Iron Curtain (47 page)

Western fear of Soviet intentions combined with Stalin’s paranoia eventually led to deeper military and diplomatic changes, all very well described in the many excellent histories of the Cold War.
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In April 1949, the Western Europeans ratified the North Atlantic Treaty and created NATO. In October 1949, Stalin abandoned the pretense that there would be an imminent reunification of Germany, and the German Democratic Republic—also known as East Germany, the GDR, or the DDR, from Deutsche Demokratische Republik—became an
independent state. The
rearmament of Germany, unthinkable a few years earlier, slowly picked up pace on both sides of the border within Germany with the creation of the Western Bundeswehr, the Federal Defense Force, and the National People’s Army in the East. Extra measures were taken to ensure the loyalty of other Eastern European armies. In November 1949, a senior Soviet general,
Konstantin Rokossovskii, was named Polish Defense Minister. Though of Polish origin (and though his family still insist heartily that he was born in Warsaw), Rokossovskii had made his career in the Red Army, and he never gave up his Soviet passport. His presence in the Polish government thus established, symbolically and practically, Soviet control over Poland’s armed forces and foreign policy.
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Other Soviet officers, some of whom spoke no language other than Russian, received senior jobs in the Polish and Hungarian armed forces at this time as well. In both armies, younger officers from working-class and peasant backgrounds were promoted rapidly while older officers were eased out.
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But in 1948 the Soviet Union also received three additional, specific blows to its prestige in Eastern Europe. The first was the arrival of the first tranche of Marshall Plan aid money, some $4 billion of which would be distributed over the subsequent two years. The Marshall Fund was not the sole reason for the Western European economic recovery, which now picked up pace, but it did provide a critical moral and financial boost. “Marshall Money” became one of the common explanations for the real prosperity gap that was now developing between the eastern and western halves of the continent.
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The second blow was the result of a Soviet provocation that backfired. Following the Western Allies’ announcement of a currency reform and their introduction of the west mark (eventually the deutsche mark) into their occupation zones in June 1948, the Soviet Union responded with what would become known as the
Berlin blockade. Soviet occupation authorities cut off electricity, as well as road, rail, and barge access, to
West Berlin and halted deliveries of food and fuel. The currency reform did accelerate the economic divergence of East and West Germany, but the purpose of the blockade was not just to protest against the new west mark. It was clearly intended to push the Americans out of Berlin, and perhaps out of Germany as well. The Red Army was confident it would succeed. One Soviet administrator later recalled that when the blockade was announced, the employees at the Soviet military headquarters in Karlshorst loudly cheered, believing that this was the beginning of the end: at last the Western Allies would depart Berlin!
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Famously, that did not happen. Instead, between June 24, 1948, and May 12, 1949, the Western Allies organized a massive airlift, bringing thousands of tons of food and fuel into the Western sector of Berlin every day, enough to sustain 2 million people. Allied commitment to the Berlin airlift, and to
the maintenance of a Western presence in Germany, took the Soviet leadership in Moscow very much by surprise. Soviet intelligence had massively underrated the airlift’s chances of success and had confidently predicted a quick Western withdrawal. Within a few weeks, the analysts were forced to change their minds. The superb logistics stunned the Russians in Berlin. To one Soviet officer, it seemed as if “the aircraft deliberately flew low over Karlshorst to impress them. One would appear overhead, another would disappear over the horizon, and a third emerge, one after another without interruption, like a conveyor belt!”
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The success of the airlift eventually forced the Soviet leadership to lift the blockade, and in the months that followed, West Berlin began agitating to become a formal part of West Germany. Soviet intelligence in the region began reporting back to Stalin threats of impending war. He was inclined to believe them.
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The third major blow to Stalin’s prestige came from within the bloc.
Josip Broz Tito, the “little Stalin” of Yugoslavia, was the only Eastern European communist leader who did not suffer from the knowledge that he was deeply unpopular. Although he had plenty of enemies, and although he disposed of them quite brutally, the Yugoslav communist party also had its own sources of legitimacy. Having led the anti-Nazi resistance, and having created his own loyal army and secret police, Tito—uniquely in the region—had no need of Soviet military support in order to stay in power. Nor did he want much Soviet interference. Although tensions had been brewing for some time, the break became official in June 1948, when the rest of the bloc agreed to expel Yugoslavia from the
Cominform.

If the success of the Berlin airlift had compounded Soviet paranoia about lurking Western conspiracies and Anglo-American spy rings, Tito’s departure from the bloc fueled Soviet fears of internal dissent. For if Tito could escape Stalin’s influence, then why not others? If the Yugoslavs could design their own economic policies, then why shouldn’t the Poles or the Czechs? Eventually “Titoism,” or “right deviationism,” became a very serious political crime: in the Eastern European context, a “Titoist” was someone who wanted his national communist party to maintain some independence from the Soviet communist party. Like “Trotskyism” the term could eventually be applied to anyone who objected (or appeared to object, or was accused of objecting) to the mainstream political line. Titoists also became the new scapegoats. If Eastern Europe was not as prosperous as the West, then surely Titoists were to blame. If shops were empty, Titoists were at fault. If Central
European factories were not producing at the expected level, Titoists had sabotaged them.

Within the boundaries of the Eastern bloc, the year 1948 was an important turning point in domestic politics too: it was the year in which the Soviet Union’s Eastern European allies abandoned attempts to win legitimacy through an electoral process and stopped tolerating any forms of genuine opposition. The full power of the police state was now turned against the regime’s perceived enemies in the church, in the already defeated political opposition, and even within the communist party itself.

Violence, arrests, and interrogations were deployed against regime opponents, but they were not the only tactic. From 1948, the communist parties also began a very long-term effort to corrupt the institutions of civil society from within, especially
religious institutions. The intention was not to destroy churches but to transform them into “mass organizations,” vehicles for the distribution of state propaganda just like the communist youth movements, the communist women’s movements, or the communist trade unions.
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In this new era, the communist parties now felt it was no longer sufficient to scare opponents. They had to be exposed in public as traitors or thieves, put through humiliating show trials, subjected to extensive attacks in the media, and placed in new, harsher prisons and specially designed camps.

The renewed attack on the enemies of communism was the most visible and dramatic element of High Stalinism. But the creation of a vast system of education and propaganda, designed to prevent more enemies from emerging in the future, was just as important to the Eastern European communists. In theory, they hoped to create not only a new kind of society but a new kind of person, a citizen who was not capable even of imagining alternatives to communism orthodoxy. During a turbulent discussion about falling listenership at East German radio, a high-ranking communist argued that “it is necessary in every detail, in every program, in every department to discuss the line of the party and to use it in daily work.”
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This was precisely what was done across society: from 1948 onward, the theories of
Marxism-Leninism would be explained, expounded, and discussed in kindergartens, schools, and universities; on the radio and in the newspapers; through elaborate mass campaigns, parades, and public events. Every public holiday became an occasion for teaching, and every organization, from the Konsum food cooperative in Germany to the
Chopin Society in Poland, became a vehicle for the distribution of communist propaganda. The public
in communist countries took part in campaigns for “peace,” they collected money in aid of communist
North Korea, they marched in parades to celebrate communist holidays.
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From the outside—and to some on the inside as well—High Stalinism looked like a political system whose attempt to achieve total control might well succeed.

From the earliest days of Soviet occupation, the church had been subject to harassment, and worse. Religious leaders, as prominent and influential members of civil society, had been among the first victims of the Red Army’s initial wave of violence. Polish Catholic priests were sent to Soviet camps in large numbers. The German postwar camps contained both Catholic and Protestant clergy, with a particularly large number of Catholic youth leaders. Soviet occupation authorities had gone out of their way to ban religious youth camps and retreats.
In Hungary, the wave of violence against youth groups had begun with the arrest of Father Kiss, the priest accused of organizing the murder of Red Army soldiers in 1946, and had continued with the banning of the Catholic youth group Kalot, slander campaigns against Calvinist and Lutheran clergy, and many other forms of legal and personal harassment. As early as May 1945, a Lutheran bishop, Zoltán Túróczy, was put on trial before one of the People’s Courts and sentenced to
prison, presumably to scare others.
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Communist leaders instinctively hated and feared church leaders, and not merely because of their own doctrinal atheism. Religious leaders were a source of alternative moral and spiritual authority. They had independent financial resources and powerful contacts in Western Europe. Catholic priests in particular were feared, both because of their close links to the
Vatican and because of the perceived power of international Catholic charities and societies. In many countries, notably Poland and Germany, church leaders had also been associated with the antifascist or anti-Hitler opposition during the war, which gave them additional status and legitimacy after the war’s end. The church’s organizing power, even aside from its ideological power, was formidable. It owned buildings where dissatisfied people could meet, as well as institutions where they could be employed. Every Sunday, priests and preachers had a guaranteed audience. Church publications had a guaranteed readership. That made the church an essential component and supporter of civic, charitable, and educational organizations of all kinds.

Yet in the early years, both the new regimes and their Soviet allies had demonstrated a substantial measure of caution in dealing with the churches. In 1945 the Red Army did not, as a rule, shut down, sack, or destroy churches as the Bolsheviks had during the Russian Revolution and Civil War, nor did it carry out mass shootings of priests.
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Much of the time, Red Army soldiers
in Germany went out of their way to facilitate the reopening of religious institutions—churches, schools, even theological colleges. They allowed the new radio stations to transmit sermons and sanctioned the printing of Bibles and other religious literature. This was deliberate. They wanted to distinguish the new occupiers from their Nazi predecessors, as one Soviet official in Germany wrote in a later analysis: “By giving churches full freedom in their activities, the Soviet occupation authorities demonstrated their tolerance of religion” and eliminated “an important part of the arsenal of anti-Soviet propaganda.”
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Their sheer ignorance of religion did lend an arbitrary quality to some of their behavior. In 1949, for example, the local Soviet commander became suspicious of the young people preparing for a Lutheran confirmation service in the town of
Nordhausen and demanded to know why “such additional propaganda is necessary.” What, he blustered, was the purpose of a special confirmation service: “Is it to agitate against Marxism and Russia?”
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Deference to the church was even greater
in Poland, where communist leaders, anxious to be perceived as “Polish” and not “Soviet” (or, indeed, Jewish), initially made obeisance to Polish national symbols of all kinds, the church hierarchy included. Senior communists marched alongside senior clergy in the annual Corpus Christi processions, and communist leaders attended mass on multiple occasions. Behind the scenes, the Polish party leadership described this policy as one of “bypassing” the church: they would reform other institutions first, tempt young people away from the church, and hope that older churchgoers would eventually die out.

As in Germany, the new government very much wanted some formal Catholic institutions to reopen in Poland as proof that “normalcy” had returned and that the Red Army’s presence did not constitute a new occupation. The most prominent Catholic institution in the country, the
Catholic University of Lublin, opened its doors in August 1944, a decision that infuriated the London government in exile, as it implied a tacit recognition of the status quo. Soon afterward, the Archdiocese of Kraków received official permission to publish
Tygodnik Powszechny
(
Universal Weekly
), the intellectual
Catholic weekly that quickly became one of the most important in the country. The writer and communist intellectual
Jerzy Borejsza also organized meetings of communist and Catholic intellectuals in Kraków in the hope of orchestrating a cease-fire between the church and the party.
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