Where to from Socialism?
Kapuściński lost a unique opportunity to talk about his dedication to the idea of communism. Although he travelled around the collapsing Soviet Union during the last two years of its existence and wrote a famous book about this journey, Imperium, he never said a word about his own connection with the idea of communism, which was fundamental to the creation of the empire.
This part of the story began in September 1939, just after the outbreak of war. Little Rysio and his mother and sister are on their way home to Pińsk after their summer holidays, but the Soviet soldiers prevent them from entering the city – they scream, threaten and point their rifles at the small family. Afterwards come hunger, fear, and deportations, and so the Kapuścińskis move from being under Soviet to being under German occupation. Imperium is not an ‘objective’, calmly written history book; it is ‘a personal account of a journey’, a reflective journal of the author’s several ‘encounters’ with the empire. It is also an account which gives rise to numerous questions.
For example, Kapuściński devotes several dozen pages to his encounter in the late 1960s, but we are not told in what circumstances he went to the Soviet Union on that occasion. Yet these circumstances are not merely worth mentioning, but entirely necessary. He was in fact sent there by the PAP, on whose commission he was meant to write a propaganda piece for the fiftieth anniversary of the October Revolution – a series of reports on the USSR’s Central Asian republics. (Slipping out of the trap, he managed to write a fascinating series of articles.)
Kapuściński personally escorts us about the Imperium and is present throughout. The exception are passages in which he speaks of the nightmares of the Stalinist terror and the Gulag, and when he deliberates on the nature of Soviet communism, the way it changed victims into executioners and vice versa, and the human costs of this seven-decade experiment. At those points Imperium turns into the cold account of a historian and analyst; the Kapuściński who encountered the empire several times vanishes. This account of the Soviet Union seems to be the product of a man who at the start of the Second World War was a victim of Stalin’s aggression towards Poland (which he was), and several decades later is travelling about the collapsing superpower as . . . who exactly? A former victim returning to the country of his childhood? An impartial observer from another planet? A historian? Any reader unaware of the author’s life story would be entitled to come away with a variety of such impressions.
My sense that the book could be thus interpreted is unintentionally confirmed by a journalist from Hong Kong, who asks me some questions about the master. It was she, a long-time fan of Kapuściński’s, who recommended Imperium to a Chinese publisher.
‘Until now, as a book by an anti-communist, Imperium has not been able to appear in China,’ she tells me.
‘An anti-communist? But for most of his adult life, Kapuściński was a member of the Communist Party.’
‘Impossible!’ she cries in amazement.
In the book, not once does Kapuściński mention that for nearly his entire adult life he subscribed to the idea that powered the building, and then the politics, of the empire, or that his own country was a sort of province of that empire. What choices did he make at the time? Why those and not others? To say nothing about this seems quite odd in the context of a personal and political reflection on his experiences of the history of the Soviet empire and of the most alluring idea of the twentieth century, which, once realized, ended in a nightmare or, in the most benign instances, failure.
In the spring of 1989, reading the news arriving from Moscow, I thought: It would be worth going there. (Others were pushing me in the same direction, since, whenever it comes to life, Russia starts to interest a lot of people.) It was a time when everyone felt a sense of curiosity about and anticipation of something extraordinary. It seemed then, at the end of the eighties, that the world was entering a period of great metamorphosis, of a transformation so profound and fundamental that it would not bypass anyone, no country or state, and so certainly not the last imperium on earth – the Soviet Union.
A climate conducive to democracy and freedom prevailed increasingly across the world. On every continent, dictatorships fell one after the other: Obote’s in Uganda, Marcos’s in the Philippines, Pinochet’s in Chile. In Latin America, despotic military regimes lost power in favor of more moderate civilian ones, and in Africa the one-party systems that had been nearly ubiquitous (and as a rule grotesque and thoroughly corrupt) were disintegrating and exiting the political stage.
Against this new and promising global panorama the Stalinist–Brezhnevian system of the USSR looked more and more anachronistic, like a decaying and ineffectual relic. But it was an anachronism with a still-powerful and dangerous force. The crisis that the Imperium was undergoing was followed throughout the world with attention, but with anxious attention – everyone was aware that this was a power equipped with weapons of mass destruction that could blow up our planet. Yet the possibility of this gloomy and alarming scenario nevertheless did not mask the satisfaction and universal relief that communism was ending and that there was in this fact some sort of irreversible finality.
Germans say Zeitgeist, the spirit of the times. It is a fascinating moment, fraught with promise, when this spirit of the times, dozing pitifully and apathetically, like a huge wet bird on a branch, suddenly and without a clear reason (or at any rate without a reason allowing of an entirely rational explanation) unexpectedly takes off into bold and joyful flight. We can all hear the shush of this flight. It stirs our imagination and gives us energy: we begin to act.1
The spirit of the times takes Kapuściński to the Vorkuta mines and the old forced-labour camps at Magadan and Kolyma.
There were 160 camps – or, as they are also called, Arctic death camps – in Magadan and Kolyma. The convicts changed over the years, but at any given moment there were around half a million residents. Of these, one-third died in the camps, and the rest, after serving years of hard labor, left as physical cripples or with permanent psychic injuries. Whoever survived Magadan and Kolyma was never again the person he or she once was.
The camp was a sadistically and precisely thought-out structure, having as its goal the destruction of the individual in such a way that before death he would experience the greatest humiliations, sufferings, and torments. It was a barbed net of destruction from which a man, once having fallen into it, could not extricate himself.2
When did he find out about all this? Did the Kapuścińskis, who escaped from Pińsk in fear of being deported, ever return to the experience in their family conversations? Did the eighteen-year-old Rysiek set about building socialism with knowledge – if only displaced – of the Soviet system, believing that in Poland it would be different? Or did he only later find out about the atrocities of Soviet Stalinism? When?
I am not asking these questions with a view to ‘squaring accounts’ or ‘hunting Reds’, as was fashionable after the fall of real socialism. I have neither the right nor the desire to pillory anyone. I simply wish to understand my hero better, and perhaps to find out something universal: what are the mechanisms that make it possible to reconcile irreconcilable information about crimes with one’s dreams of a better world? And I’d like to find that out from Kapuściński.
If he had not written Imperium, would I be asking these questions? Yes, but less adamantly. I would have recognized that behind the lack of public consideration of his own former involvement hide trauma, pain, a secret. But here, in Imperium, Kapuściński himself takes us on a tour of the Soviet Union, of the camps, of the history of the Stalinist purges, the specific facts of Soviet colonialism, which is different from the British or Spanish variety. He invites us to talk about this topic; more than that, he draws up a tally of the injustices and losses, but – in what is ultimately a personal account – he says not a word about himself or his own belief in the idea which engendered the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Absolutely nothing. With his talent for observing human attitudes and behaviour, with his unique capacity for empathy, he could have brought something new to our knowledge of the history of communism and of the twentieth century. Instead of which he offers interesting and not necessarily original thoughts, but they are sterile, bereft of personal perspective.
Perhaps only once – and even this is not certain – does he come close to confronting his own résumé, when he writes:
One walks along the streets of Magadan through high-walled corridors dug out in the snow. They are narrow, and when another person is passing one must stop to let him by. Sometimes at such a moment I find myself standing face-to-face with some elderly man. Always, one question comes to my mind: And who were you? The executioner or the victim?
And why am I moved to wonder? Why am I unable to look at this man in an ordinary way, without that perverse and intrusive curiosity? For if I could summon up my courage and ask him this question, and if he responded sincerely, I might hear the answer: ‘You see, you have before you both the executioner and the victim’.
This too was a characteristic of Stalinism – that in many instances it was impossible to distinguish these two roles. First someone, as an interrogating officer, would beat a prisoner, then he himself would be thrown into prison and beaten; after serving his sentence he would get out and take revenge, and so on. It was the world as a closed circle, from which there was only one exit – death. It was a nightmarish game in which everyone lost.3
When I think about Kapuściński’s life and the times in which he made his political and personal choices, other questions arise. Even in the worst years, communism in Poland cannot by any measure be compared with communism inside the Soviet Union. With the exception of a few years of Stalinism, which claimed thousands of murder victims, real socialism in the PRL was probably – may those who suffered harm forgive me – one of the mildest dictatorships of the second half of the twentieth century. Therefore, putting the question ‘Were you the executioner or the victim?’ to Kapuściński makes no sense. Others do, however: What did he know about all this? Had he heard of the camps or the frozen hell of the Gulag, as he picked up a pencil and sketched his poem in honour of Stalin? Did that poem ring in his ears as he filled the pages of Imperium with facts about the Soviet tyrant’s crimes?
I am not demanding remorse or self-criticism – I just want to understand. I would like to hear the voice of a man with unique experience behind him: victim of the empire, then builder of a province obedient to imperial power, witness to the disintegration of Western colonialism in Asia and Africa, observer of countless revolutions, uprisings and coups, chronicler of human poverty and greatness, human dreams and cruelties on many geographical latitudes. But instead of his voice – that most exceptional voice – there is silence. A silence I find disappointing and grating – and which I am also trying to understand.
Wiktor Osiatyński thinks that the atmosphere in Poland after 1989 was not one in which one could talk unguardedly about one’s own experiences with communism, including Party activities, ambiguous choices and compromises. Perhaps this is the key to Kapuściński’s silence on the topic of his own involvement. How many former Party activists, especially people in the spotlight, politicians, journalists, artists and cultural figures, were subjected to a public lynching without any inquiry into individual blame or any effort to understand their life stories or the tangled history of one’s own country? The so-called squaring of accounts was a tool in the fight for power, a whip to beat the enemy, picked up whenever it brought applause and votes. As he was thin-skinned, fearful of confrontation and sickened by polemic, Kapuściński hadn’t the slightest chance of levelling with his past under such conditions, of talking about it without fear of being spat at and stamped on.
Now it occurs to me that Imperium was in fact a chance of this kind – the only one he ever had. Perhaps a personal account by the greatest living reporter about his belief in communism, his hopes and disappointments, built into a journey around the collapsing Soviet Union, would not have got him into any trouble at all. Perhaps an unforced account – because, at that point, those who were eager for decommunization and lustration (the public exposure of those who had collaborated with the secret police) had not yet waylaid Kapuściński – would have had the quality of an intellectual journey into the past, a search for the truth about himself and all the people who were captivated by a great idea. Even if he had been attacked, he would have had armies of defenders, both in Poland and abroad.
He evidently wanted to forget about the past, not discuss it or grapple with it. His literary and civic activity at the time martial law was introduced suggests he found his Red past a burden, and didn’t know how to handle it, what attitude and strategies to adopt towards it. It is only now, having taken a three-year tour of Kapuściński’s life, that I sense this. As I read Imperium now, for the first time I hear a false note. I would like to know what sort of thoughts and feelings prey on a man as he writes about crimes, when his own past work includes a poem written years ago in honour of the criminal. What does the sixty-year-old, wiser with age, think of the eighteen-year-old who is filled with excitement or the twenty-something who has seen a great deal but cannot yet have understood much? What would the older man have to say to the younger one?
One of his friends offers the following thought in the form of a question: ‘Maybe he wouldn’t have said anything? He knew a lot, a great deal about the world, and about other people, but he knew little about himself. He didn’t know himself.’
The 1980s mark the start of Kapuściński’s great international career, but also of troubles with his own past. He has already left the Party, he rejects his former comrades’ offers (‘Choose whatever posting you like in the Third World’), goes to masses for the motherland, and occasionally appears at underground SDP (Polish Journalists Association) meetings but does not become openly involved on the side of the illegal Solidarity union. Something stops him. His own résumé? Definitely. But there is another reason, too: he wants to go abroad, and openly declaring himself to be on the side of the underground opposition could, at least in the first half of the 1980s, complicate if not prevent trips abroad on grants, lecture tours, and, above all, events surrounding the foreign publication of his books.
In his personal notes for 1982 he writes, with some irritation:
A man of compromise, flexible. In Poland such people are not liked. They’ll say he’s ambiguous. Here a person has to be unambiguous. Either black or white. Either here or there. Either with us, or with them. Plainly, openly, without hesitation! Our vision is Manichaean, front-line. We get upset if anyone disturbs this high-contrast image. This arises from the lack of a liberal or democratic tradition with a wide range of shades. Instead we have a tradition of fighting, extreme situations, the ultimate gesture.4
Where has the activist gone, who ‘openly and without hesitation’ sided with the ZMP revolution, clamoured from the ‘front line’ for the changes of October ’56, and in his reports from revolutions in the Third World declared himself – in ‘Manichaean’ style – to be ‘opposed to complications’, who liked ‘unambiguous’ situations and stayed faithful to them for so long?
Age does its work. Kapuściński is over fifty and has seen a lot. He knows too much to keep painting the world in black and white, on top of which he is having trouble with his old commitments – that is why he now sings the praises of compromise and flexibility, and feels the lack of ‘a liberal or democratic tradition with a wide range of shades’. He records the state of his own ‘political’ spirit in a poem (after a thirty-year hiatus, he returns to poetry):
Ah yes
it took a long time
before I learned to think about man
as a human being
before I discovered this way of thinking
before I took this path
in this salutary direction
and speaking of man or contemplating him
I stopped asking such questions as
is he white or black
an anarchist or monarchist
fashionable or outmoded
ours or theirs
and I began to ask
what in him is of human being . . .5
This is the confession not only of a mature man who is increasingly aware of the shadow line, not only of a successful writer acclaimed at home and abroad but also of a person at a political turning-point, for whom the questions of black or white, Party man or Solidarity member, oppositionist or defender of the status quo are awkward.
Only once does he try to level openly with the past, but it is a mere sketch for the argument which he will never develop, never wring out of himself. In Lapidarium he writes:
Those who lived through Stalinism, and those who find out about it from books and stories, cannot understand each other, because they are living on entirely different levels of information; it is not just about the fact that someone didn’t know, but also that he preferred not to know or refused to know: to ask a jarring question disliked by the authorities was a suicidal act. A ZMP instructor had to report on meetings to the board, telling not just what sort of statements were made, but who asked what questions.6
This internal fight as he grapples with himself can also be seen in his social and political behaviour. He goes out for a drink with his old comrades, meets with government spokesman Jerzy Urban (though refusing his offers) and takes advantage of minor assistance from an old Party comrade, but admits in his personal notes:
They point out to him that he has changed. But does that deserve condemnation? You have to start with the question, From whom has he changed to whom? They reproach him for having taken what was on offer in the past. They think badly of him for refusing to take any more. They have lost a partner – hence their fury. It’s the typical morality of the criminal gang: bonded by complicity in abuse. The moment you cease to do evil, you are doomed to condemnation on the part of those whom you have exposed through your act of refusal. The longer you stay in the gang, the more you will feel doomed to the gang. One day you want to leave the gang. But at once the question will arise: Will the other side accept me as one of them? The force that makes us stay in the gang is not so much fear of the gangsters’ revenge, as concern that we won’t be accepted by the people outside the gang.7
The other side will, however, accept and applaud him; after all, its participants include many people with exactly the same political biography as he – former communists whom real socialism has disappointed, but just a little earlier.
And once again he sides with the revolution!
In May 1987 Kapuściński receives an invitation to a meeting with Lech Wałęsa, who has just mustered several dozen opposition activists and sympathetic cultural figures to meet at a church on Żytna Street in Warsaw. After the meeting Kapuściński notes:
31.5. Meeting with Wałęsa. Those he invited included Łapicki, Samsonowicz, Osmańczyk, Beksiak, Edelman, Strzelecki, Turowicz and Tischner. I hadn’t seen Wałęsa for a long time. He has greatly matured. At one point I thought he reminds me of Witos.8
Eighteen months later, from the initial group invited by Wałęsa, the 135-member Citizens’ Committee (KO) emerges, which, at the Round Table talks and without the firing of a single shot, negotiates with the PRL government to end real socialism. At the time Kapuściński, who is formally a member of the KO, will be touring the Soviet Union as it decays from the inside, observing the disintegration process as it happens within the empire, without which the Round Table in Poland, the end of the old system, and the fall of the socialist bloc would be impossible.
In the new Poland, following the change of system, he burns his bridges with the past.
In October 1989, there is a reception at the Hotel Marriott to mark the visit of King Juan Carlos of Spain. Kapuściński bumps into an old comrade from the Party diplomatic pack, Stanisław Jarząbek. A broad smile, a warm embrace, it’s been ages! But soon Jarząbek sees Kapuściński go pale and stiffen, and from an old chum he changes into a cold stranger – and suddenly walks off.
‘His first reaction was natural, friendly, but shortly thereafter he realized he had made a faux pas. He was there in the company of Bronisław Geremek and his colleagues from Solidarity; he must have been aware that I, a comrade from a different era, was a shady customer, and that in this new environment it wasn’t right for him to admit to such intimacies. After that I watched him for the rest of the evening; he didn’t step away from people on the new team, perhaps to avoid bumping into any of his old pals, a good many of whom were circulating at the party. That was the decisive moment when I changed my mind about Rysiek.’
Some time later a similar situation arises. Following a funeral mass for an old acquaintance, Henryk Sobieski, a colleague from the same old guard as Jarząbek comes up to Kapuściński. He tries to give him an effusive greeting, but comes up against a brick wall. ‘What’s up, Rysiek, times have changed and you don’t want to know your old friends anymore?’
‘Sobieski said it very loud, plainly to draw attention to himself,’ says a witness to the event. People in the church began to look round, and Kapuściński hurried off in another direction.
The message behind both these situations is spelled out by a social clash that occurs in a totally different milieu. Shortly after the change of regime in Poland, Kapuściński is talking to his close friend and translator Agata Orzeszek and a friend of hers who is an avowed anti-communist. The friend puts Kapuściński in the firing line: ‘All your life you were a Party man, but what about now? You’ve made yourself so pro-Solidarity, you’ve followed the herd, gone with the environment.’
‘She’s not very bright,’ says Orzeszek later, once they are alone.
‘You know, she’s not so dumb at all. It’s true I’ve gone with the environment. Who should I have gone with?’
What does ‘gone with the environment’ mean?
Like most leading figures in the world of journalism, Kapuściński greets the end of real socialism with relief and enthusiastically supports the new, democratic market order. First of all, he supports Lech Wałęsa’s candidates in the partly democratic elections to the Sejm and the Senate held in 1989, when they rout the ancien régime. Then, for the most important issues of systemic transformation, he stands alongside the liberal intelligentsia: among other things, initially he approves of Leszek Balcerowicz’s shock therapy, which transforms the planned economy into a neo-liberal version of a market economy (so his friends remember, because Kapuściński never made any public statements on this topic).
When former comrades from the fight against ‘the commune’ start to argue about power and the road to a better future, Kapuściński, like the majority of the liberal intelligentsia, supports the first non-communist prime minister, Tadeusz Mazowiecki, in his dispute with the recent Solidarity leader, Lech Wałęsa. During the 1990 presidential elections, which Mazowiecki loses, Kapuściński is a member of his election committee, as are many other stars of the cultural and academic world.
In the parliamentary elections of the 1990s he supports the Democratic Union and its continuation, the Freedom Union, both of which defend Leszek Balcerowicz’s social and economic course and believe that to transform Poland into a democratic, capitalist country it is necessary to gain wide public consensus, tighten their belts and restrain social claims (he lends his name to honorary election committees, which involves no effort). Like most of the liberal intelligentsia, he expresses a dislike – only in conversations with friends, never writing anything about it – of squaring accounts with former communists, of witch-hunting or reproaching people for the past. He anxiously watches the expansion of the Church into the political sphere and its attempts at creating a confessional state.
In spring 1991, in a letter to Nowak, who is then Poland’s ambassador to Austria, Kapuściński outlines the atmosphere in the new Poland following the early political shocks:
Dearest Jurek,
Just a few words to tell you I’m still alive and haven’t forgotten you. I miss seeing and talking to you very much. The desertion from Poland of lively, curious minds still continues, unfortunately, and it’s hard to find anyone here whom you can talk to in a down-to-earth and interesting way. By and large there’s nothing sensational happening here. The situation is full of extremely bizarre contradictions, but then every revolution is typified by that sort of state of affairs.
The Khomeini-ization of the country is getting ever more intense. The mess and the political fragmentation are immense, and the brutalization of political life is huge and painful too. But there’s more talking than real political or personal decision-making. In other words, far more slandering than actual beheading.
Yesterday evening, 3 May, I was at a reception at the Castle given by the President. It turned out much better than expected. I talked to Wałęsa for a while. He said he’s very affected by it all, which makes it hard for him to maintain the calm and detachment appropriate to his function. In short, he shared his impressions of what it’s like when you become president.
I talked longer to Balcerowicz, and he asked me chiefly about the situation in the USSR. The impression of the new team [of Jan Krzysztof Bielecki, who became prime minister after Wałęsa’s presidential victory in December 1990]: they are still feeling rather unsure in the saddle, but they’re doing their best to be likeable and to make a good impression.
I think the most important thing in the country is a slight improvement in the atmosphere. There are lots of new shops opening, you can buy everything, here and there you see some beneficial changes, there are all sorts of new initiatives (especially out of town), in short, you can see a few brighter points.9
As his home turf in the new Poland, Kapuściński chooses Gazeta Wyborcza, the biggest opinion-forming daily paper, established at the moment of transformation by people who came from the underground press, and run by legendary democratic oppositionist Adam Michnik. The paper’s political line determines (or expresses) the position of a large proportion of the liberal intelligentsia in Poland’s major public debates after communism.
Kapuściński drops in at the Gazeta office on Iwicka Street, later Czerska Street, not to work but to visit, for a bit of friendly gossip. He likes to know what’s being discussed. He meets familiar people, gets to know the new generation of journalists, and creates a positive aura around himself. During his regular visits, once a month or sometimes every second month – as long as he’s in the country – he usually looks in on the deputy editors: Helena Łuczywo and his old friends from the PRL press, Juliusz Rawicz and Ernest Skalski.
‘Helena and I have established an iron principle: we don’t talk about Gazeta,’ he once told me, and shortly afterwards related some anecdotes demonstrating that the main topic of conversation was in fact Gazeta.
‘So what do you talk about?’
‘Everything; what’s going on here and there, what’s happening in Poland and abroad.’
(That is how I remember the exchange, to which I attached no significance; at the time it had never occurred to me that one day Rysiek would die and I would write his biography.)
After he was gone, I asked Helena Łuczywo herself what she and Rysiek talked about. She thought for awhile, and replied that she couldn’t remember anything in particular. ‘The news, current affairs.’
Kapuściński needed to feel a sense of belonging. He was usually independent-minded – perhaps with the exception of the first few years of democracy, when he ‘went along with the environment’ – but he understood that for success you need not just work and talent, but also a group that supports you, giving you strength, approval, and safety. He believed that a journalist, reporter or feature writer needs friendly surroundings where his work can flourish. And Gazeta Wyborcza, with which he felt far more connected than distanced regarding Polish affairs, proved to be just such a place for him. The differences between his and the newspaper’s positions, which crop up to a minor extent in the late 1990s and in international affairs after the attacks of 11 September 2001 in New York and Washington, never lead to open conflict or a parting of the ways. Kapuściński remains on friendly terms with Gazeta, its chiefs and its many journalists to the end.
Just as in the previous era he first published each new book in instalments in the weekly Kultura, so in the new times he does exactly the same in Gazeta. This is the way Imperium, The Shadow of the Sun, Travels with Herodotus and volumes of Lapidarium get published. As he used to say, having the weekly discipline was the only way he could be mobilized to write systematically; it provided an obligation that permitted him to drop the perfectionism that was so fatal for creativity, that prevented him from accepting his incomplete knowledge of a topic and held him back from starting work on a book.
His writing, too, also shows evidence of going along with the environment. How much of his grappling with his own past involves adjusting his views to fit the new times? How much is the genuine evolution of those views? How much is plain disorientation – totally understandable at the time of a historical watershed?
In his notes from the early 1990s he writes:
The tragedy of the former communists: that they remain in the orbit of the issue of communism. Obsessively, incurably. Their entire thinking, their activity is animated, powered, motivated first of all by the fight for communism, and after that the fight against communism.10
It is striking to see the former communists presented as ‘they’. The comment that comes to mind is that Kapuściński is having trouble coming to terms with his own past – which is the attitude of many people who have had similar experiences.
Further on he writes:
The environment also forces the former communist to keep harping on the issue of communism (why he joined, why he withdrew, et cetera). The environment puts pressure especially on those who are capable of saying or writing something. Meanwhile, these very people often have little to say, because they have been living in good conditions and never came up against the crimes of the system. The fact is, the system was anonymous and relied on anonymous people, on a colourless, nameless army of bureaucrats, policemen, inspectors, guards and informers. The entire fiendishness of the system lay in its greyness, fogginess and mediocrity, in its shabbiness and torpor.11
This is hugely imprecise: the system also counted among the ranks of its faithful people from the world of culture, scholars and journalists; it had an attractive – up to a point – social programme, and a vision for the future that fired the imagination. Whence the suggestion that only victims of the system and people living in poor conditions within that system can have anything essential to say about communism?
During the 1990s, in his Lapidaria, Kapuściński sometimes happens to refer to the Marxists this, the Marxists that, ‘against the expectations of the Marxists’. He points out Marx’s incorrect prophecies, for example that the working class would eliminate capitalism, when we are actually witnessing how capitalism eliminates the working class. He says nothing about the role of Marxist thought in his own intellectual biography for several decades: he himself was a Marxist. As with the former communists, the Marxists become ‘them’.
Perhaps it was because of a desire to erase the past (possibly out of fear that while hunting former Reds, someone will remember his past?) that he affirmed the view that ‘nowadays there is no left or right, there are just people with an open, liberal, receptive mentality, turned towards the future, and people with a closed, sectarian, restricted mentality, turned towards the past’.12 In so doing, Kapuściński repeats the thinking of intellectuals such as Leszek Kołakowski or the British sociologist and ideologue Anthony Giddens, who, in saying good-bye to the left, applauded the post–Cold War shift in politics towards the centre and heralded the utopia of the purported ‘end of History’.
Nearly a decade later, Kapuściński says his farewells to this line of thought – alien to everything he has written his entire life, everything with which he has identified, and of which he has been in favour. Soon he will re-adopt his left-wing thinking and return to the person he was before 1989 – but in a new language, more palatable in the era of ‘the end of History’.
Meanwhile the mainstream declares him ‘Journalist of the Century’.
In 1999 the trade monthly Press invites fifty well-known Polish press, radio and television journalists to cast their votes. Each of them offers the names of three people in the media whose achievements set an example for future practitioners of the profession.
Kapuściński wins the vote, against such candidates as Jerzy Turowicz, Jerzy Giedroyc, Melchior Wańkowicz, Adam Michnik, Hanna Krall and Ksawery Pruszyński.
Ryszard Kapuściński is the grand master of reportage. His works have gained recognition not just for professional technique, but also for literary language and idiosyncratic turn of phrase.13
This is an era of laurels at home and abroad: statuettes, honorary doctorates, lectures . . . He is at the height of his fame. In Italy, Sweden, the Spanish-speaking world, and – though to a lesser degree – the Anglo-Saxon countries, he is treated like a top celebrity, the grand master of reportage, an eminent writer. As a master of the journalist’s profession, Gabriel García Márquez invites him to the school of reportage that he has founded at Cartagena.
It seems Kapuściński has nothing more to achieve.