Iron Curtain (13 page)

Although their names and faces would appear most prominently on the placards and posters of the time, most of the little Stalins were also surrounded by other Moscow communists who reinforced their views, and who may also have watched over them on Moscow’s behalf. Bierut’s two most
important sidekicks,
Jakub Berman and
Hilary Minc—the former in charge of ideology and propaganda, the latter in control of the economy—would eventually line up with him against “Warsaw” or “Home”
communists such as Gomułka. In Hungary, Rákosi also headed a troika of Moscow communists. The other two members were József Révai and
Ernő Gerő, again in charge of ideology and economics, respectively. Mihály
Farkas, minister of defense between 1948 and 1953, was another important sidekick. All of them would eventually turn against the “Budapest” communists too.

In
Germany, Ulbricht’s most important colleague,
Wilhelm Pieck, had a long Comintern history, having been secretary-general of the organization from 1938 to 1943. From the very earliest days of
Soviet occupation, all of the German communists who returned to Berlin early, on planes flown directly from Moscow or in the company of Red Army troops, always had higher status than those German communists who found refuge in
France (where many were harassed by French authorities), Morocco (they lurk in the background of the film
Casablanca
), Sweden (where Brecht lived for a time), Mexico (then very friendly to communists), and the United States. The Soviet leadership even considered them more trustworthy than the German communists who had stayed in Germany to the fight the Nazis. Even those Germans who had suffered as political prisoners in Hitler’s
concentration camps never enjoyed the confidence of the Soviet occupation authorities. It was as if their very presence in Nazi Germany had tarnished them in Soviet eyes.

Across Eastern Europe, the Moscow communists were united not only by a common ideology but by a common commitment to the Comintern’s long-term goal of worldwide revolution, followed by an international dictatorship of the proletariat. Though Stalin’s declaration of “Socialism in One Country” had brought to an end the open warfare between the Soviet Union and the nations of Western Europe, it did not prevent him and his secret services from plotting violent change, albeit using spies and subterfuge instead of the Red Army. In fact, the 1930s—W. H. Auden’s “low dishonest decade”—were a period of extraordinarily creative skulduggery for Soviet foreign policy. In the United Kingdom, Soviet agents recruited
Guy Burgess,
Kim Philby,
Donald Maclean,
Anthony Blunt, and (probably)
John Cairncross, the infamous “
Cambridge Five.” In the United States they recruited
Alger Hiss,
Harry Dexter White, and
Whittaker Chambers.

In at least one respect, these Anglo-American agents had something in common with the Moscow communists of Eastern Europe: all of them were
willing and eager to work closely with the NKVD. So too, at the time, were most European communists. In this, they were not exceptional. Though their links to the Soviet secret police are now felt, in retrospect, to have tarnished American and European communist parties, it did not bother the leaders of those parties at the time. Generally speaking, those in the West who believed in the desirability of world revolution also thought that this revolution would be led by the Soviet communist party and thus facilitated by the Soviet secret police. Even the
American communist party took money from the USSR, sometimes channeled through the Comintern.
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Many left-wing intellectuals at the time knowingly met NKVD agents on a regular basis, as a matter of course.
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There was no stigma, as there would be in later years, in taking “Moscow Gold,” or in doing a few favors for the local undercover agents of the NKVD or, as it was later known, the KGB. To the truly dedicated, the goals of the USSR, of the Comintern, of the USSR’s spies, and of their own national communist parties would have seemed utterly interchangeable.

But the men and women who would become Eastern Europe’s postwar leaders were linked not only by the ideology of the international communist movement but also by its peculiar culture and rigid structures. Whatever their national origins, by the 1940s most European communist parties had copied the Bolsheviks’ strictly hierarchical organization and nomenclature. They were all led by a general secretary and a ruling group called the “political bureau,” or Politburo. The Politburo in turn controlled the Central Committee, a larger group of party apparatchiks, many of whom would eventually specialize in particular issues. The Central Committee oversaw regional committees, which oversaw local party cells. Everyone at the bottom reported to the top, and everyone at the top theoretically knew what was happening at the bottom.

Those who lived in the USSR were particularly sensitive to the rules of this hierarchy. For those in favor, the rewards were great. Political émigrés—
polit-emigrants
, in Bolshevik slang—had, in the 1920s and 1930s, been a “privileged caste”:

The very highest-ranking foreign communists—top Comintern officials, national communist party leaders—were housed in the well-appointed Hotel Lux, not far from the Kremlin. Their children went to special schools. Both
Markus Wolf, later East Germany’s most famous spymaster, and
Wolfgang Leonhard, later its most senior defector, attended the same Moscow high school for children of German communists. Those with a somewhat lesser status had jobs at foreign-language newspapers, or at the
International Red Aid society, which agitated on behalf of communists in Western prisons. Some worked in plants and factories scattered across the country.

Yet even at the highest level, and even when they were in favor, these privileged foreigners had been utterly dependent on the goodwill of their Soviet hosts, and on the whims of Stalin in particular. The diary of
Dimitrov, the
Bulgarian Comintern boss, illustrates this deadly dependency with an almost comic repetitiveness. Over more than a decade, he pedantically recorded his every meeting and every conversation with Stalin, up to and including the time when he called Stalin and the Generalissimo hung up as soon as he recognized Dimitrov’s voice.
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Like others, Dimitrov knew his privileged status might not last, and for some it didn’t. In the late 1930s, when Stalin turned the focus of his purges on high-ranking members of the Soviet communist party, the “international” communists in Moscow suffered too. At the height of the NKVD’s paranoia, foreigners in the USSR became direct targets. The Polish communist party, which Stalin had never really trusted anyway (he had an NKVD agent specially appointed to manage their affairs in Moscow), was almost completely devastated. At least thirty of the Polish party’s thirty-seven Central Committee members were arrested in Moscow, and most were shot or died in the Gulag. The party itself was dissolved on the grounds that it was “saturated with spies and provocateurs.”
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Many prominent foreign communists were also arrested in Moscow, among them Leonhard’s mother, and everyone was afraid of being next. In his carefully edited autobiography, even Markus Wolf wrote that his parents were “anguished” by the arrests: “When the doorbell rang unexpectedly one night, my usually calm father leapt to his feet and let out a violent curse.
When it emerged that the visitor was only a neighbor intent on borrowing something he regained his savoir-faire, but his hands trembled for a good half an hour.”
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In the hotels and dormitories where foreigners resided, the arrests came in waves—there was “Polish night,” “
German night,” “Italian night,” and so on. In their wake, the hallways of the Hotel Lux acquired a “stifling” atmosphere, in the words of the German communist
Margarete Buber-Neumann. “Former political friends no longer dared visit each other. No one could enter or leave the Lux without a special pass, and the name and particulars of everyone who did so were carefully noted down. All the telephones in the hotel were controlled by the [secret police] from the central switchboard and we could regularly hear the tell-tale click as the control switched in …”
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Buber-Neumann was herself arrested and sent to the Gulag in 1938, a year after her husband had been arrested and executed.

If their lives were precarious within the USSR, dedicated communists were not, in the 1930s, necessarily any safer at home. Throughout the prewar period, European communists were often perceived by local authorities as straightforward agents of a foreign power (which, of course, some of them were). Following the Bolshevik invasion of Poland in 1920, the Polish communist party was banned and many Polish communists spent long periods in Polish prisons—a piece of luck though they didn’t know it at the time, as they were then safe from Stalin. The same was true in Hungary, where the interwar authoritarian regime led by Admiral Miklós Horthy persecuted the communist party because of its links with Soviet agents, because of the memory of the failed 1918 communist coup, and because of the disastrous policies of Béla Kun’s brief dictatorship. In the illegal underground, Hungarian communists hid from the law and developed what one veteran called “a severe, tough, hierarchical organization,” one that tolerated very little internal democracy or dissent. Moreover, “this way of organization was idealized and admired.”
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By contrast, the German communist party was a powerful and legal force in Germany after 1918, and at the height of its influence it could command some 10 percent of the national vote. After Hitler came to power in 1933, the German communists were arrested, expropriated, and persecuted as they were elsewhere. Many spent the war in
concentration camps, and many did not survive. Ernst Thälmann, the party’s charismatic leader, was arrested in 1933 and shot in the Buchenwald camp in August 1944. Had he survived he would no doubt have been treated with suspicion by the “Moscow communists” too. In 1941 Stalin told Dimitrov that Thälmann “is being worked
on from all sides … his letters show the influence of fascist ideology”—a judgment that did not prevent Thälmann from becoming one of the hero-martyrs of East Germany in the postwar years.
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Despite these obstacles, the international communist movement flourished in much of Europe in the 1930s, and it was in this period that Eastern European intellectuals began to join the party in larger numbers, largely because there were so few other options. To anyone residing in Eastern Europe, the Western half of the continent did not look attractive. They were horrified by the rise of Hitler and Mussolini and by the inability of their own leaders to confront either of them. They were repulsed by the weakness and small-mindedness of England and
France, both of which were economically depressed, and both of which were then led by men who favored the
appeasement of fascism. After 1933, the Comintern had also been pushing legal communist parties to enter into “popular fronts,” movements that would unite communists, social democrats, and other leftists against the right-wing movements which were then coming to power across Europe, and these seemed successful. A popular front coalition ruled France from 1936 to 1938, and another popular front contested the 1936 elections in Spain. Both of these coalitions, like their counterparts in Eastern Europe, were supported by the USSR.

At the same time many had become disillusioned with their own national politics, national traditions, and national literature. The historian
Marci Shore has traced the evolution of a number of Polish poets from the artistic avant-garde to the political left—or rather from the observations that “God Is Dead” and “Realism Is Finished” to the belief that Soviet communism would fill the resulting void. In 1929, the poet
Julian Tuwim—formerly a member of the patriotic center-left—became deeply disillusioned by the way patriotism was being exploited to the advantage of the ruling elite. He exhorted his compatriots:

This wasn’t a Marxist cri de coeur—Tuwim had meant his poem as a statement of pacifism. But it was heading in that direction, and it helps explain
why Tuwim would cooperate, to some degree, with the communist regime after the war.
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Wanda Wasilewska, one of the wartime Polish communist leaders, underwent a similar evolution at about that time. Her father had actually been a minister in one of the interwar Polish governments, and as a very young woman she was active in mainstream socialist groups. Only later, after Poland’s shaky democracy collapsed into a small-time dictatorship, did she become truly radical. Disappointed with the failure of centrist, democratic politics, she enthusiastically participated in a teachers’ strike, lost her job, and joined the movement.
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Shore’s depiction of this milieu focuses on Poland, but the same evolution can be seen in many European countries, both East and West. Disappointment with the failures of capitalism and democracy pushed many Europeans to the far left in the 1930s. Many came to feel that their choices were limited to Hitler on the one hand or Marxism on the other—a polarization that was promoted and encouraged by people on both sides. Communism even acquired a certain avant-garde cachet among nihilist, existentialist, or otherwise alienated intellectuals. The towering intellectual figure of the period,
Jean-Paul Sartre, was an enthusiastic fellow traveler. Yet even he could never force himself to dwell too much on the Soviet regime’s brutality. “Like you I find these camps intolerable,” he told
Albert Camus, speaking of the Soviet
Gulag. “But I find equally intolerable the use made of them every day in the bourgeois press.”
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