The long history of Stalinist repression in Eastern Europe

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Czechoslovakia 1990: Many people who endured Stalinist repression for over 40 years came out to support the students fight for democracy.

SOCIALIST ACTION MARCH 1990 15 In the final days of 1944, hope replaced despair for millions of Eastern Europeans under Nazi occupation. The Red Army was advancing on a line from the Baltic to the Black Sea. The day of liberation approached ever closer.

Partisan bands growing in strength and confidence moved from harassing the Nazis to taking control of limited areas. Town and village councils were set up.

In September 1944, partisans in Sofia, Bulgaria hoisted red flags over the capital. Workers' committees took over factories as the owners fled west to escape the Russians. Power was falling into workers' hands almost by default.

In Poland, the Soviet army reached the east bank of the Vistula River, which flows through the suburbs of Warsaw. Inside the city, Polish partisans were in desperate struggle with the Germans. But the guerrillas were outnumbered and outgunned. Partisan couriers swam the Vistula to beg for munitions, medicines, and food from the Soviet forces.

To the amazement of the partisans, the Soviet commander refused all help. The Soviets kept their troops immobilized on the east bank of the Vistula for 63 days while the Polish fighters were slaughtered. The Russians crossed the river to liberate Warsaw only after all resistance was crushed, and the Germans were retreating from the city.

This episode would remain inexplicable unless one understands Stalin's policy in World War II. Stalin was fighting to defend Russian territory and the bureaucracy's power and privileges, and nothing more. He was on no crusade to spread socialist revolution.

The threat from Hitler's armies was obvious. But Stalin saw another threat in uncontrolled partisan bands who might establish independent centers of workers' power. The partisans fighting in Warsaw were independent, hence unreliable. It was better to let Hitler eliminate them, and avoid trouble later.

As Soviet armies moved west into Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and Czechoslovakia they were welcomed by many workers' and nationalist formations who filled the power vacuum left by the fascist puppet governments fleeing west.

How Lenin and Trotsky would have embraced these revolutionary workers! But Stalin saw only a movement he could not control. He preferred to deal with the weak and discredited capitalist class. These capitalists would help keep the workers in their place.

Under tight control

After the Red Army took control, the Stalinists nurtured these remaining capitalists, forming coalition governments with them. A few reliable Stalinists in cabinet seats would keep the coalition government on a pro-Soviet course. From their cabinet seats and department offices, the Stalinists could assure that the workers' parties were kept under tight control.

Keeping the workers under control meant eliminating a whole generation of revolutionaries who had preserved the traditions of the Bolshevik Revolution. Many had spent years in bourgeois and fascist jails.

Within a few years of the liberation of these countries, show trials in Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, and Hungary condemned these heroic working-class leaders as enemies of the workers. Like the Moscow Trials of 1937, these prosecutions destroyed a leadership that would have resisted the Stalinization of their countries.

With the militant workers' movements beheaded, the Stalinists proceeded to rebuild local Communist parties. From small groups they became mass parties of hundreds of thousands. The rival Social Democrats were absorbed into the new Communist parties. But these fused parties were still not firmly in the grip of the Stalinists. It took vast purges of the membership to reduce them to organizations of careerists and blind followers.

In Romania, 200,000 dissidents were purged in 1948, and 550,000 were expelled in Czechoslovakia. The careerists then crystalized a bureaucracy that developed a measure of independence from the Kremlin, but the ultimate power to enforce Stalinist discipline lay with the Soviet occupation forces.

The warm welcome the workers gave the Soviet army quickly cooled as they saw the Russians carting off scarce machinery and whole factories to the Soviet Union. In Romania and Bulgaria, whose governments willingly supported Germany, such plundering was termed "collecting reparations." But it is unclear what they called this wholesale looting in countries forcibly occupied by Nazi aggression.

The economies of these so-called buffer states were left in capitalist hands, but Stalin set up joint stock companies with local capitalists to direct production to commodities needed by the Soviet Union. Here contradictions broke out between profit-motivated business interests and the Soviet planned economy. Which would prevail? The drive for maximum profit or the Soviet desire for cheap products?

Precedent in the Baltic region The Kremlin had faced this problem earlier, in 1939, when Stalin seized the Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. When these nations were absorbed by the workers' state, there was no place for the Baltic capitalists. Stalin found a place for them—in Siberia. But along with the capitalists, many workers who were deemed "unreliable" were among the 200,000 deported to Siberia.

Carefully controlled workers' committees took over the factories which were incorporated into the thoroughly bureaucratized Soviet system. The Baltic workers' control of their own countries was further diluted as thousands of Russians were sent to Estonia and Latvia to Russify the provinces.

Contradictions in East Europe developed more slowly. So long as these states served as buffer zones insulating the Soviet Union, Stalin had no problem. The workers may prefer socialism, but that wish could be ignored by a government interested only in preserving their bureaucratic position.

While these events were occurring in Eastern Europe, the Stalinists were also active in the West. The workers' anti-capitalist struggles in post-World War II Western Europe were derailed as the Stalinists entered bourgeois cabinets to prop up capitalist regimes, restrain strikes, and smother the revolutionary aspirations of the workers.

Forced to overturn capitalism Stalin thought he could live peacefully with the capitalist world. But world imperialism had no desire to live peacefully with 1946. This put a gun to Stalin's head.

The Marshall Plan involved the infusion of American money to restore European capitalism and to pull it into the American orbit. If the East European capitalists participated, these states would no longer be buffer states against anti-Soviet attacks. All the contradictions between the profit system and planned economy would be exacerbated as American economic might was exerted through the East European capitalists. Stalin felt he had to move against them.

Having used the capitalists against the workers, Stalin now used the workers against the capitalists. Carefully controlled workers' committees led a partial mobilizaIncidedtion of essays in delem of socialise democracy Medied by Carl Finamore tion of the working class to oust the capitalists in the six East European states. There was little resistance. The native bourgeoisies were weak, and the United States was unable to intervene militarily because of antiwar sentiment at home.

Nationalizations took place at various times in the six countries. They were carried out as early as 1945 in Czechoslovakia and as late as 1948 in Bulgaria. In all countries the process was much the same. In no case did the workers play an independent role.

Bourgeois representatives were eased out of coalition governments by the overwhelming power of the Stalinist forces. They were replaced by leaders of the mass Communist parties, in some cases with representatives of small peasant parties subservient to the Stalinists.

Control of factories, banks, and wholesale trade was taken from the capitalists and transferred to thoroughly bureaucratized workers' councils. Rank-and-file workers had no voice in any decisions. The new order was formalized by the promulgation in 1948 of new constitutions based on the 1936 Soviet constitution.

Stalinist clones

This made the new regimes in the buffer states full fledged clones of the Stalinist dictatorship. The Soviet bureaucracy had decades to develop all the privileges and vices of a hardened caste. The new bureaucracies of Hungary, Bulgaria, etc. were created with all the vices of a caste already well developed. The Ceausescu clan in Romania showed how an absolute dictatorship could go beyond even the excesses of Stalin.

The possibility that rational, planned production could replace the anarchy of market forces made the nationalizations progressive. But each country's plans were geared first to the needs of the Soviet Union, and based on the false theory of building socialism in one country.

Development of heavy industry was stressed in each country regardless of consumers' need. Even consumer goods in short supply were exported to the Soviet Union. For years cooperation among the six workers' states was discouraged. In each country lopsided plans of development, imposed from above, led to economic crisis. Recent borrowing from the capitalist world has only exacerbated the problems.

The regimes never had popular support, and were highly unstable, as uprisings in East Germany in 1953, Hungary in 1956, Poland in 1958, and Czechoslovakia in 1968 demonstrated. The Soviet troops that crushed these revolts proved that ultimate power lay in Moscow.

Although Soviet military might could restore Stalinist order in the 1950s and even the 1960s, today things are different. Now the workers of the Soviet Union itself are challenging their own bureaucracy. Gorbachev does not dare try military repression against the millions in revolt in East Europe today. He can only attempt to salvage what he can of the wreckage of Stalinism.

American capitalists are exulting that "socialism" has failed. But real socialism has not even been approached in these deformed workers' states. What has been rejected is the Stalinist dictatorship imposed by the Kremlin.

Stalinism Dead:

democracy Edited by Carl Finamore, with essays by Esteban Volkov (Leon Trotsky's grandson), Pierre Broué (Trotsky's biographer), et al. (208 pp. w/ photos.) paper: $8.95, plus $1 for postage. Make checks payable to Walnut Publishing Co., 3435 Army St., Rm. 308, S.F., CA 94110.

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...S. Africa (continued from page secretary David Owen) is quite accurate.

For many years, De Klerk counted himself among the die-hard advocates of apartheid. Like Gorbachev, he is a party apparatchik whose goal is to reform the system in order to preserve it.

The lessons of Eastern Europe, where hard-line bureaucrats were brought down by struggles in the streets, were not lost on De Klerk and other ruling-class representatives in South Africa. To try to avoid a similar fate at the hands of the mobilized Black population, new thinking was necessary in the land of apartheid.

De Klerk announced his reforms after several months of stepped-up protests-mass rallies, strikes, sit-ins, and boycotts—by Black people fighting the apartheid system. Despite the state of emergency, the Black freedom movement was rebounding. For that reason, the door was "opened" to negotiations.

De Klerk now hopes to corral the Black movement into a drawn-out process of backroom talks and compromises.

Conditions for talks

The ANC leadership has agreed that initial talks should start as soon as possible. "The day is not very far" when discussions can take place, Mandela stressed soon after his release.

The ANC said that talks can be undertaken once the government complies with three major demands-and end to the state of emergency, the freeing of all political prisoners, and the withdrawal of troops from the Black townships.

But the South African regime is insisting that negotiations be conducted on its own terms. It has resisted setting free those prisoners who are charged with "violent" crimes.

De Klerk has extolled the role of the police in "combatting violence and other crimes" that members of anti-apartheid groups might commit. And police officials have said that exiles returning to South Africa could be subject to prosecution under still-existing regulations.

As if to give teeth to these statements, Nelson Mandela just before his trial and imprisonment government forces soon set out on a hunt for nine ANC members who are charged with being "guerrillas." Several rallies were broken up with tear gas, shotguns, and attack dogs-resulting in some deaths.

Items on the table The ANC also said that it looked favorably on the possibility of later negotiations dealing with the question of "power shar" But here, too, the De Klerk regime is determined to wring substantial concessions from the Black movement.

De Klerk proposed discussions of a new "democratic" constitution that would- include assurances of "no domination." In plain words, the regime wants it clear from the outset that whites will be guaranteed veto power under a post-apartheid government; Blacks would be denied majority rule.

At the same time, De Klerk chided Nelson Mandela's "archaic policies" supporting the continuation of guerrilla warfare and the future nationalization of the banks and the mines.

De Klerk hoping will back away from the nationalization demand. He knows that ANC leaders have held numerous meetings with representatives of the South African capitalist class, in which they stressed that the bosses have "nothing to fear."

As far as giving veto power to the white minority (or some other system of checks and balances to thwart Black majority rule), the ANC has been more cryptic. On the one hand, Mandela has repeatedly called for "universal suffrage on a common voters' roll," a formula that counters De Klerk's insistence on parliamentary representation for racially defined groups.

On the other hand, Mandela has said that he is "against Black domination" and that the ANC wishes "to find a solution which will suit both the whites and the Blacks in this country." He has not indicated, however, what form such a solution could possibly take.

As long as the Black masses remain mobilized in the streets, the white-supremacist regime can be compelled to give up more concessions. Still, it would be an illusion to Peter Mapubane/AP think that Blacks in South Africa will gain their freedom simply because the government has agreed to sit down at the table with some of their leaders.

It will take a long struggle to dismantle the apartheid system and rebuild a nation in which all the people can obtain political justice, jobs, and decent housing, education, and healthcare.

Important debates are going on in the Black movement, including the trade unions, on how to achieve these ends. A sizable component of the movement already understands that inequality and injustice are inherent in the basic structure of the capitalist system.

A democratic constitution, guaranteeing Black majority rule, is only a first step for the new South Africa. But this cannot be worked out in common with the oppressors. It is necessary to convene a constituent assembly, elected by all South Africans according to the principle of one person, one vote.

Free all political prisoners. End apartheid! Black majority rule!

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