Iron Curtain (30 page)

In the evenings, Tyrmand dressed in brightly colored socks and narrow trousers, the latter specially made for him by a tailor who also lived at
the YMCA, and went to the jazz concerts downstairs. There, “between the cafeteria, the reading room and the swimming pool the best girls ambled about in the then-fashionable style of swing.” Both the Warsaw and Łódź YMCA branches were renowned for these concerts. One fan remembered that getting a ticket to a YMCA concert was “a dream … it was cultured, elegant, hugely fun, even without alcohol.” Above all it was entertainment: “We didn’t know anything about Katyn or about how one lives in a free country, we didn’t have passports, we didn’t have new books or movies, but we had a natural need to find entertainment, fun … that was what jazz gave us.” Tyrmand himself wrote later that the YMCA represented “genuine civilization in the middle of devastated, troglodyte Warsaw, a city where one lived in ratholes. Above all we valued the collegial atmosphere, the sportiness, the good humour.”
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But with enemies like Jędrychowski and the Union of Fighting Youth, the organization could not last. In 1949, the communist authorities declared the YMCA a “tool of bourgeois-fascism” and dissolved it. With bizarre, Orwellian fury, communist youth activists descended on the club with hammers and smashed all the jazz records. The building was given over to something called the League of Soldiers’ Friends. The inhabitants were harassed, first with early-morning noise, later with cuts in water and electricity, in order to get them to move out. Eventually, the young communists threw everyone’s possessions out of the windows of the buildings and removed their beds.

Still, not everybody left, largely because they had no place to go. Tyrmand stayed. New people arrived, sometimes bringing wives and children. By 1954, the place was noisy and dirty, with washing hanging in the hall and the smell of cooking in the air. Whole families slept in the tiny rooms. The buildings had come to resemble a “Parisian slum,” wrote Tyrmand. “The cheerful comfort of the old YMCA is now but a distant memory from an idyllic prehistory.”
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The reconstruction of Polska YMCA in the immediate postwar period was a classic example of what is nowadays called “civil society,” a phenomenon that has gone by other names in the past.
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In the eighteenth century,
Edmund Burke wrote admiringly of the “little platoons,” the small social organizations from which, he believed, public spirit arose (and which he thought were threatened by the French Revolution). In the nineteenth century, Alexander
de Tocqueville wrote equally enthusiastically of the “associations” that “Americans of all ages, all conditions, and all dispositions constantly form.” He concluded that they helped ward off dictatorship: “If men are to remain civilized or to become so, the art of associating together must grow and improve.” More recently, the political scientist
Robert Putnam has redefined the same phenomenon as “social capital,” and concluded that voluntary organizations lie at the heart of what we call “community.”

By 1945, the Bolsheviks had also developed a theory of civil society, albeit one that was entirely negative. In contrast to Burke, Tocqueville, and their own Russian intellectuals, they believed, in the words of the historian
Stuart Finkel, that “the public sphere in a socialist society should be unitary and univocal.” They dismissed the “bourgeois” notion of open discussion, and hated independent associations, trade unions, and guilds of all kinds, which they referred to as “separatist” or “caste” divisions within society. As for bourgeois political parties, these were meaningless. (As Lenin had written, “the names of parties, both in Europe and in Russia, are often chosen purely for purposes of advertisement, the ‘programs’ of parties are more often than not written with the sole purpose of defrauding the public.”
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) The only organizations allowed to have a legal existence were de facto extensions of the communist party. Even completely apolitical organizations had to be banned: until the revolution had triumphed, there could be no such thing as an apolitical organization. Everything was political. And if it was not openly political, then it was secretly political.

From that assumption, it also followed that no organized group was above suspicion. Associations that claimed to be interested in soccer or chess might well be “fronts” for something more sinister. The St. Petersburg academic
Dmitri Likhachev—later Russia’s most celebrated literary critic—was arrested in 1928 because he belonged to a philosophic discussion circle whose members saluted one another in ancient Greek. While in prison Likhachev encountered, among others, the head of the Petrograd Boy Scouts, an organization that later would be considered highly dubious in Eastern Europe as well.
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This profound suspicion of civil society was central to Bolshevik thinking, far more so than is usually acknowledged. Finkel points out that even while the Soviet leadership was experimenting with economic freedom in the 1920s (during Lenin’s New Economic Plan) the systematic destruction of literary, philosophical, and spiritual societies continued unabated.
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Even
for orthodox Marxists, free trade was preferable to free association, including the free association of apolitical sporting or cultural groups. This was true under Lenin’s rule, under Stalin’s rule, under Khrushchev’s rule, and under Brezhnev’s rule. Although many other things changed, the persecution of civil society continued after Stalin’s death, well into the 1970s and 1980s.

The Eastern European communists inherited this paranoia, either because they had observed it and acquired it for themselves during their many visits to the Soviet Union, because their colleagues in the secret police had acquired it during their training, or, in some cases, because the Soviet generals and ambassadors in their countries at the end of the war explicitly instructed them to be paranoid. In a few cases, Soviet authorities in Eastern Europe directly ordered local communists to ban particular organizations or types of organizations.

As in postrevolutionary
Russia, the political persecution of civic activists in Eastern Europe not only preceded the persecution of actual politicians but also took precedence over other Soviet and communist goals. Even in the years between 1945 and 1948, when elections were still theoretically free in
Hungary and when Poland still had a legal opposition party, certain kinds of civic associations were already under threat. In Germany, Soviet commanders made no attempt to ban religious services or religious ceremonies in the first months of occupation, but they often objected strongly to church group meetings, religious evenings, and even organized religious and charitable associations that met outside the church in restaurants or other public spaces.
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Despite Marx’s belief that “base determines superstructure”—meaning that economics determine politics and culture—the attacks on civil society preceded the most radical economic changes in the region too. Although the timing was not exactly the same in every nation of Soviet-occupied Europe, the patterns were very similar. In many places, private trade was still legal even when belonging to a Catholic youth group was not.

Nowhere is the significance of civil society to the new communist parties clearer than in the history of the region’s youth movements, perhaps because there was no social group that the communists considered more important. In part, this is because their fascist opponents had considered young people important and had enjoyed great success in organizing them. As early as 1932, the German communist party boss, Ernst Thälmann, called upon his comrades to “adopt sports, discipline, and comradery, Scouting games, and marches” just
like the Nazis: “ ‘Why don’t we pick up on the romantic-revolutionary sentiments of the masses of young workers? Why are we so dry and dull in our work’ … We have to create magnets to draw the proletarian youth …”
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The obsession with young people also reflected the deep belief in the mutability of human beings that was prevalent in communist circles in the 1940s (and in left-wing circles across Europe). Stalin’s famous suspicion of genetics derived precisely from his conviction that propaganda and communist education could alter the human character, permanently. He championed quacks such as the anti-geneticist
Trofim Lysenko, who held that acquired characteristics can be inherited, and who falsified his experiments to prove it. Any scientist whose work disproved Lysenko’s theories risked persecution in the Soviet Union as long as Stalin was alive.
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Stalin’s reasoning was clear: if young people could be molded and shaped by education and propaganda, and if they could then pass these acquired behaviors on to their children, then the creation of a “new” breed of communist man—
Homo sovieticus
, about which more later—was possible.

Polska YMCA was only one of many youth groups to reemerge from the rubble of the war. In an era before television and social media, and at a time when many lacked radio, newspapers, books, music, and theater, youth groups had an importance to teenagers and young adults that is hard to imagine today. They organized parties, concerts, camps, clubs, sports, and discussion groups of a kind that could be found nowhere else.

In Germany in particular, the disappearance of the
Hitler Youth and its female branch, the
League of German Girls, left a real gap. Until the very end of the war, nearly half of the young people in Germany had attended Hitler Youth and League of German Girls meetings in the evenings. Most had spent their summers and weekends at organized camps as well. Although those organizations were now utterly discredited, they had filled a real need, and as soon as the fighting stopped, former members and former opponents of the Nazi youth groups began spontaneously to form antifascist organizations in towns and cities across both East and West Germany.

These first groups were German, not Soviet, and they were organized by the young people themselves. All around them, adults were in despair. One in five German schoolchildren had lost his or her father. One in ten
had a father who was a prisoner of war. Someone had to start reorganizing society, and in the absence of adult authorities a few very energetic young people took on this role. In Neukölln, a western
Berlin district, an antifascist youth organization created on May 8—the day before the armistice—had 600 members by May 20, and had already set up five orphanages and cleared two sports stadiums of rubble. On May 23, the group gave a performance in a Neukölln theater, which was attended by
Soviet military officers as well as the general public.
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Wolfgang Leonhard, who had by then arrived in Berlin on Walter Ulbricht’s plane, met some of the members of this Neukölln group. These were the first non-Soviet political activists he had ever encountered: “One could feel the genuineness of the enthusiasm combined with a healthy realism. Without waiting for directives, the [group’s] members had immediately realized that the first thing was to organize a supply of food and water to alleviate the most urgent needs of the population.” He marveled, among other things, at their efficient, businesslike discussions: “More was accomplished in half an hour than in all the endless meetings I was used to in Russia.”
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Similar groups began organizing food distribution and rubble clearance all across Berlin, which was entirely under Soviet control for the first couple of months after the armistice. The Western Allies arrived in July, and only then was the city divided into occupation zones. By that time, the Berlin magistrate reckoned 10,000 teenagers across the city had already joined spontaneous antifascist groups.
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But almost as soon as they had started, these groups attracted the attention and suspicion of the Soviet authorities
in Germany. On July 31, the Soviet Military Administration issued a declaration “permitting” the formation of antifascist groups under the leadership of city mayors, but only “in connection with formal requests.” Unless they received explicit permission, in other words, all other youth organizations, unions, and sports clubs—even socialist groups—were banned. Separately, another declaration also commanded all youth groups to promote “friendship” with the Soviet Union. After three months of spontaneous existence, these self-organized groups were already coming under state control.

Leonhard, who had just encountered spontaneous civil society for the first time in his life, was one of those tasked with destroying it. Not long after their arrival in Berlin, Ulbricht drew his attention to the “antifascist committees or anti-Nazi groups or socialist offices or national committees or such-like” that had sprung up without authorization. Leonhard writes that he at
first welcomed Ulbricht’s interest in these groups, having been enormously impressed by his encounter with the Neukölln antifascists, and he “took it for granted that the task Ulbricht was about to assign was to make contact with them and support their work.” He was wrong. All of these committees, Ulbricht told him, had been created by the Nazis. Most were cover organizations. He told Leonhard that they were designed to prevent the development of true democracy, and he issued an order: “ ‘They are to be dissolved, and at once.’…” Leonhard, “with a heavy heart,” agreed to carry out the task. Only later did he understand why:

But if Ulbricht and his Soviet partners did not want spontaneous committees, they did want young people to join sanctioned groups that had been properly registered with the Soviet authorities. Because Germany was deemed a “bourgeois” democracy, and noncommunist political parties were still allowed to exist, they did let some noncommunist youth groups register themselves, provided they subjected themselves to full regulation. The center-right Christian democrats were allowed to register an official “youth wing” of the Christian Democratic Party in July. In 1946, Soviet administrators would issue instructions allowing the formation of certain artistic and cultural groups as well.
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