The Power of Freedom. Mart Laar

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then undermine its control through a combination of legal restrictions and infiltration of whatever remained. In Czechoslovakia, Archbishop Josef Beran, one of the leaders of the anti-Nazi resistance who had survived three years in Nazi concentration camps, and all the other bishops in the country were interned or imprisoned. Religious seminars were closed and orders banned, the Church’s schools were closed and its land holdings confiscated.73 In Poland in 1953, the Communists went so far as to confer upon the state the authority to appoint and remove both priests and bishops. Cardinal Primate Wyszyński refused to obey and protested the order, which led to his arrest. By the end of 1955, over 2,00 °Catholic activists, among them 8 bishops and 900 priests, were imprisoned.74 The same also happened in Hungary, where leaders of the Catholic Church were imprisoned. The 58-year old Cardinal-Primate of Hungary, József Mindszenty, has recalled how he was tortured by the Communists:

      ‘The tormentor raged, roared and in response to my silence took the instruments of torture into his hands. This time he held a truncheon in one hand, a long sharp knife in the other. And then he drove me like a horse, forcing me to trot and gallop. The truncheon lashed down on my back repeatedly – for some time without a pause. Then we stood still and he brutally threatened: “I’ll kill you, by morning I’ll tear you to pieces and throw the remains of your corpse to the dogs or into the canal. We are the masters here now”. 75

      All aspects of cultural life were also brought under strict control and subject to censorship. The only official model of art – literature, painting and sculpture – was that which conformed to the Marxist canon. Artists of that period were obliged to follow the rules of socialist realism. ‘Decadent’ Western culture was prohibited, as was jazz or rock music. Intellectuals were closely scrutinised and controlled by the secret police, and each work of art was evaluated and censored on the basis of its compliance with the official canon. Just as in Nazi Germany, works deemed ‘inappropriate’ were either destroyed – books were burned or pulped, as paper was valuable – or their distribution was forbidden. All media were subjected to such a high level of censorship that they were reduced to a position from which they could only reinforce the power of the Communist Party.

      Following the Soviet example, enforced collectivisation of agriculture was introduced across Central and Eastern Europe, with the sole exception of Yugoslavia. As free peasants resisted collectivisation, open terror was needed to ‘convince’ the farmers to join collective farms. In 1949, collectivsation was enforced in the Baltic countries in the wake of major deportations. The results for agriculture were disastrous. In Estonia, for example, agricultural production decreased by 9.3 % between 1951 and 1955, in comparison with the relatively modest results of 1946–1950. By 1955, the average grain yield had fallen to nearly half the pre-war level.76 Productivity in agriculture actually decreased in all of the countries that had fallen under the shadow of forced collectivisation. Here, Stalin had to learn from his own sad experience. The forced collectivisation of agriculture had had catastrophic results for the Soviet Union, turning Russia from an exporter into one of largest importers of food. As a result of forced collectivisation over the decade between 1928 and 1938, the productivity of Soviet agriculture fell by 25 % in comparison with the ‘inertia scenario’ in which nothing had changed. The grain harvest did not reach 1925-1929 levels again until 1950-1954. Nothing like this had ever happened in the history of modern economic growth77 (Table 2).

      But Stalin did not want to learn. For him, collectivisation was needed not for the economy but for politics – private property was one of the archenemies of the Soviet system. Thus, collectivisation had to be carried out regardless of the costs. In Romania, resistance to collectivisation ended in 1949 with the arrest of some 80,000 peasants, 30,000 of whom were tried in public.78 In Hungary, the first serious attempt at collectivisation was undertaken in July 1948. Both economic and direct police pressure were used to coerce peasants into joining cooperatives, but large numbers opted instead to leave their villages. In the early 1950s, only a quarter of peasants had agreed to join cooperatives. By 1953, between 3 and 3.5 million hectares of arable land were uncultivated and 400,000 peasants had been fined. In Czechoslovakia, farms started to be collectivised more intensively after the Communist takeover in 1948, mostly under the threat of sanctions. The most obstinate farmers were persecuted and imprisoned. Many early cooperatives collapsed and were recreated again. Their productivity was low because they failed to provide adequate compensation for the work, moreover, they failed to create a sense of collective ownership; small-scale pilfering was common and food became scarce. Poland too saw active resistance to collectivisation, where it developed very slowly.79 In 1952, a collectivisation campaign was launched in East Germany, leading to the collapse of agriculture and a massive exodus of farmers to West Germany. From January 1951 to April 1953, almost half a million people left East Germany. The farmers who remained were disinclined to do more than produce for their own needs because fixed procurement prices meant little profit. Thus, by the summer of 1953, East German agriculture had entered a real crisis necessitating extraordinary help from the Soviet Union (Table 3).

      The situation was no better in other sectors of the economy that were first nationalised and then mismanaged. Under Soviet influence, totally unrealistic goals were set – among them ‘catching up and overtaking’ the developed capitalist states in per capita performance in all of the major production lines over a short period of time. The Soviet leadership demanded that the Central and Eastern European countries shift the orientation and structure of their production and export trade toward the East; a rapid increase in the output of heavy industry and massive deliveries of its products to other socialist countries, the USSR in particular. The result was that these countries started to build up certain industries, even when they lacked the necessary resources and materials to do so. For example, an aluminium smelting plant at Zvornik in Yugoslavia was proudly displayed as the largest in Europe, yet it never made a cent of profit. The expansion of heavy industry was pushed at the expense of the development of all other productive and non-productive sectors of the economy, such as agriculture or light industry. The result was the growing inefficiency of production, the failure to modernise production technology and a drop in the effectiveness of foreign trade. People were subjected to a depressed rate of growth in the standard of living, mounting shortages of goods and insufficient service facilities. ‘We have really screwed up, everybody hates us,’ the young Budapest police chief, Kopacsi, was told by an older Communist comrade on his return to his home town in the early 1950s.80

      Table 2

      Source: Calculations based on data in B. R. Mitchell, International History Statistics: Europe 1750–1993 (London: Macmillian Reference 1998); B. R. Mitchell, International History Statistics: The Americas 1750–1993 (London: Macmillian Reference 1998); B. R. Mitchell, International History Statistics: Africa, Asia & Oceania 1750–1993 (London: Macmillian Reference 1998); UN Food and Agriculture Organization, FAOSTAT data, 2004.

      Table 3

      Sources: Wädekin 1982. 85-86; Sanders 1958, 72, 81, 99, 105, 145, 147; Hoffmak and Neal 1962, 273.

      In sum, we can conclude that Stalinism in Central and Eastern Europe was a complete failure. Robin Okey argues that Stalinism bequeathed Communist regimes a kind of original sin that might be overlooked, even forgotten in subsequent periods, but which told powerfully against the Communists in the events of 1989. It was not so much the Communists’ monopolisation of power that shocked the captive nations – they had seen this before – but the magnitude and brutality of the terror and the destruction of the previous way of life – and all this for the benefit of another state, the Soviet Union. There is much

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