June 1953, Stalin had died three months before, and a new post-Stalinist era beckoned for those trapped behind the Iron Curtain. “Socialism with a human face”. But if the workers of East Germany thought that Stalin’s death meant change, they were soon disabused as the East German premier, Walter Ulbricht, strove to increase industrial output.
East Germany’s economy was stagnating and Ulbricht (pictured), a Stalinist to the core, proposed a range of measures to pump-up the economy – increase taxes, increase prices and increase production by 10% – but with no corresponding increase in wages. If the new quotas were not met, the workers were told, wages would be cut. The Kremlin viewed these proposals with concern, advising Ulbricht to tone down the measures and slow down the intense pace of industrialisation that the East German leader insisted was necessary.
For the workers of the German Democratic Republic this was a lose-lose scenario.
Citizens of post-war Eastern Europe they did as their governments ordered, any protest was silent, whispered in dark corners. But this, these measures, was too much, Ulbricht had gone too far.
Strike
On June 16, 1953, East Berlin construction workers downed tools. The following morning, June 17, the strike had spread with over 40,000 demonstrators marching through the capital. Their demands at first focussed on the economic – a return to the old work quotas. But then as the strike spread to other cities – Leipzig, Dresden and throughout East Germany, their voices gained strength and their hearts courage. They demanded increasingly more – free elections, a new government, democracy.
This was no longer a strike but an uprising.
Ulbricht turned to the Kremlin. Laventry Beria, Stalin’s former Chief of Secret Police and the man poised to take over now that that Stalin was dead, sent in the tanks. The crews, 20,000 troops based in East Germany, were told by Beria not to “spare bullets”. This was a revolution and it needed crushing. (Six months later Beria was dead - executed by his Kremlin colleagues).
The tanks moved in and in East Berlin, along the Unter den Linden, and alongside the East German police, they opened fire. People, demonstrators, civilians fell. How many were killed no one knows for sure. The figures vary considerably between sources based in the West and those of the East. But at least 40 were killed and 400 wounded. Within just 24 hours of starting the uprising was finished.
And then started the reprisals – thousands arrested, tortured and interned. During the Cold War the human face of socialism only went so far and today, 57 years on, Germany still remembers the uprising of 1953.
Rupert Colley
See also Berlin Blockade and Airlift
Read more in The Cold War In An Hour