On January 7, 1946, the Bulgarian prime minister and some members of his cabinet (also a single opposition figure, but not Petkov) went to Moscow for consultations. That night they went straight to the Kremlin to hear the dictator say he would “allow” building a new government only if it included two members of the opposition. He raked them over the coals, then offered a fig leaf of mercy by saying he was willing to reduce the costs he demanded for the Red Army’s occupation of their country. The Bulgarians were shocked by the entire event.19 Even so, the Communists renewed their campaign in Bulgaria against opposition parties, almost certainly with Soviet permission. They already controlled the police and the courts, and new laws expanded their powers to arrest or detain practically anyone.
Dimitrov went to Moscow in June 1946 to get the dictator’s approval for a referendum on the monarchy and to call elections for a Grand National Assembly that would draw up a constitution. Stalin wanted him to keep the Fatherland Front together and told him exactly the percentage of votes that the Communists and all the other parties should get. The balloting would be rigged to make his prediction come true.20
In mid-August, Dimitrov was in Moscow again to look after his failing health. He met with Stalin and his circle on September 2, and among other things they spoke about a new Bulgarian constitution, yet to be written. The Boss was convinced they needed a people’s republic with a parliamentary system. He said they should “avoid frightening” the social strata that did “not belong to the working class” and make the constitution sound less radical than the one in Yugoslavia. As a self-proclaimed constitutional expert, he generously offered to read the first draft when it was ready.
The Kremlin dictator was quite candid about the future of the Communist Party in Bulgaria and revealed in passing what all the Eastern European revolutions were about. He said that the Bulgarians should found something like the British Labour Party, “a people’s party,” and give a home to both workers and peasants. They should not simply copy the Bolshevik model of revolution, not seek an immediate dictatorship of the proletariat and the elimination of all political opposition. Instead, they should adopt different methods and “mask” the party’s Communist character for the time being.21
The referendum went ahead later that month, and 96 percent voted in favor of abolishing the monarchy. The election to the Grand National Assembly in October 1946 went just as Stalin ordered. The Fatherland Front got 366 deputies, of whom 265 were Communists, while the opposition Agrarians led by Petkov managed only 28 percent of the vote and 99 deputies. Appropriately enough, Dimitrov became the prime minister.22
The Americans and British tried to have the Soviets ensure freedom of the press, noninterference in the vote, and release of political prisoners, but their efforts got nowhere.23 The Allies finally ratified a peace treaty with Bulgaria in mid-1947, an act that was as good as recognizing the new government. It did not moderate the regime. In August police arrested the defiant Nikola Petkov, right in the National Assembly. Colleagues who tried to stop it were brutally beaten and their party soon dissolved.
In September, Petkov was put through a show trial and sentenced to death. The Anglo-Americans demanded that the verdict be overturned, but this response had the opposite effect, since Dimitrov became convinced that it was important to act all the more swiftly. To his way of thinking, a delay would only encourage further outside interference. Petkov was hanged on September 23, 1947, and with that the opposition lost heart.24
ROMANIA
The Communist Party in Romania was insignificant, with only eighty members in the capital Bucharest at war’s end, and no more than a thousand in the whole country, with a population (in 1947) of 15.9 million. Ilya Ehrenburg’s impression was that Romania was a land of strong contrasts. In the modern capital, he saw oxen driven by the poorest peasants blocking fancy limousines. Intellectuals in sidewalk cafés discussed novels by James Joyce or the poems of Comte de Lautréamont, but outside Bucharest he found people living in the most primitive conditions.25
If the nation had been given a free choice in 1940 and 1941 between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, it would have opted for Hitler. It certainly backed the fascist leader Marshal Ion Antonescu, whose dream was the ethnic homogenization of the country through deportations. For the Jews, the operation meant mass murder. But by mid-1944, with the Red Army approaching, the Conducător (Leader), as Antonescu was called, could see that his time on the world stage was drawing to a close.26
Stalin began anticipating what would follow. In Moscow, on June 20, 1944, he created a National Democratic Bloc with the intention of using it to get Romanian Communists into power. That scheme was interrupted on August 23, when military leaders, in the name of King Michael, toppled the fascists. The new government opted to throw in with the Allies, to break its alliance, and to declare war on Germany. These steps surprised Stalin and Molotov, so that when Soviet troops entered Bucharest on August 31, they could not simply overthrow the government, nor could they immediately set about engineering a new one.
By that October, however, under Moscow’s watchful eye, a more stable National Democratic Front government was formed by the Communist Party, the Social Democrats, and two other groups. The Romanian Communists decided that their party’s leadership should not go to Ana Pauker, the “obvious” candidate, a brilliant strategist and politician and among the best of the exiled leaders in Moscow during the war. Instead, they opted for Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, an “ethnic Romanian” who, as a former railway worker, also had impeccable proletarian roots. Pauker, they held, could act as the real power behind the scenes for a time. However, partly or perhaps mainly because Pauker was Jewish, she came into conflict with Stalin.27
On or before January 4, 1945, the Kremlin dictator summoned the Romanian Communist leaders to Moscow for two weeks of consultations. This was just prior to the crucial Yalta Conference. Bringing in the Romanians at such a time indicates that, notwithstanding the pleasantries he was exchanging with Roosevelt, he was busily advancing the Communist cause. Now he instructed the Romanian guests to avoid setting off alarm bells among the bourgeoisie at home; they should not “bring up nationalizing at present.” Reforms were to be modest, even in the countryside, where lands such as those left behind by the émigrés could be redistributed. Such a step would win support and make it possible for the Communists to “work toward a national-democratic front.”28 Stalin confirmed that Gheorghiu-Dej would be the party’s general secretary and not Pauker, who was Jewish and had “bourgeois” origins. For her part, she was terribly worried about being summoned to Moscow and half feared she would never emerge from the meeting in the dreary Central Committee building.29
Back in Bucharest, there was social turmoil and demonstrations on February 24. Political killings resulted: whether the Communists or die-hard fascists were the perpetrators remained unclear.30 Three days later Stalin’s henchman Andrei Vyshinsky arrived. Capitalizing on the unrest, the Red Army occupied government facilities and pressured King Michael into dismissing the government led by General Nicolae Rădescu. Finally on March 6 the king agreed to hand the premiership to Petru Groza, a peculiar character who in his dapper clothes and top hat did not look like the leader of a political party calling itself the Ploughmen’s Front. Vyshinsky insisted on Groza, who was notably not a member of the Communist Party but was sympathetic to the cause. The new National Democratic Front government that emerged had Communists getting the ministries of internal affairs, justice, and communications, all crucial for the eventual takeover. A fellow traveler was in charge of propaganda.31