Iron Curtain (14 page)

Until 1939, it was possible for all kinds of vaguely leftist, committed antifascists to support the Soviet Union without thinking too hard about it. But in that year Soviet foreign policy changed again—dramatically—and made it much more difficult to be an unthinking fellow traveler. In August, Stalin signed his nonaggression pact with Hitler. As noted in the introduction, the secret protocols of that pact divided Eastern Europe between the two dictators. Stalin got the Baltic States and eastern Poland, as well as northern Romania (
Bessarabia and Bukovina). Hitler got western Poland and was given leave to exert his
influence over Hungary, Romania, and Austria without Soviet objection. Following this pact, Hitler invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, and England and France declared war on
Germany. Less than three weeks later, on September 17, 1939, Stalin invaded Poland too. The Wehrmacht and the Red Army met one another on their new border, shook
hands, and agreed to exist in peace. Overnight, communist parties around the world were instructed to tone down their criticism of fascism. Hitler was not an ally, exactly, but neither was he to be an enemy. Instead, the comrades were to describe the war as one “between two groups of capitalist countries” who are “waging war for their own imperialist interests.” The popular fronts, which had only “served to ease the position of slaves under a capitalist regime,” were to be abandoned altogether.

This tactical change was a great blow to communist solidarity. The German communist party was bitterly antifascist, and many of its members could not accept the idea of any accommodation with Hitler at all. The Polish communist party was torn in half between those who rejoiced at the Soviet invasion of eastern Poland—a change that created jobs and opportunities for many of them—and those horrified by the fact that their country had ceased to exist. Across the rest of Europe many communists were deeply confused by the new language they were supposed to adopt in response to these events. The
Comintern itself dithered over its statement, drafting and redrafting its new “theses” so often that one Politburo member acidly complained that “By this time, Com[rade] Stalin would have written a whole book!”
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In Moscow, great efforts were made to keep up morale. There is evidence that in February 1941
Ulbricht held a meeting of the German communist party in Moscow at the Hotel Lux, where he cheered them up by predicting, among other things, that the war would end with a wave of Leninist revolutions. The task of the German communists in Moscow, he told them, was to prepare for that possibility.
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Yet the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were, for twenty-two months, real allies. The USSR sold oil and grain to Germany, and Germany sold weapons to the USSR. The Soviet Union offered the Germans the use of a submarine base in
Murmansk. The Hitler-Stalin pact even resulted in a
prisoner exchange. In 1940, several hundred German communists were removed from the Gulag camps where they had been imprisoned and taken to the border.
Margarete Buber-Neumann was among them. At the border, she wrote, these hardened German communists tried to ingratiate themselves with their old enemies: “The SS and Gestapo men thrust their hands into the air in the Hitler salute and began to sing
‘Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles.’
Hesitantly, our men followed suit, and there were very few who did not raise their arms and join in the singing. Among these latter was the Jew from Hungary.”
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Most of these loyal communists ended up in Nazi jails
and camps. Buber-Neumann herself was sent directly from the border to a concentration camp, Ravensbrück, where she spent the rest of the war. She thus became a double victim, condemned to both the Soviet Gulag and a Nazi camp as well. These kinds of stories were quickly forgotten in Western Europe, where “the war” was the war against Germany. But they were remembered all too well in Eastern Europe.

Paradoxically, Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 gave the international communist movement a new lease on life. With Stalin now a sworn enemy of Hitler, the Eastern European (and Western European) communist parties once again shared a common cause with the Soviet Union. In the USSR, enthusiasm for foreign communists also returned—now they were possible allies, fifth columns inside Nazi-occupied Europe—and Stalin’s tactics changed to suit the new circumstances. Once again, the international communist movement was instructed to unite with social democrats, centrists, and this time even bourgeois capitalists in order to create “national fronts” to defeat Hitler.

Plans were made to send loyal communists back into their countries of origin, though not all of the earliest efforts met with much success. At the end of 1941, the Red Army helped the first group of “Moscow communists” make their way into Nazi-occupied Poland, where, with radio equipment and contacts provided by the NKVD, they founded a new
Polish Workers’ Party (Polska Partia Robotnicza, or PPR) in January 1942.
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Very quickly, they squabbled among themselves and with the rest of the resistance, and probably collaborated with the German secret police during at least one operation against the Home Army, the armed wing of the Polish resistance. One of them then murdered another in a notoriously convoluted incident. Eventually they lost radio contact with Moscow.
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During the period of radio silence they elected a new leader of their own, Władysław Gomułka, who did not win Moscow’s confidence, either then or later. Concerned, the Soviet Union sent in another leader. He was injured parachuting into the country and wound up shooting himself. Gomułka thus remained the de facto wartime leader of the Polish Workers’ Party, at least until Bierut could make it into the country at the end of 1943.

Now that the Soviet Union urgently needed to train new cadres, the Comintern suddenly became an important institution again. For reasons of
security, its headquarters were moved to distant Ufa, the capital of the Central Asian province of Bashkortostan, where a new generation of Comintern agents could be trained without fear of bombing or attack. Far behind the front lines, the USSR began to prepare them for the postwar world. This was not the
first time the Comintern had undertaken such a task: a special Politburo committee, which included Stalin, had supervised the organization of the first Comintern training center in 1925, in Moscow. High standards had been set for the first participants. They had to know English, German, or French; were required to have read the most important works of Marx, Engels, and Plekhanov; and had to pass a test administered by the Comintern as well as a very thorough background check. “This is very important,” noted Comintern officials at the time, “as the whole value of the university will be lost if the proper types are not selected.”
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From the very beginning, courses were heavy on Marxism—dialectical materialism, political economy, history of the Russian communist party—though they also tried to include “practical” training, sometimes with comic results. One attempt to teach students about life in Soviet factories (“so that they would learn about the dictatorship of the proletariat from the inside”) ended badly when the designated factory, which specialized in metallurgy, could not find jobs for the untrained students, most of whom did not speak Russian. They became, as a result, “figures of fun” and a distraction for the workers.
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Worse, almost every national communist party had its splits and divisions, and there was always someone arguing that local circumstances in their country made it impossible to follow the Soviet line. The internal Comintern records from the 1930s are full of accusations and counteraccusations. Some students had “hidden aspects to their pasts,” or else bourgeois backgrounds that made them “inappropriate people to be leading a workers’ movement.” Disappointingly few appeared to be textbook revolutionaries.
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By 1941, the Comintern was a more experienced organization, and in the aftermath of the German invasion the recruitment of new students did follow some clear patterns. The foreign party leaders in Moscow immediately began the complex process of tracking down their comrades from the hiding places, refugee camps, and prisons where they had found shelter from the war, as well as from Soviet camps and prisons. Those who had been arrested or had spent years in the Gulag were often rehabilitated immediately, no questions asked, if only they could be found alive.

The German leaders Ulbricht and Pieck were particularly assiduous
about tracking down old comrades scattered across the Soviet Union, both in the Gulag and outside it. Among those they discovered was the young
Wolfgang Leonhard, who had been deported to
Karaganda, in Kazakhstan, at the start of the war, along with many other German residents of Moscow, where he languished in semi-starvation. Out of the blue a letter summoned him to Ufa in July 1942, without explanation. From then on, almost every aspect of his first encounter with the wartime
Comintern was shrouded in an air of deep mystery. The entrance to the head office was flanked with large columns, but there was no sign on the door, “nothing to indicate that this was the building which housed the headquarters of the Comintern.” Upon entering, he was immediately offered a meal—it seemed that many of the comrades who arrived there had not eaten in many days—which he wolfed down in silence. He then had a short meeting with the chief of cadres, who told him, still without explanation, that he would be traveling farther: “I will notify you of your destination.”

During the next few days he encountered many old friends, mostly children of German communists like himself, whom he had met in Moscow schools over the years and at meetings of the Komsomol, the communist party’s youth wing. None of them would speak about their recent past or their future plans, or even use what he knew to be their real names. “Gradually, I learned that different standards prevailed here: It was clear that what one did not talk about covered a much wider field.” After a few days he was again informed abruptly that it was time to leave. Still without any explanation, he was put on a boat, taken up the river, placed in a truck, and then finally told to get out and walk. At last he arrived at some old farm buildings and learned that this, at last, was the Comintern school. In deepest secrecy, he began his training.
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Over the next few months, Leonhard and his fellow students heard the standard lectures—on Marxism and dialectical and historical materialism—with an added emphasis on the history of the communist parties in their respective countries and the history of the Comintern. They had access to secret reports and papers unavailable to others in the Soviet Union. Because of the high status of their future missions, the students also received Nazi and fascist literature of a kind they had never seen or heard of before. This was to enable them to better understand their enemies, as Leonhard remembered: “Often one of us was required to expound in front of the group various doctrines of Nazi
ideology, while others had the task of attacking and
refuting the Nazi arguments. The student who had to expound the Nazi arguments was told to set them out as well and clearly and convincingly as he could, and his performance was actually assessed more favorably the better he represented the Nazi point of view.”
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Although they were allowed to read Nazi literature, they were kept well away from the writings of dissident or anti-Stalinist communists: “Whereas all the other seminars generally reached a respectable level of discussion, the seminar on Trotskyism was confined to furious partisan denunciations.”
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There were several such wartime schools, not only for communists but also for Polish officers who had been recruited into the “Kościuszko Division,” a Polish-speaking division of the Red Army, as well as for captured German officers who were being “re-educated.” A noteworthy number of the politicians who were later to play promiment roles in the postwar communist states studied at them—or sent their children to do so. Tito’s son Zarko was one of Leonhard’s colleagues, for example, as was Amaya Ibárruri, the daughter of the Spanish communist Dolores Ibárruri, better known as La Pasionaria, one of the celebrated orators of the
Spanish Civil War.

Some of the teachers in the schools had equally illustrious careers in front of them.
Jakub Berman, later the security, ideology, and propaganda boss in Poland, taught Polish communists in Ufa from 1942 onward. Then, as later, Berman took great pains to toe the party line. Among other things, he kept in close touch at this time with
Zofia Dzerzhinskaia, the Polish wife of the notorious founder of the secret police, Feliks Dzerzhinskii (who was also Polish). She functioned as a kind of godmother to the Polish communists in the Soviet Union, and Berman carefully preserved copies of his letters to her. Although these are stiffly written and not especially informative, they do shed some light on what life must have been like in wartime Ufa. Berman told Dzerzhinskaia that he often went to listen to other lecturers, including Pieck from Germany, Togliatti from Italy, and La Pasionaria from Spain. He carefully followed events in Warsaw (“with great eagerness we are following the news of the heroic battle in the country”). On the occasion of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the USSR, he solemnly informed Dzerzhinskaia that the Soviet Union is “for us the best example of how to organize in the future the same kind of life in our country.”
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Berman also told Dzerzhinskaia that he was teaching courses on “the History of Poland, the History of the Polish workers’ movement” as well as instructing young Polish communists on contemporary politics. These were
not easy subjects, given that Stalin had dissolved the Polish communist party in 1938 and killed many of its leaders. (Later, official party history would explain that the Polish communist party “was created on a base of Marxism-Leninism, but didn’t manage to finish off factionalist tendencies.”)
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The party’s replacement, Gomułka’s Polish Workers’ Party, was still very small, having been founded only in 1942. In another set of letters, to his comrade
Leon Kasman, Berman was more open about the “difficulties” these facts presented for anyone trying to teach the history of Polish communism. Obviously it was necessary to tread very delicately when the 1930s were under discussion, since it was impossible to mention Stalin’s role in the dissolution of the party, and even more impossible to mention his antagonism toward Poland.
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