Polish Brand of Communism

In February 1977 Tomasz Strzyżewski, censor no C-36 of the Kraków Main Office for Control of Press, Publications and Public Performances, boarded the ferry to Sweden at Świnoujście, Poland, for what his passport described as a two-week vacation. His real purpose, though, was quite different. Strapped in plastic bags to his back and legs, mixed in with pages from newspapers and stuffed in his pockets, were some 700 pages of classified censors' documents. These he had collected, copied and slipped out of his office between the summer of 1975 and February 1977.

1/Introduction, p3

The opening sentence of the introduction of The Black Book of Polish Censorship by Jane Leftwich Curry immediately caught my attention. And not because documents incriminating and potentially damaging to the Polish communist government were taken and removed from the west: though occurring later, I already knew of Vasili Mitrokhin and the trove of KGB documents he provided that became the basis of the books The Sword and the Shield and The World Was Going Our Way: The KGB and the Battle for the Third World.

It's the boarded the ferry to Sweden at Świnoujście, Poland, for what his passport described as a two-week vacation that caught me off-guard. How had I not heard of Soviet bloc communist regimes allowing its citizens to visit the west under any context, vacation or otherwise. Everything that I knew had the west off limits to all but the most loyal party members. And Tomasz left for a vacation?

Apparently this was intentional, as explained later:

In this respect Poland was unique among the Soviet bloc counties. Far more information on events and conditions elsewhere was available to Poles from a variety of sources over which censorship officials had virtually no control. [Edward] Gierek's policy in the seventies was to allow almost anyone who applied to travel abroad to go. Thus more Poles went abroad annually than any other Eastern Europeans, and naturally these travelers brought back impressions of the rest of the world over which the media and censors had no influence. In addition, while there were restrictions on the kinds of foreign journals that could be received and while records were kept of who received what, large numbers of individual Poles subscribed to such foreign journals as Le Monde, Der Spiegel, Time and Newsweek. Those who did not have their own subscriptions could read many Western as well as East block periodicals at the International Press Clubs and foreign-press stores located throughout Poland. Translations of Western wire-service copy on less sensitive issues were circulated widely to journalists as background information.

- 4/Rewriting World Politics, p110

Each East bloc regime implemented communism as they thought appropriate for their country, within the bounds of Soviet oversight, but - as this is after the East German uprising (1952), the Hungarian Uprising (1956) and the Prague Spring (1968), all of which led to Soviet intervention - allowing citizens access to the west seems both surprising and dangerous. Perhaps the ruling elite used this as a carrot to citizens experiencing the hardships of a poor economy and poor quality of life. Regardless, the founding of Solidarity in 1980 began the slippery slope towards the downfall of the regime.

What I haven't found is Tomasz' subsequent life: the book was published in 1984 when the communists were still in power, and, returning to Poland, he likely would have lost his job and any other job opportunities other than menial labor; very likely he would be arrested without powerful allies. I might have to learn Polish to find out!