An essay in universal history

3. THE SOVIET OLD ORDER

As the Cold War began, it became necessary for the West to define its former ally and new enemy in the East. The term they came up with was the same that Mussolini had applied to his own regime in the 1920s – “totalitarian”. Of course, the use of this term pointed – correctly – to the close kinship between Communism and Fascism. As Anne Applebaum writes, it was “Hannah Arendt, who defined totalitarianism in her 1949 book, The Origins of Totalitarianism, as a ‘novel form of government’ made possible by the onset of modernity. The destruction of traditional societies and ways of life had, she argued, created the conditions for the evolution of the ‘totalitarian personality’, men and women whose identities were entirely dependent on the state. Famously, Arendt argued that Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union were both totalitarian regimes, and as such were more similar than different. Carl J. Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski pushed that argument further in Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy, published in 1946, and also sought a more operational definition. Totalitarian regimes, they declared, all had at least five things in common: a dominant ideology, a single ruling party, a secret police force prepared to use terror, a monopoly on information and a planned economy. By those criteria, the Soviet and Nazi regimes were not the only totalitarian states. Others – Mao’s China, for example – qualified too.”³⁹

However, the definitions of anti-communist intellectuals like Arendt or Brzezinski or Koestler made little impact on the prevailing tendency in Western European intellectual life, which was pro-Communist – or at any rate, anti-fascist and therefore, in the twisted logic of the time, necessarily anti-anti-communist. This was especially the case in France, whose communist party was second in size only to Italy’s, and where the beginning of the shameful Stalinist show-trials elicited only the denial of obvious facts and frantic defence of the totalitarian dictator. This pro-Communism went with a despising of all things American, in spite of the fact that the Americans had liberated France and her survival as an independent country depended entirely on them.
As Judt writes, “Communism excited intellectuals in a way that neither Hitler nor (especially) liberal democracy could hope to match. Communism was exotic in locale and heroic in scale. Raymond Aron in 1950 remarked upon ‘the ludicrous surprise – that the European Left has taken a pyramid-builder for its God.’ But was it really so surprising? Jean-Paul Sartre, for one, was most attracted to the Communists at precisely the moment when the ‘pyramid-builder’ was embarking upon his final, crazed projects. The idea that the Soviet was engaged upon a momentous quest whose very ambition justified and excused its shortcomings was uniquely attractive to rationalist intellectuals. The besetting sin of Fascism had been its parochial objectives. But Communism was directed towards impeccably universal and transcendent goals. Its crimes were excused by many non-Communist observersas the cost, so to speak, of doing business with History.
“But even so, in the early years of the Cold War there were many in Western Europe who might have been more openly critical of Stalin, of the Soviet Union and of their local Communists had they not been inhibited by the fear of giving aid and comfort to their political opponents. This, too, was a legacy of ‘anti-Fascism’, the insistence that there were ‘no enemies on the Left’ (a rule to which Stalin himself, it must be said, paid little attention). As the progressive Abbé Boulier explained to François Fejto, when trying to prevent him from writing about the Rajk trial: drawing attention to Communist sins is ‘to play the imperialists’ game’.
“This fear of serving anti-Soviet interests was not new. But by the early fifties it was a major calculation in European intellectual debates, above all in France. Even after the East European show trials finally led Emmanuel Mounier and many in his Esprit group to distance themselves from the French Communist Party, they took special care to deny any suggestion that they had become ‘anti-Communist’ – or worse, that they had ceased to be ‘anti-American’. Anti-anti-Communism was becoming a political and cultural end in itself…”⁴⁰
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There is little evidence that Stalin was planning to extend his conquests westwards in 1945; he was not ready for world war, especially while he did not have his own atomic bomb, and needed time to digest his newly-acquired empire in Central and Eastern Europe. His only sign of renewed aggression outside the Far East was in creating an Azerbaijani puppet state in Iran, which the West vigorously – and successfully - resisted. Stalin even hesitated to impose communism fully and immediately on his European conquests – although it was already clear that he had no intention of fulfilling the promises he had made at Yalta to introduce democracy there.
However, this was only a transitional phase; Stalin’s ultimate aim of destroying the West remained unchanged, as was made clear in a speech by Beria’s deputy, Minister of State Security Victor Abakumov, to an audience of SMERSH officers at NKVD Headquarters in occupied Europe near Vienna in the summer of 1945: “Comrade Stalin once said that if we don’t manage to do all these things very quickly the British and Americans will crush us. After all they have the atom bomb, and an enormous technical and industrial advantage over us. They are rich countries, which not been destroyed by the war. But we will rebuild everything, with our army and our industry, regardless of the cost. We Chekists are not to be frightened by problems and sacrifices. It is our good fortune… that the British and Americans in their attitudes towards us, have still not emerged from the post-war state of calf-love. They dream of lasting peace and building a democratic world for all men. They don’t seem to realize that we are the ones who are going to build a new world, and that we shall do it without their liberal-democratic recipes. All their slobber plays right into our hands, and we shall thank them for this, in the next world, with coals of fire. We shall drive them into such dead ends as they’ve never dreamed of. We shall disrupt them and corrupt them from within. We shall lull them to sleep, sap their will to fight. The whole ‘free western’ world will burst apart like a fat squashed toad. This won’t happen tomorrow. To achieve it will require great efforts on our part, great sacrifices, and total renunciation of all that is trivial and personal. Our aim justifies all this. Our aim is a grand one, the destruction of the old, vile world.”⁴¹
This speech demonstrates two things. On the one hand, the old satanic hatred of the Leninist-Bakuninite revolution for the whole of “the old, vile world” continued unabated. That meant that no “normal” relations would be possible with the Soviet Union; for it was in fact an anti-state determined to destroy all normal statehood throughout the world. Two possibilities were therefore open to the West: war, or “containment”, to use the phrase of the venerable American diplomat John Kennan in his famous “Long Telegram” of February 22, 1946. The West contemplated war, but in the end chose containment; that is, the Soviets were to be contained within the boundaries of their WWII conquests, as sanctioned at Yalta and Potsdam.
On the other hand, Stalin was not yet ready for further military expansion. Denis Healy asserted that “all that the Red Army needed in order to reach the North Sea was boots.” But it was not quite as simple as that. As Eric Hobsbawm writes, “Except in the Balkan guerilla strongholds, the communists made no attempt to establish revolutionary regimes. It is true that they were in no position to do so anywhere west of Trieste even had they wanted to make a bid for power, but also that the USSR, to which their parties were utterly loyal, strongly discouraged such unilateral bids for power. The communist revolutions actually made (Yugoslavia, Albania, later China) were made against Stalin’s advice. The Soviet view was that, both internationally and within each country, post-war politics should continue within the framework of the all-embracing anti-fascist alliance, i.e. it looked forward to a long-term coexistence, or rather symbiosis, of capitalist and communist systems, and further social and political change, presumably occurring by shifts within the ‘democracies of a new type’ which would emerge out of the wartime coalitions. This optimistic scenario soon disappeared into the night of the Cold War, so completely that few remember that Stalin urged the Yugoslav communists to keep the monarchy or that in 1945 British communists were opposed to the break-up of the Churchill wartime coalition, i.e. to the electoral campaign which was to bring the Labour government in power. Nevertheless, there is no doubt that Stalin meant all this seriously, and tried to prove it by dissolving the Comintern in 1943, and the Communist Party of the USA in 1944.
“Stalin’s decision, expressed in the words of an American communist leader ‘that we will not raise the issue of socialism in such a form and manner as to endanger or weaken… unity’ made his intentions clear. For practical purposes, as dissident revolutionaries recognized, it was a permanent goodbye to world revolution. Socialism would be confined to the USSR and the area assigned by diplomatic negotiation as its zone of influence, i.e. basically that occupied by the Red Army at the end of the war…”⁴²
Why this (temporary) abdication from Lenin’s dream? Because, for all its massive power, the Soviet Union was vulnerable in many ways…
“In the West,” as Nikolai Tolstoy writes, “Russian heroism and wartime propaganda had combined to exaggerate the formidable strength of the Red Army. A prescient few already saw it as a potent threat to Western Europe. To Stalin matters appeared in a rather different light. True, his armies had, with unheard-of gallantry and sacrifices, hunted down ‘the Nazi beast in his lair’. But he also knew better than most how very near at times they had been to defeat, and also how much his conquests had owed to lend-lease supplies and American and British strategic bombing. Now the United States, with an industrial capacity and military resources dwarfing those of Germany at the height of her power, faced him in the heart of Europe….
“In 1945 the USSR still possessed no strategic air force, and there can be no doubt that Stalin regarded the awesome striking power under Eisenhower’s command with apprehension. In April 1944 he had warned his Chiefs of Staff against any idea that the defeat of Germany would be the end of their problems. There would be other dangers, equally great; notably the exposure of the Red Army to populations hostile to Communism, and stiffening relations with the Allies in the West. Meanwhile, in the Ukraine, Byelorussia and the Baltic States, nationalist partisans were fighting the Red Army and NKVD units on a scale recalling the bitterest days of the Civil War. Stalin was clearly fearful that the Western Allies would have the wit to play that card the purblind Germans had thrown away: the opposition of the Russian people to the regime. The extent of his fear may be gauged by his absolute refusal to consent to British arming of Russian sentries in prisoner-of-war camps or even enrolling them in a purely nominal ‘armed Allied unit’. He feared this might provide cover for the levying of a new ‘Vlasov’ army.
“Fear of military confrontation with the Anglo-Americans, revolt inside the Soviet Union, or contamination of the Red Army in occupied Europe effectively inhibited Stalin from any rash ventures in 1945. There were points on which he would not give way, but they were points on which the Anglo-Americans had no effective means of bringing pressure to bear. The new Soviet-Polish frontier, the annexation of the Baltic States, the refusal to implement Churchill’s illusory ‘percentages’ agreement: all these moves took place safely behind Red Army lines, and the worst the democracies could do was affect not to recognize their legitimacy.
“Caution was everything.⁴³ It was still hard to believe that the West was sincere in its belief in the possibility of genuine post-war cooperation between the two irreconcilable systems. The results of the Teheran Conference had seemed almost too good to be true (Stalin returned to the Kremlin ‘in a particularly good frame of mind’) and after Potsdam a Soviet official noted that ‘the Soviet diplomats won concessions from the Western Allies to an extent that even the diplomats themselves had not expected’. After the defeat of Germany Stalin had been fearful that the Americans might not pull back to the demarcation line, and remained convinced that Eisenhower could, had he chosen, have taken Berlin. Still, the Allies were co-operating, for whatever reason, and as Roosevelt had irresponsibly announced at Yalta that the United States forces would withdraw from Europe within two years of victory, there was every incentive for a policy of ‘softly, softly, catchee monkey’.
“Despite the overwhelming Soviet military presence in Eastern Europe, Stalin was careful for some time to maintain the pretence and even, to a limited, fast diminishing extent, the reality of tolerating non-Communist institutions and political parties. In Romania it was announced that there was no intention of altering the country’s frontiers or social system. It was more than two years before King Michael was obliged to leave the country. Similarly, in Poland, Bulgaria and Hungary the shades of independent institutions were permitted to linger on until election results proved that the most extreme efforts of intimidation and propaganda could not induce populations voluntarily to accept Communist domination. Czechoslovak ‘independence’ survived a little longer, as a result of Stalin’s confidence in the pliability of Dr. Beneš and his colleagues.
“Postponement of the full establishment of the Soviet ‘New Order’ in Eastern Europe was clearly due to several factors. If the new regimes could gain power by constitutional and legal means, this would facilitate the task of Communist Parties in Western Europe, and it was essential, too, not to jettison chances of securing a settlement in Germany favourable to Soviet expansion.
“In any case, Stalin was by no means so confident as hindsight would suggest. In Poland the carefully-planned abduction and trial of sixteen leaders of the Home Army resistance movement in March 1945 suggest that in his view effective Polish armed resistance to the imposition of Soviet rule posed sufficient threat to make it worth risking the inevitable outcry that would arise in the West.
“All over Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, the NKVD and SMERSH stretched their enormous resources to cauterize resistance. Soviet propaganda had tended for ideological reasons to exaggerate the role played by partisan and ‘people’s’ armies in defeating Nazism, and they clearly were now taking no chances. Suspect elements of occupied countries were dispatched in an unceasing shuttle of trainloads to the GULAG camps, which continued to underpin Soviet economic production until after Stalin’s death.
“About five and a quarter million Soviet citizens were recovered from Western and Central Europe. All had to be elaborately screened, after which the majority were assigned to forced labour in GULAG camps and elsewhere. At the same time deportations from the Caucasus, the Crimea, the Ukraine, the Baltic States and other regions of the USSR continued unabated. As if this were not enough, the hard-pressed NKVD apparatus had to absorb millions of Germans, Japanese, Romanian and Hungarian prisoners-of-war.
“The eight years between VE Day and Stalin’s death saw the dictator become increasingly jealous, vengeful and vindictive. Fear of the Soviet and Soviet-dominated people, mistrust of the power of the United States, apprehension at the onset of old age with all its dangerous frailties, and recurring bouts of paranoiac suspicion concurred to cause him to double and redouble precautions deemed necessary for his survival and that of the regime.
“Danger loomed everywhere. The USSR was sealed in a quarantine more hermetic even than before the war. The tentacles of the NKVD uncoiled to crush incipient dissent even before its practitioners were aware of their own intentions. Jews, heretical biologists, bourgeois composers, critics of Lysenko’s eccentric genetic theories, supporters of Marr’s still odder philological speculations… all, all were engaged in conspiracies so dark that only the Leader could penetrate the Arcanum… But Stalin was not mad, not even at the end when death interrupted the unfolding of the notorious ‘doctors’ plot’. As Adam Ulam writes, ‘ the madness lay in the system that gave absolute power to one man and allowed him to appease every suspicion and whim with blood.’ His formative years had been spent in an entirely conspiratorial atmosphere. Roman Malinovsky, one of Lenin’s ablest colleagues, had proved to be a Tsarist spy. And now NKVD records contained the names of innumerable highly-placed men and women in capitalist countries who had outwitted the formidable British and American security services in order to betray their class and country. As Stalin chuckled at the blindness of his enemies, the uncomfortable corollary must have recurred as frequently: how many of his people were secreted leagued with ‘the gentlemen from the Thames’? What if one of his closest cronies – Molotov, Mikoyan or Voroshilov – for example – were an English spy of assassin?
“It is clear that the Soviet Union for internal reasons sought to put a distance between itself and the West. The absurd and cruel policy of refusing to allow Soviet war brides of US and British servicemen to leave the country betrayed the extent of Stalin’s fears. War had stretched the resources of the police-state to their limits – limits now being tested further by the herculean task of reimposing totalitarian controls within the USSR, and extending them to the conquered territories beyond. The military power of the Western Allies was daunting enough, but the danger to Soviet morale seemed still greater.”⁴⁴
Even without the western threat (although in truth, the West’s stance was defensive), Soviet morale was low enough. In spite of stripping Eastern and Central Europe of vast resources – reparations far greater than had been agreed at Yalta – the country was still desperately poor. What resources there were were spent on the army, the secret services and building the atom bomb, while millions starved – quietly and without protest. Only in the concentration camps was there a measure of protest! There Christians of many kinds together with writers like Solzhenitsyn (who was imprisoned for criticizing Stalin in 1945) nurtured their internal freedom in conditions of total slavery, where they had nothing but their chains to lose.
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And yet, as Martin Gilbert writes, “an element of lawlessness also perturbed the apparently settled routine of Soviet life. In 1946 Stalin was told that the security police had arrested 10, 563 pupils who had run away form Factory Training Schools, as well as from trade and railway schools. According to a report from the Minister of the Interior, S.N. Kruglov, ‘Many crimes had been committed, including robbery and gangsterism’, by students from the schools. Kruglov also gave Stalin the reason. ‘The living conditions in the schools are unsatisfactory,’ he explained. ‘They are unsanitary and cold, and often without electric light.’
“It was not only the discipline of trainees that Stalin sought to tighten. Disciplining the intelligentsia was another task that he set himself. The instrument of his will was A.A. Zhdanov, his lieutenant on the ideological front, who called a special conference of writers, artists and composers – including Shostakovich, Prokofiev, and Khatchaturian – to warn them of the folly of independent thought, in music as much as in writing and art. The Soviet Writers’ Union met with Stalin’s particular anger for what he saw as repeated attempts at independent expression of opinion. The poet Anna Akhmatova was among those expelled from the Union in 1946. Such expulsion meant an end to the right to publish – a writer’s means of livelihood.”⁴⁵
He also began to tighten his grip on the Jews. In January, 1948 he ordered the murder in a staged car accident of Solomon Mikhoels, the famous Jewish actor.⁴⁶ Then came the famous “Doctor’s Plot”, which was still obsessing Staling at the time of his death.
In February, 1948, “the Central Committee of the Communist Party issued a decree on music, accusing Shostakovich, Prokofiev and Khachaturian of ‘losing touch with the masses’ and of falling victims to ‘decadent bourgeois influences’. The three made an immediate confession of their ‘errors’ and promised to mend their ways – and amend their music – in future. Newspapers also fell under the displeasure of the most rigorous ideological scrutiny. The satirical magazine Krokodil was censured by the Central Committee for its ‘lack of militancy’ in portraying the evil ways of capitalism. The Academy of Social Sciences, which had been established after the war, was reorganized to provide a more rigorous ideological training for Party and State officials.
“With Stalin’s personal sanction, a ferocious newspaper campaign was launched against two declared enemies of Soviet Communism, ‘bourgeois nationalism’ and the ‘survival of religious prejudice’. Some indication of how deeply religious feeling must have survived after thirty-one years of Communist rule was seen in the calls in Pravda for a more vigorous anti-religious propaganda…”⁴⁷
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In Eastern Europe Stalin controlled everything through the KGB. Christopher Andrew and Vasily Mitrokhin write: “Communist-controlled security services, set up in the image of the KGB and overseen – except in Yugoslavia and Albania – by Soviet ‘advisers’, supervised the transition to so-called ‘people’s democracies’. Political development in most east European states followed the same basic pattern. Coalition governments with significant numbers of non-Communist ministers, but with the newly founded security services and the other main levers of power in Communist hands, were established immediately after German forces had been driven out. Following intervals ranging from a few months to three years, these governments were replaced by bogus, Communist-run coalitions which paved the way for Stalinist one-party states taking their lead from Moscow.
“The German Communist leader Walter Ulbricht announced to his inner circle on his return to Berlin from exile in Moscow on 30 April 1945: ‘It’s got to look democratic, but we must have everything under our control.’ Because a democratic façade had to be preserved throughout Eastern Europe, the open use of force to exclude non-Communist Parties from power had, as far as possible, to be avoided. Instead, the new security services took the lead in intimidation behind the scenes, using what became known in Hungary as ‘salami tactics’ – slicing off one layer of opposition after another. Finally, the one-party people’s democracies, purged of all visible dissent, were legitimized by huge and fraudulent Communist majorities in elections rigged by the security services.
“During the early years of the Soviet Bloc, Soviet advisers kept the new security services on a tight rein. The witch-hunts and show trials designed to eliminate mostly imaginary supporters of Tito and Zionism from the leadership of the ruling Communist Parties of eastern Europe were orchestrated from Moscow. One of the alleged accomplices of the Hungarian Minister of the Interior, László Rajk, in the non-existent Titoist plot for which Rajk was executed in 1949, noted how, during his interrogation, officers of the Hungarian security service ‘smiled a flattering, servile smile when the Russians spoke to them’ and ‘reacted to the most witless jokes of the [MGB] officers with obsequious trumpetings of immoderate laughter’.”⁴⁸