Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II (61 page)

The suppression of free speech was accompanied by a huge drive towards centralization and the abolition of private property. Everything from transport, industry and mining to insurance and banking was nationalized: by 1950 alone 1,060 major enterprises had been brought under state control, incorporating 90 per cent of the country’s total industrial production. In the process, market mechanisms were destroyed, small businesses virtually disappeared, and the economy was placed in thrall to a ‘State Planning Commission’ and a Stalinist ‘Five Year Plan’.
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Perhaps the greatest upheaval in the country, however, was brought about by the collectivization of farms. The land reforms introduced by the Groza government in March 1945 were deliberately calculated to increase support for the Communist-led NDF in the countryside. According to official figures, over a million hectares of land were expropriated from ‘war criminals’, those who had collaborated with the Germans, and landowners who had left their land uncultivated over the previous seven years. Everyone who owned more than fifty hectares of land was forced to relinquish it to the state, who then parcelled it out to the poorer peasants. In total, 1,057,674 hectares of land were distributed amongst 796,129 beneficiaries, giving them an average of 1.3 hectares each. While this was an extremely popular political move, it was much less successful economically: such small parcels of land were extremely inefficient, and without the same access to farm machinery that the old, large farms had had, food production dropped dramatically.
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Four years later, after the Communists had achieved absolute control of the country, they finally revealed their true agenda for the countryside. At the beginning of March 1949, they announced that all farms up to fifty hectares, which had previously been exempt from Groza’s land reforms, would now also be expropriated without compensation. Local militias and police forces immediately moved in and evicted an estimated 17,000 farming families from their homes.
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In contrast to the Groza land reforms, these expropriations of land and property provoked widespread resistance. In the regions of Dolj, Arges, Bihor, Bucharest, Timisoara, Vla
ca, Hunedoara and parts of Western Transylvania peasants fought pitched battles in order to hold on to their lands, and in some cases the army were called in to suppress them. According to Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej in later years, mass arrests of peasants were carried out all over the country, as a result of which ‘more than 80,000 peasants … were sent for trial’.
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But now that there was no longer anyone to represent these people in government, or to protect them from the brutality of the new security forces, their resistance was futile.

The land expropriated from these peasants was used to set up almost a thousand collective farms, upon which brigades of landless or poor peasants were set to work. From the outset the project was an abject disaster. The government failed to set up anything like enough communal stations for tractors and other farm machinery: as a consequence crops could neither be properly sown nor properly harvested, resulting in drastic food shortages throughout the country. Having forced through this policy against the will of the people, just over a year later the government was obliged to scale back the programme drastically. The thrust for collectivization resumed in earnest the following year, and after ten years Dej was able to announce that 96 per cent of the total arable land in the country now belonged to state farms, collectives and agricultural associations.
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In the interest of balance, it is important to keep in mind the fact that some of the poorer peasants did find themselves better off under the new system. It is also worthwhile remembering that in the same year that thousands of Romanian peasants were fighting
against
land reform, in Italy they were protesting in their tens of thousands because land reforms were being actively prevented. None of this, however, excuses the brutal and anti-democratic way that collectivization in Romania was carried out. Both economically and in terms of sheer human misery, the programme was an unmitigated disaster.

The transformation that overtook Romania in the years 1944 to 1949 is quite astounding. In those few short years the country changed from a nascent democracy to a full-blown Stalinist dictatorship. That the Communists were able to achieve this through a largely political process, albeit a manipulated one, rather than through any kind of violent revolution is extraordinary. But the fact that Romania did not descend into the same kind of civil war that had engulfed Greece should not be taken to mean that the process was in any way peaceful. From the intimidation of trade union members to the arrest of politicians, from the massive and often unruly demonstrations in the cities to the repression of peasants and farmers in the countryside, violence, or the threat of violence, was omnipresent in Romania after the war.

Standing squarely behind this threat of violence, like the Romanian Communist Party’s shadow, was the might of the Soviet Union. As I shall show in the coming chapters, the subjugation of Romania, and indeed of the rest of eastern Europe, would have been impossible without this towering presence. It is significant that the coup which ousted Marshal Antonescu from power in the first place had only ever been conducted in order to avoid the threat of annihilation from the Red Army. This threat remained in the background throughout the events I have described, and was the principal reason why resistance to the Communist Party’s political manoeuvring was not greater.

Over the coming years the Romanian government was to become one of the most repressive regimes in the Eastern Bloc. It is painfully ironic that the coup of August 1944, which was conducted with the purpose of establishing democracy in Romania, should have heralded more than four decades of oppression that made Antonescu’s dictatorship seem positively benign by comparison.

26

The Subjugation of Eastern Europe

The imposition of communism in Romania might have been brutal, but it was by no means unique. Historians of various nationalities tend to concentrate on the ways in which their own country’s experience of communism was different from those around them. The French, Italian, Czech and Finnish experience in the immediate postwar period, for example, was one of a largely democratic Communist movement, whose leaders sought to win power through the ballot box. The Greek, Albanian and Yugoslav Communists, by contrast, were all members of a strictly revolutionary movement committed to overthrowing traditional power structures by force. In other countries the Communists sought to achieve power through a combination of these two approaches: a democratic surface, with a revolutionary undertow. In the words of Walter Ulbricht, leader of the East German Communists, ‘[I]t’s got to look democratic, but we must have everything in our control.’
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If there appeared to be many different roads to communism in the aftermath of the war, however, these differences were outweighed by the similarities between countries. The first and most important thing the Eastern Bloc countries had in common was that they had almost all been occupied by the Red Army. While the Soviets always maintained that their army was only there to keep the peace, there were definite political overtones to their peacekeeping – in this respect their policy was the mirror image of the use of the British army in Greece. In Hungary, for example, the Communist leader Mátyás Rákosi implored Moscow not to withdraw the Red Army, for fear that without it Hungarian communism would ‘hang in the air’.
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Klement Gottwald, the man in charge of the Czech Communists, also asked for Soviet military detachments to be moved towards the Czech border during the February 1948 takeover, just for psychological effect.
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Even if the Red Army was not actually used to impose socialism upon the population of eastern Europe, the threat was implicit.

Alongside the Red Army had come the Soviet political police, the NKVD. While use of the Soviet military to impose Communist rule was more often a threat than a direct reality, the NKVD took a much more hands-on approach, especially while the war was still going on. It was the NKVD’s responsibility to ensure political stability behind the front lines, and as such they had carte blanche to arrest, imprison and execute anyone they saw as a potential threat. On the face of it, their aim was the same as that of the British and American administrations in western Europe – to prevent any kind of civil conflict in the interior that might draw resources away from the front – but the systematically ruthless way in which they and their local disciples rounded up and disposed of everyone they believed to be ‘politically unreliable’ clearly demonstrates that they had ulterior motives.

This was particularly obvious in Poland, where members of the Home Army (Armia Krajowa or AK) were hunted down, disarmed, arrested, imprisoned and deported. The AK was a potentially valuable fighting force, but as an alternative power base in Poland it was also a threat to future Soviet influence there.
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For all their rhetoric, the Soviets were
never
only concerned with winning the war: they always kept one eye on the future political shape of the countries they were in the process of occupying.

A further method of ensuring Communist domination was through the use of Allied Control Commissions (ACCs). At the end of the war, the Allies set up these temporary commissions in all of the former Axis countries to oversee the business of the indigenous administrations. The ACC in Germany and Austria was more or less equally split between American, British, French and Soviet members, and arguments amongst these representatives often led to stalemate – and ultimately to the division of Germany. In Italy the ACC was dominated by members of the Western Allies. In Finland, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria, by contrast, it was the Soviets who were firmly in control, with British and American members acting merely as political observers.

According to the armistice agreements in these countries, the Allied Control Commissions had the right to approve policy decisions made by each national government, as well as to authorize or veto appointments to particular government posts. The strict reason for this was to make sure that democratic principles were upheld, so that these former enemies could not return to their pro-fascist ways. However, it was up to the ACCs themselves to decide what was ‘democratic’ and what was not. In Finland and eastern Europe the Soviets routinely abused their powers to ensure that Communist policies were adopted, and that Communist personnel were appointed to key positions in government. The ACC was effectively a wild card that the local Communists could use whenever they found their plans blocked by other politicians.
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A perfect example was provided by Hungary in 1945, where the Allied Control Commission of almost a thousand members effectively formed a parallel government. It was the ACC which pressed for an early election that year, because they believed that this would favour the Communists. When, to their surprise, the Smallholders Party won a 57.5 per cent majority, the ACC prevented them from freely choosing how to form their government by backing Communist demands for control of the all-important Interior Ministry. The Soviet-dominated ACC also interceded in land reform, censorship, propaganda and the purging of wartime officials, and even prevented the Hungarian government from forming certain ministries that did not accord with Soviet plans for the country.
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Wherever the Communists came to power after the war, their modus operandi followed a common pattern. The most important thing was to get themselves appointed to positions of power. In the aftermath of the war, when coalition governments were first being set up across eastern Europe, they were very often headed by non-Communists. However, the positions of
real
power, such as that of Interior Minister, were almost always given to Communists. The Interior Ministry was what the Hungarian Prime Minister Ferenc Nagy called ‘the all-powerful portfolio’ - it was the nerve-centre which controlled the police and security forces, issued identity papers including passports and entry/exit visas, and granted licences to newspapers.
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It was therefore the ministry that exerted the greatest power over both public opinion and people’s everyday lives. The use of the Interior Ministry to crush anti-Communist sentiment was not unique to Romania – it happened throughout eastern Europe in the aftermath of the war. In Czechoslovakia, the crisis of February 1948 was directly caused by complaints that the Czech Interior Minister, Václav Nosek, had been using the police force specifically to further the causes of the Communist Party.
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The Finnish Interior Minister, Yrjo Leino, openly admitted that when the police force was purged ‘the new faces were naturally, as far as could be, Communists’ – by December 1945 Communists made up between 45 and 60 per cent of the Finnish police force.
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