by Geert Mak
For the second time in ten years, the promising Czechoslovakian democracy had been brutally crushed. The reactions in the West bordered on panic. Now ‘Ivan’ had shown his true colours. New security alliances were forged, the start of NATO (1949). America stopped its withdrawal from Western Europe and would continue to watch over the security of the Western European countries for more than half a century. The Soviet Bloc reacted in 1955 by setting up the Warsaw Pact.
Hans Krijt noticed little of the communist coup. ‘Only when a neigh-bour would come to have his cow covered, they would talk politics, always very excitedly.’ But during the purges that followed, the secret police had little trouble finding him. ‘They picked me up, simply because I was Dutch. In our cell there was a doctor who had just come back from a sabbatical in America, they pulled him right off the plane and put him in prison. No one knew why. I was locked up for ten days in an underground cell, with no light. We all slept on the floor. On the very first night some guy tried to molest me … I didn't even know things like that existed.’ He was released after promising to report to the intelligence service any contact he had with foreigners. ‘At first I thought: I never see any foreigners, so who cares? But it put me in their hands. I couldn't sleep at night because of it.’
In summer 1950 the first four opponents of the ‘new social order’, all former victims of the Nazi camps, were hanged in Prague. On a hill across the Vltava arose a huge graven image of Stalin. Today it has been replaced by a gigantic metronome, ticking away the years.
The Cold War was a forty-year battle of threats, of economic sanctions, of words and propaganda. No shot – with the exception of the popular revolts in the DDR, Hungary and Czechoslovakia – was ever fired in Europe. It was a textbook example of a long-lasting and extremely successful policy of ‘containment’.
The first step leading to that war of containment was the swerve to the political left that took place all over Europe, including the West: in England, the Conservatives had been replaced by Labour, in France the Communist Party became the country's largest, with a quarter of all votes in the October 1945 elections. In Italy, by late 1945, the PCI had 1.7 million members, and in the Netherlands and Norway the social democrats were making a clear mark on government policy. Countries everywhere were rushing to establish government pension plans and other social facilities, and in France a whole series of concerns – natural gas, coal, banks, Renault – had even been nationalised. With regard to foreign policy, however, most European social democrats entertained very conventional views, and the communist cabinet ministers in France and Italy maintained a low profile as well.
Still, the Americans were becoming increasingly worried about the European ‘shift to the left’. When Churchill's government was replaced by a Labour cabinet in July 1945, they reacted immediately: within a few days, the celebrated Lend-Lease agreement had been withdrawn. Strict conditions were established for receiving Marshall Plan aid. In May 1947, the communists were removed from the government of France; a month later the Italian government also took on a clearly anti-communist aspect. When the Korean War broke out in 1950 and the Netherlands did not wish to send combat troops to this ‘decisive struggle’ against communism, the United States immediately threatened to stop all Marshall Plan assistance to that country. Later, President Truman would admit that the Marshall Plan was intended in part to curb the popularity of the left: ‘Without the Marshall Plan, it would have been difficult for Western Europe to remain free of the tyranny of communism.’
The growing tension was accompanied by an immense propaganda offensive. Harold Macmillan warned of an ‘invasion of the Goths’; the Lenten pastoral letter from the Dutch bishops in 1947 dealt largely with ‘Godless communism’; dockworkers’ strikes in Amsterdam (1946) and London (1949), like the miners’ strikes in Belgium (1948), were seen as ‘communist plots’ to take over the country, and books like George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) and The God that Failed (1950), as well as a collection of essays by Arthur Koestler, André Gide and other former ‘fellow travellers’ caused great furore. Three years later, almost nothing was left of the general sympathy for the brave Red Army in 1945. Life magazine dedicated an entire issue to the discrepancy in the number of troops maintained by the two superpowers: 640,000 GIs were faced off against 2.6 million Red soldiers. Hollywood films like I Married a Communist, I was a Communist for the FBI, Red Planet Mars and The Red Menace played to packed cinemas.
This – at least partly spontaneous – mobilisation against communism strengthened the bonds between all non-communists. Just as during the war, a common enemy had been found, and this sense of unity became almost as important as the struggle itself. Both the left and the right began reconsidering their standpoints. In Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden and Austria, the social democrats dropped the term ‘class struggle’, while the Christian Democrats came up with new social policies: all across Europe, old conflicts were being abandoned or mollified. Anti-communism served in this as a kind of crystallisation point, a binding anti-ideology. Without a doubt, Stalin can be seen as one of the founders of a united Europe.
In this way, sometime in winter 1946, the Soviet Union suddenly changed from a friend into a foe. From his office in Moscow in mid-February, the American diplomat George Kennan sent his superiors in Washington a biting analysis of Soviet policies. In that historical ‘long telegram’, Kennan pointed out the Soviet Union's permanent urge to expand its power and entered a plea for a new ‘containment doctrine’.‘At the bottom of the Kremlin's neurotic view of world affairs is a traditional and instinctive Russian sense of insecurity,’ he wrote, and the main element of United States policy ‘must be that of a long term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies’.
Three weeks later, on 5 March, 1946, the Cold War became a reality for one and all with Churchill's famous ‘Iron Curtain’ speech at Fulton College in Missouri: ‘From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia …'Western politicians and commentators spoke of the ‘great international communist conspiracy’ and about ‘Moscow blueprints’ for taking over Western Europe. In reality, as we know now, Stalin's basic stance in the years following the war was primarily a defensive one. The Soviet Union was completely exhausted, completely incapable of turning around and starting a new war. Stalin's greatest trauma had been the German invasion of 1941, a repetition of which he hoped to avoid at all costs. He lived in deep fear of an armed conflict with the West, and particularly of the enormous preponderance of American air power, America whose bombers could make of the Soviet Union ‘one huge target’. It is true that from 1949 the Russians had the atom bomb as well, but in those first years Russian nuclear technology lagged far behind that of the West. ‘Stalin trembled in fear’ at the prospect of an American attack, Khrushchev wrote in his memoirs. ‘Oh, how he shook! He was afraid of a war!’
There was yet another reason why there could be no such thing as a fixed ‘Moscow blueprint’ for a communist offensive: the political situations in the individual countries of Europe were too different. Local leaders, national characteristics and patriotic feelings played such a great role in those first post-war years that no country would have fitted an imposed Soviet scheme.
The clearest example of ‘popular communism’ was that of Josip Broz, otherwise known as Tito. This former Yugoslav partisan leader enjoyed enormous authority. He had led an extremely active resistance movement, and he had also succeeded in bringing together the sharply divided ethnic groups of Yugoslavia into one large, well oiled underground movement. He did not shrink from applying Stalinist methods of terror, he kept the various ethnic groups under his thumb by means of a risky policy of divide and conquer, but for the vast majority of Yugoslavs he was the natural leader. And he continued to be exactly that, for
thirty-five years.
In Greece, the communist resistance of the EAM/ELAS was at least equally popular. It had a moderate socialist programme, it was a local and patriotic movement, and by the end of the war it comprised at least half a million partisans, including many non-communists. In 1944, however, Churchill and Stalin had made some clear agreements: their ‘naughty documents’ stipulated that Greece was to remain ninety-per cent Western. In October 1944, a sizeable British military force landed in Greece to disarm the resistance – later always referred to as ‘bandit gangs’ – and support a right-wing coalition government. The vicious civil war that followed ended only after the United States took over from Britain and Tito closed his borders to the guerrillas with their communist sympathies. In November 1949, after ‘analysing the situation’, the central committee of the Greek Communist Party decided to lay down its arms. The country had been at war for almost ten years. Half a million Greeks had died under the German occupation, and the civil war had claimed 160,000 more and left 700,000 homeless. A quarter of all the country's houses had been destroyed. All the Greeks wanted was peace and quiet.
In Poland, power was assumed by a man rather like Tito: Wladyslaw Gomulka, the leader of the communist underground. His movement too soon enjoyed a great deal of support, because it addressed those problems which all pre-war parties had ignored: widespread poverty, ethnic conflicts, the anxious relationships with Germany and the Soviet Union. In 1945 he stamped out the Farmers’ Party, declaring that the communists ‘will never surrender power once they have it’, but at the same time he was a typical Polish patriot. He abhorred Stalin's brand of rigid coercion.
The communists in Czechoslovakia were initially in favour of a multi-party system, and there is nothing to indicate that they intended to ban other parties during those early days. They were popular enough as it was: in the May 1946 elections they won thirty-eight per cent of the vote, making them the country's largest party by far. Their movement had more than a million members. With the support of the communists, President Edvard Benežs and Jan Masaryk sought contact with both the Soviet Union and the West, and showed great interest in the Marshall Plan.
Yet no matter how firm their local and national roots were, all these communist parties were ultimately forced to submit to abrupt takeovers steered and manipulated by the Kremlin, dictatorial interventions by elite groups within the party who, once they had achieved position, refused to let go again. In the long run, the communists usually set up a general popular front in which all parties were forced to take part, as well as a broad gamut of associations and organisations, up to and including the Federation of Invalids. All dissidents were silenced by brute force. During the last free elections in August 1947, the communists in Hungary received less than twenty-five per cent of the vote; after May 1949, however, László Rajk could triumphantly announce that his Workers’ Party enjoyed the support of ninety-five per cent of the population. In December 1949, the Bulgarian Fatherland Front won ninety-eight per cent of the vote, a percentage that seemed rather suspect, even to its most fervent supporters.
In 1950, Hans Krijt – ‘The communist youth organisation had suddenly realised that I was a Dutch political refugee’ – ended up at the Prague Film Academy. ‘I was in the same class as Milós Forman, who wanted to be a screenwriter at that time. Milan Kundera was studying dramatics there. Forman was a real big mouth: he was the only one who would blurt out that the newest Russian film was completely worthless. Kundera was still a communist then, he wrote for official party organs. But we all made fun of Stalin. In Marxism class we used a linguistics textbook written by Stalin, he even stuck his nose into things like that. We made jokes about it, but everyone played along with the game, teachers and students. The lessons followed that textbook faithfully.’
‘Kundera was typical of that generation of intellectuals,’ Krijt's wife Olga Krijtova says. ‘Right after the war they were all communists: the Soviets were, after all, our liberators. But from 1956 they began feeling more and more uneasy. Kundera started writing satires: Ridiculous Loves in 1963 and The Joke in 1967; when you read his work you could see the Prague Spring on its way. Until 1968 came and rolled right over it. Finally he went into exile.’
Olga Kritjova became a Dutch-Czech translator. She remained a member of the Communist Party until 1968. When she quit the party, she was immediately forbidden to translate or to write. ‘That was a problem you solved by using a “front”, someone who let you use his or her name. That did create problems, though, when a “fronted” translation won a prize. Then the person whose name you'd borrowed had to accept the prize, give readings, that sort of thing.’
In 1969 the couple tried to emigrate to the Netherlands, but their application was rejected. After that Krijt taught Dutch at a language institute. After he once explained the difference between ‘I believe he's coming’ and ‘I believe in God’, he immediately received a reprimand for spreading religious propaganda.
Olga: ‘Every time a reception was held at the Dutch embassy, I had to report on it right away. What I always filled in was “Talked about the weather in Czechoslovakia and the Netherlands.” The officials never put up a fuss, they had their own forms to complete anyway.’
Hans: ‘My Dutch class was always packed with girls trying to escape the country by marrying a Dutchman.’
Olga: ‘Those were deadly years!’
For Central and Eastern Europe, the deadly years lasted from 1948, by way of 1956 and 1968, until 1989.
Churchill had declared the Cold War in 1946, but the first skirmishes did not begin until a year later. In 1947 the American president decided to support the Greeks in their struggle against ‘communist’ rebels. In that year, too, the Marshall Plan was announced – intended in part to turn the rising tide of communism in Western Europe. In the communist world, too, the first internal conflict took place. Tito had no intention of conforming to Stalin's directives, and made no attempt to hide the fact. So in spring 1948 a public rift arose between Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union, the first crack in the façade of the Eastern Bloc. Czechoslovakia began making overtures for aid from the Marshall Plan, and Stalin's paranoia increased by the week. The Cold War escalated.
In West Germany the Americans began a new purge of the administrative system, directed this time not against Nazis, but against communists. In June 1948 the announcement was made that a parliamentary council would be set up, the start of a new and independent Germany under the leadership of the former mayor of Cologne, Konrad Adenauer, a man of unimpeachable reputation. At the same time, West Berlin and the area occupied by the Western Allies received a new currency: the Deutschmark.
The Soviet Union reacted immediately: on 24 June, 1948, all connections to West Berlin – including water, gas and electricity – were cut off. The Soviet action ended in fiasco. The Americans and British, using the enormous logistical experience gained in the war, began a bold operation: the entire city, with its 2.5 million inhabitants, received all the crucial supplies it needed – including oil and coal – by means of an airlift. For almost a year, hundreds of Dakotas, C-47s and C-54s wended their way through a narrow air corridor. Thousands of pilots and air traffic controllers took part, and in May 1949 Stalin had no choice but to back down. He had not only suffered a political and strategic defeat, but he had also handed the Americans a fantastic propaganda opportunity. The Berlin blockade convinced the West Germans that they needed the Americans. After the Luftbrücke the Allies were no longer an occupying army, but welcome protectors. The blockade had far-reaching consequences for the Americans as well: rather than pull out of western Europe as planned, they decided to stay.
During that same summer in 1948, Stalin decided to tighten his hold on the Soviet Union's satellite states. He may have been relatively powerless against the sovereign and popular Tito, but he still had a hold on the patriotic leader of Poland. On 3 June, 1948, in the midst of the Yugoslavia crisis, Gomulka had poured oil on the flames by announcing in a speech that his
own Polish communists had not been independent or patriotic enough in the 1930s. The nod towards the present situation could not have been clearer. Within two months, Gomulka had disappeared – for the time being – from the political arena.
One year later it was Hungary's turn. On 30 May, 1949, the loyal communist and Spanish Civil War veteran László Rajk was arrested, along with seven other ‘conspirators’. He was horribly tortured, and during a show trial soon confessed that, working with American intelligence chief Allan W. Dulles, he had tried to set up a ‘bloodthirsty, fascist-patterned dictatorship’ in Hungary. He was hanged on 15 October, 1949, and succeeded by the grim Stalinist Mátyás Rákosi. In 1951, the secretary general of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, Rudolf Slánský, was arrested and charged with a similar ‘conspiracy’.
Slánský's trial – at the conclusion of which all the defendants were hanged – had a special twist to it: eleven of the fourteen suspects were Jewish. It was the starting sign for a new series of purges throughout the Eastern Bloc, a wave of terror with pronounced anti-Semitic characteristics. The excuse upon which it was originally based was reminiscent of the murder of Sergei Kirov in 1934. This time it had to do with Andrei Zhdanov, a member of the Politburo and a hero of the siege of Leningrad, who had died of a heart failure in a party clinic in 1948. Immediately after his death, one of the female physicians there accused her Jewish colleagues of having neglected Zhdanov's ailment, and said that they were responsible for his death. At the time, the complaint had been dismissed.
Four years later, in 1952, the dossier was retrieved from the shelves. In 1950, a man by the name of Ivan Varfolomeyer had been arrested in China; he had confessed – probably under duress – to his Russian interrogators that he worked for a group of American conspirators, led by President Truman, who were planning to blow up the Kremlin with nuclear missiles fired from one of the windows of the American embassy in Moscow. No one – except for Stalin – would ever have believed such a cock and bull story. He, however, made the Varfolomeyer affair the focal point of a new series of show trials intended to bring together all the loose ends: the American plot to destroy the Kremlin, the Zionist Jewish plot to infiltrate the party, and the Zionist physicians’ plot to murder Zhdanov.
