The Death of Tito: The Death of Yugoslavia?

 

The repercussions of the bloody break-up of Yugoslavia continue to make media headlines today, as recently illustrated by the arrests of Yugoslav war crimes suspects former Serbian General Ratko Mladic (May 2011) and Croatian-Serb General Goran Hadzic (July 2011), both of whom have been indicted for war crimes and crimes against humanity in relation to atrocities committed during the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s. In this article, guest author Simon Andrew discusses the decline of Yugoslavia in the years following the death of iconic Yugoslav leader, Josip Broz Tito. Tito’s death in 1980 marked the beginning of a turbulent decade which would ultimately result in the death of Yugoslavia, as structural problems in the Yugoslav federation were increasingly exacerbated by economic decline, rising nationalism and the changing international climate at the end of the Cold War. As a result, the federation became increasingly untenable, ultimately resulting in the dissolution of Yugoslavia, a process marked by widespread violence and bloodshed, the consequences of which are still being felt today.

 

The Death of Tito: The Death of Yugoslavia?

 

By Simon Andrew.

 

 ”I thought of the old adage that you could tell something about a nation by its vocabulary… Serbo-Croat had a disturbingly large number of words for butchery” -  Brian Hall, The Impossible Country: A Journey through the last days of Yugoslavia (Minerva: 1996)

 

As communist regimes collapsed across central and eastern Europe at the close of the 1980s and early 1990s, no country saw more violence and blood-letting thanYugoslavia. Constructed as a multi-ethnic federation, comprised of six republics (Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia and Slovenia) and two semi-autonomous provinces (Kosovo and Vojvodina), Yugoslavia contained a number of diverse ethnic and religious groups, a legacy of the region’s six centuries of empirical rule by the Habsburg Empire from the west and the Ottoman Empire from the south east. A first attempt to establish a South Slavic confederation, The Kingdom of Yugoslavia, formed in 1918 in the aftermath of the First World War but did not survive the outbreak of the Second World War; although a second attempt, the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, formed in 1943, was originally more stable. This was due in large part to the strong leadership of war-time partisan and communist leader Josip Broz Tito. Only after Tito’s death in 1980 did nationalist tendencies become increasingly prominent as the individual states in the Yugoslav Federation demanded ever greater autonomy and independence. This surge in nationalism and desire for autonomy ultimately led to five years of conflict, The Yugoslav Wars of 1991 – 1995, as the former federation collapsed amid bloodshed and atrocities which still make newspaper front-pages today.

 

The Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia: consisting of six republics, two autonomous provinces and a patchwork of ethnicity.

 

Tito’s Death

 

“We all cried, but we did not know we were burying Yugoslavia” – Mahmut Bakali, Kosovar Albanian politician and former President of the League of Communists in Kosovo, speaking about Tito’s death.

 

Tito was widely credited for his ability to unite all ethnicities and religions in Yugoslavia: initially under the banner of resistance during World War II and then via communism during his subsequent 35 years in power. His death in 1980 therefore created a considerable power vacuum. Post-1945, the second incarnation of Yugoslavia was often dubbed ‘Tito’s Yugoslavia’ due to his emblematic role as figurehead of the federation. During his lifetime, Tito was untouchable and unassailable in his position as leader of Yugoslavia – he commanded a great deal of respect from both the population he ruled and from foreign leaders for his role in liberating Yugoslavia during the war and the strength of character demonstrated during his conflict with Stalin in 1948. James Gow in The People’s Prince argues that the egotistical impact of this adulation hindered Tito’s thought process in regards to the longer-term future of Yugoslavia. Gow feels it is not impossible to imagine that Tito would have known that Yugoslavia’s future would be difficult without him at the helm, due to his overbearing association with the federation (Melissa K. Bokovoy, Jill A. Irvine, and Carol Lilly, eds., State-Society Relations in Yugoslavia, Macmillan: 1996).

 

There was no clearly identified successor to the Yugoslav leadership upon Tito’s death. Due to his longevity, many of the partisan ‘old guard’ (such as Edvard Kardelj) had already died, whilst purges conducted against ‘nationalist politicians’ in both Croatia and Serbia in the early 1970s had removed a number of the ‘best and brightest’ younger generation of politicians from the party.

 

Some measures had been taken to plan for a post-Tito Yugoslavia however. The 1974 Constitution had outlined plans for Tito’s eventual secession by proposing a rotating Presidency on a yearly basis, with each of the republics and provinces being allowed their turn to assume overall control over a presidium comprised of representatives from each individual republic and province. This rotation had two main negative effects: firstly, it led to an elongated and ineffective decision-making process and secondly, it effectively hamstrung the republic – depriving it of strong leadership, and more importantly, consistency over time. Ivan Ivekovic in ‘Identity: Usual Bias, Political Manipulations and Historical Forgeries. The Yugoslav Drama’, argues that Yugoslavia was set up to only ever truly function under the control of a dominant arbiter such as Tito, reliant on popularity and charisma, so the system left behind for his successors was unlikely to work without a similar overseer (S. Bianchini and G. Schopflin eds., State Building in the Balkans: Dilemmas on the Eve of the 21^st Century, Longo Editore: 1998).

 

Tito’s death also marked a broader generational handover. Many of those who had fought as part of the war-time liberation movement had now reached the age where their involvement in politics was coming to an end, and with it, their partisan mentality of ‘Brotherhood and Unity’ became a less dominant aspect of party politics. Members of the younger generation, who had no memory or personal attachment to such events, had begun to tire of the ‘endless celebrations’ of the partisan movement (Gale Stokes, The Walls Came Tumbling Down, Oxford University Press: 1993). However, many who were disenchanted with the federation waited until Tito had died before making a more concerted effort to gain further autonomy or independence for their respective regions, either out of respect for Tito himself or in recognition of the power and influence he wielded overall.

 

Tito (left) in 1943, the Partisan commander who brought 'Yugoslavia' together. However, later generations became increasingly disenchanted with the 'myth' of wartime unity and the 'partisan mentality' of their leader.

 

Tito had been the glue which held Yugoslavia together –  not necessarily always in a positive way – and so it took a number of years for criticism and ill-feeling towards Tito to become prevalently expressed in the public-domain. In the years following Tito’s death these criticisms slowly disseminated however, while the growing trend towards decentralisation that had marked the latter years of Tito’s rule also gathered pace, leading to the emergence of a new generation of nationalist leaders such as Franjo Tudjman (President of Croatia 1990 – 1999) and Slobodan Milosevic (Serbian President 1987-1997 and President of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia 1997-2000), whose extreme-nationalistic tendencies contributed significantly to the collapse of the federation.

 

Rising Nationalism

 

During Tito’s rule nationalist sentiment within Yugoslavia was evident but remained largely contained (at times forcibly, such as during the ‘Croatian Spring’ of the early 1970s). The two largest states in Yugoslavia – Serbia and Croatia – had never been fully happy with each other’s role in the federation however. Many Croats felt that it was Serbia’s excessive influence, (especially due to the continuation of the Serb monarchic line) which had made the first attempt at a Yugoslav union fail so spectacularly in the inter-war years, while many Serbs cited the relocation of industry to other areas of Yugoslavia (Croatia and Slovenia in particular), after World War Two as ‘punishment’ for their previous dominance. These long standing grievances remained throughout the communist period, leading to widespread prejudice. Brian Hall, emphasised that  the most important point to remember was ‘that you could not – must not – believe what one group said about another’ (Brian Hall, The Impossible Country, Minerva: 1996).

 

Tito himself was of mixed ethnicity, having a Croatian father and a Slovenian mother. After the Second World War Tito thus declared his intent to create a new ‘Yugoslav’ identity that would unify the constituent republics. The concept of ‘Yugoslavism’ was promoted throughout the communist era, however the percentage of the population which identified as ‘Yugoslav’ remained persistently low. Census data compiled in 1961, 1971, 1981, and 1991 recorded people’s allegiance with their ethnic or federal nationality, although one caveat here is that the census did not allow people to declare themselves as holding an ethnic allegiance as well as being Yugoslav – so it was not possible to indicate identification as, for example, both a Slovene and a Yugoslav – rather, individuals had to choose one main allegiance. Nevertheless, the data is revealing, with a peak figure of only 6.6 per cent of the population identifying themselves as ‘Yugoslavs’ in 1991; ironically at the very point the federation was in a state of collapse. This figure is so negligible that we can see that Yugoslavism, at least as a primary identity, only ever enjoyed a minority following.

 

Interestingly however, there are still those who feel some connection with the Yugoslav identity today. In 2007 former Serbian Government President (2007 – 2008), and current Government Minister Oliver Dulic declared himself as ‘a Yugoslav by nationality’: like Tito, he was also a child of mixed ethnic backgrounds (a common product of Yugoslavia especially in the more homogenous areas); on top of this although he is ethnically a Croat, he was born in Vojvodina, an autonomous province of Serbia.

 

Oliver Dulic: A Yugoslav in a world without Yugoslavia?

 

Figures relating to ethnic and national identification varied across the respective regions of Yugoslavia. Ethnically mixed regions – particularly Bosnia, where Serb, Croat and Muslim communities lived in close proximity in relatively equal proportions on the whole – saw larger amounts of people who considered themselves as ‘Yugoslavs’; although the overall figures were still low in comparison to those indentifying with various ethnic loyalties. More homogenous ‘fringe’ republics – Slovenia especially – were the most indifferent to the idea of cultivating a common identity. If anything this was seen as a threat to the republic’s autonomy and the unique Slovene nationality and culture. By 1974 the newly formulated Yugoslav Constitution had acknowledged the failure of the common Yugoslav identity to take hold, allowing for a level of decentralisation and greater autonomy for individual republics, meaning that the separate states increasingly grew apart, gaining further autonomy in the succeeding decades.

 

Another factor which strengthened separatist feeling in the republics, particularly during the latter decade of communist rule, was economic decline. The Yugoslav federation had debts totalling nearly $20 billion at the time of Tito’s passing. Further economic decline during the 1980s emphasised the growing disparity within the federation and this also magnified nationalist sentiment. The fundamental equality of the federation had always been under question, but now the western states, Croatia and Slovenia in particular, were consistently wealthier than the rest of the federation (Statistical Pocketbooks of Yugoslavia, 1966 – 1979). Slovenia for example, was consistently listed as the richest Yugoslav republic, however the Slovenes continued to receive per capita investment from Belgrade which far exceeded that received by other republics, fostering rivalry and discontent. By the late 1980s, Slovenia, whose population made up roughly 8 per cent of the federation’s total, accounted for roughly 20 per cent of the total GDP. In turn, Slovenes became increasingly worried about maintaining their prosperity, which gave rise to growing suspicions that that their economic growth was being stunted by Belgrade. These concerns were heightened by the growing importance and appeal of the European Economic Community (which would soon become the EU), and particularly the role of Germany, who became being the first influential nation to acknowledge claims to full independence made by both Slovenia and Croatia.

 

Tito’s death heralded the start of a new era for Yugoslav politics. The task of following in the footsteps of such an inspirational and charismatic leader, who had overseen the liberation of his country from Nazism and then ruled for 35 years would have been difficult for even the most highly groomed of successors. The situation was further exacerbated by the fact that Tito left a plan for succession which was highly flawed. Leadership of the Presidency would rotate between the leaders of the constituent members – not allowing any single person to stamp their authority or besmirch Tito’s legacy and reputation, but also not allowing for any stability or continuity. The poor state of the economy and the steady growth of nationalist tendencies amongst the majority of Yugoslavia’s ethnic groups coincided with the loss of such a well-respected leader to result in a fatal combination. With the Cold War ending, and Yugoslavia’s unique position of ‘non-alignment’ outside of either sphere of influence also at an end, the country quickly diminished in terms of international importance. A growing desire amongst people across Eastern Europe as a whole to rid themselves of Communism meant that ‘Yugoslavia’, so associated with Tito and his distinct brand of Marxist ideology, was consigned to history – although not without a bloody struggle as the federation collapsed.

 

About the Author:

 

Simon Andrew has recently completed his BA (Hons) in History at Swansea University, graduating in July 2011. During his final year of study Simon researched and wrote his History Dissertation about the break-up of Yugoslavia. Simon will begin studying for an MA in History at Swansea University in September 2011.

 

Some Suggested Further Reading on this Topic:

 

Crnobrnja, Mihailo, The Yugoslav Drama (Tauris: 1994)

Doder,  Dusko, ‘Yugoslavia: New War and Old Hatreds’, Foreign Policy, 91 (1993) 3-23.

Gow, James,  ‘The People’s Prince – Tito and Tito’s Yugoslavia: Legitimation, Legend and Linchpin’ in Melissa K. Bokovoy, Jill A. Irvine, and Carol Lilly, eds., State-Society Relations in Yugoslavia (Macmillan: 1996)

Hall, Brian The Impossible Country: A Journey through the last days of Yugoslavia (Minerva: 1996)

Hodson, Randy; Massey, Garth; and Sekulic, Dusko, ‘Who were the Yugoslavs? Failed sources of a Common Identity in the Former Yugoslavia’, American Sociological Review, 59 (1994), 83-97.

Ramet, Sabrina P., Balkan Babel: the Disintegration of Yugoslavia from the death of Tito to the fall of Milosevic (Westview Press: 2002)

 

 

The Nuremberg Trials: Perceptions and Prejudice?

 

The end of World War II saw the establishment of the first International War Crimes Trial in the German city of Nuremberg, with the formation of an International Military Tribunal to oversee the trial and conviction of surviving members of the Nazi power structure. The Nuremberg Trials have had a lasting legacy; leading to the creation of the ‘Nuremberg Principles’ of 1950, heavily influencing the development of international criminal law (particularly in relation to Human Rights), and acting as a model for contemporary war crimes trials. The Nuremberg Trials have been the subject of extensive historical research in the intervening years and War Crimes Trials of former Nazi criminals remain a topical issue today, as demonstrated by the recent trial of 91 year old former concentration camp guard, John Demjanjuk. In May 2011 a German court convicted Demjanjuk of acting as an accessory to murder in relation to the 28,069 who died at Sobibor while he worked as a guard at the camp between March-September 1943. In this article guest author Carla Giudice reflects on the performances of three of the best known defendants at Nuremberg; Albert Speer, Hermann Goering and Rudolf Hess, suggesting that the radically different personas presented by these individuals during the trials may have influenced popular perception of their culpability and the sentences they received.

 

The Nuremberg Trials: Perceptions and Prejudice?

By Carla Giudice.

 

 

The aftermath of World War II saw the establishment of the first International War Crimes Trial at thePalace of Justice in the German city of Nuremberg. The decision of the victorious Allied powers to establish an International Military Tribunal (IMT) to conduct a trial for the surviving leaders of the Nazi hierarchy was a contentious issue. The idea of the Germans being entitled to a fair trial seemed outrageous to many, but the intention of the Allied leaders was that the Nuremberg Trials would reveal the scope and barbarity of Nazi atrocities to the public for the first time, documenting these crimes for future generations, and preventing Nazi leaders from becoming martyrs by allowing them an opportunity to defend themselves.

 

Between November 1945 and October 1946 the first trial – the Trial of the Major War Criminals – took place, involving the highest-ranking surviving Nazi officials. Of the twenty-one defendants who stood trial at Nuremberg three were acquitted, seven received prison sentences and eleven were sentenced to death. All of the defendants at Nuremberg were supposedly influential Nazis (although a few individuals, such as Hans Fritzsche, were tried in place of their deceased superiors). Three of the highest ranking defendants on trial at Nuremberg were Albert Speer, Hermann Goering and Rudolf Hess. All three had held significant positions of authority in the Nazi regime and were essentially household names. Interestingly, the three most prominent defendants had opposing personalities (something that became increasingly evident as the trial progressed) and all three received vastly different sentences: Goering was sentenced to death and Hess to life imprisonment while Speer received a relatively lenient twenty year prison term. All three had responded very differently to the trial at Nuremberg. Albert Speer impressed the court with his smart appearance, intelligent and articulate testimony. Throughout the trial he cultivated an image as a ‘good Nazi’ and is remembered for his contrition, as the ‘Nazi who said sorry’. Hermann Goering on the other hand, adopted the persona of the ‘bad Nazi’, stressing his prominence in the Nazi hierarchy and close links to Hitler at every opportunity and demonstrating no remorse. Finally, Rudolf Hess’s erratic behaviour led to his being dubbed the ‘mad Nazi’ with many medical experts questioning the state of his mental health and his ability to stand trial. Question marks have also been raised about the relative leniency shown to Speer in comparison with other defendants, and whether the judges may have been influenced by class and educational bias. Might the differing social backgrounds, appearance, behaviour and presentation of the leading defendants at Nuremberg have influenced the judges’ own perceptions and opinions? Might this even have been a factor behind the different sentences these individuals received? By comparing Speer the ‘good’ Nazi to Goering the ‘bad’ Nazi and Hess the ‘mad’ Nazi, it is possible to analyse whether the myth of Speer being saved at Nuremberg by his reputation has any substance.

 

 The announcement of the verdicts delivered at the Trial of the Major War Criminals at Nuremberg, 8 October 1946:

 

 

 

Albert Speer: The ‘Good Nazi’

 

In Albert Speer’s memoirs Inside The Third Reich (Collins: 1976), written during his incarceration at Spandau Prison, Speer portrays himself as Hitler’s closest confidante. From the mid-1930s Speer enjoyed exclusive access to Hitler as his ‘favourite architect’ and was eventually rewarded for his companionship with the office of Minister of Armaments and War Production in 1942. In his memoirs Speer expresses contrition while at the same time distancing himself from having any personal responsibility for the more sinister crimes of the Nazi regime. This is the same tactic that Speer used at Nuremberg, seemingly to good effect.

 

Albert Speer, the 'Good Nazi', at the Nuremberg Trials, 1946.

 

Albert Speer stood out from the other defendants at Nuremberg; his privileged background, smart appearance and professional occupation did not fit the stereotype of a typical Nazi thug. The judges seemed to warm to Speer and could relate to the articulate and obviously well-educated defendant.  Prior to the trial, Allied intelligence teams wanted to exploit Speer’s extensive knowledge of technical information about the German economy and armaments industry and Speer had been happy to cooperate. This meant that Speer was also a useful commodity to the Western Allies in the post-War era of emerging Cold War hostility. This was a fact that Speer used to his advantage, writing a letter to prosecutor Robert Jackson to remind him that if he were to bring up Speer’s voluntary statements to the Allies during interrogation, the information divulged would have been of strategic interest to the Russian delegation. Speer also made several other calculated and shrewd moves at Nuremberg, which undoubtedly bolstered his defence. The defence strategy conjured up by his lawyer, Dr Flächsner, presented Speer as an apolitical minister who was predominately concerned with architectural pursuits. Emphasis was placed on the fact that Speer had increasingly challenged Hitler towards the end of the war, issuing a counter decree against Hitler’s ‘scorched earth’ policy and perhaps the most surprising revelation in court, that Speer had even attempted to assassinate Hitler.

 

Another redeeming factor was his contrition. Speer was the only defendant at Nuremberg to show any real remorse for his role in the Third Reich. He appeared visibly disturbed by the atrocity videos shown in court, although he continued to deny any knowledge of the holocaust. Rather than using his final statement to declare his innocence or lack of remorse, instead he admitted some level of ‘collective responsibility’ for the role he had played.

 

Speer’s responsibility for crimes committed during the Nazi reign was clearly showcased in the court proceedings however; Speer has been described as the ‘architect of mass enslavement’ for his role in employing Prisoners of War and using slave labour in industrial work. (Airey Neave, Nuremberg, Hodden & Stroughton: 1978). But an interesting comparison can be made between Speer and his subordinate, Fritz Sauckel, who was also in the dock at Nuremberg, charged with having procured slave labour to bolster the industrial workforce (on Speer’s orders). Despite Sauckel’s subordination to Speer, he received the death sentence. In comparison to the educated, presentable and articulate Speer, Sauckel was from a working class background, of average intelligence and shabby appearance, sporting a moustache that was reminiscent of Hitler’s favoured style. Could the judges’ bias towards Speer’s professionalism and intelligence have influenced their perceptions? Did this contribute to the discrepancy in sentences delivered to the two men, both guilty of involvement in crimes against humanity by use of slave labour? The judges were clearly impressed by Speer’s  performance and despite compelling evidence, chose not to punish his use of slave labour with the death sentence, instead sentencing him to twenty years imprisonment, while Sauckel was sent to the gallows. Speer went on to construct a literary career out of his time as a minister of the Third Reich. Following his release from Spandau prison in 1966, the subsequent publication of his memoirs ensured his status as a media figure until his death in 1981.

 

Hermann Goering: The ‘Bad Nazi’

 

Hermann Goering also distinguished himself from the other defendants, albeit for different reasons to Speer. By 1941 Goering held the position of Reichsmarschall and had been named as Hitler’s designated successor, but Goering’s influence had declined towards the end of the War. Heavily dependent on narcotics, he spent most of his time in a drug-addled haze, hosting parties at his Karinhall lodge where he often dressed in elaborate costumes, including a roman toga with diamond rings. However, Goering was revitalised as a result of the enforced rehabilitation regime undertaken whilst he was in captivity. Sober, he proved a formidable defendant for the prosecution to challenge.

 

Hermann Goering, the 'Bad Nazi', testifying at the Nuremberg Trials, 1946.

 

 

Goering’s image as a top-ranking Nazi was emphasised by the Tribunal but also by Goering himself; the Tribunal wanted to show the public that they were going to punish one of Hitler’s loyal paladins and Goering was keen to stress his close relationship to Hitler. Goering thus exaggerated his importance and prominence in the Nazi hierarchy at every available opportunity; Robert Conot described Goering’s performance at Nuremberg as akin to a ‘preening peacock [who] unfurled the feathers of his office’. (Robert Conot, Justice at Nuremberg, Harper & Row: 1993). Goering’s desire for recognition as a key player the Nazi power structures can be seen through humorous instances in the proceedings, such as his furious retort of ‘ich war de Zweite’ (‘I was second!’) when Hess was mistaken as Hitler’s successor designate.

 

Goering did not behave as a war criminal during his time at Nuremberg; he made requests for the return of his marshal’s baton and insisted on wearing his army uniform throughout the proceedings. Goering rather enjoyed the spotlight he found himself under at Nuremberg and his firm belief that he would one day be recognised as a martyr (he even envisaged the next generation of Germans having a statue of him in every household!) motivated him to defend himself vigorously, seemingly viewing the trial as an opportunity to spread the National Socialist message on an international platform. Goering’s persona meant that despite the overwhelming catalogue of evidence against him, he did not allow the Tribunal to render him guilty without putting up a fight. His formidable character was perhaps best illustrated during his cross-examination by American prosecutor Robert Jackson. Goering took great pleasure in pointing out a mistake in Jackson’s translation of a document regarding clearing of the Rhine and aggravated the prosecutor to the extent that he complained to the Tribunal about Goering’s behaviour. The exchange was widely viewed as a triumph for Goering.

 

Goering also surprised many of those present at Nuremberg with his congenial persona and many witnesses confessed to ‘almost liking’ the Reichsmarschall. He had a wicked sense of humour; when a reference was made to his theft of eighty-seven million bottles of champagne from France, Goering looked around the room for laughter at this achievement. Despite Goering’s obvious charisma, he showed no remorse for his actions and continued to glorify Hitler and the Nazi Party. Rebecca West, a journalist who was present at Nuremberg, noted that Goering gave the impression that if he was given the chance he would have ‘walked out of the Palace of Justice and taken over Germany again.’ (Rebecca West, A Train of Powder, Ivan R. Dee: 2000).

 

The judges at Nuremberg could show no remorse for a man who had clearly been involved in most of the criminal acts detailed in the indictment and who showed no signs of regret, sentencing Goering to death. In the few instances where the prosecution did not have solid evidence, Goering’s willingness to exaggerate his own importance meant that he even incriminated himself for crimes that the Tribunal may not otherwise have been able to convict him for. Goering’s wily humour and determination to mount a robust challenge to the prosecution may not have saved him from the death sentence at Nuremberg, but he still managed to defy the Allies by committing suicide the evening before he was due to face the gallows.

 

Rudolf Hess: The ‘Mad Nazi’

 

Former Deputy Fuhrer Rudolf Hess did not share Speer’s ability to take the strategic initiative or Goering’s capacity to mount a spirited challenge at Nuremberg; Hess was incapable of even taking the stand for cross-examination. Hess had been in Allied captivity longer than any of the other defendants; he was captured after he made an ill-fated flight to Scotland in an attempt to reach an armistice with the British government in 1941, so had been absent from Germany for the bulk of the war. Hess behaved in an increasingly unstable and erratic manner during his time in captivity in Britain: he attempted suicide on several occasions; claimed that his food was being poisoned (samples of these foods were brought to Nuremberg for analysis by Hess) and appeared to be suffering from severe memory loss. There has been some disagreement about whether Hess’s apparent insanity and amnesia was feigned to win the sympathy of the judges, while Hugh Thomas has even sensationally questioned whether the man in the dock at Nuremberg was actually Hess himself (Hugh Thomas, Murder of Rudolf Hess, Hodder and Stoughton: 1980).

 

Rudolf Hess was the 'Mad Nazi' at Nuremberg.

 

However, the prison psychologist, Gustav Gilbert, believed there was little doubt that Hess was in a state of complete amnesia, although he conceded that he may have been deliberately suppressing some memories. During a pre-trial hearing regarding his ability to stand trial, Hess stood up and declared that he had simulated his loss of memory. This intervention was interpreted as evidence that Hess was fit to stand trial, rather than considering that a man who had ruined his chances to be acquitted on medical grounds was surely somewhat delusional.

 

Unlike Speer and Goering, Hess’s presentation at the Trial was exclusively detrimental to his sentencing. Hess was the madman at Nuremberg; his grimaces and random laughter revealed his fragmented state of mind. He often read novels during the open sessions and seemed indifferent to the proceedings and to the events happening around him. On the rare occasions that Hess did speak during the trial, his speeches went off on disturbing tangents. Hess was further damaged by his apparent lack of remorse; despite the fact that he had been absent from Germany since 1941 (before the worst atrocities had taken place), he dispelled any mitigation the judges may have considered in his closing statement, when he declared that he had no regrets and would have taken the same course of action again. Hess was also the subject of particular hostility from the Soviet delegation; he was a pioneer of Nazism and a committed anti-Bolshevik, while Stalin was suspicious of his dealings with the British in 1941. The fact that Hess’s defence revealed the existence of the secret clauses contained in the 1939 Soviet-German Non Aggression Pact was also bound to have caused resentment amongst the Soviet delegation. Hess was sentenced to life imprisonment in Spandau and remained there, despite repeated calls for his release on humanitarian grounds, until his death in 1987.

 

Some of the leading defendants at Nuremberg, including Goering and Hess (front row, far left).

 

The evidence against many of the defendants at Nuremberg was clearly compelling and in many cases this was exacerbated by their lack of visible remorse. However, a number of other factors need to be taken into account in terms of assessing their influence on the outcome of the Nuremberg trials: the need to punish those who were clearly guilty of involvement in the most appalling crimes; a desire to convey the scale of Nazi atrocities to a post-War Germany and to the wider world; the differing political and ideological agendas of the Allied powers; and allegations of the retrospective application of ‘victor’s justice’ at Nuremberg.  Ultimately however, a comparative study of  the ‘good’, ‘bad’ and ‘mad’ Nazis at Nuremberg provides us with some interesting insights and their various personas can also be seen as an important factor in influencing the sentences that the leading defendants received.

 

About the Author:

 

Carla Giudice has just completed her BA (Hons) in History and English at Swansea University, graduating with first class honours in July 2011. In her final year of study Carla researched and wrote her History Dissertation assessing the impact of the defendants’ personalities on the sentences delivered at Nuremberg. Carla is joining the Civil Service Fast Stream graduate scheme in September.

 

 

Inside Ceausescu’s Romania: An Unquestionably Efficient Police State

 

In 1989, when peaceful revolutions were sweeping across Eastern Europe, the fall of communism in Romania was marked by a higher level of violence and bloodshed than elsewhere in the region. This was due, at least in part, to the repressive nature of the regime established by Nicolae Ceausescu (1965-1989) and his loyal secret police, the Securitate. Estimates suggest that the Securitate had a higher proportion of representatives per population than anywhere else in the communist block and that by the 1980s as many as one person in thirty had been recruited as a Securitate  informer. In this article, guest author Nelson Duque considers the deadly combination of Ceausescu’s distinctive style of dynastic socialism with the establishment of a brutally efficient police state, which enabled him to maintain an iron grip on power until the dying days of communist rule across Eastern Europe. Nelson briefly highlights the implications of some of the key policies enforced by Ceausescu and emphasises the key role of the Securitate in successfully ensuring the lack of any significant opposition, through the creation of a climate of fear and brutality.

 

Inside Ceausescu’s Romania: An Unquestionably Efficent Police State.

 

By Nelson Duque.

 

In post-war Romania the accession of the communists to power relied heavily on the use of coercion. Romania’s infamous secret police, the Department of State Security (DSS) or Securitate were established in August 1948, fashioned on the Stalinist-era NKVD, and trained by Soviet ‘technicians’. Throughout the communist era, the Securitate were used to maintain the Communist party’s hegemony in the face of any (real or imagined) opposition. The task assigned to the Securitate was to remove all enemies of the regime, by whatever means necessary. To this end, police oppression was widely employed, justified by those in power as a necessary means to weed out ‘class enemies’ or ‘counter-revolutionaries’ in the name of national security. Romania’s first Communist leader Gheorghiu-Dej (1945-1964) was the first to instigate a reign of terror; Dennis Deletant describes the Romanian people under Dej as having a ‘sense that they were being hunted’. However, Deletant goes on to describe Dej’s successor Nicolae Ceausescu’s rule (1965-1989) as an era marked by ‘fear rather than terror’, because Ceausescu did not copy Dej’s mass arrests and deportation policies on such an equal footing (Dennis Deletant, Ceausescu and the Securitate: Coercion and Dissent in Romania 1965-1989, Hurst: 1995). Surveillance, coercion and police terror not only remained hallmarks of Ceausescu’s Romania however, but many of these crimes were documented by the Securitate themselves. In the early 1990s, after the collapse of communism in Romania, extensive archived Securitate files totalled 35 kilometres of documents, 25 km of which comprised files containing information about victims of the Securitate, 4 km of files contained information about police informers, with 6km of other, various attached folders. Lavinia Stan has estimated that every metre of the archive contains 5000 documents and each individual file contained, on average, 200 pages in length.

 

The Securitate

 

It is still not known precisely how many Romanians were employed by the Securitate, partly as a consequence of the lack of material released since the collapse of Communism. Deletant estimates that from a population of 23 million people in 1989, available records indicate total DSS personnel of 38, 682.Virgil Magureanu, director of the SRI (Serviciul Roman de Informatii), which was formed on 26 March 1990 as the successor to the Securitate, estimates that in 1989 total Securitate personnel totalled only 14, 259, although this figure does not include those engaged in activities outside Romania, and Lavinia Stan suggests the continuity of influence between the Securitate and the SRI means that these figures cannot be trusted. The variance in figures between Magureanu and Deletant illustrates a long running debate over just how many individuals were employed by the Securitate. What is further unknown were how many people were hired to act as informers to the secret police, although this figure is considered to be extensive: Deletant simply categorises ‘tens of thousands of informers’ whom the Securitate, ‘by exploiting fear, was able to recruit’. It has been estimated that by the 1980s as many as one in every 30 Romanians was working as a Securitate informant.

 

The feared Romanian Securitate had a reputation for brutal efficiency.

 

The Securitate’s own records claimed that 97 percent of all informers were recruited voluntarily because of their ‘political and patriotic sentiment’, 1.5 percent were recruited through offers of financial compensation, and 1.5 percent through the use of blackmail with compromising evidence’.Frankly such statistics are farcical. Lavinia Stan estimates that between 400,000-700,000 part time informers were ‘employed’ by the Securitate and the chances of 97 percent of these being loyal to the regime is highly unlikely considering the low living standards and repressive policies in place under Ceausescu. Similar to the East German Stasi, fear was an essential method of recruitment employed by the Securitate, with threats and blackmail routinely used to coerce informants. It is likely that people dared not refuse the ‘offer’ of informing out of fear that they too would end up on the Securitate black list, marked as an ‘enemy’ or opponent of the state. The consequences could be serious; for example, World War Two veteran George Marzanca refused to collaborate with the Securitate and within a month he had been arrested and sentenced to four years imprisonment, on spurious grounds. In reality then there was often little real ‘choice’ in the matter; so perhaps it is little wonder that many people ‘willingly’ accepted informant status (Lavinia Stan, Inside the Securitate Archives).

 

Inside Ceausescu’s Police State

 

Ceausescu’s Romania was a unique case in Socialist Eastern Europe. From 1965, Ceausescu endeavoured to establish a dynastic form of Socialism; heavily reliant on his own ‘cult of personality’ with power concentrated in the hands of his close relatives including his wife Elena and their son Nicu. Ben Fowkes sees this relationship between family and state as detrimental to society, describing Ceausescu as ‘both incurably Stalinist and fiercely repressive’ (Ben Fowkes, The rise and fall of Communism in Eastern Europe, Macmillan: 1995). Unsurprisingly, the secret police were some of Ceausescu’s most loyal agents, carrying out his will during the 23 years of his rule. During this time far reaching policies such as widespread austerity measures, ‘systematisation’ and pro-natalism were all enforced by the Securitate. These policies illustrate prime examples of how the Ceausescus’ directly interfered in and influenced the lives of ordinary Romanians and of how the Stasi employed insidious and brutal tactics to ensure a lack of opposition.

 

Ceausescu’s policy of ‘Systematisation’ (rural relocation linked to urban planning) destroyed at least half of Romania’s 13,000 villages, allocating the rural population to new fangled ‘agro-towns’ (Tony Judt, Post war A History of Europe since 1945, Pimlico: 2007) The majority of the villages destined to be destroyed were predominantly inhabited by ethnic minorities (Hungarians, Germans and Roma). The targeting of ethnic Hungarians in a town called Dej met with initial opposition from Laszlo Tokes, who was a pastor with the Hungarian Reformed Church. Tokes gained widespread support within his parish and as a result he was soon targeted by the Securitate. Tokes and his friends were placed under constant surveillance and subject to daily harassment until pressure on the clergy eventually led to Tokes removal and enforced ‘deportation’ to a village 40 kilometers from Dej, in 1982 . The example of Tokes is telling in a number of respects: demonstrating the use of extensive coercion by Securitate agents; illustrating the lengths to which the regime would go to get rid of an opponent and exemplifying the power of the state over the Reformed Church; as members of the clergy could be forced to denounce their staff at the will of the party.

 

The case of Tokes further highlights the use of intimidation, brutality and terror tactics by the Securitate. A second attempt to deport Tokes was issued on 20 October 1989; this time he was ordered to leave the town of Timisoara, where he had been reluctantly appointed after the involvement of the US senate. After his refusal, on 2 November, four attackers armed with knives broke into the flat, ‘while Securitate agents looked on’. Fortunately Tokes survived thanks to his friends fighting the attackers off, but this instance indicates the willingness of the Securitate to tolerate state sanctioned murder. The second attempt to deport Tokes was met by a united public outcry from both Romanians and Hungarians. Demonstrations in Timisoara on the 16 and 17 December 1989 were combated with heavy-handed brutality from the Army and the Securitate. The number of casualties was initially estimated at several thousand, but subsequent investigations put the figure at 122. The brutal repression in Timisoara was directly ordered by Elena Ceausescu while Nicolae was on state business abroad, and she subsequently also ordered the cremation of 40 bodies to avoid their identification. This event was to play a clinical role in triggering the revolution of 22 December 1989, which would overthrow the Ceausescus’ from power and lead to the collapse of Communism in Romania (K. McDermott and M. Stibbe (Eds), Revolution and Resistance in Eastern Europe, Berg: 20o6).

 

Elena Ceausescu was also responsible for the serious death rate amongst women through her influential pro-natal policies. As chairperson of the National Women’s Council she nationalised what should have been a private affair, supported by her husband’s rhetoric that a pregnant woman was ‘everybody’s concern’ because family life was a ‘socialised private problem’ (Mark Almond, The rise and fall of Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu, Chapmans: 1992) . Concern over falling birth rates meant that the megalomania of the Ceausescus’ thus even extended into the bedroom, with propaganda claiming that it was a woman’s duty to rear children for her country. Methods of birth control, including condoms and the contraceptive pill, were either not available or routinely failed quality control. Disturbingly, this resulted in abortion being the only means of contraception for many women, and even this was criminalised in 1966, forcing many women to risk illegal abortions. Securitate agents were stationed at gynaecological wards and were supposed to report on any women who requested an abortion, although they could often be bribed to ‘turn a blind eye’. However, it has been estimated that between 1966 – 1989 this policy resulted in the death of at least ten thousand women and over 100,000 institutionalised children kept in appalling orphanages (Tony Judt, Post war A History of Europe since 1945, Pimlico: 2007). 

 

Maintaining Control, Ensuring Conformity

 

Due to the effectivness of their repression and brutality, Ceausescu’s Securitate were described as ‘the envy of other dictators’ (Walter Laqueur, Europe in our Time: A History 1945-1992, Penguin: 1992). As a result of their influence, there was little dissidence and virtually no organised opposition to Ceausescu’s regime. The example of Paul Goma, a dissident writer, illustrates the serious consequences that could result from individuals who were brave enough to take a public stand against the injustices of the regime. From the mid 1970’s Goma began to highlight the human rights abuses taking place under the Ceausescu regime, and even sent a letter to Ceausescu in early 1977 asking for his signature to express solidarity with ‘Charter 77’, the human rights movement in Czechoslovakia. Unsurprisingly, Goma became a target for the Securitate shortly afterwards: he was harassed by threatening phone calls; his street was cordoned off by the police and most notoriously Horst Stumpf, a former professional boxer, broke into his flat three times within a matter of days, assaulting Goma on each occasion whilst the police did not intervene despite being called. In November 1977, Goma was forced into exile in France.

 

Writer Paul Goma's public criticism of Ceausescu's regime led to his becoming a target for the Securitate. After being subjected to harrassment and physical attacks, Goma left Romania for France in 1977.

 

This lack of opposition in either the political or the public sphere also explains how Ceausescu managed to put forward such highly ambitious, yet absurd, economic policies. Official statistics claimed that throughout the 1970’s there was an economic growth rate of between 6-9 percent annually in Romania, with an investment rate of up to 30 percent.Yet the regime was outwardly lying about its economic development. In reality,  Romania was impoverished and starving, with Ceausescu’s austerity measures involvi ng the exportation of almost all agricultural surplus; frequent power cuts and shortages of basic goods, foodstuffs and medical supplies with the population dependent on ration cards. Ceausescu may have succeeded in paying off Romania’s $13 million foreign debt by the end of the 1980s, but his oppressive policies forced many of his own people to near-starvation.

 

When communism in Romania finally collapsed in December 1989, the Ceausescus’ were the only East European leaders to face immediate trial. A summary of the Ceausescus’ crimes (and those of the Securitate) are documented in their trial transcript, from 25 December 1989. Here the prosecutor accuses Nicolae Ceausescu of ‘Crimes against the people … Genocide … armed attack on the people … destruction of buildings and state institutions, undermining of the national economy’. The prosecution makes disturbing reading, Nicolae and Elena do not acknowledge their crimes and the reality of their circumstances, despite being accused of killing children and leaving people with ‘nothing to eat, no heating, no electricity’.  The prosecutor Gica Popo also demanded to know who gave the order to shoot in the Timisoara uprising, and surprisingly Elena and Nicolae blame the Securitate, accusing them of being ‘terrorists’ who killed indiscriminately;  they also deny being in charge of the Securitate,  although it was common knowledge that the Ceausescus’ had authorised their acts of terror. Following a hurried trial by military tribunal, both Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu were sentenced to immediate execution via firing squad.

 

 

Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu were tried by a Military Council and sentenced to execution via firing squad for crimes against the Romanian people on 25 December 1989.

 

It is clear that Ceausescu’s Romania was an unquestionably efficient police state. The lives of many Romanians were dominated by fear. The crimes of murder, brutality, coercion, deportation and genocide were all associated with the leadership and with the notorious  Securitate, right up until the dying days of communism in 1989. The legacy of Ceausescu’s reign still haunts Romania today, as they continue to try to break from their repressive past.

 

About the Author:

 

Nelson Duque has just completed his BA (Hons) in History at Swansea University, graduating in July 2011. During the final year of his degree, Nelson specialised in the study of Communist Eastern Europe. Nelson will begin a PGCE at the University of Warwick in September 2011.

 

 

Living with the Enemy: Informing the Stasi

The East German State Security Service, commonly known as the Stasi, was founded in February 1950. For forty years, the Stasi maintained a frightening reputation for surveillance, infiltration and terror, leading Historian Timothy Garton Ash to comment that the word ‘Stasi’ has become ‘a global synonym for the secret police terrors of communism’. The tentacles of Stasi power and influence were so far reaching that it was recently revealed that the Stasi had even compiled a secret dossier on Erich Honecker, leader of the GDR 1971 – 1989; using information obtained about Honecker’s attempts to collaborate with the Nazis during the Second World War to force him to resign in October 1989. In January 1990, shortly after the collapse of communism in the GDR, crowds of protestors stormed and occupied the Stasi headquarters in Berlin; an act symbolising the people’s victory over one of the greatest evils of state socialism in the GDR. The Stasi kept meticulous records about those placed under surveillance, with over 180km of shelved Stasi files surviving the collapse of the GDR. In the post-communist years this information was declassified and between 1992 and 2011 an estimated 2.75 individuals have requested access to their files. In many instances people discovered that people they had trusted – family members, close friends, neighbours and work colleagues – had worked as informants for the Stasi. In this article, guest author David Cook explores the key role played by Stasi informers in the GDR, considering the motivations of those who agreed to work with the Stasi and the impact of popular participation on wider society.

 

Living with the Enemy: Informing the Stasi in the GDR.

By David Cook.

 

The German Democratic Republic (GDR) was the golden child of the Soviet Union, often portrayed as the torch bearer for the communist system around the world. Yet its people still could not be allowed the freedom to air their individual opinions, the views of the state were final and absolute, and to contradict the party was considered no less serious a crime than treason itself. A powerful police organ was needed to keep the people in check, a progenitor of fear that would bend the populace to the will of the state. In the GDR the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit (MfS), commonly known as the Stasi, was the tool used to attempt to mould the East German people to the Communist Party’s (SED) requirements. However, police and party pressure alone is not enough to oppress an entire country; popular participation is ultimately key to any regime’s survival. In the case of the GDR, its own people helped to maintain the party’s power through their role as police informers. Informers played a crucial role, acting as a vital cog in the vast machinery of the East German police state; both responding to and perpetuating the climate of fear that permeated throughout East German society.

 

By 1989, when the Berlin Wall collapsed and communism in East Germany came to an end, it is estimated that the MfS had 97,000 official employees as well as approximately 173,000 unofficial informers. Roughly this translated as a ratio of one agent per 63 of the population, a position far in advance of the Soviet Union’s KGB, that even at its height could only manage one per 5830 people (Figures taken from Anna Funder, Stasiland, Granta: 2004). The Stasi amounted to a small army infiltrating the very fabric of the communist regime, whose sole purpose was the surveillance and repression of the East German people. Fear of the state – and of the Stasi as a tool of state control – was widespread, and this terror was used as a vital tool in the creation of a malleable citizenry.

 

The Stasi motto 'Schild und Schwert der Partei' declared its intention to act as the 'Shield and Sword' of the Communist Party in East Germany.

 

There were a variety of things that could bring a person to the attention of the Stasi. Once the MfS had targeted a suspect the goal was often to engender self-doubt in that person, to prevent them from living any semblance of a normal life, and if indeed they were guilty of some form of ‘subversion’, to encourage them to further implicate and discredit themselves. Ulrike Poppe was one such individual whose work in dissident peace and feminist movements were deemed to be a threat to the stability of communist East Germany by the Stasi. Between 1973 – 1989, Poppe was arrested a total of 14 times. For 15 years she was placed under surveillance, followed by her own personal MfS agent and subjected to daily harassment. In this way the Stasi undermined their targets’ self-confidence and peace of mind, rather than physically beating them. Although physical coercion was employed by the Stasi, the evidence indicates that they often preferred to utilise more ‘subtle’ (but equally effective) means of psychological torture. Isolation, sleep deprivation, disorientation, humiliation, restriction of food and water and ominous threats against the subject and their families combined with promises of leniency if they ‘confessed’ were all commonly cited interrogation tactics. The MfS was not concerned with human rights and paid no more than lip service to the notion of a democratic legal process and legitimate trials, as illustrated by the head of the Stasi, Erich Mielke, who maintained a policy of: ‘Execution, if necessary without a court verdict.’

 

One victim’s memories of Hohenschönhausen, the feared Stasi prison in East Berlin:

 

 

 

For the police state to function fully however, participation from amongst the populace was key. Their vital tool here was to be the Inofizelle Mitarbeiter (I.M). IMs were unofficial collaborators who informed on work colleagues, friends, and even their own spouses. Informers were a part of everyday life, supplying the Stasi with the banal trivialities that they deemed necessary to neutralise their targets. During the lifespan of the communist regime in East Germany it is estimated from existing archival material that there were up to 500,000 informers active at various times. Or more starkly one in 30 of the population had worked for the Stasi by the fall of the GDR. Informers were controlled by their own special department, HA IX (Main Department 9), often referred to as ‘the centre of the inquisition.’

 

People were not often willing informers however, and it would be wrong to accuse the majority of East Germans of freely consenting to work with the Stasi. Motives for becoming an informer appear to be numerous, and this topic has provided the basis for many historical works. Yet as crucial as they were to the oppression of the population, what drove so many East Germans to inform on their own people? Robert Gellately in his article, Denunciation in 20^th Century Germany, posits a view of a ‘culture of denunciation’ that was a hangover from the Nazi period. People became I.Ms for a number of reasons in his view: for personal gain; so visits to the West would be granted; from a desire to change the system from within; or in the majority of cases through blackmail and coercion by the Stasi. Fear then, was also used as a tool to recruit informers from the general populace.

 

Timothy Garton Ash’s book, The File, is based on his own personal Stasi file as he tracks down and talks to many of those that informed on him, noting the motivations behind their actions. Each of the informers exhibits differing reasons for their collaboration, all of which are covered by Gellately’s theory. ‘Michaela’ was an art director and as such was encouraged to inform on those the Stasi deemed interesting in order to make her job easier. Visas enabling visits to art exhibits in the West or much needed budget increases could be obtained in exchange for information. Whilst ‘Michalea’ was an example of someone working for the police state for personal gain, two other examples in Garton Ash’s book were recruited through blackmail. ‘Schuldt’ was persuaded to become an informer due to fear of his homosexuality being made public and his life ruined; ‘Smith’ on the other hand collaborated to prove his innocence in the face of accusations of being a Western spy. In this way the Stasi was able to build up a frighteningly vast network of informers utilised to collate data on anyone deemed of interest to the state.

 

Stasi Files Department, Berlin. The Stasi kept meticulous files on all individuals under surveillance, the majority of which survived the collapse of communism and are now accesible to the public.

 

Fear, as illustrated in the cases of ‘Smith’ and ‘Schuldt’, was the most powerful weapon possessed by the Stasi. It was a weapon they utilised freely, creating large networks of informers and ensuring the system survived. The MfS were the source of this fear in society at large, creating a resigned conformity amongst the masses that kept them subordinate to the whims of the SED. This is the crucial role played by the security apparatus in a truly repressive police state. Without the conformity of the lower levels of society the system would have collapsed. The majority of the population learned, from a dread of the consequences, to live with this authority in return for living a semblance of a peaceful life. Reicker, Schwarz and Schneider describe the day to day life of a GDR citizen as such: ‘The daily lie, which everyone participated in to some extent … Once you learn to accept the big political lie you allow yourself little lies in other places. Unconsciously.’  It was this willingness by the German population to be subjected to authority, and the all powerful nature of the MfS, that Funder argues led to the relatively low level dissident movement within the GDR.

 

Everyday life was pervaded by the party ideology, the individual was disregarded and the regime elevated above it. Virtually no corner of life was left untouched by the influence of the party and its ‘guard dog’, the Stasi. The security apparatus infiltrated and manipulated the educational sector; determining who could study at university and which subjects were ‘suitable’ for academic research and teaching, with almost a quarter of staff at the East German Humboldt university in the Stasi’s employ. All communication in and out of the communist state was monitored and intercepted by the MfS. In East Berlin, 25 phone stations enabled the tapping of up to 20,000 calls simultaneously. Figures show that 2,300 telegrams a day were read by the Stasi in 1983 alone. Interception of packages also proved to be a favoured method of state security, and one that provided rich dividends. Estimates taken from surviving archival material put the figure of currency seized by the MfS as equalling 32.8 million DM. (Figures taken from Mike Dennis, The Stasi: Myth and Reality, Longman: 2003)

 

'Smell Sampling' was used by the Stasi to track dissidents in the GDR.

 

Life was controlled by the MfS and the SED, with all methods utilised to prevent contact with the western world. People adapt however, and East Germans developed ‘coping mechanisms’. Secret codes and gestures were developed to indicate when known Stasi informers or operatives were nearby. Even today the terror of the MfS remains a powerful force in the everyday life of former GDR citizens, acting as a kind of ‘wall in the mind’. Claudia Rusch, the daughter of an East German dissident, leaves no doubt as to the GDR’s status as a police state in her description of life under the former regime:

 

“That was the real strength of the state security; to produce the effect that millions of people behaved towards one another with anxiety, self-control and suspicion. They ensured that if you told a political joke you automatically lowered your voice. Anticipatory obedience spread through every sinew of society and intimidated a whole nation”.

(Claudia Rusch, quoted in Mary Fulbrook, The People’s State, Yale University Press: 2005)

 

The people of East Germany were browbeaten by the Stasi’s propagation of fear, its far reaching tentacles spread through society in the form of informers hidden in plain sight. Any person deemed of particular interest had an MfS file which would contain an almost minute-by-minute account of the suspect’s life, from which the MfS could create any motive for action they deemed necessary. Fear pervaded all aspects of life in the GDR, the population cowed by the threat of MfS reprisal, unable to build the foundations for an opposition movement. In the pursuit of blanket surveillance of the population, the Stasi gained a terrifying level of power over the East German people and could manipulate them at their whim. Agents of the state were everywhere, in the workplace, the classroom and even sleeping in the same bed. In this way conformity was enforced through implicit, rather than explicit terror.

 

About the Author:

David Cook has just completed his BA (Hons) in History at Swansea University, graduating with first-class honours in July 2011. During the final year of his study he specialised in the study of Cold War Eastern Europe. Following university David plans to travel, before eventually undertaking a Masters degree in History.

 

For more information on this topic see:

Timothy Garton Ash, The File: A Personal History, (London: Atlantic Books, 2009)

Mary Fulbrook, Anatomy of a Dictatorship: Inside the GDR 1949-1989, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995)

Mary Fulbrook, The People’s State: East German Society from Hitler to Hoenecker, (London:YaleUniversity Press, 2005)

Anna Funder, Stasiland: Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall, (London: Granta Books, 2004)

Robert Gellately, Denunciations in 20^th Century Germany: Aspects of Self-Policing in the Third Reich and the German Democratic Republic 

 

 

Rocking the Wall: East German Rock and Pop in the 1970s and 1980s

 

The influence of popular culture was viewed as dangerous and potentially subversive in communist Eastern Europe (as previously discussed on The View East  here). Consequently, the regimes in power attempted to monitor and control the music scene. Musicians were faced with high levels of censorship, while those who were unwilling to conform to state restrictions frequently became targets for harassment and repression. This article, by guest author James Shingler, considers the impact of popular music in the GDR during the 1970s and 1980s. By exploring the changing relationship between state authorities, musicians and music fans in the GDR during the latter decades of communist rule, James suggests that by the end of the 1980s the music scene had become an important platform for promoting reform and resistance.

 

Rocking the Wall: East German Rock and Pop in the 1970s and 1980s

By James Shingler.

 

Throughout the forty years of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), the ruling Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) viewed the impact of popular music on East German youth culture with a mixture of suspicion, distain and hostility. The official view promoted by the SED was that popular music was nothing more than a dangerous American cultural weapon designed to corrupt its young people, turning them away from socialist ideals. The cultural, economic and political freedoms expressed through Western popular music were of great concern to the Party, so as the Cold War developed throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the SED increasingly took a hard line towards popular music. However, the early 1970s saw a relaxation of the hard line policies that the SED had implemented in the 1950s and 1960s. Rather than outright repression, the official policy became one of attempted cooperation between the Party, musicians and fans. The accession of Eric Honecker as General Secretary in 1971, combined with a period of détente in the Cold War, led to some liberalization of popular music in the early 1970s.

 

The 1970s

 

The early 1970s saw the official release of records by a number of Western artists in the GDR, including The Beatles and Bob Dylan as well as home grown rock bands such as The Klaus Renft Combo and The Puhdys on the state record label AMIGA. East German rock music developed its own distinctive style and grew rapidly throughout the 1970s. The SED actively encouraged musicians, so long as they were prepared to comply with the Party line, something which was policed by the requirement for a state-issued Auftrittserserlaubnis (performance permission) to allow groups to play publicly. Political controls over the media, such as the 60/40 clause (which stated that 60% of all music broadcast or performed had to come from the GDR or other Socialist States); the fact that Western bands were not permitted to play in East Germany and the state monopoly over the production and distribution of records meant that ‘approved’ East German rock bands were essentially ‘protected’ against foreign competition.

However, state policy remained restrictive and was frustrating to those artists who expressed themselves in a way that the SED disapproved of. Song lyrics would be examined by officials before artists were permitted to release their records on AMIGA. Failure to comply with official guidelines had far reaching consequences as illustrated by the case of the Klaus Renft Combo who were banned in 1975. On 22 September 1975, the band were summoned to the Ministry of Culture to perform in order to have their Auftrittserserlaubnis renewed.  On arrival however, the band were told by a member of the committee that ‘we are here to inform you today, that you don’t exist anymore’. The committee told the band that their lyrics ‘had absolutely nothing to do with socialist reality… the working class is insulted and the state and defence organisations are defamed’. In the aftermath of the hearing the band discovered that not only were they unable to perform concerts, but that the Ministry of Culture had reprinted the entire AMIGA catalogue so they could leave the band out. As Renft acknowledged ‘we simply did not exist anymore …  just like in Orwell’ (Klaus Renft speaking to Anna Funder, Stasiland, Granta: 2004). Shortly after the hearing Renft defected to West Germany where he found employment as a radio DJ. Two of his colleagues in the band, Gerulf Pannach and Christian Kunert, were less fortunate and were imprisoned until 1977 when West Germany bought their freedom.

 

The Klaus Renft Combo, a successful East German rock band who were banned by the authorities in 1975:

 

The 1980s

 

The early 1980s marked a high point for indigenous popular music in the GDR with bands such as The Puhdys, City, Karat and Silly achieving widespread popularity. These bands wrote their own music and sang in German, in stark contrast to earlier groups who had largely replicated songs by Anglo-American artists, and held relatively privileged positions in the GDR music scene, as reisefähige (travel-capable) bands. This led to limited musical exchange between East and West Germany, with The Puhdys, City and Karat permitted to tour inWest Germany, while the SED also allowed a limited number of Western artists to play in the GDR.

 

The Puhdys, an indigenous East German rock band, were widely tolerated by the authorities:

 

Regardless of the privileged positions that these bands held, they still were subjected to a lyrical tightrope between expression and censorship, which meant that any critical sentiments had to be concealed. According to Toni Krahl, the guitarist and singer of City‘every line was weighed and politically sounded out… not only by the censors, but also by the audience’. Maas and Hartmut state that ‘the poetry of GDR-rock was highly developed and the audience became use to reading between the lines’ (Maas, Georg and Reszel, Hartmut, ‘Whatever Happened to…: The Decline and Renaissance of Rock in the Former GDR’, Popular Music, 17/3 (1988), pp. 267-278). Despite the popularity of these bands they received criticism from punk and dance fans who suspected that established rock musicians were too close to the powerful. The biggest GDR musicians thus found themselves stuck in the middle of conflict between the Party and young people. As Olaf Leitner states ‘the leadership [the SED] demanded conformity, the fans opposition’ (Olaf Leitner, ‘Rock Music in the GDR: An Epitaph’, in Ramet, S.P (ed.), Rocking the State: Rock Music and Politics in Eastern Europe and Russia, Westview Press: 1994).

 

Punk Rock

 

While more mainstream artists enjoyed relative success and freedom, the early 1980s also saw the emergence of a distinctive GDR punk rock scene, which was quickly dismissed by the SED and the FDJ as subversive and a dangerous phenomenon. The East German punk scene differed from Western punk; according to Patricia Simpson in Britain and the United States punk was seen as a response to ‘unemployment, to middle-class lifestyles, ethics, and privilege, and to cultural boredom’. Punk bands such as The Sex Pistols and The Clash in the UK and The Ramones and The Dead Kennedys in the US ‘adopted forms of an ideology that was anti-ideological and behaviour that mocked approved social customs and manners by inverting gestures of the socially acceptable’. Conversely, punk in the GDR adapted the sound and fashion of Western punk to the political, social and cultural environment that existed in East Germany at the time. Simpson argues that, ‘with no official unemployment to complain about, for example, GDR punk instead negated the prevailing work ethic, whose purpose was to maintain freedom or strengthen socialism’. In the West, punk was viewed as a nihilistic movement where as in the GDR, punk was fuelled by optimism and an aspiration to revolutionise society (Patricia Simpson, ‘Germany and Its Discontents: Die Skeptiker’s Punk Corrective’, The Journal of Popular Culture, 34/3 (2000), pp. 129–140).

 

The early 1980s saw the development of an underground punk rock movement in the GDR. However the authorities viewed punk music and fashion as subversive.

 

East German punks remained on the outskirts of mainstream society; a Stasi report from 1981 estimated that there were around 1,000 punks and 10,000 sympathisers in the GDR (Mike Dennis, The Stasi: Myth and Reality, Pearson: 2003). Punk was primarily an underground movement; many bands performed concerts in their own garages and recorded and distributed their music on self made cassettes. However, as the movement grew, Stasi agents were increasingly able to infiltrate the punk scene. As with jazz, rock ‘n’ roll and beat music fans in the 1950s and 1960s, punks were subjected to a campaign of repression from 1981 onwards, involving the usual Stasi tactics of arrests, interrogations and prison sentences. The SED associated punks with degeneracy, especially in their appearance, believing that their scruffy clothes and dyed hair portrayed an aggressive, provocative manner. A Mohican hairstyle was often sufficient for a punk to be hauled into custody by the police. The Stasi banned punk bands viewed as hostile toward the GDR. In August 1983, members of the East Berlin punk group Namenlos were arrested and sentenced to between 12 and 18 months in prison for ‘disparaging the state’.   Members of the punk scene were also routinely recruited by the Stasi as Inoffizieller Mitarbeiters (Unofficial Collaborators) to report on other punks. In the mid 1980s Frank Zappe, bass player in Leipzig based band Wutanfall was recruited by the Stasi as an Inoffizieller Mitarbeiter after a period of sustained pressure. Zappe talks about his experiences with the Stasi in the video below:

 

 

The Stasi were so successful in infiltrating the punk scene that one punk band in Jena consisted entirely of Inoffizieller Mitarbeiters!  The late 1980s saw a shift in Party policy in relation to punk as certain groups, such as Die Skeptiker were professionalised by the State. Just as it had done with rock groups in the 1970s and early 1980s the Party offered support to punk bands in the form of recognition, record contracts, and sponsorship of the FDJ, in return for their compliance.

 

The Beginning of the End

 

By the late 1980s, there were a number of different musical styles that were fashionable within the East German music scene. There were around 400 professional groups in the GDR ranging from mainstream rock groups such as The Puhdys and Silly to the punk rock and heavy metal of Feeling B and Prinzip. However, East German music fans also had a healthy appetite for Western popular music. A small section of records by Western artists deemed acceptable by the SED including Phil Collins, Michael Jackson and Santana were released on AMIGA throughout the 1980s. However, these records were only released in small numbers and were difficult to get hold of. Most music fans simply resorted to taping their favorite song directly off West German radio stations and exchanging them with their friends and other music fans.  

The summer of 1987 saw West Berlin host a series of open air concerts close to the Berlin Wall. Artists including David Bowie, The Eurythmics and Genesis appeared to large crowds in front of the Reichstag. On the other side of the Wall, thousands of East German fans tried to get as close to the Wall as possible to hear the music coming from the West. They were met with heavy resistance from the guards policing the border, which led to clashes between border guards and young East Germans. Realising that suppressing popular music in the aftermath of the riot would only inflame tensions, the SED attempted to win back the support of East German youths. The following year a series of concerts were organised in East Berlin, designed to counter performances from Michael Jackson and Pink Floyd that were taking place close to the Wall in the West. In East Berlin, Western stars, such as Big Country, Bryan Adams and Marillion performed alongside East German bands like City. On 19 July 1988, Bruce Springsteen performed the biggest rock concert in the history of the GDR in front of 160,000 people.  During the concert Springsteen told the crowd ‘It’s nice to be in East Berlin. I’m not for or against a government. I came to play rock ‘n’ roll for you, in the hope that one day all barriers will be torn down’. Springsteen’s words reflected the mood of young people in the crowd, sparking wild cheering and celebrations.

 

Bruce Springsteen performing to large crowds in East Berlin in July 1988:

 

In September 1989 the new opposition movement Neues Forum (New Forum) issued a declaration known as Aufbruch 89 (Initiative 89) which called for ‘democratic dialogue’ and ‘a political platform for the whole of the GDR that should enable people from all professions, trades, social circles, parties and groups to discuss and work out society’s vital problems’.

In the same month, singer-songwriters Steffen Mensching and Hans-Eckardt Wenzel drafted a document dubbed the Rocker Resolution which was signed by a number of well known artists including Toni Krahl and Tamara Danz, lead singer of Silly. The Rocker Resolution became an important part of the reform movement within the GDR. The state controlled media refused to publish the Resolution, so bands and artists were encouraged to read the declaration out at concerts and other public events to spread the message across the country. The widespread distribution of the Rocker Resolution lead to an extraordinary meeting of the SED’s Committee for Entertainment in October 1989, which resulted in ‘the first official acknowledgement of and reaction to the worsening political situation in East Germany’ (Schulz, Hiltrud, Ear to the Wall:Rock in Late 1980s East Germany, 2008). According to Toni Krahl the aim of the Resolution was ‘not to open borders or to unify Germany, but to democratise the GDR’.

The fall of the Berlin Wall signaled the beginning of the end for the GDR and symbolized the start of the re-unification process that was completed on 3 October 1990. On 21 July 1990, Pink Floyd performed their album The Wall at Potsdamer Platz, among the ruins of the Berlin Wall, with guest appearances from artists including Van Morrison, The Band, and Bryan Adams. The concert was attended by an estimated 500,000 people, from both Western and Eastern Germany.

 

About the Author:

James Shingler has just completed his BA (Hons) in Modern History and International Relations at Swansea University, UK. During his final year of study James researched and wrote his history dissertation about the influence of Western popular music on youth culture in the GDR between 1949 and 1990.  James is now planning to study for a MA in History at Swansea.

 

For more information on this topic see:

Dennis, Mike, The Stasi: Myth and Reality, London: Pearson Education Limited, 2003.

Fenemore, Mark, Sex, Thugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll, New York: Berghahn Books, 2007.

Funder, Anna, Stasiland, London: Granta Books, 2003.

Leitner, Olaf, ‘Rock Music in the GDR: An Epitaph’, in Ramet, S.P (ed.), Rocking the State: Rock Music and Politics in Eastern Europe and Russia, Oxford: Westview Press, 1994.

Maas, Georg and Reszel, Hartmut, ‘Whatever Happened to…: The Decline and Renaissance of Rock in the Former GDR’, Popular Music, 17:3 (1988), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 267 – 278.

Poiger, Uta, Jazz, Rock and Rebels, California: University of California Press, 2000.

Schulz, Hiltrud, Ear to the Wall:Rock in Late 1980s East Germany, DEFA Film Library at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Simpson, Patricia Anne, ‘Germanyand Its Discontents: Die Skeptiker’s Punk Corrective’, The Journal of Popular Culture, 34/3 (2000), Michigan: Michigan State University pp. 129–140.

 

The East German Uprising of June 1953: Western Provocation, Workers’ Protest or Attempted Revolution?

On 16 June 1953 construction workers on Stalinallee in East Berlin downed their tools and went on strike. The initial strike spread quickly: by the morning of 17 June 40,000 demonstrators were marching in East Berlin, with a wave of similar strikes and protests recorded in numerous cities, towns and villages across East Germany. By the afternoon, the situation had escalated to such an extent that Soviet tanks had rolled out onto the streets of Berlin. Subsequent clashes between troops and protestors left at least 40 dead and over 400 wounded. By the evening of 17 June the situation in East Berlin was under control, with 700 protestors arrested for their involvement in the uprising. In the following days levels of dissent dwindled across East Germany. The East German Uprising was the first serious attempt to challenge communist authority in Eastern Europe in the aftermath of Stalin’s death, and the level of discontent demonstrated took both the East German authorities and the Soviets by surprise. In this article Rosie Shelmerdine explores the true nature of the East German rebellion by asking whether the events of June 1953 are best considered as ‘Western Provocation, Workers’ Protest or Attempted Revolution?’

 

The East German Uprising of June 1953: Western Provocation, Workers’ Protest or Attempted Revolution? 

By Rosie Shelmerdine.

 

‘The Soviet forces … have for the most part restored order in the Soviet sector of Berlin. The provocative plan of the reactionary and fascist-like elements has been wrecked … the provocation was prepared in advance, organized and directed from Western sectors of Berlin. The simultaneous actions in the majority of the big cities of the GDR, the same demands of the rebels everywhere as well as the same anti-state and anti-Soviet slogans, serve as proof for this conclusion.’ – Grechko and Tarasov, leaders of the Soviet Forces in East Germany, reporting on the East German Rising  after order had been restored by Soviet troops (17 June 1953)

 

The above extract, taken from a report written by two leading members of the Soviet forces in East Berlin on the evening of 17 June, blamed an attempted Western putsch for the escalation of events in East Germany. A more detailed report submitted to the ruling Socialist Unity Party (SED) in the aftermath of the crisis on 22 June reinforced this claim, stating that:

“Hostile forces, with direct support and under the leadership of American agencies and the peoples’ enemy and the warmongers in Bonn, organized an attempt for a fascist coup in the GDR in the period from 16 June 1953 to 22 June 1953. Besides their daily propaganda attacks by radio, leaflets and printed press, etc., [these hostile forces] increased their subversive activities following the death of Comrade Stalin … supported by their spy centers existing in the GDR and by those groups of agents smuggled in during the uprising … they temporarily managed to engage broad segments of workers and employees, in particular in Berlin and Central Germany, for their criminal objectives”

Today, the typical communist response of blaming the West has long been disregarded, with recently released documents indicating that although radio broadcasts from West Berlin probably helped to spread news about the initial protests more widely across the GDR, the Western powers were keen to avoid any direct involvement in the uprising. Rather, events in East Germany in 1953 were clearly driven by internal tensions. Today however, historians remain divided about the true cause and nature of the East German Uprising of June 1953; with some blaming worker discontent arising from economic concerns, while others attribute the escalation of events to a more general dissatisfaction with the SED regime, felt by a broader section of the population. In fact, both explanations have some merit but taken alone both views are too simplistic, due to the intrinsically linked nature of the political and economic spheres under state socialism.

In their initial report, Grechko and Tarasav justified their claims of a centrally organised Western plot by stressing that strikes occurred simultaneously in the majority of the big cities of the GDR, all having the same demands and the same anti-state and anti-Soviet slogans. The strikes were certainly widespread: after the call for a general strike by workers in East Berlin, strikes were called in 593 factories across East Germany, with about five per cent of the total East German workforce taking part. Grechko and Tarasev also reported on 17 June that: ‘The following numbers of people took part in the demonstrations: up to 15,000 in Magdeburg, up to 1,500 in Brandenburg, up to 1,000 in Oranienburg and Werder, up to 1,000 in Jena, 1,000 in Gera, up to 1,000 in Soemmerda, up to 10,000 in Dresden, up to 2,000 in Leipzig, 20,000 in Goerlitz’.

 

17 June 1953: Large crowds of protestors gather in East Berlin.

 

However, many of the workers involved in the strike action subsequently stressed the spontaneous and largely uncoordinated nature of the events of June 1953. One worker at the Agfa film factory at Wolfen near Bitterfeid later declared: ‘It wasn’t planned at all, everything happened spontaneously. Workers from nearby factories didn’t know what was happening in our factory until the moment we found ourselves in the street’, while a factory worker from East Berlin also claimed that ‘It was all improvised. We had no linkups with any other towns or factories’.

While occurring on a much larger scale than previously, the events of June 1953 were not an isolated event: smaller strikes had sporadically occurred throughout June, and dissatisfaction had been growing in the GDR for several years.

 

Video Footage from East Berlin, June 1953:

 

 

Economic Grievances

 

The first serious disputes between East German workers and the regime were recorded as early as 1951. (Arnulf Baring, Uprising in East Germany, Cornell University Press: 1972). East German leader Walter Ulbricht’s announcement of his intention to accelerate the building of socialism at the second Party Conference of the SED in July 1952 made the economic situation in the GDR worse. The ‘systematic implementation of socialism’ in East Germany resulted in a further campaign against independent farmers and businessmen and a deliberate concentration of investment in heavy industry at the expense of food and consumer goods, creating widespread shortages. As a result, by the end of 1952 living standards had fallen below the levels of 1947. It is therefore not surprising that a key demand made by protesters in June 1953 was for a reduction in the price of goods bought by ordinary consumers. To make matters worse, on 14 May 1953 a ten per cent increase in production quotas was announced, with no corresponding increase in wages, which effectively meant a pay cut for the already struggling workers. The final blow came with the announcement of the ‘New Course’ on 9 June which, while reversing many of the more coercive policies of the previous year, did not change the recently proposed increase in production quotas.

It was the initial demonstrations against these heightened production quotas by construction workers in East Berlin on 16 June that triggered a wave of strikes across East Germany.  There is certainly evidence to suggest that these strikes were fuelled by economic discontent: popular demands were certainly economic, with chants such as “we demand lower quotas”, while of a population of over 17 million, only half a million people participated directly in the protests, and these were predominantly workers, those who were most directly affected by the new economic policy. The uprising found relatively low levels of support amongst church leaders, East German students, and intellectuals. This suggests that at its heart the risings were a workers’ movement focused on economic demands. Baring claims that it was only after  these demands were granted that political demands were voiced: fuelled by the initial hesitation and perceived weakness of the government, the workers decided to exploit this opportunity, turning their economic grievances into a political protest. By the afternoon of 17 June calls for a General Strike were being broadcast through a hijacked loudspeaker van.

 

Political Demands

 

It would be misleading however, to categorise the events of June 1953 simply as an economic uprising. Whilst the majority of the strikers may indeed have been workers, it was not an exclusively workers-based movement: farmers, youths, housewives, school children and members of the middleclass were all involved too. In addition, Gareth Dale argues that political demands were actually heard at a very early stage in the protests: before the strikes had turned into a full-scale rebellion, Dale claims that there were already calls for the resignation of the East German government, free elections, freedom for political prisoners, the legalisation of strike actions and the removal of sectoral borders and occupation forces from Germany.(Gareth Dale, Popular Protest in East Germany 1945-1989, Routledge: 2005)

 

East Berlin, June 1953. This protestor is calling for free elections.

 

This was not the first time that economic dissatisfaction had boiled over into more politicised demands in East Germany. At the end of 1952, enraged by the overly-generous Christmas bonuses that the SED used to reward favoured employees, workers walked off the job in Weissenfels, Glauchau, Schkopau, Plauen, Cottbus, Berlin and Magdeburg. Despite being triggered by economic discontent, these protests also soon reached beyond monetary considerations, becoming more politicised as workers began to criticise the press and the SED’s lack of democracy.  Similar kinds of protests and criticisms were also recorded in April 1953. (Gary Bruce, Resistance with the People: Repression and Resistance in Eastern Germany 1945-1955, Rowman and Littlefield Ltd: 2003)

Furthermore, a dramatic increase in Republikflucht (emigration to the West) suggests that dissatisfaction was rife long before the uprising of June 1953. According to data from the Central Administration of the GDR National Police, during the first half of 1952, 57,234 people defected to West Germany; during the second half of the year, there were 78,831 further defections and during the first quarter of 1953 alone, 84,034 people defected (including 2,718 members and candidates of the SED and 2,610 members of the Free German Youth League!). Evidently then, the SED policy of the accelerated building of socialism was unpopular with many people. In a memorandum written on 6 May 1953, Lavrentiy Beria, at that time a leading member of the post-Stalinist leadership of the USSR, explains the cause for the high number of defections as follows:

“the desire of various groups of peasants to avoid entering into agricultural industry cooperatives currently being organized, by fears among the small and middle-size private businessmen that their personal property and assets will be confiscated, by the desire among a number of youth to avoid serving in the GDR armed forces, and by the difficulties experienced in the GDR with regard to the supply food and merchandise available to the inhabitants”.

Beria thus points to economic grievances as being the principal cause for the defections, although this is not surprising: given his position as a leading communist, Beria is unlikely to admit that it was in fact criticism of the government or socialism per se that caused them to leave. Instead, the common excuse of influences from the West and short-term economic strain was used.  Yet the defections also highlight that whilst farmers may have been worried about losing their land, the fact that they were prepared to abandon this land and leave the GDR completely shows that deeper dissatisfaction was present.  Further evidence of this is provided by the USSR Council of Ministers who recognised on 2 June that ‘there is a serious dissatisfaction with the political and economic measures carried out by the GDR among the broad mass of the population’.  The fact that by June, even the Communists were admitting to political criticism is significant. It is clear that whilst economic hardships were at the forefront of the demands, so too were political ideals, and thus it was both economic and political issues for which people were striking.

However, this is not surprising, as due to the nature of the socialist state, economic and political demands were intrinsically linked, to the extent that they were often impossible to separate.  In the case of the workers for example, the factories were under centralised control, so economic grievances were also criticisms of government policy. Bruce quotes an SED member in a report on his trip to Halle in July 1953, who claims that the main slogans were ‘cleverly disguised as smaller, more immediate economic demands but which are increasingly brought to the fore are: free elections, release of all political prisoners since 1945, apolitical unions’. The fact that political demands were made from the beginning of the protests show that the protestors were dissatisfied with the entire regime, and not just the economy.

 

A West German stamp, issued to commemorate the failed East German uprising of June 1953.

 

Assessing the East German Uprising of June 1953.

 

Why, then, was it in June 1953 that this long term dissatisfaction exploded into mass demonstrations? Stalin’s death on 5 March 1953, the resultant power struggle in Moscow and early hints about a policy of ‘de-Stalinisation’, led to demonstrations not just in the GDR but also in Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia and Hungary between May and June 1953. This suggests that Stalin’s death triggered widespread hopes of an opportunity for change. But there are unique circumstances that explain why it was the GDR where this quickly escalated into a popular uprising. Whereas the process of full Stalinisation had occurred throughout the rest of Eastern Europe soon after the end of the Second World War, due to the uncertainty over the future of a divided Germany the implementation of socialism was not pushed in East Germany until 1952. The East Germans had thus only recently been presented with the economic shortages and hardships that the construction of socialism entailed. The timing of Ulbricht’s push towards full socialism was also out of kilter with the mood in the Kremlin. In fact, the Soviet leadership had viewed Ulbricht’s announcement of the ‘acceleration of socialism’ with concern, calling him to Moscow and advising him to slow the pace of industrialisation. The ‘New Course’ subsequently announced in East Germany in June 1953 effectively reversed the harsh policies that Ulbricht had introduced only the previous year, but upheld the unpopular increase in production norms. This partial reversal in SED policy thus awakened widespread hopes that further reforms were possible, and a belief that an opportunity now existed to affect political change. In June 1953 it was hoped that popular protest could genuinely challenge the government, and thus the simmering discontent that had previously been manifest in small strikes and protests exploded into a popular demonstration against the government and its policies.

The East German Uprising was more than merely militant workers hoping for economic improvement: it stemmed from long term economic and political discontent, and was a genuine attempt to reform not only the work norms, but the government itself. Significantly, this was the first real attempt to reform communism in Eastern Europe, an attempt that ended in Soviet military intervention. This was the first time that Soviet tanks would appear on the streets of Eastern Europe to quell rebellion, but it was not to be the last; beginning a tradition that would be repeated in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968.

 

Soviet tanks on the streets of East Berlin, 17 June 1953.

 

About the Author:

Rosie Shelmerdine has just completed her BA (Hons) in History at Swansea University, UK, graduating with First class honours in July 2011. During the final year of her degree Rosie specialised in the study of Cold War Eastern Europe.  She is taking a gap year to go travelling, and then hopes to continue with postgraduate study in History.

 

 

The Bluff of the Century: Sputnik and the Cold War.

Introduction

“Half a century ago, when the Soviets beat us into space with the launch of a satellite called Sputnik¸ we had no idea how we’d beat them to the moon. The science wasn’t there yet. NASA didn’t even exist. But after investing in better research and education, we didn’t just surpass the Soviets; we unleashed a wave of innovation that created new industries and millions of new jobs … This is our generation’s Sputnik moment”

The quotation above, taken from US President Barack Obama’s recent State of the Union address on 26 January 2011, relates to his plea for the necessity of continued US investment in research and technologyin the contemporary world. His words also serve as a powerful testament to the enduring legacy left by the successful Soviet launch of the satellite Sputnik on 4 October 1957. The launch of Sputnik ignited the Cold War Space Race in earnest; as George Reedy, an aide to US President Lyndon Johnson famously declared: ‘the Russians have left the earth and the race for control of the universe has started’.

In this article, guest author Harry Hopkinson argues that Sputnik actually functioned as something of a ‘military boomerang’ for the USSR – temporarily boosting Soviet prestige but at the expense of galvanising America’s own technological and military development in the longer term and ultimately pushing the Soviets into making technological and military commitments that they would struggle to maintain – while also considering some of the ways in which Sputnik’s influence permeated the Cold War beyond the military and technological spheres after its launch in 1957.

 

The Bluff of the Century: Sputnik and the Cold War.

By Harry Hopkinson.

 

Sputnik, the world’s first artificial satellite, was successfully launched on the 4^th of October 1957. Serving as a demonstration of Soviet technological advancement, its launch was met with a response of shock, awe and fear which reverberated across both sides of the Iron Curtain. Sputnik spent a total of 3 months orbiting the Earth, emitting a simple signal that was picked up by amateur radio operators around the world. The satellite weighed 184 pounds, and the R-7 rocket that launched Sputnik into orbit was capable of generating 1,120,000 pounds of thrust.

 

Sputnik, the world’s first artificial satellite, was successfully launched by the Soviet Union on the 4th of October 1957.

 

Soviet technology thus appeared to be firmly in the ascendency, with the implication that the Soviet Union was now also capable of launching a long-range nuclear strike. In the political climate of the Cold War, Sputnik proved to be a huge propaganda coup for the Soviet Union. Soviet prestige was bolstered while the United States faced political and national embarrassment due to perceptions of their lack of comparable technology. However, the initial embarrassment that the United States experienced as a result of Sputnik’s success had a galvanising effect on American attitudes towards competition with the USSR, the exploitation of Space and the development of nuclear weapons. As a result, while Sputnik is traditionally perceived as being an off-shoot or catalyst for the Cold War arms race, as well as kick-starting the Space Race, the satellite also left a much wider legacy. The Sputnik launch and the response of the United States set the tone for the remaining years of the Cold War, and many aspects of Sputnik’s wider legacy continue to reverberate to this day. 

 

VIDEO: ‘Sputnik beeps overhead: Americans in awe’

 

 

Sputnik: The Soviet Bluff

Following the Second World War, the creation of advanced technological weaponry in the form of an Inter-Continental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) that was powerful enough to launch a nuclear warhead thousands of miles was a key aim shared by both the USA and the USSR. Sputnik’s launch seemingly demonstrated to the world that the Soviet Union had attained this goal, and was capable of threatening the USAwith nuclear ICBMs. This short animated video, shown on an American News programme, provided a simple demonstration of the science behind the Sputnik launch:

 

 

The reality of the situation however, was that the powerful R-7 rocket that lofted Sputnik into orbit possessed many problems that made it unsuitable as an ICBM. The key problem was that the heat shield that would protect the warhead from the heat of atmospheric re-entry had not been sufficiently developed. This meant that the R-7 could not function as a nuclear weapon. Khrushchev himself later acknowledged that the R-7 was a ‘symbolic threat’ and that it was ‘reliable neither as an offensive or defensive weapon’ (Quoted by Matthew Brzezinski, Red Moon: Sputnik and the Rivalries that United the Space Age, Bloomsbury: 2007). Though the rocket would continue to prove an excellent motor for Space exploration (and would also be used to propel Yuri Gagarin into orbit during the first manned space flight in April 1961), as a weapon it was clearly not capable of threatening the United States when Sputnik was launched in 1957, while in contrast, the United States had assembled a large bomber fleet that was capable of striking at the Soviet Union from bases within Europe and America.

The Sputnik launch can therefore be seen as something of a bluff on the part of the Soviet Union; giving the illusion that Soviet rocket technology and its nuclear capability was more advanced than it actually was. From a Soviet perspective, the ability to bluff an ICBM advantage was important as this could deter the USA from any pre-emptive strike on the USSR in the event of a nuclear war.  By bluffing about their nuclear capacity and creating the illusion of capability to ensure ‘mutually assured destruction’ the Soviet Union thus sought to bolster their own security. The concept of nuclear deterrence was crucial for Soviet foreign policy at a time when Khrushchev was actively seeking to establish a policy of rapprochement with the USA. The Sputnik bluff thus helped to set the stage for the doctrine of ‘peaceful co-existence’ between the USA and the USSR. 

 

Sputnik: The American Response

Although the Eisenhower administration recognised that Sputnik did not dramatically shift the nuclear balance of power, they still reacted sharply to the technological achievement demonstrated by the Soviet satellite and implemented several changes to existing policy in direct response to Sputnik. One immediate change was the revamping of the USA’s ICBM and satellite programmes. The Navy’s experimental missile project Vanguard was tasked with launching a satellite, despite the fact that its rocket had still not been fully tested. The accelerated launch of an American satellite was intended to placate public concerns that the USA had fallen behind the Soviet Union technologically. Unfortunately the experimental Vanguard rocket exploded spectacularly on its launch pad on the 6^th of December 1957, prompting wide-spread derision from the American media. The New York Times referred to the debacle as ‘Sputternik’ (7^th December 1957), while Time Magazine dubbed it ‘Project Rearguard’ (7^th December 1957). Following Vanguard’s failure, missile development and satellites became a highly politicised issue, fuelled by the popular public perception that the USA were in danger of falling further behind the USSR.

Public concern about Sputnik was also exploited by the Democratic Party for political gain. Senator Lyndon Johnson proclaimed of the Russians ‘Soon, they will be dropping bombs on us from space like kids dropping rocks onto cards from freeway overpasses’ (Quoted by Paul Dickson,  Sputnik: The Shock of the Century, Berkley: 2001) while Charles Bewton, a Democrat senatorial aide, drafted a memo for Democrat George Reedy stating that ‘the issue (Sputnik) is one which, if properly handled, would blast the Republicans out of the water, unify the Democratic party and elect you President…’ (Quoted by Walter McDougal in The Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age, John Hopkins University Press: 1985).

The Democrats repeatedly argued that a ‘missile gap’ existed between the USA and the USSR, and this became a decisive issue in John Kennedy’s winning election campaign in the run up to the 1960 Presidential elections. That Kennedy’s presidency was won on this premise illustrates that the Democrats were able to use Sputnik for political ‘leverage’: exploiting the concerns of the general public, who worried that America may lose power, prestige and international leadership.

The Sputnik bluff was therefore initially successful: it boosted Soviet prestige at the expense of the USA; marked a triumph for Soviet science and technology and changed world perceptions of the Soviet Union. Being the first into space meant that the USSR was viewed as a serious rival to the USA. This was later compounded by the Space Race, where the USA actively competed with the USSR for scientific and technological supremacy. The idea that America thus had to compete with the Soviet Union, not just militarily but in every walk of life, was established by Sputnik. Sputnik can therefore be seen as an ideological victory for the Soviet Union as it changed American perceptions of the USSR and set the tone for the remaining Cold War.

 

This cartoon, by Edwin Marcus, accurately illustrates the impact that Sputnik was perceived to have had, by 'waking up' the USA.

 

Sputnik also had a galvanising effect on American missile development and by 1960 the USA had begun to overtake the Soviets in numbers of ICBMs, while also retaining its large nuclear bomber fleet. Sputnik precipitated this galvanisation and so ironically, actually helped to put more nuclear pressure on the Soviet Union. As Sputnik served to strengthen America’s position in real terms while offering only the illusion of strength to the USSR, as a bluff it was ultimately to be to their detriment. This gulf, between the perceived Soviet capabilities that Sputnik granted and the reality of the situation, would go on to have several further influences on the Cold War.

 

Sputnik: The Wider Impact

One key impact was that Khrushchev sought to address the growing nuclear imbalance by placing missiles in Cuba, sparking the now infamous Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. A Soviet memorandum from the 24^th May 1962 outlined Soviet plans to place launchers and a missile division on Cuban soil. Placing missiles in Cuba marked a shift, as the Soviet Union now had missiles capable of threatening the USA with nuclear strikes. Khrushchev stated that levelling the nuclear balance of power was the principal aim of his decision to place missiles in Cuba in his memoirs. He asserted ‘We had to establish a tangible and effective deterrent to American interference in the Caribbean’ and went on to acknowledge how unfavourable the nuclear balance of power between the USA and USSR was at that time because ‘The United States had already surrounded the Soviet Union with its own bomber bases and missiles. We knew that American missiles were aimed against us in Turkey and Italy, to say nothing of West Germany’ (Khrushchev Remembers, Penguin, 1977). This suggests that the skewered balance of power created by Sputnik was a primary motivation for the Cuban Missile Crisis.

The Sputnik bluff also created tensions between the Soviet Union and its allies. China was highly critical of Soviet attempts to make overtures towards ‘peaceful co-existence’ with the USA, instead pushing Khrushchev to adopt more aggressive political manoeuvring, given their perceived technological ‘superiority’. Ultimately, part of the reason for the Sino-Soviet split in 1961 was because the USSR would not share nuclear technology with China. Arguably then, the Sputnik bluff gave the Chinese an inaccurate view of the true nuclear capacity of the USSR in relation to the USA, and while this was not the sole reason for the split, it was influential. Polish leader Gomulka also sent a letter to Khrushchev on 8th October 1963 arguing against Soviet proposals for a non-proliferation treaty with the USA. Gomulka asserted that the presence of missiles in Europe due to NATO would still threaten Eastern Europe and the Warsaw Pact, and argued that the USSR should share nuclear weapons with China. Gomulka does not encourage the use of nuclear missiles but does assume that the USSR is capable of dealing with the USA as an equal.

By 1963 the USSR was beginning to ‘catch up’ with the US in terms of its own missile production; however the sheer volume of nuclear weapons that the USA possessed by this point made any war so potentially devastating that there was no political incentive to fight one. Although Sputnik had given the illusion of the Soviet power equalling that of the USA, in reality their ability to use their nuclear force for political gains had sharply decreased. Therefore, the Sputnik bluff gave the Soviet Union’s allies an inaccurate view of the nature of the nuclear balance of power between the two super-powers and created a false impression of Soviet capability to use nuclear missiles to barter for political concessions with the USA.

 

Assessing Sputnik’s Legacy

The Space Race kick-started by Sputnik would open up further space exploration and go on to shape a generation of technology.  Due to the reorganisation of research and development under Eisenhower, the USA was better poised to exploit the technology it developed, while the USSR remained rigidly bound by its centralised bureaucracy and did not throw its economic, technical and human resources  in to such projects to the same extent as the USA. The subsequent success of NASA in the space race would ultimately go on to influence Reagan’s Strategic Defence Initiative (SDI) in 1983, making the prospect of a space-based weapons platform seem possible, if not entirely feasible. The extent to which Regan’s SDI was the main motivator in Gorbachev’s subsequent disarmament efforts is debatable. However this provides another example of Sputnik’s continual influence throughout the Cold War period, as it introduced the possibility that a second, space-based arms race could occur between the USA and the USSR in the 1980s, before the disarmament overtures made by Gorbachev squashed this.

Sputnik inadvertently locked the USSR into an arms race that was mirrored in a technological race between the two super powers to exploit space. The USA came out ahead in both of these races. Sputnik then, can be seen as a bluff that, while initially successful, ultimately back-fired. Militarily it was a ‘boomerang’: Sputnik temporarily boosted Soviet prestige but at the expense of galvanising America into a vast military build up. Despite initial Soviet success, the USA would also go on to dominate space through its use of satellites and the influence of NASA. The USSR struggled to catch up with both of these movements, so in many ways Sputnik can be seen as pushing the USSR into technological commitments that it would subsequently struggle to meet. Therefore, Sputnik’s influence set the tone for the Cold War from its launch in 1957 until theSoviet Union’s collapse in 1991. Sputnik can thus be seen as a turning point in the dynamic between the USA and the USSR, due to its role in changing American perspectives of the USSR and its pivotal involvement in the arms race between the two countries. Ultimately then, Sputnik allowed the USA to become more scientifically advanced while the USSR would go on to stagnate.

 

About the Author:

Harry Hopkinson recently completed his BA (Hons) in History at Swansea University, graduating with First Class honours in July 2011. Harry is particularly interested in the history of science, the Cold War and the Soviet Union and during his final year of study at Swansea he decided to combine these interests, to good effect! The result was an extremely accomplished history dissertation, Sputnik: Bluff of the Century. Harry is currently travelling in America and is considering  undertaking further historical research in the future.

 

For more information on this topic, see:

 NASA

David Scott & Alexei Leonov with Christine Toomey, Two Sides of the Moon: Our Story of the Cold War Space Race (Simon & Schuster: 2004)

Hardesty, Von & Eisman, Gene Epic Rivalry: The inside story of the Soviet and American Space Race (National Geographic: 2007)

Brzezinski, Matthew Red Moon Rising: Sputnik and the rivalries that ignited the space age. (Bloomsbury: 2007)

McDougall, Walter A.  A Political History of the Space Race…The Heavens and The Earth (The Johns Hopkins University Press: 1985)

Siddiqi, Asif A.  Sputnik and the Soviet Space Challenge and The Soviet Space Race with Apollo (University Press of Florida: 2003)

 

 

 

 

Student Showcase: Forthcoming Guest Authored Blog Posts by Swansea University Students.

 

During July, The View East is very pleased to be hosting a ‘student showcase’, featuring a number of short articles written by history students from Swansea University.

 

During the final year of undergraduate study, many students invest a lot of time and energy into their studies and produce some really excellent work as a result. However, the vast majority of work produced by undergraduate students is generally not accessible to a wider audience. Most dissertations, essays and research projects are read only by the student themselves, their supervisor, one or two other examiners and perhaps a couple of family members or close friends who may be drafted in to proofread the finished article. Reading through some of the excellent work submitted by students I’ve worked with at Swansea University over the course of the last year led me to reflect that this was rather a shame. Hence my idea to host a ‘student showcase’ here on The View East was born, by asking some of my students to write short articles related to some of the research they had conducted over the past year.

 

The students I approached have risen admirably to the challenge! Over the next three weeks The View East will feature seven short guest authored articles. All articles have been written by students from the Department of History and Classics at Swansea University. All of the authors have recently completed the final year of their undergraduate degrees and will be graduating this month. All of the students featured here either took my ‘special subject’, specialising in the study of Eastern Europe 1945-1989 during the final year of their degree, or chose to research and write their dissertation on some aspect of modern East European history, under my supervision. All of the students featured as guest authors consistently produced excellent work over the course of the year, just a small sample of which is included here. Sadly, it was not possible to feature the great work done by all of the students I have had the pleasure of working with this year, as many (particularly in the case of my dissertation group) produced excellent research, but on topics that lie outside of the scope of this blog’s focus.

 

By way of a brief introduction, our guest authors during the next three weeks are writing on the following topics:

 

Week 1:

On Monday 11 July we begin with Harry Hopkinson’s fascinating article Sputnik: Bluff of the Century. Here Harry explores the implications of the successful launch of Sputnik by the Soviet Union in 1957, not only in terms of technological and military developments but also in terms of its wider impact on the development of the Cold War.

On Wednesday 13 July we have the first of a trio of articles focusing on various aspects of the history of the GDR. In this article Rosie Shelmerdine provides a fresh and timely analysis of the 1953 East German Uprising, exploring the true nature of the rebellion by asking whether the events of June 1953 are best considered as ‘Western Provocation, Workers Protest or Attempted Revolution?’.

Our first week concludes on Friday 15 July, with James Shingler’s intriguing article ‘Rocking the Wall’, which follows on nicely from Rosie’s study of a popular uprising by exploring a rather different aspect of protest and resistance in the GDR, focusing on the impact of popular music in 1970s and 1980s East Germany.

 

Week 2:

The second week of the student showcase opens by concluding our focus on the GDR. On Monday 18 July David Cook’s article ‘Living with the Enemy’ provides an insightful and intelligent analysis of the infamous East German secret police – the Stasi.

On Thursday 21 July Nelson Duque’s article ‘Inside Ceausescu’s Romania: An Unquestionably Efficient Police State’ follows nicely on from David’s study of the Stasi by considering the repressive nature of another East European regime: that of Ceausescu’s Romania and his much feared secret police, the Securitate.

 

Week 3:

On Monday 25th July our penultimate article, written by Carla Giudice, takes us back to the immediate aftermath of World War Two by considering some of the factors that influenced the contrasting fates of three leading individuals who featured in the 1945 Nuremberg War Crimes Trials: the ‘Good Nazi’ Albert Speer, the ‘Bad Nazi’ Herman Goering and the ‘Mad Nazi’ Rudolf Hess.

In recent months there has been a renewed focus on war crimes in relation to the Balkan Wars of the 1990s, due to the recent arrest and indictment of former Bosnian Serb Army chief Ratko Mladic on charges of genocide and other crimes against humanity. On Wednesday 27th July, our final guest authored article by Simon Andrew thus provides a fitting conclusion to the student showcase, by considering some of the circumstances surrounding the bloody break up of Yugoslavia.

 

 

Monumental Makeover in Bulgaria Illustrates the Contested Status of Soviet-Era War Memorials

On the morning of 18 June 2011, residents of the Bulgarian capital, Sofia, awoke to discover that one of their monuments had been treated to a rather colourful makeover. The Second World War Monument to the Soviet Army (Pametnik na Savetskata armia), built in 1954 to commemorate the 10^th anniversary of the Soviet ‘liberation’ of Nazi-allied Bulgaria and depicting Red Army soldiers heroically fighting alongside the Bulgarian people in typical socialist-realist architectural style, had been spray painted by an anonymous artist (subsequently dubbed ‘the Bansky of Bulgaria’ by the media). The tarnished, bronzed, Red Army soldiers had been transformed into popular American icons including Superman, The Joker, Captain America, Ronald McDonald and Santa Claus. The flag held aloft by the soldiers had also been adorned with the US stars and stripes. A telling slogan was boldly written in black spray paint below the monument to accompany the statue’s makeover: ‘Moving with the Times’.

 

This photograph illustrates the recently repainted Monument to the Soviet Army in Sofia Berlin (above) compared to its usual appearance (below).

 

A wonderful 360 degree panoramic of the repainted monument can also be viewed here (click on the arrows to circle around!): http://bg360.net/pano/sofia/popart-soviet-army.php

 

The newly painted statues proved popular with many, quickly becoming a tourist magnet as people flocked to have photographs taken with them. However, not everybody was amused by the monument’s impromptu makeover. Bulgarian Minister of Culture Vezhdi Rashidov quickly denounced the re-sprayed statues as an ‘act of vandalism’ and said he ‘considered it a crime’. The Russian Foreign Ministry also issued a statement condemning ‘the hooligans behind the vandalism’ for their ‘mockery of the memory of Soviet soldiers who died in the name of freeing Bulgaria and Europe from Nazism’ and urging the Bulgarian authorities to ‘expose and punish’ those responsible. The fact that the 22 June marked the 70^th anniversary of ‘Operation Barbarossa’, the German invasion of the USSR, made the timing of the incident particularly sensitive.

 

The monument retained its new look for a few days, before being quietly cleaned and restored to its former state. However, the nature of the re-spray has prompted questions about the true motivation behind the makeover. Was this art or vandalism? Does the slogan hint at a more political message? Was the artist suggesting that American pop culture icons were the ‘new heroes’ of Eastern Europe? Or was the true message to suggest that today, in post-communist Bulgaria, one ‘imperialist ally’ has simply been replaced with another?

 

Conflicting Interpretations of Soviet-era War Monuments

 

In the aftermath of Soviet victory in World War II, a proliferation of monuments were erected across the territories of the (newly-enlarged) USSR and across Eastern Europe. During the communist era, these were protected by law, so although citizens often privately referred to the monuments in rather derogatory terms (such as the ‘Looters Memorial’ or ‘Tribute to the Unknown Rapist’) there were relatively few serious attempts to tamper with them. In the post-communist period however, many Soviet monuments have become targets for vandalism and graffiti (which is often much less sophisticated than the recent Bulgarian makeover!).

 

The status of these Soviet-era war monuments has also fuelled political debate, both within many former Soviet bloc countries and between their national governments and the contemporary Russian leadership, as both sides attempt to tentatively negotiate and re-negotiate their communist pasts. At the heart of this debate lie two very different interpretations of history.

 

One of the best known Soviet war memorials stands in Treptower Park, Berlin. A 12 foot tall bronze Russian soldier holds a young German girl in his arms while his sword cuts through the Nazi swastika, which he crushes underfoot. The monument was removed for renovation in 2003 but restored in 2004.

 

Russia maintains that the monuments symbolise Soviet sacrifice and heroism in World War II, celebrating the prestige of their hard-fought victory over Germanyand their historic role in the liberation of Eastern Europe from Nazi tyranny. Lev Gudkov argues that victory in World War II remains ‘the most potent symbol of identification’ in present-day Russia. This is supported by evidence from a variety of other quarters. In 2003 87% of Russians surveyed mentioned victory in the Second World War in response to the question ‘what makes you personally proud in our history?’ and in a list of the most important events shaping Russia’s fate in the twentieth century compiled in 2005, victory in World War II was named by 78% of respondents. Statistics such as these have led to allegations that today, many Russians continue to promote their victory in World War II as a means of legitimising or justifying many of the darker aspects of the Stalinist era.

 

In 2009, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev’s announcement of the establishment of a new Commission to ‘guard against the falsification of History’ specifically related to attempts to revise, question or challenge certain aspects of the Soviet role in World War II in the post-communist era. When announcing the formation of the Commission, Medvedev emphasised that: ‘We will never forget that our country, the Soviet Union, made the decisive contribution to the outcome of World War II, that it was precisely our people who destroyed Nazism and determined the fate of the whole world’. Medvedev even suggested that expressing doubts that the Soviets came to Eastern Europe in any other guise than that of liberators at the end of the Second World War should be considered a criminal offense, similar to that of Holocaust denial. The importance of World War II for many contemporary Russians is also illustrated  by the continuation of the traditional Soviet-era ‘victory parade’ in Moscow on 9^th May each year in the post-Soviet period, a military spectacular that was traditionally designed to act as a combined celebration of Soviet victory in World War II and a contemporary display of Russian military might (for some video coverage of the most recent parade in May 2011, see HERE ). 

 

Many of the countries from the Former Soviet Union and across Eastern Europe who gained independence from Soviet influence when communism collapsed take a rather different stance however; viewing the Soviet-era monuments as symbolic of occupation and repression following World War II and as a painful reminder of the hardship they endured under communist rule. Reuben Fowkes argues that after 1945, war memorials were erected for primarily geo-political reasons across Eastern Europe, to ‘mark on the map the area liberated by the Soviets and to claim that territory as part of the Soviet zone of influence’. Fowkes goes on to suggest that it was ‘no coincidence that some of the earliest monuments were erected at the extremities of Soviet military activity … and often have a visibly aggressive character’.

 

Speaking in an interview conducted by RFE/RL in 2007, Kadri Liik, a journalist and analyst at the Estonian International Center for Defense Studies, succinctly summarised the views held by many across the former Soviet bloc when he explained that, in the Estonian case:
 
“It [the monument] was erected in the 1940s to commemorate the so-called liberation of Tallinn … the Soviet troops entered Tallinn in 1944, in autumn. And they called it liberation. Estonians have always regarded it quite differently. Liberators leave — occupiers do not … The Soviet “liberators” stayed inEstonia until the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991″.

 

Since the collapse of communism and the break-up of the USSR, several countries have moved to displace or destroy Soviet war monuments, a policy which has persistently prompted strong objections from Russia. This forms part of a wider policy to remove communist-era monuments and symbols (such as the traditional hammer and sickle) from public buildings, however the status of war monuments has been particularly contested, for obvious reasons. The recent Bulgarian ‘paint job’ is thus far from the first controversial case to hit the headlines in recent years.

 

Perhaps the best documented example is that of the 2007 Estonian decision to move their ‘Monument to the Fallen in the Second World War’ – a 2 metre (6.5ft) statue unveiled by Soviet authorities in September 1944 to mark the third anniversary of the Red Army’s entry into Tallinn, which was more commonly known as ‘the Bronze Soldier’ – away from its original location in the centre of Tallinn to a small military cemetery on the outskirts of the capital. This decision proved particularly contentious given the sizeable Russian minority still resident in Estonia (accounting for around one third of the total 1.3 million Estonian population today). The relocation of the statue provoked two days of violent rioting and widespread looting inTallinn, during which police fired tear gas and rubber bullets, ultimately resulting in one death, 153 injured and over 800 arrests.

 

The 'Bronze Soldier' in Tallinn, Estonia. The monument depicts a Red Army soldier in uniform, his helmet in one hand, his head slightly bowed and his rifle slung over his back. Relocation of the statue in 2007 led to several days of violent protests and rioting in Tallinn.

 

A second recent example was the December 2009 demolition of a World War II Soviet war memorial in the Georgian city of Kutaisi, a towering 46 metre high concrete and bronze structure which was built to commemorate the estimated 300,000 Georgians who were killed while fighting for the Red Army. Despite sustained protests by Russian officials, Red Army veterans and pro-Russian political groups in Georgia, the government decided to destroy the monument and build a new national parliament on the site. The demolition of the monument, already a politically sensitive issue, was then further marred by the violation of safety regulations during the controlled explosion, which led to flying chunks of concrete killing two people and wounding another four. Following the destruction of the monument Russian Prime Minister Putin condemned the move as ‘another attempt to erase the former Soviet peoples’ memory of their common and heroic past’ and announced that a replica of the monument would be built in Moscow.

 

The 2009 demolition of a monument in Kutaisi, Georgia, a towering 46 metre high concrete and bronze structure which was built to commemorate the estimated 300,000 Georgians who were killed while fighting for the Red Army caused controversy, particularly as the violation of safety regulations led to two deaths.

 

Such politically and emotionally charged issues clearly need to be handled with sensitivity, particularly while the impact of World War II and its aftermath remains within living memory for many in the former USSR and Eastern Europe. Certainly, Soviet sacrifices in World War II – in terms of both soldiers and civillian casualties – should not be disregarded, with a total Soviet death toll estimated at around 27 million, more than the combined death toll of all of their wartime allies. Many contemporary Russians thus perceive attempts to displace and destroy Soviet war memorials as a humiliation and an attempt to desecrate the memory of those who died. However, Nina Tumarkin is correct when she states that the traditional Soviet version of their ‘Great Patriotic War’ contains a mixture of ‘truth, lies and unforgivable blank spots’. Much of the historical evidence that has come to light in the post-Soviet period demonstrates that this can no longer be ignored. For citizens of the Baltic states, which were first ‘claimed’ by the Soviet Union in the infamous Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939 (something which the Soviet Union continued to deny for decades afterwards) and later forcibly incorporated into the Soviet Union after their ‘liberation’ from Nazi Germany at the end of World War II; or for citizens of the East European countries where communism was imposed and maintained – at times forcibly, most obviously in Hungary 1956 and Czechoslovakia 1968 – as a result of Soviet dominance until 1989, it is easy to see how the aftermath of the Second World War soon came to be viewed less as a ‘liberation’ and more as an ‘occupation’, something which the continued presence of Soviet-era memorials may serve to emphasise.

 06/07/2011 – Edit:

In the last couple of days I have also come across these two timely, recently posted online articles:

This short post on Maria Popova’s excellent ‘Brainpickings’ blog in relation to Spomenik, a compilation of photographs of communist-era monuments in the Balkans by Jan Kempenaers

This interesting article published by Transitions Online, where Ioana Caloianu demonstrates, using a number of examples of monuments from across the East European and Central Asian region, the ways in which statues and monuments can represent ‘an uncanny guide to a people’s vices, grievances and insecurities’.

 

A Few Further Articles on this Topic:

 

Reuben Fowkes, Soviet War Memorials in Eastern Europe

‘Getting Involved in the Messy Politics of War Memorials’ in the European Voice

‘Why is the Bronze Soldier so Controversial?’ in The Times

M Ignatieff, ‘Soviet War Memorials’, History Workshop Journal, 17 (1984), 157-163

K Bruggemann and A Kasekamp, ‘The Politics of History and the ‘War of Monuments’ in Estonia’, Nationalities Papers, 36/3 (2008) 425-448

M Evans, ‘Memories, Monuments, Histories: The Re-thinking of the Second World War Since 1989′, National Identities, 8/4 (2006) 317-348

S Kattago, ‘Commemorating Liberation and Occupation: War Memorials Along the Road to Narva’, Journal of Baltic Studies, 39/4 (2008), 431-449.