Encyclopedia of the dead

VLADIMIR TISMANEANU

Anne Applebaum

IRON CURTAIN

The crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-56

614pp. Allen Lane. £25.

978 0 713 99868 9

US: Doubleday. $35.

978 0 385 515696

What do we now know about the Stalinization of Eastern Europe? Were the regimes imposed by Joseph Stalin on those nations merely artificial constructs, whimsical political and economic improvisations, or were they considered efforts to bring about fundamental change in society, culture and even the human condition in the light of ideological precepts, in other words to mimic the Soviet precedent down to the minutest detail? In her introduction to Iron Curtain: The crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-56, the journalist and historian Anne Applebaum spells out her own perspective and purpose: '''Totalitarianism' remains a useful and necessary empirical description. It is long overdue for a revival". Her thorough investigation leaves no doubt that what Stalin's underlings wanted to build in East-Central Europe was indeed totalitarianism. In the end, they failed, but initially totalitarian intentions and terrorist practices were palpably present. Totalitarianism in that region was a political, economic and cultural reality that millions lived through. Winston Churchill's speech of 1946 in Fulton, Missouri, announcing the descent of the Iron Curtain from the Baltic to the Adriatic, was not the irresponsible provocation claimed by some revisionist historians, who hold Churchill and the West responsible for unleashing the Cold War; rather, it was a rational denunciation of Stalin's plans to bring the Communists to power in the Soviet-occupied countries.

Applebaum, the author of an acclaimed history of the Gulag, brings genuine expertise to her subject and writes compellingly. We have long known the names of the Stalinist leaders, but their biographies have remained sketchy and disembodied. On the basis of fresh archival material and her own interviews, Applebaum offers insight into the political and psychological backgrounds of such men as Hungary's Matyas Rakosi, a sadistic fanatic, Poland's Boleslaw Bierut, an NKVD officer, and East Germany's Walter Ulbricht, a morose and shockingly narrow-minded bureaucrat. She captures the tensions within the nomenklatura, the permanent bitter and often murderous rivalries between Stalin's minions. As Applebaum shows, this intensively secretive world was deeply damaged in December 1953 by the defection to the West of Colonel Joef Swiatlo, a notorious secret police officer who exposed, via Radio Free Europe, the thuggish behavior of his former comrades.

Were there any real differences between these regimes? Certainly, efforts were made to engage in home-grown experiments, but these were nipped in the bud by Bolshevik bureaucrats. This was the sad fate of the People's Colleges in Hungary, one of the spontaneous forms of political mobilization that emerged as an expression of revolutionary romanticism, devoid of party control. The passions and illusions of this movement were brilliantly evoked by Miklos Jancso  in his film Fényes Srelek (Bright Winds, 1968), a masterpiece of East European cinema. As Applebaum writes, "the People's Colleges were an institution unknown to Marx, Lenin, and Stalin, and nothing like them existed in the Soviet Union. And so they were destroyed, along with so many other groups which Marx, Lenin and Stalin never mentioned".

Applebaum's analysis demonstrates the seminal role of several agencies in the making of totalitarian regimes in Central Europe: the Communist party apparatus, the ideologues, and the secret police. This has long been known, of course, but Iron Curtain provides the evidence required to show the all embracing control that revisionist critics of the totalitarian paradigm have questioned. To these key elements are added the efforts fully to control communications, culture and youth activities, to obliterate historical memory and to construct a surreal reality of socialist enthusiasm and complete submission to the regime.

In particular, Applebaum gives the most complete analysis to date of the crucial role of radio during the days of the Communist takeovers. When the Soviet Army made its final attack on Berlin, the radio tower was deliberately spared. Immediately after the seizure of Germany's capital, Communist cadres took it over to establish the new Ministry of Truth. Very few broadcasters were fired, and Nazi propaganda was instantly replaced by Communist indoctrination. As an undergraduate at Yale in the early 1980s, Applebaum took a fascinating course with the former East German Communist, Wolfgang Leonhard, author of the celebrated memoir Die Revolution entlasst ihre Kinder (Child of the Revolution, published in 1957). Leonhard, who helped establish full Communist control over the radio, became a character in Applebaum's story.

The dual political and cultural monopoly exerted by the Party was not an illusion, but a terrible and ubiquitous fact of life. Communist regimes were not solely interested in controlling material conditions; even more importantly, they wanted to penetrate and direct human minds. Applebaum illustrates the point with the case of the East German writer Christa Wolf who, in the 1950s, thought it her revolutionary duty to serve as an informer for the Stasi. In the 1980s, she became a critic of bureaucracy, but until her death remained loyal to the GDR as a political and moral project.

One of Applebaum's best chapters deals with "reluctant collaborators", revealing the visible and invisible methods used by the rulers to regiment society and emasculate critical thinking. The official anthem of the SED (the East German Communist Party) is a salient example. Titled "Die Partei hat immer Recht" ("The Party is Always Right"), it codified the presumed infallibility of the leaders and the quasi-mystical devotion due to the transcendent entity known as the Party.

The music and the text were written by Louis Furnberg, a Jewish, Czech-German intellectual who tried to ingratiate himself with his comrades during investigations that led to a major show trial (known as the Shinsky Trial) in 1952. He wanted to convince them, and perhaps himself, that whatever the Party did and decided was necessarily correct. Such methods were undeniably effective. Markus Wolf, Leonhard's close friend at the Comintem school in Moscow and for decades East Germany's spymaster, remained fully attached to the mystique of the Party until the very end of the GDR.

Applebaum successfully captures the interplay between large historical forces and the destinies of individuals. Karol Modzelewski, for example, is the son of a Russian officer executed during the Great Terror and of a Polish Communist mother. He was adopted by his mother's second husband, Zygmunt Modzelewski, a Jewish member of the Communist Party's Politburo in Poland. Describing private discussions at home in the early 1950s, the period of high Stalinism, he told Applebaum about the doubts expressed by his father regarding the official charges against old comrades. The indoctrinated teenager was shocked. Later, he became a noted historian and, in 1964, co-authored with Jacek Kuron the "Open Letter" to the leaders of the Polish United Workers Party, one of the first major documents of Central European dissent.

The exploration of the fate of psychoanalysts in Stalinist Hungary provides another fascinating story. Many of Freud's disciples in Budapest were left-leaning intellectuals. Most of them were Jewish. Some saw convergence between the revolutionary goals of the regime and the emancipatory aims of their own discipline. When the policies carried out by Rakosi and his clique hardened, this hope faded. One of the analysts was Lili Hajdu. In 1956 her son, Miklos Gimes, a member of Imre Nagy's inner circle, was involved in the anti-totalitarian revolution. In June 1958, this Marxist idealist was tried and hanged, together with Nagy, whom he refused to betray, as a "counter-revolutionary". His mother committed suicide. To borrow the title of a magnificent book by the Yugoslav writer Danilo Kis, Iron Curtain is in many respects an encyclopedia of the dead. There are many smashed destinies here: victims and victimizers, heroes and cowards, martyrs and bystanders, all caught in the maelstrom unleashed by the "bright winds".  Aapplebaum also addresses the relationship between Jews and Communism in East- Central Europe. The myth of "Zydokomuna" (the fantasy that Jews are fanatical revolutionary conspirators collectively responsible for the Communist atrocities) still holds numerous supporters in that region. In fact, as Applebaum demonstrates, there was never a Jewish predominance among secret police cadres. Although Jewish, Rakosi and his second-in-command Erno Gero, went out of their way to counter any popular perceptions of the Communists as somehow "alien". They were themselves active promoters of the "Magyarization" of the security apparatus.

After Stalin's death, the totalitarian edifice started to crumble. Former Stalinist intellectuals grew disenchanted, among them the Polish writer Adam Wazyk, whose "Poernat dla doroslych" (Poem for Adults) of 1955 exposed the degradation of human life under state socialism. As Applebaum observes, Nowa Huta, the first city in Poland to be built without a church, became in subsequent years the centre of anti-Communist ferment. The subjects of the totalitarian experiment rebelled against the self-appointed custodians of human happiness, culminating in the upheavals of 1956 in Poland and Hungary, with which this book ends.

An outstanding comparative history of the countries of East-Central Europe, Iron Curtain is seriously marred only by the virtual absence from its narrative of South-Eastern Europe: After all, the man largely responsible for designing Soviet plans for the region was the Bulgarian Communist Georgi Dimitrov, the Comintern's general secretary. The Sovietization of Bulgaria and Romania, started much earlier than in Hungary and Czechoslovakia. Strategies for building "people's democracies" were first tested in Sofia and Bucharest, and only later in ( Prague, Warsaw, Budapest and East Berlin. In a moving chapter, Applebaum describes the mass deportations of Germans and Ukrainians from post-war Poland and of Germans from Czechoslovakia. She shows that Czechoslovakia's pro-Western democratic President, Edvard Benes, was also a single-minded proponent of ethnic "purification" and forced demographic resettlement. By contrast, she merely mentions the Romanian deportation of hundreds of thousands of ethnic Germans to Soviet labor camps (the source, incidentally, for Herta Muller's stories of trauma and memory). An expanded edition of Iron Curtain that includes the Stalinist experiments of South-Eastern Europe could well become the definitive history of that bloody and turbulent period for the entire Soviet bloc.

TLS DECEMBER 7 2012