7

On the Construction Site of Socialism

In the first year of history there are more than a hundred students. They sit on long benches, several of them on each one. There is not enough room, and it is terribly crowded. Post-war poverty.

Ewa Wipszycka, years later a professor of ancient history, remembers it like this: ‘From the start it was a known fact that the shock-headed boy with the flirtatious look was a poet who wrote for the newspaper Sztandar Młodych (The Banner of Youth). Talking to him, you could feel at once that he had more experience of life than many of his peers.’

To my left was Z. – a taciturn peasant from a village near Radomsko, the kind of place where, as he once told me, a household would keep a piece of dried kielbasa as medicine: if an infant fell ill, it would be given the kielbasa to suck. ‘Did that help?’ I asked, skeptically. ‘Of course,’ he replied with conviction and fell into gloomy silence again. To my right sat skinny W., with his emaciated, pockmarked face. He moaned with pain whenever the weather changed; he said he had taken a bullet in the knee during a forest battle. But who was fighting against whom, and exactly who shot him, this he would not say. There were also several students from better families among us. They were neatly attired, had nicer clothes, and the girls wore high heels. Yet they were striking exceptions, rare occurrences – the poor, uncouth countryside predominated: wrinkled coats from army surplus, patched sweaters, percale dresses.1

Autumn 1951. President of the ZMP in the history faculty, colleague Kapuściński, summons colleague Wipszycka for a chat. Wipszycka, who like him has belonged to the organization since high school days, serves as deputy president of the students’ union in their faculty. She is not the activist type, and her colleagues have been muttering in the corridors that she is not coping very well. Kapuściński has an instructive chat with her.

‘It was like going to confession!’

During the ‘confession’, Kapuściński encourages Wipszycka to make a self-critical report at a meeting of the faculty’s ZMP. Self-criticism is a form of ritual, a public admission of one’s sins and negligence with regard to the Party, the ZMP, and the ideals of socialism.

‘I cannot remember the details of the conversation, only that just as Kapuściński wished, I made the self-critical report. In fact, my work as an activist for the student union really wasn’t going well. However, Kapuściński’s persuasion and insistence were so embarrassing that for a long time afterwards I retained the image of him as a fanatic who had played the leading role in some regrettable proceedings.’

Another time Kapuściński and a few other ZMP members from the faculty give two female students a public grilling. They knock out of their heads the young women’s faith in God and the idea of going to church on Sundays. ‘He was furious that the girls dared to stick to their guns. I myself was a non-believer, but I thought it disgraceful to force someone to drop their faith. I don’t think he understood that,’ Wipszycka relates.

In the second or third year, one of the women students edits a newsletter consisting of satirical epitaphs for the male students and lecturers who were giving others a hard time. The epitaph for Kapuściński reads thus: ‘Here Kapuściński was put to rest, / but not long had he lain / Before he was suddenly summoned / to rush off to work again’. (A decade later, in his reportage The Junk Room, Kapuściński makes use of this couplet to describe the hero of his text: ‘Here lay Grzegorz Stępik / But not long had he lain /When they pulled him from his grave / To rush off to work again’2).

‘That epitaph describes Kapuściński perfectly in those days,’ says Wipszycka. ‘An activist who is always being summoned somewhere, and then comes back with the task of mobilizing us into action. I must clarify that he was basically liked. Even though he had something of the zeal of an inquisitor in him, you never felt any malice in anything he did, and he never acted in a way meant to harm or upset anyone. What mattered to him was the cause, and he believed in it deeply.’

. . . fighting the counterrevolution. Yes, they knew at last what to do and what to say. You don’t have anything to eat? You have nowhere to live? We will show you who is to blame. It’s that counterrevolutionary. Destroy him, and you can start living like a human being.3

Years later, this quotation from Shah of Shahs, one of Kapuściński’s most famous books, sounds like a self-ironical comment . He understood what he was writing about – and not just because of the observations he made in Iran.

The years 1949 and 1950, when Kapuściński is completing his high school studies and starting at Warsaw University, are the beginning of several of the grimmest years in Poland’s post-war history. After the Second World War, Eastern Europe has ended up in the Soviet Union’s sphere of influence. Under the protection of Stalin’s troops, homegrown communists assume power in Poland. Initially they tolerate pluralism and a political and cultural opposition, but after a few years they establish the dictatorship of the Polish United Workers’ Party (PZPR). Thousands of opponents of the new system are put in prison; even the most moderate criticism in the press, in literature or on the theatrical stage is quashed.

However, millions of Poles alive in that era would not agree to only this memory of the earliest post-war years. Their account might sound like this: We emerged from the war as a destroyed, damaged society – everyone had lost someone close to them – and at the same time we were full of hope and enthusiasm that the end of the war meant the end of hell on earth. For the small number of people who took up the fight against the new regime, hell did not end – they went to prison or were deported to Siberia. Yet the majority entered ‘life’s new stream’, as the poet wrote;4 they dreamed of a normal life, of finding their loved ones, of settling down, founding or rebuilding their families, and devoting themselves to the joys of life in peacetime and to reconstructing Poland out of the ruins.

These circumstances, plus the communists’ appealing social slogans – a fairer Poland than before the war, agricultural reform, social advancement for peasants and workers – make it easier for the new regime to gain support and to strengthen its initially weak position within society. The communists take repressive measures against their political opponents, but at the same time they introduce reforms that are met with wide-spread enthusiasm. They overturn the old social structure and improve the social status of the masses of peasants and proletarians.

There may have been talk about terror, the camps and the UB [the secret police], but every debate led to the conclusion that regardless of the darker aspects of this reality, socialization would entail social cleansing, and everything bad would disappear. It was assumed that we would manage to make Poland socialist, but not Soviet.5

This is how Jacek Kuroń – a man of Kapuściński’s generation, then a young communist and later a prominent dissident – reconstructs the atmosphere of the years immediately following the war.

From the beginning of the 1950s there is increasing fear and, gradually, less enthusiasm for the regime, which stifles criticism, centralizes decisions and ever more frequently applies instruments of repression. This turn in communist policy can be plainly seen in the countryside. During the first few years after the war, by giving the peasants land of their own, the communists win their gratitude. However, in the 1950s they start to oppose these very same peasants, whom they gifted with land, as private owners and producers. They force them to provide compulsory supplies of food; those who refuse are subjected to torture, arrest, fines and imprisonment.

The Party’s policy towards young people undergoes a similar shift. Until the end of the 1940s, reasonably free debates are held within youth organizations, but in the 1950s fear starts to dominate, and even those who are most loyal to the regime are afraid to express critical views. In 1950 almost half the young people arrested are ZMP members; they usually end up in custody cells and prisons because they dare to have their own opinion, different from official directives.

To end up in prison, you do not have to plan an armed rebellion – it is enough to tell jokes about the Party rank and file, the Soviet Union, or Stalin. The authorities find out about these jokes from denunciations – Poland’s Stalinist era is the heyday of the informer. As Kuroń recalls years later:

Out of fear, sometimes even school friends who sat at the same desk would start to inform on each other. The Soviet pioneer Pavel Morozov, the boy who informed on his own parents, was promoted by the propaganda as a positive hero. The authorities not only rewarded denunciations, but expected and demanded them. The social education was geared towards creating the conviction that socialist man must be loyal to nothing but the socialist state and the Party or the ZMP.6

As the 1940s turn into the 1950s, the Party starts to muzzle people in the world of culture. It establishes a compulsory trend for creative artists: socialist realism. Immediately after the war, reasonably free discussions are still being held about the paths and styles that may be chosen by creative artists. However, in the 1950s the Party completely subjugates culture and art to its propaganda aims. Writers, poets, composers, painters and architects are to work according to ‘the only legitimate’ rules and principles. The aim of creative art is to support the building of socialism in Poland and to generate the new socialist man. The regime sets the mass media exactly the same objectives: they are to promote the Party’s policies, and in international affairs, those of the socialist camp. The press, radio and then newly developing television are subject to preventive censorship and the control of the Central Committee’s Press Office.

It is the academic year 1950–51. The regime launches a campaign to convert the universities into a breeding ground for cadres loyal to the Party. Part of it involves denouncing ‘reactionary’ lecturers. This task is usually performed by the students – fervent young activists gathered within the ZMP.

The history faculty at Warsaw University, where Kapuściński starts his studies in 1951, emerges from this campaign unscathed, at least considering the climate of the times and in comparison with other faculties. By some miracle, Tadeusz Manteuffel, head of the Institute of History, as well as dean and deputy vice-chancellor of the university, ‘gained the consent of the “appropriate authorities” to let control of historical studies remain in the hands of the old teaching staff, as recognized experts who had declared their intention to apply Marxist methodology’, remembers Professor Stefan Kieniewicz.

‘The history faculty was an exceptional place,’ says Andrzej Werblan, a historian who was then starting out as a lecturer and would later be a Party dignitary, one of its intellectual pillars in the 1970s. ‘Half the faculty board were pre-war celebrities, and the other half were post-war lecturers. Both the former and the latter were excellent historians and teachers. It was in those years that the history faculty educated the later élite of historians.’7

History studies shine, and not only compared with other faculties at Warsaw University. When Ewa Wipszycka goes to Paris on an internship, she soon realizes that her academic skills and general knowledge far exceed the capacities of her French contemporaries. ‘However grim that era was and whatever ideological imperatives were in force, at the history faculty the profession of historian was superbly taught,’ she says to me. ‘In our classes most of the professors said by and large what they wanted. The ruling principle was that the student learns just as much from the lecturer as from the other students in the course of debate. This atmosphere of freedom was not even destroyed by the fact that among the students there were many functionaries from the Ministry of Public Security, sent to college by their department. The security agents did not merely study; they also sat on the committees at entrance exams and co-decided whom to accept and whom not. Their other duties are obvious.’

‘Did the students know who was who?’ I ask.

‘It was often a “known fact” – the security agents even had a different way of moving than the rest of us.’ She laughs. ‘What was striking was not their presence, but the limited influence they had on the atmosphere prevailing within the faculty.’

I am looking through Kapuściński’s student file from the Warsaw University archive.8 First, his marks for the matura (high school graduation exams): not bad, but not highly impressive. The highest marks are for Polish, military training, religion and physical education; history and the study of Poland and the modern world are good; mathematics, chemistry, Latin, English and geography are satisfactory.

A note from 1950 entitled ‘Pupil Profile’, drawn up by some school committee, says: ‘Distinct humanities skills. Poetic talent. Very widely read, especially contemporary literature. Very active as president of the ZMP Writers’ Circle. Ideological attitude – very good. Graduate of the city administration’s political school’. The note bears the stamp of the district authorities and a comment that the authorities ‘see no obstacle to the candidate taking university studies.’

Kapuściński studies history but spends his first year in the Polish faculty. The file contains an essay he wrote at that time (it is not clear whether he wrote it for his entrance exam or while already a student): ‘The Duties of Youth Organizations in the Six-Year Plan Period’. Announced by the government in 1950, this plan established Poland’s rapid industrialization, the centralization of economic management, and the eradication of the remains of the capitalist economy.

The student (or candidate) Kapuściński writes:

The Six-Year Plan period is a particularly difficult stage in the historical development of People’s Poland. In this period, still-existing forms of the capitalist system will be removed, while at the same time the new, better life represented by socialism is being developed.

And so on, in the same lyrical tone.

The file also contains two versions of his curriculum vitae, which Kapuściński wrote out by hand (one is affixed to his application for acceptance into Polish studies; the other is from when he moved to the history faculty). In both, he relates his war experiences in a dry, colourless tone – where he lived, where he went to school, and so on.

At the end of one version of the CV is a notable sentence: ‘Differences in our political opinions have led me to maintain casual contact with my family and I am supporting myself.’ In fact, Kapuściński was living with his parents and sister at the time. How should we understand an admission of this kind, written by an eighteen-year-old in an era of repression and imprisonment, of not only opposition activists but also ‘bar-room’ critics who told jokes about the regime? I am reading this document more than half a century later, in the light of everything that is known about that era, so I cannot avoid asking questions. How should we understand the disclosure by a candidate for university in Poland in 1950 about loosening ties with his family for political reasons?

For an answer, I turn to witnesses of the era, people who played a part in the drama.

In Professor Wipszycka’s view, ‘it is absolutely not a denunciation, but a sign of the times.’

She says: ‘This sort of confession resulted from an inner need for sincerity. As young ZMP activists, we reasoned like this: if I don’t tell the people in my organization about the political differences between me and my family, it will be as if I’m hiding something. And that would mean I don’t have trust in the institutions which should know rather a lot about me, whether the college or the Party organization. Many of us had clashed with our parents over our world outlook, and we used to talk about these conflicts at ZMP meetings. We were terribly worried about generational and ideological differences in those days.’

(One day Kapuściński will tell one of his friends that after he joined the Party his parents cursed him.)

Kuroń, a student in the history faculty two years behind Kapuściński, remembers that ‘loyalty to the collective was admissible only within the scope of organizational loyalty,’ and that although ‘loyalty to a close friend or relative could appear on the most distant horizon’, ‘you always had to remember that everyone, even your nearest and dearest, could turn out to be a cunningly concealed enemy, a covert ally of America or a disguised fideist who should be denounced without delay.’9

In a conversation with Andrzej Werblan, I find further confirmation that this was how the young communists (or ‘pimplies’, as they were known in those days) thought:

‘Writing and speaking badly about your family was the norm among young ZMP and Party activists in those days, almost a ritual. They spoke about their families more or less the way the first Christians spoke about the pagans.’

‘So the definition of communism as the New Faith is not just a metaphor?’

‘It is literal. The point of having the young activists make frank confessions was to cut them off from the past, and to emphasize that they were aware of the difference between the old and new times. Of course, some of them did it for their careers, but not Kapuściński. He was sincere, genuine in his faith at the time, just as later on he was able to change his views under the pressure of reality.’

Some cars stop outside a large barracks decorated with flags and portraits of the hero workers. Lads in SP uniforms and red ties jump out [the SP was the ‘Service for Poland’, a youth organization connected to the Party and the army]. In a short while, the first district ZMP conference at Nowa Huta will begin. At it, the young people of Nowa Huta will talk about their successes, analyse their mistakes and shortcomings, share experiences and jointly draw conclusions from them, then elect the new Board.10

Such articles – reports from meetings and rallies attended by youth and Party activists – by Kapuściński perfectly illustrate the mood of the ZMP revolution of the 1940s and 1950s. Continuing in the same vein, he writes:

There is huge enthusiasm in the hall. The welcome speech . . . is interrupted by warm applause and cheers. The words ‘Nowa Huta – Peace – Stalin – Bierut – ZMP’ are chanted non-stop . . .

Long live the PZPR and its leader, Comrade Bierut.

Long live the Leader of the World Camp for Progress and Peace, the great friend of youth, Joseph Stalin . . .

All the delegates join in with the applause and for a long time the hall roars with clapping and enthusiastic cries of ‘Long may they live’.11

As a mature writer, Ryszard Kapuściński has a sense of déjà vu when, thousands of miles from Poland and a quarter century later, he sees similar scenes:

Now I visited the committee headquarters. Committees – that’s what they called the organs of the new power. Unshaven men were sitting around tables in cramped, littered rooms . . . What should we do? Do you know what to do? Me? Not me. Maybe you know? Are you talking to me? I’d go whole hog. But how? How do you go whole hog? Ah, yes, that’s the problem. Everyone agrees: That is indeed a problem worth discussing. Cigarette smoke clouds the stuffy rooms. There are some good speeches, some not-so-good, a few downright brilliant. After a truly good speech, everyone feels satisfied; they have taken part in something that was a genuine success.12

Before the farcical elections of 1952, Kapuściński runs about town with Andrzej Wyrobisz, a friend from high school, now also in the history faculty; together they encourage people to get out and vote. The agitation is pointless, because everyone knows who will win and that there is no real choice. However, the authorities want to boast of a 99 percent turn-out. The fervent ZMP members are helping them.

‘Rysiek yelled so enthusiastically that he lost his voice,’ says Professor Wyrobisz with a smile.

He really did know what it meant to go the whole way.

In the autobiographical section of Travels with Herodotus, in which he writes about this period in his life, Kapuściński says not a word about his ZMP activities, or his later ones in the Party.