Look into the future

 

Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956, page xxiii-xxix

Stalin took a long-term view: proletarian revolution would take place in due course, but before that could happen, the region first had to have a bourgeois revolution….

Yet… the Soviet Union did import certain key elements of the Soviet system into every nation occupied by the Red Army, from the very beginning. First and foremost, the Soviet NKVD in collaboration with local communist parties immediately created a secret police force in its own image, often using people whom they had already trained in Moscow.…

Secondly, in every occupied nation, Soviet authorities placed trusted local communists in charge of the era’s most powerful form of mass media: the radio’ authorities hoped that the radio, along with other propaganda and changes to the educational system, would help faring mass numbers of people into the communist camp.

Thirdly, everywhere the Red Army went, Soviet and local communists harassed, persecuted, and eventually banned many of the independent organizations of what we would now call civil scenery: the Polish Women’s League, the German “anti Fascist league,” church groups, and schools. In particular, they were fixated, from the very first days of the occupation, on youth groups: young social democrats, young Catholic or Protestant organizations, Boy Scouts, and Girl Scouts.

Even before they banned independent political parties for adults, and even before they outlawed church organizations and independent trade unions, they put young people’s organizations under the strictest possible observations and restraint.