The People's Democracies of Eastern Europe

Autumn 1944: Different Starting Points

When the Red Army crossed the Soviet frontier in the summer of 1944, the countries ahead of it stood in very different conditions. Poland was under German occupation, with a government-in-exile in London and, at home, two separate underground forces: the Home Army loyal to London and the People's Army linked to the communists. Romania, Hungary and Bulgaria were allies of Germany. Czechoslovakia's Beneš government in London had signed a treaty with the Soviet Union in December 1943, while in Yugoslavia and Albania communist-led partisans were liberating their countries by their own efforts.

In Poland, the Polish Committee of National Liberation issued its manifesto at Chełm on 22 July 1944 and established itself in Lublin. The committee was a Soviet-sponsored body that did not recognise the London government, and on 6 September it decreed land reform. While the Warsaw Uprising ran from August to October, Soviet forces remained on the east bank of the Vistula. On 31 December the committee proclaimed itself the provisional government, which the Soviet Union recognised on 5 January 1945.

In Romania, King Michael I arrested Marshal Antonescu on 23 August 1944 and took the country over to the Allied side. The governments of Constantin Sănătescu and Nicolae Rădescu included the National Peasants, the National Liberals, the Social Democrats and the Communists. In Bulgaria, after the Soviet Union declared war on 5 September and crossed the border on 8 September, the Fatherland Front took power in Sofia in the early hours of 9 September. The Front was a coalition of the Communist Party, the Agrarian Union, Zveno and the Social Democrats. From December into the following year a People's Court tried the regents, ministers and deputies of the old regime and passed some 2,700 death sentences; on 1 February 1945 three regents and twenty-two ministers were executed.

On 9 October in Moscow, Churchill and Stalin exchanged what became known as the percentages agreement. Churchill's note gave Romania 90 to 10 in the Soviet favour, Greece 90 to 10 in the British favour, Yugoslavia and Hungary 50 to 50, and Bulgaria 75 to 25; in the follow-up talks between Eden and Molotov, Hungary and Bulgaria were adjusted to 80 to 20. The document had no legal standing. What the two leaders understood by it can be seen in how the Soviet Union acted in Romania and Bulgaria, and Britain in Greece.

Under the armistice agreements, Allied Control Commissions were set up in Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary. In all three the chairman was a Soviet general. Kliment Voroshilov in Hungary, Sergei Biryuzov in Bulgaria (vice-chairman under Marshal Tolbukhin, and the working head) and the Soviet command in Romania held the final say over each government's decisions, while the American and British representatives were there to be informed. In Italy the arrangement had been the reverse, with the Western Allies leading the commission and the Soviet representative being informed, and the Soviet Union applied the Italian precedent directly to its own zones.

Stalin's words in April 1945, as reported by Milovan Djilas, compress the period: "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."

Coalition Governments and Elections, 1945–1946

Every government of 1945 was a coalition of several parties. In Poland, under the Yalta agreement, the Provisional Government of National Unity was formed on 28 June with Stanisław Mikołajczyk, the former prime minister of the London government, as deputy prime minister and minister of agriculture; the United States and Britain recognised it on 5 July. In Hungary a Provisional National Assembly had met at Debrecen in December 1944, and in Czechoslovakia the Košice government programme of 5 April 1945 launched a National Front government of six parties. In the Soviet zone of Germany, Order No. 2 of the Soviet military administration permitted party activity on 10 June 1945, and the Communist Party was the first to be refounded the next day.

The ministries the communists held within the coalitions had something in common: the Ministry of Public Security in Poland, the Interior Ministry in Hungary (László Rajk from March 1946), in Czechoslovakia (Václav Nosek), in Romania (Teohari Georgescu) and in Bulgaria (Anton Yugov). The police and security services, and the agriculture ministries that carried out land reform, went to the communists; finance and foreign affairs mostly went to other parties.

Land reform was the coalitions' first joint undertaking everywhere. Poland in September 1944, Romania on 23 March 1945, Hungary on 17 March 1945 and the Soviet zone of Germany in September 1945 broke up the large estates. In Hungary 3.2 million hectares were confiscated and distributed to some 640,000 households. Most coalition parties supported these measures. The same was true of the nationalisation of major industry: Czechoslovakia's nationalisation decrees of October 1945 were issued in President Beneš's name, and Mikołajczyk's Peasant Party voted for Poland's nationalisation law of January 1946.

Election results differed from country to country. Hungary's general election of 4 November 1945 is counted the freest in Eastern Europe in this period: the Smallholders took 57.0 per cent, the Social Democrats 17.4, the Communists 17.0 and the National Peasants 6.9. The Smallholders had the seats to govern alone, but Voroshilov required the coalition to continue and the Smallholders agreed. Zoltán Tildy became prime minister, then president when the republic was proclaimed on 1 February 1946, and Ferenc Nagy succeeded him as prime minister. In Czechoslovakia's election of 26 May 1946 the Communists took 40.2 per cent in the Czech lands and 30.4 in Slovakia, 38 per cent nationally, and became the largest party, while in Slovakia the Democratic Party won 62 per cent. Klement Gottwald became prime minister.

The counts in Poland and Romania left a different legacy. The Polish government postponed the election and on 30 June 1946 held a referendum on three questions: abolition of the Senate, land reform and nationalisation, and the Oder-Neisse frontier. The official result on the first question was 68.2 per cent in favour; Mikołajczyk's Peasant Party, which had urged a "no" on that question, claimed that "no" had in fact won. Internal tallies found by Andrzej Paczkowski in Polish and Soviet archives after 1989 show 26.9 per cent in favour on the first question. Romania's election of 19 November 1946 was officially won by the communist-led Bloc of Democratic Parties with 69.8 per cent. Research on party documents and local tallies published in the 1990s points to the National Peasants having in fact held the majority. Bulgaria's Grand National Assembly election of 27 October 1946 gave the Fatherland Front 70.1 per cent (the Communist Party 53.2) and the opposition 28.3, with the opposition led by Nikola Petkov's Agrarians taking 101 seats.

In the Landtag elections of 20 October 1946 in the Soviet zone of Germany, the Socialist Unity Party took 47.5 per cent across the five states and a majority in none; in the four-power Berlin city election the same day, the Social Democrats took 48.7 per cent and the Socialist Unity Party 19.8.

The Coalitions Come Apart, 1947

In 1947 the other coalition parties left government or were dissolved in every country. The order and the method differed.

Poland's election was held on 19 January 1947. The official result gave the Democratic Bloc of the Workers' Party, the Socialists and the Democrats 80.1 per cent and the Peasant Party 10.3. Dozens of Peasant Party candidates had been arrested before the vote, and the party's lists were invalidated in several districts. Mikołajczyk left Poland for Britain on 21 October.

In Hungary, in March 1946 the Communists, Social Democrats, National Peasants and the trade unions formed a "Left Bloc" and demanded the expulsion of "reactionary" deputies from the Smallholders. The Smallholders expelled twenty deputies on 12 March. In January 1947 an investigation into a "conspiracy against the republic" began and Smallholder figures were arrested one after another; when parliament refused on 25 February to lift the immunity of the party's general secretary Béla Kovács, the Soviet authorities arrested him themselves on charges of espionage against the Red Army and took him to the Soviet Union. Prime Minister Ferenc Nagy, on holiday in Switzerland, resigned on 30 May; his young son was still in Budapest, and the resignation was exchanged for the boy's departure. In the election of 31 August the Communists became the largest party with 22.3 per cent. The vote is known by the "blue ballots" issued in large numbers to allow voting outside one's own district, and the fraudulent votes are estimated at around 60,000. After the election the Hungarian Independence Party, which had taken 13.4 per cent, had its seats annulled. Looking back in a lecture at the party's higher school in February 1952, Mátyás Rákosi said the opposition had been cut off "like a salami, slice by slice", and the phrase became a name for the period.

In Bulgaria, on 5 June 1947 parliament stripped Petkov of his immunity and he was arrested in the chamber. Tried in August on charges of plotting a military coup, he was sentenced to death and hanged on 23 September, eight days after the Paris peace treaty came into force on 15 September. His Agrarian Union was dissolved on 26 August. In Romania, the National Peasant leadership was arrested on 14 July at Tămădău airfield while attempting to leave the country, and the party was dissolved on 29 July. Iuliu Maniu was tried from 29 October to 11 November, sentenced to hard labour for life, and died in Sighet prison in 1953. In early November Gheorghe Tătărescu of the National Liberals left the foreign ministry and Ana Pauker took his place. On 30 December Petru Groza and Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej presented King Michael I with an act of abdication, which he signed the same day. The Romanian People's Republic was proclaimed that evening.

Czechoslovakia was the only country that kept a multi-party system and a free press to the end of 1947. The cabinet crisis of February 1948 and the formation of the Gottwald government are covered in the Marshall Plan entry. A new constitution was adopted on 9 May, a single-list election held on 30 May, and Beneš resigned on 7 June; Gottwald became president on the 14th.

Two Parties Become One, 1946–1948

The merger of the social democratic parties into the communist parties ran alongside the break-up of the coalitions. The first case was the Soviet zone of Germany. On 21 and 22 April 1946 in Berlin the zonal organisations of the Communist and Social Democratic parties were united as the Socialist Unity Party of Germany, with Wilhelm Pieck and Otto Grotewohl as co-chairmen. Before the merger, on 31 March, Social Democratic members in the Western sectors of Berlin held a ballot in which 82 per cent opposed immediate unification; in the Soviet sector the ballot was not permitted. In 1948 the Socialist Unity Party declared itself a "party of a new type" and began vetting its former Social Democrats.

In Romania the Communists and Social Democrats merged as the Romanian Workers' Party from 21 to 23 February 1948. In Hungary the Social Democratic Party merged with the Communists on 12 June 1948 to form the Hungarian Working People's Party, the Social Democrats who had opposed the merger having already been expelled. The Czechoslovak Social Democrats were absorbed into the Communist Party on 27 June 1948, and the Bulgarian Social Democrats on 11 August. In Poland, at the Unification Congress in Warsaw from 15 to 21 December, the Workers' Party and the Socialist Party formed the Polish United Workers' Party; before the congress the Socialists had expelled some 80,000 of their own members in an internal vetting.

In form the mergers were unions of equals in every country; in substance they incorporated social democratic members into the communist organisation. The composition of the new leaderships, the re-registration of members after the merger, and the vetting for "social democratic deviation" show as much. Of the social democratic leaders who accepted the merger, Józef Cyrankiewicz in Poland and Grotewohl in East Germany remained in the new leaderships; Árpád Szakasits in Hungary was arrested in 1950.

From the "New Road" to "a Form of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat"

"People's democracy" was the name each communist party gave its system from 1945, and until 1947 the term meant something distinct from the Soviet system. In speeches of 1945 and 1946 Georgi Dimitrov said that Bulgaria would be a people's republic rather than a Soviet republic and could reach socialism without a dictatorship of the proletariat. In November 1946 Władysław Gomułka lectured on "the Polish road to socialism", a distinct path without the dictatorship of the proletariat or collectivisation. Gottwald likewise spoke of "Czechoslovakia's own road".

These formulations were not improvisations by the national parties. According to Dimitrov's diary, in September 1946 Stalin told a Bulgarian delegation that socialism could be reached without passing through the Soviet form, and that in that case a dictatorship of the proletariat was unnecessary. In Moscow, Evgeny Varga's book of 1946 and his 1947 article "Democracy of a New Type" defined these systems as a transitional form that was neither capitalist nor socialist. Varga's book was criticised at a discussion of the Institute of Economics in May 1947, and the institute was closed that autumn.

The turn began at the founding conference of the Cominform in September 1947. Andrei Zhdanov's "two camps" report, the criticism of the French and Italian parties and the presentation of Yugoslavia as the model are set out in the Marshall Plan entry. At that conference Gomułka expressed reservations about creating the Cominform at all, and his stance became grounds for the criticism of him the following year. After the Cominform expelled the Yugoslav party in June 1948, each party made self-criticism over its own "road".

The moment the definition changed is documented. At the Fifth Congress of the Bulgarian Communist Party on 19 December 1948, Dimitrov reported that "the people's democratic regime and the Soviet regime are two forms of one and the same power, the dictatorship of the proletariat". The programme of the Polish unification congress the same month and the Hungarian and Czechoslovak party documents of 1949 adopted the same formula. "People's democracy" thereby ceased to denote an alternative to the Soviet model and came to denote a transitional form on the way to it. The official histories of the Soviet Union and of each party thereafter described the period as "the growing-over of the anti-fascist democratic revolution into the socialist revolution".

After 1948: Settling Accounts Inside the Parties, and the Advisers

From the summer of 1948 each party began to put its own house in order. In Poland the Central Committee plenum of 31 August to 3 September condemned Gomułka's "rightist-nationalist deviation" and removed him as general secretary; Bolesław Bierut took his place. Gomułka was arrested in August 1951 and held without trial until December 1954. In Romania, Lucrețiu Pătrășcanu was dropped from the leadership in February 1948, arrested in April and executed in 1954. In Albania, Koçi Xoxe, who had been close to Yugoslavia, was executed in June 1949.

The public trials began in 1949. László Rajk, Hungary's former interior minister, was arrested on 30 May, tried in Budapest from 16 to 24 September as a spy for Tito and Western intelligence, and executed on 15 October. Lieutenant General Fyodor Belkin of the Soviet Ministry of State Security took part in preparing the case. In Bulgaria the deputy prime minister Traicho Kostov was removed from the leadership in March and arrested in June; at his trial from 7 to 14 December he withdrew his confession in open court, and he was executed on 16 December. In Czechoslovakia the party's general secretary Rudolf Slánský was arrested in November 1951 and tried from 20 to 27 November 1952; eleven of the fourteen defendants were executed on 3 December. The defendants in these trials were rehabilitated in their countries after 1956, and some 100,000 people attended Rajk's reburial on 6 October 1956.

Soviet advisers were placed in each security service and army. Advisers from the Soviet Ministry of State Security sat in the Hungarian State Protection Authority, the Polish Ministry of Public Security and the Czechoslovak State Security, and their names appear in the interrogation records of the Rajk and Slánský cases. In the armies, Soviet Marshal Konstantin Rokossovsky was appointed Poland's minister of national defence on 7 November 1949 and given the rank of Marshal of Poland, and several hundred Soviet officers entered the Polish command. In the economy, joint companies with Soviet shareholdings were set up in Romania, Hungary and Bulgaria, and the bilateral treaties between the Soviet Union and each country were concluded in turn from Poland in 1945 to Bulgaria in 1948, as the Warsaw Pact entry sets out.

In 1949 each country fixed the new order in a constitution. Hungary promulgated its constitution on 20 August after a single-list election on 15 May; Poland adopted its constitution in 1952, Romania in April 1948, Bulgaria in December 1947 and Czechoslovakia in May 1948. On 7 October 1949 the German Democratic Republic was founded in the Soviet zone. In January 1949 the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance was established.

The Readings

Accounts of these five years fall into four broad lines.

The official account of the Soviet Union and of each party explained the process as the development of an anti-fascist national front into a socialist revolution. The Red Army was a liberator, land reform and nationalisation were the demands of the majority, and the other coalition parties had excluded themselves through their links to reactionary forces and foreign intelligence services. This account survives in the trial records of 1949 and in the party histories, with the trial portions revised after 1956.

Early Western accounts followed the frame set by Hugh Seton-Watson's The East European Revolution (1950). He divided the process into three stages, genuine coalition, bogus coalition and monolithic regime, and held that each country followed the same path in an order fixed in Moscow from the start. Zbigniew Brzezinski's The Soviet Bloc (1960) rests on the same premise. In this reading the coalitions of 1945–46 and the "new road" were stages that concealed the end.

The revisionist scholarship of the 1960s and 1970s read Soviet conduct as a response to Western conduct. Gabriel Kolko, Geir Lundestad and, on Hungary, Charles Gati held that the Soviet Union had no fixed timetable before 1947 and that the break-up of the coalitions accelerated only after the Marshall Plan and the Truman Doctrine. The differing outcomes of the Hungarian and Czechoslovak elections, and the differing advice Stalin gave each country in 1946, were the evidence.

The opening of the archives after 1991 reordered the debate. The Establishment of Communist Regimes in Eastern Europe, 1944–1949 (1997), edited by Norman Naimark and Leonid Gibianskii, showed that the paths differed by country and that the judgements of the local parties affected the outcomes. Eduard Mark, in "Revolution by Degrees" (2001), argued that the Soviet Union had a "national front" strategy from 1941 and that the coalition stage was itself part of the design. Mark Kramer, in a 2009 essay, concluded that Stalin had no detailed blueprint but that the direction of Soviet control was present from the start, and that the acceleration of 1947–48 was a response to the Marshall Plan and the break with Tito. Anne Applebaum's Iron Curtain (2012), comparing East Germany, Poland and Hungary, stressed that control of the security services, youth organisations and broadcasting came before the elections. Dimitrov's diary, edited by Ivo Banac (2003), and the Cominform minutes edited by Giuliano Procacci and others (1994) became the primary sources of this discussion.

The four lines arrange the same facts differently. Stalin's words to the Bulgarian delegation in September 1946 are read both as evidence that the "new road" was meant and as evidence of a staged design. Hungary's election of 1945 is cited both as proof that the Soviet Union allowed a free election and as proof that its result was soon overturned. In either case what is disputed is intention, not sequence.

What Was Fixed by 1949, and What Followed

By the end of 1949 a common set of institutions was in place across Eastern Europe: a single-list parliament led by the communist party, nationalised industry and the beginnings of agricultural collectivisation, a bilateral treaty with the Soviet Union, an army and a security service with Soviet advisers, and a people's democratic constitution defined as "a form of the dictatorship of the proletariat". Only Yugoslavia stood outside the system.

These institutions were the frame within which the events of the next forty years took place. The workers' rising in East Berlin in June 1953, Poznań and Budapest in 1956, Prague in 1968 and Gdańsk in 1980 all occurred inside the relationship between party and state, and between the Soviet Union and each country, that was built in these years. What Imre Nagy in Hungary and Gomułka in Poland raised in 1956 was the "own road" of 1946, and the round tables of 1989 recalled the names of the parties dissolved in 1947. A judgement on what was built between 1945 and 1949 is not separable from a judgement on what happened afterwards.