The Power of Freedom. Mart Laar

Party whose leader, Stanisław Mikołajczyk, was undermined by the Communists who arrested, tortured and killed members of the wartime resistance, and harassed non-Communist political parties and civil organisations. In a free election, Mikołajczyk would most certainly have won a sweeping victory. However, free elections were repeatedly postponed.51 The absence of an effective Western policy in Poland made it increasingly possible for the NKVD to terrorise the democratic opposition. From 1946 to 1948, military courts sentenced 32,477 people, most of them members of democratic parties for ‘crimes against the state’.52 Only then the elections were held. In order to be sure that the elections would produce the ‘correct’ results, the Polish security apparatus recruited 47 % of the members of the electoral committees as agents.53 In 1947, after the manipulated elections formalised the liquidation of his party, Mikołajczyk escaped abroad and the Communist takeover was complete.

      Queues were normal part of Soviet life. Estonia, 1987

      In Hungary, the situation was even more complicated for the Communists. They were soundly defeated in the relatively free elections held in November 1944, polling only 17 % of the votes against 57 % for the Smallholders’ (Peasant) Party. The Communist response was to intensify terror and to sponsor the coalition of ‘democratic’ parties against the ‘reactionary’ smallholders. In 1947, the Communists put pressure on the Prime Minister to resign and increased their intimidation of the opposition. In the rigged elections in August, the Leftist bloc polled 60 % of the votes and were then quick to finalise their takeover. The peasants were also a problem for the Communists in Bulgaria where their main opponent was the Agrarian party. Even when the Communists could control the government thanks to Soviet pressure, opposition to them was loud and active. Unfortunately, it did not receive any real support from the West. Understanding this, the Communists arrested the leader of the parliamentary opposition, Nikola Petkov, in 1947, sentenced him to death and subsequently executed him. The Agrarian Union, with its 150,000 members, was banned and many of its activists arrested. After the destruction of Petkov, the Communists moved quickly to consolidate a full takeover, passing the new ‘Stalinist’ constitution and liquidating the last signs of democracy.

      The Communists also had a difficult start in Romania. There, the inter-war political elite had removed the regime of Marshal Ion Antonescu in August 1944, moving back to democracy and suing for peace at the United Nations. Consequently, when Soviet troops entered Bucharest, they found working democratic institutions there. But this did not stop Stalin. Taking advantage of the naiveté of their Western Allies, the Soviet representatives succeeded in gaining strong representation for the Communists in the government, who then undermined the authority of democratic parties and institutions and ultimately gained full control of the government. King Michael tried to resist but no help was forthcoming from the West. After the fraudulent elections of 1947, the Communists gained full control in Romania and the king was forced to leave.

      In Germany, the Communists experienced only partial success. With the help of the Soviet authorities, the Red Army and the Soviet secret police worked together to destroy any attempts to resist Sovietisation; the Communists were quick to assert their control over the Soviet zone of occupation. The leaders of the non-Communist political parties disappeared into the NKVD torture chambers, with some of them even being kidnapped from West Berlin. One card that Stalin intended to play in Germany was that of German nationalism. To convince the Germans in the East and West, he was even ready to rehabilitate the Nazis in Germany. As Molotov recalled, ‘he saw how Hitler managed to organise [the] German people. Hitler led his people, and we felt it in the way the Germans fought during the war.’ In January 1947, Stalin asked the German Communists, ‘are there many Nazi elements in Germany?’ And advised them to supplant the policy of elimination of Nazi collaborators ‘[with] a different one – aimed [at attracting] them’. The former Nazi activists should, he considered, be allowed to organise their own party, one which would operate in the same block as the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) and which would even have its own newspaper. ‘There were ten million members in the Nazi Party overall and they all had families, friends and acquaintances. This is a big number. How long should we ignore their concerns?’ Stalin asked.54 However, Stalin’s attempts to create an anti-Western balance in German politics failed. Memories of Soviet atrocities and the destruction of the country were too fresh, leading Germans outside the Soviet occupation zone decisively to reject all Communist takeover attempts. In elections to the Berlin City Council, pro-Communist forces were soundly defeated. It became increasingly clear that Communist authority relied solely on the bayonets of the Red Army. Ultimately then, Stalin had to give up his hopes of a united Germany allied against the West and accept instead the establishment of a socialist state in the Eastern part of Germany in 1949.55 The formation of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) coincided with the complete rehabilitation of the former Nazis as well as the officers of the Wehramacht in the Soviet occupation zone.56

      Czechoslovakia was the last country to fall victim to Communism in Central and Eastern Europe. For some time, it looked as though the country might be able to continue its democratic development. There was no Red Army on Czechoslovakian soil and it was also the only Central European country in which the Soviets accepted the return of the former president. After the war, President Beneš still seemed to be in charge of affairs. At the same time, Soviet prestige was high and the Communists were popular. In the elections held in 1946, the Communists polled 38 % of the votes and proceeded to build coalitions with other parties in the government. By exercising control in the government, the police and the army, the Communists consolidated their influence within the country. In July 1947, Moscow demanded in the most brutal way that Czechoslovakia change its decision to accept Marshall Aid from America. The Foreign Minister, Jan Masaryk, the son of the founder of the Czechoslovakian Republic, likened the decision to a second Munich. This decreased the popularity of the Communists, with public polls demonstrating that their popularity had fallen to 25 %. Now the Communists started to arm their supporters, moving in the direction of a full takeover of power. The Soviet Deputy Minister, Zorin, declared that Moscow would not allow any Western interference, while at the same time Soviet units were concentrated on Czechoslovakia’s borders. President Beneš, fearing civil war and Soviet intervention, accepted the Communists’ demands for a new administration. The Foreign Minister, Jan Masaryk fell to his death from his office window, having almost certainly been pushed by a Communist mob. Beneš resigned and Czechoslovakia was thereafter firmly embedded in the Soviet camp.57

      Czechoslovakia’s fate demonstrates that it is not fair to blame the Red Army alone for the collapse of democracy in Central and Eastern Europe. An important part in this was also played by the naiveté and ignorance of Western democracies concerning events in Central and Eastern Europe, and the weakness of the democratic traditions and democratic political parties in that region. The states and societies of Central and Eastern Europe were often poorly integrated, there were segments of society with no commitment to the state; civil society and political competition were weak and often the population had become habituated to authoritarianism and state interventionism. These factors were exacerbated by the impact of the war and Nazi terror, which destroyed the cornerstones of society as most former leading politicians were forced into exile or killed. In this situation it was easy for the Communists to present themselves as the only effective force capable of filling the power vacuum. According to George Schöpflin, the non-Communist politicians were also part of the failure. Schöpflin writes that ‘they were indeed victims, but they contributed to their own marginalisation knowingly and, to a greater extent, unknowingly’.58 They lacked political skills and were too uncertain to summon the determination to face down the Communists. They tended to see the Soviet occupation as a definitive and incalculable constraint in the face of which they were helpless. It is possible that even stronger opposition to Communism would have ended in the same way; nevertheless, the flaws of the non-Communist opposition made the Communist’s triumph easier than it might

51

Paczkowski 2003, pp. 146–197.

52

Handbook 2005, p. 271.

53

Handbook 2005, p. 255.

54

Zubok 2007, pp. 70–71.

55

Adomeit 1998, pp. 57–87.

56

Zubok 2007, p. 71.

57

Mastny 1996, pp. 41–42.

58

Schöpflin 1993, pp. 70–71.