Censorship in Poland in the Twentieth Century
"Taken from the forthcoming Censorship: A World Encyclopedia, edited by Derek Jones, to be published by Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, London, in May 2000"
Immediately upon liberation in November 1918, preventive censorship was abolished in Poland. The registration of press titles replaced the licence system that had obtained under the partitioning powers. Repressive censorship had to be instigated through the courts by the Public Prosecutor often at the behest of the Interior Ministry. Issues inspiring such motions included attacks on the government and threats to public order and Poland's territorial integrity. The state of emergency prevailing over large sections of Polish territory due to the numerous wars waged by Poland during the first few years of independence, led to the "temporary" suspension of democratic freedoms for longish periods. The 1920 War against Soviet Russia brought the introduction of preventive censorship in defence of military secrets. Vocal support by the Communists and sections of the Jewish press for the Bolshevik cause led to their suppression, and in later years the authorities applied restrictive measures against Ukrainian and Belorusian separatist movements.
Press legislation in interwar Poland initially displayed great liberalism. The 1921 March Constitution provided for a variety of liberties along the most democratic lines: article 104 acknowledged the individual's right to free expression of his thoughts and convictions in any manner he saw fit as long as it did not infringe the rule of law, while article 105 rejected both preventive censorship and any form of licensing for the press. The full implementation of these clauses was dependent on the promulgation of further acts, which did not occur, therefore making mere desiderata of some of the clauses guaranteeing basic liberties. Prior to the May 1926 coup, more repressive moves foundered on the rapid changes of government: the overturning of stringent legislation meant a return to the frequently more liberal provisions of Prussian and Austrian press laws from the previous century. Bills that had been vigorously supported by the right-wing National Democrats to suppress the Left before 1926 were later used against their own publications.
After 1926 and the installation of the Sanacja governments, government thinking became increasingly authoritarian: the unified Press Law of 8 June 1927 provided for the use of economic sanctions to curtail press independence, a tack that would be taken increasingly by the authorities during the 1930s. Although censorship applications had still to be referred to the courts on a case-by-case basis, moves were taken to reduce the independence of the judiciary, resulting in parliament's abrogation of the immovability of judges in 1932. The 1935 Constitution no longer mentioned press liberties, while the Press Law of 21 November 1938 restricted inter alia the number of people who could become editors, formalized newspapers' obligations to publish official communiques (or "corrections"), and increased the fines to be paid for violations.
The authorities also took a more pro-active stance towards the press. During the 1927-28 election campaign the Interior Ministry directed huge funds to the purchase of existing press titles (guaranteeing favourable coverage for the regime by directly appointing editors), setting up new papers, or buying oppositionist papers' quiescence for the duration. The National Democrat organ in Lwow, Slowo Polskie, was taken over by young ND activists in December 1927 with 120, 000 zloties received from Ministry coffers. The regime would also coerce editors to print favourable stories or even instruct pro-government newspapers on a daily basis about what they should print. Public institutions associated with the Sanacja government, such as the Army, could wield massive influence through its mass subscriptions to papers and journals. The political elite and their associates also strove to dominate the distribution network. On 6 March 1928, the Ministry of Communications signed an agreement with Ruch, the Association of Railway Bookshops, to exclude publications of a left-wing nature from its kiosks. In December 1935, it enabled the Association to consolidate its position by granting it a de facto monopoly on distribution from the capital into the provinces. Despite this, the system of control was in no way as rigorous and complete as that of the totalitarian systems which followed: the non-political press in particular enjoyed substantial freedom from interference, while even the most heavily censored papers continued to appear regardless of their political line towards the regime.
Interwar authors were censored broadly along the lines established for the press: left-leaning writers suffered greater repressions than supporters of the regime. Under the terms of the February 1934 Press Agreement signed secretly with Nazi Germany, works critical of Hitler and other leading Nazis were removed, and Hitler's Mein Kampf was allowed to circulate. The Catholic Church occasionally supported repressive measures against specific individuals and works which allegedly offended religious sentiment and public decency. The expressionist novels of Emil Zegadlowicz (1888-1941), which contained numerous graphic descriptions of sexual activity and scenes mocking Christian practices, fell prey to official sanctions. The second edition of Ghosts (1935) was confiscated by the authorities and officially condemned by Archbishop Sapieha of Cracow. A third version removed the offending parts, but the original version was reprinted only in 1957. Zegadlowicz's Motors, published privately in October 1937 by the non-existent firm "Sirinx", was confiscated on the orders of the Grodsk district governor's office a month later. The ban affected both the text and the fairly graphic accompanying illustrations, which were not republished until 1981. Probably the most outstanding literary work banned during this period was Julian Tuwim's (1894-1953) poem Ball at the Opera (1936), an expressionist apocalyptic vision of 1930s Poland, studded with expletives, mockery of the military elite and descriptions of decadent social excess, published for the first time in 1946.
If interwar literature sometimes radically challenged readers, interwar cinema rather pandered to viewers' tastes. Although the State showed no interest in developing a national film industry, it was very concerned to control films themselves in view of the impact upon the national imagination. For much of the interwar period, foreign films dominated the screen and only by the late 1930s did domestic output exceed imports. Like the press, interwar cinema and theatrical productions came under the jurisdiction of the Interior Ministry. The Decree on Public Performances of 7 February 1919 introduced preventive censorship in respect of "the showing of words or images a) pornographic in content or generally offensive to morality or contrary to the law; b) criminal in content, if the ways and means used to commit crimes are shown". Around this time bans were imposed on displaying military insignia and uniforms of the modern Polish army. Prior to staging or distribution, theatres and cinemas had to demonstrate to the police that works were devoid of any such content. Having received the censor's warrant, any discrepancy between the content described and the actual performance could lead to prosecution. Officials in the Interior Ministry's Press Department thus functioned as the true controllers of the mass imagination. The Instruction for Cinematographic Censors of 25 May 1920 provided far greater detail, banning the exhibition of scenes and images "contrary to the law or public morality, especially: 1) scenes offensive to religious sensibilities; 2) images of saints, objects of religious cult in inappropriate locations (cemetaries and graves may be shown as long as the scene does not offend religious sensibilities; 3) the exhumation of corpses; 4) scenes offensive to Polish national sentiments; 5) scenes offensive to decency; 6) images based on the squalor of existence; 7) brutal murder scenes; 8) scenes showing torture, the carrying out of death sentences; 9) detective and criminal images intending to give a showcase demonstration or incitement to commit various crimes; 10) images of a nihilistic or corrupting nature." The revised law of February 1934 introduced no essential changes to these categories, but refined distribution procedures: cinematic works likely to offend the sensibilities of the minorities were often given restricted distribution. Unquantifiable criteria such as "taste" or "the public interest" caused censors to mangle foreign films, such as Bunuel's Land without Bread (1932) and von Sternberg's Morocco (1930), which was never shown in its entirety. The most palpable consequence of film censorship was to encourage film makers and studios to develop pre-emptive strategies, watering down the literary originals in line with current tastes. Henryk Szaro's version of Zeromski's The History of Sin (1933) updated the story of an adulterous affair and unwanted pregnancy to contemporary Poland, but softened scenes such as the killing of the baby.
Cinemas continued to survive under German occupation, although the repertoire changed to reflect Nazi policy. German films and weekly newsreels as well as a number of Polish films were shown. The last included several films begun before the outbreak of war, which the German Film and Propaganda Distributing Society completed, or works not previously shown. In 1941 Polish films formed 20% of the repertoire, due to the receipts they brought in, a part of which went towards the German war effort. Cinemas themselves had been taken out of Polish hands and managed by the German Film Association. The underground resistance, the Home Army, attempted to disrupt performances, but without success. In line with Nazi policy in other spheres, an intention to "dumb down" audiences was evident through an emphasis on farce and comedy in the "home-grown" programme.
After the September 1939 campaign, the Nazis attempted the systematic destruction of Polish national identity. They razed statues honouring great Polish figures or marking famous victories in Polish history, plundered libraries and museums, and decimated the intelligentsia. At school, Polish children were to receive only a very rudimentary education, encompassing basic reading and mathematical skills: the emphasis fell on a technical education fitting Poles for their role as a physical labour force. National holidays were banned, pre-war history and geography textbooks removed, and the teaching of Polish literature proscribed. Anti-Bolshevik primers, such as "Ster" ("The Rudder"), which stressed the need for German-Polish collaboration, began to appear from 1940, and became a compulsory part of the syllabus. Although they included extracts from Polish classics - limited mainly to descriptions of nature, the seasons and animal life - the emphasis fell upon the promotion of work as the key value in life. The Nazis' universal contempt for things Polish, which disqualified the Poles as potential collaborators, saved the populace from indoctrination, and, unlike the Soviets, the Nazis did not move to nationalize all commercial activity, which allowed a certain space to public life. Illegal publishing - which produced important works by Milosz and Andrzejewski - and second-hand bookshops helped to maintain the continuity of Polish culture, but the setting up of four underground universities, whose degrees were recognised after the war, served perhaps as the major symbol of cultural resistance.
Soviet control, established by the annexation of Eastern Poland after 17 September 1939, demonstrated far greater rigidity. The Russian authorities' contempt for Poles - universally termed "lords and masters" (pany)in Bolshevik propaganda - initially rivalled the Nazis': their policy instrumentalized Polish culture, determining that only those elements which could be adapted for the dissemination of socialist values would survive. The city of Lwow, with its large Polish population, served as a preliminary test site for the post-war experiment in manipulating Polish culture: school textbooks incorporated extracts from classic Polish literature which either implicitly criticized the capitalist class relations or ostensibly promoted the propaganda ideals of Polish-Russian (and thus Polish-Soviet) friendship and cooperation. The revaluation of Mickiewicz's work occupied a central place in this long-term strategy: the selective promotion and tacit censorship of parts of his oeuvre diminished its anti-Russian impact, which had sustained the Poles under oppression in the previous century. The marking of the 85th anniversary of his death (November 1940) in Lwow and broadcasting of events into German-occupied Poland, then experiencing the Nazis' acts of cultural devastation, presented Soviet rule as intrinsically more benign and "cultured". Sovietization therefore intended to penetrate Polish consciousness far more profoundly than Nazism.
After the creation of the Soviet-backed Lublin government in July 1944, the Communists - the Polish (after 1948: United) Workers' Party - moved quickly to control key areas of cultural activity. Legislation failed to keep pace with Communist appropriation of such key areas as the regulation of paper production and the film industry. In December 1944, the government announced that attempts to circumvent pre-war legislation requiring owners and producers of paper supplies to present personal and legal documentation or obstructing this obligation would be punishable by death - a provision which remained in force until 1946. A regulatory body, the Central Bureau for Managing Printed Paper Supplies, was set up in the Communist-dominated Ministry of Information and Propaganda in June 1945; on the Ministry's abolition in April 1947, a body attached to the cabinet office took over its role, before the responsibility passed to the Ministry of Culture. The diet ratified the existence of "Film Polski", set up in July 1945, only in January 1946. Control of these sectors represented merely the first stage of tightening Communist control on cultural activity. Over the next five years, the Party-State's gradual accumulation of print works, enforcement of publishing plans and its development of absolute control over the whole film production process - from financing to distribution - would come to determine in every respect the products made available to the public.
The misleading official division between state, collective and private (Church and usually surviving pre-war) publishers, which obtained in publishing, began to be eroded from 1946. "Economic" arguments - "rationalization" and the democratization of access to culture through the decommercialization of publishing activity - gradually eliminated most private publishers from the market. A series of government decrees passed in 1949 introduced licensing for all firms seeking to publish books and non-periodicals (September), restricted publishing rights to enterprises subordinate to the state administration (November), and finally created a central distribution network "Dom Ksiazki" in January 1950 which left the question of the availability of books solely to the state budget and storeroom capacity. The Ministry of Culture had by this time assumed responsibility for the shape of the annual publishing plan, which had to be supplied by publishers in advance, and its allocation of the film budget and paper supplies made it the technical censor of Polish culture. The net result was to make artistic production completely independent of audience preferences, which aided the subordination of culture to the Communists' ideological programme. In July 1950, the "Ruch" conglomerate established a near-monopoly in the collection of subscriptions and distribution of periodical publications.
Institutional censorship entered postwar Poland with the Red Army. Usually women censors vetted soldiers' letters home for the disclosure of military secrets (the separate status of military censorship continued at least into the 1970s). At the end of 1944, two Glavlit employees delegated to the Workers' Party helped to set up a centralized office, which became known in July 1946 as the Main Office for Control of the Press, Publications and Public Performances (GUKP). Hitherto "elementalness" had reigned as various agencies - the Minstries of Culture, Propaganda, the publishing houses, and newspapers - competed with each other over the right to control their products. Officially, non-state publishers and press did not have to submit to the censorship process, and the non-Communist press took advantage of this loophole to publish articles critical of the regime. The extension of GUKP powers as the Communists sought to suppress the principal political opposition, Mikolajczyk's Peasant Party, stifled any dissenting voices. Despite the clampdown on political opposition, this period has been termed the "gentle revolution", symbolized by the activities of the publishing collective "Czytelnik", whose director, Jerzy Borejsza, attempted to win over wavering writers to the new system by publishing their works in substantial and attractively produced editions. At this time, the Catholic press, especially Tygodnik Powszechny, experienced relatively little repression, as the government enlisted the aid of the Church in stabilizing the internal situation, particularly on the newly gained Western territories. Catholic journalists, as did most, cooperated with the censors in producing their pieces. Nonetheless, taboo subjects included any criticism of the Soviet Union, reports of the depradations carried out by Russian troops, which the Polish authorities were largely powerless to prevent, and accounts of fraternization with the native German inhabitants of the new Polish territories.
The Decree of 5 July 1946 establishing the GUKP defined the status, duties and general conditions under which censors would intervene in artistic works, the press and performances. These criteria included attacks on the political system, disclosure of state secrets, "activity harmful to the Polish state's international relations" (usually meaning criticism of the Soviet Union and neighbouring socialist countries), and "misleading public opinion with false information". Their very lack of specificity gave the censors considerable freedom for manoeuvre in defending the ruling elite's interests, whose activity was in any case not democratically accountable.
The GUKP operated a three-stage procedure in relation to newspapers: de facto, the submission of the edition on which the censor indicated any necessary changes; ex post, immediately prior to publication, when the censor checked that the proposed changes had been made; and secondary, when a committee would assess the correctness of the decision in hindsight - with respect to the changing political situation and any oversights - and would adjust practice accordingly. Because of the licencing system, newspapers were freed from a fourth stage of preliminary censorship which books underwent, that is, the complete manuscript was submitted to the GUKP before printing.
The 1946 decree failed to acknowledge the GUKP's part in purging public and even academic libraries of works considered politically undesirable after the war. These "clearances" initially helped to remove extreme right-wing publications, but with time extended to works by the regime's political opponents both within Poland and abroad - ultimately, to dissenters such as Gomulka within the Party itself - works of history, literary history, geography books, scouting manuals, the works of emigre writers, and even Burroughs' Tarzan novels. These publications were transferred to second-hand bookshops and sold at high prices, or else pulped. Print runs for the independent Catholic press were drastically reduced and administrative obstruction of its activity escalated. After Stalin's death, Tygodnik Powszechny's editor refused to publish a flattering necrologue, which led to the paper's suspension and its transfer until November 1956 to the state-promoted "Pax" organisation. Effectively, over the years 1949-55, Poland was cut off from Western cultural, scientific and political influence as the Soviet model dominated in all spheres.
Film elicited special treatment from the authorities. Initially, films were checked centrally at the "Kinofikacja" in Lodz and audience response monitored by GUKP officials on their distribution. From the late 1940s, screenwriters submitted scripts to the Ministry of Culture, which vetted them for political acceptability, and granted funds. Once made, the film would be viewed by various committees, which might include members of the Politburo, in order to determine the extent of distribution or whether it should be released at all: by 1981, the number of shelved feature films ran into double figures, costing the state millions in lost revenues.
The imposition of Socialist Realism from 1949 as the obligatory creative method in the arts both advanced self-censorship and removed some of the responsibility for controlling works to earlier stages of the creative process. Editorial boards in publishing houses began to act as an additional screen; by funding "field trips" to industrial works to stimulate the growth of a new literature hymning the achievements of the Six Year Plan (1950-56), the Ministry of Culture encouraged conformity with the Party's aims as did the various bodies set up within the artistic "trades unions". Most of all, terror ensured either subservience or "inner emigration" on the part of the few who refused to comply.
The "Thaw", which took hold of Polish life from 1954, led to the gradual relaxation of these rigours. The main changes occurred, however, in the autumn of 1956, when Gomulka returned to the Politburo. In September 1956, GUKP employees appealed for the abolition of censorship and, in the absence of institutional controls, an ad hoc Review Board consisting of journalists, Party officials and government representatives vetted newspapers throughout the highly sensitive period of the Hungarian revolt. At this time, contacts with Polish emigre centres abroad were restored and major writers such as Gombrowicz and Milosz began to appear in print within Poland.
The liberal hopes vested in Gomulka were dashed over the next few years as he sought to fasten his control on the Party and Polish society. The GUKP was purged; the defiant newspaper Po prostu, which had been at the forefront of demands for change during the "Polish October", was closed down in November 1957; and while the revamped cultural policy ceased to require obeisance to a single artistic programme - so that the term "Socialist Realism" fell into disuse in official discourse - increasingly dogmatic trends within the Party forced a cultural clampdown. The celebrated "Polish School" in cinema was stifled by the early 1960s, key "revisionists" such as Leszek Kolakowski, who advocated change from within the Party, were expelled, and closer contacts with emigre publications such as the Paris-based Kultura discouraged. In film and literature, the so-called "black" trend of social realism practised by Marek Hlasko faced official opprobrium from 1959. Aleksander Ford's version of Hlasko's short story The Eighth Day of the Week was banned from release in 1958 and did not appear until 1983.
In the main, a stand-off prevailed between artists and the authorities during the 1960s. A protest letter by 34 leading intellectuals and writers in March 1964 at the growing power of censorship and paper shortages led to the repression of some of the signatories, but did not greatly affect the general situation. The closure of Fatherfather's Eve in January 1968 and brutal suppression of the student revolts that followed, produced complete disaffection with the Party among the intelligentsia. But it laid the foundations for the future open opposition, which was to produce the "Second circulation" and, eventually, Solidarity.
A key difference between censorship in the 1960s and its development under Gierek lay in the streamlining of the system. The lack of formality in the chain of command had led the GUKP to be "hijacked" to some extent by the chauvinist Partisan faction of the PUWP during the 1967-68 anti-Semitic campaign waged in the press after the Six Day War. In the 1970s, however, relations became more formalized: the Press Secretary of the Central Committee was supposed to serve as the conduit for all requests for censorship services, be they from the Russian ambassador, industrial interests, or other departments. The Censorship Office received ever more precise, and sometimes contradictory, instructions - the "Black Book" - on a regular basis in the attempt to guarantee the Party monopoly on information.
Access to information or limited freedom to criticize depended on the individual's status in the official hierarchy. After 1956 some highly placed party writers, such as Jerzy Putrament, received permission to tackle controversial issues such as Stalinism, which was otherwise taboo, in a more direct manner than most. Prestige also played a part as in 1973 when, after 5 years of official proscription, Slawomir Mrozek, the most renowned Polish playwright, premiered and published his new play A Happy Event in People's Poland - a work which had already been published in emigration. (The turning point in the regime's treatment of emigre literature was the award of the Nobel Prize to Milosz in 1980, which forced the authorities radically to review their policy.) Scholarly works faced slightly less stringent criteria since they were intended for a small and elite audience. In general, the popularity of the medium determined the degree of censorship: television, which arrived in Poland in the mid-1950s, was, like film, subject to the strictest controls, with every item requiring prior approval. In the 1970s, much of Polish television was pre-recorded.
From the mid-1970s, the opposition began to challenge the Party information monopoly. An unregulated "Second Circulation" set up at the end of 1976 heralded an increasingly active underground publishing network. As a result, even prior to the rise of Solidarity, the total media blackout imposed after 1976 on certain writers began to lift. This also affected some emigre writers, such as Milosz, whose Bible translations appeared in the monthly Tworczosc (Creative Work) in the late 1970s.
Accountability and transparency of censorship were one of the 21 demands made by Solidarity in the Gdansk Agreement of August 1980. The new law of July 1981 enabled editors to challenge GUKP decisions through the courts. Tygodnik "Solidarnosc" mounted the first successful challenge in November 1981 to overturn the confiscation of readers' letters in praise of the "Second Circulation". The law also removed certain categories of publication from the censorship process, such as speeches by deputies at open parliamentary sessions, textbooks approved by the Education Ministry, those approved by the Church, Academy of Sciences publications, renewals of works previously published in People's Poland or else published prior to 1918, and information bulletins. The last provision covered most of Solidarity's own publications and, in principle, the legislation partly dismantled the censorship process. The imposition of Martial Law (itself a taboo subject) and the "normalization" of the early 1980s somewhat compromised these new freedoms, but the basic trend during the 1980s was toward increasing liberalization, particularly with the advent of glasnost'. By 1989 about 25% of all newspapers were exempted from preventive control and there was a substantial decrease in censorship interventions elsewhere. Following the Round Table talks, a registration system was introduced instead of licensing, out of which Gazeta Wyborcza emerged.
Changes accelerated after the collapse of Communism: the GUKP was abolished in April 1990 and in March the "Ruch" conglomerate was broken up - the newspapers it owned were sold off, while the distribution network continues to survive to this day and enjoy a considerable advantage over other competitors due to ministers' inability to devise a privitization package satisfactory to all parties. Privatisation came slower in television, and in effect new technology and European Union legislation has to some extent invalidated politicians' attempts to retain control over the medium. The radio landscape has sustantially altered, although the state still occupies a central position in the audiovisual market.
Since 1990, politicians have shown contradictory attitudes towards the new media freedoms, calling for a plurality of views whilst wishing to retain control. Walesa deprived Gazeta Wyborcza of the Solidarity logo in June 1990 after it published articles he regarded as critical of himself and the trade union. As president he enjoyed and employed his considerable powers in terms of nominating candidates to the National Radio and Television Council (KRRT); his successor, Kwasniewski has taken a less interventionist stance in television, but the KRRT remains under the post-communists' control. Slandering the president is a criminal offence, punishable by a sentence of 10 months to 8 years imprisonment, but, although charges have been brought under this law, no one has yet been successfully prosecuted. In September 1997, Kwasniewski took legal action against the newspapers Zycie and Dziennik Baltycki over articles alleging he had had contacts with a Soviet agent. Within a week, the German owner of the Neue Passauer Presse which publishes Dziennik forced his journalists to withdraw their accusations and apologized to the president. Wolek, the co-owner and main editor of Zycie had previous experience of pursuing allegations against Kwasniewski, when he was illegally ousted by the Italian owner Grauso from the editorship of the largest Warsaw daily, Zycie Warszawy, in December 1995, following accusations of a financial scam being run by the ex-communists then in government. The alacrity with which some foreign owners accommodate the government's views does not bode well for the future of independent Polish print media.
The Church has also tried to flex its muscles since 1990. Agreements with the government and Polish Radio and Television gave it favourable access to both media as early as mid-1989. The Church pays less than commercial stations for its radio licences because it carries little advertising. An ill-defined clause enshrining "respect for Christian values" was controversially forced through by the Church's supporters in parliament as part of the new Radio and Television bill passed in December 1992. The KRRT can therefore revoke licences according to very vague criteria about safeguarding Christian values. In some respects, this merely continues the Communist regime's deference for ecclesiastical sensibilities: in the 1970s, Tadeusz Rozewicz's play Mariage Blanc, condemned by the Episcopate for immorality, was never performed in Cracow. In the present absence of state censorship, however, the Church has to take recourse to the rather sparse provisions of the Press and Penal Codes. In support of the Church, the Rzeszow municipal council attempted to ban screenings of Priest in November 1993. The Church's main concern has been to combat pornography and obscenity: in spring 1991, the attorney general published a memo suggesting an urgent need to pursue pornography. Jerzy Urban, editor of the satirical weekly NIE and the Party's press spokesman during the 1980s, challenged the memo by reprinting a picture from Penthouse and, despite being taken to court, was subsequently vindicated. In August 1995, the ex-communist paper Trybuna reported the pressure exerted by the Bialystok municipal authorities against "Ruch" kiosks to restrict the sale not only of pornographic magazines but even Gazeta Wyborcza.
Journalists find themselves under attack from a number of angles. Despite the principle of drawing a "broad line under the past" (premier Mazowiecki's phrase), to facilitate the negotiated transfer of power, many journalists who had worked in the official press before 1990 found themselves ousted. There is no code of practice. The controversy over disclosure of journalists' sources is gradually being resolved: the government's new bill on state secrets (November 1998) exempts journalists - in contrast to its original wording. On his inauguration in April 1996, Ryszard Miazek, Head of the Polish Television, declared that television journalists' job was not to "express independent opinions, because opinions are formulated by parliament and other state representatives" - a statement that caused considerable consternation in the press and was widely viewed as harking back to Communist times. The ex-communists took exception to state television programming under Miazek's predecessor, Wieslaw Walendziak, which included a number of programmes critical of the communist past broadcast on 1 May 1995. Programmes in a similar vein were removed from the schedule a year later, such as Ryszard Bugajski's feature film The Interrogation about a woman imprisoned in Stalinist times. During the September 1998 local government elections, Polish TV refused to carry the election broadcasts of the right-wing party Ojczyzna, although the political parties themselves are answerable for the content. This decision has led the procuracy to accuse Polish TV's boss of exceeding his powers (February 1999).
Despite the absence of official censorship, a number of authors have alleged book censorship. The most high-profile case is the Polish edition of Marco Politi and Carl Bernstein's biography of the Pope, His Holiness. The American publisher Doubleday demanded the book be destroyed following the removal of passages, which inter alia implicitly praised recent Polish honesty about anti-Semitism (IoS, 1 June 1997). The cuts were to appear in a special appendix. Lukasz Golebiowski (Rzeczpospolita Online, 18 June 1997) commented: "Polish editors fairly often take little account of an author's rights on the principle that the writer should be grateful that his book appears on the market... [it also indicates] a lack of trust in the reader, on whose account the publisher attempts to decide what content may, or should not, be made available." In this, as in certain other respects, the paternalistic controls of the post-war Communist state and Catholic church still make their legacy felt.
Further Reading
General
Davies, Norman, God's Playground, 2 vols, Oxford: OUP, 1981
Davies, Norman, Heart of Europe, Oxford: OUP, 1986
Tazbir, Janusz, A State without Stakes, Warsaw: PIW, 1973.
Zamoyski, Adam, The Polish Way, London: John Murray, 1987
Censorship
Anonymous, The Nazi Kultur in Poland, London: His Majesty's Stationary Office, 1944
Bates, John M., "Freedom of the Press in Interwar Poland: The System of Control", Peter D. Stachura (ed.), Poland between the Wars, 1918-1939, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998, pp. 87-108.
Buchwald-Pelcowa, Paulina, Cenzura w dawnej Polsce. Miedzy prasa drukarska a stosem, Warsaw: Wydawnictwo SBP, 1997.
Choldin, Marianna T., A Fence Around the Empire, Durham, USA: Duke University Press, 1985.
Ciecwierz, Mieczyslaw, Polityka prasowa 1944-1948, Warsaw:PWN, 1989.
Garten-Ash, Timothy (ed.), Freedom for Publishing, Publishing for Freedom, Budapest: CEU Press, 1995.
Goban-Klas, Tomasz, The Orchestration of the Media, Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1994.
Kawecka-Gryczkowska, Alodia & Janusz Tazbir, "The book and the Reformation in Poland", Jean-Francois Gilmont (ed.) The Reformation and the Book, Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998, pp. 410-31.
Kondek, Stanislaw A., Wladza i wydawcy, Warsaw: Biblioteka Narodowa, 1993.
Kostecki, Janusz & Alina Brodzka (eds), Pismiennictwo Ñ systemy kontroli Ñ obiegi alternatywne, 2 vols, Warsaw: Biblioteka Narodowa, 1992.
Madej, Alina, Mitologie i konwencje, Cracow: Universitas, 1994.
Nalecz, Daria, Glowny Urzad Kontroli Prasy 1945-1949, Warsaw: ISP PAN, 1994.
Notkowski, Andrzej, Prasa w systemie propagandy rzadowej w Polsce 1926-1939, Warsaw-Lodz: PWN, 1987.
Nycz, Ryszard, "Literatura polska w cieniu cenzury", Teksty Drugie, 1998, 3, pp. 5-27.
Pietrkiewicz, Jerzy, "'Inner Censorship' in Polish Literature", SEER, 1957, vol. XXXVI, no. 86, pp. 294-307.
Pietrzak, Michal, Reglamentacja wolnosci prasy w Polsce (1918-1939), Warsaw: KiW, 1963.
Stefaniak, Janusz, Polityka wladz panstwowych PRL wobec prasy katolickiej w latach 1945-1953, Lublin: Wydawnictwo UMC-S, 1998.
Szydlowska, Mariola, Cenzura teatralna w dobie autonomicznej 1860-1918, Cracow: Universitas, 1995.
Szyndler, Bartlomiej, Dzieje cenzury w Polsce do 1918 roku, Cracow: KAW, 1993.
John M Bates, 16 March 1999