1968

by Mark Kurlansky

  It wasn’t exactly a democracy. There wasn’t exactly free speech. It was a little like German playwright Peter Weiss’s 1964 play, The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade or, as it became popularly known after Peter Brook’s British production and 1966 film, Marat/Sade. Not only did this play start a vogue for long titles, but it was one of the most talked-about international works of theater in the mid-1960s. Expressing the sentiments about freedom of young people in much of the world, Marat/Sade takes place on the eve of Bastille Day 1808. It is a little after the French Revolution, and the people are sort of not quite free. In the end, following a song titled “Fifteen Glorious Years,” the inmates sing:

  And if most have a little

  and few have a lot

  You can see how much nearer

  our goal we have got.

  We can say what we like

  without favor or fear

  and what we can’t say

  we will breathe in your ear.

  Polish communist youth, not always in agreement with their parents, felt this “unfreedom,” as another extremely popular German writer of the mid-sixties, philosopher Herbert Marcuse, called it. Poland and much of the Soviet bloc exemplified Marcuse’s theory that the communication of opposites obstructed discourse. To criticize the government or “the system” in Poland required an aptitude for speaking opposites in reverse. Polityka, a weekly considered to be liberal and free thinking, reported on Dubek and Czechoslovakia, though mostly in the form of criticism. It often reported in reverse. If a student protested, Polityka would not report on it. But they might report that the student had recanted his protest letter and might even enumerate some of the lies he told, which he now retracted. From this, the Polish reader could learn of the protest letter and even a bit of its contents. When Mieczys™aw Rakowski, the editor of Polityka who decades later became the last first secretary of the ruling Polish Communist Party, wanted to criticize the government, he would write an article praising the government and then a week later run an article criticizing his article. He would breathe in your ear.

  As Polish youth became more adept at being dissidents, they mastered another technique of spreading information. They would leak to the foreign press whatever they wanted the Polish people to know. The New York Times and Le Monde were favorite recipients. But any news media would work, as long as it was read the next morning by Jan Nowak and his staff in Vienna, where the Polish-language service of Radio Free Europe was based. The Polish service and the Czech service would work together, so that the Poles could be informed about events in Czechoslovakia and the Czechs were informed on events in Poland. By 1968 each knew the other had a student movement. They also knew that the United States had a student movement. They had no trouble, even through the Polish press, learning about Martin Luther King and sit-ins in the South and American student movements that used demonstrations to protest the Vietnam War. The leading official Polish newspaper, Trybuna Ludu, the People’s Tribune, contained little news on Poland in 1968, though a great deal on the Vietnam War and the Middle East, which was mostly about how Israel had taken a lot of land and did not plan to give it back. They also reported extensively on the civil rights and antiwar movements in the United States. The sit-ins and marches that began to characterize American campuses were reported in the official communist press. But as 1968 began, few Polish students imagined using such methods in Poland.

  Ironically, in the happy barracks foreign press was not suppressed. A Pole could go to a library and read Le Monde or the British Guardian. But these papers were accessible only to the few who could read French or English, including many students. Otherwise Poles had to wait for the broadcast on Radio Free Europe.

  Students, tourists, even businessmen when traveling abroad would stop off at Radio Free Europe in Vienna and give information. But many refused to work with Radio Free Europe, for this cold war generation had grown up with the capitalists as the enemy, rehearsing for defense in the event of an American nuclear attack in scarce and overcrowded schools, a shortage blamed on the high cost of the fallout shelters each school had to contain.

  Leading dissident Jacek Kuroń said, “I knew that Radio Free Europe was done by the CIA. I didn’t know for sure, but I thought so. But it was the only means I had. I would have preferred to use a more neutral media but there was no other.” But despite his negative feelings about them, the Radio Free Europe staff admired and trusted him. Nowak said of Kuroń, “He is one of the most noble human beings I have met in my life.”

  An alternative to Radio Free Europe was Kultura, a Polish-language newspaper written by a group of Poles who lived together in Paris. Kultura could get five thousand copies into circulation in Poland, which was often too few, too slowly.

  Kuroń said, “My greatest concern was getting information to the Polish people. Who was beaten, who was arrested. I was a central information point and had to distribute the information.” He gestured toward a white phone in his small, dark Warsaw apartment. “Through this phone I used to telephone Radio Free Europe several times a day to give them information because it was broadcast back to Poland immediately. One time I was telling them about seven people in prison, and two political police walked into the apartment and told me to come with them. ‘Who is it you are arresting?’ I asked.

  “ ‘We are arresting you, Jacek Kuroń.’ ”

  Kuroń was holding the phone with Radio Free Europe still on the line, and the arrest was recorded and broadcast instantly.

  Radio Free Europe broadcasted in Poland from 5:00 A.M. to midnight, seven days a week. Broadcasts were by native-speaking Poles. There was music, sports, and news every hour on the hour. The station claimed strict objectivity without editorializing, though few believed this. Few cared. The station was listened to with the expectation that it was a Western point of view. But it was full of information on Poland that came from inside Poland.

  The Polish government jammed the station, but this served as a guide. If a Pole turned on the station and heard that familiar engine roar in the background, it meant this was important programming. The words could still be deciphered. “Jamming was our ally,” said Jan Nowak. “It made people curious about what they were hiding.”

  One day in 1964, an average-size, blond, fairly typical-looking young Pole stopped by Radio Free Europe in Vienna on his way back to Poland from Paris. He was only eighteen years old, a young disciple of two older, well-known dissidents: Kuroń and Karol Modzelewski. The young man talked with enthusiasm about a vision of a socialism that was both democratic and humane. Four years later, in 1968, Alexander Dubek would call this “communism with a human face.”

  Nowak recalled the young man, whose name was Adam Michnik: “He was boyish in appearance but had astounding intellectual maturity for his years.” Michnik was born in 1946, a post-Holocaust Jew from Lwov, which is now in the Ukraine but at the time of his birth was still in Poland. Before the war, when such a world still existed, his father’s family were impoverished, traditional shtetl Jews. His mother came from an assimilated Cracow family. Both parents were communists, and his father had been arrested for Party activities before the war. But Adam grew up in a communist world, with Rosa Luxemburg and Leon Trotsky, he says, by coincidence both Jews, for heroes.

  “The only way I know I am Jewish is anti-Semites call me a Jew,” said Michnik, which is to say that he never thought very much about being Jewish until 1968.

  In 1965 he was a history student at the University of Warsaw, one of about fifty young students who gathered around Kuroń and Modzelewski, a twenty-seven-year old researcher in the History Department and a Communist Party member. They were all communists. Michnik said of Kuroń and Modzelewski, “They were the heroes, the leaders.”

  Jacek Kuroń, like Michnik, was from Lwov, but he had been born before the war. In 1965 he was already thirty-one. His mother had a law degree and was married when
she became pregnant with Jacek. She often complained bitterly that “she was made for better things.” Kuroń’s father was a mechanical engineer and a leader in the Polish Socialist Party. But he disliked the Soviets, and his contact with them made him increasingly anticommunist. In 1949, when Jacek decided to join the Communist Party at the age of fifteen, his father vehemently opposed his decision.

  Originally, Kuroń and Modzelewski’s discussion groups were government sponsored. Communist youth had an opportunity to meet with Party officials and ask questions in small groups of close-knit friends. But by the 1960s the questioning was sometimes so harsh that the Party officials simply wouldn’t answer. In response to a Modzelewski speech to younger students, the government closed down the Union of Socialist Youth—ZMS—his discussion group at the University of Warsaw. Banned from the university, the ZMS continued to meet in private apartments, with about fifty students attending.

  After many long conversations, Kuroń and Modzelewski concluded that the system in power in Poland was not the one Marx had written about. It was not Marxism but used the name, used many labels to confuse and delude people. In 1965 they decided to write and distribute photocopies of an anonymous open letter calling the ruling system a fraud without justice and freedom. The two young men left their words unsigned because they did not want to experience Polish prison. But somehow the political police had been told of their activities and burst into the apartment where they were photocopying. The police simply confiscated the original and warned them that if they distributed any of the copies, they would face a prison sentence.

  Had there been no further retribution, they might have heeded the warning. But Kuroń’s wife lost her job as an assistant professor, and both Kuroń and Modzelewski experienced continual harassment. After several months, they decided that they had no choice but to bring their protest into the open, start an open debate, and go to prison for it.

  Kuroń and Modzelewski signed their open letter and next to their signatures stated that they expected to receive three years in prison for this act. “We were exactly right,” Kuroń recalled.

  They distributed only twenty copies, but they also got a copy to Jerzy Giedroyc, who published Kultura in Paris and saw to it that more than five thousand copies were distributed in his publication. The letter was translated into Czech and then into most European languages. It was read in Spanish in Cuba and in Chinese in the People’s Republic. Students in Paris and London and Berlin read it.

  At age nineteen, Adam Michnik was sent to prison for the first time, with his reluctant heroes, Kuroń and Modzelewski.

  By January 1968 the dissident movement had become a major force among students at the University of Warsaw. But it had little impact, was not even known beyond that lovely gated campus. Modzelewski had said that they were cordoned in and had to break out. He always warned that when they did, the government would attack.

  That opportunity to break out came with a production of a play called Dziady by early-nineteenth-century poet Adam Mickiewicz, unquestionably the most revered writer in the Polish language. Not a prolific writer, Mickiewicz’s unmatched reputation rests largely on an epic poem of rural Lithuanian life, Pan Tadeusz, and the play, Dziady. Among the first priorities of rebuilding the old center of Warsaw after the war had been the reconstruction of the gardened plaza built in 1898 to mark the centennial of Mickiewicz’s birth. High in the center of a rose garden among the weeping willows stands the poet reproduced in bronze. To stage Dziady in Warsaw was no more controversial than a production of Hamlet in London or Molière in Paris.

  Under communism, just as in previous regimes, studying this play was an essential part of a child’s education. Dziady, sometimes translated into English as Forefathers’ Eve, begins with the ritual summoning of the dziady, deceased ancestors. The hero, Gustav, dies in prison and returns to earth in the form of a revolutionary named Konrad. Throughout the play the rebellious antiauthoritarian message is unmistakable, as is the Polish nationalist message, since much of the play is about the struggle of Polish political prisoners at the hands of the Rus-sian oppressor. But there were also demons, a priest, and angels. This is an extremely complicated piece of theater, difficult to stage and consequently the great challenge of Polish directors.

  1968 was a great directorial moment for theater, a moment in which traditions were challenged, while the stage remained one of the important sources of social commentary. In New York, Julian Beck and his wife, Judith Malina, tried to break down the last barriers of traditional staging with their Living Theater. In their Upper West Side Manhattan living room they had begun directing works by difficult moderns, including García Lorca, Bertolt Brecht, Gertrude Stein, and the contemporary New York absurdist writer and social critic, Paul Goodman. They moved into theaters and lofts, where instead of selling tickets they collected contributions, and eventually traveled to Paris, Berlin, and Venice, living as a free-form commune with much fame and very little money. Julian built spectacularly original sets from scraps, and he directed occasionally, though it was more often Judith, the daughter of a German Hasidic rabbi and an aspiring actress who gave readings of German classic poetry, who was the director, especially of plays in verse. Increasingly political, the two boasted of having broken the barrier between politics and art. By 1968, their theater was a strong antiwar force and performances usually ended with not only applause but cries of “Stop the war!” and “Empty the jails!” and “Change the world!” The plays increasingly made contact with the audience. Sometimes actors served the audience food, and in one production an abstract painting was created in the course of the performance and then auctioned off to the audience. Theater of Chance determined lines by throws of the dice. Kenneth Brown’s The Brig, about brutality in a Marine Corps prison, allowed actors to improvise their abuse of the prisoner.

  Peter Brook’s inventive direction of Marat/Sade was also influencing theater around the world. In New York Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead opened in January, viewing Shakespeare’s Hamlet from the perspective of its two least important characters. At the same time Joseph Papp mounted a production of Hamlet in a modern setting starring Martin Sheen. Clive Barnes wrote in The New York Times, “An aimless Hamlet for Philistines who wish to be confirmed in their opinion that the Bard is for the birds.” Richard Watts, Jr., in the New York Post called it “lunatic burlesque, at times satirically amusing, at others seemingly pointless.” All of which may have been true, but still, Papp was celebrated for his boldness at a time when boldness was admired above almost all else. In April his production of Hair: The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical, largely about the hippie life with very little story, was moved to Broadway directed by Tom O’Horgan, who sent actors panhandling and distributing flowers in the audience. Barnes, in a very positive and enthusiastic review, warned the public, “At one point—in what is later affectionately referred to as ‘the nude scene’—a number of men and women (I should have counted) are seen totally nude and full, as it were, face.” On the nudism in Hair, Paris Match pointed out that there were also those who objected to the naked back of Marat being visible from the bathtub in Brook’s production.

  In Dubek’s Czechoslovakia, once-underground playwrights such as Václav Havel and Pavel Kohout were becoming international stars combining the Czech Kafkaesque tradition of absurdist wit and a dangerous, Beck-like fusion of art and politics. Communist bureaucracy was a favorite target. Papp’s Public Theater presented a production of Havel’s The Memorandum starring Olympia Dukakis, in which office workers struggle with a made-up language.

  So it was not surprising, with avant-garde theater flowering everywhere, especially in neighboring Czechoslovakia, that the Polish National Theater’s production of the Polish classic would try something different. The play, with its political side but also a religious side rooted in Slavic Christian mysticism, was often presented in precommunist Poland as a religious and mystical piece. Under communism it was generally seen as political. Inst
ead of choosing between a political play and a religious one, director Kazimierz Dejmek used both to create a complex production steeped in early Christian ritual but at the same time very much about the struggle for Polish freedom. Gustav/Konrad was played by Gustaw Holoubek, one of Poland’s most respected actors, who made the role one of inner struggle and uncertainty.

  Like an old, well-known melodrama in which everyone knows the lines of the hero and villain, Dziady has always had its familiar moments certain to provoke applause. Most of these lines are nationalist in tone, such as, “We Poles have sold our souls for a couple of silver rubles,” and the Russian officer’s words, “It’s no wonder they hate us so: For full one hundred years, they’ve seen from Moscow into Poland flow such a sewage-laden stream.” These moments were part of the Polish experience of going to Dziady. The play was anticzar, which was perfectly acceptable Soviet thinking. It was not anticommunist. It said nothing about communists or Soviets, which it predates. In fact, the way it was taught and usually produced under communism was to emphasize the political messages. Far from an anti-Soviet symbol, the play had been originally mounted the previous fall as part of celebrations for the fiftieth anniversary of the October Revolution that brought the Communists to power in Russia.