Revising History in Communist Europe: Constructing Counter-Revolution in 1956 and 1968

By David A.J. Reynolds

Those who define the past control the present. ‘Revising History in Communist Europe’ shows how the manipulation of history both empowered and weakened the communist regimes of post–World War Two Europe. It demonstrates how seismic events of the recent past reverberate in the understandings of the present, determining perceptions and decisions. With fresh analysis on the imposed communist definition of Hungary’s 1956 uprising and its effects on the definition of the Prague Spring, this study will give readers a timely and penetrating insight into both landmark events.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Jan 31, 2020
• ISBN: 9781785272103

Book preview

Revising History in Communist Europe

Revising History in Communist Europe

Constructing Counter-Revolution in 1956 and 1968

David A. J. Reynolds

Anthem Press

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2020

by ANTHEM PRESS

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Copyright © David A.J. Reynolds 2020

The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above,

no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into

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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN-13: 978-1-78527-208-0 (Hbk)

ISBN-10: 1-78527-208-X (Hbk)

This title is also available as an e-book.

For the students and teachers of Gymnázium Nad Alejí and (as it was known) Trefort Ágoston Kéttannyelvú Középiskola.

Even forgetting is not a simple and purely negative process: it entails a whole reconstruction

– Robert Hertz

Two half-truths do not make one full-truth

– Tibor Méray

That averted face of the trials revealed the cynical emptiness behind the scenes of our certainties

– Pavel Kohout

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1.The Export and Imposition of Stalinism

2.Hungarian De-Stalinization and Revising Recent History

3.A Revolution, a Counter-Revolution, or a National Uprising?

4.Stalinist Purges and De-Stalinization in Czechoslovakia

5.The Meaning of 1956 in 1968: March to June

6.June: Turning Point and the Hardening of Positions

7.July and August: Constructing Counter-Revolution

8.The Intentions of Intervention and the Shadow of 1956: Delusion and Failure

Conclusion

Epilogue

Appendix

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My gratitude is first of all due to Gyula Kodolányi, for his generous support of my history-writing in the pages of Hungarian Review, a publication I long admired before being fortunate enough to contribute to it. I am also thankful to Ildikó Geiger at Hungarian Review for her patient assistance and kindness, as well as to Éva Eszter Szabó, who extracted and edited some of this manuscript for that publication. In all, five extracts were published in the Hungarian Review.

For her careful, courteous, and considerate oversight of this project at Anthem Press, I am very grateful to Megan Greiving. My thanks also go to all the members of her team and of the wider staff at Anthem for all their excellent work on the essential tasks, hidden from view, which make this possible.

INTRODUCTION

There was no aspect of culture in which a communist regime’s monopoly was as important as historical memory. While this grip often meant the erasure of past events and people, it just as significantly entailed the manner in which an event was conceptualized and the loaded terms used to describe it. The way the past was interpreted and recalled was not a peripheral academic issue, but a deeply political matter that cut to the heart of revolutionary states’ legitimacy and authority.

As long as a communist regime controlled the past, its control of the present was secure. ‘To redefine the past is to display mastery in the present,’ EM Simmonds-Duke explains. And as an exercise of power, not research, this redefinition demands only subservience.¹

The centrality of enforced historical revisionism in communist states was a function both of Communists’ traditional self-understanding and their concept of history itself. Communism necessitates and guides the creation of a new world upon the wreckage of the old. In the event of its revolutionary devotees seizing power, Communism’s twin project of construction and destruction makes every contradictory survival of the old and failure of the new threatening.

It was the French Revolution that had, of course, provided a new concept of revolution as a phenomenon which completely upended and replaced what came before. But it did so within an equally novel idea of history as a force which itself propelled people and nations along. To study modern history, for numerous subsequent thinkers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, was to study the road on which events were inexorably travelling. For European Communists, as well as many of their contemporaries, history was something whose course had to be plotted in order to identify and join with it. Cause and effect were less important than the necessity of its trajectory.²

‘The magic spell which historical necessity has cast over the minds of men since the beginning of the nineteenth century,’ in Hannah Arendt’s words, ‘gained in potency by the October Revolution.’ From 1917 through to Communism’s European demise seven decades later, therefore, Communists enforced an official view of history – using it to control the past, present, and future – as necessity and inevitability. Rightly understood, communist dogma insisted, history presents us with a path that has necessitated the present and that will inevitably draw us to a particular future.

It is, however, an immensely complicated task to impose this concept on an infinitely cluttered reality. The historical memory of the past must first be systematically reconstructed to represent a trajectory towards this dogmatically understood present and ideologically presumed future. ‘Revolutions, regime changes in general, and Communist takeovers in particular,’ István Rév concludes, ‘invite historical revision, past actions under new descriptions.’³ New masters must join new conceptions with new silences to create a new past.

Even before the communist takeovers of the late 1940s, the people of Central Europe were long familiar with the nexus of historical memory and politics as well as the often painful process of being forced to relearn the past. The national movements that began in the nineteenth century, challenging Habsburg allegiances, were pioneered by men who constructed new national histories out of a combination of ethnic, royal, linguistic, and religious pasts. For ardent nationalists, inculcating a new (Czech or Hungarian or Polish) national understanding of the past was (as Communists would also later understand their proletarian task) a matter of awakening a people’s consciousness of who they ‘really were’. And as with communist rhetoric, national narratives helped in the first half of the twentieth century to create and destroy states and identities, scrambling individuals’ understanding of both history and self.

As Rév poignantly puts it, ‘after each turn Hungarians found themselves in a new world, living with a new past’.⁴ By 1950, a 50-year-old person in Kraków, Budapest, Vienna, Lvov, Kolozsvár, and Prague had each been through a related but different string of earth-shattering upheavals in which the past was as contested as the land itself. Residents of each city had begun the century alike within kaiserlich und königlich territory and had reached its midpoint in six separate states, four of which were now launching yet another new beginning.

So the communist states of Central Europe were by no means the first regimes in the region to revise the past in order to shape the present and future. But the scope of communist revisionism was both remarkable and vital. Communism was not just a governing ideology, but an all-absorbing ‘system of concepts’.⁵ Every existing event, person, and idea required a political and conceptual place, including the figures and moments that are the warp and woof of history. Even if the assigned position was oblivion, such silence requires intentional effort and the reordering of the remaining story.

But what has been silenced has a habit of re-emerging, and all reconstructions can be deconstructed. In the communist states of Europe, the very ideological centrality of history – both as a concept and as interpretations of the past – made these same regimes unusually vulnerable to the consequences of subsequent re-interpretation. History was a petard on which Communism could be hoisted. If the story communist states told their people about the past was undermined, then so too was their raison d’être and governing legitimacy.

The attention that communist authorities gave to historical interpretation marked it as an ongoing pressure point. ‘The regimes’ attempted production of new truths keeps history alive and under contention for everyone,’ wrote Simmonds-Duke two years before history had partial but decisive revenge in 1989. ‘By arguing over history, they have strengthened the past as a field for conducting significant discourse about the contemporary world and one’s place in it.’⁶

If this was true for the distant past or the details of closer moments in previous eras, how much more was it the case for recent history that had occurred under communist rule? Here was the most critical vulnerability of all. There was no history more important for communist regimes to control than the story of events almost universally remembered or experienced that had taken place on the watch and under the direction of those regimes. It was one thing to repaint the Reformation or erase Molotov–Ribbentrop, but it was quite another to bend and bury the historical memory of the late 1940s and early 1950s.

The ongoing attempts by the communist states of Central Europe to deal with their own recent past turned out to be the defining struggle of the 36 years they outlived Stalin. These regimes had to come to terms with their inaugural years of Stalinism in a way that preserved their authority. And their successes and failures in this endeavour proved equally damaging and decisive. This is particularly the case because the halting and tortured attempts at de-Stalinization after 1953 both framed and initiated the various movements and efforts at reform that followed. Furthermore, reform movements themselves joined the excesses of Stalinism as ideologically contested symbols.

In order to correct, or at least acknowledge, the wrongs of Stalinism, official views of the recent past had to be adjusted. How could this be done? How far could regimes go? And what would the consequences be? The unmarked graves of the victims of Stalinism ‘testified to the ill-conceived strength of […] those who had the right to take away names, leave graves unmarked, and write history by policing silence’, muses Rév. It was an illusory strength because ‘the nameless victims in the graves were also the objects of the executioners’ constant horror’.⁷ The power to kill is the ultimate sword in any state’s hands, but communist states wanted more: to plunge their dead victims into a non-existent historical void. But, ‘in this part of the world the dead, any dead, might resurface unannounced at any moment’.⁸ These dead men and women – Rajk, Slánský, Horáková, Nagy et al. – proved deafening within their historical silence.

The memory of Stalinism outlasted the policies that created it, the means that delivered it, and the powers that sought to forget it. But efforts to both remember and forget launched a struggle inside communist regimes – and between them and the public – about what these misdeeds were; what they meant for nation, state, and party; and how they should affect what happened next. In order to understand how the contest for interpreting the recent past shaped communist Central Europe, we have to first turn our attention to the roots, causes, events, and aftermath of Hungary’s 1956.

In Hungary’s unique experience of both Stalinism and its attempts to remember it, a startling defiance of communist rule and Soviet power emerged. But in the aftermath, the remembrance and contested meaning of 1956 itself became a similarly defining key of the regime, its right to rule, and its vulnerabilities. In other words, an even more potently contested recent memory lodged itself at the unspoken centre of the Hungarian body politic.

Despite the slower and distinct unspooling of Stalinism and its secrets in Czechoslovakia, we will likewise see the contest to define the recent past at the heart of the struggle between hardliners and reformers there, culminating in the Prague Spring. But what role did 1956 have in 1968? The events of 1956 in Hungary and 1968 in Czechoslovakia are now frequently linked together as the pre-eminent examples of both internal reform behind the iron curtain and the crushing of it by Soviet power. What about then? If the contested meaning of recent history was at the root of both these landmark years, what part did the memory and conception of 1956 play in 1968? How did the relevant parties view the context and precedent of 1956 in 1968? And how did they use the meaning they ascribed to those Hungarian events to both define the Prague Spring and justify their response to it?

In order to answer these questions we will have to look at the Soviets, as it was their interventions that most closely tie the two years together. But we will also look at the nature and impact of the contested meaning of 1956 in the ideas about the Prague Spring within both Czechoslovakia and it most relevant neighbour, Hungary.

In the devastated world of post–World War II Central Europe, communist rule was a novel departure. But within a few years the short histories of those new regimes were already burdensome legacies. How did the challenge to Communism’s mastery of the recent past shake its hold on the present and future, and how and why did the contested meanings that resulted guide the self-proclaimed masters?

Notes

1 E. M. Simmonds-Duke, ‘Was the Peasant Uprising a Revolution? The Meanings of a Struggle over the Past’, Eastern European Politics and Society , 1 (1987), 208. Orwell indicated a similar understanding in 1984 . The Party has the slogan: ‘Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.’

2 Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (London: Penguin, 1990), 51–58.

3 István Rév, Retroactive Justice: Prehistory of Post-Communism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 5–6.

4 Ibid., 7.

5 Érvín László, Individualism, Collectivism, and Political Power: A Relational Analysis of Ideological Conflict (Dordrecht: Springer, 1963), 134–35.

6 Simmonds-Duke, ‘Was the Peasant Uprising a Revolution?’, 189, 222.

7 Rév, Retroactive Justice , 32.

8 Ibid., 7.

Chapter 1

THE EXPORT AND IMPOSITION OF STALINISM

In order to consider the impact and influence of Stalinism on Central Europe, we must first understand how it arrived, the context of its arrival, and what it was. The advent of complete communist control in the places that, after the war, lay within the so-called Soviet sphere of interest and military control¹ is inseparable from the imposition of Stalinism because both developments originated in the same shifting tactics and will of the Soviet leader himself. It was most of all Stalin’s determination to impose total Soviet dominance in the region that endangered local variations on the path to Socialism in Central Europe, ensuring that its regimes would be forced to ape a fearful template from the Soviet late 1920s and 1930s.

So Stalinism in Central Europe is first of all defined by Stalin’s delayed insistence on imposing a uniform Soviet-inspired method of socialist development. And, above all, this consisted of rapid heavy industrialization, swift and brutal agricultural collectivization, and, most of all, a reign of state terror highlighted by show trials and purges inside the party and mass surveillance and incarceration outside of it. But by imposing this agenda across Central and Eastern Europe, Stalin added further ideological incongruities to an already confusing 30 years of contradictions.

The breakneck pace of industrialization and collectivization at the heart of Stalin’s Soviet model had, of course, been predicated on the fact that, in contradiction to Marxist theory, the 1917 revolution had occurred in an agriculturally based, semi-feudal society. Yet from the Second Congress of the Comintern in 1920, it was – in a strange inversion – Soviet development that would provide the model for European Communism. Soviet control of European Communists’ political tactics was henceforth a source of confusion. The popular front policy of collaboration with ‘bourgeois’ parties against Nazism and Fascism that the Comintern launched in the mid-1930s was a reversal of policy that was itself reversed even more dramatically after the Nazi–Soviet pact of 1939. The subsequently relaunched popular front policy that followed Operation Barbarossa was still the status quo in Soviet-dominated Central Europe when the war ended.

In 1945, therefore, the question of how Communism could be established in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and other liberated and defeated states – for both local Communists and their Soviet benefactors – was for the time being seen in the light of coalitions, cooperation, and gradualism. ‘From the classic formulations of Marx and Engels to the end of the communist system in Eastern Europe,’ Alfred Rieber explains, ‘Marxist theoreticians and communist party leaders wrestled with the dual problem of defining and managing the transition from bourgeois democracy to socialism.’² Would the context be allowed to determine the means of achieving this?

Even within Central Europe, the national contexts were very diverse. For example, on the one hand, there was Czechoslovakia which, particularly in the Czech lands, had an advanced economy with both a highly productive industrial base and a relatively prosperous and broad middle class. Furthermore, in the interwar years, Czechoslovakia had been established as a (mostly) liberal democracy, avoiding many of the common statist policies of its neighbours. In keeping with its well-established industrial strength, Czechoslovakia boasted a strong and historical communist movement. During the war, while Slovakia was an independent state allied with Nazi Germany, the Nazi-occupied Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia had been heavily utilized by Germany, leaving its economic infrastructure largely unscathed.³ Despite Slovakia’s war record, the Allies also regarded the entirety of re-established post-war Czechoslovakia as a liberated and victorious nation-state.⁴

Hungary presented a vastly different prospect. While 1918 had brought at least the partial fulfilment of Czech and Slovak national aspirations, it had marked the diminution of Hungary’s. Shorn of large swathes of the old Kingdom of Hungary by Trianon and hemmed in by new and often hostile neighbours, the remaining Hungarian rump had been emasculated by the post-Habsburg dismemberment. In the ensuing chaos, a Soviet Republic under Béla Kun had briefly seized power. After its collapse, it was followed by the ‘white terror’, in which Bolsheviks and suspected fellow-travellers were ruthlessly persecuted⁵ and a new conservative regency government formed under Admiral Miklós Horthy. In the interwar years, despite some significant industrial growth and the cosmopolitanism of Budapest, the economy remained largely agricultural. Reluctantly allying itself with Nazi Germany, Hungary also temporarily regained some of its lost territory in 1938 and 1940. But the German occupation that began in March 1944 presaged a devastating Soviet invasion that culminated in a 102-day siege of Budapest and complete Soviet occupation by 4 April 1945. Hungary, therefore, entered the era of Soviet domination as a defeated enemy,⁶ its infrastructure ravaged, and even paying reparations to Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia as well as the Soviet Union.⁷

Despite these great differences, in 1945, Czechoslovakia and Hungary were subject to the same Soviet will and pressure, often mediated through local allies. Make no mistake, it was the Soviet intention to ensure that Czechoslovakia and Hungary, along with all of Central and Eastern Europe, would be led by permanently fraternal governments in line with Soviet security concerns and political priorities. As was and is well understood, Stalin was convinced, in Mark Kramer’s words, ‘that he must prevent the re-emergence of hostile regimes anywhere along the Soviet Union’s western flank’.⁸ Furthermore, the war had caused a demographic and economic crisis in the Soviet Union, justifying, in Soviet eyes, the use of military domination for an unhindered plundering of man, beast, and machine.

But this did not necessarily mean either Soviet micromanagement or imposed pan-bloc uniformity. Stalin had abolished the Comintern in 1943, and as far back as 1928, the Soviet leader had mused about the differing paths of neighbouring nations: ‘There are no grounds for doubt that Poland and Romania⁹ belong to that number of countries that will have to pass through several more or less rapid intermediate stages on the road to the dictatorship of the proletariat.’¹⁰ This category or concept in which various paths and speeds to Socialism could be permitted seemed to have only broadened by the time Stalin said in May 1946 that ‘the democracy in Poland, Yugoslavia and partly in Czechoslovakia is a democracy that brings you close to socialism without the need to establish a dictatorship of the proletariat’. A few months later he even advised Bulgarian communists that ‘it is necessary to use different methods and forms and not copy the Russian Communists who in their time were in an entirely different position’.¹¹

Therefore, in the immediate post-war years, communist parties in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and elsewhere were, with Soviet support and direction, steadily – rather than suddenly – expanding their influence and power within coalition governments, particularly making use of control over ministries of the interior. They were also doing so in a context in which non-Communists were working towards communist aims. For example, in the autumn of 1945, the Czechoslovak government initiated a sweeping nationalization policy. These incremental, partly collaborative, and nationally distinct developments¹² were widely regarded by communist leaders as part of a potentially long and elaborate stage – departing from the Soviet model – in the transition to Socialism: people’s democracy. Like many others, in Hungary, Imre Nagy ‘conceived of people’s democracy as an extended transitional form. For that reason he regarded its structures and institutions as important and worthy of protection’.¹³ When Nagy would later lead the attempt to unravel Hungarian Stalinism, his prior expectation became a critique of the people and policies that had swiftly brought this fledgling phase to an end.

It is certainly true that there was a large degree of continuity in Soviet plans and intentions for its supposed sphere. And the relative democracy that Hungary experienced under Soviet direction from 1945 to 1947 can and has been exaggerated in the light of subsequent tyranny. László Borhi has explained that ‘in Hungary, the Communist penetration of national and local institutions of government and other centres of power, the piecemeal Sovietization of the economy, police, and army, the gradual elimination of democratic political elements and cultural diversity were concealed by the maintenance of uneasy coalition governance’.¹⁴ As both domestic opponents and Western observers mostly failed to adequately appreciate at the time, post-war communist advocacy and participation in coalitions, popular fronts, and liberal democratic forms were always only tactics designed to lead to something beyond them.

But we must also be careful not to stretch this observation too far and think of the switch from coalition to dictatorship in the late 1940s as simply the exact unfurling of a preconceived inevitability. The very differences in timing, procedure, and results in the transition to complete communist control within Central and Eastern Europe demonstrate that the phenomenon was not the godlike implementation of an omnipotent Soviet will but a delicate and changeable process, subject to numerous contingencies.¹⁵ As Borhi also notes, ‘There is no evidence for the existence of a blueprint for Communist takeover.’¹⁶ For example, it was the Soviets who insisted in the autumn of 1945 that occupied Hungary quickly hold a national parliamentary election to install a non-provisional government, confident that, thanks to Soviet and local communist patronage and pressure, a popular mandate for Hungarian Communism would be achieved.¹⁷

But, instead, the Communist Party (Magyar Kommunista Párt: MKP) was crushed in the elections of November 1945, with the Independent Smallholders’ Party (Független Kisgazdapárt: FKgP) garnering nearly 60 per cent of the vote compared to the MKP’s paltry 17 per cent. The road to a communist Hungary would, therefore, have to be both more careful and ultimately more coercive. ‘There is evidence that well into 1946,’ insists Robert Gellately, ‘the Soviet dictator was ruminating that, all in all, it might be advisable to have Hungary remain a bourgeois-style democracy for a while longer.’¹⁸

Nevertheless, in 1947, Stalin halted the accommodations and compromises that had characterized both the popular front and the concept of people’s democracy.¹⁹ The policy lines and directives of the Soviet Union had long been obeyed by national communist parties, but in post-war Czechoslovakia and Hungary (and across the region) these diktats now had the force and impetus of Soviet military and political hegemony. ‘By late 1946 and early 1947,’ Kramer identifies, ‘[Stalin] had begun urging east European Communist leaders to abandon their cooperation with non-Communist parties and to take bolder actions to ensure the Communists’ victory.’²⁰

It must be noted again, in order to understand what unfolds below, that this tactical shift was framed, in general, by Stalin’s ongoing national security fears and concerns and, in particular, by the Soviet desire to consolidate the geopolitical advantages it had won in the war. These were strategic concerns to which tactical elements had to conform. Two developments in 1947 particularly underlined and defined this shift and its motivation.

Securing the legal permanence of the de facto post-war European balance of power was a key Soviet priority and, in retrospect, it is clear that this factor had temporarily stayed Stalin’s hand. While the peace treaties with five German wartime allies – Bulgaria, Finland, Hungary, Italy, and Romania – were in negotiation, these countries were still, in theory at least, under joint Allied supervision. However, once the treaties were signed in Paris on 10 February 1947, the brakes could safely come off Soviet-sponsored communist activity within Bulgaria, Hungary, and Romania particularly.²¹ Ironically, the formal restoration of these nation-states’ independence presaged a more aggressive stage of Soviet-directed subordination.

In Romania, as Gerhard Wettig notes, ‘the Kremlin was determined to eliminate the opposition as soon as possible but waited until the allies had signed the Romanian peace treaty […] Then the opposition was smashed.’²² Meanwhile, in Bulgaria, whose occupation by the Red Army had already facilitated a more dominant communist position and a national front government that was a blatant front for communist control, the treaties likewise triggered an escalation: ‘general terrorization and prosecution of the opposition began in February 1947’.²³ Most relevantly for this study, in Hungary the treaty was followed by a withering communist campaign against its chief political rival, the FKgP.

It was in February 1947 that Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov informed the MKP leader, Mátyás Rákosi, that he should adopt a policy of ‘more pronounced class struggle’.²⁴ Already in January, members of the FKgP had been arrested on trumped-up conspiracy charges. But in the wake of the treaty signing, the FKgP secretary, Béla Kovács, a leading force within the Smallholders and long a target of communist attack, was ensnared. The Hungarian parliament refused to lift Kovács’s immunity, but, after being interrogated by the ÁVO (the Hungarian political police), Kovács was arrested by the Soviet MGB (predecessor of the KGB) on the specious charge of ‘setting up underground anti-Soviet armed groups, the members of which committed acts of terrorism and murder on Hungarian territory against members of the Soviet armed forces’.²⁵ He would remain in Soviet captivity until 1955.

With the intensification of MKP attacks on its main rival, using Soviet forces to openly and extrajudicially silence a prominent leader on fictitious charges, a Rubicon had been crossed. In the coming months, scores of Smallholders were put on trial for their part in the ‘conspiracy’ before the Ministry of Interior–controlled (and therefore MKP-controlled) People’s Tribunal.²⁶ A few weeks after Kovács’s arrest, former FKgP vice president, Dr György Donáth, was sentenced to death.²⁷ Then, in May, with the encouragement of Stalin, Rákosi used false implications extracted from Kovács to pressurize Prime Minister Ferenc Nagy, also a Smallholder, into resigning and remaining in Switzerland (where he was on holiday).²⁸ From this point forward, the FKgP crumbled before an emboldened MKP that was hollowing out all meaningful opposition from within the government.

A second 1947 landmark that served as both a sign and an impetus of the Soviet-directed seizure of total power across its European sphere was the formation of the Cominform²⁹ in September.³⁰ It took place in the Polish border town of Szklarska Porȩba, where the Soviets gathered communist leaders of Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, France, Hungary, Italy, Romania, Poland, the Soviet Union, and Yugoslavia. Stalin’s purpose for the gathering and the new organization was, as Tony Judt puts it, to decisively ‘re-establish Soviet dominion’ over European communism. Both ‘national roads to Socialism’ and coalition politics were categorically dismissed, as the Soviet Politburo member Zhdanov pontificated on the two irreconcilable camps in world politics. Afterwards, ‘Communists everywhere switched to confrontational tactics: strikes, demonstrations, campaigns against the Marshall Plan and – in eastern Europe – acceleration of the takeover of power.’³¹

In this way, both the ongoing establishment of the Soviet sphere’s external borders and its increasingly Soviet-directed uniformity ensured that Czechoslovakia and Hungary (and other satellite states) would experience two crucial processes. First, the way for existing national communist leaders to consolidate their hold on party and state power was to cleave to Stalinist models and Soviet loyalty at the explicit expense of local preferences and contexts. This was now non-negotiable and it inexorably pulled local communist leaders away from the people they led at the very time that their authority strengthened, creating a perversely