Anne Applebaum about communism, the totalitarian temptation and Austria’s limited understanding for the development of Eastern Europe.
Anne Applebaum, 49, is an American author and specialist for communism, the Soviet Union and the countries of Central and Middle Europe. She was born in Washington DC and studied at Yale and Oxford. As correspondent and editorialist for “The Economist” and the “Washington Post” she analyzed the social and political upheaval in Eastern Europe before and after the fall of the Iron Curtain. She received a Pulitzer Prize for her book “Gulag: A History”. “The Iron Curtain: the Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944-56” was published in 2012 and is the history of control and defiance in post-war Eastern Europe. Anne Applebaum is married to the poish foreign minister Radoslav Sikorski. She lives in London and Warsaw. At the beginning of the year she received polish citizenship.
Profil: Anne Applebaum, in your book “The Iron Curtain” you state that Eastern Europe does not exist?
Applebaum: I explain that I am using the term “Eastern Europe” because it is an accurate description of the region at the time I am writing about. I would not use it now. I am surprised to hear that Austrians did not make these distinctions. Because many of the countries in what used to be called Eastern Europe were historically closely connected to Austria. Austrians should at least know that Hungarians are not Slavs. Austria also came very close of being Eastern Europe. If Stalin would not have felt that he had been overextended and if he would have had the military capability, Austria would have been part of Eastern Europe – meaning: Soviet dominated Europe.
Profil: Geographically at least Vienna is located even more Eastern than Prague, Zagreb and Ljubljana.
Applebaum: The so called “Eastern Europe” was also in every other respect very diverse. It is correct to say that before 1945 these countries were very different countries with very different historical circumstances. They belonged to different empires, some of them were Ottoman, some of them belonged to the Austrian-Hungarian empire. Some of them were part of the Polish-Lithuanian empire. And some of them belonged to the Russian empire. Since 1989 they have taken very different paths and have taken very different decisions. And once again become even more different – certainly about as different as the UK is from Greece. Poland has a lot more in common with Austria than with Albania. No question. Culturally, politically and economically.
Profil: You looked at the period after the Second World War to study the establishment of a totalitarian system, is this the real aim of the book?
Applebaum: The point of the book was to explain how it was possible to create out of these very different countries one block of communist states.
Profil: Would you say that one can still see a common post communist identity - which was forced on Easter Europe for decades - today? Does it still somehow unite Eastern Europe?
Applebaum: No! I really would not.
Profil: But did the Homo sovieticus come and go without trace?
Applebaum: Yes. As I said: Poland in terms of its work ethics, in terms of its political culture, in terms of its economy has much more in common with Germany and its much more integrated with Germany than with Albania. And Germany has more in common with Poland than with Greece. In the 1930ties you would not have spoken endlessly about the Post-Habsburg world and its mentality. You would not have been talking about it for 20,30,40 years. Today people who are 35 years old – in other words: adults with important jobs - do not remember the soviet period any more. They were 10 years old when the wall fell. Middle aged people who do not remember it. It is hard for us who are older to believe that, but it’s a fact. It’s already history. A generation has passed and the countries are now very different.
Profil: Why did you choose three countries for your in depth study – Poland, East Germany and Hungary – which are more similar and not those which are even more different to make your point?
Applebaum: I selected three countries, which had very different experiences in respect to the war. So on the one hand Germany – Nazi Germany – than Poland, which was part of the Allies and than Hungary, which was something in between. I wanted to look at their experiences at the end of the war and shortly after and how come they were made so quickly to be communist countries. One of the conclusions I came to: Whether you were a winner or a looser - the experience of the war and of Soviet occupation was so devastating that it made it in any case easy to take over the countries. I did not choose the Czech republic as case study, because the history is relatively similar to the Polish experience. Germany and Poland I had to choose anyway because they were so important to understanding the politics of that period. Hungary was the one who seemed to be very different from those two.
Profil: So how was it possible to turn these very different countries into a homogenized region?
Applebaum: I will tell you, but please don’t forget to buy and read the book! In essence the Soviet Union arrived with a plan. They had experience of how to do this from other countries. In 1939 they did it to the Baltic States and Eastern Poland, so they already had a system. The book is divided into different sections to describe different aspects of it. The use not of general violence but of very directed and targeted violence – targeted at the elites, the political, intellectual, economic elites. When the NKVD came into a country they had lists of the kind of people they were looking for. Not just names, although they had that sometimes too. They were looking for leading merchants, priests, politicians. They did not wait for the Cold War to begin. They did it right at the beginning. That was one part of it. Another part was the very quick take over of mass media. And another part was the take over of the so-called “Scouting groups” – because they were very interested in dismantling the civil society. Different kinds of organizations like women’s groups, groups, which were able to organize themselves independently and quickly. Political parties of course, but not only. Church groups, youth groups. Almost from the minute the Soviets arrived they started to overtake them or undermine them. These techniques combined with the real devastations of the war in this part of Europe made it possible for these countries to become communist so quickly.
Profil: People were too exhausted to resist?
Applebaum: Maybe you Austrians can understand it because your country was also very much destroyed. In England people cannot comprehend how Warsaw or Berlin looked like, how destroyed and completely devastating it was and how shuttered they were. People wanted quiet and peace.
Profil: You dismiss Hannah Arendt in one sentence saying she was wrong when she thought the Soviets would just repeat in a fast forward mode what they had done in the Soviet Union itself.
Applebaum: By the time they got to Eastern Europe they knew what worked. For example there was no equivalent of mass terror. There were no mass deaths. This is because they knew that these cultures were very different and they did not want to create a backlash. So they targeted specific groups and left the general population alone. Some were repressed, some eliminated.
Profil: You also say that socialism Soviet style was not planned immediately at the beginning but with a more democratic period of 20 to 30 years at the beginning.
Applebaum: That was the official policy. It was their ground work. Then very very quickly, faster than they thought, they realized that they had to move forward with implementation because they encountered a lot more resistance than they had expected. At the beginning they thought they would win through elections. Maybe the elections would be a little bit manipulated, but they would take over through elections. But then they held elections in Germany, in Austria and Hungary and they were completely wiped out in all of them. They realized they were not popular and they were not going to win easily and their tactics changed. This is all clear in the documentation. They start out quite doctrinaire. They thought they apply the Leninist theories and it would work. “If we eliminate the bourgeoisie, and if we do those steps to get the peasants and the workers on our side, than the masses will support us and vote for us.” But it turned out, they didn’t.
Profil: Why?
Applebaum: Exactly: Why? They were asking themselves this question all the time. They said: Why are the workers on strike and not supporting us? And then they thought hard. You can read all this in the documents of this time. Instead of saying: Well, maybe Marx is wrong. They say: Spies! Or: We have not eliminated enough people. Or they came up with other explanations That’s why in 1948/49 you get a second wave of violence across the whole block. So to sum it up: It never worked. They tried everything and the politics changed in waves. They said: Maybe we need to be nicer to people, then they will like us. But it did not work. So then there is a crack down. But that did not work either of course.
Profil: Did Stalin want to keep Eastern Europe as a buffer zone to the West for protection or was it an attempt to extend the empire and spread communism world wide?
Applebaum: It was not an empire like the Habsburgs. But the Soviets thought: This is a new kind of society and we are spreading our ideas towards the West. There was a lingering believe that if the Soviet Union would work eventually he whole world would become communist. Western Germany and France in the end, too.
Profil: Why was Stalin interested in Poland?
Applebaum: It was just where they got to first. None of the countries the Red Army never reached ever became communist. The only way they could get a country was by conquering it. Occupying it. Hungary would not have become a communist country, if the Soviet army would not have occupied Budapest. And Austria would have been communist, if they would have taken the whole country. But they didn’t.
Profil: Was it not a defensive measure of Stalin to get Eastern Europe under control to have a buffer zone to defend the Soviet Union from further Western aggression?
Applebaum: That is not how they described it to each other. They spoke about spreading the ideology. Did they think about it as a buffer zone? Perhaps. Although in the end by the 1970ties and 1980ties these countries were a bigger problem for them than Western aggression.
Profil: When I studied Soviet documents in the Russian archives in Moscow to find out about the deportation of the Chechen people I found it quite difficult to differentiate between the real content of these telegrams and reports and the pure propaganda character that those documents also were meant to have. They were often not writing what they were thinking because it was a totalitarian system. So how do you know what was real and what was written with the purpose to spin an event?
Applebaum: It’s a good question. First of all you always have to remember that these archive materials were not meant to be published. So they might really be accurate. If you look at the archives of the discussion of the East German cultural department of the Central Committee they have arguments and different ideas about policy although they always try to justifiy them being based on Marxism. This is what we should do in order to fulfill the plan. I agree that there is a fine balancing point. This is how they spoke to one another. We can’t know what people were secretly thinking of course.
Profil: Why did Vienna not become center of Central Europe again after the fall of the Iron Curtain?
Applebaum: Berlin became the center. In Austria the term “Eastern Europe” is still used as some kind of prejudice. Eastern Europeans are seen as backward, possibly criminal. Although there are huge differences between Latin and Slav languages spoken in so called “Eastern Europe”, Austrians still tend to think they are all the same. At least Austrians could have established that Hungarians are not Slavs. The lack of understanding for Eastern Europe, which I felt when I spoke at a conference last year in Vienna, certainly makes it difficult to understand the development of Eastern Europe – it is so diverse. When the financial crisis hit, people assumed that Western Europe needed to rescue Eastern Europe. But in fact it was Northern Europe who saved the South.
Profil: Some Eastern European countries suffered a lot, too.
Applebaum: True, but the solved it differently. I made for example a comparison of Latvia and Greece. What happened in 2008? Latvia slashed public spending, reduced the bureaucracy by a third and did not inflate the currency. Although the economy declined dramatically in 2011 and 2012 there were no strikes and street protests because there was apparently a feeling among Latvians that they wanted a healthy independent economy. Today the Latvian economy is growing by 5 Percent. The Greeks on the contrary did everything too slow and too late while constantly rioting in the street against their own government and waiting for the European Union for help. I think they should have looked to Latvia as an example. But that did not happen.
Profil: Your book is about totalitarianism but it is over. Or is it not?
Applebaum: Not everywhere. Think of North Korea. And I think we are not immunized against totalitarian behavior.
Profil: Shall we be afraid of Russia?
Applebaum: Russia is so big. It is hard to say what is possible there. I am not an expert on Putin also. But: Could he try? Yes, he could try. I mean totalitarianism never worked in Eastern Europe either. It never succeeded. There never was total control. But just because it will never work it doesn’t mean that someone will not try. People might try again. I also never thought the KGB would come back. The lesson of the 20iest century is, that it can happen again. And that it can happen anywhere. Nobody is immune. The human desire to control other people has been with us forever.