Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century (42 page)

In eastern Europe, of course, the resistance to the Cold War order was met by an even harsher repression. In Yugoslavia, Mihailović’s Chetniks had been rounded up by the time of their leader’s arrest in early 1946. But in Poland and the Ukraine, NKVD and native pro-communist troops conducted ferocious anti-partisan sweeps of the forests late into the 1940s. Perhaps the most tenacious resistance struggle took place in the Baltic states. There Soviet policy—deportations and collectivization—drove many men into the forests from early 1945. The Forest Brothers, as they were known, attacked Russian troops, disrupted elections and killed collaborators. They were encouraged by their belief that there would soon be war between the West and the Soviet Union. In Latvia and Estonia their numbers were dwindling by the end of 1946, but in Lithuania the movement was more organized. By 1948 the authorities needed 70,000 troops as well as special death squads, infiltrators and regular Red Army divisions.

There are some striking cases of individuals who rejected the postwar structure of power for several decades. Tadeusz Konwicki’s nightmarish novel of Poland in the 1960s,
A Dreambook for Our Time
, shows what ghosts from the war still lurked in the forests. An Estonian Forest Brother, August Sabe, was discovered by KGB agents as late as 1978 and drowned himself rather than surrender. Similarly, after the fall of the Colonels’ Junta in 1974, a Greek partisan was reportedly discovered hiding in the White Mountains in Crete, reluctant to return to normal life. A French woman was discovered living as a recluse in 1983 in a town in the Auvergne: at liberation she had been accused of collaboration and her hair had been shorn; she had not been seen for thirty years and had gone mad.
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But people like this who refused to make their re-entry into postwar society were very much the exceptions. Most Europeans accepted the division of the continent and the post-war balance of power, and therefore participated in the social projects which developed on either side of the Iron Curtain. The wartime alliance preserved its basic understanding, and the brutal peace of the Cold War brought the continent the most precious commodity of all—time—which allowed an extraordinary and largely unexpected regeneration of its economic life and a sweeping transformation of its political habits.

EIGHT

Building People’s Democracy

We have chosen our own Polish path of development which we call the path of people’s democracy. Under the present conditions no dictatorship of the working class, and even less the dictatorship of one party, is necessary or intended. We believe that the government in our country can be carried out through all democratic parties cooperating one with another
.

—WLADYSLAW GOMULKA, 1947
¹

Every change in the social order is an historical process accompanied by difficulties, unsolved problems, shortcomings and, inevitably, mistakes
.

—FROM THE REPORT OF THE DUBCEK GOVERNMENT COMMISSION OF INQUIRY INTO THE CZECHOSLOVAK POLITICAL TRIALS, 1968
²

Eastern Europe has been the unfortunate laboratory for all three of the century’s ideological experiments. The first, that of the liberal democratic victors of 1918, lasted little more than a decade, before collapsing in the aftermath of the world depression. Hitler’s New Order lasted only half as long. Nazi defeat opened the way for Stalin to make a third attempt, and his creations—the People’s Democracies—were to prove more durable than any of their predecessors.

In the early 1950s, as Stalinist terror reached its apogee in a series of bizarre and terrifying show trials, Western political scientists developed the theory of totalitarianism, which emphasized the similarities between communism and fascism. In both cases, they argued, political power resided essentially in coercion. At a time when the labour camps were filled with hundreds of thousands of prisoners and the secret police were in the ascendant such views were highly plausible: Today, however, the limitations of the theory of totalitarianism
are more obvious. If we wish to explain why Russian rule lasted so much longer than German in eastern Europe, the differences between Nazism and communism are no less important than their similarities. Both relied upon military and police to subdue a basically hostile population but in varying degrees and at different times. More important, in their ultimate goals and political strategies, the Russians and the Germans diverged sharply.
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For the Nazis, as we have seen, the goal of occupation was defined entirely in terms of
German
interests. This was the principal reason why the dissatisfaction many Europeans felt with pre-war liberal (or “bourgeois”) democracy could not be satisfied by a Nazi New Order. It also explains Berlin’s reluctance to give any power to non-German political groups, its basic vision of eastern Europe as a source of land and foodstuffs worked by Slavic helots for the benefit of their racial superiors, and the miserable failure of German
political
warfare among the Slavs.

Soviet Russia, like Germany, sought imperial security through control of eastern Europe; like Nazi Germany, it regarded the system of independent states set up at Versailles as hostile to its interests. However, its policy was shaped not by racial nationalism but by the philosophy of socio-economic transformation known as communism. This ideology was inclusive rather than exclusive, and all the more powerful for it. The Russian empire, unlike the Nazi one, depended upon local elites, and accommodated—if not without difficulty—east European nationalism: this explains both the limits and the durability of Soviet control. Hitler’s vision of a feudal, ethnically purified farming belt was succeeded by that of an urbanized, industrial utopia: unlike Hitler, Stalin and his successors aimed at a total modernization of the region. In its own way, this happened: the rapid growth of cities and industry after 1945 dwarfed any previous changes. Communism profited from these extraordinary developments; later they helped cause its demise. Industrialization changed society in ways the Party had not anticipated: society raced ahead while the Party stagnated.
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ESTABLISHING POLITICAL CONTROL

Soviet takeover, or social revolution? Today most people would unhesitatingly plump for the former to describe Communism’s emergence in post-war eastern Europe. In the 1940s, however, well-informed and impartial observers saw things rather differently. They remembered the inter-war legacy of failed democracy, economic depression and ethnic strife—grim memories which weakened opposition to communism inside and outside the region. The British scholar Hugh Seton-Watson underlined the harsh, chauvinistic and corrupt rule of earlier regimes, and spoke of a widespread “desire for violent change, and distrust of everything said by the ruling class.” The Masaryk Professor of Central European History at London University, R. R. Betts, referred to “the revolution in central and eastern Europe” which was taking place, and stressed that “much of [the achievement, for good and evil] is native and due to the efforts of the peoples and their own leaders.” “It is clear,” he went on, “that even if the Soviet Union had not been so near and so powerful, revolutionary changes would have come at the end of so destructive and subversive a war as that which ended in 1945.”

Such commentators may have felt later that their views were coloured by wishful thinking. Seton-Watson confessed in 1961 that “the years after 1945 brought not a New Deal of liberty and social justice but a totalitarian tyranny and colonial subjection to the Soviet Empire.” But the illusions, beliefs and hopes which he later castigated were to prove no less important an instrument of imperial rule than force of arms itself; as for the social revolution, that was a reality.
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Soviet prestige may have been boosted by the military achievement of defeating the Germans, but the wartime Red Army was never envisaged as a permanent force of occupation, except perhaps in Germany itself: demobilization diminished its military strength from twelve million in 1945 to around three million three years later; in Germany itself, Soviet troop strengths dropped from some 1.5 million at the end of the war to 350,000 by July 1947. This was slower than the astonishingly rapid American demobilization but striking nonetheless. In fact, troop strengths fell quickly in all countries and the Red Army pulled out of Czechoslovakia in keeping with its international
agreements. Stalin reminded the Hungarian Communists: “Soviet power cannot do everything for you. You must do the fighting, you must do the work.” For the Kremlin it was clear that Germany must never again be allowed to threaten the Soviet Union, and that eastern Europe must form part of its own sphere of influence; both objectives, however, were conceived in primarily political rather than military terms.
⁶

For action against the Germans in the final stages of the war, as also against the opposition that emerged to communist control in the forests of the Baltic states and Poland, the Carpathians, and along the Albanian-Yugoslav frontier, reliable local armed forces needed building up. Reconstructed armies loyal to the new regime were quickly pulled together around a core of pre-war officers, resistance fighters and POWs “re-educated” in Soviet captivity. Some of these armies were purged of many former career officers as early as 1945—a necessity in the case of an army like the Romanian which had been fighting the Russians a year before—but others kept much of their pre-war character. The Polish Army was a special case, as thousands of its prewar officers had been seized by the Russians when the war began, and shot en masse in the Katyn forest and elsewhere. More reliable instruments for the new masters were the various security, police and paramilitary formations that emerged very rapidly under Soviet guidance, and played a vital role in policing elections, and targeting opponents of the new order. They were recruited not from reliable Party cadres, since these did not exist in any numbers, but from a strange mix of former partisans, collaborators, criminals and others. In Romania, for instance, the paramilitary Patriotic Combat Formations, directly under the orders of the Party, grew to 60,000 strong by March 1945. Overall, within a year of Russian “liberation,” hundreds of thousands of East Europeans were serving in military, policing and paramilitary formations under Soviet control.
⁷

There was little domestic military resistance. Anti-Soviet armed bands and resistance units continued their doomed struggle into the late 1940s, but they were systematically repressed—shot, imprisoned in camps (often taken over from the Germans, as at Majdanek) or deported—and never seriously threatened communist plans. Of the estimated 100,000 anti-communist partisans fighting in Poland
between 1944 and 1947, the vast majority laid down their arms in two government amnesties. The Serb Chetnik leader Mihailović was captured in 1946. Apart from the Baltic states, opposition was scattered and ineffectual.
⁸

The really serious challenges to Soviet predominance were not military; they came, instead, from the various parties that re-emerged after the Occupation. If the chief arena in which the struggle for power took place in post-war eastern Europe was political, the main question facing communist activists was how to obtain the ascendancy from a position of domestic weakness. In most countries, the Party membership at liberation was tiny. State repression and public indifference in the inter-war era had kept the communist movement small; Stalin’s purges in the 1930s had made it even smaller. Now the survivors were hurled into the spotlight. How should they act?

The obvious revolutionary option was to seize power as soon as possible. The paradox is that this only happened where the Red Army was
not
in control—in Yugoslavia where Tito, backed by his partisans, installed a one-party state within a year of liberation, and in his satellite, Albania. The idea appealed to many communists outside Yugoslavia, but Tito was the one communist leader in a position to ignore Stalin’s wishes, and Stalin clearly had other tactics in mind which would be more compatible with his evident desire not to alienate his wartime Allies. For as Molotov later recalled: “It was to our benefit to stay allied with America.”
⁹

During the war, the Department of International Information of the Soviet Communist Central Committee had publicized the path ahead: cooperation with other democratic forces, not communist revolution. Eastern Europe, it decreed, was not ready for socialism. Rather the residues of feudalism must be swept aside, and the abortive bourgeois revolution of 1848 completed. There would be elections, in which workers and peasants would have a new voice. Not surprisingly, many communist cadres apart from Tito found it hard to take such advice seriously.
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