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

by Anne Applebaum

  That desire did not last. In the end, the congress elected sixty-two members to the new organization’s central council, of which more than fifty were either communists or socialists. Separately, the communists allotted to themselves all the important jobs. Honecker, a communist of blind dedication, became and would remain the Free German Youth’s leader until long after he had ceased to be a youth himself (he resigned from the Free German Youth in 1955, when he was forty-three years old). A Free German Youth training school was quickly opened in Bogensee. Here, Klein remembered, “the real intentions of Honecker and his comrades became apparent very quickly … the boys and girls were trained in Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist ideology and got precise directives on what they had to do to help socialism win in the enterprises and the country.”29

  The intentions of the Soviet comrades became clearer as well. In August 1946, authorities in Saxony sounded the alert because local churches had organized their own youth retreats and summer camps. The Soviet forces came to the rescue. Soldiers marched into the forest and, in the words of a report filed at the time, “brought the children home.”30 In October, there were ominous power cuts during a large Christian Democratic youth rally in West Berlin. Everyone present knew that electricity in Berlin at that time was all supplied by a power station in the Soviet-controlled half of the city. In a spirit of defiance, the rally continued by candlelight.31

  Other groups were simply dispersed. In the spring of 1946, Soviet authorities discovered that an unregistered evangelical youth group, Christian Endeavor (Entschieden für Christus) was active in Saxony, where it held Bible discussions and prayer meetings. “This proved that control on the activity of German organizations is weak,” the Saxon authorities declared, and they immediately banned the organization.32 Another group that set up an “independent” cell of the Free German Youth in Leipzig met a similar fate. Although the leaders of the group argued that their members were more intellectually inclined than the “workers” in the mainstream Free German Youth, and that they therefore needed their own organization, they were abruptly disbanded too.33 One Soviet report complained that many of the groups that had religious affiliations “act far outside the frame of religion” and were engaging in “cultural-political work with youth,” which is of course what church youth groups had always done.

  In the winter of 1946, the Soviet authorities at Karlshorst also informed the brand-new German cultural administration—part of the German bureaucracy set up to enact Soviet policy—that artistic and cultural groups of all kinds, whether for children, young people, or adults, were illegal unless they were affiliated to “mass organizations” such as the Free German Youth, the official trade union organization, or the official cultural union, the Kulturbund: “Otherwise they cannot be controlled.” A German inspector sent out to gauge the situation of “associations” at this time discovered many such groups not aligned to mass organizations. She seemed particularly horrified by the large numbers of independent chess clubs. She called upon Soviet and German cultural authorities to eliminate these groups—chess clubs, sporting clubs, singing clubs—a task that was not finished until 1948–49. Other apolitical organizations were banned right away. Hiking clubs were strictly forbidden, for example, presumably because the Hitler Youth had a particular fondness for hiking (though the Wandervogel, the famous German hiking and nature clubs founded at the end of the nineteenth century, had once had left-wing as well as proto-Nazi sympathies).34

  Klein kept working within the system. Though frustrated with his role as the “token Christian” inside the Free German Youth, he spent a good bit of his time trying to organize the other token Christians into a voting bloc. He lobbied to keep the Free German Youth open to many different kinds of young people, but to no avail. Almost exactly a year after its founding, this brief Soviet-German experiment in nonpartisan youth politics had come to an end. On March 13, 1947, the NKVD arrested Klein, along with fifteen other young Christian Democratic leaders. A Soviet military tribunal sentenced him to a Soviet labor camp. He remained there for nine years.

  On June 19, 1946, Szabad Nép, the Hungarian communist party’s newspaper, reported a shocking story: a Russian officer had been murdered at the Oktogon, a busy eight-sided intersection in central Budapest. During the shootout, another Russian soldier had also died, along with a woman described as a “Hungarian working-class girl.” Szabad Nép explained that the murderer, a young man named István Pénzes, had been a member of a rural Catholic youth group, Kalot, and thus an “enemy of our economic recovery and freedom.” Investigators found his charred body in an attic overlooking the square and concluded he had been part of a larger conspiracy: “The traitors who lost their lands, the parasites of the hardworking Hungarian people, will try everything, in anticipation of the peace treaty and the currency reform, to make our nation’s life impossible.”35

  Little time was lost in drawing further conclusions about what quickly became known as the Oktogon murders. On the following morning, Szabad Nép filled its entire front page with an editorial entitled “Youth and Democracy”: “It is high time for us to take the weapons and the grenades out of the hands of our misled youth … After Monday’s attack, we must tell the right wing of our democracy that fighting against the fascists is a national struggle, a national duty.”36 The funeral of the two Red Army soldiers on the following day received equally lavish media coverage. “Hundreds of thousands” participated in the ceremony for the dead soldiers, according to Szabad Nép. Led by Hungarian and Soviet officials, mourners had carried banners with slogans such as “Death to the Traitors” and “Liquidate Fascist Killers.” An editorialist repeated the call for stricter treatment of misled youth: “Let us stop all reactionary criticism … Let us prevent certain church circles from teaching our youth how to commit murder.”37

  In his funeral oration, General Vladimir Sviridov, the recently arrived chairman of the Allied Control Commission in Hungary, also spoke. Although “the Red Army gave the Hungarian people the possibility to establish a new life according to democratic principles,” he declared, certain “reactionary forces, like wild dogs, attack the greatest protector of the Hungarian people, the Red Army.” Sviridov castigated Hungarian politicians: “Here in your country, which you call a friend of the Soviet Union, fascist wrongdoers ambush Soviet people. Here in your country you pay for all the blood spilled by the Red Army with bullets.”38

  Behind the scenes, all acknowledged that the true motives of the Oktogon murderer were, and indeed remain, mysterious, if he was even a murderer at all. In his memoirs, the Smallholders’ Party politician Ferenc Nagy, prime minister at the time, claimed that Pénzes had been a member of the Social Democratic youth group, not the Catholic Kalot, and that he had acted out of jealousy. Allegedly, the Soviet soldier was flirting with his girlfriend.39 Another politician at the time thought the matter had been a “simple love triangle,” which explained why Pénzes, a poor student, had committed suicide afterward: such was his distress at having murdered the woman he loved. Some versions of the story had it that there was no murderer at all. The two Russian soldiers had simply opened fire on each other, and Pénzes had been murdered by secret policemen, who burned his body to cover up their crime. Just about everyone agreed that the investigation had been delayed, inept, and politicized.40

  In the end, it didn’t matter what had really happened. The Oktogon murders, which followed close on the sentencing of Father Kiss—the priest accused of organizing the murder of Russian soldiers—were blamed on Kalot because Kalot was successful. Worse, Kalot was far more successful than the communist party’s Hungarian Democratic Youth Alliance (Magyar Demokratikus Ifjúsági Szövetség, or Madisz), with whom it had been in bitter conflict for the previous eighteen months. “Kalot” was an acronym meaning National Secretariat Club of Catholic Agricultural Youth (Katolikus Agrárifjúsági Legényegyesületek Országos Testülete) and it predated Madisz by a decade. Founded in 1935 by two energetic Jesuits, Father Töhötöm Nagy and Fathe
r János Kerkai, Kalot had continued to function during the war, maintaining its Catholic character and its credibility in the countryside by supporting land reform, peasant education, and a mild form of socialism. Kalot didn’t have the urban cachet of Polska YMCA or the angry passion of the first antifascist groups in Germany. Some of its wartime leaders were accused of anti-Semitism.41 But Kalot was authentic, it worked to improve peasants’ lives, and it had maintained enough independence from the previous authoritarian and fascist regimes not to be compromised by their collapse. Above all, it was popular. At the end of 1944, Kalot had half a million members, spread among 4,500 local organizations.

  Madisz, by contrast, was brand new, having been ordered into existence by Ernő Gerő, one of Mátyás Rákosi’s closest associates. Gerő’s intentions were similar to those of Honecker in Germany: he wanted to create an organization that would “unify workers, peasants, and students” under a “universal” and “non-partisan” banner. He also wanted to prevent other political parties from forming youth groups of their own.42 That plan failed almost immediately. At one of the organization’s first meetings in Budapest in January 1945, a Madisz leader was already complaining that “everybody thinks that Madisz is a cover organization” for the communist party. He told his comrades to fight this image: “We must tell people that we have a communist character at the moment only because noncommunists haven’t yet joined us. We must recruit people from church organizations, Scouts, and social democratic movements …” Young people would join if they could be made to understand the starkness of the choices before them: “Those who are not with us are against us … those who are against us are fascists.”43

  Another young leader, András Hegedüs, wanted Madisz to use subtler means to attract young people too. “The masses are in need of culture, we have to catch them through culture,” he argued. “There is a golden opportunity in front of us, because for the moment there is no cinema, and no one who can offer other cultural possibilities to the masses. Later it will be more difficult.” Hegedüs—who was to become prime minister of Hungary, briefly, in 1956—was interested in culture not for its own sake “but for the sake of drawing people into the movement … cleaning the ruins won’t do it, it’s not pleasurable enough.”44

  Madisz did have some success in these very early days, particularly in Budapest and particularly because its good connections with the Red Army gave its members access to food and to identity documents that could prevent them from being deported. But the group’s attempts to organize mass meetings almost always failed. When only forty people came to a rally in January, the leadership blamed “bad propaganda.”45 Six months later, when it was still proving difficult to attract young people to meetings, the leadership wondered, echoing Rákosi, if there weren’t “too many Jews” in the organization, particularly in certain districts. It had been a mistake, some felt, to “allow Zionists to march alongside us” in the recent May Day parades. It gave the wrong impression.46

  Outside Budapest it was even more difficult to get anyone to acknowledge Madisz’s natural leadership. Among rural young people, Kalot clearly had the lead—so much so that at one point Madisz tried to negotiate a deal: Madisz would manage Kalot’s cultural activities and sports, and Kalot could remain in control of church and religious activities. Not surprisingly, the Kalot leaders refused.

  Seeing that Kalot and other established youth organizations were not joining Madisz, Hungary’s other legal political parties, most notably the social democrats and the Smallholders, began organizing their own youth groups. University and secondary-school students also formed their own organization, the League of Hungarian University and College Associations (Magyar Egyetemisták és Főiskolai Egyesületek Szövetsége, or Mefesz). As these groups began mushrooming, and as it became clear that neither propaganda nor persuasion could convince them to unify beneath Madisz’s umbrella, the group’s tactics became more aggressive. Threats grew more frequent. In June 1945, Madisz authorities wrote a letter to the leaders of the Smallholders’ Party’s youth group demanding that they apply for permission before forming new cultural organizations. “Please respect these rules in the future,” the letter declared, “because if not, we will apply the most radical methods.” (The letter was signed “with democratic respect.”)47

  Across the country, Madisz members, sometimes aided by local communist party leaders and police, attempted to confiscate Kalot property and to prevent Kalot from holding meetings. The Catholic Church recorded twenty-seven occasions on which local authorities tried to ban a local Kalot group and dozens of other incidents of harassment. Kalot responded to these threats by issuing its youth leaders a set of guidelines, warning them not to recruit too heavily or put too much pressure on existing members: “Those members who want to quit should be allowed to do so, let them leave without comments, those who want to join should be welcome but do not comment on other organizations’ difficulties in recruiting.”48

  Antagonism grew anyway. In August 1945 the leaders of Madisz were already speaking among themselves of a plan to “liquidate Kalot.” A series of articles in the Madisz newspaper attacked Kalot, questioning its wartime activities and especially its cooperation with the interwar paramilitary youth movement, the levente. The latter, though not especially ideological, had been drafted to fight the Red Army at the end of the war, and its leader had just been sentenced to death. Kalot responded with a booklet answering the accusations—the Catholic Church had opposed the levente, as had Kalot—but the print run was confiscated by the secret police on the grounds that it was “anti-Soviet propaganda.”49

  Fearful for the safety of their members, some in Kalot tried to make accommodations. In January 1946, Father Kerkai, one of Kalot’s cofounders, asked a Soviet official to arrange a visit for Kalot leaders to the USSR, so that they could “get acquainted” with the Soviet system. Three months later, Kalot—over the objections of the church hierarchy—agreed to join yet another new group, the Hungarian National Youth Council. Also a creation of the young communists, this group was styling itself as an “umbrella” organization that everyone could accept.

  József Mindszenty, who had just become primate of Hungary and was slowly acquiring the anticommunist reputation that would make him famous, opposed Kalot’s decision to join this new alliance. “You have thrust a non-political movement into the swamp of daily politics,” he complained to Father Kerkai. In response, Kerkai pointed out that Hungary was going to have to learn to live “in the neighborhood of Soviet power” for a long time, and that a modus vivendi had to be found, one way or another.50 Kalot’s other leader, Father Nagy, even traveled to Rome to secure the Vatican’s support against Mindszenty in this matter.51

  In the aftermath of the Oktogon murders, it quickly became clear that no modus vivendi would be found. On July 2, General Sviridov called openly for the dissolution of “reactionary youth movements” at a meeting of the Allied Control Council, on the grounds that they “educate their members in a fascist spirit.” In private, he complained to Moscow about the “strengthening of reactionary circles” in Hungary, and told the Hungarian government, bluntly, that it must do something about the “underground fascist organizations” that had found shelter behind these legal political parties and youth movements.

  Without waiting for the government as a whole to agree, the communist interior minister, Lázsló Rajk, took up Sviridov’s cause. Between July 18 and 23, Rajk banned more than 1,500 organizations. The ban went far beyond youth groups. In the first wave he banned, among others, the Hungarian Athletic Club (described by Szabad Nép as “the exclusive sports association of the highest, sharply antidemocratic circles”); the Prohaszka Work Community, a community service organization of Bishop Prohaszka; the Association of College Students; several Christian Democratic trade unions (“which made themselves known for their strike-breaking activities in the past”); and something called the Grand Order of Emericana, which was said to hold mystical ceremonies in the manner of the Ku Klu
x Klan. In the next wave Rajk banned the Hungarian Naval Association, a few local hunting clubs, the Count Széchenyi Association of War Veterans, and the Association of Christian Democratic Tobacco Workers. Among the groups banned were professional associations and guilds, all of which were said to be working “in the service of capitalist interests,” as well as “reactionary” social organizations, Catholic and Protestant organizations, and noncommunist trade unions. Many were said to be working secretly on behalf of “fascist” or foreign interests. Finally, Rajk banned all of the local branches of Kalot.52

  After the ban, some Kalot members tried to reorganize their group under communist patronage, but nothing ever came of their efforts. In 1947, Father Nagy slipped out of Hungary and made his way to Argentina. In 1949, the Hungarian security police arrested Father Kerkai and sentenced him to a labor camp. He would be released a decade later, in 1959, when he was half blind and too ill to influence young people to become “reactionaries” any longer.53 In 1950, all of the Hungarian youth organizations were forced to unite and form a single organization, the League of Working Youth (Dolgozó Ifjúság Szövetsége, or DISZ), putting an end to the alphabet soup of youth-group acronyms, and to pluralism as well.

  As time went on, the communist attack on civil society would change and become more sophisticated. In order to create competition for authentic civil society, the regimes would create ersatz “official” civic groups, organizations that sometimes looked independent but were in fact controlled by the state.

  They also set out to destroy some of the most powerful institutions of civil society, not through outright bans but through trickery or subversion: the replacement of key leaders with regime loyalists, or the use of determined communist cells within looser organizations. Eventually these kinds of methods would be used on churches and clergy throughout the region, and much later, in the 1970s and 1980s, they would be deployed against dissidents. But they were first tried out on the most recalcitrant youth groups, most notably the Polish Scouting movement and the Hungarian People’s Colleges.