1 “Explaining the Empire: the Soviet Union, Poland, and the Press, 1945-1960.” Patryk Babiracki Johns Hopkins University Introduction Some of the most consequential results of the Second World War in Europe, besides the human death, trauma and material destruction were the enormous political and economic opportunities available to those who could muster up the strength to take advantage of them. While for the U.S. they included huge potential for investment in the destroyed national economies, Stalin was more interested in political influence to the west of his country’s borders. With his troops on a fierce offensive beginning in the winter of 1942/43, he had an opportunity to secure it. He used thousands of military stationed in parts of East-Central Europe as leverage in negotiating with the Allies during momentous meetings in Tehran, Yalta and Potsdam as well as an active means of support for the local communists. He also tried to ensure that the social and political changes taking place under the Soviet aegis would meet with support from below. Towards the end of the war, the Bolshevik leadership began reorienting several institutions to establish Soviet cultural influence in the future East European satellites. Poland had a special place in Stalin’s plans due to its size and strategic location: it was the largest state in the region, a buffer between the USSR and Germany, and the direction from which traditionally the enemy came.1 This close proximity also furnished the two countries with a richer than elsewhere 1 Stalin’s interest in Poland is evidenced in the fact that as much as one third of his foreign guests in 1944- 1945 were Polish politicians. A. V. Korotkova, A. D. Chereva and A. A. Chernobaeva “Posetiteli kremlevskogo kabineta I. V. Stalina. Zhurnaly (tetradi) zapisi lits, priniatykh pervym gensekom. 1924- 1953 gg. Istoricheskii arkhiv 4 (1996): 67-114. 2 history of conflict and mutual antipathies. This made the task of securing popular support for the Soviet-inspired changes a challenge from the beginning. Some argue that an empire’s success and stability directly depends on the extent to which its actors will resolve the conflict between “ethno-cultural heterogeneity in the imperial structure and universalism in its political practice.”2 In the context of the Cold War, John Lewis Gaddis’s distinction between the Soviet and the American empires in Europe rested on the extent to which each was able to align its own interests with those of the local populations.3 Many scholars examined the Polish communists’ dissemination of Soviet-oriented propaganda, including the most important medium of mass communication in postwar Poland, the press.4 In so doing they focused mostly on their successes in eroding the democratic values and forms of expression that existed right after the War. In this paper I show that between 1945 and 1960 the Soviet officials used the daily press in an attempt to achieve the same end directly, with only occasional mediation of the local communists. By exporting the news to Poland they were hoping to popularize the Soviet Union among the Polish readers with the Soviet official scenario and to lay out a vision of a radically new relationship between the two countries. I argue that these Soviet “news brokers” failed to fulfill their task, partly due to the structural insufficiencies of the institutions they themselves represented. But even more important was the fact that their ideological mission was at odds with the tactical concessions that the Polish communists had to make as they were struggling to gain 2 Kaspe, Sviatoslav Igorevich, “Imperii: Genezis, Struktura, Funktsii” In Polis 5/1997. 3 Gaddis, John Lewis, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997), 40-53. 4 The important publications on the press include M. Ciećwierz, Polityka prasowa 1944-1948 (Warsaw: PWN, 1989); A. Kozieł, Studium o polityce prasowej PZPR w latach 1948-1957 (Warsaw, WDiNP UW, 1991); T. Mielczarek, Od „Nowej Kultury” do „Polityki.” Tygodniki społeczno-kulturalne i społeczno- polityczne PRL. (Kielce: WAŚ, 2003). 3 power between 1945 and 1947, and to some extent, when they were tightening their grip on it afterwards. The Soviets were often in some kind of conflict over the timing, the content, or the form of the articles either with the newspaper editors or the top Polish communists to whom they occasionally appealed for help. This mixture of the internal institutional flaws and external factors that prevented the Soviet authorities effectively to impose their will onto the Poles directly affected the Soviet empire’s ability to engage the local population during the beginning, and perhaps the crucial stages of the Cold War. The Soviet authorities’ overall inability to respond to local reading habits and political sensibilities made the newspaper material they were sending to the Polish press unattractive to the local elites, who in the end had to answer for it and often found excuses not to publish it at all. Some scholars argue that Stalin did not plan to impose Soviet-style institutions in Eastern Europe immediately after the War. They maintain that the degree of pluralism that existed in Poland (and other states in East-Central Europe) between 1945 and 1947 was to Stalin a viable alternative for the future, and that he changed his mind only in response to the changing situation in international politics towards the end of 1946. These two claims are often accompanied by efforts to minimize the Soviet agency in the state-building process and instead to emphasize the participation of the local elites in the communist transformation and their approval among the local populations.5 5 A. F. Noskova, T. V. Volokitina and G. P. Murashko are the most known supporters of this view. See their Narodnaia demokratiia—mif ili real’nost? Obshchestvenno-politicheskiie protsessy v vostochnoi Evropie 1944-1948 gg. (Moscow: Nauka, 1993). Also, T. V. Volokitina, “Kholodnaia voina” i sotsial- demokratiia v Vostochnoi Evrope. 1944-1948 gg. (Moscow: RAN, Institut Slavianovedenia, 1998), esp. 49-51. For an overview, see Norman Naimark, “Post-Soviet Russian Historiography on the Emergence of the Soviet Bloc,” Kritika 3 (2004): 561-580. 4 In fact, the Soviet authorities, far from being merely observing or even responding to the Polish initiative, actively intervened in the Polish press and sought to transform its institutional structure and content to fit their needs as early as 1945-1947. Moreover, to an extent that the press was characterized by a degree of pluralism during the two postwar years, the Soviet authorities were eager to eliminate it from the beginning. By doing so they tended to bring it closer to the Soviet model. In the matters of press propaganda, Polish journalists and communists, who generally were dependent on their Soviet masters, were able to find some room for maneuver and occasionally exercise their own will. This was true particularly after 1953, but also before then, during the apex of Stalin’s rule. In that sense their relationship with their Soviet comrades resembled the top party connections: while most likely sharing strategic goals, they differed on which policies to implement.6 The difference was that a greater degree of negotiation was involved, since in dealing with mid-level officials they naturally had more courage to stand up to them. Conversely, the top Soviet authorities who supervised the mid-level social and cultural institutions were inevitably more tolerant to the Poles’ dissent than they would have been on the weightiest issues. Soviet Institutions and the Polish Press The Soviet authorities intervened in the Polish news market through five different channels. One of them was the newspaper Wolność (Freedom), published by the Red Army’s Political Department in Polish between 1944 and 1955. It appeared daily in 200,000 copies and contained six to eight pages per issue.7 It operated independently of 6 Andrzej Paczkowski provides an excellent overview of the problem in “Polish-Soviet Relations 1944- 1989: the Limits of Autonomy,” http://www.sipa.columbia.edu/REGIONAL/ECE/vol6no1/paczkowski.pdf 7 Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii (State Archive of the Russian Federation), henceforth GARF, f. R-8581, op. 1, d. 148, l. 14; Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Sotsial’no-Politicheskoi Istorii 5 the Polish authorities. But the most important channel, in terms of size scope and political weight, was the Soviet Information Bureau (SIB).8 The Bolshevik Party established it on June 24 1941, three days after Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union. Its responsibilities included informing Soviet audiences about the developments on the front, informing foreign audiences about life in the Soviet Union and its war effort, generating counterpropaganda against the Nazis as well as providing financial and organizational support to five anti-fascist committees.9 After a number of structural changes, in 1945 the SIB consisted of sixteen departments. It employed 350 people on a full-time basis and 161 field correspondents.10 Among them were the brightest stars of Soviet journalism and literature, such as I. Ehrenburg, B. Polevoi, K. Simonov, M. Sholokhov, V. Grossman, M. Shaginian, N. Tikhonov and many others. In addition the organization worked with about 1500 freelance authors, about 100-140 per individual department.11 In 1946 the number of full-time employees went up to 370.12 In January1945, SIB produced materials for USSR’s diplomatic posts, its own field offices and local social organizations (obshchestv. Org.) in 42 countries and a year later in 55 countries.13 Despite an almost total purge of (the Russian State Archive of Social and Political History), henceforth RGASPI, f. 17, op. 137, d. 172, l. 256. 8 The others were: Glavlit, the Soviet censorship apparatus; TASS (the Soviet telegraph agency); the Soviet newspapers exported and distributed through the “Vsesoiuznoe Ob’edinenie Mezhdunarodnaia Kniga.”8 Finally, there was VOKS, the All-Soviet Society for Cultural Relations Abroad, which worked through the Polish-Soviet Friendship Society.