Eastern Bloc politics

Creation of the Eastern Bloc In 1922, the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR), the Ukrainian SSR, the Byelorussian SSR and the Transcaucasian SFSR, approved the Treaty of Creation of the USSR and the Declaration of the Creation of the USSR, forming the Soviet Union. At the end of World War II by mid-1945, all eastern and central European capitals were controlled by the Soviet Union. During the final stages of the war, the Soviet Union began the creation of the Eastern Bloc by directly annexing several countries as Soviet Socialist Republics that were originally effectively ceded to it by Nazi Germany in the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. Eastern Poland, eastern Finland, the Baltics, the Northern half of Bukovina and Bessarabia, now called Moldova, were forcibly incorporated into the Soviet Union. The eastern Polish territories remain part of Ukraine and Belarus, as of the early 21st century. Red Army and NKVD personnel began to impose the communist system in 1939. They made extensive use of local communists, socialists, and their collaborators to wage a campaign of mass violence and mass deportations to camps in order to "Sovietize" the areas under their occupation. The Soviet invasion of these areas in 1939 created local allies and produced NKVD officers experienced in imposing the communist system. The Soviet Union began planning the transformation of Eastern Europe even before the 1941 Nazi invasion of the USSR. There is evidence that the USSR did not expect to create a communist bloc quickly or easily. Ivan Maiskii, Soviet foreign minister under Stalin, wrote in 1944 that all European nations would eventually become communist states but only after a period of three to four decades. Latvia (became Latvia SSR), Estonia (became Estonian SSR), and northeastern Romania (part of which became the Moldavian SSR). By 1945, these additional annexed countries totaled approximately 180,000 additional square miles (465,000 km2), or slightly more than the area of West Germany, East Germany and Austria combined. Other states were converted into Soviet Satellite states, such as the Polish People's Republic, the People's Republic of Bulgaria, the People's Republic of Hungary, the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, the Romanian People's Republic, the People's Republic of Albania, and later the German Democratic Republic from the Soviet zone of German occupation. The Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia was also considered part of the Bloc, though a Tito–Stalin split occurred in 1948 Conditions in the Eastern Bloc , Romania in May 1986. Throughout the Eastern Bloc, both in the Soviet Socialist Republic and the rest of the Bloc, Russia was given prominence, and referred to as the naibolee vydajuščajasja nacija (the most prominent nation) and the rukovodjaščij narod (the leading people). While over 15 million Eastern Bloc residents migrated westward from 1945 to 1949, emigration was effectively halted in the early 1950s, with the Soviet approach to controlling national movement emulated by most of the rest of the Eastern Bloc. The Soviets mandated expropriation and etatization of private property. The Soviet-style "replica regimes" that arose in the Bloc not only reproduced Soviet command economies, but also adopted the brutal methods employed by Joseph Stalin and Soviet secret police to suppress real and potential opposition. In addition, media in the Eastern Bloc served as an organ of the state, completely reliant on and subservient to the communist party. ==Seizing control==

Early history emblem represented the handshake between Communist Wilhelm Pieck and Social Democrat Otto Grotewohl when their parties were forcibly merged in 1946 The initial issue arising in countries occupied by the Red Army in 1944 and 1945 was the manner in which to transform occupation power into control over domestic development. At first, western countries' willingness to support "antifascist" action and for "democratization" with a socialist element helped Soviet efforts to permit communists in their respective countries to initiate a process of gradual almost imperceptibly slow Sovietization. Because communists were relatively small minorities in all countries except Czechoslovakia, During this period, and even for 25 years after Stalin's death, the few diplomats and foreign correspondents permitted inside the Soviet Union were usually restricted to within a few miles of Moscow, their phones were tapped, their residences were restricted to foreigner-only locations and they were constantly followed by Soviet authorities. For many years after World War II, even the best informed foreigners did not know the number of arrested or executed Soviet citizens, or how poorly the Soviet economy had performed. At the same time, Soviet advisers were placed in government institutions, with higher concentrations in the army and the police, while trade agreements gave the USSR a preponderant influence in local economies. Socioeconomic reforms Stalin felt that socioeconomic transformation was indispensable to establish Soviet control, reflecting the Marxist-Leninist view that material bases—the distribution of the means of production—shaped social and political relations. Moscow trained cadres were placed into crucial power positions to fulfill orders regarding sociopolitical transformation. These measures were publicly billed as reforms rather than socioeconomic transformations. Soviet and local concerns formed "joint stock companies" permitting Soviet officials to exercise direct control over important sections of the economy. Bloc politics eventually forced purported bourgeois politicians and parties to choose between unconditional political surrender and outright rejection. Two kinds of alliances were envisaged: permanent "natural" alliances with related social forces such as peasants willing to submit to communist vanguard parties and temporary accords with bourgeois parties necessary for temporary objectives. Parties, such as Social Democrats, were seen as belonging to the permanent natural category, but would be eventually expected to undergo transformations. Moscow cadres distinguished "progressive forces" from "reactionary elements", and rendered both powerless through self-emasculation or future self-sacrifice. Such procedures were repeated continuously until communists had gained unlimited power, while only politicians who were unconditionally supportive of Soviet policy remained. ==Political systems==

People's democracy Despite the initial institutional design of communism implemented by Joseph Stalin in the Eastern Bloc (see Stalinism), subsequent development varied across countries. While communism came to power in the Soviet Union following the Russian Civil War, of some embarrassment to the ruling regimes was that, in the rest of the Eastern Bloc, it came to power with the occupation of the Red Army. The resulting states aspired to total control of a political center backed by an extensive and active repressive apparatus, and a central justification of ostensibly Marxist-Leninist ideology. Decisions of consequence were made by the ruling communist parties, which were not political parties in the western sense, but apparatuses for totalitarian control of the state and society. They did not represent sectional interests, they imposed them. who was the General Secretary of the Hungarian Communist Party Non-Soviet Eastern Bloc Communist Parties held congresses every five years, not long after the Soviet Communist Party had held its congress, to elect central committees and endorse new party programs, though "central committees could call emergency" congresses. Attendance at party congresses was frequently given as a reward for long service. Parties also sometimes held national conferences to address specific issues. The General Secretary or First Secretary of the Central Committee was the most powerful figure in each regime. For example, a Polish communist described faith in the Polish United Workers' Party as that it "means that his faith in it is uncritical at every stage, no matter what the party is saying. It is a person with the ability to adapt his mentality and his conscience in such a way that he can unreservedly accept the dogma that the party is never wrong, even though it is wrong all the time." Most of the parties in non-Soviet Eastern Bloc countries differed from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in that they were technically coalitions. In response, in Poland, the central committee held a "vigilance plenum" against nationalists. One of the methods of control involved several party purges between 1948 and 1953, including 90,000 purged in Bulgaria, 200,000 in Romania (about one third of party), 200,000 in Hungary, 300,000 in East Germany, 370,000 in Poland (about one quarter of party members) and 550,000 in Czechoslovakia (30% of the party). In Czechoslovakia, approximately 130,000 people were sent to prisons, labor camps and mines. Party leader Klement Gottwald's early claims that Czechoslovakia was different from the rest of the Eastern Bloc created jealousy and additional danger later when Stalin was showing an almost paranoiac desire for unity and uniformity. The intensity of the purges varied by country, with thorough purges in places with a relatively popular party in Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria, and less thorough purges in places where the party was initially less well-established, such as Poland, Romania and East Germany. In addition to rank-and-file member purges, prominent communists were purged, with some subjected to public show trials. For those not executed, degradation and humiliation continued for years in prison or labor camps. In addition, throughout the Eastern Bloc, armies appeared in Soviet-style uniforms studying military manuals copied from the Red Army. De-Stalinization Some relaxation of Soviet control occurred after Stalin's death in 1953 and the subsequent de-stalinization. State brutality and repression waned in the Bloc. Following Mao's death and China seeking close ties with the United States, After a purge in the military and the economic bureaucracy, in 1976, Albania implemented a rigidly Marxist-Leninist constitution that not only made the party the leading force in state and society, but also limited private property and forbade foreign loans. Isolating itself completely from the rest of the world, Albania embarked on a massive defense program, including the amassing of a huge arsenal of weapons and the construction of more than 700,000 concrete military bunkers for a country with only 3 million citizens. ==Political repression==

While the initial institution of communism destroyed most of the prior institutional and organizational diversity of the Eastern Bloc countries, communist structures existed in different manifestations of strength that also varied over time. In such Communist systems, centralized and unelected state apparatuses, command economies, and scarcity or absence of independent civil associations specifically combined to tightly restrict the repertoire of action for those looking to defend their interests or press demands on the government. These features did not evolve, but rather were intentionally imposed over a relatively short span of time. As in the Soviet Union, culture was subordinated to political needs and creativity was secondary to socialist realism. The legal system and education were redesigned on Soviet lines. In addition to emigration restrictions, civil society, defined as a domain of political action outside the party's state control, was not allowed to firmly take root, with the possible exception of Poland in the 1980s. While the institutional designs of the communist systems were based on the rejection of rule of law, the legal infrastructure was not immune to change reflecting decaying ideology and the substitution of autonomous law. Political dissent Communist regimes in the Eastern Bloc viewed even marginal groups of opposition intellectuals as a potential threat because of the bases underlying Communist power therein. The central pillar on which the monopoly power of the Communist elite was based was the belief of the administrative classes—mid-level leadership cadres in the party apparatus, industry, security organs, education and state administration—in the legitimacy of the Communist Party. The perceived danger posed by dissidence and opposition was less that of the possible mobilization of broad open protest movements undermining a regime than that political nonconformism would undermine the reliability of the administrative classes responsible for carrying the party leadership's directives. Accordingly, the suppression of dissidence and opposition was viewed as a central prerequisite for the security of Communist power, though the enormous expense at which the population in certain countries were kept under secret surveillance may not have been rational. The degree of opposition and dissident suppression varied by country and time throughout the Eastern Bloc. Post-totalitarian phase repression varied across Eastern Bloc countries according to the degree of internal coherence and the social anchoring of the Communist elites in each country. Trial by jury was replaced by a tribunal of a professional judge and two lay assessors that were dependable party actors. The features of such Communist systems combined to structure the social and political environment to raise the cost of open protest, often to a prohibitive level. As with the party purges, the social purges were justified theoretically by the Stalinist doctrine that the class struggle intensifies in the immediate aftermath of the socialist revolution and in the first stages of the construction of socialism. Consequently, bourgeois and petty-bourgeois attitudes arose leading, for example, to the reliance upon home production and the black market in the resulting shortage economies. These social purges constituted generalized episodes of terror intended to be seen as such in order to establish order and control.No person was safe from the purges' effects and denunciations were rife. The definitions of crime employed in such purges were broad and vague, including the possession of goods in short supply being construed as hoarding. It was the responsibility of all citizens to integrate into their daily lives the responsibility for administering the purges. A former Romanian Securitate leader stated: While the purges quelled outward manifestations of dissatisfaction, they also caused severe economic dislocations. Large construction projects were launched with insufficient capital such that unpaid prisoners were required to serve in place of modern equipment. Disruption of the trained administrative and management elites also caused harm. So many workers were dismissed from established professions that they had to be replaced by hastily trained younger workers that did not possess questionable class origins. A Czechoslovak noted: The purges often coincided with the introduction of the first Five Year Plans in the non-Soviet members of the Eastern Bloc. The objectives of those plans were considered beyond political rapproche even where they were absurd, such that workers that did not fulfill targets were targeted and blamed for economic woes, while at the same time, the ultimate responsibility for the economic shortcomings would be placed on prominent victims of the political purge. In Romania, Gheorghiu-Dej admitted that 80,000 peasants had been accused of siding with the class enemy because they resisted collectivization, while purged party elite Ana Pauker was blamed for this "distortion". In addition, sizable resources were employed in the purge, such as in Hungary, where almost one million adults were employed to record, control, indoctrinate, spy on and sometimes kill targets of the purge. ==Secret police==

parading through the streets of Neustrelitz in 1955. They are armed with StG 44 rifles. Eastern Bloc secret police organizations were formed on Vladimir Lenin's theory and Joseph Stalin's practical application of "the defense of the revolution." One of the first acts of Lenin after the October 1917 Revolution was the establishment of a secret police, the Cheka. Such organizations in the Eastern Bloc became the "shield and sword" of the ruling Communist party. The party's claim was based on Lenin's general theory of class struggle, imperialism, legitimate socialism, and the dictatorship of the proletariat. The police served to deter opposition to party directives, and contain it should it appear. The political police were the core of the system. The names of each political police organization became synonymous with unbridled power and threats of violent retribution should an individual become active against the collective. The exceptions to this lower profile were in Albania under Enver Hoxha and in Romania under Nicolae Ceauşescu. KGB and the formation of the Stasi During party purges, the secret police became so entrenched within the party that they became their own elite within the elite of the party. After the forced merger of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany thousands of anti-Nazi social democrats and communists that opposed the merger also ended up in those camps. Erich Mielke, a key operator for the Soviets after the war, built the Stasi into a vast secret police and espionage organization. Mielke became the longest-serving state security chief in the Eastern bloc, and his relationship with the Soviet secret police dated back to 1931, when he had fled Germany for Moscow after murdering two Berlin policemen. Collaboration was so close that the KGB invited the Stasi to establish operational bases in Moscow and Leningrad to monitor visiting East German tourists and Mielke referred to the Stasi officers as "Chekists of the Soviet Union." In 1978, Mielke formally granted KGB officers in East Germany the same rights and powers they enjoyed in the Soviet Union. Stasi operations construction bugs employed in new buildings quiet camera that could take pictures through a 1mm hole in a wall automated machine to reglue envelopes after mail had been opened for examination The Stasi employed 120,000 full-time agents and an official estimate of 100,000 informants to monitor a country that possessed only 16 million inhabitants. Between 1950 and 1989, the Stasi employed a total of 274,000 persons. In terms of total inoffizielle Mitarbeiter (IMs) Stasi informants, by 1995, 174,000 had been identified, which approximated 2.5% of East Germany's population between the ages of 18 and 60. While these calculations were from official records, because many such records were destroyed, there were likely closer to 500,000 Stasi informers. A former Stasi colonel estimated that the figure could be as high as 2 million if occasional informants were included. The result was a society in which residents often did not know whom to trust, and in which few attempted to share their private thoughts with anyone but close friends or colleagues. A popular saying in East Germany was that whenever three people engaged in a conversation, one was bound to be a Stasi informant. Full-time officers were posted to all major industrial plants and one tenant in every apartment building was designated as a watchdog reporting to an area representative of the Volkspolizei (Vopo). Spies reported every relative or friend that stayed the night at another's apartment. Tiny holes were bored in apartment and hotel room walls through which Stasi agents filmed citizens with special video cameras. Similarly, schools, universities, and hospitals were extensively infiltrated. Writing to friends in the west about wishes to emigrate, which the Stasi could intercept, could draw a conviction for "establishing illegal contacts." In addition, it was a crime to fail to denounce fellow citizens, such as informers who failed to report friends stating they wished to escape to the west. The Stasi also focused upon the allies of the ruling communist Socialist Unity Party of Germany. For example, during the Soviet-backed forced merger of the SED, the Stasi arrested 5,000 Social Democratic Party of Germany members that disapproved of the merger. 400 died from a mix of executions, malnutrition or disappearing. 200 of them were later sentenced to a total of 10,000 years jail time. Until 1950, all such sentences were pronounced by Soviet military tribunals in trials that lasted no more than ten minutes each. While the Stasi had only 4,000 members in 1953, it grew considerably over the years to 52,707 in 1973. Its ranks swelled much more quickly after Eastern Bloc countries signed the 1975 Helsinki accords, which Erich Honecker viewed as a grave threat to his regime because they contained language binding signatories to respect "human and basic rights, including freedom of thought, conscience, religion, and conviction. Stasi size was immediately increased by 10,000. Mielke was accorded new, wide-ranging powers while the Stasi became the leadership's instrument of power to an extent not seen in the Eastern Bloc since Stalin's death, with the exception of the Securitate in Romania under Nicolae Ceaușescu. The Stasi then set up 24 internment camps throughout East Germany to house six categories of persons to be arrested. Mielke then issued Richtlinie 1/76, a standard operating procedure manual outlining surveillance of the population down to the last detail. Writing samples were taken from letters that could be used to match with writing on any dissident pamphlets. Those questioned by the Stasi were forced to put special cloths under the arms that were later stored in sealed and numbered cans in a massive warehouse for later use by bloodhounds in the event of a manhunt. State police organizations Under Nicolae Ceauşescu, the powers of the Securitate secret police increased to become, in proportion to Romania's population, one of the largest and most brutal secret police forces in the Eastern bloc. By 1989, total Securitate personnel officers and security troops totalled 38,682 for a population of 23 million. The Securitate employed nearly a half-million informers. Albania's Sigurimi, under the leadership of isolationist Stalinist Enver Hoxha, were as brutal as the Securitate. From the beginning, the ÁVH (first known as the ÁVO) acted as the private army of the ruling Hungarian Working People's Party. Preceding the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, the ÁVH, which fired on protesters, was opposed by the Hungarian army and abolished for a brief period during the revolution until the Red Army's invasion of Hungary thereafter. In Bulgaria, the Sigurnost grew throughout the 1970s and became even more subservient to the KGB as leader Todor Zhivkov declared that Bulgaria and the Soviet Union would "act as a single body, breathing with the same lungs and nourished by the same blood stream", and attempted to incorporate Bulgaria in the Soviet Union. The UDBa in Yugoslavia operated with more restraint than secret police agencies in the communist states of Eastern Europe. In its latter decades it was composed of eight semi-independent secret police organizations—one for each of the six Yugoslav federal republics and two for the autonomous provinces—coordinated by the central federal headquarters in the capital of Belgrade. In Poland, the Urząd Bezpieczeństwa ("Security Office", or UB) was initially formed to wage a covert war against communists in Poland. The UB was modelled on the Soviet NKVD, whose specialists had helped forge the new "shield of the state." Several state police and secret police organizations enforced communist party rule, including: The secret police and Eastern Bloc dissolution The Stasi acted as a proxy for KGB conduct activities in Poland, where the Soviets were not well liked. When the Polish Solidarity movement arose, Stasi-KGB data was immediately handed to the Polish SB which immediately arrested hundred of Solidarity members within a few hours of declaring martial law, as demanded by the Soviets. All telephone, telegraph and mail traffic in and out of Poland was put under Stasi control, while a massive Stasi Tenth Department of the Second Main Directorate (counterintelligence) was created to monitor Poland. With worries throughout the Eastern Bloc of a possible collapse if communism fell in any country, the Stasi Tenth Department dispatched operational groups to Czechoslovakia and Hungary. The Tenth Department, however, could not monitor the large number of discontented citizens in the Eastern Bloc in the late 1980s, with the first significant breach coming Hungary when the government therein ordered the dismantling of fortifications and barbed wire barriers along its border with Austria in August 1989. Word spread rapidly to East Germany, where thousands seeking freedom poured into Hungary. Hungary ignored Stasi threats regarding closure of the border. Thereafter, the battle was effectively lost, with East Germany beginning the dismantling of the Berlin Wall months later. In the first three years after the October 3, 1990 German reunification, large numbers of sensational arrests of Stasi infiltrators throughout the former West German government occurred weekly. It became clear that the entire West German government had been infested by the East German spy organization, as was every political party, West Germany's industry, banks, the church, and the news media.One female Stasi mole in the BND, an East German agent for seventeen years, had been entrusted with the job of preparing the daily secret intelligence summary for West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl. Stasi archivists estimate that at least 20,000 West Germans had spied for the Stasi and that that estimate may be conservative.After German reunification, the examination by former targets of their Stasi files led to countless civil suits being filed against informers, with large numbers of family and friend relationship destroyed. ==Notes==