Ukrainian Catholic University Press Lviv 2022
UDК 329.15:141.82](4)‘‘ 19/20‘‘(082) Т 83
The Trauma of Communism / ed. by Clemens Sedmak, A. James McAdams. Lviv: Ukrainian Catholic University Press 2022. – 300 p.
ISBN 978-617-7608-53-9
The volume includes the papers presented at “The Trauma of Communism” conference organized by the Catholic University Partnership (CUP) in June 2021. The conference was held as a part of the CUP international research project “Faith and Freedom” initiated in 2019 by the Institute of Church History, International Institute for Ethics and Contemporary Issues, Faculty of Social Sciences of the Ukrainian Catholic University and the Nanovic Institute for European Studies, University of Notre Dame.
ISBN 978-617-7608-53-9
© UCU Press, 2022
All rights reserved
Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
Clemens Sedmak, Volodymyr Turchynovskyy, Oleh Turiy
Introduction
The Trauma of Communism Past and Present: An Introduction....... 9 Clemens Sedmak
Keynote Address
The Reincarnation of Forgotten Communist Crimes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30 Myroslav Marynovych
STORIES FROM Czechia
A Personal Reflection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44
Tomáš Halík Croatia
The Trauma of Communism: Missing People and the Silence Imposed by the Regime ............. 72 Višnja Starešina
The Croatian Trauma of Communism: An Example of the Struggle to Maintain National Identity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89
Mario Bara
Proto-Feminists Despite Themselves: Women and the Catholic Church in Croatia in the Aftermath of the Second Vatican Council . . . 104 Andrea Feldman
Georgia
Church Sovietization and Its Outcomes.......................... 118 Vaja Vardidze
Contents
hungary
Seminary for Priests in the Internment Camp of Kistarcsa (1949–1950) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 134
Barbara Bank Poland
Communism and the Church: Personal Recollections . . . . . . . . . . . . . 167 Sławomir Nowosad
The Light-Life Movement in Poland Under the Communists . . . . . . . 181 Maciej Münnich
Scouting in Poland during the Communist Period ................ 195 Bogusław Migut
Do Not Judge, Beware ........................................ 212 Magdalena Charzyńska-Wójcik
Slovakia
A Broken Political Prisoner – a Slovak Story...................... 224 Marek Babic
To Heal Evil with Love ........................................ 237 Ján Baňas Ukraine
The Trauma of “Homo Sovieticus” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 249 Taras Dobko
A Pilgrimage to Freedom ...................................... 264 Volodymyr Turchynovskyy
Conclusion
Communism, Post-Communism, and the Legacies of Intergenerational Trauma . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 281 A. James McAdams
List of Contributors ........................................... 298
This book is the fruit of a long-standing collaboration. The “Catholic University Partnership,” a collaboration between six universities from Central and Eastern Europe and the University of Notre Dame (specifically its Nanovic Institute for European Studies), was established by A. James McAdams to support universities in post-communist countries in their effort to navigate the commitment to faith and academic excellence.
Each year the CUP organizes a small conference on a particular topic. In the summer of 2021, we had an online conference dedicated to the topic “The Trauma of Communism.” The idea was to collect stories and personal accounts about the traumatizing decades. Myroslav Marynovych and Tomas Halik gave keynote addresses at this conference, their inspiring contributions are included.
We had the book close to publishing at the beginning of 2022; with the Russian invasion of Ukraine the framing of a project on the trauma of communism changed significantly. These changes are reflected in the introduction.
We want to thank all the authors who contributed to this volume. We also want to express our gratitude to the Ukrainian Catholic University press (Volodymyr Netak, Rostyslav Rybchanskiy, Roman Skakun) – this has been a great place for publication before February 24, 2022, and after that it is simply the most appropriate one.
We also want to thank Bruna Celic, Abigail Lewis and Catherine Bruckbauer for their invaluable work to bring this project to completion. We would also like to gratefully mention Monica Caro and Grant Osborn from the Nanovic Institute who are deeply committed to the CUP. The work of the Nanovic Institute for European Studies is made possible by the generosity of Bob and Liz Nanovic – we want to express our gratitude also to Bob and Liz.
Sincere prayers for peace in Ukraine accompany this collection. Clemens Sedmak, Volodymyr Turchynovskyy, Oleh Turiy Notre Dame – Lviv, October 2022
The Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022 has changed the way we think about the trauma of communism. Many of our Ukrainian friends commented on the Russian aggression: “We were shocked, but not surprised.”
In drafting the 2021 conference on the Trauma of Communism that led to this book I wrote: “A reflection on the trauma of communism will also affect our thinking about the future of liberal democracies. The Economist journal appealed for reinventing liberalism for the XXI century1. There are reasons to believe that a renewal of Western political identity and European consciousness cannot succeed without reflecting on the trauma of communism and on the tragic lessons that can be learnt. The deep reflection on the trauma of Nazism has not led to a corresponding deep reflection on the trauma of communism, an imbalance that still influences European political developments. It makes sense to ask: What lessons could liberal democracy learn from the trauma of communism in Central and Eastern Europe?
With the Russian invasion of Ukraine these thoughts have become both obsolete and more relevant. Myroslav Marynovych’s remarks about the reincarnations of totalitarian ideas in contemporary Russia have sadly proven to be prophetic.
1 A manifesto for renewing liberalism // The Economist (https://www.economist.com/leaders/2018/09/13/a-manifesto-for-renewing-liberalism).
Moral clarity, defined as the lack of ambiguity in normative judgments, is a rare good. Especially in academic circles there is a culture of complexity that is justified based on nuanced assessments and the many facets of any given situation. Reconciling the respect for the complexity of issues with the commitment to moral clarity is one of the major challenges of academic life.2 I remember a class session with Denis McDonough who taught at the Keough School of Global Affairs. As an assignment he asked the students to write a memo for the US President about the question of whether the number of refugees admitted to the US should be increased or not. “And do not say: On the one hand, on the other hand, it is complicated…” The students had to commit to a position which turned out to be very difficult. We are trained to live in a “on the one hand, on the other hand” intellectual culture. The price for the recognition of complexity is often the diffusion of judgment. Henri Nouwen, when traveling to Latin America, had the opposite experience. He commented on the clarity of judgment of poor people he had met in Peru: “One of the temptations of upper-middle-class life is to create large gray areas between good and evil. Wealth takes away the sharp edges of our moral sensitivities and allows a comfortable confusion about sin and virtue. The difference between rich and poor is not that the rich sin more than the poor, but that the rich find it easier to call sin a virtue. When the poor sin, they call it sin; when they see holiness, they identify it
2 In his book on The Moral Imagination
John Paul Lederach describes key aspects of the moral imagination in “the ability to sustain a paradoxical curiosity that embraces complexity without reliance on dualistic polarity” (John Paul Lederach. The Moral Imagination. The Art and Soul of Building Peace. Oxford: OUP 2005, p. 5). The Russian invasion of Ukraine may make it hard to think beyond the dualistic polarity of “Russia” and “Ukraine,” but even in this case we find a complexity with complex and interwoven family histories and family constellations, and personal connections.
The Trauma of Communism Past and Present: An Introduction
as such. This intuitive clarity is often absent from the wealthy and that absence easily leads to the atrophy of the moral sense.”3
The special status assigned in the Sermon on the Mount to those who are “poor in spirit” (Matt 5:3) can also be understood as a praise for those with clear judgment about the essential. The intellectual challenge of identifying and even building ambivalence is a wellestablished invitation to intellectual growth and nuanced (“sophisticated”) thinking. It is, at the same time, a real moral risk of letting each judgment die the death of a thousand qualifications. Very important matters can be very simple. Two years ago, Hugo Flores, a student graduating from the master’s program in global affairs at the school where I teach, offered a compelling and simple criterion for acceptable policies of any kind; in his remarks at the graduation ceremony he said: “If we are drafting a piece of policy, or designing a project, and it is good enough to apply it to ourselves or our closest ones, then it is a good project. If not, then it is not good enough. For example, if we are going to open a clinic: Is this clinic good enough that I would send my mother to it when she is sick? If yes, it is good enough. If not, it is not. If we are designing an educational program: Is it good enough that I would let my children be trained by it? If so, it is good enough. If not, it is not. If we are setting up a standard of living, a wage, a package of services: Is it good enough that we would subject our families to living by these standards? If so, it is good enough. If not, it is not.”
This moral clarity is not so much based on abstract commitment, but on relationships. Being a person means living in and through relationships. This has been beautifully recognized by Rowan Williams’ 2012 Theos Lecture4 and by Archbishop Borys Gudziak’s
3 Henri Nouwen. Gracias! A Latin American Journal. Maryknoll/NY: Orbis 1993, p. 160.
4 Rowan Williams. The Person and the Individual: Human Dignity, Human Relationships and Human Limits. London: Theos 2012.
Commencement Speech at the University of Notre Dame on May 15, 2022. Persons are relational beings; an “idiot” (in the original Greek sense of the word) is a person who isolates himself or herself from others. Human relationships remind us of our humaneness and humanity. American philosopher Eva Feder Kittay has made this important point in her Presidential Address delivered at the 113th Eastern Division meeting of the American Philosophical Association in Baltimore on January 6, 2017. In her reflections, entitled “The Moral Significance of Being Human,” Kittay works with vignettes that remind us of the humaneness of the person. She mentions the experience of Albert Kurihara, a Japanese American who was interned after the attack on Pearl Harbor; he comments on his experience: “I remember thinking, ‘Am I a human being? Why are we being treated like this?’” She also mentions the outcry of Abdel, a twentyyear-old from Afghanistan living in the “Jungle” of Calais, the makeshift camp in France, who says to his interviewer: “They treat us like animals [...]. We are human. They should treat us like humans [...]. These people are someone’s son. They’re someone’s brother.”5
This perspective makes Hugo Flores’ appeal to a deep sense of equality and common ground understandable. Moral clarity is to be reached through personal relationships and a relational understanding of oneself as a human person. It is one of the most important insights to be treasured when looking at the big global challenges like war, migration, climate change: the human person is a relational being, we are all interconnected. The moral force of this insight gained on the micro-level can shape our thinking on the macro level. Yes, Ukrainians are human beings and Russians are human beings. And, yes, there is the privilege of the birth lottery for some and not for others. And, yes, there is complexity in the history of each person and each country. But recognizing this complexity
5 Eva Feder Kittay. The Moral Significance of Being Human // Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 91 (2017) 22.
The Trauma of Communism Past and Present: An Introduction which goes beyond any simple dualistic polarity does not mean that there would not be moral clarity.
In the case of Russia’s invasion in Ukraine there is no space for moral negotiation. It is wrong, it is criminal, it is a violation of international law. The full-scale invasion can be called the most serious violation of international law since Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990. The invasion does not only violate international law, but it also undermines the very idea and the very structures of international law.6 And this judgment holds even before news of war crimes and other atrocities reached the world. There is no space to assess the moral aspect of the situation with “on the one hand, on the other hand” thinking. People, generally and globally, judge intended harms worse than merely foreseeable harms; they judge actions leading to harm worse than omissions leading to harm; and they judge harms with physical contact worse than those with no contact.7 All these three aspects are obviously present in the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In an interview with the German magazine Der Spiegel Daniel Erasmus Kahn, a jurist specializing in international law, was asked whether the Russian invasion of Ukraine could be justified. His response: It is rare in the case of international conflicts that the answer is so clear: no. This is an attack on a sovereign state, even a member of the United Nations. One can hardly conceive of a clearer case (“Selten hat sich das bei internationalen Konflikten so leicht beantworten lassen: nein. Das ist ein glasklarer Angriffskrieg gegen einen souveränen Staat, sogar ein Mitglied der Vereinten Nationen. Einen eindeutigeren Fall kann man sich kaum vorstellen”).8
6 See the op-ed by Mary Ellen O’Connell: https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/24/ opinions/russia-repercussions-for-invading-ukraine-oconnell/index.html
7 Cf. Mats Volberg. Understanding the Global Ethic Project // Public Reason 4 (1-2) (2012) 18-27.
8 https://www.spiegel.de/panorama/justiz/der-verlustschmerz-eines-kgbagenten-kann-keinen-angriffskrieg-rechtfertigen-a-2098c44f-f1ac-42c7-816620f8ef1978af.
The moral assessment of the situation is clear: The invasion is morally wrong; Ukraine is justified in entering a war and fighting a just war, a bellum iustum.
The moral clarity of the present is connected to the moral confusion of the past. Communism has traumatized people and distorted the foundations of moral judgment. Communism led to, among other aspects, the deprivation of political and personal freedoms, the silencing of certain discourses and even disciplines, the control of culture, forms of epistemological violence, and the suppression of religion. The private sphere and public life were colonized by the system, interpersonal trust was made difficult because of a system of denunciation and control. The propaganda story of Pavlik Morozov is a good illustration of this dynamic. Being forced to hide and conceal, to create clandestine associations and secret practices, is traumatizing; so are the powers that impose silences and disappearances.
Tomas Halik’s chapter in our book is full of instances of this reality of building a culture of the unknown. He mentions that priests “began to disappear in those years,” he refers to the phenomenon of “samizdat” (clandestine publication of books and magazines) and to his “carefully concealed breviary,” to “a secret, strictly clandestine, priestly community,” to his secret ordination (driven to the bishop’s house on the back seat of a car covered by a coat), to clandestine activities and the careful management of knowledge and ignorance (“We did not all know each other by any means. It was not a coordinated network with a single organizing structure, but rather a whole number of groups, which worked autonomously, and whose members knew only a few people outside of their own group. We were not curious about each other’s details because we knew that at future interrogations, they would not be able to beat out informa-
tion we didn’t have”). What does it mean to live a life where your identity and what is most defining of who you are has to be hidden? What is the impact of an experience, expressed in Halik’s simple sentence: “Not even my mother, with whom I lived, was allowed to know I was a priest.”
We can listen to those who went through these traumatizing experiences to understand more of the trauma and the drama. This book is based on personal experiences of communism, on personal witness and personal stories. We want to offer a window into structures, by engaging “the sociological imagination” that works “between ‘the personal troubles of milieu’ and ‘the public issues of social structure’.”9
A person is formed in conversations and through the experience of being spoken to; therefore, the experience of imposed silence and secrecy are dehumanizing. Višnja Starešina entitles her contribution “Missing People and the Silence Imposed by the Regime.” She is very clear about “the main source of trauma”: “not brutality itself, nor [...] the scale of repression [...] The main source of the trauma that has lasted for 75 years, to this day, is the silence about the victims.”
Healing cannot begin under conditions of silence. The victims of communism are many, but especially those who “were simply gone, disappeared. Their families knew nothing about them for decades; they were not allowed to ask anyone because the regime kept the secret tight. In most families, it was only talked about behind closed doors or even not at all,” as Višnja Starešina writes. There were fabricated stories, truth became a scarce and precious and politically dangerous good. In her work Starešina concentrates
9 Charles Wright Mills. The Sociological Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press 1959, p. 8. The human person, in Mills’ analysis, “is a social and an historical actor who must be understood, if at all, in close and intricate interplay with social and historical structures” (ibidem, p. 158).
on giving the victims an opportunity to speak out. The stories of Stjepan S., Lada Kos, Vladimir Novak, and Andrija Hebrang Jr. stand on their own, but are, at the same time, windows into silences, torture, the breaking of identity, and resistance.10
Responding to trauma is hard work. Magdalena CharzyńskaWójcik tells the story of her father in this volume who said to her: “For a long time, I could not bring myself to recount my experiences with the Secret Police (Służba Bezpieczeństwa, commonly abbreviated to SB). My contacts with its representatives were so traumatic that even after 30-40 years when I was talking about them, my whole body began to tremble. Even now, when I talk about it, my blood pressure is elevated.”
Breaking the silence is not only about creating an external space of protection and freedom. It is also about creating an inner sense of trust in life and trust in the stability of self. Many open questions will remain, because of people’s refusal or inability to talk about the past, as Marek Babic’s chapter illustrates. There is a lot that must be unlearned as Taras Dobko observes: “Here in Ukraine, we unlearned how to reduce one’s voice in a conversation to avoid being heard and denounced when somebody non-familiar enters a room. We unlearned to loathe getting in contact with state authorities [...] We unlearned to fear and avoid at any cost any contact with police and security services and gradually started to appreciate that any law enforcing authority is here to protect and help a citizen.” There is so much to unlearn and so much to speak about.
The trauma of communism happened on so many levels – it is connected to the elimination of opponents, the difference in opportunities between those in power and everyone else, the rene-
10 The fate of individuals as windows into macro-dynamics is also the approach of a remarkable book by Cathy Frierson: Silence Was Salvation: Child Survivors of Stalin’s Terror and World War II in the Soviet Union. New Haven, CT: Yale UP 2015.
gotiation of the relationship between the public and the private, the breaking of people and the disrupting of identities, the rewriting of cultures of memory. Mario Bara describes how “the communists performed many cultural and symbolic interventions. Streets, squares, and settlements that carried the name of significant figures from Croatian history were renamed” – collective memory was manipulated. The situation created by communist regimes was described as “schizophrenic” – Slawomir Nowosad uses this term intentionally in his contribution: “We all lived in a schizophrenic situation in those days. This describes the communist system in any country. On one hand there was an official life – with the official state mass media, the communist party present everywhere with its unrelenting communist propaganda on every corner, in every school, company etc. On the other hand, there was home and the Church, the parish church, where we could hear about a different vision of life, of Polish history, of the Church, of what matters in life – about all this one could hear only at home or in the parish when talking to priests.”
A person’s identity had to be split; this did not only create moral stress, but also led to what Andrea Feldman had called “paradoxical experiences.” Living in a closed society that created the homo sovieticus did not allow for an authentic life, i.e., an external life in accordance with rich interiority and the inner moral compass. Myroslav Marynovych refers to this concept in his contribution, as does Vaja Vardidze who describes this dynamic that “implies the creation of a human being and a system where collective reasoning dominates together with the herd obedience, mistrust and permanent control, ideological exclusivism, deceptive equality and hierarchization, fading of individual responsibility, conformism and hollow ritualism.” Taras Dobko offers similar insights into the homo sovieticus, especially the claim that the ends justify the means and the tendency to judge people “by their social origin and membership in a social group.”
This dynamic of separating the inner and the outer, the micro-level and the macro-level has led to an immense erosion of trust. You cannot trust friends, colleagues, or family members. Just imagine being in a seminary preparing for the priesthood and being aware of the potential presence of informers (as Slawomir Nowosad observes: “Of course the communist Security Service had its own agents in our theological seminaries. We seminarians were well aware that communist informers might have been amongst us.”). Interactions and relationships become burdened and stressful, and mistrust increases the personal cost. Magdalena Charzyńska-Wójcik makes use of the word “they” to underline this point: “They had ways of listening to you. They were always there. I remember that whenever adults talked about anything important, they would avoid doing it in a room where there was a telephone (though not everybody had one) because they could listen on you.” Fear replaced trust and relationships based on fear are not bonding, but isolating experiences. Losing trust in others is traumatizing and leads to further losses of trust on other levels – trust in life, trust in self, trust in the world. Trauma means indeed losing a sense of trust in the world.11
From the many aspects that characterize communism and that are mentioned in this book, I want to mention three: brutality and terror, administrative harassment, convenience, and comfort. These three aspects point to the complex experience of communism that was realized through different eras and in different countries. I want to acknowledge this complexity: There is a difference between the trauma of totalitarian rule under Stalin and the everyday, mundane dictatorship of Brezhnev; whereas some of the former
11 Cf. Joseph Corbí. Morality, Self-Knowledge and Human Suffering. An Essay on The Loss of Confidence in the World. New York, NY: Routledge 2012. Traumatic experiences threaten the security of being, on the level of individuals, but also on the level of states – see Loretta C. Salajan. The Role of Trauma in Romania’s Ontological Security // Polish Political Science 47 (1) (2018) 67-76.
The Trauma of Communism Past and Present: An Introduction
continued in places like Ukraine, countries like Hungary and East Germany were characterized by the latter.12
One very real aspect of communism was, in many instances, the sheer brutality and terror, the presence of tanks, the use of guns. The Church was persecuted, as Barbara Bank’s chapter illustrates. Tomas Halik used the language of sexual violence when describing the brutal response to the spring of 1968 – “the rape of our country.” A climate of fear could be generated through one night of state terror like the night of April 13 in 1950 – mentioned by both Tomas Halik and Jan Banas. Banas reconstructs the brutal attempts to break the will of prisoners who were tortured into signing false confessions.
Another aspect of communism is the subtle display of power through administrative means. Maciej Münnich describes the power of inspection teams to disrupt community activities: “These teams always found some fault that allowed them to issue a mandatory fine. It could have been water in the well that did not meet sanitary requirements, no lightning rod on the roof, etc.” Similarly, Magdalena Charzyńska-Wójcik, using the category “They” again in her chapter, comments on “their” ways of harassing citizens: “They could refuse you a passport. Once issued, passports were not kept at home but in the central offices and exchanged for our usual IDs for the time of the trip abroad. That is, if you could afford a trip. And provided you received permission to travel. Nobody could travel abroad without permission. You had to apply for it well in advance, present the place of destination and provide all the required details. There was no guarantee you would ‘get your passport.’” They had the power to take away livelihoods, to make families collapse. This is a good example of the difference between the experience of terror and, in this case, the routine trials and frustrations of life under
12 See Vaclav Havel. The Power of the Powerless: Citizens Against the State in Central Eastern Europe. London: Routledge 2015.
late communism or, to use the regime’s phrase, “real-existing socialism.” And this brings us to a third aspect of communism, namely “the comfort of the many.”
The communist state could offer scholarships and careers and life trajectories; it could also take away opportunities and careers, thus creating deep inequalities. Boguslaw Migut points out that communism was not only about brutality and terror, but it was also about “comfort” and “convenience”: “Communism was first a corrupt social system in which social position and a comfortable life were all that mattered.” Many people are tempted to feel nostalgia for the Soviet Union since they associate it with predictability of their life trajectories. One could be sure to get a job after graduating from the university, one could count on a pension, one could rely on the state for a fundamental life security (at the price of freedom). Because of this “paternalism / maternalism” of the state patterns of dependency were established and the sense of responsibility and individual initiative became diluted. This ultimately affected self-confidence and the idea of the person shaping her life. It was very difficult to develop a sense of change or nurture the imagination about ways a person could escape from the current situation. The experience of comfort and safety came with the high price of inner inertia. In her monumental work, The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt has described loneliness and the search for a comfortable, secure life as foundations of totalitarianism.13 These are inner categories. The trauma of communism is the fact that there were rarely victories. The Church could also create spaces outside of the State as we see from Maciej Münnich’s description of the oasis movement; also, international movements like scouting could offer contexts outside
13 It is a good time to read Hannah Arendt these days (spring 2022) as Anne Applebaum observes: https://www.theatlantic.com/books/archive/2022/03/arendtorigins-of-totalitarianism-ukraine/627081/.
The Trauma of Communism Past and Present: An Introduction
of the state structure with the risk of being specifically damaged as Boguslaw Migut’s text communicates. But these freedoms came with a price: “The trauma of Communism was universal, regardless of the actual choices you made. If you gave in, you feel the trauma because you fear you failed. If you did not and showed indomitable character like my father, you ended up in trouble for decades” (Magdalena Charzyńska-Wójcik). Communism was so powerful, so monumental, because it got to the inner lives of people.
The role of the inner life and moral witness
Societal developments and human psychology are intertwined. Political frameworks impact not only individual life structures, but also the inner lives of persons. Communism tried to get into the hearts and minds of people. As Volodymyr Turchynovskyy observes in his contribution: “By imposing certain quasi-religious, quasi-democratic, quasi-public practices the Soviet state was attempting to “educate” its citizens into a unified and uniformed way of living and to force them to internalise the tenets and values of the communist ideology. It is particularly worth mentioning that the youth starting from very early age was subdued to education and formation aimed at dis-activating critical thinking potential and implanting a quasi-religious loyalty and commitment to the communist state in the young minds and hearts.”
The colonization of the mind prolongs and deepens the impact of regimes. The experience of decades of communism in several Eastern and Central European countries behind the Iron Curtain and its subsequent collapse have left long-term consequences. Several categories have been suggested to talk about this experience. Three examples: In a 2015 paper “Communism and the Trauma of Its Collapse Revisited” Catherine Schmidt-Löw-Beer, Moira Atria, and Elisha Davar discuss the profound effects communism had on the psyche with a special focus on Russia. They use labels like “loss
of privacy,” “missing adolescence,” or an “impersonal self.”14 The late Jindřich Kabát, psychologist, professor, and former culture minister (1992-1994) of the Czech Republic, published an influential book in 2011 on the psychology of communism discussing phenomena like “self-censorship,” “a permanent sense of fear,” and “human compromises.”15 Diana Georgescu used categories like “between trauma and nostalgia” and “generational dynamics of memory” to talk about the situation in post-socialist Romania.16 These categories paint a gloomy picture about the perception of the person and her dignity. The complexity of the person, however, cannot simply be eradicated. There remain aspects of a complicated story that must be nuanced and understood. The lack of moral complexity does not mean that we would not have to deal with complex issues. One fascinating aspect of any political and social dynamic is the connection between the inner life and external acts. We can look for the role of categories like “pride,” “honor,” “shame,” “humiliation,” or “identity” in the war in Ukraine. The above-mentioned jurist Kahn said in an interview that Russian president Putin suffers from “the pain of loss” (Verlustschmerz). He mourns the loss of the grand Empire of the Soviet Union. He has subjectively felt a sense of humiliation. For many, the collapse of the Soviet Union led to the rise of a melancholic sense, a vision of history seen as a painful series of losses.16 The frequently used Western political rhetoric “We won the cold war” does not help.
14 Catherine Schmidt-Löw-Beer, Moira Atria, Elisha Davar. Communism and the Trauma of Its Collapse Revisited // American Journal of Psychoanalysis 75 (4) (2015) 394-415.
15 See also Jacob D. Lindy, Robert Lifton. Beyond Invisible Walls: the Psychological Legacy of Soviet Trauma, East European Therapists and Their Patients. New York: Brunner-Routledge 2001.
16 Diana Georgescu. Between Trauma and Nostalgia. The Intellectual Ethos and Generational Dynamics of Memory in Postsocialist Romania // Südosteuropa 64 (3) (2016) 284-306.
In Putin’s infamous essay On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians (published on the Kremlin website in July 2021) we read statements like the following: 17
• “I would like to emphasize that the wall that has emerged in recent years between Russia and Ukraine, between the parts of what is essentially the same historical and spiritual space, to my mind is our great common misfortune and tragedy.”
• “Inside the USSR, borders between republics were never seen as state borders; they were nominal within a single country, which, while featuring all the attributes of a federation, was highly centralized – this, again, was secured by the CPSU’s leading role. But in 1991, all those territories, and, more important, people, found themselves abroad overnight, taken away, this time indeed, from their historical motherland.”
• “When the USSR collapsed, many people in Russia and Ukraine sincerely believed and assumed that our close cultural, spiritual, and economic ties would certainly last, as would the commonality of our people, who had always had a sense of unity at their core. However, events – at first gradually, and then more rapidly – started to move in a different direction.”
These statements convey a sense of nostalgia, loss, and humiliation. These are dangerous breeding grounds for irrationality and violence as we have seen (in 2008, in 2014, in 2022). The subjective
17 Cf. Enzo Traverso. Left-Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History, and Memory. New York: Columbia University 2016; see also Aliaksei Kazharski. Civilizations as Ontological Security? Stories of the Russian Trauma // Problems of Post-Communism 67 (1) (2020) 24–36. Kazharski describes how significant identity work had to be done in Russia after the disintegration of the Soviet Union and that this identity work expresses a desire for ontological security that, unfortunately, “produced a notably ‘securitized’ or ‘closed’ identity that resists change and inhibits Russia’s adaptation to its postimperial circumstance.”
experience of loss does not justify violent aggression in any way, but it makes it less incomprehensible. In the above-mentioned interview Daniel Erasmus Kahn comments on the “pain of loss” (“Verlustschmerz”) of former KGB agent Putin – with the comment: this pain (which may be real) cannot justify an attack. But we must be aware of these dynamics, the power of the inner life, the power of perception. There is the trauma of communism and there is the reality of a new nostalgic post-communist imperialism. These two phenomena are linked. The former is not only connected to the trauma of the experience of communism, but also to the trauma of the experience of the collapse of the Soviet Union and many aspects of communism. There was a profound sense of loss,18 a loss that could also be felt by some religious people living life with an enemy, as Tomas Halik reminds us. But the more dangerous experience of loss is clearly the one of those who lost the status quo they treasured, the power and sense of greatness. No doubt, the experience of loss can be subjectively humiliating. And it could be added that the subjective experience of humiliation is more likely to occur when it is coupled with pride. Humiliation is a powerful experience. The famous Swedish diplomat Hans Blix, after many years in diplomatic service, was once asked about the key lessons learnt in diplomatic life. His response: the importance of avoiding humiliation. “In all situations do not humiliate the other side because you don’t get anywhere; you make them furious. There are many examples of this, even in vocabulary. When trying to reach solutions try to use dry concepts and avoid loaded words. This is important. In human relations, humiliation is very dangerous.”19
18 Cf. Sergei Ushakin. The Patriotism of Despair: Nation, War, and Loss in Russia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press 2009.
19 https://www.europeanleadershipnetwork.org/commentary/interviewwith-dr-hans-blix/.
Ute Frevert has studied the political dimension of humiliation.20 There are countless examples of humiliations of individuals, communities, and even nations. There is a connection between humiliation in the past and the enactment of human dignity in the present.21 Countless persons and families have been humiliated with lasting impacts. But there is also the perceived humiliation of Central and Eastern Europe after the fall of communism. In other words, there is the trauma of communism, but there is also the trauma of transition and post-communism. In 2009 (November 10) the New York Times published an article entitled “Bulgaria Still Stuck in Trauma of Transition.” The article observed that “Bulgaria is the only former Warsaw Pact member state without an institute for national memory to hash out the historical details of a Communist past during which, historians say, thousands of people were imprisoned and killed.” This is a reminder that a confrontation with the trauma of communism will also include questions of the ethics and politics of remembering. This remark is also a further reminder that we must distinguish different “phases of trauma.”
In an interview with Eastern Focus Quarterly Stephen Holmes, co-author (with Ivan Krastev) of the 2019 book The Light That Failed. A Reckoning, claimed that “illiberalism [in some Central and Eastern European countries] was born out of post-Communist trauma.”22 The book addressed the trauma of the transition: the period of Western democratization, called by Holmes and Krastev “the Age of Imitation,” bent Central and Eastern European values to the liberal fiscal, cultural, and moral politics of integration. There was little to no sense of respecting a proper non-Western European
20 Ute Frevert. The Politics of Humiliation. A Modern History. Oxford: OUP 2002.
21 https://psyche.co/ideas/the-history-of-humiliation-points-to-the-futureof-human-dignity.
22 https://www.eastern-focus.eu/2019/12/interview-illiberalism-born-postcommunist-trauma/.
intellectual and moral tradition. Volodymyr Turchynovskyy comments: “A tight grip of the past and its continuing influence is best captured by describing a new social and geopolitical reality as post-Soviet, post-totalitarian, post-communist, and post-colonial at the same time. And whenever some social phenomena are referred to as ‘post-something’ you can be assured that that ‘something’ still plays a role in it. An ongoing clash of the past and new identities, practices, and visions can still be felt.”
This book contains some powerful stories that are powerful because of the personal relationship between the author and the person described. Magdalena Charzyńska-Wójcik tells the story of her father, Marek Babic tells the story of his paternal great-uncle. Family histories are shaped, often burdened, by the years of communist regimes. There are wounds and there are strong emotions residing in the depth of the person. Marek Babic recounts “the intensity of anger and resentment in my uncle” and narrates a family gathering where “many of those present felt old wounds open, which not even time could heal.”
There is a power in the way we remember and misremember, in the power we allow nostalgia to grow. These categories of inner life have political weight. The inner life drives external agency and vice versa. We can see the power of the inner life positively in phenomena of resilience and resistance – Barbara Bank describes the power of celebrating mass in her chapter on the internment camp in Kistarcsa. There is moral heroism and even martyrdom based on deep inner convictions. The experience of communism has also asked for sacrifices and for invitations into martyrdom – the tragic story of Fr. Jerzy Popiełuszko, chaplain for Solidarity workers in Poland, can be mentioned. His tomb has become a pilgrimage site, a site to which Fr. Nowosad has led his students, as he shares in his chapter. Jan Banas tells the story of Anton Neuwirth as a moral and spiritual hero, Barbara Bank calls attention to the witness of Fr. Imre Mócsy. There is an inner strength that nurtures the hope for new begin-
The Trauma of Communism Past and Present: An Introduction
nings. Jan Banas quotes from Anton Neuwirth: “Suffering that does not give rise to love is pointless.” Slawomir Nowosad invites a reading of history in symbolic terms with a connection to the transcendent: “The days of communism were not a blessing. But the blessing and grace of God has always been with us” (Nowosad) – with the invitation to be grateful for everything and finding God in all things, an invitation that we can also see in Volodymyr Turchynovskyy’s contribution.
The trauma of communism has deeply affected the inner life; because of our fragile inner lives the experience of communism could unfold its traumatizing and destructive power. But it is the same inner dimension of the person that is the source of hope.
How can the journey from communism to “post”-communism be most appropriately described?
This is obviously a very difficult question. This book shows what a repugnant world Putin’s Russia wants to restore by the invasion of Ukraine. What is needed is a renewed commitment to human dignity and human freedom. Taras Dobko encourages the use of the term “integral human development,” as an antidote to the ills of one-dimensionality. Volodymyr Turchynovskyy suggests the image and idea of a “pilgrimage to freedom,” once again inviting us to see the transcendent dimension that reveals itself through prayerful reflections on history. A pilgrimage “is not foremost about me mapping and controlling my route, timeline, and destination. Most importantly it’s about opening oneself up for a revelation.”
This book collects stories from different countries that suffered under communism – Czech Republic, Croatia, Georgia, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, and Ukraine. The point of the book has been aptly described by Magdalena Charzyńska-Wójcik: “A warning against totalitarian systems which in one way or another deprive us of
independence and require a tremendous amount of resilience to claim for oneself the freedom of thought which is, on the one hand, our inalienable right, but on the other, it comes at an enormous cost: either external because you stand up against the system or internal because you come to realize the full extent of the condition.” We live in an age where we can observe what Pulitzer-prize winning journalist Anne Applebaum has characterized as “the twilight of democracy.”23
After February 24, 2022, we find ourselves in a new situation that looks painfully familiar. We could have learnt from the past, e.g., from Ukraine’s struggle with its self-determined alliances or from Russia’s brutality in Chechnya and Georgia. What Ukraine is experiencing as this book is prepared for publication is yet another traumatization, but this time met with resilience, resistance, and deep beliefs in the power of truth and the value of freedom. The trauma of communism may support the will and skill of Ukrainians to fight for freedom and dignity. Taras Dobko warns against amnesia and given the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 his words are almost prophetic. Once again, Russia is closing itself off from the world of democracies, freedom, and standards of international law.
The way forward? A deep reflection on the difference between ends and means, a deep reflection on what really and ultimately matters. Myroslav Marynovych’s words speak powerfully to this point. Volodymyr Turchynovskyy ends his chapters with a deep spiritual insight expressed in a statement by the Ukrainian Greek Catholic holy martyr Fr. Omelyan Kovch who died in the Nazi concentration camp at Maidanek: “I am an only priest here. I couldn’t even imagine what would happen here without me. Here I see God.”
23 Anne Applebaum. The Twilight of Democracy. The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism. New York: Doubleday 2020.
This is a statement about the ultimate end. In his Spiritual Exercises, Ignatius of Loyola points out the importance of not confusing ends with means (Spiritual Exercises, 169) with the result that people often put last “what they ought to seek first and above all else.” This book, in its own way, is a reminder of what we should seek first and above all else.
It is a great honor for me to speak at this conference as a keynote speaker. And please be sure, that is not a standard and banal phrase. We, former prisoners of the Soviet Gulag, did not wait for a Nuremberg II to condemn the communist regime, just as Nuremberg I condemned the Nazi regime. So today, speaking at this conference about the trauma of communism, I would like to say what my comrades would have said at the imaginary tribunal if they had not died in the camps or after their release. That’s why I don’t fall into banality because I really feel this is a great honor and great responsibility.
The organizers of this conference called on the speakers to testify personally about the communist persecution. Looking back, I see the relentless crescendo of my incompatibility with the Soviet regime: a series of punishments for declining KGB proposals to become an informant, my decision to join a dissident movement, difficulties in finding employment, and participation in the founding of the Ukrainian Helsinki (Human Rights) Group followed by dismissal, provocations, and harassment by the KGB. Starting from April 23, 1977, what followed was arrest, interrogations, an unjust trial, the sentence of the seven-year prison term in a strict regime camp, plus five years of internal exile. The sentence led to long transfers in
* The following is a keynote speech delivered at the “The Trauma of Communism” conference, June 30, 2021. Myroslav Marynovych is the Vice Rector of the Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv and Gulag survivor. The speech has been included in its original format.
special wagons to transit prisons, long imprisonment in a strict regime camp in the Urals, hunger strikes and strikes on work, hunger and cold of dungeons, searches and confiscations, and starting from April 1984 – three years in exile in Kazakhstan. Even if you count without pre-trial prosecution, it is ten years altogether. I was arrested when I was 28 years old. I returned to Ukraine at the age of 38 being, at first, pardoned and, later in 1991, rehabilitated.
And all this – only for the action that the communist government considered a crime: the desire to protect human rights, including the right to criticize one’s own government. This is what gives me the moral right to speak here before you. And I will base my further reflections on my thoughts, expressed in the book of my memoir “The Universe behind Barbed Wire”, just published by University of Rochester Press.
So, let’s get started.
I know in many circles in the Western European area there is strong opposition to the equalization of the Nazi and communist regimes. Of course, I will not deny that these regimes differ in many ways. Take at least this: it is still a question which regime is responsible for more victims. Moreover, if the Nazis destroyed mostly foreign nations, the Communists led to the bloody Calvary, first, of their own population. This conclusion, of course, is not an attempt to somehow excuse Nazi criminals. The twentieth century gave birth to two Siamese monsters, whose heads grew out of one body of violence. And any reasoning, which one is better, and which is worse, becomes morally insane. However, it is important to understand how these regimes differ to understand the roots and causes of their criminality.
There is one characteristic point: the Nazis happily wore buckles on their belts with the proud inscription: “Gott mit uns”. Of course, there was nothing but name name left from God. But for
the communists, such an inscription would be an insult, because atheism was the basis of communist doctrine. The famous Bolshevik Anatoliy Lunacharsky claimed:
Christian love is an obstacle to the spread of our revolution. Away with love of neighbor! What we need is hatred. We must learn to hate, because only then can we gain the world!
I remember one moment from my trial in March 1978. While attempting to justify my position yet again, I wanted to refer to a quote from Lenin that was relevant and would have directly vindicated my actions. I started, “Even Lenin himself said...” Suddenly the judge, realizing what was about to follow, cut me off and shouted in his pathetic falsetto: “Do not utter the name Lenin! Coming from you it sounds like blasphemy!” To me, this is a brilliant confirmation of the French historian Alain Besançon’s1 thesis on the quasi-religious basis of Communist ideology.
The communist regime set itself the goal of destroying the Judeo-Christian foundation of European civilization. Therefore, at all stages of communist rule, the first victims were people of faith who were the bearers of morality and religious culture dangerous to the communists: the clergy, religious, and intellectuals. That is why the whole hierarchy of my Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church and the steadfast clergy who did not submit to the atheistic communist government were arrested. In this way, society was “cleansed” of all those who, in biblical language, “did not worship the image of the beast” (Rev 13:15). Since then, Communist-ruled Eastern Europe was inhabited by people whose spiritual world was distorted according to a new ideological paradigm.
In both totalitarianisms a new type of man is created: in communist society – the type of homo sovieticus, for Nazis – the type of Übermensch. The triumph of uncontrolled and excessive evil infect-
1 Ален Безансон. Лихо століття: Про комунізм, нацизм та унікальність Голокосту. Київ: “Пульсари” 2007, с. 65–71.
ed man, induced currents of hatred and aggression in this man, and strengthened the animal instincts in him. Proof of this is the paroxysm of violence which engulfed both the Nazi concentration camps and the vast Gulag continent, the entire territory of the tragic communist experiment. It was here that the words of Henri de Lubac were confirmed: “The history of mankind has shown that man is quite capable of building a society without God, but this society is inhuman.”
From the point of view of the average Christian mentality, both types were immoral. In fact, as Zdzisław Krasnodębski rightly remarked, both types were not a-moral: “Neither fascism nor communism were nihilistic: without the ethical mobilization of their supporters and the appeal to their ‘ethos,’ they would not have lasted long.”2
Each type had its own, clearly expressed, albeit biased morality. In one case, man considered moral what was “beneficial to the proletariat,” in the other, what was “beneficial to the Aryan race.” In both cases, the new morality initially, it would seem, disciplined society, stopped the process of its degradation, and even filled it with a certain dynamism. However, quasi-morality cannot replace absolute morality. The only thing it manages to do is relativize it. Thus, in the case of both totalitarianisms, the destabilizing effect of the “profitable” logic turned out to be their most lasting legacy. Today the winds have blown away the benefits of the proletariat and the benefits of the Aryan race, but what is left is “moral is what benefits me.”
It was exactly this type of a “new man” that became the main Achilles’ heel of Eastern Slavic societies that broke free from communist captivity. It is this type that becomes the main tool and, at the same time, the victim of propaganda manipulations by the Putin regime, in which the Chekist (KGB) principle of social engineering
2
Здзіслав Краснодембський. На постмодерністських роздоріжжях культури. Київ: “Основи” 2000, с. 128.
has been reincarnated. Therefore, let the souls of all those innocently killed forgive me, but sometimes it seems to me that the greatest victims of communism were not those who perished, but those who survived. For they could survive only by giving to Caesar what rightfully belonged to God. That is why the most important revolution that the post-communist world needs is a value revolution, a spiritual revolution.
The replacement of God by Caesar influenced another substitution: instead of the rule of law, the rule of ideology, or the rule of the will of the Communist Party, was established. This distorted the entire legal system, turned critics of the communist system into “enemies of the people” or “especially dangerous state criminals.” I was classified among the “especially dangerous state criminals” after my trial. In response to my ironic remark that for the Soviet government, critics of the system are more criminals than murderers, my investigator seriously confirmed: “Yes, it is true. A murderer kills one or two people, while you dissidents infect large masses of people.”
In such a system, the most important task of the ordinary person is to survive. And it was possible to survive by launching the main values of survival: political and ideological loyalty, the ability to adapt to ideological changes, which was ironically called “fluctuating with the party line.” And – the willingness to harass those who fell into disfavor with the communist government.
In the 1990s, the communist doctrine crumbled like a cardboard house, but the trauma it inflicted on the legal consciousness of the Communist-ruled nations proved persistent. Only those peoples who remembered the traditions of civilized justice were able to restore the rule of law, at least partially. However, as we see today, this trauma is still felt even by such incomparably more successful states such as Poland and Hungary.
According to Hernando de Soto’s theory, it is only those normally mentally close to the population which are able to take root in countries. This may explain why Russia, and, in part, Belarus has in fact returned to raping the logic of law, while Ukraine, having got rid of the most drastic practices of totalitarianism, still suffers from corruption conspiracy and “telephone law”; from the practice of “selective justice” and “political expediency.” In fact, it is an imitation of the rule of law inherited from communist times. There are exceptions, of course, but they only confirm the rule, as it corresponds to an unspoken social contract.
Sometimes people know in their souls that corruption and lawlessness are bad, but they do not see or do not want to see any other way to survive. Just as it goes in the proverb: “A bird in hand is worth two in the bush.” That is why they are trying to somehow adapt to the current legal disorder. But such adaptation is also a legacy of the communist regime. Moreover, by avoiding the fight against evil, the post-Soviet man somehow acts in its favor. Edmund Burke articulated it thus: “The only thing that is needed for the triumph of evil is that good people do nothing.”
Therefore, evil must be stopped, and Eastern Europe will not overcome the trauma of communism until it opposes the solidarity of a corruption conspiracy with solidarity in upholding the rule of law.
And let me now focus on other important aspects of the trauma.
Before starting this section, I have to make some remarks. I would love to speak about the camaraderie of my prison friends and the nobility of sacrifice of those persecuted. After all, the chronicle of Satan’s deeds is not as majestic as the shining traces of God’s light in human beings. However, communism has not gone into the abyss,
so, speaking about its reincarnations, I must make my voice more condemnatory than I wish.
The aforementioned inability of political elites in Eastern Europe to launch a rule of law raises one important question: did dissidents do the right thing by refusing to bring their persecutors to justice after the fall of the Soviet Union? At that time, the desire to start over from scratch prevailed; there was a hope: “We will not prosecute you – you will break with your past and establish democracy.”
In my essay “The Atonement of Communism,” I even concluded: “The crime of communism is the crime of Cain, who raised his hand against his brother. This crime is too great to be tried by a human court.” Today, we dissidents must self-critically and confessionally analyze whether such an attitude was correct.
However, in my opinion, another question is legitimate, too: did Western Europe rightly warn Eastern Europe against hosting Nuremberg II? I was personally persuaded by my Western partners: “Forget, do not stir the past. Move forward!” However, with weights on your feet you will not go far. Europe has forgotten that crime is turning into the past only when it is condemned and there is repentance. Otherwise, the unrepentant crimes return with new tragedies. The last 30 years since the collapse of the USSR testify to the correctness of this conclusion.
Impunity makes a crime attractive and a criminal unrepentant. He hardly respects those who do not punish him for the crime. On the contrary, he despises them because he interprets forgiveness as a weakness. Therefore, a just punishment for a crime is not revenge, but the necessary removal from the public body of those seeds which are infected with violence. Without that, society turns into a large cancerous growth.
It is this tumor that Eastern Europe has been transformed into today – giving birth to a new monster, the Putin regime. If this conclusion sounds politically incorrect, then let me remind you: the principles of Putin and his elite are deception, imitation,
falsification, treachery, dishonesty, cunning, aggression, violence, annexation, gas and trade blackmail, theft, contract killings. This enumeration can go on indefinitely, turning the usual principles of civilization upside down, but they are all, without exception, the defining attributes of the reincarnated communist devil, which once again has ambitions to end the “rotten” West and become the founder of a “new and successful antidemocratic order.”
The West is afraid of such a “demonization” of a government, because in a world of “usual” conflicts, excessive demonization of the enemy is the main obstacle to reconciliation. That is why Western politicians are surprisingly dogmatic in applying modern, politically correct win-win patterns to the Putin regime, stubbornly refusing to admit that they are dealing with a dangerous metastasis of communism that humanity has left unoperated. This takes us to the historical wrongdoing behind the 1945 Yalta Accords.
As you know, Putin has made victory in the Second World War a dominant event in the narrative of Russia’s history, which no one has dared to scrutinize. However, behind the fabrications of this truly great conquest lies the mystery of the greatest falsification of the twentieth century. The 1945 Yalta Conference led to an immense injustice: a double standard in evaluating the criminal behavior of the two totalitarian regimes. The Nazi regime was publicly condemned, while Communist crimes were kept hidden for security reasons and were never held accountable, legally, or morally. The official European narrative of history became one-sided: the Nazi regime was considered the “ultimate evil,” while Communist crimes were considered a Slavic aberration from a potentially ideal concept, that of communism. In other words, who cares that there might be some dark spots on an otherwise sparkling external façade? After all, they did help bring down the Nazi regime, and the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
As a result, the world heard of the suffering of the victims of the Gestapo, but it failed to pay due attention to all the pain inflicted by the KGB on millions of victims. The tragedies of Auschwitz, Treblinka, Buchenwald, and Guernica became classic examples of crimes against humanity, while Solovki, the Holodomor, the Siberian Gulag, and the crimes at Katyń were seen as regrettable events which are best not mentioned.3 It was an irony of history: apocalyptic evil came to be seen as the savior of mankind.
So, when the fugitive from the USSR, Andrei Kravchenko, published in the West in 1946 a book “I Chose Freedom” with incriminating materials about the communist regime, there was a fierce uproar in Europe. France and Italy organized trials of Kravchenko for speaking out against the good “Uncle Joe” – Stalin, a kind of savior of mankind from the Nazis. The world would have to wait for Solzhenitsyn with his “The Gulag Archipelago” to break down this curtain of silence.
However, the demonic evil power at the core of the Communist system had to metastasize sooner or later; the world had to reap what it had left to germinate. That is why today we seem to hear the heavy tread of death from Mozart’s Requiem: 1999. A KGB pupil became president of the Russian Federation – and this was considered acceptable, because no one in the world considered the KGB as a criminal and terrorist organization, as was done with the Gestapo. 2005. Putin called the collapse of the Soviet Union “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century,” and Russia’s wounded pride began to resemble the wounded pride of Nazi Germany, humiliated by the 1920 Treaty of Versailles.
3 Solovki: early Soviet prison camp on the Solovetsky Islands in the White Sea, built on the site of a former monastery. Katyń: series of mass executions of Polish military officers carried out by the NKVD in the Katyń forest in April–May 1940.
2005. In Moscow, the doctrine of “protection of compatriots abroad” came into force, which almost literally repeated the relevant Nazi doctrine.
2008. Russia occupied part of Georgia and it became a fait accompli. Moreover, Russia vetoed the further movement of Georgia and Ukraine to NATO at the Bucharest summit.
2014. Russia occupied part of Ukraine and annexed the Crimean Peninsula, and, taking into account the recent proposal of Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron “to speak with Putin,” this also tends to become a fait accompli.
In recent years, having met no strong resistance, the Putin regime has waged a real cyber war with the West, launched biochemical attacks in the United Kingdom, and brutally intervened into inner conflicts in Montenegro, Syria, Venezuela, and several other countries. And above all, Russia has openly declared war on the current world order.
Well, in human history, every decline of the collective security system has meant a war that has changed the status quo. It is clear that civilized nations do not want war, but nevertheless this Third World War is already underway. We do not want to notice it, because we want to prevent nuclear war. However, the main weapon of the current hybrid World War III is a bomb filled with fake news. It leaves intact not only the infrastructure but also human bodies. Instead, it strikes human souls. It is a weapon not only of mass destruction, but also of deep penetration. It destroys the value foundations of society and its morals. For example, by disorienting people with fake information, it affects the results of democratic elections and destroys interpersonal and intergroup trust. As a result, human solidarity is becoming increasingly difficult to achieve.
Thus, the long-forgotten Communist crimes are beginning to pulse through current European history, and today they have matured into new tragedies. As long as Communist crimes are not recognized, brought to justice, and finally repented for, as long as
the still-looming legacy of the KGB is not brought before a jury, any hopes for peace and reconciliation are futile. Perhaps “soft power” is indeed stronger than “hard power,” but to this point all we have is “deceitful power.”
Obviously, at this stage, any possibility of condemning Communism is, as a Polish proverb puts it, “the wishful thinking of a severed head” ( marzenie ściętej głowy ). The West will try to avoid the possibility of a Third World War at any cost, betraying their basic values and principles, but in so doing they are actually bringing this war much closer to their doorstep. Because Benjamin Franklin was right, I will allow myself to replace only one word in his famous phrase: He who is ready to give up a handful of values for the sake of temporary security deserves neither values nor security.
Why? Because the formula “dialogue at any price” is too close to the logic of the market: if the seller knows that the buyer will buy his product at any cost, the price becomes higher and higher. And we have, indeed, been witnessing a steady rise in the price of peace over the last decade.
While recalling Franklin’s words quoted above, I am not calling for war with Russia. I just want to remind you that it cannot be avoided if you take the path of appeasing the aggressor. Let’s remember another famous saying– that by King George VI with which he addressed his people on September 3, 1939, explaining why Britain was entering the war: We have been forced into a conflict, for we are called, with our allies, to meet the challenge of a principle which, if it were to prevail, would be fatal to any civilized order in the world.4
The reincarnated communist system is exactly the principle that, if won, would be fatal to any civilized order in the world. That
4 https://www.awesomestories.com/asset/view/George-VI-King-s-SpeechSeptember-3-1939.
is why the world must accept the challenge of getting rid of the logic that James Sherr described quite ironically:
We [the West] are afraid not only of Russian power, but also of our own. We do not want to prepare for Russia’s defeat without its consent.5
However, the question remains:
How can humanity accept this challenge? And is there an alternative to the military path?
I will try to answer this with a counter-question: is military power the only power of the civilized world? Have we forgotten that values matter? Have we forgotten that the West won its main struggle primarily when it turned to the values contained in the DNA of human civilization? And finally, should we Christians passively watch humanity falling into the trap of military conflict, even though we are called by Christ to the value transformation of the earth? The least we can do is to reveal the true nature of the disaster that threatens the world.
The twenty-first century can be successful if it brings all the twentieth-century accounts to a close and does not allow them to poison our world today. This requires a total spiritual catharsis –that is, not only bringing all Communist crimes to justice but also seeing to it that they are atoned for. Repentance is not necessarily a political act but, above all, a spiritual one. Its rules are unique. This is how Russian writer Vladimir Sorokin described it with regard to his own country:
Repentance is only possible after a total shake-up. It is not a medicine that can be administered. I personally think that in Russia, voluntary
// http://www.dsnews.ua/politics/strategiya-rossii-i-reaktsiya-zapada-160 32016050100.
repentance is not possible. Before you can repent, you first have to get a good jolt. Only after you get a bump on the head and you rub it, asking yourself what you did wrong, will repentance be possible. In order to repent, you have to first see yourself from the side, without any embellishments[...]. We are not talking about a single person, but about a large country. The country must see itself objectively from the side, then acknowledge its sins, and only then, after a major catastrophe, can it repent. Who will repent when everything is hunky-dory?6
So, as the conclusion of my life experience, I have developed my own version of Martin Luther King’s I have a dream. I am convinced that the day will come when what is currently unattainable will happen:
1. Communist crimes against humanity will receive their day in court, and the nature of the Communist evil will be brought to light. The illusions and temptations that inevitably lead to the sin of Communism will be uncovered, as with the sin of Nazism in the past.
2. Putin and his clique, along with their satellites like Aleksandr Lukashenka or Viktor Yanukovych, will be brought to justice by an international tribunal for their attempts to reinstate their previous Communist evil under new flags and for trying to destroy the foundations of European civilization.
3. All former Communist countries, especially Russia, will experience their own catharsis and purge themselves of their Communist “demons,” collectively acknowledging their mistake in supporting and celebrating the Communist beast. Western Europe will also have to go through a similar catharsis because of its own infatuation with Communism, which in a way supported and legitimized the apocalyptic beast that was raging in Eastern Europe.
(http://kommersant.ru/doc/ 2786007).
4. After this shared repentance, the former Communist countries will cease to bear responsibility for their bloody past.
5. Only then will the blessed day arrive when spiritually cleansed nations will don the purified garments of Communist victims and achieve that which only victims have the right to do: to forgive.
It is only by collectively judging Communist crimes that civilized nations can attain final victory over Communism and thus transform formerly Communist bloody lands into places of true reconciliation and benevolence. This will jointly acknowledge their collective blame for celebrating this evil, and it will collectively pardon them for the evil they perpetrated in a state of Communist delirium.
I was born in Prague in 1948, the year the communists seized power in our country. Three days after my birth, I was baptized in the maternity hospital chapel. When I look at the photograph of that event, I can see four men leaning over me. Where was faith at that moment? My father left the Catholic Church at the age of seventeen after the fall of the Habsburg monarchy in 1918 under the influence of the “Away from Vienna, away from Rome” campaign. Both my godfathers, uncles from my mother’s and my father’s side of the family, had probably not attended a church service since their secondary-school years. Frankly speaking, I wouldn’t even vouch for the faith of the priest who christened me, who shortly afterwards became an official of the “Peace Movement of the Catholic Clergy,” which collaborated with the communist regime.
The baptismal seed was sown onto extremely fallow soil. The religion of our family – like that of the great majority of Czech intellectuals who reached adulthood at the end of World War I and then linked their lives with Masaryk’s interwar democracy – was belief in humanity, a moral code, scientific progress, and democracy. But the Christianness of that culture tended to remain “anonymous” and implicit; it tended to be folkloric and aesthetic rather than “devotional,” separated by a high wall from everything that happened within the confines of the church.
By then many people of that generation invited clergy only to christenings, and only rarely to weddings or funerals. And during the years that followed my birth it was neither easy nor safe to meet with a priest. Priests too began to disappear in those years – to
prisons and work camps, and some to the gallows. The persecution of the church and the omnipresent brutal propaganda against the church and religion became much more intense than in any of the surrounding countries of the “socialist camp,” including the Soviet Union itself.
It would seem that the Stalinists had chosen Czechoslovakia as the soil to experiment with the total atheization of society. In a sense they had favorable conditions for the experiment. The country’s dramatic religious history – the burning at the stake of Jan Hus at the Council of Constance in 1415, the five crusades against the heretical Czechs, the violent re-Catholicization of Bohemia in the seventeenth century, and the Catholic Church’s alignment with the Habsburg monarchy, all left their trace. Whereas the Poles regarded the Catholic Church as the main pillar of their national identity (in opposition to Orthodox Russia and Protestant Germany), modern Czech nationalism – an ideology created to fight for the emancipation of the Czech lands from Vienna, in other words, also from “Austrocatholicism” and Rome – regarded the Czech identity as scarcely compatible with Catholicism (“Romanism”). By the end of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, and particularly in the interwar years, the Czech lands, in contrast to agrarian Slovakia, could boast advanced industrialization and a high level of general education –circumstances naturally favorable to secularization. Traditional rural communities – a biosphere of a popular church and piety – retreated in the face of modern urban culture, and the Catholic Church was incapable of putting down roots in this new environment.
After the fall of the Austrian monarchy, a delegation of Czech Catholics, representing a considerable part of the Czech Catholic clergy, demanded reformist changes from Rome, including the democratization of the church, the introduction of the national language into the liturgy, the rehabilitation of Jan Hus, and voluntary celibacy. Rome’s response was resolute and took the form of a single word: Numquam! Never! Most of the reform-minded clergy
accepted it with clenched teeth, but a small percentage of clergy and laity left the Catholic Church at that time.
The Czech communists subsequently built into their ideology an older anti-clerical tradition, while radicalizing it and exaggerating it ad absurdum.
But how true is the assertion that the Czechs are an atheistic nation? The roots of Czech secularization and anti-clericalism are too deep to be simply regarded as the result of communist ideological brainwashing. First, it is a much older phenomenon which emerged historically as a defensive reaction to the church’s links with power, as well as to counter-Reformation triumphalism and the formalism of “Austro-Catholicism.” Secondly, when we study this phenomenon carefully, we can see its positive aspect: a certain inward modesty out of aversion to shallow piety. The “shy piety” of intellectuals seeking a somewhat abstract expression for their humanism – a humanism open to the “transcendental” – outside the boundaries of ecclesiastical terminology has a popular parallel in what I term “somethingism”: “I don’t believe in God, I don’t go to church, but I know there is something above us... I believe in “my own God.” I often say that “somethingism” is the most widespread religion among the Czechs. Maybe this phenomenon, which has existed here for a long time already, anticipated a similar development in several other European countries.
And indeed, anti-clericalism may be conceived of as an expression of a love-hate relationship, an unconscious manifestation of unrealistic expectations of the church, which were disappointed. With hindsight, the impression I have is that communist persecution in this country helped the church in a way. Its solely formal aspects fell away. A major role was played by the life testimony of imprisoned priests; very many of those who endured communist prisons and labor camps in the 1950s either underwent conversion as the result of the influence of those priests, or at least acquired for the rest of their lives a great respect for priests and the church, and
for faith. Czechs often instinctively sympathize with the persecuted. Paradoxically, when atheistic propaganda was forced on people, sympathy for the church increased, particularly among the intelligentsia and young people, and this reached its peak just before the fall of communism.
There is one area in which the communists were successful: most Czechs born under the communist regime virtually never encountered the living church, and that “shy piety” never directly encountered Christian culture. “Somethingism” is burdened by “religious illiteracy.” That is why my country might appear to be “atheistic” at a superficial glance. *
I have a vague memory of television pictures of the suppression of the Hungarian Uprising in November 1956, when I must have been in the second grade. My father spoke about how the communist regime would collapse one day, and my mother scolded him for talking about it in my hearing. Politics was not spoken about much at home in those days. I suspected that my parents’ attitudes conflicted with the school’s ideology, but it did not interest me too much during my childhood.
I first became avidly interested in politics when I was sixteen or seventeen. I started to listen regularly to Western radio stations, particularly Voice of America and Radio Free Europe, and read Masaryk’s writings on democracy. At high school I started to take a great interest in philosophy. At that time, I started to read Nietzsche, and I have returned to his writings repeatedly at various periods of my life.
That was already the beginning of the 1960s. A breath of freedom started to be felt in cultural circles despite the regime. New films were appearing, along with small-scale theatres and exhibitions of abstract art. There was a wave of interest in Kafka and existentialism. Prague’s intellectual circles were increasingly coming alive.
The balance of power in society had altered considerably. Of course, there was still the secret police, but at least we youngsters did not come into conflict with them so much, and they did not make their presence felt to the same degree as in former years. There were fewer cases of political imprisonment, and it was mostly writers who had problems with them. Some high-profile writers’ congresses were held, and speeches by opposition authors as well as other interesting texts began to circulate among the people. However, the phenomenon of “samizdat” (clandestine publication of books and magazines) did not exist yet by any means, nor political dissent of any great influence as there would be in the seventies and eighties.
When I started to write youthful philosophizing essays (which gave way to historical novels in the course of my time at high school), religious themes spontaneously emerged in them for the first time. I began to acknowledge some transcendent life principle, although it was still far removed from the Gospel and the Catholic Church in particular.
I was about seventeen when I started to show an avid interest in religions of every kind. But it was quite a long time before I opted for Christianity. I had absolutely no experience of the living church. When “some kind of God” started to appear more frequently in my essays on philosophical texts – such as Rádl’s “Consolation from Philosophy,” some of Plato’s dialogues, or Unamuno’s “The Tragic Sense of Life” – it did not remotely occur to me that it had anything in common with the church, or that I perhaps ought to seek out a priest and discuss it with him. That first phase of my “conversion” took the form of a kind of shift toward a “philosophical life.”
During one vacation I started to read the Bible, starting at the very beginning. This is the usual mistake of potential converts. They have no one to tell them that the Bible is not “a book” but rather a library, and so, without any explanation of its structure,
they start to read it as a novel and generally give up somewhere in those interminable passages of liturgical regulations in Leviticus. Nevertheless, the Lord would seem to understand this gesture of first reaching for the Bible. And so, such fledgling readers of Scripture, even if they seldom learn much from their own reading, begin on their own to reflect more on God and relate to Him, so that these reflections lead to the first tentative steps on the path of prayer and contemplation. That is what happened to me too. I found out that there was a place of pilgrimage not far away, and I made a whole day visit to it. During my journey I wanted to decide whether I believed in God. Maybe something really did happen during that walk, some sort of transition from intellectual interest to personal faith. On that hilltop I said the Lord’s Prayer and asked God to give me light. I returned with the feeling that I truly believed in God.
In retrospect I ask myself to what extent my first turning toward religion was part of the political protest of those days. Of course, like many other young people I too started to sympathize a priori with everything that the communists railed against. In the mid-sixties I eagerly read Chesterton’s “Orthodoxy” during the Christmas vacation. Chesterton delighted me with his provocative treatment of modern prejudices, his polemical art, and his brilliant ability to look at things from another, surprising angle. That book showed me I could find a home in Christianity, and it helped me to articulate my own philosophy.
At that time one of my classmates informed me that there was a priest at the Týn Church on the Old Town Square who gave terrific, witty sermons. I had an immediate liking for Fr. Jiří Reinsberg, the priest in question. If he had gone around in a clerical collar like some “reverend father” in the old films, we would have immediately categorized him and thus “written him off.” But because he was unconventional, we started to wonder what actually constituted
priesthood, what was the “x factor” that turned this modern man, who always wore everyday clothes and with whom we could largely identify, into a priest? It was clearly not a black clerical gown, a reserved tone of voice, or a pious inclination of the head.
Although a “political thaw” of sorts was underway at that time, priests were still under strict surveillance. Any contact with young people could immediately lead to the cancellation of their “official permission to perform clerical activity,” and choosing between manual work or attending regular police interrogations involving blackmail and coercion to collaborate with the secret police. The Týn church, however, was an exception in a certain sense; it was one of those “show windows” for tourists, allowing them to see a functioning church in the center of Prague and so conclude we had religious freedom.
Gradually, Sunday by Sunday, I shifted from my safe distance near the church door, pillar by pillar, closer and closer to the pulpit and the altar.
In 1966, the year I graduated from high school and moved on to the Arts Faculty of Charles University, I was gradually making up my mind to take the next step of faith: to go to confession and communion. It seemed to me that a whole-life confession could be the threshold to the new way of life that I longed for. During the long vacation after graduation from high school I finally made up my mind, and in mid-September 1966 I went to see Fr. Reinsberg. I went to confession and then walked up to the Castle and took communion for the first time after the mass for St. Wenceslas at St. Vitus Cathedral.
The first Catholic authors I read after Chesterton were Jacques Maritain and Romano Guardini. It wasn’t until the Prague Spring that I had access to books published by the exile Czech Christian Academy in Rome or books smuggled to us through various channels – Teilhard de Chardin, Karl Rahner, Hans Küng, Thomas Merton, and others. My more systematic study of theology commenced with Ratzinger’s “Introduction to Christianity” and Kasper’s “Com-
ing to Faith.” But for many years I was escorted along my journey to faith by novels rather than theological writings: the books of Graham Greene, Heinrich Böll, Francois Mauriac, or Georges Bernanos. And when I introduced others to the world of faith, I also preferred to lend them similar literature rather than the catechism.
The spring of 1968 was the spring of my life, the spring of my faith, and a new spring of the church in the wake of the Second Vatican Council, and everything around us and within us was imbued with the intoxicating springtime scent of hope for a loosening of the political system and greater freedom. Only much later did many of us realize with hindsight the international significance of 1968, which we chiefly perceived in the light of the dramatic local events associated with the Prague Spring and the subsequent Russian occupation.
Just before the Prague Spring arrived, I made my first trip to the West. My first direct contact with the West was not particularly encouraging, however. It was a student exchange with the Catholic university of Tilburg in autumn 1967 – a harbinger of the relaxation that would arrive the following spring. I was greatly looking forward to experiencing a Catholic university for the first time. When we arrived in Holland, we suddenly found ourselves right at the center of post-Vatican II ferment. I had already read Jacques Maritain and his “Integral Humanism” at home. I immediately asked the Dutch students if they had any books by Maritain and Mounier. They burst out laughing, saying that such authors had not been read for thirty years. They reeled off the names of the new theologians, such as Schillebeeckx, Chenu, Küng, and others of whom I hadn’t the slightest inkling. They also told me that there was to be a discussion that very evening on the topic: “God is dead and has now left his mausoleum: the Catholic Church.” Their student chaplain had married, and they were organizing a demonstration against the bishop in his support. That all was really a bit too hard for me to take.
It is not surprising that the young wine of “Catholic neomodernism” shocked me in those days. It was a classic case of “culture shock” like the one that many Czech Catholics, clergy and laity alike, suffered a quarter of a century later when the borders opened after the fall of communism. A similar shock continues to color the attitude of some Christians in “the East” to the Western churches. Naturally those of us who had lived under the pressure of the communist regime were not at all accustomed to students at a Catholic university criticizing bishops, the authority of the church, or the Vatican. When the church is subjected to harsh external pressure it understandably behaves like an army unit in the trenches – it is not the right moment to criticize the captain. It was only much later, after 1989, that I realized how much our rather artificial unity had cost us. We had never developed what the Germans call “Streitkultur” – the culture of disputation; we had no experience of a free society or church in which different currents naturally exist, and in which polemic – including a critical attitude to church authorities –need not give rise to personal animosity and accusations of heresy. In the face of an external enemy, we underestimated and subconsciously concealed from ourselves the fact that there existed many marked differences of opinion and mentality among us.
After I returned from Holland, I encountered certain Catholic circles who offered me a simple interpretation of my first experience of the post-Vatican II church in the West: The Council had been the work of “Trojan horses” in the church – Jews and Freemasons working to undermine the church from within. These were the results! It was necessary to stick closely to tradition and the magisterium as much as possible and prevent all attempts to introduce the “Vatican II spirit” into our church.
I think that my brief experience with that milieu helped me understand the attitudes and psychology of Catholic integrism. For a while I really believed those opinions. Only later did I realize that Czech Catholics’ mature acceptance and understanding of Vatican
II was held back by our paltry knowledge of the theology that inspired it. When many of our clergy in public ministry – who, of course, knew virtually nothing about such authors as Karl Rahner, Urs von Balthasar, Joseph Ratzinger, Henri de Lubac, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Edward Schillebeeckx, Hans Küng or others – had to put into practice the decisions of the Council, they by and large perceived it solely as some sort of “order from on high.” That resulted in purely formal changes, such as turning the altar toward the people and celebrating the liturgy in the national language. But the mentality, theology, and preaching of most priests in public ministry was fixed in the spiritual climate of the period long before Vatican II. So long as changes, mostly just changes in the liturgy, were not accompanied by reflection on their own experience or by theological study, they remained shallow and artificial. Although those clergy mostly fulfilled “the letter” of the Council’s changes, at least formally, they never properly understood the Council or accepted it in their hearts. We can still feel the effects of that in our church, and not only among the older generation of priests, alas. I am not even surprised that some young clergy and seminarians nowadays reject that superficial form of the post-Vatican II church. Unfortunately, instead of thoroughly studying the tradition and spiritual renewal, they sometimes react by throwing in their lot with superficial traditionalism, which is often an unintentional tragi-comic caricature of Catholicism of the renovation period.
I was personally cured of that brief influence of Catholic integrists by what happened in 1968, and for three reasons. Firstly, I came to maturity by and large, and this was thanks to my dramatic personal experience of that year. Secondly, I heard the message of Vatican II from the mouths of priests who had proved their fidelity to Christ, the church, and the pope by their years in prison, and no one could suspect them of being closet enemies or “Trojan horses” in the church. Around the time of the “Prague Spring” in 1968 I came to know several other excellent priests, some of whom had
only recently returned from many years in prison. Thirdly, I was able to spend some time in the West toward the end of 1968 and form a more objective opinion.
The idea of a priestly vocation had naturally crossed my mind before 1968; such thoughts take hold of most converts. During the summer holidays of 1968, I took advantage of the opportunity to travel to the West and went on an English course in Great Britain. There I was caught up in the news of the occupation of Czechoslovakia by the Warsaw Pact armies. Like many Czechoslovaks, I was faced with the dilemma of whether to return to my occupied homeland or stay in the West. I spent a trimester studying at Bangor University in North Wales. The final decision to reject the possibility of exile and to stay in my occupied country was mainly due to the sacrifice of Jan Palach, a student of our faculty, who set himself on fire to encourage opposition to the occupiers.
The first clearer thoughts about priesthood came to my mind during August 1968, when we sat on the steps of the Czech exile center in London at night listening to the free radio transmissions and wondering how to respond to the rape of our country. The thoughts resurfaced with more urgency around the funeral of Jan Palach and grew stronger throughout 1969.
In those days there was only one seminary for priests in the Czech lands, and by then it was once more totally under the control of the communist state, represented by its “Secretary for Church Affairs,” and the secret police. As it had been throughout the communist rule – apart from the brief period of the Prague Spring –only candidates who had no previous academic education could enter the seminary. So that was not the path to take; I had to seek another route.
I could not take the route of the official priestly seminary or the theological faculty. Even after ordination the work of priests was not controlled by the bishops (at the time of my graduation almost all the posts of bishop that had been filled during the Prague Spring
were once more vacant), but by officials of the Communist Party described as “secretaries for church affairs.” The latter were empowered to arbitrarily cancel priests’ official authorization to pursue their ministry, or to assign them to defunct parishes in the border regions if they committed the most serious offence in the eyes of officialdom, which was contact with young people.
At the end of 1970, I had an important conversation with a Jesuit, Fr. Mikulášek, about my desire to join the Society of Jesus. On that occasion he sketched out his vision of future priests: they should have a dual vocation, following a profession in secular life, and being above all a presence for non-believers and seekers. That greatly appealed to me; Fr. Reinsberg had previously lent me an inspirational book by Henri Perrin about the French worker-priest. I spent the 1972–73 period in compulsory military service. At first it was quite a pleasant time because I was doing office work and did not have much to do for most of the day. I made use of the office, where I lived a virtually monkish life. I had a carefully concealed breviary and the Exercises of St. Ignatius. Part of the Ignatian spiritual exercises is making a “choice of status.” So, I meditated on my priestly vocation. On New Year’s Day 1972 I said a definite yes to my yearning for priesthood.
I had requested an interview with Fr. Václav Dvořák, a priest who was then employed in a Prague antiquarian bookshop after years of imprisonment. We spent about three hours talking. During our conversation he divulged to me that there existed a secret, strictly clandestine, priestly community, which was similar to the secular institute in form. All members had secular occupations and lived in the world; their focus was not the usual pastoral activity but discreet witness among non-believers, a discreet and profound “sanctification of the world.”
That community already had a history dating back to the time of World War II. Its remarkable founder had to emigrate after 1948, and the community went through the hard times of the 1950s. Its
spiritus agens in those days was ordained secretly in dramatic circumstances while a member of a punishment battalion in the army. During the Prague Spring they had contacted French worker priests and realized that their spirituality and activity were similar. They had resisted the temptation to come out into the open and were now continuing their strictly clandestine activity. They met three times a year, and the purpose of their activity was not to duplicate public pastoral ministry, but rather to work in depth, and each member of the community would specialize in one area. Their concern was to explore spiritually and theologically the relationship between a civilian occupation and the priesthood. They did not regard their situation as something imposed by circumstances but as an opportunity for the church to acquire new experience, which would be necessary in the future when, God willing, the church would be able to operate freely. That concept of priesthood is not a “part-time job,” however, but pervades one’s entire life, including one’s civilian occupation. It was a question of fully living that experience while thoroughly reflecting on it theologically.
When I returned from military service, I told Fr. Dvořák I had decided to join that community. He found a priest who would take care of me and be my spiritual guide and “tutor” for the overall preparation. On October 1, 1973, I had my first meeting with him, and from that moment we worked together intensively for ten years.
When I had completed roughly five years of spiritual training and theological study, my superiors came to the opinion after a series of interviews and meetings that the time had come for me to be ordained. In our community, however, it was taken for granted that a priest’s spiritual training and self-education was a lifelong task and a natural dimension of his life.
In Erfurt, at the beginning of June 1977, I was secretly ordained deacon. The ordination took place in the private chapel of Bishop Aufderbeck. The Church in the GDR was marginalized, but life within it was relatively free compared to us, at least.
After that everything was prepared for my secret ordination to the priesthood, and I was only waiting for the clandestine message to come from Germany when we received the news of the death of Pope Paul VI and shortly afterwards, of his successor John Paul I.
Just before my departure I went to my confessor to make a whole-life confession. Then we prepared on a small table everything necessary for the mass and switched on the radio for a moment as the conclave happened to be in progress in the Vatican. From Vatican Radio there came an exciting announcement, interrupting the usual program and switching over to St. Peter’s Square: “Annuntio vobis gaudium magnum! Habemus papam!” – A pope from the East! I was thunderstruck. There were no words to express our joy. Immediately the cardinal’s words ended, we commenced the mass – maybe the first mass in the world in the reign of the new pope.
The very next day was fixed for my departure. In Erfurt a red banner was strung out along the entire length of the station, with a quotation from Lenin: “Sparks create a flame.” So do ours, I said to myself, but ours will blaze much longer than yours. Before the actual ordination ceremony, I spent three hours in private prayer in the chapel of the Ursuline Sisters. I was driven to the bishop’s house on the back seat of a car covered by a coat. Although the Catholic Church in the GDR had greater freedom, nevertheless we could not be sure whether the entrance to the bishop’s residence was monitored by a camera of the East German secret police. It was Saturday October 21, 1978. I was ordained priest by Bishop Aufderbeck in the private chapel of his residence. Very early the next morning I celebrated my first mass. After the mass the bishop and I went to watch the live broadcast of the pope’s enthronement on West German television and heard his first homily on St. Peter’s Square, which culminated with the words “Do not be afraid!” I realized that I must have been the first priest
to have been ordained during his pontificate and wondered whether I would ever have the opportunity to meet him in person and share that fact with him; over eleven years would pass before it happened.
It was obvious to me at that time that ordination as a clandestine priest involved serious risks. I never really expected to live to see freedom for the church. I thought it was much more likely that sooner or later the police would find me out and I would be gotten rid of in one way or another.
The community of priests that I belonged to operated cautiously, covertly, and based on strict secrecy, and this proved to be a prudent strategy. Priests risked several years’ imprisonment for the “crime of impeding the state supervision of churches and religious societies” – which in our days usually carried a two-year sentence – but they could also be charged with “collaboration with foreign enemies,” and goodness knows what else. However, there was no longer any risk of a death sentence or imprisonment for life for “spying for the Vatican” as there had been in the 1950s.
“The underground church” or “illegal church structures” were what the secret police called us. We never regarded ourselves as some special church “alongside” or even “against” the church that officially functioned in Czechoslovakia. We wanted to prevent the church from being reduced to the bare minimum of activity permitted by the atheist regime – essentially the liturgy and the repair of church buildings – which many members of the laity and even the clergy were beginning to become accustomed to. In the ranks of the officially active clergy, we carefully distinguished between many self-sacrificing priests whom we deeply respected, and with whom we cooperated where possible, and the officials of the regime-sponsored “Association of Catholic Clergy – Pacem in Terris,” who could be seen embracing the communist bigwigs in front of the TV cameras. We concentrated on what was officially forbidden: spiritual exercises, study groups, and attempts at a kind
of “categorial pastoral activity,” particularly in areas familiar to us, and which were strictly prohibited by the communists, such as work with students and young intellectuals. In the latter activity we intentionally collaborated with some “officially” permitted clergy. Later still I chiefly prepared candidates for the priesthood, assisting their studies and spiritual training, and giving them exercises prior to their ordination. In some cases, I was witness to their secret ordination, mostly in Berlin in the private chapel of Cardinal Meisner, or at night in the crypt in St. Hedwig’s Cathedral.
We strove to understand what God was telling us by permitting this state of the church. Was he inviting us to multiply our pastoral activities, or instead to meditate honestly on the “signs of the times” and reappraise many things that the church had become fixated on in the recent past? We considered the classical territorial network of parishes to be outmoded. Josef Zvěřina wrote a text entitled “A Third Way,” in which he sought to defend this form of priesthood linked with civilian occupation as a legitimate model alongside those of parish priests and priests in monastic orders. We gave thought to a theology and spirituality for this path of ministry. The “underground church” essentially comprised three groups. The “unofficial structures’’ covered those who had been publicly ordained but whom the state had subsequently banned from pursuing their public ministry, so that they were obliged to work in civilian – often unskilled – jobs, such as night porters, lavatory cleaners, or boiler operators. They pursued their pastoral activity only clandestinely. They included, for instance, my friend Miloslav Vlk, the future Archbishop of Prague and cardinal, who was employed as a window cleaner because his “state permit” had been revoked. But the actual core of the “hidden church” were those who had never received a “state permit” because they had been ordained secretly, either abroad or in Czechoslovakia. We did not all know each other by any means. It was not a coordinated network with a single organizing structure, but rather a whole number of groups which
worked autonomously, and whose members knew only a few people outside of their own group. We were not curious about each other’s details because we knew that at future interrogations, they would not be able to beat out information we didn’t have. Apart from our own circle I only knew a few others who were ordained abroad, either in the GDR or Poland, or exceptionally – around the year 1968 – in the West. They were mostly members of religious orders, chiefly Salesians, Franciscans, Dominicans, and Premonstratensians, or people from quasi-monastic communities recognized by Rome, like our own. Monastic life, particularly that of men’s orders, was virtually eliminated and forced into illegality by the communist regime in a single April night in 1950. That night all the monasteries and convents were invaded by the police and the members of orders were transported to several locations, from where many were transferred to forced labor units or punishment detachments of the army, and some were put on trial and sentenced to lengthy penal servitude in prison or in the uranium mines.
Members of orders who survived that period or who joined orders clandestinely spent decades protesting against that genocide by their underground activity and heroically kept alive one of the fundamental dimensions of the life of the church. And even some priests who graduated from seminary and operated officially as parish priests secretly took monastic vows. This gave rise to many ideas and practical experience, which I believe could lead to a greater “aggiornamento” of the orders in the conditions of secular society; I think it is a sin that that hard won experience is ignored nowadays.
Among the underground priests there were also those who had been ordained by Czech or Slovak bishops who themselves had been secretly ordained. The genesis of that branch of the clandestine church dated back to before the communist putsch. Pius XII anticipated communism’s expansion to the other countries of eastern and central Europe and therefore adopted several preparatory measures
for a period of persecution. These measures included the instruction to each of the bishops in Czechoslovakia to ordain an auxiliary bishop to serve in the event of their being imprisoned, sent to a concentration camp, or executed. It now appears that Pius XII expected that the period of repression would be exceptionally harsh (which is why he encouraged priests to accept martyrdom), but of short duration. He did not believe that the victory of cCommunism would be long-lasting or indeed permanent, which is also why he opposed any compromise with the communists. Those who were willing to come to terms with the communist regime in any way were liable to ecclesiastical sanctions; there was the threat of excommunication for reading the communist press. That was the spirit of the pastoral letter circulated by Prague Archbishop Josef Beran, protesting the first measures taken against the church and religious freedom by the communist government. Any priest who read that letter from the pulpit was blacklisted by the regime.
Some of the measures taken by the Vatican just prior to the 1950s were unsuccessful, however. The names of secretly ordained bishops were soon discovered. It is said that some worthy monsignor in the Vatican, under the impression that the purple buttons on his cassock and the physical proximity of the tomb of the apostolic princes were sufficient guarantee of intelligent decision-making, allowed their names to be printed in the official documents of the Holy See, where they were read with interest by Soviet agents. Those secretly ordained were rounded up and imprisoned often even before the sitting bishops were forced out of their residences and ceased to perform their duties.
Likewise, the Vatican’s assessment of the viability of the communist regimes turned out to be wrong. Later, during the pontificates of John XXIII, and particularly of Paul VI, the Vatican authorities concluded that it was necessary to reassess the hardline approach to the communist regimes, which had not achieved the anticipated results, and that a new strategy should be formulated chiefly in
coordination with those who had the most experience of the actual situation in those countries, in other words, the representatives of churches under communist rule. However, those who were able to speak officially on behalf of Czechoslovak Catholics, namely the vicars capitular who acted as would-be administrators of dioceses from the long-abandoned episcopal residences, were puppets of the communist regime and mouthpieces of their propaganda. The priests who supported the regime-sponsored “peace movement of catholic clergy” were obedient tools of the “pax sovietica.” Seemingly influenced by the global movement towards détente in the 1960s and the anticipated gradual liberalisation of the Soviet bloc the Holy See replaced its hardline cold-war tactics with a much more accommodating “Ostpolitik” conceived and headed for many years by Cardinal Cassaroli. In some countries, however – particularly Hungary – that policy of compromise and “small steps’ ‘ caused the church long-term damage by undermining its moral credibility. Fortunately, the Czechoslovak communist regime, almost throughout its existence – apart from a brief period during the Prague Spring – was so intransigent in its hostility toward the church that not even Cassaroli’s more amenable approach led to any compromises that might have made things slightly easier for the church but would have gravely compromised it in moral terms.
Let us return, however, to the origins of the “clandestine church” in the 1950s. It seems that before they were arrested, some of the secretly ordained bishops of the “first wave” managed to ordain further bishops to replace them. But by then the situation was such that the normal procedures for appointing bishops could not be followed, and there was no time or opportunity to ordain bishops according to papal appointment. However, in this matter canon law is inflexible: a bishop who ordains another bishop without papal appointment, and the bishop who accepts ordination in this way, faces the church’s severest penalty – excommunication. Was there per-
haps some possible dispensation for such extreme situations? Was it possible to assume that such procedures undertaken in good faith and on the basis of heroic sacrifice and a sense of responsibility for the church would be subsequently brought into line with canon law? Here we enter the labyrinth of conjecture regarding matters that remain a conundrum and painfully unresolved, not only in Bohemia, Moravia, and Slovakia, but also in China and other places where the church has found itself in extreme situations.
That was the beginning of the genealogy of one part of the clandestine church, which would later achieve notoriety particularly because of the activity of the Moravian clandestine bishop Felix Davídek. I never met Davídek, although from the end of the 1960s I heard a lot about him, particularly from priests who were in prison with him. From the reports I heard about him I got the impression that he was an exceptional individual who was on the borderline between genius and mental abnormality. Davídek undoubtedly had many remarkable intuitions, and enormous courage, but at the same time his assessment of the situation was not always realistic enough, and he lacked the patience of far-sightedness. A number of not entirely level-headed or reliable people clearly became involved in his grandiose structures. Moreover, “information noise” probably disrupted the clandestine negotiations with Rome, because of which Bishop Felix and his followers – in good faith, I am sure – considerably exceeded their authority. That was one of the stumbling blocks in the negotiations between his followers and the hierarchy after 1989. My guess is that the confusion was caused chiefly by the clandestinely ordained Bishop Hnilica, a Slovak Jesuit, who spent many years in exile in the West. I met with Hnilica several times around 1989, and I got the impression that he was an extremely unreliable person who was unable to distinguish between reality and his fantasies and wishes. It was above all Hnilica’s reports that presumably convinced Davídek that the pope was informed about his experiments and approved of them.
Felix Davídek ordained many priests, both celibate and married men. They accepted ordination in the conviction that Felix Davídek and his people had Rome’s permission, in our exceptional situation, to ordain Roman Catholics in the Eastern Rite, in which, throughout its history, it has been possible for married men to be ordained priest. Davídek ordained at least two women as Catholic priests. He justified it on the grounds of his expectation that in the seventies there would be a similar persecution of the Catholic Church as in the fifties, and that women Christians would find themselves in prison or concentration camps where there would be a need for the services of a priest. That was one of the reasons divisions started to occur among the priests and bishops in his “Koinotes” community. Davídek himself did not live to see the events of 1989.
Although Stalinist terror did not return after the suppression of the Prague Spring, we still lived in a police state. Even in the late 1980s harassment of the church and persecution of underground activities continued. From time to time the secret police would remind us of their presence by an unannounced visit to one’s apartment and an absurd checking of identity documents. It was a deterrent signal: Watch your step; we know about you! At other times, to the contrary, they did not interfere for a long time and would carefully conceal their surveillance in preparation for the moment when they would have enough documentation for arrest and indictment.
The Charter 77 movement, the election of a Polish pope, the emergence of the Solidarity trade union movement in Poland, and the change of direction in Western foreign policy – Carter’s emphasis on human rights and Reagan’s explicit declaration that the communist system was the Evil Empire, Mrs. Thatcher’s determination, and finally Gorbachov and his “perestroika” – all indicated that the Soviet empire was starting to be shaken to its
foundations. The Czechoslovak communist regime, however, still showed no signs of reform.
Sometime around 1983, Fr. Mádr contacted me and asked me to edit an underground magazine for Christian-oriented psychologists. Later, Mádr involved me in his other plans and activities. He revealed to me that he was setting up an advisory center, which would prepare a new direction within the church in response to newly emerging needs. It was intended to be a sort of brain trust for the ageing Cardinal Tomášek, whom he said we ought not to write off despite his age and cautiousness; after all, on several occasions, he had shown himself ready to use quiet diplomacy to defend persecuted priests. If the cardinal had had appropriate support from reliable and competent colleagues, he could have had the courage to go even further. The group should include representatives of the main male orders working clandestinely, as well as a few key priests representing individual dioceses (thus constituting an important point of contact between the “above ground” and “underground” church structures), together with some “open-minded” theologians like Josef Zvěřina, the editors of the most influential samizdat periodicals, and representatives of church movements and other active Catholic circles. Its first job would be to map out the overall situation, overcome fragmentation, and, in the absence of a bishops’ conference, to direct the life of the church. * * *
During the second half of the 1980s it became the custom for various foreign bishops to make trips to Prague to lend moral support to Cardinal Tomášek. Likewise foreign politicians on official visits would include an audience in the Archbishop’s Palace in their program. The regime was understandably concerned about its reputation abroad, so it was obliged to tolerate it grudgingly. This led to the growing political and diplomatic importance of the cardinal’s person and office. During those years the cardinal would quite often
invite me to those visits, officially as a volunteer guide to the churches and historical monuments. It was a welcome opportunity to escape premises that were wiretapped and inform the bishops truthfully about the situation of our church. I also used the occasion to ask about the situation in the West and their experience. They knew from the cardinal (and later from their brother bishops and some people in Rome) that I could be trusted absolutely, so they were as frank and open with me as I was with them.
This did not entirely escape the attention of the secret police, of course. In the secret police archives, which are now open to the public, there is a police report in which I am described as a particularly dangerous individual who helps prepare the cardinal’s texts and associates under the cardinal’s protection with top-level members of the Western hierarchy. “We have so far been unable to subdue his activity,” the report ends. That was around the beginning of 1989, when major changes were already in the air, and when the secret police tended to monitor dissident activity rather than eliminate it.
In early autumn 1989, when the definitive date for the canonization of Agnes of Bohemia was fixed, it was decided that it would take place in Rome, although the Czech Catholics had been hoping that the pope would come to Prague to canonise her. Everyone waited to see what attitude the regime would adopt to the event. Someone cleverly warned the Communist authorities that if they failed to permit believers from Czechoslovakia to take part en masse, the entire event would be under the control of Czechoslovak emigrés, which would create an enormous international scandal for the regime. The authorities really did make concessions and decided to allow thousands of believers to travel to Rome, even including those who had been prevented from traveling to the West for years. To my surprise I received permission.
In Rome I sent a letter to Monsignor Dziwisz, the Secretary of the Holy Father, via Bishop Škarvada, the bishop for Czechs in exile, who worked at the Secretariat of State in Vatican, requesting an audience and setting out the matters I would like to submit to the pope. Two days later, I received a letter from the pope’s secretary that the Holy Father had invited Bishop Škarvada and me to a private dinner on November 7. It was the eve of the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the television already had coverage of the demonstrations in East Germany which were growing in strength. “This is the end of communism,” the pope declared with certainty, “and not just in East Germany. Get ready: you too will soon be free!” I permitted myself to say that papal infallibility did not extend to such things and voiced the skeptical view that there might be a few years of Gorbachev-style perestroika. The pope mentioned that he had recently spoken with Gorbachov on this very spot. But he repeated once more that communism would soon collapse, and our church should prepare itself for that moment.
On November 18, 1989, in Rome I was informed that a large student demonstration had been brutally suppressed by the police the previous day. On November 20, I flew home to Prague with Cardinal Tomášek. At Prague airport the cardinal was welcomed by the Italian ambassador with the words: “Eminence, there is a revolution here”. * * *
In the period immediately following November 1989 I truly lived as if in a feverish dream. Everything merged in quick succession. I was already over forty when a completely new chapter of my life opened. I had spent eleven years in the service of the “underground church” and in a milieu of cultural and political dissent. Not even my mother, with whom I lived, was allowed to know I was a priest. Now I could work publicly in the church and in academia, as well as take part in founding several initiatives and institutions
within the church, the university, and political life. I worked closely with leading representatives of church and state. For many years I was close to President Václav Havel. On January 25, 1990, I celebrated with Fr. Reinsberg and many priest friends attended my first public mass in the Týn Church. In February, I started teaching at the Faculty of Theology and became the rector of St. Savior Church, where I later founded the first academic parish in our country.
Also in February, I received an invitation from Pope John Paul II to come to the Vatican and prepare his first trip to Czechoslovakia (his first trip to the post-communist world). I spent more than a month in the Vatican and met with the pope almost daily. The papal visit then took place in April. Then the pope appointed me an adviser to the Pontifical Council for Dialogue with Unbelievers, and the new established Czech Bishops’ Conference elected me its first general secretary. In December, I was elected the president of the Czech Christian Academy. Because my long-term study of theology was unofficial during the communist era, in 1990–92 I passed the necessary exams at the Pontifical Lateran University in Rome and at the Pontifical Theological Faculty in Wroclaw and became a Doctor of Theology. Later, I received an honorary doctorate in theology from the University of Erfurt and Oxford University. For almost two decades I was not allowed to travel anywhere outside the Communist bloc; over the next twenty years I visited every continent on the planet, including the Antarctic. After being excluded from academia for twenty years I finally had the opportunity to lecture at universities in Europe, the USA, Latin America, Asia, Africa, and Australia.
After my fiftieth birthday I returned to literary creation, the favourite activity of my early youth. Every year I travel to a contemplative monastery in the Rhineland and spend four or five weeks there on my own in the silence of a hermitage. All my books came into being there as a “by-product” of my private spiritual exercises, of that time of prayer, meditation, study, and reflection during
long walks through the deep forest. In my sixtieth year my books started to be translated into 20 languages and reach readers and commentators in different parts of the world. I have received several international awards for my work – including the Guardini Prize in Germany, the Cardinal König Prize in Austria, St. Georg Prize in Poland, Templeton Prize in Great Britain, Knighthood of Merit from the President of the Republic of Poland and Knighthood of Merit from the President of the German Republic, etc. Pope Benedict appointed me honorary prelate of His Holiness. Being over 70, I still serve as the pastor of the Academic Parish, a professor at Charles University, and the president of the Czech Christian Academy.
However, neither the life of the church and society, nor my own life, has been or is easy even after the fall of communism. After the collapse of the communist regimes a considerable section of society had great expectations of the church, and it was disappointed.
I keep coming back to John Paul II’s appeal to Czech Christians during his first visit in Prague in April 1990: “You shall now build the temple of free life of your church not by returning to what was here before you were robbed of your freedom. Build it in the strength of that to which you matured during persecution.”
But how have we matured? Suffering does not automatically help a character to mature. Although a certain degree of persecution is beneficial to the church, long-term severe persecution, and particularly isolation from the evolution of theological thinking, is damaging to it. In certain cases where religion is transformed into a counterculture it results in unhealthy ghettoisation. Sometimes the loss of free communication with the whole of society and its culture, as well as with the outside world and the church in the free world, including with developments in theology, etc., lead to intellectual rigidity. The need to be constantly on the defensive against external pressure results in a lack of self-criticism, while the need to
close ranks create the illusion of genuine unity of opinion; wherever the fresh air of the free exchange of opinions is absent for a long time there is a danger that things become musty or even moldy.
Many Christians found themselves unable to live without an enemy, and after the collapse of communism they looked for a new one – “Western liberalism” started to fulfill that role in their eyes. Certain churches adopted, vis-a-vis the liberal environment, the strategy of hostility and circular defence that they had learned from their confrontations with the communist regimes. As a result, the churches alienated large groups of those who had sympathised with them at the time of communism’s collapse and who had also invested great hopes in them on the threshold of democratic renewal. In the Czech Republic the numbers of people identifying with the churches have fallen dramatically.
After the collapse of communism two types of missionaries soon appeared in the Czech Republic. The first consisted of fundamentalist evangelical Christians from the United States brandishing a bible in one hand and a hamburger in the other, who roared in stadiums in the expectation of mass conversion. The Czechs’ natural skepticism could scarcely provide fertile soil for that kind of Christianity. The second type were conservative Catholics from the West who were convinced that the artificially isolated church was a Snow White that was fortunate enough to have slept for several decades, including during the period of Vatican II reforms, and they were now arriving like Prince Charming to awaken the church in all its pre-modern beauty and gain a welcome ally against liberal theology in “the church of the martyrs.”
In certain Christian circles in the post-сommunist world traditionalism and fundamentalism, the yearning for simple answers to complex questions, has flourished. Nowadays, religion is used in many places as a weapon. Very dangerous is the abuse of religious emotions and the phraseology by populists and nationalists. I saw in Warsaw crowds of people with a cross in their hands, screaming
anti-Semitic slogans and singing “We want God!” What kind of God do they want? I am afraid that such a god has nothing to do with what Jesus called his own and our common Father.
*
*
According to Pope Francis, the great prophet of our time, the Church should serve as a “field hospital” in today’s world. I think this metaphor needs to be further developed. The churches, as well as the university and many civil society communities and initiatives, should jointly address the diagnosis, prevention, therapy, and recovery of infectious diseases of our civilization, especially populism that makes people silly and cruel. It looks as if global Christianity stands on the threshold of another of its historical metamorphoses. I hope that the critical reflection of the experience of Christians in the struggle for freedom may be useful.
* The chapter is comprised of excerpts translated by Gerald Turner and originally printed in Rev. Tomáš Halík's From the Underground Church to Freedom (Copyright University of Notre Dame Press, 2019). All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission of the publisher undpress.nd.edu
* The chapter is comprised of excerpts translated by Gerald Turner and originally printed in Rev. Tomáš Halík’s From the Underground Church to Freedom (Copyright University of Notre Dame Press, 2019). All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission of the publisher. undpress.nd.edu
My understanding of trauma in the communist period is strongly influenced by the year 2012. Before then, not much was written about repression under the regime. Croatia is one of the very few post-communist countries in which no lustration of officials and collaborators of communist secret services has been carried out. The old networks of the former communist party are still in a position of power as rulers in the shadows. I first heard about repression and its consequences from friends, colleagues, and family members. As a student and later as a young journalist in a Croatian daily “Večernji list” I saw how a one-party system works, I saw the difference in chances between those of who were members of the Сommunist Party and those who were not. I knew which topics were forbidden, which words should be avoided. I only became aware in 2012 of the depth and scale of the trauma that communism left on people when I started working in the newly established Office assigned to find and excavate mass graves of victims of the Communist Regime. It was already well known at the time that after the end of WWII, the victorious authorities led by Marshal Tito and the Communist Party massively eliminated its real or potential political opponents and buried them namelessly in concealed mass graves. To date, not even the approximate number of people killed and buried in those
The Trauma of Communism: Missing People and the Silence Imposed by the Regime
mass graves has been scientifically determined. In mass executions, they were killing war prisoners of defeated armies who collaborated with Hitler’s Third Reich, civil servants, priests, professors, factory owners, wealthy entrepreneurs, and wealthy peasants. It has been estimated that in the first three years of Marshal Tito’s regime, more than 300,000 people were killed throughout Yugoslavia. Among them, 150,000 to 200,000 were Croats. These figures are primarily an illustration of the extent of the physical elimination of real or potential opponents of the regime. The regime called them “enemies of the people.” In those reprisals practically, the entire civic elite was destroyed. There are two reasons why Croats were hit so hard by Tito’s regime. First, no Yugoslavia was possible without Croatia, and that is why the regime wanted to kill any idea or aspiration of the Croats for their own state. Second, Croats are extremely attached to the Roman Catholic Church which, during Tito’s regime as well as in other communist regimes, was perceived as the greatest institutional opponent of communism. In the first post-war years, Tito’s communist government killed more than 450 Catholic priests, including one bishop. Many priests were given lengthy prison sentences in the communist show trials. The best known is the case of Alojzije Stepinac, the Archbishop of Zagreb, who became a symbol of the Catholic Church’s resistance to communism not only in Yugoslavia but throughout Central Europe.
But the main source of trauma is not the brutality itself, nor is it the scale of repression. Trauma is not about numbers. The main source of the trauma that has lasted for 75 years, to this day, is the silence about the victims. They were buried without names, usually without clothes, in hidden mass graves, without any trace. They were simply gone, disappeared. Their families knew nothing about them for decades and were not allowed to ask anyone because the regime kept the secret tight. In most families, it was only talked about behind closed doors or not at all.
The Office assigned to find and excavate mass graves of victims of the communist regime, established by the Croatian Parliament in 2011, opened the possibility to clarify what really happened to those people who had disappeared several decades ago. As soon as we moved into the new office in a large building in the center of Zagreb, Tomislav D. knocked on our door. He asked us to dig up a mass grave hidden in the courtyard of the Faculty of Teacher Education. It was an adjoining building, and we could see the courtyard from the window of our office. Tomislav D. was still looking for the grave of his father who was a civil servant in the pro-Nazi Independent State of Croatia (NDH), which existed from 1941 to 1945. After the Communists took power in Zagreb in May 1945, his father was taken away and disappeared. Tomislav heard rumors that his father was killed and buried in the huge mass grave in the courtyard of the Faculty of Teacher Education.
Then came Marija M., a vital eighty-year-old lady. Her two brothers disappeared somewhere in the death marches of 1945, but she especially wanted to find her sister who had worked as a nurse in one of the hospitals in Zagreb. The communist secret police UDBA took her out of the hospital in the autumn of 1946. Marija knew that her sister was being held in remand prison on the Square of the Victims of Fascism. She disappeared from the prison. A few years later an acquaintance told Marija that he had seen her sister in a pool of blood in front of the prison building. We already had several cases in our files about political prisoners who allegedly jumped out of the window of that prison and were seen in a pool of blood. But there were no bodies, families did not get their death certificates or any information at all about the death. All traces of these people had disappeared. We believed that those stories about “jumping out of the window” were false, fabricated by communist secret police UDBA to cover up their killings without trial. I did not ask Marija if she ever suspected that the acquaintance who “saw” her sister in a pool of blood in front of the prison was an employee or associate
of UDBA, who wanted to let her know that it was over, that her sister was not alive anymore. Perhaps he did it even in good faith, to ease her uncertainty and waiting. Marija was a very strong and very rational woman, who fled Yugoslavia due to the regime’s repression. She found herself in Austria and later Australia, where she managed five-star hotels. She only returned to Croatia in retirement. But when it came to the missing sister, all her rationality would disappear. She would come at least once a month to our Office to greet us and ask: “And did you find out anything about my sister? Did you find any clues?”
We were called by a young historian Domagoj Novosel from Gračani, the northern part of Zagreb, which was once a suburb and today is an elite part of the city. He wanted to draw our attention to about twenty documented mass graves in which the victims of the first post-war executions in Zagreb were buried, within days and weeks after Tito’s communist party de facto took power. The locations of the tombs were secretly recorded by the local sanitary inspector Miroslav Haramija, who supervised the burial of those people, preserved the map of mass graves until the fall of communism, and published it in the mainstream media in 1990. After that, there was silence.
Dragutin K. from Gračani knew that two tombs with twenty people each were in his garden. For almost 70 years he did not cultivate that garden, nor did he sell the land. When we went to dig up the first tomb, only thirty inches below the ground we found skeletons. The pathologist said that these were young men on the verge of adulthood. They were shot in the back of the head and buried without clothes. Most impressive were their perfectly healthy, white teeth, without any caries. One had a clenched fist in which he squeezed a small gold cross, a pendant from his chain.
Analyzing the highly censored archival documents available to us, data from police investigations, and the statements of our witnesses, after only a few months of research we had a very clear
picture: Zagreb is surrounded by a ring of hidden mass graves in which victims of the communist regime are buried. One could say that Zagreb has a lot in common with other Croatian cities. Tens of thousands of people have disappeared without a trace, which basically means that at least four times more people, members of their families, felt the trauma of communism.
It was completely clear from our documents and testimonies that the executions were carefully and systematically planned, organized, and carried out by the communist secret police. But we quickly realized how much the law of silence about these victims is still applicable today. We also learned very directly how much the former officials of the Communist Party and its secret police, or their descendants, are still shadow rulers in Croatia today. And how much they care to keep the secret of communist repression to maintain the silence.
Just days after the Office for finding and excavating mass graves began working, an unprecedented defamation campaign was launched against us. The new government, led by the Social Democratic Party, the direct successor to the Communist Party, had already drafted a law abolishing that Office. And just five months earlier, the Office was established by political consensus in Parliament, including the consensus of the Social Democratic Party. After they took power, they no longer cared about the old consensus. They decided to change the law and abolish the Office, arguing that they wanted to improve it, of course. We managed to hold the Office for a year, with a little political help from the People’s Parties from the European Parliament. As the ultimate oversight, the Office’s budget was controlled by a former senior official of the UDBA, so we were doomed from the start to achieve nothing.
However, in that period we managed to excavate three mass graves and investigate (locate and document) another fifty mass graves. Never in my professional career, neither in communism nor in transitional democracy, have I felt the kind of political pressure
as in that year. At the end of 2012, the Office was abolished by being attached to one ministry, and the investigation of the mass graves of victims of communism was placed under the direct supervision of a former high-ranking officer of the communist secret police UDBA. The duration of the law of silence is thus ensured.
As I do not like to lose battles without leaving a trace, I decided to make a documentary in which I would give the victims an opportunity to speak out. With the help of friends, I was able to raise funds, private money, without the involvement of institutions. I made the film “The Enemy of the People,” in which victims of the regime speak – a film that is about the traumas of communism and its systematic repression. Below I will recount a few testimonies of both personal and family traumas which I gathered while working on the film.
I met Stjepan S. in 2012 while we were trying to find the secret graves of the victims of the communist regime in the villages around the town of Velika Gorica. It is about thirty kilometers away from the Croatian capital Zagreb.
Stjepan was a very special witness. He was thirteen in the summer of 1945, when mass executions began in the woods around his village. He remembered well what a typical execution looked like, from the perspective of the villagers. And, unlike the other villagers, he was willing to share his memories with us. Stjepan’s neighbors turned their heads away from our team or told us: “Whoever speaks – will disappear in the night.” Stjepan had no fear. What is more, he seemed to feel relieved by telling us his memories of the executions. Here is his story.
In the afternoon secret police agents came to the village and ordered all the locals to go into their houses and to close and darken all the windows because a military exercise would be held. Of course,
the children always found a hole through which they could see what was happening outside. After a while, two military tilt trucks would pass through the village. The villagers used to hear bursts of gunfire from the woods and after that, sometimes they even heard human screams, and then the trucks came back. And sometimes, when the trucks drove deeper into the woods, they didn’t hear the shooting, just the trucks driving back. Stjepan was a shepherd at that time, like most of the village children. After one such “military exercise,” they saw a freshly dug mound. Later, they observed the mound getting bigger and bigger. It grew to 150 meters over time.
These “military exercises” were very frequent in the summer and autumn of 1945; they were held occasionally until 1947. According to Stjepan’s memory, the last “military exercises” were held in 1952. Every day, one UDBA officer came to see the mass grave, and then he would go into the woods to visit the other graves. They knew him because he was originally from a neighboring village.
All locals were denied access to the place. But teenage shepherds still went to the mound, girls made wreaths of wildflowers and put them on the grave, and boys left wooden crosses. The UDBA agent who oversaw the tombs would remove those wreaths and crosses from the grave. According to Stjepan, even after the fall of communism this UDBA agent continued to visit the graves in the forest every day. He did it until his death in the mid-1990s. I returned to Stjepan two years later, in 2014, to record his testimony on camera when I was filming the documentary “The Enemy of the People.” I could see he was feeling uncomfortable. When we started filming, he asked us not to film his face but only his lower body. “You know, I have grandchildren who have to find a job, and ‘they’ are all around us, ‘they’ run everything,” he told me. “They” meant, of course, the UDBA guys, although the communist secret police were officially disbanded 25 years ago. We didn’t film him at all. It was so obvious that Stjepan was really scared, and it would be unfair to him. I also realized that his fear was not unreasonable. Descendants
The Trauma of Communism: Missing People and the Silence Imposed by the Regime of the people who organized the executions really occupy important positions in Croatia today.
Lada Kos never met her father Vinko Kos. She was only seven months old when Vinko, a poet and secretary of the Croatian Writers’ Association, left Zagreb in early May 1945 with a column of NDH soldiers, civil servants, university professors, and ordinary citizens. They were leaving for the West to surrender to the Western Allies, in fear of reprisals by Tito’s partisan Yugoslav army and Stalin’s Red Army. On his departure, he told Lada’s mother that “he had to go with his people, and he would come back soon.” Like most people in that column, which historians estimate numbered more than a hundred thousand people (exact figures were never established), Vinko Kos never came back. Most of the column was stopped in Carinthia (Austria) on the Bleiburg Field, from where the Allies (British) returned the soldiers of the defeated Croatian army and civilians to Yugoslavia, handing them over to Tito’s partisans. Systematic mass executions of these people, organized by Ozna (Communist Secret Police) and KNOJ (Special Execution Detachments), continued in the following weeks in Slovenia, followed by death marches and executions throughout the former Yugoslavia for months. In the recent Croatian historical narrative, these events are known as the Bleiburg tragedy.
Lada grew up with her mother, grandmother, and two-year-older sister Vera. Even after the establishment of the communist regime, the grandmother and mother tried to maintain the illusion of the former way of life and thus raised the girls. Their family life was dedicated to art and deeply connected to the Catholic Church. Lada’s father and mother met in the church. It was the Holy Family church in Lada’s neighborhood in the modest Kanal district of Zagreb, where Zagreb Archbishop Alojzije Stepinac had sent Vinko
Kos to organize some cultural activities for the war orphans during WWII. After the communist government was established, Lada’s mother and grandmother continued to go to the church; the girls went to religious education, and played and sang in the church choir. Lada soon became a soloist thanks to her strong, very special voice. She experienced the first public condemnation when she admitted in the classroom that she was going to religious education. The teacher condemned it in front of the whole class.
They lived in one room and a kitchen, parts of their own family home. In the other rooms, the communist authorities sent four other families to live as roommates. But it was normal for Lada to have roommates in her own house because she didn’t know it had been any different before. Her mother got some administrative work. They lived modestly, but in their one-room apartment they often organized evenings of singing together and evenings of poetry. They also read the poetry of Vinko Kos, which survived only in their family library because all his books had been withdrawn from the public with the establishment of the communist rule. He was completely erased as a writer, although he never wrote politically motivated books. He wrote mostly children’s books and loved poetry. Even under communism, children in primary school continued to sing the song “Home,” for which the lyrics were written by Vinko Kos, and the music by the famous Croatian composer Jakov Gotovac. But Vinko Kos was erased as the author of the lyrics. Instead of his name, they put “author unknown.”
Here are his verses of the song “Home.” “There is a small house dear to my heart. That house under the linden tree is guarded by God. My mother lives there and my dear father too. This small house under the linden tree is my dearest home.” The communists, of course, threw God out of the song. Thus, instead of “guarded by God,” they put the new text, “it is my dear home.”
Lada’s mother wrote poetry waiting for Vinko to come back. Lada started writing poetry as a teenager. Politics was not talked
The Trauma of Communism: Missing People and the Silence Imposed by the Regime
about in their house. Mother and grandmother protected the girls from the outside world. Lada says today that she had a happy childhood in the circumstances of general poverty.
She began to feel that the doors of the system were closed for her when she tried to pursue her music career. She graduated in violin from the Zagreb Academy of Music. But her wish was to sing poetry, following the trend of the French chanson. She was still a student when she began to sing her own poetry. Together with her friends, she organized her first concerts in Zagreb. Because of her powerful voice, she was soon nicknamed “Zagreb’s Edith Piaf.” But the doors of the A-level festivals were closed for her, as well as the doors of radio and television. By no means did she manage to make her own record. She couldn’t enter big concert halls. By chance, because the singer who was supposed to go on the tour got pregnant, Lada was sent by Yugoslav music authorities to the Soviet Union with a group of Yugoslav singers. At that time Yugoslav singers were very welcome in the Soviet Union. They were perceived as half-Western singers. They even interpreted mostly Western hits and old favorites. After her first tour, Soviet music authorities regularly invited Lada. Her performances of French and her own songs were rewarded by standing ovations from the audience all over the Soviet Union. She became a star there, but under strictly controlled circumstances, of course. She sang up to five concerts a day, in large concert halls in front of tens of thousands of people. The tours lasted for several months and were strictly organized. The musicians just traveled and sang, accompanied always by “their” KGB agent. In Croatia and in the former Yugoslavia, it was written about the successes of “our singers” in the USSR. But there was no mention of Lada’s successes as if she were not one of “our singers.” She could not succeed at home. She wondered for a long time if it might be that she was not good enough. This created some frustration for her, but not the trauma. She was still fighting for her chance.
Lada first heard of “Bleiburg” only during the first multi-party elections in the 1990s, when it began to be talked about publicly. She had heard from some people that they had seen her father there, but she had learned nothing reliable about his further whereabouts. In the archives, she found a paper from May 1945 on which a fellow poet wrote in his hand “death” along the name of her father. Her father Vinko Kos is still erased from Croatian literature. But his daughter Lada has also been erased from the history of Croatian chanson. The doors of radio and television remained as closed to her as they were under communism, or even more. In the meantime, Lada stopped fighting for her chance. She realized that even after the formal collapse of communism and after the disintegration of Yugoslavia and the establishment of the Croatian state, nothing fundamentally changed. Or, as Lada put it: “People just changed their coats. Those who were Somebody remained Somebody. We who were Nobody, we are still – Nobody.”
Vladimir Novak last saw his younger brother Boris in June 1946. One night their house in Varaždin was surrounded by UDBA agents (communist secret police) who arrested Boris and took him away. They said they were taking him for a short interrogation. After that Boris was detained without any explanation in Zagreb, in a military prison in Nova Ves Street. For several months, Vladimir and his mother brought food and clean clothes for Boris every day to the entrance of the Nova Ves prison. Along with the packages, they exchanged hidden written messages, which proved that Boris was alive. One day, they were told at the prison gate that they should not bring anything anymore, because Boris would not need it. A few months later, the mother received written confirmation that Boris had been sentenced to death and shot. The crime attributed to him was hostility to the state.
Boris’s only crime was that during the war and the existence of the pro-Axis Independent State of Croatia (NDH) he was a student at the military aviation high school. He wanted to become a Croatian pilot. Before Tito’s partisans entered Zagreb, Boris together with his classmates, joined the column that was moving towards the West. But already in Slovenia, he escaped from the column and after two months of hiding, he returned home to Varaždin. It seemed that everything was fine, so he continued his education and enrolled in the final grade of grammar school. UDBA arrested him and took him away three days before graduation. The entire Novak family was attached to the film industry. Vladimir’s father was the owner of the first cinema in Varaždin. Thus, Vladimir tried to use his acquired knowledge and experience in the film industry in Tito’s new Yugoslavia. The new communist class had a very poor education and at least initially they needed film professionals. However, after ten years, Vladimir realized that there was no place for him in Yugoslav film and he fled first to Belgium, and then to the United States.
In the US, Vladimir really managed to make his American dream come true. Using his father’s old connections, he managed to connect with some producers in Hollywood who opened the doors of film and show business to him. He built a career as a professional photographer in Los Angeles. The biggest Hollywood stars of the 1960s passed through his photo studio. He led a fairly “bon vivant” life, but he also had very strong political views. He wanted to contribute to the fall of communism in the world, to the collapse of Yugoslavia, and to the independence of Croatia. That is why he was one of the founders of Croatian radio in LA. In American politics, he was actively involved in Ronald Reagan’s campaign, first in the election for governor of California and then in the presidential election.
After President Reagan entered the White House, Vladimir received a written invitation to join the new administration in Washington DC. But he was not a bureaucrat by nature, so he decided to continue
his path towards achieving his political goals: working on Croatian radio in LA and promoting the idea of Croatian independence.
After the collapse of communism in Europe and the establishment of the new Croatian state, Vladimir’s political goals were achieved. He met the first Croatian president, Franjo Tudjman, during his visit to the United States, and Tudjman invited him to return to Croatia. Vladimir had two conditions: to get back the confiscated family property in Varaždin and to get institutional help to find the grave of his brother Boris. He received a promise from the highest address. He sold his property in the USA and returned to Croatia.
Seventeen years later, when I interviewed him for the film “The Enemy of the People,” Vladimir lived in a nice but very small one-bedroom apartment in Zagreb, which he had inherited from his aunt. None of the family properties in the center of Varaždin were returned to him. And he lost all hope that the state would do anything to shed light on his brother’s fate.
As he got older, the urge to find his brother’s remains was stronger. He told me: “If they just dig up the tombs, I could always recognize my brother by his teeth. His front left tooth was broken off.” I couldn’t believe that such a rational person like Vladimir could have such irrational expectations.
Andrija Hebrang Jr. has contributed substantially to my experiences and my knowledge about the victims of the communist regime and the resultant trauma. Thanks mostly to his engagement and political influence, in 2011 the Croatian Parliament decided to establish the Office for Searching for Mass Graves of Victims of Communism. He was subsequently appointed President of its Steering Committee. We worked closely together for about one year until the Office was disbanded by the new left-wing government.
Andrija Hebrang Jr. had a very strong personal motive in that engagement. His father Andrija Hebrang Sr. was one of the most prominent leaders of the Communist Party of Croatia before WWII. During WWII he was at the very top of the partisan movement and communist guerrilla warfare. But unlike Tito’s Yugoslav communism, Hebrang’s political platform was more national, more Croatian. After the split with Stalin in 1948, Tito used this conflict to get rid of not only real or imagined Stalin sympathizers, but also to get rid of his real or imagined political competitors. Andrija Hebrang Sr. was one of them. While working in the Office, Andrija Hebrang Jr. never mentioned his father’s case or his personal and family trauma. I found out more about it later when we talked about the documentary. Andrija Hebrang Jr. was two years old when his father was arrested. It was general Ivan Gošnjak, his father’s old communist and partisan comrade, who came into his father’s ministerial apartment in Belgrade and took him away on May 7, 1948. Two days earlier Hebrang Sr. had been removed from the post of Yugoslav Minister of Industry. Ten days later UDBA agents came and took his wife Olga away. Their three little children Dunja (4 years), Andrija Jr. (2 years), and Branko (1 year) were taken to Zagreb and handed over to their aunt (father’s sister) Ilonka Gobec. At that time both Ilonka and her husband Josip Gobec had lost their jobs due to family ties with Andrija Hebrang Sr. They were also evicted from their nice apartment in the center of Zagreb. All the property of Olga Hebrang, who was born into a very wealthy Jewish family named Strauss, was confiscated. So, aunt and uncle Gobec with their two children and three little Hebrangs had to move to a small house on the outskirts of Zagreb.
The uncle found a new job as a manual laborer. The aunt took care of five children. But a year later UDBA agents took the uncle away. He spent four years in Tito’s “gulag” on Goli Otok. Aunt Ilonka was left with five children and without any income.
At that time Andrija Jr. believed that both his father and his mother had been killed. And then one day they were told that their mother was alive and that she was in prison in Požarevac in Serbia. Aunt Ilonka somehow found the money and took three small Hebrangs to Požarevac to visit their mother. Andrija was barely eight years old. In the prison, a militiaman brought him a woman completely unknown to him. He told her: “You are not our mother. You were planted by UDBA.” It is his first memory of his mother.
The former leader of the Communist Party of Croatia Andrija Hebrang Sr. was convicted in a secret political show-trial as a traitor of people and a collaborator of the Ustasha regime. Most probably he was killed in prison in June 1949, a year after his arrest. Olga Hebrang was sentenced to 12 years in prison because she did not want to testify against her husband. She was also convicted of collaborating with the Ustasha regime, although as a Jew she lost more than 50 members of her extended family in the Holocaust in the Independent State of Croatia (NDH). And she herself was imprisoned for several months in the Ustasha prison Stara Gradiška, as a Jew and as a member of the Communist party.
In the communist prison, Olga Hebrang was tortured mentally and physically in the cruelest ways. After eight and a half years Olga finally signed the “confession” that UDBA asked her. She did it so she could go back to her children. But with Olga’s release from prison, the calvary of the Hebrang family was not over. To get a job, Olga and her children had to change their family name. Instead of Hebrang the Party assigned to them the surname: Markovac. The surname Hebrang was to disappear completely.
The trauma of communism has marked many Croatian families. The Hebrang family is certainly among those most affected by Tito’s communist dictatorship. In their case “the Revolution was really eating its children.” Each member of the family dealt with the trauma in his own way. Andrija Hebrang Jr. defended himself as well as
his father by striking back. As soon as he came of age, he returned his surname Hebrang.
His trauma of Communism firstly ended in victory, with the fall of communism. He joined HDZ (Croatian Democratic Union), the party of President Tudjman, which was the bearer of change in Croatia, then the bearer of Croatian statehood, independence, and the war for freedom. He was Minister of Health during the war. He remained politically very active for fifteen years after the war: he was a minister, deputy prime minister, and part of the HDZ’s closest party leadership.
The life stories of Stjepan S., Lada Kos, Vladimir Novak, and Andrija Hebrang Jr., who are victims of the communist regime or witnesses of communist crimes indicate that there exists in fact a double trauma of communism. They suffered their first trauma under communism as a direct impact of the totalitarian regime. And they are experiencing another trauma today because the victims of communism have not been recognized, the crimes of the communist regime have not been investigated, are diminished, or even denied, the graves of their loved ones have not been found, and the old communist deep-state network still rules the country.
Today, however, Stjepan does not have to be afraid that he will “disappear in the night” if he speaks in public. But there is reason to fear that his grandchildren will pay the price of his public testimony. Lada, who managed to deal somehow with communism because she did not know much about it, has a harder time dealing with the post-communist transition. Nothing has changed for her, because the same people have remained in the same positions of power. And now she knows much more about how communism works. After living his American dream Vladimir returned to the Croatian
reality: he died in his small apartment inherited from his aunt and he did not find his brother’s grave.
The post-communist trauma of Andrija Hebrang is particularly profound. Despite his political engagement and influence, he did not succeed in learning how his father was killed, when and where it happened, or where his grave is. Moreover, he failed to help other victims of communism to find the graves of their loved ones, to mark them and bring them out of oblivion. He felt like a winner when communism fell. But he was defeated in the battle to reveal the true nature of the communist regime.
This paper focuses on a half-century period of Croatian history during which the communist regime organized a partial modernization of society led by ideology, and the consequences of the same on Croatian national identity. When speaking of partial modernization or semi-modernization, the author is considering modernization processes that focus only on specific segments, like the technological, leaving out the social component of modernization. Different technical and economic modernization processes in that period were achieved, e.g., urbanization, better infrastructure in urban areas, new division of labor, growth of education, and social mobility. However, in such semi-modernization personal rights were ignored, the plurality of society was not considered, and initiatives of the private sector in the economy were not encouraged. Ralph Dahrendorf identified such types of modernization as “modernization without modernity.”1
With deeply rooted national disparities inherited from the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, the communists tried to showcase their regime as salutary for all nations. Their policy was presented as the state
1 Ralf Dahrendorf. The Strange Death of Socialism // Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review 79 (313) (1990) 12.
approaching the question of different national interests from one mutual standpoint, not considering the interests of one nation in opposition to another but rather focusing on interests of classes, common to all constitutive nations. At the same time, they criticized civil rights and repressed any form of public opinion and opposition. The principles of freedom, publicity, a right to public gatherings and public actions, and consequently, unrestricted national advancement did not exist.
Modernization can be brought into close connection with rational control by mankind over its natural and social environment. Transformation of traditional societies into modern ones implies a complex set of processes that can act in parallel to bring about an increase in the number of institutions and the transformation of simple social structures into more complex ones. Because of its social and historical determinants, Croatia represents a society which was late in its modernization process and encountered discontinuities when it comes to technological and industrial on one side, as well as cultural and political on the other. The following influencing factors can be identified: a) administrative-political and territorial fragmentation of Croatia, b) lack of sovereignty under the multinational countries Croatia was a part of during the 19th and 20th centuries, c) economical imbalance, and d) geographical differences of the Pannonian, Mediterranean, and Dinarides areas. Considering these factors and contextualizing them under the historical and geopolitical circumstances of the time is crucial for understanding the modernization process that Croatia underwent.
Seymour M. Lipset suggested that with the rise of modernization communism weakens and democracy strengthens. Democracy is positively tied to national accomplishments in economic devel-
opment, including the educational structure of a nation.2 In their first years of power (1945–1948) the Yugoslavian communists tried to strengthen new social values and proclaimed equality, administrative order, a single-party system, a planned economy, and public opinion control following a model already established in the Soviet Union. Desiring a quick technical modernization but faced with the lack of industry, machinery, raw material, and a qualified labor force, a well-known model of work competition with glorification of labor was established.3 From 1948 onward Yugoslavia freed itself from the influences of Soviet control and was among the first countries to stop blindly following the economic and institutional modernization models that the Soviets had established, instead conducting different experiments to liberalize and decentralize their economy.4
Political centralism seeking to uniformly regulate all aspects of life (“egalitarian syndrome”5) as a central value in society during the communist era in Croatia and Yugoslavia was not consistently enforced. Also, unequal treatment toward different nations was present when it came to the rights of different constitutive nations, preservation of language, using national symbols, and publicly proclaiming nationality-related sentiments.
2 Wolfgang Merkel. Eine Einführung in die Theorie und Empirie der Transformationsforschung. Opladen: Leske + Budrich bei UTB 1999, p. 37.
3 Tomislav Anić. Socialist Competition from Soviet Union to Yugoslavia // Review of Croatian History 13 (1) (2017) 183–184.
4 Dennison Rusinow. Understanding the Yugoslav Reforms // The World Today 23 (2) (1967) 71.
5 Josip Županov. Hrvatsko društvo danas – kontinuitet i promjena // Politička misao 48 (3) (2011) 149–150.
When it came to conflicts of different Yugoslavian nations during the period between the First and Second World Wars, primarily conflicts of Croats and Serbs, the communists considered this a matter of disagreement between Croatian and Serbian bourgeoisie over economic interests. They believed that the national conflicts were used to divert attention from the social issue, which was the class struggle. In these tensions existing between the nations, the communists saw a threat that would lead to the fragmentation of the working class. Thus, they decided to relieve the tensions by federalizing the state following the model of the multinational Soviet Union. During a short period of time its formal title was the Democratic Federal Yugoslavia, although it was in reality a complete opposite to any true democratic political arrangement. Croatia was named the Federal State of Croatia and became one of the six federal republics comprising the Yugoslavian state.6 Along with the declared federalism, the state still encouraged patriotism, supra-national identity, fraternity, and unity of all Yugoslavian nations. The communist regime believed that the disparities between Yugoslavian nations, protection of their interests, and the question of individual national identities were all successfully taken care of by establishing a federal government system. In reality, the authority was highly centralized with all the key features of a totalitarian system.7 Social changes were conducted through a proclaimed “self-management” model of organization that was meant to represent a type of simulated democracy in a totalitarian environment. The first signs of discontent with this new federation arose not long after. The underlying reason for the growing discontent was because many cit-
6 Zdenko Radelić. 1945 in Croatia // Review of Croatian History 12 (1) (2016) 9.
7 Carl J. Friedrich, Zbigniew K. Brzezinski. Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy. New York: Praeger 1956.
izens considered the state to be too centralized. Upon successfully dealing with the residues of democratic parties from the prewar era, the regime took on a new battle – this time with religious communities, especially the Catholic Church that represented a potential stronghold for the opposition. The Catholic Church was at the same time the only institution that managed, within its scope of mission, to nurse the Croatian national identity. Communists placed great effort into complicating the Church’s existence with an attempt to marginalize its influence in society.
Everyday life was congested with dechristianization politics and pressures under which any public manifestation of national culture withdrew. Promoting their own personal values, the communists performed many cultural and symbolic interventions. Streets, squares, and settlements that carried the name of significant figures from Croatian history were renamed. An example of such efforts to influence the collective memory of Croatians was the removal of monuments commemorating Josip Jelačić.8 At one point Jelačić was labeled by Karl Marx as an enemy of the working class because of his involvement in repressing the Hungarian revolution in 1848. This gave the communists an ostensible reason to marginalize Jelačić in the Croatian historical memory.
In addition to relevant literature related to the trauma of communism, this paper in part relies on the testimonies of the very participants and witnesses to the communist regime. It will use published and unpublished testimonies. Data was collected by means of a designed, guided conversation with individuals, questioning an event, situation, or a period in history in which they actively
8 Ante Čuvalo. Josip Jelačić – Ban of Croatia // Review of Croatian History 4 (1) (2008) 25.
participated or have witnessed. These oral histories are either audio or video recorded. Unwritten stories of “the ordinary man” have been recognized as an important source in the reconstruction of historical events and serve to enrich the information we have from other sources. The value of oral stories is especially great for those areas that have not been sufficiently researched and were neglected in social sciences. Unwritten history plays a major role in researching marginalized social groups (such as immigrants, asylants, political prisoners, and others).
The era until the early 1960s was burdened by promoting the new system of values, single-party structure, planned state economy, and complete control over public opinion. Shortly after the Second World War, the relations between the communists and the Church quickly started to deteriorate. The communists used their newly won position of power to deal with their ideological and political adversaries. Many priests, nuns, Catholic intellectuals, and opponents of the regime were imprisoned. Some of them paid with their lives for the beliefs and values they held. Croatian archbishop and cardinal Alojzije Stepinac became one of the many who lost their freedom for the remainder of their lives. For many Croatian Catholics to this day, he became one of the main symbols of Church and national resistance to the Yugoslav communist regime.9 When the Holy See declared Alojzije Stepinac a cardinal, Yugoslavia ended their diplomatic relations, accusing the Vatican of interfering in state affairs.
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44 (86) (2020) 131.
The state kept a monopoly on many aspects of public life. Although formally the national question was taken care of, any public discussion on the position of the Croatian language or equality of Croats and Croatia in the Federation guaranteed political persecution. Confirming this to be true is the testimony of Marijan Rogić, a political prisoner who as a high schooler was sentenced to a high-security prison on the island of Goli otok. The cause of his imprisonment was his discussing the position of Croatia in Yugoslavia with a group of his peers. To quote his words:
“To declare oneself as a Croat, was punishable. Croatian history, Croatian literature were oppressed. Croats were made fun of, ridiculed [...]. If somebody publicly even sang a national song he would be sentenced to six months of prison, hard time. We young people felt as a part of the Church and the people. Our religion and our nationality were combined into one” (Marijan Rogić, b. 1937).
State-to-Church attitudes didn’t begin to normalize until the death of Cardinal Stepinac in 1960. A new era began in the relations between the Catholic Church and the communist regime in Yugoslavia that would end in signing of the interstate protocol in 1966.10 That agreement, whose negotiations took around six years, allowed the Roman Catholic Church in Croatia and Yugoslavia to re-open some of its seminaries that had been closed since 1945 and to expand its publishing activities. In return, the Church had to accept the existing political system that allowed a limited level of religious freedoms in a totalitarian atheist state. The Church supported reforms that took place during the late 1960s and early 1970s and kept out of direct conflict with the regime.11 Within its scope of permissible operations, the Church actively advocated for
10 Miroslav Akmadža. Pregovori Svete Stolice i Jugoslavije i potpisivanje protokola iz 1966. godine // Časopis za suvremenu povijest 36 (2) (2004) 473–503.
11 Chistopher Cviic. Recent Developments in Church-State Relations in Yugoslavia // Religion, State and Society 1 (2) (1976) 6.
liberalization and democratization, freedom of religious choice and expression, and the right of all nations to their identity, sovereignty, and homeland. Because of this, it was under constant critique and pressure from the regime and was accused of interfering in political matters by promoting Croatian nationalism and liberalism.
One type of threat to Croatian identity (and to the identities of other nations in Yugoslavia) was the promotion of a new, supra-national Yugoslavian identity. Through its educational system and national institutions, the state created space for forming a new, Yugoslav identity, even allowing its citizens to declare themselves as Yugoslavs in the population census. Motives for choosing to declare as such were various. There were those who could not precisely determine their national identity, especially those with a heterogenous identity. Then there were those who had a different set of motivations – who used the Yugoslavian identity to express a form of patriotism, their loyalty to the regime, some even wanting to receive social and economic benefits. This type of identification was more prominent in urban areas, especially among generations born in the decade following the Second World War. Almost until the very end of the regime, these generations were the bearers of a legacy recognized as the socialist Yugoslavian identity.
With its social policies, introducing the concept of communal ownership, the state tried to promote social justice that never came to life. Disparities in the quality of life, access to basic needs, and even segregation were visible in all large socialist metropolises.12 Mechanisms that led to housing segregation were numerous, the most important of them being: unequal distribution of accommodation towards different social groups (based on education, position within the political hierarchy, employment), age of the buildings in which
12
housing was offered, and unequal access to building plots.13 There was a tendency to ensure high-quality living for military, police, and state elite while at the same time searching for a model to provide minimum quality housing for the rest of the population. 14 Numerous unemployed and disgruntled citizens decided to emigrate. The first period that lasted from the Second World War to the 1960s was characterized by rising illegal emigration due to economic and political reasons. After state-enforced restrictions were lifted in the 1960s, a significant number of migrant workers left Croatia legally. In the official statistics they were classified as “temporary workers,” and most were followed by their families at some point. Bilateral agreements allowed Yugoslavia to direct some of its unemployed citizens to foreign markets. Most sought-after were West European countries, especially West Germany (the Federal Republic of Germany). This emigration model peaked in the 1970s when limitations were imposed by many of those destination countries.15 One part of emigrants became politically organized, especially in Germany, Sweden, Australia, and USA. Their deeply rooted conflict with the ideology and policies of communist Yugoslavia served as a pillar that united them and motivated political activities aimed at ending Yugoslavia and creating a free and sovereign Croatian state.
Based on state administration records from the 1960s, 22% of the total population in socialist Yugoslavia during that period were Croats. Records also show that 65% of those who left Yugoslavia to find a better life for themselves in West Germany were Croats. For the most part, they were young men in their twenties, looking for
13 Ibidem.
14
Ivo Maroević. Hrvatska arhitektura pedesetih. Kontinuitet Moderne u okruženju socijalizma // Život umjetnosti 71/72 (2004) 143.
15 Ivan Čizmić. Emigration and Emigrants from Croatia between 1880 and 1980 // GeoJournal 38 (4) (1996) 434.
more radical forms of resistance.16 Political structures in Yugoslavia became aware that absence of a swift and appropriate reaction toward these new migrants could be taken advantage of by the older political emigrés and the Church. Leaving matters for the most part unattended by the regime, the Church sent its first mission for the Croats in Germany in 1966. By the end of 1970s the Catholic Church had set up an organizational framework to work with Croatian migrants in 110 missions across the world (The Croatian Catholic Mission).17
With this, the Church managed to accomplish one of its most valued services to Croatian people in emigration, preserving the spirit of togetherness and keeping the Catholic and national identity alive. The emigrant community took it upon itself to inform the international public of the situation Croatia was in up to the very end of Yugoslavia’s existence. They spoke about civil rights being threatened, as well as religious, political, and national freedoms.
The revival of interest in religion clearly worried the regime. Church celebrations were often accompanied by one part of the congregation expressing their national sentiments, provoking a sharp reaction from state authorities. Although bishops did not encourage such behavior, they did not prevent it either. When the regime took repressive action against those expressing their national identity and values, the Church most often stood in defense of their freedoms. 18 The reform movement that took place between 1969 and 1971 within one part of the communist party leadership in Croatia brought hope to citizens that the society and state were heading toward liberalization. Unlike Poland, East Germany, and Slovakia,
16 Mate Nikola Tokić. Landscapes of Conflict: Unity and Disunity in PostSecond World War Croatian Émigré Separatism // European Review of History: Revue européenne d'histoire 16 (5) (2009) 743.
17 Mark Baskin. Politički proces i policy zajednice u jugoslavenskoj migracijskoj politici // Politička misao 24 (3) (1987) 49.
18 Miroslav Akmadža. Katolička crkva i Hrvatsko proljeće // Časopis za suvremenu povijest 44 (3) (2012) 605.
where the Church actively engaged in supporting the reformists, in Croatia it stood apart from political turmoil.19 However, after the Croatian Spring Movement was crushed, a significant deterioration of state-Church relations was visible. Growing discontent, in part among Croatian Catholics as well, pushed the Church to take a clearer stand and act in public. From the point the Croatian Spring Movement ended, up to the late 1980s, the Church became the only institution that could act as an organization in defense of Croatian national rights. Confirming this are the words of one of our contemporaries who was at that time a student at the University of Zagreb: “I would say that the Church was the only organized opposition to the communist system at that time. Everything else was practically shattered and the Church was the only one that managed to keep that level of freedom. [...] This was the only space where you could think and discuss freely about moral, religious and political questions.” (Gordan Črpić, b. 1966).20
In accordance with this, the Church tried to expand its activities to the extent the existing legal framework and the Constitution allowed. During the 1980s it used the growing freedoms to encourage the strengthening of decentralization, rights to national identity, and sovereignty.21 The citizens started to demand their national rights more openly, and by the end of the 1980s there were clear indications that the end of Yugoslavia would not come peacefully.
To quote:
19 Jill Irvine. The Croatian Spring and the Dissolution of Yugoslavia // State Collapse in South-Eastern Europe: New Perspectives on Yugoslavia’s Disintegration / ed. Lenard J. Cohen, Jasna Dragović-Soso. West Lafayette: Purdue University Press 2007, p. 170.
20 Interview conducted by Mia Tomić, student of Catholic University of Croatia, as a part of Faith and Freedom Project of The Nanovic Institute for European Studies at the University of Notre Dame.
21 Klaus Buchenau. What Went Wrong? Church–State Relations in Socialist Yugoslavia // Nationalities Papers 33 (4) (2005) 547–548.
It was apparent to everyone that we were going into war and it would fall apart. There was no other way. It was in 1987, 1988, towards the end of that system. So they picked me up after that and they took me away [...], I don’t know, o.k., they didn’t beat me, but they harassed me, made threats and it was a matter of will I or will I not return home at that point. Nobody knew they picked me up, they wanted to scare me, told me that traffic accidents happen to young people as well, that they die of heart attacks. [...] The secret police and the state had a system of these subtle, selective prosecutions. That was on one hand. On the other hand, there was this intimidation tactic. You could end up being commended, punished or unnoticed for the same thing. The resulting effect was that you were constantly afraid that someone would tell on you, that you would say or do something wrong. This is a type of permanent fear and a permanent need to resist all in one (Gordan Črpić, b. 1966).
Another witness was a student at the Catholic Faculty of Theology in Zagreb in the late 1980s. He depicted those times with following words:
Many would say that the Church had certain freedoms back then, but they were all reduced, you had to be careful, watch what you say and how you say it. These are the patterns of learned behavior of people growing up without freedom. Certain things you would never discuss, things from the past you would never discuss. Although my grandfather from mother’s side was slaughtered by the Chetniks this was only quietly spoken about. And on the other hand you had this notion that the Croats, Catholics, Stepinac, Ustashe all held collective guilt on that side, those were the main characteristics on that side I would say (Željko Tanjić, b. 1968)22
Throughout the 1980s Yugoslavia was facing a deepening political, economic, and social crisis that weakened the Communist Party. This opened the way to public debates on further liberaliza-
22 Interview conducted by Jakov Blagojević, student of Catholic University of Croatia, as a part of Faith and Freedom Project of The Nanovic Institute for European Studies at the University of Notre Dame.
The Croatian Trauma of Communism
tion, political pluralism, civil society, and the multiparty system. At the same time, the nationalist movement strengthened in Croatia – after legal reforms in 1989, political parties were formed that contained national sovereignty elements in their statutes.
In Croatia, the Croatian Democratic Party23 welcomed elections as the largest party with a strong organizational structure, a clear program, and markings of a populist and national movement. This party was something of a phenomenon among post-communist countries because its organization was not limited to Croatia but branched out across the world. By doing that, it became a national movement that brought together Croats in their homeland and in emigrant communities.
Živko Kustić (b. 1930), editor in chief of the Catholic weekly magazine Glas Koncila (Voice of the Council), testified on the perception of HDZ:
The Church among the Croats and the majority of the Croat people perceived the Croatian Democratic Party not as a party, but as a movement of liberation. We did not support Tudjman as a party politician but because we wanted to liberate the Croatian State together with him; in any case we wanted that the people vote the communists out and that a Croatian State be created. The Croatian Democratic Party had that program, and we walked a share of the historical path together. Together we destroyed Yugoslavia. Yugoslavia had to be destroyed, that was a question of honor. Those who didn’t want to destroy Yugoslavia were not honorable people.24
The election results showed that by focusing on Croatian national liberation, the Croatian Democratic Party managed to win the majority of votes and transform into a movement, which it
23 Hrvatska demokratska zajednica (Croatian Democratic Union) led by Franjo Tudjman (1990–1999), politician and historian.
24 Klaus Buchenau. What Went Wrong? Church–State Relations in Socialist Yugoslavia // Nationalities Papers 33 (4) (2005) 547–548.
remained even after elections during war conflicts and up to the final liberation of occupied areas of Croatian territory. In 1990, the Croatian Parliament voted on the first democratic Constitution of the Republic of Croatia, preparing the ground for it to be recognized by the international community. The Holy See was among the first to recognize Croatia as an independent, sovereign country and establish diplomatic relations with it. By doing so, the Vatican offered strong support to its wider international recognition.
Several conclusions make up the summary of this paper. The first period of the communist regime was characterized by violent methods of repressive authorities and an open struggle against the Church as an ideological enemy. Although the pressure slightly subsided upon signing the agreement with the Vatican in 1966, that did not mean the state completely yielded. It carried on with slightly more subtle methods to compromise the Church in the eyes of its congregation and the international public.
Although left with a modest space for acting in public, the Church in Croatia found a way to adjust. It promoted freedom of religious expression, freedom of conscience, and the right of all nations to their own identity. The Church did not only support religious identity and unity, but national identity and unity as well, at the same time avoiding being politically instrumentalized. Its engagement in promoting societal pluralism as an instrument of resolving conflict was based on the concept of fairness. As the only organization that managed to keep its independence from the state, it served as a moral pillar for solidarity and support to the process of democratization of society. Upon Croatia gaining its national independence, the Church called out for reconciliation and renewing of society based on peace and justice, condemning all forms of violence.
With time passing since the fall of the communist regime and the Croatian War of Independence, many other topics are prevailing over the past, especially among the youth. The new, liberated position the Church found itself in opened new areas for it to act, but also shaped some new challenges to respond to.
In an essay on possibilities of coexistence of Catholicism and feminism, the prominent historian Elizabeth Fox-Genovese tried to answer a question that at least since Vatican II concerned many people. Could a Catholic indeed be a feminist and/or communist? Herself a Marxist feminist who converted to Roman Catholicism, Fox-Genovese argued that “a Catholic feminism must be flexible and capacious enough to encompass human and divine love and all of the constraints and rewards that both afford.”2 Such flexibility did not exist in the circumstances of the communist rule in the former Yugoslavia. What was life like for women in Croatia, the country that was then, as well as today, predominantly Catholic? Generations of women had to consider antagonizing aspects of the relationship between communism, Catholicism and feminism, and these issues that cut across class divisions, even if not publicly addressed. It is the intention of this essay to start a discussion of certain aspects of one of the biggest fissures in Croatian political and social life, and the ways in which some of the unknown lay Catholics in the 1960s came to deal with it.
1 This article is a part of the project that has been fully supported by Croatian Science Foundation under the project number IP-2018-01-3732
2 Elizabeth Fox-Genovese. Catholic and Feminist: Can One Be Both? // Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture 2 (4) (1999) 25.
In assessing the trauma that Communism inflicted on societies of Eastern and Central, as well as Southeastern Europe, it is important to try to understand a variety of experiences that were often paradoxical. The experiences varied at the time of revolutionary takeover, not only for members of different, opposed classes or strata of society, but also for divisions that cut through members of the same family who found themselves on conflicting sides of the ideological spectrum of postwar politics in Croatia and Yugoslavia. The example of Lav Znidarčić (1918–2001), the head of the Fraternity of the Great Crusaders (Veliko križarsko bratstvo), a Catholic youth organization, is telling. He was one of the most prominent young Catholic activists and intellectuals from Split; his three siblings were at the same time members of the clandestine Communist Party. The fact that his sister Anka Berus (1903–1991) was an equally smart and well-educated pre-war Communist and the first woman to become a minister in the communist government of Croatia, and later Yugoslavia (she was a minister of finances), did not save Lav Znidarčić from imprisonment without trial on several occasions during the Yugoslav period, and he was under surveillance by the Yugoslav secret police well into the 1980s.3 Catholics were not exempt from those divisions that often cut through families and the societal and cultural web of relations, and one should keep that in mind when trying to come to terms with the at times controversial past.
The cry for freedom in the 1960s excited and inspired many people around the world, and it did not circumvent the Catholics in Croatia. In one of his sermons held at the Zagreb Cathedral at the time, Tomislav Šagi Bunić, a renowned theologian, claimed that the solution for the ills of the modern world, in particular for the attempts to control and manipulate modern society, should be:
3 Služenje Crkvi i narodu: dr. Lav Znidarčić 1918.–2018. Spomenica u povodu 100. obljetnice rođenja / ed. Jure Krišto and Zlatko Matijević. Zagreb: Lav Znidarčić Family 2018.
in rising, growth and encouragement of strong, spiritually free persons, who will know how to keep and protect their independence and freedom, and respect and help the freedom of others – and in their mutual free association!4
What were prospects for the opening of the Catholic Church in Croatia towards lay people, and in particular towards women in the aftermath of the Second Vatican Council? Also, how has that process helped the generation of young people, specifically women, to come to terms with the communist rule and prepare themselves for the transition that followed in 1990? The experience of two prominent lay women active as Catholic journalists – Smiljana Rendić and Ljiljana Matković-Vlašić – will guide the understanding of developments during the 1960s and 1970s. These were the years of many changes for the Church, the closing of Croatian society after the demise of the Croatian Spring, and how the Croatian reform movement of the 1960s became known in the aftermath of its purge in 1971.
For a person who was a child in the sixties and whose knowledge of the church and societal relations did not extend beyond the Sunday school run by the Jesuits in Zagreb, it is not easy to assess the scope of traumatic experiences of the generation of our parents and grandparents, as indeed of Catholics in general and other believers who had to come to terms with life in an atheist society. By going to church on Sunday, attending religious classes and receiving the obligatory sacraments, I considered myself a part of a semi-secretive organization. Although religion was not strictly forbidden – it was clear from my earliest memory that it was a part of our common heritage since the majority of my friends were Catholics, and those who were not tacitly acknowledged my church-going activities – it was at the same time clear that the sheer essence of being Catholic was subversive and inimical towards the hegemony of the Communist Party.
4 Tomislav Šagi Bunić. Spasiti slobodu // Kana 3 (1972) 12–13.
The analysis of the state and church relations in Croatia and Yugoslavia after 1945 must start with the recognition that the experience of religious people under the circumstances of the communist takeover were extremely grim and indeed, in many ways, traumatic. It is well known that the communists in general were in conflict with religion, and this was no different in Yugoslavia and Croatia after 1945. One does not have to recite the histories of abuse, immense and deliberate loss of life (hundreds of priests and nuns, thousands of citizens, in the immediate post-WWII period), systematic destruction of sacral and cultural objects, churches, and monasteries, to assert that the experience of the religious populace who suffered under the victorious march of the communist ideology was identical from the Soviet Union all the way to the tiny islet of Daksa, near Dubrovnik. There, as soon as the partisans entered the city in October 1944, long before the end of World War II, they executed 53 prominent citizens without a trial, several priests and friars among them.
This became a symbol of extrajudicial executions and liquidations practiced as a part of the “revolutionary justice” by Marshal Tito and his followers at the moment of the power takeover. Alongside destruction, nationalization of private property, and exclusion from political and public life of all the people who were deemed opposed to this system, those methods of “persuasion” ensured the pacification of the populace and unhindered seizure of power. The court case of Archbishop Stepinac followed, and that attempted to tarnish the reputation not only of the highest ranking of Croatia’s clergy, but of Catholics in general.5 It also served to thwart the new communist
5 Cardinal Alojzije Stepinac (1898–1960) served as Archbishop of Zagreb from 1937, during periods of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, the Independent State of Croatia (NDH), and SFR Yugoslavia. In 1945 he refused the proposal of Josip Broz Tito to renounce Rome and establish a Croatian national church, and demanded that the communist authorities stop the repression of their opponents. In 1946 he was accused of collaboration with the Ustaše regime, and in a show trial
government’s negotiations of a concordat with the Vatican and was intended to steer the Croat Catholics away from the influence of Rome.6 The Yugoslav state and church conversations would resume eventually, but in the new political circumstances following the Second Vatican Council and the political demise of Aleksander Ranković, the most senior Serbian leader and the vice-president of Yugoslavia in 1966. The unitarist faction that formed around him in opposition to the reform movement of the federalist forces in Slovenia and Croatia, demanded the strong centralisation of Yugoslavia, its power structure, and its resources, and was suppressed in favor of the short-lived liberalization of political and economic relations.7 One of the ways of coping with life under the communist rule for the Catholics was to start using possibilities that presented themselves in Croatia during the 1960s. The contribution of the Catholic Church to this development was considerable because this awakening of civic initiatives was connected to the impact of the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965). Its aggiornamento renewed confidence in the Church, offered “the new face of the Church,” and responded to the demands of the new generation of believers, among whom was the generation born after the catastrophe and trauma of the Second World War. In special circumstances of the permanently strained relations with the Communist rulers, the papal encyclical Gaudium et spes promoted the religious revival in Croatia, as well
sentenced to 16 years in prison. He served his sentence in Lepograva prison until 1951 when under international pressure he was transferred to his parish in Krašić, where he remained incarcerated until his death in 1960. In 1998 he was beatified by St. Pope John II in a ceremony in Marija Bistrica in Croatia. See https://www. enciklopedija.hr/natuknica.aspx?id=58021.
6 Ivo Banac. Hrvati i Crkva: Kratka povijest hrvatskog katoličanstva u modernosti. Zagreb: Profil 2013, p. 95–123.
7
Ivo Banac. Yugoslav Communism and the Yugoslav State // The Cambridge History of Communism, vol. II / ed. Norman Naimark, Silvio Pons, Sophie QuinnJudge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2017, p. 585–590.
as the commencement of the interreligious dialogue, advancement of social justice and responsibilities of the faithful for development of society and community.8
The opening of the Church, a clear sign of which was the liturgy held in the national language, a new relationship of respect towards the laity (that even if only in theory included women), and toward their more active role in the life of Church, managed to establish ground for a new, enthusiastic engagement. In 1963 Pope John XXIII’s encyclical Pacem in Terris, which is often considered one of the most profound papal messages of all times, called for peace among nations that should be “founded on truth, justice, love and freedom.” As particular “signs of the times” he reflected on the equality of men and women, their personal human dignity, as well as mutual responsibilities. It outright encouraged the participation of women in public life.9 An early report from the Council confirmed the involvement of lay women at the Vatican II: “Women are here as well, and they dare to speak up about their troubles and problems, the way [the spouses of the two journalists present at the Council] did.”10
In those years a huge, almost explosive energy released itself, not only in Croatian society that was excited by the prospect of political and economic reform, but in the Church itself. It was the energy of cultural, but also social activism that was characteristic of the grassroots movements, although it cannot be said that all members of the Church hierarchy supported it without reluctance. Still, in such an atmosphere it became increasingly difficult to ignore
8 Banac. Hrvati i Crkva, p. 113–123.
9 Rebeka Anić. Između emancipacije i ravnopravnosti: Žene i muškarci u Hrvatskoj // Muško i žensko stvori ih: Žene i muškarci u življenju i u službi Božjeg poslanja / ed. Ante Čovo and Dijana Mihalj. Split: Franjevački institut za kulturu mira 2008, p. 42.
10 Glas Koncila, September 29, 1963, p. 8.
the voices that challenged the position of women in society as well as in the Catholic Church.
In telling the story of those women, the proto-feminist voices as I regard them, it is noteworthy that they appeared on the stage quite unexpectedly during these exhilarating days for the Church, several years before the second wave of secular feminism challenged some of the Marxist dogmas of women’s emancipation in the socialist Yugoslavia.11 Ljiljana Matković-Vlašić, a writer and an artist, as well as a Catholic activist, has been since the mid-1960s engaged in the newly established Catholic press. It was a part of the great wave of Catholic post-Council revival that instructed how to be a modern believer, and how to reconcile the demands of contemporary life with faith and tradition. Geared towards the Catholic family life, the journal Kana brought stories that even atheists would be inclined to read, like an interview with a popular entertainer, the British singer Cliff Richard, who visited Zagreb. The journal recommended the latest, but affordable fashions, and printed advertisements for taking “Easter breaks,” a pastime that became more accessible to the socialist consumers even during the economic crises of the sixties. Kana was in strong competition with the secular women magazines to attract the public, and judging from the high circulation that the Catholic press achieved in those years, it was tremendously successful.12 Matković was among the first contributors to the journal Kana, in which she published women-oriented articles, and openly pointed out that “the absence of competent women in Church institutions in Croatia is the bare fact that should be considered in particular.”13
11 Zsófia Lóránd. The Feminist Challenge to the Socialist State in Yugoslavia. London: Palgrave Macmillan 2018.
12 Banac. Yugoslav Communism and the Yugoslav State, p. 587. The total of 8.5 million of copies were sold in 1966, and 60,000 copies of the new translation of the Bible were printed in 1968.
13 Rebeka Anić. Više od zadanoga: žene u Crkvi u Hrvatskoj u 20. stoljeću. Split: Franjevački institut za kulturu mira 2003, p. 249–251.
As she worked for the newly established cultural institution Kršćanska sadašnjost (Christian Present) alongside prominent male colleagues, theologians, and priests like Josip Turčinović, Vjekoslav Bajsić, and Tomislav Šagi Bunić, Matković considered that period as “beautiful times in spite of difficulties.” Although communism oppressed liberty and set many limitations for believers, it at the same time inspired and motivated people to oppose it, and work “for more personal, human freedom.” Although she felt marginalized as a believer and as a woman, she raised her expectations and started to participate in several meetings of Catholic women in the West.14 At the crucial moment simultaneous with the collapse of the Croatian reform movement in December 1971, she offered her readers a perspective and a consolation: “Do we possess within ourselves enough evidence to make ourselves and the others believe that this life, so often totally senseless with its rules and coercions, could still hold its meaning and light?”15
In a surprising turn of events (considering the “Croatian silence,” as the total absence of any sort of public expression was called in the aftermath of the collapse of the reform movement and the repression that followed), Matković published the first edition of her book Woman and the Church in 1973. It was a result of her interest in the relationship of women and the Church in the postVatican II context, which she developed without restrictions during her study abroad, in Münster in West Germany. Openly Westernoriented in her outlook, Matković took an inspiration from feminist theologians who were en vogue in Europe at the time, and it is not surprising that the book attracted a lot of attention because it was the first time anyone started a discussion of the issue of women and their standing in the Church in Croatia. Although it was officially ignored in the sense that it was not reviewed, even the Croatian
14
Ljiljana Matković Vlašić in a phone interview with the author, July 15, 2021.
15 Ljiljana Matković. Nije daleko pustinja // Kana 12 (1971) 11.
Church’s “conservative setting” could not prevent interest in it, because it offered an insight into an intellectually demanding topic that was under a strong influence of feminist theology. When the second edition of the book was published in 2002, new chapters were added to adapt the book to the demands of the twenty-first century. Matković is knowledgeable on the issues of the Scriptures, but her interest in the position of women and their evolution in society and the Church incited her to discuss some psychological factors of women’s estrangement from the Church. Matković is also a great enthusiast for the Second Vatican Council and for the reforms that it entailed for women in and around the Church. Her book introduced the feminist theology of the 1970s to the wider public and made manifest women’s changed expectations from the Church at the time. Following this publication, Matković has been invited as a speaker to many conferences and meetings that debated the topic ever since: the most important was the one in (West) Berlin in 1974 that was held under the title “The Sexism of the 1970s” organized by the World Council of Churches.16 It is interesting to compare this Western impact of the feminist theology that found fertile ground among at least some Catholics in Croatia. Several years later, when encountered with the first signs of the feminist demands for reinterpretation of the dogma of the “woman’s question” that was supposedly solved in Yugoslavia, the communists accused the second-wave feminists of “importing” foreign, bourgeois ideology into the “pure” socialist context. Matković, for her part, continued to explore the issue and write about it in the years that followed. Ex Occidente Lux (Out of the West, Light), indeed.17 Perhaps reluctantly, the Church hierarchy did slowly begin to regard women in a different way, and award them more re-
16
Ljiljana Matković Vlašić. Žena i Crkva. Zagreb: Multigraf 2002.
Ljiljana Matković Vlašić. Žena u crkvenim strukturama jučer i danas // Crkva u svijetu 12 (2) (1977) 131–137 (https://hrcak.srce.hr/90977).
17
sponsibility. The renewal of the charity work of the Caritas International of the Zagreb Archdiocese that was started in 1966 during the tenure of Cardinal Franjo Šeper acted still “more in an illegal, than in a legal manner.”18 Important as it was because she was extremely well prepared for the job having studied abroad, the choice of Jelena Brajša (1935–2021) for a head of Caritas for the whole of Croatia, and indeed Yugoslavia, still speaks volumes about how women were given jobs that were traditionally not considered “men’s work” or it was not opportune for a man to take them, or men did not find them interesting enough.19 In the context of the failure of the wider state-controlled economic reform, however, pressured by many problems that needed to be resolved, the authorities allowed the opening of the kindergartens that were run by the Church (i.e., nuns), as they did allow the independent Catholic press and cultural institutions. Those enterprises that can be understood as nuclei of the opposition to the Yugoslav socialist experiment were enthusiastically undertaken and influenced by lay Catholic women.20
Among them, the most influential was Smiljana Rendić (1926–1994), one of the few Catholic women journalists whose regular contributions to the most important Catholic paper of the day, Glas Koncila (Voice of the Council), although written under a pseudonym Berith, testified to that gradual opening of the Church. Entirely self-taught, but extremely knowledgeable and polyglot, Rendić came from an impoverished middle-class family in Split, whose apartment was confiscated by the communists in 1948. While her
18 Stjepan Baloban. Karitativni rad Katoličke Crkve // Revija za socijalnu politiku 12 (3–4) (2005) 282
19 Josip Baloban. Pokoncilska situacija // Bogoslovska smotra 60 (3–4) (1990) 268; Anić. Više od zadanoga, p. 288.
20 Andrea Feldman, Marijana Kardum. Karijera, kuhinja, konferencija: Žene u hrvatskom društvu šezdesetih // Radovi Zavoda za hrvatsku povijest Filozofskoga fakulteta Sveučilišta u Zagrebu (2023). (Fourthcoming).
father was a supporter of the republican but anti-clerical Croatian Peasant Party, the most popular opposition party of prewar Croatia (and, indeed, Yugoslavia), she was from her teenage years an active member of Catholic Action. After the death of her parents, Smiljana was left without any means and could not continue with her university education but had to start working to support herself. After a clash with the Yugoslav secret police, she lost her job, could not find work, and had to sell her blood for transfusion to survive. After many years of hardship, in 1958 she moved to Rijeka, where she managed to get a job at the administration of the journal Pomorstvo (Seafaring). Although she set her ambitions on a journalistic profession, she was frequently banned from it because she was labeled “clerical,” which basically indicated she was an openly religious person. Perhaps that was the reason why she chose to publish her contributions anonymously once she got a chance to appear in the Catholic press.21
Smiljana Rendić published hundreds of articles, writing boldly about some of the most important issues of the day. She did not hesitate to state her position on a variety of issues – for instance, the complexities of the Catholic Church in Ireland and the decline of its intellectual strengths that was evident in particular in the ways in which Ireland welcomed the Second Vatican Council: “The identification of the Catholic Church in Ireland with Irish nationalism, signified a great power of dissent, but it also meant that their power was in itself exhausting.” The national cause, however, took over and the Irish clergy remained “without particular sensibilities for authentic Church values.”22 She expressed similar criticism of the Catholic Church in Croatia, although at a critical
21 Silvana Burilović Crnov. Smiljana Rendić: Katolička novinarka i pratiteljica Drugoga vatikanskog sabora. Split: Sveučilište u Splitu, Katolički bogoslovni fakultet 2019, p. 35–38.
22 Rendić. Crkva i nacionalna borba u Irskoj // Glas Koncila 11 (1972) 9.
moment in her career, she herself succumbed to the general euphoria of the times and wrote an essay that would earn her the label of a dissident, a label that she herself would gladly have declined. Still, Rendić’s experience with the Communist rulers justified her dissenting position.
The article in question was entitled Izlazak iz genitiva ili drugi hrvatski preporod (Exiting Croatian Genitive or the Second Croatian Revival) and published in the journal Kritika in 1971. It was a tour de force: an overview of the Croatian language issues during the previous 150 years of national history. Firmly grounded in Croatian linguistic and literary traditions, Rendić’s style showed panache and a great use of language. The topic that she wrote about, in an outburst of creativity, was basically a defense of the Croatian language and identity against unification or what she called “a colonization” that came from Serbia, and from the Yugoslav integrationists in the service of Serbian hegemony. Judging from today’s standards, it is difficult to grasp the reason for her persecution, since there was nothing wrong or mistaken in her perceptive analysis, but at the time the authorities considered it to be a typical Croatian nationalistic outburst aimed at destabilizing the Yugoslav edifice.23
Although that issue of the journal was not banned, and her lawyer Milan Vuković brought the receipt to the courtroom that proved how he was able to buy the journal in a bookstore, at the political “showcase” trials it was impossible to prove the innocence of the accused party. Smiljana Rendić was resentful, and indeed sorry, since she was not particularly enthusiastic about publishing that essay: It is rather grotesque to be sentenced for something that is of my rather relative interest; since I know – because my lawyer found out –that the real reason for my sentence is not that one political article,
23 Smiljana Rendić. Izlazak iz genitiva ili drugi hrvatski preporod // Rendić. Katolički identitet i Hrvatski preporod: Rasprave, kritike, izvještaji. Zagreb: Glas Koncila 2012.
but rather ten years of my work for the Catholic press. So, I console myself, that not even Our Lord, Jesus Christ was sentenced to die on the cross for the real, religious (Filius Dei), but for the political excuse (Rex Judaeorum).24
During the long and stressful court case Rendić feared for her life, and the confinement that was imminent. When the sentence was finally pronounced in January 1973 it was one year of prison and she was banned from public life for a year. The Croatian Supreme Court amended her sentence to one year suspended but extended the ban on public engagement to two years. It illustrates, however, that there were limits to personal and public freedom in society, as well as in the Church during that period. Forced into retirement, Rendić felt more and more isolated and lonely, not only in society in general, but in the Church itself. Even before the trial, she complained in correspondence with her colleagues about the treatment she was getting at the editorial board of Glas Koncila: “Am I to blame for being a layperson and a woman?” Rendić aimed this question at the Church hierarchy, but also her editors, who almost made her lose her faith and will to work.25 Many years after her death, Rendić has been widely read and recognized as a strong intellectual voice of her time. In the Catholic circles, however, her active role in asserting women’s specific position in the Church has been disregarded as was her role as an intellectual promoter of women networks.26
Coming back to my own experience of being a Catholic at the times of transition, I must admit that the newly established order in the 1990s, with its celebratory and manifest Catholicism that went hand in hand with newly discovered Croatian nationalism, did
24 Burilović Crnov. Smiljana Rendić, p. 43.
25 Ibidem, p. 98.
26 Further research should reveal and analyse the women’s networks at the time. Liljana Matković-Vlašić remembers debates on “healthy feminism in communication” with Smiljana Rendić: Ljiljana Matković Vlašić. Ime koje valja pamtiti // Nova prisutnost 17 (2) (2019) 411–412.
not agree with me. Although I kept my faith, I was estranged from the church-going activities because I found it strange, if not in bad taste, to rub shoulders with one-time members of the secret police who would have only a few years before come to Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve to count, identify, and report on the churchgoers. Granted, I was guilty of the sin of pride. Because, as Matthew says in his famous quote: “Judge not, that you be not judged.” One should forgive, but not forget. And by finding out the stories of the lay women in the Church in Croatia, I have realized that their histories and their example, their self-assurance, strength, and perseverance was what, in less favorable times, prepared the way for our own freedom. Although their life experiences were difficult, I have seen them not so much as a source of trauma, but as an expression of liberty. At the time of the prescribed falsehood, among the dull, oppressive communist rule, they taught me, as well as the wider public, how to be different, how to dissent, and how not to be afraid. The research into their history contributes to the knowledge of the history of the Church, although not necessarily as an institution, as a structure, but rather as a living community. Their experience has been a valuable lesson in a society that has broadly accepted feminist ideas of gender equality, but still upholds its religious and cultural traditions that are strongly influenced by the Catholic Church.
The question about the 70-year atheistic regime and its reflection on current political, cultural, or religious life has been problematic since Georgia restored its independence. Combat with the remnants of the Soviet Union from the mental point of view still represents a big challenge for all post-Soviet nations, and requires not only factual accounting but an analysis of the proceedings that turned into an obstacle for a free society. Thus, there is a question apart from the physical destruction of millions of people: the destructive heritage left by the Soviet Union on the social and mental levels, the eradication of which is a severe challenge for generations. The development of the church with a Soviet mentality is one of such problems in Georgia. The church causes many misunderstandings with its ambivalent nature: on the one hand, it is largely respected and widely popular due to its historical heritage and memory as a cornerstone of the national identity; on the other hand, it is an obstacle in terms of the people’s modernization and defense of human rights1 which plays a crucial role in maintaining that identity. Thus, we’ll try to say why the popularity of the church increased this much after the destruction of the Soviet Union, and why it has developed into an institution which is factually bound by the narrow frames of self-identification and is fully immersed in the pursuit of materialistic wellbeing.
1 See Elene Gavashelishvili. Anti-Modern and Anti-Globalist Tendencies in the Georgian Orthodox Church // Identity Studies in Caucasus and Black See Region 4 (2012) 118–137; K. Ladaria. Georgian Orthodox Church and Political Project of Modernization // Ibidem, p. 107–117.
The present article will attempt to answer the question of what the Sovietization of Georgia’s Orthodox Church is, and how it turned into a closed society. Naturally, the concept of Sovietization itself requires some precision. In the given discussion, it does not imply transferring the Soviet organizational structure onto the Church, but the development of a mentality led by the establishment of the Soviet order, which is far from Christ’s teaching of individual responsibility and service to others. It implies the creation of a human being and a system where collective reasoning dominates together with herd obedience, mistrust and permanent control, conformism, ideological exclusivism, deceptive equality and hierarchization, the fading of individual responsibility, and hollow ritualism. All this is reflected in the reasoning of Homo Sovieticus, who sees the Church as the only arena for self-survival. Here we do not focus on the actions of the Church which are against the secular society – anti-democratic, combating globalization and modernization, and ignoring fundamental human rights. Such trends are not strange for diverse religions and churches, and can be the subject of an ideological (and not value-based) interpretation. We will focus on only four aspects of the current Orthodox Church in Georgia that can be considered the expression of Sovietization. These are: 1) the nationalization of the Church and sacralizing of the national; 2) the transformation of the religious nature in informal areas; 3) the religious revival of persona Homo Sovieticus; and 4) the political instrumentalization of the religion and its aspiration to social-cultural domination.
Nationalization of the Church and sacralizing of the national
Before WWII, the terror carried out by the atheistic regime and constant persecution almost erased the Church, as the regime had declared religion to be a factor restricting the public from its development. The atheistic government assassinated tens of thousands
of clergymen, sent priests to concentration camps, destroyed thousands of churches, stifled religious life, and neutralized the entire institution. But when Stalin saw that it was impossible to fully eliminate religion and that it was possible to use it for his benefit (i.e., to strengthen moral support during WWII or to portray himself as a supporter of freedom of belief), he decided to control the Church and use it as a political instrument in the international arena. Moreover, he decided to access the inner life of the people and increase the regime’s influence on them.2 In fact, Stalin intended to replace the Church of Jesus Christ with the Soviet church.
After Stalin’s death, interest in national issues increased and international issues became less important. The policy toward national minorities became actively inhospitable, but differed throughout the Soviet bloc. Another activity in the Church nationalization is observed in Georgia: the systemic persecution of Islam, Catholicism, and other religious denominations that had a centuries-old tradition as an important part of the population’s lives. The persecution was launched in the Tsarist period for Russia, disguised in Orthodoxy to more easily control the Georgian public. Orthodoxy is closely related with the national identity. Tsarist Russia and later the Communist government instrumentalized the Church to improve Georgia-Russia links in the political and cultural arenas.
Starting in the 1960s–1970s, a dissident movement arose against the Soviet Union and its feudal and colonial attitudes, and focused on Georgia’s cultural and religious identity. Amid the Soviet chaos,
2 For instrumentalization of religion, sacred symbols, and rituals in Soviet Russia, see O. Kharkhordin. The Collective and the Individual in Russia: A Study of Practice. Berkeley: University of California Press 1999. “It was in the Soviet Union in particular that medieval Eastern-Christian political theology was revived in a secular Soviet form which, in the final analysis, ended in the Stalin period as Soviet Byzantinism” (Z. Andronikashili, G. Maisuradze, Secularization and Its Vicissitudes in Georgia // Identity Studies in the Caucasus and the Black Sea Region 2 [2010] 5-17).
it connected the new possibility of self-identification to the Church and supported the Church nationalization this way.3 The religious practice was declared a the national tradition, and the Georgian folklore and ethical activity, free from the communist morals, were linked to it.4 Christianity started returning to public life under the guise of national values. Thus, Orthodoxy, dressed in national clothing, was not only tolerated by the Communist Party as it provided the party with service,5 but simultaneously it represented the nation’s historical and cultural heritage. It even benefited from specific privileges the other religious denominations were deprived of. Starting in the 1960s–70s, the Church was given a larger arena, with the opening of a theological (spiritual) seminary and the publication of a religious journal. The Patriarchate and Catholicos-Patriarch of Georgia directly collaborated with the representatives of the State Service of Religious Affairs for the purpose of protecting the national heritage and church architecture. However, this freedom remained restricted and was subject to the implementation of the Soviet system’s interests and plans. The Church was merely one more face of the system.6
In fact, starting in the1980s, the Church found itself surrounded by some tension. On the one hand, it received certain benefits and privileges from the state to ideologically help the morally bankrupt Soviet nomenklatura to undermine the dissident movement which
3 J. Gerber. Georgien: Nationaler Dissens und kommunistische Herrschaft seit 1956. Köln: Nomos 1997, p. 104.
4 See T. Dragadze. Rural Families in Soviet Georgia: A Case Study in Ratcha Province. London – New York: Routlege 1988, p. 72 f.
5 While the party leadership reconciled itself to the hierarchy of the church, ordinary believers were subjected to repression and were often even the object of surveillance and persecution. See Pamela Jawad, Oliver Reisner. Die Nationalisierung der Religion in der Orthodoxen Apostolischen Kirche Georgiens – Begünstigung oder Hindernis im Demokratisierungsprozess? // Religiöse Akteure in Demokratisierungsprozessen. Konstruktiv, destruktiv und obstruktiv. Wiesbaden: Springer VS 2013, p. 158.
6 See Reisner, Jawad. Die Nationalisierung der Religion, p. 153.
was fighting on behalf of the nation. On the other hand, it attempted to be far more liberated from the Soviet dictatorship and national movement, aligning itself against secularism to make its position in the public irreplaceable and justify its own conformism. Thus, it acted as a symbol of protecting national values. So, while governed by Patriarch Ilia II, the Church ignored its traditional self-perception framework; engaged in the service of the state, it covertly acted as a rival of the Soviet system and the national secular movement. But this game could not protect the Church indefinitely from the impact of the state’s policies. Thus, the Church decided to engage them in their ideological narrative and include all the national and religious issues and aspects in its concerns. In fact, starting in the 1960s, we see that the Georgian nationality was becoming sacralized. Naturally, the process of the Church’s nationalization had its own background and the sacralizing of all the nationalities did not begin with the atheistic regime – it had specific preconditions. On the one hand, this includes the trend toward replacing religion, ever since the establishment of national churches in the Middle Ages and secular messianism. On the other hand, all this implies the replacement of a modernist idea of national states by Ilia Chavchavadze with the traditional paradigm (the model of the language, motherland, and religion), which tried to revive the faded national ideal and restore the future-oriented modern statehood, while simultaneously taking the past into account. Ilia Chavchavadze, who is considered to be the father of modern secular Georgia, succeeded with his liberal viewpoints in overcoming the previous generations’ monarchical view of the country. Thus, the Church, to avoid competing with Ilia’s patriotism or moving too far from him, canonized him as a saint in 1987. “On the one hand, the Georgian Orthodox Church absorbs the ‘author’ of Georgian secularization, appropriates him and thus levels the whole secular discourse. In fact, it takes back that dominant role in discursive and symbolic functions which Ilia Chavchavadze had taken away from it. Thus, the modern Geor-
gian state begins with a symbolic counter-secularizational act. However, the Georgian Orthodox Church is itself transformed by this act. If the fatherland held the status of the sacral in Ilia Chavchavadze’s secular discourse, and the fatherland itself had turned into church and (national) unity, by canonizing Ilia Chavchavadze the Church became the upholder of the discourse on the fatherland in secular space and, in fact, thereby appeared as a national (secular) Church.”7
The prosperity of nationalism launched in post-Stalin Georgia, in turn, was a product of the mixture of heterogeneous culture codes. Ilia’s heroism is mixed with Stalin’s heroism in this discourse. The theocentric cult of a person was essentially transferred in the national discourse. While Ilia underlined the history of the nation, Soviet Georgia put the political history forward (as Ilia said, it was “the history of the kings”).
Despite an intense application of Ilia’s symbols, in the post-Stalin era the Georgian discourse terminated its connection with the future and placed its symbolic center in the past. Georgia and its friends in the Middle Ages were turned into monuments, objects of public self-identification. Thus, the national discourse still becomes an expression of the pre-secular paradigm. The Church accepted the process and launched the post-Soviet era of a new, independent Georgia in the pre-secular paradigm. “By this the Church had, in fact, confronted secular messianism with its own messianic idea, so the secularization of the sacral ‘Heavenly Jerusalem’ – its being made earthly – took the form of its nationalization. The nationalism of the Church did not remain solely in discursive space. The Church filled an ideological vacuum in the post-Soviet period. The new Georgian state attempts to use the Church as an ideological instrument.”8
7 Andronikashili, Maisuradze. Secularization and Its Vicissitudes in Georgia, p. 14.
8 Ibidem, p. 14–15.
After the Soviet Union collapsed, the national movement, originating from the Church-related and dissident past life, occupied almost the entire political and social area.9 After the moral fiasco of the Soviet ideology, ethnic belonging turned into the main sign of social success.10 The religious factor, as an expression of the ethnic exclusiveness, became subjected to it. In fact, starting in the 1990s, the intersection of the nationalization and sacralizing of Orthodoxy appeared on the arena. These two processes, underway simultaneously, happened to be the reality of independent Georgia which defined the condition of today’s Church.11
9 Zviad Gamsakhurdia, the then leader of the United National Movement, the first president, former dissident, and anthroposophist, believed that the ideological vacuum of Soviet materialism should be replaced by Georgian Christianity, and thus the spiritual mission of Georgia as one mediator between East and West. See Gamsakhurdia. The Spiritual Mission of Georgia. A Lecture Delivered at the IDRIART Festival in Tbilisi, 2 May 1990, available at: http://rustaveli.tripod.com/ mission.html. In doing so, he once again added great dynamism to the fusion of nationalism and religion, the results of which were manifested in the second half of the 1990s, in the dominant expansion of the Church in all spheres of society. About the anthroposophical views of Zviad and the Zviadists, as well as Gamsakhurdia’s populism see: Gerber. Georgien: Nationaler Dissens und kommunistische Herrschaft, p. 277–279; Populism in Georgia: The Gamsakhurdia Phenomenon // Stephen Jones. Georgia. A Political History Since Independence. London: I. B. Tauris 1994, p. 51-74. “The support for Gamsakhurdia did represent a revolt against the liberal technocratic elite of the Georgian establishment, but as so often happens, degenerated into a different sort of elitism. […] The scapegoating of non-Georgian minorities and the emphasis on unity undermined participation and political diversity” (Jones. Georgia, p. 141 f.).
10 Jonathan Wheatley. Georgia from National Awakening to Rose Revolution: Delayed Transition in the Former Soviet Union. Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate 2005, p. 20–30; Rogers Brubaker. Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe. New York: Cambridge University Press 1996, p. 23–31.
11 For the condition of the ‘90s see: T. Blauvelt, Ch. Berglund. Redefining the Nation: From Ethnic Fragmentation to Civic Integration? // 25 Years of Independent Georgia: Achievements and Unfinished Projects / ed. Gia Nodia. Tbilisi: Konrad Adenauer Stiftung & Ilia State University Press 2016, p. 11–55.
We should note that this process was preceded by the transformation of the religious nature in mechanisms that could fill the vacuum left by the rejection and marginalization of religion. So, new subjection and domination forms were established to define religious conduct and expression in the everyday practice of millions of people.12 The Soviet system did not need to control the Church; it simply needed to neutralize it to receive secret information and access the social layer which had been hidden inside the Church. Therefore, the Church established the forms of relationships required for the total system. All this informally required that conduct meet the atheistic system requirements on the one hand, and respond to the religious requirements on the other hand.13 Such informal structures were created in other social fields as well, namely, in the criminal world (the creation of the so-called criminal boss) and on the spiritual-intellectual level in the privileged class of the intelligentsia.
The indicator of an informal parallel phenomenon with respect to belief was the domestication of religion. The home was turned into a place for the sacred, system-banned traditions, rituals, or values. Places for icons appeared in the home. Rituals for baptizing and burials were carried out secretly in the home. The Georgian Supra (table or feast) tradition developed in a manner that allowed conversations on prohibited topics. People around the table were free to bless each other, use religious words, and mention God publicly if they wanted to. In fact, the sacral area was transferred to the home, which was a place removed from the public, and
12
See Mark Edele. Soviet Society, Social Structure, and Everyday Life: Major Frameworks Reconsidered // Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 8 (2) (2007) 368.
13 See Ketevan Gurchiani. How Soviet is the Religious Revival in Georgia: Tactics in Everyday Religiosity // Europe-Asia Studies 69 (3) (2017) 514.
the people undertook the clergyman’s functions and rights. It gave them authority while still being in an informal relationship.14
Practical implementation and obedience to the official religious rules were no longer used to define belonging to a particular religion. But the understanding of the religious nature changed and, despite rejecting the liturgical practices (holy service, joint prayers, or religious life) it remained a factor for spiritual self-identification. In fact, the issue of belief turned into a privatized area. Thus, the religious nature and belonging to the Church were thought to be a far more cultural concept than an expression of a relationship with God. Trust in God was subject to the cultural and state expectations.15 For this reason, despite the criticism of the Church’s social,
14 “The urge for a typical Georgian to position him or herself as a Christian and display belonging is also manifested in the annexation of public spaces by Christian symbols and rituals. A ‘real Georgian’ has to prove his or her identity by displaying religious symbols in the workplace, at home and on the body. Domesticity is thus reserved, but transformed, and acts as another field for domination” (Gurchiani. How Soviet is the Religious Revival in Georgia, p. 520).
15 See Charles Robia. Religiosity and Trust in Religious Institutions: Tales from the South Caucasus (Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia) // eScholarship, University of California 2009 (https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1b88b59g). “Attendance should not be understood as an indicator of religiosity in the same way it is in the West because Orthodox religiosity is centered on self-identification rather than religious practice” (p. 24). “The subjective importance of religion (i.e., intrinsic religiosity) is a significant determinant of trust in religious institutions, while religiosity as measured by religious practice (i.e., external religiosity) is not” (p. 27). “The analysis has shown that although religious practice as measured by attendance, prayer and fasting are low in all three countries, religious institutions are the second most trusted in Armenia and Georgia after the army, and the third most trusted in Azerbaijan. The results demonstrate that religious practice does not determine trust in religious institutions, but rather how important people consider religion to be in their daily lives is a significant predictor of trust in all three countries. […] Georgia is the only country in which interpersonal trust is a significant indicator of trust in religious institutions” (p. 28). See too A. Filetti. Religiosity in the South Caucasus: Searching for an Underlying Logic of Religion’s Impact on Political Attitudes // Southeast European and Black Sea Studies 14 (2) (2014) 219–238.
political, or cultural activities, the expectations towards the Church are more based on trust than on the factual realization of its activities. The Church’s institutional conduct deviated from the Gospel instances and, with a full exploitation of the people’s religious instinct, remained in the Old Testament paradigm where national and ritual formalism turned into a sign of belief.
Starting in the 1990s, the Church was directly against the governing power and its external course was not its focus. For all these years, it cared for the construction of new churches and opening of monasteries, as well as the expansion of the number of eparchies and clergymen. The 1990s represented a period of prosperity, as the Church experienced material and infrastructural development as well as a return of congregations. This process included people with a criminal past, as the Church saw an opportunity for social rehabilitation among the high-rank clergymen and another means to gain power. The new generation especially tended to return to the Church to escape the troubled worldly life and find inner peace. This wish was caused by the economic, political, social, and cultural cataclysms that took place in those times. They were the so-called lost generation: after the recessive wars in the Abkhazia and Tskhinvali regions, tens of thousands of young people lost their lives. An environment where the Church began increasing its influence in all the public fields was the result of the total economic collapse created by the dissolution of the Soviet economic system. An additional factor was the non-existence of a new political elite which could transfer from the collapsed social system to a new economic and political system (unlike the former communist countries of Eastern Europe where Western investments were launched starting in the 1990s for the social and economic rehabilitation). But the development process of the Church did
not provide an establishment of a new mentality and possibilities to detect the Christian heritage and revive spirituality, but cultivated the remnants of human relations deformed by the Soviet experience. The Church and its environment became monomythical and developed as a parallel field of public perception. Thus, the public started moving in two polarized directions in a new political environment from an ideological point of view: on the one hand, in the liberal-capitalist direction and, on the other hand, by the social-conservative revanchism which thought the Church was its ally. The internal processes underway in the Church were overcome by the conservatives, as the fundamentalist and anti-ecumenical movements got stronger and stronger. The clergymen who thought in a liberal mode were marginalized and banished from the Church.16 Two factors led to the development of such an environment in the Church: the ideological and personal ties of bishops with Russia and the Russian Church. All the patriarchs, including Ilia II, were appointed by Stalin and KGB decisions, and many bishops and clergymen were educated in Russia.17 The Russian world was much closer than the Western one. The other factor of the Church’s degradation is a phenomenon of the Soviet men-
16 The anti-ecumenical movement became so active that all free-thinking and Western priests were expelled from the church or exiled abroad. Examples of this are Basil Kobakhidze, Zaza Tevzadze, Ilia Chighladze, Kakhaber Kurtanidze, and others. Under the pretext of maintaining the unity of the Church, in 1997 the Georgian Church withdrew from the World Council of Churches. About the ecumenical situation in the Georgian Orthodox Church see D. Tinikashvili. The Orthodox Church of Georgia and the Ecumenical Movement (before and after 1997) // Journal of Eastern Christian Studies 71 (1-2) (2019) 127–159.
17 A document proving Ilia II’s KGB membership was circulating on the Internet. Also noteworthy is Edward Shevardnadze’s comment on the appointment of Ilia II as patriarch, where he talks about his election as patriarch with the ordination of the state. See https://www.facebook.com/lado.gamsakhurdia/ videos/164249795094778.
tality: after many decades of terror, repression, and indoctrination, a type of person developed who is often called Homo Sovieticus. We witnessed the society brought up in slavery and poverty, with a scant understanding of liberty, an intensified instinct for survival, focused on the present time instead of prospects, who saw the possibility of continuing life in the Church and mental constancy leading to a feeling of protection. Thus, the Church adopted Homo Sovieticus who is characterized by mistrusting freedom and having a low quality of civic understanding, conformism, and absence of a critical approach to an official mode of behavior. The citizens of the Soviet republics, colonized under many years of occupation, with a low perception of statehood, became believers calling for obedience to fate, saw protection only in his/her own world, and perceived himself/ herself as a sacrifice.18 The mode of life established by the violence of the Soviet system turned into religious conduct. It is expressed not only in obedience to authoritarianism, but fideism and utilitarianism as a side effect. Decades-long indoctrination led to the desire to present the world and ideology in black and white.
The Soviet experience gives a ready framework to maneuver with the dominant power over the Christian believers.19 Daily practice: socialist genres of informal networks and negotiations are deeply rooted and still ensure normality, including the relations between the priests and Christian believers.20 It was added to a clan’s and family’s patriarchal role that was crucial for social stability and existential survival historically. It became a distorted cultivation
18 See Gurchiani. How Soviet is the Religious, p. 514.
19 Ibidem.
20 Ibidem, p. 510. “When examining religiosity in post-Soviet countries, researchers end up with a picture that leaves space for an in-depth analysis of each case, as their geographic proximity or shared Soviet history does not necessarily force these countries to move in the same direction […]. In countries where the Church was closely associated with the national idea, the Church remained strong”.
in the Church life and, instead of social trust, it was declared a Gospel-like order. Instead of recognizing the historical consistency of survival or an expression of acceptance of the truth, it turned into a tool to improve the hierarchical order. Collectivism defines Church and everyday morals; the social context of individualism is killed and religious feelings are exploited. The spiritual and religious demands of people turned into a basis for institutional legitimation which became an important component of social life. It shows us the mixture of the Soviet Union with its specific Georgian form which creates new ways of collaboration with institutional power.
The inter-delimitation of the Georgian Orthodox Church and state is declared on the constitutional level in Georgia, while the form of the relationship is regulated by a special constitutional agreement, signed in 2002, which underlines the special eminence of the Orthodox Church in the development of Georgian culture and statehood. Though it should be noted that those norms, declared on the constitutional level, are not followed in reality. On the one hand, directly or indirectly, the Church interferes with the form of the state governance not as one of the social state subjects but as a privileged one, and often it represents an institution beyond the law.21 On the other hand, neither the constitutional
21 Interference in the state affairs of the Church is revealed: in local political personnel decisions; in matters of material and financial restitution both at the state and at the regional-administrative level; in human rights issues (lobbying for anti-discrimination law, the May 17 incident); in political interference in elections. All this is not to defend values on the part of the Church, but to serve to strengthen its own privileged position and maintain influence over public processes. About the role of the church in the process of democracy see: E. Balsyte, The Relationship between Religion and the State in Connection to Democracy:
agreement is fully followed, nor are its articles fully implemented. Most of the constitutional agreement is not precised and expanded and frequently it is missing terminology and essential topics.22 It does not represent only a problem of post-modernism when the declared and content sides do not coincide in the official political discourse, but also the inability of the state and Church to sign a legally written document which would be in harmony in the entire legislative context of the state. There is no tradition of a constitutional agreement between the Church and the state in Orthodox countries, unlike the Catholic world. When this agreement was signed, it was a totally new document in Georgian reality. From a formal point of view this agreement tries to institutionalize the relationship between the Church and the state, but neither of them tries to adjust and fully realize this agreement; where informal relations dominate between the institutions, disorder creates more space for speculation. Such a failure was characteristic of Soviet life, where the communist system confessed atheism on one hand, while on the other hand it sometimes supported the Church which was in an ideological conflict with the state. The model of two ideologically opposite systems’ collaboration continued and it meant that the secret “rivalry” still exists. In turn, the Church thinks it guarantees the Georgian statehood and national identity and frequently questions trust in the state, while the latter, from the formal or legal point of view, sees the Church in its formal frameworks together with other subjects.
The Case of Georgia, Aalborg University 2015; Also S. Keskgn, Church-State Relation in post-soviet Georgia: “Deprivatization” of Georgian Orthodoxy, Middle East Technical University 2015.
22 See: D. Gegenava, Eklesia-saxelmwifo urTierTobis samarTlebrivi modelebi dasaqarTvelos konstituciuri SeTanxmebadaviT batoniSvilis samarTlis institutis gamomcemloba, Tbilisi 2018 (D. Gegenava, Legal Models of Church-State Relations and Georgian Constitutional Agreement, Prince David Institute for Law Publishing, Tbilisi 2018).
The parallel between the Soviet period and today’s life is maintained in terms of the Church-state relationship in a manner of weakened official collaboration but is observed from the point of view of the so-called “rivalry.”23 While the Church-state relationship model is observed as that of inter-restrictive and competitive subjects, they bear a destructive potential for each other. Interrelation is also destructive today, as the state institutions get discredited and weaker (the period of reforms in 2004–2012 is the exception), and pampering of the Church by the state puts it in an unfair context, and in exchange the Church will experience the deterioration of its image in the future. The popularity of the Church is fed by the historical unfairness, and it has not yet collected the negative credit that will turn into a future benefit to the Church. But it should be noted that for the last 30 years the Church misused this positive dividend so much that open criticism towards it increased. Allegedly, the popularity and trust peak has already been reached and it starts dropping now. The chance of de-Sovietisation or fading of the mentality where mercantile interests dominate the Church mission implementation, depends on the liberation of the state-Church relationship from the old, deformed model. The Church’s involvement in policy, even its geopolitical positioning, has been subject to this interest for the Church to be a dominant power receiving all the benefits and it uses political trade for this purpose. The anti-Western rhetoric of the Church gets stronger as it threatens its aspirations. The pro-Russian attitude was not stipulated primarily by the ideological proofs (but it gets clear in the preaching of many archbishops), but the mental closeness with the Soviet heritage still tries to influence its former colonies. To maintain this position, Russia has still been using the language and mechanisms of
23 See E. Chitanava. The Georgian Orthodox Church: National Identity and Political Influence (www.tdi.ge/sites/default/files/fpc_eka_chitanavas_article_2015_ 0.pdf).
blackmail,24 the aspiration to the material wealth that dominates so strongly in the Church. The Church, as the fifth column of the Soviet era, remained without a spirit in today’s Georgia which shows the calling for Christ more clearly. Though such a Church without a spirit still represents an implementation of God’s will, as such a paradoxical condition of the Church expresses the uncounted and paradoxical development of the history which refuses to be subject to the human logic, and shows its blessing amidst the flow of sin and evil and fulfills the history of salvation. This is a repressed Church which is a victim of violence; it is exasperated, it is affected by aggrandizement, and it is waiting for sanctity and hopes for self-purification and revival. It is a constituent part of the salvation history and, as Apostle Paul says, the greater is the sin the higher blessing follows it (сomp. Rom 5:20).
24 Watch the interview of the Ecumenical Patriarch where he says that Russia is blackmailing Georgia over Abkhazia: https://www.facebook.com/TVFormula/ videos/812302609391738/; another tool of blackmail are the documents preserved by the KGB, which exist from the Soviet period. The patriarch is also exposed in cooperation with the KGB and many high priests give a compelling excuse.
At the beginning, the Hungarian Communist Party (MKP) strove to maintain the appearance of democracy,1 but at the same time – with the help of the Red Army – also began the gradual implementation of its long-term goals.2 Agreements between the Great Powers and the Soviet military presence both guaranteed sovietization would happen eventually, with the timing being dictated by the development of international politics. In 1926 at a meeting of the Executive Committee of the Comintern, Stalin had explained that “the question of fight should be observed not from the perspective of sharing the truth, but from the perspective of the requirements of the political situation, from the perspective of the current political needs of the party.”3 Endre Gerő also referred to this in his recollection, namely “How it [the socialist revolution] happens will be determined by the external and internal balance of power. Which way, how fast, cannot be determined by anything other than the external and internal balance of power.”4
1 Magdolna Baráth. In the Shadow of the Kremlin: Studies on the History of the Relations between Hungary and the Soviet Union, 1944-1990. Budapest 2014, p. 37.
2 Archives of the Institute of Political History (PIL) 867, f. 2/g-127, 103–104.
3 Speech of Stalin on the meeting of the Executive Committee of the Komintern on the 22th of January 1926. See Works of Stalin, vol. 8. Budapest 1952, p. 1.
4 PIL 867, f. 2/g-127, 104–105.
By December 1944, preparatory work of the communists had already been completed and the targeted strategic goal was given. The elaboration and continuous modification of the necessary tactics – in short, the implementation – was up to Mátyás Rákosi and the Muscovite politicians arriving in Hungary with the support of the Red Army, Moscow, and the Soviet advisers.5 As a first step, the Interim National Assembly was established with Soviet help on December 21 in the city of Debrecen, which had been “liberated” from the German troops. The next day, the National Government was elected by this body. Of the 231 representatives of the Interim National Assembly, the Hungarian Communist Party had 90 members, the Party of Social Democrats had 43 members, the Smallholders Party had 56, the National Peasants Party had 16 members, the Civic Democratic Party had 13 members, while 12 representatives were non-partisan. In the cabinet, the portfolios of internal affairs,6 agriculture,7 commerce and transport,8 and welfare9 were all given to communist politicians. In ministries where the minister was not a communist, their people represented the communist party as secretaries and under-secretaries. On February 20, 1945, the Interim National Government signed the treaty of armistice, of which clause 5 stated that until the signing of the peace treaty the Hungarian government agreed on the establishment of the board consisting of the representatives of the allied powers, called the Allied Control Commission (SZEB). Leader of the SZEB of Hungary until summer
5 More about the activities of Soviet advisers, officers, and specialists: Baráth. In the Shadow of the Kremlin, p. 102–136 (“Fraternal assistance:” Soviet consultants and experts in Hungary).
6 Ferenc Erdei.
7 Imre Nagy.
8 József Gábor (MKP), later Ernő Gerő (MKP).
9 Erik Molnár (MKP).
1946 was marshal Kliment Yefremovich Voroshilov, and then lieutenant general Vladimir Petrovich Sviridov. SZEB evolved into a national inspection body with control of the service, intelligence, and administrative apparatus; it established its central, regional, county, and municipal bodies, and also possessed branches at important companies. In Hungarian regions already occupied by the Soviet army, Soviet military commands were formed whose leaders could start their important contribution in the administrative transformation of counties, towns and municipalities, and in the control of everyday life. It included the replacement and eventual arrest of county, municipal, and district leaders, as well as the appointment and replacement of the chiefs of police.
The decision on the attack against church(es) had already been determined by the Central Committee of the Hungarian Communist Party (MKP KV) in the protocol drawn up at the meeting of November 22, 1945. During this meeting, Mátyás Rákosi pointed out that “working has to be cautious and we have to be very careful about how and which way we attack.” For this reason, at the beginning attacks were never directly against the Church, but against its “most reactionary” representatives and institutions. Still, attacks against clerical figures were launched immediately, before the war was even officially over.
József Mindszenty had already stood up, together with the bishops of Veszprém and Kalocsa, in the case of the arrested and interned priests in their letter of April 30, 1945, addressed to the prime minister and the minister of internal affairs. They requested the reassessment of their priests by naming each of them, together with the permit for them to celebrate masses.10 In his letter addressed to the minister of internal affairs on November 25, 1945, Mindszenty reported that the number of internees was too high. “Under the pre-
10 Historical Archives of State Security Services (ÁBTL) 3.1.9, V-700/17, 165–67.
Seminary for Priests in the Internment Camp of Kistarcsa (1949–1950)
vious administration there were 50 of us internees in the prison of Veszprém, today there are around 1000 of them.” He also wrote that according to his knowledge the number of internees had been increased in other towns around the country as well.11 Continuing his letter, Mindszenty also wrote that “there is no need for so many internees in the free world. Their allocation is inhuman. [...] Their supply is of no glory for the state. It is not enough and of low quality. There is no medicine. Their legal treatment is as if we lived in a system of command. Months pass, they are not even told why they are interned. As a result, there is no legal remedy. In a democratic, free state the situation of internees cannot be like the situation of internees of dictatorships.”12
On the order of Mátyás Rákosi, the subdivision dealing exclusively with “clerical issues” had been organized within the Department of State Defense as early as 1946.13 At this period the main task of the subdivision was the observation of Mindszenty and his environment, as well as the control of his political activity. The clerical leaders and superiors were put under observation. Agents and whistleblowers in their environment were recruited by blackmail, threats, and intimidation, meaning that the Clerical Subdivision had been deeply infiltrated into the Catholic Church. This resulted in the minutes of the meetings of the episcopacy being immediately given to Gábor Péter, who then had them on the desk of Mátyás Rákosi the following day. He received not only summary reports but also partial reports related to given events. The functions of the subdivision were taken over by the State Office for Religious
11
ÁBTL 3.1.9. V-700/56. 177–78. The document is published in: Ádám Somorjai, Tibor Zinner. Almost Sentenced to Death. Documents to the History of the Life of József Mindszenty. Budapest 2008, p. 205–206. At that time, the number of internees in the capital alone was 7,969.
12
ÁBTL 3.1.9, V-700/56, 177–78.
13 State Defense Major János Tihanyi was appointed head of the Ecclesiastical Subdivision.
Affairs in 1951. At the same time the organization of propaganda articles and materials began with the aim of discrediting the Church. The communist propaganda against churches – and especially against the Catholic Church – had “constantly increased” by the end of 1947.
Mindszenty saw these signs and machinations and referred to them in the episcopal conference held in Vác on October 8, 1947. As a first item, Mindszenty divided the evolution of church politics into four stages:
First stage: Till the 1st of November 1945, the attempt was to make people believe, despite frequent injuries, that the Church should not worry, moreover should be happy, and that Germans could be replaced with a better occupying power. The racial directive could be replaced with non-confessed racial rule and Marxism.
Second stage: Between the 1st of November 1945 and the 15th of April 1947. Offensive against the Church: School conspiracies, charge of incitement for murder, the dissolution and nationalization of Church associations, optional religious education, monopoly on schoolbooks, humiliation of pastors in the press, identification of the Church and the reaction towards priests of lower rank, carrying the coffin of the archbishop on the streets, arrests of priests and believers, etc.
Third stage: Between the 15th of April and the 31st of August 1947. The olive branch of peace extended towards the Church, willingness for management of relations, easing of the attacks by the press towards the clergy, an intensifying campaign of Church redistricting aimed at submission and electoral majority. Development of people’s colleges and the fight for positions there went on continuously.
Fourth stage: After the 31st of August 1947. It is characterized by the admission that the initial offensive and the sub-
mission of the Church could not be completed; a more powerful endeavor showing a friendlier face by government members and even lower-rank representatives showing up for processions, etc.; photos purporting to show an improved relationship between the Church and the state; the archbishop is greeted in the name of the government on two of the Church’s provincial visits. A daily newspaper is promised to the Church. Apart from all this, there is election fraud, admission to the Communist Party (K.P.) is forced by a 3-member mobile committee on pain of dismissal within 5 minutes. The number of interrogations with torture is increased. More powerful state occupation of clerical positions, vigorous beatings and persecutions of priests, and attacks by the press continue. Which of the two faces of the Church-State relationship is the real one, the society does not know. Mindszenty had no doubt that “the cultural fight is increasing. The more it is worried by the external sharper possibilities, the more powerful the regulations become. We should not believe any promise. Let’s fight if the situation requires it, let’s keep working continuously and let’s pray all the time. Let us not forget that even those of us whom we would not think of at all, are surrounded by a whole network of spies. There’s a great need for unity.”14
In his letter regarding the Catholic Church and addressed to Mihály Farkas on January 9, 1948, Mátyás Rákosi put it concisely that “the Church is also being checkmated. There was a so-called ‘minor-bishop’ meeting chaired by Mindszenty, on which a decision has been made on taking up the meeting [sic] with the democracy –
14 ÁBTL 3.1.5, O-13405/1, 63–64.
me in person – for the time being unofficially. At tomorrow’s party conference whose preparations have been carried out in order so far, I’m going to give a powerful hit on them.”15 And it was still the beginning, but in the Buda-south Central Internment Camp the number of people belonging to or affiliated with the Catholic Church was increasing. We should not forget to mention the presence of pastors of the reformed and evangelical churches, along with Jewish rabbis. Rákosi delivered a speech at the session of the Budapest Executive Committee of the Hungarian Workers Party (MDP) at the beginning of November 1948, announcing that “from its current defensive standpoint, democracy is shifting to the most complete offensive against the Catholic Church.” He also announced that nuns selling thread and begging monks would be interned immediately for forbidden begging. Headmasters would be prohibited from making classrooms and auditoriums available to the Guards of the Sacred Hearts or congregations for meetings or ceremonies. “Until now it was the state wishing to get a papal legate to Hungary, now it’s the Holy See wishing to send one, but the democracy no longer wants a deputy sent by the Holy See.”16 And from then on, the number of captives went on increasing in the so-called papal room of the internment camp.
In earlier times, anybody could be placed under police custody at any time, for an uncertain period and without court order, apart from the police, by the political police and the public prosecutor’s office. As the power concentrated increasingly in the hands of the Communist Party, the power and the number of tasks of the po-
15 Hungarian National Archives (MNL OL) M-KS 274, f. 7, cs 125. ő. e. 1948.I.9 (letter of Mátyás Rákosi to Mihály Farkas).
16 ÁBTL 3.1.9, V-700/38, 32.
litical police grew accordingly. By 1950, the right of internment was already in the “hands” of the State Security Office, by then already separated from the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Moreover, at the release of the so-called “small time” convicts there was the institution of “escorting back,” meaning that if somebody served his or her prison sentence, they still had to be escorted to the State Security Office before release. At 60 Andrássy Avenue it was decided if he or she could be released or be put under police custody, that is, interned.17 Relatives of the interned received almost no information on the detainees and could rarely visit them or send letters. They could also get packages less and less frequently. By the fall of 1950 almost all possibilities for contact with the outside world were lost. Clergymen were no exception to this.
From the fall of 1946 the central encampment of the country was Buda-south. As the power and influence of the Communist Party increased, this camp received more and more of those who were considered enemies and reactionaries. There were officers, Swabians, gendarmes, administrative officers from the interbellum period, politicians of different parties, and young university students who believed in democracy but not in the one proclaimed by the Communist Party. This way of thinking and image of the enemy included clergymen as well. In one of his letters addressed to the prime minister, Cardinal József Mindszenty wrote about the camp he had already been interned in and obtained information on the everyday lives of captives and on the number of clergymen: “Pastoral care in the internment camp is more difficult than with the convicted prisoners long ago. It’s miserable. This only consolation, assured by
17 In detail see Barbara Bank. Recsk. A History of Hungarian Internment Camps 1945–1953. Budapest 2017.
natural law, is also heavily limited. Holy masses are only celebrated on Sundays and holidays, and only between 3 and 4 PM. There is space for 800 interned in and around the small chapel, and the congestion is great. The corridor is loaded, there are people also in the courtyard. But sometimes men or women, other times the ‘redundant’ are chased back by the police. Interns are of the Catholic faith. There are hardly any Protestants, almost no Israelites. This results in around 4000 people without a holy mass on Sundays. Confessions are forbidden. Calling a priest to minister to the sick is forbidden – they can die like animals. This way religion is not even a private matter, but a forbidden thing.”18 It is known that on June 16,1948 cardinal Mindszenty wrote another synopsis on the interned of the camp of Buda-south and on the situation of prisons in Hungary. “It is clear from this that there were nine priests in the internment camp of Buda-south (captives total c. 1560), and one priest in the lockup of Mosonyi street19 (total number c. 500). Twelve priests in the prison of Markó street20 (captives total 1150), five priests in the Central Jail (captives total 2790, of which 250 were criminals), no priests in the Pest area prison21 (total number c. 600, mainly criminals), two priests probably in
18
ÁBTL 3.1.9, V-700/17, 19–25.
19 The lockup house was under Mosonyi Street 9 in the 8th district of Budapest, while the police barracks were under Mosonyi Street 5-7. In 1950–1953 it was not only the lockup of the ÁVH but also the filtering camp of Hungarian ex-prisoners of war handed over from the Soviet Union, a prisoners’ hospital and a conspiracy interrogation place. In detail see Barbara Bank. The lockhouse at Mosonyi street and its relations, with special attention to the Recsk camp (1950) // Variations. Festive Studies in Honor of Sándor M. Kiss / ed. István Ötvös. Piliscsaba 2004, p. 278–92.
20 Today the object is bounded by Bihari János, Nagy Ignác and Markó streets in the 5th district of Budapest. The prison building is T-shaped on the Markó street side and is in close connection with the main building. In detail see Péter Tamáska. Political Convicts Wanted. Budapest 2006, p. 227, 241.
21 Budapest, District 2, the Royal Prison of Pest District operated in Gyorskocsi Street in Budapest. Today it is the building of the Budapest Police Headquarters.
Seminary for Priests in the Internment Camp of Kistarcsa (1949–1950)
the military-political department of Bartók Béla road.22 The number of the rest of detainees was unknown at the time. This means the number of political prisoners is in the thousands counting the capital city alone. This does not include the prisons of the political police, the department of military police, the military prison, and the prisons of the occupying power. The number of prisoners in the countryside is also relevant. At the moment there are 61 priests and monks in captivity. Ten of them are the deported convicts of the occupiers, taken away with noble seculars. Two persons’ location unknown, probably also on the land of the occupiers,23 captives at the same location. Of the priests deported abroad, two died for sure and uncontrollable news arrived on the death of another two. Since the end of WWII (1945) 225 priests and monks have been captured and/or convicted. This number might be higher. 24 priests and monks were captured on the grounds of protecting religious schools; some of them had already been convicted. Priests get 5-10 years of prison, 8 years of forced labor, or a life sentence. Though they fought against, for example, nationalization on the grounds of the existing state law, in a time when the bill had not been submitted to law, it was not a ‘law’ as a matter of fact. Not a single case is known however when the law against anti-class agitation, made for the protection of priests as well, would have been applied, though the agitation against the priesthood is constant, growing, and trivial. It is desirable to assure and control humane treatment of captives through the League of Human Rights or any other international organization by personal and regular visits and by international agreements. Should it not happen soon, despair in the public opinion and in relatives will grow larger and more dangerous, and the air of
22 The Military Policy Department of the Ministry of Defense operated under 24-26 Bartók Béla Street, 11th district of Budapest, formerly the Hadik barracks.
23 Referring to the Soviet Union.
society will be poisoned by the preparation for a future vengeance that also endangers international peace.”24
There was a designated room for priests also in Buda-south; that did not mean there were no clergymen housed in other rooms. Bishop counselor Dr. Alajos Németh,25 József Tornyos,26 a diocesan parish priest of Szombathely, and archbishop counselor Géza Angyal27 were put in the same room during pre-filtering. At the beginning, after being put in the camp they could not participate in the Sunday mass that was allowed back then. “The holy mass was celebrated in the courtyard not far from the filtering place. The interned were singing. We could participate in the holy mass only in spirit, but even that felt so good. The national Anthem can be heard especially well in our room. [...] The Lazarists came to celebrate masses. There were two of them coming. One of them celebrated the mass, the other listened to confessions in the meantime. During the holy mass Uncle Steve28 called me aside and asked me, whisper-
24 ÁBTL 3.1.9, V-700/17, 8.
25 Alajos Németh dr. (1904–1993) was a bishop’s councilor, pastor, and religious teacher. On June 29, 1928, he was ordained a priest in the Episcopal Church in Győr. He was inaugurated as a doctor of canon law in 1936, and in 1941 he obtained a degree in theology. In the summer of 1948, after a demonstration of student youth protesting against the nationalization of schools, the ÁVH arrested him. He spent twenty-one months in internment camps, first in Buda-south and then in Kistarcsa.
26 József Tornyos (1889–1976) was a parish priest in Kőszegpaty. Due to the nationalization of church schools, he was interned in Buda-south.
27 Géza Angyal, Archbishop of Tiszapüspöki. He graduated in law. The population in his village was uneasy about the nationalization of the schools, and eventually it deteriorated until the police were discharged. It was oil on the fire that almost culminated in a physical clash. This was prevented by Géza Angyal, who was asked by the head of the police to reassure the residents. At Angyal’s request, the crowd disbanded and everyone went home while the archbishop’s counselor was interned by the political police. He was also an intern in the room for priests in Buda-south and in Kistarcsa.
28 The surname of “Uncle Pista” is unknown. All that can be known about him is that his wife was also interned and dragged from Gyékényes to Buda-south.
ing, to put down the list of the priests on a piece of paper and hand it over to him. He gave me a pencil and a piece of paper. The archbishop always asked about the fate of the captive priests by way of the Lazarists or through other ‘wires’ as they called the broadcast of news from the camp; he got informed immediately if somebody got arrested, interned, or sentenced.”29 The clergymen were also located after the filtering in the actual regiments. They were designated for the criminal regiment, that is regiment IV. Alajos Németh recalled this: “As soon as we were done in the office, [...] the district regiment commander [...] distributed us into different rooms and floors.” At Buda-south the room for priests was in room 105 on the 2nd floor of regiment IV, which could be crowded with as many as 80 people. This congestion happened soon: “There is a terrible smell at night in the room because of the congestion and because windows cannot be left open by way of those sleeping there. Whoever must go out by the night has to face an almost impossible task if located in the inner side of the room as there are sleeping bodies everywhere.”30 There was not a single piece of furniture in the room. “Like sheep in the pen, that is how we felt, but not even like that because those get at least troughs from the shepherds while we did not even have cutlery.”31 There were three pots in the room for 12 people: two glasses and a canteen cup, all this complemented by a spoon. Catering of the interned was very poor, a fact proven by the protest letter as well, pieced together by Cardinal Mindszenty. “The camp portion of bread was small, 4-5 ounces only, made of corn flour also. We were getting hungrier every day. That two-three deciliters of lukewarm water dubbed as fried soup in the morning, that empty and sour three deciliters of tomato soup at lunch and that 1-2 ounces of marmalade at dinner, and things like that, were
29 Alajos Németh. Priests behind the Bars. Budapest 1991, p. 33.
30 Ibidem, p. 45.
31 Ibidem, p. 32.
not enough to alleviate our torturous scarcity. But I don’t want to tell lies: that tomato soup was not empty as a matter of fact, there were ten or twenty crumbs with a musty odor made from corn flour on the bottom of our pot.”32
By the summer of 1948 the room for priests was fully congested; they were sleeping everywhere they could find space on empty ground. By that time not only clergymen were “accommodated” in the room but also village peasants whose religiosity was unquestionable. “In the evenings and the morning after rising we have a common prayer. In the evenings after ‘retreat’ there are some minutes of chatting and everybody sits up, clasps his hands, and prays. Led by room chief Pozsgai [János dr. – B. B.],33 We pray among others also for ‘our absent relatives,’ and finish the prayer with the wish ‘peaceful night and liberation as soon as possible.’ After the sign of the cross eighty throats start singing the lines of Our Lady, and it is not impossible that in the dark there are tears rolling down on the serious male faces while singing these lines: ‘Being in great need, our homeland addresses thou: of Hungary, our spoiled Hungary, do not forget about poor Hungarians.’”34
On July 17, 1948, it was ordered that the crosses and crucifixes be removed from the walls of the rooms in internment camps. As time went by, the location of the room for priests changed but they were kept together, even if due to the lack of space other people were also accommodated in the room. However, on January 11, 1949, in the clerical part of the room for priests, 13 priests, 2 acolyte priests and 2 ex-acolyte priests were sent together to another prison.35 It be-
32 Németh. Priests behind the Bars, p. 32.
33 János Pozsgai dr. (1906–1976) pastor of Gyékényes. He was arrested in April 1948 and moved to the “room for priests” in Buda-south in June. He also went through the internment camp’s tightened detention center. On April 29, 1949, he was released from the internment camp in Kistarcsa.
34 Németh. Priests behind the Bars, p. 45.
35 Ibidem, p. 115.
Seminary for Priests in the Internment Camp of Kistarcsa (1949–1950)
came clear at the prison that they were brought in for smuggling soup cubes from outside, to flavor a bit the hot water they got at noon. They were betrayed by an informant, so they were taken to the infamous tower prison, where there was neither window glass nor heating. This company got out of the prison in eight days, but it took many weeks until the clergymen could reunite in the same room.
While the priests were in the prison, new clergymen got interned to Buda-south. It was dean József Winkler and catechist Péter Ketterer who joined the room for priests. Winkler was 60 by then. They wanted to force him to sign the statement against Mindszenty, which he denied; moreover, he expressed his displeasure regarding the nationalization of schools. He was arrested and dragged to 60 Andrássy avenue. According to his mates, there “they made a lot of fun on him. He had to wash the corridor. They kicked him when he bent down. He had to run up and down the corridor (a tall, fat man). He stumbled and fell in the process, at which the state security guys laughed out loud and called him on his given name, as they generally do with everybody – with no respect to age and situation. They were beating him on the head with a rubber truncheon and smashing his face. One of them raised his gun on him to shoot him. It might have just been an intimidation, but the old man took it seriously.”36
The first reliable information on relocating the camp dates to April 34, 1949, in the diary of Dr. Alajos Németh. On the Second Sunday of Easter, it was officially announced that the internment camp was moving to Kistarcsa.37 On April 26, 1949, the residents of the room for priests departed from Buda-south towards the internment camp of Kistarcsa. At this time the number of clergymen was more than thirty. “We are departing. Among the line of armed policemen. I’m thinking of 1919. On the road to Sopronkőhida.
36 Ibidem, p. 129.
37 Ibidem, p. 153.
‘Political prisoners’ were escorted like this that time, there, after the fall of the dictatorship of the proletariat, to the penitentiary of Kőhida. And this is also how assassins are usually escorted… We are worse than those. It is ‘the system’ that fears us.”38 They were transported to the internment camp of Kistarcsa in cattle cars, departing from the station of Kelenföld.
There was an internment camp in Kistarcsa between 1945 and 1946. Police barracks were founded in 1947, then from the end of April 1949 it became an internment camp again. It is not known exactly how many of the interned had been moved from the central internment camp of Buda-south; in any case there were a minimum of 2500 interned in the camp in the summer of 1949. There were many problems with the relocation of the camp: on the one hand, the detainees had less space, on the other hand, the camp had no washroom, toilet, or normal food supply. This terrible situation awaited the clergymen who were transported on April 26. A recollection of one of the interned to Kistarcsa: “The space so far, provided that the lounges are also filled, is for approx. 1000, in the three buildings standing next to each other parallel. This could provide a space for 1300 people altogether. The separate Ist Regiment and the IInd, female regiment must be added to this. How many people can be accommodated in those, I do not know. Those are not rebuilt so they remain single stories. In my opinion there is not more space in the two buildings combined than for 200-250 people. According to this, as is now they can provide normal space for 1200-1250 people. It’s a fact however that there are at least 1800-2000 people crowded in the buildings. There are people living in the corridors or, better to say, on the 1,5 m wide and 5-6 m long spaces in front of the stairs,
38 Németh. Priests behind the Bars, p. 158.
Seminary for Priests in the Internment Camp of Kistarcsa (1949–1950)
moreover – as I mentioned before – also in the body-washing rooms and in the toilets as well, the latter ones without water could not be used anyhow.”39 In the Kistarcsa internment camp the room for priests was room nr. 8 on the 1st floor of regiment V. Clergymen detained here called the internment camp “Collegium Maximum” among each other.40
Lajos Márk, a parish priest from Újpest county, once recalled it like this: “We were living among the most primitive conditions[...]. We were moved to Kistarcsa at the end of April 1949 under unsettled circumstances. No water, neither a toilet. Military wake-up call, 3 dl of black coffee, 3 dl of soup, 5 dl of vegetable stew, two times a week with a modest portion of meat, 5 dl of vegetable stew for dinner, bread: 10 ounces per day.”41 The room was tiny and of cement, but at least the walls were clean. “There is an enamel tin trough in the bodywash room intended for washing, there is no water in the taps. There is an enormous iron barrel next to the trough, supposedly we must save water in that for washing and eventual firefighting. There is
39 Sándor Bíró. The Knights of “Mátra”: the Memories of a Prisoner in Recsk. Püski 1989, p. 45–46.
40 Gyula Bodolay. Remembering Imre Mócsy // Contemporary Hungarian Jesuits / ed. Ferenc Szabó, vol. 2. Budapest 1992, p. 144.
41 Károly Hetényi Varga. Fates of Priests in the Shadow of the Swastika and the Red Star. Budapest 2004, p. 547 – recollection of Lajos Márk (1911-1992), a parish priest in the Újpest County. On January 11, 1949, he was arrested by the state defense in the parish of Újpest County. From there he was taken to the internment camp of Buda-south, where he was interrogated for three days, after which camp commander Lajos Ruscsák told him that “he attacked democracy in his speeches, organized the youth against democracy,” and, following the arrest of Cardinal Mindszenty, declared that he “continues to abide by the cardinal’s instructions.” After Buda-south, he was imprisoned in the room for priests of the Kistarcsa internment camp, from which he was released on September 10, 1953.
no water in the toilet either. By the way, using the toilet is forbidden. What replaces the toilet seat as forbidden, is something nobody talks about.”42 Accommodation conditions in the room for priests did not improve over the time, in fact. The room was so crowded, for example, that vicar János Pozsgai, the room chief, tried to sleep leaning on the door jamb. As Alajos Németh wrote about him: “He is really like a good shepherd, for whom all that matters is the flock to be able to rest.”43
After the post-move turmoil, a daily rhythm also developed in the room for priests. Nevertheless, civilians also wished to join the community of the room for priests. Apart from congestion, permanent confinement also had everyone on edge. János Pozsgai was released soon from the camp, so the duties of room chief were taken over by Alajos Németh. His task became, among others, designating and distributing the berths as well. This gave birth to the biggest controversies and contradictions even in the room for priests. At the beginning not even the daily stroll was assured for the inhabitants of the room. Apart from the so-called room for priests, in May 1949 there was also another “clerical” department with the participation of Jesuit priest Imre Mócsy and some Jesuit students. These two rooms “united” later.
On May 12, 1949, a group of people from the Ministry of Internal Affairs went to make checks of the camp. The high-ranking interior officer visited the room for priests as well, which contained 39 people altogether with those in the toilet and the washroom. It was revealed during this review, that the majority of those in the room used their own straw bag and own blanket, and that the room had altogether 3 washbasins. Washing is once a day, in 1,5 dl of water per capita.
On May 24, 1949, Jesuit priest Imre Mócsy and Jesuit seminarians obtained permission to move back to the “room for priests.”
42 Németh. Priests behind the Bars, p. 164.
43 Ibidem, p. 165.
Seminary for Priests in the Internment Camp of Kistarcsa (1949–1950)
“Our room grew in vain, as with new arrivals it became so crowded, we could hardly move. I had a berth approximately 35 cm wide for myself.”44 On June 7, 1949, a new room chief, Dr. János Fábián, had been elected for the room for priests,45 and the clerical department of the room had been fully reestablished by June 18, 1949, as civilians were “evicted.” On July 31, 1949, Jesuit priests renewed their vows in the room for priests. As time went by the rules of the internment camp against the detainees became stricter. Though on August 21 Alajos Németh reported in his diary that Lazarist priests could celebrate masses again at the internment camp, this was because Kistarcsa vicar Dr. Bertalan Bíró, the official celebrator of masses of the camp, was banned from the camp because of his sermons. Moreover, it was not allowed to sing the papal anthem at the end of the holy mass. Another tightening happened two days later: the maximum length of letters written was set at just 40 words. This referred to both the interned and their family members.
As the months went by adventurous members of the room undertook works and secretly took confessions, celebrated masses, and gave holy communion. In December the Jesuit priests organized a Santa Claus celebration and requested István Regőczi,46 who had arrived some months before, to hold a spiritual practice in the room for priests which he undertook, while Ferenc Singer celebrated masses after arriving back from the toy factory in the afternoon. At the end of the year even the Sunday masses were held, though Lazarist fathers could only celebrate the masses outdoors. In his entry dated December 14, Alajos Németh reports that “sooner or
44 Ibidem, p. 179.
45 Dr. János Fábián (1918–2000) was the primate’s secretary. He was taken to the Buda-south internment camp on March 9, 1949, and then to Kistarcsa, from where he was released on December 20, 1951.
46 István Regőczi (1915–2013) was a Catholic priest and church writer. He was ordained a priest in Bruges on March 28, 1943. He was arrested in 1949 and interned in Kistarcsa, from where he was released in 1953.
later iron bars will be installed in all buildings. This way there will be no difference between a prison and the internment camp.”47
In January 1950 masses became less and less frequent, as sending wine to the interned became prohibited. This was solved by pressing it from grapes sent in packs by Géza Angyal and Imre Mócsy, so they could celebrate masses this way.48 On January 12, 1950, the room for priests was relocated to regiment IV,49 and inhabitants were moved to the room of cauldrons. This meant they were transferred to another building, among the criminals and one floor above. They were 25 for a space of 20 in the new room again.50 “In the bunk of some of us, there were 2 people sleeping in a bunk for 1. [...] The room is very unfriendly for the time being, as our new companions also seem unfriendly. This regiment had a relatively bad reputation among us. They said it was full of informants, ex-state security guys and Jews.”51
At the end of February 1950 Alajos Németh was released from Kistarcsa with police supervision, therefore the further history of the room for priests is not well documented and detailed. In any case, the life of the entire camp changed from May 4-5, 1950, when the State Security Office literally took over the internment camp. From then on it was officially called State Security Central Internment Camp, Kistarcsa. Organizationally it became subclass nr. 6 of VI/2 Department of Inspection and Prisons of the State Security
47 Németh. Priests behind the Bars, p. 241.
48 Ibidem, p. 251–252.
49 Regiment IV was the penitentiary in the camp.
50 On December 21, 1949, on Stalin’s birthday, several were released, officially 80 of them.
51 Németh. Priests behind the Bars, p. 252.
Office (ÁVH). Life in the camp changed radically, treatment became even more cruel, and gradually all opportunities were withdrawn from internees regarding of keeping contact with family and relatives, like sending packages or letters.52 By October 1950 there were again more than 50 in the room for priests with room for 20. Alajos Páter Tüll recalled that Kistarcsa was more rigorous than the prison.53 Jesuit priest Henrik Matyasovich confirmed that everything changed in May 1950. “The camp was taken over by the State Security Office (ÁVO). No more packages arrived, meaning that we had nothing to knot.”54 Getting the wine for masses and celebrating masses also became more difficult. Behavior and rigor of the guards also changed, as those interned for political reasons were guarded now not by the police but by state security guards. The state security guards preferred bullying clergymen, no matter what they had or had not done. Forms of punishment included prison, the black hole, or cleaning the toilets.55 During the years priests not only took part in the education of the young or in the different tasks around the camp, but also gave lectures in the room, organized “conferences,” or traveled in thought to countries they had been before. “We celebrated the main feasts of the dioceses and orders with greetings and presentations. But we also held annual spiritual practices of three or eight days, a common officium on the Holy Week with sordino singing, evening punctas at Lent, and the top of it was the daily Eucharistic celebration. It was P. Mócsy who arranged concelebration, saying if they knew in Rome that such situations could
52
In detail see Bank. Recsk. A History of Hungarian Internment Camps..
53 Testimonies of Persecuted Jesuits / ed. Ferenc Szabó. Budapest 1995, p. 15.
54 Theology and Liturgy in Kistarcsa. Recollection of Henry S. J. Matyasovich // Testimonies of Persecuted Jesuits / ed. Ferenc Szabó. Budapest 1995, p. 20. The cords of the submitted packages were used by the priest’s “weaving workshop” and were also processed.
55 Ibidem, p. 23.
happen in communist countries, they would have included it into the extraordinary faculties.”56
By June 1950 the room for priests became crowded, with more than 60 people located in it. “We had different straw sacks as berths. We pulled them out from below the beds in the evening and pushed them back in the morning to have more space. The whole room became an enormous berth by night.”57
Lattice windows in the room – after the state security office occupied the camp – were painted so it was not possible to look through them and only the upper windows could be open to let some air in. “We were waiting all the time for the day; it just turns out that we are being held in by mistake. Instead, we got the ‘inward-paper’ from time to time. This meant the further extension of our internment, so took us inward to the prison. We had no idea about what life was outside. We could not read papers and could not listen to the radio.”58
Members of the room for priests occupied themselves to make captivity survivable. Some studied languages, many people worked in the so-called toy factory, while the camp administration launched a project of carpet weaving in the winter of 1949. At the beginning it involved three clergymen, but later there were five people weaving carpets on the three available looms. Father Imre Mócsy, archbishop counselor Géza Angyal, and the Jesuit priests were working at the first loom in shifts. Canon Jankovits and Alajos Németh were
56 Ádám Fricsy. Thank You, It Was Beautiful! // Theology and Liturgy in Kistarcsa, p. 85.
57 Károly Hetényi. Monks in the Shadow of the Swastika and the Red Star, vol. 2. Abaliget 2002, p. 85.
58 Recollection of Ádám Fricsy // Ibidem, p. 86.
Seminary for Priests in the Internment Camp of Kistarcsa (1949–1950)
working on the second one, while József Kovács and Péter Ketterer at the third loom by the door. Father Győző Kozma was drawing the carpet patterns. Those in the toy factory were kept working at night as well to increase production. The loom was employed all the time; this way the room for priests could get a stove in the winter of 1949 as this was only available for the rooms with inhabitants working. Moving from regiment V to regiment IB caused some disruption in weaving, but it was over in a couple of days and the loom was returned to them to continue working on it. “We forced the other two chairs between the bunks somehow. It is hard to move around in the room with the lack of space. Mócsy, Endrédy, Ketterer, Pálvölgyi, Singer, the ‘young Jesuits,’ uncle Géza Angyal, János Fábián, all joined the work enthusiastically.”59
Also, the prison had a special purpose in the internment camp, experienced by a number of clergymen. “The black hole is no better here than in Buda-south: full of dirt and feces. After arriving back [that is, from the prison and black hole – B. B.] it is a great burden for them to clean and deodorize their clothes.”60 Starting from June 1949 new prisons were built as well, something the inhabitants of the priests’ room were the first to hear about as many of them worked on the construction in order to get out of the closed room and to get more information about happenings in the camp. Alajos Németh, Imre Mócsy, and József Szölgyémi also grabbed the wheelbarrow on the construction site. “I managed to get to the building of the prison somehow. I have a wheelbarrow in my hands. [...] One of my companions asked me in the third round if I had seen the prison cells in construction. He waves me to follow as the guard is absent
59 Németh. Priests behind the Bars, p. 256.
60 Ibidem, p. 172.
now. He guides me down to the cellar first, where the black holes are located. I’m almost horrified to see the tiny seats. They are low, vaulted, damp, windowless holes. Animals would soon die in them. For humans even 24 hours are too much in these holes. The construction is still underway with plastering and installation of iron doors, electric wires, and bulbs.”61 That means they were moved into a half-constructed, half-renovated camp at the end of April 1949. Szeged vicar Tibor Nagy had also been detained in the internment camp and experienced the conditions in the prison: “The prison of the camp was an underground, cold, completely dark room. Life was represented for me only by the food given in three times and the fragments of speech filtering in from the neighboring cell. I could only pray and contemplate and offer these for whom I had been brought away from. (It’s been a hard three days!)”62 By December 1949 prisons were operating perfectly. Lajos Márk had been transported once again; he was informed on again for sending in holy wafers for the detained, including István Tabódy among others who could take part in the communion regularly there as well.
Clergymen were usually not assigned to outdoor work, but they wove carpets in their rooms and fabricated toys in the toy factory. “We were reading, holding theological disputes for each other, and praying a lot. A college of theology had also been founded with the participation of Jesuit and Franciscan monks and a young Basilian. [...] State Security Office also took care of the teaching staff. If there was a possibility, we celebrated masses.”63 Primate secretary
61 Németh. Priests behind the Bars, p. 196.
62 Hetényi. Fates of Priests, p. 230 (recollection of Tibor Nagy, parish priest of Szeged).
63 Ibidem, p. 257.
Seminary for Priests in the Internment Camp of Kistarcsa (1949–1950)
János Dr. Fábián was the professor of theology in the College of Theology operating properly in the department for priests of the internment camp of Kistarcsa. The College had 17 theologians – 14 Jesuits and 3 Franciscans – completing their studies. The leadership of the camp approved bringing in textbooks from the faculty of theology of Innsbruck, so that the students could carry out their theological studies. The college of theology of Kistarcsa was considered a theology of the Society of Jesus, with the leader being Pater Imre Mócsy, public ordinary teacher at the Pontifical Gregorian University of Rome. He received the order from Bishop Endre Hamvas. The deputy of Páter Mócsy was Dr. György Oetter, while Dr. János Fábián became the study supervisor. Pater Imre Mócsy mentioned that due to the regulations of Rome a college of theology must have at least four doctors; in the college of Kistarcsa there were 10 doctors of theology lecturing. Exam marks of the students – as there was no other means – were noted on cigarette-papers and signed officially. The first semester began on September 13, 1949.64 The lectures were conducted according to the regular university curriculum, with end-of-semester exams. János Fábián taught canon law in four semesters – including monastic law. “I also taught in four semesters the history of liturgy and some tracts of ethics. Studies were accepted everywhere after the students were released – by way of the supporting documents of director Pater Mócsy – both in Hungary and abroad.”65 Of the clergymen “merged” in the internment camp, teaching was carried out by the following: Dogmatics was taught by Pater Mócsy, Dr. György Oetter, Pater József Perényi S. J., and Dr. József Brusznyai. The Holy Writ was taught exclusively by Pater Mócsy “with great thoroughness and detail.”66 Ethics was taught, apart from Pater Mócsy, by
64 Németh. Priests behind the Bars, p. 212.
65 Hetényi. Fates of Priests, p. 96 (recollection of János Fábián).
66 Testimonies of Persecuted Jesuits / ed. Szabó, p. 20 (recollection of Mátyás Matyasovich).
Dr. Károly Gigler,67 Pater József Perényi, and József Lázár, Jesuit fathers. Studium on ecclesiastical law was taught by Dr. János Fábián, Mihály P. Horváth, a Jesuit monk, and Dr. György Oetter. Church history was taught by Cistercian monk Dr. Olaf Hölvényi, and Franciscan monk Hetény Somogyvári, while Art in church was taught by Dr. István Just. Rhetoric lessons were held by Jesuit monk Pater József Perényi and Franciscan monks Dr. Károly Giegler and Hetény Somogyvári. According to the diary of Alajos Németh, law was taught by archbishop counselor Géza Angyal, rhetoric and pastoral was taught by Lajos Márk, while philosophy, dogmatics, and Bible-reading were taught by Pater Imre Mócsy. At the beginning of October, Jesuit student Tibor Németh delivered a trial sermon. “His order and church will gain a lot with him, unless there will be a rupture in his life. His companions are also smart and hardworking. They are preparing for their future profession purposefully and consistently. They testify quite a surprising readiness on their trial preaching, which they must deliver and pass before the whole ‘room for priests,’ that is before serious critics and professionals. I could almost say that during the internment they have not lost any of the values needed for their profession. The portion they would lose is gained in life experience.”68
“Out of our scholastics, Henrik Matyasovich and János Wéber were freshmen. (The latter one left the Society for a couple of years after release from prison.) Sophomores were Tibor Németh and József Máté, while juniors were József Lázár and István Fábián. Other priests, Franciscan and diocesan, also joined the study order. After deepening the curriculum, students had to take exams. Exams were always presided over by p. Mócsy.”69 Results of the exams were
67 Papal chamberlain and canon Károly Gigler (1897–1965) was arrested by the State Security Office at the beginning of July 1950.
68 Németh. Priests behind the Bars, p. 214.
69 From the recollection of Antal Pálos: https://www.parbeszedhaza.hu/reflection/mocsy-imre-egy-jezsuita-arcel-a-kommunista-diktaturabol.
Seminary for Priests in the Internment Camp of Kistarcsa (1949–1950)
put down on cigarette-papers that were signed by the president and the examination teacher. Inhabitants of the camp brought these “documents” on their release, and they were recognized as valid by the presidents of the colleges of theology. These facts were supported also by Henrik Matyasovich arriving at the room for priests in October 1949 where “there was a great deal of theological education and learning.” He recalls also that the possibility of studying had already been established in the internment camp of Buda-south by Pater Mócsy. “In the summer of 1949, Csanád county Bishop Endre Hamvas visited the priests of the diocese of Csanád in the camp. P. Mócsy also applied on the grounds that he had been teaching in the seminary of Szeged. There were three priests from the diocese of Csanád in the camp at the time. The commander of the camp was a one-legged police officer called ‘Dreyfuss.’ During the conversation with the bishop the pastor asked if they needed anything, to which P. Mócsy replied immediately that they needed textbooks the most so that the young students could study.”70 The commander agreed and asked them to set up a list of the books he wanted to get into the camp. Pater Mócsy provided a list containing more than 60 books. “We received all the books and by the time we arrived the course was already on. We were all studying theology, with one exception. Philosophy was taught by Benedictine Father Bertold Kolos, who obtained his doctorate in Rome and proved to be a quite smart and benevolent person. [...] P. József Lázár carefully cut all books into pieces so the more people could possibly get apart from them. After all there was only one copy of everything. When it came to the exams, teachers examined the texts previously. And we were walking around with squinty eyes trying to figure out which part the teacher was reading, in the hope that he would ask questions from that part.”71 Exams were taken seriously
70 Testimonies of Persecuted Jesuits / ed. Szabó, p. 20 (recollection of Henrik Matyasovich).
71 Ibidem.
by the teachers, just like documenting the results of students. Pater Lázár wrote the results with small characters to cigarette-papers and put them on the bottom of match boxes so that he could smuggle it out from the camp on his release.72 The end of the college came in 1952 as it could be felt even in the rules that studying by the clergymen was kind of discouraged. It also showed up in the fact that books distributed in the morning had to be returned in the afternoon – reading was banned in the afternoon. In this situation lectures were kept in the afternoon by the teachers, without any assistance. “P. Mócsy also took great care of the spiritual life of the inhabitants of the camp. Despite the ban there was mass and Holy Communion every day. The annual spiritual practice of eight days and the usual recollections before renewal of the vows were carried out exactly. The daily two-hour meditation and the two exams were neither missed out.”73
There was a mass every day. Inhabitants of the room for priests had a special procedure for this so neither the guards nor the operative group discovered it thanks to their method developed so well over the years. Pater Mócsy explained the essential parts of the mass: the wine, the bread, and the text. “If somebody knows it by heart, that is sufficient. If he needs to read the text, that’s fine too.”74 In their case the altar could be a thoroughly cleaned shoe-polish box as well, with a capped medicine bottle inside, containing five drops of wine, and there was also a piece of bread. A drop of water was placed next to all this. Pater Mócsy and canon János
72 Testimonies of Persecuted Jesuits / ed. Szabó, p. 21 (recollection of Henrik Matyasovich).
73 Ibidem, p. 20.
74 Ibidem, p. 22.
Jankovich75 also had a dispute over this, but Pater Mócsy was not shaken by the reservations nor by any arguments, and continued celebrating masses. “He continued celebrating masses, normally sitting on the bed, with his legs crossed. A state security officer opened the door sometimes. At this time the father, as if nothing had happened, put the cover on the box and pulled out another box, lit a cigarette and sprinkled the ashes into the new box… High mass with smoking!”76 The existence, then lack, then acquisition of wine was always a great problem, especially in the period following May 1950. Members of the room for priests were always handy, and somehow there was wine for the Holy mass. Henrik Matyasovich recalls that he was the “winegrower, he learned how to make wine during detention.” “When the wine was almost gone, we sent a message to our brother to send in some vials incorporated in toilet soap. The 17 soaps arrived with the vials inside them. 17 people did not get soap the next month. They found it out. Then another method followed: they should put quite several grapes into the marmalade. These had to be taken out, washed, allowed to swell a bit, and then squeezed out. I had a handkerchief specifically for this purpose. The ‘cellar’ was arranged by P. Mócsy. He had a small tube with which he could easily decant the wine. Part of the wine was guarded by Józsi Máté. They found the wine at a raid and confiscated it but luckily, we have not kept all of it at the same place so there was no obstacle for us attending the Holy Mass every day.”77 Then that also ceased to exist.
75 János Jankovich (1900–1972) was a parish priest in the center of Győr, abbey canons. Member of the Vigilantia Committee. On November 5, 1948, he was interned first in Buda-south and then in Kistarcsa, from where he was released on December 21, 1951.
76 Testimonies of Persecuted Jesuits / ed. Szabó, p. 23 (recollection of Henrik Matyasovich).
77 Ibidem.
His personality must be highlighted among the members of the room for priests of the internment camp of Kistarcsa, as essentially he was the one staying on top of things in the college and with the students. Alajos Németh recalled that Pater Mócsy held the priests together well on the one hand, while they “like and respect him, although there is no well-known measure of superiority between superior and subordinate in contact with each other. Mócsy is an indirect priest with a quite modern aspect, and a zealous individual who sacrifices himself in the interests of his order and his church. His great knowledge and open-mindedness obtained him a great number of friends and admirers in the camp, not only among Catholics but also among believers of other religions.”78 In case one of the disciplines in the college of Kistarcsa had no teacher, Pater Mócsy always undertook it. He told his students many times: “You see, how good is our God! As a freshman I studied ethics as if I was preparing to be a teacher of ethics, as a sophomore I studied dogmatics the same way, and then the Bible so that now I can teach you the whole course.” Exam results, written on cigarette papers, were accepted later by all colleges of theology. In many cases there was no need to pass any differential exam as those having had an exam at Mócsy summa cum laude could stand in any circumstance.79 Pater Imre Bodolay wrote on Mócsy, that “how much he could be a helping hand in the dissemination of the Kingdom of Christ and Christian consolidation of the interned, could only be told in details by those who took part in his ‘hooligan-style’ ingenuity.”80 Father Bodolay calls Pater Mócsy “a saint hooligan” who survived in every situation, and it was very important for him to help everybody with
78 Németh. Priests behind the Bars, p. 206.
79 Imre Mócsy. I Let Myself Be Loved. Budapest 2007.
80 Contemporary Hungarian Jesuits / ed. Szabó, vol. 2, p. 142 (recollections of Imre Bodolay).
Seminary for Priests in the Internment Camp of Kistarcsa (1949–1950)
his ingenuity. “On one occasion – there was some great feast as we got bean goulash for lunch. You had to run to the second floor on the stairs. P. Lenner fell on the stairs and had the bean goulash prostrated on the steps from his canteen cup. P. Lenner swept it back to the cup with his hands. You couldn’t say a word, you couldn’t warn the elderly father to leave it as it can no longer be saved. Later in the room P. Mócsy took the rarely got, delicious meal from Father Lenner and poured it all [...] to the ‘dustbin.’ P. Lenner almost started to cry. Mócsy washed his canteen cup and began collecting the replacement from his own cup. He walked around and everybody gave a spoonful of his portion so that the cup was completely full again. P. Lenner was touched and almost at once tearing and laughing he declared: ‘It worked out well for me, next time I’ll fall down the stairs again!’”81
Imre Mócsy was born in a family of nine in 1907. His father was an attorney. After graduating he entered the Society of Jesus in 1925. After the probation periods and the studies of philosophy in Szeged, he studied and received a PhD in theology at the University of Innsbruck in 1933–1936. Following this he taught at the colleges of the order and the one in Szeged in 1938–1944, but in the meantime he was twice on scholarships in Rome, obtaining a PhD in philosophy at the Gregorian University and a candidate’s degree at the Pontifical Bible Institute. In 1944–1947 he taught at the Department of New Testament of the Gregorian University of Rome. In 1947 his order superior called him home, so he taught biblical studies in Szeged. In 1948 the president of the Episcopal Faculty, Gyula Czapik, arranged for him to go to Rome as the archbishop’s personal spokesman. He was arrested on January 17, 1949. He was first taken to the internment camp of Buda-south then to the one in Kistarcsa. “If he was questioned, interrogated, or tortured, he never talked about it to anyone. The latter could only
81 Ibidem, p. 146.
be inferred by him sometimes screaming terribly at night while he was asleep. Everyone woke up.”82 He was sentenced to nine and a half years of prison by the outgoing court in Kistarcsa in the fall of 1953. Including the time already served, he was released on condition on December 22, 1954. He had several jobs between 1955 and 1965, carrying out both physical and research work. He was arrested again on January 17, 1965, and sentenced to four years of prison for “participating in a conspiracy.” Following his release, he worked in the Northern Distribution Warehouse of the Hungarian State Railways (MÁV) until his retirement in October 1970. He died on June 12, 1980.
There were also clergymen detained in the internment camp of Kistarcsa outside the room for priests. One of these people was Archbishop Zoltán Meszlényi, later beatified, who was arrested on June 29, 1950, by the State Security Office. After being interrogated in Andrássy Avenue 60 he was detained in the private cells section of the internment camp of Kistarcsa until his death on January 11, 1953.83
“In 1952 the disturbing of the usual order of the camp began. Many were transported to the quarry of Recsk, while others to the construction site of the dam of Tiszalök. This rearrangement affected the room for priests as well. As a result of some insinuation, it was learned that the priests celebrated masses as late as in 1952, though the handover of food packages had been terminated
82 Contemporary Hungarian Jesuits / ed. Szabó, vol. 2, p. 141. 83 March 4, 1951 is erroneously given everywhere.
[...] in May 1950.”84 The leadership of the camp was interested in how the priests got the wine as “even they knew that a mass cannot be presented without wine. So, a horse thief was appointed room chief in the room for priests with the obvious aim to expose the ‘forbidden businesses’ of the priests. He enjoyed this award pretty much, just so that he could entertain the priests now with the stories of his love affairs.”85 Celebration of the holy mass, organized by Pater Mócsy, continued in this situation as well. It was solved by the fact that in the spring-summer period of 1952 there were 53 people in the room for priests whose dimensions had not changed: it was 10 m long and 4,5 m wide. “The place of the room chief was the bunk on the left corner from the door, behind a table with chairs. We woke up at six o’clock in the morning. A bed count was held at seven o’clock. Breakfast was at half past seven, then the distribution of books. You could read then. P. Mócsy immediately set up the figures on the chessboard and said: ‘Laci, come play chess!’ And took immediately the place of Laci. Then he sat opposite him, his back to the whole room. The chess game began, together with the holy mass. Uncle Pista started to utter the text of the holy mass, holding his Flemish book of psalms in his hands. He had the bread in a pocket of his shirt and the wine in a vial in another one. When stopped at a point we knew that was the moment the wine became the blood of Christ. The holy communion was held later and one-by-one. When the holy mass was over P. Mócsy stood up immediately and apologized: ‘Sorry my friend Laci, I took your seat again!’ P. Mócsy did it daily.”86 The horse thief was interned for two months in the room for priests and could not figure it out, could not report to the operative group if the priests
84 Testimonies of Persecuted Jesuits / ed. Szabó, p. 21 (recollection of Henrik Matyasovich).
85 Ibidem. 86 Ibidem, p. 22.
were celebrating masses or not. But if they are celebrating masses anyway, when, and how?
As priests were released from the room for priests and new priests came as well, it can be said that the supply of priests was continuous until the fall of 1953, the liquidation of the camp. The college of theology operated until the summer of 1952 while the leader of the college Pater Imre Mócsy was released only in 1954. More than 90 clergymen were detained in the internment camp of Kistarcsa during the years in 1949–1953. Although the authorities abolished the internment camps in 1953, the institution of internment, under the name of public security custody, was renewed after the defeat of the 1956 revolution and war for independence. Starting from the summer of 1957 the room for priests was reestablished in the camp for public security detainees in Tököl, but that’s another story…
In Poland the communist rule lasted 45 years, between 1944 and 1989. It all started when the Soviet Red Army was advancing westwards toward Berlin and moved through Polish territory. When they came to Lublin in July 1944, well before May 1945, the official date of the end of WWII, it was here that the Polish communists and collaborators of Stalin installed the first communist (socialist) government. The government was later transferred to Warsaw, the Polish capital city.
Since the very beginning the general political situation was both clear and unclear, some well envisaged what the communist rule was going to be like, others just tried to breathe freely after five years of the German occupation. As they say, even the Polish communists themselves did not realize what communism was to mean in all details. Bolesław Bierut, the first communist leader of Poland (the Polish People’s Republic – its official name), is said to have taken part in the first post-war Corpus Christi procession in Lublin. Corpus Christi and other Catholic festivals were events so important to the public at large in the Polish Catholic and national tradition that even non-believers would often join them. When the first communist government was set up in Lublin on July 22, 1944, it was the wisdom of Rev. Antoni Słomkowski, the then rector of the Catholic University of Lublin (KUL), to reopen the university as soon as possible. He did it in the autumn 1944. He himself had little doubt, if at all, about the future situation in the country under
the communist regime. Thus, KUL was the first Polish university to start teaching after the war.
As an altar boy I was considered uncertain or even suspicious by those at school. Poland has been a predominantly Catholic nation, statistically some 90 per cent of its population are Catholics. In this respect the Catholic Church seemed and was a powerful institution. But for the communist regime ideologically it was obviously a hostile phenomenon that gradually was to be done away with. Initially, however, the Church could continue its ministry legally, it was allowed to pray, celebrate masses, administer the sacraments, offer religious instruction (catechesis) etc. but only within the boundaries of parish church grounds (“the Church was confined to the sacristy” – as the saying went). Only briefly after the war were priests allowed to teach religion at state schools. But little by little many new restrictions started to be imposed on priests and the Church in this respect. For example, in 1953 crucifixes were removed from the walls of classrooms across the country. In that same year a particularly hard time came when the Primate of Poland Card. Stefan Wyszyński was detained by the communists and kept in custody for over 3 years. In 1961 religious instruction was definitely removed from all public (state owned) schools (all schools were state owned, as a matter of fact the only exception was KUL which has always been a private university owned formally by the Catholic Church). Hence religious instruction was then transferred to parish churches – to parish halls and presbytery rooms, smaller or bigger, where practically only priests, or occasionally religious sisters, were allowed to teach catechism.
We all lived in a schizophrenic situation in those days. This describes the communist system in any country. On the one hand there was an official life – with the official state mass media, the Commu-
nist Party present everywhere with its unrelenting communist propaganda on every corner, in every school, company etc. On the other hand, there was home and the Church, the parish church, where we could hear about a different vision of life, of Polish history, of the Church, of what matters in life – about all this one could hear only at home or in the parish when talking to priests.
When we were in the final year in secondary school, thus being eighteen-nineteen years old, one day a special teacher came to talk to us “seriously” on our civic duties, political responsibility for our homeland etc. Finally, he said that we should consider joining the Communist Party. For most of us it was like a joke, we did not take it seriously, but 2 or 3 of my classmates did. It was clear for everyone that becoming a member of the party would make life easier, get a better job, start a career and so on.
As a student in high school being known as associated with the Church by some teachers, I was suspected of going to the seminary. In Poland, as elsewhere I suppose, for those going to the university it was mandatory to take entrance exams. To prevent me from entering the seminary I was offered a free entry to the university, without taking any entrance exams. I did not accept it and went to the seminary to study for the priesthood.
As mentioned above, in communists’ eyes the (Catholic) Church was an obvious enemy of the regime. It was doomed to cease to exist, religion being “the “opium of the people” (Karl Marx). Hence anyone related to the Church was considered unpatriotic and disloyal, and so an unreliable citizen. It applied more to seminarians and priests.
All seminarians, not just priests, had their “patrons” (“guardians”) from the secret police. All had individual personal files in the communist secret police archives. I remember being called to
the police headquarters in Lublin when I applied for a passport for the first time while a student, in the summer of 1981. It was a short period of relative freedom, during the so-called first Solidarity days between August 1980 and December 13, 1981, when martial law was imposed. Before I was allowed to get a passport and go to Italy for a short holiday, I had a conversation with “someone special” as I was told. That man, obviously an officer from the Security Service, advised me to be attentive while abroad, to have my eyes and ears open. And upon my return, obliged to return the passport, I was supposed to report what I heard and saw, whom I met while abroad.
Of course, the communist Security Service had its own agents in our theological seminaries. We, seminarians, understood communist informers might have been amongst us. Sometimes it became clear who that was. Sometimes they were so professional that over the course of all six years of seminary formation they were never recognized and could even be ordained as priests. But as far as I can say it was rare for an informer to remain in the seminary all six years and to enter the priesthood. In my years in the seminary 1979-1984 we did suspect 3-4 of our colleagues as agents. But I may as well be wrong, they might have been more numerous. When the person was identified, he would himself very soon leave the seminary. But to some extent there was always a suspicion that even in the seminary, one could not trust all one’s classmates with whom one would go to Mass and pray together every day, live under the same roof for such a long time. Suspicion and mistrust were characteristic of any communist society, and they were deliberately excited in social relationships.
As a seminarian I remember being personally approached by a security service agent only once, in the summer of 1983 when I was at home. He was a former classmate from my high school. I never had any contact with him since we had parted when graduating from the school. So, one day he came to see me appearing
out of the blue and asked me: Could you take some papers from me and hand them over to KUL members of KOR87. Keeping in mind the circumstances it was rather clear to me it was a trap. I did not accept any documents from him, and he never came to see me again. A particular trauma of those days was 13 December 1981, when the communist leader of Poland general Wojciech Jaruzelski imposed martial law in the whole country. It was Sunday. What we all still remember is the fear we felt when in the morning we turned on the radio or TV and saw all programmes suspended, and the only thing broadcast was Jaruzelski’s address to the nation about martial law, repeated dozens of times during the day. Thousands of members of the Solidarity Trade Unions (a first ever legal independent organization in Poland since WWII, established in late August 1980) were detained and imprisoned. As a matter of fact, they simply disappeared on Sunday early morning, and no one knew where they were. One could see troops and police everywhere on the streets; schools and universities were closed. The economic situation continued to be disastrous, empty shops with empty shelves, people queuing everywhere to get even the most essential products like bread, milk, or butter.
Since it was mid-December, we were all puzzled about Christmas – are we going to be allowed to leave the seminary and Lublin and return home or shall we have to stay here? The communists decided to let us go rather than to keep us in seminaries, schools, or university dormitories. It seemed better to disperse angry young men and women than to keep them together in uncertain circumstances of winter martial law. We had to go to a special office and apply for a formal permit to travel out of town. While going home by bus (it is some 90 km, 60 miles from Lublin to
87 Komitet Obrony Robotników – the Workers’ Defense Committee – an underground organization, the first major anti-communist civic group in Poland, and probably in all Central-Eastern Europe, founded in 1976.
Zamość) I still remember a disturbing view when, leaving Lublin and crossing the city borders, we had to stop and show our permits to the armed troops at the checkpoint. Instead of fictional tanks in the WWII action movies, now they were real, within arm’s reach. It was terrifying.
On the day when martial law was imposed workers in many big plants and companies across the country went on strike, which was dangerous. In some cases, special police forces entered the plants and factories to break the strikes. In some places they even opened fire and some of the strikers were killed. A particularly well-known case was a coal mine in Silesia, in southern Poland. About that we knew almost nothing in those days. The only source of information about what was happening was Radio Free Europe and the Polish sections of the BBC or of the Voice of America. It was very difficult to tune in to those stations and catch the news unless one had a proper radio receiver. Obviously, the regime was aware people were trying to get the news about the situation in the country in that way, so those stations were constantly jammed.
I remember going out on the roof of our seminary building and watching what was happening in the local small vans factory, situated not so far from our place. It was probably the biggest company in the Lublin region. We only knew its workers went on strike on the day martial law was declared, but there was no news about what the situation was like inside the plant. As we found out later, the workers managed to stay in and continue their strike for a week or so but then both there and in other factories the strikes were brutally crushed by military forces. We all in the seminary found those experiences deeply terrifying and traumatic. It all proved again communism was an inhuman ideology and system. It continued to show its totalitarian and brutal face.
Only during his third visit to Poland was John Paul II allowed to come to Lublin, in June 1987. I was then in a parish in the centre of Lublin ministering as an assistant priest. A few weeks before the Pope’s visit a man came to the parish and wanted to talk to me. He said openly he was a Secret Police officer and wished to speak to me about the “security of the Pope” as he put it. Before I refused to talk to him, I had him show me his ID and in my notebook wrote down his name. Having been identified he felt visibly exposed, hence insecure. The conversation was very soon over. As far as I can remember, that was my only experience of meeting with a communist secret official.
I had my ordination in December 1984. December is an unusual time of the year for the bishop to ordain new priests. However, that was the case with us, the Lublin seminarians of the early 1980s. The sixth final year of our formation in the seminary was shortened to a few months only from September to mid-December, education and training were intensified, then came the ordination and we were all sent to parishes just before Christmas. The main reason for all this was the political and social situation in Poland. It was in many respects hard, restless, and extremely uncertain. Our Bishop decided there was no time to lose. Though formally martial law was lifted in 1983, politically and economically the country was still in deep trouble. Two months before our ordination, in October 1984 Fr. Jerzy Popiełuszko, a priest of the diocese of Warsaw, who was a chaplain for Solidarity workers and strikers and their families, was brutally assassinated by three agents of the communist Security Service. The murder was planned in all details and then carried out. It took place when the priest was traveling home by car from a city north of Warsaw. The car was stopped, the priest was taken out of it, severely beaten to death, then tied up and finally dropped into the river. The assassination was supposed to remain secret, but
the priest’s driver managed to escape from the scene of the murder. Hence the whole incident became public. The authorities had no choice but to identify those agents involved. Their public trial was broadcast by the state media for several months. The assassins were found guilty and imprisoned. A couple of years later they were released. The atmosphere in the whole country was deeply depressing. No one knew what was to happen the following day – but communism, though it had few supporters in Poland, seemed unshakeable. The Soviet Union was just next door.
Fr. Popiełuszko was buried in the church grounds of St. Stanislaus Kostka parish in Warsaw, where he had served earlier. His tomb soon became a pilgrimage site. In 2010 Fr. Jerzy Popiełuszko was beatified. After my ordination, when I started my parish ministry, which included catechesis, I had a lot of young people in various parish pastoral groups. I then decided to take some of those high school pupils and students to Warsaw to visit and pray at Fr. Popiełuszko’s grave. I did it many times. Such short, one-day pilgrimages to Warsaw, as I could notice, made a lasting influence on my students. For them it was a lesson, based on a very recent event, that one should be ready to recognize and accept values that surpass ordinary life in this world. In some circumstances one should be ready to bear testimony to them and maybe even offer one’s life for them. It was an experience of the living Gospel proving the words of our Lord, who himself gave His life for those He loved. Years later I consider those visits to the martyred priest’s place a lasting beam of light amidst the darkness and trauma of communism.
All party members, above all those holding managerial positions, were required to be atheists. This meant not only refraining from going to church but also not baptizing one’s children or getting married in the church. For many of those party activists, regarding themselves as communists, it meant leading a double life – officially no trace of religion but privately they would travel far away from their homes to have their child baptized, or to let their child receive
the first Holy Communion or to get married sacramentally. A lot of parish priests, particularly in small towns or villages, had to deal with such irregular situations when barely known or completely unknown people would come explaining their life circumstances and asking for the sacraments. In such cases, those often relatively young men and women suffered from the totalitarian nature of communism.
One more aspect of priests’ life made our daily existence hard. The Catholic Church was tolerated in Poland; in some cases, it was even legally entitled to own some possessions being a legal personality. At the same time priests, being representatives of the Church, were considered as unemployed. Which was ironic. Being unemployed we were unable to get insurance. In the communist system the so-called socialist economy was considered a perfect system where everyone was employed, unemployment was ex definitione unthinkable, impossible; for that reason, priests, having no formal job, could not be insured. Since there was no unemployment, priests, in a way, did not exist. The insurance system was obviously only the state one, thus we priests were not insured. I remember when I fell ill as a young priest, I simply went to hospital and was admitted by a doctor. Doctors were always helpful to us.
Since Catholicism has been a dominant religion in Poland for over a thousand years, national and religious ideas and customs very often intertwined. It became evident particularly in the communist days here. After martial law was imposed in 1981 and all public gatherings were suspended, churches were the only places where people could gather together relatively freely. A lot of public figures, like actors, singers or composers, scholars removed from universities and the like, even if not practicing Catholics themselves, started to come to churches to sing, give theater performances, conduct academic courses etc. Parish centres became cultural and academic centres in a way. I remember attending such events during my seminary years. From a legal point of view, it was all unlawful, but
they continued in many places more or less frequently. The Church, Catholicism, or more generally the religion (including non-Catholic denominations) became a culture carrier. Later, after the collapse of communism, authors and scholars studying Poland’s recent history would describe that phenomenon as culture’s only “spaces of freedom” in those days created and supported by the Church. A unique expression of what was Polish and Catholic were masses for homeland. This idea emerged rather suddenly just after martial law and became a valued sign of faith and freedom in the days of hopelessness. Those Masses were celebrated in some churches only. In Lublin the Jesuits did it in their small church in the centre of the city, opposite the cathedral. In Zamość, a much smaller town, it was said in the parish church run by the Redemptorists. Usually celebrated once a month, on a particular day, they attracted hundreds of people who would come and pray together for their fatherland. Additionally, such Masses did play a unique psychological role making people feel and see there are more of them than just some individuals who, motivated by their faith, did not give in to communism and despite all kinds of hardships continued to pray and fight for freedom and their country.
It was only in the last decade of communism in Poland, namely in the 1980s, that the authorities would give permission for new churches to be built. The then bishop of Lublin put special attention on this opportunity so that relatively many churches were started to be constructed in the Lublin diocese in those years. Usually, it took 10 or 20 years to complete such undertakings. Building a new church was an enormous effort for a local community. Above all it was a colossal task for a priest. In those days it was the priest who would be the site manager, executive director, main supplier of materials etc. It is now hard to imagine what those priests had to do, to experience, where to go and search for things like bricks, cement, wood and so forth and so on due to the shortages of everything.
Not once I talked to such priests who told me long stories about their getting into trouble while building churches. Of course, the communist local authorities were aware of the whole context. Special communist officers, responsible for – as it was called – “religious affairs” (in practice, for keeping an eye on all priests in their area) would approach those church building priests, offering them “help” in one way or another. They simply wanted to take advantage of such situations to develop some sort of relationship with those priests and to control them and perhaps make them dependent on the authorities. As far as I know not one priest suffered from those unduly burdensome and harsh experiences.
The Catholic University of Lublin (KUL), being the only nonstate-owned university, obviously had a special position in society. Though formally independent, the university was in many ways restricted and controlled by the regime. For all 45 years of communism in Poland it was a relatively small institution of higher education, with no more than 3,000–4,000 students. It never received any financial support from the communist government, on the contrary, it had to pay all kinds of taxes. On the other hand, since the communist constitution declared that “education in Poland is free”, it would be illegal for KUL to make its students pay any fee. Therefore, the university completely depended upon the Catholic Church. There was two or three special “collections for KUL” in all parishes and churches across the country. It was the main financial source for the university. However, the university was also supported by members of the Society of Friends of KUL, established by the first rector and founder of the university Fr. Idzi Radziszewski in the early 1920s, soon after the university itself was founded. Over the years the Society grew and had members even among Polish people living abroad (Polonia), particularly in the USA and Canada. Hence the university would receive some funds in foreign currency from abroad. But because of Polish internal law it was difficult, sometimes impossible to make use of the money. For instance, while it was
allowed to have US dollars, it was illegal to exchange them for Polish currency. Nevertheless, the University continued to function, teach, and conduct research in some way. There is no doubt the whole uneasy situation and the hostile political context were the source of a constant headache particularly for all university rectors. We were all aware that the party authorities were doing all they could to have moles amongst KUL faculty and students. Only rarely such individuals could be identified. Nevertheless, when years later the archbishop of Lublin set up a committee of historical inquiry it turned out that only a few, not even a dozen, of serious longterm inside men functioned among the university faculty for over four decades of the communist regime. Obviously, the communist secret police also had its occasional informers among university students. After the communist regime settled down it put a special emphasis on propaganda and ideological implementation of the socalled real socialism programme, particularly among young people. For the institutions of higher education this meant mandatory courses on Marxist philosophy. KUL also had to include such courses in its curriculum. But an unexpected outcome of this was a serious critique of Marxism due to the constant presence of classical philosophy at the university. Philosophy has always been one of the leading and most influential programmes taught and studied at KUL (Karol Wojtyła lectured in moral philosophy here for over 20 years). Conferences were held here on various trends of classical and modern philosophy, including materialism and atheistic ideologies, with the participation of Marxist philosophers or party activists from other universities and academic circles. All sorts of stories and jokes were told in this context. One was about a conference at KUL with a Marxist speaker who tried to convince his audience that towards the end of WWII, the Soviet Red Army needed only a few months moving from the East to “liberate” all the countries of Europe and establish communism everywhere. Having heard this,
a student asked a question: “Had all that happened, where would we now buy grain for bread?”
The communists had their own ways of governing and controlling people. God had His own. It is said that when a new bishop for Kraków was needed in the early 1960s, primate Stefan Wyszyński, whose task it was to find one due to the absence of a papal nuncio in communist Poland, submitted several candidates but the political authorities rejected them all. Only later when the name of Karol Wojtyła appeared on the list, did the regime officials agree, regarding him as a harmless priest interested in philosophy rather than politics.
It has always intrigued me but also encouraged what St. Paul tells the Thessalonians: “Give thanks in all circumstances” (1 Thess 5:18). We are called to perceive all life events in the spirit of faith, in the light of the faith in God, who is Father. One is never left alone. God, who is almighty and who is love, never leaves us orphans. So promised us the Lord (John 14:18). The days of communism were not a blessing. But the blessing and grace of God has always been with us, also in those days of trauma, persecution, suffering, even death. It is the Lord who leads us through life in all circumstances. What is vital on our part is a living faith, unwavering and unrelenting, whatever happens. Wojtyła was still a young man when in his notebook he put down one day: “I am very much in the hands of God”. These words say a lot about all his life. But they should be a constant motto also for us as individuals, families or nations, whatever the circumstances of our existence. We are in the hands of the One who is Father, no other option is more plausible. Jesus demanded such faith from Jairus when his daughter died: “Do not fear, only believe!” (Luke 8:50). The days of communism were not a blessing, rather a source of anguish for so many. Yet we are to give thanks in all circumstances to God, who is the Lord of heaven and earth. We do not give thanks for communism and its horrors. We give thanks to God because He loved us to the end: “I am with you
always, to the end of the age” (Matt 28:20). Now, after communism, we know it better.
God has created me to do Him some definite service. He has committed some work to me, which He has not committed to another. I have a mission. I may never know it in this life but I shall be told it in the next. Somehow I am necessary for His purposes.
Therefore I will trust Him.
If I am in sickness, my sickness may serve Him; in perplexity, my perplexity may serve Him; if I am in sorrow, my sorrow may serve Him. My sickness, or perplexity, or sorrow may be necessary causes of some great end, which is quite beyond us. He does nothing in vain. He may prolong my life, He may shorten it. He knows what He is about. He may take away my friends, He may throw me among strangers, He may make me feel desolate, make my spirits sink, hide the future from me – still He knows what He is about.
I ask not to see – ask not to know – I ask simply to be used.”
St. John Henry NewmanOur conference concerns personal experiences of the times of communism. Naturally, it will not include the first years of communism in Poland, because those who remembered them, to a large extent, are already gone. Given my age, I can only speak of the final years of the regime. However, I think my experience is quite typical of a significant number of young people growing up especially in the seventies and eighties.
It should be emphasized that the communists in Poland never managed to organize an efficient youth movement that would promote their ideas. The attempt to take over the scouting movement, i.e., the Polish Scouting Association, failed. After the removal of pre-war, patriotic instructors in 1949, the movement was incorporated into the Polish Youth Union and practically disappeared in its official form. After the October thaw in 1956, the Polish Scouting Association was reactivated. Until the fall of communism, repressed patriotic trends clashed with communist ideas imposed from above. This resulted, despite the mass of the movement (around 3 million members in 1980), in its internal division and ensuing weakness. Many of the instructors did not follow the rules of the Scouting movement and were rather government officials delegated to work with youth. The real instructors, on the other hand, had to run their activities semi-illegally. Attempts to create the so-called Red Scouting (1954–1961) also failed. It was no different with the youth group of the communist party, i.e., the Polish
Youth Union, renamed the Union of Socialist Youth in 1957. Both organizations were massive (at their peak they had 2 million members each), but membership in them was forced and, for the most part, phony. Research shows that only 10% of the Polish Youth Union members signed up for ideological reasons. This meant that the communist offer for youth, especially school children, was denied on ideological grounds, and was not considered attractive by most of the society.
The Catholic Church tried to enter this void, but it was not easy. On the one hand, the restrictions imposed by the communist authorities led to the dissolution of all Catholic youth movements in 1949 (Sodality of Our Lady, Catholic Youth Association). On the other hand, the natural tendency of young people to approach the existing structures critically did not make the task any easier. Traditional catechesis conducted outside school, although substantial in numbers, did not activate young people. It was only in the context of the Second Vatican Council that a movement emerged in Poland that tried to form young people, and later also families, independently of the communists. We are talking about the Light-Life Movement.
The Light-Life movement was established in 1976, although it had been formed earlier in 1969. Its creator was Fr. Franciszek Blachnicki. A few words are due about the founder because his biography is really interesting. He was born in 1921. Before the Second World War he belonged to the Polish Scouting Association. This had an impact on the foundations of the organization he would create. The important elements of Blachnicki’s idea were: cooperation in a small group (like a scout group) and abstinence. It is interesting that before the war, Blachnicki declared himself a non-believer. In 1939 he fought as a soldier and was taken prisoner by the Germans. He escaped from captivity, became involved in the resistance movement, and was arrested in 1940. He was a prisoner in KL Auschwitz with the camp number 1201 (14 months in
total, 9 of them in a penal company), and later in German prisons in Gliwice and Katowice, where he waited for a sentence for his activity in the resistance movement. In March 1942 he was sentenced to death by guillotine. On death row, he waited for the execution until August 1942. He then experienced a conversion. Ultimately, the sentence was changed to 10 years of hard imprisonment after the end of the war. Until the end of the war, he was held in various prisons and concentration camps. He was released only on April 17, 1945. After returning to Poland, he entered the seminary and was ordained a priest in 1950. As early as 1954, he organized a retreat for children in the form of a holiday trip in a small group. In 1957 he organized the Crusade of Temperance – the abstinence movement. However, because it was beyond the control of the state authorities, the communists decided to dissolve the movement in 1960. Fr. Blachnicki was then imprisoned in Katowice (in the same cell he was in during World War II) for having illegal leaflets urging sobriety. The whole situation showed that the goal of the communist authorities was by no means to fight the scourge of drunkenness – after all, it is easier to rule the drunk. Communists could not tolerate any independent activity, even for such a completely non-political purpose.
When a priest got in the communists’ bad books, the bishops often tried to “remove him from sight” of the authorities, which is why he was sent to study at the Catholic University of Lublin. Blachnicki first studied and then lectured in pastoral theology in 1961–1972. During his stay in Lublin, Fr. Blachnicki got to know the various trends of the Council’s renewal (especially in the liturgy) and tried to implement them. He led the pastoral ministry of the liturgical service, which he developed into a wider “Oasis” movement, based on the method of 15-day retreats for young people and then year-round work in parishes. Since the movement was grassroots, that is, it was not initially formalized as an organization, the communists had nothing to dissolve. In addition, Fr. Blachnicki
did not organize the movement at the behest of one of the bishops within his diocese, but somewhat outside of the diocesan hierarchy. Hence, it was difficult for the communist authorities to put pressure on a specific bishop to ban the activity. The “Oasis” movement at the turn of the ‘60s and ‘70s was still very small. However, a decade later (in 1979), about 30,000 people, many of them young, went on holiday retreats already organized in all dioceses. Gradually, groups of families, called circles, also began to appear (since 1973). Even martial law (from 1981) did not stop the development of the movement, and in 1985 about 70,000 people participated in the summer retreats.
I encountered the oasis movement in the 1980s. You could say that I found it in a way that was quite typical for my generation. First, along with the whole class, I was enrolled in the Polish Scouting Association where, instead of a young patrol leader, our teacher was the instructor. She was very nice, but it goes without saying that the teacher was always treated by the young people as standing on the other side of the barricade. In order to draw us in and encourage us to act, other young people were needed – and these were simply not there. In the end, I became disaffected with scouting after summer camp, which was badly organized, and some of the staff dealt more with themselves and alcohol than with young scouts. This is how my adventure with the youth movement organized by the communist state ended. And then a nun (without a habit), conducting catechesis outside the school, suggested in our class that we could join the “Oasis.” Two of us applied. It was completely voluntary, unlike state-supported organizations. At that time, everything seemed ordinary: a young boy in the Polish countryside, in a small town of 20,000, simply began to attend weekly meetings in a small group of several people, led by an only slightly older leader. The agenda of the meetings and the subject matter were predetermined, but the form was rather loose and assumed a discussion, not a lecture. The basic element was reading the Bible and talking about the pas-
sage that was read. In addition, there were joint meetings, singing songs, going outside the city, and a lot of contact with nature, all in a peer group. The meetings in the group were separate for boys and girls. However, apart from these meetings, boys and girls were together everywhere. A 15-day retreat in the youth group was organized during the summer holidays. The tutors, or leaders, were our colleagues, and the whole retreat was led by a moderator, usually a young priest. Oases were usually organized in villages. The conditions were spartan. There were old unrenovated monasteries without running water, so we had to wash at the well. Sometimes it was a rural presbytery, where we used to nestle on mattresses in a cramped attic with narrow, curving metal steps. When a herd of 13-14-year-old boys ran over them, the whole building was literally shaking. The old parish priest on the second day of the retreat hung up a small note: “Please come down like people.” The retreats were often organized in such a way that the participants slept in private houses where rooms were rented and joined common activities and meals in one of the houses or at the presbytery. The meals were modest, sometimes prepared from gifts sent from the West for the Polish Church. To this day, I remember the taste of the socalled Schmalzfleisch (not the best one, honestly). However, in view of the emerging community, these inconveniences did not matter much. They even held a certain allure, different from ordinary home life. Today, of course, no one would agree to organize a holiday for children in a center without running water. We performed all tasks in small groups, which gave us a sense of community and taught cooperation. In addition to religious meetings and masses, there was of course a lot of physical activity, hiking, having fun together, evening bonfires, etc. There was always a lot of contact with nature, which was an invaluable attraction for the townspeople. Until the end of primary school (until the age of 14), the retreats were separate for boys and girls. Later both sexes were together. Of course, the first teenage loves were born; some of
them have stood the test of time and the couples are still married today. My best friend married a girl he had met within the “Oasis” movement (unfortunately she is no longer alive). The entire oasis program had so-called “degrees” that were associated with meetings during the year and going on a holiday retreat. After completing the final degree, i.e., around the age of 17, you could participate in a course for leaders and go on holiday retreats as a caretaker. This activity often continued throughout the study period, till the age of 23–24.
All of this took place outside of the communist state. From our perspective, the state might not exist at all. We wanted no care or money from it, and the ideals we were taught did not fit the communist ideas at all. Instead of class struggle and revolution, we learned about cooperation and love; instead of reading Marx’s works, we read the Bible; instead of helping workers in state factories, we sometimes helped private farmers with their farm work. No policy-related topics were planned for the meetings. In the material we received to conduct our meetings, politics simply did not exist. However, the values that appeared important to us excluded communist ideas. Personally, I did not know any member of the “Oasis” movement who had communist beliefs. Of course, we were too young to be members of the Polish United Workers’ Party (I was only 16 in 1989, when the communist rule in Poland collapsed), but also among my older colleagues there was no such person. On the other hand, many older friends were involved in opposition, especially during their studies. The reaction of the authorities was predictable. Starting in the ‘70s they began to treat the oasis movement and its creator as an opponent.
Initially, however, the authorities did not notice the grassroots movement. Originally, the object of interest was Fr. Blachnicki and people from his immediate surroundings. They were observed, their correspondence was checked, and sometimes their places of residence were searched. Attempts were made to accuse Fr. Blachnicki
The Light-Life Movement in Poland Under the Communists
of illegal publishing activities in connection with a magazine devoted to the post-conciliar liturgy renewal, “Bulletin of Liturgical Renewal.” Ultimately, however, the Security Service (political police) did not gather sufficient evidence and the charges were dropped (1969). Following the increase in the number of oasis groups, the communist authorities acted on two levels. The first was harassment involving administrative measures. The second involved the activities of the secret services.
Attempts to intimidate through administrative action took many forms. From the beginning of the 1970s, teams consisting of local representatives of the fire brigade, sanitary inspection, and school authorities, usually accompanied by the militia or sometimes a non-uniformed Security Service officer, were sent to the farmers hosting the participants of the holiday retreats. These teams always found some fault that allowed them to issue a mandatory fine. It could have been water in the well that did not meet sanitary requirements, no lightning rod on the roof, etc. On this basis, a decision was issued to terminate the retreat and participants were ordered to go home. On the other hand, the practice of the priests conducting the retreats was to inform the authorities that the control teams operated on the basis of the regulations relating to summer camps for youth, while oases are not summer camps but retreats. The Church had permission to conduct the retreat, the moderator was sent by a bishop, and only the bishop could revoke it. Therefore, decisions to dissolve the retreat were sent to the appropriate episcopal curia. Of course, by the time the answer came from there, the retreat had already ended on the scheduled date. Sometimes, in the face of information about the planned inspection, the participants of the retreat fled, for example, to a nearby forest and waited for the commission to depart. My older brother, who was also a member of the Light-Life Movement, told me about such cases. However, the Movement headquarters advised against this type of procedure because the control teams could return at any time, which made it
difficult to implement the retreat plan. Ultimately, the inspection teams’ visit ended with a mandatory fine for the farmers hosting the retreat participants and an order to terminate the retreat. In reality, however, the retreat was not terminated, and the fines were paid by the Light-Life Movement. As the movement grew, so did the number of fines issued. At one point, having a problem with paying the fines, Fr. Blachnicki asked members of the oasis for small contributions to pay the fines. The sum that was collected from thousands of payments was more than enough to cover all fines.
In an administrative manner, not only individual retreat groups were harassed, but also the headquarters of the movement, located in the small mountain village of Krościenko. Financial penalties were regularly imposed for the “illegal expansion” of the center, for example for the construction of a chapel in the attic of a building. Of course, a permit has never been issued for legal construction. There were some bizarre situations. In 1979, an amphitheater was built on the site as a meeting place for larger groups. During the construction works, a commission came and qualified the construction as a construction without a license and started sealing it off. The workers got scared of the commission and began to leave the construction site. At that time, Fr. Blachnicki said that the amphitheater was being prepared in connection with the first pilgrimage of Pope John Paul II to Poland, which had already been planned for that year. Due to such an important reason, the work had to continue. At the same time, he expressed his understanding of the work of the commission and suggested that the commission should seal half of the area, and he would work with the workers on the other. After the commission had finished sealing its part, it switched places and the commission sealed the other part while the workers continued to work, naturally breaking the seals. Of course, the fines were traditionally imposed, but the whole thing confirmed a bad opinion of authorities among the residents, as it showed the authorities as fighting the church as well as the pope, who enjoyed great authority.
Another example of activity of the Light-Life Movement limited by administrative means were such banal situations as the refusal to sell coal for heating the center in Krościenko in 1977. Fr. Blachnicki again asked all members of the movement for support in the form of sending a kilogram of coal to the center’s address. In a short time, the post office in Krościenko was paralyzed with hundreds of packages of coal and the local authorities agreed to sell the coal for the center. Yet another way to limit the development of the movement was to seize the car of Fr. Blachnicki under the guise of finding illegal publications in it. Activities of this type intensified in the years 1977–79. However, they were not able to stop the development of the movement. The authorities did not decide to adopt forceful solutions, because the seventies were portrayed in propaganda as a period of stabilization, harmony, and peaceful development.
Due to the ineffectiveness of the administrative pressure, the work of the secret services was intensified. Secret collaborators began to be introduced to the Light-Life Movement, first to find out about the method of operation and the possibilities of the organization. It was relatively easy to recruit someone from among the youth. He/she could have been a substitute from the very beginning, or more often such a person could have been intimidated in some way and thus cooperated with the communist services. The most valuable acquisitions for the secret services, however, were people closely related to Fr. Blachnicki, especially priests. According to estimates (no exact data are available due to the destruction of the archives of the Security Service in 1989), about 10% of priests in Poland somehow collaborated with the secret services. Considering that every priest, and even every cleric in the seminary, had a file and was subject to observation, and in practice an attempt was almost always made to recruit him at some point, this means that about 90% of the clergy did not agree to cooperate. As far as one can compare, it was a much better result than in neighboring
Czechoslovakia or the German Democratic Republic, not to mention the Soviet Union. In the 1940s and 1950s, before the thaw after Stalin’s death, clergymen were forced to cooperate by suffering bogus accusations, prison sentences, and torture. Such was the case with Fr. Stanisław Skorodecki, who was arrested and finally sentenced to 10 years in prison. In prison, he decided to cooperate with the special services and reported on a fellow inmate, Primate Wyszyński. After he was released and changed his nickname (from “Krystyna” to “Wanda”), he continued to write denunciations, this time, among others, as the diocesan moderator of the Light-Life Movement in the Lubaczów diocese. Thanks to these denunciations, the Security Service knew what was happening in the headquarters of the movement. Later, the Security Service most often used blackmail during recruitment. In Polish, the expression “korek, worek i rozporek” (cork, sack, and fly of trousers) was used. This means blackmailing over alcohol abuse (“cork”), financial difficulties (“sack”) and sexual trouble (“fly”). However, since priests with the above-mentioned problems rarely showed zeal and were not involved in the newly emerging movement, the degree of infiltration by clergymen cooperating with the Security Service was relatively low.
In this situation, the Security Service began a large-scale operation to denigrate the Light-Life Movement inside the Catholic Church. I remember the effects of this type of action from the 1980s. The Security Service spread among the faithful, and especially among priests, information about the alleged “Protestantization” of the movement. I saw in the local archives of the Sandomierz diocese a letter distributed to bishops expressing concern about the alleged influence of the Baptists on the movement and warning bishops and parish priests against facilitating the activities of the Light-Life Movement. These accusations were made intelligently, for example, using the ecumenical collaboration of Fr. Blachnicki with the Protestant “Agape” movement, or with Christians in Norway, who collected food for the participants of the retreats in Poland in the 1980s
The Light-Life Movement in Poland Under the Communists when food was rationed. Also, through the Norwegian Protestants, about 1.4 million copies of the Bible, which could not be printed in Poland, reached my homeland. To this day, I use such a Bible. Interestingly, it was an edition prepared by the Polish Catholic publishing house Pallotinum, i.e., together with deuterocanonical books. At some point, however, editions with the title page of the Pallotinum Bible appeared, but without the deuterocanonical books. So far, it has not been established who printed them and where. However, it gave rise to accusations of the Light-Life Movement of allegedly distributing the Bible in the Protestant canon. The Security Service distributed leaflets with such accusations, for example among participants of pilgrimages to Jasna Góra, the most popular Marian shrine in Poland. In addition, the Special Service prepared the Movement’s original formative materials, changing some of the content but keeping the original layout and graphics. However, content was added that called for disobedience to the old bishops, who were not supposed to understand the spirit of the conciliar changes. There were also added messages indicating the worship of Fr. Blachnicki, which was supposed to suggest the sectarian nature of the movement with Blachnicki as a guru. Information of this type reached the lowest level of the Church in Poland, and I have heard from a churchman in my parish more than once that the Oasis is a sect. Such accusations were particularly easy in relation to the liturgical reform introduced in the 1970s. Fr. Blachnicki was one of the people developing new liturgical forms in the Church in Poland, and the Light-Life Movement was naturally the first environment in which they were practiced, which aroused distrust among some of the older priests. This also applied to bishops. Some of them eagerly saw the development of the Movement in their dioceses, others were reluctant to allow it. The Security Service was able to sow distrust to such an extent that the bishops decided in 1977 that all printed materials of the Movement had to have imprimatur. Fortunately, the diocese of Krakow was indicated, where the publishing
house of the movement was located at that time, and the archbishop was Wojtyła, who was favorable to the movement. Nevertheless, the accusations and doubts of the bishops regarding the actions of Fr. Blachnicki led him to resign. Although it was not adopted, it indicated the effectiveness of the Security Service’s actions in trying to break up the Church from within. The most spectacular action of the Security Service was forging a letter from Fr. Blachnicki to Bp. Tokarczuk and handing it over in May 1981 to the Primate of Poland, Abp. Wyszyński. The Primate was seriously ill at the time and died soon thereafter. The letter aroused an angry reaction from Abp. Wyszyński, who wrote to the tutor of the movement on the part of the episcopate, Bp. Błaszkiewicz, his own letter strongly criticizing “the audacious Fr. Blachnicki.” This private letter was soon made public by the Security Service, and due to the death of the Primate, the forgery could not be explained.
On December 10, 1981, Fr. Blachnicki left for Rome. While there he heard of the introduction of the Martial Law on December 13, 1981. As it was impossible to return to Poland, he finally settled in Germany in a Polish center in Carlsberg. Due to the absence of Fr. Blachnicki, the general moderator of the movement was Fr. Danielski. However, Fr. Blachnicki and his activities in Germany disturbed the communist authorities to such an extent that they decided to play a complicated espionage game. In 1982, the couple Jolanta and Andrzej Gontarczyk left Poland for Germany under the guise of emigration. There, the couple got involved in the activities of Fr. Blachnicki, including managing the printing house. From 1987, however, rumors began to appear that they were acting for the Security Service. On February 26, 1987, Fr. Blachnicki announced that in the coming days he would receive information on the possible cooperation of the Gontarczyks with the Security Service. The next day, the Gontarczyks met with Fr. Blachnicki. During the conversation there was a quarrel between them. A few hours later, Fr. Blachnicki died suddenly. The German doctor who arrived
at the scene said he was dead and mentioned pulmonary embolism as the cause. An autopsy was not performed. The Gontarczyks stayed in Germany for some time, but when they were threatened with exposure, they returned to the People’s Republic of Poland. In the regime television they painted a black picture of Fr. Blachnicki. After 1989, it turned out that from the very beginning they had been secret agents of the Security Service (alias “Panna” and “Yon”). Jolanta Lange (now she has returned to her maiden name) is currently active in the feminist movement promoting abortion and same-sex marriage. For years there have been suspicions that Fr. Blachnicki was poisoned by the Gontarczyks, who feared a premature exposure. Currently, an investigation into this matter by the Polish Institute of National Remembrance has been reopened. Despite various attempts, the communists did not manage to dissolve the Light-Life Movement. They did not decide to use force even during the Martial Law period, probably not wanting to threaten their relations with the Church. Perhaps they hoped that thanks to the efficient action of the Secret Service, they would be able to break up this movement inside the Church. Admittedly, in the early 1980s they were not far from achieving this goal. Paradoxically, however, the stay of Fr. Blachnicki in the West reduced tensions within the Church in Poland, and his successor, Fr. Danielski, was able to deftly counter various allegations prepared by the Security Service and made to the bishops. Ultimately, at the end of the 1980s, about 80,000 people participated in the retreat every year. Most of them were still young, although over time more and more families also appeared. Undoubtedly, the Light-Life Movement broke the monopoly of the communist authorities among youth movements, and for this very reason it was dangerous to the authorities. It is estimated that in total nearly half a million people participated in some form of Oasis retreat before the fall of communism. Over time, this mass of young people grew into adults who were insensitive to communist propaganda, but aware of the value of community
and freedom. Currently, the Light-Life Movement is one of many different movements in Poland trying to organize both youth and adults. Nowadays the proportions have been reversed and most of the movement participants are families. It is estimated that only in the so-called Home Church, or the family branch of the Light-Life movement, about 400,000 people are formed.
I chose this topic because of my personal commitment to the movement. I grew up in scouting, and ever since I became a priest, I have been involved in pastoral work with scouts. I was one of the leaders of the European Scouting Federation and thus I have been active in scouting on an international level for a long time.
The topic I chose is important above all because scouting was a huge challenge to the communists. They could not destroy it, because it was an international movement. So they had to skillfully subdue it. In Poland before World War II, the scouting movement was extremely powerful and influential. Most of its leaders were very well-educated men and women who felt the necessity of sound formation for the younger generation. They were the elite of the prewar society of Poland.
At the foundations of the scouting method are the discoveries of Baden-Powell, a British army officer and an attentive observer of reality. His discoveries involved the significance and influence of peer leadership within groups of boys in individual formation. He found that the highest authority for boys aged 12–17 is this kind
of leader. At this age, parents and teachers cease to be authority figures. Everything that has been important up until this point must now be confirmed by the peer group, and particularly by the group’s leader. And thus was born the “patrol system” as the first principle of scouting.
The patrol leader is the first and most important educator (formator). The most important formational group is the “patrol” (a group of 5–7 boys or girls). The patrol leader’s formator is their somewhat older colleague (university student age), known as the troop leader. The troop leader is formed in the Rovers Clan or Rangers Fire. Scouting is the formation of youth, by youth. Adults come onto the scene only at the Rovers Clan level (men) or Rangers Fire level (women), where the clan or hearth chief is the first adult educator.
The second principle of scouting is formation in the patrols through games and through each member’s responsibility for concrete tasks. It is not a lecture method.
The third principle says: A scout’s duties start at home. This means taking care of the day-to-day and the concrete. Scouting is not an exclusively intellectual formation, but is concerned with an integral formation, in other words, of the whole person. It is education through contact with nature. Nature is the first book of the revelation of God and the first challenge for man.
The fourth principle is building an education upon the law1 of scouting and the pledge.2 The law and the pledge are the main foundations of all educational work and the main point of reference.
1 The Scout Law (Federation of European Scouting. International Union of Guides and Scouts of Europe):
1. A scout’s honour is to be trusted.
2. A scout is loyal to his country, his parents, his leaders and to those who depend on him.
3. A scout is made to serve and save his neighbour.
4. A scout is a friend to all and a brother to every other scout.
The fifth principle is faithfulness to the conviction that “a differentiated education for boys and girls within homogeneous units constitutes an essential point of [scouting’s/our] pedagogy.” 2
The sixth principle pertains to age divisions in the two branches (male and female). Each branch is composed of units based on age: Packs of Wolf Cubs, aged 8 to 11; Troops of Scouts/Guides, aged 12 to 17; and Clans of Pilots and Rovers (Boys) or Fires of Rangers (Girls), aged 17 years and up.
The seventh principle is an integral formation based on the five goals of scouting:
1) Physical health (physical fitness, attentiveness to health, respect for nature);
2) Manual skill/Practical know-how (developing practical skills, resourcefulness, thrift);
3) Formation of character (continual care in developing character and self-discipline);
4) Service to others (showing respect, giving aid);
5) God (knowing and practicing faith in God).
The scouting method is ingenious and universal. It responds to the truths of maturing and growing up. It is simple and easily applied. Its direct effects are also easily seen by parents and teachers. Its universality consists in its capacity to be applied in various cultures, various environments (villages, cities, different strata of
5. A scout is courteous and chivalrous.
6. A scout sees in nature the work of God: he likes plants and animals.
7. A scout obeys willingly and does not do things halfway.
8. A scout controls himself: he smiles and sings even under difficulties.
9. A scout is thrifty and takes care of his own possessions and those of others.
10. A scout is pure in his thoughts, his words and his acts.
2 The Scout Promise (Federation of European Scouting. International Union of Guides and Scouts of Europe):
“On my honour, and with the grace of God, I promise: to do my best to serve God, the Church, my country (and Europe), to help my neighbour at all times and to observe the scout law.”
society), various religions and denominations, and in countries of varied political systems, yet independent of these systems.
It is obvious that Baden-Powell did not launch scouting for it to be used for political purposes. Less clear, and more variously interpreted, is its relationship with religion. I am thinking particularly about Catholicism. He himself was Anglican, not much involved in the life of his Church and even, according to some, a member of a Masonic lodge. On the basis of all this it would be possible to draw the conclusion that he had a very enlightened approach to God, rather as to a certain idea than to a person. However, in many places scouting is very positive regarding religion, especially regarding Christianity.
In Scouting for Boys, Baden-Powell wrote: No man is much good unless he believes in God and obeys His laws. So every scout should have a religion. […] In doing your duty to God, always be grateful to Him. Whenever you enjoy the pleasure of a good game, or succeed in doing a good thing, thank Him for it, if only with a word or two, just as you say grace after a meal. And it is a good thing to bless other people. For instance, if you see a train starting off, just pray for God’s blessing on all who are in the train. In doing your duty towards man, be helpful and generous, and also always be grateful for any kindness done to you, and be careful to show that you are grateful.3
At the same time, in his book Rovering to Success, he speaks clearly of a personal God, revealed in Jesus Christ, and of the two books written by God. The first book is that of nature, of creation. The second book is the Bible, which must be read in order to get to know God.
As steps towards gaining these two points and avoiding atheism, there are two things I would recommend you to do. One is to read that wonderful old book, the Bible, which, in addition to its Divine Revelation,
3 R. Baden-Powell. Scouting for Boys. A Handbook for Instruction in Good Citizenship. London: C. Arthur Pearson 1915, p. 228.
you will find a wonderfully interesting story-book of history and poetry as well as morality. The other is to read that other wonderful old book, the Book of Nature, and to see and study all you can of the wonders and beauties that she has provided for your enjoyment. And then turn your mind to how you can best serve God while you still have the life that He has lent you.4
Seeing a certain ambiguity in scouting’s approach to Christianity, the French Jesuit Jacques Sevin applied a Catholic adaptation of scouting; that is to say, of applying the scouting method to Catholic formation. He inserted Catholic education into the very method of scouting, and Baden-Powell accepted this. Along with Jacques Sevin, SJ (French), the creators of Catholic scouting were professor Jean Corbisier (Belgian) and earl Mario di Carpegna (Italian). In that way two models of scouting emerged: an Anglo-Saxon model and a Catholic model. Baden-Powell fully accepted Catholic scouting when he told the apostolic vicar of Denmark, monsignor Brems, during the Jamboree of 1924 that he “found in the Catholics the most intimate and profound application of the method and of the scout ideals.” Mario Mazza also wrote: “We were walking through the Jardin des Plantes in Paris when Baden-Powell told me: ‘You, the Catholics, have interpreted my ideas better than anyone else’ .”5
Polish Scouting began in two places at almost the same time: in Lwów/Lviv (1910/1911), which is to say in the Austrian partition, and in Poznan (1912), in the territory of the German partition. This was during the period of the Partitions of Poland. Initially the ideas of scouting were implemented by Andrzej Małkowski and his wife
4 R. Baden-Powell. Rovering to Success: A Book of Life-Sport for Young Men. London: H. Jenkins 1922, p. 177.
5 D. Sorrentino. Storia della Conferenza Internazionale Cattolica dello Scoutismo: 1920–2002. Roma: Nuova Fiordaliso 2004, p. 107.
Olga. A common denominator for all those creating scouting in Poland was the struggle for independence. Organizations of an athletic or military (Zarzewie, Sokół) character would be subjected to such a goal, as would that of a Catholic abstinence from drinking and smoking (Eleusis). With this context in mind, it was worthwhile to change the name, in Polish, from skaut to harcerz, that is, one who assists knights in preparing the field of battle and in opening the battle. The primary difference between most scouting organizations and the Polish Harcerstwo was described by Andrzej Małkowski: Harcerstwo is scouting plus independence.
The Polish Scouting and Guiding Association (ZHP) was established in Warsaw in 1916. The first ZHP rally took place just before Poland gained independence, on November 2, 1918, in Lublin. The Polish model of scouting was based primarily on the Anglo-Saxon model. It is, however, easy to also see the influence that earlier Catholic and abstinence movements had on scouting. The best example of this is the change in the ten-point law, where the words “A Guide/Scout is pure in thought, in word and in deed” is added “does not smoke or drink alcohol.” Catholic scouting, though, did not really get established, even though fr. Sevin got in touch with ZHP instructors in the early 1920’s through the mediation of archbishop Adam Sapieha and fr. Jacek Woroniecki, OP, and in 1923 even received a medal from the ZHP.
The greatest concerns of scout leaders were the unification of the country after the partitions, and the formation of the younger generation. From the very beginning it was rather an elite movement, developed mainly in the cities. The lofty moral and disciplinary requirements did not prevent rapid development of the movement, which by 1939 had about 200,000 members. Alongside the ZHP there also existed other scouting organizations: Wolne Harcerstwo [Free Scouting] (1921–23), demanding a break from militarism; and Czerwone Harcerstwo [Red Scouting], operating in 1926 in communities of workers. The ZHP changed its character somewhat in
the 1930’s, after the May coup d’état. In place of Catholic formation there appeared exclusively citizenship and state-oriented formation. In 1936 the ZHP was recognized as an “association of higher utility” and received financial subsidies from the state. Strong secular tendencies also appeared within the movement.
After the invasion of Poland in 1939, members of the Scout Movement were branded criminals by Nazi Germany, who had executed many scouts and guides. But the Scout Movement carried on as a clandestine organization. The Soviet Union executed most of the Scouts held at Ostashkov prison (1940). The wartime Scouts evolved into the paramilitary Szare Szeregi (Gray Ranks), cooperating with the Polish underground State and the Armia Krajowa (Home Army) resistance. The Gray Ranks regarded direct combat with the occupiers as an essential activity for scouts.
Immediately after war broke out, on October 27, 1939, a new scouting organization emerged, the Hufce Polskie (Polish Regiments), which referred back to the Catholic scouting tradition of J. Sevin. The creator of this organization was Stanisław Sedlaczek and after his death in the Auschwitz concentration camp, Witold Sawicki took over its direction. The goal of this organization was the protection of young scouts from the effects of war by conducting normal scouting activities. Sedlaczek and Sawicki warned against putting weapons into the hands of children and youth. The discussion at that time on the topic of engaging children and teenagers in armed combat remains one of the most interesting topics in the history of Polish scouting.
The greatest attempt at engaging scouts in the defense of their homeland was the Warsaw Uprising, which began on August 1, 1944. Approximately 18,000 insurgents were lost during the 63 days of the uprising (which ended on October 2, 1944). In addition, between 150,000 to 180,000 civilians perished or were murdered. During the uprising, about 4,000 male and female scouts stood on the front lines of the combatants, suffering huge losses. The losses
among scouts were all the more severe as instructors and scouts belonging to the elite of the Polish nation were on duty in all groups, thrown into battle “like stones against the ramparts.” They were also the elite of the youth. They stood out by their education, personal qualities, enthusiasm, courage, deep civic awareness, and above all, a fervent patriotism which led them to an authentic Polish “20th Century Golgotha.” For this reason, the wartime scouts, especially the Gray Ranks, have become legendary. Thanks to their spectacular warfare, weapons in hand, the scouts have become established in the collective memory of Poles, taking on the form of a symbol of the highest values at the time of the nation’s trial.6
This image of scouting has remained in Polish culture up until today, although it was seriously weakened during the communist period. The image developed before and during the war, of scouting as an educational/formational organization, was a challenge for the communists and made it impossible for them to completely liquidate or Sovietize the scouting movement.
The years 1944-1948 were a second period of conspiracy. Scouting was organized underground by individual leaders. Damaged by war and occupation, the Polish Scouting and Guiding Association (ZHP), whose staff had suffered particularly painful losses in the fight for Poland in all sectors of this struggle, was reborn into such unfavorable conditions in 1945. This revival took place as an “explosion.” In the space of three years – 1945-1948 – scouting took on about 300.000 children, adolescents, and leaders (called instructors). Polish scouting had never been so united before this time. Its attitude is evidenced by numerous protests against the Polish
6 Cf. W. Hausner, M. Wierzbicki. Sto lat harcerstwa. Warszawa: IPN 2015, p. 80.
Workers’ Party (PPR) and support for the anti-communist trend. Something downright heroic and symbolic was the return to work in scouting of former leaders who had just returned from concentration camps, from exile, who only a year earlier had shed blood in the Warsaw Uprising.7
The development of scouting was however quickly stifled by communist ideology. In 1949 a new Soviet Pioneer style organization, the Scouts of the Working Youth of Poland (Scouting Organization of the Polish Youth Association – Organizacja Harcerska Związku Młodzieży Polskiej or ZMP-OH), was founded. The basic goal of the ZMP-OH was to educate children in the spirit of communist ideology. In a way, the Scouting Organization filled the role of a “Polish Youth Association (ZMP) preschool,” a preparation for subsequently joining the ranks of the communist party. The death of Joseph Stalin (1953) notwithstanding, the communist ideologization of Scouting continued.
In 1956 the ZMP-OH was transformed and renamed ZHP. The new ZHP did not, however, consider itself to be a continuation of the pre-war ZHP, but a new organization (until 1980). The main tone of the scouting movement was set by the communist party, which at that time was called the Polish United Workers’ Party (PZPR). The then-leader of the party, Władysław Gomułka, stated at a scouting convention in 1959: “And all those who would like to look upon the mission of scouting today with the gaze of yesterday are deeply mistaken. Life develops, it moves forward. In the life of a nation, there is not and there cannot be a return to a period that has gone irretrievably into the past. The sources of youthful inspiration today can only be found in the ideas of socialism.”8 It is
7
Cf. T. Strzembosz. Harcerstwo polskie w latach 1944–1989 // Refleksje o harcerstwie i wychowaniu / ed. A. F. Baran. Warszawa – Poznań: ZHR Poznańczyk 2006, p. 182–184.
8 Hausner, Wierzbicki. Sto lat harcerstwa, p. 99–100.
noteworthy that “communism” is not mentioned here but is replaced by the term “socialism,” as one more acceptable to society. The greatest ideological trial for scouting took place in the 1970’s.
In 1973 Harcerska Służba Polsce Socjalistycznej (Scout Service of Socialist Poland) was founded, implemented by secondary school students. A red tie added to the uniform was the most visible sign of the communist ideology within scouting. This organization was great in number, but numbers do not mean commitment, nor do they mean education. The great majority of the rank-and-file members had been forced, one way or another, to join this organization and therefore did not identify with its goals. They took part in celebrations, centrally controlled campaigns, social activities (public works), and political demonstrations, but were not interested in their results nor ideological content. The managing role in this organization was played by secondary school teachers who, by forcing young people to belong to the communist scouting group, curry favor with the authorities of the Polish United Workers’ Party. Organizing recreation for young people in the communist style of the time and creating the appearance of supporting communist ideals took the place of education.
Not all scout leaders were dedicated full-time workers and communist party (PZPR) activists, “dead souls,” uninterested in any activity. For some, scouting was their life passion; they dedicated their time and strength to children and youth. While not omitting the pursuit of their own interests (advancement at work, bonuses, awards), they also undertook a genuine scouting effort. Nevertheless, they were not able to significantly influence the destruction of the scouting method and the ideals of scouting in Poland. The question of what was damaged can be answered as follows:
1) Communism damaged scouting’s freedom from politics (absence of political activity for scouts). It is obvious that Baden-Powell had not founded scouting for it to be used for political purposes.
2) Voluntary and unpaid work in scouting, with scout leaders working as volunteers, was damaged. During this period scout leaders had state salaries – they were paid by the communists.
3) The communists destroyed the scouting method, and in particular the patrol system, since for the sake of a deeper presence of communist ideology it was necessary to exert a greater influence by adults upon the youth. Scouting ceased to be a means of formation of youth by youth. The main educator in scouting is not a group leader, but a patrol leader. The patrol leader is a kind of supreme authority in the peer group. This is especially important when parents and teachers cease to be authorities for teenagers.
4) The communists destroyed scouting’s relationship to God. God was eliminated from the Scout Promise and was replaced with communist ideas (nothing; emptiness). Although the main goal of formation in Scouting is not religious faith but the integrity of the person, Baden-Powell emphasized the need to relate formation to the personal God. In his book Rovering to Success, he speaks clearly of a personal God, revealed in Jesus Christ, and of the two “books” written by God. The first book is that of nature, of creation. The second book is the Bible, which must be read in order to get to know God.
5) The entire Baden-Powell scouting tradition and the pre-war Polish scouting tradition was damaged.
It is often thought that communism is only an ideology. As an ideology communism had few adherents. Communism was first of all a corrupt social system in which social position and a comfortable life were all that mattered. As such, communism had many adherents, including within scouting. Scout leaders automatically became paid government employees and that was the extent of their involvement. With the anesthetization of the central ZHP leadership, many authentic scout leaders began to work underground. This took place particularly in the 1970’s. Often they would dress in the official uniform of the organization but in secret they took care to promote the scouting principles of Baden-Powell. They provided falsified documentation demonstrating solicitude for the socialist formation of youth. An example of such an instructor was Michał Bobrzyński from Lublin, who in this way established Catholic scouting. The longed-for moment of the overthrow of communism in Poland came with the mass strikes on the Baltic coast in 1980 and the ensuing creation of the independent, self-governing trade union, “Solidarity.” Its legalization and its vigorous activity seriously weakened the hitherto omnipotent communist party. The new socio-political situation also made change possible in scouting. In what we can call “Solidarity scouting” there were three fundamental postulates determining the direction of change. First: scouting must be an organization for the formation of children and youth rooted in the constitution, realizing the goals of the constitution – and not a political organization for children and youth. Second: Scouting must in practice be a democratic organization. Third: Scouting must be an autonomous organization; this must be confirmed by statute.9 Another important factor in the revival of Polish scouting was the first visit of John Paul II to Poland.
9 W. Hausner, M. Wierzbicki. Sto lat harcerstwa. Warszawa: IPN 2015, p. 111.
After Pope John Paul II’s first pilgrimage to Poland (1979) some “non-conforming” scout leaders within the ZHP created the Andrzej Małkowski Circle of Scout Leaders (KIHAM) in August 1980, with the objective of restoring original scouting ideals. The problems scouting in Poland had with communism did not end there, however. On the morning of December 13, 1981, Poles woke up to a completely different country. Power had been seized by the Military Council of National Salvation (WRON), a kind of junta, that is to say, a group of military personnel who took power following a coup. A massive strike by the army and militia, blockage of communication lines, imprisonment of several thousand political opposition activists, brutal suppression of social resistance, drastic restriction of civil liberties and rights, military patrols in the streets – all of this meant the imposition of martial law. Martial law consolidated the most negative tendencies and mechanisms at work in the Polish Scouting Association (ZHP) during the postwar period. All signs of partnership disappeared in the treatment of scouting by the authorities. This was quickly replaced by orders and instructions, accompanied by pressure, administrative harassment, and threats. In December 1981, the Supreme Council of the Polish Scouting Association (ZHP) supported the introduction of martial law. However, the recently initiated resurgence of the true spirit of scouting began to take over quickly.
In 1989, after communism collapsed in Poland and a peaceful transformation began, many groups of scout leaders formed separate scouting organizations. Many scouting organizations and associations are in existence today in Poland. The most important include: 1) the Scouting Association of the Republic (ZHR), a prewar style of scouting; 2) the Scouts of Europe (Catholic movement, recognized by the Church); and 3) the ZHP as the official Polish Association, recognized by the World Organization of the Scout Movement (WOSM). The ZHP is however seriously burdened by its communist past and by internal ideological struggles. Recently
certain neo-Marxist tendencies have begun emerging in this Association.
The revival of scouting in Poland was possible for several reasons:
1) There were still many scout leaders from before the war;
2) Often these leaders acted in the underground, training their successors in the spirit of the true principles of scouting;
3) Some of these leaders were involved in Communist Scouting, but only in appearance. Officially, they wrote educational programs according to the guiding principles of the dominant ideology, but in fact were leading real scouting (this type of commitment is difficult to evaluate from the ethical perspective);
4) Some young scout leaders learned the authentic method of scout education abroad, mainly in France.
Since the communists were incapable of destroying scouting and subordinating it to their ideology, they changed it, making it trivial and shallow.
I made my first scouting pledge in the fourth year of primary school. Our guardian – she was not a den mother or patrol leader – was our Russian teacher. The only attraction for me was the gray uniform we would wear for the national holidays of those times and for school celebrations. All throughout primary school I did not really understand what scouting was all about. Our meetings, though we’d be dressed in our uniforms, were not of the fun and adventurous character of the Baden-Powell method. They were meetings of the whole class, because everyone formerly belonged to the scouts. The supervising teacher did not herself belong to the PZPR (communist party) and did not put any ideological pressure on us. Mostly she taught us songs. I figured that as a “guide” for the scouts, she received a supplement to her salary.
My second encounter with scouting was in secondary school, where in the first days of class we had a meeting with the school’s scouting guide, who was a geography teacher. At the time (1975) the scouting organization was called Harcerska Służba Polsce Socjalistycznej (Scout Service of Socialist Poland). Without any discussion, the teacher informed us that we were all members of this organization and as soon as possible should buy ourselves it’s beige uniform and red tie. This met with the support of the school principal and was strictly enforced, with uniforms and formal membership in the HSPS. We had to wear the uniform and tie for national holidays and especially for the May Day parade (on May 1, parades with the white and red Polish flag, along with red flags, were held in each town to celebrate “Labor Day” and our ties with our brother Soviet nation and world communism). It was the greatest shame for us to carry those red flags, which were a symbol of communism and the Soviet Union. For that reason, often the person who got the red flag would hide the material in a pocket and throw away the staff. Apart from serving as window dressing during these holidays, we did not have any opportunity to get to know the scouting method or the true history of scouting. The teacher who was our scouting guide at school did not exert any ideological influence on us. She herself was the type of person not interested in anything deep or worthwhile, or at least that was the impression she gave. She was probably forced as a beginning teacher to lead the scouting, encouraged with a fitting financial supplement. Learning about true scouting, its history, and methods began during my theological studies at the Catholic University of Lublin and my preparation for the priesthood at the Lublin Major Seminary (1979–1984). In February of 1982 a section of the Lublin male branch of the Niezależny Ruch Harcerski (Independent Scout Movement), led by Michał Bobrzyński, formed a team within the liturgical altar service ministry, applying the scouting formation method to serving in this ministry. Scouting service was
combined to this ministry; other teams were created on the same model, with elements of the Catholic formation. In 1983, the first men’s unit was established collaborating with clerical instructor circles at the Major Seminaries in Lublin, Kraków and Ołtarzew. I was a member of the circle in Lublin. Beginning in 1985, this whole new scouting trend has been called the Scout Liturgical Movement (HRL), or the Zawiszacki Movement (the name refers to the noble figure of a Polish knight from the turn of the 14th–15th century, Zawisza Czarny of Garbow, also known as Zawisza the Black). Numerous female teams also belonged to the HRL. The HRL had its own methodology guides, program of degrees and proficiencies, and team rules.
It made it possible for me to learn about the Baden-Powell method, but also to notice the differences between the Anglo-Saxon scouting model present in Poland and the Catholic scouting model present mainly in France, Belgium, and Italy. This led to my becoming more interested in the Catholic scouting model and to my involvement, beginning in 1992, in pastoral and educational work in the Association of Catholic Scouting, Zawisza, of the European Scouting Federation, of which I was national chaplain in 2003–2009. In 2009–2018 I was the federation chaplain and ecclesiastical assistant, appointed by the Holy See, of the International Union of the Guides and Scouts of Europe – Federation of Scouts of Europe (UISGE-FSE, or simply FSE). Thanks to my involvement in the FSE, I have better understood the message of Pope Benedict XVI: “Made fruitful by the Gospel, scouting is not only a place for true human growth but also for a forceful presentation of Christianity and real spiritual and moral development, as well as being an authentic path of holiness.”10
10 Benedict XVI. Letter to Card. Jean-Pierre Ricard, President of the French Bishops’ Conference, on the Occasion of the 100th Anniversary of the Opening of the First Scout Camp (22 June 2007).
The answer can be found in the message of John Paul II to the Scouts of Europe in 2003:
The scouting experience, a privileged route for spiritual growth, is a valid path that favors the total education of the person. It helps to overcome the temptation to be indifferent and egoistic and to open oneself to one’s neighbor and to society. […] I invite you to be faithful to the rich tradition of the scout movement and its formation program through dialogue, the sense of justice, loyalty, and friendly social relations. Such a lifestyle can be your original contribution to the realization of a greater and more authentic fraternity between the peoples of Europe, a precious contribution to the life of the societies in which you live.
Scouting forms personalities of authentic leaders, concerned with the good of society. What great value there is for a young person to have been a patrol, and then a troop leader – in other words, a true authority to a group of young people – and to have accomplished tremendous work on himself and his own character. Such a young person is a candidate for becoming the best kind of worker and a future leader. For a long time in the USA and in France, and lately also in Poland, participation in scouting has been seen as a positive point in resumes and CVs. For many employers it is almost as important as graduating from a good university. The greatest threat to scouting is and will be its ideologization and politicization.
Why is it necessary to appreciate scouting in our society?
Why write about the trauma of communism? Describing a trauma is said to have therapeutic effect but for me the value is somewhere else: this testimony is a warning against totalitarian systems which in one way or another deprive us of independence and require a tremendous amount of resilience to claim for oneself the freedom of thought which is, on the one hand, our inalienable right, but on the other, it comes at an enormous cost: either external because you stand up against the system or internal because you come to realise the full extent of the condition.
It could be said that for my generation – born in the early 1970s – the trauma of Communism was mostly experienced vicariously via our parents and grandparents, with 1989 as its endpoint coinciding with our coming of age. And while this is not untrue, we also went through our own childhood fears and deprivations, felt even more acutely because of our lack of understanding that resulted from our parents’ desire to shelter our childhood. They were raising their children in the regime that denied all of us the basic human rights. But we lived in it without much hope for immediate deliverance. Our parents raised us to tame the feeling.
They. This word had two functions in my childhood. One was the pronoun: the usual grammatical referent to any plural noun. The other one was scary and encapsulated the contour-less omnipresent surveillance. They had ways of listening to you. They were always there. I remember that whenever adults talked about anything important, they would avoid doing it in a room where there was a telephone (though not everybody had one) because they could lis-
ten to you. If this was the only room where you could have the conversation (communist apartments were small), then a radio would normally be turned on and placed next to the telephone receiver to muffle up the conversation.
They could refuse you a passport. Once issued, passports were not kept at home but in the central offices and exchanged for our usual IDs for the time of the trip abroad. That is, if you could afford a trip. And provided you received permission to travel. Nobody could travel abroad without permission. You had to apply for it well in advance, present the place of destination and provide all the required details. There was no guarantee you would “get your passport”. Overall, if you wanted to travel within the Communist Bloc, this was not hard but travelling across the Iron Curtain was discouraged: you needed a good reason. Visiting friends was not one of them: how could you have friends in capitalist countries? Family? Even worse. My grandmother’s brother ended up in England after the war and did not contact her for fear of causing her trouble –a family member abroad entailed exactly that, and he knew it. Especially that he was a former soldier of the “Home Army” (Armia Krajowa, commonly abbreviated to AK1). So, my grandmother lost touch with him during the war and believed him to have been killed only to find out about his whereabouts when he died and an urn with his remains was transported to Poland for her to collect. She was a tiny woman and I remember her talking about her tall elder brother. Then, she said, there was only the small box that embodied her loss. Similarly, a cousin of hers was in a monastery in Italy and also chose not to get in touch with her, driven by the same desire to protect her from communist authorities calling her in, repeatedly
1 The Home Army was the major resistance movement in German-occupied Poland during World War II. Due to its allegiance to the Polish Government in Exile, it was considered an enemy of the People‘s Republic of Poland by the communist government.
demanding explanations, questioning her “loyalty”, and generally making her life hard. He never contacted her until 1980, when our prospects and hopes seemed high for a moment in August with the rise of “Solidarity” (Niezależny Samorządny Związek Zawodowy Solidarność, i.e., Independent Self-Governing Trade Union “Solidarity”, commonly abbreviated to Solidarność). This was an unusual reunion after over 40 years of separation. My grandmother traveled to Italy in 1982, months after the introduction of martial law on December 13, 1981. She was granted permission to travel as an old pensioner: not considered dangerous to the system and assessed as not likely to stay abroad at the age of 74. They wasted no opportunity to indoctrinate us from an early age. When you went to the cinema to watch a movie you were exposed to an obligatory portion of communist propaganda pieces which showed scenes that were in stark contrast to the surrounding reality: shops full of goods, while the shelves in our shops were literally empty. The people in these clips enthusiastically praised their socialist country as a land of plenty where everybody gets a fair share. We learned to accept this duality as part of our daily survival pack. At a time when a child learns the value of honesty and integrity, we were learning to tame the gap between the words that were uttered in any public space and their true meaning. The only exception was the church, where you could expect to hear what was going on. A priest was somebody you could trust and talk freely with even if you did not know him personally. There were the masses for the homeland (msze za Ojczyznę), during which we sang in full voice with tears in our eyes “God, give us back our free homeland”. When parents observe with pride how their children learn to speak up in defence of the values they learn at home, it was our parents’ dread that we would spill at school what we learnt from them. The children in the Communist Bloc were taught to know but we also knew to stay silent because our bravery would fire back on our parents. Though we felt strongly about our country, and we realized
its condition, our desire to rebel against the system was suppressed before we came of age.
My coming of age coincided with the fall of communism. My generation, like the generation before ours was exposed to the childhood of the ominous and omnipresent them. Our adolescence was very different from that of our peers from outside the communist Bloc. But – unlike the generation of our parents and grandparents –we were not put to the real test. None of us knows how we would behave under the pressure of fear or despair if the life of those dear to us were threatened. This is what so many representatives of the generation of our parents and grandparents had to go through. This is what my father, Wojciech Charzyński had to endure: he had to make his choices and repeatedly reaffirm them in the face of hostile reality, threats to his family and danger to his own life. He turns 90 this year. He never talked about his trauma of communism: ever since I can remember he always avoided conversation about his early youth. We knew it was a difficult time because his father was imprisoned by the communists. But there was so much more that happened to him and it took him years to tell us about it. When he did, we asked him to write it down. This is his story.
My struggles with the Secret Police of the People’s Republic of Poland in the years 1948-1952
For a long time, I could not bring myself to recount my experiences with the Secret Police (Służba Bezpieczeństwa, commonly abbreviated to SB). My contacts with its representatives were so traumatic that even after 30-40 years when I was talking about them, my whole body began to tremble. Even now, when I talk about it, my blood pressure is elevated. However, I agreed to describe it all at the request of my children. They claim that my granddaughters and my future great-grandchildren should know what the Polish reality was like in the first years after World War II.
In September 1948, at the age of sixteen, I began my high school education in Sierpc. I went to high school so late because the part of Mazovia where I lived was incorporated into the Third Reich, where education in Polish was banned and attempts to organise and conduct underground schooling were punishable with death. So, there were no schools for Poles there throughout the war and the war broke out when I was seven.2 In effect, I learned to read and write at home. My father was a teacher. I started my formal education at the Primary School in Gozdowo when it was founded in March 1945, and I graduated after three years in June 1948. Then I was admitted to the secondary school in Sierpc and my father arranged for me to stay in a dormitory there as it was too far away from where we lived to travel every day.
The beginning of the school year did not herald what was to come next. I even got a small scholarship. The first unpleasant surprise was the discovery that we had all been involuntarily put into the ranks of the Union of Polish Youth (Związek Młodzieży Polskiej, commonly abbreviated to ZMP3). During a class, the principal teacher handed out the declaration forms for joining the Union, told us to fill them in, and then we were to sign them. There was no question of not joining: the issue was not presented as a choice. In this way the whole class joined this youth organization. The teacher then asked who wanted to be the chairman of the class division of ZMP. He did not have to wait long for a volunteer. The teacher was satisfied, he congratulated us, and the matter was settled.
At the end of October 1948, my father was arrested by the Secret Police. I had six siblings. The eldest brother was then 21 years old and in September 1948 he had started working as a teacher at the Primary School in Gozdowo. The youngest sibling was only
2 School education begins in Poland at seven.
3 The Union of Polish Youth was a communist organization which served as a tool of political indoctrination of young people.
three years old. My father’s hearing took place in November. He was sentenced to 10 years in prison, deprived of civil rights and his property was confiscated. The justification of this court ruling boiled down to the fact that my father had given a sweater to a friend who belonged to the “Home Army”. After the war, when the amnesty for former AK soldiers was announced his friend came out, got a job, and started to live a normal life. However, he learned that he was to be arrested. Upon receiving this information, he did not return home. As he needed warm clothes, he came to my father and asked for the things he needed, including a sweater. Obviously, he got them from my father. The judge stated that “the accused”, i.e. my father, being a teacher, was a conscious citizen, and yet he helped the enemy of the People’s Republic of Poland, thus acting against his homeland. Therefore, the appropriate sentence for this act was the above-mentioned penalty.
The life of our entire family collapsed. Another brother, who was eighteen then, had to give up high school and get a job, not only because he could not afford to continue his education but also because he had to financially support the family. As I have already mentioned, my father was a teacher, while my mother owned a 25-hectare farm, which had been her dowry. As a result of the court ruling, my family was evicted from the house and my mother’s farm was forfeited. Only in 1952, after repeated interventions on her part, was it admitted that the farm was legally owned by my mother and she regained it, albeit in a deplorable condition and without any livestock.
Things started to go bad at school too. One day in late December 1948 or early January 1949 the school secretary called me to her office to receive a phone call. It was a phone call from the Party headquarters (Dom Partii), where the Union of Polish Youth was also located. I was ordered to report there on a specified date and time. It turned out that a Secret Police officer waited there for me. I did not know the purpose of the meeting. The beginning of
the conversation was almost pleasant. The officer asked me how I felt at school and in the dormitory. Then he explained that he had asked me to come over because we could help each other. He knew that my father was serving a sentence in prison and the family was in a difficult financial situation, so if I wanted to cooperate with the authorities, I could contribute to his rehabilitation, and maybe even to shortening his sentence and an early release. I did not initially understand what this cooperation would be about. He explained to me that I would report on the teachers and priests (I was an altar boy). When I said that I could not do it, he replied matter-of-factly that one gets used to it, and that I would help the People’s Republic of Poland. When I did not want to sign the declaration of cooperation, he said that he believed in my common sense and told me to think it over again. Then he made me write a statement that I would not tell anyone about this meeting and sign it. He also threatened that if I did not keep my word, I could be sure that my mother would not see me again. In the end he said he hoped that if I thought about it all carefully, I would see reason.
In about a month and a half I was called again by the school secretary to receive a phone call. This time I guessed it was the Secret Police. The caller specified the date and place of the meeting. It was a bench in a small square. The officer, different from the one who had met me before, took me to a small room in the basement. On the wall by his desk something resembling a leather whipping tool was hanging. This kind of “decoration” would reappear in subsequent meetings, in different venues, though I was never explicitly told that I would be beaten up if I did not comply. The conversation started innocently enough, with the officer expressing hope that I had thought everything over and that I would like to help my father and my family, as well as my country. However, when I reaffirmed my earlier position that I would not report, the atmosphere changed momentarily. My interlocutor raged in disbelief that I could turn down such a favorable offer. Despite my refusal, he
Do Not Judge, Beware
started asking questions does my history teacher (a widow of an officer murdered in the Katyn massacre4) date the mathematician (who was married with children); does my French teacher, Mrs. Zaleska (the sister of the President of the Republic of Poland in Exile5) come to school drunk, etc. I answered each of these insinuating questions in the same way: that I did not know anything about it. The meeting ended with the man’s explicit disapproval of my conduct and his threat that “I may soon regret it.” Then he said goodbye to me and again – in an almost friendly manner –expressed hope that I would seriously consider the offer.
After another meeting, which followed the same scheme, a representative of the Poviat6 Board of the Polish Youth Union appeared at my school. A meeting of the class division of ZMP was called with the participation of a teacher – supervisor of the ZMP. A representative of the board chaired a meeting, which had only one point on the agenda: removing me from the ranks of the Union of Polish Youth. My colleagues were told that I was the son of a convicted criminal who was imprisoned for his attempt to destroy the People’s Republic of Poland. In his view, it was a disgrace to the class ZMP division for someone like me to be its member. The matter was put to a vote, and I found myself outside the Union of Polish Youth. I still remember the tormented expression on the face of a teacher
4 In the spring of 1940, 22.000 Polish officers and representatives of intelligentsia were executed by the Soviet “People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs” (Naródnyy komissariát vnútrennikh del, commonly abbreviated to NKVD). The executions were carried out in several locations but the massacre is usually referred to by the name of the first place where the mass graves were discovered, i.e. Katyń.
5 August Zaleski was successively: Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Polish Government in Exile, head of the Civil Chancellery of the President of the Republic of Poland Władysław Raczkiewicz, and after the latter’s death in June 1947, he took the office of the President of the Republic of Poland in Exile.
6 Poviat is a second-level local government and administration in Poland. It is roughly equivalent to a county.
who was my father’s friend. Back then, I resented him for not even trying to defend me and my father’s good name. Later, I realized that I was wrong: his intervention would not have helped me, and he himself might have lost his job. And much more than that.
After another meeting with a Secret Police officer, I lost my scholarship, which had paid for my dormitory and full board. My emotional condition was getting worse. However, I knew that I could not consent to cooperate in any form. It was out of the question for me to report on my teachers, priests, and friends.
The meetings were always initiated by the Secret Police. Invariably, a few hours prior to the meeting, sometimes on the day before, I received the information that I was to come to a designated place. The officers changed so I did not know them, but they always knew me. Each time I had to sign a declaration that I would not tell anyone about the meeting and anything that happened in its course. It was almost always the case that at the beginning I was greeted in a friendly way, with the officer expressing hope that I had “finally come to see reason”. When it turned out that I had not, the appearance of kindness was gone. There were further arguments why I should start cooperating. One of them was ensuring that I could go to college after graduating from high school. I explained that I had many younger siblings, and I would have to get a job. I was told that I did not have to worry about the money because if I helped the People’s Republic of Poland, it would also help me.
During the next meeting, when “I still failed to see reason,” I was threatened with expulsion from my dormitory. I did not have to wait long to see that they were serious. When I returned to school after the holiday break, the dormitory manager told me that he did not know why but I could not stay there anymore. I had to look for lodging, even though there was a place for me in the dormitory.
Despite my repeated refusals to cooperate, the Secret Police still did not give up on me. More meetings were held. The promise to help me financially through my potential university educa-
tion returned, of course on condition that I would help the People’s Republic of Poland. When I reiterated that I had to get a job after high school to support my family, the officer got upset and said that I would not get any job. It was 1951 and the draft constitution of 1952 was discussed in school during our classes. I referred to it saying that the Constitution guaranteed jobs for all citizens. This upset him even more. He blurted out that not only would I not get the job, but my two elder brothers (who supported the whole family of eight people with the greatest difficulty) would lose their jobs. He also said that if I decided to continue my education, no university would accept me. I was feeling worse all the time, both emotionally and physically. When I started school in 1948, I weighed 63 kg, and when I graduated my weight was down to 52 kg. It was the end of my last year at high school and the time of the final exams. After the written part, my former roommate from the dormitory came to talk to me. He was the chairman of the school division of ZMP and in that capacity he was invited to a meeting of the district division of the Polish United Workers’ Party (Polska Zjednoczona Partia Robotnicza, commonly abbreviated to PZPR7). He told me that a resolution had been passed there that I was to fail my oral exams and asked me not to tell anyone about it. I promised. The time between the written part and the oral exam was a nightmare. I could not eat, even with the greatest difficulty. I did not know what to do. Should I take the oral exam if I was doomed to fail it? I knew for sure that the Secret Police could keep their word. If I did not go, the effect would be the same. I could not ask anyone’s advice because I would have to reveal too much of what I had to keep to myself. I could not tell my mother and elder brothers, because there was nothing they could do, and it would only give them more worries than they already had, keeping
7 The Polish United Workers’ Party was the communist party which ruled the People’s Republic of Poland as a one-party state.
the family afloat. I thought that not going meant giving in. So, barely conscious, I decided to go.
Students entered the oral exam room in twos. The exam took about two hours, and it covered all school subjects. Originally, I was scheduled with a colleague for 10:00, but then the schedule was changed, and I was to enter first, i.e., at 8:00. The exam started dead on time. When my colleague and I entered the room, the teacher who oversaw examining history and “knowledge about Poland” did not allow me to choose the subject I wanted to take first. She made me pick a set of questions and start with her subjects. When I wanted to prepare my answers, which was the usual procedure, she said the questions were easy enough so any preparation would be a waste of time. This additionally confused me: I thought that even she was against me. When I started answering the first of the three questions, she interrupted me saying, “Thank you, that’s enough.” It was the moment when a Party representative8 entered the examination room with a few minutes’ delay. After selecting the next sets of questions, this time in mathematics, physics, and Polish, I was allowed to prepare my answers for a few minutes. I was so stunned that it took me a few hours to realize that the history teacher had saved me, because in contrast to history and “knowledge about Poland”, mathematics, physics, and Polish offered no scope for the party’s representative to ask questions that would disqualify me as a high school graduate. This is how I passed my final oral exam.
When I returned to my lodging afterwards, I learned from my landlady that a man had been there asking for me who said that I was to report to the Party headquarters. In case he came back, I asked my landlady to tell him that she had not seen me and since I had left the key in the usual place, she presumed I had gone home.
8 A Party representative participated in oral exams on behalf of the system and could influence their outcome.
From then on, I tried to stay as far away from Sierpc as possible. In 1955, I learned that in September there would be additional entrance examinations at the Catholic University of Lublin. That was the only university without a Party representative.9 I passed the exams and stayed in Lublin.
This is a story of my father’s personal trauma but there are as many stories as there are people. The trauma of Communism was universal, regardless of the actual choices you made. If you gave in, you feel the trauma because you fear you failed. If you did not and showed indomitable character like my father, you ended up in trouble for decades. If you survived. And if you voluntarily cooperated with the system and had no qualms about it, you are the moral victim of the system, which had taken away from you the most precious human endowment – the desire to do good and to avoid evil. Communism infected us all in so many ways and its traumas have stayed with us for so many years after its fall that we need a brand-new generation, a generation not affected by our trauma to whisk away its ghosts. But we – the victims and witnesses – need to teach this new generation to know and, in contrast to my generation, not to stay silent; to be wary of any totalitarian systems which can lure us with promises. We need to look at them against the light and see what they really hold. We owe it to our parents and grandparents, and to our children, and their children alike.
9
Founded in 1918 and reopened after the war in 1945, the Catholic University of Lublin was the only independent university not only in Poland but also in the whole Communist Block.
“Communists were ugly pigs! They were to be convicted and executed, as well as the fascists and Nazis,” the Catholic priest, Jozef Strapec (1913–2002), cried out in a fit of anger. He was my paternal great-uncle. This cry of irritation happened at a poor Catholic parish in northern Slovakia, in 1990, shortly after the fall of communist totalitarianism in Czechoslovakia. I was 14 at the time and we were at a family celebration where part of our extended family usually met. It was customary for the elders in the family to recall the past, in our case the wrongs committed by communists. What struck me most was the intensity of anger and resentment in my uncle, whom I otherwise knew as a very kind and cultured man, educated in classical languages and culture. With stoic peace, he could use a Latin quote for every life situation. Great-uncle then pounded his fist on the table and lost his breath in anger and blushed. The whole gathering fell silent, and many of those present felt old wounds open which not even time could heal.
One of the family members present was his youngest brother, Alojz Strapec (1927–1996). The Strapec family came from Chlebnice, a small Catholic village in the north of Slovakia with an extremely strong religiosity, exceptional in Slovakia. In the twentieth century, 48 girls left this small village (of about 1500 inhabitants) to become nuns and 20 young men were ordained Catholic priests. To this day, almost every inhabitant regularly attends Sunday Holy
Mass. The Strapec family (father and four children; the mother died in 1930) moved from Chlebnice in 1941 to a Protestant village, Žaškov, to a small Catholic parish where Alojz’s eldest brother Jozef, a Catholic priest, was appointed parish administrator.
Alojz spent his teenage years during the Second World War in the family and political environment which was very closely connected with the Catholic Church. The Slovak War State was established on March 14, 1939, as a satellite state under the control of Hitler’s Germany. The first president of the Slovak state was the Catholic priest Jozef Tiso, respected in the ranks of the Catholic intelligentsia and popular among ordinary Catholics. Tiso had secured the Catholic Church’s influence in politics, schools, and culture. People enjoyed the relative economic prosperity in the first years of the state and a large part of the population welcomed their departure from the Czechoslovak Republic, in which the culturally and economically more advanced Czechs dominated. Simple Slovaks living mainly in the countryside (2/3 of the population at that time subsisted on agriculture) appreciated that the Slovak state built a dam against Czech liberalism and anti-Christian thinking. Alojz and his father and siblings cultivated large parishes in Žaškov and of course, he helped his eldest brother in the liturgy. It was a period of hard work on the parish lands, but at the same time it provided years of peace and stability, although World War II was raging in the world at that time. Alojz enjoyed learning to play on a new organ in the church in Žaškov. A new school was built in the village, roads were repaired, and new farm buildings were built. The older siblings found their spouses in Žaškov and thus integrated into the local, mostly Protestant, community.
I cannot judge to what extent ordinary villagers perceived national politics in the context of European and world events. The reality
is that Jozef Tiso was unable to defy Hitler’s demand to deport Slovak Jews to concentration camps, thus casting an indelible stain not only on himself but also on the political regime of Slovak Catholics during the war. Even if the first Slovak president did something good for Slovakia, he completely discredited himself in history with his submissiveness to Hitler and the adopted anti-Jewish laws (September 9, 1949 – the so-called Jewish Code, persecution of Jews on the basis of racial origin). From 1942 up to the end of the war, approximately 70,000 Slovak Jews had been deported to extermination camps under Act No. 68/1942, of whom only about 300-400 had survived. Ordinary people must have guessed what was happening to the deported Jews in the concentration camps. They certainly knew that Jews were ill-treated in Slovakia, because they had to wear the yellow Star of David and their property was confiscated in the form of the so-called Aryanizations. Even simple people were to some extent aware of the antidemocratic and cruel regime of Tiso’s ruling party within Hitler’s sphere of political and military influence. But the Strapec family could not influence deportations or Aryanizations and had to live with their own problems arising from caring for the church, the parish, and relatively large parish lands.
In the summer of 1944, it was clear that Hitler’s Germany would soon be defeated. In Slovakia, with the support of the Allied powers, especially the Soviet Union, military forces became active in the fight against the German occupation. In August 1944, the socalled Slovak national uprising, which was defeated during the last quarter of the year, was of great political and moral importance. The Slovaks had shown in a very concrete way that they could actively oppose German military superiority and that they were ready to join the new division of Europe’s borders on the side of
the victorious Allied powers. The problem was that not all Slovaks welcomed the uprising with enthusiasm. In particular, some Catholics – and they did not have to be supporters of the ruling party –watched with suspicion the influence of the Stalinist Soviet Union on the political scene.1 Perhaps simple people in Slovakia did not have enough information about the political games of the Great Powers, but they knew that in the Soviet Union, the communists were fighting against religion and private property. Moreover, in practice, meeting Soviet soldiers was very often a bad personal experience.2 In 2019, there was the beatification of Anka Kolesárová in Slovakia, a young girl from the east of Slovakia, who was killed after a rape attempt. Personal assaults of all degrees were not unusual occurrences. I well remember how my grandparents and their siblings, at family meetings at the parish in Veličná, strongly condemned the partisans as bandits who supported the entry of Stalinist Russian soldiers and with them the implantation of communism into the post-war state.
Immediately after the war, a lot changed for the worse in Žaškov. Unemployment had risen, infrastructure had been largely destroyed, and there had been great uncertainty in state policy. Ordinary people were unaware of the power meetings between the United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union in Tehran, Yalta, and Potsdam, where spheres of influence in the postwar world were carved out. The Czechoslovak Republic was re-established, but it fell within the sphere of influence of the communist Soviet Union.
1 There was only one ruling party in Slovakia during WWII, called HSĽS –Hlinkova slovenská ľudová strana (Hlinka’s Slovak People’s Party).
2 There were no direct battle operations in Žaškov during the war, but part of the population, mainly Protestants, joined the uprising in the form of logistical support for partisan groups.
In February 1948, the communists took over the government of Czechoslovakia under the leadership of prime minister Klement Gottwald. The then president Edvard Beneš accepted the resignation of non-communist ministers, and for 41 years communist totalitarianism prevailed over democracy in the Czechoslovak Republic. The communist coup was aided by political support from Moscow, by the weakness and lack of courage of president Beneš, and by the naiveté of part of the domestic population. Especially in the Czech Republic, sympathy grew for the new political establishment, which proclaimed an equal distribution of the state’s wealth to all people. The mood was different in Slovakia. While there were more workers and socialists in the Czech Republic, in Slovakia most of the population lived in the countryside and subsisted on agriculture. Slovak villagers were more inclined to the central conservative parties, as evidenced by the victory of the Democratic Party in Slovakia in the elections in 1946.3
It was no different in Žaškov. Especially the Catholic part of the population found it difficult to bear the victory of the Communist Party in the Czech Republic in the 1946 elections, the coup in 1948, and the even more difficult repressive actions against tradesmen, religion, and especially the Catholic Church. The Church was considered by the communists to be particularly regressive and dangerous to the interests of the new regime. They abolished all Catholic schools, including the one in Žaškov; tried to subvert the Catholic Church from within by establishing a kind of state church cooperating with the communist regime (Catholic Action); took full control of it in economic matters; and gradually pushed it out of all spheres of public life.4 Jozef Strapec had to secure state
3 Since the absolute numbers were counted, and the communists won in the Czech Republic, this turned out to be the victory of the communists in the whole of Czechoslovakia.
4 Anti-church laws were issued in 1949: no. 217, 218, 219/1949 Coll.
consent for almost everything. As a Slovak state-salaried Catholic priest, he could not marry people without a civil ceremony beforehand, and he had to obtain prior permission for all religious activities outside the church. If he violated a state regulation, he did not receive a salary. The Strapec family suffered from the rise of communists after the war, but none of its members wanted to get into an open conflict with the state power. Obedience to the authorities was encoded in Slovak small farmers. It was a way of fighting for survival in very difficult and unfavorable living conditions throughout the history of the Slovak nation. Alojz studied well, and therefore after primary school he continued his studies at the grammar school in Dolný Kubín, then the best secondary school in the region. He graduated from the grammar school in 1949, after the issuance of anti-church laws. Since there was not enough money in the family, Alojz did not continue his studies at the university but worked as an administrative staff member at a forest plant.
From 1950, the communists escalated political persecution against the so-called enemies of the state and traitors. They closed all seminaries in the Czechoslovak Republic except for two in Bratislava and Prague. The bishops (Pavol Gojdič, Ján Vojtaššák, Michal Buzalka) were accused of treason and sentenced to life imprisonment. Alojz Strapec was probably most saddened by the condemnation of bishop Ján Vojtaššák, whom he knew personally. Perhaps then something broke in him, and although he had the temperament and ability to submit to oppression, he joined the side of his friends from Žaškov who distributed leaflets of the anti-communist secret organization, the White Legion. The White Legion was not exactly a hierarchically organized institution, but rather an informal movement of opponents of the violent communist regime. Belonging
to the White Legion consisted in actively disseminating information about the crimes of communism. These could be leaflets or the provision of information to the anti-communist radio station called White Legion in Austria.5
Several young men from Žaškov, including Alojz Strapec, found it difficult to endure the communist lies, the oppression against the Church, and the nationalization of private property. They were conservative Catholics who attended Holy Mass regularly or belonged to the families of local tradesmen, so they would be typical members of the White Legion. It should be emphasized here that the expression of any disagreement with the communist government at the time required great courage, because the secret police (ŠTB) in Czechoslovakia in the 1950s was very effective, the communist prosecutor’s office very ruthless, and the courts strongly tendentious. The link between the main actors of the White Legion in Bratislava and regional activists in the northern regions of Slovakia was Ján Kurnota. The secret police discovered him relatively quickly and used physical and mental torture during the interrogation. Denial of sleep, death threats, and persecution of family members worked best. Under strong pressure, he revealed everything he knew: the names of friends who distributed anti-communist leaflets and also where they hid weapons. On June 10, 1952, the state police invaded Žaškov and arrested four young men. The next day, they did house searches for their families. In the house of one of them they found a grenade and a rifle from the Second World War. It should be emphasized that eight years after the war, it was not unusual to have a weapon at home or find it somewhere in the field. The police knew what to look for and where, because everything
5 Radio White Legion was led in Austria by Jozef Mikula and Jozef Vicen, and in Slovakia the main actors were three graduates of the Trenčín grammar school: Albert Púčik, Anton Tunega, and Eduard Tesár. All three were executed by the Communists in 1951. See Po stopách Bielej légie v protikomunistickom odboji / ed. Pavol Cintavý. Bratislava 1995, p. 35–44.
had previously been accurately described by the arrested and tortured Ján Kurnota.6
The investigation took place in Ilava and Leopoldov, the worst prisons in Slovakia. The 20-year-old boys were tortured, intimidated, confronted with each other, and confessed to everything they were accused of. In the same year, a trial was held in the presence of local workers in Ružomberok, in the textile factory named after V.I. Lenin. The trial was a farce with a predetermined judgment. Alojz Strapec and eight other young men had to recite the confessions forced on them by investigators. In addition, the workers in the courtroom taunted them and shouted slogans for the glory of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union. They were convicted of “activity in an anti-state treason organization” and sentenced to 25 years in prison in communist labor camps in Jáchymov, North Bohemia. All for a few anti-communist leaflets, one rifle, and grenade.
Uranium ore (pitch) has been mined in the Jáchymov mines since the end of the nineteenth century. After the Second World War, there was a demand for uranium which was used in the Soviet Union for the military industry. As there was no interest in working in the uranium mines, the Communists forced convicted criminal and political prisoners to work in them, and they placed them in labor camps. The camps were organized and arranged in the manner of German concentration camps. There were 18 of them in Jáchymov and each of them had its own name in the spirit of communist ideological propaganda, such as Svornosť, Bratstvo, Rovnosť (Unity,
6 In addition to Alojz Strapec, his brother-in-law’s brother, Jozef Babic, the aforementioned Pavel Brodňanský, and Michal Melek were taken into pretrial detention.
Brotherhood, Equality). After the verdict, Alojz and his friends saw the transfer to labor camps as a relief from the inhumane conditions they had experienced in their windowless pre-trial detention. On arriving at the camp, the young prisoners soon realized that they would have to fight for their lives every day. Modest rations of food according to work performance, a system of inhumane physical and mental punishment for any disobedience or resistance, dangerous working conditions, and the brutal practices of some guards were able to break every prisoner. The symbol of inhumane treatment of prisoners was the so-called Jáchymov/Stalin bus. Prisoners from the camps went to the mines in a crowd of 50 to 150 men wrapped in steel rope as a whole group. If someone in the group fell, either from fatigue or just stumbled, the rope cut into the body of the men who were on the edge. If someone tried to escape, a prison guard shot him immediately. The solitary confinement for the defiant prisoners was particularly cruel: they had to survive for several days on the concrete floor in the dark and in very cramped spaces. Of all the Jáchymov camps, the most feared was a camp called Vykmanov in the town of Ostrov. There was a so-called tower of death where uranium ore was crushed. Dust from radioactive raw material destroyed health particularly intensively and quickly, so the tower between prisoners and guards was called Likvidácia (Liquidation).
Alojz Strapec, as a quiet and unobtrusive young man, found a way to survive in the harsh conditions of the Jáchymov camp. After transport from Ružomberok, he was placed in a camp called Nikolaj, known as a camp of hunger and dirt. As the Nikolaj camp was about a kilometer away from the mining shaft, the previously mentioned cruel transportation of prisoners called the “Jáchymov bus” was particularly brutal in this case. Despite his mild nature, Alojz did not avoid staying in solitary, where he spent 7 days in the dark in
winter and almost without food. He learned how to avoid informers and not provoke attention. He also had to beware of uncovered ore in the mine or rotten wooden supports. The ubiquitous uranium ore dust, which mercilessly penetrated the lungs and blood, could not be avoided.
After a year of forced labor, a very special Christmas day came in 1953.7 The brutal communist system unexpectedly managed to show a human face, and at least for a moment alleviate everyday humiliation and hard work. The prison guard left the men free on the day of the Nativity. They did not have to go to the mine, and that evening it wasn’t mandatory to get outside in the cold as usual. In barrack no. 4 those prisoners gathered who had been waiting for the opportunity for a long time and prepared for it properly. They assembled bread, candles, a clean tablecloth, and worship texts. Priest František Szabadosz, surrounded by a handful of fellow prisoners, placed a tablecloth on his knees and Alojz Strapec read liturgical texts next to him. It was a strong emotional moment that all the prisoners would remember. It was a great consolation for the chilled, hungry, exhausted, and trampled men who had once tried to protect freedom of religion.
After 12 years of totalitarianism in the Czechoslovak Republic, the Communists felt safe and confident enough to make a generous gesture to their political enemies. On May 9, 1960, Czechoslovak President Antonín Novotný signed a large amnesty for more than 200,000 persons. Of these, 7,092 people were released from labor camps. Of these, 5,601 were political prisoners, and Alojz Strapec
7 P. Brodňanský wrote a book of memories of the prison in Jáchymov. He also described Christmas 1953 in the book, from where I draw information about this event. See Pavol Brodňanský. Moja cesta. Ružomberok: Tesfo 2007, p. 43–47.
was among them.8 He was very much looking forward to returning home to his family and his wife Matilde. It was characteristic of released political prisoners like him that “re-education” in labor camps had not been effective. He remained a devout Catholic and his distrust of the communist regime grew. His relatives, with whom he reunited when he returned to freedom, advised him that while he was in prison, the communist secret police had gained enormous power and influence, and fear controlled everyone. The families of political prisoners were under special police surveillance at all times. His brother Jozef, whom he trusted the most, cautioned him that the only possible way to survive under communist terror was to remain silent, work quietly, and not protest. Alojz had no choice. Before leaving the labor camp, he had to sign a declaration that “after his release, he will remain completely silent about everything he has learned in custody.” Alojz knew that he was being monitored by the secret police, and he was regularly invited to interrogations where he had to persuade officers that he was not carrying out anti-state activity. They pressured him to become a secret police officer. He refused to cooperate with the communists, but at the same time did not give them any trouble. He decided to live quietly, not to provoke state power, and to enjoy the joy of “normal life,” although as a minor citizen without the opportunity to work in better jobs.
On November 25, 1989, together with the priest Jozef Strapec, we watched a huge demonstration on the Letna Plain on television at his parish in Veličná. Václav Havel and the priest Václav Malý, before a huge assembly (estimates are 750,000 people), demanded an end to the power of the Communist Party. Jozef Strapec, my great uncle, was deeply moved and had tears in his eyes. I observed the same
8 Jaroslav Rokosky. Amnesty 1960 // Memory and History 1 (2011) 49.
thing with my father, and although I was only 14 at the time, I still remember the strong emotion I felt in the air and in myself. I realized that a disgusting political system that had caused so much pain to my relatives was dying – the system that seemed invincible because it had been building and refining the tools of fear and deception for decades. We cried together at the parish. Similarly, we cried in the squares, where at the end of 1989 the inhabitants of small district towns also gathered.
I did not meet Alojz Strapec or anyone from his immediate family anywhere then. They suspected that the communists were ending their rule, but they were not sure. Even then, as a teenager, I realized the significance of the moment and over the years I thought about it several times. Why did Alojz Strapec and his family show so much caution, or in other words, a lack of courage? After all, in the late 1940s, Alojz found great courage in much more dangerous circumstances. I did not receive an answer from Alojz or his relatives. In my presence – I was a child then – he never talked about his experience with Jáchymov and I seldom heard him swear at the communists. Jozef always did it for him. There is no one to answer my questions anymore, because Alojz and his peers are already dead. Many of his friends had great difficulty in reverting to normal life after the painful experience of the labor camps. Some broke up their families, others failed in health and could not work, and subsequently made a living from a poor pension. Others were bolder, such as Pavol Brodňanský, who took part in an active social life and constantly commemorated the crimes of the communists. Alojz chose the path of silence. I believe that Alojz was partially broken by Jáchymov’s labor camps. Not completely, because he could never be persuaded to cooperate with the secret police or the communists. He also remained true to his religious beliefs. But his open resistance to his tyrants broke. He felt firsthand how brutal the communist regime could be, and he simply did not want to repeat it. Can anyone blame him? I think not.
Political prisoners in Slovakia organize in associations and publish their own magazines. The most influential is the magazine Svedectvo (Testimony). The articles published in it testify to the life attitudes and moods of the ever-older generation of political prisoners. Many of them feel great frustration with the development of society in Slovakia after the fall of totalitarianism. These old women and men complain that at present there is not a single party in the Slovak parliament that would profile itself as a Christian conservative party. They see frequent and open attacks against Christian values in the public media and do not want to accept it as a necessary part of democracy. Many of the former political prisoners perceive liberalism and consumerism as new forms of totalitarianism. Some of them do not see the meaning in the suffering they experienced in the struggle for freedom and feel what Myroslav Marynovych said at the beginning of the conference: that the prisoners who survived were punished the most.
I still think most political prisoners are not bitter or frustrated. Those who cultivated a strong and sincere faith and lived according to their religious beliefs found the courage to forgive their tormentors. They find peace in their families and in engaging in local parishes. Although post-communist society did not appreciate them as they imagined, their greatest victory remains on a moral level, and they are aware of it.
I first met Anton Neuwirth at the graduation ceremony upon the completion of a semester-long academic and formation program for young Christians organized by the Ladislav Hanus Fellowship in Bratislava. Back then, I was not fully aware of the privilege I had. It was immediately apparent that Anton Neuwirth was a very wise man with lots of experience, who made a significant political contribution in the post-communist politics of Slovakia. At the same time, he was very humble and talked with us and listened to us students as if we were his equals – an attitude I was not always given by my professors at the university. This was my first impression of Anton Neuwirth. However, it was only over time that I learned more about his life, importance, and legacy. This article is but an insufficient trailer to the life story of Anton Neuwirth. A story of a man who was (rightfully) called a witness of the century1 because his life reflects and embodies how the political and social forces of the twentieth century impacted Slovakia, how its people resisted the horrors and contributed to the defeat of nazism and communism, and how faithful Christians contributed to the restoration of a free society in the wake of the collapse of communism. His answer to the suffering inflicted upon him and his family by both nazism and communism is embodied in the motto: To Heal Evil with Love. He not only preached, but consistently lived out this answer.2
1 Cf. J. Čarnogurský. Anton Neuwirth – svedok storočia (http://www.jancarnogursky.sk/clanky/12/anton-neuwirth---svedok-storocia).
2 Such is also the title of his autobiography this contribution is mostly based on (Rudolf Lesňák, Anton Neuwirth. Liečiť zlo láskou. Bratislava: Kalligram 2001).
Anton Neuwirth was born on January 22, 1921, in Bystričany to a Jewish father Dezider and Catholic mother Antónia. He attended a Jewish elementary school in Žilina where about one-third of the pupils were Catholic. This, alongside his family background, gave him the awareness of the need for national and religious tolerance. After graduating high school with honors, he enrolled in the School of Medicine of the Comenius University in Bratislava (1939–1944). In 1942, the deportations of the Jewish population started in Slovakia. By 1944 twelve of Neuwirth’s close family members had been deported to concentration camps (Neuwirth himself was granted a presidential exception from the Anti-Jewish Codex). After graduating from the School of Medicine and becoming a physician, Neuwirth continued to study chemistry at the School of Natural Sciences of the Comenius University in Bratislava (1945–1947). In 1943, during his university studies, Neuwirth met Fr. Tomislav Kolakovič, the founder of Christian network/community Rodina (Family). In 1947 Neuwirth married Eva Adamková and started a job at the Institute of Medical Chemistry of the School of Medicine, Comenius University in Bratislava. The same year the newlyweds moved to Zurich, Switzerland on a scholarship, where Anton worked as a scientific assistant to Prof. Karrer and completed two more semesters of chemistry studies. In 1948 their first child, daughter Anna, was born. Fearing that their family back home would be persecuted if they stayed in Switzerland, in October Anton Neuwirth with his wife and daughter returned to Slovakia and resumed his assistant position at the School of Medicine in Bratislava (until June 1949). During July 1949 –November 1953, he was tasked with leading the Institute of Medical Chemistry and lecturing at the School of Medicine, Comenius University in Bratislava, and at the Veterinarian University in Košice. In 1949 Neuwirth’s second child, daughter Katarína, was born, followed by the birth of two sons: František in 1951 and Anton in 1953.
During the night of April 13, 1950, that came to be called the “Night of the Barbarians’’ (a state-wide arrest and concentration of the members of religious orders) he first experienced a direct intervention by the police and the state security since at that time he stayed in the Dominican Monastery in Košice. By the time his youngest son was born, Anton Neuwirth had been under surveillance by the state security for his membership in and activities within the Rodina community. On November 30, 1953, he was arrested at the dean’s office in Košice and taken into interrogation custody at the Košice Police Directorate. In January 1954, together with other members of Rodina, he was transferred to Prague into a special state security facility (Prague–Ruyzně) for further interrogation. In the trial at the Highest court of Czechoslovakia in Prague, which took place during October 12–15, 1954, Anton Neuwirth was sentenced to 12 years in prison, confiscation of property, and 10 years of loss of civil rights and transferred to a solitary cell in the Prague-Pankrác prison. In 1955 he was transferred to the prison in Ilava, Slovakia, and assigned to be a male nurse (not a physician) there. In 1956, for the first time, he filed a petition to revise his trial. In 1958, he was transferred to the prison in Leopoldov and the revision proceedings in Prague took place. On May 9, 1960, a general amnesty was issued. Neuwirth left prison as the last one after conducting a medical examination of all the other prisoners to be released on May 11, 1960. For the following six years, Anton Neuwirth worked in the Hospital in Čadca. During this time, he obtained medical post-graduate certification for internal medicine (1960) and clinical biochemistry (1962). During 1966–1974 he served as chief physician in the Institute of clinical biochemistry at the School of Medicine of the Comenius University in Martin, a position that was lowered to a deputy during “normalization” between 1974–1987. Until 1989, he worked as a retiree in the Bojnice hospital. Since the Velvet Revolution in 1989, he had been among the founders and active members of the Christian Democratic Party (formally
established in 1990). During 1992–1994 he was a member of the Slovak Parliament and in 1993 he ran for president. During 1994–1998 he served as the Slovak ambassador to the Holy See in the Vatican and had a substantial role in initiating the process of preparation, drafting, and signing the official treaties between the Slovak Republic and the Vatican. He stayed active in public life even after leaving the official political positions, encouraging and supporting various initiatives for the younger generation of Slovaks, serving as their advisor and mentor (e.g., The Ladislav Hanus Fellowship – a Catholic academic fellowship aimed at preparing young Christians and all seeking the truth for public life inspired by Rodina; or The College of Anton Neuwirth – an independent educational institution focused on forming young people in the spirit of Christian values and the cultural heritage of Western civilization). Anton Neuwirth passed away in his home in Bojnice on September 21, 2004.
When in Medical School in Bratislava, Anton Neuwirth lived in the Catholic dormitory Svoradov. Here he met a Jesuit priest, Fr. Stjepan Tomislav Poglajen, who fled his native Croatia from the Nazis. For the escape, he changed his surname to that of his mother – Kolakovič, under which name he came to be known. Upon his arrival in Bratislava, Kolakovič found a country where the Catholic laity was mostly passive. Immediately after he arrived in Bratislava in the fall of 1943, Fr. Kolakovič started to work with university students.3 His pastoral work was very unusual for the time and sought to lead the laity to an authentic life of faith and bring them to active
3 Besides working with the students Kolakovič was very active in the church circles in general and also in many different areas of social, cultural, and political life in Slovakia.
participation in the life of the Church. His work had two foci: one was organizational, which served the second, essential, dimension of formation. His activities were modeled after the Jocist movement. Kolakovič started creating groups of students focused on their formation towards studying and living out their faith actively and authentically. He trained them according to the principle “formation by action” and taught them to live by the motto “See, Judge, Act.”4 In that same spirit, Kolakovič’s closest collaborators formed a network called Rodina (Family). Kolakovič gave lecture series, theological and philosophical seminars, led spiritual exercises, heard confessions, provided advice on their life situations, organized summer camps and meetings of Catholic youth, etc. Especially thanks to student Rodina members, these groups rapidly spread across Slovakia, and in a matter of few months the groups were present even in many smaller cities and in high schools. Rodina became the main organizer of Catholic Action5 in Slovakia. It was not a formal association or an order, nor were they a group of people viewing themselves as an elite. They were not an anti-state subversive organization (as they were later labeled by the Communist regime). They were a group of people that Kolakovič organized because he thought that they were willing and determined to work on their spiritual development and the evangelization of others. The remarkable thing about Kolakovič is how fast he was able to create a fellowship of trust and mutual friendship among a diverse group of people (priests, religious, lay people of different ages, educational, or spiritual maturity).
Kolakovič, however, not only educated the Rodina members intellectually and spiritually. Already during the war (WWII), he predicted its outcome and anticipated that Slovakia would fall under
4 Both principles/mottos originate from the Jocist movement.
5 Catholic Action was a movement of lay groups that worked to encourage Catholic influence on society at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries.
the Soviet Union’s sphere of influence. He had no illusions when it came to the communists and foresaw the persecutions they would institute. For this reason, he was practically preparing the youth for torture, harsh interrogations, and the long time they would see behind bars. He taught them to work secretly and underground. After the war, when the communists seized power, Kolakovič started to be seen as a Vatican spy, quickly fell from grace, and became an enemy (even during the war he was seen as a spy, but as a Russian spy working against the Nazi puppet Slovak state). The same came to be the case for his “followers” active in the Rodina movement across Slovakia, who began to be viewed as Vatican spies by the communist regime and its security apparatus. This was the reason Anton Neuwirth came to the attention of state security and one of the objects of an extensive security action of the regime (together with other Rodina members, approximately 300 of whom were sent to prison).
Anton Neuwirth was arrested on the evening of November 30, 1953. Based on previous arrests of other people, he had expected his arrest to happen in a few days but did not share this premonition with his wife to save her from worry. When asked the reason for the arrest, the state security agents just replied: “You will see.” Immediately after he had been arrested and taken blindfolded to the police headquarters, his home was searched by three agents with his weeping small children present. When the agents left, during the night Neuwirth’s father-in-law burned his books that could be considered incriminating, which Neuwirth had kept hidden on their balcony. Remembering Kolakovič’s advice, the very first night in the cell, Neuwirth set himself a daily routine with a precisely planned timetable. Every day he would: exercise three times; say morning, noon, and evening prayers; pray the whole rosary; pray the mass in Latin;
work on his chemistry and biochemistry textbook (in his head); and meditate word-by-word on every prayer text he knew by heart. He also set aside two hours for recreation – two hours dedicated to, in his words, unreal memories of his family. He kept this routine for the whole year until his trial. Being “preoccupied” during the whole day saved him from a lot of psychological suffering.
After a month of detention in Košice, Neuwirth was transferred for further interrogation to Prague during the night of January 4, 1954. He was placed in a prison built as a copy of Soviet prisons. Every morning two prison guards would enter the cell and recline the beds and fix them to the wall. Then they would lower a table and two seats from the wall. The seats were high so that the prisoners’ feet would be in the air when seated. The iron seat rim pressing against the veins would very quickly become uncomfortable, and thus the prisoners would be forced to stand up and walk. It was prohibited for them to recline against the wall or sit on the floor. The small size of the cells did not allow the prisoners to fix their sight on something more distanced, so their eye muscles were constantly active, which caused headaches. This headache was relieved only when they were able to look into the distance or close their eyes, but this was forbidden during the day, a rule that would be checked by the guards every two minutes. There were also other methods of making the prisoners feel helpless and dependent. Among these was the habit of blindfolding the prisoners whenever they were transferred anywhere outside the cell, especially for the interrogations. However, the prison guards carefully avoided any form of brutality that would leave signs of physical abuse and used more sophisticated forms of torture instead. Neuwirth recalls a freezing cold night in January or February when scarcely clothed, they were taken into a freshly painted and very humid room with open windows and the prisoners were forced to walk around the room for a long time. The interrogators employed various psychological strategies to break the prisoners and thus force them to confess. They would,
for example, state that they have enough time, and the prisoner can easily be kept locked up for a few years. Neuwirth was initially untouched by these threats since he naively thought that this time would count towards his future sentence. At the same time, the interrogators argued to other prisoners that it was Neuwirth’s fault that the trial was being postponed. He was also threatened that unless he talked, his wife would be forced to since she also was a member of Rodina and that they had no problem placing their children into the state foster system. Another strategy was to deny the prisoner all privileges if he refused to sign the interrogation protocol. The protocols very often said something other than what the prisoner stated or were purposefully formulated in such a manner that it would cast guilt on the prisoner. Shortly before the trial Neuwirth was called to the interrogator and told that during the trial he was to testify according to the interrogation protocols, to which Neuwirth replied that he would tell the court the same thing as he had stated during the interrogations, but that it was different from what the interrogators put into the protocols. The next day, another interrogator showed him the picture of his youngest son and told him to repeat the contents of the protocols if he ever wanted to return to him.
Formally, Neuwirth was charged with espionage. At the trial he truthfully described the activities of Rodina, believing none of it could possibly constitute the crime of espionage. However, the presiding judge always made a summary of his testimony that would be incriminating for Neuwirth under the penal code. In 1968, when Neuwirth had a chance to see his trial files, he learned he had been arrested for being in contact with a Jesuit from Mukachevo, but he never knew anyone from Mukachevo, not even the name of the person was known to him. After decades, Neuwirth also found out that the whole trial was staged, and that the instructions for the prosecutors and the sentences were prepared in advance.
Neuwirth was sentenced to 12 years in prison, confiscation of property, and 10 years of loss of civil rights. He was transferred to
the Prague Pankrác prison and placed as a fourth inmate into a cell designed for one person. The prison population was diverse. There were “regular” criminals and war criminals (sentenced for their activities during the war), but an increasing number of inmates consisted of political prisoners like Neuwirth, and communists who had fallen out of favor. This created a hostile atmosphere among the prisoners, who used every opportunity to get revenge on those who had put them in prison and now found themselves in the very same prison.
After about four months, Neuwirth was transferred to a Slovak prison in Ilava. He was happy about the transfer, mainly because he would be closer to his family. In Ilava prison, he started working as a male nurse. However, the atmosphere in this prison was no different than that in the Prague prison. Everybody hated everybody else: the guards hated the prisoners, the prisoners hated the guards; political prisoners hated the criminals, the criminals hated the political prisoners; the “new” prisoners (communists) hated the “retribution” prisoners (sentenced for activities during the war), and vice-versa. However, this hateful situation in prison was disturbed by the arrival of the prisoners sentenced for the “Catholic Action” from the ranks of Kolakovič’s Rodina. They brought forgiveness, reconciliation, and love towards all. They recognized no differences and treated everyone with respect and dignity, genuinely trying to live and carry out their duties as their faith would command them. Of course, even this was not able to overcome the systemic brutality of prison life,6 but it alleviated the atmosphere a little bit so that, from time to time, one could even see rays of humanity in the mutual relations of the inmates and guards. These moments were brief and from the outside could seem insignificant (e.g., when one of the toughest prison guards let Neuwirth pray over a dead inmate
6 For example, there was a penalty of 5 days (or more) of solitary confinement for any spiritual or religious act.
and stood saluting next to him, or when another prison guard let him watch his family through a window when leaving from a visit, etc.) but they were extremely important inside the brutal hateful place.
One day in May 1960, Neuwirth was told by another prisonerphysician that he would be released. The next day, he was given the same information about the amnesty by one of the guards. Neuwirth packed his things, but did not dare to believe it, and was ready to complete his 12-year sentence. Formally, he was given the amnesty on May 9, 1960. However, for the next three days, he was still conducting medical examinations for many prisoners to be released. Neuwirth finally left the prison on May 11, 1960. After the release from prison until the fall of communism in 1989, Neuwirth resumed his medical career, but still was confronted with further persecution from the communist regime, be it only in milder forms. In many ways, he played a very significant role during the transition of Slovakia from communism. Some of his contributions are briefly sketched in the biographical information section above. Despite undoubtedly deserving a detailed treatment, a more comprehensive elaboration on his contribution goes far beyond the scope of this article.
Anton Neuwirth was confronted with both Nazi and communist persecution. His answer to the communist persecution has been sketched out. His reaction to the horrors of nazism is well reflected in his recollection of the visit to Auschwitz two years after his release from communist prison in 1962. He writes:
My twelve of those that we call the closest stood on this roll-call place. Those dogs chased sisters of my father and their children. An SS bullet caught up with my cousin and he drew his last breath in his mother’s arms. Maybe one of those glasses was worn by my grandmother when
she used to lift into her work-torn hands one of the prayer books that are now in that bookcase. Her gray hair might be mixed with the raven hair of her granddaughter in that formless pile. Those small baby shoes might have been taken off my one-year-old nephew. And then… then they were all stripped naked, long before stripped off their human dignity, they were stripped naked … Naked in such a manner, that there was even nothing to sew the yellow star on, and they sent them to “take a shower”… There, it was precisely in that chamber, where our tour ended. In that unpleasantly clean, whitened, and carefully adjusted gas chamber, which pointlessly crowns an exhibition of suffering.
Yes pointlessly, because a blunt and carefully adjusted factuality of evil causes indignation, whipped-up hatred breeds the desire for revenge. It does conceal that even in these spaces, evil was combined with good. It is as if the horrible silence that rules the place now, were an echo of the screams of hatred and revenge of those victims, who used to die there with evil in their hearts… […] In this lies the horrible pointlessness!
And I know that this is not how it happened. It couldn’t have happened this way, because at least one time, on the threshold of death, it was spoken, it had to be spoken: “Brothers, I forgive!” I know that sentence was spoken there, that it had to be spoken there so that the suffering of those hundreds of thousands may find its meaning, and that one day a clean sacrifice, forgiving, loving could be performed there.
It is thus beyond my understanding that this sentence is not written on that white wall of the gas chamber, so that all the sacrifices may stop hovering over the world as black, sweetish smoke of a crematorium, as a cloud of revenge and hatred. This sentence needs to be written there, so that it flies out into the world and that all the people mutually call: “Brothers, we have forgiven!”
Because suffering that does not give rise to love is pointless. 7
These are extremely strong words that might send shivers down one’s spine. But they also might seem as if Neuwirth were diminishing
7 A. Neuwirth. Spomienky na Osvienčim [Memories of Osvienčim], manuscript. Published in: Lesňák, Neuwirth. Liečiť zlo láskou.
the horrors that Nazism caused, diminishing or willing to ignore the suffering of the victims and guilt of those who inflicted it. However, this is not the case and Neuwirth believed in examining the atrocities and culpabilities of both Nazism and Communism. He distinguished between an evil committed by an individual and an evil committed by society. He understood forgiveness as a restoration of a love-filled relationship. One who forgives is willing to love the other one, and thus creates a possibility for the other one to love back. However, this is not a necessary condition since love can be both one-sided and mutual. The former depends upon us, the latter also on the other one. He argued that by forgiving someone, I do not say that the evil committed is a good act. Precisely the opposite, I say it is a morally evil act, but I do forgive the consequences of the action as far as they affect me. According to Neuwirth, the same is the case with forgiving a society. I can forgive what society has done to me; I can even request that somebody is not prosecuted on my behalf. However, one is not allowed to abdicate the responsibility to secure the rights of others, their effective protection from and compensation for evil. Also, it is only possible to forgive an individual (even if the evil was committed by society) and forgiveness cannot be generalized since the securement of the common good requires justice, which is a natural and necessary condition for the pursuit of love.
This is what Neuwirth’s motto to heal evil with love means. It is certainly no easy requirement and standard to live by. Especially when one is faced with grave injustice, suffering, persecution, and evil. Nevertheless, the life story of Anton Neuwirth proves that it is not an unachievable standard. His life under the two totalitarian regimes, as well as during the period of transition from communism, and the achievements and contributions he made teach us that it is a standard worth living by. In fact, Anton Neuwirth’s story that was only briefly sketched out by this article indicates that it might be the standard to live by even more so in our present times.
In this article we would like to analyze how the trauma of communism affected the human person and distorted a moral space for action needed for enacting human dignity. We will also argue that to avoid “reincarnations” of communism both in the East and the West it is important not to succumb to the amnesia about the effects of the communist rule in Eastern Europe and especially in the Soviet Union. And even more importantly, we will try to show that the best corrective to the appeal of the communist ideals of social justice could be found in the social thought and action based on the concept of integral human development as it is developed in the social thought of the Church.
Back to the USSR?
A fish does not pay attention to the fact that it is living in the water. It is just natural for it to be that way. But it suddenly finds that it has lived all its life in the water as soon as it is taken out of it and forced into the open air. It desperately gasps for air but cannot breathe. Recently I came across a short post1 by an anonymous resident of the Crimea who stayed there after the annexation of the Ukrainian peninsula by Russia in 2014. Suddenly he discovered that the behavioral habits that were instrumental in the fight for survival in the Soviet Union and then happily forgotten while living in the independent Ukraine again are in demand. Here in Ukraine, we unlearned how to reduce one’s voice in a conversation to avoid being heard
1 https://www.facebook.com/ali.tatarzade/posts/4227554730699301.
and denounced when somebody unfamiliar enters a room. We unlearned to loathe getting in contact with state authorities and get used to visiting state offices only at our discretion without feeling any shame at not remembering where, when, and which documents need to be submitted. We unlearned to fear and avoid at any cost any contact with police and security services and gradually started to appreciate that any law-enforcement authority is here to protect and help a citizen. The occupation brought a resident of the Crimea back into “sovok,” which is a pejorative term designating the Soviet reality as well as the cumulative image of the Soviet man. Step by step the independent Ukraine made most of the skills necessary for adaptation in Soviet life redundant and useless. And now, after Russia’s occupation, many people who “suffered” the last 23 years from the uselessness of their life experience under the Soviet Union cheered up with the realization that their survival skills might again be in demand. No wonder that those who do not welcome this return to the USSR start making use of black humor to alleviate the stress of the unfortunate situation. Our resident of the annexed Crimea jokes that despite the futility of the Soviet lived experience in any normal circumstances, at least one can take comfort in the fact that with this experience one could survive even in North Korea.
In any case, this kind of testimony manifests how far the present Ukraine, even with all its deficiencies and flaws, went away from the Soviet Union and how important it is to appreciate what a radical transformation has happened during the 30 years of its independence. We should not be like a fish taking the water of freedom and dignity for granted and underestimating the historic event of the collapse of communism in Eastern and Central Europe more than three decades ago.
In some crucial sense it is good news that the generation born in Ukraine after the breakdown of the Soviet Union does not know any more what communism was about. After all, having no lived experience of the communist rule and no burden of Soviet humiliation
The Trauma of “Homo Sovieticus” could be an advantage in building a meaningful life. But there is also bad news. It happens quite often that people also ignore what communism did. They live as if nothing had happened. Or even worse, some of our contemporaries in Ukraine, Eastern Europe, and the West start to romanticize what communism was about and adopt specific attitudes characteristic of Marxist ideology in their public engagements. This amnesia is unacceptable when “reincarnations” of communism2 still abound in the post-Soviet world. The occupied Crimea is just one case in point. But it is important to stay alert to its possible reincarnations in liberal societies of the West. The risk is always there, especially in the absence of the antidote of Nürnberg II for the communist ideology and its historical atrocities. Though the Soviet Union disappeared from the political map 30 years ago, at least in Ukraine it did not completely disappear from people’s mindset, memory, everyday life, social behavior, cultural practices, education, and state institutions. One third of respondents in a recent survey3 confessed that they regret the collapse of the Soviet Union. This is of course better when compared with the data4 from Russia, where three quarters of respondents believe that the Soviet time was the best epoch in the history of the country. And it is much better when one takes as a mark of distancing from the Soviet communist past the attitude towards Stalin.5 As compared with Russia’s 59% of those with a positive attitude to
2 Myroslav Marynovych. The Reincarnation of Forgotten Communist Crimes into New World Evils // The conference on “The Trauma of Communism,” The Nanovic Institute for European Studies at the University of Notre Dame, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9VFuboLvf4I.
(https://www.vedomosti.ru/society/articles/2020/03/23/ 825985-tri-chetverti).
Stalin, there is only 18% in Ukraine. Another discouraging news for Russia is that the idea for a grand memorialization of Stalin6 and his epoch through building a monument and a new museum complex near Nizhniy Novgorod wins 50% of supporters among those who were born after the breakdown of the Soviet Union. And this number has been growing steadily starting from 2005, when only 11% of the same age group supported the idea.
All of this does not automatically mean that these people want back in the USSR. For many aged people in Ukraine, whose portion among those nostalgic about the Soviet Union is the largest, their positive evaluation relates to their nostalgia for their youth, to their feeling of vulnerability in the contemporary fluid society in contrast with the Soviet alleged stability due to a guaranteed job and modest but stable income, to their inability to take responsibility and to their strong affection for a collectivist ethos. In any case, such a social mood serves as a fertile soil for the recurring attempts at the reincarnations of the communist ideas even though the communist ideology is legally equated to Nazi ideology in Ukraine, and the communist parties and symbols are outlawed. This confirms that along with institutional problems and economic challenges, war and foreign aggression, a no less important handicap for transformation of the country is the mindset of people and the way they interact with each other in the public space. However vital it is to adopt new laws and new procedures; it is no less critical to substantially change a culture of social interaction. Laws without morals are useless!7 How to make the younger generation aware of the human costs and wickedness of the communist experiment? Especially given the attractiveness of social warrior’s ethics to young people with
6 Сталин-центр и памятник Сталину // Левада-центр (https://www. levada.ru/2021/08/04/stalin-tsentr-i-pamyatnik-stalinu/).
7 This is the University of Pennsylvania motto based on a line from Horace’s III.24 (Book 3, Ode 24): Quid leges sine moribus vanae proficiunt? (“Of what avail empty laws without [good] morals?”).
a conscience alert to violations of social justice. What is the special role of the Catholic Church and Catholic universities in overcoming this amnesia and counteracting the allure of the destructive communist ideas to a young, inquiring yet immature mind?
In his presentation at the Trauma of Communism conference Czech theologian Fr. Tomáš Halík speaks about “anthropological roots of totalitarianism” and the challenge of “overcoming the Soviet man in us” as a condition of moving forward.8 Whatever communism was about and whatever its hideous effects on society, the most harm was done by the communist distortion, both in thinking and practice, of the image of the human person. Thus, we would like to clarify four questions in this regard: What is the Soviet man? What kind of anthropology could be a viable alternative to the Soviet man? What vision of human flourishing and what kind of action in favor of social change follows from this anthropology? Without a sound anthropology, we cannot have a good society, we could not really understand and appreciate what freedom and justice mean and which implications they entail.
I remember well from my classes in the Soviet school that success in constructing a perfect communist society was predicated on the radical transformation of man and the creation of a “new Soviet people” through decades of the communist experiment. Just who is this Soviet “new man”?
The notion of the Soviet “new man” was brilliantly and prophetically displayed and satirically ridiculed by Mikhail Bulgakov
8 Tomáš Halík. The Church’s Experience of Communism and Post-Communism in the Heart of Europe // The conference on “The Trauma of Communism,” the Nanovic Institute for European Studies at the University of Notre Dame, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXIeM_D1R2s.
in a novel The Heart of a Dog as early as 1925.9 A brilliant surgeon, Prof. Preobrazhensky, picks up a stray dog Sharik and turns it by means of eugenics into a man named Sharikov. The Professor and his assistant, Mr. Bormenthal, attempt to teach Sharikov elementary manners. Instead, Sharikov insists on behaving “naturally” and ridicules etiquette as a relic of the old regime. He uses obscene language, refuses to shave, does not care about washing his clothing, eats like a glutton, abuses alcohol, and insults women. Sharikov also picks up very quickly all revolutionary rhetoric and propaganda and starts to interpret the world and human history in terms of the perpetual conflict and zero-sum game between oppressors and oppressed. He renounces the complexity of reality, speaks the proletarian slang, and finally denounces his creator by making counterfeit accusations of his alleged disloyalty to the ruling regime. Sharikov ends up badly. Annoyed with his extravagances and bullying, Prof. Preobrazhensky undoes his invention and turns Sharikov back into Sharik. But as it turned out it is not that easy to undo a non-fictional Soviet man. The intellectual description of the Soviet “new man” is known under the title of Homo Sovieticus. The most conspicuous characteristic of this creature is his attachment to the maxim that the end justifies the means. Even as a teenager with no real understanding of international politics, I was perplexed with how the Soviet propaganda could swiftly change from one opinion to its opposite and simultaneously deny any contradiction in doing so. The gap between official adherence to the alleged principles and practical unscrupulousness was startling. Today we are familiar with the phenomenon under the title of “post-truth.” But it was abhorrent to see Homo Sovieticus rationalize and absolve himself from anything “wrong” if it allegedly served the higher “moral” purpose. Consequently, Homo Sovieticus could justify anything, making himself an unprincipled and deeply cynical person.
9 Mikhail Bulgakov. The Heart of a Dog. Grove Press 1994.
A Croatian writer Slavenka Drakulic, in her book They Would Never Hurt a Fly: War Criminals on Trial in the Hague, makes a strong case in depicting the moral schizophrenia of former citizens of the Socialist Yugoslavia who committed murders, rapes, torture, and other crimes during the brutal conflicts in the region.10 Most of them, she claims, were not monsters, sociopaths, or psychopaths. They were normal people, next door neighbors who gave up their moral agency and did not develop the mature moral character necessary to act morally in adverse circumstances. To have and maintain principles was not a conducive strategy for adaptation and physical survival in the Soviet reality. Another maxim internalized by Homo Sovieticus was that initiative could be punished. Consequently, he eschews individual responsibility and shows little initiative that does not fit the ideologically construed model of behavior. A Polish political scholar, Maria Domańska, writes that “the ‘Soviet man’ is characterized by his tendency to follow the authority of the state in its assessment of reality, to adopt an attitude of mistrust and anxiety towards anything foreign and unknown, and is convinced of his own powerlessness and inability to affect the surrounding reality; from here, it is only a step towards lacking any sense of responsibility for that reality.”11 Homo Sovieticus shows servile obedience to anything that the government decrees. He is inclined to self-censorship and demonstrates the absence of critical thinking. He pays public lip-service to the ruling ideology as well as engages in public denunciation of the enemy ideology and witch-hunt of its perpetrators. The chilling effect of this culture of censorship and denunciation was pervasive. Kids were cautioned by their parents to be mindful about what they
10 Slavenka Drakulic. They Would Never Hurt a Fly: War Criminals on Trial in the Hague. New York: Penguin Books 2005.
11 Maria Domańska. Conflict-Dependent Russia. The Domestic Determinants of the Kremlin’s anti-Western Policy // Point of View 67 (2017) 40 (https://www. osw.waw.pl/sites/default/files/pw_67_conflict-dependent_net.pdf).
said in school or in conversations with their peers. As a result, double thinking was not a rare occurrence.
Another deep-seated inclination of Homo Sovieticus was to deny to other people their sovereign individuality and judge them not by their deeds or individual merits but by their social origin and their inborn membership in a social group. Homo Sovieticus considers people’s identity not as a complex interplay of both pre-given and acquired allegiances but reduces it to a single feature of their socio-economic status which dominates all evaluations of the person’s worth. This reminds me about some contemporary pressure groups which in their activity tend to treat any person not as an individual with a complex and many-layered identity but as an avatar of his or her nation, race, sex, or gender.
Ukrainian public figure and Soviet dissident Myroslav Marynovych argues that by strengthening animal instincts in man as well as by cultivating herd mentality, the communist ideology made the human person a prey to violence as a method of interpersonal and social interaction.12 Coupled with “the proletarian dialectics” always on hand to justify any imaginable and unimaginable use of violence, this dehumanizing strategy lies at the core of the subsequent surge of violent conflicts in the post-Soviet space. Often, formally stripped of its communist entourage, Homo Sovieticus became a fitting object for abuse by other ideologies – either ethnic, nationalistic, or imperial.
As Maria Domańska remarked, Homo Sovieticus has suppressed aggression – his chronic dissatisfaction with life, his intense sense of injustice, his inability to achieve self-realization, and his great envy, all erupt into a fascination with force and violence, as well as a tendency towards “negative identification” in opposition to “the enemy” or “the foreigner.” Such a personality suits a quasi-tribal approach to
12 Marynovych. The Reincarnation of Forgotten Communist Crimes.
The Trauma of “Homo Sovieticus”
standards of morality and law (the things “our people” have a right to do are condemned in the “foreigner”).13
When confronted with such an image of Homo Sovieticus, we can better appreciate what Myroslav Marynovych meant by saying that “the greatest victims of communism were those who survived because they have given to Caesar what belongs only to God.”14 That is, they abandoned voluntarily, or were forced or deceived into renouncing what it is to be fully human.
Confronted with “Homo Sovieticus” through the personal lived experience
Before discussing a possible antidote to the survival of Homo Sovieticus in people’s mindset and modes of behavior, I would like to recount some more personal memories. I was born into a family of Soviet Ukrainian intelligentsia in 1971. My parents did not come from the dissident background. But they also showed no enthusiasm for the Soviet regime as well. They took it for granted as rainy weather in my native city of Lviv. But they tried to live a decent human life and cultivate decency and integrity in their children. It turned out to be the best shield against any temptation to succumb to all the pressure from the state in its attempts to force the younger generation into the Homo Sovieticus mentality. There were many ways of resisting these attempts.
There are some memorable personal experiences, even in the most mundane form, of the resistance available to a teenager to the Homo Sovieticus pandemic. One way of confrontation was to learn foreign languages to get access to unauthorized information, or at least to information not directly controlled or produced by the ruling regime. In my case, it was the Polish language, which I learned by watching
13 Domańska. Conflict-Dependent Russia, p. 40.
14 Marynovych. The Reincarnation of Forgotten Communist Crimes.
cartoons on the official Socialist Polish TV stations which nonetheless were forbidden from broadcasting in the USSR. By using the handmade antenna and due to being close to the Polish border, many in Western Ukraine managed to watch Polish TV channels and to maintain at least some diversity in information flow.
Another common way of cultivating some humanity was to maintain hobbies. Being forced into uniformity at school and in consumption patterns, youth developed innumerable hobbies and networks of exchange of the collected items. These could have been usual hobbies like collecting coins, postage stamps, postcards, badges, bookmarks, or books. Or, unusual collections of chewing gum wrappers, matchboxes, miniature toy cars, netsuke, used theater tickets, etc. This was a way to express oneself, to cultivate one’s distinctness and build relationships not imposed by the state.
In Western Ukraine, an important and generally available way to oppose the totalitarian claim of the Soviet ideology was to participate in quasi-religious activities like playing the Nativity theatre (Vertep) during the Christmas season. It was not as spectacular as it is now with the cast in costumes, with theatrical accessories, and in large and loud groups of people. At that time, it was more modest and usually limited to singing Christmas carols. But we were wandering from one multi-story building to another, from one apartment to another while singing carols and trying to avoid the militia or unwelcoming hosts.
The cracks in the Soviet reality for a young person also appeared because of many dehumanizing experiences. One of the vital memories of this kind in the 1980s was standing in queues – in stores, cinemas, bus stops waiting for public transport, etc. We had to stand in a queue to buy not only technical devices or clothes, but the most elementary goods like milk, sour cream, meat, fish, vegetables, etc. Not every attempt to get your turn was successful. Mostly not. The products were scarce, and the deficit of goods was rampant. Sometimes, people after purchasing a good went to the end of the queue to venture once again since one was permitted to buy
only one item of a product per one turn. Instead of reading books or playing sports, or visiting youth clubs for personal development, we spent our time and energy standing in queues. This is a paradigmatic situation of wasting human life and obstructing human talent. Standing in endless queues has been carved in my memory as one of the most humiliating experiences in my life, forcing the human person into the Homo Sovieticus mentality.
There were many people who did not want to drift along the Soviet life mainstream. They openly did not comply with the communist vision of man and were strong enough to oppose any attempt to impose it on their mind and behavior. It is important to tell their stories: in research, essays, movies, biographies, graphic novels, etc. in ways fitting the communication patterns of contemporary youth. An Italian social philosopher and politician, Rocco Buttiglione, made a brilliant comment on the message revealed in the life of such people as Fr. Maximilian Kolbe. By the ultimate act of self-giving of his life for the sake of another person in the Nazi concentration camp he defeated the anti-human Nazi ideology.15 Similar stories could be recounted about people suffering in the Gulag. They challenged the Soviet and any totalitarian vision of the “new man” and brought back trust in humanity.
According to Buttiglione, the wickedness of any concentration camp – both Nazi and Soviet – consisted not only in physical annihilation of people, but also in the attempt to demonstrate that a human being is merely a beast wearing a mask of culture, that there is nothing inherently human in the human person, that in certain circumstances a man cannot but reduce his life to a mere
15 Rocco Buttiglione. Myśl Karola Wojtyły. Lublin: Towarzystwo Naukowe KUL 1996.
struggle for survival. From this perspective, we can say that people like Fr. Maximilian Kolbe, Fr. Omelian Kovch, Fr. Vendelín Javorka, Fr. Jerzy Popiełuszko, and others were true humanists, since their life experience safeguards the noble vision of and belief in man.
To evidence an anthropological alternative by all possible means is one of the most efficient ways to dispel the allure of the communist utopia and unmask its debilitating effects on the social order. But it is not enough.
What else should and could be done both on personal and social level to counteract the temptation of the communist ideology? Perhaps, first we should acknowledge that there are forces within us which could have turned us into perpetrators and put a check on these forces if we are willing to lead an active public life. How would we have behaved in a life-threatening situation? As was already mentioned, however tempting and comforting it could be to place oneself on the right side of moral conflict or “on the right side of history,” this impulse is precisely an effect of surrendering to utopian thinking characteristic of communism. We have to face the truth. It is difficult to lead a fully human life, a dignified human life. It is no less likely that we could have quite easily succumbed to the communist ideology or pressure (like his fellow intellectuals in Czeslaw Milosz’s The Captive Mind).
So, what needs to be done now to prepare oneself for the test of totalitarianism, whatever its reincarnation? In our opinion, the concept of human dignity as an image of God needs to be translated into, operationalized through, and enacted by a practice of integral human development. The commitment to integral human development, on the one hand, brings us to genuinely embrace the preferential option for the poor and marginalized and, on the other hand, it safeguards human dignity without turning the human person into a means for ideological ends and acquisition of power.
John Cavadini from the University of Notre Dame argues that “the preferential option for the poor is a category derived from rev-
The Trauma of “Homo Sovieticus”
elation, and not, in the first instance, a category of unaided scientific reason. It is not a doctrine that can come from the secular disciplines, not even philosophy.”16
Poverty is not limited here to those who are hurt by economic hardships. It is a wider category relating to “many faces of poverty” as described in the Message of Pope Francis on the First World Day of the Poor in 2017: “Poverty challenges us daily, in faces marked by suffering, marginalization, oppression, violence, torture and imprisonment, war, deprivation of freedom and dignity, ignorance and illiteracy, medical emergencies and shortage of work, trafficking and slavery, exile, extreme poverty and forced migration… What a bitter and endless list we would have to compile were we to add the poverty born of social injustice, moral degeneration, the greed of a chosen few, and generalized indifference! [...] To all these forms of poverty we must respond with a new vision of life and society.”17
As another Notre Dame scholar, Christian Smith, argues in his book Atheist Overreach. What Atheism Can’t Deliver, to ground and sustain commitment to high ethical standards, to ideas and practices that are difficult and costly (like those of universal benevolence or elimination of poverty in its many faces) requires a robust “narrative that satisfactorily explains to doubters the reality and reasons behind the belief commitments themselves.”18
To perceive another person as a brother or a sister requires moral strength and spiritual energy which could not be derived from
16 John Cavadini. Black Lives and the Preferential Option for the Poor // Church Life Journal, February 8, 2021 (https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/ black-lives-and-the-preferential-option-for-the-poor/).
17 Pope Francis. Message for the First World Day of the Poor, 19 November 2017 (https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/messages/poveri/documents/papa-francesco_20170613_messaggio-i-giornatamondiale-poveri-2017. html).
18 Christian Smith. Atheist Overreach. What Atheism Can’t Deliver. Oxford: Oxford University Press 2019, p. 53.
secular sources alone. It must be grounded in a vision of the human person of no less sublimity as that of an image of God. Then, it could really nourish fraternity experience and move our hearts to action for the sake of our neighbors.
The spiritual energy for such an endeavor – to contribute to the development of the whole person and each person – does not come from nowhere. It implies an awareness that people are not just members of one biological species or bearers of rational consciousness. It is grounded in the understanding that we are daughters and sons of the one Father.
Such a metanoia is necessary if we want to move beyond the shaky social balance of selfish impulses, private financial interests, class antagonisms, tribal complaints and grievances, and power games. This faith-based knowledge opens a moral source for the spiritual strength to work hard for this ambitious goal and not to give up when confronted with injustice, animosity, or hatred.
We see that enacting human dignity in all possible contexts of social life is not an easy task to do. It requires moral empathy and discernment ability, critical and entrepreneurial thinking, prudence, and courage in action as well as moral strength and commitment to the common good. It requires an adequate anthropology, sound moral source and mature ethical agency as a basis for political action and public engagement. And often it requires a faith-inspired vision of God, the human person, and the world.
There are many lessons still to be learned today from the failed and inhumane communist experiment to produce a brave new Man.
One of them is that politics built on grievances and complaints, imbued with attributing blame and appropriating victimhood could be efficacious in bringing social and legal change only in the short term. In the long run it will produce envy, hatred, and resentment.
And it will not stand firm, earlier or later being overridden by more aggressive and fashionable novel grievances and victimhood claims. To cast and manage social dynamics in terms of the opposition between the oppressed and oppressors results in tribal conflict for power and does not render a good service to those who are stricken by poverty in the broad sense. The game of thrones is a fateful zero-sum game based on an erroneous anthropology and flawed vision of social relations.
The trauma of communism and its concomitant trauma of the human person urge us to look for more adequate concepts of social transformation consonant with the irreducible dignity of the human person. The social tradition of the Catholic Church offers the concept of integral human development as a way of affirming and enacting human dignity. It provides a viable alternative to the radical left-wing way of thinking on social justice in the present age and could serve as an antidote to the revival and reincarnations of communist ideas in Eastern Europe.
I would like to begin by sharing with you my reflections in the light of gratitude. It was a text written by Jessica Hooten Wilson, “Gratitude as a Virtue,”1 which inspired me to do so as I was reflecting on the “trauma of communism” topic within a broader framework defined by the “Faith and Freedom” project we are beginning to delve into.
It occurred to me that exploring the past’s traumatic aspects inflicted by totalitarianism through the “lenses of gratitude” may provide us with some important clues about the resilience of the Christian life and community. This may sound somewhat counterintuitive and even controversial as we think of the magnitude of persecution and suffering systematically inflicted by the Soviet regime upon its citizens. And yet, I do think it is important to ask ourselves if and to what extent those subjected to the communist state were able under such adverse circumstances (and still are today) to perceive their lives through the lens of gratitude. It is an extremely difficult question, especially so since it implies a hugely complex and, most likely, traumatic existential component to it.
Jessica Wilson opens her text with the following observation: The year 2020 seems to offer us more opportunities to complain and lament than to be grateful. When we conceive of “gratitude” as a virtue rather than an emotion, we see that it does not depend as much on the circumstances as it does on our imagination, our practices, and our habits. How can we cultivate a gracious imagination in which we
1 Jessica Hooten Wilson. Gratitude as a Virtue // Church Life Journal (https:// churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/gratitude-as-a-virtue/).
practice receiving and extending grace, especially when we do not want what we have been given? For ultimately that is the real test of gratitude, is it not? Our courage is tested when we are threatened; our magnanimity is questioned when we are exalted; and our gratitude is proven when we face what appear to be trials.
Everyone’s life is a gift but we all uniquely differ in our ways of experiencing and living through the “giftedness” of our lives embedded in and revealed through our circumstances and contexts. Though a philosophical mind might readily acknowledge a “metaphysical beauty” attached to thinking of life as a gift and of gratitude as an acknowledgment of the reality of the gift, it takes time, courage, and solidarity on our part to translate such concepts into the actions, practices, and commitments of daily life, especially so “when we face what appear to be trials.”
In my personal case, the contexts were changing dramatically: I was born and raised in the Soviet Union (I’m a native of Lviv, the largest city in the Western Ukraine which is in itself an important piece of contextualization); I was able to witness the USSR’s collapse as I was entering my graduate studies; I was able to experience the “awakening” of Ukraine in terms of rebuilding its public space, freedom of religion, citizenship, and self-governance potential. I’m also experiencing the Soviet past’s lasting hold on the present. That tight grip of the past and its continuing influence is best captured by describing a new social and geopolitical reality as post-Soviet, post-totalitarian, post-communist, and post-colonial all at the same time. And whenever some social phenomena are referred to as “post-something” you can be assured that that “something” still plays a role in it. An ongoing clash of the past and new identities, practices, and visions can still be felt.
Eventually, the intriguing perplexity of the changing contexts I lived through led me to a long-standing engagement with the Ukrainian Catholic University (UCU) as an amazing educational startup since 1994 in Lviv, Ukraine.2 In retrospect, I believe UCU
2 The Ukrainian Catholic University (https://ucu.edu.ua/en) has inherited its mission, legacy, and academic traditions from the Greek Catholic Theological
has been playing a pivotal role in my personal “faith and freedom” story of pilgrimage from the Soviet past through the post-Soviet times to the lands of freedom.
As my pilgrimage unfolds, I am beginning to increasingly acknowledge and appreciate the role played by gratitude in sustaining and holding myself within the “faith and freedom” trajectory and dynamics. A living gratitude brings a sense of unity, coherence, completion and, importantly, happiness in my life. I do not sense my personal identity as being confined and defined by just “here and now” moments. I’d rather perceive it as being nurtured by my memories which living gratitude animates and channels into my present and opens myself up towards the future.
Our project (Faith and Freedom) leads us into the vast domain of people’s memories as we ask them to share their inner experiences, memories, emotions, thoughts about their lives during the Soviet times and the time of transition. Lord Jonathan Sacks in his text Rediscovering Our Moral Purpose reminds us of an important distinction between memory and history:
History is an answer to the question, “What happened?” Memory is an answer to the question, “Who am I?” History is about facts; memory is about identity. History is his-story. It happened to someone else, not me. Memory is my story, the past that made me who I am, of whose legacy I am the guardian for the sake of generations yet to
Academy established in the late 1920s in Lviv by Metropolitan Andrei Sheptytsky. After this institution was closed in 1945 in the wake of the Soviet terror and repressions against the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, its mission and function were assumed by the Rome-based Pope St. Clement Ukrainian Catholic University organized and chaired by Metropolitan Josyf Slipyj in 1963. In 1994, the Lviv Theological Academy (LTA) was reestablished in Lviv, three years after Ukraine’s declaration of independence (1991) signaled the collapse of the Soviet Union. One year after St. John Paul II blessed the future university’s cornerstone in Lviv during his 2001 papal visit to Ukraine, LTA was reorganized and the ceremonial inauguration of the Ukrainian Catholic University (UCU) was held in Lviv.
come. Without memory, there is no identity. And without identity, we are mere dust on the surface of infinity.3
Individual memory is not primarily about data collection and storage. It is foremost about developing and sustaining one’s sense of identity as well as the purpose and calling connected to it. Thus, memory is importantly connected with the “heart.” This is why the memory’s question “Who am I?” naturally unfolds itself into the questions “Am I right?” “Am I good?” “Is that truly me?”
Therefore a memory enlightened and nurtured by gratitude cultivates us for a different future as opposed to a memory permeated by resentment, envy, disappointment, or fear. I do think that a living memory nurtured by gratitude was an important element of the underground Church life, resistance, and resilience. Memory thus understood isn’t exclusively about “conserving” the past but also about “cultivating” the future.
In one of his recent public talks Archbishop Borys (Gudziak) made an observation: The pandemic, the quarantine, and the closing of churches brought us into circumstances that can be lived more spiritually if we prayerfully reflect on the life of Christians in totalitarian systems. It also relativizes our sense of hardship, helps us smile during veritable stress.4
3 Jonathan Sacks. Rediscovering Our Moral Purpose (https://togetherforthecommongood.co.uk/leading-thinkers/rediscovering-our-moral-purpose).
4 “The Way of Life and Identity of Priests in the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church: 100 Years in 30 Minutes,” a talk by Archbishop Borys Gudziak, Ukrainian Catholic metropolitan of Philadelphia, delivered during the international conference “Priestly Identity? Expectations in Contradiction,” organized at the Catholic University in Eichstätt-Ingolstadt on February 25–27, 2021.
Let’s ask ourselves why Bishop Borys invites us to specifically prayerfully reflect on the Christian life in the totalitarian state? I’m assuming that such an invitation is not just about getting the history of the clandestine Church right (though it is a very much worthwhile endeavor of its own). And it is not merely about attempting to discover some methods and ways of living Christian life in the underground which might be accommodated for the present-day practices (again, this might be a worthwhile thing to do as well).
A “prayerful reflection,” I believe, is an invitation to open ourselves up to the community and language of the martyrs and saints and all those who in the midst of hardships, persecutions, and trials have sacrificially invested their lives in building and protecting the “culture of dignity.”
A prayerful reflection, I think, should facilitate our discerning and grasping of a quietly spoken “language of witness.” That language and the message it conveys should not be left unnoticed and unanswered in our days. If we are serious about overcoming a “weak identity” marked as “post-Soviet” we should find a way of bridging the past and present by establishing a deep solidarity with the people who cultivated the “culture of dignity” under the heavy and deadly trials of Soviet totalitarianism.
In the case of UCU such bridging has a very special meaning and concreteness. During his papal visit to Ukraine in 2001, Saint Pope John Paul II pronounced the beatification of 25 Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church (UGCC) martyrs. Seven of them were directly associated with the Lviv Theological Academy established in 1928 which was the beginning of UCU’s institutional history and legacy from the first days of its establishment. A prayerful reflection on their lives, including their faith, intentions, commitments, service, gifts, and martyrdom would be the most proper way for us to build a personal and living solidarity liaison with them. To the extent we succeed in developing such attitudes and practices,
we would be contributing to the nourishment and promotion of the “culture of dignity” by our university community.
I breathed the air of totalitarianism from my birth and up until the middle of my university studies. Things have changed dramatically in Ukraine since its 1991 independence referendum, which triggered the collapse of the Soviet Union. The different winds started blowing and we breathed a different air. That air had a different smell and taste. It was a wind of freedom.
And yet, one thing I have gradually learned in the postcommunist years and up until now is that the “different air” metaphor does not convey the whole truth about the change and challenges we have been facing ever since 1991. I think that a deeper and more meaningful way of describing the exodus from post-totalitarianism is by thinking of it as a pilgrimage to freedom.
Pilgrimage is not just a journey through time and space. It is not foremost about me mapping and controlling my route, timeline, and destination. Most importantly it’s about opening oneself up for a revelation. It resembles a road to Emmaus experience. And thus, the pilgrimage is a way of sharing and growing solidarity in faith. It’s about encountering a stranger on your way and about experiencing yourself as a stranger in the eyes of those you meet as you walk. It’s also about growing a virtue of gratitude in accepting the gifts you are blessed with here and now, and about practicing generosity by sacrificing them for the sake of the other. It’s about prayer and prayerful reflection on what is left already behind and on what is still ahead of us.
Assuming that our pilgrimage to freedom is not over yet, a prayerful reflection about the past can define not only our pilgrimage route and direction but it also gives us a sense of solidarity and purpose. Essentially, pilgrimage is not only a way to freedom but it’s also a way of freedom.
And lastly, the pilgrimage to freedom started long before the collapse of the Soviet Union. I feel blessed by being able to join it along with my fellow citizens at the time of the profound societal transformations. This year Ukraine marks its 30th anniversary of independence from Soviet totalitarianism and our pilgrimage to freedom continues.
Our pilgrimage started in the lands of Soviet unfreedom which was sustained and cultivated for decades. Unfreedom was imposed in a two-fold way: through immensity and vastness of the state terror and by inaugurating untruthfulness as a new social norm and practice.
Thus, the Gulag became par excellence instantiation and culmination of the state terror practice aimed at instilling in the prisoners a sense of an irreversible abandonment and utter worthlessness, helplessness, and hopelessness when confronted with the repressive state machinery.
The “anti-truth” strategy was implemented by imposition of the social, political, ethical, and religious substitutes as a “new normal” for a communist society. By imposing certain quasi-religious, quasidemocratic, quasi-public practices the Soviet state was attempting to educate its citizens into a unified and uniformed way of living and to force them to internalize the tenets and values of the communist ideology. It is particularly worth mentioning that the youth starting from a very early age was subdued to education and formation aimed at deactivating critical thinking potential and implanting a quasi-religious loyalty and commitment to the communist state in their young minds and hearts. It never worked 100%, but regardless of whether you ended up eventually being a faithful communist or a profound cynic, or someone who was able to resist the communist spell, the spiritual damage and trauma done to the people was immense (in whatever
category you found yourself). Those deeper personal spiritual traumas would often develop chronic attitudes of fear and distrust which were a sort of defense mechanism aimed at protecting oneself from additional pain and suffering. Widely spread fear and distrust served as efficient multipliers for all sorts of societal deformations. What is important to realize is that the Gulag was not a kind of an unintended anomaly of the Soviet rule caused by poor implementation of some noble intentions, of an otherwise humane, free and caring communist society. No, the Gulag was an important element of the Soviet state machinery constructed as a place of the radical denial of personal freedom, depersonalization, and fear. A radical violation and abuse of human dignity was at the heart of Gulag practice. It was implemented by denying the people’s right to truth and truthfulness, by depriving them of trust and truthfulness by inflicting upon them extreme physical conditions, pain, and suffering.
Thus, the Gulag became a horrific instantiation of the communist ideology with its underlying philosophy, vision, and practice. It not only exercised its brutal power on the Gulag prisoners themselves, but it was also framing the lives of millions of the Soviet people. At the very least it was a constant reminder to everyone that a narrow line separating each soviet citizen from an “enemy of the people” (vrag naroda) status can be easily and at any time erased. In fact, in most cases, there was no need for a citizen to trespass anything to earn the “enemy of the people” label. Every citizen was essentially viewed as a scapegoat. Regardless of his or her social status, a presumption of guilt was attributed to every person. Such an approach, as it is well known, was widely applicable through all social strata including even the most loyal, fervent, high-profile, and dedicated members of the communist party leadership cohort.
In essence, totalitarianism bears within itself a declaration of a war against the humane in humans. Totalitarianism is capable of successfully leading a campaign against the humane to the extent it manages to cut the human beings off from the transcendent. This
is why any authentic religion aimed at the cultivation of a faithful, prayerful, and loving relationship with God is a deadly threat to totalitarianism. Being in a relationship with a loving God is what defines, constitutes, and cherishes our humanity and strengthens the freedom of a human being.
To the extent we are beginning to lose sight of the transcendent we become less and less resistant to totalitarianism. Thereby we repress and diminish our capacity to produce “antibodies” to combat the virus of totalitarianism. The virus penetrates our minds and souls, impacts and modifies our social attitudes and practices. In the worst-case scenario, I might be inclined to accept my “ideologically infected” Self as a normal and authentic myself.
In the opening paragraph of his recent essay, The Big Zone – How a Ukrainian dissident remained free in the Gulag, Timothy Snyder introduces Myroslav Marynovych by saying:
A young man named Myroslav Marynovych was arrested in 1977 for telling the truth about his country. The crime for which he was sentenced was the distribution of bulletins about human-rights abuses in Soviet Ukraine. When he was arrested at twenty-eight, he was an agnostic. When he was released a decade later, he was a Christian ethicist and political thinker. His memoir is a humble, and humbling, account of a man maturing in hell.5
“Marynovich’s case” is an admirable story and a profound witness because it shows us how moral and religious transcendence can shape and cultivate one’s personality in an authentic and holistic way. Both moral and religious were the life-giving sources for his long-standing witness and courageous resistance against the So-
5 Timothy Snyder. The Big Zone – How a Ukrainian Dissident Remained Free in the Gulag // Commonweal (https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/big-zone).
viet totalitarianism. Myroslav emphasizes that the time he spent in Gulag (he got there for refusing to discard what he was holding as the morally right things to do; his peacefully manifested moral righteousness was perceived by the regime as an intolerable verdict against its very existence) was the best opportunity for him to live through his Christian devotion.
If you get to know Myroslav Marynovych in person (and I’m honored and blessed for closely working with him for many years at UCU) you would be struck by his profound experience and mastery of freedom. He is a free man. He has never allowed himself to become unfree, to betray his freedom, or to “commodify” his freedom to secure his personal comfort zone. This is an especially striking experience as we realize that Myroslav had spent years in the Gulag, and he had been under constant KGB surveillance ever since and until the breakdown of the Soviet Union.
There is another striking experience which you draw from your personal encounters with Myroslav. You not only experience him as a free man but also as a man of sacrifice. Freedom and sacrifice are profoundly interwoven throughout his whole life. They seem to be so profoundly constitutive of Myroslav’s personality that you almost think of them as the two sides of the same coin, as just being the two complementary expressions of Myroslav’s personal identity and character.
Myroslav’s witness offers us a great insight into the nature of freedom. His life story sheds an important light on a phenomenon of the “free people in the Soviet unfreedom.” There’s nothing trivial about such an observation. From our present standpoint we might be tempted to think about Myroslav Marynovych’s life and his memoir, The Universe Behind Barbed Wire, 6 as foremost an illustration and description of a totalitarian system of repression and unfreedom.
6 Myroslav Marynovych. The Universe Behind Barbed Wire: Memoirs of a Ukrainian Soviet Dissident. Rochester: Boydell & Brewer 2021.
And yet, there’s a deeper message in Myroslav’s work which emerges as we begin to realize that the system of unfreedom cannot be overthrown by people who have learned to enjoy the comforts of that unfreedom. Such an act can only be accomplished by the free people. Thus, Myroslav’s book is a powerful story of personal freedom which unfolds and fulfills itself in a pilgrimage of solidarity, prayer, and sacrifice which eventually lead his beloved Ukrainians from unfreedom to liberation.
Reflecting on Myroslav Marynovych’s memoir, Timothy Snyder acknowledges that “perhaps the greatest challenge of this memoir to most readers will be its discussion of freedom.” And the reason for that, he explains, is that:
It will be tempting for people in the West to imagine that they were free in the 1970s and 1980s, and that the book that they hold in their hands is a description of Soviet unfreedom. This is not quite Marynovych’s position. Of course, he leaves a clear record of the horrors of the camp (“the zone”) and of the Soviet Union itself (“the big zone”). And yet Marynovych speaks of himself and his companions as free people.7
What Snyder intuits so well by highlighting Marynovych’s perception of himself and his companions as free people I’d like to put it in a larger context of a greater number of people who haven’t silenced their conscience and their quest for truth and freedom.
Let me build on what is so powerfully expressed in Myroslav’s observation that for him there was “no better opportunity to test one’s Christian devotion” than in the Gulag, by suggesting that for many Christians there were no better opportunities to test their Christian devotion than in the Soviet Union. In the oral history project Profiles of Fortitude: An Oral History of the Clandestine Life of the UGCC (1946–1989) conducted by the Institute of the Church History, UCU has collected about two thousand interviews with
7 Snyder. The Big Zone.
the faithful (clergy and laity) of the underground Church in which they share their personal stories of struggle and faith, sacrifices and friendships, hopes and despairs. The actual number of those who were testing their Christian devotion and their quest for freedom is certainly still larger than the number of the interviewed. Belief in God and the experience of human dignity were two fundamental sources of consolation, power, and freedom for the “powerless” under totalitarian rule.
The existential weight of “the test” my fellow citizens were presented with were not always as significant as in Myroslav’s case or in the cases of those who were lawlessly and brutally persecuted, tried, and murdered by the state. Yet such a test always implied a careful listening to one’s conscience and thus an effort to act accordingly or failing to do so. It could have been that the inner workings of your soul were invisible on the outside (like a decision to quietly pray on your way to your office, or a conscious effort of trying to spiritually distance oneself from Soviet propaganda influences).
There were also cases and situations when it was not only a matter of holding an internal stance or an attitude but of taking some actions which would imply a certain degree of visibility and publicity (such as, for example, inviting an underground priest to baptize a child, or having an intimate prayerful celebration of Christmas or Easter within a narrow family circle). Even with all such precautionary measures taken, such actions were risky endeavors. Should the KGB learn about it, one might lose one’s job and thus never be able to pursue any further his or her professional career. Or one might have been offered a deal: to regularly share information about others’ lives and activities in exchange for not being persecuted for some “improper behavior.” And yet, there were always several people who were following their conscience and were willing to take the risks and sacrifices if they had to.
Though in the late 1980s one most likely would not be imprisoned and sent to Siberia for these kinds of “wrongdoings,” yet
the risks and the consequences were sufficiently impactful to considerably limit and degrade one’s future professional career and social standing. The number of those who were ready to make such sacrifices was not insignificant. In their uniquely personal ways people were confronted with a variety of opportunities to test their Christian devotion and moral integrity under the soviet totalitarianism. There was still something in human beings which even the most oppressive, centralized and ideological system of power with almost unlimited capacity for surveillance and repression was not able to fully take control of.
Looking retrospectively from a present-day vantage point, I can’t avoid making a conclusion that the underground Church was both an agent and guardian of freedom in the Soviet unfreedom. By respecting the God-given life and dignity of everyone, by practicing faith, by eventually leading an authentic Christian life of service, prayer, and sacrifice in hostile and life-threatening circumstances, the culture of dignity was invisibly and lovingly growing within itself a seed of a future change.
The Soviet “terror managers” knew well that the surest way to destroy an institution was to take away its resources, its leadership, its means of communication, and its public voice and presence. Whatever remains is thus left lifeless and futureless and will surely fall apart on its own. The strategy was executed mercilessly but things didn’t quite work out as expected. What seemed to be an obvious dead end for the Church in the eyes of the communist party’s leading ideologists and managers was instead a resurrection to the life in Christ for the faithful.
The Church – which was thrown out of the public square, banned from the social, cultural, and economic networks and practices, and subdued to a severe persecution of the faithful – has
instead gained in profundity, intimacy, sanctity, and purity of faith and likeness to Christ. Eventually, it was “freedom protected by faith” and “faith growing in God-given freedom” which exhausted and undermined totalitarianism. “The power of the powerless” – to borrow Václav Havel’s powerful image – has overturned the power of terror and fear.
The collapse of the Soviet Union has its date in history. Once a morning came and there was no Soviet Union which had existed just yesterday. And yet, the communist heritage and legacy accumulated over the many decades have not vanished abruptly and completely overnight. They smuggled themselves into new contexts and camouflaged themselves with the clouds of the “post-realities.”
In the early 1990s Ukraine was a “post-land”: post-communist, post-colonial, post-totalitarian, post-catacomb, post-genocidal, and postmodern society. The emergence of the Ukrainian “post-realities’’ can be best understood through 69 video interviews with the leading political, religious, business, military, and academic figures who played their roles in the 1988–1991 transition in Ukraine. The interviews were recorded within the project The Collapse of the Soviet Union. The Oral History of Independent Ukraine – 1988–1991. 8
Eventually you need a stronger, deeper and a more meaningful sense of identity and purpose than a “post”-something if you wish to explore your future. It was the most difficult and significant challenge which Ukraine faced in the first years of its independence. From the present 30-year distance it becomes clear that the witness of the underground Church, the culture of dignity lived by the Church, the moral integrity accumulated over the decades of resistance and martyrdom of the faithful, became a crucial social capital in navigating through the post-realities.
8 See http://oralhistory.org.ua/.
There are numerous cases which should be studied to understand and to illustrate how the social capital of the underground Church enabled and supported all kinds of social innovations, initiatives, and projects which planted the culture of dignity seeds in the post-Soviet Ukraine. The Faith and Freedom research group will explore their impact on shaping the civil society, business, and public square in Ukraine.
As I have already mentioned, I was personally witness to one of such social innovations which became known by the name of the Ukrainian Catholic University. UCU’s 1994 re-establishment in Lviv, Ukraine in terms of resources (money, buildings, equipment, etc.), staff, and academic activities was indeed a start from scratch. And yet, it was not from scratch in an important sense: from its very beginning it was endowed with the spirit, vision, and legacy of the generation of the martyrs of the Church who sacrificed their lives. UCU thus was reborn from the spirit of the underground Church as an endeavor to build an academic start-up grounded in the culture of dignity.
The launch of the university was preceded by the oral history project Profiles of Fortitude, mentioned earlier, through which the life of the underground Church unfolded itself through hundreds of recorded conversations with the people who lived a clandestine experience amidst a massive and seemingly unstoppable totalitarian project sustained by the communist ideology. It was through this research and prayerful reflection on the hundreds of personal stories and witnesses that the mission of UCU was distilled, and its vision was articulated. Today, the national-scale impact of UCU is best acknowledged by the fact that UCU has been named one of 30 outstanding projects created during the last 30 years of Ukrainian Independence.
I’d like to summarize by quoting Clemens Sedmak who writes in his “Enacting Human Dignity” text:
Principles and concepts have to be nourished; they have to be nurtured by deep practices. These practices are “testimonial practices” in the sense that they give witness to the possibility of living a culture of dignity even under adverse circumstances.9
Thus, when it comes to the Soviet totalitarian past it is not only the acknowledgment of the immensity of the inflicted suffering, the scale of violations of human dignity, and vastness of the traumatic experiences which is important (as it were, a historic “fixation” of the facts enabling us to know the things in the light of truth). Just as important, in my view, is the exploration of witness-based communication and a culture of dignity (with its embedded practice of gratitude) which eventually proved to be more resilient than the culture of communism. It should be done for the sake of cultivating the “deep practices” needed to live the culture of dignity and to make it resilient throughout the 21st century even if under adverse circumstances.
And lastly, the issue of gratitude which I raised at the very beginning of this essay remains an intriguing question for me. It will certainly require more reflection and careful listening to those who lived through the extreme circumstances of trials, persecution, and unfreedom. How is it possible to develop and practice a virtue of gratitude if confronted with the unbearableness and immensity of suffering? And yet, lack of gratitude would signal a retreat to the unfreedom of self-isolation. Perhaps, thinking of one’s life as an invitation and opportunity to undertake a life-long pilgrimage might provide us with some helpful insight. A pilgrimage which
9 Clemens Sedmak. Enacting Human Dignity // The Practice of Human Development and Dignity / ed. Clemens Sedmak, Paolo G. Carozza. Notre Dame, IN: Univ. of Notre Dame Press 2020, p. 27-45.
resembles a road to Emmaus journey with its “weren’t our hearts burning within us” experience (Luke 24:13–35) and opens us up for a revelation and encounter with Christ.
I invite us to prayerfully reflect upon the words of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic holy martyr Fr. Omelyan Kovch who died in the Nazi concentration camp at Majdanek. These few sentences were written in a place with the highest concentration of evil and suffering imaginable, and yet they radiate with gratitude and love. In a letter to his relatives Fr. Kovch wrote:
I understand that you are trying to free me. But I am asking you not to do anything. Yesterday they killed 50 people here. If I were not here, who would help them to endure these sufferings? […] I thank God for his benevolence to me. Apart from Heaven, this is the only place I’d like to be. Here we are all equal: Poles, Jews, Ukrainians, Russians, Latvians, and Estonians. I am an only priest here. I can’t even imagine what would happen here without me. Here I see God, Who is the same for everyone, regardless of the many religious distinctions that exist among us.10
10 Quoted after Christine Chraibi. “Here I see God”: Omelian Kovch, the Ukrainian priest who saved hundreds of Jews & died in Majdanek concentration camp (https://euromaidanpress.com/2021/06/30/here-i-see-god-omelian-kovchthe-ukrainian-priest-who-saved-hundreds-of-jews-died-in-majdanek-concentration-camp/).
Yesterday, upon the stair, I met a man who wasn’t there! He wasn’t there again today, Oh how I wish he’d go away!1
William Hughes Mearns, Antigonish
Allow me to introduce you to two young street protesters. One is an idealistic chemistry student. It is December 1989, and she has skipped classes to join thousands of other young people who are celebrating the collapse of a dictatorship. Whether she is in Warsaw, Bratislava, Zagreb, or Budapest (and later, Lviv or Tbilisi), she is filled with exuberance and anticipation about the advent of a free and democratic future. Communism, so long a seemingly incontestable fact of life from the Elbe to the Bering Strait, had proven its mortality. In a millisecond in the grand scope of human history, what had once seemed so solid had melted into air. Conversely, today, more than a quarter of a century later, we encounter another young street protester, a skinhead and Identitarian radical. Unlike his predecessor, he is filled with rage about his bleak job prospects and marginal
1 David T. W. McCord. What Cheer: An Anthology of American and British Humorous and Witty Verse. New York: The Modern Library 1955, p. 429.
social status. Far from celebrating liberal democracy, he has joined his friends at a rally to listen to a racist tirade by a petty demagogue with a microphone. In a country with few immigrants, ethnic, or religious minorities, he joins the crowd in hurling hate-filled epithets at fellow human beings who, in his view, exemplify the injustices that have been inflicted on him by uncaring liberal elites.
At first glance, my portrayal of the sharply contrasting dispositions of two young persons living three decades apart might not seem very revealing. After all, there is a world of difference between the political and social conditions of the final days of late communism in the 1980s and those that exist in the post-communist democracies of the early 2020s. Indeed, the angry young Identitarian in my second depiction would not even have been alive when his counterpart was dreaming of a better future. Yet, I shall argue in this chapter that we cannot fully understand either his attitudes or those of a much broader, rising generation of Poles, Slovaks, Hungarians, Croatians, Ukrainians, and Georgians in the early 2020s without recognizing that they are rooted in circumstances, to paraphrase a well-known German philosopher, “directly found, given, and transmitted from the [late communist] past.”2 Moreover, I shall contend that if we want to prevent my contemporary protestor’s rage from shaping political and social attitudes for years to come, we need to understand the mechanisms by which the traumatic experiences of one age have given rise to the traumas of our current age.
As the chapters in this volume have demonstrated, it makes sense that a group of educators should focus on the existential crises of young people in post-communist Europe. Universities are naturally in a better position than most institutions to provide balanced and well-informed perspectives about the realities of life under communism and the benefits of liberal democracy. Furthermore,
2 Karl Marx. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte / ed. Robert C. Tucker // The Marx-Engels Reader. New York: W. W. Norton 1978, p. 595.
Communism, Post-Communism, and the Legacies of Intergenerational Trauma
I believe that educators are obliged to address this experience because their students are living at a time when advanced democracies are under attack from within.3 For this reason, it is significant that this book’s contributors are representatives of Catholic institutions. While any university can be a reliable source of academic knowledge and training in professional skills, Catholic universities are among the few institutions that are intellectually and morally equipped to provide students with the guidance they need to use this knowledge and act on these skills in responsible ways. In this way, Catholic institutions in Europe and the United States are well positioned to play a major role in defending the liberal democratic institutions and values that are currently under stress throughout the Western world.
As someone who was born in the United States, I will always be an outsider in interpreting many of the experiences – and especially the horrifying experiences – that the contributors to this book have described. Nonetheless, I have a life-long interest in the history of the communist world and have devoted my career to trying to make sense of the subject.4 My point of entry to the study of communism is rather amusing. I first became intrigued with the topic at the age of 8 when my third-grade teacher included words like “Khrushchev,” “Castro,” and “Moscow” on our spelling tests. This was the time of the Cuban missile crisis and she had just returned from a mysterious trip to Havana. I have often wondered what she was up to! I first travelled to the realm of so-called “really existing socialism” as a nineteenyear-old when I visited Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany. While studying in West Berlin in summer 1973, I had a somewhat traumatic experience in the no-man’s land between the double fortifications of the Berlin Wall. I was interrogated by the East German
3 This is the subject of my recent book (with Alejandro Castrillon): Contemporary Far-Right Thinkers and the Future of Liberal Democracy. London: Routledge 2021.
4 See my Vanguard of the Revolution: The Global Idea of the Communist Party. Princeton: Princeton University Press 2017.
security police, the Stasi, when I accidentally brought in a homework assignment, conveniently written in German, that was critical of the communist regime. In the 1980s, when I was a graduate student and then a young professor, I traveled throughout the Soviet bloc. Thanks to the support of a US academic exchange program, the International Research and Exchanges Board, I lived for two extended periods in East Berlin before the opening of the Wall. In 1988, I was a visiting scholar at the Department of Legal Sciences at the Academy of Sciences, and then in spring 1989, I was a visitor at the Academy for Social Sciences. When I returned to East Berlin in October 1989, two weeks before the fall of the Wall, I could see the entire communist experiment crumbling around me.
My goal during these years was to acquire a “deep understanding” – Max Weber called this perspective Verstehen – of the daily lives, sentiments, and aspirations of ordinary people. My encounters have led me to conclude that one cannot make sense of popular attitudes in central and eastern Europe today without considering the lived experience of people under communist rule. How is my angry young protestor’s disposition rooted in the past? As I shall suggest, one can only provide a satisfactory answer to this question by discerning how the spirit of a world that no longer exists nevertheless continues to have a tangible impact on his life.
In recent years, psychologists have paid increasing attention to the extent to which historical traumas, such as those of the American Civil War and the Holocaust, have been passed down from one generation to the next.5 In addressing this issue, they must necessarily wrestle
5 See, for example, Charles Portney. Intergenerational Transmission of Trauma: An Introduction for the Clinician // Psychiatric Times 20 (4) (2003) (https:// www.psychiatrictimes.com/view/intergenerational-transmission-trauma-
Communism, Post-Communism, and the Legacies of Intergenerational Trauma
with a puzzle. In most cases, the victims of these tragic circumstances are no longer with us. Yet, the weight of these traumas lives on in the hearts and minds of successive generations. Given the fact that these “heirs” have likely never met the victims or even the victims’ progeny, let alone shared in their experiences, scholars must demonstrate how the past has been translated into present circumstances. To be sure, people’s understanding of what came before them may be totally inaccurate. Nonetheless, it is just as real. We encountered exactly this situation in the case of my aggrieved protestor. He has no direct experience with life under communist rule. He does not know what it was like to live without fresh fruit, nor has he experienced the frustration of using telephones that never seemed to make a connection. In fact, he was not even alive when the old party dictatorships collapsed, and a new wave of democratic regimes swept in. As a result, he is incapable of distinguishing between what actually was the case and what he is now told. Still, the burdens of the distant past weigh heavily on his consciousness.
I believe the solution to this puzzle lies in the aftermath of one of the most important developments in the history of world communism: the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953. At this critical juncture, the leaders of the Soviet Union and their eastern European allies had to ask themselves whether they could afford to continue along Stalin’s brutal path of socialist construction and unremitting terror. Beginning with Nikita Khrushchev’s so-called Secret Speech at the Twentieth Party Congress of the Soviet Union in February 1956, most of them slowly and begrudgingly shed the confrontational rhetoric of high Stalinism and sought to present themselves as beneficent servants of “the whole people.” In this spirit, they launched campaigns to provide their citizens with proof of the benefits of socialism: access to basic consumer goods, modest housing, introduction-clinician); and Tori DeAngelis. The Legacy of Trauma // Monitor on Psychology 50 (2) (2019) (https://www.apa.org/monitor/2019/02/legacy-trauma).
and educational opportunities for their children. Some cautiously provided opportunities for artistic and literary expression and everso-slightly showed a willingness to tolerate the practice of religious faith. Most importantly, they promised their citizens freedom from the trauma of the recent past.
Yet, there was always a catch. The last thing these regimes wanted was to open their policies to public scrutiny. Rather, their goal was to strengthen the leading role of the communist party. In accord with what I call the “Brezhnev consensus,” they expected the beneficiaries of their largesse to display unquestioning loyalty to the partystate. After all, their governments were still dictatorships.6
The message was received in two different ways. For a small number of individuals, the shift from total confrontation to relative accommodation was little more than window dressing for regimes whose purposes remained unchanged. Two of the contributors to this volume, Myroslav Marynovych and Tomáš Halík, were among those who rejected this post-Stalinist bargain. In his memoir, The Universe Behind Barbed Wire, Marynovych vividly captures the experience of what it meant to think for oneself in the post-Stalinist years. In one vignette, he describes his interrogation by a party functionary on May 22, 1973, for the audacious crime of placing flowers at the monument to the Ukrainian national poet, Taras Shevchenko. The police official sternly warned him: “Keep in mind, if you’re not with us, you’re against us!” Marynovych characteristically replied: “Fine, then I’m against you.”7 For this statement and continuing “antisocial” behavior, Marynovych was sentenced to seven years in the most notorious prison camp in the Soviet Gulag, Perm-36. It is difficult for me to fathom such an unflinching commitment to one’s principles. Nor can I begin to comprehend the demeanor of the Czechoslovak under-
6 Vanguard of the Revolution, p. 387–388.
7 The Universe Behind Barbed Wire: Memoirs of a Ukrainian Dissident. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press 2021, p. 5.
Communism, Post-Communism, and the Legacies of Intergenerational Trauma
ground priest, Halík. After telling Halík about the murder of a Catholic bishop, his interrogator asked him whether he feared for his life. Halík replied: “I am, but what the hell!”8
Nonetheless, to appreciate the significance of Marynovych’s and Halík’s courageous acts, one needs to recognize that one important feature of the old party regimes was passing away. Whereas the crimes of the Stalinist era had been carried out in the name of an all-encompassing belief system, officials like Marynovych’s interrogator were speaking for a different generation of communists. According to Marynovych, when this official demanded that the young dissident be “with us,” he was not saying that his prisoner had to believe in the revolutionary ideals that had first brought communist regimes to power. By the 1970s, that dream had largely disappeared. Instead, he was expressing the view that the Marynovychs and Halíks of late communism should engage in a performative act. They should behave as though they still believed in a political system that, as everyone recognized, was primarily meant to keep its leaders in power. In contrast, the governments of the Soviet bloc did not need to force the overwhelming majority of their citizens into accepting the implicit deal that was implied in the revised conception of being “with us.” In the new world of “really existing socialism,” one was no longer required to be religiously political. One was merely expected to be politically and morally agnostic. For most people, this deal was worth accepting, even if one occasionally had to wrestle with one’s conscience in accepting its terms. In describing this tacit understanding between rulers and ruled, I do not mean to cast these countries’ populations in a negative light. It is important to recognize that the decision to engage in open defiance of the regime was never easy, especially if one’s choice to do so would result in the punishment of family members and friends. As I found when
8 Tomáš Halík. From the Underground Church to Freedom. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press 2019, p. 96.
I lived in East Berlin, life choices under late communist rule were complex. Far from being unthinking automatons or prisoners of communist ideology, as they are sometimes portrayed, my friends and acquaintances were rational and reflective actors.9 They picked their battles carefully, confronting authorities when necessary and resigning themselves to the frustrations and indignities of socialist existence when the cost of defiance was too high. Moreover, it is important to appreciate that people’s room for maneuver varied from one country to another. Although there were significant constraints on religious activity wherever one went in the Soviet bloc, one could more easily practice one’s faith in Poland or East Germany than in more oppressive countries, like Ukraine. Likewise, in the aftermath of the Prague Spring, the penalties for dissident activity were higher in Czechoslovakia than in neighboring Hungary. Thus, in some cases, the price of disobedience for all but the most courageous individuals would have been unbearable. This is not to say, however, that the millions of people who bought into one or another aspect of the Brezhnev consensus never had traumatic experiences. Communist regimes could be fickle and often brutal taskmasters. One could never be sure how their leaders would act on their monopoly of power. Yet paradoxically, the most intense traumas for many people came after the fall of the old communist regimes. Whereas the essence of the Brezhnev consensus was the assurance that good behavior would be rewarded with a minimum of personal turmoil, there was no one around in the early 1990s to offer such a bargain in the passage to post-communism.
9 One of the most insightful analyses of life under late-communist rule is Vaclav Havel’s essay, “The Power of the Powerless.” Havel beautifully captures the determination of people like Myroslav Marynovych and Tomáš Halík to “live within the truth.” However, one can reasonably argue that Havel’s characterization of ordinary people as “living within a lie” is misleading and even condescending. See Vaclav Havel. The Power of the Powerless // Open Letters: Selected Writings, 1965-1990 / ed. Paul Wilson. New York: Vintage Books 1992, p. 124–121.
Communism, Post-Communism, and the Legacies of Intergenerational Trauma
Instead, because of the confusion of constructing new social, political, and economic orders, the new world was swiftly bifurcated between haves and have-nots. Some people prospered under the transition. Others did not. In this respect, one could say that the latter were the victims of a system, late communism, that could not be reformed but only replaced. Or, from a different perspective, one could say that they were victimized by the overconfidence and misguided policies of their new democratic leaders. These explanations are not mutually exclusive. As I shall suggest momentarily, this point is essential for understanding how one generation’s trials could be passed on to my protester’s generation. This new period of social division was not supposed to happen. Had one only listened to the upbeat speeches of these countries’ new leaders and the self-congratulatory pronouncements of Western governments in the early 1990s, one could easily have concluded that the past would simply be washed away. Germany’s chancellor, Helmut Kohl, epitomized this mentality, promising “blooming landscapes” (blühende Landschaften) to come.10 Looking back on these years, one is immediately struck by these leaders’ inability to comprehend the extent to which decades of dictatorship would adversely shape the transition to a qualitatively different economic and social order. In this celebratory period, it was as if neither the Stalinist nor the post-Stalinist era had mattered. Similarly, in my field of specialization, social scientists argued that the transition to democracy and free-market capitalism would be relatively straightforward.11 Many of these “transitologists” were inspired by the restoration of democratic
10 Interestingly, Kohl later conceded that his optimistic assessment was a mistake. See https://www.t-online.de/nachrichten/deutschland/innenpolitik/id_ 83834132/beruehmtes-versprechen-kohl-stufte-bluehende-landschaften-als-fehler-ein.html.
11 Philippe C. Schmitter and Terry Lynn Karl. The Conceptual Travels of Transitologists: How Far to the East Should They Attempt to Go? // Slavic Review 53 (1) (1994) 173–185.
institutions that was already underway in Latin America. Thus, when they looked to post-communist Europe, they were immediately impressed with the appearance of Western-style institutions that had been inconceivable only one or two years earlier. Countries where the communist party had once been the sole repository of political power were suddenly the building sites for competitive parties, parliamentary debates, and autonomous courts. Similarly, these countries experienced an extraordinary burst of economic activity thanks to the appearance of eager Western investors and international organizations (especially the European Union). For their part and in return for this Western largesse, the newly democratizing governments subjected their populations to neo-liberal “shock therapy” to ensure the quick and efficient transition to a market economy. Yet post-communist Europe was not Latin America.12 The military juntas that ruled countries like Chile, Brazil, and Argentina were shorter in duration. Although they too were guilty of systematic repression, they lacked the long-standing transformative ambitions of their European counterparts. Then, too, even though the emergence of blooming institutional landscapes in postcommunist Europe was undeniable, social scientists and Western governments failed to anticipate the adverse impact of these policies on the ordinary man and woman-in-the-street who had been acculturated in the logic of the Brezhnev consensus.13 An institution is only as strong as the convictions of the individuals who give it life. Yet, what seemed to be a miraculous development from on high
12 In an incisive critique, Valerie Bunce addressed the potential perils of comparing Latin American transitions to those in post-communist Europe: Should transitologists be grounded? // Slavic Review 54 (1) (1995) 111–127.
13 For example, Adam Przeworski. Democracy and the Market: Political and Economic Reforms in Eastern Europe and Latin America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1991, p. ix, and Juan J. Linz and Alfred Stepan. Problems of Democratic Transition & Consolidation. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press 1996.
Communism, Post-Communism, and the Legacies of Intergenerational Trauma
was paired with a tumultuous transition from below that alienated many of the people who were supposed to benefit from the new order. While the Brezhnev consensus was premised on the minimization of trauma, post-communism brought uncertainty and turmoil. On one side of the social spectrum, many of the leaders of the new political parties were former communists, government officials, and worse still, members of the security forces. Complementing them, the freshly-minted bureaucrats of the new regimes exhibited the same heavy-handed, uncompassionate mannerisms of their predecessors.14 Finally, most of the dissidents who had once risked everything for their convictions were virtually excluded from the political realm.15
Adding to this psychological turmoil, the costs of the transition to a market economy were devastating for sizable segments of these countries’ populations. While some people prospered thanks to their personal connections with the old regimes and their access to privileged information, many others suffered as a result of the policies that were supposed to improve their lives, including the privatization of socialist industries and cuts in state subsidies. Overnight, they faced the prospect of losing their jobs, subsisting without adequate health care and pensions, and acclimating themselves to a significant loss of social status. What insights can these delayed effects of late communism give us into the volatile emotions of my aggrieved Identitarian protester?
One possibility is that he has learned to be angry from his parents and grandparents. As scholars of intergenerational trauma have demonstrated in the observation of diverse species, “parents” can pass along dispositions in stressful times that embed themselves
14 There are numerous studies about the adverse effects of the transition on mental health. For example, see Toma Tomov et al. Bulgarian Mental Health Country Profile // International Review of Psychiatry 16 (1/2) (2004) 93–106.
15 To be sure, Vaclav Havel became president of Czechoslovakia. However, this is a case in which the exception proves the rule.
deeply – and even genetically – in their progeny’s souls.16 In the case of post-communist countries, parents who suffered from the costs of transition have undoubtedly sent mixed messages, at best, to their children about the new order. To the extent that they have portrayed their country’s new leaders as having no interest in addressing their misfortune, they may have led their children to distrust democratic institutions. Likewise, when they have portrayed this new world in dog-eat-dog terms in which one’s success depends on the suffering of others, their children will probably want to do everything possible to ensure that no one gets in their way. In particular, many will be inclined to direct their animosity to ethnic and cultural outsiders, such as immigrants and practitioners of minority faiths, whom they perceive to be the cause of their distress.
Another possibility, which by no means excludes the first, is that my angry street protester is responding to the fact that the post-communist world of the 2020s is not at all like it was in the 1990s. Just as there was a social line of demarcation between the relatively small number of citizens who benefitted from the immediate post-communist transition and the larger number who were losers, my protester’s society has been subject to a second bifurcation. This line is more rigid, much harder to cross, and based upon even greater economic disparities than the one that came before it. Three decades after the fall of communism, most young people in East-Central Europe are better off, especially in countries like Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary. Although they have yet to catch up with their Western counterparts, most are
16 The transmission of parental stress to children, or epigenesis, is widely recognized by geneticists. A recent study demonstrates that epigenetic trauma can be passed down in the form of chemical markers for four generations. See Rebecca S.Moore, Rachel Kaletsky, Coleen T. Murphy. 12Piwi/PRG-1 Argonaute and TGF-β Mediate Transgenerational Learned Pathogenic Avoidance // Cell 177 (7) (2019) 1827-1841.e12 (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0092867419305525?via%3Dihub).
Communism, Post-Communism, and the Legacies of Intergenerational Trauma
well-educated, have jobs, lead reasonably healthy lives, and can realistically expect to experience steadily rising living standards as they age. Contrary to the prognostications of pessimistic outside observers, a recent study by the Pew Foundation found that this generation is generally happy and hopeful.17 Indeed, we can easily imagine a scenario in which the hypothetical son of the idealistic young chemist whom I described at the beginning of this chapter is flourishing in this environment. Thanks to the fact that my chemist was able to complete her studies after the events of 1989, she is now a well-paid physician. As a result of his mother’s success, her son is now pursuing his own passions at a prominent university and has every chance of prospering in Helmut Kohl’s delayed “blooming landscapes.”
Conversely, a smaller number of young people in these countries, like my Identitarian protester, are much less fortunate. They are underemployed or unemployed, and they do not have the technical skills and training to succeed in an advanced economy. Most importantly, they see no reason to hope that their fortunes will improve. This circumstance is not unique to post-communist Europe. Interestingly, the political scientist Robert Putnam encountered a similar situation when he returned to his hometown, Port Clinton, Ohio, several years ago. After graduating from high school in 1959, he had begun his swift rise to academic superstardom. In contrast, many of his classmates had passed up the opportunity to go to college and gone to work in the city’s factories. Initially, they were paid decent wages, bought modest homes, and counted upon passing on their good fortune to their children. However, these expectations were crushed when Port Clinton’s factories shut down in the 1960s and 1970s and their communities were pummeled by
17 Jacob Poushter. 10 key takeaways about public opinion in Europe 30 years after the fall of communism // Pew Research Center, October 15, 2019 (https:// www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/10/15/key-takeaways-public-opinioneurope-30-years-after-fall-of-communism/).
multiple recessions. As a result, as Putnam discovered, his schoolmates’ children were worse off than their parents. Moreover, they were embittered by the fact that their more affluent high-school classmates were in the position, much like Putnam decades earlier, to leave the city and begin their journey to prosperity.18
In this light, it is not surprising that the United States has its share of angry young extremists. American democracy, too, is reckoning with the consequences of this class and social bifurcation, which has given rise to would-be autocrats, like Donald Trump, and right-wing anarchist groups, like the Proud Boys and the Boogaloos. Without offering any substantial visions, these personalities have successfully garnered the support of people who perceive themselves as having been denied the American dream.
In post-communist Europe, the leaders of populist and extremist movements, such Jobbik and Pegida, have capitalized on the same emotions. However, there is a substantial difference in the circumstances in which they make these appeals. At least in the US, there is a national dream, even if many people have yet to realize its promises. Yet, what dream is available to those Europeans who feel that they will never find a place in the new post-communist social and economic order? It is hard to imagine that they will look for solutions to their plight in the drab record of late communism. It is also doubtful that they will make peace with the democratic institutions that appear to have failed them after the revolutions of 1989. To the extent that these young people can associate themselves with any identifiable history, I fear that it is with the dark days of the 1930s when many Europeans – that is, their great-grandparents – rejected liberal democracy and threw their support to neofascist demagogues and hypernationalist movements. My young protester will not be alone in seeking comfort in the mythologies surrounding this period. If 18 Robert Putnam.
Communism, Post-Communism, and the Legacies of Intergenerational Trauma
I am right in making this sobering diagnosis, the question is what remedy we can devise to head off this extremist temptation.
In their role as educational institutions, Catholic universities are in a better position to provide an effective response than their secular peers. As the Polish theologian, Sławomir Nowosad, argues in his book, On Man, Theology, and the Universe, a Catholic university has the advantage of being “bound to provide for a comprehensive account of reality.” Unlike its secular counterparts, “it asks not only about ‘the what of things’ but also the ‘why of things’; it seeks not only to find out ‘how,’ but also asks ‘what for.’”19
These questions are directly related to our efforts to educate students about the long, traumatic legacy of communism, as well as its aftermath. This is a challenging task because, for them, the communist past seems as distant as the Battle of Waterloo and the Congress of Vienna. The more we ask our students to consider the “whys” and “what fors” of this era, the more they will be inclined to seek lessons from this dark period in human history. In the Stalinist years, why did some people commit horrible crimes against their fellow human beings? In the post-Stalinist years, how should ordinary citizens have responded to the injustices that still afflicted their societies? Most importantly, how would they, our students, have acted had they been alive during these years?
European Catholic universities are already providing models for living up to this challenge. For example, the Institute for Church History at the Ukrainian Catholic University has created an invaluable resource for wrestling with the “whys” and “what fors” of the past. By collecting the testimonials of the victims of the communist era,
19 Sławomir Nowosad. On Man, Theology, and the Universe. Lublin: Towarzystwo Naukowe 2020, p. 204.
it has made it possible to pass their stories to future generations.20 These memorials are also valuable because they allow students to act as adjudicators in what Marynovych has called an “imagined tribunal.”21 It is too late for actual trials of the worst perpetrators to take place. However, our students can engage in intellectual trials by imagining both what they would say and what they would expect from the wrongdoers if they were sitting right in front of them. The more they pursue these topics, the more they will become determined to prevent past injustices from occurring again. In this way, the lessons they learn by studying seemingly distant events can provide a moral foundation for the social mores and attitudes they are called to preserve.
At this point, the reader may have noticed a possible flaw in my argument. Although my young Identitarian is haunted by the traumas of a tumultuous transition, it is extremely unlikely that he will ever appear in the classrooms of Europe’s Catholic universities. Not only does he lack the educational background and material resources to attend a university, but he is also unlikely to listen patiently while university professors explain why he should mend his ways. However, I think this problem is more apparent than real. Our job is to educate future leaders who will be committed to ensuring that my protester and his friends will never be in the position to act on their worst instincts. Currently, this assignment is more difficult than it should be. Throughout the formerly communist world, farright politicians, intellectuals, and activists have vested interests in exploiting the traumas that have been passed from one generation to the next over the past half-century. As educators, we can teach our students that the way to counter these attempts to undermine
20 For one example of the Institute’s work on this subject, see https://risu.ua/ en/exhibition-of-documents-about-the-violent-liquidation-underground-activity-and-legalization-of-the-ugcc_n34466.
21 Marynovych. The Reincarnation of Forgotten Communist Crimes, p. 30 above.
Communism, Post-Communism, and the Legacies of Intergenerational Trauma
democracy is to recognize that these inherited traumas will not go away just because we want them to. William Hughes Mearns’ “man who wasn’t there” to whom I referred in the epigraph of this chapter is, in fact, alive and all-too-present in the minds of the living. For this reason, we should encourage students to take the legacies of “real existing socialism” and post-communist transition seriously and seek to provide thoughtful approaches to healing the wounds that still exist in their societies.
Marek Babic
Marek Babic is an Associate Professor and Dean of the Department of History at the Catholic University in Ružomberok, Slovakia.
Ján Baňas
Ján Baňas has taught as an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the Catholic University in Ružomberok, Slovakia, where he also served as Vice-Dean for undergraduate and graduate studies at the Faculty of Arts and Letters.
Barbara Bank
Barbara Bank is a Professor of History at Pázmány Péter Catholic University in Budapest, Hungary.
Mario Bara
Mario Bara is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the Catholic University of Croatia.
Magdalena Charzyńska-Wójcik
Magdalena Charzyńska-Wójcik is Associate Professor at the John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin (Poland), where she is chair of the Department of the History of English and Translation Studies and served as Dean of the Faculty of Humanities (2016-2021).
Taras Dobko
Taras Dobko is an Associate Professor of Philosophy and Senior ViceRector at the Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv, Ukraine.
Andrea Feldman is a Professor of History at the University of Zagreb, Faculty of Teacher Education. From October 2018 she has been leading The Modern Thinking Women in Croatia project, the first women’s history project financed by the Croatian Science Foundation.
Tomáš Halík
Tomáš Halík is a Czech Roman Catholic priest, philosopher, and theologian. He is a Professor of Sociology at the Charles University in Prague.
Myroslav Marynovych
Myroslav Marynovych is Vice-Rector of the Ukrainian Catholic University and founder of Amnesty International Ukraine. He was also a founding member of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group and Gulag survivor.
A. James McAdams is the William M. Scholl Professor of International Affairs at the University of Notre Dame. For 16 years, he was the Director of the Nanovic Institute for European Studies.
Reverend Bogusław Migut directs the Institute of Liturgy and Homiletics and chairs the faculty of Liturgical Theology and Spirituality at the John Paul II Catholic University in Lublin, Poland.
Maciej Münnich
Maciej Münnich is a Professor at the Department of Ancient, Byzantine, and Medieval History at the John Paul II Catholic University in Lublin, Poland.
Reverend Sławomir Nowosad is the head of the Department of Ecumenical Moral Theology at the John Paul II Catholic University in Lublin (KUL), Poland.
Clemens Sedmak
Clemens Sedmak is Professor of Social Ethics and Director of the Nanovic Institute for European Studies at the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame.
Višnja Starešina
Višnja Starešina is a Croatian journalist, who worked as a journalist and editor at Večernji list.
Volodymyr Turchynovskyy is the Dean of Faculty of Social Sciences at Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv, Ukraine. Since 2013 he has also served as the director of the International Institute for Ethics and Contemporary Issues.
Vaja Vardidze
Vaja Vardidze is a theologian and the Rector of the Sulkhan-Saba Orbeliani University in Tbilisi, Georgia.
УДК 329.15:141.82](4)‘‘ 19/20‘‘(082) Т 65
Травма комунізму / ред. Клеменс Седмак, А. Джеймс МакАдамс. Львів: Видавництво УКУ 2022. – 300 с. ISBN 978-617-7608-53-9
У збірник увійшли доповіді з конференції «Травма комунізму», яка була зорганізована «Партнерством католицьких університетів» у червні 2021 р. в рамках ширшого проекту «Віра і свобода», ініційованого Інститутом історії Церкви УКУ, Міжнародним інститутом етики та проблем сучасності УКУ, Факультетом суспільних наук УКУ та Інститутом європейських досліджень ім. Нановіків Університету Нотр-Дам.
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