Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956
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From that assumption, it also followed that no organized group was above suspicion. Associations that claimed to be interested in soccer or chess might well be “fronts” for something more sinister. The St. Petersburg academic Dmitri Likhachev—later Russia’s most celebrated literary critic—was arrested in 1928 because he belonged to a philosophic discussion circle whose members saluted one another in ancient Greek. While in prison Likhachev encountered, among others, the head of the Petrograd Boy Scouts, an organization that later would be considered highly dubious in Eastern Europe as well.10
This profound suspicion of civil society was central to Bolshevik thinking, far more so than is usually acknowledged. Finkel points out that even while the Soviet leadership was experimenting with economic freedom in the 1920s (during Lenin’s New Economic Plan) the systematic destruction of literary, philosophical, and spiritual societies continued unabated.11 Even for orthodox Marxists, free trade was preferable to free association, including the free association of apolitical sporting or cultural groups. This was true under Lenin’s rule, under Stalin’s rule, under Khrushchev’s rule, and under Brezhnev’s rule. Although many other things changed, the persecution of civil society continued after Stalin’s death, well into the 1970s and 1980s.
The Eastern European communists inherited this paranoia, either because they had observed it and acquired it for themselves during their many visits to the Soviet Union, because their colleagues in the secret police had acquired it during their training, or, in some cases, because the Soviet generals and ambassadors in their countries at the end of the war explicitly instructed them to be paranoid. In a few cases, Soviet authorities in Eastern Europe directly ordered local communists to ban particular organizations or types of organizations.
As in postrevolutionary Russia, the political persecution of civic activists in Eastern Europe not only preceded the persecution of actual politicians but also took precedence over other Soviet and communist goals. Even in the years between 1945 and 1948, when elections were still theoretically free in Hungary and when Poland still had a legal opposition party, certain kinds of civic associations were already under threat. In Germany, Soviet commanders made no attempt to ban religious services or religious ceremonies in the first months of occupation, but they often objected strongly to church group meetings, religious evenings, and even organized religious and charitable associations that met outside the church in restaurants or other public spaces.12 Despite Marx’s belief that “base determines superstructure”—meaning that economics determine politics and culture—the attacks on civil society preceded the most radical economic changes in the region too. Although the timing was not exactly the same in every nation of Soviet-occupied Europe, the patterns were very similar. In many places, private trade was still legal even when belonging to a Catholic youth group was not.
Nowhere is the significance of civil society to the new communist parties clearer than in the history of the region’s youth movements, perhaps because there was no social group that the communists considered more important. In part, this is because their fascist opponents had considered young people important and had enjoyed great success in organizing them. As early as 1932, the German communist party boss, Ernst Thälmann, called upon his comrades to “adopt sports, discipline, and comradery, Scouting games, and marches” just like the Nazis: “ ‘Why don’t we pick up on the romantic-revolutionary sentiments of the masses of young workers? Why are we so dry and dull in our work’ … We have to create magnets to draw the proletarian youth …”13
The obsession with young people also reflected the deep belief in the mutability of human beings that was prevalent in communist circles in the 1940s (and in left-wing circles across Europe). Stalin’s famous suspicion of genetics derived precisely from his conviction that propaganda and communist education could alter the human character, permanently. He championed quacks such as the anti-geneticist Trofim Lysenko, who held that acquired characteristics can be inherited, and who falsified his experiments to prove it. Any scientist whose work disproved Lysenko’s theories risked persecution in the Soviet Union as long as Stalin was alive.14 Stalin’s reasoning was clear: if young people could be molded and shaped by education and propaganda, and if they could then pass these acquired behaviors on to their children, then the creation of a “new” breed of communist man—Homo sovieticus, about which more later—was possible.
Polska YMCA was only one of many youth groups to reemerge from the rubble of the war. In an era before television and social media, and at a time when many lacked radio, newspapers, books, music, and theater, youth groups had an importance to teenagers and young adults that is hard to imagine today. They organized parties, concerts, camps, clubs, sports, and discussion groups of a kind that could be found nowhere else.
In Germany in particular, the disappearance of the Hitler Youth and its female branch, the League of German Girls, left a real gap. Until the very end of the war, nearly half of the young people in Germany had attended Hitler Youth and League of German Girls meetings in the evenings. Most had spent their summers and weekends at organized camps as well. Although those organizations were now utterly discredited, they had filled a real need, and as soon as the fighting stopped, former members and former opponents of the Nazi youth groups began spontaneously to form antifascist organizations in towns and cities across both East and West Germany.
These first groups were German, not Soviet, and they were organized by the young people themselves. All around them, adults were in despair. One in five German schoolchildren had lost his or her father. One in ten had a father who was a prisoner of war. Someone had to start reorganizing society, and in the absence of adult authorities a few very energetic young people took on this role. In Neukölln, a western Berlin district, an antifascist youth organization created on May 8—the day before the armistice—had 600 members by May 20, and had already set up five orphanages and cleared two sports stadiums of rubble. On May 23, the group gave a performance in a Neukölln theater, which was attended by Soviet military officers as well as the general public.15
Wolfgang Leonhard, who had by then arrived in Berlin on Walter Ulbricht’s plane, met some of the members of this Neukölln group. These were the first non-Soviet political activists he had ever encountered: “One could feel the genuineness of the enthusiasm combined with a healthy realism. Without waiting for directives, the [group’s] members had immediately realized that the first thing was to organize a supply of food and water to alleviate the most urgent needs of the population.” He marveled, among other things, at their efficient, businesslike discussions: “More was accomplished in half an hour than in all the endless meetings I was used to in Russia.”16 Similar groups began organizing food distribution and rubble clearance all across Berlin, which was entirely under Soviet control for the first couple of months after the armistice. The Western Allies arrived in July, and only then was the city divided into occupation zones. By that time, the Berlin magistrate reckoned 10,000 teenagers across the city had already joined spontaneous antifascist groups.17
But almost as soon as they had started, these groups attracted the attention and suspicion of the Soviet authorities in Germany. On July 31, the Soviet Military Administration issued a declaration “permitting” the formation of antifascist groups under the leadership of city mayors, but only “in connection with formal requests.” Unless they received explicit permission, in other words, all other youth organizations, unions, and sports clubs—even socialist groups—were banned. Separately, another declaration also commanded all youth groups to promote “friendship” with the Soviet Union. After three months of spontaneous existence, these self-organized groups were already coming under state control.
Leonhard, who had just encountered spontaneous civil society for the first time in his life, was one of those tasked with destroying it. Not long after their arrival in Berlin, Ulbricht drew his attention to the “antifascist committees or anti-Nazi groups or socialist offices or national
committees or such-like” that had sprung up without authorization. Leonhard writes that he at first welcomed Ulbricht’s interest in these groups, having been enormously impressed by his encounter with the Neukölln antifascists, and he “took it for granted that the task Ulbricht was about to assign was to make contact with them and support their work.” He was wrong. All of these committees, Ulbricht told him, had been created by the Nazis. Most were cover organizations. He told Leonhard that they were designed to prevent the development of true democracy, and he issued an order: “ ‘They are to be dissolved, and at once.’…” Leonhard, “with a heavy heart,” agreed to carry out the task. Only later did he understand why:
It was impossible for Stalinism to permit the creation by independent initiative from below of anti-Fascist, Socialist or Communist movements or organizations, because there was the constant danger that such organizations would escape its control and try to resist directives issued from above … It was the first victory of the apparat over the independent stirrings of the anti-Fascist, left-inclined strata of Germany.18
But if Ulbricht and his Soviet partners did not want spontaneous committees, they did want young people to join sanctioned groups that had been properly registered with the Soviet authorities. Because Germany was deemed a “bourgeois” democracy, and noncommunist political parties were still allowed to exist, they did let some noncommunist youth groups register themselves, provided they subjected themselves to full regulation. The center-right Christian democrats were allowed to register an official “youth wing” of the Christian Democratic Party in July. In 1946, Soviet administrators would issue instructions allowing the formation of certain artistic and cultural groups as well.19
The communist party also set up its own youth section, optimistically assuming that many young Germans would want to join. But they did not, or at least not in the numbers anticipated. In a report filed to the leadership in October 1945, the young (or youngish; he was then thirty-three) Erich Honecker, a trusted insider—he had arrived on the first plane from Moscow with Ulbricht too—informed his superiors that progress was slow. He worried that young Germans “equate politics with the activity of the former Nazi party,” and feared many were “looking for individual solutions to their problems” or were “giving in to an addiction to pleasure and black market dealing.”20
Others also found German young people to be insufficiently political. Robert Bialek—who had now left Breslau and had temporarily recovered from his disillusionment with the Soviet soldiers who raped his wife—also complained that young Germans still thought and spoke using Nazi vocabulary. Bialek had been named leader of the youth section of the communist party in Saxony, where he argued in favor of bringing former Hitler Youth into the new organization, the better to broaden its appeal. These were Germany’s natural leaders, he declared: “We might ostracise the former leaders of the Hitler Youth Movement but we could not eradicate, even by order of Marshal Zhukov, the authority these leaders had wielded.”21
Yet while the communist youth groups languished, the strength and appeal of other groups, particularly Christian groups, was clearly growing. In the moral wasteland of post-Nazi Germany, the church seemed a spiritual and ethical oasis. Ernst Benda, later a legal scholar, judge, and eventually the president of West Germany’s constitutional court, joined the youth wing of the Christian democrats in East Berlin at that time precisely because he believed that its doctrine derived from “simple truths”: “Be completely honest, do not lie, be truthful, be fair to your political opponent, be just—which means social justice.”22
Manfred Klein, a young man who had been heavily recruited by the communist party while still in a Soviet prison camp, also drifted back to the church in the autumn of 1945. Returning to Berlin at the war’s end, he had initially helped Honecker organize the communist youth movement, but he soon grew uncomfortable. “Being only twenty years old, we were pretty helpless when facing the closeness of this system and its seemingly complete and irrefutable logic,” he wrote in his memoirs: “having been brought up on Catholic belief and having grown up with Catholic youth work I still held many reservations.” Eventually he joined the Christian Democratic Party’s youth group. This infuriated his former communist colleagues, until they realized he could be of use to them. “You are savvier than I thought you were,” Honecker told him, all smiles. The Soviet comrades approved of his decision too: now they expected him to be an agent within the Christian Democratic milieu, working on their behalf.23
By December 1945, the young communists realized they had to change their tactics. They were failing to attract young people in the same numbers as the other party youth groups, and so they decided to change the rules of the game. Honecker asked Bialek to begin surreptitiously organizing a “spontaneous” popular movement for a “unified” German youth movement. The push for the unification of all German youth groups under a single umbrella was to originate in Saxony and would involve petitions, meetings, and speeches. Youth leaders would also send letters to the Soviet authorities calling for a single, nonpartisan youth group. Once the Soviet military leaders agreed to this plan, then the “bourgeois” youth leaders would have no choice but to go along: all of the young people would then belong to the new group, and the relative weakness of the young communists would not be so noticeable.24
This was an idea born of failure: because the communist party could not compete for young people, its leaders decided to eliminate the competition. Though German in origin—it seems to have been Honecker’s idea—the plan quickly found favor with the Soviet commanders. In January 1946, Wilhelm Pieck, at the time chairman of the party’s Central Committee, made a note of a discussion held in Karlshorst, the Soviet headquarters in Berlin: “The creation of a unified antifascist youth organization: Agree, but decide in Moscow.” Ulbricht duly took up the subject on his next trip to Moscow, and in early February he returned with Moscow’s permission. Thus was born the Free German Youth (Freie Deutsche Jugend, or FDJ).
Bialek’s “spontaneous” call for unity took the other youth leaders by surprise. At a meeting called to discuss the matter, Honecker claimed that “many” groups were demanding a unified, Free German youth movement. When Christian Democratic and Social Democratic youth leaders said they had not heard any such demands, they were shown several baskets containing hundreds of letters. “The surprise was a success,” remembered Klein. “We had not reckoned with such a suggestion at that time.” A founding congress was duly organized and a range of young people—Christian Democrat, Social Democrat, communist—agreed to attend. So did Catholic and Lutheran youth leaders, albeit cautiously. Klein discussed the meeting with Jakob Kaiser, then the leader of the Christian democrats in Berlin, who agreed that he should take part but advised him to be wary: “None of us knows how long this will work.”25
This first meeting was held in Brandenburg in April 1946 and it started out optimistically. It began with a song (“The Ballad of Free Youth”) and the unanimous selection of a presidium that included Klein, Honecker, and Bialek. There were several speeches of welcome. Colonel Sergei Tulpanov, the cultural commissar of the Soviet occupation forces, told the young people that “Hitler’s ideology has left deep traces in the consciousness of German youth” and complimented those in the room, somewhat patronizingly, on having grown out of it: “We know how hard you have worked in order to purge yourselves of all of that.”26 Welcome speeches were followed by more speeches: on the achievements of youth, on the importance of the inclusion of girls, on the need for nationalized industry, on the perfidy of the West. Many of the speakers addressed the hall as “comrades.” One or two Catholic representatives did get up to speak. Yes, we want to unite, said one, “unite in the love of Germany.”27
Although the mood in the hall was reconciliatory, the atmosphere in the corridors was less so, and by day three the atmosphere had turned sour. That morning, some of the more radical communist delegates held a meeting in a side room, during which one of them had complained
about the church group leaders. He thought they should be expelled. Bialek told him not to worry, the religious young people would be kept under control: “We will give the churches ten blows a day until they lie on the ground. When we need them again, we will stroke them a little until their wounds are healed.”28
Unfortunately one of the Catholic youth leaders overheard this little speech, took notes on the dialogue, and reported back to his colleagues. Klein and several Catholic leaders announced they would refuse to join the new organization. Some shouting back and forth followed, and a Soviet officer intervened. Major Beylin promised the Catholics they could have some autonomy within the organization, whereupon they agreed to stay inside: the Soviet occupiers were, in 1946, still anxious for their occupation zone at least to appear democratic and multifaceted.