Reinventing Politics

by Vladimir Tismaneanu

  After 1961 the Hungarian communists, enjoying Khrushchev’s unstinting support, embarked on a less repressive domestic strategy. In order to create a minimal national consensus, Kadar broke with the exclusive Stalinist slogan, “He who is not with us is against us,” and replaced it with the less intolerant and deliberately inclusive policy, “He who is not against us is with us.” The Eighth Congress of the Hungarian communists took place in November 1962. Kadar announced a policy of national reconciliation and an economic strategy aimed at increasing the living standards of the population by encouraging limited private initiative and tolerating small business. He received Khrushchev’s blessing in pursuing the relaxation, which became known as “goulash socialism.” In March 1963 a general amnesty was declared, and thousands of Hungarian political prisoners were released. In exchange for that limited liberalization, the regime required its subjects to refrain from any criticism of the Soviet Union and to forget that its birth certificate had been signed in blood. The Party was ready to co-opt all highly skilled people who did not question its political legitimacy.

  ATTEMPTS AT AUTONOMY: DESATELLITIZATION AND DE-STALINIZATION IN ROMANIA AND ALBANIA

  In Romania, especially following the suppression of the Hungarian Revolution, the Stalinist leadership hardened its domestic policy. In June 1957 Gheorghiu-Dej eliminated a pro-Khrushchev faction that had tried to topple him. Interestingly, the two Politburo members eliminated on that occasion were Iosif Chisinevschi, the chief ideologue of the Stalinist period in Romania, and Miron Constantinescu, a Marxist sociologist with some revisionist propensities. Although the two had nothing in common, Gheorghiu-Dej insisted that their criticism of his role in the terror of the early 1950s was indicative of their joint antiparty activities. Khrushchev was too busy at that moment with his own struggle against the Stalinist diehards in the Kremlin to do anything in support of his presumed Romanian followers. A massive purge of the party and the intelligentsia took place in 1958, and tens of thousands were expelled from the communist party, then formally called the Romanian Workers’ Party. In June 1958, as a result of previous secret negotiations between Gheorghiu-Dej and Khrushchev, the Kremlin decided to withdraw its troops from Romania. That was considered at the time an indication of the Soviets’ unlimited confidence in the unflinchingly orthodox Romanian leaders and their capacity to maintain systemic stability. It was also a measure destined to convince the West that the intervention in Hungary had been a mere accident and that the Soviet Union did not intend to continue its imperialist policy toward the former satellites. Later on, it turned out that the Romanian communists headed by Gheorghiu-Dej had played a deceptive game with Khrushchev and that their goal was to ensure a margin of autonomy against any Soviet injunctions for further de-Stalinization. As a matter of fact, Romania and Albania were the only East European countries where the thaw was nipped in the bud.

  No challenge to Gheorghiu-Dej’s authority could coalesce in Romania, and those who dared to suggest that he had been guilty of Stalinist abuses were immediately purged. Gheorghiu-Dej’s policy amounted to unwavering Stalinism: He favored breakneck industrialization and waged a merciless collectivization campaign. In the spring of 1962 Romania’s agriculture was entirely collectivized. Gheorghiu-Dej announced the definitive and irrevocable victory of socialism in that country and the beginning of a new stage: “the completion of socialist construction.”

  For Gheorghiu-Dej, Khrushchev’s second de-Stalinization campaign, inaugurated at the Twenty-second CPSU Congress in October 1961, with the removal of Stalin’s body from Lenin’s Mausoleum, looked ominous. Like other veteran Stalinist leaders, Gheorghiu-Dej resented the Soviet leader’s erratic policies and feared that further liberalization could only undermine the foundations of the existing system. They were all convinced that further relaxation of authority would threaten their status. In this respect, Gheorghiu-Dej, like Albania’s Hoxha, Czechoslovakia’s Novotny, and East Germany’s Ulbricht, was closer to Mao Zedong’s exaltation of Stalin’s merits than to Khrushchev’s denunciation of the late despot’s crimes.

  In 1960 Enver Hoxha, the leader of the Albanian Communist Party, went to Moscow to attend the second world communist conference. On that occasion he attacked Khrushchev for his destabilizing role within world communism and maintained that the effects of the Twentieth CPSU Congress had been calamitous. One year later the Albanian indictment was repeated by the Chinese communists, who decided to give economic assistance to Hoxha after Khrushchev unleashed an economic boycott of that extremely poor country. Traumatized by the Soviet attempt to strangle them, the Albanian communists became the most vehement critics of “modern revisionism” and accused Khrushchev of being the gravedigger of world communism. For all practical purposes, Albania ceased to participate in the activities of the Eastern bloc and broke off diplomatic relations with Moscow and its satellites.39

  Meanwhile, in Romania the limited and strictly controlled de-Stalinization amounted to nothing more than a new attack on Gheorghiu-Dej’s former rivals eliminated in 1952 (Pauker and Luca) and 1957 (Chisinevschi and Constantinescu). Far from being rehabilitated, the former Politburo member Lucretiu Patrascanu, executed in 1954, continued to be vilified as a traitor to the working class. At the same time Gheorghiu-Dej ensured the rapid ethnicization of the party and government elites. Hungarian and Jewish apparatchiks were replaced by ethnic Romanians who owed to Gheorghiu-Dej their swift rise to prominence. It was at that moment that Nicolae Ceausescu, the youngest member of the Politburo, began to emerge as the leader’s heir apparent.

  Faced with potential Soviet intervention, Gheorghiu-Dej initiated a rapprochement with Tito and started to champion the principle of non-interference by the Soviets in other countries’ internal affairs. When Khrushchev tried to push for the creation of supranational integrative bodies within the CMEA, the Romanians strongly opposed those suggestions and boycotted the Eastern bloc’s summits. For Gheorghiu-Dej and his team, the only way to defend their own political hegemony was to ensure the country’s economic independence. Educated in the Stalinist faith, they thought only rapid industrialization, with special emphasis on the paramount role of heavy industry, would succeed in securing that independence. They insisted that the only chance for Romania to escape foreign—that is, Soviet—pressure was to become economically self-sufficient. That was the rationale for the Romanian deviation that developed after 1962. In 1963-64 the Romanian media published a number of staunchly anti-Soviet articles, criticizing various Soviet plans to impose integration upon the East European economies. At the same time, noting the deterioration of Khrushchev’s power in the Kremlin, Gheorghiu-Dej adopted a neutralist stance in the conflict between the Soviet and the Chinese communist parties. One reason Gheorghiu-Dej took such offense at Khrushchev’s integrationist plans was that the Romanians thought in a new East European arrangement they would become vassals of more developed countries like East Germany and Czechoslovakia. The personal animosities between Gheorghiu-Dej, on the one hand, and Ulbricht and Novotny, on the other, played a considerable role in aggravating the friction.

  In the summer of 1963 the Romanian media printed documents from both sides of the Soviet-Chinese conflict over the “general line of the world communist movement.” One can assume that, far from sharing Mao’s revolutionary zeal, Gheorghiu-Dej used the split between the two communist giants to create his own area of autonomy and to distance himself from the increasingly unpredictable Soviet First Secretary. In 1966 J. F. Brown observed:

  With daring shrewdness, Gheorghiu-Dej soon recognized the implications of the Sino-Soviet dispute for the East European satellites. He saw that they were now given much more scope for maneuver vis-à-vis the Kremlin than ever before. On the overt basic issues of the Sino-Soviet dispute, he was always wholly pro-Soviet; there was virtually no danger of his ever becoming a Maoist. Mao, to him, became simply a means of winning concession from the Soviet Union.40

  In fact, Gheorghiu-Dej empathized with Mao’s intransigent de
fense of the Stalinist legacy. Like other leftovers of the time of terror, he knew that the ultimate consequence of Khrushchev’s disruptive campaigns against the “cult of personality” would be his own political elimination from the top leadership. To prevent such a denouement and to strengthen his power base, Gheorghiu-Dej turned to the weapon of nationalism: With mind-boggling rapidity, the Romanian communists, once the most subservient in their relations with Moscow, performed an about-face and started to pledge their commitment to national values. Prominent figures of the country’s intelligentsia were rehabilitated, history books were rewritten in accordance with the new party line, and Russian ceased to be a mandatory foreign language taught in all Romanian schools. In April 1964, as the Sino-Soviet dispute reached an unprecedented polemical level, the Romanian Communist Party issued its “Statement with Regard to the Major Question Within the World Communist Movement.” The document was very much influenced by Tito’s self-ordained independence. It emphasized the right of every communist party to decide its own strategy, denied the Kremlin its privileged status within the socialist bloc, and called for new relations between communist parties and countries based on full equality and respect of national traditions and interests.

  The Romanian challenge to the Soviet claim to hegemony ensured a broader popular base for Gheorghiu-Dej’s leadership. Although his toughness in implementing the Stalinist line was evident to all Romanians, many were tempted to support the new national communist line. In August 1964 Gheorghiu-Dej felt secure enough to announce a general amnesty for political prisoners. Long-censored manuscripts by Karl Marx, critical of the Russian Empire’s expansionist policy toward the Danubian principalities during the nineteenth century, were published. Closed party gatherings were organized where members of Gheorghiu-Dej’s Politburo engaged in radical criticism of the Soviet record of plundering Romania in the 1950s. The rediscovery of national values was, of course, self-serving for Gheorghiu-Dej and his associates. Far from converting to genuine patriotism, the communist elite was trying to manipulate national symbols in order to foster its domination and absolute control over the country. At the end of Gheorghiu-Dej’s rule, in March 1965, Romania could follow one of two scenarios: either emulate Tito and de-Stalinize further, allowing for ideological relaxation and an opening to the West; or emulate Albania, that is, further strengthening of the communist party’s grip on power and consolidation of a nationalist authoritarianism hostile to any liberalization. What would have happened had Gheorghiu-Dej lived longer is hard to say. When he died in office at the beginning of 1965, his successor, Nicolae Ceausescu, pursued de-Stalinization only for purposes of consolidating his own power. Unlike Gheorghiu-Dej, however, who had grasped a measure of authority through his opposition to the Soviets, Ceausescu had to build his own image as a national leader. A former shoemaker’s apprentice with no real education, Ceausescu distrusted intellectuals and resented any form of liberalism. He played the nationalist card but made sure to keep any critical tendencies under strict control. Ceausescu pursued an adamantly Stalinist policy in the economy but permitted, at least during his first years in power, a relative loosening of the dogmatic constraints on the country’s intellectual life. Later on, he engaged in a tremendous consolidation of power and established an original version of national communism whose eclectic ideology included elements of simplistic MarxismLeninism and far-right ethnocentrism. As an unreconstructed Stalinist, he believed in the predestined role of the communist party and defended its monopoly on power. Since the only source of legitimacy for such power was the rejection of Moscow’s interference, Ceausescu exploited the national pride of the Romanians and their historical anti-Russian resentments. He became enthralled with his own propaganda and came to see himself as the incarnation of Romania’s destiny. His dream was to create a strong, highly centralized, and ethnically homogeneous state; he consistently referred to the “unified working people whose unique language would consist of communist words.” In comparison with other East European leaders, Ceausescu enjoyed the somewhat privileged status of ruling a country with no Soviet troops on its territory. Instead of using that advantage to democratize the political system, he established a personal dictatorship that in the 1980s would reach the most absurd dimensions.

  BULGARIA: THE FAITHFUL ALLY

  The Bulgarian attitude to Khrushchevism mirrored the convulsions plaguing the Soviet leadership. Todor Zhivkov, the Bulgarian leader, derived political legitimacy from the momentous revelations of the Twentieth CPSU Congress. Indeed, in 1956 Zhivkov engineered the elimination of his former patron, the Comintern veteran Vulko Chervenkov, from the top party position. At the April 1956 plenum the foundation myth of Zhivkov’s pretense to being the embodiment of a new face of communism was created. The struggle between Zhivkov and the Chervenkov faction lasted until the Soviet Twenty-second Congress in 1961, when Khrushchev created the political framework for sweeping de-Stalinization in the satellite countries. Even after Chervenkov’s expulsion from the party, however, the Stalinists continued to oppose Zhivkov’s calls for a domestic thaw. In 1962 the Eighth Party Congress consecrated Zhivkov’s triumph over his Stalinist opponents. The hard-line Prime Minister, Anton Yugov, who had participated in the purges of the 1950s, was attacked by Zhivkov and lost all his party and government positions. But Zhivkov was himself a skillful communist bureaucrat whose commitment to liberalization was perfunctory. In 1963 he emulated Khrushchev’s anti-intellectual outbursts, directed primarily against Soviet liberal artists like the poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko and the sculptor Ernst Neizvestny, and engineered a strong purge of the Bulgarian anti-Stalinists. Critics of his regime were deported from Sofia, and the secret police resumed persecution of those who were suspected of the slightest form of dissent. When Khrushchev was ousted in October 1964, Zhivkov immediately tried to ingratiate himself with the new Soviet leadership headed by Leonid Brezhnev and Aleksei Kosygin. But his power base remained very fragile, and in the spring of 1965 a conspiracy composed of communist veterans and high-ranking army officers almost managed to topple him. After the defeat of the putschists, Zhivkov stated his unconditional support for the Soviet Union. In the years to come he would make subservience the principal underpinning of his power. Later, when the Soviets ceased to support him, that was enough to enable a group of conspirators in the Politburo to eliminate him in November 1989.

  CONCLUSIONS

  The shock created by Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization campaigns affected all East European countries. The disarray among local elites resulted in the loosening of party controls and the emergence of emancipating movements from below, especially in Poland and Hungary. Once the Stalinist anti-Tito charges were exposed as insane fabrications, the national communist temptation became rampant in the region. The demolition of Stalin’s myth and Khrushchev’s calls for a creative approach to revolutionary doctrine emboldened unorthodox thinkers to question the very foundations of the existing order. From the late 1950s to the early 1960s all East European countries (to varying degrees), experienced the rise of revisionist tendencies. They were boldest in Poland and Hungary, where the Stalinist edifice crumbled under the onslaught of critical currents. In Hungary, the political dynamism resulted in the complete collapse of the communist structures and the emergence of an embryonic pluralist order, smashed by Soviet troops in November 1956. After the defeat of the Hungarian Revolution, the Soviets tried to restore the uniformity of the bloc, but their attempts were bound to fail. Centrifugal trends developed in each country, and local elites refused to be treated in the old humiliating fashion.

  In many respects, the initiatives in those countries came from the local leaders, forcing Moscow to comply with their decisions. For instance, Walter Ulbricht, the East German leader, could persuade the Kremlin that only the erection of the Berlin Wall could stop the demographic hemorrhage in his country. In Hungary, the Kadarite national consensus was based on tacit recognition of the impossibility of discussing the 1956 events and Kadar’s personal role in the a
nnihilation of the legal Nagy government. It was a compromise based on blatant lies, half-truths, and illusions regarding the reformability of the existing system from within. The lack of independence in Hungary’s foreign policy was balanced by an increased margin of personal freedom and a limitation on the powers enjoyed by the secret police inside the country. The Romanians maintained their equal distance from both Moscow and Beijing in the increasingly bitter conflict between the two communist giants. Romania engaged in a maverick foreign policy while keeping the repressive apparatus intact and sticking to a fundamentalist Stalinist interpretation of socialist construction. Yugoslavia continued to promote its nonaligned foreign policy, but Tito made no secret of his support for Khrushchev’s anti-Maoist platform. Domestically, there were new reforms in the direction of self-management, and critical Marxists established their theoretical journal, Praxis, where they called for a resolute divorce from bureaucratic socialism. They criticized Tito and the Communist League of Yugoslavia for inconsistency in their break with the authoritarian-personalistic model of socialism. Only Albania, because of its remoteness and the strength of the local repressive apparatus, could avoid any form of de-Stalinization.