Famed Polish Writer Outed As 'spy' in Anti-communist Purge
The celebrated Polish writer and reporter, Ryszard Kapuscinski, yesterday became the latest public figure to be "outed" as a "communist spy" in Poland.
Newsweek Poland put the late writer, reckoned to be 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.
Kapuscinski, who died in January, traversed the globe reporting on 27 revolutions and wrote several acclaimed books on central America, Ethiopia, Iran, and the former Soviet Union. For most of his career in communist Poland he was employed by the state news agency, PAP.
He is the latest prominent Pole to be "outed" in what critics call a rightwing witchhunt orchestrated by a paranoid government that sees "reds under the beds" everywhere in Poland.
Defenders of the purges of alleged communist collaborators - particularly among a younger generation of Polish conservatives - see the campaign as an essential, if belated, attempt at moral renewal to cleanse Poland of the influence still wielded by a former communist elite.
The rightwing government of the Kaczynski twins, president Lech and prime minister Jaroslaw, has set the country against itself through a draconian law requiring some 700,000 public employees to declare in writing that they never worked for the communist secret police.
The constitutional court has struck down most of the legislation after senior politicians such as Tadeusz Mazowiecki, the Soviet bloc's first non-communist prime minister, and Bronislaw Geremek, MEP, Solidarity founder and former foreign minister, refused to comply. The government may now throw open the secret police archives and their millions of files.
Newsweek acknowledged that although Kapuscinski had collaborated for five years in the 1960s he had not "supplied any significant documents". It was routine at the time for individuals allowed to travel widely to sign agreements with the secret police.
Newsweek Poland put the late writer, reckoned to be 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.
Kapuscinski, who died in January, traversed the globe reporting on 27 revolutions and wrote several acclaimed books on central America, Ethiopia, Iran, and the former Soviet Union. For most of his career in communist Poland he was employed by the state news agency, PAP.
He is the latest prominent Pole to be "outed" in what critics call a rightwing witchhunt orchestrated by a paranoid government that sees "reds under the beds" everywhere in Poland.
Defenders of the purges of alleged communist collaborators - particularly among a younger generation of Polish conservatives - see the campaign as an essential, if belated, attempt at moral renewal to cleanse Poland of the influence still wielded by a former communist elite.
The rightwing government of the Kaczynski twins, president Lech and prime minister Jaroslaw, has set the country against itself through a draconian law requiring some 700,000 public employees to declare in writing that they never worked for the communist secret police.
The constitutional court has struck down most of the legislation after senior politicians such as Tadeusz Mazowiecki, the Soviet bloc's first non-communist prime minister, and Bronislaw Geremek, MEP, Solidarity founder and former foreign minister, refused to comply. The government may now throw open the secret police archives and their millions of files.
Newsweek acknowledged that although Kapuscinski had collaborated for five years in the 1960s he had not "supplied any significant documents". It was routine at the time for individuals allowed to travel widely to sign agreements with the secret police.
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