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