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

by Anne Applebaum

  In the end, the town hall with the soaring spire planned for Stalinstadt was never built. Nor was the cultural center on Nowa Huta’s central square, a space that has been renamed Ronald Reagan Plaza and today marks the intersection of streets named after General Władysław Anders, Pope John Paul II, and the Solidarity trade union. Only half of the main square in Dunaújváros was completed, leaving the “square” somewhat lopsided and causing architectural controversy in the city even today. Investment in the Stalinstadt steel mill was reduced in 1954 from 110 million to 34 million marks, and construction of some pieces of the production cycle were put off indefinitely.61 Investment in the Sztálinváros mill was frozen in 1954. Although the Nowa Huta mill continued to grow, its location became more controversial with time.

  Because of the immense amount of publicity and propaganda that had initially been focused on them, all three socialist towns continued to play symbolic roles in the subsequent history of their respective countries. In the summer of 1955, Nowa Huta and its workers became the subject of one of the first openly anticommunist poems to appear in print in Poland after Stalin’s death. Adam Ważyk’s “Poem for Adults” bitterly mocked the peasants-turned-workers, the pretensions of the Nowa Huta management, and the glowing communist propaganda:

  From villages and little towns, they come in wooden carts

  To build a factory and dream out a city,

  To dig out of the earth a new Eldorado.

  An army of pioneers, a massed crowd,

  They cram into barns, barracks, and hostels,

  Walk heavily and whistle loudly in the muddy streets:

  A great migration, carrying confused ambitions,

  The crucifix of Częstochowa on a string around their necks,

  A stack of curses, a feather pillow, a gallon of vodka, the lust for girls …

  The huge mob, pushed suddenly

  Out of medieval darkness: an inhuman Poland,

  Howling with boredom on December nights …62

  Later, this same “army of pioneers,” with their crucifixes and their vodka, featured in Andrzej Wajda’s film Man of Marble (Człowiek z marmuru). The story of a Stalinist shock worker who fades into insignificance and disappointment, Man of Marble was approved for distribution in 1977 thanks to the intervention of Józef Tejchma, the former Nowa Huta youth leader, who was by then the Polish minister of culture.

  In subsequent decades, the first Polish city to be built without a church also became the focus of an enormous political and religious struggle. In 1957, the Archdiocese of Kraków applied to build a church in Nowa Huta. In 1959, the archbishop of Kraków, Karol Wojtyła, celebrated outdoor mass in the open field where the church was supposed to be constructed. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, clergy and the authorities tussled over funding and permits until finally, in 1977, the church was built. Cardinal Wojtyła consecrated it, an act that elevated both his national and his international stature. Six years later, Wojtyła—now Pope John Paul II—celebrated mass there before a triumphant crowd. Nowa Huta had become, and remains, a symbol of totalitarianism’s failure in Poland: failed planning, failed architecture, a failed utopian dream.

  Chapter 16

  RELUCTANT COLLABORATORS

  She gave us everything

  Sun and Wind, always generous

  Wherever she was, there was life,

  We are what we are because of her

  She never abandoned us

  Even in a frozen world we were warmed …

  The party, the party, she is always right!

  And Comrades, so it will always remain

  Since he who fights for the right, is always right …

  He who defends mankind is always right …

  As raised to life by Lenin’s spirit, as welded by Stalin

  The party, the party, the party

  —“The Song of the Party,” 1949

  This is the difficult thing to explain to people: that song—“the party, the party is always right”—we thought it was really the truth, and we behaved that way.

  —Herta Kuhrig, Berlin, 20061

  TO THE MODERN ear, or perhaps more accurately to the postmodern ear, the lyrics of “The Song of the Party” (“Das Lied der Partei”), cited above, are not exactly emotive. On the contrary, they seem absurd, and in the years since East Germany ceased to exist they have been mocked, parodied, and even sung by Mickey Mouse in a YouTube production.2 Without an intact ideology to support them, the words of the chorus—“The party, the party, she is always right!”—sound not merely outdated but laughable. It is difficult to imagine how anyone could have sung them with a straight face.

  But those who sang this song in Stalinist East Germany were not laughing, and the words had certainly been composed in earnest. Their author was a Czech-German communist named Louis Fürnberg, who had fled to Palestine during the war and returned to Prague in 1946. As both a Jew and a former émigré, he had become a figure of suspicion in Czechoslovakia by 1949, and was thus excluded from the party congress of that year. In sorrow—or perhaps with the hope of reversing his status—he composed “The Party Is Always Right.” But then he got lucky. Instead of going to jail with Slánský, he was sent to East Germany as a diplomat. His song was performed at the Berlin party congress in 1950, where it was much admired. Eventually, it was adopted as the German party’s anthem. After that, “The Song of the Party” was performed regularly, at official and party occasions, right up through the 1980s, often with apparent gusto.3

  Why? Some sang because they were afraid not to sing. But quite a few of them simply didn’t listen to the words or weren’t interested in them. Indeed, many of those who clapped at the leaders’ speeches, or who mouthed slogans at meetings, or who marched in May Day parades did so with a certain odd ambivalence. Millions of people did not necessarily believe all of the slogans they read in the newspaper, but neither did they feel compelled to denounce those who were writing them. They did not necessarily believe that Stalin was an infallible leader, but they did not tear down his portraits. They did not necessarily believe that “the party, the party, the party is always right,” but they did not stop singing those lyrics.

  There isn’t a straightforward explanation for why they did not resist more openly, though some may now think so. For the extraordinary achievement of Soviet communism—as conceived in the 1920s, perfected in the 1930s, and then spread across Eastern Europe after 1945—was the system’s ability to get so many apolitical people in so many countries to play along without much protest. The devastation of the war, the exhaustion of its victims, the carefully targeted terror and ethnic cleansing—all of the elements of Sovietization described earlier in this book—are part of the explanation. Both the memory of recent violence and the threat of future violence hovered constantly in the background. If one person in a group of twenty acquaintances was arrested, that might suffice to keep the other nineteen afraid. The secret police’s informer network was ever present, and even when it wasn’t people thought it might be. The unavoidable, repetitive propaganda in schools, in the media, on the streets, and at all kinds of “apolitical” meetings and events also made the slogans seem inevitable and the system unavoidable. What was the point of objecting?

  At the same time, some of the language the authorities used was very appealing. Reconstruction, though it would have happened faster and more efficiently under a different political system, was clearly moving forward. Though they often overreached, communist authorities did call for a war on ignorance and illiteracy, they did align themselves with the forces of science and technical progress, and they did appeal to those who hoped that society could be remade after a terrible war. Jerzy Morawski, a Politburo member in the 1950s, remembered wistfully that “at the beginning, I was enormously impressed with the enthusiasm. I thought we were going to create a new Poland, different from prewar Poland … that we would take care of all of those who had been maltreated in the past.”4 Another Pole, a junior officer at the time, remembered th
at “work waited for people and not the other way around, Warsaw was being rebuilt, industry was being rebuilt, everyone could study. New schools were built, high schools, and everything was free.”5

  Meanwhile the systematic destruction of alternative sources of authority and of civil society, also described in previous chapters, meant that those who questioned the system and its values felt isolated and alone. The satirist and writer Jacek Fedorowicz grew up in a family with grave doubts about the regime, but he had no idea what his classmates thought about communism and never asked them: “The terror was such that one didn’t speak of it.”6

  The communists also had a claque of influential supporters in the West, among them intellectual luminaries such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Pablo Picasso, who gave a sheen of legitimacy to communist ideology and made many Eastern Europeans feel they weren’t merely Soviet subjects but rather part of the Continental avant-garde. Much of Western Europe was turning to the left, after all, so why shouldn’t Eastern Europe do so too? Picasso himself visited Poland in 1948 to attend the World Congress of Intellectuals for Peace. Although he tore off his headset and refused to listen to the translation when the Soviet guests began insulting existentialism and T. S. Eliot, he did seem to approve of much else.7 He stayed two weeks, donated some hand-painted ceramics to the National Museum, and sketched a mermaid, the symbol of Warsaw, on the wall of one of the new socialist realist “apartments for the workers” in central Warsaw. Alas the workers became annoyed by the numbers of people who wanted to visit the sketch, and they eventually painted it over.8

  There were also outright bribes. These came in many forms, from the well-paid jobs and exclusive villas offered to famous writers and artists to the pay raises offered to the German technicians and scientists who agreed to stay in the East. Further down the scale, state employees often had very cheap or free meals, better housing, and ration tickets. At the highest levels, the privileges could be very elaborate indeed, especially by the standards of the time. In 1946, the party secretary in the Hungarian town of Csákberény held a grand dinner in the villa he had confiscated from the local gentry. One guest remembered the evening well:

  The villa was illuminated, decorated with torches. On the right side of the entrance, the hunting club stood guard in their uniforms, on the left side stood party youth leaders in blue shirts and red tie … [outside] some American limousines were parked beside two Soviet military jeeps, several motorbikes, and some horse carriages. One police car was also there … Inside on the long table there was a roasted pig, caviar, and turkey, and also wild boar, pheasant, and studded goose. Strong Meran wine from the confiscated vineyards was poured in crystal glasses from crystal bottles …9

  In Budapest and Berlin, party leaders had the pick of the villas left behind by the displaced bourgeoisie. In Warsaw, the party elite generally spent their time outside the city, in the suburb of Konstancin, where they had their own dining facilities and cinema, and where they were protected by armed guards under Soviet command. According to Józef Światło, the secret policeman who defected in 1953, the garden surrounding Bolesław Bierut’s villa was “swarming with men in dark suits and briefcases, or with their hands in their pockets,” when Bierut and his mistress were in residence: “They are there just in case ’the masses’ want to greet him, God forbid.” This description might be overcolorful, but it does have an echo in Joel Agee’s memoir of his childhood spent in the home of his stepfather, an East German writer who also lived in a heavily guarded enclave outside Berlin. Wilhelm Pieck’s villa was nearby, as Agee remembered: “Many black limousines stood in front of it, and armored cars and jeeps. A ring of barbed wire surrounded the place, patrolled by guards. You could sense it was best not to go too near it.”10

  Secret police employees could offer other services too. All of Bierut’s cooks, waiters, and cleaning ladies were Security Ministry employees, according to Światło, and their salaries were paid from its budget. Other dignitaries enjoyed similarly large staff and similarly large residences. Stanisław Radkiewicz, the security police boss, had an apartment in Warsaw, a villa in Konstancin, and four cars with four drivers to get him back and forth. But even further down the scale, deputy ministers and high-ranking security policemen like Światło “had free apartments with servants, and cars at our disposal” as well as free clothes, shoes, blankets, linen, and even socks, gloves, and briefcases.11

  There were also outright financial rewards for people willing to work secretly on behalf of the regime, especially if they agreed to switch sides. One of the Stasi’s most successful early espionage operations, Aktion Pfeil, was made possible because a low-level courier for the West German Federal Intelligence Service (the Bundesnachrichtendienst, or BND) was so easily purchased. The courier, Hans-Joachim Geyer, was a former Nazi party member and had been a BND employee for only a few weeks when he was caught. Under interrogation he immediately pleaded guilty, but declared that “he thought he could be of help …”

  The Stasi put Geyer on the payroll immediately: his first payment went through on December 12, 1952. Geyer continued to travel to West Berlin to meet his contacts. Every time he reported to the Stasi he presented them with receipts, some of which have been lovingly preserved in the Stasi archive and remain there today. These include, among other things, an optician’s bill; six tickets to the circus; and sales receipts for books, sporting equipment, and leather goods. Geyer’s Christmas shopping list (presumably presents for family) included chocolate biscuits, coconut, a pair of children’s stockings, marzipan, apricots, a new suit, and handkerchiefs.

  Apparently he was worth it. Thanks to Geyer, one officer wrote, the Stasi had been able to “arrest 108 BND spies in East Germany” and obtain hundreds of original documents. Although he was eventually brought home in the autumn of 1953 after his cover had been blown, he received multiple medals from the East German state, and even after his death the GDR continued to pay a hefty pension to his widow.12 The Stasi even paid all of his sons’ education fees, including medical school tuition. Both eventually became doctors.

  Consciously or unconsciously, the Stasi background file on Geyer reveals a good deal about the personality type of someone who could be bribed into cooperation. Geyer, his case managers wrote, “wants to please everybody.” In addition, “he is devoted to his wife and children and to the property where he lives. He doesn’t drink too much. Nothing immoral can be found out about him.” He was “politically indifferent” but “easy to influence,” and it was suggested that instructors train him in “logical thinking and the dialectical method.” Presumably he went along with that too.

  For a select few, the communist system also offered dramatic promotions—the “social advance” described in Chapter 13—and excellent opportunities for those who conformed. The new educational system and the new workplace ideology certainly created losers—teachers and intellectuals with a prewar sensibility, older skilled workers, young people who would not or could not conform—but it created many winners as well. Among them were new teachers and workers who replaced the older ones, new writers who replaced older writers, and new politicians who replaced their elders too. Jacek Kuroń, a Union of Polish Youth activist at the time (and later a renowned dissident), observed the results of the “social advance” policy in his Warsaw neighborhood during the 1950s:

  In the ruling committee of the local Union of Polish Youth group one could see it with the naked eye. Who came there? Many young people from the poorest houses in Marymont, from the prewar slums, from shacks built after the war with bricks taken out of the rubble, as well as the former officers’ villas in Żoliborz, which had become dormitories for the unemployed and were now slums as well. In fact, the people who came had been, until recently, the absolute lowest rung of society. And everyone knew someone in power. An uncle, a brother-in-law, a friend who had once hung around the neighborhood and was now in the Security Department, the army, the militia, the local or regional party committee … Of deep significance was the fact
that these young people felt themselves to be in charge. And for a certain period, particularly on the neighborhood level, they were.13

  The communist regime required very little in exchange for this brand-new sensation of control and power: it just asked the beneficiaries to close their eyes occasionally to contradictions between propaganda and reality. To some, this seemed a very small price to pay for rapid social mobility.

  Yet most people in the communist regimes did not succumb to dramatic bribes, furious threats, or elaborate rewards. Most people wanted to be neither party bosses nor angry dissidents. They wanted to get on with their lives, rebuild their countries, educate their children, feed their families, and stay far away from those in power. But the culture of High Stalinist Eastern Europe made it impossible to do so in silent neutrality. No one could be apolitical: the system demanded that all citizens constantly sing its praises, however reluctantly. And so the vast majority of Eastern Europeans did not make a pact with the devil or sell their souls to become informers but rather succumbed to constant, all-encompassing, everyday psychological and economic pressure. The Stalinist system excelled at creating large groups of people who disliked the regime and knew the propaganda was false, but who felt nevertheless compelled by circumstances to go along with it. For lack of a better expression, I’ll call them “resistant” or “reluctant” collaborators.

  Upon returning from a labor camp in Siberia, for example, Wolfgang Lehmann wanted to get a job in construction in East Germany. Because of his record, he wasn’t accepted anywhere. The chief engineer advised him to join the German–Soviet friendship society. He did. For good measure, he got a Russian friend to write a letter certifying that he’d been a good friend to the USSR while in the Gulag. He got the job.14 Michał Bauer, a Home Army soldier who also spent time in the Gulag, found himself working at a state company a few years later. Every day, the entire staff had to gather to listen to readings from the morning’s newspapers. Sometimes he had to preside over these sessions, even though he never had any sympathy for communism at all: “They would say ‘Bauer, tomorrow you’ve got press duty, find a theme’ … if you didn’t do it, you could be thrown out of work.”15