Iron Curtain (39 page)

What had happened? In its postmortem discussion of the failed referendum campaign, the communist party bitterly concluded that the mass production of leaflets had backfired, and the mass painting of slogans had annoyed people. The propaganda had been overwhelming and too crude. As one inspector in the new Ministry of Propaganda wrote in an internal report:

In the future, they told one another, agitators had to be better trained to answer the two most frequently heard public complaints: Why had Poland’s eastern territories been taken away? And why were Soviet soldiers still on Polish soil? Incompetent agitators were to be fired immediately. Conversations, not posters and leaflets, were to be used from now on.
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Even allowing for the “mistakes” of propagandists, the communist party still found it hard to understand how workers and peasants could reject them in such numbers. Profoundly wedded to an ideology that was supposed to bring them victory—workers were supposed to support the workers’ state,
after all—they struggled to understand their countrymen. Even Poles living in the new western territories had voted no to their annexation.
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One member of the Warsaw party committee concluded his countrymen were infected by “confused thinking” on an inconceivable scale:

The referendum was an important turning point, even more so than the parliamentary elections that followed. For one, it represented the dawning of a realization that would still take many years to sink in: propaganda had its limits. Not only Polish communists but communists of all kinds would eventually conclude that more did not mean better. More importantly, Poland’s communists now knew they had no chance of a “clean” electoral victory of any kind. Either they would have to threaten and intimidate Mikołajczyk’s supporters, or they would have to falsify the election results altogether.

In the end, they did both. During the six months between the failed referendum and the parliamentary election in January 1947, the secret police arrested all of PSL’s Kraków leadership; they searched and sacked the party’s headquarters in Warsaw; they interrogated and then arrested the entire PSL press department. The American ambassador in Warsaw wrote in a diplomatic cable that “even meetings arranged by PSL [that] are devoted to Polish–Soviet friendship have been broken up.”
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All public electoral meetings were organized directly by the army because, as
Brus put it, “an army uniform is much more effective than a propagandist in civilian clothes.”
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Under the guise of promoting security, detachments known as “propaganda security groups” were sent out around the country to “protect” the public from armed partisans.

As the vote grew closer, the regime’s tactics grew more brazen. A week before the election, PSL candidates were struck from the ballot in ten out
of fifty-two electoral districts—mostly in the rural southeast, a traditional Peasants’ Party stronghold. On the final evening, the communist party sent thousands of fake telegrams to PSL officials, all identical: “
MIKOŁAJCZYK KILLED LAST NIGHT IN A PLANE ACCIDENT
.” In his memoirs, Mikołajczyk described voting day, January 17, 1947, as “a black day in Polish history”:

And yet, he related, not everyone obeyed: “Hundreds of thousands of these courageous people had concealed ballots with Polish Peasant Party numbers on them, and as they approached the ballot boxes, they managed to crumple the number three slips and insert slips of their own choice into the envelopes …”
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Others ducked out of the line and returned later when the soldiers were gone. Not that it mattered. According to the official results, 80 percent of Polish voters cast their ballots for the “democratic bloc.” Only 10 percent voted for the PSL. Mikołajczyk resigned from the cabinet in protest. The parliament selected Bierut to serve as the Polish president, and Józef
Cyrankiewicz, a social democrat who wanted his party to be unified with the communists, as Poland’s prime minister. The British and American ambassadors lodged official protests and boycotted the opening day of parliament, but to no avail.
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Nine months later, in October 1947, Mikołajczyk slipped out of Poland, made his way to the British zone of Germany, and flew to England. He said he had been covertly warned that he was at risk of immediate arrest. Though the British seemed to treat him as a mild hysteric, he was probably right. His Bulgarian counterpart,
Nikola Petkov, the leader of the opposition Agrarian Party, had been arrested, tried, and executed in the summer of 1947. His Hungarian counterpart,
Ferenc Nagy, leader of the opposition Smallholders’ Party, had been blackmailed into exile at about the same time. The PSL lived on in name, in the form of the phony “shadow” party created for the 1947
elections, but played no further role in real politics, and after its demise there
would be no authentic legal
political opposition to the
communist party in Poland for more than thirty years.
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In truth, the Polish communist party’s electoral failure could not have been totally unexpected, at least in Moscow: Stalin had few illusions about the political allegiances of the Poles. But the Soviet Union had much greater faith in the electoral appeal of communist parties elsewhere. In eastern Austria, where the Red Army was still stationed, he thought the communist party might perform well in autumn elections, and there were high hopes for
Romania too. But nowhere were expectations raised higher than in Budapest.

Indeed, the Hungarian communist party was absolutely confident of its success in the first postwar national elections, the first truly free and fair poll in Hungarian history. Full suffrage was extended to women, peasants, and the uneducated for the first time.
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Campaigning was open, conducted in the press and in public. Six parties put up candidates, each on a separate list: the Smallholders’ Party, a party that was, as noted, quite similar in its sociology and its philosophy to the Polish PSL; the social democrats; the communist party; and three smaller parties.

Mátyás Rákosi personally expected a major triumph. Unemployment and discontent were such that it was easy to get angry, aggressive-sounding crowds out into the streets, and the party did so as often as possible. Across the country communist leaders staged mass demonstrations, shouted slogans, and put up posters. So overwhelming was their presence on the streets of Budapest that Rákosi confidently predicted victory for the left-wing coalition—the communist party plus the social democrats—even in the Budapest municipal elections that were held several weeks before the national poll. Together, the two left-wing parties would win “maybe 70 percent or maybe even more,” he told the Central Committee. General Voroshilov, then the highest-ranking Soviet officer in Hungary as well as the head of the Allied Control Council, suspected Rákosi was exaggerating, and complained to Molotov that the communist leader was overfond of mass demonstrations.
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True, Rákosi could get 300,000 people on the streets, but he had “not even begun meticulous educational work among his members.” Voroshilov also felt Rákosi wasn’t “focused” enough on the economy—a euphemistic way of saying that his economic policies were already beginning to fail.
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Inside his party, few dared contradict Rákosi. Jenő Széll, who then worked
in the communist party’s propaganda office (and in 1956 rebelled against communist rule), was put in charge of managing election propaganda in the town of Pápa, in western Hungary. In advance of the vote, Széll was invited to a regional meeting to report on progress. As he listened to one glowing account of mass support after another, he began to worry: “Everybody reported that the communist party is well ahead, the two workers’ parties will get an absolute majority … And I said to myself, ‘You unfortunate Széll, either you join the crowd and lie, or you tell the truth and get into trouble.’ ”
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Széll screwed up his courage and an1swered honestly. He told the assembled activists that the left-wing coalition had little support in Pápa. The Smallholders’ Party was very strong there, and might even win an outright majority (as it eventually did). Rákosi dismissed this information, declaring that Comrade Széll was misled, that he had met only with reactionaries, that propaganda would be increased in Pápa, that the public would be brought around. Eventually, Comrade Széll would see that everything would be all right.

But everything was not all right. The first shock came on Budapest’s municipal election night, October 7, 1945. As the results were read out, the communists learned that the Smallholders had received more than 50 percent of the vote. Rákosi, “pale as a corpse, sank into the chair without saying a word.” The national elections on November 4 went no better. As the results came in to party headquarters, Széll saw one senior communist “going white, going blue, going green, his lips becoming gray.” The counterrevolution was coming, the man declared, stumbling out of the room: “The White Terror will follow.”
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Rákosi, perhaps better prepared this time, reacted with more confidence. He entered the room, as Széll also remembered, “with a great smile, saying, ‘What news, comrades?’ ”

The Smallholders had won hands down, with 57 percent of the vote. The socialist party came second, with 17.4 percent. The communist party finished a dismal third, with 16.9 percent.

Though they had suspected Rákosi’s optimism was exaggerated, the Soviet authorities in Budapest were alarmed by the scale of this defeat, and they looked for scapegoats. In his report back to Moscow,
Major Tugarev of the Red Army’s political department blamed “the economic situation of the country”—inflation, coal shortages—as well as the “right-wing leaders” who had somehow contrived to make the communists responsible for these failings. He accused the Smallholders of using anti-Soviet slogans and violence, and dwelled at some length on the perfidious behavior of Cardinal József Mindszenty, primate of the Hungarian Catholic Church. Clearly, Tugarev feared the Red Army would be blamed—thefts, rapes, and deportations had taken their toll—and that there might be consequences for himself. Hungarians, he claimed, had “provoked” Soviet soldiers into bad behavior. They had given alcohol to soldiers, sent the soldiers to loot houses, and then taken the looted goods in exchange for food and more alcohol. The communist party, because of its close links to the Soviet Union, was then held responsible.
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Voroshilov pointed more forthrightly at his allies. He told Stalin that the Hungarian communist party had been infiltrated by “criminal elements, careerists, and adventurers, people who previously supported fascists, or were even members of fascist organizations.” More to the point, Voroshilov explained somewhat euphemistically, “It is detrimental to the party that its leaders are not of Hungarian origin.” By this, he of course meant that there were too many Jews.
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Within a few years, Rákosi would unleash waves of terror against precisely the same scapegoats identified in Voroshilov’s report: the Smallholders’ Party, Mindszenty, the Church, and the Jewish communists, or at least some of them.

Briefly, the Smallholders did try to benefit from their victory. Zoltán Tildy, the Smallholders’ Party leader, and
Ferenc Nagy, now the speaker of the parliament, told Rákosi that the Smallholders wanted half the seats in the new cabinet—only reasonable since they had won more than half the votes—and that the other half should be divided among the other parties. They also tried to take the Interior Ministry away from the communists and put at least some of its functions under their own control.

They lost both arguments. Voroshilov—acting under the instructions of Molotov in Moscow—told Rákosi to inform Tildy and Nagy that although
the communists had received only some 17 percent of the vote, that 17 percent represented the working class, the “most active force in the country.” Moreover, “the heavy burden of restoring the economy lies on the shoulders of the working class,” and thus the working class deserved a much larger role in government. Aside from that, he explained, Tildy and Nagy needed to understand that “Hungary is in a special situation. Although a defeated country, Hungary has, thanks to the greathearted Soviet Union, received the opportunity to rapidly rejuvenate itself on a democratic basis.” A strong presence of the working class in the new parliament was a “guarantee that Hungary would fulfill its obligations to the Soviet Union.”
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