Paulo Roberto de Almeida
Anne Applebaum:
Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944-1956
Dark Blots on the Blank Slate
An epic yet intimate history of how the Soviets attempted to remake every
aspect of life in Eastern Europe in the wake of World War II.
By JENNIFER SIEGEL
Young children, the prime minister of East Germany declared in 1949, are "our cleanest and best human material"—the blankest slates for the transformation of human society that the newly communist state was undertaking. In the wake of World War II, traditions throughout Eastern Europe were being replaced by structures and ideas that supported Soviet control. The Soviet-supervised system tried to reshape Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Hungarians, Germans and the other peoples of the Eastern Bloc into what was sarcastically called Homo Sovieticus, or Soviet Man—a more compliant species so thoroughly inculcated in Soviet ideology as to be incapable of even conceiving of opposing it.
In "Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944-1956," Anne Applebaum chronicles this dismantling of the political, social and cultural order, from the end of the war to the failed revolutions of 1956. Focusing on Poland, Hungary and East Germany, she eloquently illuminates the methods by which Stalin's state imprisoned half the European continent. With "Iron Curtain," she completes the totalitarian diptych she began in "Gulag" (2003), a Pulitzer Prize-winning study of the horrors of the Soviet prison-camp system.
Iron Curtain
By Anne Applebaum
Doubleday, 566 pages, $35
Doubleday, 566 pages, $35
Erich Lessing/Magnum Photos
Uprising A Hungarian soldier, wearing an armband marking his defection to the anti-USSR insurgents, stands near a damaged Soviet tank in Budapest, late 1956.
The Soviets' project had begun with their 1939 non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany, which granted the U.S.S.R. control over much of the territory beyond its western frontier. It continued with the aggressive "liberation" of Eastern Europe from Nazi tyranny at the end of World War II. The Soviet troops, as they marched toward Berlin, seemed at times more focused on the postwar than on the speedy conclusion of the war itself. Partisans fighting the Nazis who were not directly affiliated with the communists were sent to work camps or the gulag, rather than to the front, lest they eventually threaten Soviet rule.
The postwar period brought the imposition of more permanent control in the areas through which the Red Army had advanced. This outcome had been accepted by Britain and the United States during the wartime conferences of Yalta and Potsdam, out of a combination of naïvete and pragmatism. But the peoples of Eastern Europe did not universally accept—even grudgingly—communist rule. Anti-Nazi groups were reconstituted as anti-communist, as in the morphing of segments of the Polish Home Army into the resistance group WiN (Freedom and Independence).
But even those with no political orientation were treated as a threat. From the Soviet perspective, as Ms. Applebaum explains, "an active participant in any political group other than the communist party was a suspicious figure by definition, and probably a saboteur or spy." Those who opposed or were presumed to oppose the state were shipped off to prisons and camps modeled on the gulag, some of which, in a dark irony, were located in former Nazi concentration camps.
The theme of imprisonment is one that runs throughout the book and, Ms. Applebaum suggests, throughout postwar Eastern Europe. Under the Soviet system, thousands of people, young and old, were arrested and incarcerated "on the slightest suspicion of any form of 'anti-Soviet' politics." Willing collaborators with the Nazi regime received the same treatment as those who had been conscripted to the cause or had even abstained from it. In Hungary, Ms. Applebaum writes, the Soviets at first "seemed unsure of how, exactly, a fascist might be identified"; the result was arbitrary detentions in which men and even teenagers were "told they were being taken away to do 'a little work' " before disappearing for years.
Imprisonment was not the only tool in the Soviets' kit. Violence on an individual, ethnic and national level was commonplace. Whole populations were moved, often along lines that closely resembled Nazi ethnic cleansing. What Hitler had started in Europe—forced migrations to clear territory for citizens and ethnicities deemed more likely to support the governing status quo—the Soviets continued as a means of establishing control, although without the Nazi's genocidal ambitions.
Germans were transferred from Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Romania. Poland's western border was shifted into Germany, while its eastern frontier moved west, leaving formerly Polish territory and populations behind Soviet lines. Ms. Applebaum notes that the mass transfer of populations had been positively encouraged by the British and Americans at Potsdam, who considered competing nationalistic claims to have been a destabilizing force.
It was not only the Germans, the war's defeated, who suffered. The Poles—so often treated by the U.S.S.R. as defeated aggressors rather than as victims of both Nazi and Soviet aggression—were subject to deportation and massacre along the Polish-Ukrainian frontier; in turn, Ukrainians who found themselves on the Polish side of the new border were hounded and forcibly resettled far from their homeland. On the Hungarian-Slovak border, the forced migrations were claimed to be "voluntary," but the "volunteers" had been persuaded to leave by an almost complete denial of their civil rights. The combined effects of these forced migrations and attempts at ethnic cleansing were stark: "By 1950," Ms. Applebaum writes, "not much remained of the multi-ethnic Eastern Europe. Only nostalgia—Ukrainian nostalgia, Polish nostalgia, Hungarian nostalgia, German nostalgia—endured."
The Soviets had plenty of help from local populations who were eager to punish the defeated and benefit from their abandoned property. Poles were instructed to expel the "German filth from Polish lands" in part to free up needed housing in the war-torn state. Often, as Ms. Applebaum illustrates, "resettled Poles walked into German houses where the tea kettles were still sitting on the stoves." The Soviets also had help from their client rulers. While the model for the repressive police state came from Moscow, it was often the local leadership that escalated the crackdown on civil liberties and opposition.
Ms. Applebaum details the steps taken by Bolesław Bierut, the leader of Poland until late 1952, to "battle against the activities of the enemy," whom he saw everywhere: in the underground movements, among "clerics," social democrats, former members of the Home Army who had fought against Hitler, and even (perhaps especially) former communists who had split from the party. The Polish secret police eventually identified 43 categories of "enemies" of the state, encompassing by 1954 six million individuals. In Hungary, the secret police gave special attention to "potential" enemies. In East Germany, the Stasi obsessed over real and imaginary Western spies. In Romania, the target was anyone associated with any pre-communist governments or the church. No one was safe from observation or worse.
Opposition to Soviet control did exist, however. In the early, exhausted days of the postwar, it appeared in the form of civil organizations that were quickly crushed. In the later years of what Ms. Applebaum calls "High Stalinism," the opposition was more subtle, coming in "jokes, graffiti and unsigned letters." It could be seen in the Western-influenced narrow trousers preferred by young men; in the sneaker-like rubber-soled shoes favored by Hungarian jampecek ("slackers"); in brightly colored shirts and ties that clashed with the conformist uniforms of communist youth movements; and in the dissident obsession with jazz.
After Stalin's death in 1953, the opposition to Soviet domination shifted from passive to active. In East Germany, Poland and Hungary, strikes brought political change. But change brought crackdowns and tanks, as in the Hungarian uprising of late 1956, which managed to bring down the government before the Soviets brutally reasserted control. The uprising demonstrated that Soviet efforts to create Homo Sovieticus had been insufficient, that the peoples of Eastern Europe had not been cowed by violence and mass incarceration or inspired by socialist indoctrination. They were still more than capable of opposing the Soviet system. Sadly, the fate of the uprising also showed that Soviet brute force was still effective.
In this epic but intimate history, Ms. Applebaum offers us windows into the lives of the men and sometimes women who constructed the police states of Eastern Europe. She gives us a glimpse of those who resisted. But she also gives us a harrowing portrait of the rest—the majority of Eastern Europe's population, who, having been caught up in the continent's conflicts time and time again, now found themselves pawns in a global one: "Most people wanted neither to be party bosses nor angry dissidents. They wanted to get on with their lives, rebuild their countries, educate their children, feed their families and stay far away from those in power. But the culture of High Stalinist Eastern Europe made it impossible to do so in silent neutrality. No one could be apolitical."
Ms. Siegel is a history professor at Ohio State University.
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