(Article changed on January 15, 2013 at 09:26)
(Article changed on January 13, 2013 at 22:03)
The period following WWII in eastern Europe is considered to be a black one, best forgotten. All the pre-war governments had been quasi-fascist dictatorships which either succumbed to the Nazi onslaught (Poland) or actively cooperated with the Germans (Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria). The Soviet liberation was greeted with trepidation by many -- with good reason for the many collaborators. Within a few years of liberation, eastern Europe was ruled by austere regimes headed by little Stalins.
As in France and Italy, women who consorted with the Germans were
treated with contempt. There was a rash of rape as millions of Soviet
soldiers filled the vacuum left before the post-war occupation
structures were established.* The Soviet soldiers had been motivated by
an intense hatred of the Nazis, and their revenge was worse than that of
the American, British etc soldiers, none of whom at lost their loved
ones and homes or had faced invasion of their homelands. The chaos did
considerable damage to post-war relations and soured the prospect of
building socialism to many who otherwise would have given the new order
that was imposed on them a chance. 'Imposed' is certainly the
operational word, as the Soviets gave security and policing to their
local communist allies.
As in all wars, there were no winners (except those lucky soldiers who
emerged unscathed with lots of booty). The east European communists had
been decimated by Stalin's pre-war purges. The liberal and rightwing
forces were persecuted. War does not discriminate between good and bad
property. As in all upheavals, farsighted bad guys step forward, play
along on the winning side, and reap their rewards.
Given this deadly scenario and the subsequent Cold War, it is surprising
just how much positive resulted from the Soviet occupation of eastern
Europe, and despite author Anne Applebaum's unremitting anti-communism
(her Gulag won the Pulitzer Prize in 2003), it keeps peaking through her Iron Curtain.
Applebaum focuses on Poland, Hungary and East Germany, clearly because
they experienced uprisings following Stalin's death in 1953 (sparked by
liberal reforms that spun out of control instigated by -- of all people --
NKVD chief Lavrenti Beria). They are very different cultures and their
post-war experiences are very different, despite following a scenario
written in Moscow, including both the good (social welfare and
anti-capitalism) and the bad ('red terror' and dogmatic imitation of
Stalinism).
She drew on dozens of personal interviews of east Europeans who were
either key figures in the period of 'high Stalinism' as she calls it or
simply people who lived their lives, worked and supported (or didn't)
the regime they lived under, and now in their waning years, were glad to
reflect on what happened, how they functioned. Appelbaum's husband is
Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski, and her treatment of Poland
is particularly detailed.
Yes, people were persecuted unjustly, though it was mostly leading
political figures who suffered, or people who refused to read the
writing on the wall and spoke out (heroically or foolishly, a judgment
call) during the wave of purges which began in the late 1940s. Two
cardinals' experiences are of interest: the Polish Stefan Wyszynski and
the Hungarian Jozsef Mindszenty.
The former compromised with the communists, and only went to prison
briefly in September 1953, telling a fellow priest: "Workers, peasants,
intellectuals, all kinds of people from all over the nation are in
prison, it's good that the primate and priests are in prison too, since
out task is to be with the nation." He remained under house arrest until
1956.
Mindszenty refused any compromise with the authorities, instead firing
off insults guaranteed to infuriate them. He demanded in that the
Hungarian church receive US aid directly at a time when the gathering
Cold War made this impossible. He publicly pontificated: "The American
donations were a sign of the all-embracing solidarity of the world
Church. World Bolshevism did not like them at all." As a result of one
broadside after another, he was given a life sentence for treason in a
1949 show trial that generated worldwide condemnation, including a UN
resolution. Freed in the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, he was granted
political asylum and lived in the US embassy in Budapest for 15 years,
and finally allowed to leave the country in 1971.
Wyszynski's 1950 secret agreement with the authorities allowed the
Church to keep much of its property, separated church from politics,
prohibited religious indoctrination in public schools, and allowed
authorities to select a bishop from 3 candidates presented. This pact is
arguably better than the agreement, say, the French church has. And
Karol Wojtyla was selected by the communists as bishop.
What comes through in the interviews is just how positive the whole
post-war period was for the majority of the people, how the communist
program gave great opportunities to the vast majority in education, work
and health care. How despite the 'high Stalin' show trials and
inanities of the period, such as the slavish naming of a new socialist
town Sztalinvaros in Hungary, a then-young worker on a woman's brigade
now remembers trudging through the mud and living in damp barracks "with
immense nostalgia", though she later became somewhat disillusioned as
an activist. (She protested -- and was chastised for it -- against the
campaign to convince workers to go into debt to buy 'Peace Bonds' which
she saw as just a hidden tax.)
Just as the communists created myths and enshrined them in their history
books at the time, the victors in the Cold War are now writing their
own version of history. Yes, Warsaw's wedding cake Palace of Culture, a
'gift' from Stalin, and nearby dreary apartment blocks, spoiled the
skyline. But the communists also had the old city in Warsaw meticulously
reconstructed.
And how to explain Alexander Dymschitz, head of the cultural division of
the Soviet Military Administration in post-war Berlin, who insisted
that artists get the coveted "first" ration card, a larger piece of
bread and more meat and vegetables? Asked why, Dymschitsz declared, "It
is possible that there is a Gorki among you. Should his immortal books
remain unwritten, only because he goes hungry?"
The whole socialist 'experiment' in eastern Europe lasted only four
short decades, and considering the animosity of the West (and many
locals), was a remarkable success in raising economic and cultural
standards. Applebaum sneers at the trials of "wreckers" and saboteurs,
but from day one, the US and its by-then subservient client states in
western Europe repressed their own communists, and the CIA waged an
undeclared war on the socialist bloc, parachuting in emigres to blow up
bridges, wreck equipment and even spread crop diseases.
Applebaum's meticulous research stopped when it comes to any of this,
though there is lots of documentation. For example, the CIA funded
Ukrainian fascist leader Mykola Lebed (a Nazi collaborator and murderer
of Jews and Poles) from 1949--91 to carry out black ops against the
Soviet Union from his front organization Prolog in New York. According
to CIA director Allen Dulles, he was "of inestimable value to this
Agency and its operations".
The most spectacular instance of US subversion in the Cold War was the
1980s CIA plan to sabotage the economy of the Soviet Union. A KGB
turncoat gained access to Russian purchase orders and the CIA slipped in
the flawed software, which triggered "the most monumental non-nuclear
explosion and fire ever seen from space". The KGB never practiced this
kind of black ops, despite hysterical propaganda to the contrary.
Neither does Applebaum admit the real state of opinion in eastern Europe
about this whole period. An October 2010 poll in Berlin among former
East Germans revealed that 57% defend the overall record of the former
East Germany and 49% agreed that "the GDR had more good sides than bad
sides. There were some problems, but life was good there." Only 30% of
Ukrainians approve of the change to democracy (vs 72% in 1991), 60% of
Bulgarians believe the old system was better. The disastrous effects of
the collapse of the Soviet Union on life expectancy, especially of men,
which fell from 64 to 58, is well known.
Compare this with the 60% of Americans in 2010 who said they feel the
country is on the wrong track (albeit down from 89% in 2008 during the
closing days of Bush II rule).
Iron Curtain also ignores the devastating effect of the collapse
of the socialist bloc had on the world at large. By unleashing the free
market from the 1980s on, inequality between the richest and poorest
nations increased from 88:1 (1970) to 267:1 (2000). The US was
henceforth able to invade countries everywhere at will, as indeed it has
done, killing millions of innocent people and patriots now dismissed as
the "enemy'. But this is of no concern to Applebaum from her
comfortable perch in Thatcherite London at the Legatum Institute, nor of
her staunchly anti-communist hubbie in Warsaw. Nor of other rewriters,
financed by the likes of Soros's Open Institutes.
What is most irritating in Iron Curtain, apart from its cliched
Churchillian title, is its assumption that all readers will accept that
the term "totalitarian' applies -- uniquely -- to the socialist bloc, that
"totalitarian education would eliminate dissent; that civic
institutions, once destroyed, could not be rebuilt; that history, once
rewritten, would be forgotten." A 1956 US National Intelligence Estimate
made just months before the collapse of the Hungarian communist order,
predicted gloomily (and a tad enviously) that over time dissidence in
eastern Europe would be worn down "by the gradual increase in the number
of Communist-indoctrinated youth".
The alert reader, unburdened by "Intelligence", will find many such
glaring hints that 'totalitarian' really has much more to do with the
West, with its seductive materialist 'me' culture, fashioning people
oblivious to the welfare of their society. Post-WWII western Europe was
promised apple pie in the sky, and got it thanks to the Marshall Plan
aimed at winning the new Cold War. Once the socialist bloc was no
longer, the apple pie disappeared, as we see in the collapse of living
standards across Europe (the US as well), there being no competition
anymore to the real totalitarian system, where protests are easily
absorbed.
Not so the dictatorships of eastern Europe, which were brittle, far from
totalitarian. The spontaneous re-emergence of unsanctioned institutions
in Hungary after the death of Stalin is particularly impressive. The
"totalitarian personalities" that Applebaum conceives of are rather
found every day in Walmart queues or on 4th of July celebrations.
While young Poles, Germans and Hungarians were at the forefront of their
new socialist orders, they were also -- just as in the West -- at the
forefront of rebellion against what many saw as the stifling status quo.
For the most part, Polish bikiniarze or Hungarian jampecek,
the counterparts of American rockers and British teddy boys, hadn't
experienced the horrors of the war, had little sense of the 1930s as a
period of communist ferment, and found western mass consumer culture
much more appealing than the modest socialist one stressing personal
responsibility and solidarity with the victims of imperialism around the
world.
Jazz and western styles became ideological tools, especially in East
Germany, with RIAS (Radio in the American Sector) broadcasting from West
Berlin, and West Germany sheet music made available for the East's dance
bands. At a German composers' conference in 1951, an East German
musicologist denounced "American entertainment kitsch" as a "channel
through which the poison of Americanism penetrates and threatens to
anaesthetize the minds of workers", embodying "the degenerate ideology
of American monopoly capital with its lack of culture, its empty
sensationalism and above all its fury for war and destruction." We are
supposed to laugh at this, but this critique sounds even more cogent
today, and could be taken from a Salafist newspaper in Egypt or a
leftist tract in the US.
When the baby boom hit especially Czechoslovakia in the 1960s, it
resulted in an explosion of creative energy, and a delayed unraveling of
the by-then tattered 'high Stalinism' there, but once again context
intervened. In retrospect, if the Prague Spring had been allowed to
blossom, Czechoslovakia would have been quickly absorbed by the West,
and the Cold War eastern dominoes would have fallen much sooner.
But 1968 was the high point of European social democracy, and who knows
what might have resulted from a melding of the two systems at that time?
That the fall came in 1990 at the height of neoliberalism meant that
capitalism at its totalitarian worst called all the shots, and there is
little to crow about by the 99% of us -- East or West. Alas, this is far
from the minds of the neoliberal victors as they churn out their
history books.
***
*At the same time, there were lots of consensual affairs with liberating soldiers out of gratitude, desire or merely desire for rations. The hysterical claims of mass rape are just that, much like the exaggerated claims about the albeit tragic gulag (which Applebaum is the perfect authority for).
