wider access to the Western press.’
It is a moment of social ferment, and no one yet knows what will emerge from it.
During stormy conferences about the youth movement and the distortions of socialism, the editor-in-chief of Sztandar Młodych speaks for the Party ‘liberals’: ‘It is undoubtedly true that the Party has a better view of the historical interests of the working class. However, if this does not occur by way of full openness in political life, some very harmful rifts are bound to appear between the Party and the masses, and these rifts could result in power becoming a tool of oppression in the hands of the Party. Then the criticism will be stifled.’
Only a year or two earlier, people went to prison for such heresies.
Since early 1955 – before bringing Tarłowska his report on Nowa Huta, which she is convinced has no chance of slipping through the censor’s net – Kapuściński has been travelling around Poland. He visits workplaces, talks to workers, listens in on ZMP debates about why things are not as colourful as they should be, what mistakes we have made, and what should be done.
He is often away from home and also from the newspaper office. During these business trips, he stays at workers hotels. He argues with his ZMP comrades. He passes many nights in hoarse, drunken discussion, listening until daybreak to stories about the lives of ordinary people. He catches up on his sleep in trains.
For Sztandar Młodych he writes a series of reports from the provinces, which provide a voice in the debate about the apathy and hopelessness that are eroding the ZMP, about the degeneration of the Party bureaucracy and the mistakes made by those in power.
On returning from a ZMP conference in Kraków, Kapuściński reports: ‘What is bothering the Kraków activists? Among other things, the escalating activity of the reactionary part of the clergy . . . Some priests do not admit them to meetings, do not let children wear scouts’ scarves, and are instilling passivity in the young . . . At the Kraków conference, ten speakers have claimed that the training is “bunk”, and that the young people often go to the priest to learn things. Why?’ asks Kapuściński, and from a cool reporter he transforms himself into an ardent participant in the debate:
There is no miraculous force pushing them into the presbytery. What is it about the atmosphere of meetings, about the temperature of debate that means the young people are bored during training? No one has yet uttered a word about it.10
At another time in his life, in another part of the world, when he witnesses the Iranian people’s rejection of the Shah’s version of modernization and their return to their religious roots, Kapuściński will find one answer to the question, Why did the young reject the ZMP revolution? Surely his experience of the failure of the Stalinist revolution in Poland will give him inspiration a quarter of a century later:
The Shah’s Great Civilization lay in ruins. What had it been in essence? A rejected transplant. It had been an attempt to impose a certain model of life on a community attached to entirely different traditions and values. It was forced, an operation that had more to do with surgical success in itself than with the question of whether the patient remained alive or – equally important – remained himself.
And yet there were noble intentions and lofty ideals behind the Great Civilization. But the people saw them only as caricatures, that is, in the guise that ideals are given when translated into practice. In this way even sublime ideas become subject to doubt.11
I look through a large file of his articles from that era: they contain a good deal of the propaganda typical of the time they were written. There is plenty of naive enthusiasm – Kapuściński was only twenty-three – sometimes the language is pompous or full of pathos, and sometimes strait-jacketed by Party newspeak. There are many clumsy or banal statements: ‘Human experience bids us be prudent’, one of the longer articles begins.
Among the streams of ‘hot air’, as he himself refers to Party prattle somewhere, there are pearls of wit and irony: ‘I took part in a ZMP conference at which the chairman said: “Comrades, there is a proposal to open the window. Let the comrades express their opinion.” ’12
The articles belong to the tenor of the thaw and of score-settling with the failures of the Stalinist years. With the eagerness of a boy scout and the principled approach of an A student, Kapuściński cautions his comrades that self-flagellation is not in fact the only thing to do: ‘Let’s get down to work on a positive programme.’13
In this and a few other articles one can sense a fear that thaw-era criticism could change into hostility towards socialism and the Party regime. Can the ardent ZMP activist still not see what the years of Stalinist revolution really were? Can he see, and yet still not come to terms with it? Can he see, but only write as much as he is able to? Or does he write what he is told to?
Kapuściński is not one of the Party ‘counter-reformers’, but he does not yet feel comfortable on the side of the rebels. However, from week to week he is becoming radicalized. He writes, for instance, ‘We needed to reprimand the bureaucrats, all those lovers of bits of paper’.
The whole thing began to intrigue me, so I sat down in one of the committee headquarters (pretending to wait for someone who was not there) and watched how they settled the simplest of problems. After all, life consists of settling problems, and progress is settling them deftly and to the general satisfaction. After a while a woman came in to ask for a certificate. The man who could issue it was tied up in a discussion at the moment. The woman waited. People here have a fantastic talent for waiting – they can turn to stone and remain motionless forever. Eventually the man turned up, and they began talking. The woman spoke, he asked a question, the woman asked a question, he said something. After some haggling, they agreed. They began looking for a piece of paper. Various pieces of paper lay on the table, but none of them looked right. The man disappeared – he must have gone to look for paper, but he might just as well have gone across the street to drink some tea (it was a hot day). The woman waited in silence. The man returned, wiping his mouth with satisfaction (so he’d gone for tea after all), but he also had paper. Now began the most dramatic part of all – the search for a pencil. Nowhere was there a pencil, not on the table, nor in the drawer, nor on the floor. I lent him my pen. He smiled, and the woman sighed with relief. Then he sat down to write. As he began writing, he realized he was not quite sure what he was supposed to be certifying. They began talking, and the man nodded. Finally, the document was ready. Now it had to be signed by someone higher up. But the higher-up was unavailable. He was debating in another committee, and there was no way to get in touch with him because the telephone was not answering. Wait. The woman turned back into stone, the man disappeared, and I left to have some tea.14
This is not Poland in the 1950s, but Iran following Khomeini’s revolution, during the period when one bureaucracy was replacing another. For ordinary people, too much stayed the same as before.
As I play this game of mixing texts from different times and places, I am thinking of a conversation I had with Mark Danner. This ‘major league’ American journalist, reporter and essayist, Berkeley professor and friend of Kapuściński’s has left me with this reminder:
‘If you asked me what I’d like to learn from a biography of Kapuściński, I suppose it would be to have an answer to this question: What were the experiences Ryszard had in his life that allowed him to attain such a perfect understanding of the workings of power and revolution – in Iran, Ethiopia, and Latin America, among so many other places.’
Exactly these.
Marian Turski no longer remembers who sent Kapuściński to Nowa Huta late in the summer of 1955.
‘It was many a journalist’s ambition to be sent there – it
