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

by Anne Applebaum

  The musician Andrzej Panufnik also had no love for a system he found “artistically and morally dishonest … My musical imagination turned somersaults at the thought of reflecting the ‘struggle of the people victoriously marching toward socialism.’ ” After the war, Panufnik wanted nothing except to rebuild his country and compose music. But in order to be allowed to do so, he had to join the Union of Polish Composers. And when all union members were ordered to compete to compose a new “Song of the United Party,” he was forced to do that too: if he refused, he was told, not only would he lose his post, the whole union would lose the financial support of the state. He wrote a song “literally in a few minutes, setting the ridiculous text to the first jumble of notes that came into my head. It was rubbish, and I smiled to myself as I sent it off to the adjudicators.” To his eternal embarrassment, he won first prize.16

  These examples are by no means unusual. By the 1950s, most people in Eastern Europe worked in state jobs, lived in state-owned properties, and sent their children to state schools. They depended on the state for health care, and they bought food from state-owned shops. They were understandably cautious about defying the state except in dramatic circumstances. And, much of the time, their circumstances were not dramatic, because in peacetime, most people’s circumstances are not dramatic.

  In 1947, for example, the Soviet military administrators in East Germany passed order number 90, a regulation governing the activity of publishing houses and printers. In essence, the rule said that every printing press must be licensed and that licensed printing presses could only print books and pamphlets that had been approved and stamped by the official censors. Failure to comply with these simple guidelines did not lead to arrest or execution, but could cause the printer to be fined or the printing press to be shut down.17 The order presented the owner of a printing press in Dresden or Leipzig with a very straightforward choice. He could comply with the law and print only what was permitted. Or he could break the law and lose his printer’s license, and therefore his livelihood. For most people, it just wasn’t worth it. For those who had a sick wife, a son in a Soviet camp, or an aging parent to support, the incentive to stay within the law was even higher.

  But once the Dresden printer had made that compromise, others would follow. He might dislike communist ideology, but when presented with the collected works of Stalin, he would agree to print them. He might dislike communist economics, but when presented with a Marxist textbook, he’d probably go ahead and print that too. Why not? There were no consequences: no one would be hurt or go to jail. But if he said no, then he and his family could have real problems, and someone else would soon print it in any case.

  Meanwhile, all across East Germany, other owners of other printing presses were making the same decisions. After a while—with no one being shot and no one going to prison and no one even suffering any particular pangs of conscience—the only books left to read were the ones approved by the authorities. After a little more time had passed, there were no private printing presses anymore either. None of the printers involved would necessarily have considered himself a collaborator, let alone a communist. And yet every one of them had somehow contributed to the creation of totalitarianism. So did everyone who endured a university course in Marxism-Leninism in order to become a doctor or an engineer; everyone who joined an artists’ union in order to become a painter; everyone who put a portrait of Bierut in his office in order to keep his job; and, of course, everyone who joined the crowd in singing “the party, the party, the party is always right.”

  The experience of living in a society that forced everyone to sound enthusiastic all of the time, and that forced many people to say and do things they didn’t believe in, eventually had profound psychological consequences. Despite all of the state’s efforts, despite the education and the propaganda, many people retained an inner sense of disjunction or discomfort. “I was shouting from a tribune at some university meeting in Wrocław, and simultaneously felt panicked at the thought of myself shouting … I told myself I was trying to convince [the crowd] by shouting, but in reality I was trying to convince myself,” remembered the writer Jacek Trznadel.18 Panufnik, the composer, agonized over how and what to write—he couldn’t bear the “nineteenth-century musical language” the regime preferred but did not want to be accused of “professing the art of the rotten West” either, especially after his daughter was born. He sought refuge in the restoration of old Polish music from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: “Thus I could help to reconstruct a small part of our missing inheritance, working more as a scholar than as a composer.”19 If the genius of Soviet totalitarianism was its ability to get people to conform, this was also its fatal flaw: the need to conform to a mendacious political reality left many people haunted by the sense that they were leading double lives.

  Lily Hajdú-Gimes, a trained Freudian psychoanalyst, was perhaps the first to diagnose this as a problem in patients, as well as in herself. “I play the game that is offered by the regime,” she told friends, “though as soon as you accept that rule you are in a trap.” Hajdú-Gimes was a member of Hungary’s Association of Psychoanalysts, a once influential and largely Jewish community that had been decimated by the war. Determined to regroup and reintegrate, the association had begun to hold biweekly meetings in March 1945, and a number of its members, including Hajdú-Gimes, had joined the communist party. A few made intellectual efforts to reconcile Freud with Marxism, by examining, for example, the role of economic insecurity in the development of neurosis. The new Ministry of Health permitted the group to open two consulting rooms, and several members joined university medical schools, hoping eventually to have their speciality recognized with its own department. Hajdú-Gimes eventually went to work in the main state psychiatric hospital.

  This brief rebirth ended quickly. Freudian psychoanalysis had long been taboo in the Soviet Union—it was too focused on the individual, too accepting of irrational and subconscious behavior, and too uninterested in politics—and so it would have to be banned in Hungary as well. Attacks against the group began in 1948, following the publication of a vicious scholarly article entitled “Freudianism as the Domestic Psychology of Imperialism.” Once that had appeared, others began to use terms like “bourgeois-feudalist,” “antisocial,” and “irrationalist” to describe the profession too.20 The philosopher György Lukács called analysts “reactionaries” who longed for Anglo-American class dictatorship.21

  Some psychoanalysts quit the profession altogether. Others sought a middle ground. In an attempt to reconcile themselves to the new order, Hajdú-Gimes and a colleague, Imre Hermann, went beyond their previous attempts at reconciliation and wrote a letter to Lukács agreeing with some of his criticism—“imperialists in their own countries try to make use of psychoanalysis for their own purposes”—but objecting to the latent anti-Semitism in some of the attacks.22 They received a stinging rebuke: “I would urgently request you, comrades, not to divert important ideological debates to the roadside of common demagoguery.” Frightened, the association voluntarily dissolved itself in 1949. Hajdú-Gimes and Hermann signed a declaration that “psychoanalysis is the product of decaying capitalism and anti-state ideology.” Books by Freud, Adler, and Jung were banned; Hermann was expelled from his university post; and several analysts were arrested.23

  After that, Hungarian psychiatrists followed Soviet practice, which mostly relied on the cruder methods of electroshock and insulin therapy—also popular in much of the West, of course—and whose primary goal was to persuade people to conform. One analyst who was in training at this time remembered that “exhaustion” was one of the main postwar diagnoses, and medically induced sleep one of the main forms of therapy: “Even people who were traumatized because of the concentration camps or the Holocaust were not diagnosed as such … there was no talk of trauma, there was a denial because psychoanalysts themselves were in denial.” He thought Hajdú-Gimes, one of his teachers, had also been in denial about her own t
ragic past. Though she had lost her husband in the Holocaust, she never mentioned it.24

  She may have been in denial in other ways too. For Hajdú-Gimes, Hermann, and a few other dedicated Freudians continued to practice their true profession in secret. Hajdú-Gimes saw patients at home and even conducted Freudian training sessions in private apartments. In public she accepted the official view of the human psyche as innately conformist. In private, she listened as patients, including Holocaust survivors and children of imprisoned or executed communists, described their very individual and very unique personal demons. One such patient later remembered the experience of psychoanalysis in 1948 Budapest as very strange, since honesty in that period could be dangerous: “I told the whole truth … I was also under threat as I was analyzed. I asked myself: Did he know that? Could I rely on him? Would he give me away?” The position of the analyst was no less precarious. After one of Hermann’s patients was sentenced to death during the Rajk trial, he himself was suddenly endangered: if his client mentioned his name, he could be arrested.25 For Hajdú-Gimes, the strain of living such a life eventually proved too much, especially after the regime executed her son following the 1956 revolution. In 1960 she killed herself.26

  Hajdú-Gimes’s double life was particularly traumatic, but it was not unique. Antoni Rajkiewicz fought with the “peasants’ battalion” of the Home Army during the war, joined the party afterward, quit in disgust in 1946 and was briefly arrested in 1948. But he was also intelligent and ambitious, he wanted to get a doctorate at one of the most prestigious universities, the School of Central Planning and Statistics, and he wanted to make some positive contribution to his country’s development. He reckoned he could accept some of the party’s ideas—the emphasis on education and scientific progress, for example—even though he rejected others. Besides, there were no other options. He applied and was accepted. He studied with several Russian professors who had been imported to explain central planning to the Poles, using textbooks translated from Russian. He rejoined the party and also began, in his own words, to live a double life: “You had to behave differently, speak differently, at official meetings and party meetings, and differently among your friends.”27

  Rajkiewicz, like many young party members, stayed in touch with his friends from the Home Army and freely discussed politics with them too. At the same time, he was careful about what he said when at the university. No one gave him instructions, but “it was possible to intuit, from newsapers like Trybuna Ludu, what would be allowed and what would not.” Rajkiewicz was never ignorant of the flaws in the system, and he was not blind to its injustices. But he saw no other way to study, work, and live in communist Poland. Like Wanda Telakowska, he was a positivist who believed in pragmatic solutions and in getting on with things. His “double life” persisted until Stalin’s death, when the circle of people with whom one could speak honestly grew wider.

  For Rajkiewicz, the split was between his friends and his professional life. For Jacek Fedorowicz, later an actor and cabaret artist, the split was between home and school. Fedorowicz intuitively understood, even as a child, that there were things he was allowed to say in his house, which could not be repeated at school. As a contemporary of his notes, “It seems curious how quickly we learned this code, even in primary school, with almost zero knowledge of politics … we knew exactly what could be said in different settings, at school, among close friends and not so close, at home and on holiday.”28 Like Rajkiewicz, Fedorowicz came from a Home Army family and his father was refused permission to work in Gdańsk, forcing the family to move. His parents reinforced his childish impression of the different rules—even the different definitions of words—which applied at home and at school. Once, when told to take the Scouting oath, he went home and asked his mother whether it was right to swear allegiance to “democracy,” if “democracy” had been brought to Poland by the Russians. She explained to him that there were two kinds of democracy: “real” democracy and “Soviet” democracy. He should admire the former and keep his distance from the latter.

  Fedorowicz also picked up clues from children’s books and magazines—clues that had been placed there, unwittingly, by their authors. He was particularly addicted to a children’s magazine called Świat Przygód (The World of Adventure), which he liked to read because it contained comic strips. But at a certain point, the magazine changed its name to Świat Młodych (The World of Youth), ceased to be interesting, and stopped printing comic strips. (Presumably comic strips, as a capitalist invention, were deemed ideologically incorrect.) But as the official world became more boring, he felt an ever greater internal distance from school and an ever greater disinclination to speak honestly when he was there.

  Fedorowicz did have some teachers who also kept distance from the regime—he remembered one who would carefully explain that “Marxists think like this” while “we think like that.” Years later, he reckoned that almost everyone had overrated the effectiveness of communist propaganda and and as a result overestimated the number of people who supported the system. But like Hajdú-Gimes he also thought it impossible to live in a communist country and not somehow be touched or deformed by the system: tiny compromises, whether the mumbling of a song or the signing of a peace petition, were impossible to avoid.29

  If anything, the childhood experiences of Karol Modzelewski were even more contradictory and confusing. Modzelewski was born in Russia, the son of a Russian officer and his Polish communist wife. Three weeks after his birth in 1937, his father was arrested, and he was sent to a Russian orphanage, where he lived for several years. But he was removed from the orphanage after his mother remarried. Karol’s new stepfather was Zygmunt Modzelewski, a communist who was the Polish ambassador to the USSR in 1945–47, and later Polish minister of foreign affairs. Modzelewski learned of his biological father’s arrest only in 1954—by accident, from a schoolmate—when he was seventeen years old, and only then did he discuss the true story of his father’s life with his mother.

  Years later, he reckoned even that conversation was only possible because Stalin was already dead: “Before, no one told such things to children—there was always a threat that the child would let out the secret. It was dangerous for the child but also for the parents.” Modzelewski’s wife had been expelled from kindergarten at the age of three after Stalin’s death because she told her teacher, “My grandfather says Stalin is already burning in hell.” The teacher sent her home, not as punishment but because the danger to the grandfather and to the school was so great.

  So carefully did his parents shield Modzelewski from their own growing doubts about the Polish political system that as a child he was terrified by their occasionally critical comments. After the arrest of General Wacław Komar in 1952, in connection with the show trials of the time, he explained to his stepfather, echoing his schoolteachers, that Komar was a spy: “My stepfather shouted at me … he never cursed me so much as then. I said that he had been arrested. My stepfather replied, ‘Arrested does not equal guilty.’ It was a banal truth but at that time I felt it like an earthquake. If he was right, it meant that the authorities are arresting innocent citizens. Who could say this? Only an enemy …”

  He drew similar conclusions after he once asked about a change to the food rationing system. His stepfather snapped, “It is so that people eat less and work more.” Modzelewski was shocked: “Only the enemy could say something like that … I remember that because it was a tremendous stress at the time, I had to deny it somehow in order to decrease the dissonance … I did not recognize him as the enemy but he was speaking like one. I remember that feeling even today after all those years that have passed.”30

  The Modzelewskis were not alone in dealing with difficult information by keeping silent. Krzyztof Pomian, another scion of a communist family, remembered that “it was simply not done to speak about arrests, they were accepted without comment. And since this wasn’t a topic for discussion, it wasn’t a topic for reflection either.” In 1952, he and a Je
wish friend sat together and read accounts of the show trials in Prague. The friend asked him what he thought of the Slánský trial and Pomian replied that he didn’t think anything of it: “It’s just another trial.” The friend exploded: “You don’t see that this is an anti-Semitic story?” That was his first conversation with anyone about any of the trials, and it did make him think for the first time too.31

  Feelings of divided loyalty haunted some who were even closer to the centers of power. Jerzy Morawski, a Union of Polish Youth leader at the time, didn’t doubt in retrospect his own youthful enthusiasm for the communist cause, even in the Stalinist 1950s. But even then he knew that party meetings were, to put it bluntly, boring: “It was all stiff, all of that. And there was an enormous amount of intolerance. Everyone was supposed to agree. Everybody was supposed to think identically, act identically … that stiffness destroyed the enthusiasm.”

  Later, Morawski became a leading propaganda bureaucrat; more precisely, he was the man who decided which Stalinist slogans would be used in public spaces. But even in this position of high authority, he had mixed feelings about this work: “Something inside me always said that this is not right, it’s aesthetically unappealing … but on the other hand, that’s how we win people over.”32 This may not be an entirely honest recollection—of course, it’s easy in retrospect to say that one was uncomfortable—but the problem of divided feelings was acknowledged by others, even at the time. “People have become cunning after twelve years of the Nazi regime,” one Leipzig professor told a party acquaintance, “and if they suspect that a certain person has anything to do with state power—and this applies to members of the Party as well—they shut their mouths.”33