from the opponents of the system who shut themselves inside either the Catholic Church or the privacy of their own homes. Nor could he summon up the energy to start all over again . . .
The place on the political and cultural map of People’s Poland where this intellectual can find a safe haven is the newly founded weekly Polityka (Politics). Sacked from his job as managing editor of Sztandar Młodych, Marian Turski has moved to Polityka, bringing with him the group of journalists who resigned in a gesture of solidarity against his dismissal. Among them is Kapuściński.
Polityka had a terrible start. It was established in January 1957 by the Central Committee secretariat. Stefan Żółkiewski – Marxist scholar of the humanities, and minister of higher education (years later, to show solidarity, he would support the Warsaw University students demonstrating against the authorities) – was put in charge. This happened before the closure of the revisionist weekly Po Prostu – Polityka was meant to be a whip to beat the revisionists, an anti–Po Prostu publication. It was seen as heralding the departure of First Secretary Gomułka from the ideals of October ’56, and as a desire to exercise full control over intellectual life and thought, which had been relatively free during the years of the thaw and the October movement.
The revisionists from Po Prostu – ‘the rabid’, as their opponents call them – regard Polityka as a ‘despot’s organ’, a paper that on Gomułka’s orders is to determine the political line for the entire press. Both editorial offices are located within the Palace of Culture and Science, Po Prostu on the fifth floor and Polityka on the eleventh. The Po Prostu people are so allergic to the Polityka people that when they don’t have enough glasses in their office, and the head of administration amicably wants to borrow some from Polityka six floors above, the Po Prostu staff have a meeting, debate the idea, hold a vote and reject it.
When Gomułka closes down Po Prostu in the autumn of 1957, the editors of Polityka welcome the move. Many people assume that once the revisionists’ weekly has been eliminated, Polityka will have carried out Party orders and may leave the press scene. Meanwhile, under the management of its new chief, Mieczysław Rakowski, a former political officer and Party apparatus man, Polityka is changing from a dull, sermonizing newspaper into the most interesting weekly with a Party stamp. It will train the journalistic stars of the generation, create the Polish school of reportage and become a notorious thorn in the side of the government, a disparaging and sometimes ironic internal critic of the Party and the realities of People’s Poland. Marian Turski will say that Polityka began by being branded anti–Po Prostu but ended up becoming a sequel to its revisionist predecessor.
The young editors at Polityka knew their generation, and could sense its needs. They had been through October with it, and started their first jobs with it. They knew that the time for rallying was over, and now the time had come to establish families, wait for accommodation, and confront theory with actual life. But life was putting up resistance to their ambitions. Because life, as it turned out, also meant stagnant systems, stupid bosses defending their own jobs, regulations that block initiative, provincialism and backwardness.2
So wrote Wiesław Władyka, a historian of the PRL and beginning in the 1980s a features writer for Polityka, many years later in a book about the newspaper.
Polityka intuitively seeks contact with the engineers who have packed up their books and left the student hostel to go out into the country, with the teachers who once founded the Young Intellectuals’ Clubs, with the managers who believed in reforms, and with the artists who – as at Warsaw’s Student Satirical Theatre – made fun of the absurdities of life and of themselves, as well as of politics.3
These are the people who will be the heroes of the reportage and also the readers of the weekly created by ‘Rakowski’s gang’ (no one can remember who gave the Polityka team this name). On returning from a brief period of exile behind a desk, Kapuściński quickly earns himself a prestigious place in this ‘gang’.
‘Gomułka’s departure from the ideals of October was a disappointment for Rysiek; he believed that an original form of socialism would come into being in Poland, another path, different from the Soviet one.’
Jerzy Nowak, his closest friend for forty-six years, is trying to reconstruct Kapuściński’s state of mind and spirit at that time. They will meet a few years after the withdrawal from the new thinking of October ’56, in 1961, when Nowak is getting ready to leave for his first diplomatic posting in Dar es Salaam. Kapuściński has already made his first two journeys to Africa when they arrange to meet at a café in central Warsaw. Kapuściński is keen to meet someone who apparently shares his interest in Africa, and who is going to Tanganyika as a diplomat. The time for serious conversations about Poland and socialism, about their hopes and disappointments, will come much later.
‘At that time Rysiek believed that only within the Party, through acting from the inside, would it be possible to have a reasonable effect on Polish reality. That meant we should muster as many intelligent, sensitive people from the October generation as possible and encourage them to join the Party ranks, because without it we would never accomplish a thing and our efforts would be in vain.’
This is a good explanation for why the recent ‘thaw supporter’ and denouncer of the abuses of Stalinist bureaucracy would find a safe haven at Polityka – the weekly branded an ideological destroyer of the deeper reform of socialism. But there is another one as well.
On returning from his journey to the Far East and uniting with his colleagues who have left Sztandar Młodych in protest, Kapuściński does not know where to go. Some of the protestors find work at an evening paper, others at a magazine covering international affairs; one is banned from appearing in print. They set up a welfare fund to help anyone left without work; each of them pays a small sum into it. Officially it is a collection for a sailing boat, in case the Party should accuse them of forming an illegal professional union or an anti-government conspiracy.
Kapuściński’s new friend from India, the PAP correspondent Ryszard Frelek, now comes in handy. Frelek recommends Kapuściński to his boss, Michał Hoffman. A communist from the inter-war years, Hoffman takes Kapuściński into his team.
Because I had arrived from China, my new boss, Michał Hoffman, concluded my expertise must lie in matters of the Far East and decided that this would now be my beat – specifically, the part of Asia to the east of India and extending to the innumerable islands of the Pacific.
We all know a little about everything, but I knew nothing about the countries I had been assigned, and so I burned the midnight oil studying up on guerrilla warfare in the jungles of Burma and Malaysia, the revolts in Sumatra and Sulawesi, the rebellions of the Moro tribe in the Philippines. The world once again presented itself to me as something impossible to even begin to comprehend, let alone master. And all the more so because, given my work, I had so little time to devote to it. All day long, dispatches arrived in my office from various countries, which I had to read, translate, condense, edit, and send on to newspapers and radio stations.4
He hates working at a desk. Only once again in his life, and only for a short while in the late 1960s, will he be exiled behind a desk again – by the same Hoffman – at the agency’s Warsaw headquarters. Kapuściński thinks a man who works behind a desk is like ‘an invalid in an orthopaedic corset’: while the desk is his instrument of power, it is also his prison, fencing him off from life and from people, and making him into a slave. The world of the man behind the desk undergoes radical transformation as other values become important, and his career becomes a journey from a smaller to a bigger desk. That is not what Kapuściński wants.
He has a flair for reporting, he is ‘stoked up’ – as he puts it – by talking to ordinary people in Poland, India, Japan, and, later, other continents too. Not only would he have been incapable of working at a desk for long, he couldn’t have been a reporter in any Western
