Iron Curtain (19 page)

At the same time, Eastern European secret policemen were also taught to feel the Soviet Union’s scorn and hatred for those whom it opposed. From the late 1930s, Stalin had begun to refer in public to the USSR’s enemies in what one historian has called “biological-hygienic terms.” He denounced them as vermin, as pollution, as filth that had to be “subjected to ongoing purification,” as “poisonous weeds.”
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Some of that venom is echoed in the young
Czesław Kiszczak’s reports from
London, quoted earlier: “Those who aren’t returning and are staying in England for material reasons would probably render certain services for money, as they are typical products of [prewar] Poland, people without deeper feelings, without ambition and honor.”
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Finally, the Soviet comrades taught their protégés that anyone who was not a communist was, by definition, under suspicion as a foreign spy. This conviction would become very powerful everywhere in Eastern Europe once the Cold War was fully under way, supported by black-and-white propaganda depicting the peace-loving East in a constant battle with the warmongering West. But in East Germany it quickly became an obsession. There, the proximity of West Germany and the relative openness of Berlin in the 1940s and 1950s meant that the new East German state really was surrounded, and infiltrated, by large numbers of Westerners. The Stasi’s mentality was permanently shaped by the experiences of that era, to the point where its members later found it hard to distinguish between spies and ordinary dissidents. One internal Stasi historian described the postwar era as a period of struggle against the West German political parties as well as the “so-called
Committee of Free Lawyers,” the
Combat Group Against Inhumanity (Kampfgruppe gegen Unmenschlichkeit, or KGU), and other human rights groups active in
West Berlin at that time. These groups, in the Stasi’s collective memory, had not been designed to promote free speech or democracy but rather were intended to “isolate the GDR internationally” and undermine the state. They had a “strong social base in the GDR” only thanks to the persistence of capitalist forms of production and fascist ways of thinking, and thus it had been necessary to fight them and their “libellous leaflets” with great energy.
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This fight against powerful, unidentified, and carefully masked representatives of foreign states would take many forms. From the beginning, it certainly required close surveillance of anyone who had any contact with foreigners, any relatives abroad, or had made trips abroad in the past. The East Germans kept lists of anyone in contact with the Western press, especially Radio in the American Sector (Rundfunk im amerikanischen Sektor, or RIAS), which broadcasted under the auspices of the American occupation authorities. Special efforts were also made to place informers and spies at the station.
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The same was true in Hungary, where all Hungarians with foreign contacts
were assumed to be spies. After Ilona and
Endre Marton, two native Hungarians, were appointed correspondents in 1948 for the American wire services, the Associated Press and United Press, they were followed day and night by policemen and informers, as their daughter Kati Marton has since documented. A trip to a café, a flirtation with a colleague, an afternoon’s skiing—all of this was recorded by the Hungarian ÁVO in a file that had reached 1,600 pages by 1950. Although they were not spies—on the contrary, some American diplomats were very wary of them—when the Martons were finally arrested in 1955, the “Plan for Mrs. Marton’s Interrogation” included discussions of “the people she has met since 1945 and what sort of connection she formed with them,” as well as “her connections to the Americans and her spying” and “her love of the Western way of life.”
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The fight against enemies also required the new security policemen, from the beginning, to master the delicate art of cultivating friends and informers. Because the enemy was hidden, the enemy could be uncovered only through subterfuge and careful collaboration with secret allies, both in one’s own and in the enemy’s camp. One early Stasi training document laid out very precisely how important this kind of recruitment was:

In practice, this meant that secret policemen had to be trained in the arts of persuasion, bribery, blackmail, and threat. They had to convince wives to spy on husbands, children to inform on parents. They had to learn, for example, how to identify and monitor people like Bruno Kunkel, alias Max Kunz, who began to work secretly for the Stasi in 1950, and whose intact file reveals just how much secret policemen needed to know about their very closest collaborators, the people who worked for them in a conspiratorial capacity. Kunkel’s file lists all of his political and professional affiliations (communist
youth group, apprenticeship to a car mechanic) as well as all of his family members and their professional and political affiliations.
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It also contains several psychological profiles of him written by colleagues and superiors, not all of which are flattering (“K. does have a weak will. He has a light character and is superficial … His class-consciousness is only weakly developed. But he is friendly toward the Soviet Union and its anti-fascist democratic order”). By the time he was hired he had been thoroughly checked, but even so he was made to swear a dire oath:

He signed as both “Bruno Kunkel” and “Max Kunz,” and was apparently a faithful secret employee, since he soon afterward stopped his conspiratorial activity and went to work for the Stasi full time.

In the years that followed, tens of thousands of others across Eastern Europe had to be convinced to sign similar forms. Once they had signed, they then had to be carefully monitored to ensure that they really were keeping secrets and that the information they were reporting was reliable. Informers kept an eye on the public, but the secret police had to learn to keep an eye on its informers. Eventually, Eastern Europe’s secret policemen would strive to maintain an impossible level of vigilance against an unknown and often unidentifiable enemy, inside and outside the country, inside and outside the party, inside and outside their own organization. It was not a form of thinking conducive to democratic cooperation.

FROM THE VERY beginning, the Soviet Union and the Eastern European communist parties pursued their goals using violence. They controlled the “power ministries” of the Interior and Defense in every country, and they deployed both police troops and nascent armies to their advantage. After the war’s end, this was not the mass, indiscriminate violence of the sort carried out by the Red Army during its march toward Berlin but rather more selective, carefully targeted forms of political violence: arrests, beatings, executions, and concentration camps. All of this they directed at a relatively small number of real, alleged, and imagined and future enemies of the Soviet Union and the communist parties. They intended both to physically destroy them and to create the sense that any armed resistance was useless.
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That was not what they said, of course. At least in the beginning, the NKVD and the new secret police forces loudly declared war on the remnants of fascism, while Soviet officials and local communist parties directed their fiercest propaganda at Nazi collaborators and quislings. In this they were no different from the restored national governments of
France, the Netherlands, and the rest of formerly occupied Europe.
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But in every country occupied by the Red Army, the definition of “fascist” eventually grew broader, expanding
to include not only Nazi collaborators but anybody whom the Soviet occupiers and their local allies disliked. In time, the word “fascist,” in true Orwellian fashion, was eventually used to describe antifascists who also happened to be anticommunists. And every time the definition was expanded, arrests followed.

Some of these “fascists” had been identified in advance. The historian
Amir Weiner points out that the NKVD had been collecting lists of potential “enemies” in Eastern Europe—in Poland and the Baltic States in particular—for many years (though Weiner makes a distinction between the NKVD’s excellent “knowledge” of Poland and its very poor cultural and historical “understanding”).
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They collected names from newspapers, spies, and diplomats. When they had no names, the NKVD prepared lists of the
types
of people who ought to be arrested. In May 1941, Stalin himself provided just such a list for the newly occupied territories of eastern Poland. He demanded the arrest and exile not only of “members of Polish counterrevolutionary organizations” but also of their families, as well as the families of former officers of the Polish army, former policemen, and former civil servants.
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Not all of the arrests took place right away. On a number of occasions, Stalin ordered Eastern European communists to proceed cautiously while establishing the new social order. The then-tiny Polish communist party received a message from Moscow in the spring of 1944, ordering its leaders to work with
all
democratic forces (“all” was underlined) and to direct its propaganda at “ordinary members” of other, more “reactionary” parties.
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Stalin’s initial policy was to tread softly, not to upset the Allies, and to win people over by persuasion or stealth. This is why free elections were held in Hungary, why some independent
political parties were tolerated elsewhere, and why, as late as 1948, Stalin told the East German communists to follow an “opportunistic policy” that would entail “moving toward socialism not directly but in zigzags and a roundabout way.” To their horror, he even suggested they might consider admitting former Nazis to their ranks.
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The “national front” model had been drilled into all of the local communists who had arrived by plane from Moscow or on foot with the Red Army: don’t use communist slogans; don’t talk about the dictatorship of the proletariat; do talk about coalitions, alliances, and democracy.

Despite these moderate intentions, violence quickly accelerated, not always intentionally. Often, orders to move slowly could not be fulfilled because Soviet soldiers and officials were intellectually and psychologically
unprepared for the consequences of such a policy. To a Soviet officer, educated in Bolshevik schools and trained in the Red Army or the NKVD, an active participant in
any
political group other than the communist party was a suspicious figure by definition, and probably a saboteur or spy. Politburo members in Moscow could speak in theory about the creation of “socialist democracies,” but Soviet administrators on the ground were often unable to tolerate anything other than a totalitarian state. They reacted with instinctive horror when newly liberated citizens began to exercise the freedom of speech, press, and association that the new regimes’ rhetoric appeared to promise.

The violence also accelerated because the expectations both of the new Soviet military administrators and of the local communists were so quickly dashed. In the wake of what the Red Army regarded as its triumphant march through Europe, local communists expected the working class to join the revolution. When that failed to happen, they would often explode in fury at their countrymen’s “incomprehensible spirit of resistance and complete ignorance,” as one Warsaw party functionary put it.
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Their frustration, coupled with the profound clash of Soviet and Eastern European cultures, fed directly into the political violence too.

In some countries there was no initial “liberal” moment of occupation. In Poland, the Soviet Union treated the Polish Home Army and especially its partisan divisions in the eastern half of the country with intense hostility long before the end of the war. The first Soviet invasion and occupation of eastern Poland in 1939 had been accompanied by mass arrests and deportations of Polish merchants, politicians, civil servants, and priests. The violence culminated in the infamous mass murder of at least 21,000 Polish officers in the forests of western Russia, a tragedy known as the Katyn massacre, after the village where the first mass grave was discovered. Among the Katyn victims were many reserve officers who had worked in civilian life as doctors, lawyers, and university lecturers—once again, the Polish patriotic and intellectual elite. The Polish Home Army, exiles, and underground leadership knew this story well: the discovery of one of the mass graves at Katyn by the Nazis in 1941 had led to a total break in diplomatic relations between the Polish exile government and the USSR.

At the time of the second Soviet invasion in 1944, the Home Army was nevertheless not primarily an anticommunist organization. By definition it
was anti-Nazi and antifascist, having been formed in 1942 as the armed wing of the mainstream Polish resistance movement, the Polish Underground State. Antifascism was almost the only political sentiment that united its soldiers, in fact, among whom were members of socialist, social democratic, nationalist, and peasant parties. At its height, the Home Army had some 300,000 armed partisans, which made it the second-largest resistance movement in Europe after the Yugoslav partisans, at least until the French resistance expanded in the wake of D-Day. The Home Army was legally subordinate to the Polish constitutional government in exile in London, which gave it both legitimacy and continuity with prewar Poland, something none of the smaller resistance movements in the country could claim.
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