“From all of the above we can conclude that we should wager mainly on the youth, by making effort to prepare them for scientific-educational work, and do so mainly through graduate studies in the Soviet institutions of higher education.”^[1]

N. I. Vinogradov (after giving a series of lectures and consultations in Polish universities in the winter and spring 1951.)

“But even more than the climax of Stalinist terror in Czechoslovakia, it was my five-year stay in Moscow that gave rise to my first serious ideological doubts.”^[2]

Zdeněk Mlynář

INTRODUCTION

Historical discussions of the centrifugal forces within the Soviet East European empire in the years immediately following WWII have rarely ventured outside the geographical boundaries of individual states. In the Soviet domestic context, these forces form an imagined spectrum of individuals’ responses to the repressive communist regime; as such, they range from totalitarian “indoctrination,” to “resistance” with multiple other attitudes in between.^[3] Such atomized treatment, particularly of the late Stalinist years, is in part justified; after all, the Soviet Union indeed “turned inward” at the time and increasingly cut off most contacts with the West.^[4] But scholars who followed this generalized model sometimes made claims that appear too extreme. They explained, for example, the “complete absence of non-communist inspired opposition” among Soviet youth after WWII with the efficacy of the Soviet state in preventing alternative ideas from reaching them, “let alone gaining credence” in their minds.^[5] Such a view, among other problems, ignores the Soviet relationship with the new satellites in East-Central Europe, which managed to keep a few toes in Western culture even as they introduced communism. Through limited social and cultural links with these countries, designed to support the imperial effort, the USSR managed to help undermine its own political project.
Polish students in the Soviet Union are a case in point.^[6] As the Cold War developed into a full-blown conflict, Soviet authorities began working openly with Eastern European communists to ensure stability in the expanded empire. They realized that although state terror was a proven short-term antidote to popular dissatisfaction with Soviet rule, the more efficient, long term solution would have to rely on larger structural changes. Those in turn, would have to involve reshaping the whole paradigm of knowledge. It also meant training new ranks of specialists who would not only be competent, but most of all, loyal to the cause of Soviet-style communism. With this in mind, soon after the war, Soviet authorities and their vassals from East-Central and Southern Europe signed a series of treaties allowing hundreds, and beginning in 1949, thousands of students and graduate students to come to the USSR for training and education. It was to be a win-win situation, in which the Soviet authorities could establish stability on their own terms, the local communists would be given the opportunity to create a loyal stratum of intelligentsia, specialists, top bureaucracy and managers, while the latter would gain higher social status among the rising elites of the new empire. The students’ task was to absorb the intellectual, moral and aesthetic norms of the metropolitan state in order to popularize them in the empire’s newly acquired peripheries.
With most Soviet-trained students, the plan was a success. Many took up leadership posts upon returning to Poland and more or less directly tended to support the status quo. Yet the irony behind the communists’ actions was that their efforts to replenish the war-ravaged cadres of specialists with Soviet-trained men and women had a dangerous side effect: they simultaneously opened up an institutional space in which some young people were able to subvert the officially sanctioned values. Inefficient screening mechanisms on the Polish side coupled with the Soviet reality that starkly contrasted with its heavenly allure in Polish official propaganda not only allowed existing malcontents into the Soviet Union but created new ones as well. As a result, a minority of students who went to the USSR had been or became indifferent – or even straight out hostile – to the Soviet system and the way of life of its citizens. By articulating their grievances, resentments and – increasingly – demands, these students challenged the empire from the center. Upon coming home, too, they were hardly the apostles of Soviet communism they were supposed to be, and were likely to do more harm than good to the cause of empire.
Conflicting expectations from the new empire constituted a major source of tensions between students, communist bureaucrats and government officials in both countries. In choosing to go to the USSR, some students were often driven by purely professional or personal objectives that had little to do with the communists’ broader ideological agenda. Others were genuinely curious about what the Soviet communism had to offer. Yet a number of them, after comparing the rosy propaganda about the Soviet Union with their own experiences in the war-torn country tended to become disappointed. Some students’ subsequent unwillingness to participate in the highly-ritualized Soviet public culture eventually led to frictions with the authorities. This is because in flouting the rules of the Stalinist “performance,” these individuals embarrassed the Polish communists in front of the Soviet hosts.^[7] Many Soviet bureaucrats also became frustrated with the Poles’ behavior. The unmistakable sense of indignation with which they responded to some Poles’ irreverence highlighted their own ideas about the norms of conduct expected of the new imperial subjects. This inability on part of the Soviet (and to a lesser extent Polish) administrators to accept the most benign forms of political, social and cultural heterogeneity may have contributed to the empire’s long-term failure.
After a series of political developments that followed Stalin’s death, the conflict between Polish students and Soviet bureaucrats became more politicized. Polish students, encouraged by a degree of political relaxation in their home country, began confronting the Soviet system more openly. By fall and winter of 1956, inspired by momentous political changes in Poland and Hungary, they even encouraged doubt and protests that had begun to germinate among their Soviet peers. For that reason, local bureaucrats often perceived them as a threat to the ideological and “moral” integrity of Soviet students and communism in general. The conflict also turned more multi-polar as the less-radical communist leaders in Poland began expressing reserved sympathy for those Polish students in the USSR who had gotten in trouble for speaking their minds. This created a degree of structural support for what the Soviets saw as subversion. It also brought into relief new discrepancies in the expectations of Soviet and Polish communists concerning the imperial project at large.

THE FRAMEWORK

Polish students began arriving in the USSR en masse only in the second half of 1949. During WWII most Poles in Soviet institutions of higher education were the children of over six hundred deportees.^[8] In the five years that followed WWII nobody, according to one scholar, considered education in the Soviet Union necessary. Students had good educational opportunities at home and Polish communists, struggling for power, made much effort to dissociate themselves publicly from the Soviet Union, with which in fact they worked very closely.^[9] By mid 1949, however, Polish communists had consolidated power at home and the Soviet-Polish rapprochement took place in the context of global Cold War tensions. After the world was divided by Churchill’s “iron curtain” (1946) and Zhdanov’s hostile “camps” (1947), close cooperation within the respective spheres of influence gained international legitimacy. The presence of the Polish (and other East European students) in the USSR stemmed from this development.
Beginning in the academic year 1949, the Soviet side officially increased the number of academic placements for Polish youth. According to an agreement from May 28, 1948, each country was to bear fifty percent of the cost of education of Polish students.^[10] In subsequent years, both sides emphasized the students’ presence in the USSR as a matter of “great political importance” to their respective states.^[11] However, among communist officials the Soviet side dictated the terms, at least under Stalin. According to a Polish diplomat, in August 1951 the Soviet official A. Krasil’nikov explicitly reserved the right to adjust the number of placements for Polish youth in the upcoming year as well as their distribution among specific disciplines based on the needs of the Polish economy. The Polish government requested placements for 542 students and 70 graduate students in Soviet institutions of higher education for the year 1951-52, but received only 460 and 45 respectively. The Poles had asked for fifty placements in mining institutes, but received only eighteen. According to Krasil’nikov, “mining institutes in Poland are on a high level and educating specialists in this discipline is not a burning issue for Poland.”^[12] The misunderstanding had its likely roots in the fact that the Poles attached more than practical significance to study in the USSR; this was the case with the coal-miners, whose profession was much exalted in communist Poland, and their training in the USSR had a deep symbolic undercurrent.^[13] The Soviets, on the other hand, may have perceived more placements as an extra burden on the already overloaded student housing system.
As a result Polish students began coming in groups of two-, three- and even four-hundred members per year. Out of twenty-one disciplines pursued by the incoming students in 1949, most of them (46 students) were in technical fields, while most graduate students studied economics and medicine.^[14] As a result, at the end of 1952 there were 1037 students as well as 81 graduate students from Poland living in 17 Soviet cities (438 students from the first-year, 420 in the second year, 140 in the third-year, 27 in the 4th year, and 12 in the fifth year).^[15] Even though between 1949 and 1956 they made up roughly 1% of students in the Polish system of higher education, they were the ones predestined for the most responsible jobs.^[16] There were even more the following year, however.^[17] Only in 1957 did their numbers begin to fall – data from April of that year show that there were 1247 Polish students and graduate students in nine cities of the Soviet Union.^[18] The Poles made up 1.7% of all foreign students in 1946-47. Out of 898 foreign students at the time, the majority came from North Korea (299), the Balkans (424 people), and Mongolia (85). Only a minority came from the politically sensitive countries of East-Central Europe.^[19] On the other hand, Poles made up as much as 9.8% in 1956-1957 (Table 1 illustrates the changes).
The selection criteria for visiting students were first of all ideological. According to one Polish official in Moscow, class background counted the most, ideological position and social work were second-most important, followed by intellectual level of a candidate and, beginning in 1950, health.^[20] In particular, the graduate students were to undergo ideological scrutiny before going to the USSR. Their special status as future sources of knowledge necessitated that they be recruited primarily from the ranks of party members.^[21] In 1950, Polish Communists in Leningrad demanded that the basic condition for graduate study in the USSR be:

“Honest, sincere attachment to the People’s Poland, the cause of building socialism in Poland, sincere attachment to the Soviet Union, to the idea of communism, readiness to unconditional struggle with hostile bourgeois ideology, so that, after coming back to Poland, [the graduate students] could comprise the core of the Marxist intelligentsia, radiating into our institutions of higher education the element of cultural and scientific revolution in our country.”^[22]

<img src=http://abimperio.net/pics/babir.jpg>
^{[23] [24] [25] [26] [27] [28] [29] [30] [31] [32] [33] [34] [35] [36] [37] [38] [39] [40] [41] [42] [43] [44] [45] [46] [47] [48]}

Table 1. (No data available for some years)

The goal of sending the graduate students was to

“train lecturers, scientists, leading specialists brought up in the spirit of Marxism-Leninism, in the spirit of the principles of Soviet science, people who are knowledgeable with its achievements; use the scientific works of Polish graduate students in USSR, written under the supervision of the leading scientists from the Soviet Union, in order to illuminate and solve a range of theoretical and practical problems of economy and culture of the People’s Poland – by way of planning dissertation topics in Poland.”^[49]

The students worked within a network of institutions that provided material, academic and emotional support and enforced norms of political and social behavior within the expanded Soviet empire. These institutions were to cooperate closely with one another in fulfilling related, but complementary functions. In practice, their goals were the same: to mobilize the maximum number of students for the communist cause. This was the case with the Polish United Workers’ Party (PZPR), and with the so-called “national associations” (Rus: zemliachestva; Pol: ziomkostwa) for students who were not party members. Both had local branches in each city where Polish students lived. In reality, other than slight differences in emphasis, their tasks were almost the same since, as one Polish diplomat observed, the role of the national group “should be understood as a transmission of the Party to the students who are not party members.”^[50] Both were designed to foster the principles of Marxism-Leninism among students, as well as help them with their academic work and “political and moral attitudes.”^[51] In some cases the foreign students’ party organizations actually directed the work of the national groups.^[52] These organizations were expected closely to cooperate with Soviet “social organizations.”^[53] All branches of both organizations were supervised by separate offices at the Polish embassy in Moscow that reported to the Foreign Department of the PZPR’s Central Committee in Warsaw. Students also belonged to several Polish youth organizations.^[54]
Besides the academic institutions, the most important Soviet organization for the foreign students was the Komsomol, the communists youth organization.^[55] It was charged with providing academic and ideological support to foreign students. Leading members of the Komsomol, who often lived in dormitories together with foreign students, were expected to offer academic help when necessary. Komsomol members were often assigned a foreign student to their care, and had to inform their supervisors about any inappropriate behavior among the foreigners, most likely in the form of regular reports.^[56] Finally, they were to help foreigners “resolve problems of everyday life and to correctly understand our Soviet reality,” as one Soviet official put it in 1950.^[57] The task of local Komsomol committees was also to cooperate with various cultural institutions such as museums, cinemas, and theaters in order to “familiarize the foreign students with the Soviet Union’s life, and popularize among them the principles of the Soviet democracy, Soviet achievements in building of Communist society,” as well as “the agricultural and cultural successes in People’s Democracies.”^[58] Local cells of the Soviet Communist Party were also involved in ideological work, and to some extent doubled that of the Komsomol.^[59]

THE “BAD CLIMATE” UNDER STALIN

Lenin’s slogan “Whoever is not with us, is against us” was even truer in Stalin’s Russia; for that reason, the authorities treated direct challenges to the Soviet order and ostentatious indifference to it as merely two sides of the same coin. While organized political dissent was a rare phenomenon during Stalin’s last years, incidences of popular sedition multiplied. These often benign instances of cursing the Soviet power over a bowl of shchi gained a political meaning once overheard and reported to the local branch of the political police.^[60] Ideological indifference, as well as doubt, increasingly common among Soviet youths after WWII, seemed dangerous since it implied autonomization of the private sphere and often translated into a lack of commitment to the Soviet project. “When the virus of doubt was born in the minds of the young,” wrote Elena Zubkova, “it was [the] feeling of patriotism as the highest value that, if it did not nudge them into the ranks of the opposition, preempted in any case the development of pure cynicism.”^[61] The problem was that patriots – not to mention cynics – often begged to differ on what was best for the country.
All these phenomena were a potentially more serious affair within the transnational framework of empire. The East European and Soviet communists bent over backwards to project positive images of their countries to the neighboring states in the Eastern Bloc. According to the increasingly uniform official story, East-Central European countries willingly united under the Soviet leadership for cultural inspiration, economic assistance and military protection. After WWII, Soviet propaganda portrayed countries like Poland as places where the hitherto oppressed, communist working classes triumphed, and local East European communists depicted the Soviet Union as the ultimate stage in humanity’s search for perfect social organization and the source of worldly welfare. They were able to maintain these stories in part thanks to the tight restrictions on cross-border traffic imposed on goods, information and most of all, people.
Eastern European academic sojourns in the USSR were a rare exception to such stringent controls. They also carried two risks, which could have a bearing on the imperial stability because of their potential to undermine the official scenarios within the tightly-knit networks of the future elites. One danger was that the young communist intelligentsia might see the shortcomings of the Soviet social life, talk about them after coming back home, or simply fail to produce the enthusiasm necessary for maintaining the myth about a perfect Soviet society. The Soviet authorities, on the other hand, worried, that inappropriate signals from abroad might find resonance among local students and consequently help undermine their own authority.
Indeed, within each group of Polish students and graduate students who began arriving in the Soviet Union at the end of 1940’s, there were always a few whose conduct gave headaches to local officials and Polish authorities alike. The frictions were more frequently ideological than purely academic. The vast majority of students were in technical fields. Hence, unlike artists (and to some extent scientists) they were more able to appreciate the benefits of Soviet education.^[62] During Stalin’s lifetime, the Poles’ pattern of conflict with the authorities fit within the larger pattern of interaction between the Soviet officials and East European students in general. Upon arrival in the Soviet Union, foreign visitors displayed extremely diverse attitudes towards the country and its ideals. Yet despite their political, moral or ideological predispositions, they included those students who having come in contact with the Soviet reality began to see it either as a confirmation of pre-existing ideological misgivings or a trigger for doubt. The newcomers included those individuals who were “stuck on the fence” and still looking to make up their mind about what the Soviet Union was all about. For them, the discrepancy between official propaganda and the actual standards of living was a signal for suspicion and grounds for distrust.
Others remained loyal to their cultures’ old systems of values. In the Polish case, there were young men and women who organized their conceptual universe in a way that was completely incommensurable with the official Soviet value system. Old-world categories such as God, fatherland, individuality, politeness, “people” and honor hardly meshed with such concepts as “base and superstructure,” “forces of production,” “class struggle,” “History,” and “false consciousness.”^[63] There were also those who, having seen the meaninglessness of the Polish wartime sacrifice, believed they had witnessed the bankruptcy of the prewar values: God and honor notwithstanding, the Poles were quickly defeated. These people frequently embraced Stalinism to fill the existential void with new meanings. For some of these ideological zealots, such as the Czechoslovak communist-turned-reformist Zdeněk Mlynář, “it was not the negative aspects of Soviet life that presented a challenge to our Stalinist faith: that was undermined far more by the absence of anything positive in its place, the absence of values that the faith itself considered as primary necessary to the future of communism.”^[64] For him, and for others the dissonance between propaganda and reality occurred on a deeper level, but it was a dissonance nevertheless.
Soviet local officials repeatedly appealed to their superiors in the Central Committee of the CPSU asking to raise the question of selection criteria with East European Communists.^[65] Such “leaks” were a result of faulty screening mechanisms. In the initial years, the Polish student organizations charged with recruitment were not given enough time to perform screenings. This had sometimes disastrous results. In the summer of 1948, for example, 54 out of 91 accepted students for the 1948-49 year did not go through a background check.^[66] Some of those who eventually made it to the Soviet Union that year, obviously should not have. On one occasion, a few Soviet students found this out for themselves, as they walked in on Tatiana Nielipowicz who was praying in her dorm room. “In Poland, all communists pray,” she allegedly announced to the unexpected and rightfully astounded guests, adding that “only the Jews don’t.”^[67]
Two years later, at least 30 recruited candidates ran away from a preparatory camp in the summer of 1950.^[68] As late as 1950, local university officials sometimes simply approached random students in the hallway asking if they would want to go study in the Soviet Union.^[69] Many students found such studies to be an appealing option regardless of political views – if only because it provided full scholarship for several years and an opportunity to receive a quality education and a diploma that guaranteed a successful career.^[70] Others were driven by curiosity, the thrill of travel, or a chance to reunite with wartime acquaintances.^[71] There were also those who used their trip to live in a way they would often not be able to in their own countries – enjoying generous stipends and carnal pleasures away from their parents, courtesy of the government of the People’s Poland.^[72]
The documents show that instances of open sedition were relatively rare between 1949 and 1953. But they also suggest that in spite of a sophisticated system of informers who had been recruited from the Polish students and Komsomol members, the authorities knew only a fraction of what was really happening among their young protégés. The Polish authorities received such information from four sources. The most frequent were periodic reports from party organizations in the cities where Polish students lived. The problem is that some officials who wrote them routinely played down the scale of students’ political non-conformism.^[73] As a result these documents present a diluted picture of such behavior.
The most thorough were reports from the occasional trips undertaken by Embassy officials to investigate the situation on the spot. During such trips, lasting on average one week in each city, the embassy employees met with the Soviet officials and the student themselves, often spending hours on discussions and conflict resolution. But such trips were fairly rare – the Polish party archive has a record of only eleven of them between 1949-1953, and no indication that there were many more. There were also individual denunciations reflected in the official reports. Finally, some information came directly from the Soviet party and Komsomol officials. There is evidence that they knew even less than the Polish authorities. Although they had some information from those members of the Komsomol who roomed with the Polish students, generally, the institutional ties between the Soviet and Polish organizations were weak.^[74] In addition, the Polish local party bosses often preferred not to share the negative information with the Soviet authorities. According to a general report for 1953-1954, they did so deliberately in order not to damage their reputations with the foreign hosts.^[75]
According to the vague estimates from a Polish lower-rank party member in February 1950, a “certain amount of people” among Polish students in Leningrad were “ideologically alien.” In addition, she qualified twenty-two others as “politically uncertain.”^[76] Given that there were 113 Polish students and grad students in Leningrad, just the politically undetermined element composed at least as much as 19% of the whole student body.^[77] There were about 250 Polish students and graduate students in six different cities of the Soviet Union at that time.^[78] No reports are available from other cities that year, but there is no reason to think that the conditions there were different than in the northern capital.
Only the most serious cases amounted to political crime and resulted in the student’s expulsion. The Soviet officials’ choices of sanctions when dealing with insubordinate foreigners appear to have been limited to excluding them from the academic institutions and informing the foreign authorities about the culprit’s behavior.^[79] In Leningrad in 1950, the local branch of the Polish party “unmasked” the student Henryk D., who in the beginning of the school year, while drunk, was “slandering the Soviet Union, saying that ‘the Bolsheviks had killed his uncle.’” Unmistakably addressing the whole Bulgarian nation, he told one Bulgarian student, “‘you sold out to the Soviet Russia.’”^[80] Upon learning about the incident, the local officials banned him from his institute and informed the local police. The police announced that if he had not been Polish, he would have been immediately arrested. D. left the Soviet Union on October 29, 1950.^[81] But the police were correct. In view of the historical tradition that stresses the Poles’ near-total submission to their Soviet masters, this relative privilege that some Polish students enjoyed in the heartland of Stalinism comes as revealing.
Although some over-eager local party officials were quick to recommend such extreme measures, the last word belonged to the Polish Embassy, the Central Committee and the Politburo.^[82] These two bodies conducted thorough investigations and often revoked the decisions made by local party bosses.^[83] They were also the ones most likely to be known to the authorities. Acts of such political non-conformism ranged from the most visible displays of political indifference and skeptical comments about the Soviet social system, to active agitation against it. At the end of the 1949-1950 academic year, ten students and four graduate students were prevented from coming back to the Soviet Union for disciplinary reasons – almost 6% of the total.^[84] The number does not include those who had been expelled immediately during the year. Absent from the list was, for example, Zbigniew Nowicki, who had applied to study film in Italy, but by an odd stroke of misfortune was sent to the USSR.^[85] Nowicki arrived in the USSR in September, 1949. In January, 1950 he wrote a polite letter to the Ministry of Culture and the Arts in Warsaw, asking to let him go home. He motivated his request with difficult material conditions, harsh climate and difficulties in obtaining consumer products in Moscow.^[86] This infuriated the Polish authorities, who conducted a political investigation leading to his expulsion.^[87] The unforgiving attitudes of the communist authorities towards Nowicki’s seemingly minor transgression reflected the seriousness with which they treated propaganda issues.
Incidentally, students had some objective grounds to complain about their living conditions. While in many instances the conditions met the standards of both Polish and Komsomol officials, at other times they were appalling. Both Polish and Soviet authorities regularly recognized this fact even as they condemned those students who complained about it. Poor living conditions, such as lack of heat, dirt, and overcrowding, were cited as bases for foreign students’ discontent both in Moscow and in the provinces.^[88] There were cases where foreign students lived nine to ten people per room with about 3 to 3.5 square meters per person.^[89] Overcrowding was also reported elsewhere, and this forced the students to study for classes at the University.^[90] In Saratov in 1952, as a result of a lack of communication between the party, Komsomol, and the Soviet ministry of education, more students showed up in local universities than expected. In an attempt to accommodate them in the overcrowded dormitories, local officials resettled the Soviet students who lived there in private quarters, which apparently stirred the resentment of the foreigners among them.^[91] In one dormitory complex in Odessa, only one building had a boiler, and so the students from the surrounding dorms were forced to commute just to get a cup of hot water.^[92] Some dormitory cafeterias notoriously failed to serve and provide the basic products such as dairy, meat or fruit.^[93]
The cases of expulsion during 1949-1950 illustrate the range of acts of political non-conformism. Among the students who were sent home was Czesław Waluk, accused of harmful gossiping about top party leaders, undermining their authority, as well as slandering the Soviet Union. During vacation in Poland, Waluk allegedly discouraged fellow students from coming to the Soviet Union, claiming that the level of lectures on political economy was quite low there.^[94] An investigation revealed that Waluk had been twice arrested by Soviet authorities in the Soviet-occupied part of Poland between 1939 and 1941. He was not given a chance to continue his academic career in the USSR even though he had been an excellent student and a party member.^[95] Władysław Misiuna, on the other hand, undermined the image of Poland in the USSR. He talked to his foreign and Soviet colleagues about how the Polish party members were mostly “fascists and former Gestapo members,” who in addition “negated the alliance between the small and middle peasant” and was condescending towards Soviet students.^[96] The same was true of Irena Lewandowska, who, according to a visiting Polish official, in discussions with Soviet colleagues openly questioned Stalin’s authority, as well as “the level of the Soviet youth,” Soviet art and literature “to such an extent, that Soviet students point her out to us.”^[97] Others were ostentatiously indifferent to communist ideology or the Soviet Union. They included Waclawa Kulbacka, whose father had worked as a functionary in the forestry system before the war in western Ukraine. After a half-hour conversation, the embassy official characterized her as a “sly daughter of the kulak,” and suggested expulsion.^[98]
The graduate students had the bad reputation for the tenacity with which they held on to views that were considered incorrect. As one Polish official acknowledged in 1950, they often came to the Soviet Union as academically and politically formed individuals, who had great difficulty leaving their incorrect views.^[99] The fifty-six-year old graduate student Antoszczuk was an extreme case that year. He offended both Soviet medical profession and Polish communists when he publicly complained, apparently with some satisfaction, that the doctors at the Botvin Clinic destroyed his heart by giving him strange medications. Explaining Antoszczuk’s behavior to the visiting Polish communist, one Soviet physician read an existing bias in Antoszczuk’s behavior indicating that perhaps he was right. He commented: “our climate does not serve him well. You understand? Climate in the most general sense,” thus suggesting that perhaps political winds in the Soviet Union, and not severe Russian winters were troubling the elderly graduate student.^[100] Another graduate student, Kalabiński, came under suspicion for seeking access to classified archival materials for his dissertation on Polish history. It was later uncovered that he was under the harmful political influence of his father, all of which disqualified him from studying in the USSR. A female graduate student expelled that year, Wanda Goetel, was punished for “display[ing a] complete lack of attachment to the Soviet Union. She feels bad in this country and [the] little shortcomings in everyday life completely obscure the wonderful opportunities here.”^[101] The Embassy official Leonard Pohoryles characterized another graduate student not only as “academically unsystematic,” but also as a person who is “socially and politically indifferent.” As such he was unlikely to make a “militant art historian,” and was thus suitable material for expulsion.^[102]
The Polish authorities considered all such cases to be different sides of the same coin. They treated them in the first place, as a waste of money.^[103] More importantly, the politically indifferent individuals were not likely to evolve into anything more than placeholders in the strategically important system of knowledge production. Not only would they fail to exert ideological influence on their students or employees, but they would be vulnerable themselves to hostile influences – if not right away, then during times of crisis. The openly skeptical or confrontational were even more certain to become source of seditious propaganda. Such sentiments were particularly dangerous since they were tacitly approved by many individuals and social groups in Poland. Students took advantage of such prejudices when they could. Consider, for example, a certain George Adler, who on the train to Poland in 1949 lied to the conductor that he was returning from a Soviet jail in order to avoid paying the proper fare.^[104] Adler was a party member.^[105] Whether actively harmful or dangerously passive, such students were symptoms of the communists’ failure to engage the next generation in the common project.
The authorities realized as well that such attitudes among students were much more widespread. In his 1950 report from Leningrad, Pohoryles acknowledged that there were “many more” personal cases, and that he mentioned only the most important ones.^[106] Sometimes the authorities stumbled on politically suspicious individuals simply by accident. A drama student, Jan N., for example, was accused of trying to rape his two roommates (also men); only after the spotlight fell on him did the authorities also find out that N. had been devouring Western literature instead of the officially-sanctioned socialist realism.^[107] In addition, there were students who would be more subtle in voicing their frustrations, dissatisfactions or contempt in order not to jeopardize their careers. The authorities made efforts to see through them as well. In 1950, Polish communists from Leningrad reported that the graduate student Andrzej Kański officially agreed with the authorities on every issue, but when questioned, “displayed a sarcastic-critical attitude towards ideological education.”^[108] A visiting Polish official determined Kański’s insincerity based on the young man’s attitude towards Soviet science (“unclear”) and his assertions about what he liked in the USSR (Kański mentioned “only orphanages and the ballet”). Ironically, Kański’s excessively understanding attitude of difficulties in Soviet life struck the communist who interviewed him as “supercilious.”^[109] He, too, was recommended for expulsion. Undoubtedly in situations like this, conflicts were fueled by more or less acknowledged senses of cultural insecurity among those Polish or Soviet citizens who, in order to compensate for their countries’ own peripheral status in Europe, assumed auras of superiority towards each other.^[110]
The political situation during the 1951-1952 academic year was “much better” according to one general report, although cases of “weak political level” among Polish students were observed in Kharkov, Sverdlovsk, and Leningrad. The same was true of Stalino, where many students voiced dissatisfaction upon arrival, as well as Odessa, where students tended to “misinterpret the Soviet reality” in larger numbers.^[111] Some of the “decisively negative” incidents involved Jan Dobrzański, who publicly expressed his doubts about whether he had anything to learn in the Soviet Union, and in addition showed off to Soviet students by singing “cosmopolitan songs.” Another was Halina Mostowska who revealed her “petty bourgeois” attitudes when she publicly judged the Soviet people by the way they dressed or ate.^[112] In 1951-52, by the end of the first semester 8 students out of 1140 were sent back home for political reasons, a mere 0.7% of the total.^[113] But in the end, one cannot make much of the apparent improvement, since the authorities’ access to reliable information about students was still limited. In fact, the Polish communists’ statistical assessment of the newly arrived students suggested that there would be more difficulties, not less. Even though the new student body was younger, it included less party members or members of the original Polish communist youth organization (ZWM), leading the Polish authorities to conclude that a change in the style of work with the new students was necessary.^[114]
RELAXATION OF DISCIPLINE AND THE ESCALATION OF CONFLICT AFTER 1953

Stalin’s death precipitated a series of events that had a significant impact on the conflict between Polish students and Soviet Communists. Gradually conditions unfolded in which political motivations from above and ideological currents from below worked towards changing the strictures of Stalinism. While the new circumstances brought formerly invisible antagonisms to the surface the overall shape of the conflict also changed from local skirmishes over moral issues or ideology to an inter-party clash over different visions of communism. As early as 1954, Poland experienced a degree of political relaxation that immediately transferred to the cultural sphere. The Soviet leader’s death weakened the hard-line communists and gradually empowered younger, more educated communists who were more willing to experiment with reforming the system. President Bierut’s hard-line faction was further disadvantaged after a high official in the repressive security apparatus fled to the West in the winter of 1953 and began revealing the system’s dirty secrets on Radio Free Europe starting in 1954.^[115]
Many progressive social groups in Poland, notably students and the intelligentsia, took advantage of the system’s temporary inertia to push the limits of free speech and demands for political reform further. Even party journalists began openly criticizing the party, to the dismay of top communist leaders, speculating about necessary political and social reforms. Students began setting up hundreds of discussion clubs, small theaters and satirical cabarets all over the country that began to acquire a life of their own, as did the increasingly critical student press.^[116]
Both Soviet and Polish archival sources indicate that Polish students in the USSR responded to the political changes with a mixture of general relaxation in social and academic discipline. This often went hand in hand with more open confrontational attitudes on social and political issues. To some extent this trend only appeared to be new, as the authorities made more efforts than before to learn more about foreign students in general. The CPSU formed at least two commissions – in November 1953 and in May 1955 – to investigate the life and problems of East European students and graduate students.^[117] In the same spirit in March of 1955, the Central Committee of the CPSU issued a decision, which was sent to the provincial committees of the party, the Central Committee of the Komsomol, and several ministries, ordering them to begin seriously working on the improvement of material conditions and educational work with foreign students.^[118] Secondly, officials were less fearful to talk about potential problems, criticize the “shortcomings” and made efforts to correct them. In accord with the trend set by Stalin in his last months of rule, criticism and self-criticism were ever more expected from party functionaries. After March 1953, Khrushchev encouraged criticisms not only to fight his living political opponents, but also increasingly to profit by dissociating himself from “the cult” of his former boss.^[119] This attitude echoed among the functionaries dealing with foreign students, as they began evoking “honesty” ever more frequently in internal reports and official exchanges.
But there was also a real escalation of political ferment among Polish students. Polish officials who visited Kiev in 1953, and eight Soviet cities in 1955 (out of the total nine cities in which Polish students lived at the time) confirmed Soviet observations when they reported that worrisome phenomena had been taking place among their charges. First of all, they included extreme passivity in academic life and social work, as well as the tendency to isolate themselves from Soviet students in all spheres of life. Some students wished to live in separation from their Soviet peers because, they claimed, the latter were not neat enough. Others went their own way because they could afford it. As one pointed out in 1954: “We have 820 rubles of stipend, we can afford [to ride the train in] the second class; the Soviet students don’t have as much – they can take the third class.”^[120] Secondly, the relaxation of moral discipline in some cases took on a form of sexual dissolution, increase in recently-legalized international marriages, or heavy drinking. Finally, there was an increased incidence of confronting the Soviet officials on social and political issues.^[121] Those who came back to the USSR from vacations at home, or who simply followed the news from Poland spoke up more freely, more frequently, and were more likely to voice their often arrogant opinions regarding Soviet social policies.^[122]
According to a report for the academic year 1953-1954, out of the twenty-one Polish students who where required to leave the USSR on a disciplinary basis, six left due to poor health, five as punishment for their moral transgressions, twelve for poor academic results, and only four for strictly ideological reasons.^[123] But just like before, the list must have been incomplete. For example, it did not include Nowak, who was reported to have distributed pictures of saints during a party meeting that year.^[124] And, as in earlier instances, these were only the most extreme cases. Two embassy officials bemoaned, after their visit to the USSR in 1954, that the Polish party committees barely knew the students and therefore could not prevent them from “derailing.” “Only when a matter turns into a scandal, the student is ordered to leave the USSR and turn in his party card,” they complained.^[125]
To some extent, therefore, the documents still reveal a muffled echo of the conflicts taking place between Polish students and communists, other foreigners, as well as Soviet bureaucrats. School authorities in Odessa appealed to Polish officials in 1955 for expulsion of a few individuals who consistently throughout the year had been “slandering” the Soviet Union, Soviet foreign and domestic policy, as well as party bosses. Stefan Morody, for example, defied the official Soviet vision of its past and present. He announced one day that Khrushchev lied when he said that Yugoslavia was moving towards socialism. He breached an official taboo when he added that the USSR was responsible for killing the members of the Polish Communist Party in 1939. Other students questioned socialist realist art, education and the official take on Soviet-Polish history.^[126] Many students openly drew the connection between the lack of consumer products and politics. During a meeting in 1955, a Polish fifth-year student announced that he did not see any prospectives for socialism in the Soviet Union, because, for example, he could not find razor blades in the stores.^[127] Similarly, writing from Odessa in 1955, one Soviet official reported that “some students – the Poles for example, upon seeing shortages of consumer products in stores arrived at incorrect conclusions about the low standard of living in the Soviet Union.”^[128] Students from other countries, especially Hungary and Czechoslovakia, and sometimes Romania made similar observations. For example, commenting on the existence of beggars in the USSR, a Czech student expressed his doubts about the fact that the Soviet socialism was real.^[129] Some foreign students saw it as a paradox that a country so boastful of its own achievements should provide such low living standards for its citizens. This often led them to “incorrect conclusions” or doubts about the value of the Soviet system altogether.^[130]
Soviet authorities responded to increased criticisms with a mixture of traditional denial, more aggressive self-criticisms characteristic of the post-Stalin period, and efforts to explain the shortcomings to the foreign students.^[131] Some officials therefore deployed a range of sophisticated hermeneutic devices to make sense of foreigners’ acerbic comments. One involved downgrading the foreign students’ interpretive frameworks by blaming “incorrect conclusions” and “consumerist attitudes” on bourgeois ideology.^[132] Another allowed them to dismiss as “atypical” the backward collective farms which some students have visited during their stay in the USSR.^[133] Others yet attributed personal biases to excessive expectations with regard to the Soviet life.
Others accused the Komsomol organizations of passivity in working with foreign students, which allegedly resulted in misinterpretations of Soviet life. The Komsomol’s passivity had been a problem all along, but it became a pressing issue as foreign students began to criticize the Soviet life more frequently.^[134] For example, one official wrote:

“In the Rostov Institute of Finance and Economics during the whole year nobody organized lectures, trips, or meetings with Polish students only because the Polish students refused to participate in such events.”^[135]

Of course it remains debatable whether participation in such initiatives would have made a difference. In other cases, a Romanian student “drove out” a sanitary inspection team from his apartment telling them that he liked to live in dirt, and some Polish students got away with neglecting their Russian language classes.^[136] Sometimes the local officials were not sure whether they were allowed to criticize foreigners or not. An official from Odessa, writing to the Central Committee of the CPSU in 1953, confessed that he had no idea what kind of relationship there should be between the Komsomol organization and national student groups.^[137] Similarly, an official from Kiev observed in 1953, that the students from the countries of People’s democracies regularly put up cut-outs from their home country newspapers, to which they had belated access, upon the wall for everyone to read. The local Komsomol committee was inquiring in the report whether anyone – and if so, who – should be responsible for the surveillance of these newspapers.^[138] Increasingly, Soviet officials interpreted the lack of directions from above within the changing political course as a signal to give privileged treatment to foreigners. The Polish officials reported this with dismay and blamed it for encouraging insubordination among students.
Finally, Soviet bureaucrats together with some Polish activists rightly suspected that the vociferous propaganda meant to elicit sympathy for the Soviet Union from the Polish masses set the stage for a big disappointment among those who would actually travel to the USSR. In 1953, one local Komsomol official from Sverdlovsk suggested making sure that the foreign countries’ governments “accurately inform” its students coming to the Soviet Union about the country’s life and its people, “especially about the difficulties that they would have to withstand.” He concluded that “some foreign government officials,” when preparing their students for foreign exchange and discussing the prosperity of the USSR,

“misconstrued the principles of socialism with regard to the distribution of products. They discouraged them from taking anything, saying that they would be provided with everything, even bed linens.”^[139]

A Polish communist and an employee of the Polish Embassy, who visited most of the centers in which Polish students lived in 1955, made a similar observation. One of the problems, he wrote, was that “the one-sided representation of the Soviet life among our youth prior to their departure for the USSR does not prepare them to understand the Soviet reality, and causes the rising of critical and dissatisfied attitudes” among them.^[140]
Underlying the discussions about foreign students’ dissatisfaction was the fear that the effort to create a new intelligentsia might also result in bad advertising for the Soviet Union in its satellite states. As one Polish communist student explained to Soviet officials:

“Many of our comrades, who arrive in the Soviet Union, still have archaisms in their consciousness. And in some cases we ran into such political questions that should have been explained to us in order that we would have understood. Sometimes these questions are silly, but they are important, because then the students go back home for vacation and tell all kinds of stories. For example, they say that in stores, in shop windows, everything is wooden. They do not understand why. We explained. But there are also questions that carry more weight, and then these comrades write about them in their letters home, or talk about them when they go back for vacation.”^[141]

Some, like the student Podniesienski who did his internship in Novosibirsk, was reported talking about how “construction work in Siberia is performed by prisoners.”^[142] There were occasions when even students who were members of the ZMP (Polish youth organization) upon return to Poland “slandered” the Soviet Union by publicly doubting the value of the collective farms based on “their own observations.”^[143]
Soviet authorities regularly squandered opportunities to engage the genuinely sympathetic Polish youth in advertising of the empire. According to a January 1953 report, many requests on part of National Groups to the Komsomol to visit factories, or collective farms, or industrial enterprises, went unheeded. By remaining passive, the Soviet authorities lost opportunities to conduct mini public-relations campaigns for the imperial project.^[144] Over a period of time, such neglect had important consequences, since returning foreign students were seen as reliable sources of information about the USSR by their compatriots. During a meeting in Leningrad in 1953, the Polish student association’s representatives asked the Soviet officials to organize more trips:

“Two years ago we succeeded in organizing a trip to a Stalin collective farm in the Gatchinskii raion. It happened once, and I have to say, that this trip was rich in impressions. We would like to ask for more opportunities to visit collective farms, because, whenever we go to Poland, we find ourselves in an uncomfortable situation, especially when they send us to the village or a factory. A comrade is asked – and how are they working in the Soviet Union? And he says that he has never seen anything. How does it make him look? Some can say that they never had time, or think of some other excuse, but others say: we are not allowed to visit the collective farms. It makes an awful impression. I think this question has to be resolved somehow.”^[145]

Students of other nationalities, who asked to see collective farms and factories or even attend closed meetings of the Party or the Komsomol had similar experiences.^[146] Others complained that they could not attend closed meetings of the Komsomol or the CPSU. Their colleagues in Poland apparently knew more about how these institutions worked from the textbooks than the students staying in the USSR.^[147] Mlynář wrote in his memoirs that “most of the young communists who studied in Soviet universities in the first half of the 1950s returned home with their ideological faith shaken.” It did not collapse entirely, he made sure to clarify; rather, “we no longer believed that the USSR was the embodiment of our ideals, that it was a model we were bound to follow without reservations.”^[148] In all likelihood, his observation captured the experiences of numerous young Poles as well.

POLITICIZATION OF CONFLICT IN OCTOBER 1956

The news of Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin in February 1956 began to spread in Polish society by April, raising hopes for concrete transformations even higher.^[149] In June 1956, workers protested low living wages and unfair promotion practices at a major industrial plant in the Polish city of Poznań. The crisis grew as the communists observed the scale of social discontent, and at the same time felt that indiscriminate state violence was no longer a possible means of imposing order. The tensions culminated in October of 1956, when during the Eighth Plenum of the PZPR’s Central Committee, most conservative communists were excluded from leadership positions within the party. Khrushchev was furious that decisions of such weight were made without his approval or even consultation, and flew to Warsaw with his entourage in order to prevent the Poles from implementing them. Despite Moscow’s objections, the Poles went on with the changes. The Hungarian students and intellectuals who attentively observed, cheered, and eventually tried to reproduce similar changes by carrying their political demands to the extreme, soon had to face the Soviet tanks. Only thanks to the diplomatic skills and personal charisma of the newly-installed secretary of the PZPR, Władysław Gomułka, did Poland manage to avoid Soviet intervention.
The changes in Poland became an important episode in a series of upheavals that shook up the Soviet Union from within and without. They helped to set off a time-bomb of opposition the fuse of which had been burning since 1953. It involved many thousands of Gulag survivors who had begun returning home in 1954, and who simmered with hatred towards the regime that had imprisoned them often for political reasons. In the Western republics of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia it also included intellectuals who remembered – and longed for – the days of independence. Ukrainian nationalists, repressed religious activists, and Polish nationals in the western borderlands articulated demands for change that ranged from a “return to Leninism” to desires for national independence, as well as in some cases Western-liberal and anti-communist critiques.^[150] After WWII, Soviet youth paused over the discrepancy between the exuberant reality reflected in the propaganda poster and the wretched one they lived.^[151] Soon they entered universities across the country and by 1956, they were among the most radical elements calling for change.^[152] They had at their disposal both institutional structures and tightly-knit peer networks that provided support and facilitated the circulation of ideas. These students often challenged “not just some incongruities (nesoobraznosti) of the official ideology, but also fundamental features of the system,” such as monopoly of the party over political and social life.^[153] Western radio broadcasts as well as the daily press, especially from Poland and Yugoslavia – all of which were widely accessible at the time – encouraged such attitudes with coverage of Polish and Hungarian events and editorials that described them as only the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union as everyone had known it.^[154]
During those days, Polish students in this Soviet Union reacted to these developments in several ways. Some of them simply sank into despondency resulting from fears of discrimination upon coming back to Poland, where anti-Soviet sentiments were on the rise.^[155] But others dealt with new circumstances by challenging the empire from within the Soviet Union. During the four months after Gomułka’s coming to power, Polish students carried their enthusiasm across the border and began agitating openly for radical reforms of the Soviet system.^[156] Confrontation, bolder than before, was one of the ways in which some students dealt with their situation at home, dissatisfaction with their life in the Soviet Union, and frustration with a slower pace of reform and much more stifled climate of discussion in their host country.
Commenting on the recent developments in March 1957, A. Wajntraub, a department director in the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, observed that the escalation of conflict was often an effect of Polish students’ often tactless criticisms of the Soviet reality, often leading to intervention on the part of the institutes’ authorities, organizations, and even the Ministry of Higher Education of the USSR. According to Wajntraub, some students hold “the incorrect view that it is their task to reform life in the USSR and struggle actively against Stalinism on Soviet territory.”^[157]
Such attitudes inflamed not only the Soviet officials, but also conservative Soviet students, who angrily pointed to the Soviet sacrifice in liberating East Central Europe from the Nazi occupation and contrasted it with the present “ungratefulness” of these nations.^[158] The conflict affected those Polish students who were committed to communism as well. Some Polish students, for example, bitterly complained that their Soviet comrades treated them as second-class communists. The issue arose especially after the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU, because, the Poles complained, “the post-Congress discussion finds no reflection in the Soviet press.”^[159] In more oblique terms, the Komsomol reports also recorded an increase in seditious attitudes involving Polish students as well as more frequent instances of conflict.^[160] According to Soviet party and Komsomol sources, the scale of Polish political proselytism was matched only by the behavior of Hungarian students.^[161]
Most frequently, Polish students questioned the idea that the USSR was a democracy, challenged the objectivity of information in the Soviet mass media, criticized the Soviet invasion of Hungary, and openly defied the principles of socialist realism in art.^[162] These were cases of individual agitation and not an organized movement, since – as one Polish official pointed out – the Polish community was characterized by a “lack of internal cohesion and internal bond.”^[163] For example, on December 11, 1956, the Polish student Stefan Trojanowski, “gathered a small group of colleagues and discussed the Hungarian events.” He condemned the Soviet intervention in Hungary and argued that János Kádár’s government “rested only on the Soviet Army’s bayonets.”
He also said that the Soviet press spread disinformation to the Soviet people about the real situation in Hungary and “lies about the white terror in Hungary.” Troianovskii also announced that Soviet socialism existed only on paper, and not in reality. He expressed his dissatisfaction with the Soviet Army’s stationing in Poland. He said that they are not needed there and that Poland can well manage without them.^[164]
In another case from Sverdlovsk, Kubka, a Polish student from the Mining Institute, proclaimed in the beginning of 1957 that the Soviet student Nemelkov had “expressed the thought of the majority of the Soviet students” when he announced publicly that in the Soviet Union there exists a repression of democracy, both in the party and in the Komsomol, and the reins of policy dictated from above led to a complete lack of initiative and helplessness on the level of local organizations. Kubka added a personal note stating that “over six years of his stay in the Soviet Union, he had not seen in the USSR anything positive except,” as he had put it, “individual Soviet people.” The Pole announced that he was deeply disappointed in the Soviet country and Soviet people, and that “it affected him deeply on an emotional level, since it destroyed his hopes.”^[165]
Polish students also became a source of information, inspiration and encouragement to those Soviet peers who called for change. The Soviet press consistently minimized the scale of changes taking place in Poland, and Soviet citizens who wanted to know more had few opportunities to go beyond the limited coverage.^[166] Polish students constituted one such channel. Soviet officials reported local students taking an active interest in political events in East-Central Europe. One Moscow party official complained, for example, that the students were influenced by some erroneous materials in the Soviet press, and also “by articles about literature and art published in Polish newspapers [where] there appeared in the student milieu many politically incorrect opinions and statements.”^[167] According to them, the Soviet students had expressed lively interests in the Polish press, read it, or asked the Polish students for translations of some of the articles.^[168] One communist Soviet student told his party bosses that the foreign students at the State Institute of Cinematography distributed “harmful information (especially from Poland and Hungary) and the students believe them.”^[169] Newspapers imported for the Eastern European students from their home countries were exempt from censorship.^[170] The Polish embassy made consistent efforts to supply the students with the Polish press, lest the young men and women become too isolated from the political and social life of their country.^[171] Some Polish students distributed the newspaper Pol’sha (Poland) in their dorms, which some Soviet authorities, including Khrushchev, saw as anti-Soviet.^[172] The demand for news from Poland was generally enormous.^[173]
Admittedly, the Soviet officials were perhaps prone to overstating the case for Polish influence in order to minimize the scale of internal discord. But a Polish report confirms the view that Soviet students were receptive to news from abroad. Wajntraub wrote in his March 1957 memorandum that:

“…a part of the Soviet student body expressed vivid interest in the events taking place in Poland, asked the Poles to explain it, posed questions to the lecturers and party directors, and expressed solidarity with the Polish renewal both in private conversations and public statements.”

He added that, especially during November and December the Polish authorities observed a rapid increase of discussions, meetings, questions, and commentaries among Soviet students.^[174] In response, Soviet authorities in cities such as Moscow, Kiev and Odessa took countermeasures to limit the importation of sedition by restricting the availability of Polish news as well as the scope of political discussion.^[175] It is not clear how effective they were.
The partial sympathy with which some top Polish officials described such conflicts suggests that the latter were symptoms of deeper divisions between them and the Soviet communists, and not simply skirmishes resulting from youthful nonchalance – although undoubtedly there were plenty of those as well. The Polish leaders in the Central Committee no longer placed the source of frictions in the students’ insubordination, but rather in the Soviet misinformation. “To the extent that the Soviet people are inadequately informed about Polish events,” wrote Wajntraub in 1957, “they have sometimes passed false judgments, hurtful and offending opinions to the Polish students.”^[176] Officials from the Polish Ministry of Education, after their visit to the USSR in April-May 1957 similarly saw the roots of conflict in “prejudices present in the consciousness of a part of the Soviet society.” They correctly assessed the misunderstandings as a symptom of the divergent paths that the two countries had embarked on.^[177] Other Polish officials likewise made efforts to explain some students’ sudden pessimism with frustrations, due to “slightly different conditions in the USSR and different ways in which some problems are being illuminated” in the USSR and Poland.^[178] One report blamed Soviet officials for aggravating the conflict by approaching it with “old methods” such as crude forms of student surveillance.^[179]
By April-May of 1957, confrontational attitudes of many Polish students subsided and sharp conflicts decreased in frequency.^[180] Some students succumbed to quiet resignation stemming from the fruitlessness of ideological debates with some Soviet citizens.^[181] Fear of expulsion or other complications also played a role.^[182] Confrontational attitudes gave way by November 1957 to the tendencies among Polish students to isolate themselves from the Soviet community and sticking together.^[183] Others who had been depressed about their job prospects after coming home, had by November more reasons to cheer up, since the Polish Ministry of Education succeeded in securing jobs for “almost all” the current graduates – 80 percent of them in their own fields. The Polish government assuaged other potential malcontents by forgoing sanctions on those who had been academic underachievers in previous years.^[184]
Early in 1957, Gomułka stabilized the situation in Poland thereby disappointing those who took his aversion to Soviet tutelage as an opposition to hard-line communism in general. After that, fewer and fewer Polish undergraduate and graduate students went to study in the USSR.^[185] Among those who did in 1957, only a fraction belonged to the party. This was a symptom of the growing gap between the student movement and party ideals – not just with regard to the basic principles of socialism. As a high-ranking Polish functionary observed, the organizational framework that would help to reestablish the bond was also missing.^[186] Among those who traveled there, the desire to transform the Soviet Union also lost its immediate impetus, even though many problems that triggered it – such as the repression of democracy and the contrast between the rosy propaganda and hardships of everyday life – remained unresolved.^[187] As a result, the Polish students became a force that merged in a subdued form with stronger currents of alterity in the arts, literature, political thought and fashion coming directly from the West and the outer world.^[188]

CONCLUSION

The Polish students’ presence in the USSR during the postwar decade was an episode in a larger tale of the Soviet authorities’ torturous attempts to maintain a uniform, positive and convincing vision of empire. Outside forces consistently worked to undermine this image. The remarkable thing about the Polish students (and those from other satellite states) is that they did so from within the empire itself. The consistent thread of conflict in Soviet-Polish academic encounters testifies to the rarely acknowledged imperfections of the Soviet imperial rule. To some extent, those had to do with the conflicting expectations that students, communist bureaucrats and government officials harbored with regard to the new empire. Other reasons included faulty screening mechanisms on the Polish side which allowed biased, critically-minded or genealogically uncertain youth to study in the Soviet Union.
As early as 1957, Gomułka again tightened the screws on Polish society, as Khrushchev had done in the Soviet Union. But the Soviet-Polish relation had changed in favor of Poland’s autonomy vis-ŕ-vis its powerful eastern neighbor, and to the detriment of the empire in general. Both countries slightly opened up to the West, and with some effort one could get a hold of Western radio broadcasts, literature, music, and clothes. This was truer of Poland, which to many Soviet citizens became “a window to the West.” For many Soviet intellectuals, the temptation of being able to read news and literature unavailable in their own country was so strong that they began subscribing to the Polish press and even took the trouble of learning Polish.^[189] In this way, the imperial periphery continued to challenge the official values of the metropolitan state almost until the empire’s collapse in the late 1980s.
The process took place more obliquely as well, because many Soviet students who spoke up against the Soviet rule or sympathized with the Poles (and the Hungarians) during the events of 1956-1957 were expelled from their educational institutions. With traditional career paths barred to them, some became active in the dissident movement, which contributed significantly to restoring the rule of law in the Soviet Union. Those students who pursued their careers in the party and the Komsomol began having doubts as well; some of them became important party leaders in the 1980s and helped put the ideas behind “new thinking” into radically new practice during the tenure of M. S. Gorbachev. Others reinforced the ranks of the “new, critically-minded, anti-isolationist, increasingly Western-oriented” intelligentsia composed of philosophers, physicists, economists, political scientists, historians and others, who became Gorbachev’s main support base during perestroika.^[190]