CZECHOSLOVAKIA

Throughout the war the Czechoslovak government-in-exile in London, headed by President Edvard Beneš, focused primarily on the full territorial restoration of Czechoslovakia, including the reversal of the boundary changes made under the Munich Agreement. Logically, then, less attention was paid to the country’s political structure, although it was clear to everyone that there could be no replication of the First Republic. Frustration with the democratic West, which at the time of Munich failed to stand up to Hitler’s Germany, pushed the provisional government of Czechoslovakia into a political arrangement with the artful Soviet Union. This was expressed by the Czechoslovak-Soviet Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation, signed in Moscow in December 1943. This Treaty acknowledged the restored "pre-Munich" Czechoslovakia as a bridge between East and West. This concept, also attractive to other members of the anti-Hitler coalition, was logical only if there was at least a minimum degree of cooperation between the democratic West and Stalin’s East – the Soviet Union. The first major test of the provisional government’s doctrine of restoring the pre-Munich institutions was the outbreak of the Slovak National Uprising on 29 August 1944. Beneš then had to accept the Slovak National Council and its powerful Board of Commissioners (Zbor povereníkov), i.e. constitutional elements of Slovak autonomy (from October 1938) and independence (from March 1939). Soviet reluctance to actively help the Slovak insurgents should have served as a warning. This was a clear indication that Stalin had his own plans for the post-war structure of Central Europe. This is perhaps best expressed in his own words: "This war is not as in the past; whoever occupies a territory also imposes on it his own social system. Everyone imposes his own system as far as his army can reach. It cannot be otherwise..."

POLAND

Communist power started to be established in Poland. On 22 July, the July Manifesto (Manifest Lipcowy), declaring the creation of a new power centre, i.e. the Polish Committee of National Liberation, was issued in Lublin, which was occupied by the Soviet Army. The Committee’s chairman was the representative of the socialist left, Edward Osóbka-Morawski, who was appointed the Prime Minister of the interim government on 31 December. 22 July, until 6 April 1990 a national holiday, is considered the symbolic date of the establishment of the Communist regime in Poland. The official name of the new state was the Polish People’s Republic. Although a pluralistic political system was formally maintained, the fight for power, as in other people’s democracies, was won by the Polish Workers Party, founded in 1943 to continue the work of the pre-war Polish Communist Party, which the Kominterna had disbanded in 1939 at Joseph Stalin’s instigation. The Polish Communists relied on close cooperation with Moscow: the newly created repressive apparatus represented by the Security Office (UB, subsequently the Security Service – SB) was based on, and set up with the assistance of, the NKVD (the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs). Although the July Manifesto guaranteed the right to private ownership, industry was gradually nationalized and the collectivization of agriculture was launched (this process was reviewed after 1956). The promotional emphasis on the annexation of Pomerania, East Prussia and Silesia was intended to set off the negative impression created by the surrender of parts of Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine to the USSR republics. Polish-Soviet relations were also strained by the Katyn massacre, experience of the first Soviet occupation (1939-1941) and the Soviet Army’s position on the Warsaw insurgency. This was launched by the Provincial Army (Armia Krajowa) on 1 August with the aim of liberating Warsaw and establishing a non-Communist government before the Soviet Army arrived. However, after heavy fighting, with Soviet troops passively watching on, the Provincial Army’s commanders were forced to surrender. While 200,000 people died in the Warsaw Uprising, the largest action by the Polish resistance, under the Communist regime it was examined and commemorated only selectively, and often in a distorted manner.

HUNGARY

During the Second World War, Hungary, under the leadership of the Regent Miklós Horthy, resisted direct occupation by Nazi Germany. On the other hand, it had to work closely with Hitler; for example, it deployed its units against the Soviet Union. The disastrous defeat suffered by the Hungarian units on the Eastern Front saw Hungarian politicians probing the possibility of breaking from Germany and reaching an acceptable peace settlement with the Allies. Hitler, however, was quick to act and ordered the occupation of Hungary in March 1944. The Germans enabled the Hungarian fascists to come to the fore; these were the Nyilasists, grouped together as the Arrow Cross Party (Nyilaskeresztes Párt, NYP), who seized power in a coup on 15 October 1944. They unleashed a campaign of brutal terror aimed primarily against the Jews and opposition politicians. Their bloody regime, however, did not last long. Towards the end of the year, the Red Army occupied Debrecen, in eastern Hungary, where the Hungarian National Front of Independence (Magyar Nemzeti Függentlenség Front, MNFF) was formed on 3 December 1944. It drew together the anti-fascist parties, including the Communists, in a bid to get rid of the Nyilasists and end the war.

CZECHOSLOVAKIA

The Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSČ), founded in 1921 and from 1929 led by the pragmatic Stalinist functionary Klement Gottwald, maintained its leadership in exile in Stalin's Soviet Union. Here, it was successfully exploited by the Soviet leadership as a pressure group leaning on Beneš’s government-in-exile and where possible trying to meddle in the affairs of Czechoslovak politics. As the Soviet Army began to liberate Czechoslovakia in the autumn of 1944, the influence of the Moscow-based Czechoslovak Communists and their Party leader – Klement Gottwald – understandably grew. This culminated in the Moscow talks of 22 to 29 March 1945 between the London provisional government, the Slovak National Council and the Moscow leadership of the KSČ. As part of the resulting compromise on the post-war structure of Czechoslovakia, on 4 April 1945 President Edvard Beneš appointed a government of the National Front of Czechs and Slovaks led by the Social Democrat Zdeněk Fierlinger. The government programme (the Košice Government Programme) placed an emphasis on alliance with the Soviet Union, sanctions for the post-Munich developments, including a restriction on the number of legal political parties (i.e. only the National Front parties were legitimate), and the fundamental economic, social and cultural transformation of the state. Plans were hatched for the large-scale confiscation of property owned by "Germans, Hungarians, collaborators and traitors", and for the completion of land reform and the nationalization of much of the country’s industrial and financial capital. The liberation of insurrectionist Prague by the Soviet Army on 9 May 1945 foreshadowed future political developments in many respects. Although President Edvard Beneš made a triumphant return to Prague Castle, he was now a prematurely aged and sick man. The majority of the democratic political parties refused to acknowledge this unpleasant fact, however, and continued to rely on the President and his political judgement. Klement Gottwald’s words in December of the same year, that the National Front system was not "an end in itself is but a means to achieve our socialist objectives", accurately reflected the emerging fatal political dispute between the weakened democratic forces and the much fortified KSČ.

POLAND

While some non-Communists continued their political resistance and power struggle, others remained within the law and attempted to engage in ideological debate on Marxism. One of the focal points of these efforts was the Catholic magazine Tygodnik Powszechny, the first issue of which appeared in Krakow on 24 March. This weekly periodical, the pages of which were graced with contributions from the likes of Karol Wojtyła, Czeslaw Milosz, Stanislaw Lem, and Tadeusz Mazowiecki, and which was edited by Jerzy Turowicz throughout (except for an interruption between 1953 and 1956), was the "maximum possible" that could be achieved in debating official ideology and cultural policy. The periodical was associated with the Znak (“Sign”) parliamentary club, and later with the political opposition. - - An example of the brutality of the Soviet "ally" was the trial of 16 members of the Polish resistance from the Provincial Army (Armia Krajowa), who were also the London government-in-exile’s delegates in Poland. The trial took place in Moscow on 18-21 June. The circumstances of the arrests, made under the pretext of political talks, and failure to respect legislation during the investigation and the trial, rendered it a show trial. The sentences ranged from four months to ten years, with three acquittals; three of the defendants (General Leopold Okulicki, Deputy Prime Minister Jan Stanisław Jankowski and Minister Stanisław Jasiukowicz) died in Soviet camps and prisons, and others were persecuted on returning to Poland or were forced to emigrate. Although the Western powers, in the wake of the Yalta Conference, recognized Osóbka-Morawski’s government on 7 July, the trial reinforced tendencies leading to the emergence of the Cold War.

HUNGARY

After heavy fighting, the whole country was finally liberated, and in the end Budapest, defended hard by the fascists and German troops, was taken. On 20 January 1945, a ceasefire was signed in Moscow. Hungary, as the defeated state, agreed to the establishment of an Allied Control Commission in its territory, in which the Soviet Union, headed by Marshal Kliment Voroshilov had the last word. Immediately after the end of the fighting, work began on reconstructing political life and political parties. The Communist Party of Hungary (Magyar Kommunista Párt, MKP), due to its historical role and Hungarian society’s divided experience of the Bolshevik “Republic of Councils” in 1919, had weak support. With Soviet backing, however, there was a surge in members and voters. In February 1945, the Party had 30,000 members; by May it had 150,000, and at the end of 1945 500,000 people carried a Party membership card. Nevertheless, voters were mainly influenced by, and reserved most sympathy for, smallholders forming the Independent Smallholders Party (Független Kisgazda Párt, FGKP), which was clear from the municipal and parliamentary elections in October-November 1945. The Smallholders, with 57 per cent of the vote, overwhelmingly defeated the Social Democrats (17%) and Communists (16.9%), who were shocked to come third but also learnt valuable lessons about the means they should use in their future political struggle.

CZECHOSLOVAKIA

The second half of 1945 clearly unveiled the growing tension between the National Front’s individual parties. While the Communists clung to the Košice Government Programme, other parties were seeking to replace it with a conventionally conceived parliamentary system. Czech-Slovak relations also became more complicated when, in early January 1946, plans to form a strong Slovak Catholic Party were buried for good. On 16 January 1946, the National Front parties therefore agreed to hold the first post-war parliamentary elections in May the same year. This agreement included provisions to ensure the decency of the election campaign, which primarily excluded criticism of the National Front. The democratic parties pinned their hopes on a victory mirroring the Communists’ failures in elections in neighbouring Austria and Hungary. While the KSČ held victory in the elections to be a given, its primary interest was in assuming overall power, as testified by Gottwald’s words that "the working class, our Party, the workers, will always have sufficient resources, weapons and means of correcting simple mechanical voting ...". It was determined to fight for this power by any means necessary. The elections saw the overwhelming victory of the Communists in the Czech Republic (40.2% of votes), but their defeat in Slovakia, where the Democratic Party emerged as the winner (62.0% of votes). However, these elections were not the final word in political developments in Czechoslovakia. The Communists triumphed not so much because they were a progressive party in tune with the public, but rather because of the other political parties’ inability to make a clear declaration that the problems of the pre-Munich republic would not be repeated. On 18 June, the inaugural meeting of the Constituent National Assembly (formed after the elections) was held, and a day later Edvard Beneš was appointed President of the Republic as the sole NF candidate. Gottwald’s new Communist government, with nine Communist ministers, met on 2 July. The agenda was relatively simple: to prepare a new constitution guaranteeing the state would become a people’s democratic republic and to push through a two-year plan for 1947 and 1948.

POLAND

On 30 June, the Polish Workers Party orchestrated a referendum on political, economic and territorial changes (the abolition of the Senate, the confirmation of rural reform and the inalterability of the western boundary on the Oder and Nysa). The officially reported results (68.2%, 77.3% and 91.4% "yes" votes for each question), with a high 85% turnout, significantly helped the Communists to achieve a monopoly on power. More recent studies have shown that the results were rigged – only 27% of all voters chose "yes" for each question. --- On 4 July, an anti-Jewish pogrom in Kielce, the pretext for which was the rumour that Henryk Błaszczyk, an eight-year-old boy, had been abducted, resulted in approximately 40 victims (37 Jews and three Poles). In the propagandized trial in July, 9 death sentences and 10 life sentences were handed down. Claims of possible provocation persisted, but contemporary historical research has failed to corroborate this. The pogrom, which was preceded by similar events in Krakow and Rzeszow (in summer 1945), tarnished the image of Poland abroad and helped reinforce the stereotype of “Polish anti-Semitism”.

HUNGARY

The election result was one thing; real power, held by the Soviets in the Control Commission in conjunction with the Hungarian Communists, was another. Although the Smallholder Ferenc Nagy was appointed Prime Minister of the Hungarian government, and Zoltán Tildy (1889-1961), from the same party, was made President, the Communists managed to win the key positions of power for themselves: following Soviet intervention Imre Nagy (1896-1958) was named Interior Minister, while Péter Gábor remained head of the political police. In addition, the Communists did their utmost to destabilize and divide the Smallholders Party through administrative interventions, bullying, accusations of political crimes, persecution and enticing political allies away. In modern political science, the term "salami tactics" has entered the vocabulary – by stealth and aggression, the Communists collected together individual segments of power, and sliced away at the power of the legitimate election winners.

CZECHOSLOVAKIA

The first year of the two-year plan, entailing the ascent of a command economy and central planning, was also a year of major economic difficulties. Czechoslovakia’s inability to reach financial settlements with foreign owners whose assets had been nationalized brought it into further conflict with the democratic West. The drop in foreign trade, with huge deficits in relation to the United States and the United Kingdom, was a warning sign. As the West vacated Central and Eastern Europe militarily and politically, the Communists were able to reinforce their grip and fuel their arguments for stronger ties with the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union, for its part, pacified the region and forced the countries here to respect each other and abandon their pre-war conflicts. However, there was a darker aspect behind this in the form of stealthy Sovietization. Nevertheless, it was completely in the interests of Western countries, at least temporarily, for this region to be tranquilized, thus neutralizing any German or Hungarian aspirations to power, and therefore they fully respected Czechoslovakia’s incorporation into the Soviet zone of power and policy. Gottwald and his Communists were fully aware of this and began exploiting it to the hilt. In consultation with Stalin, they thwarted the signing of the Czechoslovak-French Treaty of Alliance. The economic crisis raised the issue of finding a speedy solution. One possibility was to accept the Marshall Plan of US economic aid to Europe. Initial Czechoslovak consent, however, was quickly negated by Stalin's statement that Czechoslovak involvement in the plan would be interpreted as a breach of the Czechoslovak-Soviet Treaty of Alliance. Gottwald dared not defy Stalin, and on 10 July 1947 Czechoslovakia withdrew from the plan. Other countries in the nascent Moscow Bloc took the same course of action. This decision undermined Czechoslovakia’s relations with the West even further and deepened the economic instability. The solution offered by the Communists was the further consolidation of links with Stalin’s Soviet Union. Soviet grain supplies during the disastrous drought and an economic agreement with Moscow signed on 11 December 1947 only confirmed the irreversible trend of Czechoslovakia’s journey into the Eastern Bloc. Throughout the year, the tough political fighting between the Communists and the democratic parties continued with mixed fortunes. Within the Social Democrats, the pro-Communist faction led by Zdeněk Fierlinger suffered defeat (with Bohumil Laušman replacing Fierlinger as party leader), while the Communists focused on eliminating the Slovak Democratic Party, a very dangerous rival, which they accused of links with the former clerical fascist Populist Party.

POLAND

A landmark on the way to the establishment of the monopoly on power was the elections to the Sejm held on 19 January, in which, according to the official results, the Communist-led Block of Democratic Parties came out on top with 80% of the vote. In the propagandistic campaign against "reactionary political buccaneers", the main loser was the rural Polish People’s Party, led by the Deputy Prime Minister Stanisław Mikołajczyk, which won 10% of the vote; the party’s chairman soon went into exile. After the Act on the Election of the President was passed, on 5 February the Communist Bolesław Bierut was elected head of state and held this office until its abolition in 1952 (it was restored in 1989). The adoption of the “Small Constitution” on 19 February completed the process of the full takeover of state power by the Polish Workers Party, which became the "absolute hegemon" (Andrzej Friszke), even though it had only 114 seats out of 444. In reality, it had secured control over the majority of social organizations, the government, the chairmanship of the Sejm, state administration, the security apparatus, foreign policy, propaganda, culture, education, and, through "secret members", the satellite parties of the National Unity Front. Open political opposition was suppressed, and armed resistance ceased to play a significant role in public life. As part of the fight for power in 1944-1949, 4,000 death sentences were handed down by military courts, 10,000 were murdered without trial and 10,000 fell in battle. The regime’s losses were between four and five thousand people. - - - In June 1947, the first issue of the periodical Kultura, initially published as a quarterly, later a monthly, came out in Rome. The periodical, published at Paris-based Maisons-Laffitte as of issue 2/3 under the auspices of the exile Literary Institute, existed between 1947 and 2000. Under the editorship of Jerzy Giedroyc it became the most important intellectual tribune of Polish democratic émigrés. The periodical, which tried to contribute to the reconciliation of Poles with their eastern neighbours, featured contributions from, among others, Czesław Miłosz, Witold Gombrowicz, Albert Camus, Simone Weil, Thomas S. Eliot and André Malraux. The Literary Institute was one of the most prestigious émigré publishing houses.

HUNGARY

Hungary was among the Second World War’s defeated states. From 29 July to 15 October 1946, peace negotiations took place in Paris, resulting, on 10 February 1947, in the conclusion of peace treaties between the victorious Allies and the defeated Italy, Romania, Bulgaria, Finland and Hungary. Besides paying high reparations, a crucial factor for Hungary was that it remained within its Trianon boundaries. Hungarian politics failed to negotiate any major territorial correction with either Czechoslovakia or Romania. Therefore, large Hungarian minorities remained in the territory of these states and immediately after the war found themselves in a position where, on the basis of collective guilt, they had no rights. For example, Czechoslovakia contemplated and prepared the displacement of Slovak Hungarians. Under the treaty, Soviet units were meant to leave Hungarian territory, but the Kremlin reserved the right to deploy a special contingent in Hungary to protect and secure a communication link with the Soviet occupation zone in Austria. On the domestic scene, the Communists continued exerting pressure aimed at dividing and marginalizing the Smallholders. Matters reached a head when the Communists accused the Smallholders’ leader, Ferenc Nagy, of conspiracy at a time when he was on an official visit to Switzerland. In fear of what fate awaited him in his home country, Nagy resigned and never returned to Hungary. The Communists won the subsequent parliamentary elections (31 August 1947) by forging ballot papers and intimidating their political opponents.

CZECHOSLOVAKIA

1948 was not just the first year of the Prague-Warsaw-Prague Race of Peace, a cycling event beginning on 1 May, which later became the Berlin-Warsaw-Prague Race and an important tool in the promotion of socialist sport, but in particular will be remembered as the year of the Communist coup in Czechoslovakia. The Communists found a fitting excuse to make their move when the Democratic Party put up strong opposition to the policy pursued by Václav Nosek, the Communist Minister of the Interior. He systematically infiltrated the state security forces with Communist Party members and at the same time rigorously removed personnel considered inconvenient to the Communists. Gottwald backed his minister and launched a campaign claiming that there was a risk a "reactionary" caretaker government could be formed. At that time, he was following instructions from Moscow (on 19 February, the Soviet emissary Valerian A. Zorin appeared in Prague to convey Stalin's recommendation that the Communists should exploit the conflict to usurp power and, in case of failure, they were to ask Moscow for military assistance). On 20 February, some of the democratic ministers protested against the KSČ’s policy by resigning; however, as they did not account for even half of the 26 ministers, Gottwald saw this as a chance for counteraction and, after organizing a general strike and various other coercive events which mainly involved the National Front’s “Action Committees”, responsible for “purging public life of the enemies of the people's democratic system and quelling reactionary conduct”, he forced the sick and exhausted President to accept the resignation of the opposition ministers on 25 February 1948. As a result, hopes that the government would resign and early elections would be called were dashed. Beneš insisted that the vacated posts should be filled by people from the same parties, and while this wish was respected, those appointed were KSČ sympathizers. On 10 March, Parliament passed a motion of confidence in the government. On the same day that the dead body of the foreign minister Jan Masaryk was found in the courtyard of Černín Palace, the Communist Vladimír Clementis was immediately installed as a replacement. The process of dismantling democratic institutions was launched extremely quickly. On 9 May 1948, Parliament passed the new Constitution, an undemocratic document codifying fully the Communists’ usurpation of power. On 30 May, elections to the National Assembly were held with a single electoral list drawn up by the National Front, in which 210 of the 300 seats were reserved for the Communists. This was followed by Beneš’s resignation as a futile attempt at resistance on 2 June and the acclamation of Gottwald as President of the Republic on 14 June 1948. The People’s Democratic Czechoslovakia thus had its first "Workers' President".

POLAND

The search for "enemies" began to focus within the regime’s own ranks. On 31 August, Władysław Gomułka, accused of "bourgeois nationalism", was dismissed as the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Polish Workers Party. His temporary political fall (in 1951 he was imprisoned, in 1956 rehabilitated and chosen to head the party) was the most visible manifestation of the fractional political struggles in the Politburo, and handed victory to the group around President Bierut, which was inclined towards the closest cooperation with the USSR. Part of the Sovietization process, as in of other countries in the Bloc, was the unification of the Communists and the socialist left, which occurred on 15-21 December at the founding congress of the Polish United Workers Party (PSDS, 1948-1990). Although some the new elite were subjected to judicial repression (for example, the trial of General Stanisław Tatar and others in October 1951), in Poland there was no major show trial of Party officials comparable with the trials of Rajk and Slánský.

HUNGARY

After politically discrediting their political opponents, the Communists concentrated on the Social Democrats, who won 15% of the vote and came fourth. The logical consequence, as in most of the Soviet Bloc, was a merger with the Communists. This duly happened at a joint congress on 12 June 1948. A new Hungarian Workers' Party (Magyar Dolgozók Pártja, MDP) was formed, in which the Communists had the last word. Led by Mátyás Rákosi, Ernő Gerő, Mihály Farkas and József Révai, they immediately launched large-scale internal purges. There were also changes in constitutional posts. On 30 June 1948, the Smallholder Zoltán Tildy resigned from office of Prime Minister and was replaced by the former left-wing Social Democrat Árpád Szakasits. The political system thus came under the full control of the Communists. Even so, there were still institutions and groups in society that had to be firmly warned that the conditions in the country had changed fundamentally. A sharp opponent not only of the Communists, but also of the overall democratic post-war conditions, was the Primate of the Hungarian Catholic Church, Cardinal József Mindszenty (1892-1975). He rejected the agricultural reform which had stripped the Church of significant assets, and the increased state interference in the education system, where Catholics traditionally enjoyed a strong position. The Communists therefore started a massive campaign of discreditation against him and arrested him in late 1948. In February 1949, he was sentenced to life imprisonment for treason and espionage.