Reinventing Politics

by Vladimir Tismaneanu

  After 1938, Josip Broz, a Croatian communist who became famous under the pseudonym Tito (one of the more than seventy that he used as a clandestine militant), was entrusted to lead the clandestine Yugoslav communist party. Among the rising stars of Yugoslav communism was Milovan Djilas, a philosophy student who would later become the country’ Vice President and, following his disenchantment with communism, a most vocal critic of the communist dictatorship and of Tito’s autocratic behavior.

  At the other end of the region’s political spectrum were the strong right-wing populist movements that appealed primarily to peasants and recently urbanized social groups through the use of chauvinistic and mystical symbols and values. Unlike the communists, who criticized the status quo in the name of absolute commitment to the defense of the Soviet Union, the alleged “motherland of world proletariat,” the extreme right criticized democracy and capitalism for their failure to create “an organic national body,” In Romania, the far right included—in addition to the “Legion” (rechristened the Iron Guard in the 1930s), made up of exalted and hopeless young intellectuals, students, priests, and untrained workers—many smaller but extremely vociferous parties and groups, which all held anti-Western, anti-Semitic, and anti-intellectual attitudes in common. Those groups lambasted communism as a “Judeo-masonic” concoction and promised to purify the country’s corrupt political life through the establishment of a dictatorial regime headed by a charismatic strongman: the Iron Guard’s captain, Corneliu Zelea Codreanu. Their ideal was the formation of a political community based on the values of Romanianism and Orthodoxy. In other words, they advocated the replacement of the secular parliamentary regime with a religiously based “national-legionary state.” To achieve their aims, the members of the Iron Guard used the weapon of political terrorism. In December 1933 an Iron Guard commando assassinated the liberal Prime Minister, Ion G. Duca, well known for his pro-Western and antifascist views. The radicalization of the far right, especially after the Nazi takeover in Germany, forced the Romanian political class to engage in repressive actions against the leaders of the fascist movement. Codreanu himself was arrested and murdered by King Carol II’s police in 1938. A royal dictatorship was proclaimed, and the parliamentary system was suppressed. The escalation of violence in that country seemed inevitable.

  In March 1938 Czechoslovakia and, ipso facto, the other descendants of Austria-Hungary received a mortal blow with the signing of the Munich agreements, which accepted the German claims on the Sudetenland. In September of the same year the Wehrmacht occupied Prague, and Hitler announced the establishment of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. Slovakia jumped to proclaim its independence, and a proNazi regime was established under the leadership of an arch-reactionary priest, Monsignor Tiso. In August 1939 the Nazi-Soviet Pact put an end to any illusions about the possibility of preventing war.

  Soviet and German troops cooperated in the dismemberment of Poland. Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov applauded the disappearance of Poland from Europe’s map. The Soviets, like the Nazis, could not accept the existence of the Polish republic, which Molotov disparagingly called “the monstrous bastard of the Peace of Versailles.”16 What had been known as Central Europe ceased to exist at the moment the totalitarian twin brothers of communism and fascism imposed their iron grip on those countries. To paraphrase Czeslaw Milosz, all the countries that had suffered the consequences of the Nazi-Soviet Pact continued to exist as a nonexistent entity in a traumatized cultural memory:

  There is probably a basic division between the two halves of Europe in the difference between memory and lack of memory. For Western Europeans, the Molotov—Ribbentrop pact is no more than the vague recollection of a misty past. For us—I say us, for I myself experienced the consequences of the agreement between the superpowers—that division of Europe has been a palpable reality, as it has been for all those in our countries who were born after the war. Therefore I would risk a very simple definition. I would define Central Europe as all the countries that in August 1939 were the real or hypothetical object of a trade between the Soviet Union and Germany …. Decades of pain and humiliation: that is what distinguishes Central European countries from their Western counterparts.17

  In June 1940 the Soviets addressed an ultimatum to the Romanian government demanding the immediate retrocession of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina. Completely isolated internationally, King Carol II, who had established his personal dictatorship in 1938, gave in and accepted the Soviet diktat. In August the Germans and the Italians imposed on Romania the Vienna Award, and Northern Transylvania was given to Hungary. Several days later the King fled Romania, and a new dictatorship was established, headed by General Ion Antonescu and the Iron Guard leader, Horia Sima. In January 1941 the Iron Guard tried to get rid of Antonescu but failed. A military dictatorship was set up, Horia Sima then left Romania for Germany, and Antonescu was proclaimed the Conducator of the Romanian state.

  Germany attacked Yugoslavia in 1941, and several resistance movements were immediately organized. The most powerful were the nationalist Serbian movement led by General Draza Mihajlovic, known as the Chetniks, and the communist resistance directed by Tito, known as the Partisans, During that period, Hungary maintained good relations with Germany, although Admiral Horthy was outflanked from the extreme right by the ultra-chauvinistic Arrow Cross movement. In Bulgaria the militarist regime, close to Germany, strove to keep the country out of imminent conflicts. For almost two years, between September 1939 and June 1941, when Hitler attacked the Soviet Union, local communist parties in Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, and Romania remained in a standby posture and even lambasted the British and French “militarists” for their alleged bellicose adventurism. (Yugoslavia was the exception.) The explanation for the East European communist parties’ refusal to engage in anti-Nazi actions between August 1939 and June 1941 was their subordination to the Soviet-controlled Comintern.

  The August 1940 Comintern directives to those parties were to oppose strongly the attempts organized by pro-British and pro-French circles—the “imperialist warmongers,” as the Stalinist propaganda called the Western democracies in the months of the honeymoon with Hitler. Like the French communists, who initially pledged to cooperate diligently with the Nazi occupiers, communists in Eastern Europe were actually sabotaging the anti-German resistance. Later they would sweep those inglorious episodes under the carpet and create the legend of the communists’ crucial role in the struggle against the Nazi invaders in all the East European countries.

  When Hitler attacked the Soviet Union, communications between Moscow and the communist parties in Europe were shut down. For some time those groups were free to act on their own. That explains the somewhat uncoordinated and often daring strategies adopted by domestic leaderships, including the Yugoslav communists’ effort to tinker with Soviet-style institutions without Stalin’s knowledge or approval. In the same vein, in Poland local communists, headed by Wladislaw Gomulka, engaged in the reconstruction of the communist party and launched a partisan movement without a direct Soviet blessing.

  The main characteristic of the war years from the viewpoint of the relationship between the Kremlin and the communist parties of Eastern Europe was the partial interruption of the flow of information and support between the center and its tributaries. In each communist party, local (home) nuclei emerged as parallel and potentially alternative leaderships to the Moscow-trained exiles. In the Yugoslav case, Tito’s radical propensities and his inclination to out-Stalin Stalin led him to initiatives that could only embarrass the Soviet leaders in their relations with the Western allies. It is important to remember that in 1943 Stalin decided to disband the Communist International as a gesture of good will to Churchill and Roosevelt. Later it became clear that the dissolution, justified at the time as recognition the decreased need for guidance from Moscow on the part of the maturing local communist parties, was merely a propagandistic concession linked to Stalin’s desire to mitigate th
e Allies’ dislike of the revolutionary Bolshevik legacy.

  As soon as the Soviets penetrated the territory of Eastern Europe, they resumed their controls over the communist parties and installed “Muscovites” (communists who had spent the war in exile in Moscow) at the top. Ana Pauker and Vasile Luca joined Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej as secretaries of the Romanian Communist Party’s Central Committee, In Poland, Boleslaw Bierut, the head of the Moscow-sponsored Lublin Government, became General Secretary of the Polish Communist Party and initiated a purge of the home communists headed by Gomulka.

  In Czechoslovakia and elsewhere, the interrupted hegemony resumed the same pattern of Soviet domination. Hegemony was pursued with the appointment of the former Moscow emigrés Klement Gottwald and Rudolf Slansky, respectively, as President and General Secretary of the Communist Party in Czechoslovakia. In Bulgaria, the home-based communists headed by Traicho Kostov had to share power with the Muscovites Georgi Dimitrov, Vasil Kolarov, and Vulko Chervenkov. In Hungary the Muscovites took over the whole leadership of the Hungarian Communist Party and established a clique dictatorship under a leading foursome made up of General Secretary Matyas Rakosi and his faithful underlings Erno Gero (the former NKVD officer who had presided over the purge of the anti-Stalinist revolutionaries in Barcelona during the Spanish civil war), Mihaly Farkas, and Jozsef Revai, a former disciple of the celebrated Marxist thinker Georg Lukacs who had been converted to hard-line Stalinism.

  Fewer possibilities existed in Yugoslavia for the hegemonic pattern to proceed along the same lines. Tito had succeeded in creating a powerful mass base for himself and his closest associates (Edvard Kardelj, Aleksandar Rankovic, and Milovan Djilas). During the bloody confrontations of World War II and in spite of their unabashed support for Stalin and the Soviet international strategy, the Yugoslav communists managed to turn themselves into a national movement. The Kremlin’s real problem with Tito was that, although definitely full of love and admiration for Stalin, his ambition was to become Stalin’s counterpart in the Balkans. Eventually that unconscious, unavowed, but very real design would bring him into first a covert and then an open conflict with the Soviet dictator.

  The Yugoslav communists launched terrorist actions against their enemies—Nazi and otherwise—and instituted a secret police system whose repressive methods were directly borrowed from the arsenal of the Soviet secret police (NKVD).18 Tito then sought to expand his influence in other Balkan countries. He sent his emissary Svetozar Vukmanovic-Tempo to develop contacts with the Greek communists, who were engaged in a civil war against supporters of a pro-Western monarchic regime. The Yugoslavs also acted as “Big Brother” toward the tiny Albanian Communist Party, headed by Enver Hoxha, a former French teacher in the city of Tirana.19

  When Stalin decided to anathematize Tito and expel him from the world communist movement, Hoxha and his acolytes remembered the humiliation inflicted upon them by the arrogant Yugoslavs and added some of the most obstreperous notes to the Soviet-orchestrated antiYugoslav campaign.

  MESSIANIC DELUSIONS

  What were all these communist formations promising to liberate their nations? What values did they stand for, and what blueprints did they offer for their countries’ renewal?

  It would be easy but frivolous to say that all those engaged in clandestine communist activities during World War II were inspired exclusively by their unreserved worship of the Soviet Union. In addition to that prevailing temporal motivation, those people were convinced that their struggle against fascism was part of a universal human emancipation.

  Many of the communists were outright Soviet agents, but not all. Especially among young intellectuals, the identification of the Soviet Union with the cause of human freedom was very powerful. Both during the interwar period and throughout the years of the anti-Nazi resistance, many young people joined the communist movement convinced that it offered a superior form of historical rationality. Information about the extent of the Great Purge in the USSR was scarce, so many people tended to dismiss it as fascist slander. The atrociousness of the fascist crimes and the astute manipulation by the Stalinists of democratic symbols, particularly after the Seventh Comintern Congress, when the strategy of the “Popular Fronts” (communist-controlled umbrella organizations) was adopted, made some people believe that after the war Eastern Europe would be governed by popular democratic regimes, with the communists behaving like normal political actors in the pluralistic game. The myth of a classless society where all political and economic tensions would be abolished in favor of an earthly paradise of human equality and dignity functioned as an excuse for the communist militants’ willing abandonment of their reasoning powers. But the Kremlin’s strategists and their East European puppets, of course, had no intention of establishing pluralism or classless societies. The Comintern’s masterminds realized that the arrival of the Soviet troops in those countries would provide the communist parties with extraordinary political and logistic superiority over any of their adversaries.

  Since the 1930s, Eastern Europe’s communist parties had been thoroughly Stalinized. There were some residual elements of original faith in the socialist dream of world revolution, but as a rule all those elites were ready to serve the Soviet Union without hesitation. Most resented local Social Democratic parties that advocated an evolutionary road to a more just society. Following the Bolsheviks’ rude propaganda techniques, the communists accused their rivals of being agents of the bourgeoisie. But because Stalin wanted to preserve his image (at least until the world war was over) as a benign and wise statesman, the pro-Soviet communists subdued their venomous rhetoric and pledged to behave as champions of national independence.

  During the years of World War II, no parties were more vociferous in proclaiming their commitment to patriotic values than the communists. The fact that many of their militants served prison terms or had even been killed in fascist jails only enhanced their public image as exemplars of martyrdom and heroism. Their sacrifices, in many cases genuine, were skillfully exploited by a cynical propaganda machine that presented them as the only legitimate exponents of national interests. The communists went out of their way to polish their image and extended their hands to other political formations, creating large umbrella movements dedicated to the establishment of allegedly democratic governments. Such was the background of the illusions entertained by many in the West, including some of the most influential policy-makers, as they analyzed and responded to Stalin’s “change of mind” about the necessity and feasibility of a “world revolution.”

  Although those illusions were rooted in wishful thinking and underrated or completely ignored the expansionist nature of the Soviet system, they were powerful enough to modify Western perceptions of the Soviet Union and to lead to a number of agreements, including those resulting from the Teheran (1944) and the Yalta (1945) conferences. At Teheran and Yalta the Soviet Union convinced its Western partners that it had the right to defend its sphere of influence in Eastern Europe. It did not matter that the language of the Yalta Declaration was imbued with flowery democratic promises: The Soviets knew how to use their internationally recognized role to impose satellite regimes in the countries of Eastern Europe.

  In the name of the struggle against fascist vestiges, democratic parties in Eastern Europe were savagely persecuted, censorship was established and intensified, and secret police systems were instituted to harass all those who dared to criticize the communists. Anticommunism (or antiSovietism) was automatically equated with fascism. As soon as they realized that no real obstacle existed to prevent their rise to power, the local communist elites started to behave with increasing boldness.

  The Soviet military presence on the territories of East European nations endowed the local communist elites with a shield of immunity that they knew how to employ successfully to further their monopolistic objectives. Across Eastern Europe, communist parties included in their official statements promises of democratic elections and respect for human rights and politica
l tolerance; however, in practice those parties initiated continuous purges and single-mindedly established their political domination.

  In order to accomplish their goals, they used splinter groups of the traditional indigenous parties and vainglorious political figures who were convinced that collaborating with the Stalinists would ensure their political survival. The communists, however, did not want to engage in any power-sharing. The logic of Leninism, with its militaristic organizational doctrine and extreme authoritarian practice, made the communists better prepared to win power in an ultimate showdown. Unlike their enemies, they were convinced that only a one-party system could solve their countries’ problems. They sincerely abhorred parliamentarianism and regarded democratic structures as profoundly and incurably inept.

  Unlike their rivals, the communists were not divided along ideological or moral lines. They were cohesive formations, monolithic in spirit and action. To be sure, these groups were not as monolithic as they claimed to be, but their factious strifes had more to do with the struggle for power within their sectarian boundaries than with different philosophies or strategies. The communists were educated in the spirit of unqualified support for their superiors. They obeyed the leadership’s orders without murmur or scruples. In garrison-style formations, no wavering was permitted. To be a true communist, a party member had to surrender any personal claim to freedom of thought or personal honesty in favor of the suprapersonal entity called the party.