Alexej Lochmatow’s book explores the public debates waged by Polish scholars and intellectuals in “the formative years of the socialist regime” (p. 2), i.e., the first post-war decade. This study covers three distinct periods: the initial “gentle revolution” (pol. “rewolucja łagodna”) when the communists attempted to gain legitimacy among the intelligentsia without open confrontation; the turn to Stalinization and aspirations of political power to transfer Stalin’s “revolution from above” logic to Poland and other countries of East and Central Europe, and finally the “thaw” of the mid-1950s where these aspirations were abandoned and the struggle for the restoration of social subjectivity replaced them.
The debates under study concern issues crucial to defining the relationships between politics, ideology, the humanities, and social sciences (or more broadly: the entirety of cultural life). The author therefore traces, among other things, ideas posited about how to incorporate revolutionary Marxism within the broader traditions of Polish culture, the discussion on the social origins of the Polish intelligentsia initiated in 1946 by the sociologist Józef Chałasiński, the polemic on the scientific and religious function of Marxism waged in 1947–1948, the Stalinist attack on the Lviv-Warsaw school philosophers, and the 1956 enunciations of young communist sociologists struggling to reconcile their ideological identities with freedom of scholarly activity. Lochmatow also devotes much space to the polemics between Marxists and various Catholic milieus.
However, the author’s ambitions go much further than simply reporting the most important polemics. He uses the category of “virtues” as his main analytical tool. This does not make Lochmatow’s book, as the author himself declares, a discussion on virtues per se: They instead serve as a prism through which he studies the public scholarly practices of post-war Polish intellectuals. The author looks for both tensions and consistencies between the understanding of “virtuous behavior” on the part of individuals situated at the intersection of politics and academia and the official “virtues politics” introduced by the ruling communists (who, in many cases, were also situated at this intersection, making the whole scene anything but dichotomic). Special places are given in his discussion to the virtue of “progressiveness” and to the Stalinist striving for unity and consensus (concordia) regarding the adoption of Marxism-Leninism by scholars.
This perspective is related to a praiseworthy aspect of the book, which is the author’s questioning of the totalitarian paradigm. Lochmatow is by no means a pioneer in this respect: See, for example, the work of Agata Zysiak, recently published in English.1 The author’s applaudable position is on the side of the growing number of scholars for whom factors such as unilateral terror, coercion, and “Sovietization” are not sufficient to explain the social and cultural phenomena of post-war Central Europe. He looks at individual actors and traces the strategies they adopted to maintain their presence in public life. He follows how the relationships between politics and the humanities were dynamic and constantly negotiated. He also outlines the games Polish intellectuals played in the face of demands to internalize the norms of “virtuous behavior” that corresponded to the logic of the Stalinist ideological breakthrough. Following in the footsteps of John Connelly2, Lochmatow also shows that there was no consistent and top-down plan for the Sovietization of Polish science and culture and that Soviet interventions in this area did not therefore form a coherent pattern.
I not only understand but outright identify with the author’s premise of moving away from perspectives focused on ideologies and institutions and toward individuals and their subjectivity, agency, strategies, activities, and agendas. However, his arguments are sometimes lacking in a more solid contextual framework. For example, a discussion on the “gentle revolution” and the agenda of Jerzy Borejsza, an unruly communist, and a chairman of the publishing “concern” Czytelnik who both coined the term and advocated the practice that followed, could be supplemented with a short introduction on how this current fit within the spectrum of the communist party’s answers to the dilemma of gaining social legitimacy.
Unfortunately, the author also does not look back to the pre-war period and reflect on what experiences shaped his main protagonists: Lochmatow instead reduces his remarks on this subject to the bare minimum. Sometimes this minimum does bring cognitive satisfaction, as in the case of Stefan Żółkiewski, a leading organizer of Marxist literary studies and his youthful search for meaning. However, it would be much easier to understand the main protagonists of the study, such as the communist Adam Schaff, socialist Julian Hochfeld, or non-Marxist radical Józef Chałasiński, if the author tried to include in the contextualizing of his topics, the most important features of the political and cultural milieus of their respective socializations. Additionally, outlining formative events and processes, such as the Great Depression, would have helped bolster his arguments.
Lochmatow’s approach is of course not biographical, so it would not be possible to follow every interpretative trail in this manner. One can still learn a great deal from this book about the “virtues”, views, and actions of various actors, as well as their dynamics. A good example is the case of the leading Polish sociologist Józef Chałasiński and his journey from defending academic freedoms through putting himself at the disposal of the Stalinist project to audibly taking the side of the “thaw”. At times, however, the complex personal motivations, entanglements, and emotions behind scholarly practices are missing from the narrative.
The discussion of Adam Schaff is a good example. He was a communist and Marxist philosopher, and during the Stalinist period was one of the main political players in the academic field. Schaff spent the war in the USSR, where he did the equivalents of a PhD and a habilitation. He returned to Poland at the end of 1945, where he took up a job as a lecturer at the university and at the Central Party School of the Polish Workers’ Party (Lochmatow erroneously keeps him in Moscow until 1948).
The author is correct that the knowledge of Soviet academia was a key asset for Schaff, but other factors influenced the philosopher’s importance at the political-academic intersection. Lochmatow does not mention that Schaff had already been working on his PhD in the 1930s in Poland (the unfinished dissertation was lost during a police search). He was thus one of the few participants in the inter-war Polish communist movement with a high stock of cultural capital. As such, he was worth his weight in gold after the war to a party aware of its weakness in intellectual, not to mention academic, circles.
Schaff was not only an orthodox Marxist-Leninist who fought for the victory of his ideology. If one were to strip the layer of unbearable megalomania from his numerous memoirs, what shines through is a man who genuinely aspired to the Polish academic community and craved recognition from it. He had a very complex mix of identities, loyalties, and practices: He was a man of science practicing politics and a man of politics practicing science. He was able to position himself as a party supervisor berating “bourgeois sociology” and as a gracious patron providing marginalized philosophers and sociologists with commissioned work. I am aware that these practices may not belong strictly to the realm of public debates that are the subject of Lochmatow’s book, but they constitute promising examples of studying “virtues” in action.
The book sometimes suffers from excessive brevity. This is evident in the discussion of a 1956 article by four young Marxist sociologists (including Zygmunt Bauman) who called for social sciences to be free of dogmatism and political control. The authors still referred to themselves as “party ideological front workers”. This was not mere rhetorical ornamentation. Lochmatow does not address this paradox, however, and the young Marxists appear somewhat out of nowhere. Meanwhile, it might be interesting, for example, to trace the evolution of Bauman’s texts from 1953 to 1956 to show the patterns of “personal de-Stalinizations”.
Finally, it must be mentioned that in general, the work is free of major mistakes. Perhaps the most serious is the one mentioned above concerning Schaff’s place of residence as it affects how Lochmatow emphasizes his alleged Moscow affiliation. I also cannot help mentioning an amusing editorial slip-up: Every time a divine entity is mentioned, it is “Gott” instead of “God”, which may be difficult to swallow for readers convinced that God is a Pole.
The reviewed book has its imperfections and shortcomings. This does not change the fact that Alexej Lochmatow’s work is a very competent and often brilliant introduction to the subject matter, especially for a reader unfamiliar with it. However, it will also be valuable for insiders and specialists thanks to the analytical tools used and the interpretative perspective proposed by the author. These are the features that make the value of this book go beyond a simple reconstruction of intellectual life in a certain Central European country in a certain post-war decade.
Notes:
1 See Agata Zysiak, Limiting Privilege. Upward Mobility Within Higher Education in Socialist Poland, West Lafayette 2023.
2 See John Connelly, Captive University. The Sovietization of East German, Czech, and Polish Higher Education, 1945–1956, London 2000.