a revolution has occurred in his family life as well.
Now he returns to the newspaper, where the ice of Stalinism is starting to melt. ‘Ilya Ehrenburg’s novel The Thaw had just appeared, its title lending itself to the new epoch just beginning’,3 he will write half a century from now.
Ehrenburg’s novel is the subject of heated debate at gatherings in smoke-filled cafés and in newspaper columns. Men of letters, critics and students are all discussing it.4 Some see the book as ‘a superb moral polemic with the image of man tailored to meet the demands of ideology’. Others criticize it for ‘losing the pathos of the struggle to build socialism’ and falsely contrasting these ideas with ‘an apology for everyday life’. Both the former and the latter can feel that something is changing, that something new is coming.
The writers have been noticing something which earlier they could not, or would not, see. In a thaw-era poem, Mieczysław Jastrun, who is the bard of socialism, describes looking through one window at prisoners building garages for the security service, and through another at free bricklayers no longer building the bright future of socialism, but now rather ‘the wall of a lunatic asylum, or House of the Dead’.5
Tone and language, aesthetics and subject matter are changing.
The main characters in stories by emerging novelist Marek Hłasko, cult writer of the thaw and of October ’56, are still workers, but they are not heroes erecting the great edifice of socialism; instead they are frustrated individuals who cannot see the future, sometimes ordinary down-and-outs whose dreams go no further than a bottle of vodka after the end of the day’s work. A lyrical note appears – alien to the spirit of socialism.
From the West comes ‘putrid imperialist literature’ – the weekly Życie Literackie (Literary Life) publishes The Old Man and the Sea, by Ernest Hemingway.
An exhibition entitled ‘Arsenal’ overturns Stalinist notions of aesthetics and the aims of the fine arts; abstraction makes its appearance, having previously been abhorred as ‘the degenerate art of the bourgeoisie’. The same sort of revolution is triggered in the world of music by the Warsaw Autumn festival, whose inception coincides with the peak of the political watershed of October ’56. The idea for the event is born a year earlier, on the rising tide of the thaw. Jazz, too, is rehabilitated – after formerly being banned as ‘the music of American imperialism’.
From its distant place of exile, there is also a comeback for laughter. At last people are allowed to laugh at the ‘distortions of socialism’: shows performed at the Student Satirical Theatre, which opens in Warsaw, attract crowds of intellectuals and prompt fiery debates in the youth press.
One daring bard of the era wrote:
Comrades, you may find this question
much too bold and even rude:
Comrades, is it my impression
you lack red cells in your blood?6
One of the most profound changes brought about by the thaw is, in the words of Jacek Kuroń, ‘the rehabilitation of private life’. Only a year or two earlier, a public debate at the university on the subject of sex was unimaginable. ‘A public meeting on the topic “May One Have Sex Before Marriage?” broke all the conventions, because until then there had only ever been meetings about the war in Korea, the Colorado beetle and German militarists, but the gradually advancing political changes were also overtaken at lightning speed by a revolution in the arts. The young people who played jazz tracks were dressing in “gear” that more distinctly and plainly rebelled against official life.’7
Thanks to the youth and student festival, in which almost two hundred thousand young people take part, including thirty thousand from abroad, including the West, smiling faces and bright colours pervade the streets of Warsaw, fresh air wafts in, and a different kind of music is heard. Originally conceived as a propaganda event on behalf of the socialist cause, the festival becomes an opportunity for Polish youth to encounter the Western culture abhorred by propaganda, and also to meet some of their contemporaries from behind the Iron Curtain. The festival, said Kuroń, ‘exposed the entire hypocrisy and falsehood of a lifestyle which had been promoted as progressive. It turned out that you could be progressive, but at the same time enjoy life, wear colourful clothes, listen to jazz, have fun and make love.’8
The young people of 1955 want to mend socialism, because there is no returning to pre-war Poland, to 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
