Kapuscinski's Double Life? — May 23rd 2007

By James Marcus

Ryszard Kapuscinski, who died in January of this year at age 74, was widely regarded as one of the great journalists and literary travelers of the modern era. Born in Pinsk, Poland (now part of Belarus) in 1942, he spent many decades working for the Polish Press Agency as its sole foreign correspondent. In this capacity he covered more than two dozen revolutions and coups, and produced such reportorial classics as The Emperor, Shah of Shahs, and Imperium. His was an art of poetry and precision, and it always seemed blissfully free of ideological blinders.


Now, however, comes a potential fly in the ointment. According to an article in the Guardian (which is piggybacking in turn on this dispatch), Kapuscinski may have paid a price for his vaunted independence: "Newsweek Poland put the late writer, reckoned to be the greatest east European journalist of his generation, on the cover of this week's issue, unveiling details of his communist-era secret police file and claiming that his global travels in the 1960s and 70s were due to a bargain he struck with the communist regime to collaborate with the secret police."

Fans of the author--especially those who don't speak Polish--will have to wait for more details. In addition, it's worth noting that Poland has been going through an ambitious anti-Communist purge. President Lech Kaczynski and his twin brother, Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski, have attempted to screen 700,000 legislators, civil servants, judges, journalists, editors, and teachers for previous Communist affiliation, only to have this litmus test struck down by the Polish courts. It's possible that Kapuscinski has been caught in the nationalist crossfire here. Whether the allegations are true or not, the ironies abound: a book such as The Emperor, about Haile Selassie's ossified rule over an impoverished Ethiopia, has always been read in part as a veiled work of dissent.

In the meantime, Netscape contacted Stephen Koch for a short conversation about Kapuscinski's case. The author of Double Lives: Spies and Writers in the Secret Soviet War of Ideas Against the West, Koch has thought long and hard about the ethical whirlpools that face almost any writer in a police state. Kapuscinski, he argues, deserves our compassion--and when it comes to his work, our unqualified admiration.

Netscape: Are you surprised by the allegations? Or did the research and writing of Double Lives destroy that capacity for surprise?

Koch: I am not surprised; not even especially shocked. We in the West do not know what it means truly to lack freedom. One test of a totalitarian society comes when the exercise of the ordinary decencies, or when the mere living of something resembling a free life, calls for nothing short of heroism. When the principle of social cohesion becomes betrayal. In the late Sixties and early Seventies, Kapuscinski was a Polish journalist who traveled abroad. That alone was enough for the regime to extract its paranoiac quid pro quo. The regime took something from everyone's freedom. No exceptions. None.

Netscape: Poland seems to be in the midst of a major political housecleaning. Might Kapuscinski himself be caught in the middle?

Koch: Score-settling is a lousy way to restore balance to any society, all the more so in a society that once made moral compromise a universal principle of life. I am not a Pole, and I do not fully understand all that is being proposed. It's true, Polish society is going to have to do something to come to terms with its history of oppression and betrayal. The German model for exposing the work of the Stasi might be a model: it seems to have been pretty balanced and just. But a ten-year "ban on working in one's profession"--which is what the rejected Kaczynski legislation proposed, should you be found to have lied about past services---sounds to me more like the disease than the cure.

Netscape: If substantiated, do you think this sort of disclosure will leave a blot on Kapuscinski's reputation?

Koch: On the contrary. I think Kapuscinski was a great (not merely good, but great) writer. Imperium is a picture of Russia on the cusp of Communism's demise that stands in my imagination beside Solzhenitsyn and Eugenia Ginzburg. The pages in which Kapuscinski describes his visit to the ruins of a major camp in the gulag are among the most harrowing I have ever read, and they were certainly not written by some servant of the regime. That is what counts. I can imagine a more enlightened view in which a full account of this man's struggle and entanglement with the regime will add depth and resonance to his biography. Three-line "revelations" are cheap stuff, and should be treated as such.

Netscape: A related question, I suppose: would the allegations color the way you look at Kapuscinski 's work?

Koch: Of course it will color the way I look at his work. But for the worse? Not necessarily. I can imagine real knowledge of the story coloring it with more compassion. Even, possibly, a deeper respect as he found his way out of the regime's maze.

Tags: books, Ryszard Kapuscinski, Ryszard Kapuscinski,poland,books, RyszardKapuscinski, RyszardKapuscinski,poland,books

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