| The experiences of East Central European countries in the Stalinist period (1945-1956) have long been thought to have been identical. In the absence of archival data scholars have posited that the Soviet Union succeeded in those years in forcing adoption of its political, economic, and cultural systems in its satellites, regardless of these countries very different cultural and historical backgrounds. Diversity in these countries' experiences is thought to have recommenced in 1956 with de-Stalinization.;The thesis discovers that the three ruling Parties did indeed construct visually identical structures with which to take control over higher education; and that these structures closely approximated the Soviet model. Yet significant differences obtained despite the nearly identical structures. In Poland and Czechoslovakia the Party failed to reshape professorial and student milieus; while in East Germany the Party succeeded both in breaking the old professorate and in guaranteeing admission and education of a loyal and technically competent student body. The important difference lay in the dedication of the Party apparatus from top to bottom to worker-peasant studies. Only the SED managed a cultural and political transformation of the university community, and this would have relevance for the subsequent shapes of these countries' histories.;This thesis attempts to show how for reasons of cultural diversity the experiences of three East Central European societies--the Czech Lands, East Germany, and Poland--differed from each other quite significantly. It compares the adoption of a set of policies in these societies which should have been of central interest to ruling Communist Parties, and given the enormous pressure from the Soviet Union in those years, should have been nearly identical--namely politics of higher education. In each society the Communist Party (SED, KSC, and PZPR, respectively) faced the task of creating new elites with which to create and govern the coming socialist order. In each society universities had very similar structures and functions; they were traditionally autonomous and produced elites of science, arts, government, and the economy. Communist Parties hence needed to subordinate these communities to their will. |
