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.^[1]
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.^[2]
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.^[3] 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.^[4] 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.^[5] 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.”^[6] 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.^[7] 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.^[8]
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.^[9] 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.^[10] 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.^[11]
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.^[12] 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.^[13] 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.”^[14] 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.^[15] 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.^[16]
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.^[17] 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.^[18] Another allowed them to dismiss as “atypical” the backward collective farms which some students have visited during their stay in the USSR.^[19] 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.^[20] 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.”^[21]

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.^[22] 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.^[23] 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.^[24] 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.”^[25]

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.^[26]
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.”^[27]

Some, like the student Podniesienski who did his internship in Novosibirsk, was reported talking about how “construction work in Siberia is performed by prisoners.”^[28] 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.”^[29]
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.^[30] 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.”^[31]

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.^[32] 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.^[33] 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.”^[34] 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.^[35] 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.^[36] After WWII, Soviet youth paused over the discrepancy between the exuberant reality reflected in the propaganda poster and the wretched one they lived.^[37] Soon they entered universities across the country and by 1956, they were among the most radical elements calling for change.^[38] 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.^[39] 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.^[40]
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.^[41] 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.^[42] 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.”^[43]
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.^[44] 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.”^[45] 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.^[46] According to Soviet party and Komsomol sources, the scale of Polish political proselytism was matched only by the behavior of Hungarian students.^[47]
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.^[48] 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.”^[49] 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.^[50]
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.”^[51]
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.^[52] 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.”^[53] 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.^[54] 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.”^[55] Newspapers imported for the Eastern European students from their home countries were exempt from censorship.^[56] 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.^[57] Some Polish students distributed the newspaper Pol’sha (Poland) in their dorms, which some Soviet authorities, including Khrushchev, saw as anti-Soviet.^[58] The demand for news from Poland was generally enormous.^[59]
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.^[60] 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.^[61] 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.”^[62] 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.^[63] 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.^[64] One report blamed Soviet officials for aggravating the conflict by approaching it with “old methods” such as crude forms of student surveillance.^[65]
By April-May of 1957, confrontational attitudes of many Polish students subsided and sharp conflicts decreased in frequency.^[66] Some students succumbed to quiet resignation stemming from the fruitlessness of ideological debates with some Soviet citizens.^[67] Fear of expulsion or other complications also played a role.^[68] Confrontational attitudes gave way by November 1957 to the tendencies among Polish students to isolate themselves from the Soviet community and sticking together.^[69] 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.^[70]
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.^[71] 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.^[72] 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.^[73] 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.^[74]

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.^[75] 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.^[76]