community of workers, and admiration for the Soviets (and their all-conquering Red Army) separated a young post-war generation from its social roots and the national past.
The decision to become a Communist (or a ‘Marxist’, which in the circumstances of the time usually meant Communist) was typically made at a young age. Thus Ludek Pachman, a Czech: ‘I became a Marxist in the year 1943. I was 19 years old and the idea that suddenly I understood everything and could explain everything enchanted me, as well as the idea that I would march with proletarians of the whole world, first against Hitler and then against the international bourgeoisie.’ Even those, like Czeslaw Milosz, who were not swept off their feet by the charms of its dogma, unambiguously welcomed Communism’s social reforms: ‘I was delighted to see the semi-feudal structure of Poland finally smashed, the universities opened to young workers and peasants, agrarian reform undertaken and the country finally set on the road to industrialization.’ As Milovan Djilas observed, recalling his own experience as Tito’s close adjunct: ‘Totalitarianism at the outset is enthusiasm and conviction; only later does it become organizations, authority, careerism.’
Communist parties initially flattered intellectuals, for whom Communism’s ambitions stood in appealing contrast to the small-state parochialism of their home-lands as well as the violent anti-intellectualism of the Nazis. For many young intellectuals, Communism was less a matter of conviction than an affair of faith—as Alexander Wat (another subsequently ex-Communist Pole) would observe, the secular intelligentsia of Poland hungered after a ‘refined catechism’. Although it was only ever a minority of East European students, poets, playwrights, novelists, journalist or professors who became active Communists, these were often the most talented men and women of their generation.
Thus Pavel Kohout, who in later decades would achieve international renown as a dissident and post- Communist essayist and playwright, first came to the public eye in his native Czechoslovakia as an ultra-enthusiast for his country’s new regime. Looking back in 1969 he described his ‘sensation of certainty’ upon watching Party Leader Klement Gottwald in Prague’s crowded Old Town Square on the day of the February 1948 Czech coup. Here, ‘in that human mass which set out to search for justice and in this man [Gottwald] who is leading them into the decisive battle’, the 20-year-old Kohout found ‘the
This sort of faith was widespread in Kohout’s generation. As Milosz would observe, Communism operated on the principle that writers need not
The innocent enthusiasm with which some young East Europeans plunged into Communism (‘I’m in that revolutionary mood… ’, as the writer Ludvik Vaculik would exclaim to his girlfriend upon joining the Czech Party) does not diminish the responsibility of Moscow for what was, in the end, a Soviet take-over of their countries. But it helps account for the scale of disenchantment and disillusion that followed. Slightly older Communists, like Djilas (born in 1911), probably always understood, in his words, that ‘the manipulation of fervor is the germ of bondage.’ But younger converts, particularly intellectuals, were stunned to discover the rigors of Communist discipline and the reality of Stalinist power.
Thus the imposition of Zdanov’s ‘two cultures’ dogma after 1948, with its insistence upon the adoption of ‘correct’ positions on everything from botany to poetry, came as a particular shock in the popular democracies of eastern Europe. Slavish intellectual adherence to a party line, long-established in the Soviet Union where there was in any case a pre-Soviet heritage of repression and orthodoxy, came harder to countries that had only recently emerged from the rather benign regimen of the Habsburgs. In nineteenth-century central Europe, intellectuals and poets had acquired the habit and responsibility of speaking on behalf of the nation. Under Communism their role was different. Where once they had represented an abstract ‘people’ they were now little more than cultural mouthpieces for (real) tyrants. Worse, they would soon be the victim of choice—as cosmopolitans, ‘parasites’ or Jews—for those same tyrants in search of scapegoats for their errors.
Thus most of the Eastern European intellectuals’ enthusiasm for Communism—even in Czechoslovakia, where it was strongest—had evaporated by Stalin’s death, though it would linger on for some years in the form of projects for ‘revision’, or for ‘reform Communism’. The division within Communist states was no longer between Communism and its opponents. The important distinction was once again between those in authority—the Party- State, with its police, its bureaucracy and its house intelligentsia—and everyone else.
In this sense the Cold War fault-line fell not so much between East and West as
This widespread ignorance of the fate of contemporary Eastern Europe, coupled with growing Western indifference, was a source of bewilderment and frustration to many in the East. The problem for East European intellectuals and others was not their peripheral situation—this was a fate to which they had long been resigned. What pained them after 1948 was their
But they did not belong to it anymore, and that was the point. Stalin’s success in gouging his defensive perimeter deep into the center of Europe had removed Eastern Europe from the equation. European intellectual and cultural life after the Second World War took place on a drastically reduced stage, from which the Poles,
