A Taste of Ashes: The Afterlife of Totalitarianism in Eastern Europe by Marci Shore, and: The Communist Quest for National Legitimacy in Europe, 1918–1989 ed. by Martin Mevius (review)

A quarter of a century after the collapse of Communism in Eastern and Central Europe, a salient question remains: how could such a manifestly unpopular, ineffective, corrupt system have lasted so long? A simple answer is that Soviet power and the cooperation of opportunistic local traitors were what preserved the system. But even though these factors were crucial, there was actually much more involved. That is the issue taken up by these two very different books.

Among the “Soviet satellites” (leaving aside Yugoslavia and Albania), Poland’s anti-German, largely anti-Communist wartime movement was crushed first by the Nazis in 1944, as the Red Army stood by unwilling to help, and was then brutally finished off by the Soviet Union after the war. Poland had a weak and unpopular Communist party, but the Communists were ideologically committed enough to help Sovietization. Much the same was true elsewhere, even among Germany’s wartime allies, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria. The Communist movements there during World War II were small and ineffective, but enough true believers were present to organize and lead the postwar opportunists who joined only after 1944–1945. In Czechoslovakia, a large, popular Communist movement appealed broadly to a people who felt they had been betrayed by the Western democracies in 1938.

We now know how difficult it is to impose a whole new sociopolitical and economic system on an invaded country purely by force. So, despite the USSR’s huge military advantage, it is unlikely that Communist institutions would have proved so durable for four decades without the cooperation of native, albeit subservient, Communist governments and bureaucracies. Who were the early true believers who worked with the Soviet Union to establish Communist rule? Many of those who became faithful Communists could hardly be classified as mere criminal hypocrites. They were idealists who, after the horrors of fascism, believed that Communism offered the best hope for their nations’ future despite its shortcomings and cruelty. For many of them, even the worst Stalinism was better than Hitlerism. To condemn them in hindsight is not only simplistic but suggests a lack of understanding of how dire the situation was after six years of war and Nazi domination.

The book edited by Martin Mevius shows that Stalinism learned to adapt to nationalism by attempting to seize and control it. To the extent that these efforts succeeded, the Communists gained greater legitimacy that allowed them to consolidate their rule. Mevius’s introduction is, unfortunately, quite unfair in suggesting that somehow this dynamic has been missed by most prior analysis. Marxist-Leninist theory certainly disliked nationalism, but Iosif Stalin and Communist parties controlled by his Cominform were not fools. They knew that nationalism had to be accommodated, not just frontally denounced.

An essay by Xosé-Manoel Núñez and José Faraldo about the Spanish Civil War shows how desperately the Spanish Communists tried to present themselves as the true Spanish nationalists fighting against German and Italian intervention while also accommodating themselves to Basque and Catalan nationalism. Their appeals had some effect among leftists who were not inherently Communist, even if behind the scenes Stalin’s agents were pursing their duplicitous agenda of destroying Trotskyites and potential opposition within Republican ranks rather than maintaining alliances to rebuff Francisco Franco’s army.

Yanis Sygkelos’s chapter on Bulgaria from 1944 to 1948 repeats the same theme, showing how Communists used nationalist stories to legitimize themselves. Unfortunately, Sygkelos stops in 1948 and misses the last decade of Communist rule, when a failing Bulgarian regime desperately turned to crude demonization of its minority Turks and Muslims to try to rally nationalist sentiment. In fact that is the real story throughout the region. Initially, Communists attached local nationalism to anti-fascism, but as...