As the Poles set up their administration, Moscow gave more advice. Practically the first thing they did was to create a secret police based on the Soviet model. A new Ministry of Public Security opened for business on January 1, 1945, the first day of the new regime. It was run by longtime Communist Stanisław Radkiewicz. The department of security, Bezpieka (officially Bezpieczeństwo), was constructed by Polish officers trained at the Soviets’ NKVD school in Kuybyshev, with the continuing aid of more than a thousand Soviet advisers. In 1945 the secret police already had 23,718 national and local officials equipped with nearly unchecked powers.15
The first Polish concentration camps took over the already existing facilities at Auschwitz and Majdanek, as well as at Sikawa (formerly Dachsgrube, a subcamp of Auschwitz) and Jaworzno. In short order, there were more than a hundred of them.16 The camps had three functions, namely to hold German men, women, and children prior to deportation; to serve as places of punishment (for crimes committed under the occupation); and to operate as work camps “renting out” prisoners to industry and agriculture. They also held German POWs who were forced to work. Many camps had more than 1,000 inmates and a few, like Jaworzno, close to 50,000 at its high point in May 1945. Polish studies describe what happened in the camps “as a role reversal,” with the winners trying to outdo what the Germans had done. Following the Soviet model, German prisoners were exploited until they were useless and then sent home.17
Stalin thought the Polish Communists should push for early elections, but they knew their limits and opted to test the waters by holding a referendum on June 30, 1946. Citizens were asked three questions: whether the “principles” of nationalizing industry and land reform should be adopted; whether the new western borders should be accepted; and whether the Senate should be abolished. By then the security services, along with the army and citizens’ militia, put together and mobilized a force of 250,000 to influence the outcome for the Communists. When all else failed, they tore up opposition ballots.18 In spite of such voter fraud, Polish Socialist Party (PPS) leaders visiting Stalin in August said that only 28 percent of the voters were behind the government.19 The PPS wanted him to act as a “referee” and bring about a Socialist-Communist alliance.20
After much preparation, the first elections were called for January 19, 1947. Stalin had lost interest in keeping Mikołajczyk in the mix because this deputy prime minister had unforgivably demanded an international commission to ensure fair balloting.21 Gomułka, of the misleadingly named Democratic Bloc—a coalition of parties led by the Communists—charged that Mikołajczyk was a “proxy” sent by Winston Churchill “to become the Polish Führer.”22
The Democratic Bloc won a prearranged massive majority, getting just over 80 percent of the vote and 327 seats out of 372. The results were fraudulent, but people were already used to mocking the initials of the PPR (the Communists) by reading them not as Polska Partia Robotnicza (Polish Workers’ Party) but as Płatne Pachołki Rosji, or the Paid Servants of Russia.23 Mikołajczyk’s Peasant Party came in a distant second with just twenty-four seats, while the “others” got twenty-one. The regime stage-managed the election to propagate the myth that it was founded with the backing of the people.24 The PPR kept the presidency while upholding the appearance of “plurality” by not taking the premiership, which it gave to Józef Cyrankiewicz of the Socialist Party (PPS).
These were desperate times all over Eastern Europe, and Stalin, anxious to ensure the success of the political mission he had set himself, had to find a way of providing food aid to Poland. And he did, even though he could do so only by taking from the already dreadfully needy citizens of the USSR, who were themselves suffering through a famine.25
For the time being, the PPR was content with five positions in a cabinet of twenty-four, but they included the crucial ones, of security, the economy, and education. Politics now changed and became more like a series of stage-managed rituals. Political opposition was weakened without a leader like Mikołajczyk, who in October felt he had no choice but to flee.26 The story of Communism in Poland was by no means prewritten, and it would turn out that Władysław Gomułka had ideas of his own of a “Polish road to socialism.”27 That Stalinism would emerge at the end, however, was no longer really in doubt.
CZECHOSLOVAKIA’S PASSAGE FROM ONE EMPIRE INTO ANOTHER
During the war, Dr. Edvard Beneš had been president of the exiled Czechoslovakian government in London. A trained philosopher and later a professor at the renowned Charles University in Prague, he was a nationalist and dedicated anti-Communist. Since 1940, Beneš had been working on a political program for his country’s rebirth, the centerpiece of which was the expulsion of most of its large German minority.28 Convinced that the key to postwar peace in Europe was to solve “disruptive” minority problems, he advocated population transfers “on a very large scale.”29 Such arguments helped persuade the British War Cabinet in July 1942 to adopt the “general principle of the transfer of German minorities in Central and Southeastern Europe back to Germany after the war.”30 Beneš went to Washington in May 1943, secured Roosevelt’s agreement, and basked in the applause on an American speaking tour.31
The Czech president knew perfectly well that he would need Soviet support, as in all likelihood the Red Army would be directly involved in liberating his country. In addition, the Soviet Union would almost certainly be more supportive of pushing the German minority to the west. Thus he flew to Moscow and met with Stalin and Molotov between December 13 and 20 and signed a treaty of friendship. He told Molotov of the West’s reservations about “the extent of the punishment” to be meted out to the Germans in the formerly Czech Sudetenland. On December 18, Stalin gave his approval for their expulsion and for sending hundreds of thousands of Czech Magyars back to Hungary as well. Overflowing with good wishes, he urged Czechoslovakia to get closer to the USSR. He even proposed that the Czechs make small territorial demands on Poland, in order that the resulting Soviet-Czech border would become “as long as possible.”32
The Czech record of the conversations shows that it was Beneš who offered Moscow the services of his new government. He said that the new Czech regime would “speak and act in a fashion agreeable” to the Soviet government on all major foreign policy decisions and that he wanted “the policies of the two nations to be coordinated from this time onwards.”33 Without lifting a finger, Stalin was handed a “friendship treaty” that all but delivered Czechoslovakia to the Soviet sphere of influence and opened the door for the Communists to assume a leading role. No wonder Stalin used this treaty as an example of how to regularize postwar relationships between the Soviet Union and other countries in Europe.
In Moscow, Czech Communist leader Klement Gottwald was elated when he heard about these events. However, the head of the officially abolished, but nonetheless active, Communist International (Comintern), Georgi Dimitrov, believed that Beneš was setting a trap for them by encouraging their radicalism in the hopes that the Czech people would be appalled and repulsed by Communism. Thus Dimitrov advised Gottwald and the Czech Communists to proceed cautiously and, further, to insist that the new Czech government be formed by a coalition of parties.34 Gottwald was a colorful figure, born in 1896 to an unmarried mother in dire poverty. A militant for years, he fled to Moscow during the war and, in consultation with the Soviets, developed plans for postwar Czechoslovakia.