All the same, Poland by the skin of its teeth avoided a bloodbath and war with the Soviet Union. It was a better, freer, cleaner place after 1956 than before, and for a few years infinitely better and freer. The Hungarians were only trying to imitate the Polish success when, on 23 October, the students marched to the statue of Jozef Bern, the Polish general who had led Hungarian insurgents in 1848. Why did they fail, and the Poles – relatively speaking – succeed?
On 10 June 1956, the Observer published what it called ‘its oddest issue’; the entire text of Nikita Khrushchev’s secret speech to the twentieth Party Congress, in which he revealed and denounced the crimes of the idol Stalin. We carried it as a single news story 26,000 words long, covering eight of the paper’s 14 pages. We got it, indirectly, from Stefan Staszewski, chief of the Warsaw party organisation, who grabbed one of the few numbered texts to reach Poland, ran off another 15,000 copies and gave three to French and American correspondents in Warsaw.
The point of this tale is that it shows how early and how rapidly Stalinist authority in Poland began to fall apart, and how effectively the party there managed to keep one jump ahead of public opinion. The aim of the reformers was to bring back to power Wladyslaw Gomulka, who had tried to keep Soviet interference to a minimum while party leader between 1944 and 1948.
The climax came on 19 October, when the party’s ‘Eighth Plenum’ met in Warsaw, its majority determined to restore Gomułka to the leadership. Khrushchev had demanded an invitation. The Poles told him he wasn’t welcome.
Khrushchev appeared all the same, shouting and screaming on the airfield at 7 a.m. about a sell-out to ‘Americans and Zionists.’ With him came a colossal delegation of Politburo members, generals, secretaries and even cooks bringing special food. Meanwhile, Soviet armoured units moved out of their camps and began to encircle Warsaw. The Polish Communists, who had anticipated something of the sort, had already stored arms for the Warsaw factory workers and now prepared to hand them out.
The rest, as they say, is history. Khrushchev eventually simmered down. Gomułka stood up to him, insisting that the thousands of Soviet officials lodged in every level of government, security and the armed forces must go home; Poland would stay in the Soviet alliance but must be allowed to run its own affairs. Khrushchev decided that this insolent jailbird was, after all, a loyal Communist in his fashion and flew home.
Gomułka was elected First Secretary. He told an ecstatic nation on the radio that there would be democracy and no more lies, independence along a Polish road to socialism and no more illegality. Two days later, in Budapest, the Hungarians marched to Bern’s statue. The secret police fired on them; the people found weapons and fired back, and the city exploded into insurrection.
Why was the outcome so different? The passions of ordinary Poles and Hungarians were much the same: intense patriotic hatred of Soviet tyranny; pent-up rage against the misery of police terror, starvation wages and censorship; the hunger for justice, free speech and political democracy. It is true that Stalinism in Hungary had been more vicious than in Poland. But by October 1956, the mood of the Polish nation was as explosive as it was in Hungary,
The difference, frankly, was that Communist Party manipulation of the crisis in Poland was much more astute. Except for one day in Poznan, the Polish masses never got the bit between their teeth. The Polish Communists were divided, but in comparison the Hungarian Communists entered the crisis in utter confusion and panic. When Imre Nagy declared a multiparty system and then, on 1 November, Hungarian neutrality, he was being blown along by the hurricane of events. The fate of Hungary on 4 November, when the Soviet tanks re-entered Budapest, sobered the Poles and helped Gomułka to retain control.
I admit to one doubt about this theory. If the Polish security police had slaughtered demonstrators in the capital Warsaw, rather than in Poznan, a full-scale insurrection might have followed. But as it was, the regime survived, playing the patriotic card and granting concessions from press freedom to the disbanding of most of the secret police.
Most of these liberties were revoked in the next few years. But what remained was decisive: the restoration of the private peasantry, the collective farms dissolved, the return to influence of the Catholic Church, the party’s enduring fear of the people’s anger.
Hungary today is a comparatively prosperous place, run with tolerance and craft by Mr János Kádár. Poland, three years beyond martial law, is restless and crippled by debt and economic failure. And yet there remains an openness about Poland, a bad-tempered but lively jostling of social forces, which makes it in the end a healthier place. The room for real change is wider, and the air is somehow fresher. That is the legacy of the ‘Polish October.’
[1986
Requiem for an Old Piano Banger
Last month, in writing a column which suggested that a song might be a better memorial than a stone, I seem to have hit on one of those topics which you, the readers, enjoy. Many interesting letters arrived. A happy New Year to you all, and what better way to start it than to continue this discussion of death, the tomb, and the meaning of memorials?
One of you described to me the Japanese monument to the war dead – of all nations – at Kyoto. Another wrote about the memorial to the Italian dead in the Isonzo battles during the First World War, inscribed with hundreds of thousands of names. Martin Green sent me his poem ‘Gandesa,’ which -not unlike Dunbar’s ‘Lament for the Makaris’ – celebrates by name every single British soldier who fell in the XV International Brigade during the Spanish Civil War.
Some liked the idea of remembering the dead through music. Others did not, like the reader whose wife died last year. He wanted no stone for her, but instead arranged for some trees to be planted by the Woodland Trust. He is a man who fought in North Africa and Italy, and he ended his letter: ‘Let us have trees as memorials, not songs. There is too much music already!’
I can’t agree with that last sentence. I am waiting impatiently for one of the most spectacular commemorations-by-music to be staged in London for years. This is the concert to celebrate the one-hundredth anniversary of the birth of Artur Rubinstein, the mighty pianist who died in 1982 at the age of 95, which will be held in the Festival Hall on Sunday 25 January.
The music is the first British performance of Penderecki’s ‘Polish Requiem,’ conducted by the composer. All kinds of rich complexities arise. The concert honours one of the most glorious sons of Polish Jewry, but the music is a form of Catholic liturgy and commemorates the death of Polish workers, a Catholic saint and a Cardinal, as well as the Jewish martyrs of the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto rising.
Krzystof Penderecki, now in his fifties, belongs to the generation of Polish composers who astonished the world some 20 years ago with their avant-garde music. Since then, after a prolonged love affair with nineteenth-century Romantic compositions, Penderecki has been producing work which is more directly emotive and accessible than his early music. In some ways, he has become a ‘composer of occasion,’ who creates in response to public events which move him.
The Requiem is partly new and partly a building-together of separate works from recent years. It includes a 1981 ‘Agnus Dei’ which Penderecki wrote on the night after the death of Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski, the ‘Recordare’ inspired by the canonisation of St Maximilian Kolbe and the ‘Dies Irae’ done in 1983 on the fortieth anniversary of the Ghetto Rising. And there is also his ‘Lacrimosa’, composed at the request of Solidarity for the ceremony at Gdańsk in December 1980, at which the monument to the dead shipyard workers of the 1970 riots was dedicated.
The Requiem itself is also a reaction to a moment in history. Penderecki was moved to construct it in December 1981, when martial law was imposed on his country. As he told an American interviewer, ‘in Poland, liturgical music is not only an expression of religion. It’s a way for composers to show which side they are on.’
The only bit of the Requiem I have heard is the ‘Lacrimosa.’ I was lucky enough to be in Gdańsk that
bitter night in 1980. Tens of thousands of people gathered outside the shipyard gate, under the soaring triple cross of steel raised by the workers to their comrades who perished 10 years before. Leaders of the State, the Church, the Communist Party and of the new free trade union stood around the plinth. Ships and factories blew their sirens. The names of the dead were called into the wind and darkness. Then, with a monstrous, droning chord, the ‘Lacrimosa’ began.
In that context, the ‘Lacrimosa’ was about reconciliation as well as grief, about the hope – background to the whole ceremony – that Solidarity and the Communist State would be able to work together in a cleaner, freer Poland. That hope proved vain. But the Requiem, in the context of this Rubinstein centenary, is about reconciliation as well as about an individual genius who adored life so much that his death still seems like a mistake. It is about Poles and Jews coming to terms about their mutual history.
The names on the concert committee are intriguing. Here on one list are Polish princes and counts from the emigration alongside famous Jewish intellectuals and business tycoons, as well as a local British marquess and duke. There were times when leaders of the Jewish community might have felt uneasy in such company, given the anti-Semitism common in the Polish upper crust in the old days. But times, finally, are changing.
Not without a few splutters, mostly from younger members of the Jewish diaspora brought up to believe that there was little to choose between Nazi Germany and Catholic Poland. There were some mutterings about the idea of honouring Rubinstein with a Catholic requiem. A Jewish Chronicle reviewer though the choice of Penderecki was a ‘false note’: he particularly resented the tribute to Maximilian Kolbe, the priest who gave his life to save another prisoner in Auschwitz, because Kolbe
- before the war – supervised a distinctly anti-Jewish Catholic newspaper.
I’m told that the reviewer has had second thoughts about this. But as often happens, opinion in Israel has developed more rapidly than in the Diaspora, and the ‘Polish Requiem’ was received with delight by Israeli music critics. Maariv wrote that it was ‘one of the outstanding and impressive creations of the century’; Haaretz said that the Requiem was ‘not just another Christian religious work’ but ‘a cry of pain and a prayer for better days.’
For many centuries, most of the world’s Jews lived in Poland. The relations between Catholic and Jewish Poles were never easy and became worse in the course of the last century, but they were intimate in a way now difficult to explain. Neither commmunity could quite imagine life without the other, until two political forces brought the symbiosis to an end: Zionism, which offered Jews the vision of a nation-state of their own, and then the catastrophe which Zionism came too late to avoid: Hitler’s systematic murder of Poland’s Jews.
Behind this concert is a new mood in which Poles and Jews are gradually understanding what they owe to one another. From the Jews, through the Bible, the Poles took the idea of a nation whose claim to survive and commandment to remember were holy. The Jews learned from Polish struggles for independence the theory and practice of modern politics – and of modern nationalism.
And yet, amid all this solemnity and significance, among Penderecki’s mourning for victims and martyrs, there is some danger of losing Rubinstein himself. He lived with a rare joy in life, defying melancholy.
When he was 75, he said: ‘Eat a lobster, eat a pound of caviar – live!’ When he was 90, he said: ‘Mozart died at 36, Schubert at 32, and I stick around like a mad old piano banger. Why me? I don’t know. But I thank God.’ On Sunday week, we will thank Rubinstein.
[1987
Invisible Men
As the Invisible Man began to die, so he began to become visible. Readers of H. G. Wells will remember the episode, as the bystanders saw appearing in the thin air at their feet the gossamer outlines of veins and sinews, then the thickening blur of limbs and skin, until a naked young man lay dead before them.
Censors are Invisible Men. And, in the same way, they gradually become visible as the life and authority ebb out of them. Contemporary Poland is a case in point. For years, some publications which are officially licensed but oppositional in their views – much of the independent Catholic Press, for instance – have been marking the place at which the censors have excised material.
I have on the desk a copy of Res Publica, an intellectual periodical which used to appear as illegal ‘samizdat’ but which has now been licensed. In an article about the politics of Bertolt Brecht, there appears suddenly the following: ‘(——) (Law of 31.7.81 on the control of publications and spectacles, article 2, section 3; Official Gazette No. 20, item 99; 1983, Official Gazette No. 44, item 204).
The article then continues to say what it was saying when it was so rudely interrupted. The reader is made aware that the censor has cut out a passage, and the context usually lets him or her guess roughly what the missing passage was about. I have seen articles which consisted only of an exciting headline, the formula quoted above, and nothing else: the whole piece has been forbidden. The authorities do not like the insertion of the formula. But they tolerate it, with occasional protests. Censorship has become visible – and weaker.
The regime’s own Press, especially publications sponsored by the Communist Party or the Government directly, has naturally played safer. Cuts are not shown, although such papers suffer from pre-censorship too, and although they, like the independent Press, frequently use the appeals procedure against censorship which survives in a mutilated form from the Solidarity period. But even here, the first gauzy traces of the Invisible Man are beginning to appear.
The weekly Polytika, published by the Central Committee of the Party, has just brought out a long article on one of the great taboos of history: the Nazi-Soviet Pact. The pact of 23 August 1939 included a secret protocol allowing for the partition of the Polish State between the ‘spheres of influence’ of Germany and the USSR.
The secret protocol and the detailed agreement on partition which followed it have been the taboo within the taboo for almost 50 years. But the author of the article, Professor Duraczynski, decided to tackle it in the least provocative way that he could think of.
This is what happened. ‘According to German sources, a strictly secret protocol was appended to the Pact providing for the demarcation of “spheres of influence” of both powers in Eastern Europe. The authenticity of this document has not been confirmed by the Soviet side (…).’
This information will hardly startle the Poles, who have known all about the secret protocol since it was published in the West in 1948. Two things matter here. The first, of course, is (…). A Party publication is marking for its readers the interference of censorship, rendering it visible.
The second point is what the censors allowed the Professor to write before they hit him with a (…). Mr Gorbachov has told the Poles that there should be no ‘white spaces’ in the history of Soviet-Polish relations. Polityka is beginning to fill in some of these spaces. The latest number, for instance, has an account of how Polish troops fought the Red Army when – as an outcome of the Pact – it invaded Poland on 17 September 1939 and met the Nazis advancing from the West.
Again, this is only a symbolic revelation. All Poles know these things: because they or their fathers were there, or through Western publications and broadcasts. When the Professor says that ‘according to German sources’ there was a secret protocol, he is playing games: there was, full stop. When he warns that the Soviet side hasn’t confirmed it, he is playing again: he knows and we know that it hasn’t confirmed it precisely because it is true and puts the USSR in a bad light.
But glasnost is not less important because it largely consists of stating in public what everyone knows already. Silence and lies form a pillar of tyranny, national or international. Telling more of the truth about history makes a better foreign policy at least possible, which is why the Poles – in a historians’ committee – have now given the Soviet Union a long list of ‘white spaces’: the massacre of P
olish Communists, the Katyn atrocity, the fate of Polish deportees after 1939, Soviet behaviour during the Warsaw Rising, the kidnap and ‘trial’ of Polish resistance leaders after the war, and so on. The Nazi-Soviet Pact is on the list, too.
The Polish official spokesman complained the other day that some people were merely filling the white spaces with dirty smears. How black will be the space where that Pact should be, when and if it is filled in?
I have been reading the manuscript of a forthcoming and fascinating book by Geoff Roberts, provisionally titled ‘Soviet Russia’s Pact with Nazi Germany.’ He has rejected the old excuse that ‘we will never know until Moscow opens its archives,’ and done his best with what is available.
One of the mysteries is when Stalin decided to seek an understanding with Nazi Germany. When the Pact was signed, an Anglo-French delegation was still in Moscow discussing military co-operation to contain Hitler. Was all that a sham on the Soviet side, the ‘option for Hitler’ having already been secretly adopted? Or – as the Soviet side prefers – was there a sincere wish for a ‘triple pact’ with Britain and France, destroyed by evidence that the Western powers hoped that Hitler would fight Stalin and would do nothing to help the USSR in that event?
Much depends on what one makes of a meeting in Berlin on 17 April – four months before the Pact. Merekalov, the Soviet ambassador, said there was no reason why Nazi-Soviet relations should not become normal and then better than normal. Was this the first sign of a new policy unimaginable to the rest of the world?
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