THE PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC 433leave. Their leaders had very little influence in British life, and were regarded as
anathema in Warsaw. The main aim of the rank and file, therefore, was to find
work, to feed the family, to gain an education, or simply to survive.
In this situation, the most important institutions of the community were not
provided by the Govemment-in-Exile, but by the Polish Catholic Mission, by
the ex-combatant associations, and by various cultural bodies. Poles in Britain
congregated round their parishes—of which there were a score in London
alone—round the schools of the Macierz Szkolna, and round numerous
social clubs. The Ognisko Polskie or 'Polish Hearth' on Exhibition Road in
Kensington was the model for similar meeting-places that sprang up in most
British towns and cities. In the cultural sphere, much sterling work was under-
taken by the Polish Library, by the Polish Institute and Sikorski Museum, by
the Polish Underground Study Trust, by the Catholic Veritas Foundation, and
by newspapers and journals such as the Dziennik Polski and Wiadomosci. Step
by step, the community lost its transient character and put down permanent
roots.
Stalinism — the dominant mode of Soviet-style communism from the late 1920s
onwards - has been variously described as a doctrine, a system, and as an atti-
tude of mind. It was all of these things. In 1948, when the normal paranoia of
the Kremlin was heightened to a new abnormal peak, it was hurriedly imposed
on all the USSR's East European allies. Poland was no exception.
For many Poles, the main traits of Stalinism, which owe much more to ancient
Russian traditions than to Marx or Engels, were all too familiar. Middle-aged
people born and reared in Warsaw or Wilno in Tsarist days experienced a strong
sensation of the deja vu. The Stalinist psychology had been well analysed in
Polish literature, notably in the work of Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz whose
satirical novel Nienasycenie (Insatiability) was now proving uncomfortably
prophetic. Witkiewicz had described the invasion of Europe by the Horde of
Murti-Bing, a Sino-Mongolian warlord who subdues the decadent West with a
well-organized sales campaign of 'philosophical pills' ensuring man's future
happiness and sociability. In the last scene of the novel, the leader of the West
abjectly surrenders, and is beheaded with great ceremony. In the post-war
period, similar feelings were expressed by the poet and critic, Czeslaw Milosz (b.
1911), whose reflections, The Captive Mind, were published in 1953 shortly after
his defection from his post as Polish cultural attache in Paris. Here, in one of
many penetrating studies, Milosz likens the practice of Stalinism in Poland to the
'Art of Ketman' as performed under the oriental despotism of the Shah in feudal
Persia. Ketman was the art of double-think, of dissimulating, and of deceit - the
profession of an army of toadies and lickspittles, who pandered to the whims of
'Him' with limitless flattery and cynicism, simply to promote their careers or to
save their skins. According to the Comte de Gobineau, who first described the