Iron Curtain (36 page)

The radio, like all other new state institutions in Poland at the time, also served other functions besides those it was meant to serve. The studios in
Bydgoszcz in June 1945 had almost no equipment and produced very little programming, for example, but employed a cook who made lunch for a hundred people every day.
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Radio bosses from around the country constantly sent in pleas for more funding, especially on behalf of musicians, many of whom were starving. The list of the illnesses suffered by radio employees included tuberculosis, rheumatism, eye diseases, and skin trouble, according to the letters they wrote to Warsaw.
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But just as the crowds cheered the first appearance of the Warsaw trams, the return of Polish radio was cheered as a sign of national revival, and it soon became a magnet for artistic talent. In his first live performance,
Władysław Szpilman played, with great emotion, Chopin’s Nocturne in C Sharp Minor, the same piece he had played just before the radio went off the air in 1939. Despite having lost his entire family in
Treblinka and the
Warsaw ghetto, Szpilman kept on composing music. He continued to work for the radio until 1963.
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Even as the radio portrayed itself as the voice of the whole nation, internal pressure to conform to Warsaw’s ever harsher and ever narrower political views increased. After the Bydgoszcz radio station failed to transmit reports of Soviet victory celebrations on May 9, the station chief felt obliged to defend himself. In a letter to
Billig, he explained that his equipment was “primitive, secondhand” and that it simply didn’t function on that day. But the local Soviet military commander and the local secret police didn’t buy that story. They claimed the transmission didn’t happen because of “disloyal technical personnel,” and they sent a Soviet technician from Raszyn to investigate.
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That kind of pressure, coupled with the general threat of violence, helps explain why the tone of the Polish broadcasts became distinctly more favorable to the new regime as the year wore on. There were material advantages available to those who cooperated as well—canteens and health care—whereas those who defied the Warsaw bosses lost their jobs and the ration cards that went with them.

If they hadn’t been communists to start with, many broadcasters had at least learned to use communist language by the end of the year. The same Bydgoszcz radio boss who had defended himself against charges of disloyalty
on May 9 wrote a letter a month later, explaining that he now met with the new “propaganda” department of the local government at least three times a week. In September, he asked for (and was granted) a car and a megaphone. That would enable radio workers to travel to places their signal didn’t reach: they could communicate by shouting slogans through the megaphone.
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In the autumn, the radio station in
Katowice assured Warsaw it was producing more programs oriented toward “the world of work” and the working class. At about the same time, broadcasters in Warsaw began planning programs celebrating the October Revolution and touting the advantages of central planning. In November, when the radio’s central authorities met to plan their future broadcasts, one executive argued that they ought to produce more programs praising the role of the political police and militia: “From the press we learn of more and more acts of theft and murder from ‘bands’ … the victims are usually democratic activists, the people whom Poland needs most.”

At the same meeting, broadcasters discussed the forthcoming congress of the Peasants’ Party, the one remaining independent force in Polish politics at that time. Most thought information about the congress should be transmitted, but some felt that “in our attitude to the Peasants’ Party we must be cautious” since it wasn’t yet clear whether the party had “liberated itself from negative elements and joined the democratic camp.” At that time, the Peasants’ Party was still legal. But that didn’t, in the broadcasters’ view, give it the automatic right to transmit its message over the radio.

By the end of the year, the radio’s tasks were clear, at least to its top executives. In a speech he gave to his employees in December 1945—the same one in which he spoke of the “noble and disinterested” help of the USSR—Billig set out his vision for the radio’s future. He spoke of the need for more radio sets—“we want the radio to be heard by peasants, workers, the working intelligentsia”—and explained that two new factories would produce some 15,000 in the coming year. He pushed aside complaints that there was too much “talk” on Polish radio. Whereas prewar radio had focused on the mere entertainment of the elite, he told his co-workers that the new radio could play “a colossal role as a propagandist. It’s an amazing weapon.” And it was a weapon that could reach everybody.

Radio, Billig explained, could help “create the new type of person which is coming to life in Poland … the main goal of radio is the mobilization of society to carry out the basic task that history has put in front of us: the reconstruction
of the country, the strengthening of democracy, the unification of the nation.”
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During the years that followed that speech, Polish radio would work hard to make sure the nation defined those words—reconstruction, democracy, unification—in the same way the communist party did.

East German radio began with Moscow-trained communists. Polish radio began with Soviet equipment. Hungarian radio began with a decree, written in Russian and published by the Budapest provisional government on January 20, 1945, the second day of its existence. The decree reestablished the
Hungarian Press Agency as well as Magyar Radio, the national radio broadcaster. It named
Gyula Ortutay director of both. Before he did anything else, Ortutay made his way to the radio’s Budapest headquarters, which had been used as a stable during the final days of the war. The equipment was smashed, the rotting corpse of a dead horse lay on a side porch, and a bomb crater scarred the courtyard. Ortutay taped a sign on the entrance of the wrecked building: “Radio people: We will be waiting on the 21st for those who are still alive, in the shelter opposite the lift.”
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From the Soviet point of view, Ortutay was the ideal man for this task. A well-known ethnographer, literary critic, and socialist intellectual who had worked for Magyar Radio before the war, Ortutay was also, as it happened, a secret member of the communist party, one of several who were then active in Hungarian politics. In public, Ortutay described himself as a member of the Smallholders’ Party, one of the four parties that had been allowed to have a legal existence after the war, and throughout 1945 and 1946 he kept in close contact with leading Smallholder politicians. At the same time he privately took orders from the Hungarian communist leadership, which issued him with a party card under a false name at a secret ceremony in March 1945.

Ortutay’s secret allegiances were known to Soviet commanders in Hungary, of course. Formally, the terms of the armistice gave the Allied Control Council responsibility for Hungarian media, and after the war’s end this body allowed each of the legal political parties to set up a newspaper. The Hungarian communist party created its flagship,
Szabad Nép
, but the Social Democratic, Smallholders’, and Peasants’ parties were allowed to have their own newspapers too. Very quickly,
Kis Újság
, the Smallholders’ Party paper, became the most popular in the country.
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In Hungary, as everywhere
else, the communists were more interested in radio, however, and Ortutay’s presence guaranteed them extra influence over broadcasting. Very quickly, Hungarian radio would come to rely absolutely on Soviet equipment, transmitters, and technicians, as well as on Soviet advisers. Soon it would reflect a distinctly Soviet worldview too.

None of this was immediately clear either to the general public or to the radio employees who read Ortutay’s notice and returned to work. In the ruins of Budapest, they began planning the relaunch of Hungarian radio with tremendous energy. Conditions were difficult. Magyar Radio’s day-to-day records note that, in May, “Lajos Hernádi, pianist, asked for a seven-minute break due to the extreme cold in the studio.”
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The initial “wage” for radio workers was a daily cup of soup, but there were other advantages: they got an identity card, printed in both Russian and Hungarian, which could help the bearer avoid the street roundups and waves of deportation.
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Even so, it wasn’t always easy to get to work in a city without public transport. Radio legend has it that on one morning, no one was in the building when the time came to start the day’s broadcast. The cleaning lady put on a gramophone record and let it play until the others arrived.
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As in Poland and Germany, many of the technicians had worked at the station before the war—and others arrived by accident. Áron Tóbiás joined in the summer after high school in 1946, hoping to earn enough money to be able to go to college. His job consisted of selecting “short stories of famous Hungarian writers to be read Sunday afternoon by actors,” a task that seemed intensely glamorous to an eighteen-year-old. He never made it to college, and remained a radio journalist until 1955.
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Still others were recruits. Among them was
Gyula Schöpflin, a communist party member since the 1930s, who became the first program director. In his memoirs—he defected from Hungary in 1949—Schöpflin remembered that although Hungary was still in theory a multiparty democracy in 1945, Ortutay’s personnel decisions were already influenced by his secret communist party membership: “The hiring and firing of people had an entirely political character.” Ortutay also set political guidelines for programming: “Avoid anything that could disturb the harmony and agreement between the great powers; beware of party politics; publicize, promote anti-Fascist international politics; promote the program of the democratic government, reconstruction, land reform; always emphasize the Hungarian and international progressive traditions …” Schöpflin himself
visited the Hungarian party headquarters “at least once a week,” asking for “guidelines, detailed party lines” for his broadcasts. He didn’t get much help, mostly because the radio was already under the direct control of the Allied Control Council, and thus the Soviet Union. Hungarian communists didn’t bother with it, as they assumed it was under Soviet control anyway.
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But if the Hungarian comrades didn’t initially grasp the significance of the radio, the Soviet comrades did. Although they had banned the ownership of radios until the end of the war, they issued the new station with a license, designated a Soviet officer as its permanent “adviser” (and main censor), and allowed the station to get ready to broadcast.
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By May 1, 1945, the radio was ready to go. At noon, loudspeakers placed strategically around Budapest played the new station signal—a few lines from a nineteenth-century anti-Hapsburg revolutionary song—and the program began. Each of the leaders of the four legal political parties spoke; news was read; music was played. A few major Hungarian musical works were performed—a Bartók piece, and then a Hungarian opera—followed by the Russian opera
Boris Godunov
. After that, the loudspeakers played a one-hour broadcast in Russian, for Soviet soldiers.
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Throughout most of 1945, radio broadcasts mostly kept within the boundaries set by Ortutay, judging from their topics—land reform, the Hungarian–Soviet friendship society, the founding of new trade unions, the war crimes trials, and the history of the communist partisans—although the broadcasters were still reading aloud the works of “bourgeois” (that is, noncommunist) writers and playing familiar music.
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Direct Soviet input presumably explains the preponderance of Russian-language programs (for example,
We Learn to Sing in Russian
) and perhaps reflects the frustrations faced by the Red Army in occupying a country with such an impossible language. By the end of the year, the fledgling Hungarian secret police force had also established a presence at the station. Officers would periodically demand copies of transcripts with “politically interesting” material. Secret police officers guarded the radio offices—another sign of radio’s political significance—checking people who entered and left. Eventually a separate secret police unit was sent to guard the technical department, allegedly because the engineers, many of whom had worked on the radio in the past, were politically untrustworthy.
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But most of the time Magyar Radio’s Soviet overseers relied on the intuition
of the radio’s communist employees to get the programming right. Even if they didn’t have
Comintern training, many had internalized the party line and made judgments on that basis. At one point, for example, Mátyás Rákosi ordered Schöpflin to broadcast live the trial of László
Bárdossy, the wartime prime minister who made the fatal decision to ally Hungary with Germany and to declare war on the Soviet Union. The trial took place a few days before the first Hungarian elections and was, as Schöpflin remembered it, a radio disaster: “Bárdossy behaved as a gentleman, he answered bravely, with dignity and without emotions, in response to the judge’s erratic shouting … I was convinced that he was guilty but this attempt of ours to transform public opinion backfired.” Schöpflin—who was by no means the most doctrinaire of the Budapest comrades—stopped the live broadcast in the middle of the trial. Bárdossy was too appealing, and his words were too damaging to the communist cause. From then on, Schöpflin played only recorded excerpts from the trial.
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For a time, Ortutay managed to preserve at least the appearance of political diversity. Until 1945, Magyar Radio had been owned by a private holding company that produced news on the government’s behalf. The same company also owned the press agency, an advertising agency, printing facilities, and some small banks. After the war’s end, its owners, who were linked in the public mind with the interwar Horthy regime, pushed hard to get their property back. They had some support from the Smallholders’ Party, which wanted to compensate them but which also argued that the majority of shares in the new station should belong to the government.