The Power of Freedom. Mart Laar

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СКАЧАТЬ under gruesome conditions. In 1950, the number of prisoners in such camps amounted to 32,638 men and women. Zbigniew Brzezinski identified 199 in Hungary and 97 in Poland. Many Central and Eastern European people were arrested by the Soviet authorities, interrogated, sentenced in the Soviet Union and sent to the GULAG. Some Central and Eastern European countries had their own ‘Siberia’ as well: the Danube-Black Sea Canal project in Romania employed prisoners and deported persons; in Poland, special units made up of political prisoners mined the most deadly coal shafts in Silesia; in Czechoslovakia, prisoners were sent to work in uranium mines – in December 1953, the number of people working there reached 16,100.64

      Another typical feature of Stalinism were the purges of the Communist parties in the conquered countries; the most violent of these took place in Bulgaria, Hungary and Czechoslovakia. According to Brzezinski, an average of one out of every four party members was purged in each of the East European parties.65 In Bulgaria, for example, nearly 100,00 °Communist Party members were under investigation between 1948 and 1953; many were imprisoned and some executed. Such purges were also organised in the Soviet Union’s ‘new territories’. In Estonia, a campaign was launched against the ‘bourgeois nationalists’ in 1950-1951; a number of leading Estonian Communists were removed from their positions and several of them were arrested and sent to the Siberian prison camps. The campaign also hit cultural circles. Most of the members of the Academy of Sciences were dismissed and creative unions underwent serious ‘clean-ups’. Repression was so severe that almost no new Estonian literature appeared from 1950 to 1952.66

      In addition to rank-and-file member purges, prominent Communists were also purged and some of them were subjected to public show trials. One of Stalin’s trustees in the region, the Bulgarian leader Gheorghi Dimitrov, announced, ‘it doesn’t matter what someone’s services and merits might have been in the past. We shall expel from the party and punish anyone who deserves it, no matter who he might have been once upon a time.’ The show trials were mostly instigated and sometimes orchestrated by the Kremlin or even Stalin himself, as they had been in the earlier Moscow Trials. These high-ranking party show trials included those of Koçi Xoxe in Albania and Traicho Kostov in Bulgaria, who were purged, arrested and executed. In Romania, Lucreţiu Pătrăşcanu, Ana Pauker and Vasile Luca were arrested and Pătrăşcanu later executed. Stalin’s NKVD emissary coordinated with the Hungarian General Secretary Mátyás Rákosi in order to determine how the show trial of the Hungarian Foreign Minister László Rajk, who was later executed, should play out. The Rajk trials led Moscow to warn Czechoslovakia’s parties that enemy agents had penetrated high into the party ranks and when the puzzled Czech Communist leaders Rudolf Slánský and Klement Gottwald enquired as to what they could do, Stalin’s NKVD agents arrived to help prepare trials. The Czechoslovakian party subsequently arrested Slánský himself, Vladimír Clementis, Ladislav Novomeský and Gustáv Husák. Slánský and eleven others were convicted of being ‘Trotskyist-Zionist-Titoist-bourgeois-nationalist traitors’ in one series of show trials, after which they were executed and their ashes mixed with material being used to fill roads on the outskirts of Prague. After the trials, the property of the victims was sold off cheaply to surviving prominent individuals; the wife of a future leader of the party, Antonín Novotný, bought Clementis’ china and bedclothes. The Soviets generally directed show trial methods throughout the Eastern Bloc, including a procedure whereby any means could be used to extract confessions and evidence from leading witnesses, including threats to torture the witnesses’ wives and children. Generally, the higher the rank of the party member, the harsher the torture that was inflicted upon him. In the case of the show trial of the Hungarian Interior Minister János Kádár, who one year earlier had attempted to force a confession out of Rajk in his show trial, he was badly beaten and then ‘two henchmen pried Kádár’s teeth apart, and the colonel, negligently, as if this were the most natural thing in the world, urinated into his mouth’. As in Moscow in 1937, the trials were ‘shows’, with each participant having to learn a script and conduct repeated rehearsals before the performance. In the Slánský trial, when the judge skipped one of the scripted questions, the better-rehearsed Slánský answered the one which should have been asked. Some years earlier, most of the people now on trial had themselves eliminated their political opponents and tortured and killed people; they therefore knew exactly what awaited them. This made them ready to play their ‘roles’ in the trials. The only exception was the popular Bulgarian Communist, Kostov, who retracted his confession and refused to admit his guilt. The public broadcast went silent and the trial was finished without Kostov. In Poland, Romania and the GDR, where the Communist parties were less well established, the purges were less severe.67

      Stalin used Yugoslavia, where the local Communists had split with Moscow and gone their own way, as an excuse for the purges. Even though some tensions were felt between Moscow and the independent-minded Yugoslavian partisan leaders during the initial years of the Second World War, Tito was a good pupil of Stalin’s in the immediate aftermath of the Communist takeover. The Soviets took the Yugoslavian economy under control, pressing Yugoslavia to sell goods to the Soviet Union at low prices which might, in an open market, have fetched high prices in hard currencies. Moscow, in its assumption of economic and cultural dominance, and in its efforts to infiltrate its agents into the Yugoslavian Communist Party, assumed that it should treat Yugoslavia no differently from the other satellite countries.68 It was wrong. The Yugoslavian leaders felt themselves to be strong; they did not need the Soviet Union to stay in power and were not ready to buckle to Soviet authority. Soviet-Yugoslavian relations deteriorated quickly and in 1948, the Yugoslavian Communist Party was expelled from the Cominform. Stalin ordered his satellite countries to start preparations for the military invasion of Yugoslavia. The assumption in Moscow was that once it was known that he had lost Soviet approval, Tito would collapse; ‘I will shake my little finger and there will be no more Tito,’ Stalin remarked. However, as Khrushchev was reported to have said afterwards, ‘Stalin could shake his finger or any other part of his anatomy he liked, but it made no difference to Tito.’ Tito quickly eradicated any Soviet-supported opposition in his party, arresting and executing many of them and interning thousands of people in a fearsome concentration camp established on the island of Goli Otok. Tito turned for help to Western powers who were immediately ready to include Yugoslavia in their assistance programmes. As Stalin’s attempts to bring down Tito repeatedly ended in failure, the Soviet-Yugoslavia split became a heavy blow to Stalin’s authority.69

      In order to combat the Western conspiracy and ‘Titoism’, all spheres of public and, as far as was possible, individual life had to be brought under the control of the Communist party and the secret police. Civic and political liberties were abolished, church and religion suppressed. For the Communists, the Church was one of the major obstacles to the imposition of the Soviet model and so its influence had to be eradicated.70 Some churches were actually more equal than others, in particular the Russian Orthodox Church that had been purged by Stalin decades earlier and brought under absolute control. At the same time, the most active measures were taken against the Uniate Church and Constantinople Orthodox churches. The Uniate Church was totally abolished in Ukraine and suppressed with particular force in Romania. Any priests or bishops who refused to sign their acceptance of a merger with the Orthodox Church were arrested and some of them were gunned down.71 In 1948, the Communist regime passed a law pushing for the dissolution of the Eastern-Rite Catholic Church. In Bulgaria, the first purge of the Orthodox Church came in 1948, when the head of the church was forced to retire into ‘voluntary exile’. In 1949, representatives of the Evangelist Church were sentenced to life imprisonment, while in 1952, several trials were held against ‘agents from the Vatican’, with many Catholic priests being imprisoned and four of them executed.72

      The Catholic Church was also actively persecuted in Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary. The Communists’ strategy was simple: first, СКАЧАТЬ