whenever
through hard work and ambition
you pour the concrete of socialism
whenever
your heart starts beating impatiently
like the piston in a machine
at once you are
a worker of victories
and a poet of powerful plans.9
An article dated 31 August about a socialist labour competition includes the following passage:
‘Yes, Comrades, more can be produced,’ says worker Czesław Naziębło, ‘but only once our norms are changed. Right now they are still old and unsuitable, and prevent us from raising our productivity’ . . . ‘I believe that by breaking the old, unsuitable norms we will build the foundations of socialism in People’s Poland faster’.10
And on 18 November there is a poem called ‘Second Defenders of Peace Congress’:
Let us ignite in our hearts
the flame of our will
The arm of Peace
flexes
more forcefully.
We –
stronger by a billion hands,
mightier
by force of Stalin’s mind.11
At a private party in the 1970s, as often happens over a glass of vodka, some Poles are chatting the night away. Wiktor Osiatyński is teasing Kapuściński:
‘How could you write those things in the 1950s? How could you support all that? After all, it was a repressive system, people were in prison.’
‘We didn’t know anything about the prisons.’
‘What didn’t you know? I’m twelve years younger than you and I knew about them in primary school.’
‘What did you know?’
‘That some of my friends’ fathers were in prison. How could you not have known?’
‘Because there was no one like that in my environment. “Class enemies” and their children weren’t admitted to college in those days.’
Maybe that’s true, says Osiatyński, but on the other hand he’d have had to be a moron not to know.
Among Kapuściński’s acquaintances in the 1950s, a classmate from Staszic High School, Teresa Lechowska, was sent to prison for political reasons. At the time she was a student at Warsaw University and a member of the ZMP. She was arrested in 1953 on a charge of telling political jokes and sentenced to two and a half years in prison for, as the verdict stated, ‘disseminating false information about economic and political relations within Poland and the friendly relationship between Poland and the USSR, and information heard on radio broadcasts by imperialist states capable of causing harm to the interests of the Polish People’s Republic’. She served a year, first in the Mostowski Palace (militia headquarters), then with female convicts sentenced for common crimes at a penal institution in Warsaw’s Gęsiówka Prison.
‘They had a thick file on me – I was denounced by a close female friend,’ says Lechowska. ‘There were jokes about Soviet science, for instance. Ivan Michurin was experimenting with genetic hybrids, and one of the jokes went: “Why is it a good idea to cross an apple tree with a dog? Because it waters itself, and if anyone tries to steal the apples, it barks.” You can understand what a threat that was to the Polish–Soviet alliance and the interests of People’s Poland,’ says Lechowska ironically.
She remembers Kapuściński from high school and university as an ardent idealist. ‘He wasn’t some sort of awful swine – he just believed in it, that’s all.’
‘Did you ever see each other at college?’
‘We bumped into each other from time to time. The university wasn’t as big as it is now, and old friends from high school knew about each other, where they were and what they were doing.’
‘Perhaps he didn’t know about your arrest and sentence?’
‘That’s pretty much out of the question. When I came out of prison, I was told that at ZMP and Party meetings at the university I was pointed out as an example of a concealed “class enemy” who had cunningly wormed her way into college. He might not have remembered someone else’s case, but I was one of his classmates and we did see each other sometimes. He must have known.’
Many years later, the only time he will ever do so in such an open way, Kapuściński will admit:
One of the basic features of a totalitarian system is to block information right from the level of the individual: people keep quiet, they see and they know, but they keep quiet. A father is afraid to tell his son, a husband is afraid to tell his wife. This silence is either demanded of them, or they choose it themselves as a survival strategy.12
When he mentioned silence, did he have his classmate in mind?
Teresa Torańska, who conducted in-depth interviews with Party dignitaries from every stage of the PRL’s history, offers a possible key. ‘Remember General Jaruzelski’s biography,’ she says. ‘He and his family were transported to the Soviet Union, so he knew all about Soviet Stalinism and its crimes, in spite of which he built communism in Poland. Years later he became the Party leader. Human memory is selective; it rejects the things that hurt and retains the things that make life easier. Kapuściński’s family came from eastern Poland, where “everyone knew” who the Soviets were and what they did after 17 September 1939. The Kapuścińskis escaped to the General Government to avoid the Soviet transports to the East – how could Rysiek not have known what that system was like? He knew it all. But as Comrade Gomułka used to say, “A man only knows as much as he wants to know”.’
I lay this key beside ‘Konwicki’s key’: that it was not so hard for young people to accept the communist proposal for a better way to run the world, especially as the old one had ‘led to a hecatomb’. There was exhaustion following the war, then there was agricultural reform, the enthusiastic drive to build Nowa Huta – the forerunner of a better world, and efforts to eradicate illiteracy, in which the young ZMP activists played a leading role.
To understand why so many young, talented and sensitive people felt ‘mightier by force of Stalin’s mind’ requires exercising the imagination, especially when the privilege of being born later comes into it. Osiatyński’s words come to mind: ‘I never judge anyone who lived through the war and Stalinism.’ How would any of us, who were born much later, have behaved? Which side would we have been on? At the same time, it is harder to understand, and to walk in someone else’s shoes, when years later the people of that era – like Kapuściński – so desperately want to forget, to wipe out and erase all traces of the past, because that suggests they cannot find any positive explanation for their earlier commitment.
When Kazimierz Wolny-Zmorzyński, now a Jagiellonian University professor specializing in literature and the mass media, tells Kapuściński towards the end of his life that one of the books about him includes biographical elements concerning, inter alia, the evolution of his political views, he erupts:
‘You’re not going to go rummaging about in my life story!’
Kapuściński threatens to take him to court, even though the man is an expert on his work.
Stalinism in Poland is the first revolution Kapuściński witnesses – he experiences it at first hand as an active participant, a youth activist, a propagandistic reporter, and a committed poet. The revolutionary cause, an obsession with great social change and with the collapse of the old world and the emergence of the new – the attitudes of people in such times and in extreme situations will become the leitmotifs of Kapuściński’s life; they will stir his passion to discover the world and will be the driving force