Iron Curtain (80 page)

In the wake of the 1953 German riots, the argument between neo-Stalinists and liberalizers intensified in the other Eastern European capitals as well. In Warsaw, Bierut and Władysław Gomułka’s battle for personal power had long ago turned into a struggle between neo-Stalinism on the one hand and a more “Polish,” less Soviet form of communism on the other. Gomułka’s cause received a sudden boost in December 1953 when Józef Światło, a senior secret policeman—the boss of Department X, responsible for watching party members—unexpectedly defected to the West. A few months later, Światło began broadcasting an extraordinary series of reports on the Polish service of
Radio Free Europe, describing the privileged lifestyle
of the party elite, the role of Soviet advisers, and the arrest and incarceration of Gomułka in lurid detail. Millions openly tuned in to listen, even in government offices. In its own report on the broadcasts, the Security Ministry noted with alarm that previously reliable informers were now refusing to cooperate and were demanding to know whether Światło would reveal their names.
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By December, Gomułka had been freed from house arrest.
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In Budapest, the party took a radically different turn. Rákosi—still the communist party’s general secretary—used the Berlin riots as an excuse to call for renewed “vigiliance” and to begin preparing for a comeback. Taking advantage of Moscow’s general disorientation, he contrived to reverse the Hungarian New Course. By 1955 he had convinced the Soviet Union to dismiss Nagy from the prime minister’s job and to replace him with a more pliant sidekick, András Hegedüs, the former youth leader. Nagy retaliated with an even more vociferous attack on Rákosi’s harsh policies.
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But while these arguments were going on at the very top of society, other things were happening far below.

If the first hint of discontent in Berlin came in the form of construction strikes, the beginning of the end of Stalinism in Poland came in the form of a large party. More precisely, it came in the form of the Fifth Youth and Students’ Festival of World Peace and Friendship in the summer of 1955.

Like its predecessor in Berlin, the Warsaw youth festival was designed to be a vast propaganda exercise, a meeting place for Eastern European communists and their comrades from Western Europe, Asia, Africa, and South America. Also like its predecessor in Berlin, it was meant to be carefully planned and orchestrated. Advance propaganda and enthusiastic coverage brought hundreds of thousands of Polish spectators to Warsaw for the five days of the festival. They traveled from all over the country to watch the dancing, the theater, and the other attractions—a Hungarian circus, a puppet show, and an opera were all performed on the first day—as well as sporting contests and economic debates.
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Yet from the very first day of the events, the crowds in Warsaw were not primarily interested in politics, culture, or even sports. The real attraction was the foreigners. Strolling the streets of the Polish capital for the first time since the war were Arabs in long robes, Africans in native dress, Chinese in Mao jackets, even Italians in striped shirts and French girls in flowered skirts.
Maciej Rosalak, a child at the time, remembered the shock:

The contrast between Poles and foreigners—especially those from Western Europe, who were culturally similar but so much richer and more open—struck everybody.
Trybuna Ludu
, the party newspaper, quoted a factory worker declaring that the dresses of the French girls were “amusing, happy, and tasteful … can’t Polish clothes be more beautiful?”
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The same newspaper also observed the contrast between the unsmiling Polish youth leaders—“we were sad, gloomy, incredibly stiff, uptight”—and their more cheerful foreign counterparts. “It turned out that it was possible to be ‘progressive,’ and at the same time enjoy life, wear colorful clothes, listen to jazz, have fun, and fall in love,” wrote
Jacek Kuroń, who had been one of those unsmiling youth leaders at the time.
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Particularly shocking, many noted, was the sight of young people kissing in public.

The political implications of this nonpolitical experience were clear even at the time.
Jacek Fedorowicz, whose cabaret group
Bim-Bom played in one of the theaters during the festival, remembered that “suddenly everything had became colorful, in a manner that was unbelievably unsocialist.”
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It was, he reckoned, “a propaganda mistake: without warning, they had let a crowd of multicolored outsiders into gray Warsaw.” A decade’s worth of anti-Western rhetoric was shown to be false: “Young people from the capitalist world were healthy and well-dressed, even though we’d been told that everything there is bad …”
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Spontaneity, the human quality most vigorously repressed by the communist regimes, suddenly flowered. To the horror of the festival organizers, Poles, Germans, Hungarians, Czechs, and others from the communist bloc actively socialized with one another and with the more exotic visitors, not only in the streets but in private apartments all over the city. Romances, friendships, and drunken evenings unfolded in an uncontrolled and unmonitored
manner. A student meeting at the library of the University of Warsaw developed into an argument when it turned out that not all of the French delegation were actually communists. For young communists such as Krzystof Pomian, this was the first experience of open public debate.
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Many officially planned events seemed somehow to go wrong too. At the old city
Arsenal, young Polish artists put on a show dedicated, of course, to “peace.” But what attracted visitors and garnered attention was not the theme but the extraordinary variation in what was on display. There were many paintings executed in heavy paint and harsh colors. Brushwork was visible. Allegories were obscure. The images were different, unexpected—and abstract and avant-garde. It was the end of an era. After the Arsenal show socialist realism would vanish from the visual arts in Poland forever.

Spontaneity in art led to spontaneity in behavior. At times, crowds grew ugly. When the sound system broke down at one event, the rioting and anger were so great that the sound technicians had to escape to their van and drive quickly away.
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People complained loudly about the shortage of food, the poor quality of some of the duller events, and the propaganda emitted by the ubiquitous loudspeakers. “In Warsaw, one dances in the name of something, or against something,” one party writer had solemnly declared in his summary of the festival, a sentiment almost everybody else found annoying.
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There were many tedious performances, from stiff folk dancing to unsmiling waltzes, from which the crowds turned away in droves.

And yet—sometimes the crowds grew spontaneously joyous as well. At one point, the Bim-Bom cabaret group was supposed to have an official meeting with a Swiss delegation. But instead of a stiff exchange of greetings, moderated by a translator and presided over by a Union of Polish Youth official, someone began to play jazz. The young people started to dance. And this time, the cabaret artists and their new Swiss friends were dancing neither for something nor against something. They were dancing just for fun.
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At that moment—as they did the jitterbug to the jazz music, as they ignored the distressed officials, as they sang along to the songs and paid no attention to their surroundings—the totalitarian dream suddenly seemed far away.

In the summer of 1955, Union of Polish Youth members were slipping away from their dull rallies to dance with Mexican communists and French fellow travelers. By autumn, their Hungarian counterparts had begun to breathe
life into their turgid League of Working Youth meetings too. These efforts had begun on a very small scale, when a group of young staff members at the Hungarian National Museum decided to organize a literary and political discussion group. They asked one of their friends, a poet named István Lakatos, to lead them. Lakatos opened the debates with a lecture on the Hungarian Enlightenment. He read from the works of Hungary’s most prominent Enlightenment poet,
György Bessenyei. In conclusion, he called upon the group to endorse Enlightenment values, albeit 200 years late, and they decided there and then to form a society, the “Bessenyei Circle.”

It was a tiny, elite, and somewhat esoteric effort. But it was nevertheless a matter of concern for the League of Working Youth, for whom any spontaneously organized group was a threat. A few years earlier, they would have banned a group dedicated to Enlightenment values. But Stalin was dead, and angry debate about Nagy’s “New Course” was still raging. They decided to replace the group’s leaders and to channel their efforts toward more politically correct, contemporary topics. Fatally, they also decided to name the group after Sándor Petőfi, the young poet of the 1848 revolution, whom they thought more appropriate to a progressive society than the “bourgeois” Bessenyei. Thus was born the Petőfi Circle, a debating club whose ostensibly academic discussions quickly became open debates about censorship, socialist realism, and central planning. Initial discussion topics included the peasants’ revolt of 1514 (a pretext for a debate on agricultural policy) and an analysis of Hungarian historiography (a pretext for a debate about the falsification of history in communist textbooks).
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The choice of name quickly proved “double-edged,” as one Hungarian writer put it: Petőfi had been a revolutionary fighting for Hungarian independence and the group bearing his name soon felt empowered to become revolutionary too.
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Changes had been taking place in other regime institutions at the same time. At
Szabad Nép
, the communist party’s hitherto reliable newspaper, reporters had become restless. In October 1954, a group of them, sent to cover life in the country’s factories, returned wanting to write about faked production statistics, falling living standards, and workers who had been blackmailed into buying “peace bonds.” In a published article, they declared that “though the life of the workers has changed and improved a great deal in the last ten years, many of them still have serious problems. Many are still living in overcrowded and shabby apartments. Many have to think twice about buying their children a new pair of shoes or going to an occasional
movie!” The following day, the reporters got the dreaded phone call from the Politburo member responsible for
Szabad Nép
: “What do you mean by this article? Do you think we will tolerate this agitation?” Instead of backing down, the editors held a three-day staff conference, at which one reporter after another stood up and called for honest reporting, supported Nagy’s reforms, and attacked senior party officials as well as their own editors. Several of these overly honest reporters lost their jobs, including Miklós
Gimes, the son of Lily Hajdú-Gimes, the Freudian psychiatrist who had practiced in secret. But a precedent had been set.
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Meanwhile, the
Hungarian Writers’ Association—the group responsible for imposing political correctness on Hungarian prose and poetry—also began to reexamine its previous views, to discuss taboos, and to welcome back its banned members. By the autumn of 1955 this formerly hard-line group even felt brave enough to issue a statement protesting against the dismissal of pro-Nagy editors from their posts, demanding “autonomy” for their association and objecting to the “anti-democratic methods which cripple our cultural life.”
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Most of these new or newly re-formed groups, clubs, and debating societies quickly came to be dominated by disillusioned young communists and former communists, mostly in their twenties and thirties. This was a generation that wasn’t supposed to be revolutionary—or rather counterrevolutionary—at all. Old enough to have been traumatized by war, young enough to have studied in communist institutions, many were products of the “social advance” promised by the communist system and many had already enjoyed rapid promotion and early success. Tamás
Aczél, active in the Writers’ Association debates, had been named chief editor of the party’s publishing house at the age of twenty-nine, and by the age of thirty-one had received both the Stalin Prize and the prestigious
Kossuth Prize for his work. Tibor Meráy, another Writers’ Association activist, had also received a Kossuth Prize, at the age of twenty-nine.
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István Eörsi, also an active member of the Petőfi Circle, had been a published poet from a very young age too.

At the same time, many in this generation had been personally affected by the destruction of civil society, the terror, and the purges that had ended just a few years before. All of them knew what it meant to be forced to play the “reluctant collaborator.” Tibor Déry, one of the leaders of the new Writers’ Association, had watched as his once celebrated works of fiction had been attacked and barred from publication as insufficiently ideologically correct.
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Gábor Tánczos, the leader of the Petőfi Circle, had been an idealistic graduate of
Györffy College, one of the Hungarian People’s Colleges, until its abrupt and brutal closing in 1949. Another People’s College graduate, Iván Vitányi—the music critic who had “brainwashed” himself after being expelled from the party in 1948—spoke about folk art and music at some of the early public meetings of the Petőfi Circle.
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One account describes the early meetings of the circle as “reunions” of activists from Nékosz, the People’s College movement, and Mefesz, the short-lived university students’ union that had been forcibly submerged into the League of Working Youth in 1950. At some of their early meetings they even sang songs together, just as in the old days.
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