Iron Curtain (46 page)

More control, not less, was what the communist parties of the region believed would stop the strikes, fix the shortages, and raise living standards to the level of the West. And so, one by one, Eastern European governments began drawing up complex, multiyear, Soviet-style central plans, setting targets for everything from road construction to shoe production. Hungary launched its Three-Year Plan in August 1947, and would announce a Five-Year Plan in 1950. Poland also launched a Three-Year Plan in 1947, and a Six-Year Plan in 1950. Germany launched a Two-Year Plan in January 1949 and then a Five-Year Plan for the years 1951–55.

The targets set in these first plans were often pulled from the air, and the understanding of pricing mechanisms was unsophisticated, to say the least. One of Poland’s first economic bureaucrats tried to keep track of the fluctuating prices of coal and bread in the months before the first plan went into effect, imagining that would eventually help him set the “correct” prices for all goods—prices which, of course, would never need to be changed again, he thought, since there would be no inflation in a communist economy. Poles also debated, at one point, whether they should simply set the same prices for basic goods in Poland as in the USSR, which had presumably already discovered the secret of correct pricing.
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The numbers were no less arbitrary at the micro level. Jo Langer, the wife of a prominent Slovak communist, worked in a
Bratislava export company in 1948 and witnessed the imposition of planning from the ground up:

Langer writes that “with a bad conscience,” she presented her invented statistics. Her boss was satisfied:

Despite their fantastical origins, the communists had great faith in the plans, which became the focus of massive national propaganda campaigns. Enormous banners hung from buildings and factories, calling on people to “Fulfill the Plan” or “Work for the Plan” or “Achieve Socialist Victory with the Plan.” The word
Aufbau
—“construction” or “building up”—was used frequently and positively as well, on posters, on banners, and in pamphlets. Radio stations discussed the plan to the point of obsessiveness. In 1948, East German radio scriptwriters were told to comment “repeatedly” on four numbers that had been written into the plan: the 35 percent increase in production, the 30 percent rise in productivity, the 15 percent increase in wages, and the 7 percent reduction in budgets.

In order not to bore listeners (or, as the radio authorities more delicately put it, in order not to “evoke apathy”) the writers were also instructed to liven up their repetition of these four figures with interviews and reports from the ground. It was suggested that they present profiles of enterprises that had overfulfilled their production plans, and that they offer “positive criticism” of delays. Success was thus to be contrasted with failure (reversible failure, of course), which would presumably make the programs more interesting.
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In the offices of Polish radio, “discussion of the Six-Year Plan” appeared on every list of every program’s political priorities, from sports to culture to politics, from 1950 until 1956.

At the same time, the plans were touted as the solution to myriad problems.
East German radio told its listeners in 1948 not to worry about the West German currency reforms, which were then shaking up East Germany: “The fulfillment and overfulfillment” of the plan will “take us across this hard but necessary currency trouble.”
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Nor were they meant exclusively for industry. “What we need from our artists,” wrote an East German newspaper, are “works of art that help us in our daily struggle in fulfilling the Five-Year Plan.”
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German cultural bureaucrats drew up annual and quarterly plans, and also issued annual and quarterly reports on their fulfillment. They included general goals—“propagating the economic and cultural development in the Soviet Union,” for example—as well as more specific targets. One 1948 plan required every museum in the country to construct, rapidly, an exhibit describing and explaining the Two-Year Plan.
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In Poland, the reconstruction of Warsaw became one of the central focuses of the Six-Year Plan, which was launched in January 1950. To mark the occasion, a lush, 350-page photo album was published under the authorship of Bolesław Bierut himself. The album contained pictures of Warsaw as it was—piles of rubble, children squatting in the ruins, women hanging laundry on broken balconies—and drawings of Warsaw as it would be: austere socialist realist skyscrapers, imposing government buildings, wide boulevards. There would be space for “mass meetings and demonstrations,” sports palaces, and parks.
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But Poland’s Six-Year Plan ran out of steam even before six years were up. It stuttered to a halt after Stalin’s death in 1953, and much of what had been planned was never finished. Though reconstruction of the city continued, many of the buildings in the Warsaw album were never built, while others were modified drastically. For that, a later generation of Warsovians was grateful.

BY THE END of 1948, the Eastern European communist parties and their Soviet allies had already enacted enormous changes in the new People’s Democracies. They had eliminated the most capable of their potential opponents. They had taken control of the institutions they considered most valuable. They had created, from scratch, the political police. In Poland, the armed opposition had been destroyed and the legal opposition had been dismantled. In Hungary and East Germany, spontaneous “antifascist” movements no longer existed, and genuine opposition parties had been eliminated. In the Czech Republic, a successful coup d’état had left the communists with absolute power. Loyal, pro-Soviet communist parties now ruled
Bulgaria,
Romania, and
Albania. Social democracy, despite its deep roots in the region, had vanished from the political arena, along with large private companies and many independent organizations.

Yet the socialist paradise was still far away. The regimes had acquired some collaborators and some true believers, and they were attempting to educate more. Many tens of thousands of people had joined the party and its affiliated mass organizations, including the youth movements, the women’s
organizations, and the official trade unions. But the communist parties were unpopular, and their support was still shaky, even in their most trusted institutions. Millions of Eastern Europeans still considered communist ideology to be alien and still thought the party represented a foreign power. The Eastern European communist parties had not won legitimacy through elections, and they had not won legitimacy through their economic policies either. Already, their economies were slipping behind those of the West. The East Germans, especially East Berliners, saw this most clearly after the West German currency
reform in 1948. But anyone with Western relatives or access to Western radio knew it too.

Even Stalin didn’t really trust his Eastern European followers, and so he concluded that they now needed harsher methods in order to stay in power. For the next five or so years the Eastern European states would directly mimic Soviet domestic and international policies in the hopes of eliminating their opponents for good, achieving higher economic growth, and influencing a new generation of firm supporters through propaganda and public education. Until Stalin’s death in 1953, all of the region’s communist parties would pursue an identical set of goals using an identical set of tactics. This was the era of High Stalinism.

Although the rhetoric of High Stalinism always sounded supremely confident, the period began in crisis. In March 1949, Bolesław Bierut, now the unchallenged leader of the Polish communist party, outlined his problem in a letter he wrote to
Vyacheslav Molotov, which was then passed on to Stalin. Bierut first praised the Polish secret policemen who had “repulsed the attacks of the enemy” in 1945 and 1946. Not only had
Poland’s Soviet-trained security officers vanquished the underground and “destroyed Mikołajczyk’s PSL” but they had become a “sharp instrument of the people’s power in the battle against the class enemy and the penetration of foreign espionage.” Yet he was not satisfied. For all of their many achievements, the secret police still had not managed to “decisively reorganize its work in order to conduct a more successful battle against the activities of the enemy.” Among these enemies Bierut listed not only the underground movements but also the “clerics,” the Polish social democrats, the former members of the Home Army, and even former communists who had been “excluded from the party.”
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Bierut then went on to list the many “insufficiencies” of the Polish secret police and to recommend solutions. These included the complete closure of the western land and northern sea borders; the infiltration of the potential
“enemy” groups; increased security for factories and party offices; and careful “tactical” work among the clergy, using everything from “coercive methods” in some cases to “neutralization” in others. The tone of Bierut’s letter is deeply paranoid, with multiple references to spies, Anglo-American agents, and enemies of various kinds:

Bierut’s paranoia was in a certain sense justified. There was indeed great dissatisfaction among many Polish clerics, as well as in ex–Home Army, ex-communist, and ex–social democratic circles. Large portions of Polish society were certainly more pro-American than pro-Soviet, and many felt more deeply attached to the ideals of the disbanded Home Army than they did to those of the new Polish army, which was visibly dominated by Soviet officers.

But Bierut’s paranoia was surely amplified by Stalin’s own paranoia, which notoriously increased in 1948 and 1949 and for some of the same reasons. Millions of Soviet citizens had experienced the wealth and freedom of Western Europe for the first time during the
Second World War and had now returned home to a world devoid of material goods. “Bikes were old, of prewar make,” wrote Joseph
Brodsky of his postwar Soviet childhood, and “the owner of a soccer ball was considered a bourgeois.”
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The dissatisfaction, even among believing communists, was real. Stalin knew it, and the Soviet secret police knew it. During a private telephone conversation, taped and recorded by the KGB, a Soviet general who had returned home from the front told a colleague that “absolutely everyone says openly how everyone is discontented with life. On the trains, in fact everywhere, it’s what everyone’s saying.”
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As a result of its wartime conquests and the bloody suppression of resistance movements, the Soviet Union had also acquired whole new categories of highly suspect residents. Because its borders had moved several hundred kilometers to the west, millions of inhabitants of prewar Poland, Romania, Czechoslovakia, and the Baltic States were now Soviet citizens. Many were naturally unsympathetic to what they perceived as a new form of Russian
imperialism, and the secret police knew that too. As of 1945, the KGB viewed all of the citizens of the new western territories as potential agents of foreign influence, saboteurs, and spies. Even after the majority of political prisoners were released from the Gulag following Stalin’s death, Baltic and Ukrainian nationalists remained in Soviet prisons well into the 1960s.
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To stifle the general discontent, and perhaps to scare new Soviet citizens into compliance, Stalin ordered a major wave of arrests in the years 1948–49, comparable in size to the
Great Terror of 1937–38. After a postwar lull, the camps of the Gulag began to fill up again. They would reach their peak, in terms of both numbers and economic significance, between 1950 and 1952.
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Stalin’s heightened paranoia also helped provoke the Cold War—which in turn fueled his anxiety further. Western doubts about Soviet intentions in Europe had solidified by the time of Churchill’s 1946 “
Iron Curtain” speech, and had become policy by 1947, when President Truman declared America’s intention to “support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures,” a statement that became known as the Truman Doctrine.
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Eventually, “support for free peoples” would take many forms, ranging from the fanciful—balloons carrying propaganda leaflets were floated over the East–West borders—to the pragmatic.
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By far the most effective Cold War “weapon” was
Radio Free Europe, a broadcasting service based in Munich, funded by the U.S. government but staffed by émigrés and exiles, broadcasting in their own languages. Radio Free Europe ultimately proved effective not because it offered counterpropaganda but because it reliably reported the news of the day.
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