Soviet Soft Power in Poland

Culture and the Making of Stalin's New Empire, 1943-1957

Patryk Babiracki

• Editorial: The University of North Carolina Press
• Año: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781469620909
• Categoría: Storia
• Categoría: Storia dell'Europa orientale

Concentrating on the formative years of the Cold War from 1943 to 1957, Patryk Babiracki reveals little-known Soviet efforts to build a postwar East European empire through culture. Babiracki argues that the Soviets involved in foreign cultural outreach tried to use "soft power" in order to galvanize broad support for the postwar order in the emerging Soviet bloc. Populated with compelling characters ranging from artists, writers, journalists, and scientists to party and government functionaries, this work illuminates the behind-the-scenes schemes of the Stalinist international propaganda machine. Based on exhaustive research in Russian and Polish archives, Babiracki's study is the first in any language to examine the two-way interactions between Soviet and Polish propagandists and to evaluate their attempts at cultural cooperation. Babiracki shows that the Stalinist system ultimately undermined Soviet efforts to secure popular legitimacy abroad through persuasive propaganda. He also highlights the limitations and contradictions of Soviet international cultural outreach, which help explain why the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe crumbled so easily after less than a half-century of existence.

Chapter 1: From Sel’tsy to Siedlce

We resembled a great laboratory, in which methods for political work of the fighting Army have been worked out. … From our ranks arose an entire group of leading state and social activists in the Reborn, Democratic Poland.

—Lieutenant Colonel Władysław Maskalan to Colonel Piotr Jaroszewicz, July 4, 1945

The White Eagle flows above us

Our banner is white and red

onto the battle field, the field of glory

our division, forward march.

—Leon Pasternak, “We, the First Division,” 1943

THE JOURNEY OF THE APOSTLES

On the bitter cold Moscow morning of May 12, 1943, six men embarked in an open, half-ton truck and sped off toward the sunrise. They headed to the region of Sel’tsy, a swampy pool of the Oka River near Riazan. Marian Naszkowski and the handful of other Polish communists in the car felt tired but overjoyed, thrilled by their newfound roles as makers of history.¹ In a few days, they would be setting up a recruitment camp for the Kościuszko Division. Named after Poland’s eighteenth-century revolutionary hero who stood up to the oppressive policies of Catherine the Great, this was to be the country’s first Soviet-sponsored military unit to fight its way home under the wings of the mighty Red Army.

Jerzy Putrament’s eastward journey toward the red, rising sun constituted a symbolic landmark on his larger political odyssey, which was not unusual for men of his generation. He had been born in 1910 to a “Russified Polish” mother and a “Polonized Lithuanian” father, as he would remind his audiences in future years.² Only one year older than Czesław Miłosz, Putrament met his younger colleague at the University of Wilno, where the two began a complicated, love-hate relationship that lasted throughout their lifetimes. In his Captive Mind, Miłosz recounted the meeting with the boorish, provincial, and recalcitrant anti-Semite Jerzy Putrament whom he branded after World War II, “Gamma, A Slave of History.” Miłosz felt offended “by his behavior, his piercing voice—he just did not know how to speak in a normal tone—and by the opinions he uttered.”³

Sel’tsy, 1943. Wanda Wasilewska speaking to the soldiers of the Kościuszko Division. Standing in the background are General Zygmunt Berling (left) and Włodzimierz Sokorski (right). Courtesy of Polska Agencja Prasowa.

Putrament’s affiliation with right-wing student organizations lasted for only one year in 1930–31; while he himself minimized this episode in later autobiographical accounts, it colored Miłosz’s memories of him for decades to come.⁴ Putrament had been attracted to the Right for many reasons. He admired the strong, charismatic leader of the university’s right-wing youth organization. He liked the latter’s clear sense of hierarchy. He had few reasons to sympathize with communism, which, as a son of a Polish officer, he associated with fear during the Polish-Soviet war of 1920. He liked the lavish corporate dress and colorful, bombastic ceremonies of his organization.⁵ Putrament claims to have broken with the nationalist youth organization, the “All-Polish Youth,” disgusted at the difference between their right-wing ideologies and the brutal methods with which they implemented them.⁶ Putrament prided himself on ending his affiliation in 1932, only after it dominated the student political scene at the University of Wilno. For that reason, as his biographer pointed out, it is difficult to read this choice as a result of Putrament’s opportunism.⁷ It was also a rare moment in which the young writer’s independence triumphed over the pressure from a force majeure. By the time the Soviets occupied Eastern Poland in 1939–41, Putrament was a committed communist, surprising the most radical Poles with his pro-Soviet zeal—in one case, trying to convince the poet Adam Ważyk and a few others to sign a statement condemning selected “traitors and renegades.”⁸ Back in 1939–41, the Soviets had been Nazi accomplices in the partition of Poland. Now the Red Army was defeating the Germans. After the Red Army’s strategic victories at Kursk and at Stalingrad many people worldwide came to admire Stalin and the Soviet system. And Putrament, once a bellicose chauvinist turned Soviet collaborator, now traveled east to become a willing interpreter of Soviet soft power.

Besides the chill, their fatigue, and a common purpose, the passengers in that speeding half-ton truck shared a sense of relief. It stemmed from the long period of anticipation that had preceded their journey. Facing an invasion by Germany and the USSR in 1939, scores of Polish communists, sympathizers, and intellectuals chose to escape east, hoping to become useful one day. While some of them ended up dead or in the camps, others saw their desires fulfilled in the Soviet Union. The “Red” L’vov, a former Polish city (named Lwów in Polish) in Western Ukraine, turned into a cultural capital of Poland’s progressive avant-garde between the fall of 1939 and summer of 1941, even as the NKVD continued to arrest people with suspicious backgrounds left and right. After the German invasion of the USSR, Polish activists and cultural figures followed the patterns of Soviet relocation into the depths of the country meant to spare the country’s industrial infrastructure and governing institutions from the bombings. Many enlisted in the Red Army either as political officers or for combat duties.⁹ Others, after months of doing odd jobs, often in remote corners of the Soviet Union, cut their teeth in propaganda work in the Comintern or Polish-language information outlets in Moscow, Saratov, Ufa, and Kuibyshev.¹⁰ Like Putrament, they were able to use their previous experience as cultural organizers, and some made their wartime media debuts. Like an answered prayer, these men at last became useful; the events of the recent past offered them the exhilarating chance to link their talents and utopian dreams directly to the cause of Poland’s liberation. The Red Army’s offensive in the winter of 1942–43 raised questions about the fate of the continent after the defeat of the belligerents in this war. Poland’s central location in the “heart of Europe,” smack between the USSR and Germany, suddenly turned it into a focal point of interest for Stalin and the leaders of Western powers.

In March 1943, Stalin gave his support for the creation of the Union of Polish Patriots (ZPP). Led by Wanda Wasilewska, the charismatic daughter of the socialist Leon Wasilewski and wife of Ukrainian writer Aleksandr Korneichuk, the leftist activists spread the word about the ZZP. Stalin used the organization to create an alternative center of power to the London-based Polish government in exile. Ostensibly established on a broad leftist platform meant to represent Poles in the USSR, the ZZP was actually an organization dominated by Polish communists.¹¹ The organization’s press organ, Wolna Polska (Free Poland), founded in Moscow, became a creative outlet to individuals who had previously worked in other editorial posts. Both the Union of Polish Patriots and its mouthpiece provided the Polish activists with a clear sense of mission and an unprecedented feeling of cohesion. Wolna Polska also spread the word about the ZPP to the Poles dispersed throughout the Soviet Union. Two newspapers, Wolna Polska and Nowe Widnokręgi, became interactive forums for discussing the role that the scattered Polish community should play in World War II after the breakthroughs on the Eastern Front.

Stalin and the Polish communists worked to create a center of power that would rival the political and military forces loyal to the Polish government in London. A vision for the country’s postwar development was most likely still vague in the mind of the Soviet leader. All the same, Stalin saw that a Soviet-sponsored Polish organization with its own military units as a potential asset in at least three ways. First, it would allow Stalin to speak on behalf of a visible, institutionalized Polish community in the Soviet Union during the inevitable negotiations with the other leaders of the great powers over the postwar order—and thus, it would help legitimize Soviet geopolitical interest as a Polish claim. Second, there was a functional advantage to having such an organized political community ready for a potential power contestation in Poland, whatever its exact nature might be. Third, the symbolic weight of associating the Polish left with the agents of victory on the Eastern Front and the liberating Red Army furnished the communists with a weapon against Polish skeptics.¹² The communists could thereby claim credit for the victory. They could also create a visible precedent for Polish-Soviet friendship, thus showing everyone that the impossible can be done.

As they were leaving Moscow behind, Naszkowski felt the growing anxiety that his fellow passengers shared. Given the complexity of the task they were about to begin, their fears were well-founded. The Polish communists in the USSR gained a powerful patron in the Kremlin. Most of them managed to rationalize Stalin’s purges of Polish communists in 1938, to justify the Soviet-Nazi nonaggression pact and their joint invasion of Poland in 1939, and even the Stalinist labor camp system. In the spring of 1943, Stalingrad seemed to embody the virtues of Stalinism more than the Gulag reflected its flaws; in any case, the Party knew best what it was doing and, after all, mustn’t one break the eggs in order to make an omelet? The Polish radicals’ faith in the iron laws of history and in the correctness of the All-Union (Bolshevik) Communist Party (VKP(b)) was matched by their unflinching belief in the infallibility of Stalin. Those few who needed still more reasons to justify their cooperation with Stalin summoned their sense of political realism sweetened by his promise of a truly free, democratic Poland, which they all yearned to see.

The bitter twined with the sweet. No Polish communist doubted that Stalin’s patronage would soon prove to be a serious liability. The ambitious young men riding to Sel’tsy knew that most of the recruits they would try to mobilize for battle under the Soviet aegis knew better than to give Stalin a second chance. After marching into Polish territory in September 1939, the NKVD had arrested these future recruits along with 300,000 other Polish citizens as proven or suspected enemies of Soviet power. The captives and their families rode in cattle wagons into the depths of the Soviet Union; upon arrival, they suffered incredible hardship in the labor camps. Their anti-Soviet sentiments and deep distrust of Polish communists were hardly mitigated by their sudden release or by the news of the new military formations. On the contrary, the biggest question in their minds was whether the Kościuszko Division was really Polish.¹³ Anti-Semitic prejudice, often intertwined with anticommunist sentiments, was common among these inhabitants of historically multiethnic lands. It rankled them to see Jewish officers in the division. Also, many of the men knew and few doubted that the 22,000 missing Polish citizens—in some cases, their family members, friends, or neighbors—had been murdered by the Soviets in 1940, not the Germans. The recruits had hoped to join the other Polish deportees released on Stalin’s orders during the brief moment of Soviet-Polish rapprochement that followed Hitler’s invasion of the USSR. Stalin granted Polish General Władysław Anders permission to form an army to be evacuated via Iran in the summer of 1942. Fiercely patriotic and loyal to Poland’s London government, the Polish deportees wanted to enlist to fight on the Western Front, but thousands missed their chance due to long distances, wartime chaos, and the obstinacy of the local Soviet authorities. Some people succeeded in contacting the Anders Army on time, but—as was the case with Józef Sigalin, the future coarchitect of Warsaw’s Palace of Culture and Science—the enlistment commission rejected them on account of their Jewish background.¹⁴ They did not wish to embrace Polish-Soviet friendship, but they saw the Kościuszko Division primarily as their way to fight the Germans and thus earn their way home.

Naszkowski grew nervous as he anticipated the upcoming confrontation with his distrustful compatriots. There was more though. Like his fellow “apostles,” as they later became known by the self-serving chronicles of the communist regime, he was keenly aware that the division ought to become the poster child for a new Poland—a clear contrast to the authoritarian, socially oppressive regimes of the interwar era, yet unmistakably Polish; friendly with the great power in the east but never Sovietlike.¹⁵ Theirs was an ambitious vision: to transform the old Polish society with its social divisions, anticommunist political traditions, and interethnic resentments into a microcosm of a new, better society that would show everyone that a total overhaul of liberated Poland would be possible and, indeed, desirable. Naszkowski, Putrament, and others keenly felt the high stakes involved. With nervous excitement, as they approached their recruits in Sel’tsy, they accepted the hard, cold, heady fact that the fate of this great experiment depended largely on them.

MICKIEWICZ AND BRONIEWSKI IN THE KILLING FIELDS

Sel’tsy surprised the newly arrived men with its onion-domed church and richly decorated window frames—a typical, picturesque Russian village. Yet, filled with excitement at the historic moment, the communist activists tended to see the familiar: the name Sielce (a Polish rendition of Sel’tsy) reminded them of Siedlce, a town back home. Not so to the future rank-and-file soldiers, in whom the camp by the Oka River, deep inside the Soviet territory, “provoked distrust.”¹⁶ The military camp lay a few kilometers outside the village. Within days after arrival, Naszkowski found himself standing “with a pounding heart,” in front of “a scowling, distrustful, silent crowd of people.”¹⁷ In a system that resembled the Soviet one, political officers were responsible for the ideological education of the troops. Naszkowski became one of them. Others included Putrament and Wiktor Grosz, a Polish-Jewish radical activist who had transferred from the Red Army. Their task was to transform the recruits who poured into the camp into “conscious fighters for a People’s Poland.”¹⁸ The quasi-religious language with which the Polish political officers enshrined their early experiences in Sel’tsy reflected their political ...