Captive University

The Sovietization of East German, Czech, and Polish Higher Education, 1945-1956

John Connelly

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781469623856
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia dell'Europa orientale

This comparative history of the higher education systems in Poland, East Germany, and the Czech lands reveals an unexpected diversity within East European stalinism. With information gleaned from archives in each of these places, John Connelly offers a valuable case study showing how totalitarian states adapt their policies to the contours of the societies they rule. The Communist dictum that universities be purged of "bourgeois elements" was accomplished most fully in East Germany, where more and more students came from worker and peasant backgrounds. But the Polish Party kept potentially disloyal professors on the job in the futile hope that they would train a new intelligentsia, and Czech stalinists failed to make worker and peasant students a majority at Czech universities. Connelly accounts for these differences by exploring the prestalinist heritage of these countries, and particularly their experiences in World War II. The failure of Polish and Czech leaders to transform their universities became particularly evident during the crises of 1968 and 1989, when university students spearheaded reform movements. In East Germany, by contrast, universities remained true to the state to the end, and students were notably absent from the revolution of 1989.

PART ONE: SOVIETIZATION

Before World War II, the basic goal of Soviet and East Central European universities was the same: to train specialists who would be useful in economic, political, and cultural life. Yet beneath this surface similarity they were as different as their societies. Universities in Eastern and Central Europe were public institutions with important powers of self-rule: faculty councils elected deans, made professorial appointments, and decided what would be taught. Universities in the Soviet Union were appendages of the state apparatus, and line items in the state plan; the ministerial and Party bureaucracy selected deans, controlled professorial appointments, and dictated the content of textbooks and lectures. In East Central Europe, though universities produced legions of bureaucrats, they also provided space for liberal education and the cultivation of critical thought. Soviet universities attempted to constrict and direct thought systematically, as students were forced into subjects of study that were narrow in the extreme, and made to memorize the principles of a single worldview: Marxism-Leninism.

Making East Central European universities Soviet was thus a revolutionary act that would require compulsion. Opposition to Sovietization was likely to be greater in Poland, the Czech lands, and Germany than it had been in Russia, because traditions of academic self-governance were well established in East Central Europe and supported by legends going back generations, whereas in Russia universities had learned to run their own affairs only very recently. As state agencies in an underdeveloped society, their mission had been more clearly utilitarian than that of their East Central European counterparts, which were pervaded by vague commitments to “value-free” scholarship. Professors in Eastern and Central Europe were politically conservative, and thus less open to reform than the more liberal Russian professoriate. Finally, there was a sense in parts of that region, especially Poland, that the Soviet system was alien and threatening to national culture.

Transfer of this system to Eastern and Central Europe also encountered more prosaic difficulties. East European Communists were dedicated Sovietizers, but they had to procure information on Soviet higher education, translate it, and then comprehend it. Each of these steps was more complicated than it appeared at first glance. After 1949, requests for detailed information on Soviet cultural institutions poured into Moscow from all over the world, and the responsible Soviet agencies—the Soviet Ministry of Higher Education and the All-Union Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries (VOKS)—suffered systemic overload. The Communists in the countries under study never received a guide to Soviet higher education; rather, they had to try to make sense of a complicated array of laws, decrees, ordinances, speeches of great leaders, and a few historical works. And these were always in short supply. The most important questions were unanswered. Would the East Europeans go through stages as the Soviets had, or simply attempt to copy the end result? Were there things in Soviet history that did not warrant repeating? Could the structures of a superpower really be adapted to small countries?

As we shall see in detail in chapter 3, there was nevertheless much agreement on what constituted the basic features of the Soviet model in higher education. But the countries of East Central Europe came at it from different directions, because the political regimes of the early postwar period had differed markedly. In 1945, East German Social Democrats and Communists (forcibly united in April 1946 in the Socialist Unity Party of Germany, SED) took control of the state higher-education machinery and consulted with Soviet functionaries on a day-to-day basis. The SED felt relatively secure in its knowledge of the Soviet system and achieved important organizational breakthroughs in such things as worker studies as early as the fall of 1946. Unpopularity and weakness in cadres discouraged Polish comrades from taking bold initiatives, however, and a long-term trend of compromise had already become discernible in the summer of 1945.

In the Czech lands, Communists neglected higher-education policy in the immediate postwar period, but after they seized power in February 1948, changes were swift and radical. Communist students with scanty knowledge of the Soviet Union now became the decisive voice in Czech university politics. They carried out a revolution of their own with little direction from the Party leadership—let alone from Moscow—and, having expelled dozens of professors and students, faced the problem of what to do next. In the weeks and months of the spring and summer of 1948 student “action committees” met and planned everything that seemed integral to Soviet-style higher education: worker-peasant studies, ideological education, stipends, extensive curricular reforms. But still they were plagued by fears of having failed to capture the spirit of the Bolshevik experience.

And so KSČ student functionary Jiří Pelikán jumped at the chance to be included on a coveted trip to Moscow for celebrations of the October revolution in November 1948. Expecting serious conversations with Soviet counterparts, he packed his suitcases full with materials on Czech higher-education reform. After three days journey by air and rail, Pelikán finally arrived in Moscow, where he and his compatriots were hustled onto a sightseeing program, which culminated in the 7 November parade on Red Square, where he caught a glimpse of Stalin. Yet, with the end of the trip quickly approaching, Pelikán became impatient to fulfill the “real purpose” of his journey. A meeting was thus hastily arranged in the Central Committee of the Soviet youth organization Komsomol:

The comrade listened to my report without great interest. He was much older than me, perhaps forty, and looked more like a grade school teacher than a Komsomol leader. Nothing lay on his desk but a pencil and paper. Our offices in Prague were a complete mess, overflowing with file-folders; this empty, spotless desk was for me a model of organization. To my great surprise he did not take notes. I attempted to describe our situation and wanted to hand over to him the files we had assembled in Prague, but he interrupted me.

“I see you are doing good work,” he said. “Changes of this sort take time; even here things are not as they should be. There is too much formalism and bureaucracy; this delays our work.”

He wished me a pleasant journey. Our discussion had lasted twenty minutes.

Pelikán, later director of Czechoslovak television and a popular figure of the Prague Spring, managed to enthuse his comrades in Prague and, for the time being, suppressed the many doubts this trip had awakened.¹ He had learned the fundamental lesson of Sovietization: that basic ideas on the implementation of Soviet models would have to be formed locally. This was a lesson that East German functionaries were learning in day-to-day contact with Soviet military officials, and that a number of Polish functionaries had brought with them from years spent in the Soviet Union.

CHAPTER ONE: SOVIET AND CENTRAL EUROPEAN SYSTEMS OF HIGHER EDUCATION

The difference between Soviet and Central European universities was easiest to see in their respective relations to the state. The former were part of the state hierarchy, with no recognized autonomy, whereas the latter, though regulated by law, possessed a large measure of self-rule. Soviet universities had to justify their activities according to the needs of the centralized economy, and by the late 1920s a theory had emerged whereby only intense, narrowly focused training could produce needed specialists. Less “practical” subjects, like the humanities, suffered neglect. Central European universities also met the needs of the state, by graduating administrators, officials, and the professional classes. The professoriate was politically loyal and could be trusted to administer state examinations faithfully.¹ Indeed Central European universities were state institutions,² with budgets controlled by ministries of education.³ The ministry created and restructured universities, and regulated procedures of academic qualification and length and schedule of the academic year.⁴ But despite state intervention, in the 1930s the humanities and the social sciences continued to dominate the university curriculum.⁵ In this same period over 60 percent of Soviet higher-education capacity was devoted to the technical sciences, and for a time the existence of universities seemed in doubt.

These differing traditions can be traced back to the nineteenth century, when universities throughout Central Europe came under the influence of the ideas of Wilhelm von Humboldt.⁶ They were supposed to be devoted to research and teaching, neither of which was to be placed in direct service of the state or any other cause; only as ends in themselves might they serve other ends. Despite the growth of natural sciences and the central presence of medical and law faculties in the latter decades of the nineteenth century, universities did not consider themselves training institutions but rather places where scholarship could be pursued for its own sake; philosophical faculties continued to predominate.⁷ Although the ideals of interest-free scholarship were never realized, they strongly influenced professors’ sense of purpose.

Academic freedoms were safeguarded by academic autonomy. The basic unit of university governance was the faculty, whose affairs were run by the professors. Faculties decided who should join the academic community, for they controlled both student admissions and the granting of advanced degrees (the doctorate and habilitation). Professors enjoyed lifetime tenure, determined what and how they would teach, and enforced discipline at the university, both for themselves and for their students. In ways that varied slightly across the region, the faculties elected their deans as well as the university’s first representative, the rector.⁸ Rector and deans presided over university affairs in regular meetings of the academic senate, which was the university’s main representative organ. Despite requirements for ministry approval of appointments, before the 1930s the state in practice rubber-stamped universities’ choices.⁹

Such traditions of university self-rule were hardly known in tsarist Russia. Until 1905 Russian professors enjoyed no corporate autonomy and were state servants enrolled on the table of ranks, not permitted to elect their own representatives. Concessions promised by the government in that revolutionary year were not granted. The Russian state continued to interfere in university operations through censorship and policing to a degree unknown in lands ruled from Vienna or Berlin.¹⁰ The relatively limited demands of Russian professors for autonomy—supported by students—met with consistent repression. In 1911 alone tsarist authorities dismissed or refused teaching privileges to over 130 professors of Moscow University, and expelled some six thousand students.¹¹ They also pressed thousands of students into military service. Such events seemed fantastic by Central European standards.

Because of the dominant ethos of the period when German university models were transferred to Russia, Russian universities’ sense of purpose differed from that of Central European universities. German higher-education reform embodied the ideals of the early nineteenth century: education was primarily to serve the cultivation of the individual. The Russian academic community came into being in the “positivistic and even scientistic intellectual atmosphere” of the mid-nineteenth century, and Russian ideas of scholarship (nauka) became dominated by natural sciences in a way that was not known in Central or Western Europe.¹² The Russian university understood itself more as an instrument of “social progress than of individual cultivation.”¹³ This more utilitarian approach to higher education was reflected in the proliferation of single-subject institutions, which had no parallels in Central Europe.¹⁴

Utilitarian tendencies in Russian higher education were reinforced by the dire need of Russian society for education. Although universities throughout Central and Eastern Europe were also elitist institutions, the gap between them and the rest of society ...