An interview with Anne Applebaum about her new book, The Crushing of Eastern Europe
In a long-awaited history due to be published this week, journalist and author Anne Applebaum draws on firsthand accounts and previously unpublished archival material to describe how the Kremlin established its hegemony over Eastern Europe at the end of World War II. The book, titled Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-56, explores the gutting of local institutions and the murders, terror campaigns, and tactical maneuvering that allowed Moscow to establish a system of control that would last for decades to come. I spoke with, Applebaum, whose previous book, a history of the Soviet Gulag, won the Pulitzer Prize.
Your book concentrates on three countries -- East Germany, Hungary, and Poland. What made you choose them in particular?I chose those three precisely because they are
so different and they just had extremely different experiences of war.
Germany obviously was Nazi Germany, Hungary had been a country somewhat
in-between, a sometimes happy, sometimes unhappy ally of Hitler, and of
course Poland was an ally and very actively [involved in the fight
against Hitler.]
So therefore there were three countries with different recent histories
and what interested me was the fact that despite those cultural
differences, despite the linguistic differences, despite the recent
political history, by about the year 1950 if you'd looked in at this
region from the outside, they would have all appeared very similar.
In the preface, you state that one of the purposes of
the book it is to study the history of totalitarian countries and the
methods employed by dictators to suppress populations. What can be
learned from the history of the Soviet influence in Eastern Europe?
What you learn from studying the period is several
things. One is how well prepared Stalin was before he got there. He had
for example prepared police forces, secret police forces for each of the
countries before he arrived in those countries. Most notably in Poland
he begins recruiting policemen from the year 1939. Of course we've
always known that he prepared and recruited, and organized communist
parties from the time of the Bolshevik Revolution onwards.
You also see which kind of institutions the Soviet Union was most
interested in. For example, everywhere that the Red Army went, one of
the first things they did was take over the radio station. They believed
very much in propaganda, in the power of propaganda and they believed
that if they just could reach the masses by what was then the most
efficient means possible, namely the radio, then they would be able to
convince them and then they would be able to take and hold power.
You also learn about some of their obsessions, some of the things they
were concerned about. From the earliest days of the Soviet Union, Soviet
representatives in the region were very interested in what we now call
civil society. So they were very interested in self-organized groups.
That means both political parties, it means soccer clubs, it means chess
clubs. Self-organized groups of all kinds were a target of Soviet
interest and in some cases repressed from the very beginning.
Despite the Soviet Union's elaborate preparations to
expand its influence in Eastern Europe, you write that there was a great
variety of political parties, private ownership, and free media left to
thrive at the beginning. So was the Soviet Union's initial occupation
plan far from ideal?
They didn't plan perfectly. They planned
strategically. And they didn't know how long it would take to occupy
these countries or to change their political systems, and in fact we
have some evidence that they thought it might take a very long time --
20 years or 30 years before Europe is communist.
They also thought from the beginning that it was only a matter of time
before they and their ideas were popular. So one of the reasons they
held elections -- and there were some free elections in the region,
particularly in Hungary and in East Germany, also in Czechoslovakia very
early -- is because they thought they would win. They thought, you
know, Marx told us that first there will be a bourgeois revolution, then
there will be a communist revolution, and sooner or later the workers
will have the consciousness, they will come to consciousness themselves
as the moving forces of history and they will understand that communism
is the way to go and they'll vote us into power.
And they indeed were very stunned in some cases when it didn't happen. I
mean, one of the reasons for the big reversal when they cut off this
early evidence of democracy was that they were losing. They lost those
early elections and they realized they were going to lose them even more
in the next round and they decided to stop holding them.
According to your book, Stalin was pursuing more than ideology
in Eastern Europe. He also had a geopolitical and even a mercantile
agenda.
There were many mercantile interests on Stalin's
part. I mean, essentially it is the deportation of German factories. The
Soviet Union literally occupied, packed up, and shipped out of Eastern
Germany, out of much of Hungary and indeed much of Poland, which was not
well known at the time, factories, train tracks, horses, and cattle.
All kinds of material goods were taken out of those countries and sent
to the Soviet Union.
There is one argument I don't really go into in my book that one of the
reasons for the postwar success of the Soviet Union was that it occupied
and took over the industrial production of these countries. It itself
was very weak after the war and there were even famines in the Soviet
Union after the war, as we know.
Did Stalin intend to create some sort of a buffer zone
between the U.S.S.R. and the West by occupying Eastern Europe out of
fear that the West might eventually attack the Soviet Union?
The Soviet Union really didn't think like that. The
people who occupied Eastern Europe and the people who collaborated with
the Soviet Union weren't thinking in those terms. The generals and the
NKVD officers who came into the region were thinking they were pushing
the boundaries of the socialist revolution and that it was only a matter
of time before they moved from Eastern Europe to Western Europe.
You write that the Soviet Union started ethnic cleansing in
Eastern Europe soon after its occupation. Who was the primary victim and
what were the motives behind the picking of particular ethnic groups
for cleansing?
What the Soviet Union was interested in after the
war was ethnic cleansing in the purest sense, that is, they were
creating homogenous states. The primary victims and the first victims of
this process were the Germans. It had been agreed at Potsdam that the
Germans would be removed from these territories, as many were mixed
ethnic territories for hundreds of years. That meant that many millions
of Germans physically had to be removed and replaced by Poles or [in]
the Sudetenland replaced by Czechs and Slovaks.
The process of ethnic cleansing was much more elaborate than we often
now remember. Many millions of people had to be put on trains and
shipped out of the country and I should stress two things about it: one
is that the communist parties themselves in many of these countries ran
this process and the second is that it was extremely popular. The
deportation of the Germans was considered a great achievement of the
communist parties and was thought as such at the time, even though it
was of course brutal and cruel and in many cases unfair. Germans who had
worked on behalf of the Polish resistance were deported alongside
Germans who had been Nazis.
The other great deportation -- one of the other great deportations of
the region -- was essentially the swap of Poles and Ukrainians. When the
Polish border was moved West, that left quite a number of Poles in the
Soviet Union, it also left a number of Ukrainians in what had been
Poland and there was a decision to swap them, to send one for the other.
And this was also not an easy process, because many of those people had
lived in their villages for centuries and they were uninclined to go.
And so at certain points force was used, threats were used, at one point
there was in effect an open war between Poles and Ukrainians in those
eastern regions, something that's not known very well in the rest of the
world.
Despite the repressions, the Soviet Union found allies
in Eastern Europe who were eager to collaborate and actively took part
in the violence themselves. Who were these people? Did they harbor
political convictions or were they simple opportunists who just strove
to gain power through cooperation with Moscow?
I think they were people who were both. They were
both opportunists and they were people who had convictions. I mean,
remember that because people had convictions .... Having convictions
doesn't make you a moral person or a good person, I mean, the Nazis also
had convictions, they were convinced that their system was right. So
there were many people who were convinced that this way of thinking was
correct and had been scientifically proven by Marx. So many of them were
ideologues and at the same time they were opportunists, they saw that
if they hewed to the party line and if they remained close to Moscow
they would remain in power.
This post appears courtesy of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.
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