Careful and nasty calculations
Norman Stone
ONI: STALIN'S POLISH PUPPETS by Teresa Toranska, translated by Agnieszka Kolakowska and introduced by Harry Willetts Through all the social upheavals of Central Europe certain fossils have sur- vived: English nannies who came out in Habsburg days; ancient aristocrats, speak- ing perfect Edwardian English, who stayed 0.n, despite everything, out of patriotism; liberal politicians of pre- and post-war. Teresa Toranska's book is about a more sinister set of fossils, the Poles who oper- ated the Stalinist system until they lost power in 1956. Oni means 'they' in Polish; they' fell from power in 1956, but some have survived to a great age, sometimes living in the same drab tower-blocks as People they once imprisoned, and some- times photographed in the same lengthy queues for the short rations which, to most Poles, discredit the whole system. Teresa Toranska, a journalist, took her microphone round some of these people, and let them talk. The result is a first-class historical source. The original Polish (pri- vately published) version contained seven such interviews (half a dozen more are said to be in the pipeline) and this new (excel- lent) English translation contains five of these. The longest and most important interview is with Jakub Berman, who in effect ran the security police and was second-in-command of the Party, behind Boleslaw Bierut, who died of shock in 1956, just after Khrushchev's secret speech denouncing Stalin. It was when Berman was assigned a place on the edge of the second rank of Bierut's mourners, he says, that he realised the game was up. Berman's is the name most closely associated, in Poles' eyes, with the tortures and killings of Stalinist times, but he himself was very far from being a straightforward thug; nor was he without a certain humour, which produces the great gem of this book. He used to go to Stalin's late-night parties, at Which the dictator liked to get men drunk, and force them to dance together while he
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waited sneeringly at the gramophone, winding the 78's. Berman danced with Molotov, and found it a convenient way of exchanging information without, for once, being 'bugged'. As an historical source, the Berman interview is important, though the publishers ought to have made it easier for a non-specialist readership and should have produced an edition with explanatory footnotes.
The other interviews are not on the same level. One, with Julia Minc, widow of the head of planning, descends to farce when, after a few acrimonious pages, she sets the dog on Miss Toranska. Another, with Roman Werfel, the one-time chief ideolog- ist of the Party, contains some interesting pieces but is far too heavily taken up with a clash between two irreconcilable opinions of Polish history. Werfel can produce Communist propaganda at will, in an angry, know-all way, and there is no sense in inviting such a response from a man like him, when the interviewer could have asked much more interesting questions. The Communist propaganda is of course simple enough, based on three ideas: that old Poland was backward, peasant, anti- semitic and suicidally nationalistic, in need of a social revolution; that the Red Army offered such a solution, and anyway had to be placated with a Soviet client-regime; with the conclusion that, anyway, apart from 'mistakes' made in the Seventies, it has all turned out reasonably well what with 1.3 persons per acre of residential housing and 2,500 or whatever calories per day.
The most important interviews, from the viewpoint of political detail, are those with Edward Ochab and Stefan Staszewski, both of whom had a role in the overthrow of the Stalinists in 1956, though they themselves had a Stalinist past. Ochab, the only non-Jew, was the anchor-man: of working-class origin, and therefore able to present a more popular face to the sup- posed proletarian supporters of the regime than the educated Jews who were other- wise available. His question-and-answer session is quite pedestrian, but also quite useful for he was relatively trusted and was able, quite honorably, to ensure that Gomulka took over in 1956 with a brief to make Communism genuinely popular. He behaved honorably again in 1968 when he resigned his offices in protest at the bout of anti-semitism and student-clouting which then broke out.
There is a tragic quality to the interview with Stefan Staszewski, who fell foul of every regime. He fled, as a Communist, to Russia in the Thirties, and was imprisoned there, in a camp, from 1938 to 1945. Communism remained his life-blood just the same, and (like others from the camps) he went back to organise provincial politics for the Polish Party — faking elections, dragooning workers, and eventually also dragooning peasants though, as he admits, he did not know the difference between barley and rice. But there was a streak of muddled humanity in him, and it came out in 1956, when he organised factory militias to fight off the Red Army in case it intervened. He and Ochab were also large- ly responsible for an important feat — the leaking of Khrushchev's secret speech against Stalin to the West. That act made it impossible for the Russians to continue the Stalinist system, and led eventually to the fall of the Polish Stalinists, including Stas- zewski. Nowadays he supports the dissi- dent movement, KOR, claims he is a non-believing Catholic, and is a Polish pat- riot. This evolution, from Judaism to Sta- linism and then vaguely Catholic dissent is not as rare as you might think; in Hungary, a surprising number of the (not many) dissidents are children of one-time Stalin- ists, and, in a way, this is even true of Adam Michnik in Poland, whose father, Osias Schechter, comes up in the pages of Oni.
'Jewish alienation', leading to Stalinism, is a very important theme in this century and it is a pity that Teresa Toranska did not develop it further. Berman, whose own brother was a Zionist, does mention it, but the other three formerly Jewish inter- viewees are silent. Why should a Roman. Werfel (or for that matter an Isaac Deuts- cher) go straight from a well-to-do, Habs- burgtreu Jewish professional background to eating ham sandwiches in the play- ground and then joining 'the Communist Party of the Western Ukraine'? The only explanations given here are superficial; more skilled interviewing might have drawn out details of family background, early development, education, experiences of anti-semitism in pre-war Poland that could have given a more rounded picture. It is of course a difficult subject (though Robert Wistrich has written penetratingly on the link between Judaism and socialism) and Teresa Toranska herself seems unwill- ing, or unable, to go into it. Her own background — Catholic from Wolkowysk, now in Russia — has its own element of cattle-trucks-to-death-camps, but she should not have let this intrude in the interviews as it does. She allows the interview with the widow Minc, admitted- ly a Rosa Klebb, to degenerate into abuse whereas the old thing — lonely, and angry with the world — would probably have come up with much more interesting per- sonal detail if she had been properly flattered and deferred to. In general, there is far too much of Miss Toranska in this book, and she is not a match for Werfels and Bermans with, in their way, formid- able brains and years of experience in agitprop.
Never once does she show any sign of knowing how badly these interviewees suffered: three suffered very long impris- onments, four of them lost much of their family in Treblinka, and the fifth, Ochab, lost his mother and two siblings from TB in the slums of Cracow, became a Commun- ist, and then sat in Polish prisons for ten years until war released him. All then had an extraordinary odyssey to Russia where they arrived, despised and ignored, until, somehow, they managed to get Stalin's ear and to create a new Polish Communist Party. How they managed this, and to keep Poland from becoming the 17th republic of the Soviet Union is a mysterious business. Part of it seems to have involved stirring up the non-Communist Resistance so as to show Stalin that, if he went too harshly with the Poles, they would resist bloodily; on the other hand, by letting the non- Communists be defeated once• they had been encouraged to revolt, the Polish Communists could ensure that their rivals at home would be too weak to resist the Communists. This involved extremely careful and nasty calculation, of which Berman was an important part. The East German, Wolfgang Leonhard, wrote a classic about the calculus of power in which foreign Communists were trained in Rus- sia: they lived very hard, learned all day long, and were taught — on the basis, mainly, of the experience of the Civil War in Spain — how to create 'stooge' parties, to infiltrate Catholic-socialist movements, to bore trade-union moderates out of important committees. These Polish Com- munists had not dissimilar training (Stas- zewski even taught at the Comintern School) and yet Miss Toranska does not elicit more than a few words from them about these matters.
Of course it is a tour de force that she managed to carry out these interviews at all, let alone to have them published. But she might have shown greater tact and understanding of the attraction which Communism could have to educated peo- ple in a backward, peasant country — an attraction which, long ago, was shared quite widely, even by Czeslaw Milosz. Then again, she misses something of a trick in failing to see that, nasty as Polish Stalinism was, it was much less nasty than Stalinism elsewhere: prison, not execution was the rule, and, as Berman himself tells her, they would not have been sitting in such conditions, in a semi-independent Poland, had it not been for the relative moderation of Polish Communists. If, in Poland, the Church survived in such strength; if the peasantry were not forcibly collectivised to the same extent as in Russia and the Ukraine; if Gomulka sur- vived to lead 'the Polish October' it was, for all the horrors, because even the Stalinists in Poland were not wholly black figures. By presenting them in such a light, Miss Toranska may have set back quite an important historical quest, because none of the others might agree to such interviews again.
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