The Collaborator's Song

The Collaborator's Song - By Anne Applebaum | Foreign Policy: In the end, the combination of these two factors led people to rebel, if not openly then more subtly, in private. Indeed, if is a lesson from the experience of Soviet totalitarianism it is this: Sooner or later, people who have been forced, persuaded or cajoled into collaboration will object, especially to a political system which fails to deliver on its promises. In Eastern Europe, this happened almost immediately. After Stalin's death, when memories of post-war violence had subsided, protests took place across the bloc, most famously during Hungary's armed rebellion of 1956 but also in East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and even Bulgaria. Though none of these led to an immediate collapse of communist power, they and others which followed later on did help erode the authority and legitimacy of the entire system, in the Soviet Union as well as Eastern Europe.