at least through the autumn of 1947. But the point was power, not legality, which is why Communists’ tactics became more confrontational and less embarrassed by judicial or political constraints, even at the cost of alienating foreign sympathy, once it was clear that electoral success would elude them.
Nonetheless, there were significant local variations. In Bulgaria and Romania the Soviet hand was heaviest—in part because both countries had been at war with the USSR, in part because of local Communist weakness, but mostly just because they were so obviously consigned by geography to the Soviet sphere from the outset. In Bulgaria the Communist leader (and former Comintern Secretary) Georgy Dimitrov declared bluntly as early as October 1946 that anyone who voted for the antiCommunist opposition would be regarded as a traitor. Even so, the Communists’ opponents won 101 out of 465 parliamentary seats in the ensuing general election. But the opposition was fore-doomed—the only thing preventing the occupying Red Army and its local allies from openly destroying all dissent right away was the need to work with the Western Allies on a Peace Treaty for Bulgaria and to secure Anglo-American recognition of a Communist-led government as Bulgaria’s legitimate authority.
Once the peace treaties were signed, the Communists had nothing to gain by waiting and the chronology of events is thus revealing. On June 5th 1947 the US Senate ratified the Paris Peace Treaties with Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Finland and Italy, despite the misgivings of American diplomats in Sofia and Bucharest. The very next day the leading anti-Communist politician in Bulgaria, the Agrarian leader Nikola Petkov (who had refused to follow more accommodating Agrarians into the Communists’ Fatherland Front), was arrested. His trial lasted from August 5th to 15th. On September 15th the Bulgarian Peace Treaty officially came into force and four days later the USA offered to extend diplomatic recognition to the government in Sofia. Within 96 hours Petkov was executed, his sentence having been delayed until the official American announcement. With Petkov judicially murdered, the Bulgarian Communists need fear no further impediments. As the Soviet general Biryuzov observed in retrospect, discussing Red Army support for the Bulgarian Communists against the ‘bourgeois’ parties: ‘We did not have the right to withhold assistance to the efforts of the Bulgarian people to crush this reptile.’
In Romania, the Communists’ position was even weaker than Bulgaria, where at least there was a history of philo-Russian sentiment on which the Party could try to draw.[33] Although the Soviets guaranteed the return to Romania of northern Translyvania (assigned to Hungary under duress in 1940), Stalin had no intention of returning Bessarabia or the Bukovina, both incorporated into the USSR, nor the Southern Dobrudja region of south-east Romania now attached to Bulgaria: as a consequence, the Romanian Communists were forced to justify a significant territorial loss, much as, during the inter-war years, they had been hobbled by the Soviet claim on Bessarabia, then Romanian territory.
Worse, the Romanian Communist leaders were frequently not even Romanian, at least by traditional Romanian criteria. Ana Pauker was Jewish, Emil Bodnaras was Ukrainian, Vasile Luca was of Transylvanian German background. Others were Hungarian or Bulgarian. Perceived as an alien presence, the Romanian Communists were utterly dependent on the Soviet forces. Their domestic survival rested not upon winning the popular vote—never remotely considered as a practical objective—but upon the speed and efficiency with which they could occupy the state and divide and destroy their opponents in the ‘historic’ parties of the Liberal center, a task at which they proved decidedly adept—as early as March 1948 the government list won 405 out of 414 seats in national elections. In Romania as in Bulgaria (or Albania, where Enver Hodxa mobilized the southern Tosk communities against tribal resistance from the northern Ghegs), subversion and violence were not one option among others—they were the only road to power.
The Poles, too, were fore-doomed to the Soviet sphere after World War Two. This was because of their location, on the route from Berlin to Moscow; their history, as longstanding impediments to Russian imperial ambitions in the west; and because in Poland, too, the prospects of a Soviet-friendly government emerging spontaneously by popular choice were minimal. The difference between Poland and the Balkan states, however, was that Poland had been a victim of Hitler, not his ally; hundreds of thousands of Polish soldiers had fought with the Allied armies on Eastern and Western fronts; and the Poles nursed expectations about their postwar prospects.
As it transpired, those prospects were not so very bad. The Polish Communists in the so-called ‘Lublin Committee’—set up in July 1944 by the Soviet authorities so that they would have a ready-made government to put in office when they reached Warsaw—could hardly claim a mass base, but they had a degree of local support, especially among the young, and they could point to some real benefits of Soviet ‘friendship’: an effective guarantee against German territorial revanchism (a genuine consideration at the time) and a policy of national exchanges whereby Poland was ‘cleansed’ of its remaining Ukrainian minority and ethnic Poles from the east were resettled within the new national frontiers. These considerations allowed Polish Communists, for all their marginality (many of them, too, were of Jewish origin), to claim a place in Polish national and even nationalist political traditions.
Nevertheless, Poland’s Communists too would always have been an insignificant minority in electoral terms. The Polish Peasant Party of Stanislaw Mikolajczyk counted some 600,000 members in December 1945, ten times the number of activists in the Communists’ Polish Workers’ Party (the Polish
Stalin was more or less indifferent to the success of ‘Socialism’ in Poland, as later events would reveal. But he was far from indifferent to the general tenor of Polish policy, especially Polish foreign policy. Indeed, together with the outcome of the German standoff, it was more important to him than anything else, at least in Europe. Accordingly the Peasant Party was steadily edged aside, its supporters threatened, its leaders attacked, its credibility impugned. In the blatantly rigged Polish parliamentary elections of January 1947, the Communist-led ‘Democratic bloc’ obtained 80 percent of the votes, the Peasant Party just 10 percent.[34] Nine months later, in fear of his life, Mikolajczyk fled the country. Remnants of the wartime Home Army continued to fight a guerilla war with the Communist authorities for a few more years, but theirs, too, was a hopeless cause.
In Poland, the Soviet Union had so obvious an interest in the political complexion of the country that the Poles’ wartime illusions—before and after Yalta—can seem quixotic. In Hungary, however, notions of a ‘Hungarian road to Socialism’ were not altogether fanciful. Hungary’s chief post-war interest for Moscow was as a safe conduit for Red Army troops, should these need to move west into Austria (or—later—south into Yugoslavia). Had there been widespread public support for the local Communists their Soviet advisers might have been willing to play out the ‘democratic’ tactic longer than they did.
But in Hungary, too, the Communists proved consistently unpopular, even in Budapest. Despite being targeted as reactionary and even Fascist, the Smallholders Party (Hungary’s equivalent of Agrarian parties elsewhere) secured an absolute majority in the national elections of November 1945. With the backing of the Socialists (whose leader Anna Kethly refused to believe that the Communists would stoop to election-rigging), the Communists succeeded in expelling some of the Smallholder deputies from parliament and charged them in February 1947 with conspiracy and, in the case of their leader Bela Kovacs, espionage against the Red Army (Kovacs was sent to Siberia, whence he returned in 1956). In new elections in August 1947, shamelessly falsified by the Communist Interior Minister Laszlo Rajk, the Communists still managed to secure only 22 percent of the vote, although the Smallholders were duly reduced to a 15 percent share. In these circumstances Hungary’s road to Socialism converged rapidly with that of its eastern neighbours. By the next elections, in May 1949, the ‘People’s Front’ was credited with 95.6 percent of the vote.
It is easy, in retrospect, to see that hopes for a democratic Eastern Europe after 1945 were always forlorn. Central and Eastern Europe had few indigenous democratic or liberal traditions. The inter-war regimes in this part of Europe had been corrupt, authoritarian and in some cases murderous. The old ruling castes were frequently venal. The real governing class in inter-war Eastern Europe was the bureaucracy, recruited from the same social groups who would furnish the administrative cadre of the Communist states. For all the rhetoric of ‘Socialism’, the transition from authoritarian backwardness to Communist ‘popular democracy’ was a short move and an easy one. It is not so very surprising that history took the turn it did.
Moreover the alternative of a return to the politicians and policies of pre-1939 Romania or Poland or Hungary significantly weakened the anti-Communist case, at least until the full force of Soviet terror was felt after 1949. After all, as the French Communist leader Jacques Duclos slyly asked in the Communist daily
