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
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
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 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:
'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
Yudit Kiss: The Summer My Father Died
A Brutal Peace: On the Postwar Expulsions of Germans
