The Second World War, or rather its outcome, reversed the course of history of East Central Europe. Traditionally a borderland or a semi-periphery of the West, the region became a westward extension of the Soviet East. Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland found themselves in a semi-colonial relationship of dependence on the USSR which was culturally, socio-economically, and politically more backward than they. At first, the communist-imposed transformation appeared as a modernizing process. The elimination of direst poverty and remnants of illiteracy, a certain equalization and democratization of society, and an all-out industrialization pointed toward progress. But the Soviet-style industrialization with its obsessive emphasis on coal and steel, which was no longer the driving force of modern economy, became increasingly anachronistic. Rigid central planning promoted waste. Inefficiency reigned supreme. Disregard for the environment opened the way to an ecological catastrophe. East Central Europe had to pay a heavy price for the forty-odd years of communist experiments, and the costs included an atomization and demoralization of society that escape quantification.
For the first time in history the Russian shadow fell not only on Poland but also on Hungary and Czechoslovakia. As long as Soviet might and willpower appeared intact, all that East Central Europe could do was to try to ease the yoke and try it did. This led at times to dramatic developments, as in 1956 in Poland and Hungary, in 1968 in Czechoslovakia, and in 1980 in Poland again. But it was only when reforms in the Soviet Union and the Soviet-dominated bloc became inevitable that native forces in the three countries could sweep communism aside in the miraculous year of 1989.
The symbol of the postwar division of Europe was Yalta. This wartime conference of the Big Three was in a sense an experiment in world government in which the United States and the Soviet Union were to play the leading roles. But the West did not envisage the Soviet sphere of influence as a closed bloc, and Churchill expressed dismay over the Iron Curtain that descended, separating
East Central Europe from the rest of the continent. Still, the ensuing decades of peace in this bipolar world came to rest on a balance between the two blocs and their formidable nuclear arsenal. It was regrettable that a hundred million or so East Central and South Eastern Europeans were subjected to an oppressive regime. Their resistance insofar as it weakened the Soviet colossus was welcomed, but not to the extent that it might rock the boat of West-East coexistence and endanger peace. There was a certain inherent hypocrisy in American policies toward the area, whether they went under the name of Containment or Liberation.
Was Stalin’s conquest of East Central Europe the result of a master plan that involved a timetable, or of exploitation of opportunities as they arose? This type of question, reminiscent of the controversy over whether Hitler had been a fanatical conqueror or a cool tactician, is somewhat naive. Surely one cannot eliminate the pragmatic factor from either Stalin’s or Hitler’s policies, just as one cannot fully understand these policies without stressing ideology. In the communist case the conviction about the inevitability of socio-economic change resulting in a permanent transformation of the world was real enough. So was the faith in the Communist Party; it was viewed as more than a sum of its members, and as embodying the true ideology and the power of the working class. It had to be always right even if individual leaders could be wrong. Finally, the belief that history was on the side of communism constituted a powerful component of Marxism-Leninism.
The First World War had brought a victory of communism in Russia; the Second was likely to spread the revolution throughout the continent. But, come what may, Stalin was determined to retain all the territorial acquisitions made in collusion with Hitler, and he rounded them out by the addition of the northern part of East Prussia, of Finnish Karelia, and Carpatho-Ukraine. As for Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia, Moscow expected their gratitude, for the Red Army had not only liberated them from the Germans, but also “saved” them from their own history: feudal, bourgeois, clerical, and fascist. According to Soviet views they were ripe for change in 1945, and the USSR was going to bring it about. Stalin, however, was astute enough to make allowances for local conditions. The region was different from Russia and it would first have to go through the stage of coalition governments—real or bogus—and then take the form of People’s Democracies before graduating to the truly socialist status.
Moreover, Soviet policies of shaping East Central Europe were operating within a changing international context. The two original Soviet assumptions of a continuing postwar cooperation between the Big Three and of a successful ideological penetration of Western Europe, had to be drastically revised in the 1945-7 period. With the beginning of the Cold War the former grand alliance was falling apart. French and Italian communists proved unable to gain power, and massive American aid in the form of the Marshall Plan (and the birth of Containment that restricted communism to its bloc) dispelled Soviet hopes for a westward extension of its ideological and political might. In response to this evolution and in accord with its own goals Moscow began to apply ever tighter screws on the regimes it had either installed or temporarily accepted in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary.
East Central Europe emerged badly scarred from the Second World War; Poland having suffered most, Czechoslovakia least. The Soviet “liberation” was accompanied by mass looting and rapes as well as by arrests and deportations. In Hungary, where some 400,000 people perished in the war, a quarter of a million were deported to the USSR, among them Istvan Bethlen. Even the Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, who had been saving Hungarian Jews, was taken to Russia. Budapest had suffered greatly during the siege, and destructions elsewhere were sizeable. The Soviets, acting under the guise of the Allied Control Commission, and ignoring weak protests of their colleagues, arbitrarily collected reparations by dismantling factories and using slave labor. In March 1945 Hungarian production stood at 30 percent of its prewar level; the total national wealth was calculated as having dropped by 40 percent.
The figures for Poland tell an even more tragic story. Population losses were proportionately the highest in Europe, and they comprised wartime dead, postwar deportees to the USSR, and the political emigration in the West. In comparison with the prewar 35 million, Poland’s population within the new borders in 1945 stood at 24 million inhabitants. The loss of $625 per capita, the destruction of 85 percent of Warsaw and some other cities, enormous cultural losses, all caused Poland to hold a number of grim records.
Territorially, Hungary returned to its prewar shape through the peace treaty of 1947; its hopes for retaining a part of Transylvania were dashed. Czechoslovakia, as mentioned, lost only Carpatho-Ukraine and gained a small bridgehead near Bratislava. The biggest and most profound changes occurred with regard to Poland, which lost nearly one half of its prewar territory to the USSR, and acquired, largely as compensation, the former German lands of Silesia, western Pomerania, and southern East Prussia. Its new territory of 311, 730 sq. km was one-fifth smaller than before the war but it included a broad access to the Baltic sea with the ports of Gdansk (Danzig) and Szczecin (Stettin). Polish coal resources doubled; those of lead, zinc, copper, and iron ores significantly increased. Postwar Poland was thus potentially a richer country than before, even though the Soviets had shamelessly dismantled factories and engaged in massive looting in the former German lands that were transferred to Poland. Furthermore the USSR forced the Poles to deliver coal at below world prices. The Poles did, however, escape joint ventures with the Soviets, which were introduced in Hungary. The devastated and dislocated Polish economy badly needed assistance, but little was forthcoming. There was some help for the population under the Allied UNRRA schemes and some direct from the United States, but the question of how to help the country without strengthening the communist regime arose early, and proved impossible to resolve.
Territorial and demographic changes amounted to a veritable socioeconomic revolution, that was accelerated by communist legislation. Expropriation of estates eliminated the aristocracy and landowning gentry; gradual nationalization of industries led to the disappearance of the bourgeoisie; the intelligentsia (its Jewish component largely gone) suffered grievous losses. Deportations, migrations, and repatriations resulted in over a third of the Polish population living elsewhere than in 1939. National minorities, after population transfers that particularly affected (apart from the Germans) the Ukrainians, have become minuscule as compared with prewar times. There remained a few hundred thousand of Ukrainians and Belorussians in Poland, although their presence has been officially acknowledged only in the last few years. There is a small but active Lithuanian minority there and a Polish minority in Czechoslovakia. Hungarians in spite of some transfers in Slovakia still constitute a sizeable group. The greatest change on the ethnic map of East Central Europe, however, has resulted from the drastic reduction, in some cases disappearance, of the Germans and Jews.
With a grudging Allied blessing some 3 million Sudeten Germans, regarded as collectively responsible for treason toward Czechoslovakia, were expelled to Germany. There were Czechs who regarded this as a Pyrrhic victory, at least from a moral standpoint, but it was only after the collapse of communism in 1989 that President Havel publicly acknowledged the feeling of guilt. Indeed, many innocent people died in the “transfer” from Czech lands to Germany. The Poles, emerging from the trauma of the Nazi occupation, found it much harder to feel compassionate toward the millions of Germans who fled, perished, or were brutally expelled from lands now coming under Poland’s rule. Communist propaganda represented the Soviet Union as the only guarantor of the new German-Polish border along the Odra-Nysa (Oder-Neisse) rivers and successfully played on Polish fears of German revisionism. Thus when the Polish episcopate declared in 1965 in an address to the German bishops that the Poles forgave and asked for forgiveness, this came as a shock to many people. It is only now that the tragedy of the Germans begins to appear in the Polish eyes as an issue that needs to be faced.
The exact number of Germans living in present-day Poland is disputed and so is the definition of a German. The highest estimates put the figure at about 750, 000, which represents about 2 percent of the total population of Poland. There are only some 50,000 Germans in Czechoslovakia, that is, 0.5 percent. In Hungary, after the expulsion of roughly a quarter of a million, another quarter million remain (2.1 percent).
The Holocaust was followed in Poland’s case by the emigration of most of the survivors, the Kielce pogrom in 1946 and the anti-Jewish purge carried out by the Party in 1968 providing the impetus. As a result the number of Jews dwindled to some 0.03 percent. The same percentage is valid for Czechoslovakia; it is 1 percent in Hungary. The traditional, orthodox Jewry disappeared altogether; those who remain can best be described as of Jewish origin. In these conditions anti-Semitism, which has been resurfacing since 1945, often under the guise of anti-Zionism or anti-cosmopolitism, has differed considerably from the prewar phenomenon. The economic grounds and the external forms of separatedness have disappeared. True, the old term of Judeocommunism has retained its appeal in certain quarters, and the anti-Semitic weapon has been used in intra-party conflicts. But the church hierarchy has generally combated the religious motivation of anti-Semitism, which Pope John Paul II explicitly condemned as contrary to Christian beliefs. Finally, none of the major political figures or trends today openly admits to being anti-Semitic.
Let us now turn to East Central European society emerging from the Second World War, and facing, for the first time, communism as an all-pervading phenomenon. The communist appeal was especially directed toward the workers. In Hungary their numbers increased from some 688,000 to 919,000 in the 193843 period, and they constituted a potentially important force. Those in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia who had received a somewhat preferential treatment under the Nazis had high expectations, and tended to evolve toward the extreme left. In Poland, one can speak of a certain social radicalization of the masses, but more important perhaps was the mental climate. War and the occupation lowered the respect for life and undermined norms of moral behavior. A certain fanaticism coexisted with cynicism. A Polish writer tried to sum up a fairly widespread attitude: “the bolsheviks are in the country, the communists are in power, Warsaw is burnt to the ground, the legitimate London government is abandoned. Nothing worse can happen to us, we lost the war and should look after ourselves.”55
The attitude of the intelligentsia was especially important. It also underwent radicalization, especially the younger generation, and tended to see matters in black and white. As a Czech writer put it, for many of his contemporaries this attitude was translated into an eager acceptance of a simplified scheme: progressive communism versus obsolete reaction. Not only those intellectuals who had inclined to the left, but also some former rightists embraced communism. Ambition, conviction, fear, despair, opportunism all figured in the complex motivation that Milosz described in his Captive Mind. Those who withstood all temptation, who resisted and rejected the new ideology, were not all that numerous. A person had to live, and as the communists proceeded to destroy those components of the civil society that stood between the people and the state, the lonely individual was helpless before the omnipotence of the Party.
Before we turn to a chronological survey of the communist seizure of power in 1945-8 and the triumph of Stalinism, let us look first at the character and position of the communist parties, and at those who stood in their way to power. The communist parties of Poland and Hungary were publicly seen as alien, and they were re-emerging from virtual oblivion. The Bela Kun episode and the part played by Polish communists in the Soviet-Polish war of 1919-20 were liabilities rather than assets. Moreover, the Polish communists never lived down the “error of 1926” when they had supported Pilsudski’s coup, and the ignominy of having been dissolved as a party by the Comintern on the trumped-up charges of infiltration by counter-revolutionary elements. Most leaders perished in the great purges in the USSR; the survivors served mainly as Comintern agents.
Similarly, Hungarian communists mostly vegetated at home or followed Soviet orders in the emigration.
The revival of the Communist Party of Poland, under the less offending name of Polish Workers’ Party (PPR in Polish) took place in 1942. It had a “Muscovite” and a “domestic” wing. Boleslaw Bierut, J. Berman, and H. Minc belonged to the former, Wladyslaw Gomulka to the latter. PPR had roughly 20, 000 members in July 1944, but by April 1945 it grew to 300,000, and by April 1947 to over 500,000. This rapid increase, stemming largely from opportunistic motives, was also characteristic for Hungary. There the Party (MKP) reappeared officially on Hungarian soil in September 1944 with some 2,500 members and reached the figure of 864,000 in December 1947. The leadership consisted mostly of those who had returned from the USSR, notably the foursome (of Jewish origin) Matyas Rakosi, E. Gero, M. Farkas, and J. Revai, plus Imre Nagy. “Domestic” communists comprised L. Rajk and J. Kadar.
The Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSC) offered a contrast to its Polish and Hungarian counterparts, insofar as it had been a legal prewar party with a large following. Originating from a split in the Social Democratic Party, it underwent a bolshevization in 1929 under Klement Gottwald, and became an arm of the international revolutionary operation directed from Moscow. During the Second World War the communist underground, more important that those in Poland or Hungary, identified itself with the liberation struggle in the Czech lands, and with national aspirations in Slovakia. A separate party of Slovakia arose with Husak and Clementis as its leaders. The top echelons of the KSC were in Moscow, headed by Gottwald and his deputy R. Slansky. The postwar growth of the party was even more spectacular than in the neighboring countries, in 1947 passing the one million mark.
The communists constituted a minority in the Czechoslovak and Hungarian coalition governments, which were about to build the post-war reality in accord with, respectively, the socially moderate Kosice and Debrecen programs. But they held key positions in those governments, controlling the police and the economy. The situation was different in Poland where the communists openly dominated an essentially bogus coalition. The Lublin Manifesto, however, was similar in its moderate language and the absence of communist slogans to the Czechoslovak and Hungarian programs. The major forces that the communists had to contend with and destroy, in order to gain full power, were grouped around the populist (peasant) party in Poland and the Smallholders Party in Hungary. In Czechoslovakia the non-communists looked up to President Benes and placed the real burden of decision and responsibility on his shoulders.
A closer look at the political scene permits us to see further similarities and differences in the three countries. In Czechoslovakia, the prewar right and center parties—the national democrats and the agrarians— were not allowed to reestablish themselves. The same was true for the Slovak populists. Social democrats were heavily infiltrated by communists and fellow travelers, which left the national socialists (Benes’s party), the Catholic populists, and the Slovak democrats to watch out for communist encroachments. Their leaders thought in terms of prewar coalition and parliamentary practices, failing to appreciate the nature of communism. A certain Czech-Slovak tension allowed the communists to drive a wedge between the democrats of both nations.
Benes held fast to his assumption that while the USSR would be the dominant power in the region it was unlikely to interfere in domestic Czechoslovak affairs, regarding the country as a constructive factor in the region and as a bridge between the West and East. Benes also believed that domestically his country would amalgamate what was best in the Western democracy and Eastern socialism. As for the communists, they appeared to him willing to participate loyally in a parliamentary system, being quite satisfied with moderate social reforms. In fact the communists were consolidating their strength in the cabinet, in the national councils in the provinces, and most important, in the factories.
Hungarian communists, like their Czechoslovak counterparts, also stressed a willingness to cooperate with all the democratic forces in the country. The latter comprised the Smallholders Party, which reemerged in November 1944 under the leadership of the Calvinist pastor Zoltan Tildy, Bela Kovacs, and Ferenc Nagy, the national populists and the social democrats. The Smallholders appeared from the beginning as the main rivals and opponents of the communists, while the other parties contained people who listened to communist wooings and weakened their parties’ internal cohesion. Apart from the obvious fact that the Hungarian communists relied on the support of the army, the police, and the Communist Party of the USSR, they tried and did emulate the Smallholders’ agrarian program. The communists’ insistence on drastic land reform and other revolutionary economic changes found a response among the masses who otherwise opposed communism as such.
In Poland the communists ran the government and the populists represented by Mikolajczyk and a few of his associates had to choose between adjustment or open defiance. Mikolajczyk joined the Provisional Government of National Unity as a result of Western pressure, and many Poles believed that he also had the assured support of the US and Britain. He was determined to challenge the communists through the “free and unfettered elections” agreed upon at Yalta. He succeeded, unlike others, in quickly re-establishing an independent populist party (PSL) which outnumbered the communists and their allies. The latter consisted of more or less truncated socialist, democratic, and labor parties from which the old leadership had been eliminated. The large prewar National Democratic Party was outlawed.
For the Polish masses Mikolajczyk personified genuine national independence. To the remnants of the wartime underground, hunted down by the communists, he represented a hope for survival, and indeed he helped to save many of them through the two amnesties passed by the government. The communists portrayed Mikolajczyk as the tool of the West and the embodiment of all forces of reaction and anti-Sovietism in the country. As elsewhere at this stage the Polish communists tried to cultivate an image of social moderation.
They denied any plans of collectivizing agriculture and argued with the populists (as in Hungary) merely about the size of peasant farms. They also spoke of a native way to socialism. Paying lip service to Catholicism they were careful not to antagonize the Church unduly or offend Polish religious sentiments.
The Catholic Church was hardly prepared, in ideological or practical terms, for a confrontation with communism. In Hungary the church (the Catholic-Protestant division notwithstanding) had been a great landowner, built into the socio-economic and political structure of the country perhaps even to a larger degree than in Poland. It also reacted more strongly when stripped of its privileges by the communists; the primate Cardinal J. Mindszenty publicly condemned Marxism. In all three countries, the church had a tradition of cooperation with the political right which was now held against it. In Slovakia, especially, accusations of “clerico-fascism” leveled against the wartime regime could not be easily refuted. But there is another side to the story. In Poland the church’s stand against the Nazis led to mass persecutions of the clergy. Many bishops and priests had been sent to German concentration camps and Father Kolbe, later canonized, died for a fellow prisoner. This greatly enhanced the church’s moral authority. In Czechoslovakia, Bishop Beran of Prague had been a camp inmate; in Hungary Cardinal Seredi openly defied the Nazis, and the Arrow Cross arrested Mindszenty.
World History
