Eastern Bloc politics
Eastern Bloc politics followed the Red Army's occupation of much of Central and Eastern Europe at the end of World War II and the Soviet Union's installation of Soviet-controlled Marxist-Leninist regimes in the Eastern Bloc through a process of bloc politics and repression. The resulting regimes contained vestiges of representative democracy to initially conceal the process.
Once in power, each country's Soviet-controlled Communist Party took permanent control of the administration, political organs, police, societal organizations and economic structures to ensure that no effective opposition could arise and to control socioeconomic and political life therein. Party and social purges were employed along with the extensive use of secret police organizations modeled on the Soviet KGB to monitor and control local populations. While multiple political parties continued to nominally exist in some countries, they were all subordinated to the government, and supported government policies. While elections continued to be held, voters were usually presented with a single candidate. The national parliaments composed of representatives elected in this manner met infrequently and always approved government proposals.
Background
Creation of the Eastern Bloc
In 1922, the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, the Ukrainian SSR, the Byelorussian SSR and the Transcaucasian SFSR, approved the Treaty of Creation of the USSR and the Declaration of the Creation of the USSR, forming the Soviet Union. At the end of World War II by mid-1945, all eastern and central European capitals were controlled by the Soviet Union. During the final stages of the war, the Soviet Union began the creation of the Eastern Bloc by directly annexing several countries as Soviet Socialist Republics that were originally effectively ceded to it by Nazi Germany in the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. Eastern Poland, eastern Finland, the Baltics, Bukovina, and Bessarabia, now called Moldova, were forcibly incorporated into the Soviet Union. The eastern Polish territories remain part of Ukraine and Belarus as of the early 21st century.Red Army and NKVD personnel began to impose the communist system in 1939. They made extensive use of local communists, socialists, and their collaborators to wage a campaign of mass violence and mass deportations to camps in order to "Sovietize" the areas under their occupation. The Soviet invasion of these areas in 1939 created local allies and produced NKVD officers experienced in imposing the communist system. The Soviet Union began planning the transformation of Eastern Europe even before the 1941 Nazi invasion of the USSR. There is evidence that the USSR did not expect to create a communist bloc quickly or easily. Ivan Maiskii, Soviet foreign minister under Stalin, wrote in 1944 that all European nations would eventually become communist states but only after a period of three to four decades.
Central and Eastern European communist leaders generally participated in "national front" coalitions during the 1930s to oppose Nazi expansion. These coalitions were modeled upon those of Spain and France. Historian Tony Judt described the civil war in Spain as “a dry run for the seizure of power in Eastern Europe after 1945.”
These included Eastern Poland, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, part of eastern Finland and northeastern Romania. By 1945, these additional annexed countries totaled approximately 180,000 additional square miles, or slightly more than the area of West Germany, East Germany and Austria combined.
Other states were converted into Soviet Satellite states, such as the People's Republic of Poland, the People's Republic of Bulgaria, the People's Republic of Hungary, the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, the People's Republic of Romania, the People's Republic of Albania, and later the German Democratic Republic from the Soviet zone of German occupation. The Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia was also considered part of the Bloc, though a Tito-Stalin split occurred in 1948
Conditions in the Eastern Bloc
Throughout the Eastern Bloc, both in the Soviet Socialist Republic and the rest of the Bloc, Russia was given prominence, and referred to as the naibolee vydajuščajasja nacija and the rukovodjaščij narod. The Soviets encouraged the worship of everything Russian and the reproduction of their own Communist structural hierarchies in each of the Bloc states.The defining characteristic of communism implemented in the Eastern Bloc was the unique symbiosis of the state with society and the economy, resulting in politics and economics losing their distinctive features as autonomous and distinguishable spheres. While over 15 million Eastern Bloc residents migrated westward from 1945 to 1949, emigration was effectively halted in the early 1950s, with the Soviet approach to controlling national movement emulated by most of the rest of the Eastern Bloc. The Soviets mandated expropriation and etatization of private property.
The Soviet-style "replica regimes" that arose in the Bloc not only reproduced Soviet command economies, but also adopted the brutal methods employed by Joseph Stalin and Soviet secret police to suppress real and potential opposition. Furthermore, the Eastern Bloc experienced economic mis-development by central planners resulting in those countries following a path of extensive rather than intensive development, and lagged far behind their western European counterparts in per capita Gross Domestic Product. In addition, media in the Eastern Bloc served as an organ of the state, completely reliant on and subservient to the communist party. The state-owned radio and television organizations while print media was usually owned by political organizations, mostly by the ruling communist party.
Seizing control
Early history
The initial issue arising in countries occupied by the Red Army in 1944 and 1945 was the manner in which to transform occupation power into control over domestic development. At first, western countries' willingness to support "antifascist" action and for "democratization" with a socialist element helped Soviet efforts to permit communists in their respective countries to initiate a process of gradual almost imperceptibly slow Sovietization. Because communists were relatively small minorities in all countries but Czechoslovakia, they were initially instructed to form coalitions in their respective countries.At the war's end, concealment of the Kremlin's role was considered crucial to neutralize resistance and to make the regimes appear not only autochthonous, but also to resemble "bourgeois democracies". Joseph Stalin had already effectively sealed off outside access to the Soviet Union since 1935, effectively permitting no foreign travel inside the Soviet Union such that outsiders did not know of the political processes that had taken place therein. During this period, and even for 25 years after Stalin's death, the few diplomats and foreign correspondents permitted inside the Soviet Union were usually restricted to within a few miles of Moscow, their phones were tapped, their residences were restricted to foreigner-only locations and they were constantly followed by Soviet authorities. Dissenters who approached such foreigners were arrested. For many years after World War II, even the best informed foreigners did not know the number of arrested or executed Soviet citizens, or how poorly the Soviet economy had performed.
In the other countries of the Bloc, Stalin stated that the Eastern European version of democracy was a mere modification of western "bourgeois democracy." Consequently, Soviet takeover of control at the outset generally followed a three-stage "bloc politics" process: a general coalition of left-wing, antifascist forces; a bogus coalition in which communists neutralized those in other parties not willing to accept communist supremacy; and complete communist domination, frequently exercised in a new party formed by the fusion of communist and other leftist groups. At the same time, Soviet advisers were placed in government institutions, with higher concentrations in the army and the police, while trade agreements gave the USSR a preponderant influence in local economies. The result of the process was that, from 1944 to 1948 in the Eastern Bloc, political parties, organizations, voluntary associations and territorial communities were covertly steered to gradually incapacitate, dissolve, and spend themselves by their own efforts in various processes.
Socioeconomic reforms
Stalin felt that socioeconomic transformation was indispensable to establish Soviet control, reflecting the Marxist-Leninist view that material bases—the distribution of the means of production—shaped social and political relations. This "sovietization" involved the gradual assimilation of local political, socioeconomic, and cultural patterns into the Soviet model while severing ties with “bourgeois” Western values and traditions. Moscow trained cadres were placed into crucial power positions to fulfill orders regarding sociopolitical transformation. Elimination of the bourgeoisie's social and financial power by expropriation of landed and industrial property was accorded absolute priority. These measures were publicly billed as reforms rather than socioeconomic transformations. Throughout the whole of eastern Europe, except for Czechoslovakia, organizations such as trade unions and associations representing various social, professional and other groups, were erected with only one organization for each category, with competition excluded. Those organizations were managed by communist cadres, though some diversity was permitted initially. Soviet and local concerns formed "joint stock companies" permitting Soviet officials to exercise direct control over important sections of the economy.Concealment
At first, the Soviet Union concealed its role, with the transformations appearing as a modification of western "bourgeois democracy." As one young communist was told in East Germany: "it's got to look democratic, but we must have everything in our control."With the initial exception of Czechoslovakia, activities by political parties had to adhere to "Bloc politics", with parties eventually having to accept membership in an "antifascist" "bloc" obliging them to act only in mutual "consensus". Moscow cadres in key positions would refuse via veto to provide consensus for opposed changes, while those who opposed communist proposed changes were accused of insubordination to Soviet authorities, frequently followed by harsh punishment. When such measures did not produce the desired effect, occupation officers would directly intervene. Accordingly, elections—which had been promised to the Western allies—did not offer a difference in policy choices.
Bloc politics eventually forced purported bourgeois politicians and parties to choose between unconditional political surrender and outright rejection. If they chose the former, they would alienate their followers and marginalize themselves, while the latter case led to defamation as deviators from the "anti-fascist democratic consensus" and "traitors" to the people, followed by ensuring isolation, prosecution, and liquidation.
Consequently, the bloc system permitted the Soviet Union to exercise Eastern Bloc domestic control indirectly. "Bourgeois" politicians willing to follow communist bloc leadership and to support socioeconomic reforms were recruited to further the illusion of classical democracy. Similar non-communist officials were put in place in some administration positions, while a reliable communist cadre worked behind the scenes to control the apparatus and decision-making process. Crucial departments such as those responsible for personnel, education, general police, secret police, and youth, were strictly communist run. From the outset, the multiparty system established by Soviet occupation authorities was planned to be temporary. Two kinds of alliances were envisaged: permanent "natural" alliances with related social forces such as peasants willing to submit to communist vanguard parties and temporary accords with bourgeois parties necessary for temporary objectives. Parties, such as Social Democrats, were seen as belonging to the permanent natural category, but would be eventually expected to undergo transformations. Moscow cadres distinguished "progressive forces" from "reactionary elements", and rendered both powerless through self-emasculation or future self-sacrifice. Such procedures were repeated continuously until communists had gained unlimited power, while only politicians who were unconditionally supportive of Soviet policy remained.
Political systems
"People's democracy"
Despite the initial institutional design of communism implemented by Joseph Stalin in the Eastern Bloc, subsequent development varied across countries. In satellite states, after peace treaties were initially concluded, opposition was essentially liquidated, fundamental steps toward socialism were enforced, and Kremlin leaders sought to strengthen control therein. While communism came to power in the Soviet Union following the Russian civil war, of some embarrassment to the ruling regimes was that, in the rest of the Eastern Bloc, it came to power with the occupation of the Red Army. What emerged is what Hungarian communist László Rajk called "a dictatorship of the proletariat without the Soviet form," a "people's democracy." The defining characteristic of communism implemented therein was the unique symbiosis of the state with society and the economy, resulting in politics and economics losing their distinctive features as autonomous and distinguishable spheres. Initially, Stalin directed systems that rejected Western institutional characteristics of market economies, democratic governance, and the rule of law subduing discretional intervention by the state. The resulting states aspired to total control of a political center backed by an extensive and active repressive apparatus, and a central justification of ostensibly Marxist-Leninist ideology.Vestiges of "bourgeois democracy"
Vestigial democratic institutions were never entirely destroyed, resulting in facade of representative institutions. Parliaments rubber-stamped decisions made by ruling parties. So little attention was paid to them that some of those serving in parliaments were actually dead and officials would sometimes openly state that they would seat members who had lost elections. Constitutions were promulgated but never enforced. Government institutions practiced democratic centralism, where subordinate organs of the party and state unconditionally supported the decisions of senior party leaders. Decisions of consequence were made by the ruling communist parties, which were not political parties in the western sense, but apparatuses for totalitarian control of the state and society. They did not represent sectional interests, they imposed them. Parliaments were elected, but their meetings occurred only a few days per year and they served to only create legitimacy for politburo decisions.Ruling parties
Non-Soviet Eastern Bloc Communist Parties held congresses every five years, not long after the Soviet Communist Party had held its congress, to elect central committees and endorse new party programs, though "emergency" congresses could be called by central committees. Attendance at party congresses was frequently given as a reward for long service. Parties also sometimes held national conferences to address specific issues.The Central Committees usually met in full, or plenary, sessions two to three times per year to elect members of the politburo or praesidium and the communist party "secretariat", which numbered 15-20 senior party individuals who each was in charge of a department of the party secretariat. These departments were either party "shadows" of the actual government departments they ended up governing or party specific institutions in charge of cadres or a party control commission that investigated any alleged infringements of party discipline.
The General Secretary or First Secretary of the Central Committee was the most powerful figure in each regime. He exercised his day-to-day authority through the politburo or presidium, which generally possessed 10-15 full members. During the Stalinist period, the head of the party also led the executive branch, with variations in the practice occurring after Stalin's death, though executive authority always resided in the party's highest organs. In Romania after the mid-1960s, no politburo existed and, instead, General Secretary Nicolae Ceauşescu nominated a small permanent executive committee from which he nominated a small permanent bureau consisting of himself, his wife, and four to five other members. In general, the longer the First or General Secretary was in office, the more powerful he became, and he could generally retain power as long as he remained healthy. The degree of leadership freedom varied, with Ceauşescu facing little debate, while Bulgaria's Todor Zhivkov could undertake actions such as forcing Bulgarian names on ethnic Turks without even discussing the matter.
The party over which the politburo held sway was not a mass party but, comporting with Leninist tradition, a smaller selective party of between three percent and fourteen percent of the country's population who had accepted total obedience. For example, a Polish communist described faith in the Polish United Workers' Party as that it "means that his faith in it is uncritical at every stage, no matter what the party is saying. It is a person with the ability to adapt his mentality and his conscience in such a way that he can unreservedly accept the dogma that the party is never wrong, even though it is wrong all the time." Entry usually required a period of probation. Those who secured membership in this selective party received considerable rewards, such as access to special lower priced shops with a greater selection of goods, special schools, holiday facilities, cinemas, homes, furniture, works of art, and official cars with special license plates so that police and others could identify these members from a distance. These members, also called nomenklatura, also obtained permission to travel abroad, which was rarely given to the general public. Envelopes containing banknotes, and sometimes foreign hard currency, were not infrequently passed out to certain party or politburo members. After the confiscation through nationalizations from prior owners following Soviet occupation, the party at first possessed considerable additional property and real estate to give members. All members possessed a party card or book in which were recorded attendance at meetings, service to the party, and any deviation from party conduct. Periodically, these cards would be inspected, frequently as a prelude to a culling or purge of those considered undesirable or insufficiently committed.
The Communist Party was at the center of the political system in the Eastern Bloc, with its leading role being absolute political rule with virtually no political discussion. Most of the parties in non-Soviet Eastern Bloc countries differed from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in that they were technically coalitions. Only in Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and Romania did the parties use the word "communist" in their name. The ruling parties in the Eastern Bloc included:
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While, in some states, other parties were allowed to exist, frequently their only substantial function was to legitimize the existence of a national front or some similar umbrella organization. The organization of the party was based on the "territorial-production" principle, meaning that the lowest level unit could be based either in an area or in a place of work. The next highest level was territorial, into districts, towns, regions and states. Each level had its own committees, bureau and secretariat. Purges and show trialsIn accordance with Soviet directives, "building communism" in the Eastern Bloc included liquidation of class enemies and constant vigilance against counterrevolutionaries, especially within the Communist parties themselves. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, more frequently after the campaign to route out "Titoists" after the 1948 Tito-Stalin split, protests occurred, with many of those taking part being workers, intellectuals, dissatisfied young men inducted into the peasantry as part of collectivizations and those who were originally most enthusiastic about Communist systems. In response, in Poland, the central committee held a "vigilance plenum" against nationalists. One of the methods of control involved several party purges between 1948 and 1953, including 90,000 purged in Bulgaria, 200,000 in Romania, 200,000 in Hungary, 300,000 in East Germany, 370,000 in Poland and 550,000 in Czechoslovakia. In Hungary, approximately 150,000 were also imprisoned, with 2,000 summarily executed. In the Estonian SSR, a purge of "bourgeois nationalists" from the Estonian Communist party occurred from 1949 to 1951. In Czechoslovakia, approximately 130,000 people were sent to prisons, labor camps and mines. The evolution of the resulting harshness of purges in Czechoslovakia, like much of its history after 1948, was a function of the late takeover by the communists, with many of the purges focusing on the sizable numbers of party members with prior memberships in other parties. Party leader Klement Gottwald's early claims that Czechoslovakia was different from the rest of the Eastern Bloc created jealousy and additional danger later when Stalin was showing an almost paranoiac desire for unity and uniformity.Nine copies of reports, confessions and other documents in all countries' purges were circulated to Soviet and other Eastern Bloc leaders. In Poland, when the local leadership resisted Soviet pressure for show trials, the Soviets demanded the construction of more prisons, including one containing a special wing for high-ranking party members. The intensity of the purges varied by country, with thorough purges in places with a relatively popular party in Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria, and less thorough purges in places where the party was initially less well-established, such as Poland, Romania and East Germany. Any member with a western connection was immediately vulnerable, which included large numbers of people who had spent years in exile in the West during the Nazi-occupation of Czechoslovakia and Hungary. Many veterans of the Spanish Civil War were imprisoned or killed because they were tainted by their western experiences. Persons with western wives also were the targets of persecution. In addition to connections with Tito or Yugoslavia, persons who had previously belonged to non-communist parties merged in the Bloc politics process were also at risk, as were members from a non-working-class background. In addition to rank-and-file member purges, prominent communists were purged, with some subjected to public show trials. These were more likely to be instigated, and sometimes orchestrated, by the Kremlin or even Stalin, as he had done in the Moscow Trials of the Great Purge in the Soviet Union in the 1930s. They included Koçi Xoxe in Albania and Traicho Kostov in Bulgaria, who were both purged and arrested. After Kostov was executed, Bulgarian leaders sent Stalin a telegram thanking him for the help. In Romania, Lucreţiu Pătrăşcanu, Ana Pauker and Vasile Luca were arrested, with Pătrăşcanu being executed. Stalin's NKVD emissary coordinated with Hungarian General Secretary Mátyás Rákosi and his ÁVH head the way the show trial of Hungarian Foreign Minister László Rajk, who was later executed. The Rajk trials led Moscow to warn Czechoslovakia's parties that enemy agents had penetrated high into party ranks, and when a puzzled Rudolf Slánský and Klement Gottwald inquired what they could do, Stalin's NKVD agents arrived to help prepare subsequent trials. The Czechoslovakian party subsequently arrested Slánský himself, Vladimír Clementis, Ladislav Novomeský and Gustáv Husák. Slánský and eleven others were convicted together of being "Trotskyist-zionist-titoist-bourgeois-nationalist traitors" in one series of show trials, after which they were executed and their ashes were mixed with material being used to fill roads on the outskirts of Prague. By the time of the Slánský trials, the Kremlin had been arguing that Israel, like Yugoslavia, had bitten the Soviet hand that had fed it, and thus the trials took an overtly anti-Semitic tone, with eleven of the fourteen defendants tried with Slánský being Jewish. The Soviets directed show trial methods, including a procedure in which confessions and "evidence" from leading witnesses could be extracted by any means, including threatening to torture the witnesses’ wives and children. The higher ranking the party member, generally the more harsh the torture that was inflicted upon him. For the show trial of Hungarian Interior Minister János Kádár, who one year earlier attempted to force a confession of László Rajk in his show trial, regarding "Vladimir" the questioner of Kádár: After this trial, Kádár later rose to General Secretary of the ruling Hungarian Working People's Party when Imre Nagy was executed. Once in the interrogation room, the inquisitors made no pretense about attempting to seek real evidence, making it clear that their only task was to extract a confession that would be used to convince other people of the defendant's guilt. Many dedicated party members accepted the argument that they could perform one last service to the party by allowing themselves to be convicted of crimes that they had not committed. Even after the party reneged on a deal that was supposed to have spared László Rajk, Rajk allegedly yelled just before his execution "long live the party!" For those not executed, degradation and humiliation continued for years in prison or labor camps. The evidence was often not just non-existent but absurd, with Hungarian George Paloczi-Horváth’s party interrogators delightedly exclaiming "We knew all the time—we have it here in writing—that you met professor Szentgyörgyi not in Istanbul, but in Constantinople." In another case, the Hungarian ÁVH secret police also condemned another party member as a Nazi accomplice with a document that had actually been previously displayed in glass cabinet of the Institute of the Working Class Movement as an example of a Gestapo forgery. The trials themselves 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.
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