Reinventing Politics

by Vladimir Tismaneanu

  The mechanics and the functions of the show trials can be understood by examining the structure of the groups selected for public exposure and liquidation. Between 1949 and 1951 the main victims of the trials were members of the “national communist” elites, or “home communists,” as opposed to doctrinaire Stalin loyalists. Koci Xoxe, Traicho Kostov, Lucretiu Patrascanu, Wladyslaw Gomulka, and Laszlo Rajk had all spent the war years in their respective countries. They had participated in the anti-Nazi resistance movement. Unlike their Moscow-trained colleagues, who arrived in the tanks of the Red Army, they could invoke a source of legitimacy from direct involvement in the partisan movement. Some of these “home-grown” communists may have even resented the condescending attitudes of the “Muscovites,” who traded on their better connections with Moscow and treated the home communists like junior partners. Stalin was aware of those factional rivalries and used them to initiate the permanent purges in the satellite countries.

  In the early 1950s Stalin became increasingly concerned with the role of the Jews as carriers of a “cosmopolitan world view” and as “objective” supporters of the West. For the communists, it did not matter whether an individual was “subjectively” against the system, but rather what he or she might have thought and done by virtue of his or her “objective” status (coming from a bourgeois family, having studied in the West, belonging to a certain minority, and so forth). Morbid anti-Semitic campaigns were organized by Stalinists in the Soviet Union against Jewish writers and literary critics. The specter of a massive pogrom loomed over the Soviet Jewish population. In the people’s democracies, the struggle against “rootless cosmopolitans” (a code word meaning Jews) allowed certain local communist leaders to engage in an elite purge against the “Muscovite” factions dominated by communists of Jewish extraction (many of whom had fled fascism and had sought refuge in the Soviet Union between the two wars). The elimination of those otherwise totally loyal Stalinists reached a spectacular level in Czechoslovakia, where the chief defendant in an October 1952 show trial was Rudolf Slansky, who until September 1951 had been the General Secretary of the ruling communist party and in that capacity had presided over the ruthless persecution of communists and noncommunists. Slansky and other prominent militants, most of Jewish origin, were sentenced to death and hanged in December 1952.

  The Slansky group was accused of Zionist conspiracy and direct collusion with the Western espionage networks. Slansky himself, who had been the chief organizer of the previous purges in Czechoslovakia, could hardly understand the fantastic charges leveled against him. He tried several times, while in his prison cell, to commit suicide. He implored the party chairman, his former friend Klement Gottwald, to grant him a chance to explain himself, but of course he was denied any such opportunity. Since the trial had to confirm Stalin’s conviction about the existence of a worldwide conspiracy determined to unsettle the communist bloc, there was no way to exonerate any of the defendants. Furthermore, the anti-Semitic charges were bound to appeal to precommunist chauvinistic prejudices widespread in the whole region.

  In May 1952 the Romanian media announced the elimination of three members of the Politburo, two of whom had been the leaders of the party’s Moscow emigré center during World War II. All three had been party secretaries and had shared absolute power with the leader of the domestic faction, Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej. Ana Pauker, a veteran communist leader who long had been lionized by international communist propaganda as an impeccable communist fighter, lost her job as Minister of Foreign Affairs and was put under house arrest. Her Muscovite ally, the Hungarian-born Vasile Luca, was accused of economic sabotage during his tenure as Minister of Finance and collaboration with the bourgeois police during the party’s underground activity. Luca was arrested and died in prison in the early 1960s. The third member of the group, Teohari Georgescu, a home communist and former Minister of Internal Affairs whose principal fault consisted in his close association with the Pauker—Luca faction, was also jailed but was soon released. Georgescu thereafter worked in menial jobs.

  The Romanian purge seems to have been determined by both local and international circumstances. There was a definite competition for authority and supremacy between Gheorghiu-Dej and Ana Pauker. The source of their rivalry, however, lay not in different political conceptions, as Gheorghiu-Dej later claimed, but simply in personal ambitions and vanities. While resolving his rivalry with Pauker, Gheorghiu-Dej capitalized on Stalin’s interest in the “ethnicization” of East European communist elites through the elimination of the Jewish leaders, among whom Ana Pauker figured prominently. He convinced the Kremlin that he was a much more trustworthy exponent of Soviet interests and accused his opponents of deliberately practicing an adventurist course bound to destabilize the country and restore capitalism.

  As for the Soviet Union itself, the anti-American and anti-Semitic campaign reached its most vicious moment in February 1953, one month before Stalin’s death, with the pseudo-discovery of the “doctors’ plot.” According to the official story, the Kremlin’s doctors—most of whom were Jewish—had long been involved in criminal activities aimed at physically annihilating the Soviet leadership. They were all arrested and subjected to horrendous psychological and physical tortures. Only Stalin’s demise prevented a public trial that would have been the opening salvo for an overall anti-Semitic purge and the forced resettlement of the Jewish population to Siberia.4 With the Slansky trial and the “doctors’ plot,” the system had reached the limits of its irrationality. The most grotesque accusations were brought against Soviet and East European Jews without any concern for minimal credibility. The “party line” was simply a plastic material used to suit the latest whims of the Soviet dictator, and nobody, not even the local general secretaries, could feel totally protected against potential accusations of treason. It did not matter whether the selected victim had ever expressed the slightest doubt about Stalin’s genius. The only concern for the Soviet advisers, the true stage directors of the show trials, was to confirm Stalin’s suspicions and incessantly add new names to the list of unmasked criminals. But the purges affected more than the top apparatus. Once unleashed, they reverberated throughout the whole party, resulting in a complete paralysis of any individual autonomy. The terrorist pedagogy totally suppressed critical attitudes and made obedience the golden rule of survival.

  At the moment of Stalin’s death on March 5, 1953, the countries of the Soviet bloc shared a political system based on terror, ideological manipulation, and command economy. The institutionalization of the purges as a mechanism of elite replacement and political mobilization was a phenomenon characteristic of the whole bloc. According to Zbigniew Brzezinski, the principal features of the Stalinist interstate system included the communality of the institutional organization; the acknowledgement of Soviet supremacy as symbolized by Stalin’s role as the leader of world communism; the paramount role assigned to ideology as the source of political legitimacy for the ruling elites; and the economic exploitation of the satellite countries by the Soviet overlord.5 In their main characteristics, those polities could be described as totalitarian, since the monolithic party-state had managed to absorb or annihilate all forms of institutional autonomy. Least affected was the German Democratic Republic, primarily because the police state could not be totally established there until the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961 completed that country’s separation from the West.

  TITO’S CHALLENGE AND THE BREAKDOWN OF MONOLITHIC RULE

  It would be hard to exaggerate the importance of Tito’s refusal to bow to Stalin’s dictates. It was the first time a Comintern-trained and -promoted communist dared to defy the Kremlin’s supremacy and claim his party’s right to an independent role. Tito’s 1948-49 opposition to Stalin’s pressure and blackmail represented a turning point in the history of world communism. It was the first successful rejection of Stalin’s claim to a monopoly of truth, a repudiation of the Stalinist concept of internationalism, and a proud assertion of nation
al values in the face of Soviet imperialist behavior. Tito rejected the Cominform dogma according to which all communists had to be judged by their attitude toward the Soviet Union and Stalin personally. In Tito’s view, it was the right of each communist party, be it large or small, to establish its political line in accordance with its own self-defined interests. Since they had directed a successful mass resistance movement against the Nazi occupiers, the Yugoslav leaders felt entitled to international recognition of their special role within world communism.

  Tito’s quest for recognition inaugurated national communism, a trend within world communism that elevates domestic priorities over imperial values and objectives. It was national, in contrast to the complete suppression of patriotic attachments required by Stalin. On the other hand, it was not a resumption of the nationalist movements and ideologies characteristic of Eastern Europe before communism. Tito promoted his own version of pan-Yugoslav socialist ideology, which had nothing in common with traditional Serbian, Croatian, or Slovene nationalisms. Stalin completely ignored or despised the national pride of the subjugated nations and did not realize that once Tito had decided to withstand his pressure, the Yugoslav communist could mobilize large segments of the public opinion that otherwise may have resented the new political order. “If I lift a finger, Tito will fall,” Stalin informed his Politburo colleagues, according to Nikita Khrushchev.6 The Soviet dictator failed to see in his Yugoslav nemesis more than a simple slave who had dared to dispute the authority of his master.

  Likewise, at least initially, the Yugoslavs could not fully understand the origins of Stalin’s wrath against them. After all, they had already behaved as the most loyal disciples of the Soviet leader. Tito was no less an industrializer than Stalin, no less committed—at the outset of his rule—to forced collectivization. Terror against the party-designated “class enemies” in Yugoslavia was consistently organized by Aleksandar Rankovic’s secret police. Schooled in the Stalinist tradition, the Yugoslav leaders saw the party as the carrier of universal reason, the perfect instrument, predestined to bring about immediate answers to the most difficult questions through the application of Leninist and Stalinist dogmas. So initially Tito and his comrades clung to the Leninist-Stalinist ideological patterns and norms, and the Yugoslav leadership responded to Stalinist accusations by trying to surpass Stalin in orthodoxy.

  In the first stage of the conflict, Tito was convinced that the whole dispute was the result of a regrettable misunderstanding. Tito’s defiance of the Soviet protectorate was the infuriated reaction of a Stalinist against his master’s arbitrariness and willfulness. It took some time for the Yugoslav leaders to engage in a full-fledged de-Stalinization. Even when they decided to do so, they conducted their break in an authoritarian manner, with methods comparable to those employed in the “people’s democracies” in the struggle against “class enemies.” Communists who refused to endorse Tito’s views and stuck to the Cominform’s abusive criticism of the Yugoslav Communist Party were labeled “Cominformists” and treated as foreign agents. Many were deported to remote Yugoslav concentration camps, including the notorious Goli Otok.7 Others managed to escape to the neighboring “people’s democracies,” where they launched a propaganda war against those whom they stigmatized as the “Titoist gang of traitors.” Only Tito’s pressing need for popular support resulted in the decision to encourage the search for a Yugoslav “road to socialism,” different from the Soviet ultra-bureaucratic and authoritarian pattern. The widely acclaimed Yugoslav “self-management,” which promised the workers a role in deciding industrial objectives, was less the consequence of the desire to break with the ossified and highly ineffective bureaucratic-administrative management system practiced in the Soviet Union than the outcome of the vital need to expand the popular base for an externally threatened dictatorship.

  Isolated from and slandered by the whole world communist movement, Tito abandoned many of the dogmas long held as sacrosanct. The Yugoslav model of “self-management” was imposed from above, and the spontaneous initiatives of the masses, ceaselessly invoked in the official propaganda, were kept under strict party control. In Yugoslavia domesticism was supposed to result not in the destruction of the communist system but only in its reformation along lines different from those pursued in the Soviet Union under Stalin. The origins of domesticism lay in a conflict between two competing communist centers rather than in a clash of visions between a totalitarian and a humanistic interpretation of Marxism and Leninism. For Tito and his associates, ethnic pride was more an instrument to strengthen their popular base than the deep motivation for the divorce from Moscow.

  But at the same time, because foreign policy cannot be totally dissociated from domestic practices, the more critical Tito became of Stalin’s imperialist behavior, the more disposed he was to criticize the Soviet system as well. In a number of theoretical documents published by Yugoslav communists in the early 1950s, the Soviet model was described as a dictatorship controlled by a huge bureaucratic machine. Those publications asserted that the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was no longer the vanguard of the world proletariat, but a clique of bureaucrats whose survival depended on the perpetuation of the purges. The Soviet system had degenerated into state capitalism administered by a new class of bureaucratic potentates. To avoid a repetition of Stalin’s mistaken choices, Tito and his comrades had decided in 1950 to experiment with the transition to a model where the workers could exert direct control over production objectives. Because they were committed communists, however, the Titoists did not completely abandon the party’s leading role. Communist party cells continued to function at the shop floor level, and the central government continued to control the appointment of industrial managers. The communist party nevertheless redefined its position in society as a political formation “with a voluntary and democratic character.”

  All those changes convinced Stalin and his associates that Tito had indeed completely abandoned socialism. For the Stalinists, the very fact that the workers were consulted with regard to their enterprises and that they were allowed to have a word in the decision-making process was considered a pernicious sign of anarchism and “bourgeois liberalism,” Even after Stalin’s death, the Soviet leaders could not reconcile what they saw in Yugoslavia with their own frozen dogmas and consequently stigmatized the Yugoslav model as “revisionism.” Still, the Yugoslav attempts to diminish the harmful effects of excessive bureaucracy did not represent a complete systemic overhaul. On the contrary, Tito made sure that the party maintained its dominant role by outlawing any alternative political formations. Censorship was maintained and severely applied against reformers like Milovan Djilas, Tito’s former lieutenant, who over-stepped the party-defined limits of “creativity.”

  In 1953 the Yugoslav leaders decided to de-collectivize agriculture. Tito, as the spokesman, engaged in more active criticism of the Soviet model as rigid and dictatorial. Unlike the Soviet theorists, who were insisting on the need continuously to strengthen the role of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the Yugoslav communists claimed that true socialism, the type inspired by genuine Marxism, would favor the reduction of state operations and eventually the “withering away of the state.” The Yugoslav “search for man,” as their differing philosophy and practice of socialism were called,8 did not include a complete separation from the dogma of the party as the repository of historical rationality. The conflict consisted rather in the determination of the Yugoslav leaders to reject the Soviet-imposed vassal status and their forceful defense of their right to national sovereignty. The special privileges of the party members, although theoretically criticized by Yugoslav communists, were not curtailed even when the well-known leader Milovan Djilas—then the country’s Vice President—decided to attack the communist nomenklatura. First Djilas was expelled from the Communist League of Yugoslavia, and then, after he published his famous indictment of the “new class” of potentates, he was jailed as a “subversive element.”9 Tito was ready to co
ndemn the atrocities of Stalinism and to deplore the bureaucratization of socialism, but he refused to countenance an overall criticism of the systemic origins of communist autocracy.

  The thrust of Tito’s divorce from Moscow consisted in an attempt to initiate a different, less repressive version of the one-party system. In his New Year’s Address of 1949, Tito condemned Stalism for its sanctification of cruelty and violence:

  Those who are appeasing their conscience with the reflection that “the end hallows the means” should remember that this dictum was particularly current among the Jesuits at the time of the Inquisition. Great things cannot be accomplished by dirty means or in a dishonest manner. Great things can only be created by honest means and in honest manner—this is what we shall always believe.10

  But when confronted with radical reformism within his own party, the Yugoslav leader resorted to the same methods for which he criticized Stalin. His mindset was not really different from that of his true mentor, nor was his goal, which amounted to the retention of absolute power in his own hands.

  THE EAST EUROPEAN STALINISTS

  To understand evolutions in Eastern Europe in the 1950s we have to remember the main features of the communist parties in those countries. Again, with the exception of the Czechoslovak and Yugoslav communist parties, all the Leninist formations in the region suffered from a chronic deficit of mass support. All those countries counted millions of party members but very few committed communists. The parties derived their legitimacy from their boundless and unconditional loyalty to the Soviet Union and to Stalin personally. Even the Yugoslav leaders, until the outbreak of their open conflict with Stalin, did not question the Soviet claim to domination within world communism. Stalin was universally worshipped as a godlike figure; no sacrifice was considered too great to show the communist commitment to the common cause.