DICTATORSHIP OF DEMOCRACY

JOSEPH STALIN CONDEMNED WITH RELISH THE REACTIONARY policies of Italian and German Fascists, but to a Communist, “Fascist” was the most versatile of insults. Rather than reserve the epithet for the real thing, Soviets used the F-word to discredit capitalists, nationalists, democrats, the religious, and any faction—whether Trotskyite, Socialist, or liberal—that did battle with the USSR for the hearts and minds of the left. In Stalin’s universe, you were either with him or no better than Hitler; there wasn’t any middle ground. One might think, therefore, that the two—Fascism and Communism—were opposites, but the contrast is more complicated.

In 1932, Mussolini described Fascism as a closed universe in which “the State is all-embracing,” and outside which “no human or spiritual values can exist.” In so doing, he acknowledged its overlap with Communism in its disdain for democracy and all its trappings. Publicly, Il Duce denounced Bolsheviks but in private he confessed his admiration for the effectiveness of Lenin’s brutal tactics. Both Fascism and Communism had utopian aspirations and both took hold amid the intellectual and social ferment of the late nineteenth century. Each purported to deliver a level of emotional sustenance that liberal political systems lacked.

However, there were also stark differences. The Nazis sorted humans based on nationality and race; to Communists, the key determinant was class. In Germany, Jews and Roma were persecuted; in the Soviet Union, the principal targets were landowners, the bourgeoisie, and only later the Jews. The Nazis perverted religion while exploiting the impulse for worship; the Communists shunned religion while treating certain secular texts as sacred. The Nazis seized control of state institutions; the Communists dismantled and then rebuilt them, replacing a slothful czarist bureaucracy with a lumbering and inefficient Soviet one. Each system had its ironies. The Nazis chased the dream of a racially pure society through occupation and conquest, thus ensuring intimate contact with people of many non-Germanic nationalities and races. The Communists insisted that national identity was irrelevant but obsessively persecuted men and women because of who they were: Latvians, Poles, Ukrainians, Armenians, Finns, Chechens, Koreans, and Turks.

As for the two leading men, Hitler, once in power, showed his indolent side, generally starting his day around noon and leaving the details of government to others. Stalin rose with the roosters, worked long hours, and demanded to be kept current on every development, whether economic, political, or military. Hitler was a teetotaler and vegetarian; Stalin drank plenty and ate omnivorously—his chefs, including Vladimir Putin’s grandfather, prepared the cuisine of the leader’s native Georgia: kebabs, stews, salads, dumplings, plenty of walnuts, and bread you could sink your hands into. Hitler preferred oral briefings; Stalin read detailed policy papers—and edited them.

For all their dissimilarities, the two men spoke a common language: violence. Both despised the Jeffersonian ideals of popular governance, reasoned debate, freedom of expression, an independent judiciary, and fair electoral competition. Both struck remorselessly at enemies within and outside their parties. In the 1920s, when the Nazis were still struggling to establish themselves, the Soviets implemented their revolution by forcibly reorganizing industry, sending millions of “class enemies” to Siberia, and triggering a horrendous famine through the collectivization of agriculture. In 1937, Stalin ordered the executions of 680,000 people judged politically unreliable, including military officers, party officials, and members of the politburo—an incredible number. The Communists, almost as much as the Nazis, knew how to turn the state into a fearsome killing machine.

Also like the Nazis, the Communists sought to shape the minds of citizens by overwhelming their senses with propagandistic spam. Each day, the men and women of the USSR were called on to sacrifice for the revolution, unite for a better tomorrow, and labor harder for the good of the whole. The hectoring was constant from billboards and radios, newspapers and party bosses; its purpose was to mold conformists who would do what the government demanded because they could no longer conceive of an alternative. Their mission, and they had no safe choice but to accept it, was to follow orders—to become human robots who equated obedience with virtue.

Communists and Nazis both thought it their calling to forge a “new man,” a creature of modernity who would rise above the individual quest for money, property, and pleasure that pitted workers against one another and, in their view, made of democracy a moral cesspool. In 1932, at a meeting hosted by the social realist writer Maxim Gorky, Stalin urged his country’s literary elite to be “engineers of human souls.” For their part, Soviet filmmakers churned out a thousand variations of the same story: a protagonist is forced by greedy capitalists to choose between self-interest and the well-being of the community. Invariably, the wrong choice leads to tragedy, and the correct one to comradely bliss.

The scenario’s attraction is readily apparent. The Bolsheviks—which translates as “the Majority”— won millions of converts, in part because of the stark inequities that persist in capitalist societies. The notion of giving everyone a seat in the same boat is appealing and seems fair. However, there is a reason the Communists had to apply such a heavy hand to put their theories into practice. Had their ideas been a better fit for real life, their campaign to indoctrinate wouldn’t have been so arduous and their gulags would have been unnecessary. Whatever might be the case in principle, the best farmers don’t like collective agriculture, because there’s nothing in it for them except more labor and less profit. In factories, the most productive workers won’t remain so unless rewarded for their efforts—and an occasional “employee of the month” ribbon isn’t enough. In any society, men and women with imagination will rebel at being told what to do, what to believe, and not to think.

A dictatorship by any other name is still a dictatorship, whether its symbol is the czarist two-headed eagle or the hammer and sickle. During World War II, the Red Army pressed into service millions of soldiers who loathed their commander in chief but still fought to defend Mother Russia against German Fascists. Soviet fact spinners later claimed that their troops had stormed into battle proclaiming their allegiance to Stalin, but that was nonsense. Communism doesn’t work.

IN JULY 1945, AT THE AGE OF EIGHT, I BOARDED A BRITISH BOMBER, found a makeshift seat in its belly, and flew home to my native Czechoslovakia. My father, having returned some six weeks earlier, met us at the airport. The postwar era had begun. In the next three years, our country would balance precariously between Soviet-style Fascism and the kind of robust democratic republic we had cherished in the 1920s and ’30s.

With the German occupation at an end, the divide between the two major components of the anti-Axis alliance—the Soviet Union and the West—was laid bare. During the war, most Czechoslovak exiles found refuge in London, but thousands of others were in Moscow, zealously preparing for what would come next. The brave souls who had resisted the Nazis from inside the country included loyalists from both camps. The unanswered question was whether the Czechoslovaks who had combined forces in time of war would cooperate in time of peace—and whether they would be allowed to do so.

Our country’s president, Edvard Beneš, wished to preserve firm ties to both East and West— a sensible approach and, with the Cold War yet to emerge fully from its womb, seemingly possible. While I was en route from London to Prague, Stalin was chatting amiably in Potsdam with Truman and the soon-to-be-replaced Churchill. Publicly, we were still all on the same side. Behind closed doors, however, an epic clash had begun.

May 1946 saw the first elections in postwar Czechoslovakia. Prior to the conflict, Communists had received but a small fraction of the vote. They had expected to do better this time, but no one anticipated that they would rack up 38 percent, finishing well ahead of any other party. Beneš remained president while the hardline Communist leader, Klement Gottwald, a former toolmaker fond of wearing caps instead of hats, stepped in as prime minister. The cabinet was equally divided between moderates and the extreme left. The balloting gave Communists the hope that they could do what Mussolini and Hitler had done earlier—achieve power by democratic means, then kill democracy.

The second round of elections was scheduled for May 1948. The Communists sought an absolute majority; the democrats were determined to prevent that and gain momentum themselves. Calculations on all sides had to be adjusted in May 1947 when U.S. Secretary of State George Marshall put forward a generous loan program for the reconstruction of Europe. Every country in the region that had been damaged in the war, including the USSR, was invited to participate. For Czechoslovakia, the Marshall Plan offered a way to refloat its economy until farm conditions improved and factories resumed normal operations. On July 4, the cabinet voted unanimously to sign up.

Seven days later, that bright green light turned red in every sense. Officials from Prague went to Moscow, where Stalin told them that the American proposal was a trick, a trap designed to isolate Russia and undermine him. To press the argument, he declared that he was the only protection Czechoslovakia had against the resurgence of German power. Should the government choose to defy him, that protection would be withdrawn. Further, he would consider it a breach of Czechoslovak treaty obligations.

This is how the Cold War truly commenced. Not only my country, but the entire constellation of Soviet satellites—Poland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Albania, and Yugoslavia—had to reject the Marshall Plan because the Red Army was close and the Western allies had put down their guns. The plan could have held the continent together. Instead, Russian insecurity—a trait that would resurface in the twenty-first century—caused barbed wire to be strung across Europe’s heart.

Back in Czechoslovakia, the democratic and Communist camps jockeyed feverishly in preparation for the scheduled balloting, with the latter having the advantage of superior organization, control of most major ministries, the backing of the Soviet Union, and the ability to summon large numbers of people to the streets on short notice. They also had the sharper elbows. Democrats pleaded with their countrymen to recognize the Communists’ hypocrisy—that the same partisans who bragged about opposing Fascism were now aping its techniques. The Communists were simply replacing pictures of Hitler with portraits of Stalin and, like Mussolini’s Blackshirts, attacking the press, smearing political rivals, demanding total loyalty from party members, and threatening anyone who stood in their way.

My family watched all this from nearby Belgrade, where my father was Czechoslovak ambassador. Under strongman Josip Broz (better known by his pen name: Tito), Yugoslavia had emerged from the war with a fully committed Communist government. From his contacts with local officials, my father knew that vultures were circling our homeland. A Yugoslav army officer told him, “I do not agree with the policy of your government . . . you have too many parties.” In his country, he said, the Communists “lead in parliament, in the army, in public administration, on the collective farms, in industry—everywhere. They act on behalf of the nation . . . it is a dictatorship of democracy.” This peculiar conception, too, was right out of the Fascist game plan: a single party, speaking with one voice, controlling every state institution, claiming to represent all people, and labeling the entire sham a triumph of the popular will.

Deeply worried, my father went to Prague in January 1948 to consult with President Beneš. Having witnessed the cutthroat proclivities of Communist leaders in Yugoslavia, he hoped to find a leader fully aware of the danger that democratic forces faced and in possession of a clear strategy to fight back. However, when he was ushered into Beneš’s office, my father was greeted by a man obviously ill, with silver hair thinning, deep bags beneath his eyes, and a slowing gait.

Beneš had been a world figure of near-legendary energy for three decades, but had recently suffered a stroke and was plainly worn down trying to hold his country together. My father, intent on making the most of his opportunity, warned the president about the inroads the Communists were making in the army, police, trade unions, media, and foreign ministry. He insisted that time was short. The older man’s soothing response—that he was not alarmed—couldn’t have been more frightening. Beneš dismissed the possibility of a coup and said he was certain the democrats would prevail in the coming elections. He urged my father to stop worrying, return to his job in Belgrade, and carry on.

A quarter of a century earlier, Mussolini had taken the reins of power from an indecisive king. In 1933, Hitler had done the same from an ailing and aged president. Beneš was neither as passive as Victor Emmanuel nor as old as Hindenburg, but he shared with them an inability to marshal democratic forces at a critical time. The showdown came in February 1948, when Communists were caught trying to subvert the police and distribute rifles to supporters in Prague. The revelations coincided with a large trade union rally scheduled for the capital on February 22, in what looked like a Moscow-orchestrated version of Mussolini’s March on Rome.

Instead of keeping their nerve, the democratic cabinet ministers resigned, in the vain hope of forcing immediate elections. The resulting chaos created an opening that Gottwald, the Communist leader, did not hesitate to seize. He demanded that Beneš replace the ministers who had resigned with a list of men he considered “more reliable.” His agents in the media echoed this call, and tens of thousands of labor activists cheered it. Then, on February 25, freedom was mugged beneath the spires of Prague. Democratic leaders on the way to work were barred from entering their offices; some had their homes searched or were handcuffed and thrown into jail. The last independent newspapers and radio stations were taken over and trashed. The Communist unions called for a nationwide strike; workers who refrained from joining were dismissed from their jobs. Gottwald went to Beneš and threatened him: Either appoint a new cabinet or more blood will flow. Reluctantly, the president gave in.

One major democratic official who did not resign was Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk, a close friend of my father and of our family. The man I knew as “Uncle Jan” much preferred playing the piano to playing the diplomat; he had eyes that tried to mourn but twinkled anyway and a habit he could not shake of telling the truth. On the morning of March 10, his broken body was found in the ministry’s courtyard, below an open bathroom window. The new government, headed by Gottwald, insisted that the death was suicide; evidence pointed to murder.

The story of the Communist takeover of Czechoslovakia holds lessons that still need absorbing. Good guys don’t always win, especially when they are divided and less determined than their adversaries. The desire for liberty may be ingrained in every human breast, but so is the potential for complacency, confusion, and cowardice. And losing has a price. After 1948, Czechoslovakia had no room for democrats. In that Kafkaesque environment, the Czechs who had devoted every hour of World War II to fighting Hitler from London were accused of having spent their days instead plotting to enslave the working class. So, for the second time in my life, I was uprooted from the land of my birth. My father was asked to chair a UN commission investigating the dispute over Kashmir between India and Pakistan. When that assignment was complete, he applied for political asylum in the United States for himself and our family, a petition granted in June 1949.

CONTEMPLATING THE DEVASTATION WREAKED BY WORLD WAR I, the leaders of the international community showed what they had learned: not enough. The European victors wanted nothing more than to grab territory and exact revenge. The losers were impoverished and spoiling to get even. The United States arrived at the peace conference in Paris with lofty principles and a short attention span, ultimately rejecting its own proposed League of Nations and withdrawing smugly to its side of the ocean. The overall lack of effective joint action—following an ordeal that had left twenty million people dead and twenty-one million wounded—enabled Fascism to rise and led the world into the abyss of a second and even more catastrophic war.

After V-E Day, President Truman and his transatlantic colleagues were determined to work together where their predecessors had not. They hoped that their wartime alliance with the Soviet Union could be extended, but the Communist coup in Czechoslovakia, coupled with Masaryk’s murder, destroyed that illusion. Stalin had no intention of keeping his wartime promises; his plan was to dominate Central and Eastern Europe.

The West countered by forging a military alliance (NATO) and helping Greece and Turkey to fend off Communist subversion. Instead of retreating again into a cocoon across the sea, the United States championed an array of multilateral organizations, including the UN, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank. In 1949, Truman unveiled Point Four, a technical aid initiative designed to help people in distant corners of the globe raise their standard of living. Each of these steps was the product of enlightened international engagement, and each was implemented in the United States with strong bipartisan support. These accomplishments and the painstaking diplomacy that brought them into being should not be taken for granted or forgotten.

The Soviet Union in this period continued to exhibit many of the classic symptoms of Fascism. When the liberal columnist I. F. Stone visited Moscow in May 1956, he encountered a Communist party functionary who seemed eager to say what was on his mind, but when Stone prompted him, the Muscovite quickly developed second thoughts, finally muttering in German, “Ili Schweigen ili Gefängnis”—“Either silence or prison.”

That grim choice was a real one, because Communist governments showed a tendency to devour their own. Many postwar Communist leaders in Czechoslovakia and elsewhere in the region were later imprisoned or hanged, some on the direct orders of Stalin, some almost certainly because they were Jews. A distinctive vocabulary was developed to justify the arrests. Those condemned by show trials were called class traitors, enemies of the people, running dogs, bourgeois pigs, imperialist spies—and, naturally, when the Berlin Wall went up, the excuse given was to protect against Fascists.

In the West, we invented our own list of disparaging labels: red, pinko, fellow traveler, commie-symp. Concerned by the danger of Soviet espionage and determined not to replicate the appeasement policy that had smoothed Hitler’s path, U.S. politicians tried to outdo one another in appearing the most vigilant. Congressional committees demanded to know “Who Lost China?” and sought to root out traitors in the media, arts, labor movement, and all branches of government. The times called for a leader of wisdom and strength who could protect the country against subversion without getting tangled in the snares of paranoia and unreasoning fear. That was the need, but it was not who barged through the door.

SENATOR JOSEPH MCCARTHY—ANGRY, JOWLY, AND PERPETUALLY indignant—had the instincts of a Mussolini, but without the intellectual foundation. Like Il Duce, he was a showman who loved politics and craved power. Unlike him, he began his public life largely ignorant of policy. His temperament was that of a Fascist bully, but he was uncertain at first where to direct his fury. During McCarthy’s early years in the Senate, he tried to think up an angle that would make sensational news out of fur tariffs, public housing, sugar quotas, or Pentagon procurement. It was hard going. Early in 1950, with his reelection campaign on the horizon, he stepped up his quest for a headline-grabbing idea.

The answer, according to contemporary accounts, came during a friendly dinner in a Washington restaurant with three fellow Roman Catholics: a lawyer, a professor, and a prominent Jesuit priest. The lawyer recommended that McCarthy make a big push on behalf of the St. Lawrence Seaway—a massive construction project. Too dull, the group decided. The professor proposed a plan to give each old person in America a hundred dollars a month. Too expensive, they agreed. Finally, the priest spoke up: What about Communism and the threat to national security? How’s that for an issue? Just right.

Thus was conceived a phenomenon that would split America from right to left and raise ominous questions—of a type we still face—about whether a democratic citizenry can be talked into betraying its own values.

Joe McCarthy had a barrel chest, blue eyes framed by shaggy brows, an abundance of restless energy, and experience as a chicken farmer. His down-to-earth speaking style pleased many voters, as did his reputation for shouting things that more conventional politicians were too timid to whisper. The senator’s skin, however, was paper-thin, and he seemed not to care very much whether his startling disclosures had any basis in fact.

Just one month after his fateful dinner in Washington, McCarthy told a women’s club in Wheeling, West Virginia, “I have in my hand a list of 205 names that were made known to the secretary of state as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping policy in the State Department.”

There followed a three-year spectacle during which McCarthy captured enormous media attention by prophesying the imminent ruin of America and by making false charges that he then denied raising—only to invent new ones. He claimed to have identified subversives in the State Department, the army, think tanks, universities, labor unions, the press, and Hollywood. He cast doubt on the patriotism of all who criticized him, including fellow senators. McCarthy was profoundly careless about his sources of information and far too glib when connecting dots that had no logical link. In his view, you were guilty if you were or ever had been a Communist, had attended a gathering where a supposed Communist sympathizer was present, had read a book authored by someone soft on Communism, or subscribed to a magazine with liberal ideas. McCarthy, who was nicknamed Tailgunner Joe, though he had never been a tail gunner, was also fond of superlatives. By the middle of 1951, he was warning the Senate of “a conspiracy so immense and an infamy so black as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man.”

McCarthy would neither have become a sensation, nor ruined the careers of so many innocent people, had he not received support from some of the nation’s leading newspapers and financing from right-wingers with deep pockets. He would have been exposed much sooner had his wild accusations not been met with silence by many mainstream political leaders from both parties who were uncomfortable with his bullying tactics but lacked the courage to call his bluff. By the time he self-destructed, a small number of people working in government had indeed been identified as security risks, but none because of the Wisconsin senator’s scattershot investigations.

McCarthy fooled as many as he did because a lot of people shared his anxieties, liked his vituperative style, and enjoyed watching the powerful squirm. Whether his allegations were greeted with resignation or indignation didn’t matter so much as the fact that they were reported on and repeated. The more inflammatory the charge, the more coverage it received. Even skeptics subscribed to the idea that, though McCarthy might be exaggerating, there had to be some fire beneath the smoke he was spreading. This is the demagogue’s trick, the Fascist’s ploy, exemplified most outrageously by the spurious and anti-Jewish Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Repeat a lie often enough and it begins to sound as if it must—or at least might—be so. “Falsehood flies,” observed Jonathan Swift, “and the truth comes limping after it.” McCarthy’s career shows how much hysteria a skilled and shameless prevaricator can stir up, especially when he claims to be fighting in a just cause. After all, if Communism was the ultimate evil, a lot could be hazarded—including objectivity and conventional morality—in opposing it.

DURING MUCH OF THE COLD WAR, THE SOVIET EMPIRE WAS AN overextended colossus, battling internal contradictions and driven more by paranoia than by any ambition for global conquest. That empire, however, was formidably armed, cynical, and cruel enough to merit a vigilant response from free societies. Thankfully, there were leaders on every continent prepared to argue for democratic representation, a strong defense, and respect for liberal norms. In Europe, these principles were wedded to a process of regional integration that eased border restrictions, eliminated tariff barriers, and developed a common currency. In the United States, administrations from both parties made major contributions through such measures as Eisenhower’s “Atoms for Peace” program, Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress, Nixon’s opening to China, Carter’s commitment to human rights, and Reagan’s support for democracy. These and other initiatives showed the fundamental difference between a state-run system that ignores individual rights and one that derives its power from the people.

The saga of the Cold War, however, was not quite as black-and-white as this duality suggests. In 1920s Italy and 1930s Germany, fear of Communism propelled Fascism’s rise. After World War II, the same fear gave life to McCarthy’s reckless allegations and to a willingness on the part of many democratic leaders to overlook repression when the governments involved were anti-Communist. By the early 1970s, the Nixon administration counted among its “free world” partners the dictatorships of South Korea, the Philippines, Indonesia, Pakistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Zaire, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Argentina, Chile, Paraguay, Brazil, and all of Central America except Costa Rica—an embarrassing list.

I’m reminded of a dream that the aunt of a friend of mine had; the woman’s name is Cleo and she grew up in Kansas during the Great Depression. In the dream, she is lifted to Heaven when just a child. There, she is greeted by an angel who says, “Take my hand and I will show you to your new home.” The angel and Cleo stroll through Heaven’s shining streets, more radiant than anything the small and nervous girl had seen. However, instead of stopping before one of the lovely houses, they keep walking, then walking some more. The lights begin to dim, the houses are smaller now and the streets not so smooth. Finally, they arrive at a tiny hut near the edge of a dense forest with just enough light to see. Cleo asks, “Is this my new home?” The angel replies, “I’m afraid so; you were just barely good enough to get in.”

During the Cold War, many governments thought it sufficient to define themselves by what they were against. When the Berlin Wall fell and the Iron Curtain parted, mere anti-Communism was no longer the credential it had been. To win respect, governments would have to aim higher than “barely good enough.” That, one might hope, would prove welcome news.

Written by Madeleine Albright with Bill Woodward in "Fascism, a Warning", HarperCollins Publishers,USA, 2018, excerpts chapter seven. Digitized, adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.