The Outer Empire

The outer empire was created in a completely different way from the Soviet Union itself, not by revolution but by military conquest in the later stages of World War II. The populations of Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, and the Soviet occupation zone of Germany had recently undergone a failed demo­cratic experiment followed by brutal Nazi rule, and hence were initially not un­willing to accept a socialist system.

The Soviet authorities were themselves at first uncertain how best to proceed in the territories recently occupied by the Red Army. Their paramount priority was to convert Central Europe into a buffer against any possible future invasions; hence, they wanted to dominate it without provoking massive internal resistance.^[2732] Liberal, Peasant, and Social Democratic parties were initially allowed to organize themselves and to participate in coalition governments alongside Communists.

Soon enough, however, at different tempos in different countries, the Communists deployed police powers and electoral fraud to squeeze out the other parties and arrest their leaders. Social Democrats were amalgamated with Communists in var­iously named “Popular Fronts.” In each case the hovering presence of the Red Army was decisive, weakening the will of non-Communist parties to stand up for their beliefs. Only in Yugoslavia and Albania, where indigenous partisans had liberated the people from the Germans without the Red Army, could Soviet hegemony not be securely imposed.^[2733]

Significantly, the process proved most problematic in the country where indig­enous Communism was most popular: Czechoslovakia.

Once the Communists had established one-party regimes, they set about reforging society in the Soviet image. Industry was nationalized and subjected to Five Year Plans, while trade unions were brought under state control. Land reform expropriated the landowners, while smallholders were dragooned into collective farms—with the significant exception of Poland. All educational institutions were taken over by the Ministry of Education, which imposed a Marxist-Leninist curric­ulum and in higher education discriminated against the children of non-worker­peasant origin. The media and the cultural world were confined by strict censorship and required to disseminate a Sovietized worldview. Church congregations were registered and clergymen were required to take an oath of loyalty to the state.^[2735]

Yugoslavia under Tito launched its own version of socialism. The absence of the Red Army from its territory meant that the Soviet authorities lacked a vital lever of pressure. Instead they broke off diplomatic relations and annulled bilateral treaties, declaring Tito “a traitor to the socialist cause.” Stalin ordered that other Communist parties cleanse themselves of “Titoism,” leading to show trials and executions of supposed dissident Communist leaders in Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary.

The Soviet bloc was formalized in two overarching institutions. The Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (Comecon), set up in 1949, coordinated the economies of the bloc, usually to the advantage of the Soviet Union. The Warsaw Pact (1955) brought the armed forces of the bloc under a single overall command structure, on the model of NATO.

Most people felt they had little option but to accept an alien system, since the Teheran and Yalta agreements had consigned their countries to the Soviet sphere of influence. But the brute fact of repression contradicted the message of liberation even more blatantly than in the Soviet Union itself. Moreover, unlike in the Soviet Union, the peoples of Central Europe cherished a tangible national ideal of alterna­tive ways of life. As soon as opportunity offered itself, they tried to turn that ideal into reality, as we shall see.