Iron Curtain (37 page)

Ortutay fought against both ideas, and he won. By the end of the summer, the former owners were disenfranchised, their property was confiscated, and the radio belonged entirely to a state-owned company called MKH Rt.
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That company was run, in turn, not by the government—which at that time still contained a range of politicians—but by a board composed of all major Hungarian political forces. There were two members each from each of the four legal parties—communist, socialist, Peasants’, and Smallholders—as well as two members from the trade unions.

It looked evenhanded, but in practice the two trade unionists were communists, so the communists had four board members. Many of the other delegates belonged to the far left wing of their respective parties, so they sided with the communists. Others were, like Ortutay, secretly affiliated with the communist party. By the beginning of 1946, only a year after the end of the
war, the Hungarian communist party in practice controlled the personnel of the radio, the board of the radio, and consequently the content of the radio, though neither the public nor the political class had been told that was the case. When the party decided a year later to tighten its ideological hold on the radio, nobody would be able to stop it.

BETWEEN THE SIGNING of the Yalta treaty, with its promise of free elections in Eastern Europe, and Winston Churchill’s “
Iron Curtain” speech, which foretold the rise of totalitarianism, a year elapsed. During that year, a great many changes took place. The Red Army
brought Moscow-trained secret policemen into every
occupied country, put local communists in control of national radio stations, and
began dismantling youth groups and other civic organizations. They arrested, murdered, and deported people whom they believed to be anti-Soviet, and they brutally enforced a policy of ethnic cleansing.

These changes were no secret, and they had not been concealed from the outside world. The British prime minister himself used the phrase “iron curtain” for the first time not in his famous Fulton speech but just as the war was ending in May 1945, only three months after Yalta. In a letter to Truman, Churchill wrote that “an iron curtain is drawn down upon their front. We do not know what is going on behind.”
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Churchill’s love of grand language concealed the truth. He did know what was going on “behind the iron curtain,” because his Polish interlocutors had been telling him, much to his annoyance.

In fact, the warm relationship between the Anglo-Saxon powers and the Soviet Union had begun to break down much earlier. “The alliance between ourselves and the democratic faction of the capitalists succeeds because the latter had an interest in preventing Hitler’s domination,” Stalin told Georgi Dimitrov before the end of the war. “In the future we shall be against this faction of the capitalists as well.” The tensions grew worse as the war drew to an end. Though the very first meeting of the
American army and the Red Army on the river
Elbe in April 1945 was an occasion of handshakes and celebrations, it was followed by petty arguments over where and to whom the Germans ought to surrender—in the end there were two ceremonies—and an abrupt American decision to end the
Lend-Lease program, which had been financing Soviet purchases of U.S. goods during the war.
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The first use of the atomic bomb in August set off another wave of Soviet paranoia. By the end of that month American and Russian soldiers were engaged in frequent nighttime shoot-outs in Berlin.
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But events in Eastern Europe, and particularly in Poland, were the real trigger for the more profound mutual distrust that would soon become known as the Cold War. By the autumn of 1944,
George Kennan had already concluded that those members of the Polish government in exile who continued to fight for democracy “were, in my eyes, the doomed representatives of a doomed regime, but no one could be so brutal as to say this to them.”
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Six months later, in May 1945,
Harry Hopkins, one of Roosevelt’s closest advisers,
traveled to Moscow to meet Stalin and to transmit to him President Truman’s concerns over “our inability to carry into effect the Yalta Agreement on Poland.” In response, Stalin furiously denounced the Lend-Lease decision and declared that the USSR needed to have a “friendly”—that is, pro-Soviet—Poland on its borders.
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Still, Stalin had agreed to the Yalta protocols, and elections would be held, even in the odd circumstances. During the initial period of Soviet occupation and coalition rule of Eastern Europe—roughly 1945 to 1947—some, though not all, noncommunist political parties still had the legal right to exist. Some noncommunist newspapers could be published. Political campaigns were conducted. The degree of political freedom varied from country to country, as did the degree to which elections were manipulated or falsified outright. But at least in the very beginning, the Soviet Union clearly intended to preserve at least the appearance, and to some extent the reality, of democratic choice.

And it expected to benefit. As I’ve noted, both the Soviet Union and its allies in Eastern Europe thought that democracy would work in their favor. This is an important point, often overlooked and worth repeating: though the sincerity of this expectation varied from country to country, most of the parties in the region held elections soon after the war’s end because they thought they would win, and they had some good reasons for that belief. In the immediate aftermath of the war, almost all of the political parties operating in Europe advocated policies which, by modern standards, were very left wing. Even the center-right Christian democrats in West Germany and the Conservatives in Britain were willing to accept a heavy role for the state in the economy in the late 1940s, up to and including the nationalization of some industries. Across the continent, just about everyone advocated the creation of extensive welfare states. Communist parties had done very well in European elections in the past and seemed poised to do so again. The French communist party won the largest number of votes in the parliamentary elections of 1945. Why should the same not be true farther east?

European communists also had ideological reasons to believe in victory. According to Marx, the working class would sooner or later become conscious of its own destiny, and would sooner or later put its faith in the communist party. Once this happened, communist parties would quite naturally be elected to power by working-class majorities. In a later interview, the Polish communist
Leon Kasman explained:

Ulbricht, in a speech to his party in early 1946, expressed a similar optimism:

At least in public, Ulbricht never entertained the possibility that elections might
not
eventually lead to a working-class majority.

Stalin himself was more cynical, or perhaps he had never quite grasped what Europeans meant by “democracy” and “free elections.” During the war, he told a Polish delegation from London led by
Stanisław Mikołajczyk, then the leader of the Polish government in exile, that “there are certain people—both Left and Right—that we cannot allow in Polish politics.” Mikołajczyk pointed out that in a democracy, it was not possible to dictate who could be in politics and who could not. In response, “Stalin looked at me as if I were … a lunatic and ended the conference.”
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Later, in August 1944, Stalin offhandedly told a group of Polish émigré leaders that the Soviet Union would look favorably upon the formation of a “coalition” of “democratic parties” in Poland—although these questions would, of course, “be resolved by the Poles themselves.” By “coalition” he meant a pre-electoral coalition, whose members would not compete with one another. By “democratic” he meant pro-Soviet.
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Clearly, he preferred the kind of “election” that involved no competition whatsoever. In those sorts of circumstances, even the Polish communists had a chance of victory. As he told Władysław Gomułka in 1945, “With good agitation and a proper attitude, you may win a considerable number of votes.”
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Several countries obligingly followed Stalin’s formula and held elections
without competition. Yugoslavia held exactly that sort of election—Tito needed no Soviet persuasion to persecute his opponents—in November 1945. The official results declared that 90 percent of voters had voted for the Yugoslav People’s Front, the only party on the ballot. The Soviet ambassador in Belgrade praised this exercise effusively, telling
Vyacheslav Molotov that these elections had “strengthened” the country. He reckoned them a great success.
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In
Bulgaria, the communist party also organized several left-leaning parties into a coalition called the Fatherland Front in November 1945 elections.
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In both countries the genuine opposition—parties of the center and the center-right that refused to join the coalition—called upon their countrymen to boycott the vote, and many did. The communist parties declared victory anyway.

Yet despite the best efforts of the NKVD and the local communists, not all of the region’s politicians were willing to enter a unified electoral coalition, and not all of the working class became rapidly conscious of its destiny either. In 1945 and 1946 the region’s economy was still in chaos. Political violence had created hatred and resentment of the Soviet Union. The result was that instead of confirming Marx’s predictions, the first round of free and semi-free elections proved catastrophic for the communists in much of the region. In their wake, the communist parties’ tactics grew much harsher.

In Poland, Stalin moved cautiously at first, at least in the matter of the elections. His envoys did not immediately bully the Polish political class into staging a one-party election, as in Yugoslavia or Bulgaria. Following the arrest and deportation of the sixteen Home Army leaders, the Western powers were watching Polish politics far more closely, and perhaps Stalin felt it was important to maintain the fiction of a coalition provisional government. Presumably with these considerations in mind, Stalin allowed one last, noncommunist Polish leader, Stanisław Mikołajczyk—the politician who had tried to argue with him about democracy—to return to the country and operate legally in the spring of 1945.

Unlike the Polish communists, none of whom had taken part in prewar Polish electoral politics, Mikołajczyk was well known to the general public. Before 1939, he had been president of the Polish Peasants’ Party (Polskie Stronnictwo Ludowe, or PSL)—a group with a rural base, a social democratic agenda, and real legitimacy. Following the double German-Soviet invasion in September, Mikołajczyk had made his way to London, where he had
joined the Polish government in exile. After the death of
General Władysław Sikorski in a shocking plane crash in Gibraltar in 1943, Mikołajczyk himself became prime minister in exile. In that capacity, he negotiated with Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill over the status of Poland at the end of the war, growing angrier and more ill-tempered as those negotiations went sour. During a particularly ugly meeting with Stalin and Churchill
in Moscow in October 1944, he accidentally learned that despite reassurances from Roo-sevelt himself, the Allies had already ceded eastern Poland to the Soviet Union at the Tehran Conference (the meeting at which Churchill suggested that Poland might “move westward, like soldiers taking two steps left close”). He shouted at Churchill and demanded a change of policy. The British prime minister shouted back at him: “We’ll become sick and tired of you if you continue arguing!”
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After the arrest of the sixteen Home Army leaders in March 1945, Mikołajczyk had little faith in the possibility of democracy in Poland. He decided to return to the country anyway. As
Krystyna Kersten notes, Miko-łajczyk was “under the illusion that Stalin was serious when he declared that his goal was not a Communist Poland but only a democratic Poland friendly to the USSR.”
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For this he was criticized by many Poles in both London
and Poland who felt his return granted a spurious legitimacy to a government that was under de facto Soviet control already. One émigré newspaper made dark predictions: “History teaches us that no one can stop dictatorial totalitarianism through even the farthest-reaching compromises … The only road to deliverance is—the timely reversal of world opinion to our advantage.”
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Mikołajczyk pointed out that the Yalta treaty had guaranteed “free and unfettered
elections as soon as possible on the basis of universal suffrage and secret ballot.” He was determined to take this promise at its face value.
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