Iron Curtain (35 page)

Wolf’s answers rarely praised communism outright, and he didn’t use Marxist language. But almost all of them praised the Red Army or the Soviet system, both of which were favorably compared to their German counterparts. And all of them explicitly contained the promise that life, which had become unbearable under the Nazis and during the final days of the war, would now quickly improve.

Other programs took a similar tack. Late in 1945, one broadcaster visited
Saxony to investigate the status of “youth” in that region and found many heartening developments. Several former Hitler Youth members told him they were “delighted not to have to salute their leaders.” All professed to be thankful that the war had ended. Schools had not yet reopened and there were many hardships, but the reporter predicted “a free and beautiful future for our youth.” The word “communism” was not mentioned.
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Yet another reporter visited
Sachsenhausen and produced a genuinely harrowing account of the final days at the camp. Though the Red Army was thanked profusely at the end, there was nothing especially ideological about that broadcast either.
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But as time went on, the station’s tone changed. Following the Berlin
municipal elections of 1946—which provided the first great blow to the East German communist party—the propaganda became more strident, the announcers’ communist affiliations more obvious. This change was immediately picked up by listeners and reflected in the letters. “Dear Radio,” wrote a listener in 1947, “you have slowly started to become boring. Your evening programs are starting to repeat themselves.” Another complained about the stridency of the language: “One would think one had tuned in to
Radio Moscow.”

In part, the new tone was inspired by the Soviet officers who worked alongside the radio staff. Until 1949 they went on reading (and censoring) preprepared texts before they were broadcast, and they remained deeply involved in the finances of the radio, which in the early days they heavily subsidized. In 1945 and 1946 the radio consulted Soviet officials about hiring decisions, spending decisions, and the coordination of news policy with newspapers.
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There was no secret about any of this involvement: on ceremonial occasions, Mahle paid official obeisance to his Soviet colleagues. It was, he said at a reception they hosted for the radio, “an honor to thank them, especially Marshal Zhukov.” He also reminded his hosts that the radio was “the largest cultural institution in the Soviet zone” and urged them to stay as closely involved as possible: the radio “needs frequent meetings with its friends and powerful sponsors.”
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But the communist party’s unpopularity among Germans in general, and Berliners in particular, would eventually give Mahle and his German colleagues reasons to worry. By 1946, the radio station would find itself in direct competition with Radio in the American Sector (Rundfunk im amerikanischen Sektor, or RIAS), which had livelier news programs and, more importantly, better music. As the station sensed itself losing out in the competition with Western radio, and as East German communists began to recognize that living conditions were improving more rapidly in the Western zones of Germany, the radio’s managers began an internal argument that would last for many years: How to win over the masses?

Some worried that the station was too elitist, that it was losing its connection to the party, and that it had too little understanding of what “the masses” really wanted to hear. “We demand of the masses that they listen to us,” one radio party member declared during an internal discussion, “but do we listen to them?” The radio should be a “megaphone for the people,” he declared. Many agreed that there should be more “ordinary” voices on the radio and far
fewer party speeches. They also knew that the letter writers thought they were boring—and they feared it was true. In a 1948 discussion of how to promote the party’s first “Two-Year Plan,” some broadcasters argued that a simple broadcast of Ulbricht’s speech on the matter wasn’t enough: “In order for listeners not to get bored, the radio must find ways to tell readers about the plan in a lively way.” The best reporters were to be commissioned, and they were to go out and interview people about how the plan would be put into practice. In a later discussion of theatrical performances, radio commissioners agreed that “writers must be able to create lively and genuine scenes from material that is often very dry,” and must learn to combine artistic technique with ideology because “it’s the special task of radio to train more and more such writers.”
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Others did not agree. As the communist party’s unpopularity deepened, some at the radio, in the party, and in particular in the Soviet headquarters at Karlshorst began to put forth another view. Russian cultural officers observed that the combination of ideology and culture didn’t always work: during one organized “culture week,” they pointed out, people came to hear the music but ignored the lectures.
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They grew suspicious that attempts to lighten ideology would simply water it down. Others felt those long broadcasts of long speeches, however boring, had to stay in the radio’s repertoire. Otherwise how could the people get to know their leaders? Their conclusion: there should be more ideology, not less—on the radio and everywhere else.

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.
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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).
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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:

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.
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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.”
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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.
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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 Ż
ycie 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.
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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.
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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.
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