480 POLSKA LUDOWA
mercy of the state land registrar, the state price commission, the state taxman, the man-
ager of the state-run machinery depot, and the state-run village store.^69
For the great mass of ordinary people, there was no escape from 'the dictator-
ship by the Party' over the proletariat.
Nothing was more redolent of this rigid social division than the forms of
address which the Communist Establishment had introduced. Party members,
talking among themselves, usually addressed each other as Towarzysz or
'Comrade'. (They would never have dreamt of addressing an ordinary man or
woman as 'Comrade'.) For an ordinary person to risk saying 'Comrade' to a
Party member and thereby to imply that they were equals, would have been
regarded as an impertinence or worse. Ordinary people were expected to call
each other obywatel or obywatelka, the Polish equivalent of citoyen and
citoyenne, 'Citizens!' In most cases, they continued to use the standard Polish
form of Fan and Pani, the equivalent of Monsieur and Madame, 'Mr and Mrs'.
In so many ways, therefore, the contrast between the ethos of the Party and
that of the population at large revealed a basic moral conflict:
... it was not the case that Poles were inherently more sensitive to moral issues than other
nations: still less that their conduct was somehow morally superior. Far from it. If
anything, the stresses and strains of life in Poland produced a greater incidence of moral
failings, petty crime, and social evils than in more fortunate lands. But that is simply to
state the problem. The citizens of a country, in which the difference between the moral
values held by society and those propagated by a monopoly state was so extreme, were
bound to suffer from extreme moral pressures. In a Communist state, it took a very
strong character to stay loyal to one's friends and upbringing at the expense of one's
career, to refrain from the pilfering of state property (in which Party officials set such a
fine example), or to resist the accepted Party norms of communal drinking and alco-
holism. At every turn, the temptation was there to gain advancement by informing on
one's colleagues, to overcome the housing shortage by bribing the foreman of the state
building-yard, or to surrender to despair with a bottle of uodka. Even Poland's admirers
must admit that all minor forms of treachery, corruption, and social irresponsibility were
rife. In such a debilitating atmosphere, it was not easy for an honest person to know
where his loyalties should lie. If a husband wished to provide better conditions for his
family, he knew that he could do so by joining the Party and forgetting everything that
his pious mother had told him about his soul and his conscience. If a wife wanted to help
her husband, she knew where to ingratiate herself. If teachers wanted to keep their jobs,
they had to impart information which they knew to be untrue, or to suppress what they
knew. If students wished to pass their exams in sensitive subjects they had to limit their
remarks to what the examiners were empowered to accept. If a worker felt inclined to
produce anything more than the minimum required, he had to accept that the benefit
would not accrue to himself but to the foreman or the factory manager. If the Party func-
tionary had genuinely joined the movement in order to serve his fellow men and the
ideals of Socialism, he had to undertake to abandon all expression of those ideals in the
interests of Party discipline. What a cruel world! And whom was one to believe? Under
some dictatorships, where all sources of information were successfully controlled or
where a social consensus had been established by force, people did not suffer so much
from the agony of conflicting authorities. But in Poland, where the Church and the Pope