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

by Anne Applebaum

  Eventually Beynar was reprieved, given a long prison sentence, and sent to Wronki, a much larger prison near Poznań that held some 4,000 mostly political “criminals.” Upon arrival, “we all cried like children,” he remembered, though the prisoner who suffered most was one who had been in the camp at Dachau. To him it felt simply like déjà vu.8 Another fellow prisoner was Stanisław Szostak, arrested along with General Wilk outside Vilnius in 1944, then rearrested in Szczecin in 1948 and immediately thrown into a cell with Nazi collaborators. Wronki, he recalled, was “full of lice, lacked air, was hot in the summer and cold in the winter.” Both he and Beynar would be freed only in 1956.9 Lublin Castle, a forbidding medieval structure that had been used as an emergency prison and execution site for Home Army soldiers in 1944 and 1945, also remained open until 1954. Its gloom, dirt, and silence were thought to increase prisoners’ terror.10

  Not everyone went to a domestic prison. Tens of thousands of Poles were sent straight into the Soviet Gulag, as were many Germans. Many of the latter had been picked up directly by the NKVD—sometimes off the streets of West Berlin—and put directly on trial in the USSR. Several hundred cases of Germans arrested in Germany after the war, tried in Moscow, and put to death there have since been documented.11 The Hungarians also adopted another Soviet penal practice and began sending ex-aristocrats, prewar military officers, former landowners, and “politically untrustworthy people” living near Hungary’s Austrian or Yugoslav borders not to prison but into exile in small villages in eastern Hungary. This policy of relocation had two additional advantages: it freed up large apartments in major cities for the new legions of party bureaucrats who needed suitable accommodations, and it provided rural communities with a new pool of unskilled labor, though not necessarily a productive one.12 A similar policy in Romania led to the removal of some 44,000 people living near the Romanian–Yugoslav border. Entire families were loaded onto trains, taken to a sparsely populated region, the Ba˘ra˘gan steppe, and left in fields to fend for themselves.13

  Still others were sent to concentration camps. By 1949 the NKVD’s Gulag camps in Germany (described in Chapter 5) had been disbanded on the grounds that they were attracting too much Western attention and creating bad publicity for the Soviet occupation regime. But at about the same time, other Eastern European governments founded brand-new camp systems. Although not part of the Soviet Gulag, they were modeled on it. As in the USSR, prisoners were meant to work in exchange for food and were meant to be “useful” to the economy.

  Between 1949 and 1953 the Czechoslovak regime maintained a group of eighteen such camps near Jáchymov, in northwest Bohemia, where prisoners worked in uranium mines, extracting raw materials for the new Soviet nuclear weapons program. The prisoners were given no special clothing or protection against radiation, and death rates were high.14 The Romanian regime also created a network of camps, the best known of which were built along the Danube–Black Sea canal, a Soviet-backed construction project with dubious economic returns. At its height, the canal “employed” some 40,000 prisoners, about a quarter of the 180,000 Romanian camp inmates.15 The Bulgarian regime also built several notably sadistic labor camps (and maintained them well into the 1960s and 1970s, long after the majority of Soviet camps had been disbanded).16 Despite its “anti-Stalinist” political orientation, Tito’s Yugoslavia built labor camps too, including one on an Adriatic island, where water was scarce and the main torment was thirst.17

  Even on this list of grim institutions, Recsk, Hungary’s most notorious labor camp, deserves a special place. Internment—imprisonment without trial—had been a feature of the Hungarian system from the very beginning, and internment camps had been constructed all around Budapest and other major cities.18 But by 1950–51, the regime considered these temporary arrangements neither harsh enough nor secure enough to deal with especially dangerous political criminals. In search of a better solution, the Hungarian leadership turned for advice to Rudolf Garasin.

  After his wartime exploits as a marginally successful partisan (described in Chapter 4), Garasin had returned to the Soviet Union. There, according to his official biography, he served as the deputy director of a state printing company until 1951, when he suddenly returned to Hungary and took a series of high-ranking government jobs, first in the Justice Ministry and then in the Interior Ministry.19 In an internal party questionnaire, he later described himself with a little bit more detail as having been “commander of a unit of Siberian military construction in the forests around Novosibirsk” during the early 1940s—an era when “construction in the forests around Novosibirsk” was almost exclusively carried out by the Soviet Gulag.20 In Hungarian government archives, his name also appears in correspondence with Mátyás Rákosi, with whom he discussed “the situation in labor camps” on several occasions. In June 1953, for example, he sent Rákosi a report containing statistics and information on people who had been interned as well as the numbers of people employed by the camp directorate.21

  Though it was never publicly stated, leading party members, government officials, and prisoners all in fact regarded Garasin as the man who had “imported” the techniques of the Soviet Gulag to Hungary.22 His reappearance in Budapest in 1951 coincided with the creation of a new Directorate for Public Works—the Hungarian acronym is KÖMI—in December. This new department was supposed to support “on the one hand the interests of the people’s economy, and on the other hand the interests of law enforcement.”23 In other words, just like the Soviet Gulag, KÖMI aimed to create profitable companies that would make use of prisoner labor in factories, quarries, and construction projects. The department was first part of the Justice Ministry, as was Garasin. In 1952, both Garasin and the department were shifted to the Interior Ministry. By January 1953, KÖMI “employed” some 27,000 prisoners.

  Recsk was only one of the camps in Garasin’s empire, a vast department that also included notoriously disorganized transit and internment camps at Kistarcsa, Kazinbarcika, and Tiszalök. But Recsk held the most prominent and distinguished prisoners, and Recsk’s existence was shrouded in the deepest secrecy. It was not given an official number, as were other camps, and prisoners there were forbidden any contact with the outside world. Few documents are available on the camp’s early days—possibly because the decision to build it was made by János Kádár, Hungary’s later leader.24

  Recsk also became, in Hungarian national memory, a symbol not only of secrecy but of the absurd twists fate could hand out to people in the era of High Stalinism. Recsk only existed for a short time—it opened in 1950 and was dissolved in October 1953—but in that period people became prisoners there for political reasons, economic reasons, or for nothing in particular. Many of the prisoners were Smallholders or social democrats, especially social democrats who had opposed the merger of their party with the communist party. Others were former aristocrats, or people with foreign contacts—even very slight foreign contacts. One prisoner, Aladár Györgyey, was a student of art history who briefly befriended a French student visitor.25 Another man was sent there after his car crashed into Rákosi’s car. He had been late to a wedding and was in a hurry.26 György Faludy, the Hungarian poet, was sent to Recsk after he returned to the country from exile in the United States. He became active in the Social Democratic Party, went to work for its newspaper, there made the acquaintance of several people swept up in the show trials of the time—and was sentenced as an American spy.27

  As in previous waves of arrests, a large number of Recsk inmates were also former members of the wartime antifascist resistance. One of them—the member of a group that in 1944 broke away from the Hungarian regime in order to fight the Germans—was beaten up during interrogation by a guard who shouted “someone who was able to organize a plot in 1944 can easily be an enemy of the people after 1945.”28 The regime wanted them out of the way even before they had begun to think about starting to fight again.

  By comparison to the vast Soviet camps in whose shadow it was built, Recsk wa
s very small. At its height, Recsk held only 1,700 prisoners, and many of the buildings used on or near the site—those where the staff lived, for example—were just large farmhouses left over from before the war. The camp itself was in a cleared piece of forest; the quarry was a short walk away; the guards lived in a small manor house nearby. On the day I visited, in 2009, not much remained of the barracks. One or two have been rebuilt to house a museum on the site, but the rest are gone, their locations indicated by a sign or a mark on the map. Local archaeologists have marked out the other important sites—the location of the punishment cell, the foundations of the other barracks, the entrance to the camp—but the overwhelming impression is one of mud, the same mud Faludy described as so thick the men lost their boots in it.

  Like the Soviet camps after which it was modeled, Recsk was built from scratch by prisoners, who then cut timber and worked in a quarry to “earn” their food, which they ate standing up outside, in sunshine, snow, or rain, as Faludy also remembered:

  We consumed the half pint of barley coffee we received for breakfast, the soup and vegetable we got for lunch and the vegetable served us as dinner standing on the hillside in front of the camp kitchen, where the cauldrons and cooks were protected against the rain by corrugated sheet-iron mounted on four posts. We poured the hot soup down our throats, spooned out the vegetable (automatically counting the little pieces of horse meat put in it three times a week) …29

  As in the Gulag, there was a hierarchy in Recsk—former social democrats were treated better than former members of center-right parties, for example, and some prisoners were allowed to collaborate and become foremen. The prisoners called them nachalniks, the Russian word for “boss.” Also as in the Gulag there were elaborate systems of control and punishment. The prisoners were regularly made to stand and be counted, no matter the weather. This took a long time because the guards’ knowledge of numbers was so weak. Those who disobeyed any of the rules could be put in a punishment barrack and deprived of food or could be sent to spend the night lying on a plank in a “wet” cell, where water seeped in from the sides, sometimes knee-deep. To observe all of these Soviet innovations, and presumably to offer suggestions for improvement, Soviet advisers paid periodic visits to the camp, as did Rákosi. As in the USSR a Potemkin village was created in anticipation of their arrival: prisoners were cleaned, workplaces were tidied up, flowers were even planted around the camp perimeter.

  Just as the Gulag began to close down after Stalin died, so too did Recsk cease to operate after the Soviet leader’s demise. Garasin’s reward—or perhaps his punishment—for importing a Soviet-style concentration camp to Hungary was to become, in subsequent years, the Hungarian ambassador to Mongolia. His party files also contain pleas for help from his Hungarian comrades—he needed money for throat operations that could only be done in Moscow, and his pension was very low. On his seventieth birthday, someone wrote a letter recommending that the Hungarian Politburo give him a medal. Soon after that, he died.30

  On the list of “enemies” that Bolesław Bierut sent to Vyacheslav Molotov in the spring of 1949, there was one very special category: “party members excluded from the party.” As 1949 turned into 1950, this category of enemy assumed far greater importance. Across the bloc, communist party and sometimes military leaders became the focus of suspicion and arrests, and then of show trials. Hitherto loyal party members and decorated generals were “revealed” to be traitors or spies. Among the communists with long records of loyalty who now fell into this category were László Rajk, the Hungarian interior minister, and Gábor Péter, the founder and leader of the secret police; Rudolf Slánský, general secretary of the Czech communist party; Władysław Gomułka, general secretary of the Polish communist party; Paul Merker, leading member of the East German Politburo; and Ana Pauker, the Romanian foreign minister. There would be Albanian and Bulgarian victims too.

  The spectacle of the revolution devouring its children was nothing new. Precisely the same set of obsessions had consumed the Soviet leadership in the late 1930s, the period of the Great Purge and the Great Terror. For the diplomats, observers, and journalists who witnessed them, the show trials of that era—featuring the humiliating confessions of internationally admired revolutionaries such as Lev Kamenev, Grigorii Zinoviev, and Nikolai Bukharin—had seemed a grotesque spectacle, proof that Stalin’s mad drive for power knew no limits. Fitzroy Maclean, a British diplomat who witnessed Bukharin’s trial, described these staged events as “fantastic public confessions, orgies of self-abasement” accompanied by the “bloodthirsty ravings of the Public Prosecutor.” One by one, he recalled, senior figures stood before the court, eyes glazed, and confessed to “a long catalogue of improbable misdeeds.”31

  Book after book has been written in an attempt to explain the rationale behind the Soviet show trials of 1936, 1937, and 1938. Obviously they were intended to create political terror, but the timing, the methods, and the politics remain controversial. Theories abound. Long after he had fled East Germany, Wolfgang Leonhard—by then Professor Leonhard—addressed the question in a famous annual lecture at Yale University, as a part of his undergraduate course on Soviet history. Among the possible explanations for the Great Purge, Leonhard listed Stalin’s insanity, Russia’s historic fear of foreign invasion—and an outbreak, in the 1930s, of highly active sunspots.32 But in their way, the Eastern European show trials of 1949 and 1950 shed some light on those earlier show trials in Moscow. If nothing else, the very fact that they were carefully choreographed in conjunction with Soviet advisers and in close imitation of the earlier Moscow trials proves that Stalin judged those trials to have been a political success, a tactic worth repeating in his new client states.

  Certainly both sets of trials marked similar turning points in the respective histories of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. In both late-1930s Russia and late-1940s Eastern Europe, the party’s economic policy was failing, and the party members themselves were becoming disillusioned. The trials diverted the blame for manifold economic failures away from Stalin (in the 1930s) and the little Stalins (in the 1940s). Simultaneously they rid the party leaders of their most dangerous internal enemies by terrorizing potential party opponents into silence. The show trials also served a public function, aside from whatever they achieved within the inner circles: like practically every other Stalinist institution, they had an educational purpose. If communist Europe had not surpassed capitalist Europe, if infrastructure projects were flawed or delayed, if food supplies were poor and living standards low, then the show trials provided the explanation: foreign spies, nefarious saboteurs, and traitors, posing as faithful communists, had hijacked progress.

  Soviet secret policemen were involved in the Eastern European show trials from the beginning. A plethora of documentary and anecdotal evidence proves beyond doubt that officials in Moscow ordered the arrests, helped choose the victims, and managed the interrogations. At the congress of the Czechoslovak communist party in May 1949, Fyodor Byelkin, the senior NKVD general in Hungary, took aside the Hungarian defense minister, Mihály Farkas, and told him Moscow had “come to the conclusion that Rajk was the rezident [the spy chief] in Hungary of a European Trotskyist organization, which was in contact with the Americans.” This party jargon was a message that the “documents of the constructed trial were already being prepared.”33

  In Poland, the fate of Gomułka was foretold in a memorandum of April 1948 prepared for Mikhail Suslov, the secretary of the Soviet Central Committee, entitled “On the Anti-Marxist Ideological Orientation in the Leadership of the Polish Workers’ Party.” The authors, three Soviet party bureaucrats specializing in ideology, complained of the “nationalist tendencies” of some Polish communists who “kept silent about the experiences and successes of the Soviet Union” and “ignored Leninist-Stalinist teachings.” They identified Gomułka as the leader of this tendency, contemptuously dismissed his notion of “Polish Marxism,” and complained about his categorical refusal to collectivize Po
lish agriculture. In fact, they suspected Gomułka of “right-deviationism,” another way of saying “Titoism,” which was itself another way of saying he might not be sufficiently loyal to the USSR. They feared the Polish United Workers’ Party might be moving closer to “social democracy,” and expressed great concern about the ideological direction of the Polish army, whose leaders were also never quite pro-Soviet enough for Moscow’s taste, even though General Roskossovskii was now firmly in charge.34

  Having caught wind of these conclusions, Gomułka paid a visit to Moscow in December to argue his case. Afterward, he wrote his infamous memo (cited in Chapter 6), complaining that the Polish communist party had been taken over by Jews, and declaring that he had always seen the Soviet Union as “the best friend of Poland” and Stalin as a great “teacher.”35 Despite these efforts, Gomułka’s closest colleagues were soon arrested—including General Marian Spychalski, a fellow Politburo member—as were a large group of Polish army officers. Bierut kept Stalin regularly updated on the progress of their cases. Gomułka himself was finally arrested in 1951.36

  Soviet ideologists prepared a similar document on the Czechoslovak communist party, which they also sent to Suslov in 1948. Entitled “On Several Mistakes of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia,” this document is broader, more theoretical, and more rambling than the Polish equivalent, identifying deep problems in many spheres. But it does get in a few digs at Slánský, accusing him of having made mistakes in recruitment to the communist party.37 That document prepared the ground for Stalin’s message to Klement Gottwald, sent via an emissary in July 1951, effectively ordering the Czechoslovak communist party boss to arrest Slánský.38 This was extremely awkward for Gottwald: the Czechoslovak communist party had just launched a national campaign to celebrate Slánský’s fiftieth birthday. A coal mine had just proudly renamed itself the Partisan Slánský mine, and other factories were clamoring for the same privilege.39