Jan Gross suggests that the Polish regime gained favor by never demanding anything like the restitution of property confiscated from the Jews during the Holocaust.88 For many Jews, the violence and hatred became unbearable, and they emigrated.
As a matter of record, 90 percent of the Jewish community in Poland had been murdered in the Second World War. Most of those who survived had either sought refuge or had been deported east by the Soviets. Between 1944 and 1946, a total of 780,000 persons were repatriated to Poland, and they included 137,000 Jews. During roughly the same time, 140,000 Jews left for Palestine, and the Jewish community in Poland faded away almost completely.89
Officially the Polish Communists were opposed to all forms of prejudice and anti-Semitism. However, when Władysław Gomułka spoke with and wrote to Stalin in December 1948, he offered a negative opinion about the Jews in his own movement, some of whom did “not feel tied by any bonds to the Polish nation or therefore to the working class.” There was evidence, he said, that the Jews in senior positions of the party and state provoked “bitterness and discontent” among the population. He accepted some of the blame himself and went so far as to say that in the future the party should cut or at least “limit the increase in the number of Jewish comrades” in its higher echelons, as well as in the state bureaucracy.90 Gomułka had recently been removed as general secretary and was under threat of being purged and arrested. Perhaps he hoped to appeal to Stalin’s prejudices, which were growing ever more obvious during this period. None of it helped, and Gomułka was to be forced out.
Facing up to all that happened in the wake of the war in Eastern Europe has been difficult. Only after the revolutions of 1989 did questioning the grand narrative about the “need” for ethnic cleansing really begin. Newly elected Czech president Václav Havel cast doubt on the morality of those actions, above all the assignment of collective guilt to all Germans. Johann Wolfgang Brügel, like Havel one of the Czech dissidents in the 1970s, said that “from the denial of basic civil rights to almost one-quarter of the population, to the confiscation of all rights of the entire population is a comparatively small step.” Another writer felt the experiences of the Nazi occupation “brought to power forces that accommodated the totalitarian methods, symbols, speech, thought, codes, and slogans” and that they “prepared the ground for the validation of the Communists in Czechoslovak society.”91
Polish historian Krystyna Kersten says that, one way or another, the deportation of the Germans “encouraged many Poles” who “might otherwise have been negatively disposed” to Communism to go along. Uprooted Polish settlers in the west lost their cultural points of reference and came to see themselves in terms of a Polish national identity along the lines set in the Cold War.92 Moreover, like Czechoslovakia, Poland made itself hostage to the Soviet Union, because only the Red Army had sufficient clout to enforce the territorial and ethnic changes, which were not recognized in law by the West until 1989–90.93
At the very least, the means used by the Polish and Czech Communists to get into power led both countries away from creating a civil society that fostered values like tolerance, pluralism, civility, openness, self-determination, responsibility, and solidarity.94
CHAPTER 14
The Pattern of Dictatorships: Bulgaria, Romania, and Hungary
Bulgaria, Romania, and Hungary, though very different in their traditions and histories, were anti-Communist in their values from the 1930s into the Second World War. Nevertheless, under Soviet tutelage all three created Stalinist-style dictatorships and police states. It happened astonishingly fast. By 1946 the Communists had consolidated their power in coalition governments and already had the upper hand. Although there were still shocks and adjustments to come, the essentials put in place in a few months held for the next fifty years.1
In each of these three countries, the Communists faced varying amounts of opposition from the people, and in line with Stalinist policies, they adjusted their strategies to fit conditions on the ground. Moscow judged that Bulgaria, for example, had too many hotheads among its local Communists and instructed them to place their zealotry on hold for fear of inflaming the opposition parties. For their part, Romania and especially Hungary were both heavily anti-Communist nations. Here Stalin’s approach was more cautious still. Some democratic-leaning Hungarians, initially unreceptive to the Communists, even began to think that it might be possible to work together in some sort of coalition government.
But on Moscow’s rules, any such relaxation of pressure on the local population was always considered a tactical measure and thus temporary. Sooner or later, and in each of the countries, the Communists, under the direction of their Soviet Boss or on their own, would judge exactly when the moment was right to use dictatorial methods and terror. Crushing political freedom, they shackled their nations with economic systems that proved to be inefficient and required a rigid authoritarianism to sustain.
BULGARIA
Churchill and Stalin had agreed, in the percentages deal, that the Soviet Union would get 90/10 share of influence in Romania, 75/25 in Bulgaria, and 50/50 in Hungary. After Molotov haggled the next day with Foreign Secretary Eden, the Soviets bumped up their percentages in Hungary and Bulgaria to 80/20. Even if such bargaining could not be binding, it sent an unmistakable message that Stalin took to heart.
Bulgaria’s fate was decided mainly in Moscow in discussions between Stalin and Georgi Dimitrov, a veteran revolutionary who had attained a degree of fame in Nazi Germany when he was arrested and tried for his alleged part in burning down the Reichstag in February 1933. The Soviets had arranged an exchange for him, and he returned to Moscow, where he continued as head of the Comintern. His goal, in the war years and afterward, was to get Communists into power around the globe and especially in his native Bulgaria.
Thus, when Marshal Zhukov flew back to Moscow on August 23, 1944, to work out plans for the coming military campaign, Dimitrov swore to him that he and his countrymen would all greet the Red Army in the Slavic tradition with bread and salt. In Sofia on September 2, however, a pro-Western group took over and sought an armistice with Britain and the United States. For Stalin, that was completely out of the question and three days later the Soviet Union declared war on Bulgaria. At midmorning on September 8, the Red Army crossed the border, and the shooting, to the extent there was much at all, was over by 9 P.M. the next day.2
The first Soviet representatives in Sofia were officers of SMERSH, in charge of tracking anti-Soviet activities, espionage, and traitors. They wanted the files of the Bulgarian secret police, with the lists of opponents. Soviet agents helped to revamp the Security Service (Darjhavna sigurnost), which had roots going back to the 1920s. It was transformed into the dreaded DS, which haunted the country for more than a half century. In addition, Communist partisans and former political prisoners formed a People’s Militia (Narodna Militsiya). One of its leaders was Todor Zhivkov, a hard-liner from an impoverished background who went on to become dictator from the mid-1950s until forced out by the reforms sweeping Eastern Europe in 1989.3