Attitude Towards the Polish People's Republic in Poland and Nostalgia for the Soviet Union in Russia in the Context of Reflections on Historical Consciousness

Violetta Julkowska Wiktor Werner Contemporary Lives of the Past Poznań 2018 © Copyright by Uniwersytet im. Adama Mickiewicza w Poznaniu, Instytut Historii UAM, Poznań 2018 © Copyright by Violetta Julkowska, 2018 © Copyright by Wiktor Werner, 2018 FinAnCiAL sUPPort Department of History Adam Mickiewicz University (Poznań, Poland) Faculty of History Adam Mickiewicz University trAnsLAtion Anna topolska reviwers Prof. dr hab. Dorota skotarczak Prof. UMCs dr hab. Piotr witek Cover Design Piotr namiota DtP Małgorzata Nowacka ISBN 978-83-65663-64-1 FACULty oF History, AMU ul. Umultowska 89d, 61-614 Poznań tel./faks 61 829 64 e-mail: [email protected], www.historia.amu.edu.pl Print Zakład Graficzny UAM, ul. Wieniawskiego 1, 61-712 Poznań Introduction (Violetta Julkowska, Wiktor Werner) .......................... 7 I Dimensions of Historical Consciousness. Studies on the Functions of History in Contemporary name and Place in time. Historical Heroes in Contemporary social reception (Violetta Julkowska) .............................................. 15 Historical Consciousness and interest in History in Poland and selected european Countries in the Light of Internet Data (Wiktor Werner) ........ 33 Attitude towards Polish People’s republic in Poland and nostalgia For the Soviet Union in Russia in the Context of Reflections on Historical Consciousness (Wiktor Werner) ........................................... 67 II Social Reception of the Past visual representations of the Past in the Contemporary Public space (violetta Julkowska) ....................................................... 95 Cultural Landscape as an element of european Heritage and regional identity (Violetta Julkowska) .............................................. 117 From Andrzej Kmicic to witcher. Alternative History and Historical Fantasy in Poland at the Turn of the 20th and 21st Centuries (Wiktor Werner) .. 139 Bibliography ............................................................... 165 notes on the Authors ...................................................... 168 Table of Contents the attitude towards one’s past can be considered a foundation of historical consciousness – it concerns an essential issue which is one’s self-identification in the historical reality. Historical knowledge in contemporary society constitutes one of the possible substitutes of myth – it gives a possibility to orientate in a reality; it defines the hierarchy of values; it builds self-esteem: positive, as winners or successful people, or ambivalent, as martyrs or victims. A lot depends on the specificity of historical consciousness and the identity accompanying it, among others such things as the ability to build relationships with other societies (nations), the ability to defend one’s own position, to negotiate common goals or the level of demanding attitude in those relationships. the more dramatic course of history the more delicate and, at the same time, important the question of historical consciousness is. in the case of the countries of eastern and Central europe, particularly dramatic was the period of the 20th century. then, not only the two world wars took place, but also two politically, economically, and to a certain extend also militarily competing superstates were created and divided Europe into two parts being their spheres of influence. In the 20th century, historical consciousness of Poles had to adapt to several violent changes of the political situation of Poland in the world; equally revolutionary were the changes in the historical consciousness of russians. the Poles underwent, in the previous century, a long way from being subjects of the three partitioning empires, through their own militarily-won independence, loss of statehood and its regaining Wiktor Werner Attitude Towards Polish People’s Republic in Poland and Nostalgia For the Soviet Union in Russia in the Context of Reflections on Historical Consciousness wiktor werner 68 according to the forced alliance with one of their enemies. the political formation which began to emerge in 1944 did not respond to the independence aspirations of wide groups of society. the Polish People’s republic evolved as a state from imitating soviet examples in the 1940s and 1950s to the attempt at combining socialist economic and social practice with the national-popular ideology. In result, the attitude of Poles to the post-war Poland was ambivalent – on the one hand the consciousness of a “bastard” origin of the Polish People’s Republic: from war failure and foreign dominance, but on the other hand a positive acceptance of some elements of social and historical politics of the Polish People’s Republic. However, significantly smaller acceptance accompanied forceful activities undertaken against people contesting the politics of the authorities, and, thus, brutal pacification of workers’ manifestations (1956, 1970, 1976, 1980) undertaken mostly due to economic reasons focused both manifested as well as silent resistance towards the Polish People’s republic. The emergence of the Third Republic of Poland in 1989 opened a new chapter in the process of formation of historical consciousness in which the approach to the Polish People’s republic, and to the reforms of the political system ending the previous form of statehood, was one of the more important criteria dividing society. the Polish political scene was quickly marked by the presence of the group emphasizing the positive aspects of socialist period and promising a kind of continuation. on the other hand, at the same time there appeared a distinct, even though internally incoherent, movement proclaiming a need of “decomunization” which meant termination of the political contract concluded at the end of the Polish People’s republic by the authorities and the representatives of so called moderate opposition, the contract which guaranteed the beneficiaries of the People’s Republic (members of the Communist Party, military officials, members of militia, and even officers of the security services) maintaining their social position. this question (of the attitude towards Polish People’s Republic) divides Polish society up to date, though there are new and new, current problems being attached to this axis of division. Attitude towards Polish People’s republic in Poland 69 equally dramatic, and society dividing, was the process of breaking with the soviet Union undergone by russians. the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, which had never been consulted with the society in a form of a referendum, dramatically changed the political and economic situation across the huge area of the country. on the one hand it referred to the national inspirations of Lithuanians, Latvians, estonians, Ukrainians, Belorussians, Moldavians and other communities of the Soviet Union, but also triggered national conflicts, e. g. between Armenians and Azerbaijanis and caused a deterioration of the standard of life in most of the former republics, and even an economic and social collapse in russia. the attitude of russians towards the soviet Union is, therefore, much more strongly marked by nostalgia than the attitude of Poles towards the Polish People’s republic. the aim of my article is to analyze the question of the approach of russians and Poles towards their not distant historical past and to indicate the specificity of the argumentation used in support of the positions appearing among them. this problem is interesting to us in the context of reflection over historical consciousness of these two societies. i have used products of mass culture as the repository of my primary sources as they are elements of an active interaction with their recipients – they exist thanks to their popularity. I have also used statistical data referring to the cognitive activity occurring on the internet (using search engines and on-line encyclopedias), as well as published and available results of surveys. The first question which I would like to answer is about the general level of interest in the soviet Union in russia and similar interest in the People’s Republic in Poland. To do so, I will use on-line repositories, mostly statistical data from google search engine and wikipedia. So, if we compare the interest in looking up terms such as “Soviet Union” and “Russia” with the use of Google search engine in the territory of contemporary Russia in 2004-2017, we will obtain the following results: wiktor werner 70 An analogical test performed for Poland gives us the following result: the axis x of the chart shows the time period for which the intensity of search for the words which interest us was researched; the axis y depicts the relative scale of intensity expressed in percents, where the maximum intensity of both searches, which are being compared, marks the level of 100 %. Average monthly intensity of searches for the Attitude towards Polish People’s republic in Poland 71 word “Russia” is 74 %, while for the Soviet Union it is a little less than 4%. In the case of Poland, the average interest in the topic of “Poland” is 76 %, while for the words “Polish People’s Republic” it is 0.14 %. This disproportion indicates a fundamental difference between the interest in the historical term (for Russia – Soviet Union, for Poland – Polish People’s Republic) and in the term having an application in the current discourse. The disproportion is significantly bigger in Poland than in russia. the interest in the history of russia and history of the soviet Union resulting from the statistics of entries into russian language pages of wikipedia answering these questions, is distributed in a slightly different way. Wikipedia, as the most popular on-line encyclopedia (of a community character), is for us also an important indicator of social interest in a given question. the axis x of this chart shows the researched time period, and the axis y – a daily number of entries into a given web page (absolute values). We can notice here two things. Firstly, the dominance of interest in the history of russia over that in the history of the soviet Union occurs but is not as strong as in the case of the difference in the searches for wiktor werner 72 “Russia” and “Soviet Union” according to the data from trends.google. secondly, we can clearly see a similarity of the charts indicating similar decreases and growths in interests in these two topics. the question of the correlation of the charts can be studied in a more accurate way if we calculate, for the entire set of data, Pearson’s coefficient of correlation1, which is comprised in the interval between -1 to 1. There, 1 signifies total correlation (identity), -1 negative correlation (reversion), 0 total lack of correlation (data are completely independent), while correlation is understood as a strong one when it is higher than 0.5 and it is approaching 1. For the data of the comparison of the number of entries into wikipedia pages devoted to the history of the soviet Union and the history of Russia (daily numbers of entries are compared), the Pearson’s coefficient of correlation is 0.69, thus it is relatively high. the correlation of interest in these two topics may denote that they are the elements of the same process – gaining knowledge on the historical continuum of russia and the soviet Union, thus, the soviet Union actually is not treated (in cognitive practice) as a fundamentally different entity than Russia in historical context. The results described earlier concerning search words “Soviet Union” and “Russia” for Google are practically uncorrelated (Pearson=-0.13). the interest in the history of the soviet Union is however (in the light of the data from Wikipedia) treated as an element of the same historical continuum, what confirms my assumption that Russians do not treat the soviet Union as a foreign and forcibly imposed creature. this is also the opinion which can be found in most historical and journalistic conceptualizations of this question which entertain mass reception. the comparison of the pages of wikipedia devoted to the history of Poland and the history of the Polish People’s republic indicates a significantly weaker correlation (around 0) of the frequency of entries and, at the same time, a bigger disproportion (to the detriment of the Polish People’s Republic): 1 Maiwada S., Lawrence Okey, The Relevance And Significance Of Correlation In social science research, international Journal of sociology and Anthropology research Vol.1, No.3, November 2015, pp. 22-28 Attitude towards Polish People’s republic in Poland 79 of the book is here meaningful. The term “progressor” was introduced into literature by popular soviet science-fiction writers Arkadij and Borys strugacki. in their novels it denoted agents situated in times of luminous future of communism, who were being sent to remote planets with the mission of instilling progressive ideas in the civilizations inhabiting those places. regardless the fact that strugackis brothers were often approaching this question with skepticism, and that their books include not only descriptions of successes of “progressors”, but also numerous questions and doubts – contemporary writers adapting this idea of strugaskis to the conditions of alternative history are still more confident about how to make society happy and lead it towards luminous future by correcting improper turns of history. the position of the writers towards the Bolshevik revolution appears here as a negative one as it cut certain historical continuum of russia’s development directed towards, according to the authors, hegemonic position in the world. The Soviet Union is evaluated differently than the October Revolution – as a return on the right path. A sign of situating historical events in a proper “rut of history” is the victory over fascism which significance is strongly underlined not only as an avoidance of extermination, but also a sacrifice of blood made in intention of rebirth of the russian empire which new incarnation would be the soviet Union. The spectacular failures of the Red Army in the first months of the war are still seen as shameful, thus so strongly expressed – in the literary imagination – need for “correction” of this mistake of Clio. taking a closer look at russian cinematography, one can notice that the period of the second world war is strongly represented in the blockbusters. Although there is a number of films referring to other times, the tiles such as “Stalingrad”19, „Panfilov’s 28”20, „Brest Fortress”21, „The Dawns Here Are Quiet ”22 undoubtedly attract attention, like tv 19 Сталинград, Reż. Фёдор Бондарчук, 2013 20 Двадцать восемь панфиловцев, reż. Андрей Шальопа, 2017 21 Брестская крепость 2010, reż Александр Котт 22 А зори здесь тихие, reż Ренат Давлетьяров 2015 wiktor werner 80 series such as “Leningrad”, “Night Swallows”, “Pilots of Fighter Jets”, “Combat Recce”, “Kill Stalin”, etc. On the other hand, not rare are also films and series about revolution and civil war – here we can see certain dualism in the Russian historical politics. Contemporary Russia is represented in the film production both as a heir to tsarist russia as well as to the soviet Union. Some points are given to both sides of this conflict what is visible in such productions as “Admiral” – both the film and the series, and “Gentlemen Officers. Save the Tsar”, where the emotional significance of the movie is on the side of “white” officers, but where Bolsheviks’ atrocities are not emphasized – there is rather an assumption that “the logic of history” is on their side. Such position of the historical politics needs to emphasize even more the defensive war with nazis as a period when communist authorities “redeem” their sins by defending the country and the nation against extermination. the unity of the nation in fight against the Nazi invader is, therefore, underlined in particularly strong way, while the problem of stalinist terror occurring simultaneously with the fight against the enemy, is rather absent – though sometimes there are mentions about labor camps or an evil-minded figure of NKVD. Even here, however, we encounter a process of “softening” of the image of Stalin and Beria, as well as of the ‘SMIERSZ’ formation – acronym for “smiert szpionom” – which was shrouded with horror, and to which an entire tv series was devoted. the series presented the formation as fighting only with Nazi spies. the soviet Union appears not only on the occasion of showing the period of the second world war, though in cinema productions such appearances are more rare. in this case, two movies about the conquest of the universe: “Gagarin, The First in Space” and “The Time of The First Ones”, “Salut-7” and the movie “Legend No 17” about soviet victory over the representation of Canada in hokey composed of professional hokey players, are attracting our attention in particular. in these movies, not only the successes of the soviet Union are emphasized, but also snapshots from life in that time are creating a positive Attitude towards Polish People’s republic in Poland 81 image of it, marginalizing the many problems scourging the country’s inhabitants. Another test which i performed with the use of data drawn from search engines was to check to what extent cognitive activities performed with them were connected with the calendar of russian national holidays established in the times of the soviet Union and referring to the historical events related to the soviet Union. Besides the Day of Cosmonautics celebrated on 12th April and commemorating the first human flight in space, these are mostly events connected with the history of the second world war: the Holiday of the Glory of the Russian Army, celebrated on 27th January and commemorating liquidation of the blockade of Leningrad; celebrated on 2nd February anniversary of the victory over German army at Stalingrad; celebrated on 9th May the Day of victory commemorating the capitulation of the third reich, and on 23rd August – the anniversary of the victorious battle of Kursk; on 5th November – “the holiday commemorating the military procession on the Red Square”, which took place on 5th November 1941, and which participants went, straight from there, to fight with German troops approaching the outskirts of Moscow. Another question is the fact that on 5th november the anniversary and the holiday of the october revolution used to be celebrated, and that the mentioned new holiday of the procession seems to be its “substitute”. On 5th December russians celebrate the Holiday of war glory of russia which falls in the month of the anniversary of the counteroffensive of the Soviet Army at Moscow. in order to check if the dates of the holidays and anniversaries correlate with the practice of obtaining information on the historical events in the internet, i have collected data from the search engine Google from the time period of 2004-2017 – we did not use here the search engine yandex because it allows only to obtain data from one year period. then, i summed up data from each month of each year separately for the entire period studied and i have drawn average values. in result, i obtained averaged data showing intensity of interest calculated with relative, percentile parameters for all first, second, etc. months for the entire time period of 2004-2017. wiktor werner 82 The results can be seen on the following chart: Attitude towards Polish People’s republic in Poland 83 As we can see in the chart above, the distribution of interest in three of the tested historical topics clearly coincides with the calendar of national commemorative celebrations: it is the interest in the figure of Gagarin – a significant increase in April when the Day of Cosmonautics is celebrated; looking up the information about the blockade of Leningrad coinciding with the months of celebrating anniversary of its liquidation in January, and the interest in the Battle of Moscow increasing significantly in December. Less clear, but still visible in the increase of interest in the Battle of stalingrad in February, while the interest in the Battle of Kursk is clearly distributed among several “anniversary” moths. we can think to what extent historical politics realized with, among others, such tools as film productions or the holidays celebrated on the state level have an influence on the historical consciousness of contemporary russians? if we can consider the practice of looking for the information about the world as an indicator of the historical consciousness, then the data from the internet search engines can be here very useful. Let us take a closer look at the most frequent questions accompanying key words „the Soviet Union” entered in Russian language with the use of a web browser yandex, popular in the post-soviet sphere. For visualizing the frequency of the data obtained (the list of the most frequently entered key words), I have prepared a ‘word cloud’, for which i used the english translations of the most frequent key words. this and the next visualizations have been prepared with the use of a script written in python language with the modulus ‘word_cloud’ authored by Andreas Mueller23. the size of the words in the visualization represents the frequency of its occurrence in the data: 23 https://github.com/amueller wiktor werner 84 the questions entered into google web browser are more thematically varied and express also an interest in the painful aspects of the history of the Soviet Union – for instance questions like “Why the Soviet Union invaded Poland?” and separate question about the causes of the invasion on Finland as well as about the introduction of military troops to Afghanistan. in the google web browser, more frequent were also questions about the causes of the collapse of the soviet Union and about the causes of the failures of this country in the economy24. i have prepared a ‘word_cloud’ visualization also for these data: 24 Data obtained at: https://keywordtool.io/search/google Attitude towards Polish People’s republic in Poland 85 As we can see, we can encounter frequent evoking of the war history of the soviet Union also in the case of the questions in google, but there are also other topics from the history of the soviet Union. The difference in data obtained from Yandex and Google are a sign of diversification in the ways of usage of these web search engines connected with different kind of questions or different group of people using each of these services. google web browser would be then used be people with a more flexible, open attitude towards the history of the so viet Union, while the yandex web browser would be used by people looking for a confirmation of their sentimental approach to this country. the selection of key words obtained from yandex shows the specificity of understanding of the significance of the Soviet Union for russians. A fundamental element is here a kind of foundation myth of this country which is based on war memory and narration, in its heroic (in the foreground) as well as martyrological aspects. Another component which builds the socially significant sentiment towards the Soviet wiktor werner 86 Union in russian society25 (present both in the data from yandex and from Google) is a conviction about ideological character of this country presenetd by a comparison to the Jelcyn’s period devoid of ideals. such image of the soviet Union is emphasized in popular literature which authors actually could not have contact with the reality of the soviet Union, and who draw their knowledge from literature, soviet movies (interest in them is also mirrored in the practice of web searching26) and from the memories of their parents and acquaintances who remember that period from the perspective of painful experiences of the 1990s (lost of economical stability, jobs, social degradation, increase of burglaries, etc.). Finally, a very important element of social sentiment towards the soviet Union is a conviction about its unlawful dissolution due to an external conspiracy and internal betrayal. these convictions are confirmed by the authors of popular books on this topic27. the attitude of Poles towards the Polish People’s republic is based not only on a different foundation of real historical events, but also on narration which has its accents distributed in a different way. Let us begin with acknowledging the fact that propaganda and mass culture of the communist Poland did not manage to create a common acceptance for the foundation myth of this country. narrations about war effort of the communist underground did not change significantly Polish historical consciousness – they did not change positive evaluation of the Home Army and warsaw Uprising. the narration about the war combat of the Polish People’s Army was struggling with explaining the causes of relocation of huge number of Polish population to the inland Soviet Union in 1941, and the euphemisms used, such as “the fate of war threw..” were ineptly hushing the fact of forced deportations of 25 According to the respondents, 73% of Russian society in 2011 eveluated the dissolution of the Soviet Union negatively. Compare: Двадцать Лет Реформ Глазами Россиян. Опыт Многолетних Социологических Замеров. Аналитический Доклад’, Москва 2011, pp. 38-45 26 Compare the table of kew words from yandex search engine included in this chapter. 27 Publications previously quoted in this chapter. Attitude towards Polish People’s republic in Poland 87 Poles (both soldiers and civil population) to labor camps which was commonly known in Poland. For this reason, the narration about the heroism of Polish soldiers fighting in the East was accepted – mostly in the form of attractive movies, but was not commonly accepted as the justification for the existence of the Polish People’s Republic. The collapse of the communist authorities was treated by a significant part of society as the culmination of a long fight for independence. The first accord of the process, which led to regaining by Poland full sovereignty was (in common reception) the fight of Polish soldiers on the front lines of the second world war, and its continuation were workers’ protests and strikes in Poznań, Tricity, Radom from 1956 to 1988, and a meaningful period was 1980-1981. Therefore, a black legend of the collapse of the Polish People’s republic did not emerge. this collapse was to a large extent awaited, or at least expected. However, there emerged a black legend of the creation of the third republic of Poland as a fruit of an “excessive” compromise between the camp of old authorities and “submissive” part of the opposition, or even as a bastard of a betrayal made by the oppositionists corrupted by the security service. the attitude towards the “Round Table Talks” and accompanying “secret” talks in the governmental center in Magdalenka28 constituted, in the first 30 years of the history of free Poland (1989-2009), the fundamental axis of ideological division in Polish society. this attitude towards the genesis of the third republic of Poland resulted in an evaluation of the social-political reality perceived or as coming from objective conditions or as an expression of agent conspiracy accompanying the creation of the foundations of the new form of Polish statehood and shaping social and economic elites in Poland after 198929. in consequence, the attitude towards communist Poland was a derivative of the attitude towards the Third Republic: “pragmatic”, which proclaimed 28 Compare the data from the announcement of CBOS: Poles on Magdalenka, Round Table and sense of betrayal, Warsaw 2010, pp. 5-7. 29 Compare: A. Zybertowicz, W uścisku tajnych służb. Upadek komunizmu i układ postnomenklaturowy. Warsaw 1993, pp. 19-65 wiktor werner 88 that both Polish People’s republic as well as the third republic of Poland are the best forms of statehood which can exist in concrete social and geopolitical reality, and “ideological” where proponents claimed that the Polish People’s republic was a form of oppression of Poles by a hostile regime in the interest of a hostile country, and that the compromise between a part of the camp of authorities and a part of the opposition was a way of maintaining this oppression in a veiled or softer form where direct violence, impossible to be kept, was substituted by economic and political (placed in the framework of a system of declaratively free market and democracy) and ideological oppression thanks to the corruption of part of elites unable, or unwilling, to judge the situation properly30. symptomatic is the fact that a coherent narrative, which would praise the Polish People’s republic actually does not exist in Poland. of course, there are fragmentary narrations which defend some of the achievements of this country, confronting them with darker sides of life in the Third Republic (unemployment, more frequent divorces, etc.)31 or which indicate examples of concrete honest people who were, in the communist Poland, preforming their work: physicians, engineers, militiamen (including those working on crimes). similarly, there does not exist a coherent narrative which would completely justify forceful implementation of the socialist system in Poland and at the same time would negate independence aspirations of the Polish nation fighting with Nazi invader and opposing the restriction of its liberty in the communist period. However, there are numerous, fragmentary narratives indicating concrete people or activities of Home Army soldiers, national Armed Forces, or later democratic opposition activists on the basis of: “there were also bandits among your people”, “there are also swines among you”32. 30 Compare: R. Ziemkiewicz, Michnikowszczyzna. Zapis choroby. Fabryka Słów 2016, pp. 30-69; A. Zybertowicz, W uścisku…, pp. 110-130; W. Łysiak, Rzeczpospolita kłamców. Salon, Warszawa 2004, pp. 120-175. 31 T.Z., Czas Bękartów, Tygodnik „Nie” 5(2011) 32 e.g. compare: B. Dunat, Patrioci we krwi, Weekly „Nie” 4(2011)