Youth

Immediately after the war, there was a great resurgence of the Scouts and thousands of other youth groups, some of them sponsored by churches or political parties - overwhelmingly, not the communists - , but many of them independent activity groups like athletic, hiking, and chess clubs, throughout Soviet occupied Eastern Europe.

Though governments in the region at this point were democratic coalitions, Stalin, the Red Army, and Soviet-controlled national communist parties together ensured ministries of the interior, police, and the secret police were communist organizations devoted and obedient to Moscow.

Within a year or so the swarms of independent clubs and organizations had been banned, penetrated, or subverted from within and ultimately absorbed into unified state, and explicitly communist, control.

Always, the struggle involved not only illegal coercive measures by organs of the state under communist control but the sort of ghastly ideological warfare and horrific propaganda made too familiar by the left even in America from the 1960s on.

Culture war every bit as bitter and sweeping, but in a time frame of only the few years immediately after World War Two.

Reading Iron Curtain, one observes the hammering of traditional scouting in our time by the left, for example, with dread.