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

by Anne Applebaum

  —Gyula Schöpflin in his memoirs1

  THE SHOW TRIALS, the arrests, and the assaults on clergy attracted national and international attention during the era of High Stalinism. But pressure from above was only one of the tools the regimes deployed to convince their fellow citizens of their right to rule. They also attempted to create enthusiasm and cooperation from below. If the immediate postwar period had been characterized by violent attacks on the existing institutions of civil society, after 1948 the regimes began instead to create a new system of state-controlled schools and mass organizations which would envelop their citizens from the moment of birth. Once inside this totalitarian system, it was assumed, the citizens of the communist states would never want or be able to leave it. They were meant to become, in the sarcastic phrasing of an old Soviet dissident, members of the species Homo sovieticus, Soviet man. Not only would Homo sovieticus never oppose communism; he could never even conceive of opposing communism.2

  In the era of High Stalinism, no one was exempt from this ideological instruction—not even the very youngest citizens. Though teenagers had long been a communist priority, now the focus was expanded to include kindergarteners. As Otto Grotewohl, the new East German prime minister, declared in 1949, the youngest German children were “our cleanest and best human material.” They were “the gold reserve for our future.” They must not “fall prey to reactionary forces,” and they should not “grow wildly, without care and attention.”3

  The notion of small children as blank slates or lumps of clay that the regime could mold at will was not a new one in Germany: the Nazis had used very similar metaphors (as had the Jesuits, among others). But the content German communists poured into the allegedly empty brains of infants would not be Nazi. As early as June 1945, a Berlin newspaper wrote of the damage already done to children by years of Nazi education:

  Let’s consider the following facts. The beginning of the strongest sensitivity and memory of the child lies between the fifth and the seventh year. Add to this the length of Nazi rule, and we get the horrifying result that all young people … have been growing up exclusively under the influence of lies that have been hammered into them in school and by the Hitler Youth.4

  Right away, the Soviet occupation force banned private kindergartens and forbade former Nazis and Nazi fellow travelers—a loosely defined category—from teaching in any kindergartens. When that edict led to a teacher shortage, the Soviet occupation regime, which surely had more urgent matters on its plate, organized six-month courses to train new preschool teachers.5

  More was to come. Indeed, the extent and nature of the Soviet Union’s desired influence over education came as a shock to many Eastern European and especially to German educators, many of whom had enthusiastically anticipated that a left-wing regime would support the progressive, avant-garde pedagogy advocated in the 1920s, with its emphasis on spontaneity, creativity, and what would nowadays be called “child-centred” education. There had been Montessori kindergartens in Budapest and Berlin since before the First World War; Janusz Korczak, a progressive educator and children’s author, had experimented with the idea of “self-government” in his Warsaw orphanages, encouraging children to write their own rules and form their own parliaments.6

  Instead, Eastern Europe’s educators learned that the “correct” methods of instruction would not be found in Montessori textbooks but rather in the works of Soviet educational theorists, and most notably in the writings of Anton Makarenko, a particular favorite of Stalin. In the 1930s, Makarenko had been the director of the Gorky colony, a reform school for juvenile delinquents. His methods were heavy on peer pressure, repetition, and indoctrination, and he emphasized collective living and working. The most eloquent passages of The Road to Life, his book about the Gorky colony, are dedicated to the glories of collective labor: “It was a joy, perhaps the deepest joy the world has to give—this feeling of interdependence, of the strength and flexibility of human relations, of the calm, vast power of the collective, vibrating in an atmosphere permeated with its own force.”7

  Like Trofim Lysenko, the fraudulent Stalinist biologist who believed in the inheritability of acquired traits, Makarenko believed in the mutability of human nature. Any child, however unpromising his background and however reactionary his parents, could be transformed into a good Soviet citizen. Put him in a team, tell him that everybody works for the good of the group, patiently repeat slogans in his presence, and he will learn. While the real Makarenko was surely more sophisticated than his followers, crude “Makarenkoism” (like crude “Lysenkoism”) looked a lot like ordinary ideological brainwashing.

  Progressive educators were forced to make a rapid retreat. “I overemphasized children’s independent activities, underestimated the necessity of political leadership, and [mistakenly] believed that people become educated through the acquisition of experience,” one German educational theorist declared in her apologetic memoirs. She also regretted not following the advice of Erich Honecker, who, though of course not an expert in early-childhood education, “approached all questions with a clear political-ideological class viewpoint” and thus reached the “right conclusions.”8 At about the same time, Korczak—who had died tragically in Treblinka, along with his orphans—was denounced in Poland for promulgating “education in the spirit of mindless subservience to the existing order.”9

  With only six months of training, the army of brand-new kindergarten teachers in Germany would have had difficulty understanding these theoretical debates, let alone deploying them in the classroom. But the basics, as they and their colleagues across the bloc soon learned, were not difficult. Politics was to lie at the center of the curriculum for every child, from kindergarten onward. Acceptable topics included the history of the working class, the Russian Revolution, and the achievements of the Soviet Union. Children were to participate in the party’s various campaigns for “peace,” for North Korea, for the Five-Year Plan. Teachers who did not teach these topics or pursue these campaigns risked losing their jobs.

  Naturally some of the material had to be changed for the benefit of small children. In Poland, the cult of Stalin was transmitted through the study of an utterly fictional version of the Soviet dictator’s childhood, which had in reality been rather grim. Polish children were taught to call him by his childhood nickname, Soso (they also learned to call Feliks Dzerzhinskii, the terrifying founder of the Soviet secret police, by the nickname “Franek”), and they read of his various exploits and youthful successes. Popular children’s magazines contained tales designed to stoke admiration of Stalin, such as the story of a child who asks his mother the meaning of the word “Generalissimo.” She explains that because “the whole Soviet nation deeply loved their leader” the USSR had granted him this special title as a gesture of thanks. Impressed by this deep faith, the child determines to learn how to spell the difficult word “generalissimo” and remember it forever.

  The glories of central planning were meanwhile conveyed through books such as Six-Year-Old Bronek and the Six-Year Plan.10 The evils of capitalism were transmitted though tales like the story of Mister Twister, an American who visits Leningrad and is shocked to find a black man staying in his hotel—or through poems about American plans for war:

  In crazy America

  They dream of war

  And the front lines are painted

  On maps with human blood11

  Novelists also worked hard to supply the children of the new era with reading material. In the late 1940s and 1950s, Alex Wedding—a communist whose books had been burned by Hitler in 1933—published a series of children’s books in eastern Germany. The first was Die Fahne des Pfeiferhansleins, the tale of a fifteenth-century peasants’ rebellion, which features a flute-playing rebel leader, a Pfeifer, who dreams of “a free homeland” without rulers and ruled. The rebellion ends badly, but the rebels don’t give up hope: “Someday the sun of freedom will break through the clouds. Someday even our exile will end, and we will see our mot
herland again, a beautiful motherland, free of the arbitrary rule of the dukes and lords … and then the flag of the Pfeifer will wave from all towers …”12

  Existing children’s stories were sometimes rewritten to conform to the new ideological spirit. A beloved Polish children’s comic strip—The Adventures of Matolek the Goat—reappeared with a few subtle changes. Before the war, Matolek had looked down upon Warsaw and seen the Royal Castle and the spire of a church. After the war, he only saw the Palace of Culture, a towering monument to Stalin. Before the war, policemen in trench coats had swung their batons at Matolek for breaking traffic regulations. After the war, as one reader remembered, “nice socialist militiamen politely point him in the right direction.” The original Matolek discovered a treasure that he gave to “poor children in Poland.” Because there were no poor children under communism, postwar Matolek gave the treasure to the “dear” children in Poland instead.13

  Textbooks also had to be rewritten to reflect the new reality. In November 1945, at a time when its bureaucrats were still collecting shoes and sweaters from the UN relief agency and handing them out to desperate teachers, the Polish Education Ministry ordered the writing of a new history of education, designed to emphasize “the fight for democratic education” and set up a committee to write new history textbooks as well.14 When that rewriting process didn’t take place fast enough, more drastic measures were used: for a brief period, in 1950–51, only Soviet history texts were allowed in Polish schools.15 In eastern Germany, the rewriting efforts were more successful. The history curriculum for thirteen-year-olds described the postwar period as follows:

  With the help of the Soviet occupation authorities, the democratic forces … managed to disempower the monopoly capitalists and landowners in the eastern part of Germany and to establish an antifascist democratic order. This antifascist democratic order … enjoys the support and help of the great socialist Soviet Union, which respects the national rights of the German people and represents its national interests.16

  Most urgently of all, teachers had to be retrained—or replaced—and not only kindergarten teachers. The Soviet military regime first proclaimed the “democratic renewal of the German school,” in August 1945, in an order that also called for a “new type of democratic, responsible, and capable teacher.” Soon afterward, educational policy in the Soviet zone of Germany was handed over to the most senior and most trusted “Moscow” communists: Anton Ackermann, a leader of the wartime National Committee for a Free Germany; Paul Wandel, a member of the Soviet, not the German, communist party; and Otto Winzer, a member of the Ulbricht Group.17 Soviet authorities would in due course use educational reform as a type of denazification, as well as a means of offering ambitious, pro-regime young people a path to rapid advancement.18 A whole generation of Neulehrer—“new teachers,” often with minimal training—were rapidly deployed in place of old ones, and they were expected to show their gratitude to the new regime by following every one of its precepts.

  By contrast, most Polish teachers were left alone in the immediate postwar chaos, despite the close links between the wartime underground and the teaching profession. In much of Poland, children had been prevented from attending school at all during the Nazi occupation—the Germans had intended to make the Poles into a nation of illiterate serfs—and many children could not read or write. The resumption of normal schooling was considered a national priority. In September 1945, the minister of state security, Stanisław Radkiewicz, even signed an internal decree declaring that in light of the “destruction wreaked on schools,” secret policemen should “arrest teachers only when absolutely necessary.” If they had to be incarcerated, then their cases should be investigated and reviewed as fast as possible.19

  Over time, however, those who did not conform to the ideology would be intimidated, threatened, and eventually fired. Their actions and behavior would be observed by local secret policemen, by school directors sent from outside, by each other—or even by students themselves. In 1946, the Education Ministry learned that in the small town of Człuchów, the teenage son of a secret policeman had been threatening both his teachers and his classmates. Bragging that he had “access to the UB building at any minute, without a pass,” he told one child he would be “locked up,” and threatened another for playing a “religious” Christmas carol (“Silent Night”) on the piano. After a teacher described “Russia’s historical push toward Constantinople” in a geography class, he told another student gleefully that “the old man’s just done himself in.” Though the boy was failing (“he can’t do simple math … and in French he is hopeless”), he bragged that, thanks to his father’s influence, he would pass without doing any work. When the school director finally summoned his parents to complain, she herself received a summons to the offices of the local secret police two hours later.20

  That particular case was resolved in the school’s favor, not least because even secret policemen didn’t like children of their employees threatening schoolmates with arrest. But other stories ended less happily, for example when teachers were made responsible for their pupils’ politics. They could lose their jobs for having presumably exerted “bad influence” over children who displayed “reactionary” or anticommunist views.21 In January 1947, a group of about thirty armed secret policemen entered a Polish secondary school near Sobieszyn, burst into a classroom, and told everyone present to put up their hands and march outside. Some students were separated, questioned, and beaten; the school director’s protests were ignored. An officer brusquely explained that the students came from “bandit” families, and that several teachers from the school had already been arrested. The raid was designed to punish the entire institution, in other words, for failing to maintain an ideologically correct atmosphere.22

  By 1948, however, the mood had changed more decisively, and the Polish Education Ministry set out to “verify” the “values, ideological and professional,” of all school directors, teachers, and educators; to “deepen the ideological offensive among teachers and students”; and to “raise the consciousness” of future teachers.23 At about the same time, one German educational bureaucrat declared that Soviet education, after thirty years of experimentation, had finally reached its zenith: the Soviet Union’s experience proved that education “on the basis of socialist humanism” could be successful. All German teachers who aimed to become “qualified progressive pedagogues” must therefore “get acquainted with, study, and increasingly learn to apply Marxist educational science as founded by Marx and Engels; spread by Joseph Dietgenz, August Bebel, and Karl Liebknecht; and further developed by Lenin and Stalin.”24 Similar programs were arranged for teachers all across the bloc.

  From 1948, Marx, Lenin, and Makarenko were added to the curriculum in teacher-training colleges across the bloc. Careful attention was now paid to the class background of new teaching cadres, and enormous efforts were made to secure teachers with the “right” class origins. According to the Polish Education Ministry, 52 percent of new teachers in training in 1948 were of working-class origin, 32 percent were peasants, and 7 percent were children of “craftsmen.” If these statistics are correct, only 9 percent of teachers that year came from “intellectual” families.25

  The proletarianization of the professoriate proved a trickier task. In East Germany, a number of university rectors tried to regroup in May 1945 in order to reconnect to the “German university tradition,” but they were almost immediately dismissed by Soviet officials who were horrified by their “reactionary philosophical worldview” as well as their previous Nazi connections. A wave of denazification followed, both mandatory and voluntary, as dozens of German professors fled to the West. By the time of the opening of the winter semester in January 1946, three-quarters of the professors at universities in Berlin, Leipzig, Halle, Greifswald, and Rostock were gone, and Soviet officers began to play an active role in recruiting new ones.26 Since they didn’t have the resources to run the university system themselves, they created a German
body, the Central Education Administration, to which they sent often-unrealistic demands. In March 1947, the Soviet military administration issued an order “on training the next generation of academics,” which called upon the Central Education Administration to find “200 active antifascists” within ten days. As one German member of the administration noted, “we cannot in all of Germany get hold of 200 active antifascists who are also academically qualified.” The Germans did eventually come up with seventy-five names of “politically open-minded” professors, but the Soviet administrators rejected thirty-two. Of the rest, most were over fifty and thus not exactly good candidates for a training program.27

  From 1948, the authorities in East Germany as well as Hungary and Czechoslovakia launched a more systematic attack on the faculties of history, philosophy, law, and sociology, all of which were transformed into vehicles for the transmission of ideology, just as they were in the Soviet Union. History became Marxist history, philosophy became Marxist philosophy, law became Marxist law, and sociology often disappeared altogether. Most remaining humanities scholars left at this time, though Soviet authorities did make some effort to keep scientists. As one German cultural bureaucrat put it, “When a reactionary philosopher or historian leaves [for West Germany] we smile. But the situation is different with physicians, mathematicians or technicians, whom we need and cannot replace.”28 Scientists were part of the educational establishment, however, and the changes affected them too. When one chemist decided to leave for the West, he told two communist functionaries his reasons. Among other things, they reported back, “He can no longer accept responsibility for educating his children at our high schools.”29 The end result was the near-total transformation of East German universities. In a relatively short period of time, a new generation of much younger professors—either more ideological, more cynical, or more easily cowed—filled all of the teaching posts and controlled all future academic appointments as well.