’56: Revolution All Over Again
Every revolution is preceded by a state of general exhaustion, and takes place against a background of unleashed aggressiveness. Authority cannot put up with a nation that gets on its nerves; the nation cannot tolerate an authority it has come to hate . . . A climate of tension and increasing oppressiveness prevails. We start to fall into a psychosis of terror. The discharge is coming. We feel it.
Ryszard Kapuściński, Shah of Shahs1
‘This will never get through,’ snaps the editor-in-chief of Sztandar Młodych. She can tell that the report about Nowa Huta that has just landed on her desk will get the newspaper into trouble.
Irena Tarłowska is not a timid boss. At thirty-seven, she is quite a bit older than the twenty-somethings who form the main core of her staff. (‘Irena Tarłowska was a strapping, handsome woman with thick blond hair parted to one side’, Kapuściński would write about her years later.2) A left-wing woman who radiated French culture, she had been in the communist youth movement during the inter-war years and in the PPR (Polish Worker’s Party) and the underground People’s Army during the war. She had personal connections with high-ranking officials of the post-war regime. Her appointment in 1954 as the editor-in-chief at Sztandar Młodych was interpreted by the journalists as a harbinger of approaching change.
‘There’s no question – the censor won’t let this through,’ she repeats firmly, leaving no hope for the poet and history graduate upon his return to work.
For the past three years, Kapuściński has been writing for Sztandar Młodych sporadically – an occasional review, a short report or a poem in praise of socialism, but no more than a few items a year. He has been fully occupied by his studies and his ZMP activities at college, and a revolution has occurred in his family life as well.
Now he returns to the newspaper, where the ice of Stalinism is starting to melt. ‘Ilya Ehrenburg’s novel The Thaw had just appeared, its title lending itself to the new epoch just beginning’,3 he will write half a century from now.
Ehrenburg’s novel is the subject of heated debate at gatherings in smoke-filled cafés and in newspaper columns. Men of letters, critics and students are all discussing it.4 Some see the book as ‘a superb moral polemic with the image of man tailored to meet the demands of ideology’. Others criticize it for ‘losing the pathos of the struggle to build socialism’ and falsely contrasting these ideas with ‘an apology for everyday life’. Both the former and the latter can feel that something is changing, that something new is coming.
The writers have been noticing something which earlier they could not, or would not, see. In a thaw-era poem, Mieczysław Jastrun, who is the bard of socialism, describes looking through one window at prisoners building garages for the security service, and through another at free bricklayers no longer building the bright future of socialism, but now rather ‘the wall of a lunatic asylum, or House of the Dead’.5
Tone and language, aesthetics and subject matter are changing.
The main characters in stories by emerging novelist Marek Hłasko, cult writer of the thaw and of October ’56, are still workers, but they are not heroes erecting the great edifice of socialism; instead they are frustrated individuals who cannot see the future, sometimes ordinary down-and-outs whose dreams go no further than a bottle of vodka after the end of the day’s work. A lyrical note appears – alien to the spirit of socialism.
From the West comes ‘putrid imperialist literature’ – the weekly Życie Literackie (Literary Life) publishes The Old Man and the Sea, by Ernest Hemingway.
An exhibition entitled ‘Arsenal’ overturns Stalinist notions of aesthetics and the aims of the fine arts; abstraction makes its appearance, having previously been abhorred as ‘the degenerate art of the bourgeoisie’. The same sort of revolution is triggered in the world of music by the Warsaw Autumn festival, whose inception coincides with the peak of the political watershed of October ’56. The idea for the event is born a year earlier, on the rising tide of the thaw. Jazz, too, is rehabilitated – after formerly being banned as ‘the music of American imperialism’.
From its distant place of exile, there is also a comeback for laughter. At last people are allowed to laugh at the ‘distortions of socialism’: shows performed at the Student Satirical Theatre, which opens in Warsaw, attract crowds of intellectuals and prompt fiery debates in the youth press.
One daring bard of the era wrote:
Comrades, you may find this question
much too bold and even rude:
Comrades, is it my impression
you lack red cells in your blood?6
One of the most profound changes brought about by the thaw is, in the words of Jacek Kuroń, ‘the rehabilitation of private life’. Only a year or two earlier, a public debate at the university on the subject of sex was unimaginable. ‘A public meeting on the topic “May One Have Sex Before Marriage?” broke all the conventions, because until then there had only ever been meetings about the war in Korea, the Colorado beetle and German militarists, but the gradually advancing political changes were also overtaken at lightning speed by a revolution in the arts. The young people who played jazz tracks were dressing in “gear” that more distinctly and plainly rebelled against official life.’7
Thanks to the youth and student festival, in which almost two hundred thousand young people take part, including thirty thousand from abroad, including the West, smiling faces and bright colours pervade the streets of Warsaw, fresh air wafts in, and a different kind of music is heard. Originally conceived as a propaganda event on behalf of the socialist cause, the festival becomes an opportunity for Polish youth to encounter the Western culture abhorred by propaganda, and also to meet some of their contemporaries from behind the Iron Curtain. The festival, said Kuroń, ‘exposed the entire hypocrisy and falsehood of a lifestyle which had been promoted as progressive. It turned out that you could be progressive, but at the same time enjoy life, wear colourful clothes, listen to jazz, have fun and make love.’8
The young people of 1955 want to mend socialism, because there is no returning to pre-war Poland, to exploitation and inequality. Socialism is the future, justice, equal opportunities for all! We made some mistakes, yes, but they can be fixed, and lack of integrity can be avoided in future.
The Party is losing control on the cultural front. Blasphemous voices are saying the political authorities should not interfere in culture at all: this is a coup against the most sacred dogma concerning ‘ideological–political and Party management in the arts’. The Politburo advises and orders: Resist! The obedient writers rush to the counter-offensive. They decry ‘the recidivism of the bourgeois concept of art’, ‘nihilism’, ‘showing off ’, ‘revolutionary tendencies’, and ‘the emptiness of petty bourgeois radicalism’.
As Kapuściński wrote a quarter-century later in his book about the workings of revolution, Shah of Shahs:
More than petards or stilettos, therefore, words – uncontrolled words, circulating freely, underground, rebelliously, not gotten up in dress uniforms, uncertified – frighten tyrants. But sometimes it is the official, uniformed, certified words that bring about the revolution.9
The snowball of youth opposition and unleashed imagination can no longer be stopped.
‘We still believed in socialism. We believed it was possible to go back to the ideals, and that it was just a matter of eliminating lack of integrity. We were under the irresistible influence of the debate about new literature and art . . . We were longing for an open window onto the world.’
Historian and Holocaust survivor Marian Turski is Tarłowska’s deputy and Kapuściński’s line manager at Sztandar Młodych. He often runs the paper when Tarłowska is busy smoothing out its relationship with the authorities.
Whenever an article appears in Sztandar Młodych that the Party top brass find indigestible, Tarłowska applies the crafty strategy of pretending to be feather-brained: she fibs that she wasn’t at the office, she had gone out, and her young colleagues printed something without her knowledge. She saves her own neck and makes it look as if she is going to take measures against her subordinates, but she never does.
Step by step, Sztandar Młodych is becoming one of the tribunes of thaw-era criticism, but the role model for how to haul the authorities over the coals is provided by the editors of another journal. Po Prostu (Quite Simply), a weekly for students and young intellectuals and until recently an organ of the ZMP, is the first to point out the ‘mistakes and distortions’ at enterprises and manufacturing co-operatives. This happens at the start of the thaw, but as the months go by, Po Prostu demands democratization of the system, free debate within the Party and the ZMP, and even an equal partnership with the Soviet Union. It reaches out to social groups which until now have been anathematized by the authorities in the PRL – people with origins in the non-communist resistance movement during the Second World War (members of the underground Home Army and people who took part in the 1944 Warsaw Uprising). Every week, queues form at the newspaper kiosks to buy the journal that speaks a different language and covers previously banned topics.
Meanwhile, Sztandar Młodych is still the official newspaper of the ZMP, although an extremely heated debate about the youth movement is being conducted on its pages. ‘The paper was a forum for debate,’ says Turski, ‘a tool for criticism and at the same time a focal point around which young people wanting to do something within society were gathering. For the first time we have wider access to the Western press.’
It is a moment of social ferment, and no one yet knows what will emerge from it.
During stormy conferences about the youth movement and the distortions of socialism, the editor-in-chief of Sztandar Młodych speaks for the Party ‘liberals’: ‘It is undoubtedly true that the Party has a better view of the historical interests of the working class. However, if this does not occur by way of full openness in political life, some very harmful rifts are bound to appear between the Party and the masses, and these rifts could result in power becoming a tool of oppression in the hands of the Party. Then the criticism will be stifled.’
Only a year or two earlier, people went to prison for such heresies.
Since early 1955 – before bringing Tarłowska his report on Nowa Huta, which she is convinced has no chance of slipping through the censor’s net – Kapuściński has been travelling around Poland. He visits workplaces, talks to workers, listens in on ZMP debates about why things are not as colourful as they should be, what mistakes we have made, and what should be done.
He is often away from home and also from the newspaper office. During these business trips, he stays at workers hotels. He argues with his ZMP comrades. He passes many nights in hoarse, drunken discussion, listening until daybreak to stories about the lives of ordinary people. He catches up on his sleep in trains.
For Sztandar Młodych he writes a series of reports from the provinces, which provide a voice in the debate about the apathy and hopelessness that are eroding the ZMP, about the degeneration of the Party bureaucracy and the mistakes made by those in power.
On returning from a ZMP conference in Kraków, Kapuściński reports: ‘What is bothering the Kraków activists? Among other things, the escalating activity of the reactionary part of the clergy . . . Some priests do not admit them to meetings, do not let children wear scouts’ scarves, and are instilling passivity in the young . . . At the Kraków conference, ten speakers have claimed that the training is “bunk”, and that the young people often go to the priest to learn things. Why?’ asks Kapuściński, and from a cool reporter he transforms himself into an ardent participant in the debate:
There is no miraculous force pushing them into the presbytery. What is it about the atmosphere of meetings, about the temperature of debate that means the young people are bored during training? No one has yet uttered a word about it.10
At another time in his life, in another part of the world, when he witnesses the Iranian people’s rejection of the Shah’s version of modernization and their return to their religious roots, Kapuściński will find one answer to the question, Why did the young reject the ZMP revolution? Surely his experience of the failure of the Stalinist revolution in Poland will give him inspiration a quarter of a century later:
The Shah’s Great Civilization lay in ruins. What had it been in essence? A rejected transplant. It had been an attempt to impose a certain model of life on a community attached to entirely different traditions and values. It was forced, an operation that had more to do with surgical success in itself than with the question of whether the patient remained alive or – equally important – remained himself.
And yet there were noble intentions and lofty ideals behind the Great Civilization. But the people saw them only as caricatures, that is, in the guise that ideals are given when translated into practice. In this way even sublime ideas become subject to doubt.11
I look through a large file of his articles from that era: they contain a good deal of the propaganda typical of the time they were written. There is plenty of naive enthusiasm – Kapuściński was only twenty-three – sometimes the language is pompous or full of pathos, and sometimes strait-jacketed by Party newspeak. There are many clumsy or banal statements: ‘Human experience bids us be prudent’, one of the longer articles begins.
Among the streams of ‘hot air’, as he himself refers to Party prattle somewhere, there are pearls of wit and irony: ‘I took part in a ZMP conference at which the chairman said: “Comrades, there is a proposal to open the window. Let the comrades express their opinion.” ’12
The articles belong to the tenor of the thaw and of score-settling with the failures of the Stalinist years. With the eagerness of a boy scout and the principled approach of an A student, Kapuściński cautions his comrades that self-flagellation is not in fact the only thing to do: ‘Let’s get down to work on a positive programme.’13
In this and a few other articles one can sense a fear that thaw-era criticism could change into hostility towards socialism and the Party regime. Can the ardent ZMP activist still not see what the years of Stalinist revolution really were? Can he see, and yet still not come to terms with it? Can he see, but only write as much as he is able to? Or does he write what he is told to?
Kapuściński is not one of the Party ‘counter-reformers’, but he does not yet feel comfortable on the side of the rebels. However, from week to week he is becoming radicalized. He writes, for instance, ‘We needed to reprimand the bureaucrats, all those lovers of bits of paper’.
The whole thing began to intrigue me, so I sat down in one of the committee headquarters (pretending to wait for someone who was not there) and watched how they settled the simplest of problems. After all, life consists of settling problems, and progress is settling them deftly and to the general satisfaction. After a while a woman came in to ask for a certificate. The man who could issue it was tied up in a discussion at the moment. The woman waited. People here have a fantastic talent for waiting – they can turn to stone and remain motionless forever. Eventually the man turned up, and they began talking. The woman spoke, he asked a question, the woman asked a question, he said something. After some haggling, they agreed. They began looking for a piece of paper. Various pieces of paper lay on the table, but none of them looked right. The man disappeared – he must have gone to look for paper, but he might just as well have gone across the street to drink some tea (it was a hot day). The woman waited in silence. The man returned, wiping his mouth with satisfaction (so he’d gone for tea after all), but he also had paper. Now began the most dramatic part of all – the search for a pencil. Nowhere was there a pencil, not on the table, nor in the drawer, nor on the floor. I lent him my pen. He smiled, and the woman sighed with relief. Then he sat down to write. As he began writing, he realized he was not quite sure what he was supposed to be certifying. They began talking, and the man nodded. Finally, the document was ready. Now it had to be signed by someone higher up. But the higher-up was unavailable. He was debating in another committee, and there was no way to get in touch with him because the telephone was not answering. Wait. The woman turned back into stone, the man disappeared, and I left to have some tea.14
This is not Poland in the 1950s, but Iran following Khomeini’s revolution, during the period when one bureaucracy was replacing another. For ordinary people, too much stayed the same as before.
As I play this game of mixing texts from different times and places, I am thinking of a conversation I had with Mark Danner. This ‘major league’ American journalist, reporter and essayist, Berkeley professor and friend of Kapuściński’s has left me with this reminder:
‘If you asked me what I’d like to learn from a biography of Kapuściński, I suppose it would be to have an answer to this question: What were the experiences Ryszard had in his life that allowed him to attain such a perfect understanding of the workings of power and revolution – in Iran, Ethiopia, and Latin America, among so many other places.’
Exactly these.
Marian Turski no longer remembers who sent Kapuściński to Nowa Huta late in the summer of 1955.
‘It was many a journalist’s ambition to be sent there – it was a prestige topic. Those who were sent thought of themselves as privileged.’
Nowa Huta is not just any old conglomerate – it is the flagship, the symbol of Polish socialism. Meanwhile, here and there people are hearing rumours that all is not well aboard ship. Somebody at the PZPR Central Committee comes up with the idea of sending someone there on a special mission. The job is entrusted to Remigiusz Szczęsnowicz, manager of the cultural centre in the Warsaw district of Targówek, who works with ‘difficult’ young people. He is to look around and write a report for the Central Committee. As he recalls years later, at the time there was a story doing the rounds at Nowa Huta about some newborn babies found in lime pits there.
Kapuściński is given a different task: to take a stand against Adam Ważyk’s ‘Poem for Adults’. ‘[W]ithin the Party management they were ready to flip – “What shall we do about Ważyk’s lampoon? Let’s prove it’s all lies!” ’15 recalled the late Wojciech Adamiecki, then a journalist for Sztandar Młodych.
‘Poem for Adults’ is emblematic of the time, a landmark text from which the beginning of the thaw in Poland is often dated. In fact, the Stalinist ice has been melting for over a year when the poem appears on 21 September 1955 in the weekly Nowa Kultura (New Culture). But as a composition reflecting the spirit of the times, this, and no earlier or later literary text, is the one that passes into history. Its author is a poet who in past years has dedicated his entire soul and creative art to the cause of socialism. (‘I destroyed the mythology that I myself had believed in until then,’ he will admit years later.)
The ‘Poem for Adults’ is about Nowa Huta, the construction of which was extolled by the socialist–realist poets. Ważyk does not embellish; he sees the naked truth about socialism in Nowa Huta.
From villages and towns they come by the cartload
to build a steelworks, conjure up a city,
dig a new Eldorado out of the earth,
an army of pioneers, the assembled rabble,
they crowd into shacks, barracks and hotels,
they whistle as they trudge down the muddy streets:
a great migration, dishevelled ambition,
a string round the neck with a cross from Częstochowa,
three storeys of curses, a small down pillow,
a gallon of vodka and a yen for the whores,
a mistrustful soul, torn from near the border,
half aroused and half deranged,
reticent with words, singing folk songs,
suddenly ejected from medieval darkness,
the wandering mass, inhuman Poland,
howling with boredom on the long December nights . . .
The great migration building industry,
unknown to Poland, but known to history,
fed on the emptiness of great big words, living
wild, from day to day and in defiance of the preachers –
in a cloud of carbon monoxide, in a gradual torment,
from it the working class is being smelted.
There’s a lot of debris. But so far it’s a shambles.16
Five years earlier, in his ‘Poem about Nowa Huta’, Kapuściński had praised this showpiece construction project of People’s Poland. He went there with Wiktor Woroszylski in the summer of 1950, where Woroszylski had read his poems to the men building Nowa Huta, and the eighteen-year-old Kapuściński had listened, looked around, and become acquainted with some people. Later he wrote many critical comments about the authorities’ negligence ‘in the cultural sphere’, including that the travelling cinemas did not come to Nowa Huta often enough, that the libraries for workers were inferior, and that there was a lack of quality entertainment.
Now his job is to go there and see that everything is in the best possible order.
Kapuściński and Szczęsnowicz share a rented room in one of Nowa Huta’s small hotels. They expect to have a boring time trudging about the building site and having cliché conversations with the workers. And suddenly they discover an unknown world whose existence they have never imagined.
In his report to the Central Committee, Szczęsnowicz writes that ‘you won’t be able to educate the young people building Nowa Huta with the help of a church and a wretched pub selling vodka’.17 The image that Kapuściński paints in his report, entitled ‘This Is Also the Truth about Nowa Huta’, prompts the editor-in-chief of Sztandar Młodych to say, ‘This will never get through.’
What won’t get through?
The story about the pimping mother, who sits in one room collecting money for services provided by her daughter in the next room. Or the one about the fourteen-year-old girl who has infected eight boys and ‘described her exploits in such a vulgar way that one felt like vomiting’. Or the young married couples who spend their wedding nights in gateways and ditches (‘whoever thought up the brilliant idea that married couples can only stay together in a hotel room until eight p.m.?’).
A worker friend tells Kapuściński that he will never marry, because in these conditions he would be bound to ‘have no respect for his wife’.
[A]t Huta the bureaucracy reaches a degree of barbarity. For example, a woman living in a workers’ hotel is going to give birth. There are six other girls living in the same room. After three months she is supposed to go back to work. She doesn’t: she works at Huta, several kilometres from the hotel, but she has to feed her baby four times a day. Nevertheless, they tell her to bring a certificate proving that she is working. Yes, but she cannot get one. Then along comes the hotel man, takes away her bedding, takes away everything that is not her property, and the woman and her baby are left on the bare floor-boards.18
Kapuściński hears about the fortunes of his friends from a few years earlier who have had enough and refuse to put up with ‘all these obscenities’. One has written complaints and petitions, for which he has been punished by having his accommodation allotment withheld, despite the fact that he has a sick mother and his wife lives out in the countryside because they have no home of their own in the town. Another critic has been sacked from his job. Still another has been stymied by lethal rumours that ‘he is a shirker and troublemaker. Not the worst method either!’ he writes. ‘People can see what’s going on. It is as if some monstrous bureaucratic fungus has sprung up here, which is proliferating and crushing everything, but no one seems at all concerned.’ In his report, Kapuściński reveals that complaints about what is going on at Nowa Huta have reached the ZMP authorities in Warsaw, but no one cares and they have gone unanswered.
Instead of painting the world of Ważyk’s poem in rosy colours, Kapuściński adds even more black to it. He is on the side of the workers, who feel hurt by the poet’s words: ‘rabble’, ‘semi-deranged soul’, ‘inhuman Poland’, ‘a shambles’. ‘To them these expressions,’ writes Kapuściński, ‘are wrongful, untrue and insulting’; they feel as if ‘they are of no use to anyone, as if they are invisible’. ‘But they admit that many of the images in the poem are true, all the more since they all too rarely read the whole truth about themselves.’
Kapuściński ends with a challenge to the Party and the ZMP: ‘At Nowa Huta they must see that we are on the side of the working man every day of the week . . . The people at Nowa Huta are waiting for justice. They cannot wait for long. We have to go there and dig up everything that has been carefully hidden from human sight, and respond to a very large number of different questions.’
‘There’s no point even going to the censor with this,’ says Tarłowska.
There’s a fuss in the corridors at the newspaper office. Kapuściński has given the article to his colleagues to read, and now they are asking the editor-in-chief to call a meeting.
‘The article should be printed!’
Tarłowska resists. Kapuściński takes it upon himself to sort the matter out at the censor’s office. He has a friend there from his student days, Mietek Adamczyk, and with the report in hand he goes straight to him.
‘If you stop this article, I will never shake your hand again.’
With what is left of her instinct for self-preservation, Tarłowska prevents her younger colleagues from posting the article on the front page – it ends up on the second page, on 30 September 1955. It is Kapuściński’s first article to have repercussions.
A scandal erupts, on a scale that probably only Tarłowska was expecting. The Central Committee Press Office makes a decision to fire her, and the generous censor is also given notice. The board of Sztandar Młodych is to be taken to task by Jakub Berman in person, the Party’s number two, and he is gearing up for a meeting with the journalists. Meanwhile, Kapuściński’s colleagues are urging him to disappear and sit it out somewhere.
So he goes to Nowa Huta, and skulks at a workers’ hotel. A man called Jakus – the activist whose criticism was silenced by rumours that ‘he is a shirker and troublemaker’ – takes him under his wing.
Now the Party reformers go on the counter-offensive. Jerzy Morawski, one of the leading lights of the thaw (and soon to become Tarłowska’s second husband), devises a Central Committee commission to investigate the situation at Nowa Huta. The commission goes to the site and sees . . . the same things as Kapuściński. The ‘commissars’ try to get in touch with the reporter, but the ZMP members at Nowa Huta, who have given him shelter, say they won’t give up their colleague until the Party provides a guarantee that nothing bad will happen to him. The Party not only provides the guarantee but gives him a national decoration – the Gold Cross of Merit. Tarłowska and the friendly censor return to their jobs. Soon Trybuna Ludu (The People’s Tribune), the organ of the Central Committee, is writing about the social ills at Nowa Huta. The paper brands the local Party organization as the culprits, the board of the conglomerate is replaced, and the local Party authorities offer their resignation.
Kapuściński learns three lessons from this story. He discovers that writing is a risky business and that written words carry consequences. He also becomes convinced that the written word can change reality. Finally, as he learns from the story with the censor, success in the public sphere also depends on taking care of things through informal channels, and on building a network of personal contacts with people in power. If you have friends here and there, they will help you in times of need.
Adam Daniel Rotfeld, a good friend of Kapuściński’s, believes that to the end of his life Rysiek carried the conviction that honesty and competence are not enough. When in 2005 the poet, journalist and expert on Italian culture Jarosław Mikołajewski applied for the post of director of the Polish Institute in Rome, his friend Kapuściński called Rotfeld, who was then head of the diplomatic service, and said: ‘Listen, my friend Jarek . . .’ He had decided to help in the certainty that he was supporting an undoubtedly excellent candidate. Rotfeld insists that he did not intervene; Mikołajewski did get the job, because he really was the best applicant.
‘But till the end, Rysiek was certain, even proud of the fact, that he had “fixed” the dream job for his friend.’
When did the cultural dissent, later known as revisionism, cease to be partly fashion and become front-line politics?
It starts with a secret speech by Khrushchev, given in February 1956 in Moscow at the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party. Its content creates a sensation in Poland: here is the Soviet Party admitting to murder, to the destruction of its political opponents, to fabricated trials. Knowledge of similar methods used by the authorities in People’s Poland has already reached certain segments of public opinion: almost two years earlier, Józef Światło, deputy director of Department X at the Ministry of Public Security, defected to the West and exposed crimes committed by the Polish apparatus of repression (his department was involved in eradicating ideological deviations within the Party). The Poles hear these revelations on Radio Free Europe; those who are glued to their wireless sets manage to catch bits of these nightmarish stories despite the jamming devices working at full steam.
Khrushchev’s speech initiates a political earthquake throughout the socialist bloc, most of all in Poland and Hungary. It is discussed at Party meetings, in cultural circles and on the streets. Duplicated using crude methods, the key points of the speech can be bought for an astronomical sum at flea markets and bazaars. At exactly the same time, Polish Party leader Bolesław Bierut dies in mysterious circumstances, prompting a wave of speculation: Was he murdered? Soon there’s a popular saying: ‘He went out in a fur overcoat and came home in a wooden overcoat.’ Straight after that the Party’s number two, Jakub Berman, is thrown out of his job. The Party is bursting from the inside.
There is a clash between two tendencies, later called fractions. One group is known as the ‘Puławians’ – people who seek more civic freedom, relative autonomy in cultural life, more democracy within the Party, less central planning within the economy, and more independence for enterprises. They have the sympathy of opinion-forming circles and of many people in the press and the cultural world. (It is interesting to note that they meet at the flat of Ignacy Loga-Sowiński, secretary of the Central Council of Trade Unions, and Irena Tarłowska, still editor-in-chief of Sztandar Młodych). The other group is called the ‘Natolinians’. They are believed to have connections with the Soviet embassy; they’re not keen on democratization, but they’re not against sacrificing a few scapegoats, preferably of Jewish origin, on the altar of squaring accounts with Stalinism.
The political prisoners are released, including people from the post-war anti-communist underground as well as followers of the ‘new faith’, who were locked up for being critical or as a result of internal power struggles. Functionaries within the apparatus of repression who have been particularly cruel to the prisoners lose their jobs and are accused of abusing their power. The Stalinist system is collapsing . . .
In June the workers’ rebellion in Poznań occurs. After several days of strikes and street demonstrations, the army and the secret police fire on the protestors. Several dozen people are killed, and many are wounded. A Party plenum calls the Poznań revolt ‘counter-revolutionary’ and a campaign by ‘imperialist circles’. Prime Minister Józef Cyrankiewicz warns that any hand raised against the people’s power will be cut off. The entire movement for renewal finds itself under threat.
A day after the massacre, on the orders of the Party leadership, Sztandar Młodych – like other papers – writes about the tragedy in a tone ringing with Stalinist propaganda:
For some time, imperialist agencies and the reactionary underground have been trying to exploit economic difficulties and weak points at certain production plants in Poznań in order to provoke unrest against the people’s power . . . The enemy agents succeeded in provoking street riots. There were attacks on several public buildings, which resulted in human casualties . . . The provocation in Poznań was organized by enemies of our homeland . . . The government and the PZPR Central Committee are convinced that any attempt to provoke riots and protests against the people’s power will be met with the appropriate rebuff from all working people, all citizens who care about the good of the country.19
The Poznań tragedy is a shock, especially for those who still believe in socialism but want it to be thoroughly reformed. As a result, the workers’ protest, the massacre and the Party leadership’s conservative attitude to the tragedy accelerate the impetus for change. At the production plants, workers councils are established, and pro-democratization rallies are held at schools and colleges. The culmination of the political turmoil is a Party plenum held in October. Comrades from Moscow fly to Warsaw, headed by Soviet Communist Party First Secretary Khrushchev, and Soviet troops move towards the capital. There is a fear that their tanks will run down the Polish movement for the renewal of socialism.
The crisis ends with the election of a new Party chief, Władysław Gomułka, who led the communists during the war and who has recently been released from prison. He was sent to jail in the early 1950s for so-called rightist–nationalist leanings. Gomułka – who installed the Stalinist system in post-war Poland, took part in the elimination of the opposition, and agreed to Poland’s becoming subordinate to the Soviet Union – did, however, want Polish socialism to retain some specific national features. He was not a fan of collectivization; he was in no rush to condemn the ‘Yugoslav path to socialism’, which was independent of Stalin; and he was fond of the national features of Polish Socialist Party tradition. As Jacek Kuroń wrote about him years later:
No leader of the Polish People’s Republic ever gained such popularity or was as loved by the crowds as Władysław Gomułka was in autumn 1956. Few people remembered the role he had played in the late 1940s. The crowds saw him as the man of the moment, the saviour of the fatherland, the one just man. The years he had spent in prison had built him a legend as a defender of democracy and an advocate of liberty.
Many of his initial moves appeared to confirm that legend. A few days after Gomułka was brought in, Cardinal Wyszyński was released from house arrest in Komańcza. Polish debt relief was soon negotiated in the USSR, as were the rules for stationing Soviet troops in Poland, and Soviet officers were withdrawn from the Polish army.20
So Gomułka sails forth on the wave of the thaw and starts off by making a powerful anti-Stalinist speech, but soon shifts to pacifying the movement for renewal. Many of those involved in the October 1956 movement for change imagine that his election marks the start of reforms and the building of democratized socialism. During a historic rally outside the Palace of Culture and Science in Warsaw, however, Gomułka plainly states that he has no desire to make radical changes. He says there’s been enough rallying and calls on the people to go home and get down to work.
After the fuss about Nowa Huta, Kapuściński becomes a bolder promoter of the movement for the renewal of socialism.
He visits a chemical plant in Kędzierzyń. During the day he tours the production halls, and in the evenings he goes to a workers’ hotel. He wants to find out what ordinary people think. Later he writes that during his conversations, ‘tongues loosen, and people who were passive shortly before, turn out to be thoughtful, astute and intelligent.’21
He tells the story of a female worker named Cela Wehner, who had some curious adventures. One time, she saved a colleague’s life when he was electrocuted, then found a grenade among the lumps of coal on a production line that almost blew up in her hands. She also exposed ‘the engine scandal’ – discovering an engine that someone had removed from the factory floor and hidden in a burned-out building under a pile of rags. But instead of giving her a reward, a bonus, or praise, the management cut her pay. Cela Wehner’s problem is that although she belongs to the ZMP, she isn’t an activist (‘although she is capable of talking about the organization more thoroughly, wisely and truthfully than several of its official activists’).
‘I’d like to find a caricature of one of the many stiflers of criticism, an article branding a specific oppressor, a call for joint management of the department, or condemnation of a specific bureaucrat. But there’s none of that.’ The local ZMP is not aware that something is changing in the country, and that even the Party in Warsaw is now allowing limited reforms. Meanwhile, the enterprise in Kędzierzyń is being strangled by bureaucracy, and the people are feeling increasing rage.
One current of the October renewal is the workers councils that are spontaneously being formed at major industrial plants. According to people such as Lechosław Goździk, then the workers’ leader at Żerań (site of the FSO car factory), as well as Jacek Kuroń and Karol Modzelewski, the future authors of a famous letter to the Party, this is the only way to remove the authorities’ bureaucratic hold on society – by taking the path of democratization and of limiting central control of the economy. This current arises from the conviction that socialism is a good thing, but that it has been stifled by the bureaucrats.
Kapuściński shares this belief. In Sztandar Młodych he publishes one of the few articles he ever wrote that had the tone of a theoretical treatise, almost a political manifesto: ‘On Workers’ Democracy’. In it he writes that in a centralized system, there is no room for workers’ democracy, and that the system prevents the workers from making even the most minor decisions concerning their own enterprise.
Kapuściński is a fan of the movement to create workers’ councils and encourage the independence of enterprises. ‘This movement is extremely valuable, because it speaks the language of practical proof and tangible example . . . The Party’s best forces are interested in strengthening this movement.’22
Why do the poets, writers and commentators – people like Woroszylski, Ważyk, and the then still greenhorn Kapuściński – who were the most passionate in the Stalinist era, form the vanguard of the anti-Stalinist movement? What causes them first to build a Stalinist order and then, a few years later, dismantle it with the same ardour?
In the account-settling literature written after the fall of communism, various explanations are offered, including that the years of stabilized Stalinism were a period of frustration for them, because the spontaneous movement for building a new order had been curbed by the iron fist of the Party, the secret police and the bureaucracy. To the dictatorship, anything spontaneous, grass-roots or outside their control – including these people – represented a threat.
Sociology professor Hanna Świda-Ziemba comments ironically that during the thaw and the events of October ’56, the former young Stalinists could once again stand at the head of the procession, leading the movement for change, once again believe in a utopia, once again experience their youthful enthusiasm and enjoy being on the side of dissent. She adds that the ‘Octobrists’ – both earlier as Stalinists and later as anti-Stalinists – are full of altruism; during the thaw and October they ‘return to being their real selves, with force and anger at those who have enslaved them, while at the same time wiping from memory the fact that they were co-creators of those times’.23
Adam Michnik, the legendary oppositionist who in the 1960s began as a young communist revisionist, calls the dissent of October 1956 ‘a furious reaction’ and ‘the shame of people’ who ‘had taken part in totalitarian destruction’. ‘Revisionism rejected totalitarian doctrine and practice, by citing Marxist language and the communist system of values,’ he writes. ‘In formulating its criticism, it took both domestic and international realities into consideration. In this way, it caused pain to deluded people who had followed the path of self-delusion.’24
Is it possible to explain this more simply, and without stern judgements? For young people like Kapuściński, who after the Second World War believed that communism was a new beginning for the world that would produce the just system of their dreams, the natural reaction to the newly discovered tragedy and deception of Stalinism was to attempt to right the wrongs, go back to their ideals, and oust those who had lied to them. They did not have to wipe anything from memory – they genuinely felt deceived.
October ’56 was a consequence of their earlier involvement, idealism and altruism. They had committed no crimes, although crimes were committed in their names. They had not necessarily deceived themselves; they quite simply believed that this time it was for real, that now at last . . . They were neither the first nor the last people in history who would attempt, invoking noble ideals, to repair a social order founded on crimes and injustice.
It is the end of 1957. Almost a year has gone by since Gomułka’s speech outside the Palace of Culture. On 14 September 1957 Sztandar Młodych is put on trial at the Central Committee Press Office.
Press Office chief Artur Starewicz takes the floor:
While Sztandar takes no political line within the youth movement, it does take a harmful political line in international affairs. A campaign of opposition to our Party, our line and People’s Poland as a whole, and to other socialist countries too is being conducted on the pages of Sztandar Młodych. This line involves an emphasis on everything that divides us, and on [writing] nothing about what unites us. For example, on Hungary it always writes about sentences and arrests . . . This is harmful activity . . .
It is no accident that in the USSR Sztandar is regarded as a harmful newspaper. For us it is painful and significant that Sztandar is seen there as an anti-Soviet publication . . .
The Party makes harsh demands on the press. It must be explained that our political line is the only right and appropriate one. This newspaper does not have a political line of this kind . . .
People who have departed from socialism cannot hold editorial positions. Comrades who are implementing the Party’s political line need to stamp their mark on the paper. There has to be an outward unanimity of views. That is a condition for Party discipline.25
Once Starewicz has finished his speech, a debate begins. Grzegorz Lasota from Sztandar says: ‘Showing anti-Stalinist changes in the Soviet Union is a way of getting through to the young. It’s a pity it is regarded as anti-Soviet activity.’ Comrade Stanisław Brodzki, president of the Polish Journalists Association, says: ‘I believe a debate is needed here on the optimal limits of freedom of speech. What has been said here about anti-socialist tendencies is slander, but Sztandar has to know the range of what is viable and what is not.’ During the debate, Mirosław Kluźniak from Sztandar points to a polemical dialogue between Ryszard Kapuściński and Krzysztof Kąkolewski, entitled ‘Our Birth Certificate’,26 as an example of the paper’s vitality. Kąkolewski has praised privacy in post-October Poland, and Kapuściński has called for this generation to become involved in fixing the world, ‘even if it falls over dozens of times along the way’.
But storm clouds are gathering over the newspaper; there is increasing trouble with the censors, and more and more phone calls from the Central Committee Press Office.
‘The interference usually involved allusions to the Soviet Union and our sympathies for the Italian and French communists,’ says Marian Turski.
At the newspaper office, everyone is seething – and the younger they are, the more they seethe. Everyone sees designs everywhere on the ideals of October. The journalists keep an eye on Turski (who is officially acting editor-in-chief at the time): Isn’t he going too far in his compromises with the authorities? Turski can usually guess which articles the censor will not let through, but he avoids preventive editorial interference. He wants to show the journalists that he’s with them.
Meanwhile Gomułka, the new Party leader, has his own plans for Sztandar Młodych: the paper is to be subordinated to a new organization, the Union of Socialist Youth (ZMS), which is replacing the ZMP. The Union is ‘a transmission belt’ to convey the will of the Party to youth groups. The Sztandar journalists can only dream of independence and moderately free criticism.
Yet it is Po Prostu that is first in the firing line. A bastion of revisionism, this weekly continually urges Gomułka to democratize socialism. However, for Gomułka attaining power is not the start but rather the end of the changes. He regards revisionism as ‘a set of false views’ which ‘put strain on Party unity’. It is an intellectual invention, and he doesn’t like intellectuals; it is a dangerous, infectious virus outside Party discipline and control.
At a meeting convened by the Central Committee Press Office, Jerzy Morawski, a member of the Party Politburo, announces that the weekly Po Prostu will have to be disbanded or suspended.
‘I was the only person in that circle who defended Po Prostu,’ says Turski, who was at the meeting. ‘I fudged, I said that inappropriate views had appeared in the weekly but that it shouldn’t be terminated, because it had a lot of prestige.’ However, the Party decides that Po Prostu must go. The closing of the weekly and a brutally dispersed student demonstration against the decision are regarded as the symbolic end of October ’56.
Now Gomułka and Morawski order all the newspapers to publish an editorial approving the closure of Po Prostu. ‘ “Jurek”, I said to Morawski, “if I print that, you will never shake my hand again,” ’ Turski recalls. ‘ “I defended Po Prostu at the meeting, and I can’t behave like a weathercock.” ’
Sztandar Młodych is the only paper that refuses to publish Gomułka’s statement. Soon Morawski informs Turski that the Party leadership have decided to dismiss him from the post of acting editor-in-chief. In an act of solidarity, most of the journalists working for the paper hand in their resignations.
At the time, Kapuściński is Sztandar’s correspondent in China. As soon as he hears what has happened at the newspaper office, he leaves the paper.
Shortly before leaving for China, Kapuściński writes a series of reports on ZMP members who have been set adrift since October ’56, and about the hopes that have been dashed for the second time in their short lives.
At the Dymitrow mine in Bytom he goes to see a newly founded club for former ZMP members, who are now frustrated. ‘The students come and shout: drive him out, he’s a Stalinist’, confides a former activist. Nowadays the most common attitude is: don’t stick your neck out, don’t be active, because, as another interviewee says, ‘There are plenty of active people among the Stalinists’. Yes, the former activists are disillusioned at the way they have been repaid for all their enterprise and dedication.
Until recently a ZMP activist just like them, and president of the faculty organization at college, Kapuściński shows open solidarity with the spurned ZMP members. He contrasts them with the masses, who ‘go straight to bed after work, go out chasing girls, or sometimes go to the cinema’.
For who can still be counted on? Who is going to change our world? The końcowi (‘enders’) aren’t going to do it, are they?
The końcowi, who are also young people, are the opposite of the ZMP members. Kapuściński encounters them in the Warsaw districts of Wola and Ochota. These are people from another world; a few years earlier, he would have described them as ‘the enemy’. For the końcowi, good looks, strength and money are what matter. They don’t like intellectuals or smart alecs – ‘squares’ – because they reek of school, and school is the worst thing of all. Under Stalinism, they rebelled against the ZMP’s prim-and-proper manner, and among themselves they said what they thought about socialism. There was a bit of risk and cynicism in their behaviour. But now? Now anything’s allowed. You can even laugh at a ZMP president to his face, and what happens? Nothing.
Stories about the końcowi contain a hint of nostalgia for the grand years of building socialism, even if the mirror image of the solemnity of those years are now people who don’t give a hoot about socialism. In his pieces about the końcowi, Kapuściński records the climate of apathy and post-October decadence, portraying a Poland he hardly knew – as a young ZMP activist, he never paid attention to it. But the moment is coming that will mark the end of rebellion, the exhaustion of strength, a collision with the pervasive presence of those who hated socialism. By the same token, his stories about ZMP members describe the atrophied hopes of those who wanted to repair socialism.
And afterward? What happened afterward? What should I write about now? About the way that a great experience comes to an end? A melancholy topic, for a revolt is a great experience, an adventure of the heart. Look at people who are taking part in a revolt. They are stimulated, excited, ready to make sacrifices . . . But there comes a moment when the mood burns out and everything ends. As a matter of reflex, out of custom, we go on repeating the gestures and the words and want everything to be the way it was yesterday, but we know already – and the discovery appals us – that this yesterday will never again return. We look around and make another discovery: those who were with us have also changed – something has burned out in them, as well, something has been extinguished. Our community falls suddenly to pieces and everyone returns to his everyday I, which pinches at first like ill-fitting shoes – but we know that they are our shoes and we are not going to get any others. We look uncomfortably into each other’s eyes, we shy away from conversation, we stop being any use to one another.
This fall in temperature, this change of climate, belongs among the most unsettling and depressing of experiences. A day begins in which something should happen. And nothing happens. Nobody comes to call, nobody is waiting for us, we are superfluous. We begin to feel a great fatigue, apathy gradually engulfs us.27
So he will write many years later, in his book about the Iranian revolution. (Can we be certain it is just about Iran?)
And so begins the period in Polish history known as the ‘minor stabilization’.
But Kapuściński, the romantic, cannot come to terms with what he sees and describes in his reports: ‘We should continue to take up the task of liberating the world anew, even if it means falling over dozens of times along the way.’28 Were it not for a certain journey, from which he has recently returned, he would not have written this manifesto.