From this side of the Iron Curtain, Communist bloc countries tend to look alike. We have all become accustomed to a model of Communism in which ideology is the single most important distinguishing mark, and perhaps such is indeed the proper model for most members of the Eastern bloc. A mere week’s stay in Warsaw, however, is enough to convince one that it does not in the least fit Poland.
When one approaches Warsaw from the countryside the first major building in view is the Palace of Culture, a monstrously ugly wedding-cake structure thirty-two stories high: Russia’s unwelcome gift to the people of Warsaw. But driving toward the center of the capital one finds the beautiful Old City, a magnificent recreation of 17th- and 18th-century Warsaw. The Polish capital was almost totally destroyed by the Nazis, and for a time it was seriously proposed to rebuild the city somewhere else in order to avoid the great expense involved in carting away mountains of rubble. The decision finally made, however—and by no one else than the tough Stalinist apparatchiki of the Bierut regime—was not only to build the city where it had always been, but to reconstruct it on the model of previous centuries rather than as it had been just before the war. Old drawings and paintings such as the works of Canaletto and other Venetian painters who had depicted Warsaw were patiently and carefully consulted, and on the basis of these, the Old City was reconstructed. All this was done during a period of great scarcity, while often acutely hungry people lived in hovels, desperate for apartments, without such minimal requirements as adequate hospital facilities. The Marxist-Leninist masters of the country saw fit to neglect the laying of its economic foundations for the sake of recreating the visible superstructure of—feudal Poland! It was not workers’ apartments, nor even housing for the new bureaucratic upper class that received top priority, but rather the palaces of the old Polish aristocracy in line with a drive to symbolize—for a country whose borderlines had changed drastically and whose capital was shattered beyond recognition—the Polish past. In this way, the fierce love of Poles for their national past imposed activities on the postwar government which from a purely economic point of view were sheer madness. Facts such as these disrupt some of our handier notions about the uniform dynamics of Communism.
Shortly before I arrived in Poland this summer, Adam Schaff, professor of philosophy at Warsaw University, published a series of articles on “The Meaning of Life” which ran in three consecutive issues of the official Przeglad Kulturalny. Here are some representative passages:
As long as people go on dying, suffering, and losing those near to them, questions about the meaning of life are going to be asked. . . . The question: is it worth living? is prompted not only by the inevitability of death which casts a shadow of doubt over all the efforts and labors of the individual . . . it also encourages skepticism: is it worth it? why suffer? . . . In this field the philosopher is more like an ancient sage pondering the problems of human life than a laboratory scientist. It is impossible, unless one accepts absolute moral imperatives . . . to prejudge the individual’s answer, that is, make the individual’s choice for him—since this is something only he can do. . . . The problem does not consist in overcoming the philosophically speculative “loneliness” of man, but in overcoming, or in certain situations loosening, the strait jacket imposed on the individual by society.
We have here not a French existentialist but the leading exponent of “Marxist-Leninism” in Poland. Once one has seen the palaces of Poland’s feudal oppressors rebuilt with loving care by the masters of the People’s Poland and has read the leading Marxist-Leninist philosopher talking about the need for loosening the strait jacket imposed on individuals by society, one must simply give up the attempt to fit Poland into pre-existing categories.
Poland today is run by a Communist party (officially called the Polish Workers’ party) in which few Poles put any trust but which very few would nevertheless be disposed to overthrow. The ranks of this party contain practically no True Believers; it is pragmatic, “other-directed,” rather than dogmatic. The moment of truth after Stalin’s death, the revelations of Khrushchev at the 20th Congress of the Russian Communist party, the accession of Gomulka to power backed by the workers from the Zeran factories and the intellectuals of Warsaw—all these combined once and for all to break the back of dogmatic Marxism in Poland. Although many of the liberal concessions granted by Gomulka in 1956 have since been revoked, and the momentarily hopeful atmosphere of five years ago has turned sour, the breakthrough from the dogmatic slumber of the country under Stalinist domination has turned out to be irreversible. In the course of my stay I met men who by need and temperament were fitted to be True Believers; even these—having much in common, in fact, with a good many would-be religious thinkers—were unable to believe.
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Despite the paraphernalia of parliamentarism and a multi-party system, the government of Poland of course remains a one-party dictatorship. Yet the dictatorship is that of a party which has no “line,” and which keeps its ears open to the noises coming from the underlying population. This is not to say that it does not act arbitrarily or in an authoritarian manner; it often does. Writers are censored, professors dismissed from research institutes, people hampered in their movements. But no longer propelled by a single, consistent ideology, the Polish Workers’ party is continually on the lookout for popular reactions. It is much disliked, yet desires to be popular. Gomulka was, it seems, genuinely hurt when a number of revisionist intellectuals, finding that their expectations of liberalism after October 1956 were not fulfilled, left the party. “They found it possible to stomach the party under the Stalinists,” he is reputed to have said, “but they leave us now when things are so much better.”
This desire of the party to be in touch with popular sentiment explains at least in part the remarkable ascendancy of Polish sociology in recent years. Administrators want to avoid the mistakes of the Stalinist period, when the party moved in a closed and paranoid universe of fixed and unreal categories. So they sponsor social research, particularly opinion polls, in which large samples of the population are asked questions about such things as job satisfaction, the orientation of youth, attitudes toward vocational training, social mobility, and the social prestige of various occupations. Particularly where democratic mechanisms for gauging the will of the majority are unavailable, the public opinion poll may become an auxiliary of government: the interview responses become in some respects the functional equivalent of the ballot. And these studies—whether government-sponsored or not—are read carefully by policy makers. The manager of a huge new industrial enterprise in western Poland told a friend of mine, “We need social researchers here to find out what ails the workers. We don’t want a new Adam Wazyk writing his Poem for Adults.” (Wazyk’s bitter poem about the horrors of the new industrial complex of Nova Huta served as a kind of poetic manifesto for the October revolution.)
The lack of firm ideology for Polish Communism is perhaps nowhere more apparent than in the party’s educational policies. These contrast sharply with those of most totalitarian regimes. Only 20 per cent of all teachers today are members of the party. In 1957, the party had registered a gain of 200 new members from the teaching profession, but in 1959 no less than 9,000 left it. Young men and women who are now in their twenties rebelled violently against the indoctrination they were given in the schools of the Stalinist period. The generation of students which follows them has nothing to rebel against, since it has never been exposed to Marxist ideology in any consistent manner. There are three Polish youth organizations under the general direction of the party, but their total combined membership represents only one quarter of all Polish youth. Only 14 per cent of those of eligible age belong even to the organization equivalent to the Boy Scouts, the largest and least political of all the groups.
From 1956 until last year Catholic religious instruction was permitted in the schools, a major concession by the party to gain the support of the Church. At the same time “politics” had practically disappeared from the course of instruction. For a while it seemed that religion was to become the major “ideological” influence in Polish education. Last fall the regime finally abolished religious instruction in the schools: for one thing, the children of party members, under pressure from their peers, were finding it practically impossible not to attend the religious classes. However, by taking this instruction out of the schools, the government has made it possible for religious education to operate without state or party control of any kind, and in so doing may therefore have helped to make it all the more effective. Now the party has decided that the ideological level of the schools is “unsatisfactory”—and beginning this fall students in the last two years of high school will be devoting two hours each week to something called “philosophical studies.” So far, however, there are neither textbooks nor specialized teachers for this subject. Eight hundred teachers are being given a special course of training, but some of them have already protested that the proposed plan of study contains too little non-Marxist philosophy. The children, they say, will not, for example, learn what existentialism really means. . . .
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As for the population at large, to judge from my conversations with people and from some of the opinion polls, very few people have any desire to return to the pre-war social system—at least very few people in urban Poland. The majority of the population would in a general way consider themselves “socialist,” but as in the West, this word no longer has an unambiguous meaning. In fact, the people I talked to who claimed to be for socialism defined it as “a system resembling that of Sweden,” and those who were opposed to socialism defined it as a regime resembling that of the Soviet Union!
But even such vague ideological preferences as these play very little part in the everyday activities and ideas of the mass of the population. Since the short-lived exhilaration following on the events of October 1956, Polish life has suffered a massive withdrawal of affect from the public scene. No matter what the notion of the “end of ideology” does or does not signify in the West, in Poland this condition is an absolute reality—if for no other reason than that Poles feel themselves to be left no political choices. Given the proximity of Russia, there is indeed very little for them to do beyond what they have done already, and they would be hard put to find any genuine alternative to Gomulka’s pragmatic balancing act. Hence the energies which might at other times have become absorbed in political affairs are now directed toward such things as art, theater, and music. Culturally speaking, Western Europe begins at the Russian-Polish border. Abstract painting is flourishing. At the theaters one gets to see a fair sample of the recent Western plays—Ionesco, Beckett, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams. Some of the best jazz on the other side of the Atlantic is played in Warsaw student hangouts and the clubs of the intelligentsia. (When the police recently raided the headquarters of a band of hooligans in a cave among the ruins of the Warsaw Ghetto, they found an abstract mural on the walls.)
The young generation does not trust the party because it has come to be suspicious of any political appeals. It cultivates a kind of ostentatious nihilism. Only about 1 or 2 per cent of the students at Warsaw University express any interest in Marxism. When the authorities recently corralled students for a “spontaneous” demonstration in front of the American Embassy to protest against the Cuban invasion, those who could not think of a pretext not to come in the first place stole away after a few minutes. This youth is sullen and resentful, seeming to harbor some undirected feeling of frustration and betrayal.
And their elders, if they cannot share their style, nevertheless are quite as much withdrawn from public concern. But Poland is rapidly industrializing, and to this generation the regime has in recent years brought many tangible benefits. Living standards have improved; a refrigerator or TV set is no longer an unattainable luxury. Housing is, of course, still the major problem: the most any single family is allowed is a two-room-plus-kitchen apartment, except for scientific workers who have the right to a three-room apartment (one room for study). Still, these overcrowded apartments are beginning to be filled with mass-produced amenities, and people have the sense that things are getting better all the time. For the country is rapidly reaching the point where it can get over the hump of economic development, where the painful process of primitive accumulation can give way to one of increasing consumption. Ideological and political differences with the West seem to pale into significance when they are seen against a background of the basic similarities of all emerging mass societies. Modern technological civilization puts the stamp of uniformity on societies whose structures may otherwise differ radically from one another. Certain areas of Warsaw look exactly like certain German towns in their Wirtschaftswunder prosperity.
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Ignazio Silone used to say that in capitalist society the country was run by plutocrats, people whose power was based on their wealth, but that Fascist Italy was run by “cratopluts,” that is, people whose wealth stemmed from their power. Whether or not the same is true for the other members of the Communist bloc, such is certainly not the case in Poland. Gomulka lives in a three-room apartment in a workers’ district. Contrary to what general sociological theory would lead one to expect, there is a most imperfect correlation between social power and private income. The men who have great power have little money, even when supplemented by standard perquisites of status, like vacation homes for themselves and their families. Those with the highest incomes are private traders and businessmen (the privat-initiativ) and some free professionals like doctors and lawyers. What Bacon said about late 16th-century England applies equally well to contemporary Poland: “The ways to enrich are many, and most of them foul.” As in the days of Russia’s NEP, the strata of society which the regime considers most inimical to its aims—namely, private urban enterprise, the free professions, and the peasantry—are precisely those enjoying the greatest economic benefit. But unlike the Russian policy makers who, fearing a revival of capitalism through capital accumulation by the peasantry, reverted to mass collectivization, the Gomulka regime harbors no such fears and envisages no such measures. The countryside is slowly being depleted by the mass exodus of the young to the city, and in any case, the specific weight of the peasantry is inevitably declining before the onslaught of industrialization. The regime, then, can rely on the working of sociological forces, without resort to terror, for maintaining the control of the economy.
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In a communist country, when the old certitudes of the party no longer hold, everything comes to have a provisional character. Policy in the realm of ideas is as makeshift as it is in building construction or city planning. One day the censor might reject an article he would cheerfully pass on another; today a professor may lose a job in a research institute as a result of certain imprudent remarks, but tomorrow he might be offered another one. The censor does not allow the publication of translations of such bourgeois sociologists as Mannheim and Weber, though these works had already been announced; and studies thick with footnotes that refer to all the Western social thinkers and empirical researchers are published. Every social scientist I met has a full library in which places of honor are occupied by the works of Freud or Weber, Robert Merton or Talcott Parsons. As I have said, the censor can at times be very severe, yet he recently passed an article in which there appeared a sardonic reference to “the owners of the people’s Poland.” (My own suggestion that the Russian class structure was best discussed by distinguishing between the upper-classless, the middle-classless, and the lower-classless was received into the body of comment currently circulating through the cafés and private parties of the social scientists.)
The revisionist intellectuals who played a leading part in October 1956 still meet every second week in their clubhouse “The Crooked Circle” in the Old City. Anywhere from fifty to five hundred people, depending on the topic of discussion, attend these meetings. The regime tolerates them possibly on the ground that they constitute a kind of safety valve. The discussions nevertheless do have real reverberations since many of the Crooked Circle members are people in positions of high responsibility and influence. A de-ideologized party finally has no real means of shielding itself from such influences. And while the intellectual situation may look and be an unstable one, the present balance has persisted through the last five years.
The majority of the intelligentsia, however, is not much interested in the meetings at the Crooked Circle. To them the 1956 revisionists are relics of another, perhaps heroic, age whom one may admire and leave alone. People have been able to avail themselves of job opportunities in administration, research institutes, and the like, which are freely open to talent. In fact, most intellectuals hold several jobs simultaneously, and under these conditions are quickly depoliticized. They have to make a certain concession to the powers that be, and find that they can ease any possible qualms of conscience by setting very high standards of technical achievement for themselves. A job well done within their sphere of responsibility comes to seem far more valuable than pronouncements on political issues.
Intellectually, the Polish intelligentsia has one great advantage over its colleagues in Western Europe. The vague “progressivist” clichés that still clutter so many first-rate brains in the West have for them been utterly destroyed. A Polish intellectual feels a mixture of irony and pity when he reads, say, that Sartre is toying with the myth of the proletariat or that he identifies the French Communist party with “true” working-class interests. There is no Warsaw counterpart to the opium of the left-wing intellectuals of Western Europe.
Catholic intellectuals in Poland, to judge by their publications—I did not meet any—are extremely vigorous. And, I am told, it is among them that one is most likely to find dedicated scholars. The graduates of the Catholic University in Lublin with rare exception do not get jobs in public schools, universities, or administration; around this university one apparently finds the young men who resemble those modern “clerks,” disinterested servants of the cause of ideas, whom Julien Benda wrote about. The younger Catholic intellectuals are influenced by French Christian-Socialism and Personalism; and this sometimes brings them into conflict with the more conservative members of the Church hierarchy. It is not uncommon for young Catholics and young former Marxists to meet and discover that they, as marginal men from the two great antagonistic camps of Polish society, have more in common among themselves than they have with the huge bureaucratic organizations from which they stem.
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Poland, then, presents the spectacle of a planned society being put together from day to day in a most unplanned way. The rebuilding of Warsaw is a case in point. Apartment houses, for instance, are constructed in the central “downtown” areas of the city with utter disregard for the economics of land utilization. The inefficiency and disorder in this city border on the miraculous. My hotel room in the newest and most up-to-date hotel of the city had a splendid bathroom, but hot water was available only three days out of the eight I spent there—and since there was no stopper for either the sink or the bathtub, I had to stuff a towel into the drain.
It seems that a group of architects proposed to the City Council to build a number of thirty-story apartment houses around the Palace of Culture so as to hide it somewhat and prevent it from monopolizing the skyline. The Council was perfectly willing to consider the project on the condition that the architects themselves agreed to move into the top-floor apartments. This the architects indignantly declined to do, and the project was abandoned. They were aware of the hazard of living thirty floors up in a country where the elevators work only sporadically and hot water is not likely to reach that high with any regularity.
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The Polish Workers’ party headquarters, built in the most unappealing Russian style, stands in the middle of the city, but it is not from here, one feels, that the transforming energy of recent years has come. What the party has done is to make possible that uneasy modus vivendi with Russia which was a necessary condition for further development. But the real impetus has come from the enormous technological and industrial process itself. Beside this powerful long-term process all the short-term influences seem minor and transitory. There were some 88,000 engineers in Poland in 1960; by 1965 it is predicted that there will be 116,000, and that during the same period, the number of technicians will rise from 161,000 to 272,000. The share of net investment in the total national income will rise from the already extremely high figure of 20.1 per cent in 1960 to 22.2 per cent in 1965, and the plan is for per capita consumption to rise in these five years by 23 per cent.
The service in stores and restaurants is appalling, the amount of paper work involved in even the simplest transaction is staggering—people often show an almost nihilistic disregard of their work—yet somehow life proceeds and things get done. Rows of new houses go up every month, and the standards of consumption continue to increase. Both hooliganism and alcoholism have declined with the coming of consumer goods onto the market. The availability of such goods is in itself a major incentive to produce. The unskilled worker who used to drink away a high proportion of his earnings out of sheer boredom, and because there was little else he could buy with his extra income, now saves for a television set. There is less delinquency now, not only because of the gradual elimination of the ruined buildings in which the hooligans used to hide, but also because young workers can now acquire legitimately some of the marks of status and identity.
Poland today is a country caught in the fascinating contradictions of a de-ideologized Communism. Given any small amount of political and military stability in the coming decades, the country promises to become a full-fledged member of the mass technological family, sharing its concerns and bearing a resemblance that is stronger and seems to go far deeper than matters of political structure.
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