allowed Yugoslavia to receive military aid under the terms of the Mutual Security Act. By 1953 the Yugoslav national deficit on current account was fully covered by American aid; over the course of the years 1949-55 Tito’s aid from all Western sources amounted to $1.2 billion, of which just $55 million was repaid. The stand-off over Trieste, which had bedeviled Yugoslavia’s relations with Italy and the West since May 1945, was finally resolved in a Memorandum of Understanding signed by Yugoslavia, Italy, Britain and the US on October 5th 1954.
Western aid allowed the Yugoslav regime to continue favoring heavy industry and defense, as it had been doing before the 1948 split. But while the League of Yugoslav Communists retained all the reins of authoritarian power, the ultra-Bolshevism of the post-war years was abandoned. By the spring of 1951 only the postal service, together with rail, air and river transport, was left under federal (i.e. central government) control. Other services, and all economic enterprises, were in the hands of the separate republics. By 1954, 80 percent of agricultural land was back in private hands, following a March 30th 1953 decree permitting peasants to withdraw themselves and their land from the collective. Of the 7,000 collective farms, just 1,000 remained.
Stalin had emerged from his victory over Hitler far stronger even than before, basking in the reflected glory of ‘his’ Red Army, at home and abroad. The personality cult around the Soviet dictator, already well advanced before the war, now rose to its apogee. Popular Soviet documentaries on World War Two showed Stalin winning the war virtually single-handed, planning strategy and directing battles with not a general in sight. In almost every sphere of life, from dialectics to botany, Stalin was declared the supreme and unchallenged authority. Soviet biologists were instructed to adopt the theories of the charlatan Lysenko, who promised Stalin undreamed-of agricultural improvements if his theories about the inheritability of acquired characteristics were officially adopted and applied to Soviet farming—as they were, to disastrous effect.[50] On his 70th birthday in December 1949 Stalin’s image, picked out by searchlights hung from balloons, lit the night sky over the Kremlin. Poets outdid one another in singing the Leader’s praises—a 1951 couplet by the Latvian poet V. Lukss is representative:
This obsequious neo-Byzantine anointing of the despot, the attribution to him of near-magical powers, unfolded against a steadily darkening backdrop of tyranny and terror. In the last years of the war, under the cloak of Russian nationalism, Stalin expelled east to Siberia and Central Asia a variety of small nations from western and south-western border regions, the Caucasus in particular: Chechens, Ingush, Karachays, Nalkars, Kalmyks, Crimean Tatars and others, in the wake of the Volga Germans deported in 1941. This brutal treatment of small nations was hardly new—Poles and Balts had been exiled east by the hundreds of thousands between 1939 and 1941, Ukrainians in the 1930s and others before them, back to 1921.
The initial post-war trials of collaborators and traitors across the region echoed nationalist sentiment as well. Peasant party leaders in Poland, Hungary and Bulgaria were arrested, tried and shot between 1945 and 1947 for a mixed bag of real and imaginary crimes, ranging from Fascist sympathies through wartime collaboration to spying for the West; but in every case prosecutors took particular care to impugn their patriotism and credibility as representatives of the Bulgarian/Hungarian/Polish ‘people’. Socialists who refused the embrace of the Communist Party, like the Bulgarian Krastyn Partakhov (tried in 1946 and sentenced to prison where he died three years later), were also singled out for punishment as enemies of the people.
What is striking about the non-Communist victims of these early public trials is that—with the exception of those who really had thrown in their lot with the Germans and whose activities were thus common knowledge— they conspicuously refused to plead guilty or confess to their alleged ‘anti-national’ crimes. In the palpably rigged Sofia show trial of Agrarian Party leader Nikola Petkov and his ‘co-conspirators’, in August 1947, four out of the five accused proclaimed their innocence in spite of torture and false testimony. [51]
With the Yugoslav crisis of 1948, Stalin’s attitude shifted. As an alternative to Moscow, Belgrade had a certain appeal to many. Unlike Stalin, Tito posed no imperial threat (except within the local Balkan context); and by liberating his country and leading it to Communism with no help from Moscow, the Yugoslav leader had set an attractive precedent for any Communist in eastern Europe still tempted to ground a local revolution in national sentiment. Stalin was notoriously paranoid about threats to his monopoly of power; but that does not mean that he was altogether mistaken to see in Tito and ‘Tito-ism’ a genuine danger. Henceforward, therefore, nationalism (‘small-state nationalism’, ‘bourgeois nationalism’) ceased to be a local asset and became instead the main enemy. The term ‘nationalist’ was first deployed pejoratively in Communist rhetoric at the June 1948 meeting of the Cominform to condemn the Yugoslav ‘deviation’.
But with all domestic non-Communist opponents now dead, imprisoned or in exile, to what genuine risks was the Soviet monopoly of power exposed? Intellectuals could be bought off or intimidated. The military were firmly under the thumb of the occupying Soviet forces. Mass popular protest posed the only significant threat to Communist regimes, as it would seriously erode the credentials of the ‘worker and peasant’ state. But in their early years the Peoples’ Democracies were by no means always unpopular with the proletarians they claimed to represent. On the contrary: the destruction of the middle classes and the expulsion of ethnic minorities opened prospects of upward mobility for rural peasants, industrial workers and their children.
Opportunities abounded, particularly at the lower rungs of the ladder and in government employ: there were jobs to be had, apartments to be occupied at subsidized rents, places in schools reserved for the children of workers and closed to the children of the ‘bourgeoisie’. Competence mattered less than political reliability, employment was guaranteed, and the burgeoning Communist bureaucracy sought out reliable men and women for everything from block organizer to police interrogator.[52] Most of the population of Soviet eastern Europe, especially in the more backward regions, accepted their fate without protest, at least in these years.
The two best-known exceptions to this generalization both occurred in the most urban and advanced corners of the bloc: in industrial Bohemia and in the streets of Soviet-occupied Berlin. The ‘currency reform’ of May 31st 1953 in Czechoslovakia, ostensibly ‘a crushing blow against the former capitalists’, had the effect of cutting industrial wages by 12 percent (because of the price rises that followed). Together with the steadily worsening working conditions in what had once been an advanced industrial economy based on well-remunerated skilled labor, this triggered mass demonstrations by 20,000 workers at the Skoda plant in Plzen, a major industrial center in western Bohemia, followed by a march on the city hall, on June 1st 1953, by thousands of workers carrying portraits of Benes and pre-war president Tomas Masaryk.
The Plzen demonstrations, confined to one provincial city, fizzled out. But a few days later a far larger protest was sparked off a few dozen miles to the north by substantial(unpaid) increases in the German Democratic Republic’s official work norms. These were imposed by an unpopular regime, already (and not for the last time) far more rigid than its Soviet masters in Moscow, whose advice to the East German Communist leadership to accept reforms and compromises to stem the hemorrhage of skilled workers to the West had been ignored. On June 16th some 400,000 workers went on strike across East Germany, with the biggest demonstrations in Berlin itself.
As with the Plzen protesters, the German workers were easily put down by the
