Comrade Kapuściński defends himself:
‘What has been said in the discussion is fair, but I am sorry it has been limited to academic issues. I did indeed have a non-Party attitude to my studies, and I have not yet fully overcome that attitude.’
Comrade Holzer rushes to Comrade Kapuściński’s rescue.
‘He has done good work on the ZMP Faculty Board. He has a strong emotional attachment to the Party. He is highly enthusiastic and eager to work. He has not entirely overcome the following defects: an insufficiently serious attitude to his studies, not always fully considered decisions, and a not always self-critical approach. Being admitted as a candidate for the Party will help Comrade Kapuściński to overcome these faults.’
From the stenographic record: ‘Comrade Kapuściński was unanimously accepted as a candidate for the PZPR’; he becomes a Party member on 11 April 1953.
Professor Wipszycka explains this eagerness to vet the CVs and attitudes of candidates for the Party as follows: ‘Within the Party élite in the history faculty, the cult of knowledge was paramount, and that is why Kapuściński was so harshly treated for his ‘non-Party attitude to his studies’. We wanted – and I do not exclude myself – to show that we were the best in terms of quality, especially to those professors and students who were “non-believers” in socialism. That is why we demanded the highest standards from each other, the best academic results.’
Why did a person become a communist in those days? Why did so many young, and not just young, talented people voluntarily – enthusiastically even, with religious zeal and fanaticism – declare their intention of taking part in a system which limited freedom and applied repression?
For us, still children, the reasoning was simple: if Hitler fought against Bolshevism, it must be a good thing, worth supporting. That was how identifying with Bolshevism came about, which someone born later might no longer be able to understand.3
Kapuściński never made any other significant statement about the origins of his post-war choices. There are a few perfunctory remarks in interviews, such as ‘everything I did, I did with immense conviction’.4
There was a sort of religious element in all this, an attempt at a sort of faith.
Other writers of that generation were more talkative on this topic. From the vast literature squaring accounts with their involvement in building socialism in the 1940s and early 1950s, I have chosen the voices of two of Kapuściński’s colleagues as representative of the mind-set of the part of their generation that believed communism was the start of a new world, the future of mankind.
This is how Wiktor Woroszylski remembered it:
We hated the world order in which we had lived through that bad period between childhood and youth. We despised the older generation for failing to prevent that world, and we longed for some sort of major compensation, for a new world built on the ruins, a world that was not only good and fair, but strong, attacking, suppressing evil, merciless. We were hungry for a great division, in which we could stand on the side of good.5
Tadeusz Konwicki remembered it this way:
When I was seventeen or eighteen, the nation was being massacred all around me. Right next to me there were boys with machine guns, for whom killing someone was no big deal. I did not belong to the generation of businessmen involved in scams, but to the generation of people exhausted by a terrible war. At that point people climbed to the zenith of humanity. I was living in a moral ecosphere, in a tense atmosphere. That is why it was easy for me to accept such a proposal for a better way to run the world. While also convinced that the stupid world had led to a hecatomb. Nowadays if I were to tell a Polish businessman that the world needs improving, he’d laugh at me, but in those days it wasn’t funny . . .
I confess to being totally incapable of even attempting to describe to you, or to anyone who did not live through it, the time at the end of the war, the moment when we entered a new life. Sunshine, orchards in blossom, the hopes that something would be built, something would be done, that life would be different, better. Of course you can say: ‘You were terribly naive, gentlemen’. Yes, we were naive, that was to do with our age, with our very painful war experience, not so long, but intense, and with our civic upbringing in the convention of Polish Romanticism. My generation lived on an entirely different level from yours. We lived in a world of moral necessities, dramatic situations.6
What did the young people know about Stalin’s crimes? About the Katyń massacre, about repression and disappearances, or about the transports to Siberia? What did the young Rysiek Kapuściński, history student, ZMP and Party activist, know about all that? How did everyone cope with it?
A note in the margin: ‘Ask RK’s close friends if anyone ever talked to him about it.’
Once again I come upon a clue implying that Kapuściński wove a slightly distorted autobiography in his books. In Travels with Herodotus, after recalling the strict political censorship of the Stalin era of 1949–55, he writes:
Two years had passed since Stalin’s death. The atmosphere became more relaxed, people breathed more freely. Ilya Ehrenburg’s novel The Thaw had just appeared, its title lending itself to the new epoch just beginning. Literature seemed to be everything then. People looked to it for the strength to live, for guidance, for revelation.
I completed my studies and began working at a newspaper. It was called Sztandar Młodych (The Banner of Youth). I was a novice reporter and my beat was to follow the trail of letters sent to the editor back to their points of origin.7
I quote this extract from Travels with Herodotus to Professor Wipszycka, and before I have a chance to ask a question, she waves her hand and says: ‘1955? Oh, that’s too late. From the start of college we all knew him as a reporter and poet for Sztandar Młodych.’
Why, in a book written at the end of his life, does he not mention his work for Sztandar Młodych during the years when Polish Stalinism was at its height? For an answer, I go to the library.
No one now remembers who offered the high school pupil Kapuściński the opportunity to work for Sztandar Młodych in 1950, nor is it of any significance. Someone must have taken notice of the young poet, who has just published several poems in Odrodzenie and Dziś i Jutro (‘I owe the fact that I became a journalist to poetry – not the best, but it was mine,’ he would say years later). The fledgling poet belongs to the Youth Circle attached to the Polish Writers’ Union, and there he meets Woroszylski.
Sztandar Młodych, the newspaper for young communists in the ZMP, is produced by people of various temperaments and, above all, various experiences in life. One has been through exile in Siberia, another has fought in the Warsaw Uprising, another has survived the Holocaust. ‘We were ready to move mountains, climb to the peaks, often demolishing things along the way that you weren’t supposed to demolish,’ one veteran of the paper will recall.8
Their later fortunes will vary. One will remain faithful to socialism to the end; another will be a famous figure in the opposition. One will take part in the anti-Semitic witch-hunt of 1968; another will be its target. And one will end up as the world’s most famous Polish reporter.
To the offer to work for the newspaper, the high school poet Kapuściński replies: ‘First let me pass my high school graduation exams.’
Straight after these exams, in 1950, he turns up at the Sztandar Młodych editorial office, which occupies three floors of a tenement house on Wilcza Street in the centre of Warsaw. There are stacks of paper, lots of cigarette smoke, some lively minds and interesting discussions. The young poet finds the atmosphere of the place thrilling. At once, his pieces start to appear regularly in the newspaper. He reviews books and theatre, writes poems, and is a fully involved reporter and commentator – a participant in the ZMP revolution.
On 12 August, there appears a poem entitled ‘Our