by Geert Mak
From 1950, therefore, there began a systematic persecution of predominantly Jewish doctors, military men and party leaders, and of Jews in general. In the early 1950s the camps of the Gulag were fuller than ever: at the peak, in the dark 1930s, there had been 1.8 million Soviet citizens in the camps; in 1953, there were 2.4 million. And the terror had now spread to the satellite countries as well: in Bulgaria, at least 100,000 people were detained in the infamous ‘Little Siberia’; in Hungary some 200,000 political prisoners were sent to the camps. Almost 140,000 Czechs and Slovaks, 180,000 Rumanians and 80,000 Albanians were interred as well.
In familiar agitprop style, a campaign was started in January 1953 to whip up interest in the coming trials. Big articles appeared in Pravda and Izvestia telling of a ‘bourgeois-Zionistic-American conspiracy’ that had infiltrated the country, and the newspapers’ tone grew more anti-Semitic every day. The Jews – and not only Jews – lived in fear of mass deportation.
Was it really a coincidence that, at precisely that point, on 5 March, 1953, Stalin died suddenly of a brain haemorrhage? Historians have been wondering about that ever since. The various eyewitness accounts of his death differ on essential points – a fateful sign, in itself – and it is certain that he lay dying for hours on the bedroom floor of his dacha. He had become a victim of his own terror: none of the staff dared at first to open his bedroom door, no doctor dared risk his life with an attempt to save Stalin's. In fact, for some time – whether out of fear or on purpose – no doctor was even summoned. Beria, who had been warned right away, shouted half-drunkenly at Stalin's bodyguards: ‘Can't you see that Comrade Stalin is fast asleep? Get out, all of you, and don't disturb him!’
In the end, it was twelve hours after Stalin's stroke that a doctor was finally called; no good explanation has ever been given for the delay. As Stalin lay dying, his son Vasili screamed at Beria and other members of the Politburo: ‘You filthy swine, you're killing my father!’ And according to Molotov, Beria told him later: ‘I put him away, I saved all your lives.’
Whatever the case, the fact is that Stalin's exit was a matter of life and death for many members of the Politburo in spring 1953. Most of them had come to power during the previous purges, and they remembered all too clearly how Stalin had dealt with their predecessors. Molotov's Jewish wife had already been arrested, and men like Beria, Deputy Prime Minister Georgy Malenkov and Khrushchev knew that their time had probably come as well.
When the physicians at last arrived, they hardly dared to unbutton Stalin's shirt. They asked Beria and the other leaders present for express permission for everything they did. Stalin's struggle with death lasted five days. ‘At the very last moment he suddenly opened his eyes and looked at everyone in the room,’ his daughter Svetlana Alliluyeva recalled. ‘It was a terrible gaze, mad or perhaps furious, and full of the fear of death …’ But Stalin had barely drawn his last breath when Beria bounded out of the room, called loudly for his chauffeur and, as Khrushchev remembered it, walked around ‘beaming’. ‘He knew for a certainty that the moment for which he had been waiting so long had arrived.’
The show trials were quickly called off, most of the defendants were freed, and the Gulag was slowly dismantled. Less than a month after his death, Stalin's name began not to be mentioned in Pravda any more. His portrait disappeared from public places. In late June, the seemingly simple and coarse Khrushchev was able to seize power. By the end of that year, in classic Stalinist fashion, his rival Beria had been arrested, condemned as a ‘British spy’ and an ‘enemy of the people’, and shot through the head. All of the older people I talked to in the former Eastern Bloc still knew exactly what they had been doing on the morning of Friday, 6 March, 1953, when the news of Stalin's death was announced.
‘My father was standing in the doorway,’ Yuri Klejner in St Petersburg told me. ‘He wiped his eyes: they were absolutely dry. I was six at the time. I tried to cry too, because that's what everyone was doing, but I couldn't either. A little neighbour girl said: “It's not right to play now that Comrade Stalin has died.”’ Irina Trantina, the daughter of a general in Kiev, was eleven and heard about it on the radio: ‘I started crying loudly, it was as though the world had ended. My parents were also very afraid of an atomic attack by the Americans, during those weeks everything was in a state of alarm. My father had barely escaped being convicted in an earlier purge because, as he put it, “I was wearing the wrong shoes.”’
Anna Smirnova was a young mother at the time: ‘I was upset, that above all. Not because of Stalin, but because of the feeling that something very bad was on its way again. What would the next regime have in store for us?’ Ira Klejner, daughter of a high-ranking officer in Sebastapol: ‘I was seven. I can remember eating a slice of bread with a fried egg. I realised I was supposed to weep, like everyone else, but all I could summon up was one tear. One tear. It fell on my egg.’
‘I'm not the right person to ask. In those days I was on the wrong side. I was one of those in control. It would be like denouncing myself.
‘But all right, since you insist. My name is Wladek Matwin. I was born in 1916, in a village not far from Katowice, close to the Silesian border. As boys, we were taken to school in the back of a lorry. The town in those days was inhabited almost solely by Jews, and we threw stones at them. Because the Jews were different. They wore strange clothing, they had funny hats, they didn't speak Polish, they didn't belong.
‘As I said before: my lifetime was a time of great violence. In most of the things I experienced, I had no choice in the matter. There were these huge outside forces dragging me along by the hair: during the war, with the communist rebels, in the army, in the party, and finally in the factory as a mathematician. Only much, much later did I realise that we are all limited. Our points of view, our intelligence, it's all very limited. My own life was already too much for me to understand.
‘I went to school in Poznan, joined the Polish communist youth organisation at eighteen and finally ended up in the Soviet Union. I fought in the Red Army, helped to reopen the Polish embassy in Moscow, and by 1946 I was back in Moscow. That's how it started.
‘I became a party official. Chairman of the communist youth organisation, party overseer of Wroclaw and Warsaw, secretary of the central committee, and, in the end, more or less the right-hand man to Gomulka.
‘During those first few years it was simply a matter of clearing the debris, literally as well, the way I suppose it was everywhere in Europe. All of Wroclaw had been blasted to pieces, we had to bury thousands of bodies, countless Germans were driven out, millions of Poles came in their place, it was one huge chaotic mess. Often, what we did wasn't nice, it was violence, violence against people, violence against the opposition, violence against all forms of reflection, but we thought of it as a struggle; we considered everything a struggle.
‘But it would be untrue to say that everything was bad back in those days. We weren't Stalinists; for example, we kept Polish agriculture from being collectivised. We were driven by a desire to help, we did our duty, we lived and worked for a cause, and everything was subservient to that. Duty is a military thing, and also something religious. We believed in many things, the party was almost a church. These days I know that real Marxism is essentially a scientific theory, with all the associated room for doubt. The most difficult thing, of course, is to combine that sense of duty and that doubt – which is what happened after 1956 – but right after the war we were still pure believers.
‘A lot of things were swept under the carpet in those years, there were things we didn't talk about, subjects we didn't touch upon. The worst year was 1948. At first Gomulka had taken part in the communist takeovers, but he refused to go on and collectivise the farms, and he was also interested in receiving aid from the Marshall Plan. But well, we knew it wouldn't be very wise to start a full-scale revolt against the Russians. That has never worked out well here, and besides, the country was full of Russian garrisons. We Polish communists were angry abou
t that as well. As if Poland was part of Germany!
‘Gomulka felt that he had made a big mistake by involving the Russians too much in the country's affairs. He was a real worker, not much of a reader, not particularly interested in the nuances, he was mercilessly frank and absolutely incorruptible. He possessed the enormous willpower that was needed in those days to say no to the Russians. In the end I couldn't work with him any more, yet he was a formidable personality. He actually ended up in prison for a few years.
‘I met them all. Erich Honecker was my DDR counterpart in the youth organisation, and fanatical even then. His boss, Walter Ulbricht, was also one of those people who never laughed. He was such a nasty, drab, tale-teller of a bureaucrat! Khrushchev had something clownish about him, a smart rebel of a farm boy. He had never read much, but he had this gleam in his eye. And Stalin, yes, Stalin, I was introduced to him once, during a buffet dinner in Moscow. I was a young, ambitious Polish talent at the time, and we talked about philosophy. He was short and really quite ugly, and he spoke Russian with a horrible Georgian accent. But I'll never forget his eyes: not brown, not blue, not dark, not light; the eyes of a tiger. When we said goodbye, Stalin pointed at me and asked our minister of foreign affairs: ‘That boy, does he belong to us or to Poland?’ The minister said: ‘To Poland.’ After that I was no longer allowed to attend such functions. I had been too brash.
‘Stalin, well, how I can put this? I adored the man. When he died I was party overseer of Warsaw. It was in the middle of the night, I was fast asleep. Suddenly the phone rang, it was a colleague from the central committee. All he said was: “Listen, Stalin's dead.” I was crushed. Even when my father died, I wasn't as shattered as I was at that moment.
‘Of course I am very well aware that Stalin was a villain, a major criminal. But to say that is to oversimplify matters. He was also a great man. History has given us a number of people like that: Robespierre, Cromwell, Napoleon, all of them villains. But when you mention those names it's not enough just to say that; then you're not speaking the truth. They were also great statesmen. They were criminals, and they were statesmen. People usually don't even want to know that such a combination is possible, I don't know why that is. But of course it's possible. That criminal Stalin, after all, also led us into battle against fascism, and that's a fact.
‘The world and history are not as simple as children often imagine. It's as complicated as love. So: I loved a criminal. But if I had known in 1941 what I knew after 1956, I would never have been able to fight that way in the war. The world is complicated, my friend.
‘As I said, Khrushchev was a rebel. During the three years after Stalin's death, a lot of things began changing within the party. East Berlin had revolted in June 1953, we had had an uprising in Poznan, party members were going back to Lenin, to Marx, to places where there was room for doubt. The party top brass was fearful. Our party was organised on the basis of discipline and service, not on reflection. The leaders were frightened by that.
‘And then came Khrushchev's shock therapy. Despite it all, Stalin was still a person we respected rather deeply. And during Stalin's lifetime, Khrushchev had never uttered a word of criticism, he had been the most faithful vassal imaginable. Then, suddenly, there was that emotional speech at the twentieth party congress in which he explained how things really were. The entire pre-war leadership of our party turned out to have been murdered by the Soviets. Khrushchev revealed that Lenin, during the last year of his life, had tried to put a stop to Stalin. He condemned the purges, Stalin's waste of lives during the war and the collectivisation of Soviet agriculture, his paranoia and his break with Tito. Hundreds of thousands of innocent and honest communists had been tortured into making the most bizarre confessions, and Stalin had personally been behind it all. Khrushchev wanted to go back to the roots of communism, to Lenin. He flogged the aggrandisement of a man who had, in reality, never gone anywhere, who hadn't spoken to a farmer or a worker for years, and who knew the country only on the basis of newsreels in which everything had been tidied up. ‘He was a coward,’ Khrushchev shouted. ‘He was panicky! Not once during the entire war did he dare even to come close to the front!’
‘Stalin came crashing to earth, and with him our view of the world. Our Stalinist party leader, Boleslaw Bierut, had a heart attack and died a few days later. To be honest, I believe the Soviet Union never completely recovered from that speech.
‘That was in February 1956. Within our very own party, a movement started that demanded greater democracy and more self-rule. It was on that wave that Gomulka made his comeback, and he stayed in power until 1970. I stood behind it four-square; rigid socialism was, in my eyes, a dead-end street. But we were all terribly concerned what the Russians would do. In October, Khrushchev and the commander of the Warsaw Pact forces suddenly arrived for a surprise visit. At the airport, the first thing he said was: ‘We are ready to intervene.’ Gomulka refused to talk with a loaded gun on the table. That same afternoon we chose him as our new party leader.
‘The Poles are spirited fighters, we all formed a single front, and it would have been havoc for the Russians. Khrushchev knew that. In the end, despite all their differences, Gomulka was able to convince the Russians that he was an upstanding communist. Khrushchev was even touched by his words, and so the Russians agreed to allow the Poles to follow their ‘own line’. That was definitely the wisest thing they could have done; Poland is quite a bit larger than Hungary, they couldn't risk an open conflict.
‘It was a huge success for us. We kept up our sovereign stance towards the Russians. The DDR never achieved that level of independence, and after 1956 it became unattainable for the Hungarians as well, and it failed with the Czechoslovakians in 1968. We did it better, in silence, almost without bloodshed.
‘Politicians are the people operating the machine. They hop on it, like onto a moving train, and they jump off again too. That's the way things were between Gomulka and I. I was always there for him, I advised him on a daily basis, but I was also critical. In 1956 I felt that we should launch a number of far-reaching changes, enter into a dramatic democratisation process. It wasn't enough just to change leaders. But the system remained rigid and totalitarian, an ironclad state apparatus.
‘My next-door neighbour here in the street is Mieczyslaw Rakowski, he was the last leader of the Polish Communist Party. He was the one who turned off the lights when he went out of the door in 1990. When I talk to him about it now, he says: ‘Oh, why didn't we give them more freedom? Why didn't we let them do as they pleased, with commerce, shops, permission to travel freely? We were so stupid, we wanted to arrange everything for them, everything had to be ironed smooth and tucked in tightly.’ He's right about that. Socialism is only tenable as an ideal. You can't force it down people's throats, you can't steer it. It has to come from the people themselves, the pursuit of justice, freedom, equality, brotherhood. In that context, we need to keep looking for new forms all the time. Because having only market forces, only inequality, spells disaster for the world that is now on its way.
‘In 1963 I asked Gomulka to release me from servitude. I went to school and studied mathematics and history, I've been a normal citizen for almost forty years now. My faith has changed to doubt. Let me tell you, my friend, politics is hard work. You must have a feeling for it, you must have a taste for it. I did it for years, but in the long run I don't really belong to that species.
‘When I was party overseer in Wroclaw, I used to spend whole evenings talking to Tadeusz Mazowiecki, who became the first non-communist prime minister of Poland forty years later, the first one in an Eastern Bloc country. He was a Catholic journalist and politician at the time, but we understood each other very well. He taught me that the word “religion” comes from “religio”, which means “to be attached”. You are religious if you feel attached, to the world, to people, to God. “You can't always believe,” he said. “But you can be bonded.”
‘I'm in my eighties now, and I've been an atheist
all my life. But St Francis has always been very close to my heart. And he says the same thing: “That tree is my friend, that little dog is my friend.”
‘It's hard to understand everything that happens in your life. Sometimes my little dog understands better than I do.’
Chapter FIFTY
Budapest
THE GRASS HAS BEEN MOWED. THE TREES ARE FULL OF RED APPLES. A man and a woman trudge along the road carrying pitchforks. Beside the houses lie the piles of logs, neatly stacked for the winter, heavy with the scent of resin. On a hillside two men are ploughing; one of them is sitting on a bright red tractor, the other one is guiding the plough.
At the campsite where I am staying, close to the brand-spanking-new customs house on the border between the Czech Republic and Slovakia, almost everyone has left. The last few employees sit in the canteen at night, watching television. There's a film on: a girl is seduced by a fat old man, she goes with him to bars where the patrons speak only English, a former boyfriend tries to talk sense into her, she laughs in his face, the old man cheats on her and she becomes increasingly addicted to the foreigners’ lifestyle, until the ex-boyfriend …
Outside you hear only the crickets, the brook, an owl …
Budapest, after all this, is wild, footloose, careless, full of holes and dents and honking cars, not a museum or a display case but a living city. In Buda the cranes swing back and forth, in Pest one hears the chipping and chiselling of the stonemasons: like everywhere else in Central Europe, the building and the painting is going on here as though half a century must be made up for in five years.
The Monument to the Martyrs, the falling figure with which the Hungarian communists would later commemorate the 1956 uprising, has vanished from the city centre. The marble stairs lead nowhere. The former party headquarters has been taken over by the socialists, the building still hums with spirited discussions, with the sound of typing and the murmur of meetings. The monument itself has been moved to the edge of town, to the place where statues from the olden days are sent to die, a walled place of exile specially built to house the former communist memorials. And there they are, indeed: the comrades joining hands, the leaders with spectacles and briefcases, the soldiers with flags and pistols, all those popularly edifying mothers, children, tractors, flowers and flames. At least half the statues have their hands raised to the sky: in this sad compound, a muffled ‘hurrah’ is always present in the background. It is not all ugly, by no means, some of the monuments are absolutely lovely, it's just that they bear the wrong names, the wrong slogans and the wrong symbols.
