In 1945 and 1946 the Communists entrenched themselves, working out how to take power. In the summer of 1946 the matter became urgent. The failure of the Council of Foreign Ministers to agree as to Germany’s future was followed, that September, by the speech of James F. Byrnes in Stuttgart, to the effect that a German state in the west was under examination; Bizonia had already been announced, and its economic council was to be the nucleus of a West German government. Poland, in her strategic position, was then taken over by Stalin. It was important to discredit the non-Communists in Western eyes, and of course old Poland could be caricatured as a place of great estates and downtrodden peasants. There was some truth in this, but not much: the country had made considerable but unsung progress between the wars. Anti-semitism could also be used to discredit the anti-Communists, and there were indeed murderous clashes as Jews returned, trying to recover their property. The Cardinal Prince Sapieha himself was tactless, saying after an incident in the summer of 1946 that there were too many Jews in a government ‘the nation does not wish’. In saying this he was only echoing a widespread peasant opinion that rząd jest zażydzony — ‘the government is judaized’ — and at a time when almost all of Western opinion sympathized with the Jews, such lines were not helpful.
The Communists mobilized their supporters, awarding them lands and houses evacuated by the three million Germans in 1945-6, whether in Silesia, Pomerania or southern East Prussia, and by April 1946 were being pressed by the Western ambassadors for proper elections. These could be postponed for a time, with reference to the endless movement of people, but not for ever; they needed preparation. In June there was a dress rehearsal — a referendum, containing three questions inviting the answer ‘yes’ (e.g. whether to approve of the new western borders). That allowed a drawing up of electoral lists, and a noting down of who was who. The next stage was to gain the alliance of left-wing elements outside the Party, much as the Bolsheviks had done in 1917, with the Left of the Socialist Revolutionaries. The Communists took over the trade unions, with endless detailed manoeuvering in committees where the agenda was ‘fixed’ by a Communist nominee. That way, ‘the organized discontent of the masses’ could be deployed against any independent voice. Besides, the Communists allocated land and housing, and could therefore arrange for whole blocks and factories to vote in unison. ‘Anti-Fascism’ was a weapon to use against opposition, and a dissident party was simply outlawed; with some left-wing socialist help a new electoral law was passed in September. Another scheme was to establish dummy parties, pretending to be properly Catholic or Liberal or Peasant; the real ones could then, again, be outlawed; and opposition media could be silenced. There were even some supposedly realistic Catholics, such as the journalist Stefan Kisielewski, who called for a Catholic bloc acceptable to both sides. When the election occurred, ‘List Three’, ‘the Democratic bloc’, won 80 per cent of the vote with 90 per cent participation, whole factories and housing blocks voting together: there had been 15,000 arrests and 10 per cent of the opposition (PSL) offices were simply closed. The non-Communist ministers, still theoretically in charge of their second- and third-rank ministries, found their telephones disconnected and their secretaries sabotaging correspondence. The Western embassies collected tales of all this and protested, but the Communists could weasel out. When the parliament met, in January 1947, with its handful of real opposition deputies, these behaved bravely, but, fearing for their lives, fled abroad.
In Germany, Soviet policy somewhat varied. On the one side were demands for reparations, and much of industry in the Soviet zone was dismantled. But on the other, the zone was supposed to be an advertisement for socialism, or, at the very least, to show that a neutral, unified Germany would have nothing to fear from Moscow, somewhat in the manner of Finland. In 1945 revenge was the dominant note. All along there had been friction in the German capital. Almost as soon as they occupied the city, the Russians had flown in old German Communists from Moscow, with an idea of controlling their zone through apparently democratic methods. To start with, the Communists announced that they would co-operate with other anti-Fascist parties and not insist on a full-scale Communist programme. They would, for instance, have a land reform, but one designed to break up the estates of the ‘reactionaries’ and grant land to small farmers (who were expected, as in Poland or the Czech lands, then to support the Communists). But elections did not go their way — hardly surprisingly, since at the time the Red Army had acquired a terrible reputation for looting and raping, and a quarter of the industrial installations of the zone were being dismantled. When free elections were held in Austria and Hungary (November 1945) the Communists did badly, and in Hungary had to be given an artificially powerful place in the government (controlling the police). One solution would be to force the Social Democratic Party (SDP) (and the trade unions) into a Communist framework — a united workers’ party — and to muzzle any other parties. That last was easy enough, and the leaders (of the Christian Democrats and the Liberal Democrats) were just expelled, while dummies took their places. No more opposition from that quarter. The Social Democrats, collecting roughly two thirds of the vote, were more difficult, and the picture was complicated. Most Social Democrats were not unsympathetic at least to co-operation with the Communists. They regarded the recent German past with horror, some had spent time in concentration camps, and almost all felt that the failure of the two working-class parties to collaborate against Hitler had been a main cause of the Nazi catastrophe. In some cases, there was an idea that the Soviet Union alone offered a real chance that Germany could be a united, democratic and neutral country, like an enormous version of Finland, and maybe there would be concessions as to the border with Poland. Gustav Dahrendorf, who had been a member of the Reichstag before Hitler came to power, dallied with such ideas in 1945 and early in 1946. But the Communists behaved in a devious and bullying way, repellent to democrats, and they also resorted to force, kidnapping opposition figures. Meanwhile, they activated a form of the Nazi system of local control. Under the Nazis, each block of flats had its political supervisor, who snooped and bullied. The Communists reintroduced the system. When it came to political or trade union meetings, they were also skilled at the tactics employed by revolutionary minorities throughout history: ‘packing’ key committees with their own place-men, putting essential details into the small print, preventing opponents from attending meetings, deploying boring and lengthy speeches as a way of emptying a hall of moderate opponents and then taking a snap vote, provided they had the chairman in their pocket. In that way the trade union elections in Berlin produced a Communist majority (just as had happened in Russia, with the Soviets, in the later months of 1917). In any case, there was the Soviet military presence, as a great threat: the Social Democrats were forced to hold all meetings jointly with the Communists, Russian officers in plain clothes, with stenographers, in attendance. The Russians forced out opposition SPD figures, replacing them with men who supported fusion. Late in 1945 the SPD passed a firm resolution that there would have to be a fusion of the parties at national, not zonal, level, though they refused to present a joint list of candidates at the next elections. In this way, the Social Democratic Party of the eastern zone was fused with the Communist one in April 1946.