The displaced began voyages into the unknown, full of foreboding and already traumatized by what they had gone through. The travel was a prolonged nightmare, and the overloaded communication systems broke down. Thousands of Poles waited around railway stations in appalling conditions for weeks to travel west, while equal numbers of Ukrainians were stuck in similar hell on their way east. The UPA or the Soviet police harassed Poles into leaving, and whole villages were burned to the ground. The trains carrying them were given specific destinations, but often the freight cars were unloaded anywhere at all in the “new Poland.” It was worse in those areas that were still populated by ethnic Germans, who had not yet been driven out. In Poland’s collective memory, the “transfers” of the Poles are regarded to this day as “expulsions.” The social fabric was weakened when so many were torn from their moorings, and they were left prone to anxiety and race hate.67
Similar and sometimes worse things happened in Poland to force the Ukrainians to go east. Many preferred living anywhere but in the Soviet Union. In 1947 the remaining Ukrainians who tried to stay were subjected to an all-out military campaign. Little wonder they supported or collaborated with the UPA in the struggle. Nevertheless, by January 1947 the insurgency was largely at an end, with thousands who once dared resist dispersed across either Poland or Ukraine.68
The vast scale of the Soviet retribution was aimed at punishing alleged past and present misbehavior of individuals or whole nations and cleansing the new lands to the west of all enemies in preparation for their “rejoining” the Soviet Union. Counterinsurgency operations “were accompanied by thorough ideological and socio-economic measures.”69 From Stalin’s perspective, moreover, the country as a whole had to be readied for the looming struggle with the West, and it was also high time to straighten out any ideological wanderings and “false consciousness” that had crept into people’s heads during the war.
CHAPTER 12
Reaffirming Communist Ideology
The cataclysmic events of wartime rattled the Soviet dictatorship and opened more space for people to think for themselves. In October 1944 the police secretly recorded novelist Sergei Golubov reflecting on the newfound freedom that came with earlier setbacks: “When we had military defeats, the authorities lost their head a little, people wandered where they wanted ideologically, and no one took any interest in us.”1 Moreover, temptations to deviate from the Soviet path were plentiful for the millions of soldiers and others who had experienced the allures of the West for themselves.2 One Red Army officer, a party member in good standing, later recounted his feelings upon crossing the border heading west. He realized that everything he had been taught “about conditions of life outside Russia, also about the history of the Communist Party, was false.”3
However, already in 1944 people sensed that the fist would come down again. “Now that we are winning,” Golubov said that year, the powers that be “are recovering and the old ideology has resurfaced.”4 Even before the shooting stopped, Stalin began restoring his rule with a full-fledged campaign on the ideological front.
PATCHING THE IDEOLOGICAL FRONT
Stalin assigned Andrei Zhdanov the job of getting Communist thinking back on course.5 He called Zhdanov from Leningrad full time in December 1945, bringing him immediately into the ruling group, which expanded to a “sextet.” The years 1946 to 1948 are often dubbed the Zhdanovchina (Zhdanov era) to suggest that he dominated the assault on the arts and sciences. We now know, however, that the label is inappropriate because Stalin was behind the whole thing, initiating and directing it. Still, for a period of just over two years, his protégé was amazingly active both inside the Soviet Union and in the international Communist movement.6
On April 18, 1946, Zhdanov observed in a meeting of the Central Committee that their leader had raised questions about literature, movies, plays, and the arts and believed that the agitprop (propaganda) section needed improved criticism from “the best people on matters of ideology.”7 He was appalled that poems were being published about what it was like to visit devastated “hero-cities” like Sevastopol, without mentioning its defenders and bringing out the popular political implications.8
The minister explained the mission to a young man he was trying to recruit. Stalin’s strategy, he said, was to restore the economy and raise its levels of production. In order to accomplish that, the party had to do more and better ideological work among the people. The “plans of the imperialists” had failed on the battlefield, so now they were pursuing an ideological offensive and catching the Soviet Union unprepared. An “apolitical, non-ideological sentiment” supposedly pervaded the intelligentsia, and it had become servile to the West. For these misguided souls, he said, everything was “Ah, the West!” “Ah, democracy!” “Now there’s real literature for you!”9
On another occasion, Zhdanov pointed to the ideological and political role that the arts had to play in the Soviet Union. He said that Leninism “starts from the premise” that literature should not be apolitical. There was no place for “art for art’s sake,” and novels, poems, plays, and all the rest had to take a leading part in forming the new society. As an illustration he quoted Stalin’s famous dictum that “writers are the engineers of the human soul.” For Zhdanov, the implication was that all of them had an “enormous educational responsibility” to train youth and to elevate popular consciousness.
At a time when the country faced so many national and international challenges, why would Stalin and the Central Committee bother with the finer points of poetry, literary criticism, novels, plays, music, and movies? That was the question Zhdanov posed. His answer was that it was essential “to bring the ideological front into line with all other sectors of our work.” To his chagrin, he noted serious failings in those who looked to fashionable “modern, bourgeois writers in America and Western Europe” who were trying to attract “the attention of the progressive strata” in the USSR. The West wanted to entice Soviet writers “into a groove of cheap meaningless art and literature, dealing with gangsters and show-girls and glorifying the adulterer and the adventures of crooks and gamblers.” Fully in tune with the Master, he preached a return to socialist realist art that taught “morally and politically” sound values.10
As for Stalin, even though he was busy hammering together a new empire and facing growing resistance from the United States, he still found more than enough time to get involved in the details of the arts. Nothing was too small to ignore. For example, he considered the abstruse literary journals of singular importance, and on August 9, 1946, he met editors from several of them. He and Zhdanov wanted explanations for decisions to publish this or that work by a non-Soviet author or by a writer out of favor with the regime. Stalin queried Boris Likharev, editor of the journal Leningrad: “Is it worthy of a Soviet man to walk on tiptoe in front of foreign countries? This is how you cultivate servile feelings, this is a great sin.” Likharev’s meek response was that indeed they had published some translated works. Stalin replied sternly: “By doing this you are instilling a taste of excessive respect for foreigners. You’re instilling the feeling that we are second-rate people and there the people are first-rate, which is wrong. You are the pupils, they are the teacher. In its very essence, this is wrong.”11