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

by Anne Applebaum

  Throughout his career, Piasecki’s ambiguous status made everyone uneasy. Perhaps because he did have a separate relationship with Soviet officials, the Polish communists never trusted him. Although he continued to play their game (at one point he offered to send Pax observers to North Korea to promote “peace”), the government left him out of the creation of the union of “patriotic” priests and did not ask him to help negotiate the church–state accord. At the same time, his public Catholicism did not endear him to the church as much as he might have hoped. Cardinal Wyszyński loathed Piasecki, and at one point forbade clergy to subscribe to his publications, which eventually came to include Słowo Powszechny (Universal Word), a daily newspaper, as well as Dziś i Jutro. Wyszyński was particularly infuriated by Piasecki’s management of Caritas, the Catholic charity—Pax took it over after the real organizers were removed—especially when unscrupulous Pax priests were caught selling donated penicillin on the black market.48 The rivalry between the two men may well have been encouraged by the communist party, of course, which had no interest in seeing Pax and the church create a united front. In later years the party allowed rival “official” church groups to proliferate precisely in order to create competition among them.49

  In the end, Piasecki failed in what he apparently set out to do. He never did persuade “reactionary forces” to join the new system. Nor did he persuade the communist party to make Pax an equal partner. He guessed, correctly, that someday the party would hand over power to an opposition grouping of its choice, which is indeed what happened in 1989. But he appeared on the scene too early to take advantage of such a situation himself, and he paid a very high price for trying. In 1957, his teenage son, Bohdan, was kidnapped and murdered, probably by a faction within the Polish secret police, in circumstances that remain murky to this day.

  Piasecki did open what seemed, at the time, to be a window of freedom for a few people, and he did ensure that an avowedly Catholic discourse remained part of public life. The books and newspapers published by Pax provided some Catholic education for a generation of readers. More importantly, from Piasecki’s point of view, he survived. At a time when other ex–Home Army officers were dead or in prison, he and his colleagues had their own party, their own newspapers, a stable position within the system. And they had influence in all kinds of places. In 1955, Mazowiecki, Zabłocki, and several others rebelled against his leadership. But after they quit their jobs at Dziś i Jutro or Pax, all of them found it difficult to get new jobs elsewhere: every potential employer was warned off by the secret police, and no one wanted them around. All learned a lesson: a fight with Piasecki was dangerously close to a fight with the regime.50

  Odd though it may sound, newspapers and magazines also provided a way out for reluctant collaborators. Of course, those who wrote about politics had few options in this era. They had to accept the telephone calls from the party brass, listen to instructions, and write as they were told. But others had more leeway. Leopold Unger, a correspondent for Życie Warszawy (Warsaw Life) in the early 1950s, remembered that even then it was possible to write freely and critically about all kinds of things. The potholes in the streets, for example, or the lack of public buses: “It just wasn’t possible to criticize the system itself.”51

  Newspapers were not all about politics, even then, and there were other kinds of publications as well. Alexander Jackowski, after trying and failing to find his way in Poland’s Foreign Affairs Ministry in the late 1940s, began editing a folk-art journal in 1952 “by accident,” as he recalled. He kept that job for forty-six years. During that period, he became a renowned expert in the subject of folk art, which he genuinely came to know and love. He didn’t challenge the system in that job, but he did not need to spend any time defending it.52

  At some level, the regimes themselves understood the need for apolitical outlets, both for the reading public and for journalists. That’s the best explanation for the East German regime’s decision to begin publishing Wochenpost (The Weekly Post) in the autumn of 1953. Although the first issue appeared after Stalin’s death, plans for the newspaper had been laid a year earlier. Originally, the idea was Soviet: a senior Red Army general stationed in Berlin felt the East German press was not succeeding in reaching the entire population, especially women. The general approached Rudi Wetzel, a journalist then out of favor with the regime, and asked him for some ideas. Wetzel made a proposal that seemed to come to nothing.

  But behind the scenes a discussion had been sparked. Official reports bewailed the “colorlessness and uniformity of material about life in the republic,” as well as the absence of articles on “gardening, medicine, housework.”53 The East German leadership, ever conscious of how boring its propaganda could be, finally approached Wetzel and proposed that he start a magazine. Their suggestions were identical to those Wetzel himself had made to the Soviet general. And thus Wochenpost was born.

  From the start, the newspaper tried to be different. Wetzel went out of his way to find journalists who were ambivalent about the regime, at one point even describing the first editorial board as a “journalistic penal colony, full of ex-convicts.” Their articles, at least by comparison to the political tracts found in Neues Deutschland, seemed remarkably fresh and entertaining. The first issue, published in time for Christmas, contained gardening hints, light features, and a “womens’ page.” The cover showed a child blowing out a candle and the words “To all who are of goodwill.” Later issues would feature travel writing, long pieces of reportage, even articles for children. But the Wochenpost never tried to become an opposition newspaper, in any sense of the term, and this may have been part of its appeal. As the journalist Klaus Polkehn has argued, Wochenpost was “no more opportunistic than its readers.”54 The newspaper didn’t push the limits, and neither did they.

  Polkehn would have known both his colleagues and his audience very well, since he worked at Wochenpost from the very beginning until almost the very end. Many years later he was still nostalgic about his career there, and it isn’t hard to see why. Polkehn was aged fourteen at the end of the war, and aged seventeen when he left school to become a typesetter at a newspaper. He was encouraged in these choices by his father, Hugo Polkehn, a communist and journalist who thought his son should “get experience in real life.” After the war, Polkehn senior became editor of Tribune, the East German trade union newspaper. But in March 1953 he was suddenly arrested: Tribune had made a typesetting mistake in Stalin’s obituary. Instead of writing “Stalin was a great friend of peace” a typesetter accidentally set “Stalin was a great friend of war.” Both Hugo Polkehn and the typesetter were sentenced to five years in prison, of which they would serve three. At the time of the trial Klaus Polkehn lost his job and was told he would “never work again as a journalist.” Wochenpost hired him right away.

  For the subsequent four decades, Polkehn remained loyal to the newspaper that had given him this second chance. He maintained, until the end, that it had also allowed him an extraordinary amount of freedom within an extraordinarily constrained system. Because of his father, and because he was in any case dubious about many aspects of the regime, he stayed well away from domestic politics. Instead, he became the magazine’s travel writer, eventually filing stories from all over the world. Polkehn was allowed to go everywhere, so long as he stayed within certain boundaries. Before he went to Egypt, for example, he was told not to write critically about Anwar Sadat, who was then exporting a lot of cotton to East Germany. But in Cairo, “I got a whole day at the pyramids … that was my privilege.” At a time when few East Germans could travel at all, that was a great privilege indeed.

  There was a price to pay for that kind of freedom. Polkehn, like the other Wochenpost journalists, had to learn to read between the lines, to follow the political signals, and above all not to cause “trouble.” When I asked him what “trouble” meant, he explained that it would begin with a phone call from someone on the communist party Central Committee, berating you for crossing t
he invisible lines. Trouble could continue with a reprimand, a meeting, maybe being fired from an excellent job at a relatively open-minded newspaper. Polkehn sought to avoid this at all costs. Only once, when he had violated an unwritten code and written something thatł crossed one of the invisible lines, did he get the telephone call, and a request: “Please give a written statement, explaining why this article was published.” That was enough for him to make sure it never happened again.

  He was aware, even then, that he was lucky and that others resented him. He sometimes had letters from readers: “As long as we can’t travel, we don’t want to read your articles either.” Many of his compatriots were wary of journalists in general—they were seen as a part of the communist establishment—and would refuse to be interviewed. But he brushed away the idea that he might have taken part in more open dissent: “It seemed pointless to me.” He disliked the dissidents who later became part of East Germany’s political scene, finding them “conceited, indecent people.” He suspected that some of them adopted their pose of opposition in order to secure an exit visa to West Germany.

  Polkehn did contract ulcers, which mysteriously disappeared in the 1990s, after both Wochenpost and East Germany had ceased to exist. Perhaps this was not surprising: his life required him to walk a kind of political tightrope, keeping away from all sensitive subjects while producing articles he believed had integrity. But he felt pride in his work, even years later. He loved writing, he loved traveling, and there were modest material advantages as well as intellectual pleasures. His job at Wochenpost was relatively well paid, by East German standards. There were two holiday homes, one near Berlin and one by the Baltic Sea, which the journalists were allowed to use every third or fourth year. The newsroom also had access to a tailor’s shop and a cobbler as well as a dentist: “It saved time. He was very good.” As at almost every workplace in East Germany, there was a very cheap canteen for meals.

  Polkehn didn’t change anything about the system he lived in, but nor did he feel responsible for its more brutal aspects. He kept well away from the secret police, well away from those in power, and well away from controversy. Like Piasecki, he prospered, flourished, and remained nostalgic for his years as a travel writer. “It was my dream job,” he told me.55

  Chapter 17

  PASSIVE OPPONENTS

  The time had now come when we must listen with devoted expressions to Soviet orders, smiling only with the wrinkles in our bottoms, under our trousers, as did the lackeys of the Byzantine emperors. Heroic gestures would be of no avail; we would have to speak the language of flowers, be patient and cunning, as we had been under Hitler. The essential thing was to survive.

  —György Faludy, paraphrasing Jan Masaryk, 19461

  A thing is funny when it upsets the established order. Every joke is a tiny revolution.

  —George Orwell

  BY 1950 OR 1951, it was no longer possible to identify anything so coherent as a political opposition anywhere in Eastern Europe. There were a few Poles who kept their pistols hidden in the barn, waiting for a better day, and one or two who were still hiding in the forests. There were some officially tolerated regime opponents like Bolesław Piasecki, whose real views were opaque. There were a few people who were able to criticize the regime’s less important decisions in public and were even encouraged to do so, as long as they kept the right tone. As Bolesław Bierut had declared, “There are different kinds of criticism. There is creative criticism and hostile criticism. The first is helpful to our development, the second is an obstacle … criticism shouldn’t undermine the authority of the leader.”2

  But the remaining Polish Home Army leaders were in prison or in the Soviet Gulag. The Hungarian regime’s most powerful opponents were imprisoned in Recsk. East Germany’s critics had left or fallen silent. The public sphere had been cleansed so thoroughly that a tourist visiting Warsaw, Budapest, or East Berlin—or Prague, Sofia, or Bucharest—in the early 1950s would have observed no political opposition whatsoever. The press contained regime propaganda. Holidays were celebrated with regime parades. Conversations did not deviate from the official line if an outsider was present.

  The tourist might even have assumed that all were united in support of the regime, and various distinguished visitors did indeed form that impression. Upon returning from Warsaw in 1950, one British socialist, the wife of a Labour MP, told a crowd at Trafalagar Square she had seen “no signs of dictatorship” in Poland. On the contrary, she declared, the only “iron curtain” in existence was the one around Great Britain (the British government had just refused visas to Eastern European delegates who had wanted to attend a world peace conference in Sheffield).3 One of her compatriots, equally impressed with her visit to the East, said that to be in Warsaw was “like changing worlds, like stepping into the sun after being in the rain.”4 Though these were extreme views, they reflected a broader prejudice. The Western notion that the Eastern bloc contained an undifferentiated group of countries with identical regimes and indistinguishable people—“Siberia starts at Checkpoint Charlie”—dates precisely from this era.

  And yet there was opposition. But it was not an active opposition, and certainly not an armed opposition. It was rather a passive opposition, an opposition that sought outlets in jokes, graffiti, and unsigned letters, an opposition that was often anonymous and frequently ambivalent. It existed in all classes and among all ages. Sometimes the regime’s passive opponents and reluctant collaborators were actually one and the same. Many people felt embarrassed or ashamed by the things they had to do in order to keep their jobs, protect their families, and stay out of jail. Others were appalled by the hypocrisy of public life, bored by the peace demonstrations and parades that impressed outsiders. They were stultified by the dull meetings and the empty slogans, uninterested in the leader’s speeches and the endless lectures. Unable to do anything about it openly, they got their revenge behind the party’s back.

  Not by accident were young people the most enthusiastic of the passive resisters to High Stalinism, if “enthusiasm” is a word that can be used in this context. They were the focus of the heaviest, most concentrated, and most strictly enforced propaganda, which they heard at school and in their youth groups. They bore the brunt of the regime’s various campaigns and obsessions, they were sent around to collect the subscription money, gather signatures, and organize rallies. At the same time, they were less cowed by the horrors of a war they didn’t necessarily remember, and less intimidated by the prospect of prison they had yet to experience.

  As a result, examples of low-level opposition among young people abound. Organized protest was relatively uncommon but it was not unknown, and young people sometimes paid a high price to join it. In 1950, twenty-year-old Edeltraude Eckert was arrested for distributing pro-democracy leaflets. She received a twenty-five-year prison sentence, which became a death sentence after an accident in an East German prison factory turned into an infection that killed her. From her cell, and then from her hospital bed, she sent hopeful, optimistic notes home. “The world is so beautiful you just have to believe in it,” she wrote to her mother, a few months before her death.5

  Jokes, insults, and tricks, often aimed at the somber and humorless youth leaders, were much more common, and there are dozens of examples from the late 1940s and early 1950s. At an election in one of the youth group cells in a Polish mining town, for example, someone wrote in “Adenauer”—then the chancellor of West Germany—as a joke candidate. The ballot was treated as evidence of “enemy tendencies,” and an investigation was conducted into the identity of the author. In a youth workers’ brigade, another young man was reprimanded for composing rhyming couplets. One of the few obscenity-free verses read like this:

  Cleanliness prevails in the camp

  When you want to wash yourself there is not a drop of water

  But someone can weep tears over you.6

  At times these things were taken extremely seriously. Between 1948 and 1951 alone, some 300 East
German high-school and university students were arrested and sentenced to hard labor, many for similar pranks. A group of young boys in Jena received ten years apiece for throwing stink bombs at school officials during a formal celebration of President Wilhelm Pieck’s birthday. By 1950, East German camps and jails held 800 boys and girls under the age of seventeen. Some were being held for having made faces during a lecture about Stalin, or for having scribbled an “F” (for Freiheit, or freedom) on city walls at night.7

  But young people also had some less verbal forms of protest available to them. Just as Western teenagers were beginning to discover that long hair and blue jeans could be an enormously effective means of registering discontent, Eastern European teenagers living under Stalinist regimes discovered that narrow trousers, shoulder pads, red socks, and jazz could be a form of protest too. In different countries, these early “youth rebel” subcultures had different names. In Poland, they were called bikiniarze, possibly after the Pacific atoll where the United States tested the first atomic bomb—or, more likely, the Hawaiian/Pacific/Bikini-themed ties that some of the truly hip bikiniarze managed to obtain from the care packages sent by the United Nations and other relief organizations. (The truly lucky also got hold of makarturki, sunglasses of the kind General MacArthur wore.) In Hungary, they were called the jampecek, a word that roughly translates as “slacker.” In Germany—both East and West—they were the Halbstarke, or “half strong.” There was a Czech version—the potapka, or duck—probably named after the ducktail hairstyle, and even a Romanian version, the malagambisti, named after a famously cool Romanian drummer, Sergiu Malagamba.8

  The fashions adopted by these youth rebels varied slightly from country to country as well, depending on what was actually available in flea markets or from those Western care packages, and what could be made from scratch. Generally speaking, the boys favored narrow, drainpipe trousers (in Warsaw there was a tailor who specialized in making them out of ordinary ones). The girls at first wore tight pencil skirts, though later they switched to the “New Look” then being sold by Christian Dior and copied everywhere else: dresses with small waists and wide skirts, preferably in loud colors and patterns. Both favored shoes with thick rubber soles—a distant echo of the American sneaker—which in Hungary came to be called jampi shoes. Brightly colored shirts were popular too, since they contrasted so starkly with the conformist uniforms of the communist youth movements, as were wide ties, often hand-painted. The idea was that shirts and ties should clash. Particularly popular was the combination of a green tie and a yellow shirt, known in Polish as “chives on scrambled egg.” In Warsaw, Leopold Tyrmand popularized the wearing of striped socks as well. He did so, he once said, to demonstrate “the right to one’s own taste.”9 He maintained some ironic distance from the bikiniarze, who mostly belonged to a younger generation, though in general he approved: