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In Poland, an important role was also played by the fact that in the first half of the 1950s, undeniable evidence appeared in the West that the Katyn crime, which the USSR and Polish communists tried in vain to attribute to the Nazis, was in fact the work of Soviet hands. By 1956, when the workers ‘uprising in Poznan and the change of the pro-Stalinist leadership of the Polish United Workers’ Party took place, practically no one in Poland believed the official version that the Germans killed Polish officers in Katyn, and this did not contribute to love for Moscow.
When the communist regimes were established in Eastern Europe, they were essentially Stalin’s puppets and obediently carried out commands from Moscow, including those to fight the “enemies of the people” in the ranks of the communists themselves, although the scale of the Soviet Great Terror of 1937-1938 was not a repression in Eastern Europe reached. In Hungary, the most notorious was the completely falsified Laszlo Rajk case, in which former Interior Minister and Foreign Minister Laszlo Rajk and two high-ranking communist functionaries Tibor Sonny and Andras Salai were executed in the fall of 1949 for alleged ties with Yugoslav leader Josip Broz Tito.
But in addition to repressions, which were nevertheless directed primarily not against the communists, but against representatives of the propertied classes, members of non-communist parties, military personnel and policemen, the coming to power of the communists in Eastern Europe resulted in a sharp drop in living standards. Stalin was preparing for a future war with the West. And since the human resources of the USSR were depleted to the limit by the Great Patriotic War, in which more than 40 million Soviet citizens died, it was supposed to fight primarily at the expense of the Eastern European allies, who were also supposed to supply a significant part of weapons and military equipment. Therefore, in the countries of Eastern Europe, the military industry developed primarily to the detriment of the industry producing consumer goods. In addition, the Soviet Union, through the joint-stock companies controlled by it, received from Eastern Europe practically for a song the raw materials and fuel it needed, including coal and uranium.
The forcible collectivization of agriculture did not raise the standard of living, although it was carried out in Eastern Europe in a milder form than in the USSR. The communist leader of Hungary, Matthias Rakosi, followed the directives from Moscow especially zealously, under which the size of the Hungarian army reached 200 thousand people (for comparison, now the size of the Hungarian army, with practically the same population as in the 50s, is only 22 thousand . person), and the slogan “guns instead of butter” was carried out most consistently from all the countries of Eastern Europe.
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