Remembering on Command: Autobiographical Narratives of the Officers of the Polish Security Forces,1944–1956

Social, Political, and Professional Background of the Authors

The analysis presented in this article is based on the selection of twenty-four accounts of the officers serving in the Warsaw voivodeship that surrounded the Polish capital but excluded it. I consider this area as a promising space for studying the twofold revolutions introduced above. It was simultaneously central and peripheral—close proximity to the capital city of Warsaw went along with a geographical location in central Poland, but the northern part of the region had been a Polish-German frontier before the shifting of national borders after the Second World War. It was also a socially and economically underdeveloped, rural, and small-town region with no heavy industry. In regard to the history and the memory of political conflict and violence, two other characteristics should be pointed out. First, a struggle between communists and the anti-communist underground did not overlap with the Polish-Ukrainian conflict as it did in south-eastern Poland. ²² Second, one should note significant activity by the anti-communist underground in the northern part of the province, which was associated with the geographical conditions (sparsely populated forest terrain, lack of big cities) and the right-wing political traditions of the area. ²³

The authors wrote down their accounts between 1974 and 1981 (with one piece from 1984 standing out), mainly in the late 1970s. They are of various lengths: from a dozen to over a hundred pages of typescript; some of them also contain photographs and copies of personal documents. ²⁴ Although they focus on the first post-war decade, they also recall some of the authors’ pre-war and war-time experiences. For this research, I have also studied the authors’ personal files, and I refer to them to present examples of tensions or contradictions between different sources.

Thirteen authors served in the MO, nine in the UB, and two were at some point transferred from the MO to the UB. Although official MO duties can be identified with “ordinary” police tasks (maintaining order and fighting crime) and the UB was the political police and counterintelligence, both formations took part in the fight against the underground and in political violence against the opponents of the new regime. The authors were usually associated with the security forces throughout their entire post-war professional life. However, five of them, under various circumstances, left the MO/UB ranks as early as the first half of the 1950s. Thus, officers who quit the service or were fired at the time of the highest staff turnover in the late 1940s are not represented in this sample. The authors retired mostly in the late 1960s and early 1970s, but three of them were still professionally active in the late 1970s. The group under study may be called the fulfilled pensioners of the ministry, and one third of these veterans (8) had reached the rank of colonel or lieutenant colonel by the time they wrote their memoirs.

Although high-ranking officers were overrepresented in this group, as regards social background the authors were typical representatives of the Communist security forces. ²⁵ They were a group of men ²⁶ born mostly between 1915 and 1925. Virtually all of them grew up and socialized themselves politically in the independent Second Polish Republic. They were “ethnic Poles,” born or raised in the Warsaw voivodeship or its fringes, and only four came from other regions. All but one, a native of Warsaw, were born in the countryside or small towns. In terms of their social origin, they were sons of the popular classes: small-town proletarians, smallholder peasants, and farm labourers working on landowners’ estates, the latter being the most unprivileged and exploited stratum of the Polish pre-war working class. This social background strongly influenced their chances in interwar Poland’s educational system, one that strongly reproduced the inequalities of social stratification. ²⁷ Thus, after primary school, none of them had even started secondary school, and only three attended vocational schools. Considering their social background, one may also claim that even after putting on the uniforms, after the war they could be seen by local residents as “homeboys” rather than as “strangers” (such as Soviets or pre-war communists with a Jewish and/or big city background).

For some of them or their significant others, the path of emancipation and subjectivity was possible within left-wing political movements—mainly the radical, revolutionary, and illegal Communist Party of Poland (Komunistyczna Partia Polski [KPP]) or its youth organizations. Four authors were participants in the movement themselves, while another eight had parents, siblings, or other close relatives who belonged to or at least supported it. As to wartime, the authors remained in German-occupied Poland and only one spent the war in the Soviet Union, where he joined the communist-dominated Polish army. Nine men experienced German concentration camps or forced labour. Six joined the communist resistance, but three of them had already been pre-war communists; there was also one militant of the non-communist Peasants’ Battalions (Bataliony Chłopskie [BCh]).

They were representatives of the Polish popular classes who experienced deprivation, injustice, and humiliation on a daily basis. Generationally, they were formed by the Great Depression of the 1930s and then the brutalization and anomie of the Nazi occupation. In regard to the latter, one can definitely assume that wartime could have radicalized the authors of the accounts with regard to social issues and made them more familiar with violence. ²⁸ However, most of them did not reflect on this matter, and on the war in general, in their memoirs and did not access communist organizations until 1945. They put much more emphasis on their pre-war childhood and adolescence. Their narratives include such experiences of the people’s history as the whip of the overseer in the manor, humiliation of shabby clothing with a sense of belonging nowhere in society, the death of a communist father beaten by the police, or attempts to regain political and individual agency by taking part in workers’ strikes and other forms of conflict with employers. As Mieczysław Gałązka wrote, “from my childhood, my distrust and fear of a policeman, priest, squire, and anyone who in some way represented authority, was formed.” ²⁹

Paradoxically, from 1944/1945 onwards, they were the ones who represented authority and exercised power. Almost all the authors joined the MO or the UB immediately after the German retreat. As a rule, they started their service in the vicinity of their place of birth or in the neighbouring counties, and then were often—but not always—transferred to other areas within the province. By 1956, almost half of this group (11) took managerial positions as the heads or deputy heads of the local MO/UB forces, at least at the district level.

Narrative Types

Although, as said, the narratives emerged from a very specific context and came from a relatively homogeneous group, they are characterized by considerable diversity. A peculiar case of “an aspiring writer” stands out. Władysław Śniadowski, who had been working as an editor of the MO’s weekly since 1955, embellished his account with a literary style by using dialogues and intertwining his own memories with short pieces based on second-hand stories. ³⁰ One could trace some similarities between this narrative and guerrilla memoirs by the militants of the communist underground during the Second World War published in Poland in the 1960s and 1970s. ³¹ Writing his memoirs might have been yet another way for him to pursue his artistic aspirations and facilitate his subjectivity. By doing so, he undoubtedly went beyond the framework that the historians of the Ministry of the Interior were trying to impose.

I situate all the remaining accounts on the continuum between two ideal types: (1) the narrative presented “from a bird’s-eye view,” poorly individualized, distanced, and devoid of personal emotion and interpretation, ordering historical facts in accordance with official, ideological matrix, and avoiding more controversial topics; and (2) “a frog’s-eye” narrative, highly individualized, presenting personal emotions and interpretation, and focusing more on depicting what the authors lived through themselves. The authors closer to the former ideal type were more likely to have served longer in the Ministry of Interior and to have reached higher ranks than the authors closer to the latter type. The authors writing “from a bird’s-eye view” more often wrote in reasonably correct language and in an orderly fashion. The accounts of the representatives of the second type are more chaotic, in some cases resembling an unstructured stream of consciousness, and they contain a significantly greater number of grammatical and spelling errors.

Tadeusz Kleczkowski, the author of the most personal account, wrote straightforwardly about the somatic reactions (“I must admit that I really felt sick, I started sweating, my stomach demanded at least some water”) accompanying his transfer to a dangerous, remote district of Ostrołęka. Quite exceptionally, compared to other veterans, he also recalled his state of mind before one of the actions as the cursed, “shitty fate of a common man” entangled in constant violence and the risk of death. He also recalled the rationalization he had performed at that time—that being an officer was a job he had chosen for himself. ³² In sharp contrast to this testimony, an author of a vague and general memoir that was very much in line with the official political clichés idealistically declared that “nobody thought about death.” ³³

The differences between the narrative styles are sometimes striking even in regard to the most dramatic events. In one of the more de-individualized accounts, written by Jan Rypiński, the death of the author’s father, a party activist, at the hands of the underground is described in a perfunctory way which carries no emotional charge. ³⁴ On the other hand, Kazimierz Piecychna, who was generally more inclined to use a personal perspective, presented analogous experiences as one of the main axes of his story. He wrote in detail how “an emptiness has been created, a depressing picture of despair and our helplessness has developed,” and about his oath to find the perpetrators. The political struggle was therefore intertwined with a personal vendetta. ³⁵

It ought to be stressed here that all the accounts have common elements; both the guidelines of the Historical Bureau and the authors’ shared common experiences and socialization processes could have contributed to this. These are, for example, stories about poor supplies (weaponry, uniforms, food, etc.) or dire housing or transport conditions in the first post-war years ³⁶ ; quantitatively, most space is occupied by descriptions of armed combat. Extra-service life is virtually absent from the stories and appears only in the most personal ones; one author, for instance, mentions the tragedy of his little son’s death. ³⁷

At the same time, even in the most “frog’s-eye” narratives, there are sudden ideological inserts, such as about friendship with the Soviet Union—although expressed in the authors’ own ways rather than using the official political language. ³⁸ And the narratives of the “bird’s-eye view” may be distinguished between those in which ideological scripts come to the fore and those that instead present events without extensive comment or focus on the daily operational practice of the security service. Therefore, the distinction between different types of storytelling made above is not a rigid classification. One could easily find the evident, emblematic examples for both the tendencies, as well as much more ambiguous ones.

Becoming an Officer

The new post-war order that emerged after the communist takeover promised and, to a great extent, realized a dynamic social advancement and attempted to overthrow the social hierarchies of power, wealth, prestige, and fear. The authors of the accounts analysed here began the transformation from peasants to guardsmen as they entered the field of exercising power or at least participating in its maintenance. As one of them wrote, “The party, that made us, simple people, workers and peasants, into officers and directors.” ³⁹ The party brought revolution to the county and allowed some people to become revolutionaries of their own lives. Another veteran recalled the statement by a local commander of an anti-communist underground unit who allegedly claimed that there were “only shepherds” in the UB, perhaps revealing not only political hostility but also prejudices of the more privileged towards the poor within the countryside communities. The author then went on to comment that eventually “those whom he had called ‘shepherds’ wiped out [. . .] contenders eager for the restoration of the old, irretrievably outdated bourgeois-landowner reality.” ⁴⁰ He presented a personal interpretation of the socio-political change and the capture of power by the communist party as a triumph for the excluded and stigmatized.

What other patterns and categories did they make use of to interpret this experience of identity and status transformation, and what did it mean for these people to put on a uniform? The lack of cultural capital and the necessity of learning the simplest professional activities from scratch were recurring themes. ⁴¹ As Stanisław Gińko wrote, “it was such a job that I, who at that time could barely sign [my name], organized the district headquarters of MO.” ⁴² There is pride in this statement, but there is also an echo of the uncertainty that the representatives of the popular classes must have felt while entering positions that were not only new but, to a large extent, also alien, as belonging to the privileged classes and “bourgeois” power. Another statement may reflect this alienation: “I was a worker before that [joining the MO], I had nothing to do with the law.” ⁴³

At the same time, entering these new fields was sometimes presented as a kind of experience of dignity, as in a symbolic scene in one of the accounts—a pre-war communist returning in uniform to a city whose pavements he had been pounding as a worker in worn-out shoes. ⁴⁴ Czesław Łyszkowski recalled how he refused to take off his officer’s cap during the skirmish, although it made him a visible target for the enemy; the cap was given to him by the “people’s power” and he would not take it off in front of the “bandits.” ⁴⁵ Yet another author associated his change of status with something appealing to the sense of masculine attractiveness and power when he recalled a party secretary who had presented the officers with a vision of the success with women that they would enjoy. ⁴⁶

The veterans would sometimes interpret the randomness of the process of becoming an officer in teleological terms. That was the case with an author who concluded an accidental encounter with an MO officer in a destroyed town right after its liberation from the Germans in this way: “This meeting decided about my further life! Then I understood where my place should be [ . . .].” ⁴⁷ Others, though, highlighted their dilemmas and hesitations. Władysław Śniadowski initially refused to join the MO because he did not want to leave his family and believed that “I will not be any cop, because I am already a locksmith.” His working-class habitus resisted remodelling, until he went to a meeting of party and security officials which—“to this day I still do not know how it happened”—he left as the commandant of the village post. ⁴⁸

The moment of joining the MO/UB was not only a turning point in the process of biographical transformation. In many cases, it also clearly delimits the way of talking about one’s experiences. Referring to the pre-war or war-time period, even the authors of the most de-individualized narratives allowed themselves to recall, for example, their feeling of alienation as a peasant child in Warsaw and the fear that there would be no place for them anywhere—not in the overpopulated countryside nor in a city full of unemployed. ⁴⁹ In the memoirs of Stefan Madziar, a pre-war communist, there is a clear rift between his pre-war story about the struggle for emancipation, agency, and subjectivity of a young worker in his conflicts with employers, ⁵⁰ and the main story focused on his work in the UB, superficial and devoid of both ideological scripts and personal confession.

Asymmetry of Violence

The first post-war years in Poland were a time of widespread and common violence, terror, and coercion. Violence was a deeply internalized disposition for both communists and anti-communists, especially those originating from the radical nationalist pre-war movement—both proletarian revolution and national breakthrough could not have been imagined without crushing an expected resistance. ⁵¹ In the post-war reality, violence turned out to be a concrete and available answer for the Leninist dilemma “who, whom?”—a tool to gain and maintain political control and discipline.

The space of Polish-Polish political violence in the 1940s was not only the battlefield between groups of armed men. Violence in the form of political terror would take place on a daily basis, with pacifications of villages, beatings, rapes, shooting at civilians, assassinations and tortures, looting, robberies, and so on. Physical coercion was one of the basic instruments used by the communist authorities against opponents—at MO posts and UB facilities, people were abused, tortured, and killed, as shown by uncountable sources. The anti-communist militants did not refrain from committing atrocities against real or alleged supporters of the new order either.

The chief issue that may only be signalled here is also the question of a few overlapping factors. The first is related to “the revolution in a county”: the externalization of Soviet Stalinist practices ⁵² and the downward transfer of the ideological script of the struggle between “revolution” and “reaction.” The second is the “county revolution”: the bottom-up, pre-existing conflicts and divisions in local communities; the prevalence of violence in social life; and atrocities motivated by mutual retaliation, fears, and anxiety. The third is the uncertainty of untrained cadres in the security service, for whom beating was the only third-degree “operating technique” they knew. Another issue that goes far beyond the scope of this article is the question of to what extent joining the security forces—not only Communist—appeals to individuals with a predisposition to make use of violence and to what extent (in my opinion, to a great one) such dispositions are shaped through the specific socialization within the ranks of the force, conformity towards norms, group and authority, situational conditionings, and so on. ⁵³ As Polish historian Mariusz Mazur rightly argues, it was a complex process to get used to violence on one’s own part. ⁵⁴ Besides, there was also the violence of criminal bands and the violence perpetuating the relations between “ordinary” people in the conditions of post-war demoralization and availability of weapons. Below I outline how the experiences of several aspects of this “culture of violence” ⁵⁵ were reconstructed and reinterpreted in the narratives of security service veterans.

As I have mentioned already, one of the main themes of these accounts are various forms of armed clashes: skirmishes, manhunts, ambushes, and so on. They are presented as basic facts, as adventures, or—although rarely—as illustrations of an almost naturalistic intensity. All authors, regardless of whether they served in the MO or the UB, took part in armed combat personally. They would carry out reconnaissance, attack or trace the enemies, and defend themselves. Interestingly, however, only a few accounts contain a direct statement in the first-person singular, which could be summarized as “I was shooting at somebody” or, as one of the authors who had no reluctance to do so put it vividly, “I had no problems with taking the machine gun off my shoulder.” ⁵⁶ No one confessed to killing an enemy, and only in one case—to inflicting wounds on them. ⁵⁷

Was it a matter of a “division of work” on the battlefield between those who shoot and those who had other duties, or a question of how many MO/UB functionaries in the 1940s were psychologically primed and ready to shoot at other human beings? As some studies suggest, this share was in fact low even in the regular armies of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries (although other scholars point out the relationship between killing and pleasure). ⁵⁸ Or maybe the authors considered the fact of using weapons so apparent to themselves and their expected readers, who were also supposed to be a younger generation of officers, that it was unworthy of a separate mention? Or was it, even among men who had socialized themselves to violence, a kind of cultural taboo to talk about it openly? As Sönke Neitzel and Harald Welzer observed, German prisoners of war (POWs) from infantry units overheard by the Allies also rarely talked among themselves about killing the enemy on the battlefield. ⁵⁹ Mariusz Mazur, in the most comprehensive study on the individual experience of belonging to the Polish anti-communist underground, also states that acts of killing are rarely reflected in the memoirs of these militants or they are hidden behind euphemisms. Nevertheless, he presents examples in which this problem of killing somebody was subjected to far-reaching reflection by the authors. ⁶⁰ A similar reflexivity about the moral dilemmas of shooting and killing was expressed by members of the war-time underground scouting organization Grey Regiments [Szare Szeregi], interviewed in the 1970s. ⁶¹ In this regard, the MO/UB veterans were clearly much less reflective—but the circumstances of creating their accounts were far less favourable for such confessions.

The issue of violence against detainees and civilians is virtually absent in the analysed material. This is in no way surprising, as it fits perfectly into the official, mythologized, and subject to strict political control discourse of People’s Polish Republic about “consolidating the people’s power.” (Self)censorship was definitely of key importance for the ministry as well as for the veterans. At the same time, I do not assume that all of the authors must have definitely taken part in atrocities; however, they fail to mention such practices by their fellow officers.

Perhaps also these practices could have been taken for granted by the individual authors. After all, as early as 1949, at the meeting of a certain communist party cell in the UB, the following words were uttered: “We say that we are a sort of military institution, so we never raise the issue that people are beaten.” ⁶² Eventually, one may assume that the narrative outcome is a result of fulfilling the political expectations of an institution as well as individual strategies to avoid taking on the moral status of perpetrators ⁶³ or moral and emotional disengagement, cutting off from responsibility for atrocities. ⁶⁴ And, as Aleida Assmann points out, silence may be intertwined with power. ⁶⁵ Although the analysed narratives were not meant to be made accessible to the general public, ⁶⁶ their authors, the individuals who objectively served as one of the pillars of Communist rule, could have felt obliged to silence and suppress any “inconvenient” issues (including their own memory). Also, categories such as shame or guilt are absent from these stories.

Only in three cases did this form of violence penetrate into the accounts. One of the authors mentioned that he had not allowed another MO officer to beat up a detainee, ⁶⁷ while another wrote about his colleague who beat up a suspected cattle rustler. ⁶⁸ The latter case signals the commonness of violence also in a relatively less “political” field—relatively, as every use of violence intertwined with the power relationship is in some sense political. The third author recalled one of his colleagues being arrested and sentenced for hitting a detainee, “who spit on him, kicked, insulted him as ‘Stalin’s minion’. We all had very strong doubts about the allegedly just punishment. It was a bandit who provoked him [the officer] after all.” The problem was, therefore, not violence but excessive control and discipline on the part of the officers’ supervising units in the public security structure, which “made life a misery a lot.” ⁶⁹

Thanks to the confrontation of these accounts with other sources, we can find out what the authors definitely could not or did not want to uncover in their stories. Probably the most distinctive example is Kazimierz Michalski, who was allegedly discharged in 1952 for health reasons. ⁷⁰ In point of fact, he faced charges of murder of another officer, and the broader context was his involvement in a “death squad” that carried out extrajudicial assassinations of the opponents of communist rule. This particular veteran was arrested twice, but the case was eventually discontinued. ⁷¹

The authors also avoided considering how long-term functioning as perpetrators of violence—but also as potential victims—influenced their personality, emotions, and psyche as a perpetrator trauma of any kind. ⁷² This problem sometimes does appear but only in the most individualized accounts. Czesław Łyszkowski reflected, for example, on the impact that funerals of fallen officers might have had on his own children, ⁷³ while Czesław Jacek shared his thoughts on the growing anxiety and distrust about the real identities of fellow officers who might have turned out to be traitors: “There were no friendship relations [. . . ] Firstly, there was no time for it, secondly, out of fear, because it was not known what people had on their conscience. [. . . ] A man became wary of strangers.” ⁷⁴

The image of the enemy from the anti-communist underground, invariably referred to as “gangs” and “bandits,” ⁷⁵ which is based on a heavily imprinted linguistic and political cliché of post-war Communist discourse in Poland, is a problem that may be only briefly signalled in this article. ⁷⁶ The authors did not consider the motivations of their enemies and left remarks that they knew some of them personally, for example, from school, without any further comments. ⁷⁷ The enemies are not even presented as caricatured, repulsive, or dehumanized; they mostly remain simply faceless, without any qualities; sometimes, their origin from more privileged strata is pointed out as a kind of social stigma and explanation of their actions. Nor did the authors present any “unorthodox” judgements on the logic of the post-war conflict: in line with the official narrative, they presented their own role as defenders of social gains, order, and security against criminal and reactionary “bandits.” Sometimes, though, the authors admit that every fratricide is socially harmful ⁷⁸ or evoke their dilemmas related to the possibility of death at the hands of a fellow Pole. ⁷⁹

In full accordance with the asymmetrical script of the official story of the beginnings of “People’s Poland,” the accounts are filled with data and commentary on atrocities committed by the underground. Some of the narratives are in fact enumerative and undetailed lists of successive assaults and murders. On the other hand, while the perpetrators remain faceless, there are much more illustrative examples such as the murder of a communal secretary of the Polish Workers’ Party, whose head was allegedly cut off and stuck on the rails, or soldiers of the underground who had killed an officer during a barn dance and then “danced two dances in blood oozing from corporal Grzęda’s head.” ⁸⁰ In many accounts, a motif of children orphaned by killed functionaries or party activists appears. Most often, these are simply enumerations (“X left three little children”), but there are also stories such as the one about the widow begging for bread for her children and “bandit families” setting dogs on her. ⁸¹

Obviously, the question arises to what extent these stories are credible, to what extent they are exaggerated, and to what extent they are part of local or institutional legends. Although such episodes are difficult to verify at this point, they are not entirely improbable due to the brutalization of the conflict on both sides. And the political divisions and ideological hatred were tightly intertwined with neighbourly conflicts and distrust. I should also emphasize that similar dilemmas of credibility apply, in fact, to all the issues addressed by the authors.

An important, recurring pattern regarding both armed struggle and political violence comes in references to events in which the authors did not participate personally but which widely echoed in their area and institutional milieus. Such events were the assault by the underground on the prison in the district town of Pułtusk in November 1945 and the ambush of a group of communist activists in the nearby village of Lubiel on May 1946. ⁸² These events became ministerial “sites of memory” as understood by Pierre Nora, that is, “any significant entity, whether material or non-material in nature, which by dint of human will or the work of time has become a symbolic element of the memorial heritage of any community.” ⁸³ Another kind of “site of memory” are humiliating situations—not experienced by the authors themselves—when the underground soldiers would force local communist activists to eat their party cards and wash them down with liquid manure. ⁸⁴

Finally, it can be also added that sexual violence is left unsaid entirely in these testimonies, which can be seen as yet another example of the widespread silence that cloaked this issue in post-war discourses. ⁸⁵ And only authors who adopt the most personal perspective refer to such issues as the violence of officers against each other or, as Molly Pucci puts it, a kind of redistribution of wealth by unprivileged classes in the form of looting, theft, or profiteering. ⁸⁶ Cases such as the accidental killing of a fellow officer were also left unsaid. ⁸⁷

Alcohol and Drunkenness

Although much less dramatic than violence, the problem of excessive alcohol drinking may serve as another interesting prism through which the tensions and complementarities between ideological scripts and individual experience can be studied. “Drunkenness,” in the ranks of the MO/UB, was in fact a widespread problem, which the authorities were perfectly aware of. It was not only a matter of this peculiar group, and one should also take into account the entire social context of the deliberate policy of German occupiers, (post)war chaos, anxiety, anomie, and overwhelming stress-related factors that brought about a significant increase in general consumption of alcohol. ⁸⁸ Vodka and moon shine were also a part of the everyday life of soldiers of the anti-German and anti-communist underground, regardless of their ideology. ⁸⁹ In fact, it seems fairly impossible to profoundly understand the practices and relationships of that time without taking into account how strongly alcohol could influence social interactions. Bottom-up conditionings of “county revolutions” were in fact largely shaped by actors who would make decisions, act, kill, and die while drunk, which makes this matter worth investigating.

If alcohol appears in the narratives researched here (which is not always the case), it is generally depicted as an element of everyday life, not worthy of reflecting on. Drinking together sometimes takes on the aspect of cementing the comrades-in-arms community and—as sociologist Randall Collins puts it—enhancing the emotional energy of these interactions. ⁹⁰ Some wrote about drinking cautiously, some in the spirit of an anecdote, while others—with straightforward, detailed naturalism. ⁹¹ In some testimonies, “drunkenness” was associated primarily with officers who had served in the pre-war police or turned out to be collaborators of the underground. ⁹² Tadeusz Grzybowski admitted, though: “People being transferred from other areas, estranged from their families and friends, without any social life, and at a young age, would often find drinking as their only entertainment” ⁹³ ; Tadeusz Kleczkowski, who was otherwise most inclined to reveal his emotions, acknowledged that it was vodka that made it possible to drown out a sense of threat. ⁹⁴

There is also a story with a kind of moral lesson, when disregarding orders and getting drunk brought death to an officer at the hands of the underground. ⁹⁵ I have also identified visible attempts at reconciling personal memories (e.g., of a sentry who shot an innocent man while drunk) with an ideological matrix. Mieczysław Gałązka admitted that for the officers drinking opportunities were frequent because of successes in combat and funerals of comrades—but the communist party’s care was a barrier against alcoholism. ⁹⁶ Another narrative contains a story of an alcoholic security officer terrorizing the village. His removal was supposed to change the political attitude of this community in favour of the new authorities. ⁹⁷ His example allowed for a convenient explanation of the initial legitimacy shortcomings of the communists, but, on the other hand, in the chaotic reality of 1945, their government often had the face of, first of all, a local policeman or security officer.

Safe Spaces of Political Criticism

The MO and UB veterans whose accounts I have analysed presented themselves as loyal, obedient officers of the ministry and convinced supporters of the Polish United Workers’ Party and the post-war order. Their stories correspond to what Fritz Schütze called “institutional expectation patterns,” the process structure of a biography when the individuals arrange their autobiographical narratives in terms of fulfilling the expectations of the institutions in which they function. ⁹⁸ This loyalty could have been to same extent a strategy of self-presentation, but we can assume that it was also a genuine, deep-seated disposition, an integral part of the habitus developed in the special conditions of political socialization that the authors underwent. Jan Rutkowski wrote the following, recalling a time when he had lived in constant fear for his life: “At that time I promised myself that I would never spoil what I was building, even if I found myself in the most difficult living conditions.” ⁹⁹ In what areas, however, did the authors allow themselves to take a more critical view?

First, the general overtone of the analysed accounts is very apologetic towards former comrades-in-arms, even idealistic in the way the first cadres of the MO and UB are depicted—people fully committed to the cause, courageous, righteous, though simple, uneducated, and often poorly prepared for the tasks entrusted to them. The authors explicitly categorize their memoirs as an expression of tribute and remembrance of comrades, especially the fallen ones or a way of passing on stories about their sacrifice to the younger generations. ¹⁰⁰ They participate in accumulating their own moral capital and that of their institution by filling the moral statuses of heroes and heroic victims; they also create “ethos stories” highlighting tensions between unfavourable conditions and their unwavering and righteous attitudes. ¹⁰¹ Their stories form a strongly idealized picture that is diametrically different from the image of the MO and UB officers as demoralized, frustrated, unable to cope with their new status, despised, and feared, which is based on a critical approach to various sources. ¹⁰² The fact that in 1947 almost half of the MO functionaries in Poland were disciplined or expelled is not reflected in any way in these testimonies. ¹⁰³ They hardly address any issues related to the negative image of their institution in the society. Sometimes, however, the accounts contain less favourable characteristics of individual colleagues or superiors related to their alcohol issues, excessive ambition, lack of appropriate competence, and so on. Czesław Łyszkowski complained, for example: “In my opinion there were too many commanders on our side. Everyone wanted to boss around [. . . ].” ¹⁰⁴

Second, more individualized narratives become a space for authors to express personal grievances. Jan Rutkowski, a former soldier of the war-time non-communist Peasant Battalions, complained that his promotion had been blocked because of his past and that he had been treated with suspicion. He also wrote with a visible regret about internal conflicts that made him leave the UB in 1955, as well as the bitter confusion over granting him a pension. ¹⁰⁵ Leon Janczewski decided to recall his conflicts with superiors over some illegal economic activities pursued by them or their families, which led to the author’s dismissal from the MO (he concluded, “I was terribly ill-used”). Even he, however, having stated that he had given his best years to the people’s government, felt proud of it and he felt respect for his colleagues from that time. ¹⁰⁶ Similarly, Czesław Łyszkowski, who complained that after years of service he had difficulties with getting an apartment in his hometown, wrote that he did not regret anything and was not ashamed of being called “a Stalinist.” ¹⁰⁷

In some accounts, the claim to recognition of merits is raised, not so much for the authors themselves but for the community to which they belonged and with which they still identified. This took the form of statements that the people who really fought for “the power of the people” are forgotten and not appreciated in the 1970s, while there are those who did not prove themselves in the time of trial but boast of their “heroism.” ¹⁰⁸ The veterans tried to present their past experiences as not only heroic but meaningful as well, and they wanted them to be meaningful also to the younger generations of the security service officers, or the younger generation in general. ¹⁰⁹

Third, the authors very rarely allow themselves to criticize the more general directions of the party’s and government’s policies—although, of course, it is difficult to say to what extent this is a matter of self-censorship strategy or a testimony to a strong internalization of a worldview. A fragmentary criticism appears with regard to the issue of collectivization of agriculture. It concerns problems such as the government’s underestimation of the strength of the individual peasants’ desire for land, making hollow promises to peasants, neglecting the creation of appropriate infrastructure for the collective farms, and cases of squandering. ¹¹⁰ Another author even mentioned the anti-collectivization riot in one of the villages and refrained from harsh condemnation of this form of social resistance in Stalinist Poland. ¹¹¹ It should be remembered that the failure of collectivization, a “signature feature of the Stalinist revolutionary breakthroughs,” ¹¹² was one of the elements of the Polish specificity compared to other communist countries. ¹¹³ It was, therefore, much easier to lament about it. On the other hand, the authors originating from the countryside and maintaining various ties (e.g., with their relatives) with it could have been particularly sensitive to this issue. At the same time, they do not mention practices of political, economic, and physical coercion at the hands of authorities against reluctant peasants that took place in the early 1950s. ¹¹⁴

Conclusion

A set of research problems that may be studied through the prism of these sources, going beyond the scope of this article, is capacious: the image of the enemy, the role played by the local Soviet advisors, the linguistic side of the accounts, and so on. Following the process of their editing and publishing in the internal journals of the ministry, tracing what has been removed or modified seems to be a promising research topic too. At the same time, even in this limited scope, the experiences and recollections of the authors, what they lived through as well as how they spoke about it, illustrate the ambiguous identities of many young Polish men from the popular strata in the 1940s and 1950s. They were guardsmen of the “revolution in a county,” who followed the orders of the Party, and yet they experienced their own revolutions and transformations which I associate with the “county revolution” phenomenon. Tracing the links between experiences and recollections, I would go on to say that the narratives written “from a bird’s-eye view” correspond with the “revolution in a county” perspective, while “frog’s-eye” accounts highlight mostly spaces of “county revolutions.”

All the analysed narratives of the Citizens’ Militia and the Security Office veterans were created within a specific institutional context unfavourable to subjectivity and reflectiveness, favouring self-censorship and conformism instead. As an actor of memory, the Historical Bureau of the Ministry of Interior was—as proposed by Jan Kubik and Michael Bernhard—a part of the official memory regime of the Polish People’s Republic, a monopolistic “mnemonic warrior” in this field, securing the “right” version of the past, based on the “us vs. them” cleavage, legitimization of the former, and condemnation of the latter. ¹¹⁵ Apart from this part of the institutionalized historical apparatus, there was also a milieu of MO/UB former officers: veterans of a fight to “consolidate the people’s power” can be easily identified with a memory group that shares common experiences, ways of looking at the past, interests, and communication. ¹¹⁶ But still, there were also individual actors, the authors of the accounts.

Having been asked by the ministry to write their stories, they followed the “narrative command” and tried to fulfil the expectations of the institution, which, as we can presume, were very much in tune with their worldviews and other effects of political socialization. A vast majority of these stories follow similar patterns depicting the post-war political struggle; there is also a visible mechanism of (self)suppression of individuality. In the process of “remembering on command,” political “surrogates for memory,” ¹¹⁷ in the form of official clichés and scripts, come into play. They are, as one may assume, often tightly intertwined with personal, intimate recollections.

These stories are not completely standardized though. The veterans might all have been loyal and disciplined, but they differed not only in terms of cognitive competence or language skills but also in regard to willingness to express their emotions, ways of thinking, grievances, and interpretations. It is most evident in the parts that concern their youth and their transformation into officers, but there are also some gaps in the political script in later parts.

In this analysis, I tried to prove that communist “guardsmen” were not only cogs in some dehumanized “totalitarian” machine but also actors of social life with their own agency, as Pucci claims—“active pursuers of radical political and social agenda.” ¹¹⁸ They were functioning, however, within a framework that tried to standardize and discipline this subjectivity, in which they also, paradoxically, actively participated.