THE URGE TO JUDGE

Abstract

Post‐1989 debates about intellectuals and communism in Poland have focused on intellectuals’ failure to oppose a system which sought to make them the objects of its cultural policy and on the extent to which they were therefore responsible for the communist system and its abuses. This article surveys these debates, tracing participants’ urge to judge intellectuals who failed to fulfil their longstanding “obligation” to serve as the nation’s defenders, heroically resisting authoritarian rule in all its guises. It also discusses the early postwar actions and images of Polish painter Jonasz Stern, arguing that Stern’s simultaneous support of and resistance against the communist regime complicates – and perhaps dooms – retrospective efforts to morally judge intellectuals and their responsibility for communism.

KEYWORDS:

• Poland
• intellectuals
• communism
• lustration
• socialist realism

Notes

1. I am thinking in particular of philosopher and educational reformer Hugo Kołłątaj (1750–1812), poet Adam Mickiewicz (1798–1855), novelist Henryk Sienkiewicz (1846–1916), painter Jan Matejko (1838–1893), historians Jacek Kuroń (1934–2004) and Adam Michnik (born 1946), and dissident publicist Tadeusz Mazowiecki (born 1927).

2. On the difference between “intellectuals” and “the intelligentsia”, which Aleksander Gella sees as a distinct and historically constructed “social formation”, see Gella (1976, pp. 19–23). Since I consider the post‐1945 intellectuals I am discussing in this article closely linked to the nineteenth‐century intelligentsia in terms of their sense of national/universal mission, I use the terms interchangeably.

3. Poland’s lustration law was passed only in 1997 after more than a decade of heated debate. It stipulates that candidates for public office must publicly acknowledge whether or not they collaborated with the communist‐era secret police. There is no sanction if they did, but if a candidate is found to have lied, s/he may be removed from office. For an overview of Poland’s lustration tribulations, see Grzelak (2005).

4. IPN’s full name is Instytut Pamięci Narodowej – Komisja Ścigania Zbrodni przeciwko Narodowi Polskiemu, or Institute for National Memory: Committee for the Prosecution of Crimes against the Polish Nation. It was created by an act of parliament in December 1998. See www.ipn.gov.pl.

5. See Subotić and Stankiewicz (2005). The IPN’s own statute noted that if secret police or other archival materials showed that an individual had collaborated with communist‐era secret police, s/he could not be appointed as director. But the document in question had not come from the secret police archives: it was a former secret policeman’s 1990 description of the work he had done in early 1989, which he submitted to a verification commission with his application for employment in a post‐communist security organization. The verification commission’s documentation then found its way into the IPN archives in 2001. IPN director Leon Kieres and other prominent members argued that this meant Przewoźnik could be approved as director, but the head of the IPN’s judicial committee (kolegium) disagreed and refused to accept Przewoźnik as a formal candidate. The position of IPN director was not one covered by the lustration law, but Przewoźnik was eager to clear his name and appealed to the lustration court to hear his case. It did, and ruled in his favour on 28 November 2005. See Czuchnowski’s articles (2005a, 2005b, 2005c).

6. Since it would be virtually impossible to assess (or even uncover) every published entry in the debate, I have focused on a handful of the most discussed books and a 1999 special edition of the Catholic journal The Sign (Znak), which provides a particularly illuminating overview of the key issues. For reprints of representative press articles published between 1989 and 1999, see Śpiewak (2000).

7. See Torańska (1987) for a series of 1981 interviews with communist party functionaries that is scathing in its tone. It is a good example of the Solidarity generation’s eagerness to condemn previous generations’ engagement with the communist state.

8. See Słabek (1997, pp. 9–16) for a brief overview of London emigré writers’ critiques and of the less categorical position adopted by exiled writers in Paris, grouped around Jerzy Giedroyć’s publication Kultura.

9. The first above‐ground Polish edition was published in Lublin by Test (1990).

10. See the autobiographical section of his introduction (Trznadel 1994, pp. 11–21). Curiously, Trznadel’s reliance on third‐person and impersonal grammatical forms suggests he’s not entirely willing to shoulder the blame. “They” shouldn’t have done what they did, Trznadel says again and again, but he refrains from saying “we”.

11. He presents “the Germans” as the model of a society which has accounted for its past, and “the Russians” as the archetype for one which has not (see Trznadel 1994, pp. 28, 29, 295).

12. Legutko also dismisses both Miłosz’s and Herling‐Grudziński’s analyses. If “intellectual mistakes” were responsible for intellectuals’ engagement, he writes of The Captive Mind, then “it would be natural to expect the correction of these mistakes”, that is, a serious attempt at reflection on the part of most intellectuals (p. 19). “That this has not happened, one can surmise, means that Polish intellectuals either do not agree” with Miłosz’s thesis “or have not yet understood the nature of their mistakes” (p. 19). Herling‐Grudziński’s hypothesis of fear and character flaws, on the other hand, seems to Legutko to inaccurately minimize the intellectual elements involved (p. 20).

13. Życiński is referring in particular to Andrzej Walicki, whose “sheep and goat” argument he cites earlier; see Walicki (1997).

14. Słabek uses sources from more than eighty intellectuals, and aims for a representative sample of writers, critics and scholars who had been in their twenties and thirties in the late 1940s. About half had been members of the Polish United Workers’ Party (PZPR, Polska Zjednoczona Partia Robotnicza) in the 1940s and 1950s, though most left its ranks after 1956. Most were critical toward socialist realism, which state officials sought to impose in 1949; more than a third had spent time in the USSR, most as wartime deportees and labour camp prisoners; some 70 per cent were well known writers. See Słabek (1997, pp. 5–8).

15. See chapters II, “Refleksja czasów klęski”, and III, “Nowa wiara”, for more on writers’ pre‐ and early post‐1945 positions (Słabek 1997).

16. Świda‐Ziemba (1989) discusses pressures on pages 26–43 and coping mechanisms on pages 57–66.

17. Regrettably, Świda‐Ziemba offers neither evidence for nor a discussion of this claim. Perhaps because she is a sociologist, her approach to evidence differs from that employed by most historians. As she notes in the first few pages, she draws on her own personal experiences, comments made by people she knows and students she has taught, the observations she has done in schools, factories and worker housing developments, and “chance conversations”. She does not comment on any difficulties that her role in producing and/or mediating such evidence might raise.

18. Świda‐Ziemba seems to be using “false consciousness” (zafałszowanej świadomości) in a purely descriptive way rather than in reference to Marx; she does not use quotation marks, and I see no touch of irony in her phrasing.

19. See also Szacki (1990, 1991).

20. Such efforts are visible in many realms of everyday life. To cite but one small example, a recently published book on the communist period aimed at a popular audience carries the following title: Communism in Poland: Betrayal, Crime, Lie, Enslavement. The entire narrative revolves around the communists’ repression of the Poles, and ends with a chapter devoted to the “post‐communists” of the 1990s. The last page features a photograph of Polish president Aleksander Kwaśniewski (president from 1995 to 2005) warmly embracing Russian president Vladimir Putin. As the book jacket notes, the book was clearly “written with passion” – perhaps too much. See Bernacki et al. (2005).

21. Here Szacki refers readers to T. S. Eliot’s essay “The Man of Letters and the Future of Europe”, in Huszar (1960, pp. 256–260).

22. Matejko aimed his 1883 painting of King Sobieski’s 1683 victory over the Ottoman Turks at Vienna at an international audience. Exhibiting the painting first in Vienna, Matejko then donated it to Pope Leo XII, on behalf of the Polish nation. See Dabrowski (2004, pp. 59, 60, 70–72). Dabrowski also chronicles the impact of a musician‐intellectual in the early twentieth century, the great pianist Ignacy Paderewski (2004, pp. 165–173).

23. For more on Stern, see the catalogues from two retrospectives (Świca 1997; Nowaczyk 2005).

24. Kraków’s post‐impressionists were the Kapists, so named because of their prewar experiences in Paris (Kapist is derived from Komitet Paryski, or Paris Committee). They controlled the postwar artists’ union, a major artistic monthly and Kraków’s art academy.

25. For more on the Grupa Młodych, see Chrobak and Świca (1999, 2000). See also Czerni, based on interviews with the Grupa Młodych’s theoretician, Mieczysław Porębski (Czerni & Porębski 1992). The Grupa Młodych held its last exhibit in December 1948–January 1949, but it was revived in 1957 as the Grupa Krakowska (II), an informal artistic alliance which continues to exist today.

26. These activities are described in a number of Artists’ Circle protocols that are reproduced in Świca (1991). Józef Chrobak received the originals years ago from group members and holds them in the Grupa Krakowska’s archive. There is no trace of Artists’ Circle documents in the regional party or city archives, or in the Warsaw archival holdings on the PPR artists’ committee.

27. The document in question is “Protokół z posiedzenia koła Plastyków PPR 23 XI 1946 r”, reproduced in Świca (1991).

28. Stern joined the board in February 1951; see Archiwum Państwowe w Krakowie (APKr), Związek Polskich Artystów Plastycznych (ZPAP), folder 33: “Posiedzenie Zarządu 20 II 1951”. The basic party organizations (Podstawowa Organizacja Partyjna, POP) were the lowest‐ranking organizational “cells” in the party‐state system. They were nearly ubiquitous in the 1950s, attached not just to factory workshops and service professions, but to theatres, universities, and, as this case reveals, professional unions.

29. See APKr, ZPAP, folder 33: “Protokół z Walnego Zebrania Okręgu Związku P.A.P. w Krakowie z dnia 6. V. 1950 r”; APKr, ZPAP, folder 33: “Posiedzenie Zarządu, 19 I 1950”; APKr, ZPAP, folder 34: “Posiedzenie prezydium w dn. 8 kwietnia br. [1953]”.

30. Special thanks to Barbara Jaroszyńska‐Stern, Jonasz Stern’s widow, for permission to reproduce the images here as Figures 2 and 3.

31. In a 1988 interview, shortly before he died, Stern looked back on the early 1950s only reluctantly, saying the period belonged to the past and he preferred not to return to it. He also claimed that “I never broke down and I never painted tractor drivers or labor heroes.” Though correct on this count (he had not mentioned construction sites), Stern also insisted he had been able to work at the art academy only after Stalin’s death, which was not accurate. See Stern (1988, p. 41; cited in Chrobak & Świca 2000, p. 262).

32. See the documents in Stern’s union personnel file, APKr, ZPAP, folder: Akta Personalne 2.