138 PIOTR H. KOSICKI
pate had reached a new agreement with the new leadership of the
Polish United Workers’ Party.
De-Stalinization as Aggiornamento?
De-Stalinization led to a brief efflorescence of civic associational
life in Poland. Known anti-Communists were out of the picture,
but revisionist Marxists and so-called “open” Catholics were al-
lowed to form—albeit on a limited scale, with invasive oversight
by the Office of Confessional Affairs—their own discussion clubs,
journals, newspapers, youth groups, publishing houses, and even
trading companies. In the Catholic sphere, this shift broke PAX’s
monopoly on Catholic activism, consigning PAX definitively to
the dustbin of unprincipled collaborationism.
The result was a whole network of lay Catholic activists oper-
ating according to what one of their leaders, Stanisław Stomma,
described as “neopositivism”: a willingness to accept Communist
authorities in the name of raison d’État, so that Catholics could
build from the ground up their own sphere of livelihood.40 The
resurrection of journals suppressed under Stalinism—Tygodnik
Powszechny, as well as the Znak (Sign) monthly—went hand in
hand with the creation of multiple Catholic Intelligentsia Clubs
spread across the country, a publishing house called Znak, a
monthly called Więź (Bond), and a trading company to fund their
operations. The Polish Communists’ de-Stalinizing general secre-
- It was the literary critic and satirist Stefan Kisielewski who coined the term
“neopositivism,” but Stanisław Stomma emerged as its principal theorist and practi-
tioner; Stomma, “ ‘Pozytywizm’ od strony moralnej,” Tygodnik Powszechny, April 14, - The term was a clear reference to the nineteenth-century positivism that lay at
the roots of “organic work” pursued by Polish cultural and literary authorities after
the failed uprising of 1863–64 against Russian imperial authority. Positivism’s fun-
damental goal was to train the best and brightest of future generations in what it
meant to be Polish while awaiting freedom, rather than have them die in a failed up-
rising along the way; Jerzy Jedlicki, A Suburb of Europe: Nineteenth-Century Polish Ap-
proaches to Western Civilization (Budapest: Central European University Press, 1996).