by Norman Stone
An equivalent such deal was successfully done over Finland. The Russians had attacked her in the winter of 1939-40, with a view to seizing lands north of Leningrad; after several months, in which blundering Soviet soldiers were outmanoeuvred by white-clad Finnish soldiers sliding on skis from ambushes, the Finns had had to surrender; they lost the lands, but, when Hitler attacked the USSR, joined up with him to take them back. If they had then cut the supply line to Leningrad, that city would have collapsed, and would have faced the utter extinction that Hitler had promised it. However, the Finns’ leader, Marshal Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim, knew his Russia — he had been a cavalry general under the Tsar — and told his intimates that if the Finns acted ‘they will never forgive us’. The Finns stopped, dragged their feet, maintained a link to Moscow through Stockholm, got out of the war in September 1944, and fought the Germans in their far north. In the resulting peace, Finland lost land, had to pay reparations (mainly in timber), conceded a Russian base and proclaimed neutrality. But there was no Soviet occupation, and parliamentary democracy was maintained at the cost, now and again, of grubby concessions (would-be Soviet defectors were, for instance, handed back).
The London Poles did not give way and it may not anyway have made a difference. Poland was much larger than Finland, in a much more strategic position — on the way to Germany — and in any case strongly anti-Soviet or even just anti-Russian (at Potsdam, Stalin openly said that a free election would mean an anti-Soviet government). Sad battles went on in the eastern territories as the Red Army settled in, and local Lithuanians or Ukrainians tried to establish themselves in the historic Polish cities: very young Polish hotheads were killed in defence of Vilna, for instance, and are remembered with cheap iron crosses in the old cemetery; and there was a battle in Balzac’s old haunt, Wierzchównia, in which the entire village was wiped out by Ukrainian partisans. Five million Poles were expelled from these regions as the Red Army cleared them out. They were settled in turn mainly in the formerly German lands that had been assigned to Poland as compensation, from which 3 million Germans had themselves been expelled. Shattered Warsaw was reoccupied by 1.5 million people. Inflation was rife, and in 1945 and 1946 the average monthly wage in Poland bought ten pounds of meat or sugar; bottles were currency; there were epidemics of venereal disease. Late in 1945 an amnesty brought 30,000 demoralized men from hiding. The non-Communists were in no position to resist with any force. On the other hand, Poland had ‘a mass of manoeuvre’ in the sense that the population was greater and the territory quite large; besides, the Western embassies had treaty rights, and the Communists had public opinion in the USA to consider. Also, there was Catholicism, and that required some management. Still, at Yalta the Western powers had given way, in exchange for a guarantee that the Soviet Union would help against Japan. There were supposed to be free elections but everyone knew what these would entail. When Roosevelt told Stalin that the American Lithuanians might object if their country were taken into the USSR, Stalin said, ‘You want a referendum? It can be arranged.’ With a near 100 per cent ‘yes’ vote, this duly happened. The British and the Americans (though not the Vatican or the Irish) recognized the Communist-based Polish government, provided that some (unimportant) ministries went to non-Communists. It was now up to Stalin’s Polish collaborators to manage the takeover.
The people who did the stage-managing were acute and energetic enough, and Marxism was a useful training. They were widely hated, and eventually lost, but many lived on to a great age, and an enterprising journalist got them, in retirement, in small, overheated, book-lined flats, to talk. The head of the Secret Service, responsible for espionage and lengthy prison sentences, was Jakub Berman — forty-four in 1945, son of a Warsaw commercial traveller with five children, and he went on to higher education. Most of the family were wiped out by the Nazis at Treblinka, though one brother managed, as secretary of the Jewish resistance organization, to escape, eventually to Israel. Berman himself had the advantage of talking Russian, because he had attended the main Warsaw Russian school, and he reached the Soviet zone early on. Then he went through the grim and dedicated political school, and attracted the attention of a Comintern chief, Dmitry Manuilsky, and lived in a chauffeur’s room on the fifth floor of the Hotel Lux (there was a telephone in the corridor, which no-one, for fear that it might be the NKVD police, dared to answer; it was part of the sinister surrealism of the place that when he did eventually answer an insistent ringing, someone asked him about a Polish Communist writing on Africa). Berman then cultivated the obviously up-and-coming Soviet officials Nikita Khrushchev, in the western Ukraine, and Boris Ponomarev, in Byelorussia, who was to be head of the International Department of the Central Committee, the successor to the Comintern. As the Red Army moved forward, Berman was one of the very few Poles whom Stalin trusted, and in Warsaw he took over the Security Service, the UB, with its networks everywhere, and he was a main architect of the new regime, arranging for the persecution and silencing of opponents. In case such men might let him down, Stalin would be a constant presence, even telephoning at midnight to catch them off their guard. But there were figures ostensibly less sinister than Berman. The press chief, Stefan Staszewski, had had a terrible history. Born in 1906, son of a Jewish small tradesman, he became a law student, joined the Communist Party, went to the Comintern school in Moscow for three years, and then served as youth secretary in south-east Poland, where the Party tried for an alliance with Ukrainian nationalists. He was arrested, fled to the USSR in 1934, and was sentenced there to eight years in a camp, in the terrible frozen Kolyma. A brother was murdered in the USSR; his mother was murdered at Treblinka. A man such as Staszewski only really had the Party as a mental and emotional focus, and in 1948 he was its press chief. Or there was Roman Werfel, socially above Staszewski, in that his father was a prosperous lawyer in the chief city of the south-east, Lwów, when it was one of the great places of the Austrian empire. There was a portrait of the Emperor on the wall and the family spoke German at home. Roman — like so many other boys of this class — despised religion, ate ham sandwiches at school, and was beaten up by other Jewish pupils. Then it was Vienna and Communism, followed by Berlin and a return to Poland, where he organized strikes on the noble Sapieha family estate at Rawa Ruska, where the peasants were generally Ukrainian. In 1939 he escaped to the Soviet zone, and joined up with the Moscow Communists as head of the ideological section. As such, he came to run much of the educational and cultural side of Polish Communism, but he was very erudite, and he did use his influence to help people who, in, say, Prague, would have been cleaning boilers. There were others who followed the Stalinist line and who were as much its captives as its advocates, and their loss of office later on probably came as a relief. Of the people the journalist spoke to, the only unrepentant figure was Julia Minc, widow of the one-time economic chief. Her past was part prison (for membership of Communist Youth, in 1922), part France, part Samarkand, where her husband, during the war, taught economics. Her interview with the journalist was pure agitprop, delivered with contempt, and when the journalist demurred, she told the dog to bite her.
In 1945 and 1946 the Communists entrenched themselves, working out how to take power. In the summer of 1946 the matter became urgent. The failure of the Council of Foreign Ministers to agree as to Germany’s future was followed, that September, by the speech of James F. Byrnes in Stuttgart, to the effect that a German state in the west was under examination; Bizonia had already been announced, and its economic council was to be the nucleus of a West German government. Poland, in her strategic position, was then taken over by Stalin. It was important to discredit the non-Communists in Western eyes, and of course old Poland could be caricatured as a place of great estates and downtrodden peasants. There was some truth in this, but not much: the country had made considerable but unsung progress between the wars. Anti-semitism could also be used to discredit the anti-Communists, and there were indeed murderous clashes as Jews returned, trying to recover
their property. The Cardinal Prince Sapieha himself was tactless, saying after an incident in the summer of 1946 that there were too many Jews in a government ‘the nation does not wish’. In saying this he was only echoing a widespread peasant opinion that rząd jest zażydzony — ‘the government is judaized’ — and at a time when almost all of Western opinion sympathized with the Jews, such lines were not helpful.
The Communists mobilized their supporters, awarding them lands and houses evacuated by the three million Germans in 1945-6, whether in Silesia, Pomerania or southern East Prussia, and by April 1946 were being pressed by the Western ambassadors for proper elections. These could be postponed for a time, with reference to the endless movement of people, but not for ever; they needed preparation. In June there was a dress rehearsal — a referendum, containing three questions inviting the answer ‘yes’ (e.g. whether to approve of the new western borders). That allowed a drawing up of electoral lists, and a noting down of who was who. The next stage was to gain the alliance of left-wing elements outside the Party, much as the Bolsheviks had done in 1917, with the Left of the Socialist Revolutionaries. The Communists took over the trade unions, with endless detailed manoeuvering in committees where the agenda was ‘fixed’ by a Communist nominee. That way, ‘the organized discontent of the masses’ could be deployed against any independent voice. Besides, the Communists allocated land and housing, and could therefore arrange for whole blocks and factories to vote in unison. ‘Anti-Fascism’ was a weapon to use against opposition, and a dissident party was simply outlawed; with some left-wing socialist help a new electoral law was passed in September. Another scheme was to establish dummy parties, pretending to be properly Catholic or Liberal or Peasant; the real ones could then, again, be outlawed; and opposition media could be silenced. There were even some supposedly realistic Catholics, such as the journalist Stefan Kisielewski, who called for a Catholic bloc acceptable to both sides. When the election occurred, ‘List Three’, ‘the Democratic bloc’, won 80 per cent of the vote with 90 per cent participation, whole factories and housing blocks voting together: there had been 15,000 arrests and 10 per cent of the opposition (PSL) offices were simply closed. The non-Communist ministers, still theoretically in charge of their second- and third-rank ministries, found their telephones disconnected and their secretaries sabotaging correspondence. The Western embassies collected tales of all this and protested, but the Communists could weasel out. When the parliament met, in January 1947, with its handful of real opposition deputies, these behaved bravely, but, fearing for their lives, fled abroad.
In Germany, Soviet policy somewhat varied. On the one side were demands for reparations, and much of industry in the Soviet zone was dismantled. But on the other, the zone was supposed to be an advertisement for socialism, or, at the very least, to show that a neutral, unified Germany would have nothing to fear from Moscow, somewhat in the manner of Finland. In 1945 revenge was the dominant note. All along there had been friction in the German capital. Almost as soon as they occupied the city, the Russians had flown in old German Communists from Moscow, with an idea of controlling their zone through apparently democratic methods. To start with, the Communists announced that they would co-operate with other anti-Fascist parties and not insist on a full-scale Communist programme. They would, for instance, have a land reform, but one designed to break up the estates of the ‘reactionaries’ and grant land to small farmers (who were expected, as in Poland or the Czech lands, then to support the Communists). But elections did not go their way — hardly surprisingly, since at the time the Red Army had acquired a terrible reputation for looting and raping, and a quarter of the industrial installations of the zone were being dismantled. When free elections were held in Austria and Hungary (November 1945) the Communists did badly, and in Hungary had to be given an artificially powerful place in the government (controlling the police). One solution would be to force the Social Democratic Party (SDP) (and the trade unions) into a Communist framework — a united workers’ party — and to muzzle any other parties. That last was easy enough, and the leaders (of the Christian Democrats and the Liberal Democrats) were just expelled, while dummies took their places. No more opposition from that quarter. The Social Democrats, collecting roughly two thirds of the vote, were more difficult, and the picture was complicated. Most Social Democrats were not unsympathetic at least to co-operation with the Communists. They regarded the recent German past with horror, some had spent time in concentration camps, and almost all felt that the failure of the two working-class parties to collaborate against Hitler had been a main cause of the Nazi catastrophe. In some cases, there was an idea that the Soviet Union alone offered a real chance that Germany could be a united, democratic and neutral country, like an enormous version of Finland, and maybe there would be concessions as to the border with Poland. Gustav Dahrendorf, who had been a member of the Reichstag before Hitler came to power, dallied with such ideas in 1945 and early in 1946. But the Communists behaved in a devious and bullying way, repellent to democrats, and they also resorted to force, kidnapping opposition figures. Meanwhile, they activated a form of the Nazi system of local control. Under the Nazis, each block of flats had its political supervisor, who snooped and bullied. The Communists reintroduced the system. When it came to political or trade union meetings, they were also skilled at the tactics employed by revolutionary minorities throughout history: ‘packing’ key committees with their own place-men, putting essential details into the small print, preventing opponents from attending meetings, deploying boring and lengthy speeches as a way of emptying a hall of moderate opponents and then taking a snap vote, provided they had the chairman in their pocket. In that way the trade union elections in Berlin produced a Communist majority (just as had happened in Russia, with the Soviets, in the later months of 1917). In any case, there was the Soviet military presence, as a great threat: the Social Democrats were forced to hold all meetings jointly with the Communists, Russian officers in plain clothes, with stenographers, in attendance. The Russians forced out opposition SPD figures, replacing them with men who supported fusion. Late in 1945 the SPD passed a firm resolution that there would have to be a fusion of the parties at national, not zonal, level, though they refused to present a joint list of candidates at the next elections. In this way, the Social Democratic Party of the eastern zone was fused with the Communist one in April 1946.
Hungary went the same way, in September 1947, with a unified Workers’ Party in 1948. Hungary in 1945 had reached the end of the line. Budapest had had its moment of glory, around 1900, and, with Glasgow and Sydney, was among the greatest of the Victorian cities. But Hungary had consistently chosen the wrong side, had lost territory all around, and had fought the war to the bitter end: the siege in February smashed the great bridges between Buda and Pest, the Royal Castle on the Buda side was a ruin, and from the top floor of one of the grandest mansion flat buildings in Pest there stuck the fuselage of a bomber. Crammed into the ghetto area, there survived still about 250,000 Jews, whose lives had been spared because there were considerable limits to the anti-semitism of Hungary; but there was bitterness and privation all around. The Soviet authorities had promoted a sort of last-moment National Front and anti-Nazi coalition, and then set about recruiting Communists in a country that did not, by nature, produce very many. However, land reform was a serious cause in a country still dominated by great (and quite efficient) estates; there was at least a peasant radical movement, and, given the large and sometimes foreign-owned factories in Pest, there was at least the beginning of a labour movement.
To begin with, Stalin had not quite known how to handle Hungary, and allowed a free election in November 1945 — calculating no doubt at first, as with East Germany, that the triumph of the Red Army would cause Communism to become popular. But there was an overwhelming vote for the Peasant Party. It formed a government, but the Soviet occupiers gave control of the police and the Security Service (AVO) to Communists. Most of these were Jewish, their leader
, Mátyás Rákosi, soured and made crafty by long experience of pre-war prison. Others had survived in Moscow (where Stalin had had several of their associates murdered) by treachery and guile.
Two young men in the new apparatus, Vladimir Farkas and Tibor Szamuely, had had characteristic Hungarian lives. As a young adept in AVO, Vladimir Farkas, born in 1925 in that selfsame region of what had been north-eastern Hungary that produced Robert Maxwell, distinguished himself as a zealot: the headquarters, on one of the main boulevards of Pest, had its complement of torture instruments, and there was a whole office to listen in on telephone conversations or to open letters. When he was born, his father, a Communist (and later on head of AVO), was in prison, and when he came out the family disintegrated. Father left for Moscow and worked for the Comintern, remarrying with a German woman and living in the celebrated Hotel Lux with the other Comintern families. Mother did not get on with grandmother, tried to kill herself by jumping into the river Hernad with her child, and then left for France, where eventually she joined the Communist resistance. She and Vladimir briefly met again only in 1945. He grew up in a sometimes flooded cellar with his grandmother, who took in washing; as a child he took meals to German Communists in the prison. The old woman, hitherto Orthodox Jewish, decided that there was no God after all, and when the Hungarians reoccupied the place sent the boy off to join his father in Moscow, having baked a favourite cake called Linzer Karikak which had raspberry jam inside and nuts outside. She was to die in 1945 and was buried in the Jewish cemetery, but her son, by this time head of the Hungarian Communist security system, would not have a proper tombstone put up. The boy, now fourteen, went on a Hungarian Jewish network to Prague, Warsaw and Moscow in 1939. His first (and characteristic) experience of the USSR occurred when the customs officials split open his apple to find out if anything had been concealed in it. Then he stayed, ignored, with his father and stepmother in the sinister Lux. In October 1941 the Germans arrived outside Moscow, and the Comintern people were evacuated to Samara, then called Kuybyshev. The lift wheezed up and down from the fifth floor, where the Farkas family lived in a set next to the Gottwalds from Czechoslovakia. Father and stepmother piled in with suitcases, leaving no place for the boy, and father pressed the button. Boy ran down the stairs and arrived at the lobby just as father’s bus pulled out. He did get himself to the train after an odyssey through trudging refugees, and travelled for a week, fed from sardine tins by a Hungarian Communist woman, Erzsébet Andics, who, looking like Madeleine Albright, urged her charms on all and sundry. Then that Comintern political school, all pseudonyms, water, relentless Marx and no sex. Vladimir went to Hungary late in 1944 with a view to organizing the Communist takeover. With him went another Moscow product, Tibor Szamuely. Szamuely was the nephew of the man who had set up the Hungarian equivalent of the Cheka, the secret police of revolutionary Russia. They were called the ‘Lenin Boys’. They had fled in 1919, and ended up via Vienna in Moscow. Young Tibor was sent to Bertrand Russell’s progressive school, and was therefore bilingual in English (of which he was a superb writer). Back in the USSR, such people went to camps, and he did as well, but war liberated him and he too arrived in Budapest with instructions concerning the takeover. Both men ended up on the other side. Tibor Szamuely kept his cards hidden and arranged an appointment in the end as ambassador to Ghana (of which he remarked that the anthem should be ‘aux arbres citoyens’) and defected to London with all of his belongings. Vladimir Farkas was imprisoned in 1953 for his misdeeds and was let out in 1961, returning to his grand apartment on the Orsó utca in Buda to see his little daughter and his wife, who slammed the door in his face.
