After the initial formation of the people’s democracies in Eastern Europe in 1944-45, the next stage of Sovietization involved the establishment of Communists’ predominance. This process varied from country to country and differed significantly in its pace. It is also important to note that there was considerable fluidity between these periods within individual countries. Still, the task of Sovietization was essentially completed in all of them by the end of 1947 and 1948.
The regimes in Bulgaria, Poland, Romania, and the SBZ developed mixed political systems in which the Communists accepted non-Communist parties as junior partners in multiparty coalitions. Controllable opposition parties were also sometimes acceptable in this schema. In Bulgaria, non-Communist parties that participated in the government were allies of the Communists within the Left bloc. In Poland and Romania, the allied parties in the Left bloc supplied the overwhelming majority of the government ministers. Some centrist forces also took part in the political life of these countries, but they were insignificant minorities in their respective governments. In Poland, this was the case of the Polish Peasant Party under Mikolajczyk. In Romania, the centrist forces were represented by the National Liberals, headed up by Gheorghe Tatarescu; but they soon abandoned their oppositional stance and joined with the FND.
In the SBZ, as well as in Poland and Romania, there can be little question that the leftist governments and the leading position of the Communists in them resulted primarily from Soviet military and political domination rather than from internal developments. In Bulgaria, on the other hand, the leadership of the Left bloc with the Communist Party at its head enjoyed substantial popular support. In Czechoslovakia and Hungary, coalitions were formed between the Communist Parties and their leftist allies on the one hand and the democratic and even some conservative parties on the other. The coalitions were more genuine than the ones in Romania, Poland, and eastern Germany, and were based on a rough parity between leftist and center/rightist parties. Despite the growing pretensions of Josip Broz Tito, Moscow tended to be quite satisfied with the evolution of the Yugoslav regime and its Albanian client.242
In most of Eastern Europe, Moscow opted for a strategy that emphasized the gradual evolution toward a socialist order. This meant gradually increasing the role played by the Communist Parties in the national governments and eliminating or marginalizing opposition forces in or outside the ruling coalitions. The Communists complemented these policies with the subordination of their partners on the Left. Meanwhile, the Communists strengthened their control over the economic and social spheres, expanding the realm of government-owned industry, taking over transportation, finance, and trade, and implementing radical land reform. Still, on Soviet instructions, they stopped short of fully nationalizing industry and collectivizing agriculture. The facade of democracy was to remain in the form of political coalitions, multiparty systems, and parliaments. The idea, which Stalin articulated in discussions with a number of leaders of East European people’s democracies, was for these countries to move toward socialism without going through the stage of the dictatorship of the proletariat.243
Stalin was far less specific about the length of time it would take for the East European states to reach the stage of a socialist order by this non-Soviet route. Nor did he indicate how long a multiparty and parliamentary system should be preserved, including a legitimate opposition and elements of genuine coalition politics. Some historians maintain that the Soviets intended to drop the democratic facade as soon as possible and replace it with a transition to socialism on the Soviet model. Others contend that Stalin seriously considered the possibility that the countries ofthe region could develop democratic paths to socialism, distinct from the Soviet example.244
The argument about the Kremlin’s long-term intentions aside, the documents made available in Russia and Eastern Europe over the previous decade make it apparent that the means by which socialism would be built had little to do with democratic politics and parliamentary procedures. On the contrary, the implementation of socialist policies by the Communist Parties and their Soviet mentors relied from the beginning on administrative pressure, subversion, and direct repression, including attacks on the opposition and leftist allies if they proved too independent. At the end of 1944 and beginning of 1945, the Bulgarian government persecuted the leader of the Agrarian Union, Georgi Dimitrov (Gemeto), who was not only removed fTom his post as a result of behind-the-scenes Communist pressure but was subsequently arrested and brought to trial. Also in Bulgaria, Stalin ordered that the defense minister and a leader of the Zveno (Link) Party, Damian Velchev, be removed from power.245 In Poland and Romania, the security organs arrested and interrogated opposition leaders and subjected others to restrictions and intimidation. To these actions in Poland and Romania should be added the blackmail, threats, and falsified results that accompanied the Polish referendum of
June 1946 and the parliamentary elections in Poland in January 1947 and in Romania in November 1946.
Having falsified the Polish parliamentary elections of January 1947, Communist authorities set out to destroy Mikolajczyk’s PSL through force and repression. This produced a crisis within his party, which ended when Mikolajczyk and other PSL leaders fled for their lives to the West in October 1947, leaving control of the party to those members who opted to side with the Communist authorities.246 In Bulgaria and Romania in June 1947, based on fabricated accusations of plotting against the government, the chief leaders of the opposition were arrested, accused of a variety of crimes in a series of show trials, and sentenced to long prison terms.247
At the turn of 1946/47, the Hungarian Communist-controlled secret services initiated a campaign against the leaders of the Smallholder Party, which held significant positions in the government and in the parliament. (In the 1945 elections the party had received 57 percent of the vote.) The Smallholders were accused of fomenting an antigovernment conspiracy. As a result, the Soviet military authorities arrested the party’s general secretary, Bela Kovacs, in February 1947 and, in the course of the investigation, produced materials regarding the alleged participation in the plot of several party leaders, including the prime minister, Ferenc Nagy. The Hungarian Communist leader Matyas Rakosi used these allegations to force the Smallholders to transfer the party’s leadership and the post of prime minister to Left-leaning members connected with the Communists. As a consequence of splits within the opposition engineered by Rakosi (his so-called salami tactics), in August 1947 new parliamentary elections were held in which the leftist bloc collected 60 percent of the vote. Communist Party members officially held a third of the positions in the new government but, counting secret members and sympathizers who nominally represented other parties, they controlled more than half of the government posts. Relying on their strengthened position in the government, the Communists used well-tested police methods of accusing opposition politicians of engaging in antistate activities to eliminate political dissidence altogether.248
Similar methods were used in Czechoslovakia. During the second half of 1947, the Communist-controlled secret police leveled accusations of
14. Hungarian election posters, 1947.
Antigovernment conspiracy against several non-Communist parties in the ruling coalition. This offensive concluded with the February 1948 coup, which was orchestrated by the Czechoslovak Communists themselves and led to the destruction of all of the other parties.249 In Bulgaria and Romania, the legal opposition was entirely eliminated in 1948; in Hungary, this process extended until the beginning of 1949.
In most of the East European countries, the domination of the Communist Parties over their social democratic "allies" was an important part of achieving
Total control over the domestic political situation. In the SBZ, this process began already in the spring of 1946, when the forced "unification" of the KPD and SPD produced the new, Communist-dominated SED (Socialist Unity Party). By 1948, the elimination of social democratic parties by merging them forcibly with the Communist Parties, often heralded by noisy "unity" campaigns, was completed in all of the countries of the region. The Communists reorganized and eliminated the other parties of the Left bloc during 1947-48, merging some into new formations, splitting others, and leaving some to survive as "stage props," which unreservedly supported the preeminent role of the Communist Party in the building of socialism. Now all of the countries of Eastern Europe essentially had Communist one-party systems like Yugoslavia and Albania. The monopoly on political power was combined in all of the East European countries, including the SBZ, with corresponding measures in the social, economic, and cultural spheres.
Soviet representatives were involved in virtually all of the political machinations described above. Soviet advisers shaped electoral campaigns, selected government ministers, and approved secret police actions. Stalin sent a team of Soviet Interior Ministry experts to Poland to provide "technical advice" about the legal and extralegal methods to achieve the appropriate results in the elections of January 1947.250 Stalin also personally approved political trials, unification campaigns with the social democrats, and important government appointments. East European Communists fully expected to work with the Soviets on political matters.
The East European comrades were also closely watched and sometimes carefully micromanaged by Moscow. Communist functionaries expected to be instructed, and they learned to ask their Soviet patrons for permission to undertake initiatives or for directives regarding even trivial internal or external policy questions, including appointments to positions in the party and government. Competing factions within the East European Communist Parties played out their rivalries in Moscow, providing alternative policy or appointment suggestions to their Kremlin patrons. One can see this in particularly sharp reliefin the competition between Gheorghiu-Dej and his group in the Romanian party and their rivals Ana Pauker, Vasile Luca, and Teohari
Georgescu.251 The conflicts between Enver Hoxha and Kofi Xoxe in the Albanian Communist Party were similarly articulated in their alternative presentations to Moscow.252 253 In these cases and others, internal party rivalries on the one hand, and Stalin’s unwillingness to make an unambiguous choice on the other, often left the East Europeans with a measure of autonomy.
Differences between Soviet advisers in the region also left room for Maneuver.
Where Stalin allowed the East Europeans very little autonomy was in the realm of foreign policy. Instructive in this connection were the measures taken by Moscow at the end of June and beginning of July 1947 to ensure the desired response of the people’s democracies to the Marshall Plan. In a little over two weeks, the Soviet leadership changed its directives three times in encrypted telegrams sent to the leaders of the East European Communist Parties.254 Initially, the instructions stipulated that all the people’s democracies should express interest in the plan. Later, the Soviets suggested that their representatives should participate in the conference of European states convened to discuss the plan, but should disagree with its substance and withdraw, trying to persuade the other small European states to leave with them. Finally, Moscow directed the people’s democracies not to participate at all in the conference or in the implementation of the plan. The East European Communist leaders accepted seriatim all of these directives without question. The only serious complications emerged with the Czechoslovak government, which had a non-Communist majority. Benes and his associates were completely committed to the Marshall Plan process. But at a meeting in Moscow on July 9, 1947, Stalin ruthlessly pressured the Czechoslovak government delegation, forcing them to reject outright the Marshall Plan and refuse participation in the upcoming confer-ence.255 Jan Masaryk wrote: "I went to Moscow as a Foreign Minister of an independent sovereign state; I returned as a lackey of the Soviet Government."256
World History
