In the Corridors of Power
The phone rings in Artur Starewicz’s office.
‘Listen, Rysiek Kapuściński is coming to see you – he’ll tell you about his African plans.’
Before giving his final consent and arranging a foreign currency allowance for the reporter’s trip, PAP editor-in-chief Michał Hoffman calls the man in charge of all journalists and editors, the head of the Central Committee Press Office.
‘Hoffman was an intelligent man,’ says Starewicz at his flat in Warsaw’s Old Town. ‘He wanted some back-up in case any of the Party leaders hauled him over the coals for wasting money. Africa wasn’t a priority, but Hoffman reckoned it was important and worthwhile, apart from which he valued Kapuściński. And I always gave a positive opinion.’
Starewicz, Gomułka’s man, was born in 1917. Close to the Party ‘liberals’ (the ‘Puławians’) in the watershed period of October ’56, he first meets Kapuściński during his days at Sztandar Młodych. Their relations are ‘friendly but formal and professional’. They do not meet up in private. They address each other in the formal manner, as ‘Comrade’, which was regular parlance within the Party apparatus in those days. Kapuściński is on informal terms with Starewicz’s wife, who works for Polityka.
Rysiek arrives at the Central Committee building on the corner of Jerozolimskie Avenue and Nowy Świat Street in central Warsaw – he has a multiple entry pass – and tells Starewicz where he wants to go and what he is planning to do. On his return from the journey, he returns and tells him what he saw and experienced.
‘I heard everything from him that could later be read in his reports, except in a more adventurous version. He told me how he had nothing to eat in Africa or nowhere to spend the night. But he wrote better than he narrated.’ Starewicz laughs. ‘He wanted to catch my interest so that the door would be open for him to make more trips in the future.’
‘Did the Central Committee know who Kapuściński was?’
‘Of course, it was known he was a talented man and wrote superb analyses. But to tell the truth, no profound, in-depth view was expressed, because Gomułka was more interested in German affairs – for him Africa was an exotic place.’
‘Did you remain in touch later on, when Gierek replaced Gomułka, and you left the Central Committee?’
‘No. To be honest, I don’t know what Kapuściński thought of me – after all, I represented the Party apparatus which was at loggerheads with the journalists. When I was the Polish ambassador in London in the 1970s, he never visited me, though I know he used to come to London. Maybe he didn’t need me any more and chose not to keep up our acquaintance?’
‘Did you know that Kapuściński had support within the Party élite that was not entirely sympathetic towards you? His chief protector was Ryszard Frelek.’
‘Well, Kapuściński was a journalist; he kept up with various people. In the 1960s Frelek was secretary to Zenon Kliszko [the Party’s number two person]. Kliszko took him on because he wasn’t a good judge of people. But he knew Frelek was intelligent and could be useful. Frelek could pick up various sorts of rumours for him: who, what, with whom. Kliszko liked to know that sort of thing but had no way of finding it all out.’
In 1968, when the Party starts beating its anti-Semitic drums, Starewicz, who has Jewish roots, will be one of the objects of attack by the Red-nationalist élite, among whom Frelek will play a significant role.
His office is on the first floor, in the wing of the Central Committee building that overlooks the National Museum. The women secretaries’ room adjoins at the front, then there is a large study the size of three biggish rooms in an apartment, with a small bedroom at the back. This is where Frelek works. On returning from his posting as a PAP correspondent in India, after a short period co-managing the PAP, Frelek drops journalism and focuses on a political career.
As a thirty-something mapping out a route to the top, he could not have found a better job: his boss, Kliszko, has the deciding vote on the country’s most important political issues, with the exception of the economy. Kliszko’s authority covers matters of personnel, education, culture, the press, foreign affairs and relations with the Church. In addition, he is quite a cultural snob: he can recite the Polish nineteenth-century romantic poet Cyprian Norwid’s verses by heart, and he publishes his own poems under a pseudonym.
They are a perfect match – Frelek, too, will never drop his intellectual ambitions. While working as a Party dignitary, in his spare time he will write stage plays, film scripts and novels of manners; he will also lecture at the journalism faculty and run courses on the history of diplomacy. His friends and comrades describe him as a ‘Renaissance man’. His enemies and comrades call him ‘a murky character, a schemer’.
Frelek is fond of Kapuściński. It is he, while still one of the decision-makers at the PAP, who brings him into the agency and suggests he take the posting in Africa. He appreciates the talents of his chum from India and finds their friendship flattering. To some extent, he feels like a patron – vicariously satisfying his own dreams, set aside for another day.
While Kapuściński is away for several years on his African posting, unrest within the Party begins. The second and third Party ranks – the thirty- to forty-year-olds – are beginning to grumble about the older ones. This is nothing new: it is the usual rebellion by the younger generation, a revolt by bureaucrats jockeying for position. Meanwhile, their paths to promotion are blocked because the more important posts are occupied by older activists, from the war period and the time immediately afterwards.
The young bureaucrats do not have the ideological zeal of the communists from the heroic era of building socialism. What they are interested in are privileges; they want a comfortable, affluent life. But First Secretary Gomułka is an old-style ascetic, and he has been preventing them from enjoying the fruits of power. It would be worth removing him – but how?
At this same juncture, a group known as ‘the partisans’ appears on the Party’s political horizon. This is a fairly informal faction, whose most prominent figures are people who fought with the communist partisans and are now employed at government ministries. The informal leader of this movement, or ferment, or élite, is a veteran of the Red partisans of the Second World War, Mieczysław Moczar. He holds the post of deputy minister and will soon be minister of internal affairs; he is also the president of an old soldiers union that has several hundred thousand members. His ‘partisans’ promote a curious ideology: nationalism expressed in the language of communist doctrine.
They rehabilitate the national tradition, which the PRL’s official propaganda has perhaps not entirely consigned to the dustbin but regards as a relic, a symbol of bygone days that will never return. The Red nationalists like to talk about the Fatherland, Tradition and the Nation in capital letters, with pomp and pathos. They extol the achievements of the Polish army in centuries past and during the Second World War. Books, films and plays appear in the spirit of Red-nationalist ideology. The main mouthpieces are Catholic journals licensed by the Party and also a few Party publications, including the weekly Kultura.
The partisans derive their strength and confidence from the fact that the thirst for their ideology goes beyond the Party ranks. Many people in Poland who keep their distance from the Party and live in a private niche of their own, Catholics who reject the official atheism, and citizens who care about patriotic traditions, view the partisans with a certain degree of sympathy, a touch of incredulity, and some amount of hope. Here a different species of Red has appeared: they talk about the Fatherland and do not abhor the national tradition. Is it possible to attain some sort of patriotic socialism that is common to all of us?
The nationalist–patriotic mythology proves to be the perfect fuel for a revolt by the second ranks, the people within the apparatus who occupy posts at the middle level – on municipal and district Party committees. At the top of the power structure the informal patrons of this new wave are the ‘secretaries’ secretaries’: Walery Namiotkiewicz (Gomułka’s secretary), Stanisław Trepczyński (head of the Central Committee secretariat), and Frelek (Kliszko’s secretary).
The partisans define their enemies within the Party as nihilists, cosmopolitans, and also, as in the past, revisionists. Gomułka cannot stand revisionists either, which he has demonstrated more than once: however, the partisans think him too lenient, and feel that the poison of revisionism is still destroying the Party. In the eyes of the partisans, the main hotbed of evil includes people involved in culture and the academic world, the eggheads, ever suspicious, who sneer at national tradition – and if they are of Jewish origin, they are sure to be enemies of Poland.
At first the partisans adopt a carrot-and-stick approach to Polityka and its editor-in-chief, Rakowski. Before dubbing him an enemy, attempts are made to bring him over to the ‘right’ side. ‘It would happen like this: Frelek would drop in at the editorial office and say to Rakowski: “Listen, why not give Mietek Moczar a call? He’s always asking about you. You could meet for dinner and have a chat,” ’ Marian Turski tells me.
Rakowski, who loathes the nationalist ideology of the partisans, resists all the subterfuge and persuasion. Neither he nor the Polityka team give in to the Red-nationalist wave during its apogee in March 1968, when the official language of the nationalist–communists becomes anti-Semitism, and removing people of Jewish origin from Party and public posts becomes Party policy.
Kapuściński, who spends most of this time in Africa, is confused on his return to Poland by the friction within the Party. Rakowski records an anecdote from August 1966:
Recently Rysiek Kapuściński told the following story. On his return from Africa he was invited in by Trepczyński, head of the First Secretary’s office with the rank of CC department manager. Werblan and Olszowski also took part in the conversation. After a while his interlocutors moved from African affairs to domestic ones, and started to criticize Gomułka extremely severely . . . Rysiek was surprised. ‘What’s going on?’ he asked me. ‘Can you imagine, his closest associates were bitching about him in the room next door to his. What does it mean?’ I tried to explain the situation to him.1
Kapuściński is torn by loyalties and friendships. He worked with Rakowski for several years at Polityka, and they liked and respected each other; now, however, the editor-in-chief of Polityka, as well as the weekly itself, is starting to be frowned on at the summit of power. Occasionally Rakowski gets a dressing-down from Gomułka; he is also being jostled by the partisans and the secretaries’ secretaries (most openly by Frelek) – ultimately by friends and colleagues. To be too close to Rakowski and Polityka would be politically unwise.
On top of that, Kapuściński has close social connections with Frelek, a history of shared experiences in India, and a chummy relationship. Frelek can do more for him: he can help, fix things – he has already done that anyway. And Frelek can’t stand Rakowski; he is waging an underhand war against the editor-in-chief of Polityka. Who should be held on to?
According to Marian Turski, his former boss at Sztandar Młodych and his colleague from Polityka: ‘Rysiek always knew how to come to terms with his political bosses. He never fell into disfavour with his superiors, thanks to which he had a free hand in many matters and could put his plans into action.’
Kapuściński showed patience while listening to the high and mighty. He had a friendly expression, a smile, and, whether consciously or not, he did not put on airs or imply that he was better than they. And that flattered the provincials and parvenus in high positions. ‘He listens to me,’ some of them would think. ‘That brilliant reporter, an intellectual who has travelled the world, understands me. So what I say must be clever and interesting.’ He knew how to listen to nonsense while showing interest when necessary. He gave the impression of caring about his interlocutors.
Was this opportunism? Possibly. Or maybe just competence, a way of achieving his ends.
‘It was a known fact in our environment that whenever Kapuściński came back from his latest journey he gave Kliszko and Frelek a sort of informal briefing.’
Daniel Passent is far from passing censure on Kapuściński. Such were the times, and that was how you functioned if you wanted to work in that profession. To do something positive, to make arrangements or push things onto the right tracks, you had to have connections ‘upstairs’. In any case, today’s appraisals are often out of historical context: Kapuściński regarded the PRL as his country, a place where he felt comfortable. He was a loyal Party member. Why should he ever have thought of talking to colleagues on the Central Committee as doing something wrong?
‘He was more intelligent and better informed than most of our diplomats in the Third World countries. It is to the Party decision-makers’ credit that they wanted to hear what he had to tell them about the situation in Africa, and later in Latin America.’ This is Frelek’s view: that people in power should listen to what Kapuściński has to say about the Third World.
Frelek can fix matters that cannot be fixed. Józef Klasa, who also took part in the ‘second ranks’ revolt, relates that it was thanks to Frelek that Che Guevara’s Bolivian Diary was published in Poland – at Kapuściński’s request, and in his translation. Being at loggerheads with Moscow, Guevara is regarded within the socialist camp as a shady character, an anti-Soviet lefty. Kapuściński takes the matter to Frelek, Frelek takes it to Kliszko, and the revolutionary’s diary is published (it will never been reissued in communist Poland again).
Kapuściński sorts out not just his own affairs through Frelek, but also those of his friends. In a letter to Jerzy Nowak, in which he urges his closest friend to drop the diplomatic service and choose an academic career instead, he writes:
I had a meeting with a PISM [Polish Institute for International Affairs] seminar on the Third World – the standard was simply desperate. The worst thing is they’re all retired people, there are no young ones. They regard anyone who wants to work on the Third World as worth their weight in gold. I have already spoken about you to Ryś Frelek – they’ll give you an academic grant and welcome you with open arms. You’ll soon get your post-doc done, become an associate professor, and soon after that a Warsaw University professor.2
When Kapuściński leaves for his posting as a PAP correspondent in Latin America – the only time he ever takes his wife and daughter along – Frelek looks after his flat in Warsaw’s Wola district. When he is in Poland, he often visits Frelek at his summer cottage in Mazuria. Sometimes he hides away there, far from the office, far from Warsaw, and writes.
‘I remember those strong, unfiltered cigarettes, those parties. When Rysio used to sing “The magic of Polesie, the wild forests and marshes . . .”,’ recalled Frelek after his friend’s death.
‘He had good intuition about people.’
Andrzej Werblan, a prominent Party activist in those days, gets to know Kapuściński through Frelek. Familiar with his African reports issued in the PAP’s Special Bulletin, he is delighted by Kapuściński’s sense of observation, his analyses and his knowledge of remote and unknown parts of the world.
‘He used to come and see us at the Central Committee – I can remember having conversations about the rivalry between the Soviet Union and China on African territory, and of course about decolonization. He was an idealist, always emotionally involved, sometimes a little uncritical. He also had an emotional approach to his leftist convictions and his Party membership, wholly and utterly.’
I ask Werblan for character sketches of Kapuściński’s remaining political friends (apart from Frelek) in that era:
Trepczyński: Open-minded, speaks foreign languages, prides himself on having friends in the world of culture. A social charmer. As with Frelek, Kapuściński meets up with Trepczyński socially too, at name-day parties, for dinner, for drinks.
Józef Czesak: Head of the Central Committee Foreign Department. A good deal older than Kapuściński. An émigré who returned from France, from a mining family that left Poland before the war. Western chic, great intelligence. A communist believer, but one who believes ‘in the French way’, with detachment and self-irony.
Michał Hoffman: Editor-in-chief of the PAP, Kapuściński’s direct boss and promoter. Before the war he was a journalist at the Polish Telegraphic Agency, in love with the profession. Indulgent about Kapuściński’s extravagances, i.e., disappearing for weeks on end, writing not necessarily in the news style required at the PAP and not always at sufficient length. Someone will mention years later that Kapuściński did not shine for his reports on political and economic events, because he was more interested in fraternizing with ordinary people in each successive African country. Hoffman tolerates his protégé’s predilections.
I make the following notes in the margin: Do not forget the most important thing – Kapuściński achieves his success thanks to his talents and some terribly hard work, his wonderful reports, and then his books. His genuine commitment to the Party, friendships and connections at the pinnacle of the power structure facilitate a great deal for him and are extremely helpful; they create the conditions for his talent to develop. Be careful, however, not to imply that Kapuściński’s greatness comes from the fact that he knew Frelek and other comrades. This is a significant element of his success, the fascinating know-how necessary to a career in the PRL era, but it is not the essence of why we love and admire Kapuściński. Plenty of writers and reporters had close connections with the authorities, friends in high places, and plenty of them have been forgotten. But we still read Kapuściński, in Poland and worldwide.
Marcin Kula, a historian to whom I talk about Kapuściński’s connections within the Central Committee, picks up a surprising lead. He once wrote a book called Communism Like Religion, in which he analyses the similarities between church and communist rituals. After reading it, Kapuściński wrote Kula an enthusiastic letter congratulating him.
In our conversation, Kula notes that in communism one can discern a curious vestige left over from feudalism: the relationship between the feudal lord and his vassal. He cites two examples from real life. His father, Witold Kula, was an eminent historian who occasionally benefited from the help of a certain acquaintance, a professor high up in the Party hierarchy. For instance, whenever he had trouble obtaining a passport, he would turn to his ‘feudal lord’, who would say, ‘Go and see so-and-so, he knows who you are, he’s sure to help.’
In much the same way, whenever the censors found fault with something in his History of Brazil, Marcin Kula would turn for help to an academic he knew at the Jagiellonian University who was a member of the Politburo. He would manage to save the politically incorrect passage, though not in every single case. In tricky situations, Kula used to ask him to intervene two or three more times.
‘But please do not write that my father or I, or Kapuściński, were anyone’s vassals,’ he urges me. ‘This imperfect analogy is just meant to illustrate one of the mechanisms of the “progressive” system, one of its paradoxes.’
‘In the end Rysiek distanced himself from Polityka,’ says Janusz Rolicki, a junior colleague from the weekly.
His colleagues can sense that Kapuściński finds his recent connections with Polityka uncomfortable.
‘Why do you think that was?’ I ask.
‘He felt tied to people like Frelek, or Trepczyński . . . And apart from that he manoeuvred and calculated.’
Kapuściński publishes his final reports in Polityka in 1966. His name appears only a few more times on its pages, for example when it reprints his longer articles from Latin America from the PAP Special Bulletin. After that, the final links are broken.
‘Did the “partisans” flirt with Rysiek?’
‘I’d be surprised if they didn’t try,’ Turski tells me.
‘He regarded the partisans with sympathy,’ recalls a colleague from the PAP, Wiesława Bolimowska, but at once adds a proviso: ‘However, you must understand properly what that means.’ As she indicates, one cannot regard that conflict within the Party purely in terms of the later anti-Semitic campaign of March 1968. The nationalist–communist wave was a reaction to a lack of motion, to stagnation, and at first it looked like a movement of defiance against the minor stabilization. Moczar was supported not just by nationalists and anti-Semites but also by the ‘technical intelligentsia’, who wanted to open up the country to modernity. Nowadays it has been forgotten that many people from various parties saw hope for change in nationalist communism.
‘And then we were horrified by the face that Moczar-ism revealed to us,’ Bolimowska continues. ‘Afterwards, Rysiek said something along the lines of “It’s a good thing I went abroad, because they wanted me to get more involved; they would have dragged me into it.” ’
The apogee of the partisans’ anti-Semitic campaign coincides with student protests against censorship (concerning a photograph from the National Theatre’s poster for Adam Mickiewicz’s play Forefather’s Eve) and in defence of colleagues expelled from academic institutions. Now not just the partisans but also Gomułka, riding on their wave, promote the idea that the youth protests are inspired by former Stalinists of Jewish origin, who want to return to power. This bogus theory serves as justification for the purge that sweeps across the country, removing Poles of Jewish descent from their jobs in offices, on committees and at colleges. The vacated posts are occupied by those who until now have belonged to the second and third ranks of Party bureaucrats. Goal achieved! Gomułka himself, who has no qualms about joining the nationalist campaign, will remain in power for only another two and a half years.
During the apogee of the anti-Semitic witch-hunt, Kapuściński is working as a PAP correspondent in Santiago de Chile, during which time he travels to La Paz, Lima, and elsewhere. Despite being far from home, he has the opportunity to see at close range how Ambassador Jerzy Witold Dudziński is removed from his post on the wave of purges.
Does Kapuściński comment on this event in private conversations? Does he express an opinion about the turmoil in Poland, the anti-Semitic propaganda, the student protests or the repression? A Polish diplomat of the time in Chile says, ‘We never got onto “dissident” topics.’
Does Kapuściński know – or will he find out later – that his political patron, Frelek, has a hand in the anti-Semitic campaign?
On 11 March 1968, the front page of Słowo Powszechne (The Universal Word) carries an appeal ‘To Warsaw University Students’, in which the leaders of the student protests are characterized as Zionists and the children of Stalinists. Everything is clear: the ‘Judaeo-Stalinists’ are raising their heads, so they have to be cut off. The appeal has no signature. Many years later, Rakowski will reveal in his published diaries that this anti-Semitic text was written by Ryszard Frelek.3
A friend from the weekly Kultura remembers a conversation with Kapuściński sometime after the shock of 1968. Kapuściński said at the time that ‘a wave of coups d’état and military dictatorships is rolling across the world’, and then predicted that ‘the security services are going to take charge in Poland too!’ As the friend recalls, ‘He announced it with his typical doom and gloom.’
A female fellow journalist remembers a meeting at the Polityka office attended by Kapuściński, who at the time was on a short holiday in Poland: ‘He clearly didn’t want to take a stance on the issue of March 1968, at least within our circle. Polityka had behaved decently at the time; it was the only Party newspaper that didn’t take part in the anti-Semitic witch-hunt. Rysiek looked down on us a little, from a bird’s eye view – for being so excited about our backwoods while in the world outside major things were happening, and so events in Poland should be viewed in a broader perspective. I got the impression that he regarded Moczar-ism as a “refreshing” movement, but after all, lots of people, especially the young ones, let themselves be taken in by it.’
On returning from his short holiday in Poland, Kapuściński writes in a letter to Nowak (who is then working at the embassy in Buenos Aires):
The situation in a nutshell: the All-Poles have pulled themselves upwards, but not very much, not very much. The old lot have to a large extent managed to restore the balance, to restore the old system. There is stabilization again, and a personnel freeze. This state will continue for ages, several years at least. The year 1968 is now never to be repeated. There will be no great sensations before we go back to Poland. It’s a country where nothing is ever done fully.
He continues with a bit of advice for his friend:
In any case, don’t stick your neck out, because it’s very unfashionable now. Act according to the principle ‘let each within his own circle do as the spirit of the Lord bids him, and the whole thing will fall into place’. A definite individualization of effort has set in, i.e. it’s important to do something that aims towards one’s own development.4
Kapuściński’s attitude towards the political turmoil of March is not clear. He writes about the nationalist–communists as ‘All-Poles’, which sounds mocking and indicates a sense of detachment, implying that he regards them as nationalists rather than as fellow communists. But what does he mean when he says Poland is a country ‘where nothing is ever done fully’? Is he saying Poland is a country where even a bad business never manages to be fully carried through? Or even to ruin everything entirely? (Later Nowak remembers his unambiguous view of the anti-Semitic witch-hunt of 1968: ‘a disgrace!’)
Certainly the advice he gives his friend suggests that the idealist in Kapuściński was at that moment overcome by the realist. If there is no place for socialist ideals, ‘let’s do our own thing’, as a famous bard of the People’s Poland era used to sing.