Iron Curtain (78 page)

Not all of the refugees were political. One factory in
Köpenick, required to explain its employees’ departures, told the authorities that people left because their relatives were in West Germany, because the factory had not granted them a leave of absence to study, because they had debts, and because they thought they could make more money in the West. This was probably an accurate reflection of many émigrés’ motives, which were undoubtedly mixed. The last point in particular was surely influential. By the early 1950s, West Germany’s economy had left East Germany’s economy far behind, as everyone could see.

But not all of those who remained were unhappy, and it is a mistake to imagine that only a sullen, apolitical rump population remained behind after this exodus—or that, as the German scholar
Arnulf Baring once wrote, “anyone who showed initiative or was energetic and determined, had either left in time or was thrown out later on.” At least until the wall was built in 1961, those who stayed behind had extra leverage: if not given housing, better wages, or a top job, they could always threaten to leave. Those in certain critical professions—doctors, for example—were showered with privileges designed to persuade them to stay, and some of them reckoned they were better off for it. When, after Stalin’s death, her husband told her that changes in regime policy might mean that many who had fled to the West might be coming back to East Germany,
Herta Kuhrig, then aged twenty-three, thought: “Oh my God, if they return, we might have to leave our flat.”
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Knowing its citizens had a choice, the East German government refrained from cutting wages, and probably kept the police regime lighter than it would have been. Fear of a mass exodus might even help explain why there were no show trials in East Germany.
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Not all of those who stayed
were admirers of the communist system, but they had assessed the situation, worked out how much compromise would be required and how much passive opposition would be possible. They made what they thought was the best choice for themselves and their families, and then waited to see what would happen next.

ON MARCH 6, 1953, Eastern Europeans, like the rest of the world, awoke to hear stunning news: Stalin was dead.
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Across the region, radios played funereal music. Shops closed their doors. Citizens were urged to hang flags from their homes, and millions voluntarily wore black clothes and black ribbons. Newspapers appeared with black borders around the edges, black sashes were placed on Stalin’s photograph in offices, and schoolchildren took turns standing as honor guards before his portrait. Delegations from factories and ministries trooped through the offices of Soviet commandants in East Germany, where they signed condolence books in mournful silence. In the town of
Heiligenstadt, Catholic churches rang their bells and priests said an “Our Father” in Stalin’s name.
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Enormous crowds of mourners filled Wenceslas Square in
Prague, and tens of thousands gathered around the Stalin statue in Budapest. A moment of silence was observed on Alexanderplatz in
East Berlin.
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In Moscow, Stalin’s acolytes and imitators gathered for his funeral. Bolesław Bierut and Konstantin Rokossovskii, Mátyás Rákosi and
Klement Gottwald,
Walter Ulbricht and Otto Grotewohl, all of them were there. So were Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej from
Romania, Enver Hoxha from
Albania, and Vulko Chervenkov from
Bulgaria. Mao Tse-tung and Chou En-lai came from
China,
Palmiro Togliatti came from
Italy, and
Maurice Thorez from France.
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Georgy Malenkov,
Lavrentii Beria, and
Vyacheslav Molotov gave funeral orations, although they did not, one observer noted, “exhibit a trace of sorrow.”
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Emotions must have run high, however. Gottwald suffered a heart attack after the funeral and died soon after.

Change followed swiftly. By the time of his death, Stalin’s colleagues had grimly concluded that things were not going well in the Soviet empire. For many months they had been receiving regular, accurate, and extremely worrying reports from Eastern Europe. The Soviet ambassador to Prague had written of “near-total chaos” in Czech industry in December 1952, for example, along with steep price increases and a dramatic drop in living standards. Following the deaths of Stalin and Gottwald, strikes across Czechoslovakia picked up pace again. In May, thousands of Czechoslovak workers marched three kilometers from the Škoda factory to the city hall in Plzeń, where they occupied the building, burned Soviet flags, and threw busts of Lenin, Stalin, and Gottwald out of the window—a symbolic protest against the defenestration of
Jan Masaryk, the former foreign minister, an anticommunist who had been thrown out of the window of Prague castle in 1948.
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Strikes also began to spread among tobacco workers in Bulgaria, until then one of the most obedient countries in the bloc. The Soviet Politburo found this particularly disturbing: if hitherto loyal Bulgarian workers were restless, then the rest of the region must be even more unstable.
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The news from East Germany was not good either. Despite ever increasing border security, despite police controls and barbed wire, traffic over the internal German border was accelerating. More than 160,000 people had moved from East to West Germany in 1952, and a further 120,000 had left in the first four months of 1953.
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One report warned of “growing unrest among the [East German] population stemming from the hard-line policies of the GDR leadership.”
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Beria himself penned a very accurate, perfectly clear-eyed analysis:

Even with the evidence in front of them, the Soviet leaders did not publicly question their own ideology. The ideas of Marxism were still correct—but, they concluded, the people in charge had failed: they had been too harsh, too arbitrary, too hasty, too incompetent. In particular, the East German party bosses had failed. On June 2, the Soviet Politburo summoned Ulbricht,
Grotewohl, and
Fred Oelssner, the ideology chief, to Moscow to tell them so. For three days, the Politburo lectured their German comrades. They told them to abandon celebrations of Ulbricht’s birthday, to liberalize their economic program, and to postpone, indefinitely, the planned announcement of East Germany’s imminent transition to “full socialism.” This “incorrect political line” was to be replaced by a “
New Course.” The Germans naturally obeyed. On June 11,
Neues Deutschland
published a statement from the party leadership on its front page, apologizing for the “grave mistakes” of previous years, calling for an end to collectivization and even for the rehabilitation of victims of political trials.

Soviet–Hungarian talks followed a week later. This time, the Politburo attacked Rákosi, along with Ernő Gerő, Józef Révai, and Mihály Farkas. Beria—who had himself personally conducted brutal interrogations in the Soviet Union—led the charge: Rákosi, he said, had initiated an insupportable “wave of repression” against the population, even giving personal directions as to who should be arrested and beaten. Beria’s colleagues also accused the Hungarian leader of “economic adventurism.” Well aware of “discontent among the Hungarian population,” shortages, and economic hardship they ordered Rákosi to step down as prime minister, although they allowed him to remain general secretary of the Hungarian communist party.
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They replaced him with
Imre Nagy, the little-known agricultural minister. Nagy was also a “Moscow communist” who had lived in the Soviet Union before the war—where, as the historian Charles Gati argues, he had
probably worked as a secret police informer and maintained informal links to some of the Soviet leadership. But he had long favored a more gradual transition to communism and, more importantly, was not Jewish, which the Soviet Politburo seemed to think was an enormous advantage.
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He set to work designing a New Course for Hungary, and within a few weeks he was ready to announce it. In July he made his first speech to parliament, stunning his party and his country. Nagy called for an end to rapid industrialization, an end to collectivization, and a more relaxed approach to culture and the media. “In the future,” the Central Committee would soon declare, “the primary goal of our economic policy will be to raise constantly and considerably the standard of living of the people.” Nagy remained a Marxist and described all of his policies using Marxist language—his long, dull, and almost unreadable written defense of the New Course quotes Stalin and Lenin with alarming frequency—but in the context of the time he seemed fresh and very different.
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The Soviet Politburo had never intended East Germany and Hungary to make these changes on their own: the liberalization was meant to be instituted across the bloc in order to stem the tide of protest and discontent. Some of them may even have imagined that eventually similar changes would take place in the USSR, where, for a few short years—a period known in the USSR as “the Thaw”—it would also seem as if truly radical change were possible. Certainly in all of their conversations with their Eastern European partners in 1953, the Soviet leaders made it clear that their criticism was intended “not just for a single country but for all the people’s democracies.”
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Talks with the Albanian leader Enver Hoxha followed those with Ulbricht and Rákosi. More conversations, plotting more New Courses, were planned for late July. The Politburo also intended to invite the Poles, the Czechs, and the
Bulgarians to Moscow, where they would also be told to change direction and make themselves popular—or risk catastrophe.

But catastrophe came anyway, though in a form nobody had expected.

The weather broke bright and clear in Berlin on
June 17, 1953. Nevertheless, many Berliners stepped into the sunshine with trepidation, not sure what the morning would bring. The previous day, East Berlin had witnessed its first major mass strikes since the war. Emboldened by the announcement of the New Course, cheered on by Stalin’s death, frustrated by the fact that the
new policies didn’t seem to include lower work quotas, Berlin’s workers had taken to the streets to protest.
Lutz Rackow, an East German journalist, had walked down Stalinallee on June 16 alongside several thousand construction workers. They carried banners—“Berliners, join us! We don’t want to be slaves to our work!” Few had dared. But as soon as he got to Stalinallee on June 17, Rackow immediately saw that things were going to be different: “This time people were joining. Not only that, workers were coming into the city from as far as Henningsdorf to join, even though public transportation had been halted and the walk took three hours.”
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Erich Loest, the novelist who had tried to teach workers to write theater reviews, was on his way into the city that morning from
Leipzig and he saw strikers too. But he also saw Soviet tanks and trucks moving north from bases near Schonefeld and Ahlsdorf. They were heading for the center of Berlin at about the same speed as his train. On another train from Leipzig—or perhaps even the same one—the writer Elfriede
Brüning saw the same tanks. She was sitting with a colleague, who read aloud a newspaper headline: “Tumult in Bonn,” it declared. Her friend laughed, and made a daring joke: “How is it that the government has heard only about the tumult in Bonn and not the uprising in Berlin!”
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On the Western side of the city,
Egon Bahr, then the chief political editor in West Berlin for RIAS (Radio in the American Sector), was anxiously waiting to hear what was happening. A couple of days earlier, a delegation from East Berlin had come to his office to ask him to publicize their planned strike. He had agreed to broadcast the strikers’ demands—they wanted lower work quotas, lower food prices, and free elections, among other things—and he had continued to do so until the radio’s American controller,
Gordon Ewing, burst into his office and told him to stop: “Do you want to start World War Three?” Ewing told Bahr that American responsibility and American security guarantees ended at the border, and he’d better be clear about that in his broadcasts. As Bahr remembers, “This was the only order I ever got from the U.S. government at RIAS.”
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On the Eastern side of the city, most of the Politburo had left their homes early and made their way to Karlshorst, where they could hide from the expected crowds. In fact, they wound up spending the entire day there, standing around the office of the Soviet ambassador,
Vladimir Semyonov. This was not a voluntary activity. At one point, Ulbricht asked to return home, and Semyonov snarled at him: “And if anything happens to you back in your
apartment? It’s all very well for you, but think what my superiors will do to me.”
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It was perfectly clear who was in charge: at lunchtime, the Politburo learned that the Russian authorities had unilaterally imposed martial law on East
Germany. The Soviet “state of emergency” would last until the end of the month.