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With a trip to Kraków on the cards, I decided it was time to go up to the attic and dust down a guidebook to the old town. The book I came across, blocking a hole in the thatch, was called simply Kraków and was published in 1951 with a print run of 20,300. I turned immediately to the more interesting passages:

The small town, population 80,000, living in an atmosphere of the patriotic inspirations of Anczyc and Matejko, proud of its university’s growing fame, was also in large part an example of social and political backwardness. The generality of residents, under the influence of a servile bureaucracy and a powerful reactionary party, lead lazy lives marked by conciliation with the ‘mild’ black and yellow servitude. Into this environment, fresh from a successful jailbreak, came Ludwik Warynski, a young fighter for victory of the masses. [...]

The flame of revolution burst above Kraków twice during this period [between the wars]. In November 1923 the working people of Kraków gave battle to the forces of reaction, liberally bedewing the city’s streets with their blood. It was an eloquent protest against a government that had sold out to capitalist exploiters.

I look forward to visiting the house at 49 Lubomirskiego Street, where Lenin lived from 1913 to 1914 (after abandoning “distant and Tsarophile Paris”) and wrote some of the 300 articles he allegedly produced (one every two days!) during his two years in Kraków.

On a totally unrelated note, prime minister Donald Tusk has been voted Person of the Year by god-awful current affairs mag Wprost.

Cudowna Melina (Wonderful Drinking Den) by Kazimierz Orłoś is an interesting case of a book that requires a certain knowledge of its times to be fully appreciated. Written in Communist Poland (1971), it is, to say the least, schematic. You can almost guess the pattern: an idealistic young party apparatchik comes to town and cleans it up, rooting out the corrupt and the bourgeois, in an object lesson in socialist morality. Except that in Orłoś’s version of the tale it is the party apparatchiks that are cynical, corrupt and greedy. The new broom is not the local party secretary but the chairman of the town council – and he fails miserably in his attempt to reform the town and break up the cliques. Not only that, but he is generally unpopular, earning the nickname “Chrystusek” (Little Jesus) because he will not take bribes or even a drink.

That this outwardly formulaic book is in fact a parody is signalled on the back cover by later, helpful reviewers but there are hints within as well. One of them is the remarkable fact that there are funny bits in it. Take for instance the description of Sergeant Zenon Olszewski: “He was known for the implacable position he took with regard to the hooligan elements that did not observe order and discipline in our town. He was particularly attentive to the matter of correctly crossing the road.” So incorruptible is Olszewski that when people try to go over his head to Major Popielak the major can only wring his hands and say “There’s nothing I can do… The policeman is within his rights,” which must have brought a bitter smile to Poles of the times.

It also illustrates the usefulness of parody: no need to immerse oneself in the real socialist realist literature when books like this serve as both entertainment and literary handbooks. I also cannot help wonder if Orłoś was also taking a swipe at “dirty realism” too, of the type found in Hłasko and Nowakowski. At one point a hippy turns up in town. This harmless stranger is introduced, described and inevitably beaten up and run out of town in just three and a half short pages.

Although the satire is quite broad – the establishment is totally rotten with almost no redeeming features at all – there are some excellent small touches, as when the party secretary books a table in a café but does not deign to say for how many. The owner, in turn, does not dare to ring back and ask.

Cudowna Melina fell foul of the censor and was published in Paris in 1973. Orłoś was banned from publishing for the rest of the existence of the People’s Republic of Poland with the exception of a short period in 1980-1981.

While prying through some personal files late one night last week in the local IPN branch I came across one that caught my eye. It was the file of a certain university professor, doctor… well, let us call him “Dr. Wykształciuch” for the sake of discretion. The top sheet was his CV and at the top of his CV was his father’s name and occupation. Your background was very important in Communist Poland, of course. Priority was given, at least in theory, to the sons and daughters of workers and peasants. Needless to say, in the bad old days before democracy one’s birth was very important in Poland as elsewhere. But now, in free, democratic Poland, grown men still tell their prospective employers what Daddy did for a living? The ruling parties talk seriously about judging people by the role their families played in the anti-Communist opposition…

I sometimes wonder if Poland has grown or ever will grow into a republic.

Here’s a Polish poem from 1950 in - for reasons that should become obvious - very free translation:

“One needs”
Stars
stars have spread out in heaven
Silence descends from the tops of the town.
One needs
one needs love poems
so that lovers can notice them

In the plan
in the plan
in the six-year plan
one needs
one needs happy families
Let poetry among them become
an ornament to their evening hours.

Communist Poland was so fiercely independent of the USSR that their plans lated six years, not five. The poet in question is Wisława Syzmborska, who went on to better things.

Over the last few days Gazeta Wyborcza has been running an excellent series devoted to Komitet Obrony Robotników (Workers’ Defence Committee), to mark the thirtieth anniversary of this, the first open opposition movement in the Soviet bloc and the forerunner of the Solidarity movement. Authors include well known opposition figures and people still prominent in Polish public life such as Seweryn Blumsztajn, Konrad Bieliński, Bronisław Wildstein, Róża Woźniakowska Thun, Władysław Bartoszewski, Zbigniew Bujak and Lech Wałęsa. You might expect these tales of late seventies communist Poland to be ones of oppression, depression and repression but no — the most striking thing about the series is the sense of euphoria (Piotr Wierzbicki) felt by the participants in this then tiny movement. Blumsztajn, editor of the illegal and uncensored Biuletyn Informacyjny writes:

Never again did I have a greater sense of safety. I knew that every one of the people I worked with would replace me if I were put away and would go to jail in my defence. That was the most important principle of the movement.

Wildstein, a founder of Studencki Komitet Solidarnościowy (Student Solidarity Committee) says that Cracow felt free - in the late 1970s! In nearly all of the accounts the late Jacek Kuroń’s name recurs. Zbigniew Bujak tells of his surprise in learning that a simple working man like himself had only to ring Kuroń. Eugeniusz Smolar, then a journalist with the BBC, describes Kuroń ringing him and dictating to him reports on the repression of opposition figures in Poland. Maciej Kuroń describes beating off the heavy squad from a lecture given by his father in their home: “TKN” stands for Towarzystwo Kursów Naukowych (Society for Academic Courses), an organisation dedicated to teaching all comers without conforming to communist dictates. Władysław Bartoszewski was arrested for delivering a lecture in a private flat which he had delivered the week before at KUL (the Catholic University of Lublin), the only “free” university in the eastern bloc. No doubt there is a certain amount of romanticisation of the past in the reminiscences of the past. (It has been claimed that the nostalgia felt by some for communist Poland is in fact a nostalgia for lost youth.) But if you have locked arms to repel a baton charge it will all ring true. There’s no other word for it really: solidarity. Well, maybe comradeship as well.

And now, in 2006, what is left? Now we have “TKM,” “teraz kurwa my”, which loosely translates as “now it’s our fucking turn” (i.e. to get our snouts in the trough). Go to KUL now and you will notice it has been renamed. It is now the Catholic University of Lublin John Paul II and its interior is festooned with posters equating homosexuality with mental illness, child abuse and drug abuse and offering to “cure” you of it. The lecturers joke that John Paul, who once lectured there, was thrown out because he was too liberal.

Today Bronisław Wildstein is a PiS bootboy, who makes none-too veiled threats of suing to journalists impertinent enough to ask him who he works for. Antoni Macierewicz, a leading KOR activist, is now, to put it diplomatically, a divisive figure. The Kaczyński brothers - yes they were in this as well - see the round table talks of 1989 (in which they took part) as a sellout to the communists. Ludwik Dorn was also active in the democratic opposition: now look at him congratulating the police for illegally breaking up peaceful demonstrations.

Naturally, the contributors are not unaware of this. Ewa Milewicz recalls the words of Jacek Kleyff, who said that if his persecutor of today were in the future to be persectued his doors would be open to him. Where is this spirit of trust and brotherhood now? Piotr Wierzbicki writes, in quite a moving piece: “The transformation of Antoni Macierewicz from a Warsaw member of the intelligentsia into a nationalist Catholic telling fairy tales about Masons was a shock to me.” Wierzbicki was from 1993 to 2005 editor of Gazeta Polska. The following quote from that paper comes from September 6th 2006, after Wierzbicki’s editorship:

The fact of secret service talks [i.e. with Kuroń] would not be so embarassing for Kuroń’s fans if they had resulted in a normal democratic country. As it is, there is something less than normality [...] We don’t know the exact decisions reached in the talks between the secret service and Kuroń and his political friends. This is precisely what this politician’s modern day defenders are most ashamed of.

The posthumous smearing of Jacek Kuroń is perhaps the hardest thing of all to take. So he had talks with the communists? We can only guess how many lives that saved in the - as it turned out - peaceful handover of power. The British for many bloody years refused to talk to what they regarded as a terrorist organisation in Northern Ireland. When they finally did, the killing abated. Leszek Kołakowski is worth quoting at some length:

Today the Polish Round Table and its participants are frequently slandered and reviled, often by people who didn’t lift a finger if it meant bringing themselves to the attention of the Polish People’s Republic authorities. They know that getting involved in talks with the communist government was a crime, that the affair should have been settled entirely differently. How? This they don’t say. Should an uprising have been started, bringing the country to its feet? If so, why didn’t they rise up? Who was stopping them? We don’t know. But we do know the terrible conditions and the immense difficulties the first government, of Mazowiecki, Balcerowicz, Skubiszewski and Kuroń, worked in while putting the country on a new track. They succeeded in the end and for this TP (True Poles) cannot forgive them, claiming they would have done it differently and a hundred times better (we still don’t know how though) and without sullying themselves with the negotiations with commies that cause TPs to react with such horror.

I leave readers to guess who the “TPs” might be.

Nie (”No”) is a weekly current affairs magazine. Its editor is Jerzy Urban, the mouthpiece of communist Poland in the 1980s. The editorial line is firmly anti-Catholic church and the present, right wing government is not in favour either. Its journalists try sometimes a little too hard to defend the legacy of the People’s Republic of Poland.

The magazine is known for its unparliamentary language and its attacks on “good taste”: they insist on carrying ads for sex toys and the like. The language is one of its strongest points, though. Reading the main daily newspapers here can be a real struggle. The younger journalists are palatable enough but have nothing to say. Legible but unreadable, you might say. In Nie there is life in the lines. Here is Nie on the subject of PiS (Law and “Justice”)’s TV ad campaign, which resembles Ronald Reagan’s from many years ago:

Smiech tez wywoluje emitowana w telewizjach reklamowka PiSuaru. Zerznieta z zamierzhlej reklamy Reagana….
Pisuar’s ad on the TVs is also getting a few laughs. Ripped off from ancient Reagan ads….

That doesn’t do justice to the original. “W telewizjach” (on telly) is difficult to translate: it is a little like the way some write “the internets” when they want to satirise a politican’s limited knowledge of the technology. (”Telewizja” means “television” and is not supposed to be used in the plural as it is in this case.)
Now here is the more “serious” Gazeta Wyborcza on the same subject:

Oba materialy maja niemal identyczna konstrukcje. Odwoluja sie do pracy, rodziny, milosci. W obu mozna obejrzec zadowolone rodziny wracajace z zakupow, szczesliwe mlode malzenstwa, rolnika pracujacego na traktorze, a nawet ludzi niosacych dywan….
The material in both cases has an almost identical construction. They refer to work, the family and love. In both one can see happy families returning with the shopping, happy young couples, a farmer working in his tractor and even people carrying a carpet….

It’s worth noting that the high brow, serious, weighty etc. GW gives this trivial item far more space (including six photos) than the scurrilous, low brow, commie etc. Nie.

The irony of all this is that Jerzy Urban was spokesman for a communist regime which was famous for “dretwa mowa” (”numb talk”) or, in other words, newspeak.