2014

Roundtable Editors: Thomas Maddux and Diane H-Diplo Labrosse Roundtable and Web Production Editor: George Fujii H-Diplo Roundtable Review h-diplo.org/roundtables Commissioned for H-Diplo by Thomas Maddux Volume XVI, No. 8 (2014) 23 October 2014 Introduction by Norman Naimark

Anne Applebaum. The Iron Curtain. The Crushing of Eastern . New York: , 2012. ISBN: 978-0-385-51569-6 (hardcover, $35.00); 978-1-4000-9593-3 (paperback, $17.95).

URL: http://www.tiny.cc/Roundtable-XVI-8 or http://h-diplo.org/roundtables/PDF/Roundtable-XVI-8.pdf

Contents Introduction by Norman Naimark, Stanford University ...... 2 Review by Mary Fulbrook, University College London ...... 6 Review by Peter Kenez, University of California, Santa Cruz ...... 11 Review by Molly Pucci, Stanford University ...... 15 Author’s Response by , Legatum Institute in London, Washington Post, Slate ...... 19

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H-Diplo Roundtable Reviews, Vol. XVI, No. 8 (2014)

Introduction by Norman Naimark, Stanford University

ne after another, the communist regimes of fell like a row of dominos in 1989. Then the seemingly impossible happened: the superpower, which O had created, molded, and nurtured these regimes in the first place, the , itself collapsed in 1991 almost as easily as did the others. The speed and seeming ease with which these events took place should not diminish in any way the long and hard struggle carried out by opponents and dissidents in all these countries, the Soviet Union included. The quick dissolution of the communist regimes should also not obscure the fact that the Soviet bloc was a powerful combination of military prowess and authoritarian force that was successful in frustrating western ambitions in Europe and the world for nearly four decades after the end of the Second World War.

Many of the countries of Eastern Europe have emerged from the long, hard period of to flourish as . has overcome severe economic instability and internal political warring to become a reliable and economically dynamic leader of the European Union, symbolized by Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s recent election as President of the European Council. The Federal Republic of Germany incorporated the German Democratic Republic and made the once divided Berlin its capital, putting an end to an inherently unstable geopolitical arrangement in the center of Europe. The former broke into warring parts. But the violence of the 1990s has receded while Croatia, following Slovenia, Bulgaria, and Romania, has joined the European Union. Despite occasional nostalgia for the (often imagined) generous social system under ‘real existing socialism,’ communism is a bad memory for most adult citizens of Eastern Europe, something they would just as soon forget. But, as Anne Applebaum reminds us in Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1945-1956, the history of the Soviet bloc provides the contemporary reader in and outside the region with an important lesson of how societies can be undermined and taken over by sometimes quite brutal non-democratic forces.

Applebaum’s book comes at a particularly appropriate time. The archives of many countries in Eastern Europe are now available for research. The last ‘veterans’ of the Stalinist period are still alive and ready to talk. There has been a notable development of the historiography in each of the individual countries, though cross-regional and comparative studies are regrettably few and far between. Not only is the timing right for Applebaum’s study, but the author is a perfect candidate for writing a widely accessible book that encapsulates the experience of the Soviet occupation and the communist takeover, as well as the coercion, indoctrination, manipulation, and adaptation that followed. A Pulitzer-Prize winner for her masterful history of the Soviet Union’s system of prison forced labor camps,1 Applebaum is a brilliant writer and sharp analyst of both Soviet and East European history. She lives in Poland part of the time, and she knows the region and a number of its languages. She works as a journalist and knows how to find

1 Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History (New York: Doubleday, 2003).

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little-known material and seek out and interview relevant informants. Almost all of her reviewers, even the critical ones, praise Applebaum for her ability to enliven history with gripping stories of the historical struggles for Eastern Europe.

At the same time, Applebaum operates within the historiographical framework that has developed over the past half century to understand the evolution of Eastern Europe after the war. The questions about Soviet intentions and actions, which are at the heart of any investigation of the period, are not easy to answer. Did Stalin intend from the very beginning to Sovietize the territory under his occupation at the end of the war? Was the Soviet Zone of Occupation in Germany fated to become a communized country of its own? Was it possible for the East Central European states, Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia, all with ostensibly democratic systems at the beginning of the peace, to exist as multi-party parliamentary states with free elections, as called for in Allied agreements? Was Moscow going to allow cultural and political heterogeneity within its in Eastern Europe? Related to that, did Stalin take seriously the early Soviet propaganda about ‘national roads to socialism,’ which would allow for the countries of Eastern Europe to combine their own individual national traditions with general ideas about socialism? Was he going to stick to his repeated statements that they did not historically require a ‘dictatorship of the proletariat,’ as did the Soviet Union? Was there any chance that they would be allowed to evolve differently, as implied by the ‘national roads’ template?

Applebaum’s insertion into the historiography -- and her answers to these questions – are unambiguous. Stalin and the Soviets beat, terrorized, tortured, swindled, and cajoled the East Europeans into compliance from the very beginning. Moscow forced on the East Europeans a totalitarian system, a foreign ideology, and alien political leaders, who were little known to the peoples involved and often were as Soviet in their outlooks as they were Polish, Hungarian, or German. There could not be any real ‘national roads to socialism.’ This was all a smokescreen for the Stalinization of society and politics in the region. Real civil society was destroyed and an artificial Sovietized one was erected in its place. The way this worked in reality was frequently physically savage, but also could be devastating as a psychological process, as demonstrated by Czeslaw Milosz’s classic study, Captive Mind, and more recently, Marci Shore’s Caviar and Ashes.2

The reviewers generally think that Applebaum does well as far as she goes, but that she needs to push her analysis further. Comparing the development of the secret police in the region, Molly Pucci suggests that the East European revolutions need to be thought of as taking place in different stages, which again brings up the question of Soviet intentionality. Pucci also poses another issue that pervades the historiography of postwar Eastern Europe and that is how much of this history was determined by Soviet leaders and agents, and how much by the East European communists themselves. In his foundational study of universities under , John Connelly talked about the “self-Sovietization” of East

2 Czeslaw Milosz, The Captive Mind, trans. Jane Zielonka (New York: Vintage, 1990); Marci Shore, Caviar and Ashes: a Generation’s Life and Death in Marxism, 1918-1980 (New Haven: Press, 2006).

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Central Europe.3 To what extent did East Europeans talk and work themselves into a Soviet system, as argued with respect to the Czechs by Bradley Abrams?4

Peter Kenez focuses on the historiographical issue, mentioned earlier, of whether Stalin “knew in May 1945 how Europe would look in May 1948.” He believes only Poland should be considered a fait accompli. Otherwise, the ‘history’ of East was pretty much up for grabs. But he is right to state that there are any number of accomplished historians and commentators who agree with Applebaum. Kenez, like Pucci, believes the period Applebaum deals with, 1945-1956, has several distinct sub-periods within it that cannot be collapsed into one. From the very beginning of the historiography of East Central Europe after the war, with the work of Hugh Seton-Watson and , this issue of how one should periodize the history of the Soviet bloc has been crucial.5

Mary Fulbrook’s criticism of Applebaum’s rendition of “popular history” needs to be evaluated as a problem of genre rather than historiography. But Fulbrook adds the important issue of how much influence the West, especially the , may have had on the evolution of early Cold War history in East Central Europe.6 She also poses interesting questions about the social bases for the emergence and development of communism in the region. Fulbrook asks for a more nuanced rendition of popular support for and participation in the communist system, and in doing so dwells on the complex issue of anti-Semitism in the societies of the region. One might add to this other dimensions of the wartime history of the region, including the complicated dynamics of collaboration, resistance, and indifference that influenced the history of the postwar period. But with all of this said, Applebaum’s book marks an important juncture in the historiography: a synthesis, in many ways, of a quarter century of research and questioning in and outside the region about how East Central Europe became a crucial fulcrum of the communist world and the Cold War, and the beginning, one would hope, of new investigations steeped in the archives and motivated by the questions of the new ‘post post-communist’ generation of historians.

Participants:

Anne Applebaum is a columnist for and Slate. She also directs the Transitions Forum at the Legatum Institute in London. After graduating from Yale

3 John Connelly, Captive University: The Sovietization of East German, Czech, and Polish Higher Education, 1945-1956 (Chapel Hill, Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2000).

4 Bradley F. Abrams, The Struggle for the Soul of the Nation: Czech Culture and the Rise of Communism (Lanham: Rowan&Littlefield, 2004).

5 Hugh Seton-Watson, The East European Revolution, 3rd ed. (New York, Praeger, 1961); Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Soviet Bloc: Unity and Conflict, rev. ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967).

6 One is reminded of Geir Lundestadt’s seminal study, The American Non-Policy Towards Eastern Europe 1943-1947 (Tromsö-Oslo-Bergen, 1978).

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University, she was a Marshall Scholar at the LSE and St. Antony’s College, Oxford. In 2012- 13 she held the Philippe Roman Chair of History and at the London School of Economics. Her most recent book, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956, won the Cundill Prize for Historical Literature, the Duke of Westminster Medal, and an Arthur Ross Silver Medal from the Council on Foreign Relations. It was also shortlisted for the National Book Award and the Pen/Faulkner Award. Her previous book, Gulag: A History, was published in 2003 and won the for non-fiction in 2004. The book narrates the history of the Soviet concentration camps system and describes daily life in the camps, making extensive use of recently opened Russian archives, as well as memoirs and interviews. Gulag: A History has appeared in more than two dozen translations, including all major European languages.

Norman Naimark is Robert and Florence McDonnell Professor of East European Studies in the History Department at Stanford, and is Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Freeman-Spogli Institute. He also serves as Sakurako and William Fisher Director of Stanford’s Global Studies Division. A selection of his books includes The Russians in Germany: A History of the Soviet Zone of Germany (Harvard 1995); Fires of Hatred; Ethnic Cleansing in 20th Century Europe (Harvard 2001); and Stalin’s Genocides (Princeton 2010). He is presently at work on a “World History of Genocide” for Oxford and a book project, “Stalin and Europe, 1945-1953.”

Mary Fulbrook, FBA, is Professor of German History at University College, London. Educated at Cambridge and Harvard, she is the author of numerous books. Relevant publications include: Anatomy of a Dictatorship: Inside the GDR, 1949-89 (Oxford University Press, 1995); The People’s State: East German Society from Hitler to Honecker (Yale University Press, 2005); Dissonant Lives: Generations and Violence through the German Dictatorships (Oxford University Press, 2011); and A Small Town near Auschwitz: Ordinary Nazis and (Oxford University Press, 2012).

Peter Kenez (B.A. Princeton, Ph.D. Harvard) is Distinguished Professor of History (retired) at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He has published eight books on Soviet and Eastern European history. His most recent work is entitled From to Genocide; the Origins of the Holocaust. With Professor Murray Baumgarten for many years he has taught a course on “The destruction of the European Jewry”. He is a recipient of an excellence of teaching award.

Molly Pucci is a Ph.D. candidate at Stanford University. She holds a Master’s degree in history from Stanford University, and in Russian, East European, and Central Asian Studies from Harvard University. She is currently in Warsaw conducting research for her dissertation, a comparative study of the secret police in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany from 1944 to 1953.

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Review by Mary Fulbrook, University College London

nne Applebaum’s The Iron Curtain is popular history, in every sense of that phrase. It has been written in a clear, accessible, punchy style for a popular audience; and Ajudging by newspaper reviews and Amazon ratings so far, it has achieved considerable popularity with a wider audience. This is also an explicitly political, moralizing book. Applebaum’s stated aim is “to gain an understanding of […] totalitarianism in practice” (xxxvi). This aim informed her methods and dictated her selection of documents: among other things, she “sought evidence of the deliberate destruction of civil society and small business” (xxxv); she “gathered as much information as possible on the founding and early development of the regime’s secret police”; and she “sought to understand how ordinary people […] collaborated […] resisted [… and] came to make terrible choices that most of us in the West, nowadays, never have to face” (xxxvi). The conclusion of the investigation was present in its premises, even before the research had begun. But popular history should be more than extended political moralizing bolstered by a dazzling array of details and adorned with footnotes, and we can learn much from Applebaum’s enterprise.

Iron Curtain certainly portrays in often chilling detail the violence, brutality, and terror that accompanied Soviet occupation and growing control over selected areas of eastern Europe towards the end of the war and in the years following. Focusing primarily on the three cases of Poland, Hungary and East Germany, Applebaum presents summary overviews and personal vignettes illustrating Soviet attempts at gaining and retaining total control of the region. The political duplicity and malign manipulations practiced by Communists, the terror exerted by police forces, the horrific experiences of displacement in the expulsions and forced population movements at the end of the war, Stalinist attempts at achieving ‘total control’ through use of the radio, suppression of independent political and social organizations, and enhanced influence over the young – all these and more are given full discussion, before the author moves on to the economic, cultural and political convulsions that marked the short-lived era of ‘High Stalinism’ once the new ‘People’s Democracies’ of eastern Europe were firmly in place. The book concludes with a brief overview of the first major attempts to overthrow this system, in the revolutionary uprisings of 1953 (in the GDR) and 1956 (in Poland and Hungary). There is an Epilogue that, with the benefit of hindsight about 1989-90, rubs in the point that “the communist project itself was flawed” (464). At every turn of this extensive denunciation, the implicit contrast is capitalism American-style.

Applebaum has been praised for her wide reading and comprehensive research; but inevitably, for a book on this scale covering three different cases, she is better qualified to write on some aspects than others. She is well-versed in the Polish materials, where her discussion appears most secure. She also reads Russian, but the book does not seem to have benefitted intellectually from the recent and highly interesting scholarship – largely in English – on the self and Stalinism that has emanated from specialists on Soviet history.1

1 See for example ’s classic work on the even more repressive era of the 1930s, Everyday Stalinism. Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet in the 1930s (Oxford: Oxford University

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For the other cases her reliance on researchers and translators is evident, certainly as far as East German history is concerned, where the book’s coverage even of English language secondary sources and debates is thin. Since one of the book’s stated aims was to “look for patterns and make comparisons” (xxxv), this is a pity.

There are undoubted strengths to this book, as there must be if a wide readership is to be so captivated by its contents and message. Applebaum’s descriptions are at times absorbing and informative, as in her detailed account of the methods used to obtain “confessions” in preparation for show trials (289). She synthesizes a selective reading of well-known secondary sources to produce vivid depictions of particular issues or moments. But professional historians in this area will find little that is new by way of significant material or original interpretation; and much that is dated, particularly in terms of the interpretative framework. To focus, for example, the discussion of industrialization and the experiences of workers on the issues of unrealistic economic planning and pressure to exceed individual work norms is to leave out of sight some of the more interesting recent studies on postwar (and post-Nazi) worker mentalities and organization,2 or serious debates about economic reforms; but it does again serve to hammer home the wider political message of the book. The popularity of this kind of journalistic history thus raises some more general questions.

As a gesture towards not merely readability but also originality, Applebaum relies throughout the book on interviews she has carried out with key informants. Some are prominent people who have also written extensively about their experiences, such as the West German politician Egon Bahr or the East German politician Hans Modrow; others are less well-known. Even where protagonists have produced written versions, or where contemporary ego-documents are available, Applebaum instead relies on her recent interviews as sources for her account of ‘how the past really was’ (to adapt von Ranke’s expression, wie es eigentlich gewesen [ist]), and this in a remarkably uncritical manner. There is little trace of the theoretical sophistication of most practitioners of oral history when, for example, Applebaum repeats Modrow’s account of his conversion from Hitler Youth to young Communist, in which he deploys the classic tropes that are so familiar from countless East German conversion narratives (17-18).3 The apparently unproblematic

Press, 1999); or Jochen Hellbeck’s wide-ranging and perceptive work, Revolution on my Mind: Writing a Diary under Stalin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006); or Alexei Yurchak’s work on generations in the late Soviet era, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006).

2 See for example Andrew Ian Port, Conflict and Stability in the German Democratic Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); or the differing approaches developed in Katherine Pence and Paul Betts (eds.), Socialist Modern: East German Everyday Culture and Politics (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008).

3 See for example the now classic work by Lutz Niethammer, Alexander von Plato, and Dorothee Wierling, Die volkseigene Erfahrung (Berlin: Rowohlt, 1991). Further references and discussion of this issue may be found in Mary Fulbrook, Dissonant Lives: Generations and Violence through the German Dictatorships (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

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direct portrayal of a past subjectivity [“The shame he felt at having been an ardent Nazi could at last be erased”, (18)] makes for good readability in novelistic style, but it is not necessarily good history.4 Nor is there much evidence of the social scientist’s concern with questions of representativeness and generalizability. A point is brought to life by a suitable anecdote or quotation, in itself a good technique for historians to use; but it is frequently just left at that, without asking much more about the reliability and validity of the source being used in this way. We often simply do not know how far to trust the sources that are mobilized as evidence. The result is a (mostly) lively text but one that is not always adequate to the subject matter. This is neither Timothy Snyder’s nor Saul Friedländer’s and the .5 But historians might do well to ponder further ways of portraying individual subjectivities.

The more problematic aspects of this book have to do with its theoretical framework and wider interpretation. This relentlessly moralizing and politicized account of the ‘crushing of Eastern Europe’ tells us a lot about ‘how’ this was achieved, but very little about the ‘why’, or ‘what else’ was going on at this time. It is a one-sided picture constructed of what were undoubtedly horrendous years for the many victims of political oppression. But a one-sided and selective account is not necessarily an adequate account.

In the classic style of totalitarian theorists, Applebaum emphasizes the roles of violence and terror accompanied by propaganda and ideology.6 The narrative drive consists in documenting the imposition of unpopular policies from above, and evoking sympathy for the experiences of those adversely affected below. Chapters generally proceed by raising a particular topic and circling the three cases to find examples illustrating the various ways in which something nasty was played out in each case. We are thus left with a comprehensively disagreeable picture – but also a distorted explanatory framework.

This is because so much is left out. For one thing, the wider context, both international and domestic, is often under-represented. It appears at times almost as if was operating in a vacuum, driven purely by his own ‘paranoia’ (a term often repeated by Applebaum). We hear remarkably little about western responses, reactions, and initiatives, even when these are quite crucial to the course of events. We are told, for example, that “[i]n October 1949, Stalin abandoned the pretense that there would be an imminent reunification of Germany, and the German Democratic Republic […] became an independent state” (252) – but we are not told in this crucial context that the western Federal Republic of Germany had been founded some five months earlier, in May 1949; nor

4 See further Lynn Abrams, Oral History Theory (London: Routledge, 2010).

5 Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands (London: The Bodley Head, 2010); Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, two vols. (New York and London: HarperCollins, 1997 and 2007).

6 See for further discussion and references, Mary Fulbrook, ‘The State of GDR History’ in Francia. Forschungen zur westeuropäischen Geschichte, Nr. 38, 2011, pp. 259-270; and Mary Fulbrook and Andrew Ian Port (eds), Becoming East German: Socialist Structures and Sensibilities after Hitler (New York: Berghahn, GSA Spektrum series, 2013).

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that Stalin made another gesture towards reunification in 1952, which may or may not have been a ‘pretense.’ The account of the suppression of the June 1953 uprising in East Germany duly celebrates the role of Egon Bahr and the Radio in the American Sector (RIAS), which he had used to voice the demands of the protestors, and highlights the role of Soviet tanks in suppressing the revolt and causing dozens of deaths; but Applebaum does not devote space in the book to discussion of the decision by West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer to abandon his former compatriots in the East to their fate, nor the view of the western powers that intervention was not worth the risk. To underplay or leave out the roles of western protagonists in the early Cold War leads to a lop-sided view of the historical dynamics. The biggest absence and yet simultaneous implicit presence throughout the book is that of America, the moral and political standard against which the failings of Communism are measured but which, despite occasional appearances in the historical account, is never itself subjected to sustained analysis.

For another, certain voices are clearly privileged over others, with sympathy evoked only for some victims of history, accompanied by an apparent disregard for the historian’s duty of empathy for all in order to achieve enhanced understanding, irrespective of personal sympathies for one view or another. Victims of Stalinism receive a great deal of space, but there is next to nothing on those groups who actually benefited from the new social and economic policies. Applebaum pokes fun at anti-elitist educational policies designed to support previously under-privileged classes, but gives no space to the voices of those who at the time or later felt gratitude for what they saw as new life chances. Anyone who did appear to support any aspect of a Communist regime was clearly in some sense a fellow- travelling victim of what Applebaum, deploying a now quite elderly term from the high era of totalitarian theory, calls “ordinary ideological brainwashing” (302). The chapter on ‘Homo Sovieticus’ does not really tell us anything at all about how people’s attitudes, aspirations, and behavior patterns actually changed as a consequence of living within a new postwar system, merely detailing what policies were instigated to effect changes. Applebaum has a better ear for the plight of Catholics in Poland and Hungary than for the Protestant Churches of eastern Germany, where her account is notably much thinner than in the corresponding sections on other cases. And despite acknowledging the tangles about historical guilt and suffering which beset this area, she devotes arguably more space and sympathy to the voices of German victims of ‘ethnic cleansing’ – many of whom, as she rightly notes, had earlier been colonizers in Hitler’s racist policies of ‘Germanization’ – than she does to Jewish survivors of the Holocaust. As her in-depth illustration for the latter, she takes a singularly uncharacteristic individual of controversial credentials, Salomon Morel, who was accused by a Polish prosecutor in 2005 of having committed war crimes in the violent and cruel way he allegedly ran a post-war labor camp for incarcerated Germans. Applebaum highlights the fact that he was not ‘typical’, but her real focus is on the complex relations between Communism and anti-Semitism in this period. Jews appear rather formulaically in relation to discussions of anti-Semitism, or of the extent to which Jews were prominent Communist party members, but rarely as individuals with experiences and voices of their own. Indeed, the Nazi background and the horrors of the recent past are treated far too briefly in this account, which often seems to have little inkling of quite what difficulties faced not only the new regimes, particularly in Germany, but also the people emerging from the ruins of Hitler’s empire. 9 | Page

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A final problem is the short time frame. By focusing on this most virulent period of the establishment of a highly repressive Communist system in eastern Europe, Applebaum does not have to deal with the question of how the system was stabilized in the ‘frozen peace’ of the following decades, and how a period of normalization affected the views and experiences of generations born into this system; nor does she need to ask what it was about the Gorbachev era that was eventually to create the space for effective oppositional movements and the dismantling from within of the Soviet empire. Rather, she repeats without critical exploration the usual mantras about how communist ideology and theory “contained the seeds of their own destruction” (465) and in this way risks leaving less well- informed members of her wider readership assuming that all continued much along the lines of the violent early years.

The fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of oppressive communist regimes in eastern Europe occasioned massive celebrations; a more surprising twist was the post-1990 nostalgia for lost societies and the memories of private lives marked not only or always by fear but also by happiness, time for family and friends, and a sense of security, however constrained within geopolitical borders. Despite the undoubted strengths of Applebaum’s book in portraying, yet again, and in rich detail, just what a violent and disagreeable system has been left behind, readers do deserve a more nuanced account of how this system functioned, a more comprehensive portrayal of how it was experienced at the time by a wider range of protagonists than those privileged to appear in this book, and a more open exploration of its significance and consequences for those who lived through this tumultuous period of history.

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Review by Peter Kenez, University of California, Santa Cruz

he major historical event in the second half of the century was the conflict between the democratic West and the Soviet Union and therefore it is not surprising that a T great deal of attention was devoted to the issues of who was responsible for the Cold War and how it could have been avoided. In retrospect, it is evident that the conflict was over-determined. On the one hand, the Western leaders had always been aware of the nature of their wartime ally, and therefore were unwilling and unable to continue to overlook the egregious behavior of their previous friend. On the hand, the Stalinist leadership needed a foreign enemy in order to consolidate its power, which had been very much weakened as a result of the necessities of fighting the German Army. From its point of view it was essential to cut contacts with the outside world.

Not only ordinary Poles and Hungarians, but also even serious historians have liked to argue that the democratic West betrayed the Eastern Europeans and at Yalta, or perhaps already at Tehran, and handed them over to the tender mercy of Stalin.1 None of these historians explained what the non-betrayer would have looked like. By 1945 the had occupied Eastern Europe and the British and the other Allies lacked the means to persuade the Russians to go home. The threat of military action was obviously unbelievable. Had the British and Americans invaded Western Europe in 1942, the meeting of American and Soviet armies would have taken place far to the East and people living in the satellites would have been saved from a great deal of suffering. However, such an invasion would have meant the sacrifice of hundreds of thousands of British and American lives. The Allied leaders were morally justified in not taking that step. The sad consequences for the people of Eastern Europe were both foreseeable and unavoidable.

Anne Applebaum’s impressive and original book deals with these consequences. The subtitle of the book is obviously misleading. This work is not about Eastern Europe, but it is a comparative study of Hungary, Poland and East Germany in between the time of the end of the Second World War and the revolutionary year of 1956. As it is, the topic is large enough and it would be unfair to ask the author to do more.

This is not a political history. The author gives little attention to the often Byzantine ways with which the Communists got rid of opponents or to the internal struggles that took place within the three leaderships. Her great achievement is giving a sense of what life was like for people who experienced Soviet-style communism in Hungary, Poland and East Germany. She manages to accomplish this goal by studying the secondary literature, working in the archives and by carrying out a series of interviews. She quotes so many Hungarian sources that one must conclude that in addition to German and Polish she also managed to learn this difficult language. She is very successful in finding anecdotes that are

1 For example, see , Europe at War 1939-1945 (London: Pan MacMillan, 2008); Laszlo Borhi, Hungary in the Cold War 1945-1956 (New York and Budapest: Central European University Press, 2004); and Fraser Harbut, Yalta 1945: Europe and America at the Crossroads (London and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

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revealing: one of my favorite ones is the story of the two Communist sisters who lived together and both became disillusioned and yet were afraid to talk to one another. Yes, this is the way it was. She also writes with the fluency of a journalist and therefore succeeds in presenting her complex material in an easily digestible format.

Applebaum’s goal in writing this book was to demonstrate that the Red Army imposed a dreadful uniformity on these three societies. In order to discuss her material comparatively she had to organize it thematically rather than chronologically. She has chapters on the police, on literature and the arts, on the youth, on radio, on the political police, etc. In emphasizing the similarities, however, we should not lose sight of the fact that in spite of the imposition of a quasi-Soviet system, these three remained different societies. In East Germany the parallel with the Western half and the availability of Western radio was obviously important. It mattered a great deal that the Polish regime would not and could not deliver such a blow to the as happened in Hungary. Applebaum contrasts the diplomatic Polish Cardinal Wyszinski with the inflexible Hungarian Cardinal Mindszenty.

I do not share the author’s admiration for the Hungarian Cardinal. At the time of his infamous trial most of the charges against him were patently ludicrous, but it was not unfair to describe him as a loyalist because that was what he was and remained to the end of his life. To be sure that was not a crime. But Mindszenty was by no means an admirer of Western-style and rejected the notion of the separation of Church and State. He remained a partisan of an outdated and repressive social political system. His partisans made much of the fact that the Hungarian Nazis arrested him in 1944. However, that happened not because he took an energetic stance against them, or because he protested the deportation of the Jews (as the Papal Nuncio, Angello Rotta, did) He was detained for a short time because he would not let the Nazis quarter soldiers in his official residence. Not all anti-Communists were alike and deserving equal admiration and respect. Just because the Communists indiscriminately described all their enemies as reactionaries does not mean that there were not genuine reactionaries, and none of these had greater influence than Mindszenty.

Of course Applebaum is well aware of the differences of the three societies, but she tends to stress the similarities. She wanted to describe a system that existed all over the satellite states. Because of her thematic organization the reader could get the impression that those twelve years in fact were uniform. This would be a misleading impression. Soviet-style regimes were by no means static. In fact it followed from a utopian ideology that the leaders were constantly surprised that there always remained problems and therefore the system needed constant ‘improvements.’ They thought that their blueprint was correct and therefore all that was necessary was to experiment with some smaller or larger reforms.

Applebaum’s first chapter is entitled “Zero Hour.” This phrase is often used to describe the immediate postwar period in Eastern Europe. But in reality, of course, there is no such thing as ‘zero hour,’ or tabula rasa. It mattered a great deal what happened before ‘zero hour.’ The Soviets imposed their abominable regimes not on the wreck of fine democratic states. About the heritage of Nazi Germany there is nothing more that needs to be said. 12 | Page

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However, inter-war Hungary or Poland were hardly model democracies. It is worth remembering that the world Zionist leadership in the mid-1930s feared for the physical survival of the Polish Jews more than they feared for the German Jews. Poland differed from the rest of Eastern Europe in as much as the Soviet leadership was convinced, and not without reason, that any democratically elected Polish government would not only be violently anti-Soviet, but also anti-Russian. The Poles may have had good reasons for their dislike, or even hatred, for Russians, but it is also understandable that Joseph Stalin was unwilling to accept on the sensitive Western border an inevitably hostile state. The fate of Poland, unlike the rest of Eastern Europe, alas, was sealed at Stalingrad.

It is worth pointing out that in the period between 1939 and 1941 the Germans had a far more extensive policy of exterminating the Polish elite that the Russians had. 2 They killed many times more members of that elite than there were victims of the Katyn massacre and yet, even in our own days, Katyn is the symbol of Polish suffering and injustice. Polish prejudice against Russians has always been greater than their dislike and fear of Germans. As far as violating the territorial integrity of Poland, from the point of view of Moscow, things looked different than they looked for Polish nationalists. The Soviet leadership was well aware that Lord Curzon, the British Foreign Secretary at the end of World War I, drew a line which he believed corresponded to the demands of ethnicity. Stalin was careful in 1939 to take Polish territories that were east of that line. It is difficult to imagine circumstances in which he would have been ready to retreat from that line. There is no reason to think that the Poles had a greater claim to suppress Ukrainian national aspirations than the Russians had. The Ukrainians fought against their Polish lords in 1919 and were not much more enthusiastic at the end of World War II to live under Polish rule again. We should not regard taking ‘Polish’ territory as a great crime.

In Hungary, some liberal thinkers greeted the arrival of the Red Army as an opportunity to carry out a much-needed social revolution. Hungary in 1944 was perhaps the last feudal state left in Europe where the aristocracy not merely held on to their lands, but also possessed political power until October 15th, when the Nazis took over. Istvan Bibo, the great liberal thinker said at the time “write on my gravestone: lived 1945-1947.”3 What he had in mind was that these were the only years when he had a hope for a decent social political order. That things turned out so very differently made the Hungarian tragedy all the greater.

The twelve years should be divided into three periods: 1945-1948, 1948-1953 and 1954- 1956. Applebaum sees the entire period as one. In reality, the future was still open, at least in Eastern Germany and in Hungary until the end of 1947. We have good reason to doubt that Stalin knew in May 1945 how Europe would look in May 1948. Of course, the Stalinist

2 See Edward B. Westerman, Hitler’s Police Battalions: Enforcing Racial War in the East (Lawrence, Kansas: The University Press of Kansas, 2005).

3 http://hungarianspectrum.wordpress.com/2011/08/15/istvan-bibo-august-7-1911-may-10- 1979/

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leaders believed in the promise of Marxism and took it for granted that Eastern Europe would become Communist. However, at this point they did not know whether the period of transition would take two years or fifty years. The non-Communist politicians of the immediate postwar era, who believed that it was possible to cooperate with the Communists, were neither naïve nor silly. To be sure, the playing field was never even. With Soviet help the Communists took over those institutions that later would be essential for destroying the opposition. However, living in Hungary between 1945 and 1947 was not the same as living that country between 1948 and 1953.

A series of events at the end of 1947 and in 1948 signaled the end of an era. One of these was the meeting of the Communist representatives from various satellite countries at Szklarska Poreba, Poland, in September 1947 where the Communist representatives received instruction from Moscow concerning the introduction of a new course. Another was the coup carried out by the Communists in Prague in February 1948, and perhaps the most important was the failed Berlin blockade in the same year. Applebaum is not alone in her view that everything had already been decided with the arrival of the Red Army in the future satellite countries, but I cannot agree. It seems to me that the Soviets were experimenting, finding their way until all heterodox views were repressed and a genuine totalitarian order was introduced. In retrospect, it seems to some that everything was already decided at the outset, but that is not how contemporaries saw it, even those who were bitterly anti-Communist. When the first period ended in mass arrests, executions and phony Soviet-style trials commenced and a deadly uniformity was introduced. These were gloomy years indeed.

We must also not underestimate the significance of the introduction of the new course after the death of Stalin. The Spirit of Geneva, Nikita Khrushchev’s visit to Tito, the Austrian state treaty mattered a great deal to Eastern Europeans. Some of the prisoners were allowed to leave, the regimes attempted to raise the standard of living finally, and from the point of view of what was to happen very soon a fermentation started within the existing political system. Conflicting voices emerged within the party leaderships between the partisans of reform and the conservatives, or, as the Communists chose to phrase it, those who were more afraid of the consequences of ‘left wing’ or ‘right wing’ deviation. The pre-history of 1956 started in 1953.

I do not mean to detract from Applebaum’s achievement by pointing out that the same material could be arranged differently and different points might be emphasized.

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Review by Molly Pucci, Stanford University

zes the twenty-year old son of an impoverished Polish worker, triumphantly rode a Red Army tank through the streets of Vienna in 1945. Kiszczak Chad ław spent Kiszczak, the Second World War in a labor camp before the Nazis sent him to Austria to work as a slave laborer. He returned to Poland after the war as a member of the Communist secret police. For Kiszczak, the decision to link his fate with the Soviet-backed Polish regime was a lucky one. His subsequent career—typical of the new Communist elite—was dizzying. A year later, he was working as a military intelligence officer. (73) He eventually ran the secret police as Minister of Internal Affairs and served briefly as the last Prime Minister of Communist Poland in 1989.

From 1944 to 1956, East Europe was torn apart by war, Nazi occupation, Soviet occupation, and multiple Communist revolutions. As Kiszczak’s story shows, a slave laborer one day could inhabit the halls of power the next. He is just one of the many figures we meet in Iron Curtain, Anne Applebaum’s history of East Germany, Poland, and Hungary after the Second World War. Drawing on materials from archives across the former , Applebaum explores how the Soviets and East European Communists transformed the region from a sea of chaos— broken states, ruined cities, and millions of displaced persons—into a set of nearly indistinguishable, highly centralized states. This transformation and its experimentation, idealism, disillusionment, and violence, is the history of Stalinism in East Europe.

Were East Europeans or Soviets more influential in shaping post-war states and societies in the region? Anne Applebaum considers this question—long-debated among historians— in her book, illustrating it with lively writing and colorful anecdotes. As she shows, it was not always clear where to draw the political, linguistic, or even geographic line between ‘Soviets’ and ‘East Europeans’ in the post-WWII Communist elite. One example is the career of the Hungarian Communist Rudolf Garasin. Garasin was born in Hungary, fought for the Bolsheviks in the Russian civil war, spent a large part of his life in the Soviet Union, and joined the Red Army to liberate Hungary after the war. (78) East European Communist leaders had similar personal and professional ties to Russia and the Soviet Union. Bo aw Bierut, the head of the Polish Communist Party, was born in the area of Poland that belonged to the and likely attended a Russian language school. (45) Mlesłátyás Rákosi of Hungary spent years as a political prisoner in Russia and helped lead the ill-fated Hungarian Soviet Republic in 1919. (48)

Bo aw Bierut and Mátyás Rákosi were larger-than-life figures in their respective countries by the 1950s; their names blazed on red banners and their portraits were carried in parades.lesł (43) And yet—were these local leaders the most powerful men in post-war East Europe? Applebaum contends that they were not. Before the war, she writes, most Communist parties were persecuted or illegal in East Europe. (54) Only the Communists backed by Soviet leader Josef Stalin and the might of the Red Army made it to top positions in the post-war era. (49) In her account, the Soviets were the brains and brawn behind ‘totalitarian’ regimes in the region—strong, hyper-centralized states that banned all non-

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state social, political and educational organizations. Totalitarianism is a familiar narrative in scholarship on communism, recounted in this book with an eye to the stories of East Europeans. Applebaum addresses three components that she considers of primary importance to the Soviet totalitarian model in East Europe: state control of the radio, the destruction of civil society, and the secret police.

Applebaum argues that the Soviets used the radio as a medium to assert monopolistic control in the region after their troops crossed into Germany, Poland, and Hungary in the last months of war. In her words, “East German radio began with Moscow-trained Communists. Polish radio began with Soviet equipment. Hungarian radio began with a decree, written in Russian and published by the Budapest provisional government on January 20, 1945, the second day of its existence” (187). At first, the Red Army employed locals who had no experience in radio broadcasting. Some announcers were dilettantes who had accidently wandered into radio stations or technicians working for a half mug of moonshine (182).

This chapter points to one of the analytical challenges of studying this era: untangling the Soviets’ military occupation of the region—and Germany in particular— from their establishment of ‘totalitarian control’ there. Doubtless, the Red Army, at least initially, captured radio stations to communicate with local populations and wrest the media from the Nazi and fascist regimes they were fighting. The imposition of censorship, not uncommon in military occupations, and employment of untrained broadcasters must also be understood in this context. In raising these issues, Applebaum’s work poses interesting questions for future researchers. What about Soviet behavior in these years was “typical” for a military occupation? By extension—what was singular to the Soviet occupation of the region?

What does seem particular to the Soviet occupation, as Applebaum rightly points out, was the state’s hand in the creation of civic organizations. “Everywhere the Red Army went,” she writes, “Soviet and local communists harassed, persecuted, and eventually banned many of the independent organizations of what we would now call civil society: the Polish Women’s League, the German ‘anti-fascist’ groupings, church groups, and schools.” (xxix). In Germany, for example, Soviet occupation authorities insisted that artistic and cultural groups register with the authorities. (159). They also pressured church groups to disband. Applebaum argues that the institutions the Soviets created in place of local civil society were “ersatz ‘official’ civic groups.” (177) These were social groups that appeared to be spontaneous civic initiatives, but were in reality controlled by the state. There is little doubt that by the 1950s Communist regimes controlled most political and social groups in the region. But whether this represented the destruction of civil society or the creation of a new one remains the subject of historical debate.1

1 See, for example, , Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), Jochen Hellbeck, Revolution on my Mind: Writing a Diary under Stalin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006).

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Alongside depictions of a strong-armed state, the book includes personal testimonies of East Europeans who lived through the era. By conducting numerous interviews with people from the region, Applebaum turns her attention from communism as a political system to communism as a society in which people worked, studied, and lived. She introduces the reader, for example, to Júlia Kollár, a young bricklayer in a southern Hungarian steel mill. Kollár was the ideal Communist worker. The daughter of peasant farmers, she enjoyed her work in the all-women’s construction brigade and Communist youth groups (362-363). After the war, people were happy to be alive, work was plentiful, and rebuilding was accompanied by a sense that the emptiness of ‘Zero Hour’ could be filled by social reform and self improvement.

But for Applebaum, several post-war institutions— particularly the secret police—were not subject to local influence. “Everywhere the Red Army went,” she writes, “the Soviet Union always established one new institution whose form and character always followed a Soviet pattern. To put it bluntly, the structure of the new secret police was never left up to chance, circumstance, or local politicians to determine” (68). For Poland, her argument hinges on the careers of the ‘Kuibyshev gang,’ the 200 agents schooled in early 1944 in an officer-training program of the NKVD, the Soviet secret police. (68-69) The Kuibyshev men were a military and political elite. They accompanied and assisted the NKVD when the Red Army crossed the border of Poland in the summer of 1944.

Yet as Applebaum suggests, but does not fully elaborate on, even in the secret police the Soviets could not avoid the question of how to win local populations over to communism. As she mentions, after the Red Army entered Poland, the Polish secret police (Urząd Bezpieczeństwa, UB) was transformed from an elite force to a mass institution in an extremely short period of time. The number of men in the UB expanded from 2,500 men in December 1944 to 23,700 men in November 1945 (71). Most of these newly recruited men were far from the ideal of a Kuibyshev intelligence officer: they were uneducated, of peasant or worker background, and had never belonged to a political party (71-2). In my mind, the rapid— almost desperate— opening of the ranks of this elite institution to all and sundry in 1945 suggests interesting questions for future research. How did the Soviets and Polish communists manage to win over such a large part of the local population? How many years did it take for them to fold these hastily recruited men into an organized and disciplined state institution? What did the process of state-building look like for Poles on the ground after the Red Army had departed?

Applebaum also claims that the Soviets built an identical secret police in Czechoslovakia (68). At least for Czechoslovakia, I would argue that local improvision extended even to this most ‘Soviet’ of institutions after the revolution in February 1948. Soviet advisors were not stationed in the Czech or Slovak secret police until the fall of 1949. In 1948, the Czech secret policeman went on research trips to Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, and Yugoslavia to search out the elusive ‘Soviet model’ for their secret police. In his notes, he studies and reflectsŠtěpán critically Plaček on the methods and organization of other secret police in the Eastern Bloc, writing down what was appropriate— or not— for a Czechoslovak national

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context.2 These observational trips show that the initiative of local Communists should be considered alongside Soviet pressure as a factor in the establishment of political cooperation and exchange between the countries of communist East Europe. By 1948, the ‘Eastern Bloc’— as an integrated political, social, and economic space— was more than just a plan on Stalin’s desk. It was becoming a reality.

As Applebaum illustrates, by the early 1950s, the structure of East European states and societies was no longer up for negotiation. The improvisation of the post-war years—and the back and forth between East European Communists and the Soviets over political ideas and forms — was largely over. The Homo Sovieticus generation, who had come of age in Communist schools and youth groups, worked in shock brigades, and marched in May Day parades, was now in power. Iron Curtain is a widely readable and compelling portrait of this generation, and a synthesis of a complex period in the history of the region.

2 The best source on the research trips of to Bulgaria, Romania, Yugoslovavia and Hungary is Jan Kalous, Štěpán Plaček: Život zpravodajského fanatika ve službách KSČ (Ústav pro studium 2010), p. 77-80, 86-94. Štěpán Plaček

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Author’s Response by Anne Applebaum, Legatum Institute in London, Washington Post, Slate

irstly, many thanks to the academic readers of The Iron Curtain. With one exception the reviews were all fair and interesting. Here are a few thoughts. F

Molly Pucci is absolutely right to point to the importance of ‘local’ communists’ initiatives in the Sovietization process, and she cites an interesting example of a Czech secret policeman who sought to help his comrades become ‘more Soviet’ by copying other police forces in the region. There were in fact several stories of a similar kind in my book. For example, the East German artist Oskar Nerlinger, an abstract painter and a communist, spent many weeks living among the workers of Eisenhuttenstadt, trying to absorb their way of thinking. He was not forced to do so; he genuinely wanted to turn himself into a Soviet-style social realist. There is no question that Sovietization was achieved using many tactics, of which violence was only the crudest. Ideological conviction, the desire to fit in, the postwar need to return to some form of ‘normality’ - all of these things also helped transform people. I would argue, though, that this phenomenon of “self-sovietization,” as Norman Naimark puts it in his introduction, always took place against a background of violence. Those who were ostentatiously seeking to become more like their Soviet occupiers always knew, consciously or otherwise, that there could be a price to pay if they chose a different path.

Peter Kenez is also right to point out that there were different “periods” between 1945 and 1956, and I did note this too. Certainly there was a shift in tactics after the Soviet leadership abandoned their initial attempt to win power through an electoral process, and the book is divided very roughly into two parts accordingly. But I also wonder whether some earlier attempts at ‘periodization’ haven’t been overly simplistic as well. Again, there was a good deal of violence used in 1945 – violence that was aimed directly at eliminating potential opposition to the Soviet-backed communist parties. The Red Army’s attack on the Polish and the mass arrests carried out in East Germany were clearly intended to eliminate future political rivals, right from the very beginning. Even in Hungary, the Red Army carried out mass arrests and began hunting for potential enemies as soon as it crossed the border. To remember 1945-47 as ‘good’ period, as some in Hungary do - or rather as a period in which a form of democracy was given a chance - is to ignore how the first years of occupation were actually experienced by many Hungarians.

As for what Joseph Stalin thought in 1945, I do not in fact believe that he had a ‘blueprint’ for what the region would look like by 1950. He was not certain how much support he would have on the ground, or whether the West would intervene, or what circumstances would dictate. He is therefore better described as an opportunist who seized advantages rather than as a careful planner. But although he began rather cautiously, I don’t think it can any longer be disputed that his long-term goal was the spread of the Soviet system – in the form that he had helped shape it - as far West as possible. So while it was not inevitable that the region would be run by Soviet-style communists, and while the process of Sovietization could have gone on longer or taken a different course, I do not think his political imagination ever stretched to imagine a very different endgame. Perhaps it might have been possible, for

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H-Diplo Roundtable Reviews, Vol. XVI, No. 8 (2014) example, to have negotiated a unified, neutral, ‘Finlandized’ Germany, but for Stalin that could only ever have been the first step to a unified Soviet Germany.

I should add that while writing this book, I was struck over and over again by how often ideology really did serve as an excellent guide to the behavior of the East European communists. Stalin was no exception. Karl Marx said there would be an international revolution, and although that revolution could be delayed – as it was during the 1920s and 1930s – Stalin never really lost faith in it. In purely economic terms, the occupation of the region was ultimately bad for the Soviet Union. Indeed, it can be argued that the repeated rebellions in the region helped lead to the downfall of the Soviet Union in 1991. But several generations of Soviet leaders nevertheless continued to believe that it was necessary to maintain the occupation, and ideology played a large role in this belief.

Though this is not really an issue of substance, Mary Fulbrook’s repeated assertion that Iron Curtain is “moralizing” and “politicized” does unfortunately need an answer, as does her general condemnation of the book and its “dazzling array of details adorned with footnotes” on the grounds that it is intended for a popular audience. By making these charges she points to one of the deepest problems haunting academic history, and indeed broader academic culture: Much of what professional historians produce today is unreadable, intended only for a specialist audience, and as a result the level of general historical understanding continues to fall. My goal in writing “popular” books is to reverse this trend. But to do so, I do need to accumulate the “dazzling details” that she finds so suspect, and to describe the ways in which the political events of the time affected ordinary people. It is also important to connect history with wider contemporary political and intellectual debates. Although she doesn’t ever explain exactly what she means, I assume it is this effort which she disparages as “moralizing.” One might also say it is an attempt to make the past relevant. As for the issue of “politicized” writing, I would note that this book has had both left and right-wing admirers in the various countries where it has been published – including Poland, Germany and Hungary - as well as both left and right-wing critics. I can only assume therefore that the bias Fulbrook alludes to is her own.

Many thanks again to my colleagues for their contributions.

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