Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956

by Anne Applebaum

  The situation in Poland was different, in part because the war, the Warsaw Uprising, and the Katyn massacre had more thoroughly devastated the Polish intellectual class. In 1939 the Nazis had sent the entire faculty of the Jagellonian University in Kraków, the oldest in the country, to Sachsenhausen (where they were incarcerated alongside more than a thousand students from universities in Prague and Brno).30 It wasn’t easy to fire a Polish professor, because there might not be anyone remotely qualified to replace him, and as a result there were far fewer ardent young ideologues in university faculties than there were in East Germany. As late as 1953, law students in Kraków could still study most of their subjects, including the history of Polish law, legal theory, and logic, with prewar professors. Only one or two obligatory courses in Marxism-Leninism were taught by new appointees. As John Connelly points out in his definitive study of High Stalinist Eastern European universities, the culture of Polish academic life was also different. Many academics who survived had worked in the “flying universities” during the war, teaching students in secret, and the habits of patriotism were strong. It was quite common for academic administrators to pay lip service to the regime, but to teach, lecture, hire, and fire without any regard to politics. Even in the late 1940s and early 1950s, older professors habitually protected younger students and colleagues from police investigation.31 Ties of family, loyalty, and academic influence often proved stronger, at least behind the scenes, than fear of the party or the secret police.

  But the proletarianization of the student body was, for the communist parties, far more important. Bourgeois professors would die out eventually, and then they could be replaced by eager members of the working classes. In Polish, the term for this wave of academic affirmative action was awans społeczyny, a rather ugly bureaucratic phrase that translates, more or less, as “social advance.” The term took on enormous significance over time, referring both to a policy—the rapid promotion of peasants’ and workers’ children into higher education—as well as to the “socially advanced” class that emerged as a result. A similar form of social advance was a central goal of every country in Eastern Europe. In a speech to the 1949 German party congress, Grotewohl proposed to single out and promote “workers and peasants” from among the Young Pioneers. They had, he said, “experienced a different kind of learning from early childhood” and could therefore be transformed into a “genuinely new, democratic, socialist intelligentsia … which we will need to command our economy and to carry out socialist measures.”32

  The attempts to create a “new, democratic, socialist intelligentsia” to replace the old, suspect, bourgeois intelligentsia ranged from the admirable to the absurd. In Poland, where schools of all kinds had been forcibly closed throughout the duration of the Nazi occupation, the postwar illiteracy rate was an extraordinary 18 percent. The party launched a mass “battle to liquidate illiteracy” campaign in 1951, preceded by a school reform that emphasized technical education.33 The success of this program persuaded many intellectuals of the party’s good intentions. One former Polish schoolteacher, though not a communist himself, spent the first part of his career teaching adult literacy classes to refugees from Ukraine and marveled at the impact: “They became different people.” Participating in the campaign helped convince him that the party, though it made mistakes, ultimately meant well.34

  But the mere teaching of reading and writing would not by itself create a new elite. Across the bloc, other forms of more aggressive affirmative action were also put in place. The children of workers and peasants had privileged access to university places, training programs, jobs, and promotions. In East Germany, education bureaucrats actively recruited workers and peasants to join special courses designed to move them quickly up the ladder. Students could qualify for these preuniversity entrance courses if their parents came from the correct social background and if they could submit “political character references of democratic organizations,” either trade unions or youth groups.35 In Poland, Union of Polish Youth activists actually took control of the university admissions process through the institution of “technical secretaries,” functionaries who were placed in deans’ offices where they “through self-sacrificing work contributed to the improvement of the action.” Thanks to these efforts, between 1945 and 1952 the number of students of worker and peasant origin at East German universities rose from 10 to 45 percent of the total. In 1949, the numbers of worker-peasant students at Polish universities rose to 54.5 percent.36

  Polish communists also created their own alternative institutions of higher education to increase the speed of this social advancement further. Students with no high-school education were offered the chance to obtain a Polish baccalaureate—the matura, similar to a high-school graduation certificate—in six months at the Central Party School. With this so called “small” matura, they could enter a university. Although other institutions offered faster degrees at this time as well—many young people completed the two-year preparatory course to enable them to enter a university without finishing high school—the Central Party School had different criteria: “political consciousness” was considered far more important than the ability to read and write well.

  The result was predictable. In 1948, the Central Committee Secretariat complained that some 20 percent of the students at the Central Party School course—overwhelmingly young, working-class men with no secondary education—couldn’t finish the course because they weren’t competent enough to take lecture notes.37 More than fifty students at Humboldt University in East Berlin reportedly had nervous breakdowns in the 1950s.38 Professors, particularly in Poland, sometimes quietly advised young workers at the beginning of their courses that they weren’t going to make it and should return to their factories. There were also reports of Polish students faking their social origins: “Sons and daughters of merchants, kulaks, and prewar colonels came to the examinations in dirty overalls” and pretended to be workers, as one indignant report had it.39 In Hungary, some students from bourgeois families were instructed outright to spend a bit of time working as laborers and then to reapply for university places. Minor displays of loyalty, such as becoming a youth group leader, helped secure university places too.40 Material gaps between the worker-peasant university students and the children of prewar intellectuals remained, however—the former often lived in shabby university dorms and the latter lived at home—and the two groups often kept their distance from one another.41

  In Germany, some of the attempts to retrain workers to fill cultural jobs also ended in fiasco. At one point, the writer Erich Loest was assigned to teach a group of factory workers to become Volkskorrespondenten, people’s correspondents. The logic was straightforward: if the proletariat could be trained in journalism, then newspapers would by definition become ideologically correct, and there would be no need for bourgeois journalists. Or so the theory went. In practice, Loest’s particular task—the training of workers to become theater critics—was less than successful:

  There were fifteen people—twelve women, three men—they were workers. They had been asked at their enterprise, “We need people for this group, who of you likes going to the theater?” And they had put their hands up and been selected: “Well, Hildegard, you are a member of this group now.” We went to the theater together and afterward or the next day we met. And I told them, tried to tell them, what a theater review is about. And then we wrote a review together. I was twenty-five by then and I had liked going to the theater … It was horrible. We were all unhappy. I was unhappy, they were even more unhappy … They were supposed to write a theater review, they could not do that, and they did not learn it with me. After half a year the whole thing collapsed. We carried on for one winter.42

  But, in a narrower sense, these policies succeeded: eventually they changed the composition of the urban intelligentsia. One Pole remembers that at his elite Warsaw school in the 1950s, almost everybody came from a rural background. When the teacher asked the children where they were going
on summer vacation, they answered almost in unison: “I’m going to stay with my grandparents in the countryside.” It took him many years to realize that in most European capitals, the vast majority of people did not have grandparents who lived on tiny farms and grew potatoes.43 The social advance policy did also produce a generation of loyal if not necessarily talented communist party leaders. As one historian explains, some people saw right from the beginning that the system could provide them with a clear path to upward mobility, regardless of their background and regardless of their abilities, if they played by the rules:

  They were active in the party, they always had something to say at meetings and consultations—and it was always something “in line” and “correct” as we said back then. They defended the position of the directors and the party organization, they took part in after-work “cultural” activities and made other social contributions. Whatever the quality of their work and their professional training, they advanced quickly, though not necessarily in the workplace. More often they were promoted into the administration, or sent away on courses … sometimes they wound up in the party apparatus.44

  A glance at the sociological backgrounds of the Eastern European communist leadership in the 1980s reveals that many activists from modest backgrounds did eventually climb to the very top. Mieczysław Rakowski was born into a peasant family, operated a lathe as a teenager, received a doctorate from the Warsaw Institute for Social Sciences in 1956, and became prime minister of Poland in 1988. Miloš Jakeš was born into a peasant family, worked in a shoe factory, obtained a degree from the Moscow Higher Party School in 1958, and was named general secretary of the Czechoslovak communist party in 1987. Egon Krenz was the child of East Prussian refugees, became the leader of the Young Pioneers in the 1970s, and was named prime minister of East Germany in October 1989, a job he held until December 1989. All of these men were among the most outstanding beneficiaries of the “social advance.” And all of them reached the summit of power too late to enjoy it.

  During the school and work day, the communist educational establishment could keep children, students, young people, and young workers safe from the forces of reaction. But after school—on weekends, in the summers—they could still be exposed to any number of harmful ideas. Makarenko had believed that Soviet children and teenagers should be occupied at all times, with collective work, sport, or study. By the late 1940s, bureaucrats in Eastern Europe were striving toward the same ideal. At a 1951 Polish teachers’ conference, much time was devoted to extracurricular education. Those present agreed that it should be used “to deepen and broaden education obtained in school … to create conditions for collective life, and to support valuable, socially useful character traits in the spirit of socialist morality.”

  More to the point, one speaker declared, after-school programs would keep children safe from bad influences: “The failure to organize the time children spend outside school creates conditions that encourage hostile activity on the part of reactionary priests as well as other reactionary elements and imperialist agents.” Examples of such negative activity, as presented at the conference, included the “organization of children’s day care in the basement of the Warsaw basilica” as well as the “participation of priests in various sporting and other organizations for children” (though not that many priests, at that point, were in a position to do so).45

  In order to keep children and young workers away from these reactionary contacts, the educational establishments across the bloc created a vast program of after-school and evening clubs, teams, and organizations, all of them under state control though not necessarily political. Some of these official after-school programs were even deliberately apolitical, including everything from music and folk dancing to painting and needlework. Chess clubs were especially popular. The idea was to draw children into a place where they could be subtly influenced. If nothing else, organizers had the satisfaction of knowing that children were singing, sewing, or checkmating one another in rooms where Stalin’s portrait hung on the wall, under the supervision of ideologically reliable educators. All of these activities were free, and hence very attractive to working parents.46

  More overtly political activities were also available. In Poland, the Society of the Friends of Children organized not only after-school clubs but “mass actions” such as the decoration of communal New Year’s trees (as opposed to Christmas trees). In Hungary, the Young Pioneers organized Michurinist clubs, which experimented with cotton and other plants in the manner of Ivan Michurin, a botanist colleague of Lysenko and an opponent of genetics.47 The German Young Pioneers also participated in young technician and young natural scientist clubs, all intended to lead children in professional directions useful to the party.48

  But the real prize, for dedicated communist educators, was the summer vacation, two long months of idleness that presented enticing possibilities for those who wanted to influence the young. At summer camp, young people were not only away from their families and any other reactionary influences but inside an environment that, in theory, the party and the youth movements could control down to the last detail. Of course, summer camps were nothing new in this part of the world. But in Eastern Europe only the state was allowed to organize youth summer camps—and the state took them very seriously indeed. In Germany, summer camps were of sufficient importance to merit Politburo and Central Committee debate. In Poland, the Education Ministry set up a special Commission on the Matter of Summer Vacations for Children and Youth in 1948.49

  At first such experiences were available only to the most ideologically correct. In the first few years after the war, only about 10 percent of German children attended summer camps. But the German Politburo soon saw that it was the ideologically incorrect children who most needed camps that could teach them “firm friendship with all peace-loving human beings, especially with the people of the great Soviet Union and the best friend and teacher of all children, the great Stalin.” In 1949, the German communists therefore launched a new campaign—Frohe Ferientage für alle Kinder (“Happy Holidays for All the Children”)—and obliged state companies to sponsor it. By the summer of 1951, some 75 percent of children in the Soviet zone of Germany attended some kind of overnight summer program.

  Once these camps were up and running, no detail was left to chance. In Germany, guidelines for the directors of the camps were composed by the central council of the Free German Youth and the communist party Central Committee. These dictated everything from the number of hours to be spent swimming during the three-week camp session (eighteen) to the number of hours to be spent singing (two and a half). Campers were to be instructed in the merits of the Five-Year Plan, and were taught the history of the Komsomol, the Soviet youth association, “the vanguard of the democratic youth of the world.” There would be group readings of How the Steel Was Tempered, a novel by the Soviet writer Nikolai Ostrovskii. Every day would start with gymnastics and a morning roll call, and on certain days special ceremonies would be observed: July 18, the “Day of the International Brigades”; August 6, the anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima; August 18, the day Ernst Thälmann had been murdered in Buchenwald.50

  Traditional games—tag, hide-and-seek, capture the flag—were also adapted for the new era. In 1950, for example, one observer described a German summer camp game as follows:

  Boys and girls were hidden on the slopes, under bushes and trees, crawling forward under camouflage … We happened to come across a Pioneer leader with a red armband and asked her what the children were playing. She explained to us that the children were divided into two armies, the People’s Army and the capitalist army. She pointed to the Free German Youth banner placed on a mountain, which was to be conquered by the capitalist army … On a different hill the “People’s Army” were calling to the capitalist army: “Do not fight for the capitalists, defect to the People’s Army” and similar slogans. During the fight they had to rip off the armbands of the opponents. A Pioneer without an armband was conside
red dead.

  Afterward, a camp leader explained that these war games were preparing the children to “struggle for peace”: “The children must know what to defend!”51

  Nor was teaching confined only to games. At about this time, the central council of the Hungarian youth movement also issued instructions to directors of summer camps in Hungary. Among other things, they advised them on the correct methods of dealing with rebellious campers. Cliques should be broken up, but “not with violence.” To command the respect of campers, the group leaders should set an example: every morning, they should get up and get dressed before anyone else.

  If all else failed, punishments should be meted out—but only punishments that, in the manner of Makarenko, would have a positive impact on the group as a whole. Punishment through “excommunication” was highly recommended, for example: if a camper refused to go along with group activities, other campers should refuse to call him “comrade” and refuse to speak with him. This peer pressure not only would make the recalcitrant camper change his mind and rejoin the group, but others would see that it was a great honor to be called “comrade” and would strive hard to be worthy of the title.52

  As the camps expanded, standards slipped. It was one thing to declare that every child must attend summer camp; it was quite another to build and supply the camps and to train the instructors at short notice. An inspection of some day camps in the Hungarian countryside in 1950 revealed that although children were in theory busy from eight in the morning until six in the evening, in practice they went home much earlier. Some even left before lunch. By the time the camp leaders were preparing the all-important, end-of-day flag-lowering ceremony, “everybody was gone.” The inspectors complained that the camp leaders lacked organization and initiative: “In none of these camps did we see organized group activities, hours devoted to education.” Worse, some of the camp leaders “didn’t understand the importance of fighting against clerical reactionaries … one group leader was playing the organ in the church.” The proposed solution: “more ideological education.”53