All totalitarian regimes, all fanatical ideologies see in the young the most appropriate executors of their goals. Here are the words of one of many Socialist songs from the ’50s.
Forward, boys and girls,
a new world we are building among perils.
This one has but little strength,
thus all must work together at length
Forward, boys and girls,
a new world we are building among perils.
Lenin, Stalin, Gottwald as well,
them we shall follow and enemies expel.
The coup was supposed to be a new beginning of history. But there were, and still are, more convenient reasons to celebrate youth. Radicalism belongs more to the young than to the old, just as does the image that the world could be better organized than it ever has been. The young have a tendency to question the values of their parents’ generation and are more open to slogans and simplifying explanations of society’s ills and the promise of a finer world. They cannot oppose a false ideology with their own insufficient life experiences, and they usually lack a deeper understanding of history and the inherent laws of society. On the one hand, the totalitarian regime flatters the young, and on the other it forces upon them its own image of the ideal person and the ideal society.
In 1920, Lenin outlined his ideal of a young communist:
The Union of Communist Youth will deserve its name and will show that it is a union of the young Communist generation only by linking up every step in its studies, training, and education with the continuous struggle of the proletarians and the working people against the old society of exploiters. . This generation should know that the entire purpose of their lives is to build a Communist society. . [Its] morality is what serves to destroy the old exploiting society and to unite all the working people around the proletariat, which is building a new, Communist society.
Fifteen or sixteen years later, it was precisely this generation that was killed off in Stalin’s purges, and a new generation of fifteen-year-olds was bombarded with flattery. Pavlik Morozov, who informed on his own parents and fulfilled Cabet’s vision that every citizen will be an informer, became the new official hero and role model recommended to Soviet youth according to Lenin’s theory of the new morality.
At the same time (1935), Adolf Hitler was embodying his image of the young generation in images that corresponded to his poetic invention: In our eyes, the German youth of the future must be slender and supple, swift as greyhounds, tough as leather, and hard as Krupp steel. We must cultivate a new man in order to prevent the ruin of our nation by the degeneration manifested in our age. A year later the Reich government passed a law specifying that, among other things, all German youth besides being reared within the family and school, shall be educated physically, intellectually, and morally in the spirit of National Socialism to serve the people and community, through the Hitler Youth.
The first of the Ten Commandments for students, delivered in Nazi Germany in 1934, was: It is not necessary to live, but it is necessary that you fulfill your duty to the German people. Whatever you are, you must be German.
The Nazis emphasized the mission of the people, the Communists the mission of the working class; today’s theoreticians of Muslim fundamentalism emphasize the cleansing mission of their religious faith as revealed in the Koran, from which they select those passages that justify the hatred and violence they commit.
The youth of postwar Czechoslovakia was an especially propitious section of society upon which Communist propaganda could concentrate. The life experiences of those born during the 1920s and ’30s were one-sided and mostly negative. The way their parents’ generation had organized society seemed unconvincing and had obviously caused, or at least allowed, not only a cruel economic crisis but even the war and an unbelievable number of casualties.
Politicians and thinkers of the older generation, even those democratically minded ones, admitted their mistakes. The president of the republic, Edvard Beneš, in a speech at the law school where he was receiving an honorary degree shortly after the war, criticized late-nineteenth-century liberalism.
Politically
this is a society with an expanded number of contending and anarchizing political parties, which are subverting the nation as a whole with their battle;
economically
— it is a society with a highly cultivated culture of capitalism and industrialism, which produces a relentless class struggle between the exploiters and the exploited;
socially
— it is a society waging an exalted battle between the person of the past with his feudal aristocratic conceptions and the person with egalitarian ideas attempting to assert the equality of people;
culturally and artistically
— it is a superficial and aestheticizing society, a welter of opinions and chaotic conceptions without any literary or even artistic style; in short, it is a
sick society, uncertain, searching for something new and incapable of finding it
.
Even though Beneš reached the conclusion that the new society must be democratic, he defended friendship with the Soviet Union as well as a new social politics: One of the most important issues is to open the gates to social change in the sense of socialism.
It was not difficult for Communist ideologues to interpret this to the members of the younger generation, who barely remembered the First Republic, as a clear condemnation of liberalism and of an unjust social system, and emphasize the necessity of doing away with the bygone system and replacing it with a Socialist one.
To the naive or politically inexperienced, it could seem that democrats and Communists were in agreement on the need for societal and economic changes.
When the Communists achieved power after the February 1948 coup, they sought as quickly as possible to destroy or remove their political opponents from all important positions. It was, however, necessary to replace them posthaste. Suddenly there was an opportunity not only for the “reliable” ones — genuine believers in Communist ideology, or pragmatic careerists who understood that the new authority would reign for many years — but also, and primarily, for the young, who still had no political past and were now being offered a marvelous future as long as they assumed the proper form. And so, in only a few weeks, the young enthusiasts could become (as long as they underwent the necessary courses) attorneys, judges, teachers, officers, factory directors, even doctors, although they often lacked a degree.
At the end of the 1940s and the beginning of the ’50s, young people voluntarily and often enthusiastically left home to construct huge smelters in Ostravsko and a Railway of Friendship into eastern Slovakia. News articles and films were produced upon the order of the party, celebrating their heroic feats of labor. Journalists praised these marvelous achievements with the pathos characteristic of the time. These disingenuous campaigns served several purposes. They provided an inexpensive labor force, and participation in a work brigade contributed to the further reeducation of people and transformed them into confirmed disciples of the new regime. At the larger construction sites, the organizers invited young people from democratic countries as well. Thus young adherents of communism from different countries came together to spread revolutionary ideology.