Is it possible to explain this more simply, and without stern judgements? For young people like Kapuściński, who after the Second World War believed that communism was a new beginning for the world that would produce the just system of their dreams, the natural reaction to the newly discovered tragedy and deception of Stalinism was to attempt to right the wrongs, go back to their ideals, and oust those who had lied to them. They did not have to wipe anything from memory – they genuinely felt deceived.
October ’56 was a consequence of their earlier involvement, idealism and altruism. They had committed no crimes, although crimes were committed in their names. They had not necessarily deceived themselves; they quite simply believed that this time it was for real, that now at last . . . They were neither the first nor the last people in history who would attempt, invoking noble ideals, to repair a social order founded on crimes and injustice.
It is the end of 1957. Almost a year has gone by since Gomułka’s speech outside the Palace of Culture. On 14 September 1957 Sztandar Młodych is put on trial at the Central Committee Press Office.
Press Office chief Artur Starewicz takes the floor:
While Sztandar takes no political line within the youth movement, it does take a harmful political line in international affairs. A campaign of opposition to our Party, our line and People’s Poland as a whole, and to other socialist countries too is being conducted on the pages of Sztandar Młodych. This line involves an emphasis on everything that divides us, and on [writing] nothing about what unites us. For example, on Hungary it always writes about sentences and arrests . . . This is harmful activity . . .
It is no accident that in the USSR Sztandar is regarded as a harmful newspaper. For us it is painful and significant that Sztandar is seen there as an anti-Soviet publication . . .
The Party makes harsh demands on the press. It must be explained that our political line is the only right and appropriate one. This newspaper does not have a political line of this kind . . .
People who have departed from socialism cannot hold editorial positions. Comrades who are implementing the Party’s political line need to stamp their mark on the paper. There has to be an outward unanimity of views. That is a condition for Party discipline.25
Once Starewicz has finished his speech, a debate begins. Grzegorz Lasota from Sztandar says: ‘Showing anti-Stalinist changes in the Soviet Union is a way of getting through to the young. It’s a pity it is regarded as anti-Soviet activity.’ Comrade Stanisław Brodzki, president of the Polish Journalists Association, says: ‘I believe a debate is needed here on the optimal limits of freedom of speech. What has been said here about anti-socialist tendencies is slander, but Sztandar has to know the range of what is viable and what is not.’ During the debate, Mirosław Kluźniak from Sztandar points to a polemical dialogue between Ryszard Kapuściński and Krzysztof Kąkolewski, entitled ‘Our Birth Certificate’,26 as an example of the paper’s vitality. Kąkolewski has praised privacy in post-October Poland, and Kapuściński has called for this generation to become involved in fixing the world, ‘even if it falls over dozens of times along the way’.
But storm clouds are gathering over the newspaper; there is increasing trouble with the censors, and more and more phone calls from the Central Committee Press Office.
‘The interference usually involved allusions to the Soviet Union and our sympathies for the Italian and French communists,’ says Marian Turski.
At the newspaper office, everyone is seething – and the younger they are, the more they seethe. Everyone sees designs everywhere on the ideals of October. The journalists keep an eye on Turski (who is officially acting editor-in-chief at the time): Isn’t he going too far in his compromises with the authorities? Turski can usually guess which articles the censor will not let through, but he avoids preventive editorial interference. He wants to show the journalists that he’s with them.
Meanwhile Gomułka, the new Party leader, has his own plans for Sztandar Młodych: the paper is to be subordinated to a new organization, the Union of Socialist Youth (ZMS), which is replacing the ZMP. The Union is ‘a transmission belt’ to convey the will of the Party to youth groups. The Sztandar journalists can only dream of independence and moderately free criticism.
Yet it is Po Prostu that is first in the firing line. A bastion of revisionism, this weekly continually urges Gomułka to democratize socialism. However, for Gomułka attaining power is not the start but rather the end of the changes. He regards revisionism as ‘a set of false views’ which ‘put strain on Party unity’. It is an intellectual invention, and he doesn’t like intellectuals; it is a dangerous, infectious virus outside Party discipline and control.
At a meeting convened by the Central Committee Press Office, Jerzy Morawski, a member of the Party Politburo, announces that the weekly Po Prostu will have to be disbanded or suspended.
‘I was the only person in that circle who defended Po Prostu,’ says Turski, who was at the meeting. ‘I fudged, I said that inappropriate views had appeared in the weekly but that it shouldn’t be terminated, because it had a lot of prestige.’ However, the Party decides that Po Prostu must go. The closing of the weekly and a brutally dispersed student demonstration against the decision are regarded as the symbolic end of October ’56.
Now Gomułka and Morawski order all the newspapers to publish an editorial approving the closure of Po Prostu. ‘ “Jurek”, I said to Morawski, “if I print that, you will never shake my hand again,” ’ Turski recalls. ‘ “I defended Po Prostu at the meeting, and I can’t behave like a weathercock.” ’
Sztandar Młodych is the only paper that refuses to publish Gomułka’s statement. Soon Morawski informs Turski that the Party leadership have decided to dismiss him from the post of acting editor-in-chief. In an act of solidarity, most of the journalists working for the paper hand in their resignations.
At the time, Kapuściński is Sztandar’s correspondent in China. As soon as he hears what has happened at the newspaper office, he leaves the paper.
Shortly before leaving for China, Kapuściński writes a series of reports on ZMP members who have been set adrift since October ’56, and about the hopes that have been dashed for the second time in their short lives.
At the Dymitrow mine in Bytom he goes to see a newly founded club for former ZMP members, who are now frustrated. ‘The students come and shout: drive him out, he’s a Stalinist’, confides a former activist. Nowadays the most common attitude is: don’t stick your neck out, don’t be active, because, as another interviewee says, ‘There are plenty of active people among the Stalinists’. Yes, the former activists are disillusioned at the way they have been repaid for all their enterprise and dedication.
Until recently a ZMP activist just like them, and president of the faculty organization at college, Kapuściński shows open solidarity with the spurned ZMP members. He contrasts them with the masses, who ‘go straight to bed after work, go out chasing girls, or sometimes go to the cinema’.
For who can still be counted on? Who is going to change our world? The końcowi (‘enders’) aren’t going to do it, are they?
The końcowi, who are also young people, are the opposite of the ZMP members. Kapuściński encounters them in the Warsaw districts of Wola and Ochota. These are people from another world; a few years earlier, he would have described them as ‘the enemy’. For the końcowi, good looks, strength and money are what matter. They don’t like intellectuals or smart alecs – ‘squares’ – because they reek of school, and school is the worst thing of all. Under Stalinism, they rebelled against the ZMP’s