As a result of these kinds of problems, the employment opportunities for enthusiastic youth activists were virtually limitless, although these jobs were not easy. Krzysztof Pomian was the leader of the young Polish communists in the Warsaw district of Mokotów in the early 1950s:
To be a youth leader meant endless meetings, lasting until very late hours in the night, even for schoolchildren. Meetings, group singing sessions, marches, demonstrations, checking whether everyone was at the May 1 celebration, at the July 22 celebration … Those who went to these meetings with a feeling of responsibility were deadly serious, others took it all with a grain of salt … Green shirts, red ties, singing the “Hymn of Youth” before lessons—it was all easier for me because I came from a communist family, and the forced communist “liturgy” didn’t bother me as much as it did others.54
Still, those who stuck with it could remain “youth leaders” for many years. Honecker finally resigned as the Free German Youth leader in 1955, at the age of forty-three, whereupon he slid seamlessly into the leadership of the East German communist party. Józef Tejchma, a Union of Polish Youth activist from 1948 until 1956, when he was twenty-nine, went on to become minister of culture in 1974. András Hegedüs, who attended the founding meetings of the young Hungarian communists in 1945, found himself unexpectedly named prime minister of Hungary a decade later, just before being forced to flee the country following the Hungarian Revolution. For those who played the game, the rewards could be high—but so could the price.55
Children and young people offered the most enticing prospects to party propagandists—they were, literally, the party’s future. But party activists also felt that they had a special mission to win over blue-collar industrial workers, the men and women (but mainly men) in whose name the revolution had been carried out. In order to raise the consciousness of the working class, they therefore turned factories and workplaces into centers for ideological education too, using some of the same techniques—lectures, banners, posters, rallies—as they deployed in schools. By the late 1940s, work itself had been redefined as a political activity. To do a factory job, especially in heavy industry, became a form of service not just to the state or to the economy but to the party itself.
In fact, ideology filled a very important gap in the economy of the period. In state-owned factories better performance did not bring a salary increase; wages were set by central government bureaucrats and there was no incentive to produce more or better. The temptation not to work—or to work slowly and poorly—was very strong. The new factory managers knew they had to find a way to motivate people, and they now did so by tying the performance of individuals directly to the national Five-Year or Six-Year Plans: industries had a daily “norm” or quota, factories had a daily quota, workers had a daily quota, and workers would be paid according to how well they met their quota. They would also battle one another in “socialist competitions,” racing not only to fulfill their quotas but to overfulfill them, and thus to overfulfill the national plan.
Once again, this idea was not a new one. Socialist competitions had been used in the Soviet Union before the war in response to similarly unmotivated workers, low productivity, and an urgent need for faster economic growth. Like their Eastern European counterparts of the late 1940s, the Soviet leaders of the early 1930s were also anxious to prove the superiority of their economic model, which they still expected would soon outpace the capitalist West. In order to inspire their sluggish working class, Soviet propagandists had focused on a select group of high-performing (or allegedly high-performing) examples. These were the “shock workers,” the Heroes of Labor. They dug more coal, produced more iron bars, and constructed more kilometers of road than anyone else. Their model was Alexi Stakhanov, a Donbass miner who on August 31, 1935, supposedly dug 102 tons of coal in five hours and forty-five minutes, fourteen times his assigned production quota. Stakhanov’s achievement was brought to Stalin’s attention, and subsequently turned into a miniature cult of personality. There were articles, books, and posters about Stakhanov as well as Stakhanov streets and Stakhanov squares. A Ukrainian town was renamed Stakhanov in his honor. Heroes of Labor were renamed Stakhanovites after him too, and Stakhanovite competitions were held all over the Soviet Union.
The Eastern European communists would have known the Stakhanov cult very well, and some of them imitated this model with great precision. Eastern Germany’s Stakhanov was Adolf Hennecke, a coal miner who astonished his comrades in 1948 and dug 287 percent of his production quota. This was far lower than Stakhanov’s record—a German could not be expected to surpass a Russian—but Hennecke’s name soon appeared on posters and pamphlets anyway. October 13, the anniversary of his great feat, was for several years celebrated as a national holiday.
Poland had a coal-mining shock worker too, Wincenty Pstrowski. He achieved 273 percent of the norm in 1947, and then endeared himself to the authorities by issuing a challenge: “Who can extract more than I?” Pstrowski was a rather less successful figure than Hennecke. Although he had a clean ideological background—he had emigrated from Poland during the war and joined the communist party in Belgium—he wasn’t an entirely reliable propagandist. In public meetings he would often reminisce weepily about his years in exile instead of lecturing the enthusiastic crowd about the joys of hard work. Worse, he died unexpectedly in 1948, possibly because of a dental operation gone wrong. (He had wanted to look better in his photographs but apparently contracted blood poisoning after a surgeon pulled too many teeth at once.)56 After his death, Poles invented a little poem about him:
Chcesz się udać na sąd bosk
Pracuj tak jak górnik Pstrowski.
In rough translation it means, “If you want a shortcut to heaven, work as hard as miner Pstrowski,” but in Polish it rhymes. Hungarians made similar rhymes about their most famous shock worker: “I don’t care about girls any more, I’d rather watch Ignác Pióker.” Pióker was a factory worker who achieved 1,470 percent of the norm by 1949, and had finished his personal five-year plan in 1951, four years ahead of schedule.57 But not everyone was laughing. For a time, some Eastern European workers really did compete with one another to match the feats of Hennecke, Pstrowski, and Pióker, and not just in factories. In Germany, one historian records:
… a 17-year-old girl sorted 20,000 cigarettes in a single day, surpassing the previous record of 14,000. A 16-year-old boy installed 20 radio tubes per hour. A Leipzig train conductor spearheaded the “500 Movement,” whereby every locomotive had to be driven 500 kilometers per day. A truck supervisor outdid that: he launched the “100,000 Movement,” whereby his truck drivers would travel 100,000 kilometers without repair. Not to be left out, a “4,000 Liter Movement” enlisted Hero of Labor cows to contribute 4,000 liters of milk annually.58
Since plans and quotas were in existence everywhere, shock workers were eventually found, or created, in a wide variety of fields and professions. East Germany held Hennecke academic competitions for schoolchildren and Hennecke contests for university students, who vied with one another to complete their studies in record time.59 There were also “hero brigades,” such as the Hungarian “youth brigade” at the Sztálinváros steel factory, which worked so fast it ran out of bricks. Realizing that they needed 14,000 more bricks, youth activists attached to the brigade came to the rescue: “They saw the problem and mobilized young people from other parts of the construction site … from 10:30 in the morning until 2:30 a.m. the brigade transported bricks to where they were needed, in knee-deep mud and heavy rainfall. This helped the brigade fufill their pledge and finish one month early.”60
For a brief period, successful Heroes of Labor really were a privileged group with an important role in the communist narrative. Successful workers were praised locally and sometimes nationally, not for merely setting records but for achieving great things for the benefit of the whole of society—or, increasingly, for the benefit of the party—and the rewards were more than material. Their names appeared
on signs and billboards. They were celebrated in the newspapers and on the radio, and they featured in public events, newsreels, and parades. Sometimes they received unexpected perks, as one female Polish textile worker remembered:
In 1950 or 1952 … I don’t remember exactly … I was chosen as the best Stakhanovite in my factory. I did 250 percent of the quota … One day I went to work, of course in my daily clothes, because you do not go to work in Sunday clothes. And they gave me a ticket saying that I am going to the Stakhanovite ball. I said I was not going because I was not dressed up, but they ordered me to go. So I went with the others. It was an amazing experience: me, an ordinary worker of a sewing department, visited President Bierut himself. Bierut welcomed us, and thanked us for our good work. I received a letter of commendation. We returned home in the morning. My mother started to shout at me—where had I been? I showed her the letter but she didn’t believe me. I wept and tried to convince her that I was in Warsaw with Bierut! After some time she started to believe me. And when she started to believe, she was proud, so proud.61
Yet in purely economic terms, the shock worker movement was a failure. For one, it created perverse incentives: workers competed to finish quickly and ignored quality. As a result, “socialist competitions” never made the economy more productive, in the Soviet Union or anywhere else. The economic historian Paul Gregory reckons that in the USSR the Stakhanovite movement had no impact on labor productivity whatsoever: the cost of the expensive prizes and higher wages for the Stakhanovites canceled out whatever value industry might have gained from the superhuman effort of individual workers.62
In political terms, the movement’s impact was more mixed. In some places, the daily quotas became a bone of contention, particularly as they began to rise faster than wages and living standards, and the party had to invent new techniques to stop the complaining. In 1952, one large Budapest factory called in party activists to lecture its employees on “how workers lived during the Horthy regime,” “what is the true situation of young workers today,” “what the future will bring,” and “the consequences of the international situation and the struggle for peace.” The workers were told how much worse things had been in the past, how much better life had become, and how much wealthier they would be in the future, once capitalism had been defeated.63
In Germany, the party countered some of the complaints about high quotas using Betriebsfunk, workplace radio stations. Party activists helped workers write and organize radio programs, which were then broadcast throughout the larger factory complexes using loudspeaker systems. At a meeting to discuss the national Betriebsfunk effort in 1949, German radio bureaucrats agreed that such broadcasting was of the highest significance. “We must find the language to reach people who are working hard,” said one of them; perhaps those who had “lost trust in the radio” would feel differently when they heard reports from their own enterprises. Plans were made to organize lunchtime broadcasts and after-work broadcasts for workers waiting for transportation to go home. The idea was that “the achievements of employees should be recognized and repeated every day” (although some thought it was “a mistake to be too political,” even on the Betriebsfunk, and so music and light entertainment were also thrown in).64
But the movement did have some political successes. In the USSR, Stalin had used the shock workers as a tool to replace the Soviet Union’s technical and managerial class. At a speech to the Stakhanovite Congress in 1935, he had called on the gathered shock workers to “smash the conservatism of some of our engineers and technicians” and to “give free range to the new forces of the working class.”65 Many of these “engineers and technicians” were subsequently blamed for the system’s failure to produce rapid economic growth and wound up in the Gulag. In Eastern Europe, the movements filled a similarly revolutionary, though slightly different, function. In practice they often pitted younger, inexperienced, but more “ideological” workers against older and more skilled foremen. The older workers remembered prewar factory conditions, which though not necessarily better had not been necessarily worse. Some had once been part of authentic trade union movements too, and they knew that the state-run trade unions, beholden to the government and thus to the factory bosses, were not the same thing at all.
In many factories, older workers quickly became hostile to the work competitions, suspecting, correctly, that they were designed to get everyone to work harder for the same wage. That hostility is reflected in the official biography of Jószef Kiszlinger, a Hungarian Stakhanovite who came into direct conflict with older workers: “Sometimes he worked with a different knife and managed to overfulfill his quota. The older ones attacked him: ‘Are you insane? You’re undermining us!’ Even one of the union officials came to warn him: ‘Watch yourself, son. This isn’t a good idea. Don’t go for too high a percentage.’ ”66
A young woman who threw herself into the work competitions at the Eisenhüttenstadt combine in Germany—“we always did our best, so that we would win,” she told an interviewer—also encountered hostility from her older male colleagues. One of her colleagues told her that if the factory management were ever to plant trees, “you will be the first to be hanged from them.”67 It isn’t hard to see how enthusiastic young people who voluntarily carried bricks in the mud until 2:30 a.m. quickly became annoying. Their efforts set a precedent others would have to follow.
This generational conflict had been created deliberately, and it was deliberately sustained through propaganda as well. Industrialization was proceeding rapidly, and the party had to integrate thousands of inexperienced and mostly rural laborers into the workforce. In Budapest, Szabad Nép declared that “in the Stakhanovite movement a new kind of worker has appeared: the first signs of the new communist working class have emerged … From the practice of their everyday life the toiling masses learn the truth of what theory tells us, that the construction of socialism … is tied to an increase in the welfare of the workers.”68
By 1950, many who had refused to join the competitions were disappearing. In Hungary, an investigation into “sabotage” in the construction industry in September concluded that hundreds of senior people were responsible for the collapse of a dam: the whole industry would have to be cleaned of “enemy elements.”69 By 1951, some 250 “prewar foremen” had been deliberately removed from their jobs in Warsaw too. They were replaced by younger, more ideological colleagues. In due course, the party expected them to be more reliable too.
If propaganda for the young didn’t cease at the end of the school day, propaganda for adults didn’t end with the work day either. After-work clubs, “houses of culture,” and theatrical expeditions for young workers were organized at the larger factories. Many workplaces also organized discussions and lectures on political themes. But in addition to these more mundane events and meetings, the party also planned countless commemorations, festivals, anniversaries, and holidays. These were designed both to educate the general public and to ensure that the general public was kept fully occupied during its scant free time.
By the late 1940s, every communist country had established an official calendar, a list of holidays designed to replace traditional saints’ days and religious feasts. May Day (May 1), the Anniversary of the October Revolution (November 7), and Stalin’s birthday (December 21) were common to all. Each country also had holidays of its own, including July 22 in Poland, the date the Polish Committee of National Liberation had published its manifesto; April 16 in Germany, Ernst Thälmann’s birthday; March 19 and April 4 in Hungary, which respectively marked the launch of the Hungarian Revolution in 1919 and the completion of the Soviet conquest of Hungary in 1945. Each country celebrated its own leader’s birthday as well. All of these holidays were marked by parades, often including floats, music, and gymnastic displays, as well as flags, banners, and speeches, special editions of the newspaper, and special programs on the radio, all of which required quite a bit of time and energy to set up.
Some of these occasions were deliber
ately designed to push older holidays out of the way. In Poland, May 1 came into direct conflict with May 3, the anniversary of the signing of the country’s first democratic constitution in 1791. In Hungary, March 19, the anniversary of the 1919 communist revolution, clashed with March 15, the anniversary of the revolution of 1848. Illegal celebrations of the “wrong” holidays became a feature of public life and a form of low-level opposition in both countries for many years.
There were rewards for participation in the “right” holidays: May Day celebrations often included free sausages for those who marched in the parade. But the behavior of the celebrants at all of these events was also carefully observed. According to an inspector who attended several commemorations of Mátyás Rákosi’s birthday in 1950, the results were sometimes mixed. At one meeting of the Young Pioneers, a Hungarian child, overwhelmed by the intensity of the propaganda, broke into tears and cried that “he had no father, but even if he had a father he would love comrade Rákosi more.” But at another meeting, a child was overheard telling another that “I wish Rákosi had never got out of prison.” The remark was reported to his school director, who spoke to the child’s parents as well as to the parents’ employers. Both children were expelled from the Young Pioneers and presumably had to find other ways to occupy themselves after school.70
Special plans were made for round-number anniversaries. Rákosi’s sixtieth birthday in 1952 was marked by a specially commissioned biography, which was rapidly translated into several languages, as well as multiple ceremonies and a special exhibition containing photographs of the leader as a young man, paintings of events in his life, and gifts presented to the leader from his grateful people, including elaborate peasant embroidery, ceramics, carvings, and dolls.71 Bolesław Bierut’s sixtieth birthday in 1952 also required the publication of a biography, as well as a special poetry anthology. Pledges were made to honor him with extra output at factories, and congratulatory letters were sent from around the country. Elaborate ceremonies were held, including at two factories that had decided to name themselves after the leader. A mountain village (Bierutowice) did the same. At the main ceremony in Warsaw, Bierut’s photograph was placed between busts of Lenin and Stalin.72
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