turn into the 1950s, the Party starts to muzzle people in the world of culture. It establishes a compulsory trend for creative artists: socialist realism. Immediately after the war, reasonably free discussions are still being held about the paths and styles that may be chosen by creative artists. However, in the 1950s the Party completely subjugates culture and art to its propaganda aims. Writers, poets, composers, painters and architects are to work according to ‘the only legitimate’ rules and principles. The aim of creative art is to support the building of socialism in Poland and to generate the new socialist man. The regime sets the mass media exactly the same objectives: they are to promote the Party’s policies, and in international affairs, those of the socialist camp. The press, radio and then newly developing television are subject to preventive censorship and the control of the Central Committee’s Press Office.
It is the academic year 1950–51. The regime launches a campaign to convert the universities into a breeding ground for cadres loyal to the Party. Part of it involves denouncing ‘reactionary’ lecturers. This task is usually performed by the students – fervent young activists gathered within the ZMP.
The history faculty at Warsaw University, where Kapuściński starts his studies in 1951, emerges from this campaign unscathed, at least considering the climate of the times and in comparison with other faculties. By some miracle, Tadeusz Manteuffel, head of the Institute of History, as well as dean and deputy vice-chancellor of the university, ‘gained the consent of the “appropriate authorities” to let control of historical studies remain in the hands of the old teaching staff, as recognized experts who had declared their intention to apply Marxist methodology’, remembers Professor Stefan Kieniewicz.
‘The history faculty was an exceptional place,’ says Andrzej Werblan, a historian who was then starting out as a lecturer and would later be a Party dignitary, one of its intellectual pillars in the 1970s. ‘Half the faculty board were pre-war celebrities, and the other half were post-war lecturers. Both the former and the latter were excellent historians and teachers. It was in those years that the history faculty educated the later élite of historians.’7
History studies shine, and not only compared with other faculties at Warsaw University. When Ewa Wipszycka goes to Paris on an internship, she soon realizes that her academic skills and general knowledge far exceed the capacities of her French contemporaries. ‘However grim that era was and whatever ideological imperatives were in force, at the history faculty the profession of historian was superbly taught,’ she says to me. ‘In our classes most of the professors said by and large what they wanted. The ruling principle was that the student learns just as much from the lecturer as from the other students in the course of debate. This atmosphere of freedom was not even destroyed by the fact that among the students there were many functionaries from the Ministry of Public Security, sent to college by their department. The security agents did not merely study; they also sat on the committees at entrance exams and co-decided whom to accept and whom not. Their other duties are obvious.’
‘Did the students know who was who?’ I ask.
‘It was often a “known fact” – the security agents even had a different way of moving than the rest of us.’ She laughs. ‘What was striking was not their presence, but the limited influence they had on the atmosphere prevailing within the faculty.’
I am looking through Kapuściński’s student file from the Warsaw University archive.8 First, his marks for the matura (high school graduation exams): not bad, but not highly impressive. The highest marks are for Polish, military training, religion and physical education; history and the study of Poland and the modern world are good; mathematics, chemistry, Latin, English and geography are satisfactory.
A note from 1950 entitled ‘Pupil Profile’, drawn up by some school committee, says: ‘Distinct humanities skills. Poetic talent. Very widely read, especially contemporary literature. Very active as president of the ZMP Writers’ Circle. Ideological attitude – very good. Graduate of the city administration’s political school’. The note bears the stamp of the district authorities and a comment that the authorities ‘see no obstacle to the candidate taking university studies.’
Kapuściński studies history but spends his first year in the Polish faculty. The file contains an essay he wrote at that time (it is not clear whether he wrote it for his entrance exam or while already a student): ‘The Duties of Youth Organizations in the Six-Year Plan Period’. Announced by the government in 1950, this plan established Poland’s rapid industrialization, the centralization of economic management, and the eradication of the remains of the capitalist economy.
The student (or candidate) Kapuściński writes:
The Six-Year Plan period is a particularly difficult stage in the historical development of People’s Poland. In this period, still-existing forms of the capitalist system will be removed, while at the same time the new, better life represented by socialism is being developed.
And so on, in the same lyrical tone.
The file also contains two versions of his curriculum vitae, which Kapuściński wrote out by hand (one is affixed to his application for acceptance into Polish studies; the other is from when he moved to the history faculty). In both, he relates his war experiences in a dry, colourless tone – where he lived, where he went to school, and so on.
At the end of one version of the CV is a notable sentence: ‘Differences in our political opinions have led me to maintain casual contact with my family and I am supporting myself.’ In fact, Kapuściński was living with his parents and sister at the time. How should we understand an admission of this kind, written by an eighteen-year-old in an era of repression and imprisonment, of not only opposition activists but also ‘bar-room’ critics who told jokes about the regime? I am reading this document more than half a century later, in the light of everything that is known about that era, so I cannot avoid asking questions. How should we understand the disclosure by a candidate for university in Poland in 1950 about loosening ties with his family for political reasons?
For an answer, I turn to witnesses of the era, people who played a part in the drama.
In Professor Wipszycka’s view, ‘it is absolutely not a denunciation, but a sign of the times.’
She says: ‘This sort of confession resulted from an inner need for sincerity. As young ZMP activists, we reasoned like this: if I don’t tell the people in my organization about the political differences between me and my family, it will be as if I’m hiding something. And that would mean I don’t have trust in the institutions which should know rather a lot about me, whether the college or the Party organization. Many of us had clashed with our parents over our world outlook, and we used to talk about these conflicts at ZMP meetings. We were terribly worried about generational and ideological differences in those days.’
(One day Kapuściński will tell one of his friends that after he joined the Party his parents cursed him.)
Kuroń, a student in the history faculty two years behind Kapuściński, remembers that ‘loyalty to the collective was admissible only within the scope of organizational loyalty,’ and that although ‘loyalty to a close friend or relative could appear on the most distant horizon’, ‘you always had to remember that everyone, even your nearest and dearest, could turn out to be a cunningly concealed enemy, a covert ally of America or a disguised fideist who should be denounced without delay.’9
In a conversation with Andrzej Werblan, I find further confirmation that this was how the young communists (or ‘pimplies’, as they were known in those days) thought:
‘Writing and speaking badly about your family was the norm among young ZMP and Party activists in those days, almost a ritual. They spoke about their families more or less the way the first Christians spoke about the pagans.’
‘So the definition of communism as the New Faith is not just a metaphor?’
‘It is literal. The point of having the young activists make frank confessions was to cut them off from the past, and to emphasize that they were aware of the difference between the old and new times. Of course, some of them did it for their careers, but not Kapuściński. He was sincere, genuine in his faith