In 1939: What happened in the end of WWII in Eastern European countries.
Another immediately visible and terrifying reality was the massive power of the Soviet Army, which had played the predominant role in destroying Nazi Germany.
And now, after Germany was defeated, 11 million Soviet soldiers still stood in Eastern European territories.
Joseph Stalin saw this postwar chaos as a chance to strengthen his grip throughout the region.
Within the expanded borders of the Soviet Union, Stalin quickly finished digesting the territories he had gained through his pact with Hitler at the outset of the war in 1939: the Baltic states and Bessarabia, now in the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic.
He wouldn’t waste much time in taking control over these territories and as many others that his Red Army could reach.
The tragic result was that after suffering the bad luck of being caught in the blood-lands between Hitler and Stalin during the war, these countries would now find themselves trapped behind what Winston Churchill aptly called the Soviet Union’s “Iron Curtain.
” The consequences for these people were catastrophic. The poverty from communist economics and forced recourse extraction were bad enough, but it was the sadistic violence and the lack of freedom that was the most soul-crushing.
The scale of the punishment that would be handed out to the citizens trapped behind Stalin’s borders in the decade following the Second World War was monumental - and, outside the Soviet Union itself, utterly unprecedented.
Show trials would be but the visible tip of an archipelago of repression: prison, exile, and forced labor battalions.
By 1952, at the height of the Second Stalinist Terror, 1.7 million prisoners were held in Soviet labor camps, further 800,000 in labor colonies, and 2,753,000 in “special settlements.”
The process by which Joseph Stalin took over Eastern Europe has come to be called Stalinization, whereby he expanded his power through gradual political steps mixed with strokes of brutality.
Some countries and people bravely resisted, some with success, others would pay with their lives.
It used to be believed that in the first few years after the Second World War, Stalin took a light approach in exerting control of Eastern Europe.
This lie has been exposed with brutal detail by the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Anne Applebaum in her book: Iron Curtain.
These first years of seeming pluralism, in fact, coincided with careful preparations behind the scenes for the creation of Stalinist regimes.
The reality was that by betraying previous promises of free elections and national independence for liberated Eastern European countries, Stalin imposed communist control. This creeping Stalinization took place in stages.
Later, the Hungarian Stalinist leader Matyas Rakosi described the approach as “salami slice tactics," steps that in isolation did not alarm or provoke panic, but that taken together proved decisive.
The plans began as communists who had spent the war in the Soviet Union were sent back to their homelands.
There, they were to help create so-called National Fronts, where they cooperated with socialists and farmers' parties.
These National Fronts stood united against the fascists in their rhetoric. Of course, the label “fascist” quickly came to mean anyone the Communist Party didn’t like.
In these coalitions, the communists increasingly dominated the interior ministry posts, those bureaucracies that controlled the police and the army.
Once they had these in their hands, they used them to purge all potential opposition - sometimes in secrecy and sometimes in public displays of force.
Meanwhile, the National Fronts engaged in reconstruction policies that commanded considerable popular support as they tried to win over the citizenry.
These included abolishing the last monarchies in Romania and Bulgaria, more land reform, and the nationalizing of industries.
Once the communists had effectively centralized their control, they would dispense with their earlier allies in the National Fronts and either close their parties or fuse them into a movement they would dominate.
In view of continuing scholarly disagreement over responsibility for the division of Europe, it is perhaps worth emphasizing that neither Stalin nor his local representatives were in any doubt as to their long-term goal.
Coalitions were the route to power for communist parties in regions where they were historically weak; they were only ever a means to this end.
As Walter Ulbricht, leader of the East German Communists, explained privately to his followers when they expressed bemusement at party policy in 1945: “It's quite clear - it's got to look democratic, but we must have everything in our control.”
Once control was established, anything outside of the state became a target for the communists. No elements of civil society would be tolerated.
That included churches, the media, universities, charitable organizations, clubs, and workers' unions.
The Boy Scouts - along with countless other youth organizations - and the Salvation Army were eliminated.
Youth groups and schools had to conform or were simply taken over by communist officials.
Anyone who openly disagreed with such actions risked jail, deportation, or worse.The goal was to raise up a new type of Soviet Man. “
In theory, they hoped to create not only a new kind of society but a new kind of person, a citizen who was not capable even of imagining alternatives to communist orthodoxy.
During a turbulent discussion about falling listenership at East German radio, a high-ranking communist argued that "it is necessary in every detail, in every program, in every department to discuss the line of the party and to use it in daily work."
This was precisely what was done across society: the theories of Marxism-Leninism would be explained, expounded, and discussed in kindergartens, schools, and universities; on the radio and in the newspapers; through elaborate mass campaigns, parades, and public events.“ (Applebaum)
The communists truly believed that their ideas would become popular over time. This is why they allowed elections early on.
However, they continually lost out to liberal, socially democratic, and agrarian small-holder’s parties. The result was that communist parties adopted, instead, a strategy of covert pressure, followed by open terror and repression.
Electoral opponents were maligned, threatened, beaten up, arrested, tried as fascists or collaborators, and imprisoned or even shot.
A particularly pivotal example was the Communist coup in Czechoslovakia. By 1947, electoral support for the Communist Party began to decline, in part because of the Soviet Union vetoing Czechoslovakian participation in the Marshall Plan - a $12 billion United States plan to help rebuild Europe. The result was the Communist Party in Prague seizing power at the end of February 1948.
Also in 1948, Stalin precipitated a Berlin crisis, using the city as a sensitive pressure point.
To forestall the emergence of a state in Western Germany, Stalin closed off Western access to Berlin in June 1948, cutting the railroad and highway links.
This proved to be a public relations disaster, as the Americans and British conducted a dramatically successful airlift of supplies to aid the two million people in the western part of Berlin. After 11 months, Stalin lifted the blockade, embarrassed and angry.
These events greatly alarmed Western countries and led to the 1949 founding of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a Western alliance.
This mutual defense pact, which included the US, Canada, and 10 Western European countries, established that an attack on one NATO member would be an attack on all.
If the West couldn’t push the Iron Curtain back, they were at least going to try to stop its growth.
A strong challenge to Stalin's monopoly of control arose in the communist bloc itself in 1948, in Yugoslavia.
During World War Il, Yugoslavian Communist partisans under Josip Broz Tito had largely defeated the Germans themselves, which made them more independent in their home country than many Eastern European communists who had returned home with the Red Army.
That sense of independence and confidence - personified in Tito - frustrated Stalin, who was ever alert to challenges.
And when Stalin demanded that Yugoslavia concentrate its economy on agriculture to supply Soviet industry, Tito refused. Stalin also demanded that Yugoslavia federate with Bulgaria, but Tito again refused.
In February 1948, portraits of Tito that were displayed in Romania as a sign of admiration for a fellow communist suddenly disappeared.
The next month, the Soviets recalled their advisors from Yugoslavia, claiming that they were "surrounded by an absence of comradeship."
Stalin then ordered Tito to come to Moscow to explain himself. Tito refused - a decision that likely saved his life. A chill now descended on these former partners.
Stalin used the Cominform (short for Communist Information Bureau) and other Eastern European communists to put pressure on Tito to get back in line. He also considered invasion plans.
The independent Yugoslav communists reacted by tightening their own control, often in brutal ways.
They arrested 14,000 comrades who supported Stalin. They also abused their enemies with harsh propaganda.
By June 1948, Tito's break with Moscow was out in the open.
It attracted American attention, and the US sent financial aid to Yugoslavia, to exploit this split in the Cold War.
When the Korean War broke out in 1950, the US sent military aid to Yugoslavia, so that during the global emergency Stalin could not intervene there.
This confirmed that Tito was gone from the Soviet bloc for good. Although a communist, he was now on the side of the West.
As one American diplomat put it: “He may be a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch.”
Stalin's fury at the audacity of the Yugoslavs took murderous form in a whole series of purges and show trials during what has come to be called the Second Stalinist Terror.
In Romania, one of the first female foreign ministers in the world, Ana Pauker, was put on trial, forced to denounce herself, and ejected from the party. Here, her Jewish background may have made her a target as well.
The classic show trial was in Czechoslovakia in 1952. The so-called Slansky trial had been prepared for three years.
It mostly involved Czechoslovakian Jewish party officials, especially Rudolf Slansky.
After ritual proceedings, 11 were executed. Anti-Semitism was being mobilized in East Europe again. It's worth asking: How did Stalinism gain support?
The initially small communist parties in Eastern Europe grew as party membership became a route to advancement.
Support also grew as it became clear that non-party members were more likely to be selected by the secrete police or publicly denounced as fascists, or Trotskyites, or right-deviationists.
Others were genuinely attracted by the egalitarian promises of the new regimes, and identified with them.
The great Polish poet, writer, and 1980 Nobel Prize winner Czeslaw Milosz drew on his own personal experience and observations to deliver a stunning psychological study of Stalinism in Poland. This was his book The Captive Mind, published in 1953.
He observed that in serving Stalinism, it offered its adherents the power of insider knowledge and the sense of being on “the right side of History” (with a capital H).
He deducted that the costs included an inner brutalization, the loss of freedom, national identity, and trust.
To be against the Party was criminal, but to be for it was to lose oneself. To understand this grim period, Miłosz is indispensable
Stalinism's prime mover, Stalin himself, died in 1953. He seemed to be on the verge of yet another wave of terror, this time directed against the Jews.
It was almost like Stalin had taken a page out of the playbook of his previous ally - and then adversary - Hitler. Soviet authorities had announced the discovery of a so-called Doctors' Plot.
It was alleged that government doctors, mostly Jewish, had planned to poison the Soviet leadership. But before the purge could really get going, Stalin unexpectedly died.
One of Stalin’s fellow communists gave a devastating judgment of the man who was responsible for the deaths of many millions, calling him: “The greatest criminal leader in history.
The worst despot. A monster who is utopian and pragmatic at the same time.”Today, Stalin’s reputation is in flux.
Although Russians were among the main victims of Stalin, in 2015, new polling results showed that only 20 percent of Russian respondents regarded Stalin with fear, dislike, or distrust.
Meanwhile, 45 percent concluded that Stalin’s achievements were a justification for their costs.
Those who resisted Stalinization, or died in a gulag, or starved during a famine brought on by forced collectivization, or were executed by the NKVD - or other Soviet-supported secret police forces - would not agree.
The reality is that there simply is no way to sugarcoat the plague that the Soviet Union and Joseph Stalin were for the people of Eastern Europe.
“The effect of the Sovietization of Eastern Europe was to draw it steadily away from the western half of the continent.
Just as Western Europe was about to enter an era of dramatic transformation and unprecedented prosperity, Eastern Europe was slipping into a coma: a winter of inertia and resignation, punctured by cycles of protest and subjugation, that would last for nearly four decades.
It is symptomatic and somehow appropriate that during the very years when the Marshall Plan injected some $14 billion into Western Europe's recovering economy, Stalin - through reparations, forced deliveries, and the imposition of grossly disadvantageous trading distortions - extracted approximately the same amount from Eastern Europe.
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