Iron Curtain (15 page)

None of this prevented Berman from trying, as best he could, to indoctrinate young Poles and to teach them how to defend the Soviet Union. At one point, he even told Dzerzhinskaia that he had asked his pupils to listen to the broadcasts of the anti-Nazi and anticommunist Polish resistance movement, the Home Army, in order to be able to “counter” their arguments. While German communists like Wolf and Leonhard were being taught to counter Nazi propaganda,
Polish communists were thus preparing for the coming ideological struggle against the leaders of the mainstream Polish resistance. In one of his notes to Dzerzhinskaia, Berman wondered whether it might be possible to find “healthy elements”—that is, future collaborators—among the peasant leaders and even the far-right National Democrats. “For this reason,” he explained to Dzerzhinskaia, “it’s absolutely necessary, I believe, to continue the tactics of the united front.” The Polish communist party must not show its true colors too early. First it would have to find allies and collaborators, and only later could it promote Soviet-style reforms.

He was not alone in making plans along these lines. At about the same time, Soviet leaders were also preparing once again to promote “united fronts,” coalition governments that could rule immediately after liberation, across Eastern Europe. In his long 1944 memo to Molotov,
Ivan Maiskii, the Soviet foreign minister, had speculated that the proletarian revolutions might take place in some thirty or forty years’ time. But in the meantime he advocated keeping Poland and Hungary weak, perhaps dividing Germany—“in the long term it will contribute to the weakening of Germany”—and, last but not least, ensuring that local communists worked in tandem with others.
“It is in the USSR’s interests,” he concluded, for postwar governments to be “based on the principle of broad democracy, in the spirit of the idea of the national fronts.”
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The word “democracy” naturally must be taken here with a large grain of salt, for Maiskii also made it clear that these governments, created “in the spirit of the national fronts,” would not be able to tolerate the existence of political parties that were in any way hostile to socialism. In practice, this meant that in some countries (he mentions Germany, Hungary, and Poland) “various methods” of external influence would have to be deployed in order to prevent such parties from gaining power. He did not explain what those methods would be.

Persecuted in both East and West, European communists of all stripes came to inhabit a
culture of conspiracy, secrecy, and exclusivity. In their native countries they worked in cells, knew one another by pseudonyms, and communicated using passwords and dead-letter drops. In the USSR, they kept their thoughts to themselves, refrained from criticizing the party, and searched their lodgings for secret microphones.
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Wherever they were, they observed a “rigid etiquette,” which has been beautifully described by the writer
Arthur Koestler in both his novels and his memoirs. Koestler, much of whose fiction and nonfiction describes his relationship with communism, himself was drawn to the German party in the 1930s, not least because of his attraction to secrecy, conspiracy, and intrigue: “Even a superficial contact will make the innocent outsider feel that members of the Party lead a life apart from society, steeped in mystery, danger and constant sacrifice. The thrill of being in touch with this secret world is considerable even for people with an adult and otherwise unromantic mentality. Still stronger is the flattering effect of being found worthy of a certain amount of trust, of being permitted to perform minor services for the harassed men who live in such constant danger.”
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The lure of an elitist existence, complete with access to privileges and to privileged information, remained an important part of the attraction of communism for decades. At his special Comintern school
Wolfgang Leonhard read for the first time the same high-level telegrams circulated among the party bosses and realized how much more they contained than the propaganda fed to the masses: “I remember very well the feelings with which I held one of these secret information bulletins in my hands for the first time.
There was a sense of gratitude for the confidence placed in me, and a sense of pride at being one of those officials who were sufficiently mature politically to be trusted with the knowledge of other points of view.”
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Their experiences of terror—mass arrest and purges, accompanied by rapid tactical changes—had a profound impact on European
communists as well. At the
Comintern school in Ufa, Leonhard was humiliated by being forced to make a ludicrous public statement of self-criticism. As he reflected on the experience, and on the smug behavior of some of his comrades—notably a German woman named Emmi, later to become Mrs. Markus Wolf—he suddenly wondered: “Is our whole relationship at the school what it ought to be between Party members? There came back into my mind other critical thoughts, which I had had earlier in the period of the purges. Critical conversations came back to me, and I was frightened of myself. If I had already expressed critical thoughts like these, what was the end likely to be? I made up my mind in future to be much more cautious in what I said and to keep it to the minimum necessary.”
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These kinds of experiences eventually convinced Leonhard to flee East Germany, and ultimately to leave the party altogether. But others, though humiliated in similar ways, did not flee or leave. Nor were they rendered any softer or more compassionate by their traumatic experiences. Far from being humbled by their wartime suffering, whether in Hitler’s camps or in Western jails, the communists who remained in the party often became more devoted to the cause, not less so.

Many of those who physically survived the purges in the USSR—and intellectually survived the policy changes—emerged from the war with not only an increased sense of tribal loyalty but an increased feeling of dependence on the Soviet Union. And those who had remained faithful party members through the arrests, wild tactical shifts, and confusion of the 1930s often emerged as true fanatics: totally loyal to Stalin, willing to follow the Soviet lead in any direction, they obeyed all orders they were given, if to do so served the cause.
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AS THE WAR drew to its bloody end, Stalin at last gave his Eastern European protégés the chance to prove themselves. One by one, as their countries were liberated, he sent the Moscow communists back into their homelands along with the Red Army. All of them were fully conscious of their tiny numbers, and all publicly declared an intention to found or join a coalition government together with other, noncommunist parties. Bolesław Bierut arrived in Warsaw in December 1943, just in time to be named president of the new
National Council (Krajowa Rada Narodowa, or KRN). This first attempt to create a popular front failed to attract anybody except Władysław Gomułka’s still-tiny Polish Workers’ Party and a few fringe social democrats who had not joined the mainstream resistance. But a few months later, the National Council helped form a larger group, the
Polish Committee of National Liberation (Polski Komitet Wyzwolenia Narodowego, or PKWN), whose name, personally approved by Stalin, deliberately echoed de Gaulle’s French Committee of National Liberation.
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Although it was based in Lublin and now contained a few genuinely noncommunist politicians, there wasn’t much doubt about who was backing the Polish Committee of National Liberation. Its July 22 manifesto sounded very liberal, promising that “all democratic freedoms will be reinstated for all citizens irrespective of race, religion, and nationality; those freedoms to be: freedom of free associations in political and professional fields, freedom of press and information, freedom of conscience.”
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But the document was issued in Moscow, not Poland, and it was broadcast immediately on Soviet radio.

The creation of a Committee of National Liberation posed an immediate dilemma for the London government in exile, which had represented Poland abroad during the war and still maintained close links to the Home Army and the mainstream Polish resistance. Though they struggled mightily to remain Poland’s international voice, they lost that battle. In due course, the committee transformed itself into the Provisional Government of National Unity (a group that became known as the “Lublin Poles”), which all of the Allies would eventually recognize instead of the London government in exile (the “London Poles”) as Poland’s legitimate rulers. The provisional government ran the country from the beginning of 1945 and was meant to organize the elections that would select the permanent government. Because Stalin was keen to boost its legitimacy, he agreed to allow
Edward Osóbka-Morawski, technically a member of the socialist party and not the communist party, to become the provisional government’s first postwar prime minister (Bierut would acquire a formal government title only in 1947). More importantly, he allowed the prime minister in exile,
Stanisław Mikołajczyk, to return to the country and join the provisional government as minister of agriculture and deputy prime minister. For a short period, Mikołajczyk’s Polish Peasants’ Party (Polskie Stronnictwo Ludowe, or PSL) would be allowed to function as a true anticommunist opposition. Officially there was no legal Soviet or Allied authority in Poland. In practice, an NKVD general, Ivan Serov, functioned as the senior Soviet adviser to the new government and to the new Polish security forces. It soon became clear that his influence was very broad indeed.
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Not long after Bierut’s arrival in Poland, events began to move swiftly and a new authority was created in
Hungary too. At the beginning of November 1944, Mihály
Farkas,
Ernő Gerő, and
Imre Nagy, three leading “Moscow communists,” were flown in Soviet planes to the liberated eastern city of
Szeged. Immediately, they called a mass meeting to celebrate the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, during which Gerő called for “Hungarian Rebirth.”
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Mátyás Rákosi arrived in
Debrecen after that city was liberated in
January, also on a plane from Moscow. His orders were to set up a Hungarian provisional government there and to prepare for the Red Army’s conquest of Budapest. He did so in conjunction with other Hungarian politicians who were now emerging from hiding or returning from abroad. Together, they negotiated the creation of a provisional national assembly, which selected a provisional national government. As in Poland, the latter was meant to rule Hungary until elections could be held.

Also as in Poland, this first Hungarian provisional government was a coalition. It contained four legal political parties: the communists (Magyar Kommunista Párt, or MKP), the social democrats (Szociáldemokrata Párt, or SZDP), the Peasants’ Party, and the Smallholders’ Party. The last, a prewar party of small businessmen and farmers, rapidly developed into an anticommunist opposition party and rapidly attracted wide support. Nevertheless, it did not dominate the new provisional national assembly or the new provisional government. Despite the fact that the Hungarian communist party had only a few hundred members at the time, the communists were awarded more than a third of the seats in the provisional national assembly as well as several key cabinet posts, in practice including the Interior Ministry. Even Gerő acknowledged the imbalance: “The proportion of communist members was a little oversized. It was partly due to the hastiness, partly due to the overzealousness of local comrades.”
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Under the terms of the
Hungarian Armistice Agreement, signed in Moscow in January 1945, the Hungarian government in this interim period was also subject to the oversight of the Allied Control Council, a body that technically included American and British representatives but was in practice run by
Marshal Kliment Voroshilov, a senior Red Army commander who regularly failed to consult the other Allies about anything.
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Finally, on April 27, 1945, the Red Army flew the
“Ulbricht Group”—several dozen communists, under Ulbricht’s leadership—to join the First Belorussian Front on the outskirts of Berlin, whence they would enter the city. Wolfang Leonhard went with them. A few days later, the “Ackermann Group,” containing another several dozen communists, prepared to enter Berlin from the south with the First Ukrainian Front. Unlike Poland and Hungary, in eastern
Germany there was no temporary or provisional government. Instead, a
Soviet Military Administration ran its zone of Germany until the creation of the German Democratic Republic in 1949. But the Soviet administrators slowly created a German bureaucracy to help run the country
beneath the Soviet umbrella.
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In June 1947, this bureaucracy, by then a shadow government under control of the Soviet authorities, was blandly christened the
German Economic Committee (Deutsche Wirtschaftskommission, or DWK). Many German communists, especially “Moscow communists,” were immediately given senior roles to play in it. Eventually, the Economic Committee became the basis for the East German government when the
German Democratic Republic achieved statehood in 1949.

The Soviet Union would also oversee municipal and local elections in Germany as elsewhere. Although the USSR actively encouraged the refounding of the Social Democratic Party, the Christian Democratic Party, and the Free Democratic Party in their zone of Germany, they still placed communist party members in key positions in the trade unions, cultural associations, and other new institutions.
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Wherever possible, noncommunists were given public roles while communists took key jobs behind the scenes. Other kinds of political and semipolitical groupings were reconstituted elsewhere, including Zionist and Bundist organizations in Poland and Hungary, some of which initially seemed to have a degree of real independence.