THE PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC 467asserted the right of the USSR to oppose the secession of its allies from the Soviet
Bloc, and the Helsinki Agreement, which confirmed the political and territorial
status quo in Europe, it underlined the extent to which Poland's destiny was
hitched to that of the Red Star. There was a time after the War, when Poland's
relations with Germany had not been regulated, when it might be argued that
Soviet protection was necessary. The danger in the 1970s was that the Soviet net
was being tightened at the very moment when Soviet protection had lost its
justification.^63 (See Diagram H.)
Yet no simple description can possibly convey the complicated character of
late Communist Poland. Life there was not characterized by the eternal opti-
mism of official propaganda, but by a welter of conflicting values, contradic-
tions, and paradoxes, which once convinced Europe's leading existentialist that
he had at last discovered the world of perfect absurdity. According to Jean-Paul
Sartre, who visited Warsaw in 1960, here was 'a country torn from its past by
violent measures imposed by the communists, but so bound to that past that the
demolished capital is being rebuilt from the pictures of Canaletto'; 'a capital
where the citizens have taken up residence again in the "Old Town", which is
entirely new'; 'a country where the average monthly remuneration does not
exceed the price of two pairs of shoes, but where there is no poverty'; 'a social-
ist country where Church festivals are a public holiday'; 'a country of total
disorganisation, where nonetheless the trains run exactly on time'; 'a country
where the censorship and satire both flourish, and in which every flower is sub-
ject to planning, but in which foreign journalists can circulate without a
guardian-angel'; 'the only country of this bloc whose citizens are free to buy and
sell dollars (but not to possess them)'; 'a country, where, as a result of terrible
forces of powerlessness unparalleled in the world, the traveller must abandon all
logic if he is not to lose the ground beneath his feet'; 'a strange country where
one can talk with the waiter in English or German, and with the cook in French,
but with the Minister and the Under-Secretary only through an interpreter.. .'
To the Anglo-Saxon observer, Poland appeared to be imbued with the unmis-
takable flavour of Irishness (and not only, as one distinguished Professor has
maintained, because Poland and Ireland are the only two Catholic countries
which thrive on a diet of potatoes and hard spirit). Whimsical anomalies
abound. Most Poles are by temperament 'agin'.
Poland vies with Ireland and Spain for the title of Most Catholic Nation.
Ninety-five per cent of Poles were baptized Roman Catholics, and the majority
were practising ones. Yet the state was officially godless, and gave no support to
organized religion. In the resulting struggle, every citizen was caught in a welter
of divided loyalties which he had to reconcile as best he could. Split minds, dou-
ble lives, and double-think, were the order of the day. It was not unusual for
younger priests to be anticlerical, for example, or for communists to be church-
goers. Workers were often required on pain of dismissal to attend factory
meetings or political rallies carefully arranged to clash with religious demon-
strations. Somehow, with candle in one pocket and red flag in the other, they