Iron Curtain (69 page)

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:

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:

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 cities 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:

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.

In the end, the town hall with the soaring spire planned for Stalinstadt was never built. Nor was the cultural center on Nowa Huta’s central square, a
space that has been renamed Ronald Reagan Plaza and today marks the intersection of streets named after General Władysław Anders, Pope John Paul II, and the Solidarity trade union. Only half of the main square in Dunaújváros was completed, leaving the “square” somewhat lopsided and causing architectural controversy in the city even today. Investment in the Stalinstadt steel mill was reduced in 1954 from 110 million to 34 million marks, and construction of some pieces of the production cycle were put off indefinitely.
⁶¹
Investment in the Sztálinváros mill was frozen in 1954. Although the
Nowa Huta mill continued to grow, its location became more controversial with time.

Because of the immense amount of publicity and propaganda that had initially been focused on them, all three socialist towns continued to play symbolic roles in the subsequent history of their respective countries. In the summer of 1955, Nowa Huta and its workers became the subject of one of the first openly anticommunist poems to appear in print in Poland after Stalin’s death. Adam Ważyk’s “Poem for Adults” bitterly mocked the peasants-turned-workers, the pretensions of the Nowa Huta management, and the glowing communist propaganda:

Later, this same “army of pioneers,” with their crucifixes and their vodka, featured in
Andrzej Wajda’s film
Man of Marble
(
Człowiek z marmuru
). The story of a Stalinist shock worker who fades into insignificance and disappointment,
Man of Marble
was approved for distribution in 1977 thanks to the intervention of Józef Tejchma, the former Nowa Huta youth leader, who was by then the Polish minister of culture.

In subsequent decades, the first Polish city to be built without a church also became the focus of an enormous political and religious struggle. In 1957, the Archdiocese of Kraków applied to build a church in Nowa Huta. In 1959, the archbishop of Kraków, Karol Wojtyła, celebrated outdoor mass in the open field where the church was supposed to be constructed. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, clergy and the authorities tussled over funding and permits until finally, in 1977, the church was built. Cardinal Wojtyła consecrated it, an act that elevated both his national and his international stature. Six years later, Wojtyła—now Pope John Paul II—celebrated mass there before a triumphant crowd. Nowa Huta had become, and remains, a symbol of totalitarianism’s failure in Poland: failed planning, failed architecture, a failed utopian dream.

TO THE MODERN ear, or perhaps more accurately to the postmodern ear, the lyrics of “The Song of the Party” (“Das Lied der
Partei”), cited above, are not exactly emotive. On the contrary, they seem absurd, and in the years since East Germany ceased to exist they have been mocked, parodied, and even sung by Mickey Mouse in a YouTube production.
²
Without an intact ideology to support them, the words of the chorus—“The party, the party, she is always right!”—sound not merely outdated but laughable. It is difficult to imagine how anyone could have sung them with a straight face.