Postwar

Political repression, censorship, even dictatorship were by no means unknown in Europe’s eastern half before the coming of Stalinism, although there was universal agreement among those in a position to compare that the interrogators and prisons of inter-war Hungary, Poland or Romania were much to be preferred to those of the ‘popular democracies’. The instruments of control and terror through which the Communist state operated after 1947 were perfected by Stalin’s men, but for the most part they did not need to be imported from the East; they were already in place. It was not by chance that Pitesti prison was set up and run for the Communist Securitate by one Eugen Turcanu, who in an earlier incarnation had been a student activist at Iasi University for the Iron Guard, Romania’s inter-war Fascist movement.

What distinguished the Party-State of the Communists from its authoritarian predecessors, however, was not so much the sheer efficiency of its repressive apparatus; but rather that power and resources were now monopolized and abused for the near-exclusive benefit of a foreign power. Soviet occupation succeeded Nazi occupation with minimal transitional disruption and drew Europe’s eastern half steadily deeper into the Soviet orbit (for the citizens of East Germany, emerging from twelve years of Nazi dictatorship, the transition was smoother still). This process and its consequences—the ‘Sovietization’ and ‘Russification’ of everything in Eastern Europe from manufacturing processes to academic titles—would sooner or later alienate the allegiance of all but the most inveterate Stalinists.

And it had the ancillary effect of blurring many people’s recollection of their initial ambivalence in the face of the Communist transformation. In later years it was easy to forget that the anti-Semitic and frequently xenophobic tone of Stalinist public language had found a sympathetic audience in much of eastern Europe, just as it did in the Soviet Union itself. Economic nationalism had popular local roots too, so that expropriation, nationalization, controls and state regulation of work were by no means unfamiliar. In Czechoslovakia, for example, under the Two-Year Plan introduced in 1946, recalcitrant workers could be exiled to labor camps (though it is also true that most Czech judges in the years 1946-48 refused to apply these penalties).

In its initial phases, then, the Soviet take-over of eastern Europe was not quite as one-sided and brutal a transition as it would appear in retrospect, even if we discount the high hopes vested in the Communist future by a minority of young people in Warsaw or Prague. But just as the Nazis’ brutality had alienated potentially friendly local sentiment in the territories they ‘liberated’ from the USSR in 1941-42, so Stalin soon dispersed illusions and expectations in the satellite states.

The result of imposing an accelerated version of the Soviet Union’s own dismal economic history upon the more developed lands to its west has already been noted. The only resource upon which Communist managers could consistently rely was labor-intensive production pressed to the breaking point. That is why the Stalinist terror of 1948-53 in Eastern Europe so closely resembled its Soviet counterpart of twenty years before: both were tied to a policy of coercive industrialization. The centrally planned economies were actually quite effective at extracting surplus-value from miners and factory workers by force; but this was all they could do. Soviet-bloc agriculture slipped further and further backwards, its occasionally surreal inefficiencies exemplified in the USSR by the bureaucrats in Frunze (now Bizkek, in Kirghizstan) who in 1960 encouraged local peasants to meet their (arbitrary and unattainable) butter delivery quotas by buying up stocks from local shops…

The trials and purges, and the accompanying chorus of mendacious commentary, helped degrade whatever remained in eastern Europe of the public sphere. Politics and government became synonymous with corruption and arbitrary repression, practiced by and for the benefit of a venal clique, itself rent by suspicion and fear. This was hardly a new experience in the region, of course. But there was a distinctively cynical quality to Communist misrule: old-fashioned abuses were now laboriously embedded in a rhetorical cant of equality and social progress, a hypocrisy for which neither the inter-war oligarchs nor the Nazi occupiers had felt the need. And, once again, it was a form of misrule adapted for the near-exclusive benefit of a foreign power, which was what made Soviet rule so resented outside the Soviet Union’s own borders.

The effect of the Sovietization of eastern Europe was to draw it steadily away from the western half of the continent. Just as Western Europe was about to enter an era of dramatic transformation and unprecedented prosperity, eastern Europe was slipping into a coma: a winter of inertia and resignation, punctured by cycles of protest and subjugation, that would last for nearly four decades. It is symptomatic and somehow appropriate that during the very years when the Marshall Plan injected some $14 billion into Western Europe’s recovering economy, Stalin—through reparations, forced deliveries and the imposition of grossly disadvantageous trading distortions—extracted approximately the same amount from eastern Europe.

Eastern Europe had always been different from western Europe. But the distinction between eastern and western Europe had not been the only one by which the continent understood itself, nor even the most important. Mediterranean Europe was markedly different from North-West Europe; religion had far greater salience than politics in the historic boundaries within and between states. In Europe before World War Two, the differences between North and South, rich and poor, urban and rural, counted for more than those between East and West.

The impact of Soviet rule upon the lands east of Vienna was thus in certain respects even more marked than it had been upon Russia itself. The Russian Empire, after all, had only ever been part-European; and the European identity of post-Petrine Russia was itself much contested in the course of the century preceding Lenin’s coup. In brutally cutting the Soviet Union adrift from its ties to European history and culture the Bolsheviks did great and lasting violence to Russia. But their suspicion of the West and their fear of Western influence was not unprecedented; it had deep roots in self-consciously Slavophil writings and practices long before 1917.

There were no such precedents in central and eastern Europe. It was, indeed, part of the insecure small- state nationalism of Poles, Romanians, Croats and others that they saw themselves not as some far-flung outriders at the edge of European civilization; but rather as the under-appreciated defenders of Europe’s core heritage—just as Czechs and Hungarians understood themselves, reasonably enough, as dwelling at the very heart of the continent. Romanian and Polish intellectuals looked to Paris for fashions in thought and art, much as the German- speaking intelligentsia of the late Habsburg Empire, from Sub-Carpathian Ruthenia to Trieste, had always looked to Vienna.

That integrated, cosmopolitan Europe had of course only ever existed for a minority—and it died in 1918. But the new states hatched at Versailles were fragile and somehow impermanent from the very start. The inter-war decades had thus been a sort of interregnum, neither peace nor war, in which the fate of post-imperial central and eastern Europe remained somehow undecided. The likeliest outcome—that a renascent Germany would be the de facto heir to the old empires in the territories stretching from Stettin to Istanbul—was narrowly averted only by Hitler’s own errors.

Instead, the imposition of a Russian rather than a German solution cut Europe’s vulnerable eastern half away from the body of the continent. At the time this was not a matter of great concern to western Europeans themselves. With the exception of the Germans, the nation most directly affected by the division of Europe but also ill-placed to voice displeasure at it, western Europeans were largely indifferent to the disappearance of eastern Europe. Indeed, they soon became so accustomed to it, and were anyway so preoccupied with the remarkable changes taking place in their own countries, that it seemed quite natural that there should be an impermeable armed barrier running from the Baltic to the Adriatic. But for the peoples to the east of that barrier, thrust back as it seemed into a grimy, forgotten corner of their own continent, at the mercy of a semi-alien Great Power no better off than they and parasitic upon their shrinking resources, history itself ground slowly to a halt.

VII. Culture Wars

‘We all rejected the preceding era. I knew it chiefly through literature, and it seemed to me to have been an era of stupidity and barbarity’.

Milan Simecka