Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956

by Anne Applebaum

  In addition to handing over their property, some companies were also forced to pay the transport costs. Others were forced to sell goods below price: the owner of a carpet factory in Babelsburg complained, indignantly, that he was required to lower prices for the Red Army. Farmers also complained that they were asked to sell goods to the Russians below the market price, or else not be paid for what they delivered.47 The dismantling of a factory was even sometimes accompanied by the deportation of workers, who were simply put on trains and told to expect new job contracts upon arrival in the USSR.48 Factory owners (as well as the Leipzig zookeeper) demanded compensation for the goods from Berlin, but to no avail. Listeners wrote letters to the Deutsche Rundfunk radio station—one of the few visible German authorities at the time—asking the same questions: How would the German administration pay them back for goods taken by the Russians? When would people who worked for the Russians be paid?49

  Private property also disappeared, sometimes on the grounds that it was Nazi-owned, whether or not this was actually the case. The Russians sequestered town houses, vacation houses, apartments, and castles—and in their wake so did the German communists, who needed “party headquarters,” holiday homes, and living quarters for their new cadres.50 No private car was safe, and no furniture either. Marshal Zhukov himself was alleged to have furnished several Moscow apartments handsomely with his personal trophies.

  German workers sometimes fought hard to save their factories, often appealing to the communist party, which they hoped could intervene with the Russians. The party leaders of Saxony wrote to party authorities in 1945 to protest against the dismantling of a company that was the only one able to supply industrial glass for local industry. “If dismantled,” they declared, “it will affect many other companies.” The company appealed to the local Soviet commanders, and to local and provincial party leaders, to no effect, and were now finally writing to the communist party in Berlin, hoping for an intervention. The economic department of the party’s Central Committee received dozens of such letters in 1945 and 1946. In most cases, it couldn’t help.51

  Even though the scale of payments was greatest there, the collection of reparations was not unique to Germany. As former Nazi allies, Hungary, Romania, and Finland also had to pay huge reparations in the form of oil, ships, industrial equipment, food, and fuel.52 The Hungarian contribution had to be continually revisited because Hungary’s galloping inflation made the prices of things difficult to calculate. Current estimates put the payments at $300 million (in 1938 American dollars) to the USSR, $70 million to Yugoslavia, and $30 million to Czechoslovakia. To put it differently, reparations shipments siphoned off about 17 percent of Hungarian gross domestic product in 1945–46, and a further 10 percent in 1946–47. After that, the reparations payments accounted for about 7 percent of GDP annually until the deliveries ended in 1952.53

  There were other costs to Soviet occupation too. Feeding and housing the Red Army on its own proved an enormous burden for the Hungarians, who by the summer of 1945 were complaining that the cost already accounted for 10 percent of the government’s budget and had led to the “complete emptying of the food stores.” Hungarians also housed and fed some 1,600 nonmilitary Allied officials—Soviet, American, British, French—whose costs were not insignificant either. Among the expenses the British and American officials scrupulously presented to their Hungarian hosts were bills for “cars, horses, clubs, holidays, villas, golfing, and tennis courts.” A clutch of florists’ bills caused a great scandal in 1946, when details of these expenses appeared in the communist party’s newspaper, Szabad Nép (Free People): members of the British and American delegations were sending great quantities of flowers to their new Hungarian girlfriends and expected the Hungarian government to pay.54

  No parallel scandal haunted the Soviet delegation because Soviet officials did not present bills. Instead, they treated everything around them as booty, confiscating food, clothes, church treasures, and museum exhibits. They routinely broke into office safes and locked storage boxes, removing bundles of the now worthless Hungarian currency, the pengő. In one celebrated case, an Anglo-American lightbulb factory was dismantled by Soviet officers despite Hungarian protests, and the contents shipped off to the USSR. About a hundred other factories were also taken down in this period of “wild” reparations too.

  More complicated still was the matter of German property in Hungary, which, according to the Potsdam treaty, had to be ceded to the USSR. Though an initial list was made up—first twenty large factories and mines, then a further fifty companies—it was not easy to say what was “German” in Hungary and what was not. In practice, Austrian and Czech companies were confiscated, as well as companies that had some, but not necessarily a majority of, German shareholders. Jewish property that had previously been confiscated by the Germans was now confiscated by the Russians too. The Russians argued they had a moral right to this property, since “these companies belonged to the German war machine, and served its goal of destroying the Soviet Union.”55 Only in 1946, with inflation out of control and the economic stability of the country under threat, did the demands for reparations in Hungary slow down and eventually cease.

  But Axis countries were not alone in paying a high price for occupation. Though few knew it at the time, Poland, in defiance of international agreements, was also made to pay reparations. Soviet military archives contain records of the dismantling and transportation, among other things, of the contents of a tractor factory near Poznań, a metalworking factory in Bydgoszcz, and a printing press in Toruń, all of which lay in regions of Poland that had not been German before the war. The justification for such confiscations—that this was “German” property—is highly dubious, given that much of the “German” property in Poland had (as in Hungary) earlier been confiscated from Poles or Jews.56

  Thanks to recent archival revelations, it is also now clear that the USSR also carefully planned the dismantling and removal of “German” property from Upper Silesia, which had been a part of prewar Poland (Lower Silesia, which is confusingly to the north, had lain within the prewar German Reich). In February 1945, Stalin ordered a special committee to investigate and create an inventory of the property “gained” in the war, with the aim of carrying it off to the Soviet Union. By March, the committee had already ordered the dismantling and shipping of the contents of a steel mill and a factory that made steel pipes, as well as furnaces and machine tools from other factories in and near Gliwice, part of prewar Poland. A single steel factory in Ukraine received thirty-two trainloads—1,591 wagons—of equipment.

  In the months that followed, the Red Army proceeded to pack up factories as far from the German border as Rzeszów, in the southeastern corner of Poland. Several electric power plants were dismantled, almost always without the foreknowledge of Polish authorities. Henryk Różański, then the deputy industry minister, recalled later that the Russians took Polish train tracks, as well as Polish trains: “There began a kind of game, involving painting and repainting the symbols on the trains—a game that became a serious conflict between Polish and Russian railway workers.” At one point, Różański traveled to Katowice, where locals told him that the Red Army was removing the contents of a factory producing zinc oxide. He paid an unannounced visit and discovered machines and furnaces already lying about in the snow.

  He protested to local Soviet authorities: after all, this was a Polish factory, in territory that had been Polish before the war. It had never had German owners. It had never been part of any reparations treaty. But they ignored him. Poland might have been an ally, but it was still, in Soviet eyes, an enemy.57

  The Red Army’s entry into Eastern Europe in 1944 and 1945 had not been carefully planned, and none of what followed—the violence, the theft, reparations, rape—was part of a long-term scheme. The Soviet Union’s presence in the region certainly was the accidental result of Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union, of the Red Army’s victories at Stalingrad and Kursk, and of the W
estern Allies’ decision not to push farther and faster to the east when they had the chance. But it is incorrect to assume that the Soviet Union’s leadership had never before contemplated a military invasion of the region, or that they were indifferent to the opportunity. On the contrary, they had already tried to overthrow the political order in Eastern Europe, more than once.

  If the Red Army’s soldiers were shocked by the relative wealth of Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union’s founders would not have been surprised at all, for they knew the region extremely well. Lenin spent several months living in Kraków and the Polish countryside.58 Trotsky spent many years in Vienna. All of them followed German politics closely, and all regarded the politics of Germany and of Eastern Europe as vitally important to their own.

  To understand why, it helps to know some philosophy as well as some history since the Bolsheviks read the works of Lenin and Marx not as they are read today, as texts in a university course, or as one of many theories of history but as scientific fact. Contained within Lenin’s oeuvre (and built up by Trotsky) was a very clear, and equally “scientific,” theory of international relations, which went something like this: the Russian Revolution was the first of what would be many communist revolutions; others would soon follow, in Eastern Europe, in Germany, in Western Europe, and then around the world; once the entire world was run by communist regimes, then the communist utopia could be achieved.

  Certain of this rosy future, Lenin himself referred to the coming upheavals with conviction and even a kind of reckless insouciance. “Zinoviev, Bukharin and I, too, think that revolution in Italy should be spurred on immediately,” he wrote in a note to Stalin in July 1920. “My personal opinion is that to this end, Hungary should be Sovietized, and perhaps Czechia and Romania. We have to think it over carefully.”59 A year earlier, he referred to the “worldwide collapse of bourgeois democracy and bourgeois parliamentarism” as if it were imminent.60

  The Bolsheviks did not intend to sit back and wait for these revolutions to unfold. As the revolutionary vanguard, they hoped to facilitate the coming turmoil through propaganda, subterfuge, and even warfare.61 In the spring of 1919 they had set up the Communist International, popularly known as the Comintern, a body officially dedicated to the overthrow of capitalist regimes according to a Leninist blueprint, as outlined in books such as What Is to Be Done? (Lenin’s furious denunciation of social democracy and left-wing pluralism, published in 1902).62 In practice, as Richard Pipes has written, the Comintern constituted a “declaration of war on all the existing governments.”63

  In the chaos that followed the First World War in Europe, the possibility that all existing governments might collapse did not seem at all farfetched. In the first few shaky years, it even seemed as if Marx’s prophecies would come true first in his own country. The Versailles treaty and its punitive sanctions created immediate dissatisfaction in Germany. The German comrades, at the time the world’s largest and most sophisticated communist party, immediately tried to use this to their advantage. In 1919, German communists staged a series of uprisings in Berlin. Weeks later, two veterans of the Russian Revolution helped lead a Munich rebellion that proclaimed, briefly and improbably, a Bavarian Socialist Republic. Lenin greeted these events with enthusiasm. Official Soviet envoys were dispatched to the Bavarian Workers’ Soviet, arriving just before it collapsed.

  These German rebellions were not flukes. A similarly chaotic end to the First World War brought a similarly short-lived communist regime to power in Hungary, another country that had been severely punished by a postwar settlement that eventually removed two-thirds of its territory. Like the German uprisings, Hungary’s short Marxist revolution also had deep Soviet connections. Its leader, Béla Kun, had taken an active part in the Russian Revolution, had founded the first foreign delegation within the Soviet communist party, and had even befriended Lenin and his family. Kun set out for Budapest in 1919 at Moscow’s request. His brief but notably bloody rebellion imitated the Bolshevik Revolution in many ways. Among other things, the 133 days of the Hungarian Soviet Republic featured thugs in leather jackets calling themselves “the Lenin boys,” the transformation of the police into a “Red Guard,” and the nationalization of schools and factories. But Kun proved a sloppy political leader, just as he had been a sloppy conspirator (he once left a briefcase full of secret party documents in a Vienna taxi). The Hungarian Soviet Republic ended ignominiously, with a Romanian invasion and the founding of an authoritarian regime led by Admiral Miklós Horthy.64

  Back in Moscow, the Bolsheviks perceived these setbacks as temporary. Of course, they argued, the reactionary forces would grow stronger in the face of growing working-class power. Of course the imperialists and the capitalists would fight tooth and nail to save themselves from destruction. According to marvelously flexible Marxist-Leninist theory, the growing power of the counterrevolution merely reflected the strength of the revolutionary tide. The greater the opposition, the more likely it was that capitalism would eventually fail. It had to: Marx had said so. Zinoviev, the Comintern’s first leader, was so confident that this revolutionary wave was about to break that in 1919 he predicted “in a year we shall already forget that Europe had had to fight a war for Communism, because in a year all Europe shall be Communist.”65

  Lenin was confident too. In January 1920, just as the Russian Civil War was drawing to a close, he approved a plan to attack “bourgeois” and “capitalist” Poland. Though there were political, historical, and imperial reasons for the conflict—the new border between Poland and Russia had turned former czarist lands over to the Polish state, and Polish troops were already fighting to take more of Ukraine—the true casus belli was ideological. Lenin believed that the war would lead to a communist revolution in Poland, and ultimately to communist revolutions in Germany, Italy, and elsewhere, and so he ordered the creation of a Polish revolutionary committee (“PolRevKom”), which would start preparing itself to take power in Soviet Poland. Delegates to the Second Comintern Congress in Moscow that summer cheered the daily reports of Bolshevik victories, which were marked on a map that had been stuck up on a wall beside a discarded Romanov throne.66 In London, the then-junior cabinet minister Winston Churchill gloomily predicted that “the Polish nation would emerge a Communist annexe of the Soviet power.”67

  To everyone’s immense surprise, the war ended with the decisive defeat of the Bolsheviks. The turning point came in August 1920 at the Battle of Warsaw, still remembered by the Poles as the “Miracle on the Vistula.” Not only did the Poles turn back the Red Army but they captured some 95,000 Red Army soldiers. The rest fled east in what turned rapidly into a total rout. The young Stalin played a minor role in this failed venture: as the political commissar of the southwestern front, he botched communications during the Polish counteroffensive. By all accounts he continued to resent the “Polish Lords” and the “White aristocrats” who had dealt the Red Army such a blow for the rest of his life.68

  Only in the wake of this embarrassing defeat did the Bolsheviks conclude that the time for revolution was not quite ripe. Poland’s workers and peasants, Lenin bitterly observed, had failed to rise up against their exploiters, and had instead “let our brave Red soldiers starve, ambushed them and beat them to death.”69 It was left to Stalin, Lenin’s successor, to explain this defeat with a new interpretation of Marxist theory. In 1924, he declared, with great fanfare, that it was now possible to achieve “Socialism in One Country.” Banal though this sounds to us now, at the time this was a major shift in revolutionary thinking—and the beginning of Stalin’s break with his internationalist archrival, Leon Trotsky.

  It also marked the beginning of a shift in the Soviet Union’s relationships with the outside world. In the wake of Stalin’s announcement, Western countries began broadening their relations with Moscow. The United Kingdom granted diplomatic recognition to the USSR in 1924. Nine years later, the new American president, Franklin Roosevelt, established diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union too
. He had been persuaded, in part, by Walter Duranty, the enthusiastically pro-Soviet Moscow correspondent who had notoriously (and knowingly) failed to report the existence of mass famine in Ukraine the previous year. Duranty assured Roosevelt that, as he had written in The New York Times, “the word ‘Bolshevik’ has lost much of its former mystery and terror over here.”70 The USSR was becoming “normal”: more to the point, it seemed to have settled down within its borders.

  As it turned out, the international revolution had not been abandoned. It had merely been postponed. And by 1944 the Soviet Union was preparing to relaunch it.

  Chapter 3

  COMMUNISTS

  Whoever defames you, wants to slander us, the Party and the working class …

  Those too stupid and blind to understand this will fall victim to the enemy …

  You stand at the summit of our Party.

  —Poem written in honor of Walter Ulbricht1

  ONCE, THEIR NAMES appeared on red banners, their portraits were carried in parades. No government office was complete without their photographs hanging on the wall. No national celebration could be held without them. They inspired awe and fear. Even their closest friends spoke guardedly when they entered a room. Yet in none of their respective countries are the men sometimes known as the “little Stalins”—Walter Ulbricht of East Germany, Bolesław Bierut of Poland, Mátyás Rákosi of Hungary—now admired at all. Even at the height of their powers, none of them ever held total power. The cults created around them were mere shadow versions of the cult created around Stalin himself. His comrades frequently hailed Stalin as “the great genius, the continuer of Lenin’s immortal cause,” something that was never quite said about Stalin’s Eastern European imitators.2 At the same time, no account of postwar Eastern Europe can be complete without a brief examination of the men whose names and faces were once ubiquitous in the streets of their respective countries.