Books reviewed: The moral burdens of living under communist rule in Eastern Europe

Anne Applebaum - Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956

Marci Shore - The Taste of Ashes
reviewed by CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL

“the loss of freedom, tyranny, abuse, hunger would all have been easier to bear if not for the compulsion to call them freedom, justice, the good of the people

Do not save me,” read the note that the Polish poet Aleksander Wat left by his Paris bedside in 1967, after taking the overdose of sleeping pills that would kill him. The twentieth century was unkind to Wat. As a Jew, and as the onetime editor of the Marxist Literary Monthly, he was unlikely to flee westward when Nazi armies and their Soviet allies converged on his country in 1939. But he found no welcome either when he fled eastward to Lwów. He was arrested by the secret police and exiled with his family to Kazakhstan. Wat was a man of conscience. Although among the twentieth century’s victims, he would be racked with guilt over the part he had played as a perpetrator—as one who had made the intellectual world safe for Stalinism.

Wat had a sense of what made totalitarian ideologies hard to see through. This sense inspires historians even after the ideologies themselves have withered. A passage from his autobiography—“the loss of freedom, tyranny, abuse, hunger would all have been easier to bear if not for the compulsion to call them freedom, justice, the good of the people”—serves Anne Applebaum as an epigraph for her new history of Soviet rule in Eastern Europe. Marci Shore has written much on Wat and his circle, and in her new book she describes being among the last to interview some of Wat’s contemporaries—and among the first to read that chilling suicide note, which was removed from Wat’s bedside and ordered sealed until the twenty-first century.

Applebaum and Shore are among the historians who have shown that there is much to know about communism in this century that was not obvious to everyone in the last. They are both polyglot and well-
traveled writers of regional history, and both have been especially captivated by the variety, the indomitability, and the energy of Polish (and, in Shore’s case, of Polish-Jewish) culture. Both regard Soviet communism as more intertwined with the history of Nazism than most historians did before the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Applebaum’s book is social history rather than narrative history. It does not survey Eastern Europe from the heights of the State Department, citing cables and monographs, and judging whether it was Roosevelt or Churchill who sold Poland out at Yalta or whether it was Truman or Stalin who started the cold war. Instead Applebaum provides us with an intimate and claustrophobic impression of how Stalinism functioned on the ground in Poland, Hungary, and East Germany.

Stalin’s project to reshape Eastern Europe by force began in collaboration with Hitler. After signing a pact to divide up the region between them, both dictators invaded Poland in September 1939. Stalin’s defenders claim that he was cannily playing for time against a German invasion of the Soviet Union that he knew to be inevitable. Applebaum does not buy it. Had Stalin really suspected a double cross, he would not have sent so many German communists back to Hitler, prison, and death. In this period, the Soviets committed Nazi-style mass murders, most infamously the Katyń Forest massacre, which saw 22,000 Polish officers and other prisoners of war executed in half a dozen far-flung spots. “The Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were, for twenty-two months, real allies,” Applebaum writes. That period ended when Hitler attacked the Soviet Union in 1941.

This chronology creates a confusion that any history of postwar Eastern Europe, and especially Poland, must reckon with. For when the Red Army came roaring back westward across Poland in 1944 and 1945, it was engaged in two wars at once: a wholly legitimate defensive war against the Nazi aggressor, and a thoroughly illegitimate continuation of a war of conquest begun in collaboration with the Nazi aggressor. The Allies were involved in the Soviets’ defensive war but not in their imperial one. This explains how they could betray Poland a second time without ever, then or now, allowing their consciences to be troubled that they might have done otherwise.

It was hard for the Russians to keep the two wars separate. An occupying power in a just war is due a certain freedom of maneuver. When the Potsdam Conference in August 1945 granted allies the right to intern not just Nazis but also “any other persons dangerous to the occupation or its objectives,” it opened the door to many Soviet abuses, but Applebaum does not claim that there were any serious alternatives. When the Soviets reopened the concentration camps of Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen, using them as POW camps, they intended, in Applebaum’s words, to “cut dubious people off from the rest of society, at least until the new Soviet occupiers had got their bearings”—not an unreasonable aspiration.

The problem is that it is difficult for a large and unsophisticated army, one that has been engaged for several years in barbarous combat, to make fine distinctions. The Russians treated their Polish vassals like their German enemies. Actions that would have been defensible on military grounds in Germany—confiscating all radios, for instance—were outrages in Poland. Notoriously, the Russians waited across the Vistula during the Warsaw Uprising of 1944, while the Germans reduced the city to rubble. The Polish Home Army, the main Polish resistance, with 300,000 men under arms, offered to subordinate itself to the Soviet high command in the fight against the Nazis, but the Russians tricked, disarmed, and arrested its officers and—in many cases—sent them to the gulag. The Polish communist Jakub Berman, Stalin’s Polish adviser and later the boss of Poland’s secret police, instructed his cadres on how to outmaneuver the Home Army, as if they were so many Nazis themselves.

The Soviets thrived in the mayhem that the Nazis left. Twenty percent of the Polish population was dead, including the great majority of its Jews. Parts of pre-war Poland were grafted onto Lithuania, Belarus, and the Ukraine and were “replaced” with German territory. Applebaum sheds no tears for the 7.6 million Germans expelled from Poland—their goal had been Lebens
raum, colonization, and the destruction of Polish civilization—but she is appalled by the way the Germans were removed. Institutions created to manage their removal were used later to harass other groups. Russians took over property that the Nazis had stolen from Poles and, especially, from murdered Polish Jews. The communists’ justification was to blame the property itself: “These companies belonged to the German war machine, and served its goal of destroying the Soviet Union.”

Hannah Arendt once said that the story of the communist takeover of Eastern Europe has no intrinsic narrative interest, because it had all happened in the Soviet Union before. Applebaum strongly disagrees. She sees what was imposed on the East as the essence of Stalinism, a set of dark “best practices” distilled over the years. The postwar show trials of Hungarian and Czechoslovak officials accused of “Titoism” and “Zionism” were patterned on those carried out in Moscow between 1936 and 1938. This, for Applebaum, “proves that Stalin judged those trials to have been a political success, a tactic worth repeating in his new client states.”

In all countries, the communists followed a simple formula. Even before any provisional government was in place, they would set up a secret police apparatus along Soviet nkvd lines. They meant business. The Hungarian census bureau, which had successfully resisted German demands to identify the country’s Jews, quickly surrendered data on those who had registered asVolksdeutsche, or ethnic Germans, under the occupation. Next, the Soviet authorities took over the organs of information, starting with the radio, but eventually extending to all other media.

The Soviets believed—sincerely, in Applebaum’s view—that behind-the-scenes control, along with the natural affinity of workers everywhere for their ideology, would allow them to take power while respecting democratic forms. Electorates were more hostile than anticipated. In Hungary in November 1945, the conservative Smallholders’ Party got an absolute majority running against communists and four other parties. Applebaum’s telling of the “extraordinarily brave and amazingly blunt” campaign of Stanisław Mikołajczyk’s Polish Peasants’ Party (PSL) is the narrative highlight of the book. It ended in the murder of party members, a stolen election in June 1946, a sabotaged one in January 1947, and the exile of Mikołajczyk. A partial exception to this democratic repugnance was Czechoslovakia, which gave Communists 38 percent of the vote in 1946. But there was never any possibility of a repeat, once Stalin forced the Czechs to reject the financial aid that the United States was offering under the Marshall Plan. By the time leaders of the Communist Bloc met in 1947 to discuss what to do about Marshall aid, Applebaum notes, “almost every one of the communist parties present at the meeting already had a stranglehold on power.”.. 

read more: http://www.newrepublic.com/article/113574/when-evil-was-social-system-moral-burdens-communist-rule#

Also see: 

Stalin’s Shadow ‘Iron Curtain,’ by Anne Applebaum

A superb study in the Soviet invasion & occupation of the Eastern bloc

Hannah Arendt: Reflections on Violence (1969)

The secret speech that changed world history

Stalin & Hitler: Mass Murder by Starvation

A Final Warning by George Orwell

'In our world their will be no emotions except fear, rage and triumph: the sex instinct will be eradicated we shall abolish the orgasm, there will be no loyalty except to the party.. but always there will be the intoxication of power always at every moment there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless…, If you want to imagine the future; imagine a boot stepping on a human face forever. The moral of this story is.. don’t let it happen.' 

Closing the Circle (Frontier Vol 45, Aug-Sept 2012)

Yudit Kiss: The Summer My Father Died

A Brutal Peace: On the Postwar Expulsions of Germans