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Email this citationCIAO DATE: 1/00
The Limits of Totalitarian Rule in Communist Czechoslovakia: The Case of Higher Education
Political Relations and Institutions Research Group (PRI)
Working Paper 2.54
March 1998
University of California, Berkeley
Center for German and European Studies
A project conducted jointly by the Center for German and European Studies and the Center for Slavic and East European Studies at UC Berkeley.
Abstract
This paper investigates an incongruity of Czech Stalinism: namely that the Party leadership permitted significant latitude to local party organization in determining the content of educational policy from 1948-53. This was at odds both with the Soviet model and other East European experience. In particular students were permitted to manage university affairs with little supervision from above. It would seem that a would-be totalitarian state purposely limited its influence in a key ideological area. By placing this case in broader context, the piece locates the major explanation for this exception in the peculiar constitution of the Czech Communist Party leadership.
For social scientists and historians, “totalitarianism” has long been outmoded, both as interpretive device and as descriptive category. During the 1960’s a consensus emerged even among once forceful proponents that “totalitarianism” could not account for observed change in Soviet-type societies; in the following decade historians too increasingly agreed that the term obscured contradictory social realities in Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia. The post-totalitarian consensus has yet to seriously affect our understanding of Stalinist Eastern Europe, however. Because ideology and institutions adopted in Eastern Europe after 1949 were nearly identical, the assumption has prevailed that societal experience of Stalinism was uniform. As Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote in 1960:
There is no need to trace in detail the penetration of each society by party controls. Suffice it to say that the Soviet model was duplicated, and in every factory, enterprise, town, or village it was the party committee which was the source of authority, no matter how trivial the issue, no matter how unimportant the problem. 1
Now that the archives have been opened in Eastern Europe, it is worth testing this received wisdom, because by attempting to subordinate varying societies to the same model of political development, East Europe’s Stalinists unwittingly created laboratory conditions for comparative social science research. Under Soviet tutelage, Communist leaderships attempted in effect to control for the “variable” of politics: they duplicated Soviet models down to the last detail, with the force of terror if necessary. Therefore any variance in political practice or outcome requires explanation, and every explanation, in turn, tells us something about native political structures, traditions, and practices, because these “variables” could not be held constant.
I have compared Communist policies of higher education in East Germany, Poland, and Czechoslovakia through the Stalinist period (1945-56), because universities figured centrally in the designs of Soviet leaders, especially as devices for creating new elites. 2 On the one hand this study confirms the fantastic uniformity that obtained in Stalinist Eastern Europe. Institutional forms were visually identical: in each case parallel Party and state hierarchies were created to manage and plan higher educational affairs to the last detail. Soviet-style ministries of education (and later higher education) emerged, directed by leading communists and advised by “kollegia” (the Soviet name was used in each case), and took charge of previously semi-autonomous university communities. In keeping with Soviet models universities were broken down into more manageable units (for example higher schools of law or medicine) and were directed by a rector, who was no longer an elected primus inter pares, but a state official. The parallel hierarchy of Party offices, from a Central Committee science and education department down to university basic party organizations was charged with “controlling” (i.e. supervising) the implementation of policy decided upon in the respective politburo; in each case, however, the Party often overstepped the boundaries of “controlling” and itself actually implemented policy. Scientific degrees, length of studies, “worker faculties”, textbooks and curricula in almost every discipline, student summer holidays, student organizations, paramilitary education for men and women—every conceivable component of Soviet experience was duplicated. Finally each country was host to numerous Soviet delegations which saw to it that the Soviet system was faithfully replicated.
Despite this startling institutional uniformity, my study has yielded a number of unexpected divergences in outcome: above all the failure of the Polish Party to politically transform the professoriate through purges, and the failure of the Czech Party to socially transform the student body through affirmative action policies. 3 In what follows I would like to explore a specific aspect of the Czech case which is partially linked to that second divergence, namely the little-understood “revolution from below” launched in 1948. As is well known, the Party leadership staged a seizure of power in February of that year through “action committees”: communist controlled organs which were attached to every conceivable form of associational life. These were veritable assassins of civil society: they set upon and destroyed political parties, newspapers, sporting clubs, student councils, professional organizations. Perhaps they were particularly necessary in the Czech lands, because non-state associations there had enjoyed the relatively greatest freedom of organization in the early postwar years of any state in East Central Europe.
What has not been explored is the development of action committees (and their successor basic Party organizations) after February 1948. The literature more or less assumes that they acted as disciplined executors of central party apparatus directives. In the case of universities this was not the case, however. Once they had been set in motion, the central party leadership seemed to forget about university action committees, and as basic Patty organizations they continued their destructive course with little inspiration or supervision from above. This fact is reflected in the emergence of a term which is unique to the Czech lands: “studentocracy.” From 1948 to 1953 Communist students controlled university basic Party organizations. Especially in Brno, they scorned ministerial directives and lorded it over even Communist professors. What follows will explore this unusual power from below. How much room had the leadership left for local Communist initiative, how can one explain this apparent incongruity within the immediate Czech context, and what does it mean for our understanding of the dynamics of Communist rule? Social historians, especially of Nazi Germany, have paid close attention to ways that society limited a would-be totalitarian state. Here we seem to have a case of the would-be totalitarian state limiting itself.
Action Committees
The origins of “action committees” (akcni vybory) are uncertain. Such committees had been set up by the left wing of the Czech Social Democratic Party in 1920 in an unsuccessful attempt to seize power, but the concept has also had broader usage, denoting for example boards which help organize art or science exhibitions. 4 The important precedent for the postwar period seems to have been made in May 1945, when extralegal, revolutionary action committees secured Czech—versus German—domination of public institutions, including universities. With the stabilization of the Czechoslovak state in the summer of 1945 a role for extralegal committees all but disappeared, being limited to various “people’s courts” which judged wartime collaborators.
During the governmental crisis of February 1948 Communist Party boss Klement Gottwald called upon “progressive forces” to form action committees throughout society: in the Office of the President of the Republic, government departments, offices, associations, universities, the state opera and theater, conservatory of music, Parliament, local, district and provincial national committees, the railroads, Boy Scouts, the Sokol gymnastic association, factory committees, publishing houses, radio stations, and of course political parties. The action committees were dominated by communists, and purged these institutions of anyone considered less than loyal.
At universities, students, who had been the Communists most interested in education, took over action committees, and dismissed dozens of professors. 5 These measures were sanctioned by law only after the fact. To the extent that the Party leadership gave the matter thought, perhaps it felt the force of intergenerational rage guaranteed the most complete demolition of these bastions of conservative thought. In 1947 Charles University had defied leftist forces by electing as its rector Karel Englis, an economist who had been minister of finance for the Czech National Socialist party during the First Republic. 6 Englis was among the first professors the students removed, and this act was considered so radical that Party chief Klement Gottwald got on the telephone with prominent student activist (later dissident and Italian Socialist) Jiri Pelikan, and asked whether he was “thinking with his head or with his arse”. Gottwald was sensitive to the international echo this move would have. Though Englis and several colleagues were reinstated as professors (and promptly awarded indefinite sabbatical), the damage had been done: Englis stepped down from rectorship, and several foreign universities canceled participation in Charles University’s 600th anniversary celebrations later that spring.
Englis’s faculty, the law faculty, was a particular target for purging; by the second day of the crisis his colleagues Profs. Matejka, Vosta, and Drs. Busek, and Novotny had likewise been dismissed from teaching. 7 The Party representative at the medical faculty later admitted that the action committee there went too far in its purges. Over a year after the fact, he wrote: “February went smoothly at the faculty, only after February were the noisiest cases eliminated. The Action Committee did not strive to convince, rather it was an organ that punished and gave orders. One reason for this was that there was no organ at the faculty which would have coordinated the activities of basic Party cells and the trade union, and their lives became ends in themselves.” 8 At the Higher Economics School the action committee removed the rector Prof. Svamberg and installed Dr. Vilem Sada, president of the Prague Commerce Chamber. Initially the action committee of the law faculty in Brno was hesitant to act; but that committee was disbanded and a new one formed consisting purely of students and employees. 9 Seven of thirteen professors were let go. 10
On March 1, 1948 a first coordinating meeting took place of the Prague Central Action Committee of the National Front under the direction of Jiri Pelikan. The action committees in the faculties were in complete control of the faculty disciplinary committees, and 1:2 student faculty ratio applied in faculty councils. 11 The Central Action Committee had practically supplanted the ministry of education, which would not be purged until 1950. It mandated the beginnings of ideological education, educational planning, and the preparing of worker and peasant children for university study. Its presidium considered “how to limit the entrance of reactionary high school students to higher schools,” and thus introduced a coordinated student admissions policy.
In the summer of 1948 a Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSC) higher educational council in Prague assumed a coordinating role in higher education policy. It was in effect successor to the Central Action Committee and remained dominated by students. The purging of teaching staff had been thorough. By 1951 not a single member of the Brno law department was still teaching, and less than one third the habilitated professors of Prague’s law faculty remained. Only one of Brno’s philosophers and sociologists survived into the early 1950’s. Their positions had been greatly weakened due to the influx of non-academics and hastily promoted professors, like Dean Gustav Riedel of Brno’s philosophical faculty, who advanced from student to professor in one year. 12
Next, “revolution from below” turned its attention to the student body, most of which had supported anti-Communist forces in Czechoslovakia’s last free elections, the student council elections of fall 1947. Early in 1949 faculty action committees set up screening boards which tested each student’s academic and political suitability. The screenings were supposedly for “academic” worthiness alone, but internal reports make clear the dual objective of the process. One report even complained of the “significant problem” of “eliminating reactionaries who are satisfactory academically.” A solution was found in passing such cases to regular action committees. Slightly more than a fifth of all students in the Czech lands were expelled from university at this stage, 13 but in some faculties the total was higher, for example in Prague’s law faculty forty percent of the students lost their right to continue studies. 14
Perhaps because they seemed a revolutionary achievement, the results of these purges were never undone, and in subsequent years thousands of appeals were routinely refused. Neither East German nor Polish Communists ever unleashed such violence upon universities. Rather, they devoted energies to recruitment and preference of students from underprivileged social milieus, a task their Czech comrades egregiously neglected.
Studentocracy
The student domination of university Communist party organizations continued well beyond the February seizure of power. In important ways the central student role had begun before the February coup d’etat: a decision of the KSC secretariat of early 1946 had put students and professors in joint faculty organizations, but instructed students not to make “professors’ attendance at meetings a matter of party discipline.” 15 Students conducted the political battles of the pre-February period. 16 Into the early 1950’s students maintained power through numerical superiority at all levels of Communist Party organization. In February 1949, there were 6,410 KSC members at Prague’s higher schools. Of these 5,489 were students, and 394 “teachers and professors.” At the law faculty 296 students faced 8 “teachers and professors,” and in the larger philosophical faculty 731 students shared the organization with 27 teachers and professors. 17 Leading functionaries were young. In 1950, the important position of university secretary was held by functionaries under thirty years old at Brno University, Prague’s Technical University, the Academy for the Performing Arts, and the University for Politics and Economics. 18 The average age of political directors of worker preparation courses in 1951 was thirty-three. The top men in the Central Committee apparatus in charge of higher schools, like L. Holubec and C. Cisar, were recent university graduates.
The effect of this heavy student domination of university affairs was to subject professors’ lives to constant political scrutiny. This was especially true of the Brno organizations. During the Fifth district conference of Communists of Brno higher schools in early 1951 visitors from Prague—including top cultural functionary and later minister Ladislav Stoll—were coolly received. The rectors of local universities were not accorded a special welcome, and professors in general not shown “the least respect”. They were treated as subordinate party members and did their best to keep attention from themselves. One rector simple read off a statement the students had prepared for him, and not a single professor was nominated for a place in the district higher educational council, despite urging from Prague representatives. 19 The following year basic party organizations were elected in the pedagogical and medical faculties in Brno without a single representative of the teaching staffs. 20
Issues of major ideological importance were decided by students. In February 1952 a conference was held to indicate new directions in the ideological struggle at universities, but the Central Committee apparatus had practically no role in its planning. Functionaries of Brno’s military academy had decided who would be invited, and neglected the “strongest schools” in Prague and Slovakia, failing to include Charles University rector Mukarovsky (a founding member of the Prague “linguistic circle”) as a member of the conference presidium. The central apparatus had not been consulted on the content of speeches, nor were the ideological directives that emerged from the conference “agreed upon or collectively discussed. Except for the speech of comrade Kopecky the speeches were the private matter of the speakers.” Kopecky, one of the most powerful men in the KSC leadership, endeavored to persuade his comrades in Brno that “concern for ideology is one of the most important tasks of the [central] party apparatus”: the “concern of the party ought to be felt everywhere.” But at this conference “spontaneity and improvisation dominated, which thanks to the good will of everyone present, turned out for the good.” 21
Students exploited the general atmosphere of terror in these years to establish their own reign of intimidation. The ministry of education was afraid to return students to studies who had been unjustly removed, for fear of eliciting protests from basic party organizations that they were returning children of “factory owners and agents.” 22 “Leading functionaries” were “fearful” to defend professors when attacked by students and “submit[ed] themselves to the decisions of party organizations out of fear that they will be accused of opportunism”. 23 At a joint meeting of professors from Olomouc and Brno in September 1953 a young Communist from Brno, historian and later Prague Spring supporter Frantisek Jordan, “induced” Brno University rector Travnicek (also a leading linguist) to declare the renowned sociologist Josef Ludvik Fischer “intolerable as a teacher at any kind of school.” 24 Communist students at Prague’s medical faculty “victimized” old professors, for example holding back publication for over a year of a work by Prof. Studnicky—though this work had been awarded a state prize! The students did not “understand that teachers, members of the party, had gone through a complicated political development, and had to battle against many remnants of old education.” And
Instead of helping teachers in these battles hospital Party organizations have brought uncertainty and fear into the ranks of teachers, through constant disciplinary measures, often for trifles. 25
At the first ideological conference in Brno classicist Prof. Stiebitz merely wanted to express his “admiration for Soviet science,” but was strongly criticized by the students for supposed “ideological immaturity”. The comrades there refused to share their basic party organization with professors, despite a decision by the political secretariat in Prague: “As in other cities party organizations at Brno’s universities have interfered with university administration and frequently try to replace it.” 25
In 1952 Soviet visitors increasingly complained of the negative effects such harassment was having on professors’ productivity. They pointed out the “bad results of studentocracy, especially when it comes to criticism of professors by students.” In the Soviet Union such criticism issued only from high-placed functionaries: “experience shows that when students criticize professors, professors become fed up with the regime”. It was Czech Communists’ “obligation to attract to scientific work and train even those teachers who have reservations toward our regime...” 27 The following year a first Czech delegation visited the Soviet Union to study institutions of higher education and reported that in keeping with Soviet experience the Czechs must begin delegating Communist professors to leading positions in university party organizations:
until now the party organizations at our higher schools have had mostly a student character and especially the leading functionaries /aktiv/ have been almost exclusively studentsCentral Committee functionaries who visited local party organizations in 1953 sent back alarming reports of “anarchic-trotzkyite” and “sectarian-nihilistic” attitudes of students toward old professors, and a tendency to criticize superior party organs.
Revised party statutes of that year reinvigorated the principles of “democratic centralism.” 28 In 1953 the Charles University KSC committee was finally placed under the leadership of the rector and included several professors. 29 Measures were also taken to improve professors’ salaries. After 1953, there were no more complaints of “studentocracy,” and during the short-lived liberalization of 1956, students voiced criticism of decisions made over their heads.
The Absent State
Few sins seem more serious for Marxist-Leninists than “spontaneity.” Yet clearly the KSC leadership tolerated uncontrolled, and often spontaneous activity in basic party organizations at universities until 1953/54. Why was this so? The KSC was, after all, the strongest Communist Party in the region—with consistently the most cadres per capita—and did not hesitate to use violence. Why did it fail to empower the state apparatus, supposedly the instrument of the central leadership’s will?
A major reason for ministerial ineffectiveness in the early 1950’s was that, contrary to university faculties, it had not been carefully purged in 1948 or earlier. In fact, there was a high degree of continuity not only through the 1948 upheaval, but also through the war. An October 1950 “cadre examination” ascertained a persistent “tendency to exaggerate the importance of many years experience in educational work”:
A number of employees have been with the ministry for many years, and have served various regimes without difficulty. According to a register from the occupation period seventy-six officials, mostly in important positions, joined the “Union for Cooperation with the Germans.” Most of them have been removed, but still thirteen of them are employed in the ministry and not in subordinate positions. Several of them belong to the party. For example, comrade Dr. F. Hejnic, candidate of the Party, previously a [Czech] National Socialist, deputy head of the legislative department, in the ministry since 1936. Competent, obliging, and accommodating official, politically not very mature, aspires to become head of department. During the occupation a member of the “Union for Cooperation with the Germans”, and in the register there is a notation next to his name: “hat sich aktiv betatigt” [took an active part]. After the occupation and to this day a zealous worker, and the comrade Minister takes him to meetings in the government when legislative matters are discussed. 30Clearly, students who had seized power in the name of socialist revolution in 1948 were little impressed by injunctions from such a ministry. Indeed, Central Committee inspectors found that among such a-political officials “political immaturity” was “connected to an uncertainty in judgment and in the execution of simple measures and interventions.” 31 The high number of officials from earlier regimes meant that the ministry, instead of leading, “limped” behind the education functionaries of the provinces. 32 The entire department for university student affairs would have to be replaced except for two officials; three of five department heads and eighteen of thirty-six experts (referenty) would have to go. Of these thirty-six, eleven had joined the ministry before 1939 and three during the Nazi occupation! Only seven were pre-1948 members of the KSC. In all, of 655 employees, 149 would have to be removed. 33
Though some replacements would come from education departments of district national councils or factory apprenticeship programs, a significant number were untrained “worker cadres.” The massive introduction of such “worker cadres” into the government machinery was, like the action committees themselves, a Czech communist innovation, only partly inspired by Soviet example. Central Committee functionaries sent to the ministry had filed reports exuding suspicion of experts who tended to form cliques and refused to share their knowledge with younger cadres. As the purges of 1948 and 1949 had shown, the Party leadership had a predilection for crude methods of breaking apart such potentially recalcitrant milieus. The KSC thus went from one extreme to the other: from an opportunistic and competent to an ideologically sound and incompetent staff. Neither was an adequate solution to the demands of revolutionizing education, and both were for their own reasons ineffective.
The first worker cadres entered the ministry in March 1950. In their view only one department was properly staffed: the cadres department, which was already saturated by the KSC. The “workers” acted as a political police in the ministry, paying careful attention to superficial signs of loyalty, for example whether functionaries wore their party pins. They noted with special disapproval the failure of the minister, Prof. Zdenek Nejedly, to receive them personally, and reported that he was still using the same chauffeur as occupation era minister, the notorious collaborator Emmanuel Moravec. Many staff members neglected to reciprocate their way of saying hello: “Cest pracy!” (honor to work). 34
As was the practice throughout state administration, room was made for the “worker cadres” by sending officials to factory work. 35 Purging began in the summer and continued through the fall of 1950. 36 By November 1951, exactly one-fifth of all experts (referenty) at the Ministry of education were “worker cadres”, 37 who had completed three-month crash courses. 38
These worker cadres were concentrated in the ministry’s cadres department, of which they made a shambles. In 1950 a “working class employee” comrade Koutnak replaced a comrade Ruzek as director, who had been “using police methods” and preparing a “take-over” at the ministry. Koutnak did not manage to “remove remnants of such work”; and was “incompetent in making judgments about scientific workers, professors, etc. and is drowning in paper”. 39 What a Central Committee functionary found “most striking at first glance was [Koutnak’s] basic personal ignorance of cadres /for example at universities/.” 40 In early 1950 there were still no cadre officials in place at universities who would keep the ministry informed; a year later the situation had not changed. 41 In 1954 Central Committee reporters still noted the “very low level” of this department, and especially of its director. 42
Higher education was a particular victim of the chaos and mismanagement that plagued the ministry. The higher education department (IV) was consistently the weakest of the entire ministry:
Universities complain that it is out of touch with the life of higher schools, that it does not know their needs, and that it works bureaucratically. Moreover, the department has recently been falling apart. For example now three people work on universities, two on technical colleges, and no one at all on science. 43Soviet visitors were appalled by the staffing problems and recommended hasty improvement.
Neglect was apparent in every corner of higher educational administration; competent organs—the ministry’s cadres and higher education departments, the state council for higher education, the Central Committee education and science department —had no institutionalized forms of cooperation, and frequently worked at cross purposes. Professor Miloslav Valouch, in charge of department IV in the ministry, was kept in the dark on basic issues by Party counterparts, like the readmission of purged students. 44 The Central Committee discovered after the fact that certain important personnel decisions, which were supposed to be approved at the very top by the Party Secretariat, had been decided in the presidium of the state council for higher education. 45
A centrally planned economy without staff or competence at the center caused frustration and overwork below. Dean of the philosophical faculty at Charles University, the renowned linguist Bohumil Havranek, wrote a letter of complaint to Miloslav Valouch in May 1951, detailing the effects of ministerial chaos.
Recently university departments have been literally buried by a mass of various pedagogical-administrative tasks /drawing up plans of lectures, examination plans, examination requirements, discussion of the foundations of worker preparation courses, making lists of department members, investigating the work-load of department members, complicated planning questions related to the mobile component of the pay for external teachers, thoughts on the proposed splitting of faculties, etc./ so that they have not had time for their major task... For example recently the department of Marxism-Leninism wrote a very long report showing how overwork caused by unplanned tasks coming from above has been one of the basic reasons for the department’s ideological backwardness... The departments feel constantly overworked, constantly racing against deadlines, and speeding up production at the last minute /sturmovstiny/... The root of the problem is first the unplanned character of work at the ministry of education, and second /following from this/ the failure to coordinate all components of higher education: the dean’s offices, the rector’s office, the ministry, and the state council for higher education. 46The most obvious reason for this chaotic situation was leadership, or rather lack thereof. Miloslav Valouch had taken on his position as higher education department director rather unwillingly, because he was new to the Communist movement (1945) and felt uncertain of his qualifications. He had completed a doctorate in physics in Göttingen and did not possess first-hand knowledge of the Soviet system—a system he was charged with duplicating. Despite continued requests to be released, he was kept in this position until late 1952. The Central Committee functionaries in charge of higher educational affairs: Cisar (later famous during the Prague Spring), Mucha, Holubec, Pelisek, Kolomaznik were all recent university graduates and possessed little independent stature. The minister himself, Zdenek Nejedly, was an esteemed old communist, but he opposed complete introduction of Soviet models in Czechoslovak education. He was ill through much of this period, and eventually resigned to become president of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences. 47
During Nejedly’s illness Vaclav Kopecky, minister of information, presided over the ministry of education. Kopecky had little interest in educational affairs, however, and during his tenure the ministry’s coordinating bodies—the collegium and the state council of higher education—did not meet. A sort of “dual power” emerged at the ministry, with one group of administrators following the old deputy Pavlik, and the others following his rival Pavlasek, who enjoyed Kopecky’s favor. Valouch, a “poor organizer who wants to please everyone /prizpusovec/” proved unable to put his department in order. 48 The Party leadership’s role in educational affairs approached insignificance in 1952 as Kopecky and Central Committee secretary Gustav Bares (Culture and Education) exchanged denunciations on each other to Gottwald. Bares was particularly fearful, because of frequent dealings with Rudolf Slansky, and because like Slansky he was Jewish. Stability did not return to higher educational affairs until late 1953, after Gottwald’s death, and after Valouch, Nejedly, and Bares had departed, and new men took over the education ministry, L. Stoll and F. Kahuda.
Despite frequent letters describing this untenable situation from Central Committee functionaries, Klement Gottwald did nothing to encourage a more rational administration of higher educational affairs. He refused to meet with Zdenek Nejedly. 49 In fact, it was he who pushed the so-called “worker cadres” into positions of influence; if anything Gottwald promoted the personal differences among functionaries in higher education. 50 If there was any basis to the thinking of Gottwald in his later years, when he was severely weakened by alcoholism and perhaps syphilis, it was perhaps faith in the force of interclass and intergenerational resentments. But he did little to productively channel them.
Gottwald’s approach stands in stark contrast to that of counterparts in Warsaw and East Berlin. Higher education apparatuses in these two cities were methodically shaped by the respective leaderships, and could operate in relative harmony throughout the Stalinist period. Both leaderships refused to assume old ministry staffs and created new entities from 1945 onwards. These were marked by great postwar continuity. The woman in charge of the department of higher education in Warsaw, Eugenia Krassowska, remained in her position from 1947 to 1964. The situation in East Berlin was also marked by clear competencies and relative continuities: first the physicist (Russian speaking, pre-war Communist) Robert Rompe (1945-50), then briefly Otto Halle, who was revealed incompetent and quickly replaced by the Soviet-trained physicist Gerhard Harig (1951-57). There were also no signs of serious conflict between party and state functionaries, or of any massive influx of so-called “worker cadres” into the ministry. In the East German case functionaries were taken into the central ministry who had proved themselves in the provinces. In East Germany careful attention could be devoted to worker education, expansion of technical education, adjustment of salaries, development of ideological education, slow but steady advancement of loyal cadres into the professoriate. The records are full of personal interventions by top functionaries Anton Ackermann, Kurt Hager, Fred Oelssner, and Walter Ulbricht. They harbored no more love for intellectuals than Czech counterparts, but they knew the political value of education.
Conclusion
In a number of important ways the chaos in higher educational management, and the concomitant “studentocracy”, limited Czech Communists in carrying out a coordinated and rational Marxist-Leninist higher education policy. In terms of overall higher educational strategy the Party leadership failed to significantly alter the “class relations” at the university: people of middle class background remained in the majority among university students throughout the Stalinist period. This was very much in contrast to the situation in the Soviet Union in the early 1930’s or Poland and East Germany in the early 1950’s. Furthermore, throughout the 1950’s the Party leadership neglected to recast a devastated professoriate in law and the humanities—students and non-academics did much of the teaching in the early 1950’s— and had yet to make significant inroads in the sciences and medicine. Especially in the latter, Party presence remained minimal. The most visible sign of failure was the renewed unrest among university students in 1956— much in contrast to the situation in the GDR.
How is one to explain this pervasive failure to transform higher education? Unlike the Polish case, where universities also remained beyond careful Party control, one cannot argue from the weakness of the Party. The KSC was the largest and best rooted Party in the region. One might argue that the socio-economic structure of the Czech Lands did not force the Party to think of higher education as seriously as other Communist leaderships: the KSC inherited large and well-trained technical and managerial elites; so large in fact that it felt free to squander talent and engage in a policy of drastic wage-leveling. The case of East Germany shows, however, that even in a highly industrialized land a Communist leadership can still attempt to form loyal and competent elites.
It is true that the KSC did not enjoy several advantages of East Germany’s Communists: denazification permitted a quick and radical break with the past, both in terms of university and ministerial staff; the Soviet Military Administration provided unique logistical assistance and police terror to aid in subjugating universities; and an open border to the West placed pressure on the East German leadership to reach reasonable accommodation with the technical intelligentsia and leading scientists. Yet nothing had hindered the KSC from holding and purging the education ministry; instead it chose to abandon this ministry after the election victory of 1946, favoring instead the ministry of domestic trade. After having abandoned the ministry, the KSC failed as an organization to act to promote change in education, in particular the recruitment of workers for university, something that was a central demand of German and Polish counterparts, from 1945 onward. 51 The KPD/SED took a consistent interest in university matters, both after the Soviet Military Administration had withdrawn from day-to-day management, and before the open border became an issue in the late 1940’s. The KSC leadership showed undisguised contempt for universities before and after seizure of power; its almost absentminded decision to permit students to control university personnel matters for several years, with minimal input from above, was part of a long-term policy of neglect. 52
The question remains as to why KSC leaders chose this course. A comparative context makes clear that the answer must lie at least partly in the realm of culture, because the institutional and ideological logics in East Central Europe were nearly identical in the period under study. And here we are confronted with a paradox: namely that Czech national culture is well known for its promotion of education; in fact the modern Czech middle class was to a large extent made at the university. 53 The KSC would seem to have reacted against that mainstream, and indeed this is the explanation several authors have invoked to explain the radically Stalinist path taken by its leadership. 54 A Moscow-sponsored Communist Patty within a tolerant and successful democracy had no choice but to negate mainstream institutions: thus it is no surprise that a particularly virulent anti-intellectualism could thrive within the Bolshevized KSC of Gottwald, Slansky, and Kopecky (and the other “boys from Kladno”). Indeed, sociological studies from the 1960’s confirmed the anti-intellectualism that took hold of the KSC, especially after 1945. 55 Completely unknown is the other side of the story, however: what were the sources of this anti-intellectualism and precisely how could the KSC leadership create constituencies among the Czech working class? Half a century after workers’ supposed victory these issues remain a riddle. This is perhaps the supreme irony in the history of the Czechoslovak “workers’ state”.
Endnotes
Note 1: Zbigniew K Brzezinski, The Soviet Bloc: Unity and conflict (Cambridge, Mass., 1967), pp.85, 87. For similar views see Joseph Rothschild, Return to Diversity: A Political History of East Central Europe Since World War II (New York, 1989), p. 145; Robin Okey, Eastern Europe 1740-1980: Feudalism to Communism (Minneapolis, 1982), p.198; George Schöpflin, Politics in Eastern Europe 1945-1992 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), p.76-77; Jacques Rupnik, The Other Europe: The Rise and Fall of Communism in East-Central Europe (New York: Pantheon, 1989), p. 109; Jörg K. Hoensch, Sowjetische Osteuropa-Poltik 1945-1975 (Cologne: Droste, 1977), pp. 44-67. Back.
Note 2: See Sheila Fitzpatrick, Education and Social Mobility in the Soviet Union 1921-l934 (London and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979). Back.
Note 3: The Polish leadership left intact even law faculties. In both Poland and East Germany, as had been the case in the Soviet Union, people of underprivileged social background (“workers and peasants”) entered universities in large numbers. In the Czech case numbers were significantly smaller, never exceeding 43 percent. See John Connelly, “Students, Workers, and Social Change: The Limits of Czech Stalinism,” Slavic Review, Summer 1997. Back.
Note 4: See for example vYstava soudobE kultury v CSR: exposice odboru vEdy, duchovE a technickE kultury a SkolstvI vysokEho (Brno: V. RoSTlapil, 1928); Vratislav Busek, “Action Committees. A Case Study of the Application and the Use of Action Committees in the Czechoslovak National Socialist Party,” in Miloslav Rechcigl, ed., Czechoslovakia Past and Present (The Hague: Mouton, 1968), 296. Though superficially resembling Russian “soviets,” these were Czech inventions, and Radotnir Luza has termed them “the most original instrument of the communist takeover” p.98 in Charles S. Maier, ed. The Cold War in Europe. Back.
Note 5: Prague’s Central Action Committee for Higher Schools consisted as of February 25 of the Professors Jul. Dolansky, R. Foustka, Kolman, Valouch, and Turecek, as well as a dozen more mostly Communist and Social Democratic students and three workers. Svobodne Noviny, February 27, 1948. On February 26 Br. Hejzlar of the SCM joined the central higher education action committee. Back.
Note 6: The Czech National Socialist Party was the Party of Edvard Benes and had nothing in common with the NSDAP. Klement Gottwald called this election “a further example of the penetration of the influence of the reaction into several parties of the National Front.” Communist Information Minister Vaclav Kopecky, looking back on the pre-February time twelve years later would even call Englis a “collaborator” with the Nazis. See CSR a KSC, pametni vypisy k historii ceskoslovenske republiky a k boji KSC za socialisticke ceskoslovensko (Prague, 1960), pp.410-411. Back.
Note 7: He had supported the appointment of Communist Vladimir Prochazka to the faculty in 1945; see the letter of Prof. Matejka to Zdenek Nejedly of November 14, 1945 in Archiv CSAV, Nejedly papers, Carton 31. The action committee of the Ministry of Education approved of these measures and itself dismissed from professorial duties the members of the philosophical faculty Drs. Hysek, Hutter, Jirak, Kalista, Kral, Stejskal, Heger, Ullrich, Patocka, Machotka, Hendrych, Chaloupecky, Ripka (former Minister of Foreign Trade), Kovarna; as well as the lecturers Jirasek, Slaby, and assistants Dr. Dedek and Dr. Veltrusy. These were called “collaborators or active agents of enemies of the Republic.” Mlada Fronta, February 27, 1948. Back.
Note 8: Archiv UV KSC, f. 19/7, a.j. 313/390. Back.
Note 9: Dejiny Universitv v Brne , p.274. Back.
Note 10: Ibid., p.275; Letter of Weyr to Englis, April 10, 1948 in National Museum Archive, Prague, Englis Papers, Carton 399. Back.
Note 11: Letter of Jiri Pelikan of March 3, 1948 in AUK SVS B 166. Back.
Note 12: FilosofickY Casopis, 1967, pp 559-560, cited in A. Kratochvil, Hochschulpolitik. Back.
Note 13: Archiv UV KSC, f. 02/4 aj.113/19/1-8. Back.
Note 14: Archiv UV KSC, f. 19/7, a.j. 338/11. Back.
Note 15: Meeting of KSC sekretariat 2 February 1946; f. 02/4, a.j. 14, b. 4. Back.
Note 16: For a general description of this period see 100/1 1155/170-175 (May 1951). Back.
Note 17: 2/14/49 19/9/ 320. Back.
Note 18: The secretary at Olomouc University was 37 years old. Back.
Note 19: 100/1, a.j. 1159/50-51. Back.
Note 20: Dejiny University v Brne, 279. Back.
Note 26: 314/11. Report of April 1952. Back.
Note 27: Report of 3 June 1952 by M Valouch in Valouch papers Sg. IV i.c. 852; zprAva k pRipomInkAm zAvodnIch organisacI vys. Skol k prAci vysokoSkolskEho odboru msvu /also in 272/2 109/. Valouch related the experience of a Prof. Vrbensky, against whom a complaint had been raised for his political behavior. He had a tendency of making wisecracks. Yet in Valouch’s recollection this valuable expert—who now faced dismissal—was a “progressive man.” The Soviets insisted that through “patient and tactful work” such a man must be gained for the regime. Reports from Prague’s medical faculty of early 1954 talk of professors who had been “turned off” to scientific work through the “harassment” of student communists. Ever fewer doctors proved willing to join the party; out of 57 full professors only 7 belonged to the Party. 313/84-86. See also 241/8-9 (1954) for reports of “sectarian attitudes” of assistant professors which had a “repugnant effect especially toward old professors.” Back.
Note 28: See the reports in 236/13-14; 272/144-150. 1953 plan of odbor vedy a vys skol in mid-1953; 236/13-14. Back.
Note 29: 19/7 272/2 136-143; The local party organizations were not so quickly suppressed, however. In March 1954 comrade Kahuda, the most powerful man in the state higher education apparatus, appeared before the Party committee of Charles University to answer criticism of the ministry’s work. It was noted that his answers sounded like “rejection of criticism.” A new committee was elected consisting of three professors (including the rector), one docent, seven graduate students, and four undergraduates. 272/165. Back.
Note 36: Cisar report of 9/17/51 K vyvoji situace na ministerstvu skolstvi, ved a umeni /obdobi zari 1950 - kveten 1951./ 100/24 a.j. 975/39-44 Back.
Note 37: pRehled o rozmIstEnI edElnickYch kAdrU v UstRedI MSVU ke dni 24. listopadu 1951; Valouch Sg. IV i.c. 833 Back.
Note 38: Cadres destined for personnel affairs received an extra six week training. The basic three month schooling consisted of:
- History of pedagogy
- Overview of the organization of people’s and school administration
- Czech language and a brief overview of the history of Czech literature
Note 39: letter of Bares to Gottwald 9/18/51 on situation at MSVU in 100/24, a.j. 975/35-38. The decision to concentrate “experienced worker functionaries” in cadre departments was made by the KSC Secretariat in May 1950. Submitted 5/3/50, 02/4 aj. 120/19/3-5. Back.
Note 40: Report of 17 September 1951, by Mucha, Nedostatky, ktere se projevuji v cinnosti MSVU od 5/51; UV 100/24, a.j. 975/45-51. Back.
Note 41: 02/4 a.j. 106/8/2-3 Back.
Note 42: See the report on the subsequent cadre director, Hruza, who even in 1954 devoted half a speech, which was “improperly prepared both in terms of form and content”, to describing the “remnants of the [Slansky] anti-state conspiracy” 19/7 241 Back.
Note 43: Mucha, Nedostatky, ktere se projevuji v cinnosti MSVU od 5/51; UV 100/24, a.j. 975/45-51 Back.
Note 44: Report of November 8, 195 by Miroslav Valouch to Vojtech Pavlasek in Archiv CSAV, Valouch Papers, i.c. 833. Back.
Note 46: 279/1 83-84 For massive complaints of the failure of the ministry to “direct” universities, see the records of the sixth district meeting of Communist university organizations, 22/23 March, 1952 in Valouch Papers, i.c. 852. Back.
Note 47: Before he took leave—at the insistence of Soviet doctors—Nejedly’s declining health had greatly limited his ability to manage educational affairs. 100/24, a.j. 975/49; resistance to the radical duplication of Soviet norms—for example the reduction of university preparation from thirteen to eleven years—was already making Nejedly an outsider in educational affairs. Back.
Note 48: From letter of Bares to Gottwald 9/18/51 on sit at MSVU in 100/24, a.j. 975/35-38. Back.
Note 50: Instead of supporting Valouch, the KSC leadership brought Slovak pedagogue O. Pavlik to Prague, and made him deputy minister as well as chief of the state commission for higher education, essentially stifling Valouch’s influence. Valouch openly admitted to Pavlik in early 1951 that he was purposely sending correspondence past him directly to the minister, due to “lack of trust”. 4/23/51 Valouch sg. iv i.c. 833. Pavlik was returned to Bratislava in late 1951. Back.
Note 51: This record of neglect continued after 1948. See Connelly, “Students, Workers, and Social Change”. Back.
Note 52: A similar argument applies to the more general issue of terror and purging: the KSC neglect of higher education far predates the dynamics of denunciation that perhaps frustrated rational statecraft in any area in the early 1950’s. Back.
Note 53: See Gary C. Cohen, Education and Middle-class Society in Imperial Austria, 1848-1918 (West Lafayette, 1996). Back.
Note 54: As is well known, the Bolshevizzation of the KSC leadership in the late 1920’s represented a radical response to the rather moderate Czech social democratic movement. On the importance of this change within the KSC for concentrating certain elements of Czech political culture, see esp. H. Gordon Skilling, “Stalinism and Czechoslovak Political Culture,” in Robert C. Tucker, ed., Stalinism: Essays in Historical Interpretation (New York, 1977); Jacques Rupnik, “The Roots of Czech Stalinism,” in Raphael Samuel and Gareth Stedman Jones eds., Culture, Ideology and Politics: Essays for Eric Hobsbawm (London, 1982), pp. 302-320. Back.
Note 55: See the contributions to Revue dejin socialismu of 1968 and 1969, and in particular the probing studies of Jirí Manák, Lenka Kalinová, Václav Brabec, and Jana Neumannová. See also Raymond Sin-Kwok Wong, “The Social Composition of the Czechoslovak and Hungarian Communist Parties in the 1980s,” Social Forces, September 1996. Back.
