Stalin's Secret Directives for a Communist Europe

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Stalin's Secret Directives for a Communist Europe

4 HOURS AGO Carmen Elena Dorobăț

This month marks almost 70 years since the NKVD directives for Eastern Europe—discovered and published in Poland in 1981—were penned by Lavrentiy Beria, then head of the KGB’s precursor, following Stalin’s indications. The directives—written for Poland in particular, with speculated similar versions for Romania, Czechoslovakia, and Bulgaria—were devised to strengthen the control of occupied eastern European nations by the Soviet forces after the Second World War, mainly by controlling key administrative positions and by subverting strategic sectors such as transportation, health, and education.

 

The content and tone of these directives is hardly surprising, given the well-known involvement of USSR secret services in the ‘Sovietization’ of the Eastern bloc at the time. Beria himself, Russia’s own “Himmler” (as Stalin reportedly introduced him at the Yalta conference in 1945), is remembered for his pivotal role in this takeover, together with his equally central role in the expansion of Gulag labor camps and the execution of Polish war prisoners at Katyn.