De-Stalinising Eastern Europe

The Rehabilitation of Stalin's Victims after 1953

Kevin McDermott, Matthew Stibbe, Kevin McDermott, Matthew Stibbe

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137368928
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

This unique volume examines how and to what extent former victims of Stalinist terror from across the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe were received, reintegrated and rehabilitated following the mass releases from prisons and labour camps which came in the wake of Stalin's death in 1953 and Khrushchev's reforms in the subsequent decade.

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De-Stalinising Eastern Europe: The Dilemmas of Rehabilitation

Matthew Stibbe and Kevin McDermott

I think you will agree that there is not much to choose between Russia and Germany, but I think you will also agree that the present regime in Germany must come to a dead end, whereas Russia does seem to point ultimately, although perhaps a very long way away, in the direction of sanity...¹

These words were written by Jack Pritchard to the Conservative MP for Hampstead, George Balfour, on 26 September 1938, four days before Neville Chamberlain and Édouard Daladier signed the Munich agreement with Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. Pritchard was a Hampstead-based furniture designer, left-liberal intellectual and anti-appeaser. At the time of writing, Moscow had directed a wave of bloody purges and accompanying mass terror against its own people, and organised three well-publicised show trials, the last of them against Nikolai Bukharin and his associates. While many on the left in Britain continued to support the Soviet system, even after the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939, and dismissed as western or ‘imperialist’ propaganda the claims that Stalin was deporting, enslaving and murdering as many communists and non-communists as Hitler, doubts began to appear and were reinforced by the publication of books such as Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon (1940).² Yet in the long run, Pritchard was right. Whereas Nazi Germany went down in the final and totally mad ‘destruction’ and ‘self-destruction’ of 1944–1945,³ the Soviet Union did finally begin to reverse its use of terror and redirect itself along the path of ‘sanity’.

The change of direction was belatedly acknowledged in the west following the leaking of news of Nikita Khrushchev’s ‘secret speech’ to the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party (CPSU) in February 1956, but its origins can actually be traced back to the very first weeks and months after Stalin’s death in March 1953.⁴ Indeed, in many ways the eastern bloc and cold war ‘crises’ of the year 1953 – the cancellation of impending purges and the implementation of the first big amnesty for Gulag prisoners in the Soviet Union in late March; the announcement of a Soviet-imposed ‘New Course’ in the GDR and Hungary in early June; the uprisings in the Czech city of Plzeň (1 June 1953) and in East Germany (17 June 1953) and their bloody suppression; the (non-) reaction to these developments in the west; and, finally, the continuation of West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer’s policy of Westintegration and rearmament under NATO’s umbrella after his success in the parliamentary elections in September – form the background to the events discussed in this volume.⁵

Historical overview

The volume seeks to explore the process of rehabilitating former victims of Stalinist terror in five Soviet republics: Russia, Ukraine, Moldavia, Latvia and Belarus, and in six countries in the post-war Soviet ‘sphere of influence’: Hungary, Poland, the GDR, Czechoslovakia, Romania and Bulgaria. Key questions that are considered essential for understanding the legacy of Stalinist terror after 1953 include: when, why and on what terms were victims rehabilitated?; what were the main demands and expectations of the rehabilitees and their families, and how far were these demands satisfied?; what were the political implications of the rehabilitation process for incumbent communist leaderships?; why were some Soviet and East European Stalinists able to remain in power after 1953 and/or 1956, while others were permanently removed?; and to what extent were former perpetrators able to evade justice as well as minimise or cover up the extent of Stalinist-era atrocities more generally? Other questions are important too: were communist victims treated any differently after 1953 to non-communist victims of Stalinist terror?; to what extent was it possible to hold rehabilitated political prisoners to the silence and gratitude that was expected of them?; how far was policy on rehabilitation determined by the ‘centre’ (Moscow), how far by national and local party leaderships, and how far by outside pressures, including émigré and expellee associations, victims’ representatives and media outlets based in the west?; and last, but not least, how did East European citizens, both communist and non-communist, react to the releases and rehabilitations, and what political impact, if any, did diverse social attitudes have on the post-Stalinist regimes?

Before any of these questions can be addressed, however, it is first necessary to provide a brief historical and historiographical overview. Already in the first three months after Stalin’s death, the number of prisoners in the Soviet Gulag fell from around 2.5 million to 1.3 million, largely as a result of the amnesty of 27 March 1953, which reduced the tariffs for those convicted of non-political crimes. Following several further waves of releases, amnesties and revision or commutation of sentences, the vast majority of MVD camps and colonies had been emptied by 1960, and only 550,882 inmates remained. Most of the close to three million persons estimated to be living in banishment in remote parts of the Soviet Union in 1953 – whether former political prisoners who had reached the end of their sentences, members of forcibly resettled national or ethnic groups, or peasants from the western regions of the USSR deported as kulaks – also had the remaining restrictions on their freedom of movement lifted between 1954 and the early 1960s.⁶ Millions of children orphaned by the terror and subsequently brought up in state-run institutions, and relatives of Gulag prisoners who had faced harsh forms of discrimination in the spheres of education, welfare, right to travel and employment, likewise benefited from the post-Stalinist ‘Thaw’.⁷

Meanwhile, as a result of petitions from individual citizens or recommendations made by various sentencing review commissions, courts were instructed to re-examine large numbers of political cases, and between 1954 and 1961, up to 800,000 Soviet citizens – some dead, some living – and tens of thousands of foreigners were formally rehabilitated in the sense of having their convictions overturned.⁸ Khrushchev, while himself heavily implicated in some of the crimes committed under Stalin, nonetheless became a firm advocate not only of the restoration of ‘socialist legality’ (meaning, among other things, ending the use of torture in police interrogations) but also of the release and rehabilitation process, telling delegates at the 1956 party congress that the ‘unprecedented violation of revolutionary legality’ during the years 1936 to 1953 could not simply be forgotten or swept under the carpet.⁹ In 1961, he ordered the removal of Stalin’s body from the Mausoleum on Moscow’s Red Square, and in 1962, he personally intervened to make possible the publication of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s novella about the Gulag, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.¹⁰ One leading German expert on the Stalin era, Jörg Baberowski, has even described the far-reaching changes brought about by Khrushchev as a ‘cultural revolution [and] civilising achievement which changed the lives of millions’.¹¹

Given that the measures outlined above also had major implications for the communist countries of Eastern Europe, and for western republics of the Soviet Union which had witnessed large-scale deportations to the east during the Stalin era, it is astonishing how little attention has been paid to the rehabilitation issue in previous literature.¹² On the one hand, these countries and republics now had to reintegrate some of the prisoners released from the Gulag – those, not few in number, who had a claim to be repatriated or resettled in their original homelands after years of living in captivity or forced exile. As Matthew Stibbe demonstrates in his chapter, this posed a particular challenge to the GDR and its claim to represent the ‘better Germany’ in the 1950s. On the other hand, the East European states had also instigated their own terror systems during the years 1948–1953. In some of the Soviet bloc countries, this involved the staging of high-profile show trials against alleged ‘Titoists’ or ‘Zionists’, and in all of them, the imprisonment of large numbers of real and presumed ideological opponents and ‘class enemies’. The Czechoslovaks, Romanians and East Germans even continued to hold frame-up political trials, albeit in camera rather than as public events, in 1954 and 1955.¹³ Thereafter, pressure grew to follow the Kremlin’s lead and end the practice of extra-judicial purges, mass incarceration and overt political repression. Equally, Soviet bloc countries were urged to establish sentencing review bodies and rehabilitation commissions of their own, with some satellite nations – notably Hungary and, to a lesser extent, Poland – proving more willing than others, and one country in particular, Czechoslovakia, experiencing a delayed, but far-reaching, form of de-Stalinisation in the 1960s which failed with the crushing of the Prague Spring in 1968. Ironically but tellingly, the only Warsaw Pact state that refused to participate in the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia – Romania – was also the one that had done least in terms of restoring justice to domestic victims of terror. Instead, as Calin Goina shows in his chapter, although three separate amnesties took place in the early 1960s, the country’s formal break with Stalinism was more or less restricted to the years 1968–1969, when selected individuals were publicly rehabilitated to serve the new nationalist direction taken by the maverick dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu.

In the 1970s, the number of political prisoners rose again across the Soviet bloc, in spite of the signing of the Helsinki agreements in 1975. Although they were no longer allowed to use physical force or torture, the communist security services could still harass people, spy on them, blackmail them, collect evidence for use against them in criminal state prosecutions, even have them confined to psychiatric institutions.¹⁴ In reality, a full reckoning with Stalin’s legacy was not possible until communist rule came to an end in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Yet even now the process of rehabilitation is still ongoing, both in Eastern Europe and in the successor states of the Soviet Union.

Rehabilitation, restitution and transitional justice in a global context

The collapse of a variety of left- and right-wing dictatorships across the world at the end of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first centuries has cast Soviet history from 1953 to 1991 in a new light. It has also raised more general questions about how states and societies cope with the transition from a violent past to what is hoped will be a more just and peaceful future, while underlining the fact that the dilemmas faced by communist and post-communist regimes in dealing with Stalinist era crimes were far from unique.¹⁵ One could mention, among other examples, the human rights abuses practised by various military juntas in Latin America as well as in Spain, Portugal and Greece in the period up to 1974–1975, or the atrocities committed by South Africa’s apartheid governments between 1948 and 1990. However, the most obvious point of comparison in our case would be with West Germany after 1949. Here, historians have shown how an initial emphasis on Germans as victims, as illustrated, for instance, by frequent calls in the early 1950s for amnesties for convicted Nazi war criminals and for the lifting of employment bans and other restrictions imposed under Allied de-Nazification measures, gradually gave way to a growing recognition of the importance of facing up to the past, particularly after the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem in 1961. In Ulm in 1958 and more conspicuously in Frankfurt-am-Main in 1963–1965, federal cases were launched in West German criminal courts against former members of the security police and SS mobile killing squads (Einsatzgruppen), officials at the Auschwitz death camp and other perpetrators of Nazi atrocities, with Holocaust survivors appearing for the first time as prosecution witnesses for the German state. In June 1969, the 20-year statute of limitation was completely lifted for acts of murder and genocide committed during the Second World War.¹⁶

By this time the primary victims of the Third Reich were increasingly (although by no means universally) recognised in wider ‘discourses of restitution’ as being non-Germans, especially by the younger generation of Germans born after 1939. Internationally as well as domestically, this was symbolised by the spontaneous decision of Social Democrat Chancellor Willy Brandt to kneel before the monument to the fallen of the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising during an official visit to the Polish capital in December 1970.¹⁷ However, when it came to achieving redress for individuals, West German law allowed financial compensation and restitution to be granted only to former...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Table
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• Abbreviations and Glossary of Terms
• 1 De-Stalinising Eastern Europe: The Dilemmas of Rehabilitation
• 2 Rehabilitation in the Soviet Union, 1953– 1964: A Policy Unachieved
• 3 De-Stalinisation in Hungary from a Gendered Perspective: The Case of Júlia Rajk
• 4 The Release and Rehabilitation of Victims of Stalinist Terror in Poland
• 5 The Limits of Rehabilitation: The 1930s Stalinist Terror and Its Legacy in Post-1953 East Germany
• 6 The Rehabilitation Process in Czechoslovakia: Party and Popular Responses
• 7 Rehabilitation in Romania: The Case of Lucrețiu Pătrășcanu
• 8 De-Stalinisation and Political Rehabilitations in Bulgaria
• 9 The Rehabilitation of Stalin’s Victims in Ukraine, 1953– 1964: A Socio-Legal Perspective
• 10 The Fate of Stalinist Victims in Moldavia after 1953: Amnesty, Pardon and the Long Road to Rehabilitation
• 11 Latvian Deportees of the 1940s: Their Release and Rehabilitation
• 12 The Amnesty and Rehabilitation of Victims of Stalinist Repression in Belarus
• 13 Afterword: Stalinist Rehabilitations in a Pan-European Perspective
• Index