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Alexey Tikhomirov is assistant professor of East European history at Bielefeld University Pages:
384 • Trim: 6⅜ x 9
978-1-66691-189-3
• Hardback • March 2022 • $125.00 •
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978-1-66691-191-6
• Paperback • August 2023 • $42.99 •
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978-1-66691-190-9
• eBook • March 2022 • $40.50 •
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From
the “Red Tyrant” to the
“Liberator” The Image of Stalin in the Soviet
Occupation Zone of Germany
THE
POLITICS OF HATE: TOWARD AN EMOTIONAL ECONOMY OF VICTOR AND VANQUISHED
In the German Empire, the East had long been associated with disorder, backwardness, and barbarism. As Gregor Thum observed, Germany saw the “east” as the antithesis of the “civilized” West, a “mythical landscape” onto which Germans could project their anti-Western and antimodern fantasies. Caricatures depicting Russians with Asiatic features and wearing Cossack hats had been part of German visual memory since World War I. Verbally, in Nazi propaganda they were “Asiatic hordes,” “bloodthirsty murderers,” “death” itself, or the “Devil,” barely human creatures who threatened the security of the “national community” and the well-being of Western civilization as a whole. The visual norms mentioned above were reinforced by anti-Semitic images; in the Third Reich, they were combined to create the topos of the “Jewish-Bolshevik menace” to Europe. This amplified the crucial binary, which was highly charged in visual and verbal content, pitting the “master race” (Herrenmenschen), that is, the German “Aryan race,” against the “sub-humans” (Untermenschen), Slavs, Jews, Sinti, and Roma in a lifeor-death struggle. Ritualistic humiliation of Jews and other members of local populations displayed the hierarchy and differences between the “higher” and the “lower races,” which were integral to realizing the German project of conquest in the East. The Nazi image of intellectually backward, uncultured, physically underdeveloped Slavs justified violence on the Eastern front. As a result, Stalin himself came to embody the “dangerous and wild, culturally backward and Asiatic country,” and anxiety about pan-Slavism, global proletarian revolution, and a worldwide Jewish conspiracy surged. By describing him as a “bloodthirsty and soulless tyrant,” “the incarnation of the JudeoBolshevik threat,” “the embodiment of death, famine, and destruction,” and “a fiend from hell and the devil himself,” Nazi propaganda turned Stalin into the personification of several stereotypes of the abhorred communist enemy. On the Soviet side, long before the war ended, the leadership began to define the normative emotions, rituals, and practices needed to emotionally manage its army. In the fight against Nazi Germany, the Red Army constituted an emotional community mobilized by hatred of the Germans. The Soviet leadership pursued a deliberate, carefully constructed policy of revenge and retribution with roots in the decade preceding the war. As Soviet society became increasingly militarized in the 1930s, representations of “fascist agents” were integrated into the narrative legitimating the Great Purges of 1937–1938. During the Great Fatherland War, the well-known novelist and journalist Ilya Ehrenburg’s reports of Nazi atrocities appeared in the army newspaper Krasnaia Zvezda (Red Star). His soldier-readers took his precepts, such as “The best Germans are dead Germans,” as a guide to action. At the front, Soviet propagandists demanded retaliation and informed the troops about the Wehrmacht’s brutal crimes. Frontline newspapers reported on how cruelly the Nazis treated civilians and published instructions about which emotions the troops should express to the enemy and how a real soldier should conduct himself in war. In parallel, the print media celebrated instances of soldiers’ heroism and bravery. Even the Red Army intelligentsia showed a marked readiness to take revenge. Jewish soldiers at the front spoke of a “double hatred”: the desire to avenge both their ravaged Soviet homeland and the annihilation of the Jewish people. Likewise, the dominant feeling of hostility toward Germans was certainly a factor in the positive way local populations received Soviet soldiers during the liberation of Poland and Czechoslovakia. The national camp’s program in postwar Poland demanded that at least three Germans be killed to avenge the death of each Pole, calling for “German soldiers [to] fertilize our soil en masse.” As witnesses to (and often victims of) Nazi arbitrariness, local communities were “powder kegs” of hate for the occupiers. In Warsaw, the “civic code of morality” made the rounds in the underground press and leaflets with the slogan “A nation’s greatest defeat is its humiliation.” Because the urge for revenge drove the patriotic national powers, the Red Army was partly seen as a liberating force in the fight against a common enemy. Soldiers were emotionally mobilized before the battle on a daily basis to boost their morale. To activate the desire for retaliation, reports were presented to the troops as well as discussions about what the enemy was doing to the Soviet homeland: the plundering and the damage they caused, not to mention the unprecedented scale of human casualties. At one of these meetings, each member of the Komsomol was told to write down in a shared notebook what his own family had suffered at the hands of the Germans. With their officers standing by, soldiers pledged to take revenge on the enemy. Listovki—sheets of paper—reprinted the oath soldiers took to fight against the enemy and distributed information about enemy atrocities against civilians and POWs. Official reports from the front made it clear that the politics of hatred was justified. However, in the spring of 1945, Soviet commanders tried to reduce the hate propaganda in an attempt to curtail the violence accompanying the Red Army’s advance on European territory. On February 9, 1945, appealing to Red Army soldiers, Krasnaia Zvezda proclaimed, “We aren’t Germans, we don’t kill women and children.”Moscow’s directives ordered soldiers to renounce retribution and treat German civilians more humanely. However, establishing order in the army remained beyond Moscow’s reach, and the troops’ desire for vengeance intensified as the Red Army drew closer to Berlin. The escalating violence was largely the result of war propaganda which incited Soviet citizens to hate the Germans and taught soldiers that it was their “moral duty” to avenge the suffering of their families and the destruction of their motherland. This propaganda was grounded in the collective memory of the well-known Russian saying, with its biblical roots, “He who raises the sword will die by the sword”. The Soviets depicted the war as a sacred struggle of “good” against “evil.” After the capture of Berlin, in their letters home, Red Army soldiers called themselves “victors” who had killed the “beast” in the “fascist predator’s lair.”Comparing Nazi crimes to the monstrous acts of nonhuman creatures gave the soldiers of the liberating army a completely free hand to take revenge, because the sacred mission of protecting their own families, their communities, and the state justified violence. Revenge also became a permissible motive for retaliating against the Germans. “Death for death, blood for blood. I don’t feel sorry for these people-haters, these animals,” as Russian officer Vladimir Gelfand noted in his diary when he crossed the border into Germany in the spring of 1945. As a result, on German soil Red Army soldiers described themselves as “masters of the situation” who held the fate of the German people and the German state in their hands. They saw their arbitrary use of power as the workings of “the court of the victor” and “the court of history” or as “compensation.” From a military perspective, acts of vengeance were valid as the lawful exercise of justice. Soviet soldiers’ written communication with their families and relatives on the home front played a crucial role in legitimating revenge. They interpreted vengeance as a moral duty and, in their letters to friends and family members at home, they felt obliged to report on how they were carrying out this imperative. They described what they observed about the defeated people from this perspective. As a soldier wrote on May 9, 1945, “I ran and looked at the Berliners. Overcome with shame, they couldn’t look you right in the eye. The ones who wanted to defeat us in 2 months are now lying at our feet.” Letters from the home front were also intended to maintain Red Army morale through personal reports of enemy atrocities and the scale of human suffering under Nazi occupation. In collective letters from working collectives, people thanked Red Army soldiers for their heroism and for defending them against the enemy. For both sides, empathy and compassion for the enemy were taboo. Under the moral mandate to exact vengeance, these were signs of unmanly, unpatriotic weakness. A Red Army soldier confirmed the mood among his comrades as they invaded German territory: “We are taking revenge for everything, for our wounds, for Leningrad, for Moscow, for the children and the old people, for our girls.” Thus, hate took on the emotional force of moral duty, linking the front lines with the home front through the civic duty enjoined on both realms to participate in the shared struggle against the enemy. “LIBERATOR,” NOT “VICTOR”. On May 13, 1945, a German translation of Stalin’s radio broadcast to the Soviet people was read out to Germans to mark the end of the Great Patriotic War: The great day of victory over Germany has come. Fascist Germany, forced to its knees by the Red Army and the troops of our allies, has acknowledged itself defeated and declared its unconditional surrender . . . The great sacrifices we made in the name of the freedom and independence of our Motherland, the innumerable privations and sufferings our people endured during the war, the hard work in the rear and at the front laid on the altar of our fatherland were not in vain and have been crowned by our complete victory over the enemy . . . Three years ago, Hitler publicly announced that his mission was to dismember the Soviet Union and wrest the Caucasus, the Ukraine, Belorussia, the Baltic lands, and other regions from it. He openly announced that “We will destroy Russia so that it can never rise again.” That was three years ago. But Hitler’s wild ideas were fated never to come to pass. The course of the war scattered them like dust. In fact, what happened was the exact opposite of what the Hitlerites raved about. Germany was smashed to pieces. The German troops are surrendering. The Soviet Union is celebrating its victory, although it does not intend to dismember or destroy Germany. Comrades! The Great Patriotic War has ended with our complete victory. The war in Europe has ended. An era of peaceful development has begun. The Soviet leader signified that the war had ended with the long-awaited word: “Victory!” The triumphant victory of the Soviet people was the Germans’ traumatic defeat. The figure of speech Stalin used—“Germany on its knees”—emphasized that the enemy had been humiliated and dishonored. After the war ended, Stalin demanded repentance and shame for Nazi crimes from the Germans. As a result, the population, crushed by the defeat, met the victors with red armbands and white ones and hung out red and white flags. These were the visible symbols of capitulation; they acknowledged the Red Army’s role as the victor. At the Potsdam Conference, answering Truman’s question about how the “concept of Germany” should be defined, Stalin continued to use the rhetoric of the winner of the war. He said, This is a country without a government [and] without borders because the borders have not been determined by our troops. Germany does not have troops, including border troops, it is divided into zones of occupation. It is a defeated and broken country. On the level of symbolic politics, this statement depreciated the country’s sovereignty, the source of the state’s national honor and dignity. Rhetoric of this kind, emphasizing the former enemy’s humiliation and its greatly diminished status in the international arena, intensified the Soviet people’s pride in their triumph. In Germany, during the first postwar months of 1945, visual markers of the Red Army’s victory appeared in public spaces throughout the Soviet zone. These signs publicly proclaimed the hierarchy that would prevail in the conquerors’ communication to the defeated. Posters with the caption “What Comrade Stalin Says about Germany and the German People” were put up all over East Germany. These posters listed the decisions made at the Potsdam Conference. They were produced in print runs of 210,000 and sent to every military commandant’s office in the Soviet zone. At the same time, the population became familiar with a new image of Stalin as the victor on whose will and words the fate of the German people would henceforth depend. A middle-school mathematics teacher in Bernau reacted to the postwar Soviet representations of power with the observation that “The victors are not judged for what they have done. Those who are defeated are always to blame and have to answer for everything.” The image of Stalin as the victor was promoted against a backdrop of mass disillusionment with Hitler, whose cult had been the mainstay of the Third Reich’s political system. For German society, the only way to defend itself and rationalize the defeat was to distance itself from the crimes of national socialism by ascribing all sins to Hitler. With the loss of the former sacral center of power, which had been the source of social integration for the “racial community” or Volksgemeinschaft, apathy, despair, and feelings of alienation and depression washed over the population. An ordinary citizen named Klaus Gerber wrote that The great disappointment in what we so blindly believed, that national socialism was the only possible form of rule, has depressed us. Little by little we have begun to realize that this is not so! This was a shock: suddenly everything changed, it was no [longer] majestic and absolute but became a criminal political system. The “old” values had collapsed, but the “new” ones created more fear and distrust than hope and optimism about the future. Humiliated and dishonored, the German “society of the catastrophe” needed new narratives and visions which they could believe in—ones offering a fresh strategy for development and liberation from the “dark past,” narratives and imaginations which would justify the difficulties of postwar reality and open a perspective on a successful future. A society in ruins needed a different system of coordinates: new goals, tasks, values, different points of reference and fresh tactics, strategies, emotions, and moral norms. This system might not only lead it out of the crisis of defeat but could also reunite diverse segments of the German population divided by their traumatic experiences, and give them a revitalized, positive way of seeing themselves. From the “Red Tyrant” to the “Liberator” To a certain degree, the Soviet occupation authorities were able to respond to this challenge quickly. In close cooperation with the SED, they set about constructing political “myths of a beginning,” official narratives about the new start which would legitimate the political order of the occupation, create a new sense of “we,” and lay the foundations for the population’s loyalty to the postwar order. Narratives about how the Red Army had freed the German people from fascism and the myth of German antifascism played key roles in defining East Germans’ new self-understanding. These narratives soon became personified, incorporating the Soviet leader’s image, which merged with the myths, symbols, and rituals of the Stalin cult. In fact, plans for East Germany’s development along Soviet lines were essentially a search for a new Führer, that is, another leader-messiah who would enable the nation to achieve its desired goals. The way forward would be to work side by side with the Soviet Union, to build socialism together as brothers and friends, not sworn enemies. Examining each of the propaganda narratives mentioned above in more detail will make this clearer. During the final period of the war, the population viewed, and had been primed to view, Soviet soldiers as rapists, marauders, thieves, and murderers, not liberators. To replace these negative impressions with a positive image of Red Army soldiers, narratives about how these soldiers had freed Germany from Nazi rule had to be created and popularized. As occurred in the Soviet Union, the concepts of “Stalin” and “victory” merged, and in East German official discourse too, “leader” and “liberation” became synonymous. Propaganda presented the Red Army and Stalin as rescuers of the German people and saviors who freed them from the “yoke of fascism.” The narrative of liberation included not only the break with the “fascist past” but also a simultaneous rescue from the “cabal of capitalism.” West Germany was proclaimed enemy number one of the “new, antifascist, democratic Germany” and was presented as an “outpost of American imperialism,” a “base for remilitarizing and preparing for a new war,” and the “site for restoring German imperialism.” In socialist propaganda, West Germany was the Third Reich’s political stepchild. Representations of the new enemy were an ideal way to create a stark contrast with East Germany. This opposition was crucial for staging the SED’s political regime as the best Germany, the state that was morally purer than the FRG, because all remnants of Nazism had been decisively rooted out there. In the myth of antifascism, the advent of the Red Army was described as the long-awaited moment of liberation. All the fascists, militarists, and warmongers fled to the West, transforming East Germany into a territory that was free of fascism. After the fall of the Third Reich, this narrative made it possible to restart nation-state building with a clean slate. As a result, the postwar phase of “antifascist-democratic rebuilding” (Erneuerung) of Germany acquired historical legitimacy in the communist antifascist tradition, whose roots went back to the Weimar Republic. In 1935, an antifascist popular front was created at the Seventh International Congress of the Communist International, and Stalin was publicly declared to be its leader. Wilhelm Pieck, the future president of the GDR, was among the first to introduce the Stalin cult to the congress’s international audience, ending his speech at a session by saying, “We are going to fight for freedom, for peace, for bread, for Soviet power, for socialism. Our motto is fight for Soviet power. Our banner is the banner of Marx-Engels-Lenin-Stalin. Our leader is Stalin.” The myth of antifascism had several important implications which helped shape East Germany’s political culture. It highlighted a shared GermanSoviet tradition of struggle with a common “enemy”—the Hitler state. This shared tradition automatically justified the postwar ties between German communists and the Soviet Union, and legitimated German communists who drew closer to Stalin as the “leader of the antifascist movement.” In addition, the myth of antifascism became an important precondition for creating an SED political regime that modeled itself on the Soviet Union. Condemning former Nazis was an integral part of the antifascist idea about what de-Nazification entailed, but it also meant fighting against “other-thinking” people by criminalizing oppositional sentiments and using terror against people whom the regime found displeasing. Moreover, propagandizing the myth of antifascism offered the East German population deliverance from guilt about wartime crimes and encouraged them to undergo a political conversion, which would turn “enemies” into “Stalin’s friends.” This myth offered the individual ready-made models of behavior; by adopting these models, the subject turned defeat into victory. Being able to identify oneself as an antifascist also gave people an alibi for charges of complicity in Nazi crimes. Antifascism became a key part of the GDR’s ideology, which paved the way for the later radicalization of the Stalin cult. To popularize the myth of antifascism, SVAG set about developing the cultural memory of German communist antifascist heroes. Honoring opposition fighters who had sacrificed their lives to bring liberation closer was a key component of this effort. The most vivid example is the cult of Ernst Thälmann. Representations of him as the “leader of the working class” and the “best friend of the Soviet Union” allowed the German political elite to construct Soviet-style historical traditions and symbols of German-Soviet friendship. Within the ranks of the SED, Thälmann was presented as the “leader of the party,” “a true seeker of Germany’s national unity and independence,” and a “friend of Lenin and Stalin.” The fact that the Nazis murdered Thälmann in Buchenwald allowed the SED to canonize him as a hero of the resistance and a great martyr. The symbolic capital that accrued to the figure of Thälmann, who personified the myth of antifascism in the GDR, was integrated into the Stalin cult and used to increase the Soviet leader’s popularity in the role of the “the world’s chief antifascist”. The discourse of gratitude to the Soviet leader emerged from previous uses of Stalin’s image to personify political myths. In the Soviet Union, the entire society had already been enjoined to express gratitude to the “leader” and the party from the 1930s. Acknowledging liberation from Nazi rule became a positive, emotionally saturated strategy for rapprochement with Moscow and a way to win the Soviet leader’s trust. This tendency was particularly apparent in late 1947 and in the first months of 1948 in conjunction with the rejection of a “national German path to building socialism” and the transition to the Sovietization of East Germany. The first East German rituals of gratitude to Stalin took place on February 23, 1948, in conjunction with the thirtieth anniversary of the creation of the Soviet Army in 1918. In towns in the Templin area, speeches about the Red Army’s mission of liberation emphasized “Comrade Stalin’s outstanding role in the leadership of the armed forces of the Soviet Union.” Mass organizations and educational institutions sent telegrams with congratulations and expressions of gratitude to the military command posts. For example, a certain Herr Wiegelmann, a member of a local Kulturbund, wrote that “I am very grateful to the Soviet Army because it freed the German people and other peoples from Hitler’s oppression and because it helped us lay claim to a new democratic order.” In another instance, a Herr Berndt asked representatives of SVAG to convey his warm wishes for “successes and good health to Generalissimo Stalin.” Thus, the “myth of the beginning” and the “myth of antifascism” offered a new scenario of the postwar social order in which the person of the Soviet leader had the central role. For a defeated society, the positive image of Stalin pointed toward a strategy of national and state development. Such representations of Stalin promised resources and new ways to resolve political, economic, and national issues quickly by offering the possibility of joining a history of successes, suddenly on the side of the victors, not the vanquished. In conversation with colleagues, someone on the staff of the administration of the federal state (Land) of Brandenburg reflected that Now I want one thing: to use the defeat and make it a victory in the sense of creating a strong and indestructible union with Russia. |
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ALEXEY TIKHOMIROV - TRANSLATED BY JACQUELINE FRIEDLANDER |
© Alexey Tikhomirov
© Rowman &
Littlefield
