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Labour Focus on Eastern Europe, Vol. 2 No. 2, May–June 1978, pp. 19–20.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
The first Congress of the Polish Writers’ Union to take place since the June 1976 strike movement and the subsequent emergence of a broad dissident movement took place in Katowice on 7–8 April. The C0ngress was the culmination of an intense battle between writers supporting the Party leadership and those pressing for greater cultural freedoms in Poland. The results of the elections to the Board of the Writers’ Union suggests that the dissenting writers won a qualified victory at the Congress.
The central issue at the Congress was the censorship of Polish publishing. Last year an official from the censorship office left Poland with a huge file of internal documents that gave the most complete picture to have emerged from Eastern Europe on how official censorship works. At the same time a number of leading Polish writers began to publish their own unofficial literary journals, the most prominent of which is Zapis. Against this background a large-number of writers had gained a new confidence to struggle for greater freedom of literary expression at the Congress. Their numbers were swelled when the leadership of the Warsaw Branch of the Union tried to engineer the election of a docile delegation to the Congress, thereby angering a number of writers who considered themselves apolitical or neutral in the growing battle. According to a Palach Press report the Warsaw Branch elected only two members of the Branch executive to the 75 strong delegation to the Congress, and the deputy Chairman of the Union, the hard-liner Jerzy Putrament, was elected as the 75th delegate by only one vote. A similar pattern emerged in the election of delegates from Krakow, Wroclaw and Lodz.
At the Congress itself, the role of the Censorship was openly debated. The Party’s increasingly powerful and authoritarian cultural and press chief, Jerzy Lukasziewicz, spoke three times, and denied that the Censor’s Office had got out of control. One of the delegates, Andrzej Braun, severely attacked the censorship system and accused the Union of failing in its duty of defending Polish culture. According to Palach Press some participants stated that the Congress heard some of the most outspoken speeches since the Writers’ Congress of 1956.
All the Congress delegates were invited to a ceremony at the headquarters of the Ministry of Mining in Katowice, where the deputy provincial head, Dr. Gorczyca, attacked Andrzej Braun by name, saying he had ‘foreign task-masters’. Cries of ‘Shame!’ came from the audience and many writers, including even Jerzy Putrament, got up and walked out. The Congress subsequently passed a unanimous resolution condemning the “attempt to meddle in the Congress’s affairs” at the Mining Ministry ceremony.
In the elections of the new Board of the Union, Marek Nowakowski, one of the editors of the unofficial journal, Zapis, was among those elected.
In order to head off the opposition to the official censorship, Lukaszewicz promised the creation of a Publications Council, attached to the Ministry of Culture and composed of both politicians and creative writers. Its function would be to arbitrate in arguments between artists and censors. But it remains to be seen how far such measures as this will be successful in stemming the movement to abolish the censorship of cultural life in Poland.
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Last updated: 15 February 2023