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

by Anne Applebaum

  There was no Soviet occupation of the radio station in Poland, because in Poland there were no radio stations to occupy. By the end of the war there was almost no broadcasting equipment remaining in the entire country, since most of it had been confiscated by the Nazi occupiers. Polish radio went off the air in September 1939, to the sound of Chopin’s Nocturne in C Sharp Minor, played by Władysław Szpilman, author of The Pianist. Transmissions began again, briefly, on August 8, 1944, following the outbreak of the Warsaw Uprising. For two months, the Home Army’s Radio Błyskawice (Radio Lightning) heroically issued four radio bulletins every day, covering military events as well as literature and culture. But it fell silent in the first week of October, when the Home Army capitulated.

  Radio returned to Poland for good under Soviet auspices and with the assistance of Soviet soldiers. Radio Pszczółka (Radio Honeybee) began transmitting on Soviet equipment from a train wagon near Lublin on August 11, 1944, and advanced into the city with the Red Army. Once in Lublin, the radio station set itself up in a private apartment on Chopin Street. The “studio” was placed in the sitting room, while another room doubled as a reception room and, in the evenings, the announcers’ bedrooms. The first broadcasts—all live—consisted of military communiqués and situation updates, mostly intended for field commanders and partisans who might be expected to have radios. In liberated Lublin, Rzeszów, and Białystok, the radio station employees also established radiow ę zły—outdoor loudspeaker systems—so that people could gather in town squares and public places to listen to the broadcasts several times a day. At that point the radio began to add live music played by the many artistic refugees who found their way to the city after the failure of the Warsaw Uprising.23

  As in Germany, some of these first Polish radio operators were communists. They weren’t as prominent or as well known to the Russians as those who would run the new radio in Berlin, but then prominent and trusted Polish communists were thin on the ground. The first director of Polish radio, Wilhelm Billig, was a prewar party member and a working engineer. Later he became head of the Polish nuclear research agency (and much later he assisted the anticommunist Solidarity movement).24 All of the first radio news broadcasts were written by propaganda officials of the Lublin provisional government and then passed to the radio to be read out.

  Some of these first employees found their way to the radio by accident. Stefania Grodzieńska, later a well-known actress and writer, saw a microphone for the first time in her life on September 2, 1944, and became an announcer for Polish radio on September 3. In her memoirs, she describes the first, distinctly improvised, weeks of the Lublin radio station:

  On Chopin Street, aside from the announcers, there were a few technicians. The most popular of them was a Mr. Nierobiec who lived in a village outside of Lublin and traveled in for work. He owed his fame to the large jug he brought with him, which was filled with moonshine. Around the neck of the jug hung a notebook with a pen, as well as a mug. Anyone who wanted a drink wrote his name and the quantity in the notebook—for example, “Sikirycki—half a mug.” On payday Nierobiec stood with his notebook next to the cashier and took our contributions.25

  As communist-era accounts had it, the months that followed were a heroic era for Polish radio. “As the country was liberated,” one later report declared, “Polish radio technicians followed right behind the front line, trying to save whatever radio equipment remained,” bravely rebuilding transmitters and cooperating happily with the Red Army. At the end of 1945, Billig would publicly declare that the radio had succeeded thanks only to the “noble and disinterested help of the Soviet Union.”

  Billig was correct in his account of the speed of the reconstruction. Within three years, Polish radio technicians had built twelve stations and ten transmitters. He was also right to thank the Soviet Union, up to a point. During the course of 1945, Soviet money paid for a transmitter in Raszyn, a Warsaw suburb, which could transmit to the entire nation, and Soviet technicians came to help in its construction. According to Billig, Stalin personally approved the construction of the Raszyn transmitter, and there is no reason to doubt him, or to doubt that the Soviet Union wanted to rebuild Polish radio. But on the ground, the Red Army often seemed to have more ambivalent instructions as well. In theory the Soviet Union may have wanted to encourage “communist” radio, but on the ground the NKVD also feared Poles might create rival Home Army radio stations, or perhaps that they might rig their radios to receive “enemy” signals from London.

  Though in principle committed to rebuilding Polish radio, Soviet officers were thus in practice suspicious of anyone who tried to build or reclaim transmission equipment. A letter to the central radio office from the Silesian city of Zabrze in June 1945, complained that the former employees of the radio station had been forbidden to transmit by the local Soviet commander. The writer was diplomatic about it: “We believe this is the result of a misunderstanding and the matter will be resolved positively on the basis of Polish–Soviet friendship.” When local authorities tried to set up a radio station in Gliwice at about the same time, Soviet troops actually threatened them with guns. Authorities in Lower Silesia also had trouble persuading Soviet commanders to hand over radios and transmission devices. When they managed to obtain some equipment, it was quickly confiscated by the Polish secret police.26

  In the very early days, Soviet authorities treated even the redistribution of the radio sets confiscated by the Germans with caution. In August 1944—just as Radio Honeybee was starting its work—Red Army commanders issued an order commanding all Poles on liberated territory to surrender any radio transmitting or receiving equipment in their possession, “regardless of its type and usage,” and to hand it over to the Polish National Liberation Committee. Anyone who violated these commands would be treated as an “enemy agent.”27 A few months later, the committee issued a more drastic version of that order: from October 30, Bolesław Bierut declared, anyone who owned a radio without a licence could be sentenced to death. At least one such sentence was carried out. On May 1, 1945, Stanisław Marinczenko of Poznań was executed for illegal possession of a “Philips” radio.28

  Attitudes toward newspapers, periodicals, and publishing at this time were also uneven. In theory, the provisional government supported freedom of the press. All legal political parties were allowed to have their own newspapers—the communist party began to publish its paper, eventually to be called Trybuna Ludu (People’s Tribune), in 1944 but there were several others. Throughout 1944 the Home Army and other resistance groups were also publishing dozens of small papers and periodicals, and one or two newspapers emerged thanks to the initiative of journalists, most notably Życie Warszawy (Warsaw Life). But paper was extremely scarce—70 percent of all paper mills had been destroyed, and they were producing one-fifth of their prewar output—and by December 1944, thanks to nationalization of the remaining mills, most of the newsprint was under government control and most publishing was in the hands of a single company, Czytelnik.29 A bill limiting private ownership in the printing industry had been passed by June 1945, and by 1946 newspapers unfavorable to the regime would have trouble getting hold of newsprint. Still, Gazeta Ludowa, the People’s Paper, the most outspoken of the legal papers and the organ of the most outspoken political party, the Peasants’ Party, continued bravely to publish open criticism of the government. Officials responsible for propaganda didn’t necessarily control the party press either: some communist journalists reckoned they didn’t have to listen to the propaganda bureaucrats because they were ranked higher in the party hierarchy, so even the party newspapers didn’t always toe the line.30

  Polish radio was not so bold, though it was initially not so professional either. Throughout 1945, the war dominated not only news programs but everything else as well. Broadcasters reminisced about their experiences, got other people to do so, and read out long lists of lost family members on the air. Some told war stories for children. A broadcast on February 2 warned inhabitants of
Warsaw to keep the wartime curfew, as the “Hitlerite barbarians” had not yet surrendered, even though the front line had moved west. Other common themes were the reconstruction of factories and schools, as well as the welcoming back of soldiers from abroad.31

  The radio, like all other new state institutions in Poland at the time, also served other functions besides those it was meant to serve. The studios in Bydgoszcz in June 1945 had almost no equipment and produced very little programming, for example, but employed a cook who made lunch for a hundred people every day.32 Radio bosses from around the country constantly sent in pleas for more funding, especially on behalf of musicians, many of whom were starving. The list of the illnesses suffered by radio employees included tuberculosis, rheumatism, eye diseases, and skin trouble, according to the letters they wrote to Warsaw.33

  But just as the crowds cheered the first appearance of the Warsaw trams, the return of Polish radio was cheered as a sign of national revival, and it soon became a magnet for artistic talent. In his first live performance, Władysław Szpilman played, with great emotion, Chopin’s Nocturne in C Sharp Minor, the same piece he had played just before the radio went off the air in 1939. Despite having lost his entire family in Treblinka and the Warsaw ghetto, Szpilman kept on composing music. He continued to work for the radio until 1963.34

  Even as the radio portrayed itself as the voice of the whole nation, internal pressure to conform to Warsaw’s ever harsher and ever narrower political views increased. After the Bydgoszcz radio station failed to transmit reports of Soviet victory celebrations on May 9, the station chief felt obliged to defend himself. In a letter to Billig, he explained that his equipment was “primitive, secondhand” and that it simply didn’t function on that day. But the local Soviet military commander and the local secret police didn’t buy that story. They claimed the transmission didn’t happen because of “disloyal technical personnel,” and they sent a Soviet technician from Raszyn to investigate.35 That kind of pressure, coupled with the general threat of violence, helps explain why the tone of the Polish broadcasts became distinctly more favorable to the new regime as the year wore on. There were material advantages available to those who cooperated as well—canteens and health care—whereas those who defied the Warsaw bosses lost their jobs and the ration cards that went with them.

  If they hadn’t been communists to start with, many broadcasters had at least learned to use communist language by the end of the year. The same Bydgoszcz radio boss who had defended himself against charges of disloyalty on May 9 wrote a letter a month later, explaining that he now met with the new “propaganda” department of the local government at least three times a week. In September, he asked for (and was granted) a car and a megaphone. That would enable radio workers to travel to places their signal didn’t reach: they could communicate by shouting slogans through the megaphone.36 In the autumn, the radio station in Katowice assured Warsaw it was producing more programs oriented toward “the world of work” and the working class. At about the same time, broadcasters in Warsaw began planning programs celebrating the October Revolution and touting the advantages of central planning. In November, when the radio’s central authorities met to plan their future broadcasts, one executive argued that they ought to produce more programs praising the role of the political police and militia: “From the press we learn of more and more acts of theft and murder from ‘bands’ … the victims are usually democratic activists, the people whom Poland needs most.”

  At the same meeting, broadcasters discussed the forthcoming congress of the Peasants’ Party, the one remaining independent force in Polish politics at that time. Most thought information about the congress should be transmitted, but some felt that “in our attitude to the Peasants’ Party we must be cautious” since it wasn’t yet clear whether the party had “liberated itself from negative elements and joined the democratic camp.” At that time, the Peasants’ Party was still legal. But that didn’t, in the broadcasters’ view, give it the automatic right to transmit its message over the radio.

  By the end of the year, the radio’s tasks were clear, at least to its top executives. In a speech he gave to his employees in December 1945—the same one in which he spoke of the “noble and disinterested” help of the USSR—Billig set out his vision for the radio’s future. He spoke of the need for more radio sets—“we want the radio to be heard by peasants, workers, the working intelligentsia”—and explained that two new factories would produce some 15,000 in the coming year. He pushed aside complaints that there was too much “talk” on Polish radio. Whereas prewar radio had focused on the mere entertainment of the elite, he told his co-workers that the new radio could play “a colossal role as a propagandist. It’s an amazing weapon.” And it was a weapon that could reach everybody.

  Radio, Billig explained, could help “create the new type of person which is coming to life in Poland … the main goal of radio is the mobilization of society to carry out the basic task that history has put in front of us: the reconstruction of the country, the strengthening of democracy, the unification of the nation.”37 During the years that followed that speech, Polish radio would work hard to make sure the nation defined those words—reconstruction, democracy, unification—in the same way the communist party did.

  East German radio began with Moscow-trained communists. Polish radio began with Soviet equipment. Hungarian radio began with a decree, written in Russian and published by the Budapest provisional government on January 20, 1945, the second day of its existence. The decree reestablished the Hungarian Press Agency as well as Magyar Radio, the national radio broadcaster. It named Gyula Ortutay director of both. Before he did anything else, Ortutay made his way to the radio’s Budapest headquarters, which had been used as a stable during the final days of the war. The equipment was smashed, the rotting corpse of a dead horse lay on a side porch, and a bomb crater scarred the courtyard. Ortutay taped a sign on the entrance of the wrecked building: “Radio people: We will be waiting on the 21st for those who are still alive, in the shelter opposite the lift.”38

  From the Soviet point of view, Ortutay was the ideal man for this task. A well-known ethnographer, literary critic, and socialist intellectual who had worked for Magyar Radio before the war, Ortutay was also, as it happened, a secret member of the communist party, one of several who were then active in Hungarian politics. In public, Ortutay described himself as a member of the Smallholders’ Party, one of the four parties that had been allowed to have a legal existence after the war, and throughout 1945 and 1946 he kept in close contact with leading Smallholder politicians. At the same time he privately took orders from the Hungarian communist leadership, which issued him with a party card under a false name at a secret ceremony in March 1945.

  Ortutay’s secret allegiances were known to Soviet commanders in Hungary, of course. Formally, the terms of the armistice gave the Allied Control Council responsibility for Hungarian media, and after the war’s end this body allowed each of the legal political parties to set up a newspaper. The Hungarian communist party created its flagship, Szabad Nép, but the Social Democratic, Smallholders’, and Peasants’ parties were allowed to have their own newspapers too. Very quickly, Kis Újság, the Smallholders’ Party paper, became the most popular in the country.39 In Hungary, as everywhere else, the communists were more interested in radio, however, and Ortutay’s presence guaranteed them extra influence over broadcasting. Very quickly, Hungarian radio would come to rely absolutely on Soviet equipment, transmitters, and technicians, as well as on Soviet advisers. Soon it would reflect a distinctly Soviet worldview too.

  None of this was immediately clear either to the general public or to the radio employees who read Ortutay’s notice and returned to work. In the ruins of Budapest, they began planning the relaunch of Hungarian radio with tremendous energy. Conditions were difficult. Magyar Radio’s day-to-day records note that, in May, “Lajos Hernádi, pianist, asked for a seven-minute break due to the extreme cold in the studio.”40 The init
ial “wage” for radio workers was a daily cup of soup, but there were other advantages: they got an identity card, printed in both Russian and Hungarian, which could help the bearer avoid the street roundups and waves of deportation.41 Even so, it wasn’t always easy to get to work in a city without public transport. Radio legend has it that on one morning, no one was in the building when the time came to start the day’s broadcast. The cleaning lady put on a gramophone record and let it play until the others arrived.42

  As in Poland and Germany, many of the technicians had worked at the station before the war—and others arrived by accident. Áron Tóbiás joined in the summer after high school in 1946, hoping to earn enough money to be able to go to college. His job consisted of selecting “short stories of famous Hungarian writers to be read Sunday afternoon by actors,” a task that seemed intensely glamorous to an eighteen-year-old. He never made it to college, and remained a radio journalist until 1955.43 Still others were recruits. Among them was Gyula Schöpflin, a communist party member since the 1930s, who became the first program director. In his memoirs—he defected from Hungary in 1949—Schöpflin remembered that although Hungary was still in theory a multiparty democracy in 1945, Ortutay’s personnel decisions were already influenced by his secret communist party membership: “The hiring and firing of people had an entirely political character.” Ortutay also set political guidelines for programming: “Avoid anything that could disturb the harmony and agreement between the great powers; beware of party politics; publicize, promote anti-Fascist international politics; promote the program of the democratic government, reconstruction, land reform; always emphasize the Hungarian and international progressive traditions …” Schöpflin himself visited the Hungarian party headquarters “at least once a week,” asking for “guidelines, detailed party lines” for his broadcasts. He didn’t get much help, mostly because the radio was already under the direct control of the Allied Control Council, and thus the Soviet Union. Hungarian communists didn’t bother with it, as they assumed it was under Soviet control anyway.44