The Atlantic and Its Enemies

by Norman Stone

  The first sign of movement in Moscow came when on 8 February 1955 Molotov at last said that there might be a Staatsvertrag (‘state treaty’) over the restoration of Austria — no need to wait for a German treaty, he said. Earlier, the USSR had refused any Austrian arrangement: the country was on the Czechoslovak and Hungarian borders, and might make these countries unstable. But Austrian independence was a useful carrot to have on offer. Now, fearing that the western zones of Austria might be incorporated in the new western Germany, and wanting to show the Germans what might be achieved, the Russians recognized and evacuated Austria. A Staatsvertrag was signed in the Belvedere Palace on 15 May, and the Red Army moved out quite quickly. The Austrian chancellor, Julius Raab, spent three days in Moscow discussing these arrangements, and Austrian neutrality was solemnly declared by the parliament in October. In this case, the neutrality meant certain rewards — for instance, the placing of international bodies (including the new Atomic Energy Commission) in Vienna — but it also had its questionable side, in that Vienna became something of an espionage capital, and, like Finland, a place where Moscow might maintain agents of influence. The most obvious of these was one Kurt Waldheim, who slipped and slithered his way from the staff of an Army Group in the Balkans to the Austrian foreign ministry, where he connived in the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia and was rewarded to become secretary-general of the United Nations. In this same period, the Soviet bases in Finland were also given up, partly on the grounds that they made the Swedes nervous, and caused them secretly to co-operate with the West. This again, as with Austria’s Waldheim, was to prove its uses with Sweden’s Olof Palme. In May 1955 Khrushchev visited Tito, in an attempt to make up, but there, one Communist seeing through another, he had a guarded welcome, and Tito was enjoying his role as arbiter between East and West; Yugoslavia also became an important pioneer of the ‘Third World’, made money out of Arab shipping, oil and construction, and was cheerfully represented as every country’s favourite neutral. West Germany was once more well and truly on the map, and in 1955 Adenauer was invited to Moscow for resumption of diplomatic relations — one present being the return to Germany of the prisoners of war who had been cruelly kept back, including the few thousand survivors of Stalingrad and the men who had been in Hitler’s Bunker to the very end.

  At any rate, here was a grinning Khrushchev going round the West, even being received with rapture by ambitious hostesses in California and talking agriculture with prominent American farmers. A machinery for East-West relations was coming into existence. At the United Nations and in foreign ministries, a bureaucracy was to emerge, with an interest in common matters, such as disarmament talks or ‘summits’, which were supposed, generally quite wrongly, to make for personal friendships that would solve the various international problems. Quite soon, American farmers were saving the Soviet population from the consequences of Moscow’s misdeeds over agriculture (in 1914 Russia had been the greatest grain exporter in the world). Grain exports started in 1955, and were generally paid for, through a credit system, by the American taxpayer. However, there was an obvious problem, in that the People’s Democracies that Stalin had set up were considerable counter-propaganda. The contrast between Austria and Hungary was illustrative. Vienna was remaking itself as an historic city. Budapest, its twin, was still pockmarked by bullet holes, the splendid boulevards of nineteenth-century Pest dimly lit, empty, and marked only by occasional dingy shops. Any appeal to the West would mean getting rid of the little Stalinists who ran these places, each with its own miniature Iron Curtain, complete with savage Alsatians (a stuffed one, in heroic biting mode, was on display in the Prague museum of the security police, which occupied part of the old German university).

  Getting rid of these little Stalinists was not easy. Czechoslovakia had her own native Communist movement of some strength, but in Poland and Hungary Communism was the imposition of a small minority. The local Communists kept power by Stalinist methods — in Hungary a labour camp at Récsk, in Romania a much larger one in the foetid Danube Delta — and crammed peasants into collective farms or towns and cities, which were swamped. Cracow, an historic baroque town in southern Poland, Catholic and middle-class in character, acquired a huge steelworks, Nowa Huta, to introduce a proletarian element. To combat religion, sport was used: Katowice had a huge smog-bound stadium in its centre. Churches, independent organizations of all sorts, contacts with foreigners or emigrants all came under severe censure, and a secret police, the UB, had its spies everywhere. In East Germany the situation was still harsher. Meanwhile, a good proportion of anything that these countries produced went to the USSR. The cities were dominated by lorries carting building rubble around, spewing out Soviet-refined oil, which had its own unmistakable smell. In Stalin’s last years, there had been grotesque political trials, in which senior Communist stalwarts, generally Jewish, were tortured into confessions as to British espionage and the like. The problem here was the example of Tito, whose enmity Stalin himself had created, but whose example, as an independent national-minded Communist, might prove tempting to other of the satellite country leaderships.

  Now, as part of a strategy to make the USSR less repellent in Western and especially German eyes, Khrushchev attempted to make conditions in the People’s Democracies less oppressive. He would try to find popular and national Communist leaders to replace the various Stalinist oppressors. Even in 1953 there were modest changes: George Soros visited Budapest, for instance. The chief idea (Molotov did not like it) was to make Communism less unpopular, by associating it with nationalism (and Khrushchev went to Warsaw and Prague in 1954, also with a view to minor relaxations). The local Stalin-appointed leaderships got in the way; the furniture would have to be changed. This was not easy. The satellite leaders each had his own network and support system, and in Czechoslovakia, which was still quite an advanced country, with a genuine proletariat, Klement Gottwald and his successor, Antonín Novotný, were not at all easy to shake. Even, they could claim to have taken over the country because of electoral popularity rather than through the Red Army. The country was anyway made up of two nations, Czech and Slovak, and in so far as there were ‘national’ Communists, they were likely to be Slovak, men such as Gustáv Husák and Alexandr Dubček. Poland was the greatest headache — the largest of these countries, and, as everyone knew, likely to be strongly anti-Soviet if freed from Moscow’s control. Hungary, though much smaller, was similar. As with Poland, she was tightly controlled by a small knot of mainly Jewish Communists — Mátyás Rákosi, a veteran of pre-war prison; Ernő Gerő, a veteran of the Spanish Civil War and much else in particular; others, including a female or two. These people were an embarrassment and the Hungarians’ security police, the AVO, were famously horrible. On the other hand, once they were removed, who else? Khrushchev interfered, but not with much forcefulness. One of the worst AVO men, Vladimir Farkas, was removed. More, a man with long associations in Moscow was moved back into a position of power. Imre Nagy was not Jewish. He was of a poor and provincial Protestant background, and in Hungary the Protestant minorities in the past had been substantial, creative, the backbone of the national cause and, before 1867, sometimes persecuted by the Catholic establishment of the Austrian empire. Nagy as a young soldier had been made prisoner by the Russians in the First World War and, like many such, including figures as diverse as Tito in Yugoslavia and Ernst Reuter, mayor of Berlin at the time of the blockade, had become a Communist. In the 1930s he had lived in Moscow, and had survived the killings that Stalin launched against foreign Communists not protected by their own embassy. Nagy was widely assumed to have been an informer — perhaps trying to get rid of rivals within the Party, such as its leader, Béla Kun. He came back to Budapest in 1945, and was minister of agriculture. As such, he protested against the grotesque misuse that was made of farmers, and was sidelined; under pressure from the USSR, he was reinstated, as prime minister, in 1953, but he did not replace Rákosi as Party secretary, and, since in that system the P
arty constituted the real power, he was rapidly pushed aside through committee manoeuvring by the Rákosi-Gerő team. In the same way, on a much grander scale in Moscow, Malenkov, head of the government, was outmanoeuvred by Khrushchev, who ran the Party. But now, Khrushchev wanted to be rid of Rákosi.

  The long-accepted account of the Hungarian national uprising that followed ran along heroic lines. In 1848 there had been a great revolt against the Austrian empire, and it had had an operatic quality — barricades, student demonstrations, public rhetoric, epic poems by writers and, behind the scenes, calculations by clever aristocrats. Updated, this meant the masses, bare hands against tanks. This was legend: manipulative noblemen had been at work. The same, in much different form, happened again: 1956 was a stage revolution that got out of hand. The Stalin speech in February 1956 was supposed to have been secret, but Khrushchev did not mean or expect this to remain the case, and the rumours of it spread. Upsetting Rákosi meant organizing some well-placed demonstration against him, and a useful forum was the Writers’ Union. Under Communism, writers were a privileged breed, with special restaurants and guaranteed royalties, and their union was a natural home for writers who knew that they were not in the first class. It was also heavily bureaucratized by the Party. On the anniversary of the start of the 1848 uprising, a national day, some students — their union, too, heavily bureaucratized — laid a national flag at the statue of the great poet of 1848, Sándor Petőfi. The writers followed, with a carefully worded resolution as to the need for this or that alteration of the Party’s ways. Rákosi, dented, carried on, but the new developments were obvious enough. Then came news of events in Poland, which stimulated the opposition to continue.

  The Stalin report had given the visiting Polish leader, Bolesław Bierut, a heart attack; of which he died. Khrushchev went to the funeral, and stayed for the election of Bierut’s successor. He tried both to excuse his own Stalinist past, and to explain how the monster had ruled; when someone anonymous broke out with a ‘no’, Khrushchev retorted, quite accurately, that that kind of objection, to a Soviet leader, would have been unthinkable before his, Khrushchev’s, report, and, ‘as the saying goes, the fool becomes smart afterwards’. Khrushchev then vastly alarmed his Polish audience when he praised Stalin’s imposition of a quota — 2 per cent — for Jews in important places, including the universities. What, in a very muddled and offensive way, he was doing was to make his audience elect as leader a ‘national’ and non-Jewish figure. They did not know what to do; the interim successor figures toyed with change, and events then brought on a crisis. Tito had arrived in Moscow early in June and at the end of the month, at Poznan, working-class restiveness resulted in a huge anti-Soviet demonstration and a strike that was only crushed by tanks and security troops in thousands; over seventy people were killed, and hundreds wounded. It mattered that, in Poland, there was a very widely popular Church which had a long tradition of working-class Catholicism. The priests were politically, by implication, far more powerful in Poland than elsewhere in the bloc and they became important in the sequel. The Communists themselves did not even, for years, imprison the Cardinal, as had happened in Hungary, and only latterly kept him under house arrest in the southern mountains.

  When the Poles met to elect a new Politburo on 19 October, they elected Władysław Gomułka. He, back in 1948, had had some popularity (he was not a Jew, though his wife was), had been expelled from the Party for the usual heresies, and in 1951 was arrested (though, again, interned rather than purge-tried). Now he was brought back, to enormous waves of public enthusiasm, and when Khrushchev wanted an invitation to Warsaw it was refused. He came, uninvited, with a retinue of senior Soviet politicians and generals, in full-dress uniform; he threatened to order the troops into Warsaw. There was a high scene at the airport, but Gomułka won Khrushchev round: there would be yet another enormous Polish rising unless the Polish Communists were allowed to order things their own way. Khrushchev flew back to Moscow, still in two minds but in the end resigned. There was to be a Polish ‘national Communism’, with Gomułka in charge (and the Cardinal always there to advise prudence). There were tempestuous scenes in Poland, and they were transmitted to Hungary. On 23 October Budapest exploded as well, this time organized by the students. Thousands strong, they moved towards the parliament, and towards the radio station, where they wanted to be on air; they tore down the huge Stalin statue in the Városliget. There was firing by the AVO that evening, but the police were overwhelmed and fled. The fact was that there was no Church to calm tempers; nor was there a Gomułka. The Hungarian Stalinists were hated, and Hungary as a country had faced vast humiliation, whereas, though Poland had been ruined, she had at least counted among the victors, and the Communists, though detested, had had their human face. Khrushchev detected that the Hungarian situation would be much more explosive and, though he did encounter criticism, moved in troops on 24 October. But they met resistance from Molotov cocktails and the like, and the Hungarian army went over to the rebellion. Gerő speedily went, replaced by János Kádár, who, like Gomułka, had been a victim of the Stalinists, but the fighting went on, with hundreds of dead Hungarians and Soviet soldiers. Even Marshall Zhukov now thought that the troops should be withdrawn, and others in the Politburo agreed. On 30 October Khrushchev was ready to withdraw from Hungary altogether and issued a placating statement. But by then events in Budapest were out of control and a mob sacked the Party headquarters; the AVO men were identified by their light-coloured shoes, and lynched (hanged from the trees). Hungarian tanks defected and Nagy now said he would leave the Soviet alliance, the Warsaw Pact. Mikoyan and Mikhail Suslov, the head of ideology, were in Budapest, and Nagy also talked to them about a Soviet withdrawal from Hungary. Khrushchev had been very much in doubt up to that point, and now he began to see the dangers in further concession — as he said to Tito, it would mean ‘capitalists’ on the Soviet border. To begin with, the Chinese had been all for a Polish solution but Mao Tse-tung, too, urged force on the evening of 30 October, when he learned of the lynchings and on the 31st Khrushchev told the Praesidium that the USSR must restore order. Several days before, Khrushchev had noted that the British and French were embroiled in Suez and had said the USSR should not be similarly embroiled. But he went ahead. Mikoyan protested. Khrushchev just said that ‘bloodshed’ then would spare much worse bloodshed later on.

  Then he went off to talk to the Poles (at Brest-Litovsk) and to Hungary’s neighbours. They were worried that a non-Communist Hungary would make trouble over the borders with the Hungarian minorities. In the 1920s and 1930s, there had been an alliance of Czechoslovakia, Romania and Yugoslavia against Hungary, known as the ‘Little Entente’, and it now made a shadowy reappearance. Khrushchev made an especial appeal to Tito, who made him fly to his country retreat on the island of Brioni, one of the Quarnero group at the head of the Adriatic, where storms frequently blew. He flew into a terrible one over the mountains, and then had to cross a wild sea: Malenkov was very ill. Tito — himself recently revealed to have been, like Nagy, a one-time agent of the NKVD — gave the Russians his support, and their troops would move in on Budapest again. It took several days of fighting for Budapest to be brought back under control, under a new government, Kádár’s, which started off with severe repression, while 200,000 people fled the country. Nagy was shabbily tricked into the Yugoslav embassy, with other leading figures, was promised asylum, and was kidnapped to Romania, where he was kept for two years in seclusion. Then, bizarrely, he was tried and executed — his remains thrown into an unmarked prison grave. He said, before his death, that history would rehabilitate him; the only thing he feared, he added, was that it would be his executioners who did the rehabilitating, and there he was completely right. His eventual rehabilitation, in 1989, was part of the Communists’ struggle to survive. But 1956 had another curious effect, that Moscow would from now on handle the Hungarians with a certain amount of care.

  8. Europe and the Wider World

  Hungarian
s in the West demonstrated outside Soviet embassies in protest at the crushing of Budapest; there was an exodus from Western Communist parties. However, there was never any question of Western intervention in the affair; on the contrary, it confirmed the existing borders. Besides, the rising in itself caused the Soviet hand to be less heavy. Khrushchev hoped that a more national character in the People’s Democracies would make them less unpopular, and for a time that did indeed succeed — even, eventually, in Hungary, the leader of which might well echo an old line of central European politics, that ‘I have no ambition in politics beyond the attainment on all sides of a supportable level of dissatisfaction.’ Khrushchev, for his part, was still full of himself. True, western Europe had not fallen — quite the contrary. But there was the rest of the world, and Moscow was now discovering it.

  The justification for Stalin had been that semi-colonial backward peasant countries could remake themselves in a generation, through industry, and defeat the Western imperialists. Mao Tse-tung was applying what he took to be Soviet lessons, and in 1955 Khrushchev had been quite generous as regards help, though he stopped short at nuclear secrets. Progressive intelligentsia the world over took the Soviet example seriously, and studies of the whole subject in the West were dominated by E. H. Carr’s multivolume history of the Revolution. Carr, who had earlier written a book arguing that, since Hitler had power, Britain should side with him, now noted that Stalin had power, and that Britain should accommodate him. His account of the Revolution showed how that power had been obtained, and it took the whole experience of Five Year Plans and the collectivization of agriculture very seriously. He waved aside with contempt any suggestion that Russia in 1914 had not really been so backward after all; his history of the Revolution hardly bothers with the subject, and begins rather bewilderingly and at length with arguments between a few dozen socialists in exile. The Soviet example had acquired worldwide resonance; now Latin America was in the offing, and so also was the Middle East. Khrushchev went onto the world stage.