Communist parties.
Albania, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland and the German Democratic Republic were to become, in the felicitous words of one scholar, ‘geographically contiguous replica states’.[45] Each was to have a constitution modeled on the Soviet one (the first of these was adopted in Bulgaria in December 1947, the last in Poland in July 1952). Each was to undergo economic ‘reforms’ and adopt Five Year Plans to bring its institutions and practices into line with those of the Soviet Union. Each was to become a police state on the Soviet template. And each was to be governed by the apparatus of a Communist Party subservient (in fact if not name) to the ruling Communist Party in Moscow.[46]
Stalin’s motives for reproducing Soviet society in the satellite states were once again very simple. The widespread desire in post-war Eastern Europe for peace, land, food and a new beginning might have eased the Communists’ path to power, but it was no guarantee of local support for Soviet policies. The preference for Communists over Fascists, or for some form of democratic Socialism, could not be counted upon to survive practical experience of Communist rule. Even the appeal of Soviet guarantees against German revanchism might wane in time.
Stalin needed to secure his satellite neighbours’ unswerving allegiance, and he knew only one way to do this. First, the Party had to secure a monopoly of power. In the words of the Hungarian Constitution of August 1949, it was to take and keep a ‘leading role’, extinguishing or absorbing all other political parties. The Party became the only medium of social mobility, the sole source of patronage and the dispenser—through its control of the courts—of justice. Inseparable from the state whose institutions it monopolized, and taking its instructions directly from Moscow, the local Party and its state security apparatus were the most direct lever of Soviet command.
Secondly, the Party-State was to exercise a monopoly over economic decisions. This was not a simple matter. The economies of the east European states varied considerably. Some were modern, urban and industrial, with a sizeable working-class; others (the majority) were rural and impoverished. Some, like Poland and Hungary, had quite sizeable state sectors, dating from pre-war strategies of protection against German economic penetration. In others, like Czechoslovakia, property and business had been mostly in private hands before the war. Some countries and regions had a thriving commercial sector; others resembled parts of the Soviet Union itself. Most of the region had suffered seriously from the effects of the Depression and the autarkic protectionist policies adopted to combat it; but, as we have seen, during the war certain industrial sectors—in Hungary and Slovakia especially—had actually benefited from German investment in war production.
Notwithstanding this variety, the Communist seizures of power were followed in short order by the imposition of economic uniformity across the region. First, in keeping with the Leninist redefinition of ‘socialism’ as a matter of ownership rather than social relations, the state expropriated large-scale firms in service, commerce and industry, where these were not already in public hands. Next, the state took over, taxed or squeezed out of business all firms employing more than fifty people. In Czechoslovakia, by December 1948, there were hardly any private businesses left with more than 20 employees. By that same date 83 percent of Hungarian industry was in state hands, 84 percent of Polish industry, 85 percent of Romanian industry and fully 98 percent of Bulgarian industry.
One of the means at hand for eliminating the property-owning middle class in eastern Europe was currency reform. This was an effective device for destroying the cash savings of peasants and businessmen alike, an updating of older exactions like the forced capital levy. In Romania it was undertaken twice, in August 1947 (when it had the legitimate objective of ending hyperinflation) and in January 1952, when peasants who had built up savings over the previous four years (there was little for them to spend their money on) saw them wiped out.
As in the Soviet Union, so in Soviet-run eastern Europe, the peasantry were doomed. The initial post-war reforms in the countryside had distributed small parcels of land to large numbers of farmers. But however politically popular, these reforms simply exacerbated the longstanding agrarian crisis of the region: too little investment in machinery and fertilizer, too many underemployed laborers and five decades of steadily falling prices for farm produce. Until they were firmly ensconced in power, the Communist parties of eastern Europe actively encouraged inefficient land redistribution. But from 1949 they moved, with increasing urgency and aggression, to destroy the ‘nepmen’ and ‘kulaks’.
In the early stages of rural collectivization, small peasant landowners—few large landholders remained by this time—were penalized by punitive taxation (often exceeding their money income), differential prices and quotas that favored the new collective and state farms, the withholding of ration books, and discrimination against their children, who were denied access to post-primary education. Even under such conditions a surprising number of independent peasants held on, though mostly on economically insignificant ‘microfundia’ of two hectares or less.
In Romania, where tens of thousands of peasants were forcibly registered on collective farms in the autumn of 1950 and where the regime was uninhibited in its resort to force, it was not until 1962 that future President Nicolae Ceausescu could proudly announce the completion of rural collectivization ‘three years ahead of schedule’. In Bulgaria, in the course of the first two Five-Year Plans beginning in 1949, viable agricultural land had been completely removed from private hands. In the Czech lands, where collectivization began quite late (in 1956 most arable land was still privately farmed), 95 percent of agricultural land would be taken over in the next ten years, rather less (85 percent) in backward and inaccessible regions of Slovakia. But here, as in Hungary and throughout the region, independent farmers survived only in name. The measures taken against them and the destruction of markets and distribution networks ensured their impoverishment and ruin.
The irrational, occasionally surreal quality of Soviet economic practice was faithfully reproduced throughout the bloc. On September 30th 1948, Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej of the Romanian Communist Party announced that ‘We want to achieve a socialist accumulation at the expense of the capitalist elements in the countryside’—in a country where ‘capitalist elements’ in the rural economy were conspicuously absent. In Slovakia, in the course of 1951, there were even efforts to send urban clerks and government functionaries out into the fields. ‘Operation 70,000 Must Be Productive’, as it was called, proved disastrous and was quickly abandoned; but this exercise in Maoism
To address this palpable policy failure, the authorities introduced Soviet-style laws criminalizing ‘parasitism’, ‘speculation’ and ‘sabotage’. In the words of Dr Zdenka Patschova, judge and member of the Czechoslovak National Assembly, addressing her fellow legislators on March 27th 1952: ‘The unmasking of the true face of the village rich is the foremost task of criminal proceedings… Non-deliveries and non-fulfillment of the [agricultural] production plan must be severely punished as sabotage.’ As this faithful echo of Soviet rhetoric from the 1930s suggests, antipathy towards the peasant, and successful implementation of rural collectivization, were one of the chief tests of Stalinist orthodoxy.
In the short run, implementation of Soviet-inspired plans for
The number of people employed in agriculture even in Czechoslovakia, the most urbanized state in the region, dropped by 18 percent between 1948 and 1952. In the Soviet Zone of Germany raw steel output rose from 120,000 tons in 1946 to over 2 million tons by 1953. Parts of Eastern Europe (south-west Poland, the industrial belt north-west of Bucharest) were transformed almost overnight: whole new cities were built, like Nowa Huta near Crakow, to house the thousands of workers turning out iron, steel and machine tools. On an appropriately smaller scale the semi-militarized, monolithic, first-generation industrialization of the interwar Soviet Union was being re- run throughout the Soviet bloc. Much as they had set out to do in Russia, the Communists in eastern Europe were reproducing a foreshortened and accelerated version of western Europe’s nineteenth-century industrial
