The catchword of the epoch in Eastern Europe was the Stalinist rationale for the Great Purge in the Soviet Union: “When one chops wood, the chips must fly.” At that particular stage, the denunciation of Tito as an infiltrated spy on the payroll of Western intelligence agencies served as an argument for a redefinition of the main priorities in the people’s democracies. The communist parties announced their embarkation on the “construction of socialism.” The “people’s democracy” was described as a new form of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Time and again, leading Cominform doctrinaires emphasized the “leading role of the vanguard party.” The supremacy of the party could not be questioned, and the Soviet dictatorial pattern was reproduced without any hesitation or concern for national characteristics.
To keep strict control over all mechanisms that guaranteed social reproduction and preserved the matrix of domination in such a system, the party had to play the central role. Ideology was the main argument for doing away with actually or potentially seditious elements within and outside the party. Political police, cast in the Soviet mold and controlled by Soviet advisers, took care to fulfill the ideological desiderata. The political content of that ideological dictatorship in its mature incarnation (1948-53) was sheer terror and permanent propaganda warfare waged within a personal dictatorship. The main weakness of this system was its deficit of legitimacy.
Legitimacy is usually acquired through institutional solidification, stability, and a guarantee of conservation of certain values, or at least a minimal degree of national consensus. Under mature Stalinism, both in the Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe, autocratic despotism managed to ruin the functioning of the party as an autonomous institution. As terror unfolded, the party itself became a simple appendage of the General Secretary’s personal office. In the words of Bertram Wolfe:
Under a dictatorial one-party regime the party is anything but a party. It is a Praetorian guard; a privileged, dedicated, commanding caste; a band of activists to drive everyone to carry out the “Summit’s” or the Leader’s plans; a sounding board to broadcast infallible commands and dogmas; the eyes and the ears of an espionage system; a nucleus of penetration and control of all organizations, clubs, unions, collective farms, factories, government organs, army, police; a transmission belt to convey the Leader’s will to a will-less nation, and to members and sympathizers in other lands.37
In this monolithic structure dominated by the revolutionary phalanx, the plans to reshape man, nature, and society could be frantically pursued. The Stalinist model was thus transplanted to all the East European countries satellitized by the Soviet Union after World War II: Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, the German Democratic Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Romania. In Yugoslavia, because of Tito’s obstinate rejection of Stalin’s interference in his country’s internal affairs and the subsequent break with the Cominform, a different pattern would emerge. The leading role of the communist party would be differently justified and applied in Yugoslavia.
With the exception of the Yugoslav leaders, all the communist formations derived their claim to legitimacy from their subservience to the Soviet Union and to Stalin himself. Even had they nourished any heretical thought, they could not have developed it, for at that moment the communists lacked any mass base. For the local populations, communists were simply agents of a foreign power. Most East Europeans perceived the communists as “them,” a group of mystical militants serving a foreign despot and trying to impose a social model with no roots in the national legacies of Eastern Europe.
To ensure their monopoly of power, the communist parties engineered the methodical destruction of the traditional political cultures in the countries they were ruling. The socialist parties were dissolved, and their left-wing factions were absorbed in the so-called united workers’ parties. Using both coercive and persuasive (propaganda) measures, the communists managed to recruit large segments of the industrial working class and expand their social base. In the name of the struggle against foreign powers, noncommunist parties were either banned or co-opted within rubber-stamp parliaments totally pliable and controlled by the communists. The Stalinist theory of the intensification of class warfare and its corollary, the psychology of the beleaguered fortress, became the rationale for the construction of a ubiquitous and universally feared secret police force that penetrated all walks of life and maintained an atmosphere of universal fear and mutual distrust.
The human model in this society was the selfless individual ready to inform on his closest friends and relatives. Treason on behalf of the party was considered a virtue. Failure to cooperate with the police was, of course, a political offense. In her gripping memoirs, Nadezhda Mandelstam, the widow of Osip Mandelstam, the great Russian poet who died in Stalin’s Gulag during the Great Terror, poignantly captured the unbreathable climate in this type of society. Referring to a scathing remark by Anna Akhmatova, the “keening muse” of Russian poetry, as Joseph Brodsky once called her, Nadezhda Mandelstam wrote:
At this period, astonished how people abroad—in particular Russian emigres—utterly misunderstand our life, Akhmatova often repeated a phrase that infuriated me: “They are envious of our suffering.” Such failure to understand has nothing to do with envy—it comes from the impossibility of imagining our experience and also from the deluge of lies by which reality has been twisted out of all recognition …. But the main thing was that it was nothing to envy. There was absolutely nothing at all uplifting in our suffering. It is pointless to look for some redeeming feature; there was nothing to it except animal fear and pain. I do not envy a dog that has been run over by a truck or a cat thrown from the tenth floor of a building by a hooligan. I do not envy people like myself, who suspected a traitor, provocateur, or informer in everyone and did not dare utter their thought even to themselves for fear of shouting them out in their sleep and giving themselves away to the neighbors on the other side of the thin walls that divide our apartments. There was, I can tell you, nothing to envy.38
In all East European countries, those nightmarish feelings were experienced by millions of people. The communists’ attempts to destroy individual autonomy were unceasing. No one could see any promise of light at the end of the tunnel, only monstrous witch-hunts organized to affect both the noncommunist groups and, in a most atrocious way, the communist elites themselves. The Cominform provided the groundwork for the enactment of surreal show trials, where diehard communists acknowledged that they had always been traitors and spies.
TWO
Children in the Fog
From People’s Democracies to “DevelopedSocialism”
And so I was living like a drunken child in fog. I knew nothing; that is, I knew and I didn’t know, like all the rest of our circle. Only in prison did I see what political struggle in the communist camp meant, between communists, what mighty hatreds, what fanaticism, what ruthlessness that struggle could assume.
—Aleksander Wat
Stalin’s terminal paranoia exacerbated terror both in the Soviet Union and in the satellite countries of Eastern Europe. Convinced that Tito’s autonomist heresy and his explicit challenge to the Kremlin’s authority amounted to pure treason in favor of the “imperialist bloc,” Stalin ordered his supporters to intensify the search for potential and real saboteurs. Stalin’s rationale for the Great Terror—the 1937-formulated theory about the heightening of class struggle as socialism advances—was enthusiastically embraced by local despots in the satellite countries. In each of the East European communist countries the secret police were endowed with discretionary powers, and nobody—not even the party apparatus—felt protected against the mounting wave of repression.
PURGES AND WITCH-HUNTS
The category of “objective enemy,” that is, of people who by virtue of their social status of background were capable of conspiring against the communist regime, was applied by Stalin’s local henchmen to justify the terror. The purposes of the show trials that took place in the people’s democracies were to c
reate a national consensus surrounding the top communist elite and to maintain a state of panic and fear among the population. According to George H. Hodos, a survivor of the 1949 Laszlo Rajk trial in Hungary, those frame-ups were signals addressed to all potential freethinkers or heretics in the satellite countries. The trials also “attempted to brand anyone who displayed differences of opinion as a common criminal and/or agent of imperialism, to distort tactical differences as betrayal, sabotage, and espionage.”1 But those trials were not a simple repetition of the bloody purges that had devastated the Soviet body politic in the 1930s.
Although the show trial rituals in the satellite countries were similar in some respects to their Soviet predecessors, the selection of the defendants differed, as did their background. To prepare those purges, Stalin dispatched to all the satellite countries special teams of “advisers,” who directly conducted the interrogations and contributed to the concoction of the diabolical scenarios that justified the death penalties for the defendants. Such Old Bolsheviks as Grigory Zinovyev, Lev Kamenev, Aleksei Rykov, and Nikolai Bukharin, who had once challenged Stalin and had represented a viable alternative to the Stalinist course, had been the victims of the Soviet show trials, but in the 1950s in Eastern Europe the chosen victims came from among the Stalinist elite itself. The show trials were introduced under the camouflage of the Cominform’s break with Yugoslavia and the denunciation of Tito as the head of a “gang of murderers and spies.”
The fact that the trials were held did not mean that the East European communist parties actually contained movements aimed at limiting Soviet influence and encouraging genuine national communist experiments. To be sure, differences existed between different wings, especially between local and Muscovite communists (people who had returned from Moscow exile after the end of World War II). But one should not consider those distinctions indicative of the existence of real Titoist factions throughout Eastern Europe ready to emulate the Yugoslavs in their defiance of Moscow’s dictates. For Stalinism to function properly, that is, to maintain a perpetual state of national emergency and fear, conspiracies had to be continuously invented and unmasked. Nobody was above suspicion; absolutely everybody had to feel like a potential victim of the impersonal terrorist machine. The techniques and the procedures adopted in Eastern Europe were the same as those used during the Moscow show trials: The prosecution based its charges solely on the confessions of the defendants. No material proof of guilt was ever presented as the psychologically crushed people in the dock delivered their self-deprecating statements. Hodos writes:
The show trials in Eastern Europe would have occurred even without the break between Stalin and Tito, probably even with the identical victims, as the device by which the brother parties of the postwar Soviet satellite states in Eastern Europe were subordinated to the Soviet party. Show trials were an integral part of Stalinism, and their introduction into the satellite states was a logical step, albeit with variants on the tested Soviet model …. The show trial is a propaganda arm of political terror. Its aim is to personalize an abstract political enemy, to place it in the dock in flesh and blood and, with the aid of a perverted system of justice, to transform abstract political-ideological differences into easily intelligible common crimes. It both incites the masses against the evil embodied by the defendants and frightens them away from supporting any potential opposition.2
Because the new regimes in Eastern Europe suffered economic set-backs and failed to arouse mass popular support for their social policies, they engaged in this frenzied exercise in terror and persecution. The prelude to the trials took place in Albania in May 1949, when the former Politburo member and Minister of the Interior Koci Xoxe was executed as a Titoist. As a matter of fact, in the aftermath of World War II Tito tried to extend his influence throughout Eastern Europe, but there was no indication that he ever tried to initiate a concerted opposition to Stalin. “Titoism,” therefore, referred to a style of conduct more assertive of national interests than the policies dictated by Stalin to the local communist elites. In September 1949 Laszlo Rajk, Hungary’s former Minister of the Interior and one of the top communist leaders after the war, admitted his guilt in a public trial and was sentenced to death together with other former prominent party figures. On that occasion, the state prosecutor’s speech bordered on hysteria. He venomously linked the alleged Rajk conspiracy to Tito’s treacherous activities, which were in turn conditioned by his subordination to Western warmongers engaged in the preparation of an overall attack against the people’s democracies:
American imperialism was the instigator and executor behind Tito’s and Rankovic’s entire political program and “putsch” plans! The American and British intelligence services purchased Tito and his clique even during the war against Hitler, to prevent the national and social liberation of the peoples of southeastern Europe, to isolate the Soviet Union, and to prepare the third world war …. The putsch in Hungary, planned by Tito and his clique to be put into action by Rajk’s spy ring, cannot be understood out of the context of the international plans of the American imperialists …. There are no extenuating circumstances, only aggravating circumstances. Our people demand death for the traitors and I, as the representative of the prosecuting authority, identify myself with this demand. The head of the snake that wants to bite us must be crushed …. The only defense against mad dogs is to beat them to death.3
In December 1949 a former Politburo member and economic czar of Bulgaria, Traicho Kostov, was indicted together with other former influential communists on charges similar to Rajk’s: espionage, Titoism, and collaboration with bourgeois secret police during the party’s clandestine years. In Rostov’s case, the well-prepared public show was almost ruined by the chief defendant’s sudden decision to refute the prosecutor’s charges, but everything was put back in order following a short recess. Kostov, like the other East European leaders accused of conspiracy, eventually accepted the verdict and cooperated with the court in his own destruction. He abjured his earlier attempt to deny the charges and, according to the communist official daily Rabotnichesko Delo, confessed that he was nothing but a scoundrel. We cannot engage here in a long disquisition on why, for what reason, those people cooperated with their tormentors. Their behavior was motivated principally by their orthodox Leninist belief that the party was the bearer of historical truth and that they had to sacrifice their own lives on the shrine of the party’s ultimate interests. Educated in a spirit of infinite dedication to Stalin and the Soviet Union, they lacked the minimal spirit of independence that would have permitted them to realize that they were trapped in a monstrous charade that had nothing whatsoever to do with the professed goals of their party. Some of them were so astounded by the enormity of the charges that they initially thought that they were victims of a counterrevolutionary coup. A few refused to accept the surreal charges leveled against them, but that small group represented the exception rather than the rule. The use of physical and psychological pressure, including threats to the lives of the defendants’ relatives, also helps to explain how the confessions were extorted.
In September 1949, in a fulminating indictment entitled “The Communist Party of Yugoslavia in the Hands of Murderers and Spies,” delivered to the Cominform summit in Budapest, Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, the Romanian communist leader, denounced his former Politburo colleague and Romania’s ex-Minister of Justice, Lucretiu Patrascanu, as a Titoist traitor and foreign agent. Patrascanu had been arrested earlier, but after Gheorghiu-Dej’s speech, which anticipated the tribunal’s verdict, his fate was sealed. However, because he refused to admit his guilt and engage in masochistic public confessions, Patrascanu could not be used for the staging of a show trial in Bucharest. He stayed in jail until April 1954, when he was sentenced to death and shot following a pseudo-trial.
After the same 1949 Budapest meeting, and in keeping with the international campaign against Tito’s alleged supporters, the Polish communist leader Wladyslaw Gomulka was demoted, accused of a lack of
revolutionary vigilance with regard to nationalism, and placed under house arrest in Poland under secret police surveillance. The Polish United Workers’ Party was completely, after the purge of Gomulka’s group, in the hands of the Muscovite faction headed by Boleslaw Bierut, Jakub Berman, and Hilary Minc.
At the time of the trials, the atmosphere in the people’s democracies had become unbreathable: The obsession with the infiltrated enemies, the hysterical celebration of Stalin’s universal genius, the humiliation of the national intelligentsias, and the assault on national tradition had created a general climate of hopelessness and anguish. For most of the population, the show trials were events that happened in another universe. The defendants were communists executed by their fellow communists. The involvement of the average citizen in these rituals was absolutely perfunctory: They had to repeat the nonsensical charges in order to become part and parcel of this new reality based on lies and fear. The average citizen was aware that the tragic fate of the ousted communist leaders could befall himself or herself as well at any moment. Irrationality had to be internalized as the system’s way of functioning. Everybody was a candidate for the criminal mechanism’s next strike. Any form of doubt had to be covered under the most obedient expressions of loyalty. The gigantic communist propaganda machine compelled the whole population to indulge in mass ceremonies of adherence to the party’s slogans. At the same time, as if to enhance the mandatory frenzy, the model of forced (and false) stimulation of labor productivity was imported from the Soviet Union; those workers who did not perform in accordance with party orders were considered politically unreliable. The effect of the show trials was a schizoid split in the individual’s mentality: The public person proclaimed precisely those values that the private one execrated.
Reinventing Politics Page 7
