Chris Harman
The fate of Eastern Europe was decided with the defeat of the German armies in 1944 and 1945. The leaders of the various allied powers came together in a series of conferences and meetings, hoping to reach some amicable agreement about the division of the spoils of war and the allocation of influence in the post-war World.
The last thing any of those involved in the negotiations considered was the desires of the people of Europe. In later years, western politicians were to spin a fine web of rhetoric on the suffering of the populations of the East European countries. At the time, however, the most cynical _Realpolitik_ was the order of the day. Talks between Churchill and Stalin in 1944 were typical.
The moment was apt for business, so I said 'Let us settle about our affairs in the Balkans. Your armies are in Rou-mania and Bulgaria. We have interests, missions and agents there. Don't let us get at cross-purposes in small ways. So far as Britain and Russia are concerned, how would it do for you to have 90 per cent predominance in Roumania, for us to have 90 per cent of the say in Greece, and go 50-50 about Yugoslavia?' While this was being translated, I wrote on a half sheet of paper: Roumania: Russia 90% - The others 10% Greece: Great Britain 90% - Russia 10% Yugoslavia: 50-50% Hungary: 50-50% Bulgaria: Russia 75% - The others 25% I pushed this across to Stalin, who had by then heard the translation. There was a slight pause. Then he took his pencil and made a large tick upon it, and passed it back to us. It was all settled in no more time than it takes to set down ... After this there was a long silence. The pencilled paper lay on the centre of the table. At length I said, 'Might it not be thought rather cynical if it seemed we had disposed of these issues, so fateful to millions of people, in such an off-hand manner? Let us burn the paper.' 'No, you keep it,' said Stalin. [1]
Out of such meetings emerged an agreement on the funda-mental aspects of a division of Europe, although at first there were significant differences between the various powers as to what form this division should take. The Americans, in particular, tried to avoid a formal demarcation of spheres of influence, assuming that without this they would be able to dominate the whole of Europe with their superior economic strength. However, the Russians, and to a lesser extent the British, were able to force the us into effective acceptance of such a division. [2]
The powers drew a line between them that both the West and the Russians took for granted through all the trials and tribulations of the cold war. Although there were nasty jostlings at certain key points along this border - Berlin and Korea, for instance - neither side made any serious attempt to alter the bases of the division.
In Greece in 1944-45, for example, although the majority of the Greek people clearly supported the war-time resistance force, EAM-ELAS, the Communist leaders of that movement were under clear orders from Moscow not to prevent British dominance of the country:
Of all the groups in EAM the Communists were the most willing to submerge social objectives to the need of a United Front and the only group willing to specifically designate Greece as part of the British sphere of influence after the war. [3]
At the Yalta conference in February 1945, Stalin made it clear that 'he had no intention of criticizing British actions there or interfering in Greece'. [4] Churchill indicated that he 'was very much obliged to Marshal Stalin for not having taken too great an interest in Greek affairs'. [5]
In Italy and France, similarly, the Russian-directed Communist Parties played a key role in preventing radical change. From mid-1943 the areas of Italy under Allied occupation were nominally ruled by a government under Badoglio, appointed by the fascist Grand Council in place of Mussolini. But this government had no popular support anywhere in Italy.
The mass of the resistance forces were adamant in their opposition. Not only the Socialists and the Communists, but also the liberal Action Party would have no truck with Badoglio. Then on 26 March 1944 Togliatti flew into Italy from Moscow. 'As matters moved towards a decisive resolution and Badoglio's days seemed numbered, the neo-fascist regime and Churchill found new allies: the Soviet Union and the Italian Communist Party.' [6]
Stalin's behaviour in Western Europe was to be matched by Western behaviour in the East. Western politicians made a great deal of noise and indulged in considerable rhetoric when Russian troops put down popular insurrections in 1953 and 1956, but gave no material aid to these uprisings. At late as 1968 the us refused a loan to the Czechs to assist them to overcome their economic difficulties, on the grounds that this 'might be construed by Moscow as a massive economic and political intervention in Eastern Europe. [7]
Just as the regimes that replaced Nazi rule in Western Europe were established under the control of American and British capitalism, so the character of the regimes of Eastern Europe was determined by the rulers of Russia.
The Russian armies found themselves occupying territories whose societies could never have survived in their old form on their own. The old ruling classes had demonstrated their bankruptcy and could mobilize no popular support for postwar reconstruction.
Already, before the war, the result was a lack of social dire-tion and cohesion. Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary had only emerged as separate states in 1919. Everywhere extreme tensions threatened the unity of the various state structures - Poles or Czechs against Germans, Slovaks against Czechs, Ukrainians against Poles, Rumanians against Hungarians, Croats against Serbs.
The whole of Eastern Europe was trapped in poverty, a condition that increased immensely during the slump of the 1930s. The backward agriculture of the area was particularly severely hit. Existing national tensions within each state were exacerbated, and many of the existing nationalist governments began to be at least tinged with fascism. Against this background the dominant political pattern became one of the increasingly unstable, right-wing governments. A viable industrial capitalist base had hardly been created anywhere in the area. Where industry did exist, foreign capital in-variably played a key role. Thus in Poland in 1937 40.1 per cent of the capital in joint-stock companies was held by foreign investors, and companies in which foreign capital predominated constituted 63.1 per cent of all joint stock companies. [8]
The position in other countries was similar. As little as 15 to 20 per cent of Rumanian shares capital was in indigenous hands, [9] while the proportions of foreign capital in Yugoslavia and Bulgaria were respectively 49.5 per cent [10] and 42.6 per cent. [11]
Private industry's weakness was reflected in the indispens-ability of the state in sustaining what industry there was. Poland, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia all illustrated the extent of previous state intervention throughout Eastern Europe.
In Poland 'The state took upon itself the role of pioneer and entrepreneur in many fields of the economy ... Roughly half the bank credits flowed from government banks and agencies. Some of the leading sectors of the economy were almost completely owned and managed by the state.' [12] In Czechoslovakia the pre-war state, while not as important as in Poland, 'had a tradition of an active initiator, supporter, controller and entrepreneur', [13] directly owning about 10 per cent of industrial capital. In pre-war Yugoslavia the state owned not only the railways and the telephone system, but also about 25 per cent of the coal and 90 per cent of the iron ore industries. Central government and the local authorities between them owned about 60 per cent of the forest area, basic to the important timber industry. Finally the Yugoslav state controlled the iron and steel industry and armaments production, as well as having a large slice of sugar and cellulose production.
Czechoslovakia, alone of the Eastern European states, enjoyed any success in modern capitalistic terms. Industry did at least grow in the inter-war period, despite being hit by the slump, so that production was a third higher in 1937 than it had been twenty-five years before. [14] And only in Czechoslovakia could some sort of bourgeois democracy be maintained. But even this was destroyed by the Munich agreement of 1938, as German tanks rolled in with British acquiescence.
The war shattered these fragile social structures. Whether the pre-war ruling circles had chosen to align themselves with the Nazis, as in Rumania, Hungary and Bulgaria, or had put up some sort of resistance as the Czech and Polish governments did, by 1945 they were weakened and fragmented.
Poland was the country hardest hit by the war. Estimates suggest that as many as 20 per cent of the population perished. [15] The military elite which had been so central to the politics of the country before the war was virtually wiped out. The factories that had con-tributed the wealth of the already weak indigenous bourgeoisie were reduced to rubble.
Forty-five per cent of pre-war Polish territory was absorbed into the USSR. The old ruling elites of Rumania, Bulgaria and Hungary were completely discredited. The local populations had already paid a terrible price, in losses on the Russian front and internal terror, for their rulers' alliance with Hitler.
Even in Czechoslovakia, where the losses directly due to the war had been least, and where the allied armies' occupation was least prolonged, the bourgeoisie did not emerge from the war unscathed. It was evident to old-time politicians like Benes that the pre-war policy of links with the West had come to a disastrous end with Munich and must be replaced by Russian influence.
If the war decisively weakened the old political set-ups, it also accentuated the trend towards statification of the various national economies. In Czechoslovakia by 1945 60 per cent of industry and virtually the whole of the finance system were in German hands. Only the state was in any position to take over when the Germans fled. The bourgeois president of Czechoslovakia, Benes, described how
The Germans simply took control of all main industries and all banks ... If they did not nationalize them directly they at least put them into the hands of big German concerns ... In this way they automatically prepared the economic and financial capital of our country for nationalization ... To return this property and the banks into the hands of Czech individuals or to consolidate them without considerable state assistance and without new financial guarantees was simply impossible. The State had to step in. [16]
The German defeat meant that _without_ any large scale nationalization of local capital, the Czechoslovak government found itself in control of about three quarters of industry.
In Poland a similar situation arose, through state appropriation of former German property in both the pre-war Polish territories ('Old Poland') and in the 'new' territories annexed from Germany.
In those countries, too, which had allied themselves with Germany (Hungary, Bulgaria, and Rumania), the war had witnessed a considerable further infiltration by German capital. [17]
The result was that whoever, at the end of the war, controlled the state apparatus in these territories controlled industry, to dispose of it as they would. They could either maintain it in their own hands or return it to its pre-war owners. Those owners, in turn, could only regain their former power and possessions by ingratiating themselves with those who physically controlled state power. And the Russian army was the most important factor in disposing of that power.
The old ruling classes were in no condition to put up real resistance to Russian demands. All their protests and manoeuvres over the next two or three years availed them nothing. No significant section of the population had enough faith in them to back them against the Russians. The occupying forces and the local Communist Parties were able to determine with remarkable ease the contours of the society that emerged out of the post-war chaos.
Almost all the Communist Parties of Eastern Europe were, by themselves, extremely weak at the time of the German forces' withdrawal.
The Hungarian Party had led a shadow existence during the years of dictatorship from 1920 onwards. Its leaders had spent most of the period either in prison or in exile in Moscow - where any of them who might conceivably have begun to question Stalin's authority was purged, along with founder of the party, Bela Kun, at the time of the Moscow trials.
The Polish Party had always been a minority by comparison with the Polish Socialist Party in the trade unions and the working class generally. It was effectively liquidated by Stalin in 1938, when be had at least twelve members of its central committee executed. The party was only reconstituted in late 1941, and did not develop into a really viable political force until after the defeat of the German armies at Stalingrad. Membership in the middle of 1942 was reckoned to be about 4,000. Nor did it have anything like a stable or independent leadership. In 1942 the leader of the party was murdered in mysterious circumstances by his 'number three', Molejec, who in turn was executed after a trial by a party court. In 1943 two more leaders were picked up and executed in suspicious circumstances by the Gestapo.
In Rumania, party membership in the middle of 1944 was estimated to be no more than a thousand. Once again the leadership had undergone a process of 'natural selection': all those who failed to exhibit the requisite submissiveness to Russian dictation had been weeded out (and often executed in exile) in successive purges. Thus one of the principal party leaders at the time, Anna Pauker, survived - while both her husband and her lover were purged. [19]
In Czechoslovakia the party had been rather stronger than elsewhere. Even at its lowest point in 1930 the membership was 24,000. [20] Its electoral support never dropped below three quarters of a million. But it was still not the majority party among the organized workers. It tended to be weak in the larger factories and never controlled more than 12 per cent of the trade-union movement. [21] Its leadership had been selected according to the usual criterion - willingness to accept Stalin's policies. Nevertheless, the party was more successful than others in maintaining an organizational framework through the period of German occupation, so that by the time of the Nazi defeat and withdrawal in May 1945 it had 27,000 members in the Czech areas alone. [22]
Despite their previous weaknesses, the postwar Communist Parties found themselves in strong strategic positions, given the collapse of the old society and, crucially, the Russian presence. How was this strength to be utilized?
When Marx spoke of the socialist revolution he spoke of the action of the 'overwhelming majority in the interests of the overwhelming majority': for the first time in history decisive social change was to involve the mass of the population acting in their own interests, and not a minority proposing to act for them.
Lenin too, speaking of the socialist revolution, stressed this role of self-conscious mass activity. In his writings of 1917 (above all in the oft-misunderstood "State and Revolution") he emphasized that the socialist revolution cannot be accomplished without the destruction of the old state based upon hierarchy and authoritarianism. Thus, in 'The Task of the Proletariat in our Revolution', he wrote that in a 'parliamentary bourgeois republic ..., all the machinery of oppression - the army, the police, and the bureaucracy - is left intact. The Commune and the Soviets _smash_ that machinery and do away with it.' (Lenin's emphasis). [23]
If the Communist Parties of Eastern Europe had been serious about their claims to stand in the tradition of Marx and Lenin, their strategy would have been clear. They would have led an agitation among the mass of workers against the old forms of society and would have attempted to increase their own influence by proving themselves at every point the most consistent and far-seeing section of the workers. They would have led mass struggles of workers, the culmination of which would have been the creation of direct organs of workers' power (workers' councils, the Soviets of 1917), which would have endeavoured to smash the old state and replace it by the power of the councils.
In fact, the policy of the Communist Parties was to do exactly the opposite. Immediately after the German surrender they entered governments in coalition with the anti-fascist bourgeois parties, the peasant and the socialist democratic parties. Their justification for joining these coalitions was not that they could carry through any sort of social revolution, but rather that 'Popular Democratic' governments would eradicate the last remnants of feudalism and establish normal 'bourgeois-democratic' regimes. In these coalitions the Communists were allotted seats as a tribute, not to the extent of their popular support, but to the influence of the Russian occupation forces. Thus they were no less important in the government in Poland or Hungary, where their popular support was very small, than in Czechoslovakia or Bulgaria, where they had some sort of mass base.
In the three Eastern European states that had been allied to Germany, military defeat was followed by revolutionary upsurge. This was most pronounced in Bulgaria, rather less in Hungary and Rumania. But the Communist Parties made no attempt to lead this wave of popular insurgency into an assault on the old order of society. Instead they united with representatives of the old order to destroy the spontaneous movement from below.
Developments in Bulgaria were typical.
Reports on the Bulgarian forces of occupation in Western Thrace and Macedonia vividly recall the picture of the Russian Army in 1917 (wrote a Western observer). Soldiers' councils have been set up, officers have been degraded, red flags hoisted, and normal saluting has been abolished. [24]
The Russian leaders rapidly intervened to put a stop to this. Molotov declared:
If certain Communists continue their present conduct we will bring them to reason. Bulgaria will remain with her democratic government and present order ... You must retain all valuable army officers from before the _coup d'etat_. You should reinstate in service all officers who have been dismissed for various reasons. [23]
The Communist leaders did everything they could 'to stop extremists in the party agitating for sovietization of the country'. [26] The Russian army also acted to preserve the status quo.
On several occasions when local Communists in the provinces tried to displace city officials and take matters into their own hands they were ordered by the Russian military authorities to return the jobs to old officials until orders were received from the Fatherland Front government in Sofia. [27]
'Order' was rapidly restored in the Bulgarian army. The Minister of War 'issued a stern order for troops to return immediately to normal discipline, to abolish soldiers' councils and to hoist no more red flags'. Bulgarian troops were placed under the supreme command of Marshal Tolbukhin who had 'no patience with Balkan repetitions of 19l7'. [28]
At the same time as they curtailed the revolutionary movement, the Bulgarian Communist leaders declared very emphatically that they stood for the status quo and the maintenance of private property. Yugov, the Communist Minister of the Interior, declared in mid-1944: 'This government ... has no intention of establishing a Communist regime in Bulgaria ... There is no truth in the rumour that the government intends to nationalize any private enterprise in the country.' [29] Early in 1946 Dimitrov declared: 'The immediate task is neither the realization of socialism nor the introduction of the Soviet system but the consolidation of a truly democratic and parlia-mentary system.' [30] In this period (from September 1944 to October 1946) the head of the coalition Fatherland Front government was General Kimon Georgiev. He had played a leading part in the military, semi-fascist _coup d'etat_ of 1923, in which tens of thousands of workers and peasants had been massacred, and was the direct author of the military coup of 1934 that led to the immediate dismissal of the government, to terrible persecution of Communists, Socialists and Agrarians, and to the dissolution of the trade unions for the first time in Bulgarian history. [31] His supporters wielded such influence in the Fatherland Front government that a serious western commentator could remark that 'the composition of the government suggests that the group that has now taken over in Sofia is the famous Military League that took power by _coup d'etat_ in 1934'. [32]
It was in this government that the Bulgarian Communists participated, this government to which both they and the Russians gave unstinting support while the revolutionary wave was forced back. Only later did they turn against the pro-western elements within it.
In Rumania a similar situation occurred. The government was constituted from March 1945 onwards by equal numbers of Communists and members of the ill-named 'Liberal' party, together with various other individuals. The 'Liberal' vice-president Tatarescu had organized anti-Jewish pogroms in 1927. After the rise of Hitler, the British Communist weekly, "World News and Views", had described him as belonging to the 'right, pro-Hitler wing of the National Liberal Party'. [33] The Minister of Culture, Mihail Ralea, had been a minister under King Carol and an open admirer of the Hitler regime. The Minister of Cults, Father Burducea, had been one of the most notorious members of the Fascist Iron Guards. The Minister of Labour, Lotar Radaceanu, had been in Carol's totalitarian 'Renaissance Front' . [34]
What applied to the government applied to the rest of the structure, too. Cambrea, who had commanded the Rumanian troops fighting against the Russians at Stalingrad, was promoted and made Assistant Chief of Staff of the Army. The new head of the Secret Police was a former active Fascist, Major Popescue-Argetoia. The personnel of the judiciary remained virtually unchanged, with only 20 new Judges out of 2000 being appointed. [35] When the Peasant Party leader Maniu was put on trial in 1947, the president of the court was the same individual who had been prosecutor at the trial of the Communist leader Anna Pauker in 1936 and who had later been wartime director-general of all prisons and concentration camps. [36]
Not that the Communist Party itself was much different. Rumanian Communist leaders have since admitted that whole sections of the Fascist Iron Guards joined the party. [37] As in Bulgaria, Rumanian Communist and government leaders made numerous statements expressing opposition to nationalization or Sovietization. For the first three years of the 'People's Democratic Government' capitalists who had collaborated with the Nazis were untouched. Patrascanu, the Communist Minister of Justice, drew up a law permitting 'industrialists, business men and bankers to escape punishment as war criminals'. [38]
Far from deploring such a situation, the Communist leaders actually welcomed and defended it. On 3 November 1946 Premier Groza declared: 'The King, the Church, the Army, the People and the Government are all one.' On the King's birthday, the Communist daily "Era Noua" said: 'The people of Rumania have faith in their king.' [39] Such was the monarchist ardour of the Communist leaders, that they attacked the Peasant Party leader Maniu as anti-monarchist when he and his followers withdrew from parliament: 'In fact Maniu's unparliamentary attitude is only a guise for his anti-dynastic policy' complained "Era Noua". [40] In Hungary the pattern was again very similar:
Instead of nationalizing property on a broad scale, an act that would not have met with serious opposition in 1945, the Communists were instrumental in restoring all but the largest factories and mines to private owners. [41]
In Poland, a revolutionary upsurge took place before the final German evacuation. The mass of the population of Warsaw rose up against the occupying German forces on 1 August 1944, as the advance guard of the Russian army approached to within fifteen miles of the city. Poorly armed, with home-made grenades and other improvized weapons, the people of Warsaw fought heroically, women and children joining their menfolk in the combat. Within two days the Germans had lost control of most of the city to the insurgents.
Although the military command of the uprising lay in the hands of members of the pre-war Polish army like General Bor-Komorowski, mass popular organizations, particularly the Polish Socialist Party (PPS) and the Peasant Party played an important role, and military units of these parties in the main resistance movement, the Home Army, retained their separate identity, while the forces of the extreme right were small and organized in a separate organization, the NSZ. The uprising was said later by followers of the Moscow line to be 'reactionary' or to have been premature, but at the time the Communist organization in Poland, the Union of Polish Patriots, itself put out calls for the insurrection. [42] The Communist paper "Armia Ludowa" stated: 'The armed uprising has found the support of the broadest masses of Warsaw's people, quite independently of who started it and for what purpose, and that is its strength.' [43]
The programme announced by the Polish Council of National Unity in the middle of the insurrection, on 15 August 1944 included 'Agrarian reform covering estates of over 50 hectares ... Socialization of key industries ... Participation of workers in the management of enterprises and control by workers of industrial production.' [44] The leadership of the Warsaw uprising was clearly no more 'reactionary' than the various monarchist and ex-fascist elements who proliferated at the time in the governments of Rumania, Bulgaria and Hungary with Russian backing. Yet the Russian forces, so close to Warsaw, gave no help. It is an open question whether it was militarily feasible for them to advance into the city - a German offensive forced a temporary withdrawal of up to fifty miles along most of the front. But air support was certainly possible, supplies could have been dropped, resistance could have been mounted against the Luftwaffe planes that were bombing and strafing the insurgents.
As it was, the Russian forces stood back while the Germans put down the rising. After 63 days Warsaw fell. The city had been systematically destroyed, house by house, 240,000 of its inhabitants had been killed and another 630,000 deported. In this way the revolutionary insurgency of the mass of Poles was destroyed before the Russian troops eventually took the city early in 1945.
Yet in the whole of Eastern Europe a decisive social transformation was carried through in the post-war years. The Communists were not making a revolution of the sort talked about by Marx and Lenin. But neither were they in the 'People's Democratic' governments to serve the interests of their bourgeois allies. They collaborated with these to put down any independent insurgent movements from below. But at the same time they were preparing the ground, in co-operation with the Russian occupying forces, to destroy these allies as well - 'from above'.
In each government the Communists held only a minority of ministries. But the Russian presence ensured that they obtained key positions from the point of view of gaining overwhelming political control. Everywhere those ministries concerned with the repressive functions of the state - in particular the ministries of the interior and of defence - were taken over by party members. The Hungarian leader, Rakosi, later admitted,
There was one position, control of which was claimed by our Party from the first minute. One position where the Party was not inclined to consider any distribution of the posts according to the strengths of the parties in the coalition. This was the State Security Authority ... We kept this organization in our hands from the first day of its establishment. [45]
The old state machine was not destroyed, it was handed over wholesale to those Communist leaders whom Stalin trusted. Its instruments of repression provided the keys to control over the rest of society. Czechoslovakia provides a good example. Here the Communist Minister of the Interior ensured that all the major posts under his control were held by party members. The old police force was reorganized under Communist officers, so that, for instance, four of the five chief officers in the Prague headquarters of the Security Police were party members, along with twelve out of seventeen regional directors of the Police, while in the directing office of the Security Police Corps, nine out of thirteen officers were in the party. [46]
This system of control over the old repressive apparatus enabled the Communist leaders to begin eliminating from the rest of the state machine, and from the various political and mass organizations, those who ever refused to accept their dominance.
The speed at which the state machine and the mass organizations were purged varied from country to country, but its results were similar everywhere. A bureaucratic instrument was created which subordinated to itself all other social forces. Those who controlled its levers were increasingly able to dominate both their 'allies' in the government and the mass organizations outside it. Arrest and trial of leading figures on trumped up charges were used to intimidate activists at all levels. Those outside the apparatus were given the choice: succumb to the Communist leaders or face an unpredictable terror.
Two sorts of mass organizations constituted obstacles to the Communist Party takeover: the peasant parties and the non-Communist socialist parties.
The peasant parties of Eastern Europe varied enormously. Because of the heterogenous nature of the rural populations - extending from virtually landless labourers to capitalist farmers employing hired labour - and also because of the tendency for the real leaders of the peasant parties to be sections of the urban middle class, a single party could contain both progressive and reactionary elements at one and the same time. The parties also varied widely between countries.
The attitude of the Communist leaders to the various elements in the peasant parties was not determined by their 'progressiveness', however, but by a quite different criterion: the degree to which they could put forward independent policies and achieve an independent following. Where they enjoyed any independence, the line of the Communist Party was one of hostility and the state machine was used to weaken and fragment them.
The Rumanian Communist Party participated in a coalition with the arch right-winger Tatarescu, while persecuting the opposition party led by Maniu, censoring its press and eventually putting its leader on trial. In Poland the Communist Party supported the creation of a puppet leadership for the Peasant Party under the chairmanship of Andrzej Witos, who had supported the reactionary 'colonels' regime' in the interwar period. The real leader of the Peasant Party, the bourgeois democrat Mikolajczyk, was thus forced to form his own party, the PSL. Though Mikolajczyk was a member of the coalition government, tens of thousands of PSL members, including leftists like Baginski and Mierzwa [47] were arrested. In Hungary, the Communist leaders demanded the expulsion of a number of outspoken anti-Communists from the Smallholders' Party (which had half the seats in the government). When the Smallholders rejected this, the Russian Command in Budapest intervened directly, threatening to increase the level of reparations. The Smallholders then acquiesced. [48]
What applied to the peasant parties applied in equal measure to the socialist parties, in particular to the most important one, the Polish Socialist Party (the PPS). In a country where the Communist Party had been small before the war (and defunct for four years after 1938) the PPS had both dominated the labour movement and moved sharply towards the left to the extent of raising the slogans of 'social revolution' and 'dictatorship of the toiling masses'. [49] With years of experience of underground activity, it had survived the period of German occupation, building in the process a party militia on a territorial and factory basis which played an important role in the Warsaw Uprising. [50]
After the war, the PPS continued to gain majority support from the industrial workers. In 63 elections to shop committees held in the largest industrial district in Poland in 1945, the PPS gained 556 seats (64 per cent) as against the Communists 193 (21 per cent). It also had the support of two thirds of the delegates at the Congress of the Polish TUC in November 1945.
The Russians and the Communist leaders tried to break the independence of the Socialists. A new leadership was imposed on the PPS at a non-representative congress in Lublin in September 1944, while most of Poland was still under German control. Two of the new 'leaders'. Osubka-Morawski and Drobner, had not even been members of the PPS during the war.
The real leaders of the PPS emerged from the underground or from German prisons, to face harassment and even arrest by the police and the Russian forces. Puzak, Zdanowski, Cohn, Pajdak, Dziegielewski, Krawczyk, Wilczynski, Sobolewski, Oberski, GaIaj and many others were imprisoned. [51]
The new 'official' leaders of the PPS tried to secure a unification of the party with the Communist Party. But they faced continual resistance from the rank and file. When the question of fusion was raised at regional conferences in Cracow, Katowice and other towns during 1946, it met with almost unanimous opposition. Adam Kurylowicz, recently elected General Secretary of the Trade Unions, wrote in "Robotnik":
From all parts of the country fresh reports are coming in of injustices suffered by the workers. The elements alien to the working class behave in an arbitrary fashion and act like 'bosses'. They hire and fire workers without taking into account the opinion of the workers of the plant, scorning the laws, conquests and social rights of the workers. A clique of self-seeking politicians is being formed. [52]
The Socialist Party Congress, in December 1947, refused to vote for unification. However, three months later Cyrankiewicz, a member of the leadership, declared that the merger of the parties would be carried out. 82,000 members were expelled; twelve members were removed from the Central Executive Committee and twelve from the Supreme Council. Kurylowicz was removed from his position in the unions.
Elsewhere in Eastern Europe the pattern was similar: on the one hand threats to the social-democratic leaders of the established workers' movement; on the other, the offer of positions in a new and rapidly expanding bureaucracy if they would collaborate with the Communist Party and the Russian occupying forces. In Eastern Germany in 1945, for instance,
individuals who commended themselves to the local Soviet commanders were given positions of responsibility on the spot, regardless of their record, provided they were not obvious National Socialists. In this way a whole new cadre of mayors, _Landraete_ and police officers was appointed... the minor war criminals and Nazis had an easier life in the East than in the West ... [53]
In 1946, a number of leaders of the Social Democratic Party agreed to merge their party with the Communist Party in the Russian-occupied zone. The party leader most prominent in pushing this line was Grotewohl, although he had opposed such a merger only four days previously. He was rewarded with a top position in the new regime. [54]
Nevertheless, the Social Democrats rather than the new Stalinist Party, the SED, retained the allegiance of many of the workers. In the elections of 1946 the SED failed to get a majority, and in Berlin only got half as many votes as the Social Democrats.
The Russian occupying forces and the SED leaders set out to overcome their weakness - not by class agitation (they opposed any strikes or wage agitation, although industry remained privately owned in 1946), but by a mixture of bribery and threats. Those who joined the SED were given special ration cards by party headquarters.
There were many cases of political opponents of the SED, who while being slandered almost daily in the Eastern Zone, received gifts from time to time from the SED, combined with offers of a good position in the SED itself. [55]
At the same time many ex-social democrats were arrested for 'social- democratic agitation', including some who were formerly members of the SED. In the prisons they found that their conditions were no better than those of ex-Nazis; and a 1948 general amnesty that freed minor ex-Nazis, left social-democratic workers languishing in their cells. [56]
After such policies had been implemented for a period of three years, the Communists effectively controlled every aspect of political life in the Eastern European countries. By now the 'coalition' governments were coalitions between the Communist Party leaders and their shadow. Those who opposed the hold of the Communist Party, whether they came from the old bourgeoisie or the working-class movement had either been bought off with bureaucratic posts or eliminated.
Bribery, intimidation and terror alone were not sufficient to dominate society. Human material for staffing the mushrooming apparatus was needed. Only if a solid layer of the population identified themselves with Communist leaders would their rule have a secure base. What was required was the formation of a new social stratum bound to the policies of the new rulers by common interest and aspirations, sharing some of the privileges of those at the top of society and aware of the gulf between themselves and those at the bottom.
The Communist leaders set out to build up mass, bureaucratically centralized parties, on the lines of the Stalinist party in Russia, organizations which could be employed to monitor and control social life throughout the nation at every level. The method used was simple: they recruited everyone willing to join the Communist Party, and offered considerable advantages to those who did.
The doors of the party were thrown wide open to all those seeking admission.
They applied pressures to those who refused to cross the line. Peasants needing tools or fertilizers quickly found they could get them much more easily by joining the party. Those eager to obtain more land soon found that the party membership card was the magic formula that alone seemed to clear the interminable red tape. Employees of Ministries and offices headed by Communist chiefs and their fellow travellers saw promotion evading them until they chose to sign the membership application blanks ...This experience was shared by those who aspired to better or softer jobs in the nationalized factories. [57]
Only one thing was demanded clearly of anyone who joined the Communists at this point: a readiness to obey instructions from above. The Communist Parties grew at a rapid rate, taking in ever larger numbers of people who were bound to them by ties of relative privilege and identified their future with that of the Party. The Polish Party grew from 30,000 members to 300,000 between January and April 1945; [58] the Czechoslovak Party membership from 27,000 to 1,159,164 between May 1945 and the beginning of 1946; [59] the Rumanian Party from about 1,000 members to 800,000 between mid-1944 and October 1945. [60]
Careerism and opportunism were not the only motives drawing the mass influx into the Communist Parties. There were others. Clearly some, if not many, of the recruits were motivated by various degrees of idealism, or sentiments of generalized working-class solidarity. More significant, however, was a feeling among whole strata of the population that the moderate, statified, economic and social system for which the Communists were agitating at the time - with, for instance, full freedom (and even privileges) for organized religion, with positive encouragement for areas of private enterprise, with land belonging to the peasants, and so on - was the only way forward for any sort of national development. This programme appealed especially to all those who wanted to 'get on' in society, who had aspirations to mobility before and during the war, but had been unable to improve their situation because of the backwardness of the country and the disastrous policies of the ruling class.
As in many undeveloped countries today, sections of all social classes responded to such a vision. In the pre-war period the educated lower middle classes of the towns had often turned in despair to the fascist parties. Now they streamed into the Stalinist parties, seeing here hope for both personal advancement and for national development. But it was not only to the existing middle class that these parties offered a way forward. Similar opportunities were offered to thousands of manual workers too, who could join and rapidly be raised out of their class: in Czechoslovakia 300,000 were individually promoted from the workbench to bureaucratic positions in this way.
In summary: the Russian rulers were looking for local mass parties with which to gain total control over social life. To this end the Communist Parties were turned into giant machines for promoting social mobility. Hundreds of thousands of individuals were raised to positions of authority at every level and in every sphere of social life - positions in which they were utterly dependent on the will of the Communist leadership.
In Czechoslovakia and Poland this process was aided by an-other policy, which the Communists and their coalition partners carried out without any sign of hesitation: that of 'racially purifying' the nation.
For more than 700 years there had been a German-speaking population in Czechoslovakia, which by the early years of the twentieth century numbered about three millions. It was slightly more proletarianized than the Czech population as a whole - 61 per cent being workers in 1930. This Sudeten population voted overwhelmingly for either the Social Democratic or the Communist Party in elections between 1920 and 1930. [61] 'The ratio of Germans and Hungarians in the Communist Unions far exceeded that of the Czechs and Slovaks ...' [62]
However, the failure of the Social Democrats and Communists in Germany to resist the rise of Nazism and to offer the German workers a socialist alternative to unemployment and fascism had its effects in Czechoslovakia. Industry in the Sudetenland was more severely hit than elsewhere in Czechoslovakia by the slump of the thirties, and unemployment among German speakers was about twice the national average. The appeal of pro-Nazi German nationalism grew among the Sudeten population, until in 1935 the pro-Nazi party polled 62-63 per cent of the Sudeten votes. Nevertheless 300,000 Sudetens continued to vote for the Social Democrats and about 120,000 for the Communists. After Munich 40,000 of these suffered heroically for their internationalism in Nazi concentration camps, where about half of them perished. [68]
In 1935, the official Comintern organ apportioned the blame all too clearly for the victory of the Nazis in the elections: 'The reason for this victory is the policy of the Czech bourgeoisie which has led to terrible poverty and misery and national oppression in the German districts ...' [64] A Czechoslovak historian recently pointed out that: 'Until 1944 the leadership of the Czechoslovak Communist Party opposed the demand for population transfer'. [65]
But when the war ended this tune changed completely. Instead of calling for any kind of working-class unity between Czechs, Slovaks and German workers, they proclaimed quite clearly that:
The new Republic will be a Slav state, a Republic of Czechs and Slovaks. We will deprive the Germans and the Hungarians, who have so heavily sinned against our peoples, of their citizenship and will severely punish them. [66]
The Communist Minister of Education was adamant:
We do not know any progressive Germans, nor are there any ... We will purify Prague and the border districts, and we are in a position to do this because we have a great helper in doing this - the Red Army. [67]
With the Communists outdoing the bourgeois parties in chauvinism, this 'purification' was carried out very rapidly. As one bourgeois Czech politician who _approved_ of that policy describes it:
On May 17 the Germans were given smaller food rations ('the same basic food ration as the Jews received during the occupation' according to a government order of May 17). They had to wear special white armbands and were not allowed to use public means of communication ... In June all German schools were closed. Compulsory labour conscription was introduced ... Practically all movable and immovable property was taken away from the Germans ... The confiscation would make good wrongs committed on the Czech nation since the end of its independence in 1620. The Communist Party in particular emphasized the national movement and became the most nationalist party. [66]
This anti-Sudeten feeling might, of course, be explained as a spontaneous upsurge (although this does not explain why there was not, say, a similar 'spontaneous' upsurge among Czechs against the Slovaks, many of whom had collaborated with the pro-Nazi Tiso regime, or why there was not a similar upsurge of Yugoslavs against German speakers). But even if this were the case, any genuine marxist party would have fought against chauvinism and racism, explaining to the mass of Czech workers the reasons for the Nazi sympathies of many German speakers (as the Czechoslovak Party had done in the thirties). Instead, the Communists chose to fan the flames of chauvinism deliberately, to turn Czech worker against German worker (and Slovak worker against Magyar worker).
The German speakers were driven off the land and out of the factories. As one Stalinist writer put it at the time:
Above all two problems stand out; namely the distribution to Czech peasants and agricultural workers of confiscated German land and property, and secondly the replacement of Germans by Czechs in industry. [69]
There was token recognition by the Stalinists that some Sudeten workers might have resisted Nazism and even suffered somewhat in doing so:
The Czechoslovak Social Democrat and Communist Parties set up special offices to provide for the voluntary (sic) emigration of members of their former German sister parties ... Over 100,000 anti-fascists were transported to the Soviet and American zones in 1945-46. [70]
Thus those who had risked their lives to fight for socialism against the Nazis were rewarded by the 'socialist' parties in power with ... more pleasant forms of transportation than was usual!
In whole areas of the country the Czechoslovak working class had been about half German speaking. The proportion of German speaking workers in the glass industry, for example, had been 60 per cent, in paper 58 per cent, in textiles 56 per cent and in mining 45 per cent. [71] As the Stalinist writer we quoted above put the matter: 'President Benes ... emphasized that the transfer of the Germans means the loss of one million workmen ...' [72]
Through confiscation and deportation, broad avenues of social mobility were created in the Sudeten areas of Czechoslovakia. Peasants without land could suddenly acquire it; those with land could get more. In factories, with half the workforce gone, there could be some promotion for nearly everybody. The unskilled could become 'skilled' overnight. At the same time houses, furniture and other property were suddenly 'created'. And those who redistributed the positions and belongings of one section of the working class to the rest were the functionaries of the Communist Party and the trade unions. It is small wonder, then, that the recipients were ready to join the party and, f or a time, to show some allegiance to it; and small wonder, too, that the party could grow so rapidly and gain such influence in a 'racially pure' labour movement.
The hysterical, chauvinistic campaign against German (and Hungarian) speakers served the interest of the Stalinist leaders admirably. It provided an issue with which the bourgeois parties were in full accord. It enabled the Stalinists to take the forefront in carrying through 'national unification' while avoiding the key question: which class would control the country in the future. Above all it enabled them to divide the working class down the middle and to turn organizations of the working class into their opposite.
The role of the trade unions was no longer one of furthering the goals of a unified working class, but rather that of offering displaced Germans' places to Czech workers. 'It was chiefly the trade unionists who organized the work and supply of workers.' [73] Not only German speaking workers 'lost' their trade unions: so did the Czech and Slovak workers. Their trade unions changed their class goals:
Today questions of labour disputes are no longer the main preoccupation of the trade unionists... Today they are talking about the standard of production, the state of various industries, the policy and measures for the increase of industrial output. [74]
Czech policy towards the Sudetens was matched in the territories taken by Poland from the Germans after 1945. Here again the Communist Party used the situation to strengthen its hold over the Polish immigrant population - with the Communist, Gomulka, as minister for the New Territories, the party gained support by distributing land, jobs and property.
By the end of 1947, whoever controlled the Communist Parties of Eastern Europe had de facto control over all the major institutions of those societies. Control over the security police permitted systematic intimidation of opponents, both in the bourgeois parties and in the labour movement; show trials, imprisonment without trial, torture and censorship were the chosen instruments. At the same time, offers of rapid, unexpected promotion enabled the creation of a growing body of loyal, disciplined recruits both among the ranks of the governmental bureaucracy and within society generally. Mass parties had been built, most of whose members were dependent on those above them for their relatively privileged positions.
Only when the levers of control were firmly in their hands, at the end of 1947, did the regimes of Bulgaria, Hungary and Rumania move on to extensive nationalization. Together with the other Eastern European states, their economies were internally restructured in the image of Stalin's Russia.
With one possible exception, the transformation of the national economies was carried out without mass mobilization or agitation. The nationalizations were a mere rationalization of a situation in which, as everyone knew already, the Communist Parties had succeeded in establishing monolithic social control. Only in Czechoslovakia did it seem that elements of a real workers' uprising were involved in the reorganization of the economy.
Even writers generally hostile to Stalinism have argued that it was a workers' movement that gave full power to the Communists in Prague in 1948.
Unlike the other European upheavals, this bore the mark of a revolution from below, even though it was timed to suit Stalin's convenience. The Communists accomplished the revolution by their own strength, supported by the great majority of the workers; they had only to parade their armed militias in the street to block any counter action ... Benes and Masaryk, overwhelmed and depressed by the evidence of mass popular support for the revolution - the streets of Prague were full of armed workers marching towards the seats of government - bowed to the victors. [75]
Although Isaac Deutscher's description of the pessimism and resignation of the bourgeois leaders is accurate, his talk of 'revolution from below' is not. Deutscher ignores an aspect of the situation far more fundamental than the 'armed workers' - the role of the armed police. The significance of the Prague coup was the issue that brought it to a head. It followed a ministerial crisis when the non-Communist ministers attempted to resist increased Communist Party control over the police. [76] But the ministers proved powerless against the Communist Party leaders, who were already in effective control of the state apparatus and able to use it.
The Ministry of the Interior moved police regiments to sensitive areas. The offices of the non-Communist political parties were placed under guard. The 6,000-strong border police - established in 1946 in the Sudeten areas - were so deployed as to be able to take over key points in Prague and Bratislava at short notice.
The media were also already under effective Communist Party control, through the Ministry of Propaganda. Non-Communist politicians, including the leader of the Social Democratic Party, were denied access to the radio, which broadcast non-stop support for the coup. The non-Communist newspapers were simply refused supplies of newsprint. As an additional precaution, and by way of a warning to any who opposed the coup, Russian troops gathered on Czechoslovakia's border, making it clear that they would intervene if necessary.
If revolution means turning the state machine upside down, there was no revolution in Czechoslovakia in February 1948. Rather, the state machine itself was used to remove the symbols of formal power from the non-Communist section of the government. Nor did any major change in property relations occur. Before the coup 80 per cent of industry was nationalized; afterwards 95 per cent.
There was a façade of workers' activity, but not an 'insurrection'. A congress of works councils was called - but just for one day, with uniformed policemen acting as ushers. Its delegates voted to support the coup, and were then sent home. They were not meant to run the country themselves. There was a general strike, but as it only lasted for one hour, it was hardly the decisive factor in the crisis. There were a couple of mass workers' demonstrations, organized from above, with the police, as well as other workers, beating up those who refused to participate.
More significant in the coup was the role played by the so-called workers' militia, whose unarmed members patrolled the streets of Prague during the decisive days and guarded strategic points.
But the workers' militia was in no sense an organization emanating from or belonging to the mass of the workers. It was dominated by a minority of Communist Party members in the factories, who were dependent on the Communist leadership for their relatively privileged positions. And during the coup itself, the militia was organized not from below but by the security police.
Josef Pavel, a party member with a senior position in the Interior Ministry, commanded the militia, while two other security police officials, Majors Duda and Paducha, were attached to it, to provide co-ordination with the police. It was the security police, too, who arranged the arming of some 6,550 members of the militia (a minuscule proportion, about 0.20 per cent, of all Czechoslovak workers). Remembering that some 300,000 workers were being promoted into privileged positions in the state machine by the Communist authorities, it is not difficult to understand why many of them should have given active support to the coup. But none of that amounts to the working class as a whole taking control of its own destiny.
Indeed, there are indications that in the period prior to the coup, increasing numbers of workers were turning hostile to the Communist leaders. In April 1947, the Communist general secretary of the trade unions complained that in the first round for the election of Works Committee members, 35 per cent of the official Communist Party-nominated candidates had been voted down, although no other candidates were allowed. The chairman of the unions had a simple answer to this - he prolonged the life of the old committees by one year. [77]
Precautions were taken to ensure that the same discontent with officials did not get expressed in the elections of January 1948. The social-democratic paper "Pravo Lidu" complained afterwards that
especially in the large industrial concerns, it is evident that all sorts of questionable practice was used, calculated to upset the democratic form of election ... The meetings were usually called after working hours, when the majority of workers were leaving or had left ... [78]
With 80 per cent of industry nationalized _before_ the coup, Communist union officials could rely upon the co-operation of Communist factory managers in their efforts to keep tight control over the unions. Union officials and managers also worked together to mobilize for the mass demonstrations and the one hour strike in February.
Very few workers resisted participating in the demonstrations. The majority probably identified with the Communist Party's aims - just as many British workers support the Labour Party, even though it rarely fights for their interests. On the other hand they were moved by no massive enthusiasm. When the coup was over, they still had to clock into work, still had to submit to the orders of the same foreman, still faced the same relentless pressures to put out more effort. To that extent the coup had changed nothing.
The Prague coup was not a 'revolution from below' but a police manoeuvre, accompanied by a carefully prepared display of popular support. In that display the state machine played the key role; the workers had a strictly walk-on part.
Notes
1. Winston Churchill, "The Second World War", Vol. VI, London 1954, p.198.
2. For a full discussion of the various interests of the great powers see Gabriel Kolko, "The Politics of War", London 1969. Kolko argues that the interview between Churchill and Stalin was much less important than Churchill thought. The spheres of influence that were eventually decided upon 'were less a creation of new relations than a formulation of the status quo'. Even so, the spheres of influence which eventually emerged were very much as laid down in the Stalin-Churchill discussion.
3. Kolko, op. cit., p.174.
4. US Department of State, "Foreign Relations of US, the Conferences at Malta & Yalta 1945", p.783, quoted in Kolko, op. cit., p.359.
5. ibid.
6. Kolko, op. cit., p.50.
7. Economist Intelligence Unit, "Quarterly Economic Review, East Europe North", 1968, No.3.
8. F. Zweig, "Poland Between Two Wars", London 1944, p.121 cf. also L. Wellisz, "Foreign Capital in Poland", London 1938, p.145.
9. Royal Institute of International Affairs, "Agrarian Problems from the Baltic to the Aegean", London 1944, p. 81, quoted in Y. Gluckstein, "Stalin's Satellites in Europe", London 1952, p.26.
10. B. Kidric, "On the Construction of Social Economy in FPRY", quoted in Gluckstein, op. cit.
11. Royal Institute of International Affairs, "South Eastern Europe, A Political and Economic Survey", London 1939, p.173, quoted in Gluckstein, op cit.
12. A. Zauberman, "Industrial Progress in Poland, Czechoslovakia and East Germany, 1937-62", London 1964, p.1.
13. ibid.
14. Zauberman, op. cit., p.106.
15. Estimate given in N. Bethell, "Gomulka", London 1972, p.118.
16. Article by Benes in "Manchester Guardian", 15 December 1945.
17. For more details on the development outlined in this paragraph, see Gluckstein, op. cit., pp.26-29.
18. For accounts of the development of the Polish Communist Party, see Bethell, op. cit., pp.15-72, and A. Korbonski, "The Politics of Socialist Agriculture in Poland, 1945-60", New York 1965, pp.50-66.
19. For one account of the Rumanian Communists in the prewar period, see Introduction to G. Ionescu, "Communism in Rumania, 1944-62", London 1964.
20. Figures given by P.L. Zinner, "Communist Strategy and Tactics in Czechoslovakia", London 1963, p.30.
21. ibid., p.63.
22. ibid., p.75.
23. V.I. Lenin, "Collected Works", Vol.24, Moscow 1964, p.69.
24. "Economist", 7 October 1944, quoted in Gluckstein, op. cit., pp.132-33.
25. "New York Times", 16 January 1954, quoted in ibid.
26. "New York Times", 21 September 1944, quoted in ibid.
27. "New York Times", 21 September 1944, quoted in ibid.
28. "Economist", 7 October 1944, quoted in ibid., p.133.
29. "New York Times", 22 September 1944, quoted in ibid., p.134.
30. Quoted in ibid., p.134.
31. Account given in ibid., pp.134-35.
32. Observer, 10 September 1944, quoted in ibid., p.135.
33. 19 November 1938. For a long description of his actions in organizing repression against workers and peasants, see "Inprecor", 8 December 1933, quoted in ibid., pp.136-37.
34. ibid., p.137.
35. Statement by Patrascanu in "Christian Science Monitor", 12 December 1945, quoted in ibid., p.140.
36. "New York Herald Tribune", 7 November 1947, quoted in ibid., p.140; cf. also Ionescu, op. cit., p.131.
37. Speeches of Gheorgiu Dej and others at the November-December 1961 Plenum of the Central Committee of the Rumanian Workers' Party.
38. "New York Times", 17 March 1945, quoted in Gluckstein, op. cit., p.138.
39. "Era Noua", 8 November 1946. Quoted in "East Europe", London, 20 November 1946, quoted in Gluckstein, op. cit., p.141.
40. "Era Noua", 3 December 1946. Quoted in "East Europe", London, 18 December 1946, quoted in Gluckstein, op. cit., p.141.
41. P.E. Zinner, "Revolution in Hungary", New York 1962, p.52.
42. Appeal of the Union of Polish Patriots broadcast by Moscow Radio, 29 July 1944. Quoted in Gluckstein, op. cit., p.144, cf. also appeal of the UPP radio, Radio Kosciuszko, the day before the rising began: 'Peoples of Warsaw to arms. Attack the Germans ... Assist the Red Army in crossing the Vistula', quoted in "Manchester Guardian", 22 August 1944.
43. "Armia Ludowa", 15 August 1944, quoted in Gluckstein, op. cit., p.148.
44. Quoted in Zaremba, "La Commune de Varsovie", Paris 1947, pp.39-40. Notes
45. Speech of 29 February 1952. Extracts in Problems of Communism, 1952, No.4, p.35.
46. Facts given in H.Ripka, "Czechoslovakia Enslaved", London 1950, p.195. Ripka was Minister of Foreign Trade in the coalition government prior to the coup of February 1948.
47. Korbonski, op. cit., p.106; cf. also Gluckstein, op. cit., p.168.
48. P.E. Zinner, op. cit., pp.43-44.
49. Gluckstein, op. cit., p.175.
50. A. Ciolkosz, "The Expropriation of the Socialist Party", New York 1946, p.3, quoted in Gluckstein, op. cit., p.176.
51. Gluckstein, op. cit., describes the repression, pp.177-81.
52. "Robotnik", 5 May 1947, quoted in Gluckstein, op. cit., p.179.
53. P. Nettl, "The Eastern Zone & Soviet Policy in Germany", London 1950, pp.56, 58; cf. also W. Leonhard, "Child of the Revolution", London 1957. Robert Havemann tells that when he was sacked from his university job for criticisms of Stalinist practices in the mid-sixties 'the rector of the university and the state secretary for universities who sacked me were former members of the Nazi party'. "An Alienated Man", London 1973, pp.60-61.
54. Nettl, op. cit., p.88.
55. ibid., p.70.
56. ibid., p.71.
57. Taborski, "Communism in Czechoslovakia 1948-60", New Jersey 1961, p.18; see also Zinner, "Communist Strategy and Tactics in Czechoslovakia", p.123.
58. Bethell, op. cit., p.93.
59. Zinner, op. cit., p.124.
60. Ionescu, op. cit., p.114.
61. Gluckstein, op. cit., p.186.
62. Zinner, op. cit., p.62.
63. Gluckstein, op. cit., p.187.
64. "Inprecor", 1 June 1935.
65. Huebl in the Czechoslovak Writers' Union monthly, "Host do Domu", 1968 translated in "Studies in Contemporary Communism", April 1969, p.189. For descriptions of the expulsions as seen in one village, of L. Vaculik, "The Axe", London 1973.
66. Declaration of Gottwald, 12 May 1945.
67. Statement of Zdenek Nejedly, 29 May 1945.
68. R. Luza, "The Transfer of the Sudeten Germans", London 1964.
69. G. Beuer, "The New Czechoslovakia", London 1947, p.193.
70. R. Luza, op. cit.
71. Zinner, op. cit., p.79.
72. G. Beuer, op. cit., p.194.
73. ibid., p.214.
74. ibid., p.214.
75. I. Deutscher, "Stalin", London 1966, p.576.
76. For descriptions of the events of the Prague coup, see Zinner, op. cit., pp. 202-206; Korbel, "Communist Subversion in Czechoslovakia"; H. Ripka, "Le Coup de Prague", Paris 1949, pp.53ff.
77. Gluckstein, op. cit., p.84.
78. "Pravo Lidu", 9 January 1948.