeration of Stalin’s role in the war and the propagandistic elevation of Stalin as a monumental hero. Though a committee had prepared these charges, functionaries were shocked because Khrushchev tore the veil of silence from a whole series of transgressions in which many of them had participated.34 This spirited attack on the cult of personality toppled Stalin from the pedestal of a guiding saint in the quasi-religious belief system of Marxism-Leninism. Though the “secret speech” was intended to reinvigorate communism by distancing it from its prior crimes, internal dissidents and external critics now found their worst fears officially proven.
By encouraging such a de-Stalinization, Khrushchev initiated a cultural liberalization in the Soviet Union that inspired hopes for a more open form of socialism in the satellites as well. Named after a 1954 novel by Ilya Ehrenburg, this “thaw” not only toppled Stalin’s statues, renamed places named after Stalin, and released prisoners from the gulag; it also allowed more experimentation in the arts by lessening censorship. Now the innovative compositions of Dmitri Shostakovich and Sergei Prokofiev could be played in public concerts. Though Pasternak’s Dr. Zhivago, printed in Italy, remained prohibited, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was allowed to appear. Suddenly movie directors were able to show the horrors of war in films like The Cranes are Flying, which won the Golden Palm at the Cannes Festival in 1958. Bands were permitted to play U.S.-style music, youth festivals brought in foreign visitors, and more eastern athletes were able to compete in world championships and Olympic Games.35 Among sympathetic intellectuals the thaw once again revived hope that it might be possible for Soviet communism to develop in a liberal direction.
When testing the new freedom at the end of June 1956, Polish workers in the city of Poznań quickly learned that communists were still ready to repress any real challenge to their power. While intellectuals grumbled about ideological controls, laborers at the Stalin Metal Plant went out on strike to demand better food and higher wages. The general resentment against political repression and poor living conditions drove about one hundred thousand sympathizers into the central square. They sacked the headquarters of the Polish United Workers’ Party, disarmed the police, and opened prison gates. To keep things from spiraling out of control General Konstantin Rokossovsky sent four hundred Soviet tanks and about ten thousand troops into the city to fight, ostensibly against “German provocateurs.” At least 57 people were killed, 600 wounded, and 250 arrested. In order to keep the unrest from spreading, the Soviets subsequently permitted the appointment of Władysław Gomułka as first secretary of the Workers’ Party, and he initiated some limited reforms.36 Nonetheless, the Poznań protests were a warning that de-Stalinization should not be carried too far.
The subsequent Hungarian uprising of October 1956 was an even more dramatic challenge to Soviet domination because it involved an entire nation. Associated with the Dual Monarchy’s and independent Hungary’s defeat and the loss of ethnic territories, communism had never been especially popular in Budapest. When students demonstrating in front of the parliament building were stopped from broadcasting their demands by radio, violence broke out in the Hungarian capital. Rebellious crowds formed workers’ councils and militias to battle the secret police and chase away party functionaries, inducing the government to fall. As new prime minister, the reform communist Imre Nagy promised free elections and announced that Hungary might leave the Warsaw Pact. Afraid of losing power, orthodox Politburo members eventually called for help from the Red Army, which on November 4 invaded the country, setting off a week of desperate but unequal fighting. About twenty-five hundred Hungarians and seven hundred Russian soldiers were killed, but the West did not come to the aid of the revolution, afraid that intervention would trigger World War III. Some two hundred thousand people fled during the harsh repression, which again revealed Soviet communism’s dictatorial face.37
Khrushchev’s effort at a limited de-Stalinization therefore produced a paradoxical mixture of hope and disappointment in the Soviet Union and its satellites. In some ways, the attempt to distance communism from the use of force in collectivization and industrialization and to end the murderous repression of the Great Purges and the gulag was an overdue course correction, designed to make the system more palatable to East Europeans and Soviet citizens. Moreover, the creativity unleashed by the thaw was truly impressive, since it produced cultural works of lasting merit, appreciated by international audiences. But even in Moscow, Khrushchev used the denunciation of Stalin to reassert his dictatorial control, and the party squelched all efforts at public debate. Moreover, in East Berlin, Poznań, and Budapest the brutal repression of the successive revolts indicated that any dissent would be snuffed out by the Soviet military, intent on defending its empire by force. Because granting freedom remained at the discretion of the party rather than being a fundamental right, the idea of a liberal communism remained a contradiction in terms.38
CONSUMER COMMUNISM
Afraid of making political concessions, communist dictators turned instead to raising living standards in order to gain public approval for their unpopular regimes. After brutally suppressing all dissent, the new Hungarian leader Janós Kádár began to promote a compromise, called “goulash communism” after a popular stew of meat, noodles, and paprika. In the economic realm this policy implied a gradual shift away from the heavy-industry emphasis of “smokestack socialism” to the production of consumer goods such as television sets and cars, even if they were more modest than their western counterparts. In the cultural arena, this course meant the grudging acceptance of international modernism as a style of architecture, such as prefabricated concrete apartment buildings similar to housing developments in the West. The underlying bargain, promoted all over the Soviet Bloc, was public toleration of the system in exchange for a slow improvement in living standards.39 While the people were grateful for every step toward a better life, communism thereby entered a dangerous competition with the West.
In some areas related to defense expenditures, the Soviet Union was surprisingly successful, exceeding western expectations. On October 4, 1957, Russia launched a satellite into earth orbit from Baikonur, thereby winning the first leg of the “space race” with the United States. Called Sputnik, the shiny one-hundred-kilogram globe with two antennas was of simple design, containing a radio transmitter that sent back scientific data for three weeks. A propaganda success, the launch nonetheless proved that Soviet development had increased the range of the R-7 rocket to such an extent that it could reach the North American continent. Understandably the Soviet government used Sputnik to tout communist science, while the U.S. public went into a “Sputnik shock” because its faith in the superiority of western research was severely shaken.40 Another arena was sports competition, in which Soviet athletes claiming to be “state amateurs,” supported by the armed forces, scored an increasing number of successes against westerners who were still trying to compete as genuine amateurs. Winning against capitalists in space and athletic contests was therefore an important source of pride.
The communists were less adept in the consumer competition of “peaceful coexistence” since they remained wedded to a production ideology. Ebulliently optimistic, Nikita Khrushchev promised that the Soviet Union would soon achieve a higher living standard than that of the United States, but this claim proved more difficult to realize than he anticipated. During the American National Exhibition in Moscow in 1959, the Soviet first secretary and Vice President Richard Nixon jousted in the “kitchen debate” over which system provided better appliances, a contest won hands-down by the typical American home. Trying to ease women’s frustration, the Soviet regime sought to go beyond providing basic necessities by offering more attractive clothes, shoes, and furniture, even allowing a touch of fashion in modern design. This campaign also attempted to make other consumer goods more appealing and to transform the drab state-run shopping outlets of the local Konsum into something approaching a department store. To forestall future revolts, the leaders of the Eastern Bloc realized that they had to make greater efforts to satisfy popular wishes for consumption.41
The goal of improving living standards seemed within reach, since the communists achieved a modest Economic Miracle of their own, albeit later and at a lower level than in the reconstruction of West Germany. For postwar rebuilding of industrial plants and infrastructure, which required coal and steel as well as much labor, smokestack socialism was actually quite appropriate. Collectivization did gradually produce enough food to overcome shortages, and nationalized industries could offer sufficient products to end rationing. But owing to the emphasis on fixed quantitative targets, meeting the more flexible challenge of making consumer goods proved difficult for the planned economy, since satisfaction also depended on quality and style. With a delay of a decade or more, the Eastern Bloc also started to produce refrigerators, television sets, and cars, but their prices were high, deliveries slow, and design often outdated when they arrived. Since lack of supplies, production shortfalls, distribution bottlenecks, and political interference hindered creative designers, the East was always playing catch-up to the more dynamic West.42
The communist failure in the consumer competition was ultimately due to the structure of the planned economy, which proved too rigid to meet shifting demand. It did not help that the arms race, secret service, and party bureaucracy devoured enormous sums. The price controls, which ignored production costs by subsidizing food, housing, and transportation, contributed to the misallocation of resources. The guarantee of job security, regardless of performance, also undercut work morale, since frequent bonuses or preferred vacation destinations provided only modest incentives. The nonconvertibility of eastern currencies shielded local production from the stiff competition of the world market, leading to a series of Comecon barter agreements. As a result, the dollar and deutsche mark functioned as second currencies with which western goods could be bought at privileged Intershops. In spite of gradual improvement, the economy remained full of bottlenecks, requiring barter in services and standing in line. Various efforts to reintroduce elements of market competition foundered on the rigidity of planning ideology.43
The lessening of ideological fervor also deepened the Sino-Soviet split, since it suggested that Moscow had abandoned its commitment to revolution. Initially Mao Zedong had been quite grateful for Russian support in the Chinese Civil War and for subsequent help in rebuilding his ravaged country. But Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization shocked the Chinese leadership, which also rejected the policy of “coexistence” as a revisionist sellout. Instead, Mao developed an independent form of agrarian communism that inspired the Great Leap Forward and attracted North Korea and North Vietnam, which were fighting anti-imperialist struggles against their southern cousins. In contrast to the pragmatic policies advocated by a satiated Soviet Union, the radical Chinese path appealed to national-liberation movements that had yet to seize power and wanted to modernize their countries. Behind Beijing’s refusal to follow Moscow’s dictates also lay divergent national interests, which eventually surfaced in the border clashes in the Amur region. Because of its relative moderation, Moscow slowly lost ideological control over the communist camp.44
After eleven years of leading the Soviet Union, Khrushchev was suddenly overthrown by a coup of his own associates who claimed that he had lost his touch. On October 14, 1964, the Presidium of the Central Committee of the Communist Party voted to oust him but allowed the fallen dictator to retire and write his memoirs. There were many reasons for the party’s dissatisfaction with him. Khrushchev’s mercurial personality, his rudeness to subordinates, and his authoritarian leadership style did not exactly endear him to his colleagues. At the same time the failure of the agricultural reforms to deliver more food also disappointed his erstwhile supporters. Moreover, Khrushchev’s attempts to restructure the party bureaucracy threatened many functionaries, who feared losing their positions. Finally, his erratic foreign-policy record of suppressing rebellions in the bloc, crises over Berlin and Cuba, as well as disagreements with China raised doubts about the correctness of his course. Repudiating this “adventurism,” the party leadership chose the war hero Leonid Brezhnev, who returned to a more orthodox neo-Stalinist policy.45
Shifting from outright oppression to economic competition therefore turned out to be both frustrating and dangerous for the Soviet Bloc. In Walter Ulbricht’s dialectical image, the East needed to “overtake [the West] without catching up” to it—an impossible task in physical terms. Because of their materialist ideology, communists could not resist the trap of wanting to outproduce the West in consumer goods, even if their starting position was rather unfavorable. No doubt the citizens of the Soviet Bloc were grateful for every improvement in their living standard that eased the burden of coping with a shortage economy and lightened their daily routine of standing in line for special goods like bananas or coffee. But those privileged cadres who were allowed to travel to the West soon realized that the race was unwinnable, because market competition created more economic dynamism. As a result of entering this economic contest of consumption, the eastern leadership discredited itself and fueled that popular discontent with communism which eventually precipitated its overthrow.46
REAL EXISTING SOCIALISM
Contrary to some western charges that communism was merely trying to catch up, the Soviet project was an effort to create an alternate, postcapitalist form of modernization. The planned economy was supposed to avoid the cyclical crises of the market and the exploitation of wage labor; the egalitarian abolition of class privilege was intended to enable political participation beyond the squabbling of democracy; and the scientific worldview of Marxism-Leninism was expected to overtake bourgeois scholarship in discoveries and technical innovation.47 Flush with victory over the fascist enemy, Moscow set out to impose this vision of progress on its newly conquered territories and satellite states in Eastern Europe. Many workers and intellectuals, even in the West, hoped that this party-dominated approach would offer a shortcut to economic development, yielding the benefits of modernity without its attendant insecurities. While state socialism worked fairly well during postwar reconstruction and for creating a smokestack industry, it ultimately turned out to be a reform-resistant dead end.
Because of the failure of interwar democracy, the Soviet Union initially had more success in transforming Eastern Europe than is acknowledged in retrospect. In some countries like Bulgaria, Moscow could rely on Slavic ethnic ties and hopes for development; in other nations like Poland it could claim credit for having defeated Hitler and keeping the Germans at bay; in yet other places like Czechoslovakia it could count on sizable sympathies for the project of revolutionizing society; and in defeated states like Hungary it could rely on the intimidating presence of the Soviet army. Moreover, after several years of control, the communist regimes were able to point to some notable achievements: In all eastern countries Stalinist policies created a heavy industrial base needed for further development. The massive use of labor succeeded in rebuilding most of the wartime damage in infrastructure and housing. The mechanization of agriculture finally overcame food shortages. Careful planning also produced an ample supply of basic goods.48 In contrast to the prewar crisis, communist leaders were therefore quite certain that they were now much better off.
After economic security had been achieved, the limitations of the communist road to modernity became more and more apparent. The biggest handicap in the East European countries was the imposition of the Soviet model by force from the outside, which ran counter to the wishes of the majority of East Europeans. While catch-up industrialization offered progress to Bulgaria and Romania, it was actually a step backward in the more highly developed economies of Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, and Poland. At the same time, the reduction of political participation to mere membership in mass organizations and to public acclamation of the communist dictators seemed a hollow ritual to citizens who had experienced a taste of democracy during the interwar period. Moreover, the inculcation of the Marxist-Leninist dogma as method and result of inquiry constrained scientific and artistic innovation among intellectuals who recalled the excitement of free debate and inquiry. By suppressing civil society and ignoring human rights, the dictatorial communist approach robbed modernization of its self-correcting dynamism.49
Instead of suggesting a road to social progress, “Sovietization” became a term of derision during the Cold War, pointing to Eastern Europe’s subjection to Stalinist terror. From the outset the rapes, plunder, and wanton killing of the liberation saddled the Soviet project with negative associations difficult to overcome. The ruthless class warfare in the name of denazification that expropriated landowners and industrialists revealed the callousness of Marxist social engineering in creating a more egalitarian social order. The brutal suppression of political alternatives, the systematic persecution of opponents by the secret police, and the muzzling of public discussion also showed a fundamental disregard for the people. Finally the imposition of ideological conformity by obligatory training in Marxism-Leninism and systematic censorship demonstrated the inhumane character of the regimes. Only a minority of supporters praised the positive aspects of communism, while the majority of the public resented its massive repression. In the end, both the excessive goals and brutal methods discredited the socialist project.50
For the Soviet Bloc, the communist path toward modernity therefore turned into a “civilisational mirage” in which self-destructive traits smothered the progressive potential. Conceived as an alternative developmental path for avoiding the “crisis of western modernity,” the Soviet model consisted of a curious mixture of Marxist ideology, antifascism, and Russian imperialism. The proposed solutions such as the planned economy, the single-party dictatorship, and the inculcation of socialist ideology created internal contradictions that proved impossible to resolve. At the same time the presence of the Soviet army, the activities of the secret police, and the role of Russian advisers exported a repressive version of socialism that was never able to shed its Stalinist deformation entirely.51 As a result, efforts of liberalization from above in de-Stalinization and in protests from below during 1953 and 1956 could not alter the dictatorial character of the system sufficiently to make it bearable. Though appreciating the victory over fascism, most East Europeans experienced the communist project as a frightful dystopia.