On the Construction Site of Socialism, Continued
In 1952 Kapuściński writes an application requesting to be ‘admitted as a candidate for the Polish United Worker’s Party’.
It is my greatest need and desire to join the ranks of our beloved Party. This necessity is on a par with my greatest aspiration, which is to serve the cause of our Party with all my strength and my entire being. Throughout my life, ever since I understood to whom I should devote it, I have felt how every victory brings me closer to the Party, and how every defeat or mistake demands that I make an even greater effort not to turn back on the road I have taken – the road to the Party.
Being admitted as a candidate for our Party will be a very great reward and honour for me, and also a very high obligation. I want even more and even better to live the Party life, to work and fight to fulfil the tasks set by the Party for the best Party comrades. I pledge to safeguard the recommendations which Comrade Stalin has vowed to protect and fortify in the name of all ‘people of a special cut’.
My guiding light shall be total dedication to becoming worthy of that title, and to remaining so for the rest of my life.1
On the next few pages of his application to join the Party, Kapuściński provides a self-critical report, saying that the young communist in him did not awaken quickly enough: ‘My world outlook was still burdened by remnants of petty bourgeois ideology, there were many things I did not understand, and I did not feel the need to get involved.’
Among his mentors at this time he mentions Wiktor Woroszylski, a young socialist-realist poet and the editor of the culture section of the ZMP newspaper Sztandar Młodych, as well as several other poets and writers, above all Władysław Broniewski. (Someone later tells me that as president of the Young Writers’ Circle affiliated with the Polish Writers’ Union, Kapuściński made sure that the notoriously drunken Broniewski drank a bit less.)
In support of his application, Bronisław Geremek, Kapuściński’s fellow student in the year above, writes him a letter of recommendation: ‘I have known Comrade Ryszard Kapuściński since October 1951 from work within the ZMP organization at our college.’ As well as praising his ‘dedication and devotion, youthful enthusiasm and eagerness, militant attitude’, and also his ‘political sophistication’ and ‘exemplary moral attitude’, Geremek informs the Party of the candidate’s ‘serious mistakes and shortcomings’:
1) failure to understand the role of the Party organization within the faculty, an inappropriate, ill-considered attitude to his Party comrades in Year One,
2) an immature attitude to his studies, continuing from the previous year, which recently Comrade Kapuściński has managed to overcome, as evidenced by his good results in the summer session,
3) a not fully collective style for his work in managing the faculty organization, originating mainly from a lack of confidence in people and in the collective,
4) reluctance to accept criticism, and also too little self-criticism,
5) immaturity of decisions often involving youthful bluster and leftism.2
‘That was the lyrical style required for recommending candidates to join the Party,’ explains the famous historian. ‘It wasn’t appropriate to give nothing but praise.’
Despite his critical words, Geremek supports Kapuściński’s request, ‘in the belief that our Party will gain a member worthy of it’.
On 30 June 1952 a meeting of the PZPR executive at the history faculty is held to discuss admitting Kapuściński to the Party. The participants include Bronisław Geremek, Adam Kersten, Jerzy Holzer and a few other activists. The candidate is present too.
Comrade Kersten takes the floor:
‘Comrade Kapuściński shows evidence of a certain failure to appreciate the value of academic studies. For Comrade Kapuściński, the chief measure of an activist is social work.’
Another comrade polemicizes:
‘Comrade Kersten is somewhat overcritical of Comrade Kapuściński’s academic situation. This issue came up in the winter session. Comrade Kapuściński’s attitude to his studies has now changed for the better.’
Comrade Geremek stipulates:
‘Comrade Kapuściński should be cut off from organizational work so that he can put more emphasis on his studies. Comrade Kapuściński does not always know how to work with colleagues who are not committed.’
Comrade Kapuściński defends himself:
‘What has been said in the discussion is fair, but I am sorry it has been limited to academic issues. I did indeed have a non-Party attitude to my studies, and I have not yet fully overcome that attitude.’
Comrade Holzer rushes to Comrade Kapuściński’s rescue.
‘He has done good work on the ZMP Faculty Board. He has a strong emotional attachment to the Party. He is highly enthusiastic and eager to work. He has not entirely overcome the following defects: an insufficiently serious attitude to his studies, not always fully considered decisions, and a not always self-critical approach. Being admitted as a candidate for the Party will help Comrade Kapuściński to overcome these faults.’
From the stenographic record: ‘Comrade Kapuściński was unanimously accepted as a candidate for the PZPR’; he becomes a Party member on 11 April 1953.
Professor Wipszycka explains this eagerness to vet the CVs and attitudes of candidates for the Party as follows: ‘Within the Party élite in the history faculty, the cult of knowledge was paramount, and that is why Kapuściński was so harshly treated for his ‘non-Party attitude to his studies’. We wanted – and I do not exclude myself – to show that we were the best in terms of quality, especially to those professors and students who were “non-believers” in socialism. That is why we demanded the highest standards from each other, the best academic results.’
Why did a person become a communist in those days? Why did so many young, and not just young, talented people voluntarily – enthusiastically even, with religious zeal and fanaticism – declare their intention of taking part in a system which limited freedom and applied repression?
For us, still children, the reasoning was simple: if Hitler fought against Bolshevism, it must be a good thing, worth supporting. That was how identifying with Bolshevism came about, which someone born later might no longer be able to understand.3
Kapuściński never made any other significant statement about the origins of his post-war choices. There are a few perfunctory remarks in interviews, such as ‘everything I did, I did with immense conviction’.4
There was a sort of religious element in all this, an attempt at a sort of faith.
Other writers of that generation were more talkative on this topic. From the vast literature squaring accounts with their involvement in building socialism in the 1940s and early 1950s, I have chosen the voices of two of Kapuściński’s colleagues as representative of the mind-set of the part of their generation that believed communism was the start of a new world, the future of mankind.
This is how Wiktor Woroszylski remembered it:
We hated the world order in which we had lived through that bad period between childhood and youth. We despised the older generation for failing to prevent that world, and we longed for some sort of major compensation, for a new world built on the ruins, a world that was not only good and fair, but strong, attacking, suppressing evil, merciless. We were hungry for a great division, in which we could stand on the side of good.5
Tadeusz Konwicki remembered it this way:
When I was seventeen or eighteen, the nation was being massacred all around me. Right next to me there were boys with machine guns, for whom killing someone was no big deal. I did not belong to the generation of businessmen involved in scams, but to the generation of people exhausted by a terrible war. At that point people climbed to the zenith of humanity. I was living in a moral ecosphere, in a tense atmosphere. That is why it was easy for me to accept such a proposal for a better way to run the world. While also convinced that the stupid world had led to a hecatomb. Nowadays if I were to tell a Polish businessman that the world needs improving, he’d laugh at me, but in those days it wasn’t funny . . .
I confess to being totally incapable of even attempting to describe to you, or to anyone who did not live through it, the time at the end of the war, the moment when we entered a new life. Sunshine, orchards in blossom, the hopes that something would be built, something would be done, that life would be different, better. Of course you can say: ‘You were terribly naive, gentlemen’. Yes, we were naive, that was to do with our age, with our very painful war experience, not so long, but intense, and with our civic upbringing in the convention of Polish Romanticism. My generation lived on an entirely different level from yours. We lived in a world of moral necessities, dramatic situations.6
What did the young people know about Stalin’s crimes? About the Katyń massacre, about repression and disappearances, or about the transports to Siberia? What did the young Rysiek Kapuściński, history student, ZMP and Party activist, know about all that? How did everyone cope with it?
A note in the margin: ‘Ask RK’s close friends if anyone ever talked to him about it.’
Once again I come upon a clue implying that Kapuściński wove a slightly distorted autobiography in his books. In Travels with Herodotus, after recalling the strict political censorship of the Stalin era of 1949–55, he writes:
Two years had passed since Stalin’s death. The atmosphere became more relaxed, people breathed more freely. Ilya Ehrenburg’s novel The Thaw had just appeared, its title lending itself to the new epoch just beginning. Literature seemed to be everything then. People looked to it for the strength to live, for guidance, for revelation.
I completed my studies and began working at a newspaper. It was called Sztandar Młodych (The Banner of Youth). I was a novice reporter and my beat was to follow the trail of letters sent to the editor back to their points of origin.7
I quote this extract from Travels with Herodotus to Professor Wipszycka, and before I have a chance to ask a question, she waves her hand and says: ‘1955? Oh, that’s too late. From the start of college we all knew him as a reporter and poet for Sztandar Młodych.’
Why, in a book written at the end of his life, does he not mention his work for Sztandar Młodych during the years when Polish Stalinism was at its height? For an answer, I go to the library.
No one now remembers who offered the high school pupil Kapuściński the opportunity to work for Sztandar Młodych in 1950, nor is it of any significance. Someone must have taken notice of the young poet, who has just published several poems in Odrodzenie and Dziś i Jutro (‘I owe the fact that I became a journalist to poetry – not the best, but it was mine,’ he would say years later). The fledgling poet belongs to the Youth Circle attached to the Polish Writers’ Union, and there he meets Woroszylski.
Sztandar Młodych, the newspaper for young communists in the ZMP, is produced by people of various temperaments and, above all, various experiences in life. One has been through exile in Siberia, another has fought in the Warsaw Uprising, another has survived the Holocaust. ‘We were ready to move mountains, climb to the peaks, often demolishing things along the way that you weren’t supposed to demolish,’ one veteran of the paper will recall.8
Their later fortunes will vary. One will remain faithful to socialism to the end; another will be a famous figure in the opposition. One will take part in the anti-Semitic witch-hunt of 1968; another will be its target. And one will end up as the world’s most famous Polish reporter.
To the offer to work for the newspaper, the high school poet Kapuściński replies: ‘First let me pass my high school graduation exams.’
Straight after these exams, in 1950, he turns up at the Sztandar Młodych editorial office, which occupies three floors of a tenement house on Wilcza Street in the centre of Warsaw. There are stacks of paper, lots of cigarette smoke, some lively minds and interesting discussions. The young poet finds the atmosphere of the place thrilling. At once, his pieces start to appear regularly in the newspaper. He reviews books and theatre, writes poems, and is a fully involved reporter and commentator – a participant in the ZMP revolution.
On 12 August, there appears a poem entitled ‘Our Days’ (an extract from a long poem called ‘The Road Leads Forward’):
And whenever
in statistics you see
the picture of days to come,
whenever
through hard work and ambition
you pour the concrete of socialism
whenever
your heart starts beating impatiently
like the piston in a machine
at once you are
a worker of victories
and a poet of powerful plans.9
An article dated 31 August about a socialist labour competition includes the following passage:
‘Yes, Comrades, more can be produced,’ says worker Czesław Naziębło, ‘but only once our norms are changed. Right now they are still old and unsuitable, and prevent us from raising our productivity’ . . . ‘I believe that by breaking the old, unsuitable norms we will build the foundations of socialism in People’s Poland faster’.10
And on 18 November there is a poem called ‘Second Defenders of Peace Congress’:
Let us ignite in our hearts
the flame of our will
The arm of Peace
flexes
more forcefully.
We –
stronger by a billion hands,
mightier
by force of Stalin’s mind.11
At a private party in the 1970s, as often happens over a glass of vodka, some Poles are chatting the night away. Wiktor Osiatyński is teasing Kapuściński:
‘How could you write those things in the 1950s? How could you support all that? After all, it was a repressive system, people were in prison.’
‘We didn’t know anything about the prisons.’
‘What didn’t you know? I’m twelve years younger than you and I knew about them in primary school.’
‘What did you know?’
‘That some of my friends’ fathers were in prison. How could you not have known?’
‘Because there was no one like that in my environment. “Class enemies” and their children weren’t admitted to college in those days.’
Maybe that’s true, says Osiatyński, but on the other hand he’d have had to be a moron not to know.
Among Kapuściński’s acquaintances in the 1950s, a classmate from Staszic High School, Teresa Lechowska, was sent to prison for political reasons. At the time she was a student at Warsaw University and a member of the ZMP. She was arrested in 1953 on a charge of telling political jokes and sentenced to two and a half years in prison for, as the verdict stated, ‘disseminating false information about economic and political relations within Poland and the friendly relationship between Poland and the USSR, and information heard on radio broadcasts by imperialist states capable of causing harm to the interests of the Polish People’s Republic’. She served a year, first in the Mostowski Palace (militia headquarters), then with female convicts sentenced for common crimes at a penal institution in Warsaw’s Gęsiówka Prison.
‘They had a thick file on me – I was denounced by a close female friend,’ says Lechowska. ‘There were jokes about Soviet science, for instance. Ivan Michurin was experimenting with genetic hybrids, and one of the jokes went: “Why is it a good idea to cross an apple tree with a dog? Because it waters itself, and if anyone tries to steal the apples, it barks.” You can understand what a threat that was to the Polish–Soviet alliance and the interests of People’s Poland,’ says Lechowska ironically.
She remembers Kapuściński from high school and university as an ardent idealist. ‘He wasn’t some sort of awful swine – he just believed in it, that’s all.’
‘Did you ever see each other at college?’
‘We bumped into each other from time to time. The university wasn’t as big as it is now, and old friends from high school knew about each other, where they were and what they were doing.’
‘Perhaps he didn’t know about your arrest and sentence?’
‘That’s pretty much out of the question. When I came out of prison, I was told that at ZMP and Party meetings at the university I was pointed out as an example of a concealed “class enemy” who had cunningly wormed her way into college. He might not have remembered someone else’s case, but I was one of his classmates and we did see each other sometimes. He must have known.’
Many years later, the only time he will ever do so in such an open way, Kapuściński will admit:
One of the basic features of a totalitarian system is to block information right from the level of the individual: people keep quiet, they see and they know, but they keep quiet. A father is afraid to tell his son, a husband is afraid to tell his wife. This silence is either demanded of them, or they choose it themselves as a survival strategy.12
When he mentioned silence, did he have his classmate in mind?
Teresa Torańska, who conducted in-depth interviews with Party dignitaries from every stage of the PRL’s history, offers a possible key. ‘Remember General Jaruzelski’s biography,’ she says. ‘He and his family were transported to the Soviet Union, so he knew all about Soviet Stalinism and its crimes, in spite of which he built communism in Poland. Years later he became the Party leader. Human memory is selective; it rejects the things that hurt and retains the things that make life easier. Kapuściński’s family came from eastern Poland, where “everyone knew” who the Soviets were and what they did after 17 September 1939. The Kapuścińskis escaped to the General Government to avoid the Soviet transports to the East – how could Rysiek not have known what that system was like? He knew it all. But as Comrade Gomułka used to say, “A man only knows as much as he wants to know”.’
I lay this key beside ‘Konwicki’s key’: that it was not so hard for young people to accept the communist proposal for a better way to run the world, especially as the old one had ‘led to a hecatomb’. There was exhaustion following the war, then there was agricultural reform, the enthusiastic drive to build Nowa Huta – the forerunner of a better world, and efforts to eradicate illiteracy, in which the young ZMP activists played a leading role.
To understand why so many young, talented and sensitive people felt ‘mightier by force of Stalin’s mind’ requires exercising the imagination, especially when the privilege of being born later comes into it. Osiatyński’s words come to mind: ‘I never judge anyone who lived through the war and Stalinism.’ How would any of us, who were born much later, have behaved? Which side would we have been on? At the same time, it is harder to understand, and to walk in someone else’s shoes, when years later the people of that era – like Kapuściński – so desperately want to forget, to wipe out and erase all traces of the past, because that suggests they cannot find any positive explanation for their earlier commitment.
When Kazimierz Wolny-Zmorzyński, now a Jagiellonian University professor specializing in literature and the mass media, tells Kapuściński towards the end of his life that one of the books about him includes biographical elements concerning, inter alia, the evolution of his political views, he erupts:
‘You’re not going to go rummaging about in my life story!’
Kapuściński threatens to take him to court, even though the man is an expert on his work.
Stalinism in Poland is the first revolution Kapuściński witnesses – he experiences it at first hand as an active participant, a youth activist, a propagandistic reporter, and a committed poet. The revolutionary cause, an obsession with great social change and with the collapse of the old world and the emergence of the new – the attitudes of people in such times and in extreme situations will become the leitmotifs of Kapuściński’s life; they will stir his passion to discover the world and will be the driving force behind his entire future literary output.
In a way, the romantic reporter running about the world in pursuit of revolutions, rebellions and liberation movements is born in the Stalinist era in Poland – a sinister one in view of the terror, and yet for many people a time full of hope that they will succeed in building a just world free of hunger, wars and poverty. This paradox of revolution, the internal rupture of great political shocks, will become an intrinsic part of the reporter’s life story and of the attitudes of the man who made his intellectual, professional and practical choices in the Cold War era, amid conditions under which his own country’s sovereignty was limited.