The Atlantic and Its Enemies

2. Cold War

The British collapse in that terrible winter of 1946-7 coincided with a worsening of the domestic problems of western Europe, but it also coincided with the start of the Cold War, an expression that now entered the world’s vocabulary. The tensions grew in central Europe, and especially Germany. Here was the greatest economic power in Europe, but in 1945 Germany was prostrate. The smashing of Germany’s cities was a very cruel business, and was carried on almost to the very end of the war, quite without necessity. In July 1944 the British and Americans fielded their maximum bomber strength — 5,250 — with a capacity to drop 20,000 tons of bombs over any target in a day, and overall, from D-Day to the end of the war, a million tons were dropped on German cities and towns, even smaller ones. The last RAF raid took place, appropriately enough, on Potsdam, the heart of ‘German militarism’, where 500 aircraft went in on 14-15 April and killed 3,500 people. Even places far from the front line, which were also famous centres of German civilization, were attacked. They included the Wagner headquarters of Bayreuth, which had once been a scene of nationalist pageantry. The Festspielhaus was missed but the place was looted by American soldiers shortly afterwards, and Wagner’s house, the Villa Wahnfried, has (or had), among its exhibits (its point unclear — or perhaps too clear), a photograph of a black American soldier playing the great man’s piano.

In April 1945 the Russians were already besieging Berlin, and a terrible vengeance descended on Germany. She lost 1.8 million soldiers, dead, in the defeats of 1944, and that did not include civilians. The fighting in 1945 cost another 1.4 million dead, again not including civilians. Even before the final capitulation on 8 May 1945, the disintegration that marked the post-war years had set in — valueless paper money, churned out by an official printing press that could only be backed by the execution squads or the concentration camps; a paralysis of transport, people huddled in the rubble. Cigarettes replaced money as the store of value, and the working classes increasingly rejected money wages for them. Hitler, a fanatical anti-smoker, banned them. Oddly enough, that was how the public came to learn that Adolf Hitler had died. He had immured himself in his great bunker, far underground in the gardens of the Reich Chancellery that had been built for him in his days of greatness, and, there, the machinery of government ran to the end — heels clicked, trays presented by white gloves, titles adhered to. The Soviets were only a few hundred yards away when Hitler at last committed suicide. His private pilot, crossing the garden above, became aware of cigarette smoke coming through the ventilator shafts, and he realized that Hitler must have died. Once he had died, the various adjutants and secretaries put on dance music, attacked the wine cellars, and lit cigarettes. The whole episode has been brilliantly captured in Downfall.

At the film’s end there is a scene of genius. One of the young women from the Bunker, desperate to escape without being raped, commandeers a lost boy, and marches boldly through the Soviet ranks with him. She gets away, and under a bridge the boy discovers an abandoned bicycle. She peddles off, with the boy on the handlebars, you assume to safety, to a new life, and overall recovery from the catastrophe that the film has shown. It is a well-chosen, symbolic end, because the recovery of Germany was one of the great themes of the half-century that followed. At the time, not many people foresaw this (one of the few was Dr Hjalmar Schacht, held as a prisoner for the war crimes trials to come, at Nuremberg: he told his interrogators that Germany would of course rise again).

That mistake was forgivable. Germany had had the fate of Genesis’ Sodom and Gomorrah, brimstone and fire, and on the Dutch border there were signs reading, in English: ‘Here ends the civilized world’. Two out of five boys born between 1915 and 1925 were dead or missing. The 10 million surviving Wehrmacht men were herded into makeshift camps behind barbed wire, and another 10 million non-Germans, released from the camps or from forced labour, were wandering around at will. Another 10 million evacuee Germans went back from the countryside to the stricken towns and cities. On top of all this, in the summer of 1945, Germans from the east had to be settled. Some had taken part in the ‘trek’ out of areas that were about to be taken by the Soviets but others, in the summer and winter of 1945, had been expelled from their homes in Poland or Czechoslovakia. Coal production had collapsed, and what little was produced could not be moved. Food supplies fell to the point of near starvation. The problem was made all the worse because the Allies did not know, at first, what to do. There was even a decree (‘JCS 1067’) to the effect that there must be no fraternization with this savage people. However, that broke down very quickly, and in any case an element of the biblical Sodom came up: there were ‘righteous men’. From internal or external exile, and even in some cases from the camps, men appeared, willing to help in the creation of a decent Germany — on the whole, Catholics and Social Democrats, both of whom had faced persecution under the Nazis. Some sort of administration might be set up, locally. The symbolic woman-boy-and-bicycle in Downfall made, here, their first and halting moves forward. But the end of the Third Reich was followed by two years’ penury, and the winter of early 1947 worsened it. The British had been responsible for the industrial north-west, and had been parting with food to keep it going at a time when their own rations were poorer than during the war itself, when the Americans had helped out. On 1 January 1947 they agreed to put their own zone together with the American one, based on Frankfurt: the result, most of what was to be West Germany, was called ‘Bizonia’, but that too did not work any too well.

The German problem went together with others, worldwide. Japan, her capital almost flattened, and two principal cities nuclear ruins, was prostrate; European colonies in south-eastern Asia were hardly governable. Especially, a vast civil war was brewing in China. The Chinese Communists had acquired a solid base, with Soviet help and with captured Japanese weaponry, in Manchuria, and it was traditionally from there that China was conquered. But Stalin was probing in other areas as well. Himself from the Caucasus, he wanted to reassert Russia’s old dominance in the northern Middle East, a dominance that had been lost after the First World War, and he prided himself on restoring the Tsarist empire. It had collapsed, ran the thinking, from backwardness and exploitation by foreigners, with native collaborators. Communism had re-established the empire, and now he aimed at the Istanbul Straits, the most important waterway in the world, Europe’s way to Asia. During the war there had been a British and Russian occupation of Iran, and Soviet troops stayed there. The north of the country was largely Azeri and Kurdish, and Stalin encouraged both elements: Soviet Azerbaidjan, centred on the oil of Baku, was in theory an independent place, but the real Azerbaidjan was mainly in old Persia, and Stalin urged on Azeri nationalism. He did the same with the Kurds of northern Iran, some of whose tribesmen briefly declared a republic. This might have been the nucleus of a Kurdistan that would have taken Turkish territory; and Stalin anyway threatened Turkey, which had entered the war only at the last moment, with an insultingly worded demand for bases, along with a further demand, that the Turks should give back three provinces in the north-east that had once belonged to Tsarist Russia. For the West this was a step too far, the eastern Mediterranean being a very sensitive spot, and it was over Turkey that the first Cold War crisis came up. In spring 1946 the Americans sent warships to the Straits, and Stalin, his hands already full with Germany, backed off.

The Communist takeover of what came to be known as ‘eastern Europe’ was becoming a fact, and the process was very ugly indeed: a blanket tyranny was falling on countries that had already been semi-wrecked by the war. In the Soviet zone, there had been an orgy of killing and rape; the concentration camps themselves were still open, sometimes for Germans quite innocent of involvement with Nazism; and in some countries liberated by the Red Army, there were outright massacres. Later on, ‘Yalta’ became a code-word for the willingness of the Western Allies to consign half of Europe to Stalin.

Churchill had agreed in 1944 that the British would take scant interest in the fate of Romania or Bulgaria, but he wanted security in the eastern Mediterranean above all, and that meant Greece, or, to some extent, Yugoslavia. The latter occupied a strategic position on the Adriatic, and in the war the British had been the essential element in supplying arms to the Communist partisans who, in 1945, took over. Their leader, Marshal Josip Broz Tito, was a man of infinite guile, whose chief ambition in 1945 was to take over the great port of Trieste from Italy; and that mattered to the British, the more so as an Italy deprived of Trieste might easily be tipped over into Communism. It is tempting to think, though the evidence is conjectural, that relations between the British and Tito carried on surreptitiously, through such men as Sir Fitzroy Maclean. He had been dropped into Yugoslavia to make contact with the partisans and he knew them as brothers — or comrades: some were women — in arms. He had also been foremost in getting weapons for them from British rather than Communist sources, and, like so many others, he believed that Yugoslavia was the only possible answer to the problems of nationality in the western Balkans. Here were half a dozen quite different but often intermingled peoples, and the alternative to coexistence was endless mutually hostile tinpot nationalistic states. A great many people on the ground agreed (a prominent Croat writer, contemplating folklore dances and fancy invented words, said, ‘God save us from Serbian bombs and Croat culture’). In 1945, as the partisans tried to take over Trieste and parts of south-eastern Austria, there were clashes with British troops, but personal contacts remained and in 1948 came to life again (Maclean was given a house on the island of Korčula in the Adriatic and wrote one of the war’s classics). Tito himself was quite capable of singing in different keys. He had been in Moscow, and had worked as an agent for the NKVD, or People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs. He knew his Stalin: suspicious and murderous. Churchill had got Stalin to approve a fifty-fifty deal over Yugoslavia, and in due course — in 1948 — that became reality.

Elsewhere, in 1945 and 1946, the Communists took over. The techniques of takeover amounted to a choreography which they had learned mainly in the Spanish Civil War: indeed, some of the people they used had had experience in Spain. There, the Communists had had to play a complicated game — how to infiltrate trade unions, to destroy anarchists, to exploit minority nationalism, to keep poor peasants and middle-class progressives in step, to gull the foreign press, to recruit concealed agents (one of them, the Spanish foreign minister himself). Controlling the media was important, and there were specialists in this: before the war Willi Münzenberg had built an empire on Moscow money and, carefully keeping a neutral face, lined up the grand intelligentsia of Europe and America at prominent platforms on the Left. Tito himself had been involved in this, and so, in Hungary, was Ernő Gerő; Georgy Dimitrov, who took over Bulgaria, had been secretary of the Comintern, managing much of the game from Moscow. Grim bare-floorboard Party schools taught Marxist political science, and it was often enough quite accurate. It was also ruthless against the rest of the Left. Anarchists, moderate socialists, trade unionists only wanting better wages and lower hours: all might be enemies. In Spain, to the disgust of George Orwell, the Communists in Barcelona had killed or imprisoned members of the POUM, an independent Communist organization that wanted revolution there and then, which did not fit with Soviet Communist purposes. In Spain, Stalin’s real aim was not victory, but a continuation of the civil war. It divided Italy and Germany from Britain and France. He sent weaponry to the Republicans when they seemed likely to collapse, and stopped deliveries when they were winning. He also used Catalan nationalism, which the POUM opposed. It was a cunningly played game, and had lessons for the men and women who emerged from the Party schools to take over central Europe.

That sophistication was not needed in the Balkans, where there was not much between lord and peasant. There, the choreography was simple, brutal, and short: terrorize any opposition, offer land reform and grant property to new Party members. They were easy enough to recruit: disgruntled peasants (the village bad-hats) and the local minorities, including gypsies. In Romania some of the Hungarian minority were mobilized, and there were always Jews, though not of course the religious Jews, who suffered as much persecution as did other religious. However, even with religion, there were hatreds that could be exploited. Most Orthodox followed their own Patriarch, but there were other Orthodox — the Uniates, especially strong in Romania and the western Ukraine — who followed the Pope. The Communists might gain Orthodox support by campaigning against Uniates, and they did so. Elections in such circumstances were a sinister pantomime. The presence of Western representatives did mean, in Bulgaria and Romania, that some token elements from the old order were permitted to stay on. Some might be straightforward opportunists, such as the one-time Romanian foreign minister Gheorghe Tătărescu, who, with thirties manners, perfect French, and a habit of adultery, could be indulged or blackmailed into acting as a non-Communist front man. Even the young king of Romania was kept going until early in 1948, when he was bullied into abdicating and sent (not penniless: four automobiles of his collection, and some jewels, accompanied him) abroad. But these figureheads were powerless and were soon eliminated. Stalin got the Balkans, and a tyranny emerged: deportations in the hundreds of thousands, public executions, concentration camps, rigged elections and purge trials. Albania and Yugoslavia did not even need the Moscow bargain: they had strong Communist movements which took power as soon as the Germans had retreated, and they disposed early enough of the non-Communist furniture. The Western Allies were not consulted (in Bulgaria, Marshal Fyodor Tolbukhin, chairman of the supposed Allied Control Council, attended only once and otherwise did as he pleased) and there was some shabby behaviour, as when the British revealed to Moscow what their agents had been told by non-Communist Romanians, or threw a would-be Bulgarian refugee out of their embassy at 2.30 a.m. People’s Republics soon emerged. But a Communist takeover elsewhere was more difficult, requiring a more complicated choreography. The media had to be controlled, and you had to win elections that might be supervised by foreign observers. There were middle-class sympathizers to be brought along, and you had to make some appeal to peasant farmers who were not obvious Communist supporters. The trade unions mattered, especially, because they could mobilize hundreds of thousands of demonstrators or strikers, and if, say, you wanted to shut down an opposition newspaper you could do it either by rationing its paper quota or by getting the printers to strike against ‘anti-democratic’ writings. A secret police, keeping a close eye on it all, therefore became very important and even central. These things happened, with variations, in Poland and Hungary. Czechoslovakia came later, early in 1948.

The British had gone to war in alliance with Poland, and had even guaranteed her territory. However, Stalin wanted to annex a good part of the Polish east — lands that were mainly Ukrainian or Byelorussian, which he could attach to the Soviet republics of those names, for the sake of what he himself called a Bolshevik version of Pan-Slavism. Since the Red Army occupied the area in 1944, and went on to occupy the entire country in 1945, there was not much that the British could achieve on the ground. Churchill tried. The deal which the British had in mind was a sacrifice of the eastern lands in exchange for western lands taken from Germany, and that deal was implicitly agreed at the Teheran conference late in 1943. The British wanted the Polish government in London exile to accept this, with a further guarantee that the country, no doubt neutral, would have its independence respected by Stalin. But there was too much bad blood. Stalin, occupying the Soviet part of the country in the early part of the war, had behaved atrociously, murdering 15,000 Polish officers at Katyń and elsewhere, and deporting hundreds of thousands of people. Almost no Pole was prepared to cede the historic cities of the east, and even when Churchill was in Moscow in October 1944 to negotiate over the issue, one of the Polish delegates, a professor, chose to lecture him for a long time on the historic rights of Poland in that region. It is just thinkable that, in exchange for an agreed cession of the eastern territories, Poland might indeed have been neutral and independent.

An equivalent such deal was successfully done over Finland. The Russians had attacked her in the winter of 1939-40, with a view to seizing lands north of Leningrad; after several months, in which blundering Soviet soldiers were outmanoeuvred by white-clad Finnish soldiers sliding on skis from ambushes, the Finns had had to surrender; they lost the lands, but, when Hitler attacked the USSR, joined up with him to take them back. If they had then cut the supply line to Leningrad, that city would have collapsed, and would have faced the utter extinction that Hitler had promised it. However, the Finns’ leader, Marshal Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim, knew his Russia — he had been a cavalry general under the Tsar — and told his intimates that if the Finns acted ‘they will never forgive us’. The Finns stopped, dragged their feet, maintained a link to Moscow through Stockholm, got out of the war in September 1944, and fought the Germans in their far north. In the resulting peace, Finland lost land, had to pay reparations (mainly in timber), conceded a Russian base and proclaimed neutrality. But there was no Soviet occupation, and parliamentary democracy was maintained at the cost, now and again, of grubby concessions (would-be Soviet defectors were, for instance, handed back).

The London Poles did not give way and it may not anyway have made a difference. Poland was much larger than Finland, in a much more strategic position — on the way to Germany — and in any case strongly anti-Soviet or even just anti-Russian (at Potsdam, Stalin openly said that a free election would mean an anti-Soviet government). Sad battles went on in the eastern territories as the Red Army settled in, and local Lithuanians or Ukrainians tried to establish themselves in the historic Polish cities: very young Polish hotheads were killed in defence of Vilna, for instance, and are remembered with cheap iron crosses in the old cemetery; and there was a battle in Balzac’s old haunt, Wierzchównia, in which the entire village was wiped out by Ukrainian partisans. Five million Poles were expelled from these regions as the Red Army cleared them out. They were settled in turn mainly in the formerly German lands that had been assigned to Poland as compensation, from which 3 million Germans had themselves been expelled. Shattered Warsaw was reoccupied by 1.5 million people. Inflation was rife, and in 1945 and 1946 the average monthly wage in Poland bought ten pounds of meat or sugar; bottles were currency; there were epidemics of venereal disease. Late in 1945 an amnesty brought 30,000 demoralized men from hiding. The non-Communists were in no position to resist with any force. On the other hand, Poland had ‘a mass of manoeuvre’ in the sense that the population was greater and the territory quite large; besides, the Western embassies had treaty rights, and the Communists had public opinion in the USA to consider. Also, there was Catholicism, and that required some management. Still, at Yalta the Western powers had given way, in exchange for a guarantee that the Soviet Union would help against Japan. There were supposed to be free elections but everyone knew what these would entail. When Roosevelt told Stalin that the American Lithuanians might object if their country were taken into the USSR, Stalin said, ‘You want a referendum? It can be arranged.’ With a near 100 per cent ‘yes’ vote, this duly happened. The British and the Americans (though not the Vatican or the Irish) recognized the Communist-based Polish government, provided that some (unimportant) ministries went to non-Communists. It was now up to Stalin’s Polish collaborators to manage the takeover.

The people who did the stage-managing were acute and energetic enough, and Marxism was a useful training. They were widely hated, and eventually lost, but many lived on to a great age, and an enterprising journalist got them, in retirement, in small, overheated, book-lined flats, to talk. The head of the Secret Service, responsible for espionage and lengthy prison sentences, was Jakub Berman — forty-four in 1945, son of a Warsaw commercial traveller with five children, and he went on to higher education. Most of the family were wiped out by the Nazis at Treblinka, though one brother managed, as secretary of the Jewish resistance organization, to escape, eventually to Israel. Berman himself had the advantage of talking Russian, because he had attended the main Warsaw Russian school, and he reached the Soviet zone early on. Then he went through the grim and dedicated political school, and attracted the attention of a Comintern chief, Dmitry Manuilsky, and lived in a chauffeur’s room on the fifth floor of the Hotel Lux (there was a telephone in the corridor, which no-one, for fear that it might be the NKVD police, dared to answer; it was part of the sinister surrealism of the place that when he did eventually answer an insistent ringing, someone asked him about a Polish Communist writing on Africa). Berman then cultivated the obviously up-and-coming Soviet officials Nikita Khrushchev, in the western Ukraine, and Boris Ponomarev, in Byelorussia, who was to be head of the International Department of the Central Committee, the successor to the Comintern. As the Red Army moved forward, Berman was one of the very few Poles whom Stalin trusted, and in Warsaw he took over the Security Service, the UB, with its networks everywhere, and he was a main architect of the new regime, arranging for the persecution and silencing of opponents. In case such men might let him down, Stalin would be a constant presence, even telephoning at midnight to catch them off their guard. But there were figures ostensibly less sinister than Berman. The press chief, Stefan Staszewski, had had a terrible history. Born in 1906, son of a Jewish small tradesman, he became a law student, joined the Communist Party, went to the Comintern school in Moscow for three years, and then served as youth secretary in south-east Poland, where the Party tried for an alliance with Ukrainian nationalists. He was arrested, fled to the USSR in 1934, and was sentenced there to eight years in a camp, in the terrible frozen Kolyma. A brother was murdered in the USSR; his mother was murdered at Treblinka. A man such as Staszewski only really had the Party as a mental and emotional focus, and in 1948 he was its press chief. Or there was Roman Werfel, socially above Staszewski, in that his father was a prosperous lawyer in the chief city of the south-east, Lwów, when it was one of the great places of the Austrian empire. There was a portrait of the Emperor on the wall and the family spoke German at home. Roman — like so many other boys of this class — despised religion, ate ham sandwiches at school, and was beaten up by other Jewish pupils. Then it was Vienna and Communism, followed by Berlin and a return to Poland, where he organized strikes on the noble Sapieha family estate at Rawa Ruska, where the peasants were generally Ukrainian. In 1939 he escaped to the Soviet zone, and joined up with the Moscow Communists as head of the ideological section. As such, he came to run much of the educational and cultural side of Polish Communism, but he was very erudite, and he did use his influence to help people who, in, say, Prague, would have been cleaning boilers. There were others who followed the Stalinist line and who were as much its captives as its advocates, and their loss of office later on probably came as a relief. Of the people the journalist spoke to, the only unrepentant figure was Julia Minc, widow of the one-time economic chief. Her past was part prison (for membership of Communist Youth, in 1922), part France, part Samarkand, where her husband, during the war, taught economics. Her interview with the journalist was pure agitprop, delivered with contempt, and when the journalist demurred, she told the dog to bite her.

In 1945 and 1946 the Communists entrenched themselves, working out how to take power. In the summer of 1946 the matter became urgent. The failure of the Council of Foreign Ministers to agree as to Germany’s future was followed, that September, by the speech of James F. Byrnes in Stuttgart, to the effect that a German state in the west was under examination; Bizonia had already been announced, and its economic council was to be the nucleus of a West German government. Poland, in her strategic position, was then taken over by Stalin. It was important to discredit the non-Communists in Western eyes, and of course old Poland could be caricatured as a place of great estates and downtrodden peasants. There was some truth in this, but not much: the country had made considerable but unsung progress between the wars. Anti-semitism could also be used to discredit the anti-Communists, and there were indeed murderous clashes as Jews returned, trying to recover their property. The Cardinal Prince Sapieha himself was tactless, saying after an incident in the summer of 1946 that there were too many Jews in a government ‘the nation does not wish’. In saying this he was only echoing a widespread peasant opinion that rząd jest zażydzony — ‘the government is judaized’ — and at a time when almost all of Western opinion sympathized with the Jews, such lines were not helpful.

The Communists mobilized their supporters, awarding them lands and houses evacuated by the three million Germans in 1945-6, whether in Silesia, Pomerania or southern East Prussia, and by April 1946 were being pressed by the Western ambassadors for proper elections. These could be postponed for a time, with reference to the endless movement of people, but not for ever; they needed preparation. In June there was a dress rehearsal — a referendum, containing three questions inviting the answer ‘yes’ (e.g. whether to approve of the new western borders). That allowed a drawing up of electoral lists, and a noting down of who was who. The next stage was to gain the alliance of left-wing elements outside the Party, much as the Bolsheviks had done in 1917, with the Left of the Socialist Revolutionaries. The Communists took over the trade unions, with endless detailed manoeuvering in committees where the agenda was ‘fixed’ by a Communist nominee. That way, ‘the organized discontent of the masses’ could be deployed against any independent voice. Besides, the Communists allocated land and housing, and could therefore arrange for whole blocks and factories to vote in unison. ‘Anti-Fascism’ was a weapon to use against opposition, and a dissident party was simply outlawed; with some left-wing socialist help a new electoral law was passed in September. Another scheme was to establish dummy parties, pretending to be properly Catholic or Liberal or Peasant; the real ones could then, again, be outlawed; and opposition media could be silenced. There were even some supposedly realistic Catholics, such as the journalist Stefan Kisielewski, who called for a Catholic bloc acceptable to both sides. When the election occurred, ‘List Three’, ‘the Democratic bloc’, won 80 per cent of the vote with 90 per cent participation, whole factories and housing blocks voting together: there had been 15,000 arrests and 10 per cent of the opposition (PSL) offices were simply closed. The non-Communist ministers, still theoretically in charge of their second- and third-rank ministries, found their telephones disconnected and their secretaries sabotaging correspondence. The Western embassies collected tales of all this and protested, but the Communists could weasel out. When the parliament met, in January 1947, with its handful of real opposition deputies, these behaved bravely, but, fearing for their lives, fled abroad.

In Germany, Soviet policy somewhat varied. On the one side were demands for reparations, and much of industry in the Soviet zone was dismantled. But on the other, the zone was supposed to be an advertisement for socialism, or, at the very least, to show that a neutral, unified Germany would have nothing to fear from Moscow, somewhat in the manner of Finland. In 1945 revenge was the dominant note. All along there had been friction in the German capital. Almost as soon as they occupied the city, the Russians had flown in old German Communists from Moscow, with an idea of controlling their zone through apparently democratic methods. To start with, the Communists announced that they would co-operate with other anti-Fascist parties and not insist on a full-scale Communist programme. They would, for instance, have a land reform, but one designed to break up the estates of the ‘reactionaries’ and grant land to small farmers (who were expected, as in Poland or the Czech lands, then to support the Communists). But elections did not go their way — hardly surprisingly, since at the time the Red Army had acquired a terrible reputation for looting and raping, and a quarter of the industrial installations of the zone were being dismantled. When free elections were held in Austria and Hungary (November 1945) the Communists did badly, and in Hungary had to be given an artificially powerful place in the government (controlling the police). One solution would be to force the Social Democratic Party (SDP) (and the trade unions) into a Communist framework — a united workers’ party — and to muzzle any other parties. That last was easy enough, and the leaders (of the Christian Democrats and the Liberal Democrats) were just expelled, while dummies took their places. No more opposition from that quarter. The Social Democrats, collecting roughly two thirds of the vote, were more difficult, and the picture was complicated. Most Social Democrats were not unsympathetic at least to co-operation with the Communists. They regarded the recent German past with horror, some had spent time in concentration camps, and almost all felt that the failure of the two working-class parties to collaborate against Hitler had been a main cause of the Nazi catastrophe. In some cases, there was an idea that the Soviet Union alone offered a real chance that Germany could be a united, democratic and neutral country, like an enormous version of Finland, and maybe there would be concessions as to the border with Poland. Gustav Dahrendorf, who had been a member of the Reichstag before Hitler came to power, dallied with such ideas in 1945 and early in 1946. But the Communists behaved in a devious and bullying way, repellent to democrats, and they also resorted to force, kidnapping opposition figures. Meanwhile, they activated a form of the Nazi system of local control. Under the Nazis, each block of flats had its political supervisor, who snooped and bullied. The Communists reintroduced the system. When it came to political or trade union meetings, they were also skilled at the tactics employed by revolutionary minorities throughout history: ‘packing’ key committees with their own place-men, putting essential details into the small print, preventing opponents from attending meetings, deploying boring and lengthy speeches as a way of emptying a hall of moderate opponents and then taking a snap vote, provided they had the chairman in their pocket. In that way the trade union elections in Berlin produced a Communist majority (just as had happened in Russia, with the Soviets, in the later months of 1917). In any case, there was the Soviet military presence, as a great threat: the Social Democrats were forced to hold all meetings jointly with the Communists, Russian officers in plain clothes, with stenographers, in attendance. The Russians forced out opposition SPD figures, replacing them with men who supported fusion. Late in 1945 the SPD passed a firm resolution that there would have to be a fusion of the parties at national, not zonal, level, though they refused to present a joint list of candidates at the next elections. In this way, the Social Democratic Party of the eastern zone was fused with the Communist one in April 1946.

Hungary went the same way, in September 1947, with a unified Workers’ Party in 1948. Hungary in 1945 had reached the end of the line. Budapest had had its moment of glory, around 1900, and, with Glasgow and Sydney, was among the greatest of the Victorian cities. But Hungary had consistently chosen the wrong side, had lost territory all around, and had fought the war to the bitter end: the siege in February smashed the great bridges between Buda and Pest, the Royal Castle on the Buda side was a ruin, and from the top floor of one of the grandest mansion flat buildings in Pest there stuck the fuselage of a bomber. Crammed into the ghetto area, there survived still about 250,000 Jews, whose lives had been spared because there were considerable limits to the anti-semitism of Hungary; but there was bitterness and privation all around. The Soviet authorities had promoted a sort of last-moment National Front and anti-Nazi coalition, and then set about recruiting Communists in a country that did not, by nature, produce very many. However, land reform was a serious cause in a country still dominated by great (and quite efficient) estates; there was at least a peasant radical movement, and, given the large and sometimes foreign-owned factories in Pest, there was at least the beginning of a labour movement.

To begin with, Stalin had not quite known how to handle Hungary, and allowed a free election in November 1945 — calculating no doubt at first, as with East Germany, that the triumph of the Red Army would cause Communism to become popular. But there was an overwhelming vote for the Peasant Party. It formed a government, but the Soviet occupiers gave control of the police and the Security Service (AVO) to Communists. Most of these were Jewish, their leader, Mátyás Rákosi, soured and made crafty by long experience of pre-war prison. Others had survived in Moscow (where Stalin had had several of their associates murdered) by treachery and guile.

Two young men in the new apparatus, Vladimir Farkas and Tibor Szamuely, had had characteristic Hungarian lives. As a young adept in AVO, Vladimir Farkas, born in 1925 in that selfsame region of what had been north-eastern Hungary that produced Robert Maxwell, distinguished himself as a zealot: the headquarters, on one of the main boulevards of Pest, had its complement of torture instruments, and there was a whole office to listen in on telephone conversations or to open letters. When he was born, his father, a Communist (and later on head of AVO), was in prison, and when he came out the family disintegrated. Father left for Moscow and worked for the Comintern, remarrying with a German woman and living in the celebrated Hotel Lux with the other Comintern families. Mother did not get on with grandmother, tried to kill herself by jumping into the river Hernad with her child, and then left for France, where eventually she joined the Communist resistance. She and Vladimir briefly met again only in 1945. He grew up in a sometimes flooded cellar with his grandmother, who took in washing; as a child he took meals to German Communists in the prison. The old woman, hitherto Orthodox Jewish, decided that there was no God after all, and when the Hungarians reoccupied the place sent the boy off to join his father in Moscow, having baked a favourite cake called Linzer Karikak which had raspberry jam inside and nuts outside. She was to die in 1945 and was buried in the Jewish cemetery, but her son, by this time head of the Hungarian Communist security system, would not have a proper tombstone put up. The boy, now fourteen, went on a Hungarian Jewish network to Prague, Warsaw and Moscow in 1939. His first (and characteristic) experience of the USSR occurred when the customs officials split open his apple to find out if anything had been concealed in it. Then he stayed, ignored, with his father and stepmother in the sinister Lux. In October 1941 the Germans arrived outside Moscow, and the Comintern people were evacuated to Samara, then called Kuybyshev. The lift wheezed up and down from the fifth floor, where the Farkas family lived in a set next to the Gottwalds from Czechoslovakia. Father and stepmother piled in with suitcases, leaving no place for the boy, and father pressed the button. Boy ran down the stairs and arrived at the lobby just as father’s bus pulled out. He did get himself to the train after an odyssey through trudging refugees, and travelled for a week, fed from sardine tins by a Hungarian Communist woman, Erzsébet Andics, who, looking like Madeleine Albright, urged her charms on all and sundry. Then that Comintern political school, all pseudonyms, water, relentless Marx and no sex. Vladimir went to Hungary late in 1944 with a view to organizing the Communist takeover. With him went another Moscow product, Tibor Szamuely. Szamuely was the nephew of the man who had set up the Hungarian equivalent of the Cheka, the secret police of revolutionary Russia. They were called the ‘Lenin Boys’. They had fled in 1919, and ended up via Vienna in Moscow. Young Tibor was sent to Bertrand Russell’s progressive school, and was therefore bilingual in English (of which he was a superb writer). Back in the USSR, such people went to camps, and he did as well, but war liberated him and he too arrived in Budapest with instructions concerning the takeover. Both men ended up on the other side. Tibor Szamuely kept his cards hidden and arranged an appointment in the end as ambassador to Ghana (of which he remarked that the anthem should be ‘aux arbres citoyens’) and defected to London with all of his belongings. Vladimir Farkas was imprisoned in 1953 for his misdeeds and was let out in 1961, returning to his grand apartment on the Orsó utca in Buda to see his little daughter and his wife, who slammed the door in his face.

As Farkas says, ‘the parliamentary democratic order was condemned to collapse on the day the November election results were published.’ For a time, the Hungarians were told that they might have favourable peace terms in return for good behaviour: the eventual peace treaty, at the turn of 1946-7, went against them, as all of the lands awarded to Hungary by Hitler were returned to her neighbours. Then there was an inflation — the worst ever experienced in a European country, including Weimar Germany. By July 1946 there were 50 million million million pengo˝ in circulation, and you survived by doing deals with the Communists, who controlled things. Dealing illegally in dollars was also possible, but it gave the Communists an apparently legitimate way to try to sentence anyone who was involved, including, as things turned out, the Cardinal himself, József Mindszenty. But Hungary was not Poland. The Church did have its supporters, but there was a large Protestant element, itself divided between Lutherans, Calvinists and Unitarians; there was no basis here for the passive resistance that Poles could put up, or for the Christian Democracy that emerged in Italy to defeat the Communists. Indeed, strict Calvinists, hating the Catholics, supplied useful men for the Communists, including a pastor, Zoltán Tildy, who even became president for a few years. Meanwhile, the Communists infiltrated the trade unions, where there was supposed to be parity with the Social Democrats, and the trick was, as in Czechoslovakia, to identify a left-wing element. This was not altogether difficult. In the first place, there generally was, among the non-Communist left-wing elements, one that would always argue for appeasement: the Communists would behave better if collaborated with. But there was terror, and there was bribery, and there was cynicism; and in the hopeless condition of Hungary in 1945, many people (including among the intelligentsia) saw Communism as the way forward. There were vast demonstrations of ‘the organized discontent of the masses’ in Budapest, and in 1946 ‘conspiracies’ were unearthed, by which the non-Communists could be discredited (there is a heroically mistimed — 1986 — Communist book on this period, by Jakab and Balogh, which announces grandly that ‘the competent authorities of the Ministry of Home Affairs’ ‘discovered the existence of an anti-republican illegal organization’). In Hungary, there was a further factor. In 1920 she had lost many of her old and historic lands, Transylvania especially. With Hitler, some of Transylvania had been recovered; and there was a hope that, with collaboration, something could be saved from the wreckage. Not until early in 1947 were the 1920 borders reconfirmed, Romania taking back Transylvania, and Czechoslovakia or the USSR an equivalent region in the north-east.

In 1946 the non-Communist government had very limited power, given that the Communists held the Ministry of the Interior, i.e. the police, and the security services. Besides, the Red Army was in occupation, and it simply carried people off for forced labour in the USSR; meanwhile, the economy, such as it was, was now dominated by Soviet cartels, and the foreign factory owners were powerless. The government was in any case easy to divide, because some of its following remained doggedly faithful to free markets, whereas others were sympathetic to the Left; and the religious division was still so strong that, in 1947, there were vicious fights over the presence of religion in schools. With their stories of ‘conspiracy’, the Communists could arrest, torture and deport even quite prominent Peasant Party politicians, and then extract confessions from them which would incriminate the prime minister himself. The government was only really able to let people escape to the West, including, in spring 1947, the prime minister, whose little son (now a New York banker) was held hostage. At the same time, with mass demonstrations in public, and secret police threats in private, sections of the governing party could be isolated and banned (‘salami tactics’, as they were called). The Allied Control Commission, dependent upon its Soviet chairman, was powerless. In 1947 a left-wing stalwart of the Peasant Party, István Dobi, took over, a man so demoralized and given to drink that, when he headed a delegation to Moscow, Molotov simply slid the bottle contemptuously down in his direction. There was then a coup against the Social Democrat and trade union ‘Right’. An apparatus of dummy parties emerged, and in the elections of September ten parties fought, seven of them splinters, one of them so absurd as to be allowed to function openly: the ‘Christian Women’s Camp’. A Communist-dominated coalition with Social Democrats and Peasant Radicals easily won, and by March 1948 the Social Democrats had been forced into fusion with the Communists, as the ‘United Workers’ Party’. In 1949 this won ‘95.68 per cent’ of the vote, and Stalinism descended.

Its local face was that of Mátyás Rákosi, born as József Rosenfeld in Bácska, to a family of twelve children from a small trader. He had won scholarships to Hamburg and London, had been a prisoner of war in Russia (at Chita, where a Countess Kinsky had helped) and had then experienced, on and off, but more on than off, prison. He knew how to act. He had a superb voice and had charm of a sort; he was also very vain, and at his sixtieth-birthday celebrations had special shoes constructed so that he could appear taller than Anastas Mikoyan, the Party vice-chairman, who bore birthday greetings from Stalin. Thirty-three prominent writers managed to write assorted items in praise of him, at a celebration in the Opera. Rákosi was hideous, the very exemplar of the French line that at forty you are responsible for your face. For the next five years, until the death of Stalin, Rákosi ran Hungary.

As Churchill said, an ‘Iron Curtain’ had indeed descended, and though there were still Soviet sympathizers, they lost the battle for public opinion as the facts seeped through the Curtain. Greece at least had been saved from the Communist takeover because of Churchill’s bargain with Stalin in 1944. But, as ever, Churchill’s side needed American backing.