THE CAPTIVE MIND
53
uous pressure on the communist rulers from without. Milosz was keenly aware
of this and therefore agreed that
The Capti/Je Mi/ld
had become a tale of a bare–
ly comprehensible past. I feel, however, that he conceded too much when he
concluded that
171C
Capti/Jc Milld
was rather atypical for Poland. I think he was
right when he stated that the simpler forms of Ketman, in the sense of role–
playing and conscious protective adaptation, had been a mass practice.
In
any event, the period of ideocratic totali tarianism was much short–
er in Poland than elsewhere. In fact, it ended almost definitively in 1956.
The significance of this date was greatly underestimated because public
memory became dominated by two groups for whom it was less impor–
tant than for the population-hard-line anti-communists and ex-Stalinists.
Both of them knew little about dual consciousness and internalized ideo–
logical oppression: the former because they had always been immune to the
new faith; the latter because their commitment to communism had been
total. Hence they did not experience the communist ideocracy as a spiri–
tual tyranny. Paradoxically, their deepest experience of the oppressiveness
of communism came after its fall, when they found themselves in open
conflict with the regime and had to abandon their hopes.
What about Polish society after 1956? Did it make Milosz's book
irrelevant? Yes and no. Yes, because the party ceased to behave as a mili tant
church, leaving no space for non-politicized privacy. Marxism ceased to
function as the hypnotizing pill of
MllYfi-Bing.
Control over intellectual life
was greatly reduced. Standards of conformity became looser and more
pragmatic. But it remained relevant because the system was still dependent
on its ideological legi timation and therefore could not free itself from the
residual forms of communist ideology. Limitations of freedom were still
ideological in nature, or perceived as such, which made them more and
more unbearable. And the disappearance of the system was viewed as
impossible. This maintained the need to defend one's separate identity as
well as to reconcile oneself with systemic necessities; the techniques of
coping with this situation were remarkably similar to Ketman. The post–
Stalinist Ketman was meaningfully related to the old classical one.
Understandably, the new Ketman flourished, above all within the ruling
party. True, the party was no longer terrorized by fanatics; its younger mem–
bers had not passed through a period of total indoctrination and were
contemptuous of the Stalinist past. Nevertheless, they retained a vestigial ide–
ological superego. As a rule this superego was convinced that, in spite of
everything, the socialist camp had historical right on its side. Such belief was
combined with a cynical attitude toward official propaganda and a lack of
illusions about the existing state of affairs. Hence it was not mental captivity
in the classical sense. However, the lack of ideological illusions could coexist
with the relics of an ideological conscience. Polish party leaders sometimes
