3. Regimentation in Central Europe (1944-1952) The Background 29-Poland 30-Germany 32-Hungary, Rumania and Bulgaria 35-Czechoslovakia 36-Regimentation of Labor 39-Colonialism 40-The Road Back 42
3. Regimentation in Central Europe (1944-1952) "In all the forms of transition to socialism, an absolute and decisive requirement is political leadership of the working class headed by its...
...Other peasant leaders, however, were wary of Socialists as well as Communists because of forcible farm collectivization and religious persecution under Soviet rule...
...In Magdeburg, Social Democrats were told by the Soviet Commandant that they could not publish their paper because of ''newsprint difficulties," although the SPD itself had sufficient stocks on hand...
...On February 25, 1948, aging President Eduard Benes of Czechoslovakia faced Communist chief Klement Gottwald in Prague's Hrdcany Castle...
...You are talking to me like Hitler," Benes told Gottwald, and capitulated...
...labor, they agreed, should be recognized as "the greatest social value, and the foundation of the economic development and welfare of the country...
...At the same time, the Communists (who had for thirty years opposed piecework in Hungary) established progressive and premium piecework throughout industry...
...In the fall of 1945, Kojdar, a member of the party's executive committee, was slain by local Communists in Przemysl, while Scibiorek, its general secretary, was killed by security troops...
...He had, in fact, fought against a united front with the Communists from the first days after his release...
...Erstwhile trade-unionist Zapotocky, now Premier, declared in July 1952: "People say that socialism fought for an eight-hour day and that, therefore, nobody should be asked to work more...
...Regimentation of Labor: Between 1949 and 1952, the Communist leaders of Central Europe installed most elements of the Soviet political and social order, including its repressive labor laws...
...The next day, February 25, Communist police and paramilitary forces controlled Prague and Benes approved Gottwald's handpicked cabinet...
...In Mecklenburg, 64 out of 74 mayors, appointed by Soviet Military Government, were Communists: in the 26 districts of Thuringia, 23 police chiefs and three-quarters of all police officers were KPD members...
...In the Soviet zone of Germany and in countries allied with the Axis during the war (Hungary, Rumania, Bulgaria), the Soviet dismantling of war-potential industries, seizure of assets, and reparations in industrial goods and raw materials became powerful instruments of economic imperialism that forced down labor's living standard...
...Despite British and French?later German—investment, industrialization and urbanization moved slowly...
...Overtime was limited and well paid...
...A clandestine Communist paramilitary force armed and massed in the Prague suburbs...
...Communist police pressure soon compelled Peyer to flee the country...
...Soviet-controlled corporations purchased coal and raw materials from Poland and Czechoslovakia below their world market price and resold them at a profit...
...espionage which has infiltrated the tiniest cells of society—into the relations between husband and wife, parents and children, artists and their inspirations—in a way that human history has never known till now...
...The KPD was outlawed and thousands of Communist workers jailed...
...The National Socialists were again, as they had been from 1918 to 1938, Czechoslovakia's leading party...
...each worker was entitled to six months' benefits...
...On May 3, 1945, Molotov announced that the 16 had been arrested for "diversionary activities...
...In November 1952, he—together with a number of other leading Czechoslovak Communists—was tried for treason and executed...
...During most of the Nazi era (1933-1945), they were in Moscow...
...And, according to Walter Ulbricht, Zhukov offered to place 4,000 factories at the disposal of the Germans which "really belong to the Soviets" as reparations...
...fines, loss of social-security benefits, deprivation of lunch periods, demotion and dismissal were the penalties provided for failure to work properly, an attitude suggesting opposition to the regime, or any action "harmful to the national economy...
...Pieck and other Communist leaders were on display at every newsstand and book store...
...they were released by Stulin and Lavrenti Berin in Angust 1941 when they agreed to help form a world Jewish anti-Nazi committee...
...since they comprised a majority of the Cabinet, they expected President Benes to ask them to form a new one—thus ending Communist control of the police...
...Other Jewish Socialists in the Baltic States and Poland who managed to survive were seized by the Gestapo a year later...
...Hitler responded by jailing Socialists en masse, destroying the free trade unions and "abolishing unemployment" by conscription of labor for war industry...
...This key blow enabled Nationalist Chancellor Franz von Papen to wrest control of the Prussian police from the Socialists...
...In May 1932, the Socialist Government of Prussia was overthrown by votes of Nazis, Nationalists and Communists on a motion introduced by Communist Wilhelm Pieck...
...In Czechoslovakia, Poland, Finland and the Baltic States, however, democratic peasant parties cooperated with substantial Socialist movements...
...Nazis and Communists were the main beneficiaries...
...When Hitler became Chancellor on January 30, 1933, rank-and-file German Communists—including thousands of militant workers?paid for their leaders' collaboration with the Nazis...
...Puzak was sentenced to 18 months' imprisonment, Pajdak to five years...
...It now showed that the Communists, far from gaining a majority, had lost almost a third of their 1946 strength: They could expect only 28 per cent of the vote...
...Cabinet decisions 30-31-32 of 1951 established a 48-hour week "in general," but the Government reserved the right to fix hours arbitrarily...
...Though the recognized leaders of the PPS and underground WRN (Taddeusz Arciszewski, Jan Kwapinski, Adam Ciolkosz) supported the Government-in-exile, Edward Osubka-Mor-awski and Jozef Cyrankiewicz of the PPS, political unknowns before the war, joined Bierut's so-called "Lublin Committee...
...On the 24th, Communist militia reinstalled Fierlinger's group in Social Democratic headquarters by forcibly ejecting Vaclav Majer and Vojta Benes, brother of the President and one of the party's oldest leaders...
...From 1948 to 1951, about three-quarters of a million work shifts have been lost...
...In January 1948, the Information Ministry's Institute for Public Opinion Research took a secret national poll of the electorate...
...Throughout the Weimar Republic's life, Nationalist paramilitary organizations, Hitler's Nazis, and the Communist party (KPD) led by Ernst Thaelmann and Wilhelm Pieck attacked its institutions and liberties...
...the nonpartisan Jan Masaryk, son of the late President, was Foreign Minister...
...In Soviet-held territory, hundreds of thousands were shipped to forced-labor areas in northern Russia, Siberia and Central Asia...
...the Communist press pointedly described it as "the largest and most powerful workers' parliament the country has ever seen...
...Later that winter, the Social Democratic party denounced Communist strong-arm methods in the factories and attacked Zapotocky's treatment of independent unionists...
...In May 1945, Wilhelm Pieck and Walter Ulbricht arrived from Moscow to reestablish the KPD in Berlin and the Soviet occupation zone...
...In 1946, this poll had been accurate to less than half of one per cent...
...Three years later, when the Soviet Government began to work for a postwar Communist regime in Poland, it started with new leaders...
...By January 1946, the Sachsenhausen concentration camp was known to hold at least 83 Social Democratic officials, of whom 30 had previously been appointed to administrative posts by Soviet Military Government...
...Millions of Communist leaflets and placards were distributed and posted on the walls of every city and town in the Soviet Zone, and several hundred thousand copies of pamphlets by Ulbricht...
...Thaelmann was to die in a concentration camp, but Pieck, Walter Ulbricht and others escaped...
...On the surface, capital accumulation was impressive under the Plans...
...violent . . . pressure from the iron heel...
...Strong-arm squads also seized the National Socialist, Social Democratic and People's party newspapers and printing plants...
...Communist Antonin Zapotocky headed the new "united" trade-union movement, which at this stage agitated for wage increases and broader social security...
...For workers throughout the Soviet zone and beyond, Berlin Social Democracy became a symbol of future liberty...
...The Soviet Army forbade publication of this decision in the Socialist press...
...Some of these groups (e.g., the Agrarian Union of Bulgaria) followed the pre-1917 teachings of the Russian Socialist Revolutionaries...
...Among them were Socialists Kasimierz Puzak and Antoni Pajdak...
...In 1950, 52 million work-hours were lost through unexcused absenteeism and by unpaid leave...
...The Communists at once accused them of plotting to overthrow democracy and prevent "a decent free election...
...At SPD meetings everywhere, Communist "observers" took stenographic notes for the Soviet commandant, and Socialist executive committees were forced to deliver minutes of their meetings to the Soviet administration...
...On February 11, 1946, the Central Committee, including Grotewohl, finally voted eight to three (with four members abstaining) for merger with the Communists...
...Shortly after Hitler attacked Russia (June 22, 1941), the Soviet Government recognized the Polish Government-in-exile...
...Hungary, Rumania and Bulgaria: Because the governments of these three countries were allied with the Axis in World War H. Soviet occupation authorities freely dictated major decisions in the first year after the war...
...the Communist union chief instead used this issue as a pretext to summon 8,000 "works council" delegates to Prague on February 22, 1948...
...What has happened to democratic socialist parties under the impact of Communist power...
...At the end of January, Marshal Zhukov summoned a Social Democratic leader and stated that he wanted a united party not later than May 1. If the Socialists agreed, Zhukov hinted, the Soviet occupation force would be reduced...
...On July 29, 1944, Soviet armies under Marshal Konstantin Rokossovsky reached the industrial suburbs of Warsaw...
...Communist newspapers reached a total run of four million copies—four times as many as the other three parties combined...
...Vice Premier Siroky said that Clementis had forgotten that "for a Communist there is a rule which must be observed at all times and especially in difficult circumstances—unreserved confidence in the Soviet Union and the great Stalin," who "at all times and in all places conduct a policy designed to one end alone—the good of the international working class movement and the fight against imperialism...
...Their libraries, medical centers and sports clubs were part of the life of almost every Czech family...
...Social Democratic cooperatives had 490,000...
...In 1939, two-thirds of them—more than a million men—belonged to unions...
...Vaclav Majer, Peter Zenkl and several others managed to escape the country...
...On the eve of the world economic crisis, the Communists had singled out democratic socialism as their main enemy...
...The ratio of heavy to light industry was 12-to-l, for example, in Hungary's 1950 plan...
...A joint resolution of the Council of Ministers and the National Council of Trade Unions (November 2, 1952) declared that only eight hours' overtime were to be paid, though overtime was mandatory...
...When the world economic depression struck and 6 million German workers lost their jobs, voters turned against the democratic parties that had held office?Socialist, Catholic and liberal alike...
...Some weeks earlier, National Socialist deputies had revealed in Parliament that Nosek had added 1,500 Communists to the police force in Slovakia alone...
...When the Yugoslav Party failed to topple under Moscow's assault, the Kremlin struck at Communist leaders in other countries whom it suspected of seeking relief from Soviet domination...
...In February 1948, the Communists demanded the expulsion of Ban and Miss Kethly from the Social Democratic party...
...The average Hungarian worker in 1948 had only 1.38 dependents...
...Despite the reign of terror, the Central Committee of the Social Democratic party of the Soviet Zone on January 15, 1946 adopted a resolution opposing merger with the Communists unless it was approved by an elected national convention...
...In the worst days of the depression, nearly a million people were unemployed, but by 1938 this had been cut nearly in half...
...In mid-1946, the Communist regime turned on the Socialists...
...Moscow liquidated the entire leadership in 1936-7 and the Party was dissolved in 1938 by a Comintern edict...
...became a militant rallying-point for the entire population of the Soviet occupation zone...
...The Cabinet by majority vote instructed Nosek to reinstate the eight Prague commanders...
...The National Front Government was composed of President Benes's National Socialists, Communists, Social Democrats, Slovak Democrats, and the (Czech Catholic) People's party...
...The Socialists organized resistance units called the WRN—initials for "Liberty, Equality, Independence"—and joined the Peasants and two other prewar opposition parties in sponsoring the Polish Home Army and the new Government-in-exile...
...Charles Peyer, General Secretary of the Hungarian Trade Union Council and recognized leader of the Social Democrats, had spent the last year of the war in the Mauthausen concentration camp...
...All these factors enabled the Czech Communists to win 38 per cent of the vote in the elections of May 1946—the highest proportion any Communist party has ever achieved...
...Between 1883 and 1929, German trade unions won an impressive code of labor and social legislation—the most advanced in the world at the time—and high living standards...
...In September, too, Zdcnek Fierlinger, postwar chairman of the Social Democrats, announced that his party would collaborate more closely with the Communists.* But the Social Democratic party congress in Brno in November ousted Fierlinger as leader, and elected Bohumil Lausman to replace him...
...On February 20, the National Socialist, People's party and Slovak Democrat ministers submitted their resignations...
...In December 1949 he was expelled from the Central Committee...
...When the USSR annexed the three Baltic States in 1940, many Bund leaders in Lithuania—together with hundreds of other leading Baltic trade unionists and Social Democrats?were arrested by the NKVD...
...Gottwald talked of "socialism by peaceful evolution," and the Communist press predicted that the Party would win a clear majority in the elections scheduled for the late spring of 1948...
...Former Justice Minister Drtina, who had been found bleeding and unconscious after the coup, was imprisoned...
...After World War I, this Jewish Socialist party had continued its work in independent Poland and Lithuania...
...Now, when Social Democratic Food Minister Vaclav Majer proposed a pay raise for Government workers, Zapotocky opposed it...
...Between 1936 and 1938, the Socialists organized an effective series of sit-down strikes, and in 1938-39 they scored important gains in municipal elections...
...As living standards declined, resentment against Soviet economic domination developed within Communist ranks...
...Finally, on December 15, 1948, Cyrankiewicz led the purged PPS into a fusion congress with the Communists...
...Nikita Khrushchev, Soviet Communist Secretary, February 13, 1956...
...Marshall Plan aid under Moscow pressure...
...In Poland, for instance, a decree of April 19, 1950 provided the following penalties for 20-minute lateness or three days' absence within three months: admonition, deduction of two days' wages for each day of absence, transfer to a lower-paid job, a 10-25-per-cent pay deduction for three months...
...Most of the unions were under the aegis of the Polish Socialist party (PPS), founded in 1892...
...On the 22nd, Zapotocky's congress of works councils assembled...
...In that last free election, the Communist party received 16 per cent...
...The Road Back: Djilas—and the Soviet Government—underestimated the resiliency of Central European labor...
...furious, inhuman and alcoholic outbursts of pseudo-happiness...
...On June 27, 1948, the Social Democratic party was merged with the Communists...
...Factory elections, in which the Communists had been badly defeated, were voided and the Social Democrats forced to share union leadership on a 50-50 basis with the Communists...
...Before the war, a weekly food basket which cost a British worker 5.6 hours' wages was twice as expensive (11.6 hours) for the Soviet worker...
...In the election of June 1920, Social Democrats and Independent Socialists received more than 11 million votes, two-fifths of the electorate...
...On March 1, two thousand Socialist delegates met in a stormy five-hour session in West Berlin, overwhelmingly repudiated the Central Committee and voted for a democratic referendum...
...The capital-investment rate of the Soviet-dominated Balkan countries was higher than that of Spain and Portugal...
...In November, Grotewohl, then SPD Chairman of the Soviet Zone, told a public meeting that democratic assurances were essential before the Socialists would consider the Communist offer...
...The police doctor who pronounced him a suicide was himself found dead in his office (again a "suicide") a few weeks later...
...This and other frictions led Moscow to reply on June 28, 1948 by expelling the Yugoslav Communist party from the Cominform, and branding its leaders as "fascists," "Trotskyists" and "imperialist agents...
...Again Grotewohl's address was not published anywhere in the Soviet Zone...
...How did this happen...
...Czech workers, who had practiced passive resistance against the Nazis, fought higher norms by staying home...
...But Central European labor's living standards soon fell below 1913 levels under the impact of economic exploitation, collectivization and the Soviet-style heavy-industry program...
...night work, Sunday work and child labor (under the age of 15) were generally banned...
...On the eve of the war," writes British historian Hugh Seton-Watson, "it was clear that in conditions of political freedom these two parties would have had a majority of the people...
...trusted Communists replaced them...
...In the governments of the five Soviet-occupied provinces, Communists were appointed to run the ministries of police, interior, propaganda and personnel...
...In East Berlin and other cities, house and block wardens (a Nazi institution restored by Soviet Military Government) went from door to door interrogating Socialists on their attitude toward fusion, and sent reports to the NKVD...
...Between 1946 and 1949, however, the new Social Democratic party of Berlin, headed by Mayor Ernst Reuler, Franz Neumann and Otto Suhr...
...In these countries, peasant parties (sometimes called by that name, sometimes called Agrarians, Small Farmers, Populists) were the main democratic force...
...But when the Nazi assault had been repulsed, the USSR began favoring its own Polish regime, headed by Moscow-trained Boleslaw Bierut...
...By October 1945, Social Democrats who at first had favored a nation-wide united labor party had developed serious doubts...
...Poland: Although their country was partitioned until 1918 and ruled by military men after 1926, Polish workers were well organized and vigorous in fighting for their economic rights...
...On the night of February 20, meanwhile, the Communist police occupied the Prague post office, radio station and other public buildings, while Communist "action committees" were sped to Prague by truck from the Bohemian and Sudeten hinterland...
...On February 13, the Cabinet learned that Communist Interior Minister Vaclav Nosek had dismissed or transferred the eight remaining non-Communist police commanders in the Prague area...
...Increased trade-union strength in the Thirties showed that the party's influence was also mounting...
...The Social Democrats voted against the Reichstag Enabling Act giving Hitler dictatorial powers...
...At the same time, these countries' traditional trade relations with Western Europe were cut off...
...later, in 1950, norms were raised and pay reduced...
...A law of December 19, 1951 set up the Soviet system of "correctional work" in the place of employment, at a 25-per-cent pay cut...
...Instead of internationalism, brotherhood and equality, nationalistic darkness, occupation and suppression of six civilized European states, expropriation of their property, preparation for aggressive war, allegedly against capitalism but in reality to assure the Soviet Union of plunder and new territory...
...Meanwhile, Soviet officials launched a campaign of intimidation to break Socialist opposition...
...In the Central Administration of the Soviet Zone, Communists became ministers of interior, police, propaganda, personnel and youth education...
...The eight-hour day and collective bargaining were established in 1918, and laws of the early Twenties set up minimum wages, factory inspection, paid vacations, family allowances, and compulsory accident, sickness, disability and old-age insurance...
...The Five Year Plans built up heavy industry at the expense of food and consumer goods...
...But on June 19—a few days after Marshal Zhukov, Soviet Military Governor, authorized the establishment of four parties in the Soviet Zone (Communists, Social Democrats, Christian Democrats and Liberal Democrats) ?Ulbricht announced that there could be no Communist-Social Democratic merger without "ideological clarification...
...As the depression deepened, the combined force of the Nazis and Communists became strong enough to paralyze every cabinet...
...Discharge from public service meant, among other things, surrendering Category I and II food ration cards for semi-starvation Category V, lowest in the scale...
...In 1928, some 5.7 million workers belonged to Social Democratic and Christian trade unions, and the real wages of German workers were 6 per cent higher than in 1913—despite wartime economic waste and the ruinous inflation of the mid-Twenties...
...The free elections scheduled for late spring might well force the Communists out of their key positions in the Government...
...This represents the loss of one month's output for the entire mining area...
...Prace of Prague wrote on September 7, 1952: "Absenteeism and turnover . . [are] disorganizing our production...
...In the fall of 1947, however, the Party began preparing to seize power without waiting for elections...
...The KPD rejected the appeal: Such action, they said, would "only disarm the proletariat...
...Among them were Ban and Miss Kethly...
...Two strong radical democratic parties led the strongest unions and cooperatives: They were the Social Democratic party, a party of urban workers, organized in 1876 and long affiliated with the Socialist International...
...The Soviet Army did not move to help them...
...Progressive and premium piecework, "socialist competition," "shock brigades," uncompensated overtime and weekend work accompanied the regimentation of the unions...
...For workers and indeed for the entire population, life changed radically when Hitler received the Sudetenland (October 1938) and then took over the rest of Czechoslovakia (March 1939...
...Hermann Brill, an anti-Nazi who had spent seven years in prison and the Buchenwald concentration camp, wrote to a friend: "After having been arrested twice by the Russian authorities and after constant threats of being court-martialed and shot, I have been forced to resign from my position...
...This is absolutely wrong...
...and more than 11 hours for Poles and Hungarians...
...and the broader-based, non-Marxist National Socialist party, led by Masaryk's successor Eduard Benes...
...Below, in Wenceslas Square, Benes saw 100,000 armed Communists...
...Among the victims was former Party Secretary Rudolf Slansky, who had aided in earlier purges and had been regarded as a close associate of Soviet MVD chief Lavrenti Beria...
...Poles, to arms...
...by the summer of 1946, 35 of the 80 members of the Agrarians' supreme council (as well as 15 members of the Socialist central committee) were in prison or concentration camps...
...Prague, Karlsbad and Pilsen...
...more than 10 hours for Bulgarians, Rumanians and Czechs...
...Imprisoued and condemned to death for "coll aboration with the fascists...
...The Communist-run police concealed the facts, but a Justice Ministry investigation soon revealed them...
...In five preceding days, Communist police and paramilitary forces had seized Prague's strong points and democratic party headquarters...
...Thus, Bulgaria's Law #14 of February 17, 1953 provided prison terms for unauthorized quitting of jobs or labor schools...
...3. Regimentation in Central Europe (1944-1952) "In all the forms of transition to socialism, an absolute and decisive requirement is political leadership of the working class headed by its vanguard...
...But Polish, Czech and German workers could obtain the same food basket for less than 7 hours of labor, and Hungarian, Rumanian and Bulgarian workers for less than 8 hours...
...In his memoirs, published in 1949, Fierlinger admitted that he had agreed as early as 1942, when he was Czechoslovak Ambassador to Moscow, to bring about a Social Democratic-Communist merger...
...In Halle, Socialist editor Hugo Saupe was forced to surrender first-page space for Communist editorials directed against SPD independence...
...A Dresden paper which tried to print the resolution was immediately suppressed...
...Throughout the SPD's history, it has been as strong in what is now Soviet Germany—Brandenburg, Mecklenburg, Pomerania, Saxony and Thuringia—as in the Ruhr basin and the North Sea ports...
...In the three-and-a-half years between the uprising of the Warsaw population and the Communist coup in Prague, workers in eight nations of Central Europe—Yugoslavia, Poland, Hungary, Rumania, Bulgaria, Albania, Czechoslovakia, and the Soviet zone of Germany—were subjected to Soviet economic exploitation and to the destruction of their political and trade-union rights...
...In May 1950, Slovak Communist Vladimir Clementis, who had succeeded Jan Masaryk as Foreign Minister, was accused of "national deviationism...
...In February 1951, Clementis was arrested as an "imperialist spy...
...in 1917, it had opposed the Bolsheviks in the Soviets...
...The Party also took the lead in expelling some 2 million Germans from the Sudetenland...
...In the first six months of 1952, some 200,000 Czech workers were absent daily—a national absenteeism rate of 19 per cent...
...Under these conditions of political democracy and relative social stability, the Czechoslovak Communist party remained small...
...On August 1, the workers rose, and for 63 days battled eight German divisions...
...Forced labor camps dotted Central Europe, hundreds of thousands were deported to Soviet labor camps, and again, as under the Axis, youth was conscripted for labor service...
...A few years later, the bitter public memory of the position taken during the Munich crisis by the French and British Governments was to aid the Communists...
...During May and June of 1947, another 200 independent Socialists were imprisoned...
...The merger, according to Communist Matyas Rakosi, was "based on Leninist-Stalinist principles...
...Thus, while British labor in 1953 had to work only four-fifths as many hours as before the war for basic foods, Czech labor had to work more than 1 1/2 times as long and Polish workers almost twice as long...
...The Soviet-controlled press and radio denounced this action as a plot of "pro-fascist and reactionary elements...
...Here is how the atmosphere of the time was described by Milovan Djilas, a veteran Communist and then Vice President of Yugoslavia...
...Social Democratic newspapers exposed the methods of the Communist police, while the National Socialists attacked Gottwald for rejecting U.S...
...Joseph Buchler, Social Democratic party secretary...
...Installing Communists in the ministries of interior and justice, the Soviet occupation authorities paved the way for decimation of the majority parties...
...Bulgarian Vice Premier Traicho Kostov, former secretary of the underground committee of the Party, was labeled a "left-wing sectarian" after he withheld information on Bulgaria's foreign trade from Moscow...
...Next day, a Communist delegation visited Benes and demanded that the democratic ministers be replaced by representatives of Zapotocky's union federation...
...In 1931, Germany's Socialist and Catholic labor leaders appealed to the Communists for a common front to save the Republic...
...Yet only a few months after Gottwald forced out Benes one country—Yugoslavia—had already left the Soviet orbit, and by March 1953, when Stalin died, labor in other countries was fighting back...
...Finally, in 1952, Szakasits, Marosan, Horvath and their associates were also jailed...
...Agoston Valentini, former Minister of Justice...
...A Rumanian law of January 13, 1949, for example, provided the death penalty for anyone failing "with premeditation" to fulfill working obligations...
...Gomulka was jailed in August 1951 and remained in prison until December 1951...
...The Central European workers' standards declined in relation not only to workers in many other parts of the world, but compared with those of Soviet workers...
...Munich, together with a traditional sympathy for Russia, the wartime victories of the Red Army, and Moscow's support of the coalition "National Front" Government, gave the Czech Communist party new prestige...
...Early in 1948, Yugoslavia—which after the war had relied heavily on over 2.5 million tons of UNRRA supplies to combat destitution—asked the Soviet Union to deliver promised industrial goods which the country could no longer obtain from the West...
...in November 1932, it was 13 million—a third of the electorate...
...Henceforth, labor could no longer look to the police for protection against growing Nazi terror...
...Instead of a happy life for working people, a gray mentality...
...the program adopted at the Sixth (1928) Congress of the Communist International, as Stalin then described it, "lays stress on Social Democracy as forming the main support of capitalism within the working class and the chief enemy of Communism...
...In the next six weeks, the Communists discussed the creation of a united labor party for all Germany with a group of relatively little known Social Democrats in Berlin (headed by Otto Grotewohl, Max Fechner and Erich Gniffke...
...Despite these arrests, the Polish Socialists resisted merger with the Communists for three years after the war...
...The Chairman of the Social Democratic party of Thuringia, Dr...
...For a week, Gottwald and Nosek played for time...
...Polish farmers were productive, and few Polish workers lacked basic consumer necessities...
...the Social Democrats were reduced to 20 per cent...
...In Hungary, a full year of arrests of Small Farmers leaders was climaxed in February 1947, when Soviet security troops abducted Bela Kovacs, general secretary of the party and editor of its daily newspaper...
...With Gomulka out, Marshal Rokossovsky became a member of the Polish Politburo and Minister of Defense...
...Youth under 18 and women were barred from heavy industry...
...We are convinced," he said, "that unity in the Soviet Zone alone will make it impossible to achieve the unity of the working class in the rest of Germany...
...They began by excluding 78 of the 300 deputies in Parliament...
...Gottwald was Premier...
...Once the Communists had achieved full power, Interior Minister Nosek called the five-day week a "counter-revolutionary demand...
...Another member was Wladyslaw Gomulka, a Communist labor organizer since the 1920s, who had joined a workers' battalion in the 1939 defense of Warsaw, and in 1942 organized a new underground Communist party...
...Peyer opposed this agreement, but a majority of the Social Democratic central committee went along...
...On his return, he found the Soviet Army had barred many of his former colleagues from politics because they had held union posts before the war...
...In August 1943, these four parties jointly pledged complete political democracy, broad land reform and public ownership of basic industry after the war...
...Factory management was turned over to single directors and the trade unions ordered (as a Prague journal put it in October 1951) "to create a political atmosphere that will assist the director...
...This party took over the so-called German Democratic Republic which the Soviet authorities installed in the Pankow district of Berlin in 1949...
...Work-books were introduced in 1950-51, and Law #28 of 1952 provided penalties up to five years in jail for managers who hired workers without them...
...Two groups of Social Democrats now remained—a group favoring merger with the Communists (led by Arpad Szakasits, George Marosan and Zoltan Horvath) and a "center" group (headed by Anna Kethly and Antal Ban...
...After the Soviet Army entered Warsaw, when Moscow made it plain it would ignore the Government-in-exile (now headed by Socialist Arciszewski), the Western powers persuaded Stalin at Yalta (February 1945) to broaden the Bierut regime by including Peasant leader Stanislaw Mikolajczyk and to promise free elections...
...Despite existing restrictions on freedom, Polish law limited the work week to 46 hours from 1918 to 1933, 48 hours thereafter...
...A few weeks later, the Soviet Government invited 16 resistance leaders to Moscow to discuss Poland's future...
...Henryk Erlich, a former deputy of the Petrograd Soviet, and Victor Alter were the most prominent Jewish Sorialist louders seized...
...The Social Democratic party was liquidated and the new party?with many of its rank-and-file already in NKVD concentration camps—was named the Socialist Unity party (SED...
...They disappeared in December 1941...
...in December 1949, he was tried for treason and executed...
...The last few months have brought back the events of 1933...
...Shortly after Masaryk's funeral, the Communists carried out a purge of democratic leaders...
...it resumed publication with pro-Communist editors...
...the Berlin Social Demoerats and trade-unionists helped greatly to convert a grave threat to peace into one of democracy's major victories after World War II...
...How has the worker fared...
...In March 1946, some 1,200 of the 2,000 delegates to a peasant cooperative congress were arrested...
...The Social Democratic labor federation, the nation's strongest, had 685,000 members...
...At the close of the Stalin era, the notorious Soviet labor decrees of 1938 and 1940 were being enacted in the "people's democracies...
...In Bulgaria, Soviet pressure quickly forced the removal of democrat G. M. Dimitrov as general secretary of the Agrarian Union...
...In Nazi-ruled Polish territory, meanwhile, large numbers of Polish workers were deported to factories in the Reich...
...Warsaw, Lodz and Poznan were Socialist strongholds before World War I. Industrial workers organized in powerful trade unions and democratic socialist parties won higher living standards and enlightened social legislation in post-1919 Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Finland and the Baltic States...
...Polish Communists were a minor party, weakened by factional struggle...
...In the elections of May 28, a "Government list" prepared by the Communists ran without opposition...
...In Hungary, this was the sequence by which the Soviet system of labor regimentation was installed: After the coup of June 1947, the right to strike was abolished...
...On June 6-7, 1950, the Communists carried out a mass arrest of 200 Socialists and 4,000 trade-unionists...
...The Hungarian pattern was typical for Central Europe...
...Colonialism: Under the Five Year Plans, the Central European economies were linked with the industrial-expansion program of the USSR...
...The Background: Democratic socialist parties were founded throughout Central Europe in the last quarter of the 19th century...
...The Soviet Govemment later announced that they had been shot as "Nnzi agents...
...During the Soviet blockade of Berlin in 1948 and early 1949...
...Soviet censors banned publication of Grotewohl's speech...
...it entered the ruins of Warsaw with Marshal Rokossovsky's army on January 17, 1945...
...Before long, as in the Soviet Union, the worker was bound to his job by the work-book, severe penalties for lateness and absenteeism, and other sanctions...
...Among the first seized were leaders of the democratic Jewish Socialist Bund.* In 1903, the Bund had fought within the Russian Social Democratic party against Lenin's concept of a centralized, conspiratorial party...
...Their strength was concentrated in the industrial regions: Germany, western and central Poland, Bohemia and Moravia, metropolitan Budapest...
...In September 1939, when Poland was occupied by Nazi and Soviet forces, Polish workers carried the struggle for freedom underground...
...In the Reichstag election of 1928, the Nazi party received less than a million votes...
...In Borba of November 21, 1950, Djilas wrote: "Not only every Marxist but every bourgeois politician and every common man can see what the Soviet Union really is...
...By 1939, too, they had established friendly relations with the democratic Peasant party, also in opposition to the quasi-dictatorship...
...Unemployment insurance was directed by the trade unions, with Government aid...
...Rakosi characterized this seven-year campaign against democratic labor as the "salami-slicing technique...
...On the 23rd, the action committees occupied four ministries previously headed by non-Communists, while Nosek's police seized National Socialist headquarters and arrested the party's secretary general, Vladimir Krajina...
...On March 31, Social Democrats in the three Western sectors of Berlin went to the polls and defeated merger with the Communists by a 7-1 margin...
...In the months that followed, Soviet Military Government installed German Communists in key positions...
...But Berlin workers refused to accept the decision...
...Germany: The Social Democratic party (SPD), founded in Leipzig* in 1863, became Germany's strongest party in 1912, with 4 million of the 12 million votes cast...
...At 8:15 p.m., Moscow's Polish-language radio called on the workers for "direct, active struggle in the streets of Warsaw, in its houses, factories and stores...
...At a conference of the two parties on December 20-21, Grotewohl came out flatly against merger unless it was on a Germany-wide basis...
...The start of farm collectivization, combined with forced industrialization, produced widespread inflation, depressed workers' living standards and forced women and minors into the factories...
...Over the next year, Communist terror was directed against Mikolajczyk's reorganized peasant movement, the People's party...
...In the Balkans, village life predominated...
...At the same time, the Communist Minister of Agriculture called a national congress of the Communist-controlled farmers' union for February 28...
...In Zwickau, the Socialist paper was suspended because it opposed fusion...
...Poles, the time of liberation is at hand...
...In Hungary, too, a multi-staged campaign was carried out against the Socialists and trade unions...
...Communists were also assigned the main positions in the Berlin city government and in Radio Berlin as well as at the Leipzig and Dresden radio stations...
...There was no strong democratic party which represented both industrial workers and small farmers...
...In Schwerin, the modern Socialist printing plant which had been expropriated by the Nazis in May 1933 was seized by the Communists in July 1945, just as the first Social Democratic publication was about to come off the presses...
...In June 1948, the Communists absorbed the remaining "Social Democrats" in a new Hungarian Workers party...
...On September 11, 1947, the Communist organization in the city of Olomouc, under the guidance of Alexei Cepicka...
...mailed bombs (labeled as perfume) to Jan Masaryk and two National Socialist leaders, Vice President Peter Zenkl and Minister of Justice Prkop Drtina...
...The PPS grew steadily during the 1920s and polled 12 per cent of the vote in the last national election in which it participated (1928...
...Communists held the ministries of interior, information, agriculture and finance...
...They called on the works council meeting on the 22nd and the farmers congress on the 28th to block the "subversive intentions of reaction...
...Odon Kishazi, President of the Council of Trade Unions, and Miklos Vas, its Secretary...
...More than 200,000 men and women were killed or wounded before Warsaw surrendered on October 2. A few weeks later, the Soviet Government recognized a Communist-run committee previously formed in Moscow as the "Provisional Government of Liberated Democratic Poland...
...By 1930, the Nazi vote reached 6 million...
...Two weeks later, the body of Jan Masaryk was found in a courtyard of the Foreign Ministry...
...In 1953, the same food basket, which now cost the British worker only 4.5 hours, was still twice as expensive for his Soviet counterpart (9.7 hours), but labor in the "people's democracies" was much poorer than before the war...
...In November, on the eve of the general elections, more than 300 Socialists, running as independents against the Government bloc, were arrested and forced to withdraw from the race...
...During the same period, hundreds of Social Democratic officials were dismissed from central and local administrative posts by Soviet Military Government on charges of "corruption" and "incompetence...
...Nearly everywhere, strikes were treated as crimes against the state...
...What role did labor play in Central Europe and how did Communism alter it...
...Gottwald demanded that Benes approve a new cabinet, handpicked by the Communists in defiance of the majority parties...
...Six of their leaders were court-martialed, among them Puzak, back from Soviet imprisonment and now sentenced to 10 years in a Polish jail—where he died...
...Soviet economic imperialism was also directed against Poland and Czechoslovakia, which had been victims of Axis aggression...
...Such cities as Berlin, Leipzig, Dresden and Halle...
...In March 1948, the police purged the entire Socialist executive committee of industrial Lodz, and carried out similar dismissals throughout the country...
...Democratic newspapers were heavily censored and denied paper and printing facilities...
...When Stalin died on March 5, 1953, a fierce struggle was in the making between the working class and its self-appointed "vanguard" throughout Central Europe...
...The food basket cost 9.8 hours' wages for East Germans...
...in the Ostrava-Karvina area alone...
...Armed with this clear mandate, a Party Congress of Berlin Social Democrats met on April 7, expelled Grotewohl and his supporters and elected new leaders...
...Czechoslovakia: Under President Thomas G. Masaryk (1918-35), Czechoslovakia's balanced, decentralized economy and cooperative social institutions withstood the depression...
...For Polish workers staged strikes in Lodz and Stettin in 1947 and 1950, and East German workers formed a powerful resistance network...
...In Rumania, Soviet Deputy Foreign Minister Andrei Vishinsky compelled the formation of a "Fatherland Front" cabinet including members of the previously insignificant Communist party...
...In October, Communists and Nazis joined in a strike against Berlin's municipal transit system...
...Twice in 1932, Communists in the Reichstag introduced, and the Nazis backed, motions which forced new national elections, thus increasing general unrest amid economic crisis...
...The Party was reminded that in 1940 he had criticized the Nazi-Soviet Pact...
...the ultimate objective was their full integration with the Soviet economy...
...the Government announced that it had won 89.3 per cent of the vote...
...The Soviets, for example, purchased Polish coke at $14 a ton, then resold it to Hungary at $17...
...In Chemnitz, the Social Democratic printing plant was wrecked...
...The main target of abuse was Kurt Schumacher, one-armed veteran of ten years in Nazi concentration camps and leader of the SPD in West Germany...
...Wladyslaw Comulka, General Secretary of the Polish Communist party, was accused in August 1948 of "insufficient appreciation of the role of the USSR" and ousted...
...Cabinet decree #2,000 of 1950 made refusal of overtime tantamount to "arbitrarily quitting the job," punishable by transfer to a lower-paid job, or loss of vacation and sick benefits...
...The Republic's social policies were progressive from the start...
...With these Party purges, fear mounted within the Communist hierarchy even as workers' resentment with conditions kept spreading...
...Among the inmates were the Deputy Mayor of Potsdam, the police chief of Halle, two SPD district chairmen and a trade-union secretary...
...Readers of the Soviet-controlled press learned only that the conference had adopted a resolution favoring merger...
...In 1936, more than a tenth of the Czechoslovak population belonged to cooperatives, and almost a seventh—some 2.2 million people—were organized in labor unions...
...during that week, Soviet envoy Valerian Zorin arrived in Prague, and heavy Soviet troop concentrations were reported on Czechoslovakia's borders...
...In the Soviet Zone, despite the clear verdict of the Social Democratic workers, unity of the two parties was proclaimed under Soviet auspices on April 21...
...Following the mass purge of Social Democrats and trade unionists in 1950, Cabinet decree #34 turned all cases of labor discipline over to management...
...In Hungary, Soviet Commissioner Kliment Voroshilov forced the popular Small Farmers party to share the Government with the Communists even after it had won 57 per cent of the votes in a free election...
...In Hungary, Laszlo Rajk, former Foreign Minister and Interior Minister, was tried in September 1949 for plotting with Tito and executed...
...Terror was directed against the Socialists because the workers were supporting them: In 1947 elections to Workers' Committees, Socialists won 63 per cent of the seats, while the Communists received only 21 per cent...
Vol. 39 • December 1956 • No. 62
