Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

Within a few years, and in most cases by 1948, this coalition was broken down and replaced by narrow Stalinist control, governed by a typical Stalinist tyranny. This was achieved by getting the significant government posts into the hands of hard-core Stalinists, usually the former Moscow exiles, and forcing other groups out of the coalition. In this process, the presence of Soviet troops was often the vital factor. Along with this went a social, economic, and propagandist campaign to split the farmers by calling the more affluent, better educated, or more obstinate ones “agrarian reactionaries” and “enemies of the people.” These were liquidated, frequently by death. The chief index showing that this stage had been reached was usually a reversal of the agricultural policy from agrarian reform to collectivization similar to that achieved in Russia in 1930-1934.

As one consequence of this change, each satellite found its welfare, especially in economics, subordinated to that of the Soviet Union. This was reflected in numerous economic and commercial agreements which set up conditions of commercial exchange and joint-owned public corporations able to milk the satellite countries for Russia’s benefit. Some of this was based on reparations. As examples of this exploitation, we might mention that the joint corporations in East Germany drained from that area goods worth a billion Reichsmarks a year in terms of 1936 prices in the 1946-1948 period. The Soviet-Polish coal agreement of 1945 bound Poland to sell coal to Russia at one-tenth the price obtainable elsewhere. In all, it has been estimated that the Soviet Union extracted goods worth $20 billion out of eastern Europe in 1945-1946.

By 1952, eastern Europe, with the notable exception of Yugoslavia, was being organized, as a colony of the Soviet Union, along Stalinist lines. The bitter attacks on Tito arose from Tito’s refusal to accept this and from the challenge which the existence of his different system offered to Stalin’s control. Tito was able to resist because he was outside the zone of Soviet military occupation and had built up a military and bureaucratic hierarchy loyal to him, while inside that zone these hierarchies had been constructed under Soviet guidance and were loyal to Stalin rather than to the local leaders. The one exception, Albania, sided with Stalin because it feared Yugoslavia, just as Tito feared the Soviet Union, as a too powerful neighbor.

In 1951-1952 the incipient purge in the Soviet Union was extended to the satellites where its anti-Semitic overtones were even more evident. Rudolf Slansky, leader of the Czech Communist Party, was tried and executed in spite of his abject subservience to Stalin, while Anna Pauker was removed from her offices in Romania. This drove Tito closer to the Western camp and led Tito’s friend Milovan Djilas to recognize that the problem of Stalinism was not personal but institutional, caused by the structure of the system, a disease fatal to any real social welfare; he called this disease “bureaucratic degeneration.” When Djilas went further, at the end of 1953, and recognized that the real issue was between freedom and absolutism, a choice for all the Zone between the West and the East, he broke with Tito because his criticism clearly applied to Tito’s authoritarian bureaucracy as well. Many persons in the satellites, even the young who had lifelong indoctrination in the authoritarian outlook, reached similar conclusions and were like tinder to any anti-Soviet spark.

The sparks were provided by Khrushchev, with his continued curtailment of the secret police, his acceptance of Titoism, and, above all, his “secret speech.” Few recognized that Khrushchev was basically an ultra-Stalinist himself, fully committed to foreign aggression, to ultraindustrialization, and to ruthless discipline of the working masses, especially the peasants. His tactical shifts were taken as indicators of a moderate personality, while, in fact, Khrushchev was as extreme as Stalin and more reckless.

As part of the thaw in eastern Europe there was a considerable shift from Stalinism. Hundreds of thousands of political prisoners were either released or given reduced sentences, and party leaders who had been purged were restored to the party. Some who had been executed were posthumously rehabilitated. That key indicator, pressure to build up collective farms, was reversed. In Hungary in a single year (May 1953 to May 1954) the acreage under collective farming decreased one-third, while the number of peasants on such farms fell 45 percent. This was fairly typical of the Zone as a whole.

This general shift undoubtedly encouraged resistance to Soviet domination, a feeling which was greatly increased in 1956 by three other factors: (1) the growing impoverishment of the Zone from Soviet exploitation, from the poor crops and food shortages of 1956, and from the equally grave fuel shortages (both coal and petroleum); (2) the shift of Soviet attention from Europe to Asia; (3) the unexpected reaction to the “secret speech.” The consequences of these disturbing influences were general in the Zone, but the specific cases of Poland and Hungary hold great interest, because they worked in such totally different ways.

The chief difference, of course, was the great strength of the Polish leaders and people, going back to their terrible experiences at the hands of both Russians and Germans and their memories of the extraordinary feats of the underground resistance. Soviet reactions to Polish demands for liberalizing the regime were undoubtedly influenced by a reluctance to meet that resistance again. However, the chief difference lay in the related fact that the leaders of the Polish Communist Party led the demand for liberalization and maintained a united front while doing so, while the Hungary movement was resisted by the party leaders and could be split by personal ambitions.

The crisis began in both countries in the last week of June 1956. A stoppage of work at the Polish railway factory in Poznan grew into a mass demonstration against the Communist regime. Shots were fired, and eventually over 50 were killed and 323 arrested. Polish Party Secretary Ochab made concessions to the opposition and attributed the episode to “social roots . . . the existence of serious disturbances between the party and the various sections of the working class.” This was rejected three days later by Bulganin during a sudden and unexpected visit of the Kremlin leaders to Warsaw; their version attributed the troubles to foreign capitalist agitators. Ochab continued his concessions and, on August 4th, readmitted to the party the popular Vladislov Gomulka, a strong nationalist Communist who had been removed and imprisoned at Stalin’s orders in 1951.

Because the continued worsening of economic conditions in the late summer of 1956 made it impossible for the Polish Communists to offer the people any substantial economic concessions, they continued the political relaxation, which alarmed the Kremlin. The trials of those arrested in the June disturbances were fair and punishments lenient, amid growing

nationalist enthusiasm. On October 15th Moscow learned of a Polish decision to convene the Polish Central Committee on October 18th to elect a new Politburo which would not include Soviet Marshal K. K. Rokossovsky, defense minister of Poland since the days of Stalin, and would make Gomulka party secretary. After a hurried meeting of the Soviet Presidium on October 18th, Soviet troops and naval contingents began to converge on Poland, and Khrushchev, Molotov, Kaganovich, and Mikoyan burst into the Polish Central Committee session of October 19th just as it began. The presence of that rigid Stalinist Molotov, who had been dismissed as foreign secretary in June, was significant of the precarious decline of Khrushchev’s position in the Kremlin.