Kapuściński hears about the fortunes of his friends from a few years earlier who have had enough and refuse to put up with ‘all these obscenities’. One has written complaints and petitions, for which he has been punished by having his accommodation allotment withheld, despite the fact that he has a sick mother and his wife lives out in the countryside because they have no home of their own in the town. Another critic has been sacked from his job. Still another has been stymied by lethal rumours that ‘he is a shirker and troublemaker. Not the worst method either!’ he writes. ‘People can see what’s going on. It is as if some monstrous bureaucratic fungus has sprung up here, which is proliferating and crushing everything, but no one seems at all concerned.’ In his report, Kapuściński reveals that complaints about what is going on at Nowa Huta have reached the ZMP authorities in Warsaw, but no one cares and they have gone unanswered.
Instead of painting the world of Ważyk’s poem in rosy colours, Kapuściński adds even more black to it. He is on the side of the workers, who feel hurt by the poet’s words: ‘rabble’, ‘semi-deranged soul’, ‘inhuman Poland’, ‘a shambles’. ‘To them these expressions,’ writes Kapuściński, ‘are wrongful, untrue and insulting’; they feel as if ‘they are of no use to anyone, as if they are invisible’. ‘But they admit that many of the images in the poem are true, all the more since they all too rarely read the whole truth about themselves.’
Kapuściński ends with a challenge to the Party and the ZMP: ‘At Nowa Huta they must see that we are on the side of the working man every day of the week . . . The people at Nowa Huta are waiting for justice. They cannot wait for long. We have to go there and dig up everything that has been carefully hidden from human sight, and respond to a very large number of different questions.’
‘There’s no point even going to the censor with this,’ says Tarłowska.
There’s a fuss in the corridors at the newspaper office. Kapuściński has given the article to his colleagues to read, and now they are asking the editor-in-chief to call a meeting.
‘The article should be printed!’
Tarłowska resists. Kapuściński takes it upon himself to sort the matter out at the censor’s office. He has a friend there from his student days, Mietek Adamczyk, and with the report in hand he goes straight to him.
‘If you stop this article, I will never shake your hand again.’
With what is left of her instinct for self-preservation, Tarłowska prevents her younger colleagues from posting the article on the front page – it ends up on the second page, on 30 September 1955. It is Kapuściński’s first article to have repercussions.
A scandal erupts, on a scale that probably only Tarłowska was expecting. The Central Committee Press Office makes a decision to fire her, and the generous censor is also given notice. The board of Sztandar Młodych is to be taken to task by Jakub Berman in person, the Party’s number two, and he is gearing up for a meeting with the journalists. Meanwhile, Kapuściński’s colleagues are urging him to disappear and sit it out somewhere.
So he goes to Nowa Huta, and skulks at a workers’ hotel. A man called Jakus – the activist whose criticism was silenced by rumours that ‘he is a shirker and troublemaker’ – takes him under his wing.
Now the Party reformers go on the counter-offensive. Jerzy Morawski, one of the leading lights of the thaw (and soon to become Tarłowska’s second husband), devises a Central Committee commission to investigate the situation at Nowa Huta. The commission goes to the site and sees . . . the same things as Kapuściński. The ‘commissars’ try to get in touch with the reporter, but the ZMP members at Nowa Huta, who have given him shelter, say they won’t give up their colleague until the Party provides a guarantee that nothing bad will happen to him. The Party not only provides the guarantee but gives him a national decoration – the Gold Cross of Merit. Tarłowska and the friendly censor return to their jobs. Soon Trybuna Ludu (The People’s Tribune), the organ of the Central Committee, is writing about the social ills at Nowa Huta. The paper brands the local Party organization as the culprits, the board of the conglomerate is replaced, and the local Party authorities offer their resignation.
Kapuściński learns three lessons from this story. He discovers that writing is a risky business and that written words carry consequences. He also becomes convinced that the written word can change reality. Finally, as he learns from the story with the censor, success in the public sphere also depends on taking care of things through informal channels, and on building a network of personal contacts with people in power. If you have friends here and there, they will help you in times of need.
Adam Daniel Rotfeld, a good friend of Kapuściński’s, believes that to the end of his life Rysiek carried the conviction that honesty and competence are not enough. When in 2005 the poet, journalist and expert on Italian culture Jarosław Mikołajewski applied for the post of director of the Polish Institute in Rome, his friend Kapuściński called Rotfeld, who was then head of the diplomatic service, and said: ‘Listen, my friend Jarek . . .’ He had decided to help in the certainty that he was supporting an undoubtedly excellent candidate. Rotfeld insists that he did not intervene; Mikołajewski did get the job, because he really was the best applicant.
‘But till the end, Rysiek was certain, even proud of the fact, that he had “fixed” the dream job for his friend.’
When did the cultural dissent, later known as revisionism, cease to be partly fashion and become front-line politics?
It starts with a secret speech by Khrushchev, given in February 1956 in Moscow at the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party. Its content creates a sensation in Poland: here is the Soviet Party admitting to murder, to the destruction of its political opponents, to fabricated trials. Knowledge of similar methods used by the authorities in People’s Poland has already reached certain segments of public opinion: almost two years earlier, Józef Światło, deputy director of Department X at the Ministry of Public Security, defected to the West and exposed crimes committed by the Polish apparatus of repression (his department was involved in eradicating ideological deviations within the Party). The Poles hear these revelations on Radio Free Europe; those who are glued to their wireless sets manage to catch bits of these nightmarish stories despite the jamming devices working at full steam.
Khrushchev’s speech initiates a political earthquake throughout the socialist bloc, most of all in Poland and Hungary. It is discussed at Party meetings, in cultural circles and on the streets. Duplicated using crude methods, the key points of the speech can be bought for an astronomical sum at flea markets and bazaars. At exactly the same time, Polish Party leader Bolesław Bierut dies in mysterious circumstances, prompting a wave of speculation: Was he murdered? Soon there’s a popular saying: ‘He went out in a fur overcoat and came home in a wooden overcoat.’ Straight after that the Party’s number two, Jakub Berman, is thrown out of his job. The Party is bursting from the inside.
There is a clash between two tendencies, later called fractions. One group is known as the ‘Puławians’ – people who seek more civic freedom, relative autonomy in cultural life, more democracy within the Party, less central planning within the economy, and more independence for enterprises. They have the sympathy of opinion-forming circles and of many people in the press and the cultural world. (It is interesting to note that they meet at the flat of Ignacy Loga-Sowiński, secretary of the Central Council of Trade Unions, and Irena Tarłowska, still editor-in-chief of Sztandar Młodych). The other group is called the ‘Natolinians’. They are believed to have connections with the Soviet embassy; they’re not keen on democratization, but they’re not against sacrificing a few scapegoats, preferably of Jewish