Part of the reason the SED did not proceed with show trials was that the process was overtaken by social turmoil. Back in April 1952, when the East German leaders visited Stalin, he warned them to go slow with their “kulaks,” and to proceed modestly in organizing collective farms. He agreed they should firm up the border and recruit more guards, and after the SED bosses returned home, on May 26, they all but sealed the country off from the outside world. Yet they wanted to do more and prevailed on Stalin in July for permission to embark on what they called “the construction of the fundamentals of socialism.” Their eschatological vision of a new, better world haunted every step they then took, from forcing small farmers into collectives, to confiscating the properties of private businesses. Following the Stalinist model, their new five-year plan emphasized heavy industry over consumer goods. Early in 1953, and in response to what was called “ideologial laxness,” the SED regime imposed new higher quotas on the people and a “strict economy.”56
Soviet officials, as well as some German ones, grew alarmed at the sheer volume of the arrests that soon resulted. In May 1953 Beria expressed dismay at East Berlin’s ham-handed methods and the large numbers fleeing the country because of its social policies.57 By June 2 the Soviet Council of Ministers called SED leaders to Moscow and told them in no uncertain terms to deal with “the serious dissatisfaction” and “mass flight of residents,” that is, to reverse course. They were instructed to cease the radical drive to socialism and restore a semblance of legal rights.58
Whatever fitful efforts were made in East Germany by the SED, they failed to stem the immediate tide of unrest that began erupting during the second week of June 1953. There were similar rumbles of discontent at this time also in Czechoslovakia, Romania, Hungary, and Bulgaria, though these were soon contained.59 In East Berlin and the GDR, however, popular defiance culminated in a mass uprising on June 17. Soviet and East German officials were shocked at the scale of the events, which (Soviet documents said) affected 270 or so towns and as many as 157,000 strikers and 335,000 demonstrators.60 Although one Pravda reporter confided in a note to his editor that the outburst was not all that significant and likely organized by the West, the uprising became the biggest protest against Stalinization since the war and was put down only by declaring martial law.61
The Soviet Council of Ministers brought in the leaders of most of the Communist parties during June and July. The message was like that given the Hungarians on June 13: they had made bad judgments—admittedly sometimes following mistaken orders from Moscow, in fact Stalin, and they all needed to take a “new course” that was less likely to spark popular unrest. The Hungarian boss Rákosi, however, was held responsible for most of the errors in his country, where the situation was getting out of control. As Beria put it, “If the great Stalin made mistakes, Comrade Rákosi can admit that he made mistakes too.” At another meeting on June 16, the Hungarians were given specific directives, and while Rákosi was permitted to keep control of the party, he was replaced as prime minister by Imre Nagy, a longtime Communist known to be more moderate.62 Moscow expected Nagy to act in character and what he did with relatively small concessions was to “lift the lid off the pot” and let out steam.63 The effort worked for a time, though not enough to avert the eruption of the Hungarian revolution in October 1956, savagely repressed by direct Red Army intervention to underline the country’s vassal status.
It turned out that Moscow was not really interested in backing reformers, and in one country after the next the “new course” set after Stalin’s death was soon derailed.64 With the Cold War already well under way, and the Korean War continuing, U.S. policy on the front lines in Germany and Berlin during the June events in 1953 was cautious to the point of appearing “impotent.”65 Given the rapid intervention of Soviet troops, any action by the West to support the German protesters in 1953 would have been unrealistic. The SED regime faced a mass of discontent, and yet regardless of what it conceded, it “could not keep up with the shifting complexity of its populace, which required ever more personalized cajoling and coercion.”66 In the wake of the uprising East German officials began to build anew a Soviet-style state and resorted to fostering the Stasi. On August 13, 1961, in order to stop the mass flight from the country, they constructed the Berlin Wall.
It was then that the sense of powerlessness really hit families like Joachim Gauck’s. The Wall forced them and all East Germans to adjust, and yet they had to go on living, so if they could not travel to neighboring Denmark anymore for an ice cream, they convinced themselves that their own was better anyway. Looking back in his recently published memoirs, Gauck said: “That was how we often declared the abnormal to be the normal, in order not to be overwhelmed from pain, fury and rage.”67
But what kind of system had to lock all its citizens in? During the existence of the Wall up to November 9, 1989, a mere 16,348 managed to escape, while tens of thousands were arrested and hundreds were shot for attempting to do so.68 We can gain some insight into the process that produced the GDR through the massive documentation relating to and collected by the Stasi. These materials are held at the new institution established when the Wall came down in 1989 and subsequently led by Joachim Gauck.
Gauck, a Protestant minister, had his first experience with the secret police when he was six years old. His father, Joachim Gauck Sr., went to visit his mother on her birthday on June 27, 1951; she had just turned seventy-one. Gauck Jr. remembered the date, because that day his father disappeared or, as the expression went, he was “picked up” (abgeholt). No one would say where he was, what he had done, or even if he was still alive. Gauck Sr. was a works inspector at the Rostock shipyard, and a former boss had written to him from West Berlin with an invitation to visit. Gauck never responded, and yet the police heard something and put him before a military tribunal that gave him twenty-five years for “espionage.” He received another twenty-five for “anti-Soviet activities,” because after they searched his home they found a technical journal published in the West.
“The charges were arbitrary,” said Gauck Jr., “and followed the principle: If we already have the person, we’ll soon find a crime.” Without permitting a word to his family, the authorities shipped his father to deepest Siberia. He was fortunate to survive and was released on October 19, 1955, as part of the “thaw” following Stalin’s death.69 If the elder Gauck could have foreseen the future, he would not have believed that one day his son would become the president of a free and united Germany, as indeed happened when Joachim Gauck took the oath of office on March 23, 2012.
CHAPTER 21
Stalin’s Last Will and Testament