Scouting had surprisingly deep roots in Eastern Europe, especially in states whose borders had been redrawn after the First World War. Leaders of these “new” states—Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary—very much wanted young people to become engaged in the national rejuvenation and reconstruction projects of the time. With its emphasis on health, work, and community service, Lord Baden-Powell’s modern Scouting movement seemed to show the way. Scouting, one Polish enthusiast wrote in a 1924 pamphlet, not only defined the vague notion of “character” for young Poles but offered them a concrete means to acquire it.54
In Poland, the Scouts had acquired an extra layer of emotional and political significance during the war. Following the invasion of the country in September 1939, Scouting leaders had taken the momentous decision to go underground and join the resistance. Under the name Szare Szeregi—the Gray Ranks—the Scouts became messengers, liaison officers, radio operators, nurses, and eventually partisan fighters in the Home Army. Scouts as young as ten or twelve fought and died in the Warsaw Uprising. Young men and women, sometimes still wearing their tattered gray uniforms, turned up in Soviet concentration camps after the uprising failed and the Home Army was defeated.55 “This was a different Scouting movement from today, we were brought up in the spirit of Poland,” wrote one.56
The underground Gray Ranks dissolved themselves at the war’s end along with the rest of the Home Army. But Scout troops began openly re-forming themselves on liberated territories even before the end of the war in Białystok and other eastern cities. Almost as soon as Kraków was liberated, several well-known prewar Scout leaders started to organize new troops there too. They did not inform the provisional government in Lublin. Why would they? They hadn’t had to inform anybody of their activities before the war. By the end of 1946, the movement had 237,749 members, both young men and young women. Enthusiasm was high, as one Scout remembered: “Scouting, in the first months after independence, exploded like a powerful bomb. Scouts and Scout leaders appeared as if from nowhere. Every night, campfires burned and Scouting songs were sung in uncounted courtyards. Young people were extraordinarily enthusiastic, full of energy.”57 Another recalled a summer Scouting camp he had attended in July 1946:
I remember the charm and the special atmosphere of the traditional campfire at that camp—in unplanned, lively discussions, using simple words, people spoke of what they had lived through in recent years, of their future plans, of the meaning of life, friendship … and when, by the smoldering coals of the disappearing fire, we folded our hands in the traditional Scouts’ prayer, our faces were thoughtful, serious, but glowing with happiness …58
To begin with, the Polish Scouts set out to be apolitical. In this moment of national rebuilding, they wanted only to be useful. One former Girl Scout remembered working in orphanages during the week, while during the weekends her troop traveled to the formerly German territories around the Mazurian lakes to help create school libraries, catalogue historic monuments, even to “take part in the committee for language changes,” which was then translating German place-names and street names into Polish.59 But signs of official disapproval appeared almost immediately. In late 1944 and early 1945, the Polish authorities in Lublin created a temporary “Scouting council” to oversee the movement’s activities. Although the council included some prewar troop leaders, it immediately made a few subtle changes to the Scouting oath, which now referred to the Scout serving “Democratic Poland” and left out “service to God.” It also created an umbrella organization, the Union of Polish Scouting (Związek Harcerstwa Polskiego, or ZHP), under which, theoretically, all troops were supposed to fit. The point was to make the spontaneously forming groups subservient to the communist administration, and it didn’t work.60
By the end of 1945, there was clear tension between the government officials who were trying to control and direct the movement (they wrote yet another version of the oath, one in which Scouts would pledge to create “a better world”) and the grassroots Scouting groups, not all of whom kept the Warsaw-dominated union informed of their activities. A number of well-known Gray Ranks leaders had entered the movement’s leadership, and although they also remained officially apolitical, there were some political incidents. In Bydgoszcz, Scouts marching past the local secret police headquarters during a parade in 1945 were stunned to hear two shots fired from the window. Two Scouts died. No one was ever sentenced for the murders.61 At a “youth rally” in Szczecin in 1946, a shouting match between Scouts and young communists turned into an open brawl. At least two Girl Scouts were badly beaten.62 Scouts across the country were arrested after taking part in demonstrations on May 3, Poland’s traditional constitution day.
At several points in 1947, Polish authorities considered shutting the Scouting movement down altogether. They worried, however, that a ban would send thousands of young people into the arms of the underground, or into the woods with the partisans.63 So they waited. And eventually, they adopted the tactic which, as noted, would become a standard tool in the Eastern European communist arsenal: they resolved to destroy the movement from within. The Hungarian communists made a similar decision about their own, equally problematic Scouting movement at about the same time.
Like their Hungarian and German counterparts, the political Polish youth groups had been unified into a single organization, the Union of Polish Youth (Związek Młodzieży Polskiej, or ZMP) in February 1948. After that, it was the turn of the Scouts. The Education Ministry launched a “reorganization” of the national movement, unifying the male and female Scouts, removing many older leaders and replacing them with younger, less experienced, and more ideologically pliable leaders. These changes were done gradually. First someone at the top was replaced; then he or she appointed a new deputy; then the deputy appointed a new regional leader—and so on. The new national Scouting leaders began, subtly, to change the Scouts’ activities. In addition to the traditional Scouting activities—hiking, camping, survival skills—troops should now “take part in the daily life of the country.” They were sent to plant trees, help lay telephone cables, and work in preschools. They were directed to become, as one bureaucrat put it, a younger version of the “Polish Service” (Służba Polska), the unskilled work brigades that traveled from one construction site to the next. Some were even delegated to factories or workshops to learn a trade.64
The Scouts ceased to be a cross-generational organization. Whereas, in the past, Polish Scouting troops had included men and women in their late teens and twenties, Scouts aged sixteen and older were now “promoted” to the Union of Polish Youth, making Scouting an activity for children. Organizationally and financially, the Scouts eventually became a subdivision of the Union of Polish Youth rather than a separate organization. As such their main task was the political education of children. In practice, they began to look and act like Soviet Pioneers, the junior youth organization. They even wore similar white shirts and red ties.65 In 1950, the Scouting oath was changed for a third time. The new version now had the Scouts swear an oath to People’s Poland, and promise to promote “peace and the freedom of nations.”
The Scouts themselves understood what was happening. As one Scout leader later remembered, “Each month, new people began gradually infiltrating the Scouting movement. There was one, Kosiński, said to be a Scout leader. He was as much a Scout leader as I am a ballet dancer. He was a [secret police] officer. An awful man.”66 Those who cared gradually left the movement, drifting away to other activities. Those too young to remember how the organization had once looked weren’t going to complain, and their parents, wanting their children to conform and not get into trouble, said nothing.
Those who wanted to form alternatives could pay a high price.67 A few troops went underground and got hold of guns—still plentiful enough at that time—and began training themselves to fight. The secret police uncovered one such group in the town of Krotoszyn in 1947. The group had called itself Zawisza, a name with allusions to chivalry. Its leader, aged eig
hteen, committed suicide at the moment of arrest. The other members, some as young as fifteen, were arrested and sentenced. Another group of former Scouts was “liquidated” in Radzyminsk, also in 1947. The secret police sent their Union of Polish Scouting membership cards to the minister of education as a kind of warning: this is what could happen if young people were not strictly, carefully, and energetically controlled.68 But unarmed objectors could face severe punishment too. In 1950, a seventeen-year-old Polish girl from Lublin decided to ask the members of her old Scouting group to meet informally, just to discuss things not discussed in school. She and her seven friends were arrested in 1951, and all received sentences of two to five years: anything that looked like an authentic Scouting troop had to be destroyed so that the ersatz Scouts could take over.69
If anything, the Hungarian People’s Colleges movement presented an even more complex challenge to the Hungarian communists than the Scouting movement did to their Polish colleagues. Whereas Scouting was associated with prewar patriotism and the “reactionary” (that is, centrist) wing of the political spectrum, the People’s Colleges were an explicitly populist, left-wing project. The original People’s Colleges had been founded before the war by a group of romantic, reform-minded poets and writers. Designed to educate the children of peasants, the colleges were intended to function as schools, clubs, and living spaces in cities for students from the countryside. They were not ordinary schools but rather had something of the spirit of the kibbutz about them, emphasizing communal living, democratic group decision-making, folk dancing, and singing. Although they had strong socialist leanings, and although a number of their leading members joined the communist party during the war, they weren’t Soviet or party institutions.
After the war, the founders of Györffy College, the first People’s College to restart its program in June 1945, were under the impression that they could carry on in the same spirit. In December 1944, some of the prewar students and teachers began meeting regularly at an old German language school in the liberated part of Budapest, and they began planning a new curriculum right away. The provisional government encouraged this enthusiasm and as soon as it could gave Györffy a new building, a garden with fruit trees, and a vacation house on Lake Balaton. But Györffy’s leaders intended to remain independent. At a conference held to mark the opening, the college’s prewar leader, Lajos Horváth, called upon those assembled, many of whom were already communist party members, to “fight for the autonomy of the college, and protect it from the party and the state as well.” In the months that followed, he and others helped to found Nékosz, the National Association of People’s Colleges, which would eventually build dozens of similar institutions around the country.70
In fact, Nékosz’s “autonomy” was doomed from the start, for neither Györffy nor the other colleges had any independent means of financing themselves. Their buildings came from the government—castles, old garrison buildings, confiscated villas—and their students existed on government subsidies.71 State influence came with state money, and the communist leadership had different goals from the leaders of the People’s Colleges. At first, the conflict was hidden. Leading communists were publicly supportive of the college movement. Both Rajk, the interior minister, and Révai, the culture minister, gave regular lectures at the colleges, and Rajk helped found the Petőfi College in Budapest. The first generation of students were ecstatic simply to be there. Miklós Jancsó, a Nékosz graduate who became a film director (one of several People’s Colleges’ alumni to enter the movie business), portrayed the passion and zeal of the People’s Colleges movement in his 1968 film Bright Winds (Fényes Szelek),72 the title of which comes from the Nékosz anthem:
Hey, our banner blows in the bright winds! Hey, on it is written, Let Freedom Live!
Hey winds, blow! Bright winds, blow, for tomorrow we will change the entire world!
Afterward, Jancsó was asked by a group of university students why he had written so much music into the script, the first half of which contains more singing than dialogue. He replied that this was pure realism: “At that time, after the war, it was very common for young people to sing together on the streets.” Iván Vitányi, another People’s Colleges alumnus, also remembered that “sons and daughters of the peasantry, we were singing all day long.”73
The enthusiasm came in part from the sense of opportunity experienced by these first students, for the colleges offered education to people who’d never had any before. Some were the first in their families who could properly read and write. By March 1948, the 158 People’s Colleges contained 8,298 people, of whom 35 to 40 percent came from rural or peasant backgrounds and 18 to 25 percent were working class. The majority were men, but some women graduates later became very prominent, including a handful of actresses. Some offered high-school education, some offered teaching certificates, some could provide higher education. The curriculum was often left wing but not necessarily Marxist. In its first year, Győrffy College organized seminars on the revolutions of 1848 and the history of music; lessons in English, French, and German as well as Russian; opportunities to study “Hungarian realism” and the history of Hungarian industry. The students received free theater tickets and were encouraged to use them, and they were given lists of books they were expected to read in their free time.74 One of the other colleges, the Vasvari Academy, encouraged its students to study abroad for half a year.75
Left to themselves, the People’s Colleges would have been content to produce a new generation of progressive intelligentsia. But the Hungarian communist party had a narrower goal. They saw that the colleges might help solve two of their most pressing problems: deep unpopularity in the countryside, and a lack of rural party members. In February 1945, Gerő wrote a note to Rákosi, pointing out that Hungary had a “shortage of cadres, especially of leaders.” More to the point, “the biggest problem is that many of them are of Jewish origin.” Although, as noted, Gerő and Rákosi were themselves Jewish, both feared that the Hungarian peasants would oppose the communist party if it was “too Jewish.” The People’s Colleges seemed to provide an answer: they could train peasants to become “folk” communists—“folk” being a kind of euphemism for “non-Jewish”—and thus “Hungarianize” the communist party.76
The transformation of the colleges began at first within the leadership, which from the beginning contained a handful of communists. They now set out to take control. András Hegedüs, a People’s Colleges student who had also been a founder of Madisz, the communist-backed youth movement, admitted in an interview years later that the communist cell at Györffy College was “rather militant” and “to a certain degree” it “terrorized the rest of the group.” Another student, also a party member, agreed that it was a “general law that an organized small group could impose its will on a larger heterogeneous group.”77 Within the colleges, communists slowly took over the democratic self-government mechanisms. From this position of influence they brought in a more political element to student life. They organized students to work as advocates for land reform and cooperative production in the countryside, and to participate in mass communist party rallies that preceded the 1945 and 1947 elections. They also influenced the curriculum so that it more closely followed the communist party line. In 1946, the entry questionnaire for Györffy College required applicants to answer some distinctly biased questions: “In your village, are churchgoers better people than those who don’t go to church? Can you describe a reactionary priest? Are young people in your village religious?”78 Sessions of criticism and self-criticism eventually dominated the evening meetings and colloquia within the colleges. During this same period, the leader of Györffy College, László Kardos, who was given to using communist clichés—he spoke of “having friendly relationships with democratic youth of the world”—began to play a much more dominant role in what had previously been a loose, almost anarchic, nonhierarchical institution.79 But the change most bitterly remembered by nostalgic ex-students was the press attacks, w
hich became increasingly bitter—students were accused of insufficient loyalty; unprofessionalism; and, ironically, anti-Semitism—as well as the internal students’ “courts,” which began to expel those who failed to meet the ever more drastic standards of political correctness. All of the students were told to stay alert for ideological errors in themselves and others, and to search for evidence of “peasant romanticism,” which was now considered a bad thing, as well as “petit-bourgois decadence.” Alajos Kovács, a teacher in one of the colleges at the time, remembered that “we were shocked, we did not even know why they were attacking us, we could not understand what had happened. Because of this incomprehension, we began to try—in a masochist, self-defeating way—to understand what had gone wrong, what we had done wrong.”80 One of these “trials” forms the dramatic conclusion to the film Bright Winds.
The idealists might eventually have fought back, and there were numerous struggles for power throughout the larger Nékosz organization. But in 1949 the regime would run out of patience. The colleges were abruptly and decisively nationalized, on the grounds that they needed to become more “professional.” They were absorbed into the rest of the state university system, the buildings were adopted by other institutions, the special reading lists and theater trips were abandoned, and the idealistic self-governing mechanisms, which had largely ceased to function in any case, were dissolved. The decision was justified by reference to Marxist theory. As Rákosi put it, “I learned all about socialism from the famous old books. I learned about mass organizations, youth associations, women’s organizations, trade unions … There is not a single word about People’s Colleges in those books, and I don’t think they are necessary.”81
In other words, the People’s Colleges were an institution unknown to Marx, Lenin, and Stalin, and nothing like them existed in the Soviet Union. And so they were destroyed, along with so many other groups that Marx, Lenin, and Stalin had never mentioned. In the end, the fate of the Polish Scouts, the Hungarian People’s Colleges, the German Christian Democratic youth, and a vast range of other institutions—mainstream and idiosyncratic, political and apolitical, from shooting clubs and fencing teams to folk-dance troupes and Catholic charities—was the same. The nascent totalitarian states could not tolerate any competition whatsoever for their citizens’ passions, talents, and free time.
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