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

by Anne Applebaum

  Tejchma stayed for three years, during which time he encountered “the vast complications that accompanied the transfer of young people straight from the countryside into big factories.” Many of those who arrived in Nowa Huta were illiterate or semiliterate. They had never left their small villages, never been away from their families, and knew nothing of the outside world. Tejchma did not immediately see this as an insurmountable problem. He himself was the product of an impoverished village, and the modest “corner” he inhabited in a workers’ hotel in Nowa Huta was more luxurious than anything he’d known growing up: “There was water, electricity.” He also had a secretary and a salary, paid by the ZMP, which made him independent of the factory.

  At first, Tejchma’s days were packed with interest. Though he had instructions from Warsaw, telling him how to organize lectures and parades, he also had a good deal of independence. He walked around the building site, “interesting myself in how the young people were working, maybe intervening, making suggestions, looking at the dining hall, the educational system.” He brought his conclusions to the construction bosses and argued for changes. In order to prevent workers from “lying around on benches” after work, he organized a fleet of construction site trucks to take a group of workers, many of whom had never been inside a theater before, to attend a performance in Kraków. Tejchma also organized meetings with the important writers, artists, and poets who came to Nowa Huta in search of creative inspiration. At the same time, Tejchma kept track of who was meeting construction norms and who had beaten them. True to the spirit of the age, he encouraged “socialist competitions” and rewarded the victors. Some people listened: “They engaged, they tried to do well, they raced against one another. But of course it didn’t look, in real life, the way it did in the newsreels.”

  Very quickly, Tejchma’s job became a disappointment. Some of his new charges appreciated his work, wanted to broaden their horizons, learn the history of the workers’ movement, become acquainted with theater and literature. But others were not only bored by his efforts; they were actively hostile. Many of them “had no cultural standards at all. No education, no need for higher things. They were constantly drunk, they entertained themselves by fighting. They had no sense of unity. They wanted nothing that we had to give them.”

  He was not the only one to come to that conclusion. In 1955—after Stalin’s death, by which time the press was much freer—the young journalist Ryszard Kapuściński visited Nowa Huta on behalf of Sztandar Młodych (Banner of Youth), the newspaper of the ZMP. In the recently completed apartment blocks, Kapuściński met many people who were satisfied with what they had achieved. “I’ve been here two years and won’t leave for anything,” one man told him. But in the barrack cities on the outskirts of town, he found dramatic, even Dantesque living conditions and an emerging underclass of impoverished and degenerate factory workers:

  Not long ago, a fourteen-year-old girl infected an army of boys [with venereal disease]. When we met her, she described her achievement with such vulgarity that we wanted to vomit. She isn’t alone. Not all of them are so young, but there are many. Go to the Mogilski forest, to “Tajwan,” to “Kozedo” [names of pubs] … In Nowa Huta there are apartments where in one room the mother takes money from men, and in the other the daughter makes it up to them. There is more than one such apartment …

  And now look at the life of a young man here in the factory. He gets up early, he goes to work. He comes back at three. That’s it. At three, his day ends. I’ve walked around the dorms where such men lived. I’ve looked inside: they are sitting. Actually that’s the only activity they do. They don’t talk, what is there to talk about? They could read, but they aren’t used to it; they could sing, but that would bother others; they could fight, but they don’t want to. They just—sit. The more active wander around the streets. Hell, maybe there is somewhere to go, something to fill half the day? There are a lot of bars. But some don’t want to go there, others don’t have money. Besides that there isn’t anything …47

  Tejchma made the same observation. He tried to hold group discussions with the most apathetic workers, but while they would happily complain about working conditions, it was impossible to get them to talk about much else. When famous writers came to visit, they mostly sat silent, as if waiting to be instructed by these visitors from a different world. Tejchma began to warn these literary figures in advance, even advising them against overselling Nowa Huta. He told Kazimierz Brandys, at the time a leading Stalinist writer, to tone down his description of the building site: real life was not so optimistic, so joyful as it appeared to be in Brandys’s work. There was a vast gap between daily life as it was actually lived and daily life as it was described in the newspapers, the newsreels, and the novels.

  Vast gaps were also emerging between the different districts of the socialist cities. Not far from May 1 Street, the Switzerland of Sztálinváros, there were barrack cities with names like “Radar” and “South.” These were in fact slums, with no running water, no indoor toilets, and no asphalt streets. Rubbish collection was irregular. People kept pigs and chickens in sheds alongside the barracks—and sometimes in the half-finished apartment blocks nearby. When it rained the mud was so deep that parents had to carry children to kindergarten on their backs. Sometimes two, three, or more families lived in spaces meant for one.48 For entertainment, the inhabitants of the barrack cities visited not theaters and hotel restaurants but pubs. The most notorious—Késdobáló, which literally means “the Knife-Thrower” as well as “pub” or “joint” in Hungarian slang—was, according to press reports, a place of drunkenness, wild singing, fights, and stabbings. Of another pub—Lepra, or “the Leopard”—it was jokingly said that one had to fire into the air upon crossing the threshold, and if no one shot back then it was possible to enter. Periodically the police tried to close these establishments, but the pubs had become gathering places for former peasants, who defended them vigorously against the “urban” police and media.49

  Stalinstadt was equally divided. In one part of the city, the lucky few were able to move into new apartments and were genuinely enthusiastic about their new circumstances. Elsewhere, things were harder. Most of the workers who came to the site in the early days were young people who came from all over Germany—one in three was a refugee from Poland, Sudetenland, or elsewhere in the former Reich—without their families. They lived in barracks, ten to a room, and their main entertainment was drinking. One remembered going “over the rail tracks to Fürstenberg,” where, as in Sztálinváros, there were bars with nonutopian names like the Wild Boar and the Cellar.50 Another remembered a pub that was so crowded it was difficult to enter—unless you were lucky enough to get there after a fight, when the clients had all been tossed out.51

  The speed of the construction, the use of night shifts, the long working days, and the inexperience of both workers and management also meant that there were frequent technological failures in these supposedly ideal construction sites. The loose, sandy soil of Sztálinváros caused enormous problems and slowed down progress. Tevan remembered waking up early on Sunday mornings and sneaking out to the construction site to make sure that “the walls and the buildings were still there.”52 Her piece of the factory survived, but a wing of one of the local schools did collapse and had to be reconstructed. In 1958 the entire sewage system had to be refurbished. Ideology itself was the source of technical problems: at one point Tevan requested that a much-applauded brigade of shock workers be removed from one of her projects because they were so anxious to finish quickly and collect their rewards that they cut corners and did the work badly. That kind of problem arose at many other building sites and in many other factories in this era, but heightened propaganda made the problem worse in the socialist cities.

  Technical problems arose within the steel mills too. At Stalinstadt, a furnace designed to produce 360 tons of raw iron was initially only able to produce about one and a half tons. After about two months of repairs and adjus
tments, it could produce around 205 tons—which meant, at least, that the plan could be “fulfilled by 58 percent.” The output eventually improved, but poor planning and engineering failures meant that parts of the steel production process at the Stalinstadt mill would be carried out in the Soviet Union for many years. Decades after the mill was “complete,” unfinished materials still had to be shipped back and forth across the border for processing. The entire plant, encompassing all of the stages of the steel production cycle, would not be completed until the 1990s, after East Germany no longer existed.53

  Rapid development often leads to these kinds of mistakes and failures in poor countries. But in the new socialist cities the gap between the utopian propaganda and the sometimes catastrophic reality of daily life was so wide that the communist parties scrambled constantly to explain it away. Certainly mass propaganda campaigns were organized in the socialist cities on a broader and more frantic scale than elsewhere in the country. The campaign to change Dunapentele’s name to Sztálinváros was carried out precisely in order to mobilize the city’s workforce, for example, and perhaps to encourage the Soviet Union to pitch in as well. As Ernő Gerő wrote in a letter to Rákosi in 1951:

  With the new name we could have a big boost in the organization of work contests on the construction sites. We could organize the name change in such a way … that the overwhelming majority of the workers identify with the plan, and ask the government to fulfill their demands for the name change … Also I think that naming the Duna Steel Mill after Comrade Stalin would morally oblige Soviet economic organizations to offer us the necessary help in planning and supply …54

  A “spontaneous” campaign was duly set in motion. From all over the city, workers wrote letters to Rákosi, pledging to achieve higher work norms and faster deadlines if only the Hungarian leader would agree to change the city’s name. “I promise that with all my efforts and knowledge I will help this little tree planted in this small village Dunapentele to reach the skies in the wondercity of Sztálinváros,” wrote one. “I beg Comrade Rákosi to bring this letter to our father Stalin,” declared another. Some wrote poems:

  By the Volga, there is Stalingrad, by the Danube we have Sztálinváros,

  Comrade Stalin is the greatest guardian of peace, his name will protect our city …

  Finally, a workers’ delegation went to see Rákosi and presented him with all of the letters, bound into a large leather book that is preserved today in the city museum. He shook hands with them and told them he had agreed: the city could be renamed. A three-day “naming” celebration was scheduled for the anniversary of the October Revolution, complete with folk-dance performances, theater and opera, sporting contests, and a book fair with all of Stalin’s books. A huge portrait of Stalin was hung on the party headquarters, carefully lit up, in the words of a local journalist, “as if the light of gratitude of the Hungarian people would shine upon his face.”55

  In East Germany, the party leadership took a grimmer approach to their socialist city’s mistakes. Particularly concerned by the engineering failures, the East German party leadership organized a meeting of the Stalinstadt party bosses in 1952. Behind closed doors, all of the problems were aired: the lack of supplies, the lack of protective clothing for workers, the poor transportation, the filthy barracks, the dysfunctional furnaces. The result was a blistering report, laying most of the blame on the minister of metallurgy, Fritz Selbmann, who was charged with “arrogance” and fined. He was told he could keep his job, but only on the condition that he led a commission of experts to oversee work at the factory for the next three months, and only if the commission made swift changes.

  Separately, the East German secret police carried out their own investigation into the poor performance of the brand-new furnaces. The Stasi boss, Wilhelm Zaisser, personally commissioned a report entitled “On Suspicion of Sabotage in Project Planning and Construction of Eisenhüttenstadt.” At the suggestion of his Soviet advisers, Zaisser once again laid much of the blame for technical failures on “the completely irresponsible behavior of Minister Selbmann,” and there was some dark talk of a show trial (perhaps along the lines of the Soviet Shakhty Trial of the 1930s, during which several hapless engineers had been blamed for a whole range of industrial failures). Selbmann and his colleagues were only saved from arrest and public humiliation by the arrival of a group of Soviet engineers. After examining the project, they applauded the construction of the furnaces but criticized the “inexperience” of their German colleagues: the low production rate was not caused by sabotage but by an incorrect mixture of coke and iron ore.56 The pressure on Stalinstadt engineers remained so strong that the technical director of the mill, Hans König, openly complained of constant attacks and accusations. In 1955 he slipped over the border to the West.57

  Ordinary workers shouldered some of the blame too. The Sztálinváros press openly blamed glitches and delays on the “criminals, prostitutes, and déclassé elements” who had found their way to the city by nefarious means and were now allegedly pushing up crime rates and sabotaging the effort of others. There was some truth behind these accusations. Sztálinváros was the biggest construction site in the country, and all kinds of people drifted there to seek their fortunes. The appalling living conditions—overcrowding, lack of entertainment, the housing shortage—might have made workers behave worse too, though not always. Tevan had several ex-prostitutes in her women’s construction brigade: “Some of them of course continued their jobs in Sztálinváros, but some of them really wanted to start a new life. I had one such employee whom I helped a good deal, and who later became a local shop manager. Every time I went to shop there she gave me the best produce, she was so grateful.”58

  But the majority of the workers who came to the socialist cities were not criminals or prostitutes, just as the majority of those who went to the makeshift pubs were not gun-toting thugs. In the end, the mythology of Sztálinváros as a lawless “gold-rush” town, where anything could happen and all rules were broken, was more useful than true. Like the accusations of industrial sabotage, it helped explain why living standards weren’t rising, why apartments weren’t complete, and why even Soviet-designed steel mills built from scratch weren’t able to fulfill the communist party’s ambitious plans.

  The campaigns against shirkers, “criminals,” and other spoilers may have had their successes. But the gap between propaganda and reality eventually became too wide to disguise, and in time even many enthusiastic socialist city dwellers became disillusioned. After a few years as a youth activist, Elek Horváth was drafted into the army and given an officer’s commission. Júlia Kollár—now Júlia Horváth—was invited to attend a party training school in Budapest, where she got in trouble for voicing her opposition to the “peace bonds” campaign. As a League of Working Youth leader, she had been obliged to sell these “bonds”—a tax, in effect, since the money went back to the state—to her fellow workers: the more bonds you sold, the higher your standing inside the youth movement. She came to feel it was wrong to persuade people to go into debt in order to purchase peace bonds, and she didn’t want to do so herself, even if it meant that the Horváths would no longer be considered “exemplary cadres.” She said so aloud. Soon afterward, someone asked her if she was proud to have a husband who was an officer at such a young age, and she said no, she didn’t like his job because it meant that he was away most of the time. Both that conversation and her comments about the peace bonds were reported to the school director. Summoned to explain herself, she told him that this was not “enemy behavior,” just an expression of her opinion. The incident ended there and she returned to Sztálinváros as a party activist. But she never returned to construction work, and she has no nostalgia for the later years she spent in the city.

  If the enthusiasm did not last, neither did the utopian dream of a socialist city. After Stalin’s death in 1953, not everything changed right away—the names Stalinstadt and Sztálinváros remained in use until 1961, when the two cit
ies were quietly rechristened Eisenhüttenstadt and Dunaújváros, respectively. But new architectural principles were put into practice right away. In December 1954, less than a year after Stalin’s death, Nikita Khrushchev launched a campaign to promote the “industrialization of architecture.” In a speech that heralded some of the political battle still to come, he spoke enthusiastically of prefabricated buildings, reinforced concrete, and standardized apartments. He dismissed architects who were too concerned with appearances: “He needs a beautiful silhouette, but what people need are apartments.” And he stomped on the extravagances of Stalinist socialist realism:

  Certain architects have a passion for adding spires to the tops of buildings, which gives this architecture an ecclesiastical appearance. Do you like the silhouette of churches? I don’t want to argue about tastes, but for residential buildings such an appearance is unnecessary … This produces no extra convenience for residents and merely makes exploitation of the building more expensive and puts up its cost.59

  In line with this new set of policies, the Soviet Central Committee passed a decree on “the elimination of unnecessary extravagance in architecture.” Eastern Europe followed suit. In January, Khrushchev’s speech appeared in a German translation. In February 1955, the party Central Committee in Berlin declared that all new construction was to go forward under a new slogan: “Better, cheaper, faster.”60 Prefab tower blocks—the infamous Plattenbau—began going up in Stalinstadt and other East German cities not long afterward.